Unti Lucy Black Novel #3 Read online

  “Run a PM and DNA tests on the corpse to confirm identity.”

  Fleming nodded. “Already on it,” he said, though Lucy knew that they weren’t. Still, she guessed, Fleming wouldn’t give Burns the satisfaction of knowing that. “What’s the story with the body in the bin? You think he’s homeless.”

  “I think it’s safe to assume, considering he was sleeping in a bloody bin. Do these ­people not realize what could happen to them?”

  “These ­people probably have no alternatives,” Fleming replied tersely.

  “There are always alternatives,” Burns commented. “Regardless, we need your expertise: we have ID on record for the victim,” he said. “Just not the right one.”

  “How do you know it’s wrong?”

  “He was lifted a few years back for being drunk and disorderly. He provided one of the hostels in Derry as his address. The only identification he had was a driver’s license which listed an address in Poland.”

  “Did that not have his name on it?” Fleming asked.

  “It had a name on it. Prawo Jazdy.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “When we tried running it through this morning we found out that Prawo Jazdy is not a name. It’s the Polish for ‘driver’s license.’ ”

  Lucy managed to stifle her laugh; Fleming on the other hand didn’t even try, guffawing loudly at the comment. “Morons,” he managed.

  Burns smiled stiffly. “It’s a bit embarrassing for the District. And it doesn’t help us at all.”

  Fleming nodded. “Of course,” he said. “What hostel did he give as his address and when? We can check the names of any Poles who used it regularly.”

  “There can’t be that many,” Burns said, hopefully.

  Chapter Ten

  “THERE HAVE BEEN loads,” Niall Toner said, as he brought them into the Foyle Hostel. Situated off Bishop Street, the hostel was opened in the early seventies in response to the levels of chronic alcoholism affecting the men in the city.

  “Really?” Lucy asked.

  “Yeah. A lot of them were construction workers who came over for the building boom during the Celtic Tiger. When the downturn hit, they couldn’t find work, or, if they did, it was for fairly crap wages.”

  “Unemployment and social deprivation,” Fleming commented.

  “The breeding ground for alcoholism,” Toner said. “It could have been the motto of this city for years. Not so much anymore.”

  “Why didn’t they just go home?” Lucy asked. “Not to get all BNP about it or anything. If there was no work for them anymore.”

  “Some of them fell into relationships here. Or had destroyed their relationships at home. There was the promise of all the work that would come, too, with the A5 and A6 expansions. Of course, that hasn’t quite worked out.”

  Lucy nodded. She was well aware of the A5 debacle, it being the main road that ran from Derry along the river, past Prehen and all the way south to Aughnacloy some fifty-­five miles away. The road was the main link between Derry and Dublin. At the height of the boom, the Irish government and the Northern Irish Assembly announced plans for a joint roadbuilding program, to open up the west with a dual carriageway replacing the dreadful single-­lane road currently in place. The project was to cost in excess of £300 million, partly funded by the Irish government despite the road not being in the Republic; the rationale was that it would increase trade to the Republic by improving infrastructure. When the crash came and the Irish government went bust, the promised money vanished. Then a group of landowners along the route took the project to the High Court in the North, which ruled against the expansion after finding that an environmental assessment of the impact on two salmon rivers had not been completed properly. Since then, the project had stalled, despite almost £60 million having already been spent, most of it on consultants’ fees. The promised boost to the construction industry had not happened.

  The A6 was the main road leading from Derry to Belfast which, likewise, had languished as a single carriageway for years, despite the fact that every other major town and city in the east of the province had long since been dualled. That the two main routes out of the second city of the North were allowed to languish in the state they were in for so long was seen as testament to the lack of political will in the North to fund works in the west of the province. The first section, to Dungiven, was rumored to start in 2015 at a cost of £100 million; no one really believed it would ever happen.

  “Do you have a picture of him? I might remember him,” Toner asked, bringing them into his office. It was small room with three mismatched easy chairs in front of a desk on which an old PC hummed noisily.

  “You’d not recognize him, Mr. Toner,” Lucy said. “Not the state he was left in.”

  “I didn’t quite catch you on the phone. Was he found in a bin?”

  Lucy shook her head. “We think he was in a bin. It was emptied last night into one of the lorries doing the night round. He was in the compactor for some time.”

  Toner blanched. “Jesus,” he said, blessing himself quickly. “What a horrible way to go. Was he alive before he . . . you know?”

  “We don’t know,” Lucy said. “If he was sleeping in the bin, then it’s likely that he was. On the other hand, maybe someone dumped his body in there just to get rid of him.”

  Toner shook his head. “I’m sure when he came across here from Poland he didn’t think he’d end up sleeping in a bin.”

  “Or dying in one,” Fleming commented.

  Toner nodded. “When was he here? We take notes of all admissions.”

  “He was arrested on 16th October, 2010,” Lucy said. “He’d been in a fight and was drinking. He gave his address as here.”

  “Why have you no name for him?”

  “The officer who took his name recorded the wrong thing.”

  “They thought the Polish for ‘driver’s license’ on his ID was actually his name. Prawo Jazdy.”

  “And the man himself would hardly have corrected their mistake,” Toner commented.

  “Not if he was so drunk they’d had to lift him.”

  “The PSNI’d normally contact us the next day to tell us they had him. If they’d given us that name, we’d not have had him listed as a resident,” Toner said. “October 2010,” he repeated to himself, standing and moving across to one of the filing cabinets behind his desk. He unlocked the third and pulled out the middle drawer, flicking through the various folders, then pulled out the one he wanted.

  “These are all the admissions for October of that year, as well as those longer-­term residents who were with us.”

  “How many have you got in here?” Lucy asked.

  “Twenty-­five at a time,” Toner said. “All single men. We don’t take anyone with a history of violence or certain criminal offences. Beyond that, we’ll try to help anyone we can.”

  “How many are alcoholics?”

  “Almost all,” Toner said, without looking up. “We try to support them into drying out and turning things around. Here,” he added, pulling out a sheet. “These are the twenty-­five we had registered for that week. Most of them were here longer-­term, so if he was here, he’ll be one of these.”

  He laid the sheet on the desk and they scanned down through it, looking for Polish names. Only one stood out: Kamil Krawiec.

  “Give me a second,” Toner said, standing. “I should have a copy of his ID somewhere.”

  Within a few minutes, he produced a folder from the first cabinet this time. He opened it and handed the top sheet to Fleming. “Is that him?”

  Fleming studied the picture. “I’m not sure. Can I take this?” He passed the sheet to Lucy. It was a blown-­up photocopy of the man’s driver’s license, with “Prawo Jazdy” indeed printed at the top. The man in the image looked in his late twenties, sharp featured, his hair cropped tight
against his scalp, staring, unsmiling at the camera.

  “I’ll do you a copy,” Toner said. “I remember him, I think. He was a construction worker, right enough.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  Toner flicked through the file. “He left us in June 2011. I’ve not seen him since.”

  “Any ideas where else he might have been living?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. Since the factory on the Foyle Street collapsed, the street drinkers have had to find new places.”

  Lucy remembered the building. It had once been a shirt factory, next to the Craigavon Bridge, long since disused. Indeed, she had visited it once, with Tom Fleming, to find a woman who had once known her father in a previous case. A year or so after the case, the building had collapsed one night. Luckily, those who had been inside had managed to escape before the whole thing had fallen. Strangely, another shirt factory on the other side of the bridge had burned down a few years before that, with the result that there were now two gaps of rubbled land on either side of the main approach into the city. As part of the City of Culture celebrations, the council had had the areas laid with grass to make a little more picturesque the gaps in the smile the city presented tourists.

  “We’ll take a drive around,” Fleming said. “See if we can’t spot some of his drinking companions.”

  “In that case,” Toner said, “if either of you should happen to see Sammy Smith, can you tell him he needs to call and get his shots?”

  “Shots?”

  “Insulin. He’s on two shots a day. His pharmacist delivers them to here. I’ve not seen him the past few days with the good weather. He’d need to get his insulin, especially if he’s drinking again.”

  “We’ll look out for him,” Fleming said.

  As they were leaving, Toner addressed Tom Fleming directly. “I hear Terry Haynes is missing.”

  Fleming nodded. “I only heard last night.”

  “I hope he’s not had a relapse. The man’s been a star; he’s done quite a bit for some of our residents to help them get themselves back on their feet. I’d hate to think he’d had a slip himself.”

  Lucy felt her mobile vibrate in her pocket. She pulled it out and checked the screen, but did not recognize the number.

  “This is All Hallows Crematorium,” a voice said. “Someone was looking for information about a ser­vice here the other day?”

  “That was my Inspector, Tom Fleming,” Lucy said. “I’m DS Black. Who is this?”

  “Frank Norris. I’m in charge up here. I believe there was some suggestion that we’d not cremated a body.”

  “Not quite,” Lucy said. “We’ve found a body in the river which we believed was to have been cremated. Stuart Carlisle.”

  “Yes. He was definitely done,” the man said. “I’ve the paperwork here. Duffy, the undertakers, took the ashes back with them.”

  “I know,” Lucy said. “We’ve seen them. But we’ve also seen Mr. Carlisle’s corpse.”

  “Well, we cremated whoever was brought up to us. We don’t open the coffin to check who’s inside, you know.”

  “I understand,” Lucy said. “And you’re sure there was a body inside?”

  “Certain,” Norris said. “The ashes . . .”

  “Could that not have been from the coffin?”

  “What about the plates and pins?” Norris countered, a note of triumph in his voice.

  “Excuse me?”

  “There were two metal plates and a few surgical pins removed from the remains,” Norris said. “We cremate the body in stages. The first part removes soft tissue and that. We then crush the bones. Metal in the body can damage the crusher, so we have to remove it first by running a magnetic plate across the remains.”

  “Metal in the body?”

  “Tooth fillings and that normally,” Norris said. “But replacement joints and such things crop up, too. The Carlisle cremation produced a number of fillings, long surgical pins, and two metal plates.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Here,” Norris said. “We recycle the metal. Unless the next of kin particularly want it. In this case, as the next of kin didn’t even bother coming to the ser­vice, we thought it highly unlikely they’d want the deceased’s fillings. Or his surgical implants.”

  “Can you bag those for me?” Lucy said. “Someone will be up for it shortly.”

  “We’ll be closing in an hour, so they’d best be quick.”

  Chapter Eleven

  IN THE END, the desk sergeant in the Strand Road contacted Belfast and asked a squad car to collect the implants and bring them down the road. A uniform from Derry would drive up and meet them halfway, at the bottom of the Glenshane Pass.

  That arranged, Lucy and Fleming drove back through the city to Foyle Street. The old factory, facing the river, had proved to be a focal point for many of the homeless in the area for years. With its collapse, as Toner had said, their groupings had become more dispersed. Despite that, Tom Fleming’s work in the soup kitchens on the weekends meant that he had some ideas of the common hangouts.

  Even as they drove down the Foyle Street, a girl in her twenties staggered out onto the roadway in front of them and picked her way across to the opposite pavement. The space between the pavement and the river beyond housed the Foyle Valley Railway Museum.

  Though now only one train line ran into Derry, from Belfast via the Antrim Coast, at one stage, four different railway systems had connected the city to the rest of the North as well as neighboring Donegal. The museum, which had been built in the late eighties, was actually the recreation of an old railway station and platform, overlooking the river. A track ran from the museum for three miles, along the site of the original Great Northern Rail line which connected Derry and Strabane, running up the Donegal side of the river, then cutting over the Foyle just North of Strabane, across an island known as Islandmore. Lucy remembered, as a child, her father taking her on the old diesel railcar that had shuffled back and forth along the track when the museum first opened. It had long since stopped. Two original locomotives remained, one inside the building and a second, rusting model, positioned outside.

  The drunk girl picked her way across to the low wall outside the museum and, swinging her leg, managed to step over it. They watched as she meandered past the building, then turned in left behind it, to where the platform was.

  “We’ll try here first,” Fleming said.

  Lucy pulled in and parked outside the museum, which was already closed for the day. She and Fleming got out and followed the girl’s path, around to the platform.

  There were about a dozen ­people gathered there, most of whom were female. One old man sat in their midst, a bottle of White Lightning cider in his hands. The others were sharing cans of lager. The warm breeze, carrying down the Foyle Valley, seemed to strengthen here, as if the structure of the platform roofing created a wind tunnel of sorts. A second man sat with his T-­shirt removed and tied around his head to protect his scalp from the sun, his trunk milky white against the livid red burns on his arms and face. He glanced up at Lucy as they rounded the corner and made to struggle to his feet.

  “It’s okay, Sammy,” Fleming said. “Don’t stand up.”

  “Inspector Fleming,” Sammy said, exposing his gums in a toothless smile. “Come on and sit,” he added grandly, patting the concrete ground on which they sat with the flat of his hand.

  “How are you keeping, Sammy? You’ve taken a scalding.”

  “I’m watching my head,” Sammy said. “Don’t want to get sunburn on me ears.”

  “Niall Toner is looking for you. He says you need to call in and get your shots.”

  Sammy winked broadly at Fleming. “I’ll call round later,” he said. “He’s an awful worrier.”

  “Someone needs to worry about you, Sammy.”

  Lucy glanced at
the others gathered there who were following the exchange. She recognized a few of them, though not by name. She was struck by the number of women there. Many of them were relatively young. One appeared to be still in her teens. She wore skinny jeans and red sneakers. She had her hair scraped back in a ponytail.

  “Should you be here?” Lucy ventured.

  “Where else should I be?” the girl asked, sharply.

  “Leave her,” Sammy said, though Lucy could not tell whether he was addressing her or the girl. “She’s crabbed.”

  “Piss off,” the girl said, kicking out with her foot, missing Sammy and striking the older woman who sat next to him.

  “I’ll slap your arse,” the woman said, with such conviction, the young girl’s reply died on her lips.

  “We’re looking for someone,” Fleming said to Sammy. “Kamil Krawiec.”

  Sam shook his head. “Never heard of him.”

  Fleming handed him the picture that Toner had given them. Sammy took it, studying the picture. After a moment, his face lit with recognition.

  “Crackers? Why didn’t you say?”

  “Crackers?”

  “Aye. Crackers. Who the fu—­” He glanced again at Lucy. “Who can say that, whatever it is?” He pointed at the man’s name on the license with a thin grimy finger. “Camel?”

  “Kam-­eel,” Fleming pronounced. “Have you seen him?”

  Sam shook his head. “Not in a while. What’s he done?”

  “Nothing,” Fleming said. “We just wanted to find him.”

  “Is this about the bin?” a woman to Lucy’s left asked.

  Lucy glanced down. The woman looked to be in her forties, though Lucy knew that meant little if she’d been living rough. She had thin pinched features and auburn hair with a single patch of gray above her left ear. “What bin?”

  “The body in the bin? They were talking about it at the soup kitchen. Was it Crackers?”

  “We don’t know,” Lucy said.

  “He used to be about a lot,” the woman said. “But I’ve not seen him for months.”