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  Johnny sat on the metal frame which doubled as a bench and bed in the holding cell, his fingers exploring under the bandage which had been taped around his abdomen. He looked up when he saw me enter the cell, but went back to his work, testing the wound for tenderness and inspecting the dressing for blood.

  "Well, Johnny. Do you feel better now?"

  "Piss off, Devlin. You're not allowed in the North. You shouldn't be here."

  "Neither should you, Johnny. I'm off duty. This is a social call. What were you playing at, taking on the travellers?" I asked, but his attention remained focused on his dressing. Hendry kicked at Johnny's foot when he still didn't look up.

  "I've nothing to say," Johnny muttered. "Have you a fag?"

  "Aye," I said, taking the cigarette packet out of my pocket. "But I've forgot my lighter. Have you got one?"

  "Ha, ha! Stick it up your arse, Devlin."

  "Oi! Mind your mouth, son, you're not in the South now," Hendry said. "Jesus, Devlin, what class of criminal are you lot breeding over there?"

  I squatted down beside Cashell, hoping to get his attention. "What had this to do with Angela, Johnny?" I asked, and saw, for a second, the slightest glimpse of recognition. "It was Angela, wasn't it, Johnny? You see, that's why Inspector Hendry here has contacted me - on account of what happened to Angela. But this won't bring her back, Johnny." I didn't intend to sound as patronizing as I did.

  He looked up at me fiercely, anger and pride defiant in his face. "And you will, will ye Devlin? Fucking resurrect her? Is that it? You couldn't catch cold in a snow storm. You're a joke. Fuck you." He grew more animated as he spoke, getting angrier and angrier until he almost spat in my face, "Fuck the lot of you!" Then in the silence that followed, his venom spent, he sank back onto the metal frame again. He buried his face in his hands, as would any grieving father who has vented his anger and frustration at the person nearest him because of his failure to do so at those who actually deserved it.

  "The boy he was seen chasing was Whitey McKelvey. His real name's Liam or something, but everyone calls him Whitey. A bad wee bugger, too," Hendry told me as he walked me back to my car, where Debbie and the children were waiting for me. "He looks about ten but he's nearer eighteen. Undernourished. Some of the lads here reckon it's deliberate so he can slip through windows more easily when he's robbing a place. Whitey's been in and out of detention centres. He hasn't done anything yet to do real time for, but it'll happen soon enough. Wouldn't surprise me if he's involved in the girl's death. Knives are his thing, mind you. I don't know if he'd be strong enough to lift a body, either. He's wiry but fairly weak. Vicious rather than strong, you know."

  "I know him," I said. "He's popped up once or twice on our side too. White-blond hair, FA Cup ears? Let us know if you lift him. Cashell obviously thinks he knows something."

  We shook hands. "Surely," Hendry said, "though I hope you get him first. Last time we lifted Whitey, he left the place in a right mess."

  Later that evening Superintendent Costello arrived at our house. He does this fairly frequently; part of his personable, policing-the- community bit. He squeezed into the armchair in the corner furthest from the TV and held in his hand the teacup and saucer Debbie had given to Penny to bring him. The coffee table upon which a plate of biscuits sat was just a little beyond his reach and the effort required to set down and pick up the cup was evidently too much to make it worthwhile. The cup looked tiny in his hand and he seemed awkward drinking from it.

  "Quite a good response from the RTE thing," he said, holding the cup just below jaw-level, his third and fourth fingers jutting out, the handle of his cup too small to accommodate them. "Twenty-three calls. Twelve nutcases."

  For the press conference we had decided not to mention that Angela's body had been dumped naked but for her underwear, nor the ring which she had been wearing, in an attempt to weed out the cranks from those with genuine information.

  "A few promising leads though," Costello continued, stirring the tea now to give him something to do with his hands and the cup. "A mention of a traveller boy, presumably Whitey McKelvey. The two of them were seen together on Thursday night, at a disco in Strabane. Drugs were mentioned too." I nodded, unsurprised. "In connection with her - not him, Benedict."

  "Might be worth asking for toxicology reports from the state pathologist," I suggested, though I suspected Costello had already done so.

  "I spoke to her earlier," he said, trying to place the spoon back on the saucer as gently as possible. "The manager of the Cineplex saw Angela there on Friday afternoon with her sisters. They bought tickets for a children's matinee but went to some horror thing. They were thrown out at about four o'clock." The spoon clattered off the side of the cup and fell to the ground. Penny scurried over on all fours and retrieved it with a smile.

  "On Friday?" I repeated. "Are you sure? Cashell said she left the house on Thursday."

  "Best check it out in the morning," Costello replied. "Preliminary findings are through from the pathologist as well. They put time of death at somewhere between 11 p.m. Friday night and 1 a.m. Saturday morning." As he spoke, he lifted a cream-coloured folder out of the bag he had brought with him. He passed it over to me and turned his attention to Shane, who was sitting on his sheepskin rug, watching Costello with open mouth, a rusk held aloft in his hand, his face smeared with soggy biscuit. He grinned, showing off his two teeth, and gurgled with satisfaction.

  I skimmed through all the technical jargon. In short, Angela had been engaged in sexual activity before she died - more than likely consensual and most definitely using contraception; the lubricant found in swabs taken from her suggested Mates condoms, and precluded any possibility of finding DNA evidence, unless hairs could be found on her body.

  Stomach contents seemed to verify that she had indeed been at the cinema on the day of her death: there was no doubt that Angela had eaten popcorn, chocolate and, at a later stage in the day, burger and chips. The pathologist also noted a partially decomposed tablet of some sort, speckled brown and yellow. Toxicology would identify the exact constituents.

  The level of lactic acid in Angela's muscles - all her muscles - when she died was massive, suggesting that they had been in vigorous use at the moment of her death. The pathologist suggested that this was probably not consistent with regular activity. It was more likely that Angela had suffered some kind of seizure. She had died through asphyxiation. The bruising on her chest and other bruising, discovered around her mouth when the lipstick was removed, suggested that someone fairly small had sat or, more likely, knelt on her chest and covered her mouth, perhaps while she thrashed beneath them in a fit. Eventually the lack of oxygen and massive electrical activity in her brain became too much.

  "Someone knelt on her?" I said, breaking my own rule of never discussing such things in front of my children.

  "Someone small," Costello said, "and s-e-x-u-a-l-l-y active," he added, mouthing the letters, while motioning with his head towards my children, who sat pretending to watch TV but were listening to the exchange. I decided not to tell him that Penny is top of her class in spelling - though I trusted they had not reached polysyllables like that in Primary Two.

  "Outside, kids," I said and waited until Penny pulled the door quietly shut behind her, hefting Shane in her other arm. "What do you reckon with the tablet? E?"

  "Could well be. We'll find out soon enough. Check with the family about drugs history. Check about epilepsy as well. If she'd never had a fit before, 'twould fairly much guarantee that it's drug- related in some way."

  I nodded. "Still, this mention of someone small would seem to suggest Whitey McKelvey."

  "Looks that way, Benedict," Costello agreed. "I'll put out a description, see if we can't pick him up. Either that or hope the northerners get him before Cashell's extended family go out and buy more petrol."

  Chapter Three

  Monday, 23rd December

  On Monday morning I stopped off at the station early and was informed b
y Burgess, the Desk Sergeant, about Tommy Powell's father, who had reported seeing an intruder in his room at Finnside Nursing Home. Neither Burgess nor I felt it warranted much of an investigation: a seventy-five-year-old man, placed in a home because he suffers from dementia, claims someone was in his room, in a place where the nurses check on the patients every hour or so, night and day. It seemed like a no-brainer. On the other hand, Powell was not only very rich, but also influential, with a mouthy son who would think nothing of going to the local papers about how Garda carelessness left his poor father prone to intruders in his own bedroom. I told Burgess I would follow it up myself when I got the chance, just to keep Powell Jr quiet.

  I phoned ahead to the cinema to make sure that Martin, the manager, was there, then drove round and took his statement, which simply confirmed all that Costello had told me. Martin knew the Cashell girls; he'd recognized Angela because of her blonde hair, and her two sisters - one older, one much younger. Better still, he was able to show me the CCTV recording for that afternoon.

  We sat in the back office of the cinema, the building strange in daylight without the smell of heating popcorn. Martin fast- forwarded the video until 2.45 p.m. and we watched. A few minutes later a group entered the shot, coming into the cinema. But the girl who should have been Angela was not wearing the jeans and blue hooded top her father had described. In fact, she was wearing a short skirt and a red coat. It was difficult to identify her for certain because of the graininess of the shot, but Martin was convinced.

  "That's them," he said, pointing to the group.

  "Are you sure? That's not what we were told she was wearing."

  He sighed and looked at me as though I had disappointed him. "I'm telling you, that was them. I served them myself; I remember Angela Cashell. My wife calls that thing she's wearing a greyhound skirt."

  "Why?"

  " 'Cause they're just behind the hare." He laughed at his joke.

  He forwarded further through the tape, seeming to know where to stop and I suspected that he had gone over it a few times already in preparation for a visit from the Guards. At 4.03 p.m. Angela Cashell walked out of the cinema with her sisters. Despite the graininess of the footage, I think she laughed as she spoke to the other girls. I hope she did.

  "The younger one was the problem," he explained: "why we asked them to leave. The older two could watch the horror movie, but not the young girl. It would give her nightmares."

  I nodded and silently considered that the murder of her sister might have a more lasting impact on her than a horror film.

  Before getting back into my car, I walked the few hundred yards from the cinema to the spot where Angela Cashell had been found. The grass was well-trodden now and some locals had left bunches of flowers lying just beyond the spot where she had lain. Blue and white crime-scene tape fluttered in the breeze and tangled in the branches of the old hawthorn tree to which it had been tied.

  I went over to the bouquets at the base of the tree, reading the cards attached with grim curiosity. There was a bunch left by the Cashell girls. Sadie had left an old battered teddy bear with "From Mummy and Daddy with love" written on a piece of foolscap tucked into the ribbon around its neck. The whole thing reminded me of the fairy trees people used to talk about in the west of Donegal. Locals would tie talismans of some sort around the tree and in return, the fairies would bless them. The base of this tree was covered with Mass cards and rosary beads, sympathy cards and flowers. Among them I saw a photograph, clearly taken decades earlier. In it, a young woman was sitting on a set of concrete steps. Behind her, I could see children playing on a beach. I assumed the woman was a grandmother of Angela's and replaced the photograph, tucking it behind a vine of ivy that snaked up around the hunk of the tree. I read a few more of the messages, laying each card gently onto the bed of damp moss at the tree's base.

  Days later I would still feel saddened by the simplicity of Sadie's message; what else could adequately convey a parental emotion so instinctive it could barely be expressed?

  When I arrived at her house, Sadie was sitting on a wooden kitchen chair on her front door-step, smoking a cigarette and talking to her neighbour, who leaned across the hedge that divided their two houses, The neighbour, Jim something-or-other, nodded towards me as I got out of the car and I heard him say, "Hey Sadie, someone's brought home the bacon."

  I wanted to tell him to screw himself, but nodded politely and smiled. Sadie stood up as I approached and walked into the house, leaving the door open, which I took to be as close to a sign of hospitality as I was going to get.

  The two younger daughters were sitting at the kitchen table, almost exactly as I had last seen them and, I noticed, in the same clothes. Both looked up from their play when I came in, then returned to their dolls. Sadie was standing at the stove, removing a fresh cigarette from the packet on the worktop beside her.

  "Have I not enough to be bothering me? What do you want?"

  She leaned over the stove, removing a pot from a gas ring and lighting her cigarette from the flame. She had to drag at it several times to get it lit, billows of smoke mingling with the steam from the pots which left her face damp and flushed.

  "I've a few questions, Sadie. About Angela. If you're feeling up to it."

  "The fuck you care if I'm up to it. That bastard's gone and got himself nicked again. Two days shy of Christmas. What am I meant to do? Eh?" She sat down, a tacit recognition that, try as she might to blame me, she knew I was not the architect of her misfortunes. I sat opposite her, studying her face.

  She had always been a fairly heavy woman, her chestnut brown hair tied back from her face. It had lost its lustre now, and the deep brown, which once had resembled a mare's mane, was streaked with white and dirty grey. Her skin was weathered as leather, peppered with burst blood vessels. In another life, with another husband perhaps, she could have been attractive in a way, but life with Johnny Cashell had taken its toll on her. She looked significantly older than her forty-seven years. I had never seen her look more dejected in my life. I opened my wallet and took out three 50 euro notes that I had withdrawn from the bank machine that morning in order to buy Debbie's Christmas present. Sadie watched me with open suspicion.

  "Sadie, we had a whip-round at the station, seeing as all that's happened the past week to you. Take this to tide you over Christmas."

  Her initial response was indignation and anger, though I assured her that it was not charity as such, but simply a contribution to help her over a bad patch. Slowly, and without thanks, she took the money, folded the notes once and slipped them under the fruit bowl. Then she gestured towards me without discernible reason, which I assumed to be a sign of her assent to the interview. I looked at the two girls, not wishing to speak in front of them, but Sadie, wafting the smoke from in front of her face, said, "It's okay. They don't understand anyway."

  "Sadie," I began, still glancing at the girls uncomfortably, "we think Angela took a fit of some kind—"

  "Is that what killed her? A fit?"

  "We don't know. We're fairly certain that at some time before she died she went into a seizure. Was she epileptic? Did she take Ills?"

  "Never. But then, if she had a fit, she weren't murdered. A fit's not murder, is it?" For a moment a spark of hope seemed to flicker in her eyes, as though the means of Angela's death could somehow after the final outcome.

  "We don't know, Sadie. She never took fits?"

  "Never."

  "Was she on medication of any kind?"

  "No. She were on iron for a while, months back, but not now."

  "What did her iron tablets look like Sadie - in case maybe she look some recently and you didn't know?"

  "Why? What difference do iron tablets have to make?"

  "Just clearing some things up. Can I see her tablets?"

  "Muire, run up and fetch them tablets from the bathroom, love," Sadie said, and the younger of the two girls - the girl whom I had thought was going to speak on my last visit - ran up t
he stairs, her footfalls thudding across the ceiling above us.

  While I waited for her to return, I promised Sadie that we would bring Angela to them as soon as possible. "And her belongings, Sadie. You'll want that gold ring back, I'm sure," I said, remembering the ring Angela had been wearing.

  "What gold ring? She didn't wear no gold rings."

  "Are you sure? She was wearing a gold ring with some kind of stone in it. It looked expensive."

  She paused for a fraction of a second too long before responding, "Oh, right. Aye. That ring. Aye. I forgot about that. Bought it herself, she did."

  But I knew she was lying. Angela didn't wear a gold ring and Sadie was chancing her arm for a piece of jewellery she didn't own.

  A more important issue, though, was where, then, the ring had come from. A boyfriend or lover perhaps? The lover who had had sex with her before she died and who was, presumably, the last person to see her alive and, logically, therefore, her killer?

  Muire returned with the tablets. They were red and green in a plastic coating and looked nothing like the description of the tablet discovered in Angela's stomach.

  "Sadie, could you ask the girls to leave? I have one or two more questions," I said.

  "Go'on out and play wi' yourselves," she said and the two girls left with their dolls.

  "Did Angela have a boyfriend?" I asked.

  "Probably. She were a lovely looking girl."

  "You don't know any names, Sadie?"

  "No."

  "What about Whitey McKelvey?"

  "Are you joking? You're as bad as that ignoramus I married. She wouldn't have spat on McKelvey if he was on fire." She paused briefly as she realized how inappropriate her choice of words had been.

  "Then why did Johnny go after him? They were seen together. Might she have been seeing him without you knowing?"

  "I'm telling you. Whatever she was meeting McKelvey for, it weren't boyfriend stuff."