‘The link, as far as I can see with Anna Crowe was that he was lecturing at the National College of Art and Design when she was a student there. I still have to connect Anna and Darach Boran, but…’
‘Good work, June. Westmont, did you get a chance to look at footage from Traffic?’ Grady nodded towards Westmont, a six-footer with a shock of blond hair and a ruddy complexion.
‘Yeah, nothing worth looking at. We ran a tracer on the husband’s car. If he was in the area, he didn’t take the motorway. But sure you know these little villages, there’s a thousand and one ways to get to them without ever being spotted.’
‘What about some of those company vans we saw in the car park of ABA Technics?’ Iris asked while still typing furiously on the notebook before her.
‘We’ve run them all, even the plates for any of the other lads on shift with him. Nothing. If he travelled out from work we haven’t picked him up on Traffic, but that doesn’t mean much, there’s a handful of back roads that tack together so he might never show up anyway.’
‘Okay.’ Grady raised his voice. Some wag had just shared a joke with the hard men at the back of the room. ‘Crowe did his apprenticeship in the army – can we find out if he might have had access to rifle training?’ He nodded towards Iris.
‘Sure.’ She noted the direction down efficiently. ‘Just a thought… working out at Shannon, would he have any contact with the American planes that drop by occasionally?’ US Marines landed in Shannon regularly to refuel. No one knew much of where they were headed, but often the soldiers were unloaded and given an opportunity to stretch their legs around a closed-off lounge. There shouldn’t be any communication or possibility that Crowe could get his hands on a military gun there, but there was always a chance he could – wasn’t there?
‘That’s another one for you to check out so.’ Grady was moving on; it was a remote connection, but one that would have to be looked at all the same.
‘Slattery?’
‘We covered the PM. That just confirmed what we’d known unofficially. The three victims died of gunshot wounds. The timing confirms their deaths were close to the estimated time that the fire was started. It looks like our man did the dirty, torched the place and did a runner as quick as possible.’ Slattery cleared his throat loudly. ‘Nothing else of great note showed up. There are more tests to be run, toxicology and all that, but otherwise we have what we have.’
‘Slattery turned up the name of a local tramp – Pat Deaver – seems like he spent a bit of time up at the cottage. Anna Crowe looked out for him; he’s probably worth talking to,’ Grady told the room. ‘So ye’re going to follow it up?’ Grady nodded back to Slattery, he was answered with a cynical nod.
‘He’s got form.’ Iris raised her head. ‘This Deaver, he’s been in and out of institutions of various types for most of his adult life. Mainly psychiatric services, but he’s done time too.’
‘So, what’s he been in for?’ Grady asked.
‘Torching his council house, bang smack in the middle of Kilgee,’ Iris said. It was all there on PULSE – police using leading systems effectively – if Slattery had bothered to check. Still, Grady looked at her. She was eager, he’d give her that, even if it wouldn’t exactly ingratiate her with Slattery.
Chapter Six
Slattery slugged greedily from the bottle. He loved and hated the sensation of the whiskey as it stung the back of his throat and glided down his gullet, warming his chest, and then settling; a familiar balm in his raging stomach. He hated that he needed this remedy before the day had even started. He could blame this case, but the truth was, it was every case – or at least every case that reminded him of the one he couldn’t solve. That case, well, it wasn’t really a case at all. His sister, found strangled in the flat she shared here in Limerick – it happened before he was old enough to join the guards and it loomed large when he worked a case like Anna Crowe’s.
Somewhere behind him a door slammed. Slattery was only vaguely aware of the noise penetrating his fuggy brain. All the same, he tucked the whiskey roughly beneath his jacket. The disused hallway was home to illicit smokers, stealing a moment away from the job. The open window reeked of fag ends and Slattery had long since convinced himself that they weren’t all his. Either way, he’d never spotted anyone else here; unless you were lost or a loser like Slattery, there was nothing else to bring you here. He stuffed the bottle deeper into his jacket and made his way back to the incident room.
Slattery wasn’t sure if he could even call Pat Deaver’s place a house, never mind a home. It was, as Veronique had said, nestled close enough to the local church, down a small lane that may once have led somewhere, but now was hardly wide enough for the Ford Slattery had taken from the car pool. He didn’t expect Deaver to be inside, for many reasons. Chief among them being the house could barely qualify as having an inside. At some point in its tragic history, it had managed to lose its front door and a number of windows. The roof only covered half the structure and what was left open was clearly covered at a lower level, the original tiles had been left where they’d fallen. Someone didn’t want Deaver here, whether it was the council or his neighbours, and no one had bothered much to see if anything could be done to make it just a little more habitable.
‘Mr Deaver,’ Slattery called out the name, fancying that nothing much beyond birds and mice would be able to hear him. All the same, he stepped warily from the car. The track beneath was heavy with mud and his shoes gave a satisfying squelch with each step he took nearer the cottage. There was no answer, but he began to walk the perimeter cautiously, peering into the dead windows as he passed each one. The rear of the house was slightly better than the front. Here at least, two windows had survived, their lace curtains smoke damaged, but the rooms, from outside at any rate appeared to be sealed. Slattery pushed in the back door slowly, calling out that he was there at the same time. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark and he blinked them shut tightly for a second. He’d arrived in a room that was serving as an all-purpose living area. A fireplace held an old kettle, and a table heavy with all sorts of knickknacks stood grumbling silently beneath a tower of empty food cartons. Meals on wheels? In the corner, Slattery just about made out the form of Pat Deaver. He was a bundle of grey coats and shaggy hair. An English sheepdog of a man, but a man all the same. If Slattery had the will to inhale now, he knew he’d smell the rancid odour of living death.
‘Mr Deaver, Pat.’ Slattery bent down, shook the man awake. For a minute, he thought Deaver must be dead. Then, there was a moan; a vital sign of his continued existence – whether he liked it or not, his drunken reverie had been broken.
‘What the…?’ He looked up drowsily into Slattery’s eyes. He wasn’t used to being woken; maybe he wasn’t used to having anybody near him at all. Maybe it was a place anyone could drink themselves into very easily.
‘It’s all right, everything is fine, Mr Deaver. I’m a guard. I wanted to talk to you about Anna Crowe.’ It seemed for a moment as though Deaver had fallen asleep again, and then his body began to shudder.
‘So, it’s true?’ Deaver said finally from beneath his uneven breath. ‘It’s true, she’s gone?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ Slattery said and he wondered at how this wretched man could feel any pain at all for another soul beyond his own sorry state.
It took almost an hour to get Deaver from the cottage. Slattery knew that he had to bring him to the station. They had to get him sober first and from the looks of him, that could take days. Slattery lifted him; he was a corpse of a man, rotting from the inside out. In the car, Slattery opened the windows, but it was no good. He was retching from the smell before they reached the end of the driveway. Where was this man’s family? Who really gave a shit about anyone when good people could live nearby and someone was permitted to exist like this? And, maybe worst of all, he wondered, if he wasn’t a guard, would he be much different?
Grady told Slattery he would question Deaver with him
. Iris knew that she shouldn’t take it personally. After all, they were both at the same grade, both sergeants, only Slattery had twenty more years’ experience and a blind man could see that he and Grady were as tight as rashers in suction wrap. Iris sighed. She’d get her chance; all she had to do was hang back and wait. Slattery would mess up sooner rather than later, the old guy was lucky to have hung in this long.
Grady had just set her a paper exercise, something to cross off his list. Well, she was going to show him what she was made of. She’d spent most of the morning being shunted about various army extensions trying to get anything she could on Adrian Crowe. ‘This is a murder inquiry, for heaven’s sake, a woman and her children are dead,’ she’d finally shouted down the phone. Then as if by magic, she’d been transferred to a helpful corporal.
‘I remember him,’ Corporal Huxley said, as if he was conjuring before him a vision of Adrian Crowe. Huxley sounded as if he’d spent fifty years sitting at a desk, buried somewhere deep in military bureaucracy. ‘He came here straight from school. Great worker, but he had no interest in the army – he was all about the planes. I’d say he wanted to fly, but he didn’t make it into the cadets.’ He said the words as if they were a common malady and his world was divided into the fliers and the ground bound whose dreams had been crushed early. Iris didn’t have to guess too hard to know which category Huxley belonged to. ‘’Course it was a long time ago now, must be ten years, at least.’
‘Yes, about that, your memory is good.’
‘Well, I’m here a while, I had a bit of a run-in with a land mine over in Iraq. Peacekeeping. That’s what they call it, anyway.’
‘Sorry,’ Iris said, worried this guy could talk all day. ‘Should I apply somewhere to see his file?’
‘I wouldn’t bother, I have it here, give you anything you need, considering the circumstances, it’s the least I can do.’ Huxley sounded as if he was flicking through pages. ‘Now, he was a worker all right, but he only stayed for the minimum. Got his qualifications and he high-tailed it into the private sector. Handy with a gun, though…’
‘How’s that?’ Iris felt her stomach fill with butterflies. Part of her didn’t want to think of Adrian Crowe cold-bloodedly shooting his family, but she wanted someone to pay for this more than she’d ever expected she would on a murder case. And Adrian Crowe had a drop of something in him that she didn’t like at all.
‘He’s won prizes for shooting skills and for endurance tests. He’s a tough bit of goods.’
‘He hardly looks it.’ Iris found it hard to think of the Walter Mitty figure she’d met having any resemblance to a soldier with a gun or being involved in any kind of physical testing.
‘Ah, no, you don’t see what I mean. The endurance testing he excelled at was psychological. He’s a mind game man. Bet you’ll find he’s big into puzzles, Sudoku, anything that challenges him mentally.’ Huxley began to stammer, then he barked abruptly, ‘Maybe you should make an order for the file.’ Iris could hear him closing up the pages on the other end of the line.
‘Can’t you tell me any more?’ She was pleading; she had a gut feeling that there was something in those pages that might really help the investigation.
‘I’m not sure I can. I think you’ll have to go through the proper channels for anything more.’ Huxley’s voice had closed off; perhaps someone had come into the room and warned him to keep his mouth shut.
‘Listen, Anna Crowe is dead, her two kids are dead, we’re not dealing with a smash and grab here, we’re dealing with a murderer. A cold-blooded murderer and he could murder again, so if you have anything there, anything at all that might help us to move a bit quicker, then please…’
Huxley coughed at the other end of the phone. Lowered his voice and seemed to move his lips closer to the phone, so it sounded to Iris as if he was whispering just to her. ‘Look, you should order the file, have it removed from the records here; it’s just a day’s worth of paperwork, and I’d have it on your desk before the week is out.’ She could sense urgency in his voice.
‘Fine, fine, but tell me, off the record, do I have to worry about Crowe?’
‘Off the record,’ he lowered his voice further, ‘now that I look a little more closely, I’d be very worried about him; his psych assessment is throwing up words like obsessive and manic – now, I’m no quack, but that sounds like he could be a bit of a nutter to me.’ Iris hardly had time to say thanks; Huxley cut off the phone so quickly.
She looked around the incident room; if she had to leave today and head back to Dublin would she even remember this place? Would she remember Slattery, Grady and the rest? She’d remember Anna Crowe, she was sure of that. She’d remember Anna Crowe, who’d once sat opposite her, held her hand and taken her phone number and had two small kids that were the centre of her world. She’d remember what someone had done to Anna Crowe, cut her down, made her into a grotesque charred creature who would never laugh again. Anna would never paint again, never have another glass of wine, or a cup of coffee. When Iris looked down at the black coffee before her, she knew that she had to be sure they had the right man in for questioning.
She looked back at Dennis Blake, who was shuffling through the various reports already submitted. As the bookman on the case, it was his responsibility to make sure that everything tallied, that everything fitted into place. And she wondered, just for a second, how long he’d been around. Back when Baby Fairley had been taken, had there been a bookman? Had everything been recorded, or was there someone like Dennis Blake, walking about, knowing far more than he realised even now? That case was bothering her, as much because it seemed like a shadowy presence that slipped between them all. Grady wasn’t taking it seriously as having any link to the present case and Iris knew, he was probably right.
Iris was itching to get her hands on that file. It would mean a trip down to archives. She’d been there once before, as a student; she’d done a turn in the large offices to the rear of Corbally station, just photocopying, making coffee, that sort of thing. Now, she knew, no real guard wanted to be anywhere near the place. It was the home of the bureaucrats in the southern region. Then, it seemed like the place to be. At seventeen, she’d snatched glimpses of files that quickly passed through her hands, armed robberies and domestic violence reports were as close as she got to the action, but it was too late by then. It was in her blood, she was born a guard, born a detective, no other choice, she supposed with Jack Locke’s blood coursing through her veins. It was the last thing he wanted for her – the guards, Limerick, Corbally, and definitely Murder. Hard to please everyone. She’d soon have to tell him that she’d managed to land herself in all four. She still remembered the archives rooms – essentially a long vault, running the length of the old building, probably built as a wine cellar, according to the old guy who’d shown her around in those heady days. Everything had been stacked high, so much paper, so much time, too many lives and deaths, recorded here, a necropolis with no relatives coming to tend what remained.
‘How come I can’t access anything on the Baby Fairley case?’ she asked Blake who was sitting opposite her, his desk a perfect fairy fort of piled papers, working their way beyond his chair, the stacked files insulating him from anything that might encroach.
‘That’s going back almost thirty years, back to your father’s time…’ He raised his reading glasses high on his craggy forehead. ‘Give us a chance, you’ll see that…’ He gave a dozen quick taps on the keyboard before him, moved closer for a moment and dropped the glasses down before his eyes once more. ‘Hmmm, now let’s see…’ Iris moved closer to him. ‘That’s strange.’
‘What’s strange?’ She pulled a seat in beside him.
‘Oh, nothing, I’m sure it’s nothing.’ But Iris knew, the look on his face said it was far from nothing. ‘Leave it with me, will you?’ He no more wanted her watching him work than he’d have invited her to spend time with him in the jacks.
‘Sure,’ she said sweetly. ‘Like me to get yo
u anything from the canteen?’
‘Ah, no, no, you’re fine.’ He wasn’t even listening to her now. He was too wrapped up in figuring out why a case that was as cold as a toddler’s toes in seaside Rossnowlagh would be restricted access at this stage.
Iris made her way down to the canteen. She picked up a cup of what seemed to pass for coffee in this place and headed back towards the incident room again. She was frustrated. She wanted down and into that archive room – and what was stopping her, she thought as she headed towards the stairs. After all, she was working on a case directly related to the Baby Fairley case – well, connected at least, right? Worst thing that could happen, they’d run her out of the place for not having clearance. She was new, just getting the run of things, she might actually get in there without having to go through the crap that was now basic procedure in opening closed files; these days, it was almost easier to get an exhumation order signed.
She took the two flights of stairs down into the basement where the first thing to hit her was an ominous smell of damp. Taking out her badge, she flashed it at the old boy who sat at a desk surrounded by files that seemed to have been scatted about him.
‘I’m looking for the Baby Fairley case – it was 1990, should have been transferred to PULSE, but they want me to take a look and see if there’s any physical evidence.’
‘You’ll be lucky,’ the old guy said rubbing his eyes, but he got up slowly and led the way through what seemed like endless aisles of storage. He stopped, three quarters of the way along an aisle that had dates running through the eighties. ‘Fairley?’
Silent Night: An absolutely gripping crime thriller Page 6