Collusion (7 page)

You heard about Kevin Malloy? What happened to him night before last?’ Lennon asked. ‘He was one of Bull O’Kane’s crew. Bull O’Kane owns the farm where McGinty got killed.’

‘That Malloy thing was a robbery gone wrong,’ Hewitt said. ‘Besides, it’s nothing to do with us. It was on the other side of the border. The Guards can take care of that one. You’re fishing. What for?’

Lennon took a chance. ‘What do the notes say about Marie McKenna?’

Hewitt paled.

‘In the Rankin interview,’ Lennon continued, not giving Hewitt a chance to sidestep. ‘Right at the end, he mentions her.’

‘No he doesn’t,’ Hewitt said with a weak laugh. He picked up his fork and stabbed at soggy lettuce leaves.

‘He does,’ Lennon said. ‘Right at the end.’

Hewitt dropped the fork and reached for the folder. He pulled out loose pages and flipped through them. He found the Rankin interview and traced the lines with his fingertip. After a few seconds of page turning, Hewitt said, ‘It doesn’t mention Marie McKenna anywhere.’

‘Nope,’ Lennon said. ‘Made you look, though, didn’t I?’

Hewitt stared hard across the table at him, his cheeks flushed, before stuffing the pages back in the folder. ‘I’ll hang on to these,’ he said, ‘make sure they’re properly disposed of.’

Was Marie involved in any of that?’ Lennon asked.

Hewitt stood. ‘I’m not having this discussion with you, Jack.’

‘I drive by her street sometimes,’ Lennon said. ‘Not in a dodgy way, you understand, just if I’m passing. Her windows have been boarded up for a while now. I asked around, at her work, places like that. They said she’d moved away, they didn’t know where. She went in a hurry.’

Hewitt moved around the table to Lennon’s side. ‘Jack, if you want any more information from our files, you can make an official request.’

‘She moved away with my daughter,’ Lennon said. ‘You know my family disowned me when I joined up. Personnel have my next of kin down as a cousin I only talk to once a year, for Christ’s sake. Ellen’s the only mark I made on the world. The only family I’ve got, and she doesn’t know who I am. I just want to know where she is.’

‘All right.’ Hewitt placed a hand on Lennon’s shoulder. ‘I’ll tell you this as an old friend. I shouldn’t discuss it at all, but I’ll make an exception for you.’ He leaned in close to Lennon’s ear. ‘These papers say absolutely nothing about Marie McKenna or her child. Fair enough?’

Lennon turned his head so their eyes were inches apart. ‘Fair enough.’

Hewitt patted his shoulder and walked away, the file tucked under his arm.

‘But, Dan?’ Lennon called after him.

Hewitt stopped, sighed, and turned around.

‘If you’re lying to me,’ Lennon said.

‘You’ll what?’

Lennon thought about it for a few seconds before telling the truth. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

13

Gerry Fegan stood still and closed his eyes when the long Cadillac slowed alongside him. He’d been as careful as he could, getting off the F Train at Delancey Street station instead of East Broadway, and taking the most circuitous route he could find to his building on the corner of Hester and Ludlow Street. He would have fled when he had the chance, only he needed money and his fake passport. He had no choice but to go back to his shabby little room on the Lower East Side.

The brakes whined. ‘Doyles want to see you, Gerry Fegan,’ a heavily accented voice called.

Fegan opened his eyes and turned to Pyè Préval. He was the only black man the Doyle brothers would have about them. The small and wiry Haitian leaned out of the rear passenger side window. Fegan had met him a few times on the sites he’d worked on. In his strange mix of Haitian Creole and English, Pyè often told Fegan he wanted to visit Ireland. He asked Fegan about the weather and the landscape, the drink, and the ‘fi’ – the girls. Fegan liked him in a way, but knew a bad man when he met one. Pyè would be handy with a knife, Fegan was sure of it.

Pyè got out of the car and held the door open. ‘Zanmi mwen,’ he said, his smile as bright as the day. He pointed inside the limo. ‘My friend, get in machin nan.’

‘Jimmy Stone’s going to need surgery on that knee,’ Frankie Doyle said. He speared a meatball with his fork and squashed overcooked pasta into it with his knife.

The tourists on Mulberry Street paid no attention to Fegan or the Doyles as they talked at a table outside the restaurant. The brothers didn’t offer Fegan any food.

‘Tell him I’m sorry about that,’ Fegan said.

Packie Doyle snorted and mopped his mouth with a paper napkin. ‘Christ, I don’t think sorry’s going to do it, Gerry.’

Fegan didn’t protest at the name. ‘Will he be all right?’ he asked.

‘Eventually,’ Frankie said. ‘He’ll be on crutches for a month or two, and he’ll have a limp for a good long while. Some of the boys thought we should do you over for that, Gerry. Do both your knees, see how you like it.’

Fegan said nothing. An image flickered briefly in his mind: breaking a young man’s left knee behind McKenna’s bar on the Springfield Road. It had been more than two decades ago, and remembrance could do no good. He pushed the memory away.

Packie mopped up sauce with a fistful of bread. ‘We don’t want a fight with you, Gerry,’ he said.

‘No fight,’ Frankie said. ‘Jesus, if we wanted that, we wouldn’t be sitting here now. We could just as easy turn you in to the cops, or immigration even, as hand you over to this guy who’s looking for you.’

‘We could’ve done that,’ Packie said through a mouthful of bread, ‘but we didn’t.’

‘Look at things our way for a minute,’ Frankie said. ‘Good men are hard to find.’

‘You can’t get the help these days,’ Packie said.

‘So along comes a good man,’ Frankie said, ‘and we want to put some work his way.’

‘But he throws it back in our face,’ Packie said.

‘And we’re just trying to do him a good turn,’ Frankie said. ‘You see where we’re coming from, Gerry?’

Fegan clasped his hands together. ‘I just want to be left alone.’

‘We all want a quiet life,’ Packie said.

Frankie nodded. ‘What we want and what we get are two different things.’

You owe us, Gerry,’ Packie said. ‘And not just for keeping quiet about who and where you are.’

‘Jimmy’s surgery won’t be cheap,’ Frankie said.

‘Thousands, it’ll cost,’ Packie said.

‘There’s no getting round it, Gerry,’ Frankie said.

‘Everybody pays,’ Packie said.

‘Sooner or later,’ Frankie said.

Fegan eyed the bottle of red wine the brothers shared. He swallowed against the dryness in his throat. ‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked.

14

Lennon watched Marie McKenna’s flat for an hour, his mind working over the documents Hewitt had let him see. The windows were still boarded up, no outward sign that anything had changed since May. He often scolded himself as he sat there, parked wherever the best vantage point lay. This was stalker behaviour, plain and simple, and he hated himself for it.

Worst of all, the one night he could have done any good, he hadn’t been there. Just a day before Marie disappeared, Lennon sat in this very parking space and watched a tall thin man call at her door. When she welcomed the stranger in, Lennon had sped off, almost clipping another car. The next day he found out the man was Gerry Fegan, a known killer. Fegan had been arrested for brawling with another thug outside the flat.

Lennon asked CI Uprichard what was going on. Uprichard made a call while Lennon waited, nodded his head and grunted agreement. When Uprichard hung up, he paused, smiled and said, ‘Best just leave it.’

But Lennon didn’t leave it, at least not for a while. He asked around, begged favours, and leaned on lowlifes. All he could get was that she’d moved away in a hurry, taking the little girl with her.

His little girl.

He had put it to the back of his mind, convinced himself his daughter was lost to him, but still once every week or two he would take a detour by Eglantine Avenue. Like this evening.

The window above Marie’s flat lit up. A young man with a rollup cigarette between his lips appeared for just a moment as he lowered the shabby blinds. An idea presented itself. Lennon pushed it away. The idea resisted. He gave in, knowing it was a mistake.

Lennon climbed out of his Audi, locked it, and walked towards the flat. There were three doorbell buttons. The bottom one, the button for Marie’s flat, had no name tag. The middle one said ‘Hutchence’. Lennon held his thumb on it for five seconds, then took a step back.

The middle blind on the bay window shot up, followed by the sash pane. The young man leaned out. ‘Yeah?’

‘Police,’ Lennon said. ‘I need a word.’

The young man banged his head on the window frame as he ducked back inside. Lennon heard the frantic muttering of at least three voices from above. He guessed it wasn’t tobacco the young man was smoking.

The young man’s head appeared again. ‘Can I see some identification please?’ he asked, his voice breaking like a twelve-year-old’s.

‘If you like,’ Lennon said. He pulled his wallet from his hip pocket, opened it, and held it up. ‘I doubt if you’ll be able to read it from up there, though.’

‘I’ll be down in a minute,’ the young man said, the last word at least an octave higher than the rest.

Lennon scanned the tiny garden as he waited. Marie used to keep it pretty neat. Now litter and dead leaves gathered in the corners, and a summer’s worth of weeds had grown up through the cracks in the concrete.

A light appeared in the glass above the front door. Lennon put on his best scary cop face, ready to put the wind up the youngster. The door opened. He held his identification up at the kid’s eye level. There was no sound but the flushing of a toilet somewhere upstairs.

Eventually the kid smirked and said, ‘John Lennon? Was Ringo busy?’

Lennon gave the boy his hardest stare. ‘Detective Inspector John Lennon. My friends call me Jack. You can call me Inspector Lennon. Understood?’

The kid’s smirk dropped. ‘Understood.’

‘Is your name Hutchence?’

Yes.’

‘First name?’

‘David.’

‘What are you, a student?’

‘Yes.’

‘At Queen’s?’

‘Yes.’

‘You having a party, David?’

‘No!’ The young man held his hands up. ‘It’s just me and my flatmates. We weren’t making any noise. We’ve no music going or anything.’

Lennon leaned forward and sniffed the air between him and the kid. ‘You been smoking anything?’

‘Just fags.’ The young man forced his shaking hands together as the toilet flushed again.

Lennon stepped into the hall. ‘How long have you been here?’

‘Just a couple of weeks,’ the kid said as shuffled backwards. ‘Term only starts on Monday.’

Lennon walked past the young man and peered up the stairwell. Another kid’s head ducked out of sight on the landing above. A flatmate, presumably. ‘Who lives on the top floor?’ Lennon asked.

‘No one yet. The landlord said there’s more students moving in next week.’

Lennon pointed to the door in the hallway beyond. It had been six years since he’d left the ground floor flat, and that life, behind. ‘What about in there?’ he asked.

‘It’s empty too,’ the kid said. ‘The landlord said someone rents it, but they’re away travelling or something.’

Lennon tried the door handle. It was locked, of course. ‘Is there ever anyone around?’

‘No, there’s… oh, wait!’ The young man’s face lit up like he’d won a prize. ‘Someone picked up the post last week. There was a pile sitting there.’ He indicated the shelf above the radiator. ‘We went out one night, and when we came back, it was gone. Do you want the landlord’s number?’

No,’ Lennon said. He’d tackled the landlord not long after the flat had been boarded up and come away with nothing. He handed the kid a card. ‘If anyone ever comes around, goes in there, takes anything away, anything at all, you give me a call, all right? And I’ll pretend I didn’t smell anything funny coming from upstairs.’

The young man gave a weak smile and nodded.

‘I’ll see myself out,’ Lennon said.

15

The Traveller didn’t like this one bit. The broad-shouldered man with dirty-fair hair was clearly a cop. The Traveller hadn’t noticed him pull up, so he had to assume the cop was watching the flat too. Of course, it was possible the cop wanted something with the kid who answered the door, but the Traveller knew that wasn’t so. He knew it in his gut.

Christ, it had been a long day. When he fled the hospital he drove straight to Portadown, constantly checking the mirror with his one good eye. He considered ditching the car, but the risk of stealing another was greater than the chances of his number plate being caught on CCTV in the hospital car park.

Once he’d got to Portadown he’d pulled into the first place he could find. He walked until he found a chemist and bought a little tube of antibiotic eye ointment and a bottle of water. The girl behind the counter stared at the orange streaks around his bad eye made by the stuff the doctor had used. He held his hand out for his change. She put it on the counter and stepped back.

When he returned to the car, he tilted his head back, pulled up his eyelid, and poured the water in. Jesus, it went everywhere, but it seemed to do the trick. He dried his face with his sleeve as best he could, and then put a dollop of the ointment in his eye. He sat there blinded for half an hour before heading for the motorway. It took less than forty minutes to reach Belfast, nudge his way through the traffic on the Lisburn Road, and turn right into Eglantine Avenue. He knew to look out for the church on the corner.

As soon as he parked, he put another dollop of the ointment in his bad eye, hoping it would ease the stinging and itching. Instead, it left him squinting and swearing. Maybe that was when the cop pulled up. The Traveller cursed himself. He and the cop had been sitting yards from each other, watching the same boarded-up flat, for at least an hour. The Traveller always listened to his instincts, that reptilian part of his brain, and right now it was telling him the cop was trouble. He took the mobile phone from his pocket, entered the password, and dialled the only number it held.

‘What?’ Orla O’Kane barked.

‘Who’s the cop?’

‘What cop?’

‘The cop who just went into Marie McKenna’s building. The same cop that’s been sitting watching it for at least an hour.’

‘Jesus,’ Orla O’Kane said.

‘Jesus what?’

‘That wee girl of hers. The father’s a cop. Can’t remember his name, but I’ll find out. What’s he look like?’

‘Big fella, good shape,’ the Traveller said. ‘Dark blond hair. His suit looked better than a cop could afford, even with the danger money they get up here. Maybe he’s bent.’

‘I’ll see what I can dig up. I heard about our friend in Monaghan on the news, by the way. Pity about his wife.’

‘Yeah, pity,’ the Traveller said.

‘I suppose it couldn’t be helped.’

‘No, couldn’t,’ the Traveller said.

‘Fair enough. What about Quigley?’ she asked.

‘I’ll maybe call and see him a bit later.’

‘You do that. I need some progress to—’

‘Whisht!’ the Traveller hissed, silencing Orla. ‘The cop’s coming out. I’ll maybe follow him, see what I can see.’

‘Don’t take any chances,’ she said, her voice low and serious. ‘We’re not interested in him. If he’s a problem, deal with it, but leave him alone otherwise. Understood?’

‘Understood,’ the Traveller said. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll just have a wee shufti. Nice talking to you, big lass.’

‘Watch your m—’

The Traveller hung up and slipped the phone back into his jacket pocket. The cop crossed the road ten yards ahead and disappeared from view. The Traveller lowered his window a little. He heard a car door opening and closing with a solid thud. Something quality, probably German or Scandinavian, or maybe a late Ford. An engine sparked and caught with an ugly diesel clatter. The Traveller lowered his window a little more so he could lean out. Up ahead, a silver Audi A4 pulled out and accelerated towards the Malone Road.

‘Nice motor,’ the Traveller whispered to himself. It looked pretty new. Thirty-five thousand euro, maybe forty, depending on the engine size and the options. He didn’t know what it would cost in pounds sterling, but it would still be big money for a cop. The Traveller turned the old Merc’s key, and the ignition whined until the engine burped and farted into life. He let a Citroën pass so he could keep it between him and the Audi before he pulled out.

The cop turned right on the Malone Road, as did the Citroën, but he surprised the Traveller by immediately turning left into the cluster of churches and old houses that led to Stranmillis. The Citroën stayed on the Malone Road, leaving no buffer between the Audi and the Merc. The Traveller had to be careful. He didn’t know the names of these little streets, but he knew Stranmillis Road when the cop turned onto it. The Traveller let two cars pass before he followed, giving him some cover.

The river came into view as they approached the roundabout at the bottom of Stranmillis. Surely the cop didn’t live down here? A doctor or a solicitor could just about manage a mortgage around these parts, but surely not a cop.

‘Jesus,’ the Traveller said when the peeler pulled into a smart apartment block just beyond the roundabout. He didn’t dare follow the cop into the car park, so he kept driving, wondering if it was really his place or a girlfriend’s. Maybe the peeler was shagging some lady lawyer, or a female executive after a bit of rough.

‘Dirty fucker,’ the Traveller said. He headed back towards the Lisburn Road hoping one of those fancy new restaurants had pictures on their menus.