Jeremy’s habit was to finish up in Clifden soon after ten o’clock, so he could walk back to Ballyconneely in the dusk. The walk was very enjoyable, especially once he got past the narrow road leading out of the town into more open countryside. It usually took him about an hour and a half to complete, and by the time he reached home the cool night air and the exercise ensured that he was stone cold sober, which pleased his mother greatly.
The evening in question was much like any other. Jeremy left King’s just after ten, and walked down the main street of Clifden, out across the narrow bridge and on out towards the secondary school. He turned the corner by the smoked salmon factory, strolled across the second bridge and headed for home. Walking along the road, feeling mellow from the beer he had consumed in Clifden, and inspired by the beauty of the surroundings in which he found himself, Jeremy counted his blessings silently to himself. His parents had always looked after him well. He had been sent to a good private school in London when his father was struggling with a new business and didn’t have money to spare, and he knew that his parents had foregone holidays and other luxuries to ensure that he got the very best possible start in life. He was a fortunate young man.
The late evening twilight had softened the breeze to a veritable cat’s paw and the scent from the hedgerows helped to create an idyllic scene as Jeremy walked along. There was very little traffic on the road, with most of the tourists checked into their hotels and guesthouses by this hour, so there remained just the occasional local making their way towards the town to grab a pint or two before closing after a hard day digging peat or working on the land.
Jeremy was about half way home when he rounded a bend in the road to see an old silver Toyota stopped untidily with its bonnet raised. Standing beside the car, looking helpless in the fading light, was a small, thin, but not unattractive girl with a ponytail, wearing jeans and a zipped up pink jacket and trainers.
“Hello there,” said Jeremy, “got car trouble?”
“Oh hi, yes, it just stopped. I don’t know what’s wrong. There’s plenty of fuel,” the girl said in a plaintive voice, standing beside the front wing with one hip dropped in a rather provocative pose. “Do you know anything about cars?” she continued.
Jeremy was struck by Sheila’s appearance. She was gorgeous, and he thought that if he could get her car going, he could almost certainly cadge a lift from her back to Ballyconneely, and if he used his charm to good effect, who knows what might develop.
“Not much to be honest. But I’ll have a look if you like.”
“Oh, would you please? I have to get back to Galway tonight. Thanks,” she said, smiling warmly at the lad, and turning to show off the best attributes of her neat figure for him to admire.
Jeremy made his way to the front of the car and stuck his head under the bonnet. He fiddled with the wires going into the spark plugs, and pushed a few things around, not really knowing what he was doing, but anxious nevertheless not to appear too clueless in front of the pretty girl.
As he was lifting his head out of the engine bay, saying, “Try it now,” a thick wooden baton smashed into the back of his head, and he fell to the ground clumsily, out cold.
“Quick. Help me get him in the boot,” Lorcan instructed, as he closed the bonnet of the old car with a loud thud.
“Here,” he said, handing the girl a roll of silver duct tape, “tape his mouth and bind his feet with this, and hurry up.”
The girl did as she was told. Then the two assailants dragged Jeremy round to the back of the car and bundled him into the boot. Lorcan hopped into the driver’s seat, his accomplice beside him, started the car and took off at speed towards Roundstone. Lorcan was well pleased with himself. The whole thing had only taken a minute or two, and there was no one around to see what had taken place.
The plan was to drive to a cottage out at Carna that the man had rented for a week. It was well out of the way and had been stocked with some basic provisions. Lorcan and Sheila were to keep Jeremy at the house while the man made the ransom call to the Craigues. Then, Lorcan would pick up the cash the following evening, bring it back to the cottage, hand over the money to the man, receive his payment of a thousand euro, and leave. Once they were back in Galway, they would phone the Craigues from a public phone and tell them where to pick up their son. Simple.
Chapter Four
Lorcan was not used to driving on narrow, boggy roads, and the suspension of the old car was not the best in any case. With nervous energy still coursing through him from the snatch, he was going too fast and was having a hard time keeping the vehicle under control. As he tried to navigate the S bends at the turn down to Dog’s Bay, about a mile before Roundstone village, Lorcan finally lost command of the car. The old Toyota gave up its tenuous grip on the road. It spun around, hitting the bank on the sea side of the road, then flipped over and skidded along on its roof, before coming to rest in a cloud of smoke and steam at the side of the ditch.
Lorcan blacked out for a minute or two as he was thrown around inside the tumbling car. When he came around, his head hurt like hell, and he was bleeding from a cut over his eye. He was upside down, held in by his seat belt. The car was still emitting steam and smoke from the engine bay, and Lorcan’s thoughts turned immediately to freeing himself from the wreck in case it caught fire. He found the seat belt button and released it, causing him to fall forward onto the roof of the inverted car, jammed between the shattered windscreen and the seat. He managed to kick the remains of the broken front window out and, scrambling for grip while trying not to cut himself further on the many sharp edges all around him, he stumbled out onto the road.
Dizzy, with his head hurting badly and with his face covered in blood, his thoughts turned to Sheila. He got around to the passenger’s side of the car and managed to pull the door open with much renting and scraping. Sheila had not fared as well as Lorcan in the crash. She was unconscious, with a nasty wound on the side of her head that was bleeding quite profusely, and her left arm appeared to be twisted at a crazy angle.
“Sheila, Sheila!” he shouted. Then, louder as he nudged her shoulder, “Sheila, can you hear me?” There was no response.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Lorcan shouted to no one in particular.
“We have to get out of here,” he said to himself. He spent the next five minutes gently lifting and prising the limp form of the girl away from the seat, and the now deflated white airbag away from her face, and finally got her free. Lorcan had to carry the girl but, although she wasn’t heavy, he was not feeling too good himself. He needed to distance them from the scene as soon as possible, so he set off along the narrow, tarred lane that leads down to the beautiful beach at Dog’s Bay.
After a few minutes, having stopped to rest a couple of times, the two approached the end of the track where the old abandoned camping site stood. Just before the boarded-up entrance, a half-built cottage, set back in the rocky scrubland, looked as if it could provide some rudimentary shelter for them until Lorcan could sort things out.
The cottage had been partly completed but the owner had run out of money before it was finished. It had windows and doors, and a roof, but the inside was totally barren, with no doors and just the basic concrete block walls dividing up the space. Many of the windows had been broken too, and Lorcan, having set Sheila down on a patch of soft reeds and grass, had no difficulty getting inside through the back door.
He went back and collected the girl. Inside the house he found an old mattress where he laid her down gently, being careful of her broken arm.
There were a couple of old kitchen chairs and a crate that had been used as a table in the room with the mattress. On it were three old mugs, still with mouldy dregs of tea in them. The workmen had used the grate to light a fire, presumably to boil water for their tea and the ash of their last effort, along with a few dried-out sods of turf, remained in the hearth.
* * *
The man waited up for the one-word text message that he had arrange
d for Lorcan to send once they had got Jeremy back to the hideout in Carna. But it didn’t arrive.
“Damn it Lorcan,” he said to himself. “They must be back there by now. Maybe there’s no signal on his phone. Yes, that will be it. I checked my phone out there, but he’s probably not on the same network. Sure, it will be fine. What could possibly go wrong?”
The man stretched out on the sofa in his room and pulled the rug over him. He set his phone to wake him at five o’clock in the morning and drifted off to sleep.
Chapter Five
The early morning sun streamed in through the dirty broken glass at the half-finished house at Dog’s Bay. Lorcan woke with a start. He was sore and stiff, but as he shook off the last of his restless sleep, he checked himself over and found that everything seemed to be working.
He knelt beside the still shape of Sheila and nudged her shoulder.
“Sheila, Sheila, wake up. It’s morning,” he urged.
Sheila’s eyes opened slowly, and she looked up at him.
“Where are we?” she murmured, “what happened?”
“We had a car crash. You’re quite badly hurt.”
“Oh God, don’t I know it. My arm hurts like hell, and I’m frozen stiff.”
Sheila tried to get up using her good arm as a pivot, but she couldn’t make it work, and she collapsed back down onto the mattress with a yelp. Lorcan noticed that the severe gash she had on her head had begun to ooze blood again.
“You’ve got to go and get help Lorcan. I’m not in good shape. My arm’s broken and I’m dizzy and cold. Help me please,” she implored.
“OK, OK. I’ll go and get some stuff. I’ll be back in a while. You just stay there and rest,” he said.
Lorcan made his way out of the back of the house and off across the fields towards Gurteen. He gave two obviously occupied houses a wide berth, although at half past six in the morning there was no one at all around. The third cottage he came to, overlooking the strand at Gurteen, appeared to be empty. He circled it quietly, noting that none of the curtains were closed, and there were no vehicles outside. He approached the rear of the property and after a final check to see that it really was unoccupied, and there was no one observing him, he smashed the glass in the back door and let himself in.
Lorcan wasted no time in rounding up as much as he could easily carry back to Sheila. He took two large fluffy towels, some paracetamol that he found in the bathroom cabinet, and he filled a litre bottle of water from the kitchen tap and helped himself to two unopened packets of biscuits that had been left in one of the kitchen cabinets.
He was back at the abandoned house with his small consignment of provisions twenty minutes later. Sheila appeared to have gone downhill in his absence. She was drifting in and out of consciousness and wasn’t making any sense when she tried to speak. He managed to get a few painkillers into her, but he didn’t like the way she was shivering, and she looked so very pale. He would have to get her to a hospital and that meant he needed a car, and quickly.
Lorcan set out again with just one thing on his mind. He needed to steal a car so he could get Sheila to a hospital as soon as possible. He crossed the fields again and walked around by the narrow little coastal road into Roundstone, which was barely more than a track, but it was useful for keeping him off the main road. He was looking for an older car, and hopefully one that wouldn’t be missed for a few hours. He emerged back out onto the main road just west of the village, and walked purposefully on, skirting the main street by walking down by the shore, and on down to the harbour. At the harbour he found his target. It was a small white Citroen van that looked serviceable, even though it was more than ten years old. The van had been left unlocked, so it only took Lorcan a few seconds to hot wire it and drive off. He was fairly certain no one had seen him too. The van drove well for an old vehicle, and mercifully was three-quarters full of diesel. Lorcan drove to the car park at Gurteen Bay and parked the van pointing back the way he had come in case a quick getaway was needed. He headed back up over the graveyard and across the rocky field to the old cottage to collect Sheila. There was still no activity anywhere around at that early hour of the morning.
Back in the house, he hurried to where he had left Sheila on the dirty mattress.
“Come on Sheila, get up. We’ve got to go,” he called, but there was no reply. He found her lying on her back, her lifeless eyes staring, unseeing, at the ceiling. The skin on her face had gone blue. Sheila was dead.
Chapter Six
Paddy McKeever arrived at the An Post sorting office at half past five in the morning as usual. He loaded his little green and white van with the five bags of mail that he would deliver throughout the morning on his route out to Clifden. Paddy had been a postman for almost forty years and enjoyed the peculiar hours and free time that went with the job. For the last four years, since the last restructuring in An Post, his routine had been the same.
He left the depot at around six each weekday morning and drove directly to Moycullen. Here he delivered the post himself to the businesses and houses in the town, and would be on his way again by quarter to seven. In Oughterard, the routine was different. The town had its own postman, so Paddy left the bag of mail in a locked box in the main street and carried on out west. At Maam Cross, and again at Recess, he delivered anything that was required, turned off the N59 onto the N341 and headed to Roundstone. He always stopped at Lahinch Castle on his way and was usually greeted warmly by the night porter who was finishing his shift at that early hour. The night porter always gave him a cup of tea and a few slices of hot buttered toast, and the two of them nattered on about the guests that were staying in the hotel, and what they had been up to.
By eight o’clock, Paddy would arrive in Roundstone and leave any mail for the town in Frawley’s shop, or even outside on the step if the shop wasn’t open. Here, the post would be collected by the town’s people later in the day, and anything that they wanted to send away would be collected by Paddy in the same shop on his return journey. It was all a bit unorthodox, but it worked well, as there was no official post office in Roundstone.
With his business finished in the village, Paddy left Roundstone and drove out along the old bog road towards Ballyconneely. He passed the turn for Gurteen and continued up the gentle rise in the road, admiring the view of the sea and the beaches as he went. As he rounded the bends at the turn down to Dog’s Bay, he came across the upturned Toyota.
“Dear God in heaven,” he said as he pulled the little van to a halt in front of the wreck. Paddy got out and walked over to the upturned car. He quickly established that there was no one inside but was concerned to see a good lot of dried blood on the deflated airbags, and on what was left of the smashed windscreen which was lying in the road not far from the car.
When he’d had a good look round the stricken vehicle, he dug his old Nokia push button phone out from his inside pocket. He had tried to change to a smart phone at Christmas when his daughter had bought him a present of an iPhone, but he never mastered it, and used the excuse that he couldn’t get a signal on it out in the west, which was partly true in any case.
Paddy dialled Pascal Brosnan – the local Roundstone Garda. The station was a one-man operation, located at the edge of the village close to the Catholic church. Roundstone had somehow managed to dodge the swingeing cuts that saw the closure of over a hundred rural Garda stations in 2011, following the financial crisis of a few years earlier. Furthermore, the old and rather down-at-heel station in the main street had been sold off for development, and a smart new, purpose-built station, modest in size, but functional nevertheless, had been provided out beyond the church standing on a large plot.
Garda Brosnan, who lived in a tidy little bungalow a few hundred metres further down the road from the Garda station, opened up every morning at nine o’clock Out of hours he had the station phone switched through to his house or mobile. He was surprised to be getting a call this early in the morning, but answered it nevertheless o
n the third ring.
“Garda Brosnan,” he announced.
“Pascal, thank God you’re there,” said the postman making a rather unnecessary observation.
“This is Paddy. I’m on the road out at the Dog’s Bay turn. There’s a car crashed and upside down in the road,” Paddy reported, still not quite believing what he was looking at.
“Good God, Paddy, is there anyone in it?”
“No, no I don’t think so, but there’s quite a lot of blood around, and on the road, but no sign of anyone. Will you come out?” Paddy said.
“Sure of course I will. I’ll see you there right away. Don’t touch anything Paddy – wait till I get there,” Brosnan instructed, reaching for his jacket from the back of the kitchen chair where he had been sitting eating his breakfast.
* * *
A few minutes later Pascal Brosnan arrived at the scene in his brightly coloured Garda car. He got out of the vehicle and put on his peaked cap as he made his way across to where Paddy was standing beside the wreck.
“God, that’s a fine mess you’ve brought me, Paddy,” Brosnan said as he started a preliminary investigation of the upturned car.
“Well, the engine is cold, so it must have happened during the night. I wonder where the occupants have got to?” he said to no one in particular, observing drops of dried blood on the tarmac leading away from the vehicle.
“Looks like there was a driver and a passenger, judging by the blood on the airbags,” Brosnan went on, “but we can’t leave it here. I’ll give Tadgh Deasy a call and get him out to take it away.”
The Galway Homicides Box Set Page 30