Liam said nothing. Cormac tried to read his expression, then realised he was expecting Liam to deliver a solution, neatly wrapped up in a bow if possible. He felt a sinking depression.
‘This Schiller thing,’ Cormac said in the end. ‘It’s motive.’
‘Is it though?’ Liam said. He looked around the pub. ‘I’m not a cop anymore. We’re just a pair of old colleagues, catching up over a beer. And maybe I’m wrong. You were given a name. Maybe that’s the name you put in your report.’
‘Christ, Liam. You’re not a cop anymore, but I am.’ And if he’d been so wrong about Maude, could he have been wrong about everything? Could she have had something to do with Jack’s death? No. Just no way. He didn’t believe it, and there was still the question of why he’d been put on this case in the first place. Murphy hadn’t known about Schiller. Hadn’t even had Hannah Collins’s statement when he’d set Cormac on the trail.
‘Do you think Maude could know something?’ he asked Liam. ‘Could she have known something from those years that someone wants to keep a secret? Someone with the power to force a Garda investigation and a prosecution?’
But Liam was shaking his head. ‘It’s possible but I doubt it, Cormac. Schiller wasn’t my case, but an old partner of mine was on it and I know the details. He wasn’t alone, but we know his . . . affiliates. I don’t think we missed one. Then again . . .’ He shrugged. ‘I can’t say it’s not possible.’ Liam’s eyes went to the door, then to his watch. It was dark outside; his daughter would be here soon.
Cormac watched him for a long moment before speaking. ‘Danny said you had a drink problem.’
‘What?’ Liam looked bemused by the change of topic; he smiled as if waiting for a punchline.
But Cormac was suddenly absolutely sure that what Danny had told him was bullshit. ‘Danny McIntyre told me a detailed story about you. He said that the last few years had taken their toll. That you’d retired, and hit the bottle, and that Cáit didn’t want you spending time with cops.’
Liam’s eyes had lost their amused glint. ‘Did he now?’ he said.
‘What do you know, Liam?’ Cormac said. ‘What do you know that Danny wouldn’t want me to know?’
‘I don’t know anything about your case, Cormac. Nothing more than I’ve told you.’
‘But there is something. Something you haven’t told me. Something he knows you know.’
For the first time in the conversation Liam looked less than comfortable. He put a hand to his mouth, rubbed his jaw. ‘There’re things Danny might not want you to know that have nothing to do with what you’re working on. Secrets he’d keep for personal reasons. Professional too.’
‘Secrets you’ve been keeping for him?’ Cormac asked, and the question was more pointed than he’d intended. Liam shrugged. ‘I have to ask you to tell me, Liam,’ Cormac said. ‘There’s something not right here. It’s been off from the beginning. And I don’t know if Danny’s part of it, but I need to know if I can trust him.’
‘You’re asking me to trust you too, Cormac,’ Liam said. He rubbed his jaw again, apparently reached a decision. ‘You might not know that Danny has a sister. Much younger than him – she’d be about eighteen now.’
‘Yes.’ Cormac thought Liam was about to tell him about Lorna’s disappearance, and he was distracted, trying to work out how there could possibly be a link between that and secrets Danny might be keeping. It took him a moment to realise that Liam was telling him a very different story.
‘Lorna’s a nice girl. Quiet. She went out one night with friends to Westies – you know it? A nightclub in one of the villages. It has buses that collect kids from around the countryside. She got the bus there with friends, but came home alone the next morning, off her head on something or other. She’d had her drink spiked. Someone brought her into a back room to sober up. After the club closed, two men came into that room and raped her.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘One of them drove her home afterwards and dropped her at the gate like nothing had happened. Anyway, Lorna pressed charges, and two men were arrested. One of them was Aengus Barton, a local farmer. Owns a hundred hectares out near Lough Mask. The other was Jim Kavanagh, owner of the club.’
‘Big Jim,’ Cormac said. ‘The man Danny arrested for drug dealing.’
Liam nodded. ‘Jim Kavanagh and his mate were charged all right, but Lorna dropped the charges less than a week later. The rumour was that they’d taken photographs, posted one on the internet. The message Lorna took from that was unless she wanted a lot more published for the world to see, she would drop the charges. So that’s what she did. Can’t blame the girl. She would have known too that the chances of conviction were small.’
‘And Danny goes on to arrest her rapist for drug dealing. Did no one think there might be a conflict of interest?’
Liam gave a shrug. Clearly no one had given a shit either way.
Cormac rubbed his eyes. ‘Jesus, Liam, do you think he did it?’
‘The rape or the drug dealing?’ Liam asked.
‘The drugs. That was Danny setting Kavanagh up, wasn’t it? To get revenge?’ And could he even blame him? Cormac thought about Emma. If he’d been there the day she was attacked he would have ripped the fucker’s head off his shoulders. But this felt different. This was half the police force in the west of Ireland knowing what Danny was about and turning a blind eye. And everyone who did that had a smudge on their record. What would they do the next time a colleague asked for a small favour, a colleague who knew after all that they’d known about Danny McIntyre? And what would they do when that small favour turned into a big favour? The line was there for a reason. It mattered. It had to be respected, no matter how hard that was.
Liam was watching him.
‘She’s missing,’ Cormac said.
‘What?’
‘Danny’s sister. She’s been missing for two weeks.’
‘That’s not good.’
‘No.’
They sat in silence while Cormac thought it all through. How many officers would have known? Did Murphy know? Was this why Danny was promoted?
‘They wanted him out of the village, didn’t they? Wanted him in Galway where they could keep an eye on him?’
Liam shrugged.
‘But why let him away with it?’ Was it sympathy, a brothers-in-arms wish to take a rapist down, no matter the method? He could believe that of some, but not Brian Murphy. He wasn’t the type. There was something more going on here. ‘Where did Danny get the drugs, Liam?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’d say you can guess.’
Liam met his eye, but said nothing. Liam knew, or at least had a theory he wasn’t willing to share. The drugs had to have come from a bust. Danny must have taken them from evidence. But could he have managed that alone? There were evidence logs that would have to be changed; too many people would have had to be actively complicit. Did Healy know? Was that where the strain came from, between Danny and the rest of the drugs team? Cormac tried again with Liam but Liam either didn’t know the answers, or wasn’t willing to provide them.
Cormac remembered why he was there in the first place and looked around for Lanigan. There was no sign of him. There were two girls behind the bar, serving the growing crowd, but no sign of Lanigan.
‘He’s gone out the back,’ said Liam.
‘What?’
‘Your man you’re here to keep an eye on. He’s gone out the back for a fag. He’ll be back in a minute.’ Liam stood. ‘My daughter’s here,’ he said. He opened his wallet and took out twenty euro, left it on the table. ‘Give that to the young one behind the bar for me, will you?’ A quick handshake, and he was gone.
Cormac paid for the meal, ordered coffee, and waited for Lanigan to return. He was back before the coffee had cooled enough to drink. Cormac abandoned it on the bar, left through the front door and walked around to the carpark.
Cormac wasn’t in the mood to wait. He opened the passenger do
or to Fisher’s car. ‘We’ll have to be quick,’ he said.
They walked to the back door of the pub. Fisher had a torch at the ready. Two cigarette butts, smoked down to the filter, lay on the ground by the door.
‘He didn’t even blink,’ Fisher said. ‘Didn’t even notice that the pot was gone, that the place was cleaned up.’
‘It was dark,’ Cormac said. ‘Or dark enough. And Lanigan’s a creature of habit. He’s not thinking when he comes out here, just going through the motions.’ He took two quick photographs as Fisher pulled on a pair of gloves, then bagged the butts. They walked back to Fisher’s car.
‘Send it to Dublin,’ Cormac said. ‘This one shouldn’t need to go to the UK. I’ll have the American profile sent over for comparison, then we’ll see. You understand that we won’t be able to get him for the Hughes case, not unless something unexpected turns up?’
‘But her family will know, right? If we get him for the American murder. You’ll go to Maura Hughes’s family and let them know?’
‘Yes,’ Cormac said. It would be a kind of closure for them. And once Lanigan was jailed there was always a possibility that he would give up the location of Maura’s body.
Fisher nodded. ‘I’d like to be with you, for that conversation, if it’s all right.’
Cormac nodded.
‘Thanks,’ said Fisher. ‘The DNA. It’ll take a few months, do you think?’
Cormac shrugged. Fisher knew the answer to that as well as he did. No one skipped the queue at the state lab, not unless you had a politically significant case or a lot more pull than Cormac had. This case was too old, the connections they’d drawn too tenuous. They would have to wait. In the meantime, there was other work to be done.
The drive back to Galway was a sombre one. Cormac hadn’t needed to be there for the Lanigan DNA collection. It was something he could easily have left to Fisher and another uniform. He’d gone because he wanted the distraction, wanted time away from Galway to think. But now that it was done and there was nothing between him and Monday morning except a bad night’s sleep, he felt tired and defeated.
What the fuck was he going to do about Danny? The line that Danny had crossed; it was sacrosanct for Cormac. Never to be crossed, mostly because once crossed, how would you stop yourself from crossing it again, and again? And then maybe the threshold for crossing it would drop, until you found yourself justifying every corrupt step you took in the name of some nebulous greater good. But Danny’d been protecting his sister. Or avenging her. And if Cormac went after Danny, what then? Half the gardaí in the country – probably more – would condemn him for it. He’d have a target on his back for the rest of his career, which would probably be considerably shortened.
He thought about Maude Blake. He’d found her motive and it was compelling. Motive was not relevant to a criminal offence. Not under the law. Intent was what mattered. And yet juries needed a motive if they were to convict – and judges weren’t immune from wanting one either. He should give Hackett the motive. It might be what was needed to push the case over the line, and he believed it now. Maude had killed her mother. He felt sick at the thought. What could he do? He was a policeman to his bones, but he couldn’t give Maude up for this.
Despite his racing thoughts, Cormac felt his eyelids grow heavy, and he opened his window to let in some chilly air. Turned on the radio. News bulletins in Irish. Switched again. Heard the opening riff of AC/DC’s ‘Whole Lotta Rosie’. He had a sudden flashback to Templemore, to their graduation dance. He’d joined the guards straight out of school, and had been twenty when he graduated from Templemore. They’d all ended up in Thurles afterward, at a nightclub that still played slow dances. God, they’d been so young. Glad to get out of their ill-fitting uniforms, put on jeans and a T-shirt, sink a few – far too many – pints. It hadn’t been about the girls, that night. So many nights were about finding a girl, but not that one. He remembered the opening riffs of ‘Whole Lotta Rosie’ had played and almost every one of them had hit the dance floor and gone mad in a sudden, testosterone-laden mosh pit. There had been female trainees; they’d either joined in, or stayed at the bar, watching the scene, amused by it maybe. Danny hadn’t joined in, Cormac remembered now. He’d stayed at the bar too. When Cormac had asked him about it, he’d said he didn’t like the song. Curled a lip.
The song on the radio came to an end and news headlines started again. There was more talk about austerity politics, more talk of protests about home and water taxes. Same old same old. He was reaching for the dial when he heard it. The body of a young woman had been found inside a car submerged in a flooded quarry near Lough Mask in County Mayo. She had not yet been identified. A man, the owner of the land on which the quarry was located, had been taken into custody on suspicion of murder and was being questioned at Castlebar Garda Station. Lough Mask. Christ. Lorna McIntyre, it had to be.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Aisling drove straight home. She turned the heat up to maximum but it was twenty minutes before she stopped shivering. Jack’s phone sat on the passenger seat. She glanced at it every now and again, as if it was a live thing that might jump up and bite her. Her hands left brown and red smears on the steering wheel. She wiped them on her jeans. She should have waited for the police at the main road. Should have found out what they were searching for, made sure that they knew about the connection to Jack. But she’d been so afraid. That fear should have seemed stupid as she drove into Galway, down well-lit streets busy with traffic, but the taste of it was still with her, sour and curdled on her tongue, as she pulled in outside the house.
She went to their bedroom first. Jack’s charger was still plugged in on his side of the bed. She connected it to the phone, waited, tried switching it on. Nothing. Aisling checked her watch and could have screamed in frustration. She was due at the hospital in less than two hours. With an enormous effort of will she left Jack’s phone plugged in and headed for the shower. She dropped her dirty clothes in a heap onto the bathroom floor, and was climbing into the shower before the water had had a chance to warm up. It took far longer than she had patience for, to scrub the dirt from her hands and nails, to wash her hair, but when she got out of the shower and returned to the phone, it still wouldn’t switch on. Damnit. Maybe it had gotten wet. Or the fall that had cracked the screen had broken something more fundamental.
Aisling pulled a pair of jeans from her drawer, a T-shirt, an old jumper. She would get a set of scrubs at work. She’d told them she was coming in for this shift. She couldn’t change her mind again, or be late, or they’d think she’d turned into a total flake. But first she had to get to the garda station. She paused long enough to send a message to Maude, telling her that she’d found the phone and was bringing it to the police. Aisling felt she owed her that much. Would she even get the message? Not if she was still in custody.
Aisling got to the station just after seven, went straight to reception and asked for Cormac Reilly. Not available. Ceri Walsh too was off duty. In desperation, she asked for Rodgers, and was met with a polite suggestion that she return in the morning. That was when she raised her voice. Said that she wanted to make a formal complaint. Said that she had evidence her boyfriend had been murdered and the police weren’t doing anything about it. Said that if she didn’t get to speak to someone in the next ten minutes she was going straight to the newspapers. She felt sure that Maude would have been proud of her performance.
Unfortunately shouting got her nowhere. She was told, reasonably politely, by a now harried-looking young garda, that he couldn’t produce officers who weren’t in the building, and as they had a lot on at that moment there was no one who could see her. If she’d like to take a seat, and wait, he would see what he could do. Or alternatively she could come back in the morning.
She left, feeling like she was letting both Jack and Maude down, and was halfway to her car when she heard her name called.
‘Miss Conroy.’
She turned. The man who’d arrested Mau
de, looking much less police-like now, was standing in front of her dressed in jeans and a ratty jacket, open over a Grateful Dead T-shirt.
‘Daniel McIntyre,’ he said, holding out a hand to be shaken. ‘You wanted to speak to someone about Jack’s death?’ he said.
‘I . . . yes.’ She checked her watch. ‘I was hoping to speak with Detective Sergeant Reilly. But he’s not there.’
‘Is there something I can help you with?’ His eyes dropped to Jack’s phone, which she still held in one hand. He glanced over his shoulder towards the station.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Aisling. She could come back. One more day couldn’t make much difference.
‘You told the duty officer that you had evidence Jack was murdered. If you do, I’d like to hear about it.’
Aisling hesitated. This was the man who had arrested Maude, after all. It didn’t feel right to hand Jack’s phone over to him. But he had the kind of face you could trust, the kind that looked like it could break into laughter at any moment.
He looked back over his shoulder again. He must be in the middle of something, whatever it was that was taking so much garda attention that evening. And she was going to be late for work. So Aisling talked, quickly. She said that she’d been wrong to ever even consider that Jack killed himself. That he would never, ever have done so. She talked about the CCTV footage. Standing there, in the carpark, she talked about the postmortem results.
‘And that?’ he said in the end, nodding towards the phone.
‘It’s Jack’s phone,’ she said. ‘I tracked it. Jack went to Lough Mask on the day he died. To hike. I found his phone there, in the mud at the bottom of the trail. Something happened to him there. What if someone hurt him, then drove him to Galway and dropped him in the river, to make it look like a suicide?’ She got it all out in one fast sentence, afraid that she might sound hysterical, but desperate to be taken seriously. Something flashed in McIntyre’s eyes, but it was gone too fast for her to read.
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