Borderlands (24 page)

"What
if McKelvey wasn't the link. What if the message wasn't for McKelvey or
Costello? What if it was meant for Johnny Cashell?"

"It's
possible. Should we go see him?" Williams suggested.

"I
guess we'd better," I said.

We didn't
get any further, though, for my own cellphone rang. It was Kathleen Boyle,
Terry's mother, and she had received something unusual in the mail.

"I
don't usually open my husband's mail," she explained, sitting on the same
sofa as she had the night her son had been murdered. "Only at Christmas.
Well, some people don't realize we're separated, you see. They still send
cards to both of us, but in his name. You know, Mr and Mrs Seamus Boyle. I open
them and send his on to him."

"No
need to explain, Mrs Boyle," Williams said, impatient to find out what
exactly had been sent.

"Well,
I knew this was a Christmas card when it arrived today. I just thought it was
late. But the card was blank you see - no message, nothing. Just this inside .
. ." She held out a photograph, its subject unclear as the light shimmered
with the shaking of her hand across the glossy finish.

When I took
the picture from her, I was both surprised and strangely comforted to see the
familiar image of Mary Knox, sitting on the steps, frozen in a moment that must
have held significance for whoever had taken the photograph - or whoever was
attaching it to murders twenty-odd years after her disappearance.

Mrs Boyle
caught the glance between myself and Williams. "Do you know who she
is?" she asked.

"The
question is, do you?" I replied.

"No
idea. I've never seen her before. I just thought... Well, you said if I thought
of anything unusual to get in touch."

"You're
sure you don't know her?" I asked again, desperate now to find the link,
the relevance of this picture.

"No,
I've never set eyes on her, I swear."

"The
card was sent to your husband, Mrs Boyle. Would he know her?"

"I
...
I don't know," she said, suddenly taken
aback by the thought. "She might be one of his ... women. But the picture
looks so old."

"Can
we contact your husband, Mrs Boyle?" I asked. "To see if—"

She nodded
vigorously. "Oh, he'll be here later. For the funeral tomorrow." She
looked from Williams to me and back, as if somewhere in the space between us
she might find an explanation for the death of her son.

After
assuring Mrs Boyle that she had done the right thing in calling us, we sat in
the car and discussed our progress. There was no discernable link between Ratsy
Donaghey, Angela Cashell and Terry Boyle, yet someone had murdered the three of
them, and Mary Knox's picture had turned up in connection with all three
crimes. Ratsy Donaghey was the same generation as Johnny Cashell and, though I
didn't know Seamus Boyle, Mary Knox's photograph had been sent to him, not his
wife. I decided the only thing left to do was to confront Johnny Cashell and
Seamus Boyle. Before we did, I called Hendry to see if he had found out
anything more about Knox's disappearance. He had spent the morning going over
case notes for me.

"I
told you yesterday. The main line of inquiry at the time was IRA involvement.
Of course, that meant that it never went any further."

"Does
the name Ratsy Donaghey mean anything? Druggie from Letterkenny."

"Tony?"

"That's
him."

"Tony's
name appeared once or twice. One of the neighbours said she had seen him a
couple of times around the house before the girl vanished. Not just him,
mind," he added.

"No
word on the kids yet?"

"Nothing.
My guess is if she's alive they're with her. Otherwise, one of her neighbours
wasn't spotted for a few days after the disappearance. Went to Dublin to a
sister, she said. She and Knox were very close; she looked after the kids,
apparently, when Knox was working. Joanne Duffy her name was. Lives in Derry
now, somewhere. Why do you ask about Tony Donaghey?"

"His
name's come up on this side."

"What
did you call him? Ratsy?" Hendry asked, and I explained.

When
Donaghey was a teenager he used to hunt and catch rats in the farms around
Lifford. On summer days, when the weather was stiflingly hot, he went into
Letterkenny and hung around by traffic lights, a live rat in the pocket of his
coat. If a single female driver stopped at the lights, with her window down
because of the heat, Donaghey would throw the live rat onto her lap. Generally,
the driver's first reaction was to leap out of the idling car. Donaghey could
then jump in and drive off. He did it six times before he was caught. Rumour
also has it that the officer who caught him, who is now a superintendent, broke
the bones of Donaghey's two hands with a truncheon as a salutary lesson in the
summary justice of Donegal.

"Fair
enough," Hendry said. "He was a bad bastard by all accounts. Reading
between the lines here, he was fairly in the frame for the Knox disappearance,
and a few others. We had him down as a Provo, for a while anyway, until even
they kicked him out. No evidence, though, so it was left in the wind.
Sorry."

I thanked
him and hung up. Twice now he had mentioned the Provo connection. I couldn't
see it. Still, I thought, it would do no harm to check. I picked up my car
keys. Williams looked at me.

"I
think I need to go to confession," I said.

Our local
priest is an elderly man called Terry Brennan. He moved to Lifford four years
ago after serving in one of the roughest areas of Derry for fourteen years and,
while many assumed him to be a bumbling old relic from the golden age of
Catholicism, few knew that he had mediated between the IRA and British
government ministers for several years in the late '80s and early '90s. He had
no affiliations with either group, yet managed to retain the respect, and, more
importantly, the ear of both.

The 10.30
a.m. Mass was not yet over, so we sat in the car park until the small number of
woman parishioners exited into the morning sunlight, pulling on coats or
fastening scarves around their heads against the cold. Then I went into the
chapel.

The
sunlight from outside shone through the stained glass at such an angle that the
spectrum of colours splashed across the white marble of the altar. Father
Brennan was in the confessional; two elderly supplicants knelt at the pew
directly outside. The door of the box clicked open and a child came out,
holding the door open for a woman who was, presumably, his grandmother. Within
less than a minute, she too came out and the man in front of me entered the
box. From where I was sitting I could hear his soft murmuring, interspersed
with the deeper, more guttural mutterings of Father Brennan. Then the man came
out and left the confessional box door swinging in air heavy with the scent of
incense.

I went into
the box and pulled the door behind me. The atmosphere was warm and close, the
smell of polish and wood mixing with the scent of the priest's aftershave. I
could make out his silhouette through the grill that separated us. He was
looking down at his lap, at a prayer book, his ear close to the grille.

"Bless
me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been a few weeks since my last
confession," I began.

"Better
make it quick, Inspector, my breakfast's being made," Brennan replied in a
voice gravelled by years of smoking Woodbines. He laughed softly to himself, a
chuckle that resonated like a cough.

"I
need a favour. I need to speak to someone who could help me with a case. A
prostitute named Mary Knox disappeared from Strabane in 1978. I need to know
whether the Provos had anything to do with it. It connects with the Cashell and
Boyle deaths, I think."

"They're
connected?" Brennan hissed.

"We
think so. But no one knows, so ..." My unspoken request for confidence
hung unanswered. Brennan did not speak for almost a minute, the silence
interminable in the darkness of the box. He leaned closer towards the grille
and, in the half-light, I could see that he had turned his head towards me, a
glint of external light catching the frame of his glasses. "I can't
promise anything, Inspector. It's a very unorthodox request. Give me a number
to contact you. As I say, no promises."

"Thank
you, Father," I said.

I heard him
moving in the box next to me, preparing to leave. He reached up and pulled the
stole from around his neck.

"Father,"
I said. "I was wondering if you'd hear my confession while I'm here."

He did not
speak, but sat again, and I could faintly make out in the gloom that he had
placed the purple stole around his neck again and blessed himself. I began to
tell him about McKelvey, about Anderson and his sheep and, mostly, about Miriam
Powell. He asked me if I had told Debbie what had happened. He asked me if I
was sorry. He asked me would I have taken the affair any further and I said,
"No."

"God
forgives you, Inspector. Your wife, I suspect, will forgive you. Try now to
forgive yourself. I absolve you from your sins, in the name of the Father, the
Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. Leave your phone on."

Williams
and I went to a restaurant on the border called The Traveller's Rest. She ate
cereal and toast while I had a full breakfast with bacon, eggs, sausage and tomato.
I was wiping my last slice of toast through the remaining egg yolk when my
phone rang.

"Devlin
here," I said, not recognizing the caller ID on the phone's display.

"The
priest said you wanted to ask some questions." The voice was cold,
disconnected not just by the anonymity of the mobile phone but by something
deeper.

"Yes,"
I said, though he had not asked a question.

"What
do you want?"

"Mary
Knox. She was a—"

"The
priest told us. What do you want?"

"Did
the IRA have anything to do with her disappearance?" I asked and realized
that the people at the table beside us were staring open-mouthed at me. I
stepped outside, fumbling in my pocket for my cigarettes as I spoke.

"No."

"Are
you sure?" No response. "What about Ratsy Donaghey? Was he one of
yours?"

"It's
a well-known fact, Devlin. The priest told me that—"

"So
Ratsy Donaghey didn't have anything to do with Knox's disappearance?"

"I
didn't say that. Listen. We did not sanction the ... disappearance of Mary
Knox. Whether one renegade volunteer did is another matter and one for which we
accept no responsibility. Such behaviour reflects badly on us."

"I
hardly think you're in a position of moral highground," I began.

"The
priest told us you were a decent fella," the voice said. "He was
wrong. I can understand why they torched your car. Don't look for this to
happen again."

"Wait,"
I said. "What about Johnny Cashell and Seamus Boyle?"

"Are
you fucking stupid? They all worked together." Then the line went dead.

I recorded
the phone number that had shown on my display, a northern cellphone number. I
phoned through to the Garda Telecomm Support Unit and asked them if they could
trace it. Later that day, they contacted me to tell me that the number belonged
to a ten-year-old who had reported it lost in her school some days earlier.

"Donaghey
did it," I said, having relayed the details of the conversation to
Williams. "He was IRA but acted outside of them.

When he
went into drugs they cut him loose completely. But he must have done it."

"How
come the RUC couldn't get him?"

"Extradition
proceedings in the '70s were fairly rare. Probably not worth the effort if they
couldn't be sure the state would hand him over. Besides, they needed to prove
it was him for a case. We don't have to
prove
anything. Suspicion is enough to get us going - give us
something to work with. So, let's work on the assumption that Ratsy Donaghey
did kill her. Let's say he stole her jewellery. That was the kind of lowlife he
was. Twenty-five years later, his house is broken into and the jewellery
stolen. So much time has passed he believes he's in the clear. No one will
remember a bloody ring, he thinks. And it must be worth something. Maybe he
wanted the insurance to cover it. Somehow, someone sees the ring on the stolen
items list, though. They make the connection. Ratsy gets tortured and killed.
What if it wasn't a rival drugs thing or questions about the ring? What if
Ratsy was tortured until he spilled the whole truth on Mary Knox? What if he
named names? Let's say he names Cashell and Boyle. A little while later,
Cashell's daughter and Boyle's son both end up dead, with photographs of the
dead woman, and Cashell wearing her ring."

"How
did they get the ring? Check all the jewellers' shops until they get a hit?
Follow it back to Whitey McKelvey, get the ring and set him up? None of the
jewellers mentioned anyone asking questions except us, and it's our job to do
that!"