Borderlands (18 page)

"Have
you touched this, Sadie? I asked. "Since you got it back. I need to know -
for fingerprints."

She looked at
me and shook her head, once.

"I'm
sorry, Sadie," I said. "I had to ask." I told her that we had to
leave and she stood to walk us out to the door.

"Johnny
was angry at me, you know. For taking that money," she said. "He told
me we don't need a copper's charity."

"We all
need a little help sometimes. Johnny's just raw over Angela. It's
understandable."

"She was
his favourite, you know. In a strange way, she was his favourite. He treated
her as if she were his own daughter."

I took her
hand in mine and looked her in the eyes. "She was his daughter, Sadie, and
I'll not let anyone say any different."

She pulled me
close to her quickly, gripping my arms in her hands, and muttered something
into the nape of my neck. I felt the wetness of her tears against my skin.

By the time
we arrived back at the station a fairly large group of reporters had gathered across
the road in front of the visitors centre. Someone was holding court before
them. He was too slim to be Costello. For some reason I was not wholly
surprised when I realized that the figure in the dark suit decrying Garda incompetence
was Thomas Powell, attempting to assume the mantle his father had passed to
him. It was perhaps no accident that he had chosen the road in front of the old
courthouse, from whose roof eighteenth-century recidivists were hung in front
of crowds of thousands, to give his lecture on crime and justice in Lifford.

"In the
past weeks, three young people have died, one while in Garda custody, and yet
nothing seems to have been done. Livestock is being slaughtered by a wild
animal of some sort, but again nothing has been done." He scanned the
group as he spoke, making eye-contact with as many of them as possible, perhaps
trying to remember faces for future press conferences. Then, his eye caught
mine and I swear he smiled. "Instead, we have officers following personal
agendas while we suffer the effects of their incompetence." He pointed in
my direction. "Perhaps Inspector Devlin here would elucidate further on
what Gardai are doing to clean up this mess?" He turned to the cameras,
dictaphones and microphones, clearly assuming that I would stick to Costello's
"no comment" dictate. "My father campaigned tirelessly against
Gardai incompetence and I regret that I seem to have to do the same and
represent the people of Donegal with an impartial voice."

"Let's
take the fight to him, shall we?" I said to Williams, and walked over to
stand beside him in front of the reporters. I felt Williams tug at my jacket,
saw the panic register on her face; then she stepped back, away from the glare
of the lights.

Powell was
alerted to my presence by the radio reporter I had met earlier.
"Inspector, any comment on these claims?"

I raised my
hand and waited until the gaggle quietened a little. I spoke slowly and
clearly, without looking at Powell, who stood beside me, his arms folded,
"I've just returned from visiting one of three houses on both sides of the
border, where a family has spent Christmas in mourning for the loss of a child.
I think perhaps we should respect that, rather than using their coffins as soap
boxes from which to electioneer, don't you?" I smiled sweetly, then turned
and walked into the station. Costello glared at me from his office door, having
watched the performance from between the slats of his drawn blinds.

I asked
Williams to take the ring to Patsy McLaughlin, one of our oldest forensics
experts, a man known for his care in lifting evidence.

While he
checked the ring for fingerprints, I phoned my father, the man Powell Sr had
described as the "furniture man". My father has worked with antiques
all his life and, consequently, knows most of the older and more knowledgeable
antique dealers in the area. I didn't know if the ring was an antique, but it
looked old enough to at least be worth checking. I also wanted some indication
of its value, for it seemed no more plausible that such an object should belong
to a drug dealer like Ratsy Donaghey than to Angela Cashell.

My father
said he would phone me back in five minutes. Half- an-hour later, he got back
to me to say that he had found a man in Derry, Ciaran O'Donnell, who would look
at the ring. I arranged to meet them at O'Donnell's shop on Spencer Road at
5.00 p.m., by which time I hoped Pat McLaughlin would be finished with it. As
it transpired, he was done with it much sooner, for an hour later he and
Williams arrived at the murder room with the news that they had found nothing,
which didn't explain why the two of them seemed so happy. McLaughlin explained.

"I
laughed when she brought it. Do you know how many sets of prints you get off
something like a ring? But there was nothing. Do you realize what that
means?"

"Obviously
not, or I'd be smiling like you two. Astound me," I said.

"Think
about it, Detective. Your prints aren't there, are they?"

"Of
course they're not. I didn't touch it..." I said impatiently

"What
about the pathologist? Her prints aren't on it either."

"Because
she wears gloves when she's working," I said, my excitement rising fast as
I reached the clear conclusion.

"Exactly.
And so did whoever put the ring on the girl's finger, because
she
clearly didn't do it
herself. Someone was very careful about putting this ring on her."

At five
o'clock we met Ciaran O'Donnell and my father outside his shop, an old unit
built on a slope off Spencer Road in Derry. The slope runs down to the River
Foyle, which splits the city in half.

Having been
closed for Christmas, the shop was bitterly cold, making my fingers so stiff
and blue that I pulled my coat sleeves down over my hands and balled them into
fists. The air was musty and damp underneath the sweet smell of furniture
polish that pervaded every surface.

O'Donnell
was an old man, bent slightly from the mid-section of his spine. His hair grew
symmetrically on both sides of his bald dome in wisps of grey and white. He
wore thick-lensed glasses, which he removed to examine the ring, putting a
jeweller's loupe in his right eye. He sat at an old oak desk and flicked on a
tiny desk-lamp and examined the ring in minute detail for a few minutes,
turning it in various directions, brushing it lightly with a tool that
resembled a tiny toothbrush. Then he set it down and lifted a green book from
the bookcase in the corner of the room. He carried the book to the desk, put
the glass in his eye again, and examined the ring with his left eye shut, then
perused the book with his right eye shut. Finally satisfied, he put everything
on the desk in front of him and called us over.

"An
interesting piece," he began. "The ring is eighteen-carat gold with a
moonstone insert, surrounded by twelve rose-cut diamonds. What's interesting
about this is - well, two things, really - one of the diamonds has been
replaced. It's a very neat piece of work, but it's sourced differently from the
others: there's a slightly pinkish tint to it under this light. The second
thing, which isn't really interesting, is that this is not an antique. I'd say
it's thirty years old at most."

"Any
idea about where it came from?" Williams asked.

"Well,
there's good news on that front," he said. "It was made in Donegal.
By Hendershot & Sons to be precise. They were very exclusive jewellers
during the '70s and '80s, though they've disappeared into the woodwork
recently, so to speak"

"How
can you tell that?" I asked, while my father smiled and nodded his head.

"Very
simple, really. They stamped the ring with their own mark beside the gold
mark."

"What
about the engraving, the 'AC'?" I asked.

"No
idea. Except I think it was engraved when the ring was made; the inside surface
of the engraving is as dulled as the rest of the ring. More recent work would
leave a slightly shinier surface."

"What
would you recommend we do now?" I said, glancing at Williams.

"Well,
you're the policemen - police
officers
- so I wouldn't want to say. But I'd contact Hendershot
& Sons and see what they can tell you."

"I
thought you said they'd vanished into the woodwork," Williams said.

"Yes,"
he said. "In terms of market share and so on, they have. But they're still
open. It was a side street off from the Atlantic last time I was there, but that
was some years ago and they may have moved. Check the phonebook."

We thanked
Mr O'Donnell for his help and I promised my father we would visit him and my
mother soon. "Do," he said. "And give the kids a hug from
me." I promised I would. Then Williams and I drove home.

"Well,
do you fancy a trip to Donegal?" she asked as we drove past Prehen Park
and up the Strabane Road.

"Why
not? Especially if I get mileage allowance for it."

"We
could kill two birds with one stone and head on to Bundoran - check out the
officer in charge of the Ratsy Donaghey killing while we're at it."
Williams said, smiling.

Before I
signed out of the office for the evening, I received a call from the doctor who
had attended me on Christmas Eve, whose name, I learnt, was Ian Fleming.

"My
father was a Bond fan, if that's any use to you," he explained, though I
had not passed comment. I nodded into the receiver. Then I realized that he
couldn't see this gesture and managed a grunt, despite the dryness in my
throat.

"Good
news, Inspector," he said. "All clear so far - a late Christmas
present."

I almost
wept as I thanked him.

"Don't
forget. Check again in a few months time. Without giving too much away, I spoke
to the boy's GP this afternoon at the dogs. Explained about the bite. He
checked for me. Figures the boy was clean, too. So hopefully ..."

Debbie let
slip a tear or two when I told her, then made tea, as it seemed the only thing
to do. I invited her to join Williams and me the next day, in case she wanted
to go shopping in Donegal, but she had promised her mother she would take her
to Derry. We ate dinner in companionable silence, though I suspected that my
kiss with Miriam Powell still played on her mind.

At around
8.45 p.m., we heard Penny calling from upstairs. She had gone to bed twenty
minutes earlier and normally took after her mother in that she fell asleep as
soon as her head touched the pillow.

Her bedroom
is at the front of the house and we found her kneeling on her bed, her head and
half her body hidden underneath the curtains while she watched something out
of her window. She lifted the curtains above her head slightly when she heard
us and invited us into her makeshift tepee. Then we saw what had got her
attention.

On the road
outside, a number of the local farmers were gathering with shotguns and
torches. In the middle of the group, Mark Anderson was standing like some
tin-pot general, issuing orders and pointing first at a scrap of paper in his
hand and then to various points in the fields around our house. Someone was
taking pictures, and in the light of one of the flashes, Anderson evidently
saw our three faces peering down at him from the bedroom for he pointed us out
to the photographer and said something that caused him to laugh. Unable to hear
anything, we watched him silently throw back his head with his toothless mouth
wide open, then splutter and cough, before spitting onto the ground.

I went downstairs,
pulled on a jacket and went out to see what was happening. The photographer was
writing names in his reporter's notebook and seemed to be packing up. I called
him over.

"What's
going on?"

"They're
searching for the wild cat that's been killing Mr Anderson's livestock."
He was barely out of his teens and still had the fresh red scars of acne across
his cheeks and around his mouth.

"The
last time he was called Mr Anderson was in court, sonny," I said, "so
I wouldn't waste it on him now. Where are they going with the guns?"

"Haven't
you heard,
mister
," he said, bristling at the 'sonny' comment.
"Thomas Powell has offered a reward of a thousand euros for whoever can
capture the cat, dead or alive. Says the Garda aren't doing anything so he has
to instead. Care to comment, Inspector?" the boy said, smiling at his
guile.

"Yeah,
you're standing in my driveway. Piss off."

I went back
into the house and put on a jumper and waterproof coat and my rubber boots.
Then I padlocked Frank in the shed, just as a precaution.

I found
Anderson about a quarter of a mile up the road, standing at the gate of his
field, which ran all the way down to our home and up another mile or so to his
own house. The moon was high and the sky clear, and in the lilac light the veins
which had burst on Anderson's cheeks and nose through years of drinking stood
out. As he talked, his toothless gums seemed purple and angry.