The Rising (9 page)

‘I’m very sorry, Simon,’ I said. ‘It’s just terrible.’

‘It is,’ he agreed, looking at me but not shaking my hand.

‘How are you since?’

‘What – since this morning?’

I opened my mouth to speak, but the words faltered in my throat.

‘I’m Ben’s wife,’ I heard Debbie say as she came over to us. ‘I’m truly sorry for your loss. Peter was a fine boy. We loved him dearly.’

Simon Williams stood and took my wife’s hand and thanked her for coming.

I turned to Caroline, who remained at her son’s side, her fingers lightly stroking the wood of his coffin. There was something pathetic about the intimacy of such a gesture on cold, varnished pine.

I hunkered down in front of her, my hand taking her free hand, which rested on her lap.

‘How are you?’ I asked, aware of the futility of anything I said.

She looked at me a little blankly, as if struggling to place me. She had slept little over the past few days. After the terror of Peter’s disappearance, she had experienced the false hope of his text message and finally the knowledge that he was dead. I hoped that, at least having got her son back, she could begin to grieve properly. I only worried about what that grief might do to her.

‘Anything you need, Caroline. Just ask,’ I said, standing up to go.

She attempted to stand and put her arms around my neck, hugging me close to her.

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ she croaked. ‘I didn’t do this.’

‘No one did this, Caroline,’ I said, holding her tight against me. ‘It was a horrible accident. No one is to blame.’

‘I didn’t do this,’ she repeated, her voice rising hysterically.

‘But, Caroline,’ I began, moving out of our hug to face her. ‘No one’s bl—’

She grabbed my face in her two hands, forcing me to hold her gaze. ‘I didn’t do this. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not . . .’ Her words repeated over and over until they became indecipherable from her sobs. She rested her head against the crook of my neck. Her father, clearly having heard the noise from downstairs, appeared beside us, placing his hands on her arms, attempting to disentangle us.

Caroline looked at me, pleadingly, her eyes drawn in terror as her father surrounded her in his arms. Simon Williams sat straight-backed on his wooden seat, staring at the wall opposite, his expression unreadable.

Downstairs, Caroline’s mother, Rose, offered us tea before we started home. I noticed, sitting alone in the corner, a cup in one hand, his Garda cap hanging on his knee, Joe McCready.

‘I’ll only be a minute,’ I said to Debbie who was standing with Rose, offering her condolences.

McCready stood up when I approached him and appeared relieved to have someone to talk to.

‘Inspector,’ he said.

‘Good to see you, Joe,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’

He looked around and blushed.

‘I felt . . . it was my . . . not my duty, but . . .’

‘I understand,’ I said. ‘Above and beyond the call of duty though, Joe.’

‘I could say the same to you,’ he said, smiling.

‘Caroline’s my friend,’ I explained as I took out my cigarettes and offered him one. Smoking in a stranger’s house is frowned upon on almost any occasion except a wake. I had noticed when I came in a number of the other mourners smoking. Most of them, granted, were elderly men, smoking yellowed twists of Rizla paper loosely filled. I offered one of my own smokes to McCready, but he shook his head.

‘I don’t, thank you, sir,’ he said.

‘Clean living for a Guard,’ I commented, lighting my own. ‘Married?’

‘Nearly, sir,’ he smiled.

‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘When’s the big day?’

‘December, sir.’

‘How does . . .?’

‘Ellen,’ he prompted.

‘How does Ellen feel about you doing this?’ I said, gesturing around the room, though I meant being a Guard.

‘Oh, you know,’ he said. ‘The same way your wife does, I imagine.’

I stopped myself from telling him that that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

‘We have a slight problem, sir,’ McCready said.

For a second I assumed he was still speaking about his forthcoming marriage and I demurred from responding.

‘The pathologist’s report,’ he muttered, glancing around.

‘Let’s step outside,’ I said. Debbie scowled at me when she saw me leave the room, though I gestured to her I would only be a moment.

‘What’s the problem?’ I asked, once we had stepped out into the garden. The rain was falling heavier now, in thick swathes that washed up the street, hammering off the roofs of the cars, splintering off the glistening pavements beneath the street lamps. Already one of the drains across the road had flooded and a stream of overflow water rushed alongside the kerb and bubbled in the drains. We stepped in tight against the front of the house, sheltered from the worst of the rain by the eaves.

‘The pathologist has put time of death as Saturday night,’ he stated. ‘I went to the post-mortem. She said Peter died at some stage between Saturday night and Sunday morning.’

‘So he couldn’t have sent the text message to Caroline on Sunday night.’

‘Exactly. I’ve been thinking about it. I put pressure on Murphy and Heaney. I asked had he been drinking and told them that when we found him, dead or alive, the truth would come out. Then this message comes. Do you think one of them was trying to throw us off the scent?’

Despite the clichés, McCready was right. Someone wanted to stop our searching in Rossnowlagh.

‘Anything else come up?’

He glanced around him, then leaned closer to me. ‘She thinks he killed himself on purpose.’

‘Why?’

‘There are no injuries on his hands. She suggested that there should have been laceration, or bruises where he tried to stop his fall, if it had been an accident. Even drunk, she thought, he’d still have tried to break his fall. She reckoned his injuries were more consistent with someone who had jumped rather than fallen.’

‘That’s speculative,’ I argued.

‘Isn’t most pathology?’ McCready countered.

‘Maybe. To be honest, his mum told me that he’d been depressed recently. His GP had prescribed him antidepres-sants.’ I was reluctant to betray Caroline’s confidence, but at the same time McCready had obviously invested heavily in the investigation into Peter’s death. ‘They’d argued before he left home. She said he’s been out of sorts quite a bit recently.’

‘It’s a bit extreme – jumping off a cliff, though.’

I nodded as I stubbed out my cigarette and blew the last stream of smoke upwards against the rain.

‘Will I cancel the tox reports? The pathologist said she’d have them done as soon as she could.’

‘Leave them for now. But I guess we accept that Peter Williams killed himself and leave it at that.’

‘What about the text about Dublin? One of the boys must have sent it.’

I nodded. ‘God knows why, though. Maybe they wanted to give Caroline a bit of hope. Who knows what goes on in a youngster’s mind?’

‘When the tox report comes through, I’ll send you on a copy, sir,’ McCready said, fitting his cap back on his head.

The journey home took almost an hour longer than it should. The roads were flooded most of the way, especially around the Gap, where streams had washed smaller rocks down the mountainside and onto the hard shoulder. The car steered light, and on bends slid towards the centre of the road, even at low speeds. The rain battered against the windscreen and, when we stopped at traffic lights, thudded off the roof.

A wind was rising, coming in from the west, and the forecasters had issued gale warnings overnight. I’d phoned ahead and told my parents we’d be delayed. As a consequence, they decided to stay with us that night rather than risk driving home in a storm.

By one o’clock we were home. Several thick pockets of wind had buffeted the car sideways along the final stretch of road before Lifford, the elms lining the road thrashing to and fro with the gathering gale.

The night had done little to ease the storm, which continued to blow the following morning. Despite the large black umbrella I carried, the lower halves of my trouser legs were dark with rain by the time I made it into the church, at the back of the small procession which heralded Martin Kielty’s final journey.

The priest spoke, during his sermon, about Kielty’s love for his child, and the pain of his passing for his mother, Dolores. I could see the woman in question, standing in a pew near the front of the church. Kielty’s sister sat beside her, her arm around her shoulder, her head pressed against her mother’s, both of them crying openly. By contrast, and strangely separate from these two, in the front pew, sat Elena McEvoy. She wore a black trouser suit and white blouse. Around her neck she had tied a polka-dotted kerchief, twisted to the side. Every so often her hand ran up through her hair and flicked it to one side, and I could see the profile of her face, her eyes clear and dry. On the seat beside her, her daughter slept in a curved baby carrier, her dummy bobbing among the bundle of blankets.

After Kielty’s body had been carried out of the church again, and most people forsook the drive to the cemetery, scattering instead to escape the rain, I saw Elena approach Kielty’s mother. They did not kiss or embrace, and I guessed that Kielty’s mother had not approved of her son’s girlfriend.

McEvoy said something, about which the older woman began to protest, but McEvoy gestured towards the baby who was exposed to the rain, beneath the thin fabric hood of her seat, then she turned and strode over to one of the black funeral cars.

Despite the damp, under the cover of the porchway, I managed to light a cigarette, and watched as the remainder of Kielty’s family shuffled through the storm into the other car. A heavyset undertaker approached them when he saw them moving, and held his umbrella above their heads.

At one o’clock I made it to the local radio station, 108 FM. The car park was full, so I had to park in the estate across the road. In running across the road at a break in traffic, my umbrella was blown inside out, the spokes snapping against the wind. I made it to the front door and pressed the buzzer. The security man sitting at the reception desk was speaking with someone on his phone and the concept of multitasking seemed to escape him, for he left me standing in the rain until he had finished his call. Indeed, it was only because the water dripping from my hair was marking the sign-in book on the front desk that he offered me a bunch of paper towels he had sitting on the desk beside him to dry myself.

‘Wet one out there,’ he said, in case I hadn’t noticed. ‘What are you here for?’

‘I’ve been asked to speak about drugs.
The Afternoon Show
.’

He leaned back in his seat and pointed to a small room to the left.

‘The other man is in there already. Get yourself a cuppa before they take you into the studio, if you’ve time.’

I thanked him and handed him back the wad of wet towels, then went down the corridor to the room he had indicated. The other man was standing at a tea urn, his back to me, making himself a cup of tea.

‘Jesus, what a day,’ I said.

‘It’s to get worse,’ the man replied, turning to face me. ‘Good to see you again, Inspector.’

In the time it took me to formulate my response, I not only placed the man’s face, but also realized that I had seen him a few days earlier, nodding at me as he walked past on his way back from the protest outside Lorcan Hutton’s house. ‘Vincent Morrison?’ I hadn’t intended it as a question.

Morrison had been the owner of a haulage firm that was involved in the smuggling of military software to Eastern Europe and of illegal immigrants back to Ireland. Despite his involvement in a variety of criminal enterprises, the only thing we’d managed to get him on was fuel laundering. The last time I had seen him, he was standing outside Derry courthouse on the day of his trial. Since then he had shaved off his moustache, which made his face thinner and more youthful-looking.

‘What are you . . . are you part of The Rising?’ I managed finally.

‘Not quite. I’m a spokesman for the Portnee Community Association. We’re supporting The Rising in their anti-drugs stance. I’ve become something of a community activist these past few months, Inspector.’

‘You’re kidding me,’ I said. ‘That’s quite a career change. Have you moved into drugs now instead of smuggling people?’

He smiled and looked past me. The presenter of the programme, a young man with a mullet hairstyle whom I had seen presenting on regional TV, was standing in the doorway, staring from one of us to the other, presumably having overheard my final comment. ‘Are you two here to speak?’ he asked. ‘Which one of you is the Guard?’

‘That’ll be him,’ Morrison said, gesturing towards me with his polystyrene cup. ‘We’ll pretend he didn’t make that last statement, eh? Defamation of character and all that.’

We were led into a small, stuffy studio. The presenter took his seat behind the main console, and we were directed to a pair of seats on the other side of the desk, positioned around a single microphone.