Borderlands (2 page)

Johnny
Cashell was an obdurate man with a chip against anyone better educated than himself.
He would hold court in the local bars, boasting of all he had achieved despite
having left school at fourteen. In reality, he was a petty criminal, stealing
from phone boxes and charity tins, and pissing it against the wall of the
Military Post as he staggered past on his way home.

No
matter how low Johnny sank, Sadie was always waiting for him, even when he
stole his mother-in-law's pension book. However, we all had to reconsider
Sadie's loyalty to Johnny when he got out after serving nine months for that.
Three months later she gave birth to a baby girl, the only member of the
Cashell family who didn't have Johnny's bright copper colouring but a head
washed in wisps of white-blonde. They called the girl Angela, and Johnny cared
for her as if she were his own, as far as anyone knew never questioning her
parentage. We all suspected that secretly it hurt him - the bright blonde so
obviously at odds with the fiery reds of her siblings. In weaker moments, when
Johnny shouted profanities from the holding cells until we couldn't take it any
more, we taunted him about his blonde-haired daughter and how she was the
prettiest of the bunch. The slightest comment was enough to silence him and
ensure a full night's sleep for whoever was stuck on duty because of him.

The
snow ceased as the assistant state pathologist arrived, black medical bag in
hand. I stood by the river as she worked, wondering what to say to Johnny
Cashell, and watched the sun exploding low over the horizon, turning the ribs
of the clouds first pink, then purple and orange.

Cashell
was a barrel-chested, red-faced man with thick, curly red hair that he kept
tied back in a ponytail. He dressed as if from a charity shop and his clothes
had a musty, damp odour. He was more particular about his feet, and I never met
him wearing the same pair of trainers twice: they were always new and always a
brand label. When you spoke to him he looked at the ground, scrunching up his
toes so you could see the movements through the white leather of his shoes. When
he spoke it was not to your face but to a spot just to the left, as though
someone else waited at your shoulder for his words. All his children had
developed the same habit, which their social worker had thought of as rude
until she got to know them.

As
we stood at his doorway, he stared at his shoes while I told him of his
daughter's death and invited him to identify her. Then he looked past me, his
eyes flickering with grief or anger. He exhaled a breath which he seemed to
have been holding since I arrived, and I thought I could smell drink under the
cigarette smoke.

"It's
her," he said. "I know it's her. Sh'ain't been home these two days.
Went out to Strabane on Thursday." He leaned back a little, as though
steadying himself against the door jamb, the sunlight burnishing to gold the
red curls on the back of his hands.

Sadie
Cashell appeared behind him, face ashen, seemingly having overheard our
conversation. She was drying her hands on a dishcloth. "What is it,
Johnny?" she asked with suspicion.

"They've
gone and found Angela. They think she's dead, Ma!" he said. And with that
his lips softened and his face crumpled.

He
spluttered rather than cried, spit and tears dribbling down his chin. His eyes
stopped flickering as the final rays of sunlight stole from the sky and the
world darkened almost imperceptibly.

"How?"
Sadie demanded, her jaw muscles quivering.

"We
... we don't know yet, Sadie," I said. "We think someone has killed
her, I'm afraid."

"There's
been some mistake," she said, her voice rising hysterically, her grip
tightening on her husband's arm until her knuckles whitened. "You're
wrong."

"I'm
sorry, Sadie," I said. "I'll... we'll do what we can. I promise."
She stared at me, as if waiting for me to say something else, then turned and
went inside.

Johnny
Cashell snuffed through his nose, his face turned towards Strabane. I guessed
that Sadie had broken the news to their children, for I could hear the cries of
girls begin from inside the house, the sound building quickly to a crescendo.

"We
need you to come to the morgue, Mr Cashell. To identify her. If you don't
mind."

"She
needn't be there now. Bring her home," he said.

"Mr
Cashell, we have things we have to do, sir, to find out what happened to her.
You mightn't get her back for a day or two, I'm afraid."

He
took a tin from his pocket and removed a rolled cigarette from it, put it in
his mouth and lit it. Then he spat a piece of tobacco from his tongue and
looked once more in my direction, just beyond my shoulder. "I know what
happened to her. I'll deal with it," he said.

"What
do you mean? What do you think happened, Mr Cashell?" I asked.

"Never
mind," he said, still not looking at me.

His
wife reappeared at the door. "Where's my girl, John?" she asked her
husband. He pointed to me with his thumb.

"He
says we can't have her yet. She ain't ready to come home, he says."

"Who
did it?" she demanded.

"I...
we don't know, Mrs Cashell," I said, glancing at her husband. "We're
working on it."

"You're
fast enough to pick up on innocent people in the street, maybe has a drink. Now
you're slow all of a sudden. Some rich girl, you'd be faster, I'd say."

"Mrs
Cashell," I said, "I promise we will deal with this as quickly as
possible. Can I speak with your other daughters, please?"

Sadie
looked first at me, then at her husband, who shrugged his shoulders and walked
away from the door, still smoking. Then she allowed me in.

Angela's
three sisters were seated around a table in the kitchen. They looked remarkably
similar. A baby, dressed only in a nappy, clung to the chest of one of them,
bunching up her white blouse in his fist.

I
sat at the table and took out my cigarettes.

"No
smoking around my wee'un," said the young mother, tapping her own
cigarette ash onto the linoleum floor.

I
did not put the cigarette away, nor did I light it. The youngest daughter was
still crying, but the other girls stared at me, one red- eyed, one vaguely
defiant, as if unwilling to show emotions in front of a Guard.

"I
need some help in finding out what happened to Angela," I said.
"Perhaps you could tell me people she was with, boyfriends, that sort of
thing."

The
youngest girl opened her mouth as though to speak but was interrupted by the
one holding the baby, whose name I seemed to remember was Christine.

"We
don't know nothing,
Inspector."
She
pronounced each syllable of the title deliberately and with as much disdain as
she could muster. I noticed that she alone, of all the sisters, had not cried
since she had heard the news. Her eyes were clear and white. Aware of my gaze,
she looked down at her baby instead, her head tilted slightly to one side.

I
turned to the youngest girl. "Were you going to tell me something?"
I said. "To help me?"

She
glanced furtively at her sister, then lowered her head and stared at her hands,
which were joined in her lap. She looked undernourished, her bony pink hands
like baby birds in a nest.

Christine
spoke again. "Like I already told you", she said, "we don't know
nothing." With that, she lifted her baby's bottle and began to feed him,
holding the cigarette in her mouth and squinting through the smoke.

I
asked Sadie if I could see Angela's room. She led me up the stairs in silence,
pushed open one of the bedroom doors and waited for me to go in. I was a little
surprised to find the room so tidy, and at the same time a little ashamed at
the unworthiness of the thought. A window dominated the far wall, facing onto
the backyard.

The
room looked freshly painted, a lavender tint; the carpet and bed linen were
light green. A poster of someone called Orlando Bloom had been tacked carefully
to the wall behind the bed. The wardrobe was packed with clothes, neatly
arranged and hung according to type and size. I spotted the corner of a
paperback on the floor, peeping out from the overhanging bedspread. I recognized
the author as one whom my wife Debbie read. Flicking through the pages
absentmindedly as I looked around the room, I noticed that Angela had been
using a strip of passport photographs as a bookmark. The strip showed the
half-faces of two girls, grinning in from the white border on either side. One
of them was Angela. In the final picture their faces touched lightly and Angela
was no longer smiling, yet seemed all the more content. It saddened me to see
her so alive. I held the pictures up to Sadie and asked her who the other girl
was, but she simply shrugged her shoulders and asked if I was finished. I
replaced the strip of pictures, careful not to lose the page, before I
realized the futility of the gesture.

In
the corner of the room there was an old CD player and a plastic rack with a
dozen or so discs sitting under a freestanding mirror. Most of the bands I
either did not know or had heard of only from Penny. Strangely, I noticed in
the middle a CD by the Divine Comedy, whom I had seen perform in Dublin a few
years previously. It seemed a little incongruous amongst all the boy bands. I
asked Sadie about the CD. Again she shrugged and moved into the hallway, making
it clear that she did not wish for me to remain in her daughter's bedroom. I
thanked her and offered my condolences again as I made my way downstairs and
outside to arrange for Johnny Cashell to identify the body.

He
was still standing in his front yard when I left the house, picking the last
remaining deadheads off a florabunda rose bush. The heads themselves were heavy
and brown, hanging low. He broke them off with his hand, clasping fists full of
dead petals.

"I
am sorry, Mr Cashell." I said, shaking his free hand. "There is one
other thing. Can you tell me what Angela was wearing when last you saw
her?"

"Jeans,
probably. A blue hooded thing her ma bought her for her birthday, I think.
'Twere only last month. Why? Don't you know what she's wearing?"

As
a father myself, I could not deprive him of his assumption that his daughter
had retained some vestige of dignity in death. I opened my mouth to speak, but
the air between us was brittle and sharp with the scent of decaying leaves and
I could think of nothing adequate to say.

When
I returned to the station, Burgess, our Desk Sergeant, told me that I was
wanted immediately by the Superintendent. Costello - or Elvis to everyone who
spoke of him (though not to his face) - was famous in Lifford, having served
here, in and out of uniform, for almost thirty years. It was suspected that he
knew many of the family secrets that most people preferred to keep buried. It
meant that, in the village, he was universally admired but secretly mistrusted.
However, he never knowingly used the information he had gathered unless
absolutely necessary, and he excused many ancient crimes on the grounds that if
they had not merited punishment at the time, how could they do so now? By
rights he should have been stationed in Letterkenny, which is the centre of the
Donegal division, but following his wife Emily's mastectomy several years
earlier, he had requested and been granted permission to use Lifford as his
headquarters.

His
nickname came not only from his surname, but also his Christian name, Oily;
more than once, Gardai called to public-order disturbances had been greeted
with a drunken chorus of "Oliver's

Army",
despite the fact that his name was actually Alphonsus. The name stuck to the
force in Lifford in much the same way that Elvis stuck with Costello. He never
said it, but I think he was secretly pleased by the nickname, taking it as a
tacit sign of affection, recognition of his position as an institution of
sorts.

"Cashell
is a Cork man," he said now, straightening his tie in the mirror hung
behind his office door. His position meant that he was the only person in the
station to have his own office, while the rest of us shared rooms. In fairness,
Elvis had been careful not to rub our faces in his perks: the furnishing was
perfunctory, not expensive.

"Really?"
I asked, unsure of his point.

"Yes.
Moved here when he was three. A lot of us suspected at the time that they were
travellers, but his family rented out towards St Johnston. He got placed in Clipton
Place after he got Sadie pregnant the first time. Didn't fit in too well to
begin with."

"Apparently
not," I said. "Drove the neighbours on one side out with the noise,
drove the neighbours on the other side out with a claw hammer."

"For
which he was cautioned. Still, this is a terrible thing to happen. How did he
take it?"

"As
you would expect. He seemed shattered. I thought one of the daughters was going
to tell me something, but the rest of the family closed tight."

"Years
of mistrust, Benedict, learnt at the dinner table." Costello is also the
only person I know who refers to me by my full Christian name, as if it would
be unmannerly of him to do otherwise. "Leave them a day or two and try
again. Maybe when fewer of them are about."