Unti Lucy Black Novel #3 (10 page)

 

Chapter Twenty-­Two

T
HEY RETURNED TO
the PPU Block in Maydown station. Fleming had agreed to contact the City Center Initiative about the image of the car Colm Heaney claimed to have seen. Lucy, meanwhile, called Gabriel Duffy to get further details about his son's disappearance. Avoiding making such calls, Fleming said, was one of the few perks of promotion.

Lucy listened to Duffy's complaints without commenting on their suspicions that his son had been involved in swapping Stuart Carlisle's body with whoever had ended up in the coffin. For all she knew, she reasoned, the father could have been complicit in it. Instead, she assured Gabriel Duffy that his son had not been missing long enough to warrant too much worry. Still, she took details of the boy's phone number and bank account details and agreed to watch both if he hadn't reappeared by the following day.

Having done so, she remembered she'd promised Doreen Jeffries that she'd get someone to come out to her house. She knew if she put in an official request, it could take days to process, considering Burns's frequent complaints about being understaffed. Instead, she called through directly to a Forensics technician, Tony Clarke, with whom she had worked on an earlier case, and asked him to fit it in.

“We're up to our neck in crap, Lucy,” Clarke protested. “Literally. We've been shifting through all the rubbish that was pulled from the compactor to make sure we've not missed any of the evidence in the ‘Bin-­man killing' and I've two more out sifting through bins in an alleyway, thanks to your boss.”

“I know,” Lucy said, recognizing that the protest was more to elicit sympathy than a prelude to refusal. “I'm sure you're stretched thin. I'd really appreciate it, though,” she added. “She's a lovely old woman. It was her life's collection of jewelry. From her late husband,” she added. “She's terrified to stay in the house alone and I'd really like to be able to get the place cleaned up and back to normal for her.”

There was silence for a moment, then Clarke agreed. “Enough with the guilt trip,” he said. “I'll get someone out. Or I'll do it myself.”

“You're a star, Tony. Can you send the results to me rather than going through the system?” Lucy added. If, as she expected, Helen Dexter's prints were found on the jewelry box, she wanted the opportunity to try to deal with it without it being processed and someone in CID picking up on it as a quick and easy case to close. Besides, Burns would wonder why
she
was handling a burglary.

She heard her phone beeping to indicate she had another call coming in. She glanced at the number but did not recognize it. Thanking Clarke, she ended his call and answered the other.

“DS Black,” she said.

“Is that the woman cop from the railway museum,” a girl's voice asked.

“Yes,” Lucy said. “Who is this?”

“I think I know where Crackers died,” the voice said.

T
HE BUILDING, LOCATED
in Waterloo Place, had housed a bank at one stage but, several years earlier, when the market collapsed, they'd closed up a number of their branches and relocated out of town to a single unit where the rent was cheaper. Many of the high street businesses were closing down or cutting back, and the Poundlands and Quick Cash shops which had replaced them were operating on too tight a profit margin to be able to afford the rental for the whole block, meaning that on many streets, only a handful of units would be active in any row. Besides, much of the city center trade had shifted to the industrial parks and supermarket complexes out of town.

Despite that, from a distance, the abandoned building looked to be in state of good repair. It was only as Lucy and Fleming drew nearer that they realized that it was one of the buildings that had been given a false frontage. The windows had been boarded up with sheets of wood, painted to look like windows, showing through to blackness. The main door was, ironically, another solid sheet of wood, painted to look like a large green wooden door.

“Maybe Jim Lowe designed it,” Fleming nodded, then glanced at Lucy's unresponsive expression. “The song? ‘Green Door'? I'm wasted on you, you do know that,” he said.

“I only know the Shakin' Stevens version,” Lucy said. “That's not something I'm proud of.”

“Understandably,” Fleming agreed. “So, where's your caller?”

Lucy stood outside the building and, turning, surveyed Waterloo Place itself. It was, Lucy realized, shaped like a capital A, with one upright leading up from the Strand Road and up Waterloo Street, an incline lined with pubs. The other leg ran across toward the Guildhall. The triangular space in between was a pedestrian area, at the center of which was a seating area. Above it, dominating the far end, was a large LCD screen which had been erected during the London 2012 Olympics and which remained, silently relaying images of great sporting achievements over the heads of those shuffling beneath, trying to get their shopping and get home. Lucy knew there had been statues of emigrants in the Place for some time, to mark the multitude who had had to leave Ireland for a new life somewhere else during the Famine years. She realized with some surprise that the statues were gone.

“Were there not statues of kids and that here?” she asked Fleming.

“They moved them to Sainsbury's along the river,” Fleming said. “To the point from which they would have departed.” He scanned the area the moment, then added, “You could say they've emigrated.”

Lucy smiled, if only to keep him happy. She'd known him long enough to know that his good humor was a facade itself. He'd not mentioned Terry Haynes since, but she wondered as to the effect the loss of an AA sponsor might be having on him.

“There we go,” he said, pointing. Lucy followed his gaze and spotted someone she recognized. Sitting on one of the benches outside Supervalu was a girl, pretending to watch the silent footage of an athletics competition playing out on the screen above her. However, every so often she would glance across at Lucy and Fleming. She smoked a tight roll-­up cigarette and sat, one leg tucked under her bottom, the flash of the red sneakers unmistakable.

When she saw that Lucy had spotted her, the girl straightened, nipped off the tip of her cigarette, and stood. She wore a light vest top, which accentuated the narrowness of her frame and the thinness of her shoulders and upper arms. She stuffed her hands in her pockets and began walking toward the Guildhall, passing the bank building on her left without glancing at either Lucy or Fleming.

“Let's go,” Lucy said. “She doesn't want to be seen helping us.”

They followed her alongside the city's Walls, as if toward Guildhall Square, past the lines of stalls set out by street traders hoping to capitalize not just on the good weather, but on the influx of tourists they hoped the City of Culture year would bring. Then she cut suddenly to her right, in through Magazine Gate. Lucy and Fleming followed, realizing that the girl had, just inside the gateway, climbed onto the steps to her right, which would take her up onto the Walls. In doing so, she was now standing at the portion of the Walls against which abutted the rear of the old bank building.

When she saw them approach, she moved across to one of the rear windows on the first floor of the bank, but actually at chest level to the girl in her elevated position on the Walls, and she pulled back the board on the window. Behind remained the glassless frame of the original window, giving way to what would, at one stage, have been an office but which now was now in considerable disrepair. The girl glanced at Lucy, then climbed in.

“Jesus, I'll never fit in there,” said Fleming.

“I'll go in with her,” Lucy said.

“I'll go in through the front,” Fleming protested.

“It'll be fine,” Lucy said. “I'll call if I need support.”

Using the stonework at the top of the Walls for leverage, she hoisted herself up, then dropped down in through the open window frame. “Don't stray too far, please,” she added.

“Pull the board closed again,” the girl said. “Leave a gap for light.”

“You called me?” Lucy said.

The girl nodded. “I'm Grace.”

“Lucy Black. You think Kamil was killed here?”

The girl nodded. “I found something downstairs. Look.” From her back pocket she pulled out a folded picture. The light was so meager, Lucy could barely make out what was on it, until the girl pulled out her phone and, turning on the flash on the camera, illuminated the image for her. It was a picture of a man, woman, and two children. It was badly worn, as if through years of being handled. She was fairly certain that the man in the picture was Kamil Krawiec.

“It's Crackers, isn't it?” Grace asked.

“I think it might be,” Lucy agreed.

“I told you I could be a cop,” the girl said. “Follow me.”

 

Chapter Twenty-­Three

A
S THEY MOVED
out of the room, Lucy pulled out her own torch and illuminated it. Within its circle, she could see that, regardless of how well the exterior of the building had looked, the bank had been ransacked inside. The fluorescent tube lights had been pulled down and lay smashed on the carpeted floor beneath their feet. The silvered plastic fittings that had housed the lights were shattered and hung from the ceiling. Lucy swept the torchlight across the ceiling above her, examining the polystyrene tiles, stained brown with watermarks, which had been smashed through, the cavity above them empty. As she picked her way down the corridor, she saw that a thick trench had been made in the wall to her left, just above door level. The cement and broken stonework lay on the ground next to her as she walked. They passed a second office, as badly trashed at the other, Grace nimbly picking her way along the corridor in front of Lucy, moving with the ease of familiarity.

“What were you doing in here anyway?” Lucy asked.

The girl didn't turn her head. “I came in out of the rain.”

“It hasn't rained in weeks,” Lucy said.

“It usually does,” the girl countered, clearly keen not to further explain her presence in the building.

They reached a third office to the left, just before the staircase leading down, and Lucy swung the torch beam in to scan the room quickly. It was tidier than the other two, a lot of the rubble and trash pushed against one wall. A stained mattress lay on the floor, next to which, catching the torchlight in their foil, lay several opened condom wrappers. Lucy guessed at the nature of business conducted in the bank office now.

As she turned to the stairs again, she realized the girl was looking at her, as if daring her to react.

“That's not a Derry accent, Grace,” she said, instead. “I'd guess Belfast.”

“Lisburn,” the girl corrected her.

“So what brought you to Derry?”

The girl waited a pause, then turned and led her down the steps. “Watch your feet, the carpet's pulled near the bottom and you can fall. Trust me.”

“Spoken from experience?” Lucy said.

“I was in care,” Grace said. “In Belfast. My mum couldn't control me and my stepfather made her put me in care in case I infected any of their new kids with my being a fucker.”

“What about your dad?”

“He was killed in a bombing at an army barracks in 1996.”

“I'm sorry to hear that. Was he a soldier?”

“Bread man,” the girl said. “Delivering their bread for the day. They stopped their cease-­fire for one year and that's all it took them to kill my daddy.”

Lucy tried to think of something to say, but couldn't.

“Fuckers. Anyway, when my ma remarried, the new one didn't like me. Thought I had too much to say for myself.”

“Did you?”

The girl twisted to glare at Lucy, then broke into a smile. “Probably. They put me in care a few years back. Once I was sixteen no one really gave a shit enough to come looking for me.”

“And what age are you now?” Lucy asked. She knew, with all the other demands on Social Ser­vices, a child going missing near the age at which they could choose to leave care anyway wouldn't warrant any massive effort in searching. Still, if she was still young enough, Lucy could contact them.

“Eighteen,” the girl said, defiantly, so that Lucy could not tell if she was being truthful.

They reached the bottom of the steps and moved through a doorway from which hung the remains of a door. The space into which they stepped had once housed the cashier area. To one side stood a row of cashier desks behind a security screen of bulletproof glass, spiderwebbed now, with cracks where someone had tried their best, repeatedly, to break through. As with upstairs, several trenches ran along the walls, the rubble and cement dust carpeting the reception area.

“That was all recent,” the girl said. “The holes in the walls. It wasn't like that a fortnight ago.”

“Was that the last time you were in here?”

The girl nodded.

The last time it had rained, Lucy reflected. Grace was evidently plying her trade outdoors in the good weather.

“What is it, anyway?” the girl asked, nodding to the gaping space.

“Someone has stolen all the pipes and cabling, I think,” Lucy said. “They must have realized that no one would see them doing it, what with the false fronts on the windows. Why do you think Kamil died in here?”

“I'll show you,” Grace said, leading Lucy across. Near one wall was a pile of rubble. “I found the picture here, last night,” she said. “Just over to that side.”

Lucy shone her torch across the pile of shattered stonework. Only then did she notice the dark brown splotches among the cement dust, the spatter marks that, in places, had managed to make it as far as the wall several feet behind.

She looked again at the picture in her hand. There was a stain on it, which, absurdly, reminded her of Tony Henderson's paint-­encrusted fingerprint on the image of Stuart Carlisle which she had shown him when asking him to identify his great-­uncle.

She turned the picture over. The white back still carried the faint outline of several dark brown fingerprints.

“That's blood, isn't it?” Grace asked.

“That's blood,” Lucy agreed.