Unti Lucy Black Novel #3 (8 page)

 

Thursday, 19 July

 

Chapter Eighteen

L
UCY WOKE JUST
after eight, feeling rested for the first time in months. Her arms ached pleasingly from the exertion of swimming the night before.

She'd nothing for breakfast in the house, having left the groceries she bought with Doreen, so stopped at a café, before heading on to the Strand Road station where she and Tom Fleming were to meet Chief Superintendent Burns to update him on the developments with Kamil Krawiec.

Burns sat back in his seat as they explained the process by which they had identified the man, pushing his hand through the loose sandy curls of his hair as he listened.

“So, we know that the victim was in the Foyle Hostel years back. Where has he been since?”

Fleming shrugged. “No one seems to know. He may have crossed the border, he may have gone over to England looking for work. We'll continue to ask around.”

“And you have a positive ID on the man from the river?”

Lucy nodded. “Stuart Carlisle. Our difficulty now is that, while Mr. Carlisle didn't make it to his own cremation, someone else did. We need to identify who it was and why they were cremated in that manner.”

“Hugger-­mugger,” Fleming said, smiling to himself.

“How were the bodies swapped?”

It was Lucy's turn to shrug. “Presumably, it was something to do with the Duffys, but they're denying it. The son was the one driving the body to Belfast. It might be worth checking when the ser­vice ended here and what time he arrived in Belfast for the cremation. See how much of a gap there was between the two. If we can show that there's an unusually long lag between his leaving Derry and arriving in Belfast, we can put some pressure on him.”

Burns nodded. “Very good. Look, I know your hands are full enough, but we need help processing interviews over this bin death. We put out a request for information last night and we've had hundreds of calls. The team is stretched beyond breaking.”

“Can uniforms not help out?” Fleming asked. “We've our own work to do.”

“With all due respect, Tom, neither of your guys are going anywhere—­either the one who wasn't cremated, or the one who was.”

“The one who was cremated had a mark on one of the plates recovered from his ashes. The pathologist reckoned he'd been struck with a hatchet.”

“Jesus!” Burns held up his hand. “Look, don't tell me. When you have a name, we'll open a case. Most of the uniforms have been drafted up to help police with this nonsense in Belfast. Derry's so quiet at the moment, we've a skeleton force working.”

“We're victims of our own success,” Fleming added. “I blame the heat; it's making ­people fractious. If it was pissing down, half of them would stay off the streets.”

“Regardless,” Burns said. “DS Gallagher will pass you on names and numbers of callers. Maybe do a quick first interview over the phone, see if any of them are worth following up on with a face-­to-­face. We can handle those interviews ourselves.”

L
UCY KNEW THAT,
considering the time difference, it would be unlikely that United Surgical Specialists would be open. However, when she checked their website for a contact number, she saw that their European offices were based in Dublin.

Part of the reason that the Celtic Tiger had been so ferocious was the policy of the Irish government to offer huge corporation tax incentives for American firms to use Ireland as their European bases, bringing with them thousands of jobs. It had been claimed that some major American companies had paid only two percent tax in Ireland. It was no huge surprise, then, to find that USS were based there, too. However, it took three calls before the receptionist in United Surgical Supplies finally answered the phone and, when she did, she put Lucy on hold.

Despite the earliness of the hour, the heat was building and opening the windows in Lucy's room offered little respite. Maydown station, where she was based, had been built during the Troubles. The windows in the rooms had been designed to sit high up on the walls, well above head height, to reduce the opportunity for a sniper outside the compound to target anyone in the rooms beyond. Their size, no more than one foot from sill to frame, also meant that, in the event of a rocket attack or explosion, there would be a reduced chance of being injured by falling glass. The drawback to such security measures was that it created a heat trap in the rooms. She opened her polo shirt collars as wide as they would go and leaned back in her chair, the phone resting between her chin and chest, stretching her arms above her to ease the aching she felt from her swim the night before.

Eventually, she began flicking through her notes from Tony Henderson regarding his great-­uncle's funeral ser­vice. Henderson had said that it started at 1 p.m. He'd had a hospital appointment that afternoon, so hadn't gone to Belfast with the remains. Ciaran Duffy had said he went straight from the funeral parlor to Belfast, stopping only for a few minutes in the shop at the foot of the Glenshane. She knew the place, a petrol station with a restaurant attached, positioned just as the road began the incline up through the mountains, then back down into Dungiven and on to Derry.

“Sorry for keeping you. Your call is important to us. How can I help you today?” the woman at the other end of the phone intoned suddenly. Lucy imagined her sitting at the other end of the line, reading a magazine or surfing the net as she spoke.

Her enthusiasm waned as Lucy explained the purpose of her call.

“If he was cremated, how can you not know who he was?” the woman asked, her voice nasal.

“We believe someone swapped the body that was to be cremated with one that wasn't. We've identified the man who was meant to be cremated but wasn't. We've yet to identify the man who wasn't to be but was. If that makes sense?” she added.

“Uh-­huh,” the woman said, unconvinced. “Well, I don't see how we can help. We simply provide the implants. We've no idea who the intended recipients are. You'd need to contact the hospital who used it.”

“I hope to,” Lucy said. “If you could tell us which hospital the implant was sent to. I have the batch number, if that's any use.”

She read the number off twice, having to repeat it the second time to allow for the broadness of her Northern accent.

“I'll have to come back to you, Sergeant,” the woman said. “I'll be quick as I can.”

She hung up. Lucy lifted the receiver, then dialed Tony Henderson's number. She explained that she needed to know when the ser­vice for his great-­uncle had concluded.

“It started at one o'clock,” he said. “I had an appointment at half past two and I was just on time, so, allowing for the travel time to the hospital, I'd say it was two when it ended.”

“Perfect,” Lucy said. “Thanks.”

“Listen,” Henderson said. “Just when you're on the line. Will this whole business screw with the will and that? The sharing of his, you know, his estate and that.”

“I wouldn't have thought so,” Lucy said. “So long as the death certificate was issued, his burial, or lack of, is irrelevant, I'd imagine.”

“Brilliant,” Henderson said.

Lucy called All Hallows again and asked to speak with Frank Norris. After a moment, she recognized his voice when he answered.

“Mr. Norris? DS Black. We spoke yesterday about the Stuart Carlisle cremation.”

“I remember. I've been thinking about it all night. You know, we could get shut down if ­people think we cremated the wrong body. ­People here are squeamish enough about the whole cremation thing without something like this.”

“Maybe it's a fear of being burned alive,” Lucy suggested.

“Because that's so much worse than being buried alive, is it?” Norris snapped.

Lucy laughed. “That's true. Mind you, there's always a chance of getting out if you've been buried alive, I suppose.”

“What I'm saying is, I'd appreciate it if anything that needs to be done about this can be done, I suppose, discreetly.”

“I'll do my best, Mr. Norris. The reason I'm calling is: you wouldn't happen to know what time the Carlisle coffin arrived with you, would you? I'm trying to ascertain when exactly the swap was made.”

“Swap?”

“The person in the coffin was obviously not Stuart Carlisle. All I can think is that someone swapped the body.”

“Why? To avoid funeral costs?”

“To hide a murder, possibly.”

Norris groaned. “Jesus, it just gets worse by the minute. No offence, DS Black, but every conversation I have with you is taking years from my life.”

“Have you a record of the time the body arrived?” Lucy persisted.

“I should have it here,” Norris said. “I pulled the file yesterday when you called.” She heard his breath echoing on the line as he read through the paperwork, could hear his lips softly mumbling the words he read. “At 5:45 p.m.,” he said. “I have it here. The cremation started at 6:15 and we were completed at 9 p.m.”

“You're sure of those timings?”

“Absolutely.”

Lucy jotted them down. She'd have to trace William's van, but didn't want to have to contact the undertakers to ask for details of the van he drove, for to do so might alert them to the angle the investigation had taken.

“You wouldn't happen to know what type of van the body was brought up in, would you?” she asked.

“It belongs to Gabriel Duffy,” Norris said. “It's his van.”

“I understand that. I was just hoping you might remember something about it.” Like the registration plate, she wanted to add.

“No. You don't understand. It's Duffys' van. Their name is written up the side of it. Duffy and Sons. Undertakers. It's unmissable.”

“Perfect,” Lucy said and, thanking Norris, hung up.

Ciaran Duffy had claimed he left after the ser­vice at 2 p.m. yet he didn't arrive in Belfast until 5:45 p.m. He said he stopped for only a few minutes. Allowing for traffic, it would take, at most, two hours to travel from Derry to All Hallows, probably less. Taking into account rush-­hour traffic, even though most would be coming out of Belfast rather than going into it, and the fact that he stopped at the shop, it would still be a stretch to have taken more than 2 hours 30 minutes. That being the case, there left at least 1 hour 15 minutes unaccounted for.

Lucy looked up, staring absently at the noticeboard opposite her desk. The picture of Mary Quigg stared down at her. Mary was a child with whom Lucy had had some dealings when she'd first joined the PSNI's Public Protection Unit. Mary's mother's partner had murdered both her and her mother, when he set the house alight and took off with as much money as he could steal. He had never been charged with the killings, having fled to the Republic. Notices, posters, bulletins had come and gone from Lucy's noticeboard, but Mary Quigg's picture remained and would do until her killer, Alan Cunningham, finally paid for what he had done.

The ringing phone startled her and it took her a moment to place the English-­accented woman who spoke as the one who had taken her call to United Surgical Specialists.

“I've tracked that batch for you,” she said. “It was part of a large shipment which went to Beaumont Hospital, right here in Dublin, in October 2007.”

“Great. How many were in the shipment?”

“One thousand. Beaumont is a specialist center for cranial injuries, so they're a big buyer for us.”

Lucy thanked the woman and, hanging up, sighed. One thousand plates. She could ask the hospital to provide her with names of those who'd had cranial and leg surgery, but there was no guarantee that the two injuries had occurred at the same time, or had been treated in the same hospital. That meant someone would have to sift through each one of them, set against Missing Persons reports, hoping for a match. And, as Burns had already pointed out, there were no spare uniforms to help with it.

 

Chapter Nineteen

S
HE
G
OOGLED THE
name of the shop on the Magherafelt side of the Glenshane, where Duffy claimed to have stopped on his way to All Hallows, then phoned through to it. If the shop had CCTV, there was a good chance it would have recorded the arrival of the van in the forecourt.

The person who answered the phone sounded harried, as if the call was an added inconvenience that she didn't need. In the background, Lucy could hear the low murmur of conversations and the metallic clattering of cutlery. She realized, too late, that the number she had dialed had taken her through to the adjoining restaurant rather than the shop. The waitress to whom she spoke gave her the right number and, on her second attempt, she finally got to speak to someone she wanted to.

“When was this?” the manager asked, after he'd introduced himself as such, though without giving his name.

“Monday afternoon. At some stage between 2:30 and 4:45,” Lucy said, allowing for the travel time required between there and both Derry and Belfast.

“What type of vehicle?”

“A van with an undertaker's name on the side. Duffy and Sons. There would have been a youngish man driving it; thin, late teens to early twenties, dark hair. He bought a can of Coke, if that's any help.”

“Let me see,” the man said. “This thing is digital now, so it's very easy to use; you can just rewind and fast-­forward with the touch of a button.”

Lucy considered that that was always how you'd rewound or fast-­forwarded, even predigital, but the man was being helpful, so she said nothing.

“I'm checking the forecourt video first. That will pick up everyone coming into the front area of the shop . . .” His voice petered off as if even he realized the banality of his small talk. He clicked his tongue a few times, to fill the silence, then said, “Bingo. Duffy and Sons, Undertakers. White van.”

“That's it,” Lucy said. “What time did he get there?”

“You weren't far off: 4:33.”

“Four thirty-­three? You're sure.”

“Totally. It's printed here. I can send you the image on email.”

“That would be great,” Lucy said, giving the man her address.

“Oh, just one thing. You've got it wrong. It wasn't the young man who bought the Coke. It was the girl. A blondie.”

“A girl?”

“Well, a young woman. She came out of the van at 4:34. Let me check the till cameras for that time.”

Lucy heard tapping, heard the man clear his throat. “There we are,” he said. “Nice-­looking girl, too. I'll send you her picture as well, shall I?”

“If it's no trouble,” Lucy said.

“Oh, none at all. That's the beauty of this system. One click and it's away. Because it's—­”

“Digital?” Lucy offered.

T
HE IMAGES PINGED
in her inbox seconds later and Lucy was grudgingly forced to admit that the man's CCTV system was impressive. The girl appeared to be in her early twenties. She had short blond hair, shaved in at the sides. She wore a white top, and jeans over outsized sneakers. She bought two cans of Coke and a packet of cigarettes.

“Why did Ciaran not mention you?” Lucy asked, printing the image off. And where had he been from the end of the ser­vice until 4:33. The shop was, at most, forty-­five minutes from Derry.

“Have you a minute,” Tom Fleming asked, sticking his head around the doorjamb. “I've been skimming through this list that Burns gave us of the phone interviews about the Krawiec death and I know one of the names: Colm Heaney. He's a barman in Spice nightclub. Very reliable he is, too.”

Perhaps Lucy's expression betrayed her thoughts. Spice nightclub was the haunt of teenagers. That Fleming knew the barman was a little strange. Even when he had been drinking, he didn't seem like the typical clientele of Spice.

“I know him through the soup kitchen,” Fleming said. “He stops off every Friday for chicken soup on his way home from work and has a chat. He's a decent sort.”

“So long as we can speak with Ciaran Duffy afterwards,” Lucy agreed.