Bleed a River Deep (Inspector Devlin Mystery 3) Read online

  ‘Do you expect trouble?’ Patterson asked, then seemed to gauge the stupidity of the question by our expressions, for he immediately added, ‘Beyond the usual, I mean.’

  ‘Senator Hagan has his detractors, both at home and abroad, as I’m sure you’re aware, Harry. In addition, the environmental lobby seem determined to vilify us at every turn, despite the fact that, before a sod was cut here, we invested millions on an environmental impact study, to whose recommendations we have adhered in every point.’

  ‘How much security will he be bringing with him?’ I asked.

  ‘One or two personal security men, I suspect,’ Weston answered. ‘He’s retired now, Ben, so he isn’t afforded quite the level of protection he once was.’

  ‘So we’ll be responsible for the bulk of it,’ Patterson said. It was a statement rather than a question, but Weston nodded.

  ‘When’s the visit?’

  Weston grimaced, then, leaning forward in his seat, consulted a document on the desk before him, although he clearly knew the date by heart: ‘Monday, ninth of October.’

  Following coffee and preliminary security discussions, Patterson and I were escorted back downstairs. Weston gestured to the welcome packs we had been given.

  ‘Everything you could ever want to know about our company is in those packs, gentlemen.’

  As we shook hands to leave, the receptionist approached nervously, holding a blue box. She passed it to Weston, who opened it and inspected the contents.

  ‘Beautiful choice, Jackie,’ he said, nodding with admiration. Clearly relieved to have completed this latest task to Weston’s satisfaction, Jackie smiled and hurried off again. I was a little taken aback when Weston handed me the box. ‘I hope your wife likes it, Ben,’ he said.

  I opened the box, a little confused and feeling my face flush with embarrassment. Inside it sat a thick gold necklace, which I was sure I had seen in the display cabinet earlier with a price tag in excess of €3,000.

  I held the box out towards Weston again. ‘Thank you, sir, but I can’t accept this. It’s . . . it’s far too much.’

  He stood his ground, however, his hands clasped in military fashion behind his back, his smile fixed. ‘No, I insist, Ben.’

  I could think of nothing to say, and so in the end simply thanked him for his generosity, though as we left the building to return to Patterson’s car I could not help feeling that, in some way, I had accepted more than just a gift for my wife.

  ‘Bloody hell, Devlin,’ Patterson said as we pulled out on to the main road. ‘That thing costs a fucking fortune.’

  ‘I didn’t ask him for it,’ I said defensively.

  ‘You may as well have done,’ he retorted, and I suspected that part of his reaction was jealousy that he had not been similarly gifted. ‘You can’t fuck up this visit now,’ he added, without looking at me.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You. I’m putting you in charge of it,’ he said. Then, nodding towards the box I held in my hand, he added, ‘You’ve already been paid for it, after all.’

  We had only travelled a mile or so when a security van accompanied by a convoy of Garda and Army vehicles approached us on the other side of the road, travelling towards Lifford to stock the banks in preparation for wages day. As it passed, a camper van with number plates so muddied they were impossible to read overtook it, then cut across the lane in front of us and trundled up a dirt track just off the main road. Patterson slammed on the brakes, though there was no real prospect of our colliding with it.

  ‘Fucking hippies!’ he shouted, flicking one finger in the general direction of the van, whose rear bumper we could see disappearing up the laneway.

  While we were sitting there a second camper, which had remained behind the security cortège, indicated and pulled across the road in front of us, also heading up the lane.

  ‘Where the fuck is everyone going?’ Patterson asked incredulously.

  ‘Maybe we should find out,’ I suggested, if only so we wouldn’t have to sit in the middle of the road any longer.

  He grunted, then turned the car on to the laneway and followed the trail of dust raised by the van in front, up the path and into the pine forest I had seen from Weston’s office. The car shuddered along the dirt track, the air cooling as we drove beneath the canopy of the trees. The lower trunks and boughs were completely bare, the forest floor thick with browned pine needles and lumps of cones, the air sharp with the scent of sap when I wound down the window. Above the drone of the car, I could hear the rushing of the Carrowcreel.

  Around the next bend, we pulled to a stop behind the two camper vans, which had parked alongside several other cars and trucks. The occupants of each were unloading tents and camping equipment from their respective vehicles. My initial thought was that it was perhaps a group of travellers or crusties, setting up camp illegally. However, as I looked closer, it became apparent that the people around us were of no single age or social group. The second car from the front was being emptied by a middle-aged couple. The camper van did indeed contain crusties, clad in woolly jumpers, with dreadlocked hair, tight jeans and loose boots. There were also single men and women and families, even a local barman I recognized, Patsy McCann, removing camping gear from the boot of his car.

  We got out of the squad car. Patterson immediately made a beeline for the camper van, already fitting his cap on his cannonball head. I wandered over to Patsy McCann, taking the opportunity to light up as I did.

  ‘What’s up, Patsy?’ I said, holding out the box to offer him a cigarette too.

  ‘Here ahead of the rush, Ben,’ he said over his shoulder to me, not stopping his unpacking. ‘No thanks,’ he added, nodding at the proffered cigarettes.

  ‘What rush?’

  ‘The bleedin’ gold rush, man,’ he said, cocking an eyebrow at my ignorance.

  I laughed, assuming it was in some way connected with the record prof its Orcas had just announced. I was wrong.

  Patsy turned long enough to hand me the local newspaper, then turned again and, having emptied the boot, strained to pull, from the back seat of his car, a rucksack, tied to which was an old kitchen sieve. I opened the paper. The story could not have been more obvious. Under the headline PREPARE FOR THE RUSH was a picture of a middle-aged man holding up a nugget of gold the size of a penny.

  His name was Ted Coyle. He had been camped out in this woodland for three weeks now, without anyone knowing. He had come here, he said, because of the goldmine, believing he was fated to strike it rich. Coyle sounded like a lunatic. Whether he was or not, according to the news report, he would soon be a rich lunatic. The nugget in his hand might just make his fortune, the report claimed. He had found it while panning the Carrowcreel.

  Chapter Two

  Friday, 29 September

  On the final Friday of each month, in preparation for wages day, each bank in the East Donegal region is replenished with cash. A security van, containing on some days over ten million euros, travels slowly from bank to bank throughout the county. As it makes its way along deserted country roads and through mountain passes, its safety is guaranteed not simply by the armour plating and time locks on the van but by the fact that it is sandwiched between two Garda cars, and, in front of and behind those again, two Irish Army jeeps, with armed soldiers. At each bank, as the cash is hurried into the branch, soldiers toting M-16s line the road outside. The message is unmistakable. Only an idiot would try to rob a bank on such a day. Or someone too desperate to care.

  It is doubtful that the man who decided to hold up the local Ulster Bank branch in Lifford that morning knew this. Just after eleven, when one of the two cashiers had gone upstairs for his tea break, the man had entered the bank. He was unshaven, his skin sallow, his hair unkempt. He wore denim jeans a size too big and a multicoloured sweater unravelling around the hem. He wore no coat. He glanced around the branch, then shuffled over to the stand of pre-printed dockets, as if to complete one for a transaction. The girl behind the desk, Catherine
Doherty, began to suspect that something wasn’t right. She reached under the desk and placed her finger lightly against the alarm button hidden there, ready to press it if the need arose.

  The man stood for a moment flicking through the blank dockets. Then he approached the counter, seemingly unaware that the glass partition in front of him was two inches thick and bulletproof. Behind the counter, Catherine Doherty brushed her hair from her face and smiled, then said, ‘Good morning.’ The man shouted something she could not understand, and produced a gun from the waistband of his trousers, which he brandished at the window. By this stage, of course, Catherine Doherty had already pressed the alarm button. Then she ducked beneath the counter and waited.

  The security van preparing to unload two cashboxes in Lifford pulled up outside the Ulster Bank at 11.03. The guard inside logged the time on his record sheet then waited for the soldiers in front of him to get out of their vehicle. Next the Gardai accompanying him got out. Finally he opened his door and waited for the time lock to click. He was two minutes early. Time for a smoke, perhaps.

  They all heard the alarm go off at the same time. Instinctively, he clambered back into the van and shut the door. Likewise instinctively, four Army officers simultaneously shouldered their weapons.

  Instinctively, the man turned and ran from the counter, his replica weapon still in his hand, blundering through the doorway and out into the car park. Perhaps he wondered how the Guards had arrived so quickly. Perhaps he believed that if he raised his hands they wouldn’t shoot. He was wrong.

  Patterson had got the call on our way back from the Carrowcreel. The man’s body still lay on the pavement when we arrived. The force of the automatic weapons had spun him several feet back towards the door. His legs were splayed, his arms bent unnaturally and twisted behind him. He lay facing the sky, his skin taut against his cheekbones, his mouth hanging open, his jaw slack. He had several bullet wounds to his chest, and one to his forehead. Presumably he had held his hands in front of his face in some final futile survival instinct, for his right palm was marked with a hole reminiscent of the wound of Christ into which Thomas had been able to place his finger.

  His head rested on the gravel path, his face turned slightly sideways, bits of grit stuck to his cheek. Behind his head a halo of blood widened slowly, its surface already beginning to congeal. The replica gun which he had been waving as he ran out of the bank lay several feet away from him, its casing shattered.

  John Mulronney, our local doctor, had already pronounced the man dead. He stood now with his back to the body, smoking the cigarette I had offered him while the Scene of Crime team checked the body.

  ‘Multiple gunshot wounds. I’m guessing the one to the forehead actually killed him, but even if it hadn’t, one of the wounds to his trunk probably would have anyway. Any ideas who he is?’

  ‘Was,’ Patterson said. ‘Looks like a foreigner.’

  This pearl of wisdom was soon tested. One of the SOCOs brought over the man’s wallet that contained a photograph of a woman and spare change just short of a euro. In the notes section of the wallet was a driving licence featuring a photograph of the dead man in front of us. His name was Joseph Patrick Mackey, and his address was in Coolatee. Folded behind the licence was a small prayer card, written in a language I did not recognize.

  ‘Russian?’ Mulronney suggested.

  ‘God knows,’ I said. ‘“Joe Mackey” hardly sounds particularly Russian, though, does it?’

  ‘Find out,’ Patterson said, handing me the keys to the car he had been driving. ‘Take a woman with you to break the news.’

  *

  Even before I had knocked at the door, something felt wrong. The house in Coolatee listed as Mackey’s address was huge, set up from the road with a winding driveway leading up to the front porch. A drystone wall five feet high surrounded the plot and a new-registration Avensis was parked in front of the garage. Somehow it didn’t seem to suit an unshaven robber in torn clothes with less than a euro in his wallet.

  ‘Nice spot,’ Helen Gorman said. I had picked her up at the station. Helen was a uniformed Garda officer with whom I had worked on previous cases. Certainly this wasn’t the first time she had accompanied me to break such news.

  A woman we took to be Mrs Mackey answered the door, though she looked nothing like the young woman in the photograph we had taken from the dead man’s wallet. Mackey was in her fifties, with tanned skin and platinum-blonde hair.

  ‘Mrs Mackey?’ I asked, somewhat incredulously.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, smiling confusedly. ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘We’d best go inside, ma’am,’ Gorman said, the implication of her words already filling Mrs Mackey’s expression with dread.

  The woman stood her ground, refusing to move along the hallway towards where we could see the kitchen. ‘It’s Joe, isn’t it?’

  I scanned the walls behind her head, taking in each photograph: a child playing in snow, squinting a smile towards the camera; Mrs Mackey, a little younger, her husband standing beside her, holding her hand, relaxed, smiling; her husband, bald, pale and a little podgy. Not thin, not black-haired, not the man lying dead outside Lifford bank.

  ‘I’m afraid we have some bad news, ma’am,’ I heard Gorman say.

  ‘What?’ Mrs Mackey stuttered, stretching one hand to steady herself against the wall, her other reaching for her chest. ‘Not Joe. He can’t be.’

  I glanced at Gorman, wishing I’d spoken a second earlier. ‘He’s not, Mrs Mackey. Look, can we come in and sit down? We need to talk.’

  I finally assured Mrs Mackey that her husband – her bald, pale, podgy husband – was, to the best of my knowledge, still alive and well and playing golf. Then we fairly quickly established that Mrs Mackey – Diane Mackey – had no relatives matching the description of the man we’d left lying in Lifford Main Street. Finally, for confirmation, I showed her the licence we had taken from her ‘husband’s’ corpse.

  ‘That’s his information all right – even his date of birth,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know the man in the picture. He’s not my husband.’

  ‘Why would he have your husband’s licence?’ I asked.

  ‘I have no idea,’ Mackey replied. ‘But that man’s not my husband.’ Then something seemed to strike her. ‘Shouldn’t you people check these things out more carefully? Telling someone their husband’s dead when it’s not true.’

  ‘It doesn’t usually happen, ma’am,’ I said. ‘It was a genuine mistake.’

  ‘Genuine or not, I’m quite angry about it.’

  ‘I understand, Mrs Mackey,’ I said. ‘Has your husband ever had his licence stolen?’

  ‘Don’t you check anything? The whole bloody house was emptied in February. We spent days filling out forms and lists of what was taken. Of course, we never heard another word from you lot. A waste of time.’

  She folded her arms and turned her face towards the window to emphasize her disgust at our inefficiency.

  Patterson wasted no time in letting the entire station know about his anger at our mistake – my mistake, apparently – by loudly repeating each part of the story as I relayed it to him. I had told Gorman to find something to do until he’d had a chance to react and I was glad that I had. She’d have been even more upset than she already was. For my part, I took what Patterson threw with gritted teeth.

  ‘Have you nothing to say, Devlin?’ he spluttered, finally spent.

  ‘It was a genuine mistake, sir. But a mistake, none the less, for which I take full responsibility.’

  He looked at me suspiciously, and I could see he was trying to figure out the angle. I suspected he was gathering himself for another tirade, but realized there was little point, for I had mounted no defence.

  ‘Just find out who the hell he actually was then. And no more fuck-ups,’ he spat, stabbing the air with his finger.

  ‘I’ll try my best, sir,’ I said, standing up.

  ‘Try better than that,’ he growled.


  I sat in a patrol car for a few minutes, risking a cigarette in spite of the smoking ban and trying to decide what to do next. Finally I went back to the site of the shooting, where the dead man’s body had been covered with a sheet in preparation for the pathologist’s arrival. I retrieved the prayer card I had seen in the man’s wallet. Then, with the card safely wrapped in an evidence bag, I drove to our local technical college. The Tech, as it’s known, offers a fairly diverse range of subjects, including European languages, so I was hopeful someone would be able to help me identify the language on the card the man had been carrying. It would at least be a first step towards identifying him.

  After I had signed in at the reception desk, one of the secretaries took me to the office of the Head of Languages, Marie Collins, a small, middle-aged woman.

  She came around from behind her desk and gestured towards one of the two easy chairs in her office, indicating that I should sit.

  ‘I’m hoping I’m not in trouble, Inspector,’ she said, smiling mildly.

  ‘Not at all. I was wondering if you could tell me what language this is, please,’ I said, holding the card out to her.

  ‘It’s the Cyrillic alphabet,’ she said, having read the first few lines. ‘I’d say Caucasian, possibly Chechen,’ she continued. ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘It’s part of an ongoing investigation,’ I said.

  She widened her eyes slightly, as if I had shared privileged information with her. ‘It’s a prayer to St Jude,’ she explained. ‘Patron saint of lost causes.’

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  ‘The reason I mention it is that Chechens are predominantly Muslim. Quite rare to find a Chechen Catholic.’