Borderlands (11 page)

"Did I
miss a famous Holmes simile?" she asked, smiling.

"Nearly.
You're just in time."

"What's
up?" she said, waving a sheet of paper in her left hand.

"Nothing.
Lorcan Hutton has joined us for a chat. Brought his lawyer."

"What?"

"Yep. I
invited him to the station; he picks up his mobile and phones. The fucking
lawyer was here before we were."

"Jesus."
She allowed a respectful pause before telling us of her success. "Guess
what? We got a hit on the ring. Two hits, actually."

"Great.
What?"

"I kept
phoning round jewellers and that, and this morning got a woman in Stranorlar
who recognized the description of the ring."

"Any
names come up?" I asked impatiently. Williams looked a little hurt at my
lack of appreciation for her storytelling and continued.

"I
couldn't find any of you, so I went on myself. Seems that about a month ago, a
young traveller boy tried selling her a number of items, including the ring.
She remembered the ring in particular because she has a moonstone ring herself.
Said it was very unusual. Offered him twenty euros for it, thinking he wouldn't
know the value. Told her to go fuck herself and left the shop. She thought he
was playing hard to get, that he'd be back for the money, but she never saw him
again."

"Is she
sure it was a traveller?"

"Oh yes.
Made a big deal out of showing me the can of air freshener she said she'd
had
to spray after he went.
A blond boy, she said. Hair almost white. Big ears."

"Whitey
McKelvey. Jesus! Good work, Caroline," Holmes said.

"Thank
you." She smiled warmly. "Anyway - here's the interesting bit. She
said she told the other Garda who had asked."

"What
other Garda?" I asked.

"She
said that a Guard had called into the shop one day, just out of the blue, and
asked her about the ring. Had a sketch of it. She said she told him then; gave
a full description of the boy. A young Guard."

"Who was
it?"

"I don't
know. I've contacted Letterkenny and they're to get back to me about it,"
Williams said. "But I figured that it meant the ring must have been
stolen, not bought. Guess what?"

"What?"
I said.

"It was.
Stolen, I mean. In Letterkenny, a few weeks earlier."

"Makes
sense." Holmes said.

"What
does?" I asked.

"McKelvey
steals it from Letterkenny, tries to shift it, doesn't get the money he
expected and so gives it to his girlfriend in return for ..." He looked at
Williams. "For you know what."

"I
suppose," I agreed a little reluctantly. "Who reported it
stolen?"

"Someone
called Anthony Donaghey. Said it was a family heirloom, belonged to his
mother."

"Anthony
Donaghey.
The
Anthony Donaghey?" I asked in amusement.

"I don't
know.
An
Anthony
Donaghey, certainly," Williams said, annoyed at my tone. "Why? Who's
Anthony Donaghey?"

"Ratsy
Donaghey," I said, looking to Holmes for agreement.

"Right,
right. The drug dealer. Right."

"More
than a drug dealer. Fulltime asshole. If that ring belonged to his mother,
I'll ...
I don't know what
I'll do. But it's not his mother's. She spent her days cleaning the local
primary school; she didn't buy gold-and-diamond rings."

"Maybe
she ran a sideline, same as her son," Holmes said, laughing.

"Maybe
we should have a talk with Mr Donaghey," Williams suggested, pointedly
ignoring the previous remark.

"You'll
have a hard time doing that," a voice behind us said. We all turned to see
the oily face of Mr Gerard Brown, lawyer to Lorcan Hutton, about whom we had
completely forgotten.

"Why?"
asked Holmes.

"He was
found dead in Bundoran last month."

"Client
of yours, too, was he?" Williams asked, smirking.

"Occasionally,"
Brown replied, without a hint of irony. "I take it my present client is
free to go now."

I nodded at
Holmes. "Try him one last time. Make it clear," I said, as much for
Brown as for Holmes, "that we will ignore any admission of knowledge about
drugs in the area, if Mr Hutton reveals such while giving us information which
pertains to this murder inquiry."

"I'm
sure my client will do his best to help the Garda," Brown said. Then he
and Holmes went back into the interview room.

"So,
what do you think, guvnor?" Williams said, stressing the last word.

"I think
Holmes is right." Her face fell slightly. "That was bloody good work,
Caroline."

She blushed.
"What about Donaghey?" she said.

"Check
where he died. Contact the station involved and see what they say about his
death."

"Do you
think there's a connection?" she asked.

"I don't
see how there could be, but best check, eh? Meantime, we wait to see if
McKelvey turns up in Ballybofey."

"Why
Ballybofey?" she asked, and I filled her in on all that I had learned that
morning. Then Williams went to her desk, while I began to work through some of
the many message sheets that had gathered on my desk since Angela Cashell had
died.

The top pile
related to Terry Boyle. Apparently he had been seen in three different pubs on
the evening he died, though no one remembered him leaving with anyone. Someone
had run a standard record check on him the previous night and had reported
that he was charged with possession of marijuana in Dublin when a first-year
student. He got off with a fine and community service. An appeal for
information had just started to filter out through the media - by tomorrow, I
expected my messages pile to have grown considerably. I read and was able to
scrap immediately the note from Williams, saying that she had got a possible
hit with the ring in a second-hand jewellers' in Stranorlar, and couldn't wait
for me to return. She added that Holmes had gone out to pick up Lorcan Hutton.

Burgess had
left two notes that morning to say that Thomas Powell had phoned enquiring
about the state of inquiries regarding his father's intruder. Burgess had
spelt both words correctly, though had used them the wrong way around.

On Saturday
night, five cars along Coneyburrow Road had had their wing mirrors smashed off
by a drunken man seen staggering along the road. The following day, all five
owners had phoned to say that the culprit, a local schoolteacher celebrating
the Christmas holidays, had called on each that morning and apologized before
offering to pay for all damages.

That same
night, four bottles of gin were stolen from an off- sales office at the back of
the local pub. The thief had tried to escape out of the toilet window, dropping
and smashing three of the bottles in the process.

On Sunday
morning, a Derry man phoned to report seeing a wild cat along the main Lifford
road the previous night as he returned home in a taxi following a wedding. He
was unable to describe colour or size - only that it was dark and bigger than a
normal cat.

Finally,
while I was sitting there, the pathologist's report was left on my desk by
Burgess. Terry Boyle's identification had been confirmed using hospital notes
which mentioned two breakages in his femur from childhood accidents. Cause of
death was attributed to a single gunshot wound to the head, delivered at
point-blank range from a handgun. He had certainly been dead before his car was
set alight. Stomach contents revealed he had drunk in excess of the legal
drink-driving limit, which made me wonder whether he had stopped in the lay-by
where he was killed to sleep off the drink. There was no sign of the drug which
had been found in Angela Cashell's stomach, which further convinced me that the
two killings were linked by nothing more than geography.

An hour and
three coffees later, I became aware of a figure standing before me and looked
up to see Garda officer John Harvey, a young uniform with light brown hair and
glasses, holding his cap in his hand.

"You
wanted to see me, sir?" he said.

"Did
I?" I asked.

"Yes.
Sergeant Williams said I was to see you about the stolen ring. I was the one
called to the jewellers about it."

I invited
Harvey to sit, and he did, carefully, as though attending an interview. Harvey
was a part-timer, but clearly loved the work and compensated for a limited
intellect by being fastidious and deferential to all the full-timers in the
station, especially detectives.

"I
brought my notes, sir. And a copy of the report I wrote." He smiled as he
offered me the two typed A4 sheets and his notebook, in which he had recorded
the interview in longhand. The notes confirmed exactly what Williams had told
us, with a vague description of the boy, as provided by the jeweller in
Stranorlar.

"Could
it be this Whitey McKelvey, sir?" Harvey said, eagerly.

"Could
be. Why did you go to the jewellers in the first place?"

"Sergeant
Fallon asks some of us part-timers if we'd go around local second-hand shops
every so often with stolen-goods lists. I wasn't doing anything that day, so I
volunteered. I don't know if he followed it up, though."

I figured
Fallon probably hadn't. Stolen rings were low priority; simply by sending
someone like Harvey out to check, Fallon had covered himself should anyone make
a fuss that their loss wasn't being treated seriously. In reality, we all
accepted that stolen goods generally stayed lost. I could also understand why
Fallon picked people like Harvey to do the job: he had clearly approached it
with the same seriousness as he would a murder inquiry. In fact, I decided to
follow Fallon's lead.

"John,
perhaps you could help me with something else. Tommy Powell in Finnside Nursing
Home claims he had an intruder in his room last week. I promised we'd send
someone out to check. Would you take a run out, if you get a chance?"

He nodded
eagerly. "I'd love to," he said.

"Thanks,"
I replied, looking back to my paperwork in the hope he'd take the hint and
leave. He didn't.

"My
pleasure, sir. If there's anything I can do to help with the Cashell case. You
know, I could . . ." He didn't get any further, as Burgess shouted that
Costello wanted to see me.

When I went
into his office, he was speaking to someone on the phone and had a copy of the
Belfast Telegraph
on the
desk in front of him. He spun the paper round to face me while he agreed with
whatever was being said to him on the other end of the line. Then he pointed at
an article on the front page, apparently a story concerning the latest UN
debate over the efficacy of Hans Blix's Inspection Team, and the inevitability
of a war in Iraq. I failed to see the relevance of the story and shrugged my
bewilderment. Costello frowned and stabbed a finger at the bottom of the page,
without interrupting his conversation. I sat down when I saw the short piece to
which he had pointed, under the heading, "Puma on Prowl in Donegal?"

The story
told, in sensational detail, how sheep in the area of Lifford were being terrorised
nightly by an unidentified creature. It also quoted an eyewitness, the Derry
man who had spotted the creature on the way home from a wedding, giving a much
fuller description than the one he had provided for our desk sergeant when he
had phoned that weekend. He had, he said, contacted the local Garda, but felt
that his complaint was not taken seriously. Now poor animals were suffering due
to Garda reluctance or inefficiency. As a side-bar to the story, the paper had
included a table of facts about pumas and what to do if you encountered one,
including the suggestion that, when face-to-face with a puma, it is best not to
panic, but rather pretend that it is not there.

By the time I
had stopped reading and put the paper down, Costello was holding the phone in
his hand, the mouthpiece covered. "Do you know anything about this?"
he said, lifting the paper, as though to check whether the story was still
there, then throwing it across his desk. It skimmed across the polished surface
and slid onto the floor. I picked it up.

"A bit.
The Derry man left a message. I only got it today. I thought we had more
important issues."

"Well,
this might explain Anderson's complaints about his sheep."

"Possibly,"
I agreed.

"Except
we look like spare pricks at a funeral not doing anything about it. RTE have
been on the phone. Again."

"Twice
in one week. We've hit the big time."

"Three
times," Costello corrected me. "You got the pathologist's report, I
take it?" I nodded. "What do you think?"

I recounted
my thoughts on reading it, including my view that perhaps Terry Boyle had
parked at Gallows Lane to sleep off the effects of overdrinking. Costello let
me speak, then passed me a booklet of typed sheets.