The Rising (6 page)

‘How the hell did the media know? We haven’t even got official confirmation that the body is Kielty’s.’

‘God knows,’ Patterson said. ‘Your station leaks like a sieve. Speak to that fat sack Burgess about it, find out if he told anyone.’

Your
station.

‘Is Hutton there?’

‘We’d better hope not,’ Patterson said, then turned and walked away from me.

After putting on one of the fluorescent vests being handed out to Gardai by two uniforms, I walked back up towards the gathering crowd. I called Debbie to tell her I’d be a bit late home. I’d missed dinner and the kids’ bedtime yet again, she observed, before hanging up.

As I was putting my phone away, our desk sergeant, Bill Burgess, approached me. He was usually good-humoured, if not a little sarcastic, but it was clear that Harry Patterson had said something to him regarding the leak of Lorcan Hutton’s name.

‘I tried calling you several times today,’ he started, clearly believing the best form of defence to be attack.

‘I was busy. Harry spoke to you, I take it.’

His expression softened a little and he nodded his head. ‘Ignorant bastard,’ he murmured. ‘He accused me of letting slip about Lorcan Hutton and Kielty to the press.’

‘Did you?’ I asked. Burgess was reliable but was so used to doing things his own way and in his own time, he could have said something carelessly in earshot of the wrong person.

‘I did not,’ he said, indignantly. ‘I don’t know who told them, but it certainly wasn’t me.’

‘Then forget about it,’ I reasoned.

‘But Harry said—’ he protested.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘There’s no harm done.’

I was fairly certain it hadn’t been Burgess who’d leaked the news. But I had lied when I’d said there was no harm done. It had alerted Lorcan Hutton to the fact that we were looking for him, which would probably mean that he’d go underground for a while.

Satisfied that I was convinced, Burgess wandered off, trying to look busy. I followed suit.

I scanned the crowd in front of me as I walked. There were upwards on one hundred present. Two press photographers skirted the body of people. One of them climbed up onto the pillar of someone’s garden wall in order to get a shot encompassing the whole crowd. I climbed up on the wall beside him to get a better view of proceedings myself.

‘All right,’ he said, nodding, his camera poised in front of him. I suspected he thought I was going to tell him to get off the wall.

‘What’s the story?’ I asked, gesturing towards the front of the throng.

‘You tell me,’ he shrugged. ‘We just got word that this Rising crowd were protesting tonight. Do you think there’ll be any trouble?’

‘I doubt it,’ I shrugged.

‘Pity,’ he replied, then continued taking his shots.

I thought of something and, checking my jacket pockets, found the pictures Jim Hendry had given me the day previous.

‘You couldn’t do me a favour,’ I said, handing the images to the photographer. ‘Would you let me know if you spot any of that crew?’

He glanced down at the pictures, flicking from one to the next, committing the faces to memory. At the third he stopped.

‘Jimmy Irvine?’

I nodded.

‘Shouldn’t be too hard to spot that baldy bastard,’ he said, handing me back the pictures I’d given him.

I scanned the gathering myself, looking for familiar faces. To the front of the crowd, a cameraman and interviewer were moving slowly backwards while they interviewed someone at the head of the mass of protesters. The cameraman had a light attached to the top of his camera, which silhouetted the heads of those in the front rows, making it difficult for me to see who the interviewer was speaking to.

The lights went out suddenly, as the crew finished filming, and flickers of white light dazzled my eyes as I adjusted to the darkness again. Someone at the front had produced a bullhorn and was starting a chant of ‘What do we want? Dealers out! When do we want it? Now!’ The gathered crowd soon took up the mantra, their chants growing in intensity.

Finally, the shouting began to quieten and I realized someone at the front had started to address the crowd. It was difficult to hear exactly what was being said, though I could hear something about ‘peaceful protest’. I saw, from my vantage point, a figure break from the protesters and walk up to the door of Lorcan Hutton’s house. He stopped at the door and pushed a white envelope through the letter box. The crowd cheered and the man with the bullhorn started another chorus of chanting. The crowd stood like that for a further fifteen minutes before those gathered at the rear, disappointed not to have witnessed a lynching, began to break away and make their way back out of the court.

As they did so, the photographer I’d spoken with earlier nudged me. He pointed to our far left, towards a group of men standing distributing leaflets.

‘That’s the crowd you were looking for,’ he said. ‘Irvine’s not there though.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, palming him twenty euros.

I made my way over to where the men stood. Some of those they had given leaflets to passed me, dropping the green flyers on the ground as they went. I stopped and lifted a copy.

Under the heading, ‘Taking Back Our Community’, the flyer boasted a photograph of a man, tarred and feathered, tied to a lamp post. Around his neck hung a sign, though the reproduction quality was too poor to be able to read clearly what was written on it. Under the picture was a lengthy piece of text about the rising drugs problem and the lack of response to it from the police and politicians. It called for ‘a new Rising to reclaim our streets’.

As I approached the group, the older man – Armstrong, Hendry had called him – stepped forward, a leaflet held towards me.

‘I’ve seen more than enough already.’

‘We’re just saying what needs to be said. Someone has to take a stand against the dealers poisoning our children.’

‘Fascinating,’ I said. ‘I’d like to speak with Mr Irvine.’

‘He’s not here.’

‘Where is he then?’ I asked.

‘Fuck business is that of yours?’ Armstrong asked with sudden aggression.

‘Someone murdered Martin Kielty. I’ve been told that your outfit are likely to blame.’

‘Then you’ve been told wrong. We’d nothing to do with Kielty. We’re a legitimate, peaceful community organization.’

‘Distributing images of fascist street justice?’

‘Still justice though, innit?’ Armstrong leaned slightly forward on the balls of his feet as if trying to emphasize his point.

‘Tell Jimmy Irvine we’d like to speak to him when he has a chance. He can find me at Lifford Garda station any time he feels like talking.’

‘We’re holding a rally in Letterkenny on Thursday night,’ Armstrong sneered. ‘You want to hear Jimmy talk, you can come along to that, same as everyone else.’

The conversation reached an abrupt conclusion with the arrival of Harry Patterson accompanied by a handful of Guards in fluorescent vests. He had clearly been shown the flyers.

‘What’s this bullshit?’ Harry barked as he approached us.

‘Here we go, lads,’ Armstrong said, smirking to the others. He underestimated Harry Patterson if he believed he could intimidate him.

Harry squared up to Armstrong, their faces inches apart.

‘Take this crap and clear off back over the border. If I see this bollocks around here again, I’ll lock the lot of you up.’

‘On what?’

‘A whim,’ Patterson said quietly, his forehead almost touching Armstrong’s.

Armstrong lingered for a few seconds, as if to show his men that he was unafraid of Patterson, though perhaps he also recognized that Patterson was just the type of Guard who
would
have them held for the night on a whim, for he gathered his flyers, dropped them into a bag that had lain at his feet and began to move away. The others followed, their recalcitrance intended to imply that they weren’t obeying Patterson’s command.

‘Prick,’ Patterson said. ‘What the hell does he think he’s at, handing out this shit here?’

‘Jim Hendry told me the Drugs Squad in the North thought this crowd were responsible for attacks on dealers over the border. He suggested we look at their head man, Jimmy Irvine, for Kielty.’

‘I’ll follow it up and see what I hear,’ he said. ‘Ask around. If yer man shows his face on this side again, lift him. The same for this character Irvine too.’

He moved back into the crowd again. ‘Let’s move back, men. Make sure there’s no trouble on the way out.’

Over the course of the next twenty minutes, more pockets of people broke away from the crowd and wandered back down from Hutton’s house. Some of them looked a little bemused by the whole activity, some others seemed to have been fired up by it and spoke animatedly to those around them. It was as I was removing my Garda overcoat before getting back into my car that one such group passed by. As I slammed the door, I looked out through the windscreen. One member of the group caught my eye as he passed and nodded. A narrow face, brown, untidy hair, darkened glasses; he was past my car and had disappeared into the dissolving crowd before I could catch a second glance. The man’s identity played at the edges of my mind all that night, but I was unable to place him.

I slept late and it was almost ten thirty by the time I made it to Letterkenny, where Kielty’s post-mortem was being completed. In fact, I hadn’t even had time to contact the station to let them know that was where I would be.

When the state pathologist, Dr Joseph Long, had finished his examination, I went in to speak to him. In the adjoining room the charred remains of Martin Kielty – for identification of Kielty had been confirmed – now lay on a trolley, shrouded in a stained green scrubs sheet. The assisting technician was washing down the steel table on which the post-mortem had been conducted. The dental records I had left at the hospital matched the corpse and, said Dr Long, with no possibility for visual or fingerprint identification, and a lack of hospital records in Letterkenny, would have to suffice for identification evidence.

‘The body was very badly burned,’ Dr Long stated, washing his hands at the sink. ‘Cause of death though was a knife wound. There was one stab wound, above the eighth rib on the left-hand side of the sternum. The blade passed through the lung causing fatal haemorrhaging. There was no evidence of respiration of soot or ash, as one would expect from a victim in a fire. Nor is there evidence, in the less badly damaged skin, of vital reaction to the burns. He was dead for some hours before the fire started.’

‘No gunshot wounds?’ I asked.

Long shook his head. ‘None.’ Mulronney had been right.

I wondered again where, then, the gunfire had come from. Perhaps the Quigleys had been mistaken.

‘What about time of death?’

‘Very difficult to say. Liver temperature would be unreliable in a corpse as badly burned as this one. I’ve taken a sample of the vitreous humour to test potassium levels, but even with that, it’ll still be an estimate.’

‘The fire was reported after 4 a.m. It certainly wasn’t burning at two thirty – we have a witness. Kielty’s phone hadn’t been used since ten fifteen the evening previous.’

‘That sounds like a reasonable time frame,’ Long suggested. ‘I’ll not be able to narrow it down any further than that for you anyway.’

‘Anything else?’

‘I’ve taken swabs from the victim’s skin. The severity of the burns would suggest that he was coated in an accelerant of some sort. Again, when I know more, I’ll send on the information to your superintendent.’

I didn’t spend any longer than necessary breathing in the stench of the embalming fluids in the autopsy suite. Excusing myself, I headed out to the car park for a smoke. As I leant against my car, I breathed an inward sigh of relief. Kielty had been dead before the fire started; he had not moved as he lay in the flames; I could not have saved him. I realized too, though, with a sudden shock of sadness, Sam Quigley had given his life in attempting to rescue someone who could not have been saved. Still, whoever had killed Kielty and set the fire in the barn was also responsible for the death of Quigley. And I could do something about that.

Kielty had been selling drugs out of his house in Carrigans. I suspected that he was working with – or for – Lorcan Hutton, of whom there was, as yet, no sign. On Friday evening, Kielty had arrived at his house at 8.30 p.m. The blue car pulled up at 10 p.m. when Nora Quigley looked out. Kielty last used his mobile phone around that time too. By 2.15 a.m., the car had gone and a white Transit van was there instead.

By 4 a.m., the barn was burning, with Kielty’s body inside, soaked in accelerant. The thought reminded me that I had to chase up the Forensics report from Patterson.

Burgess was holding his usual spot at the front desk, a paperback novel sitting in front of him, its spine bent backwards, and a sloppily filled mug of coffee adding to the collection of coffee rings on the desk.

‘Good afternoon, Inspector,’ Burgess said when I came in. ‘Nice of you to join us.’

‘Always a pleasure to see you, Sergeant,’ I said. ‘Learning to read, I see.’