Unti Lucy Black Novel #3 Page 8

  “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

  SHE GOOGLED 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.

  THE 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.

  Chapter Twenty

  COLM HEANEY WAS in his forties, but dressed as if twenty years younger. His skin was swarthy and, despite his age, in such good condition that Lucy guessed he must have a more rigorous facial routine in the morning than she did. Admittedly, she thought, that wouldn’t be hard.

  “How’re you, Tom?” he asked, leading them into his living room. He lived in College Terrace, just off the Strand Road, his house facing into the lower grounds of Magee University.

&
nbsp; He had two bookcases against the far wall, both laden with CDs and DVDs, though no books.

  “Not bad, Colm. Are you working these nights?”

  “Run off our feet,” he said. “Plus we’ve the Fleadh coming up in a few weeks. They’re expecting four hundred thousand extra ­people in the city for that.”

  The Fleadh was an annual celebration of Irish music, held in a different city or town in Ireland each year. This would be the first time it was to be held north of the border.

  Lucy stood in front of the shelves, glanced at the contents, realizing with some surprise that the CDs were stacked according to artist, who in turn seemed to be arranged alphabetically.

  “You called in about the body found in the bin?” Fleming asked, sitting.

  “Can I get you a tea? Coffee? Soup?” he added, nodding at Fleming with a smile.

  “I’m good, thanks,” Lucy said.

  The man nodded. “Yeah. I was walking home on Monday night and came down through Sackville Street. The alleyway there behind Mullan’s pub? There was a silver Toyota parked in it and two guys were throwing something into the big metal industrial bins that sit there.”

  “Right?” Fleming said. “Could it not have been someone from the bar?”

  “Well, I thought that,” Heaney agreed. “Only, I used to work in there and I know a lot of the staff. I stopped to say hello and that, but the two guys got back in the car and scarpered. They reversed out the other way rather than coming past me.”

  “Reversed out where?”

  “Onto Great James Street. They pulled out there and then took off up past the post office.”

  “What time was this at?” Fleming asked.

  “It must have been, like, 3:30 in the morning. The place was dead, like. I just thought it was a bit odd.”

  “Did you get a look at either of the men?”

  “Not really. It was dark. They were big guys, heavy, you know. The driver especially. Not fat. Big build.”

  “You don’t happen to remember the registration number of the car, do you?” Lucy asked.

  “I’m not Rain Man,” Heaney said, smiling. “Sorry.”

  “Your CDs are arranged alphabetically,” she observed. “I just wondered.”

  “The artists are alphabetical,” Heaney corrected her. “The CDs are chronological, from date of release, within each artist.”

  “That’s . . . impressive,” Lucy managed.

  Heaney blushed. “They thought I was on the spectrum when I was at school.”

  “Did they now?” Lucy asked, attempting to appear surprised.

  THEY DROVE DOWN Great James Street to get a sense of the whereabouts of any CCTV cameras that might have picked up the car. Derry had its own city-­wide CCTV, but it was operated by the City Center Initiative rather than the PSNI. This was, at the time of its installation, the only way to make its presence palatable to the city’s residents, who feared it was another form of police surveillance. The images were monitored by the CCI and, if the police needed to see any images, they had to lodge a request through the Chief Super. The CCI would feed through footage to the Strand Road station and would only provide copies of specific frames from the footage. While the system was working well, it was slow. If they could find a shop nearby whose own external security cameras had picked up the car, it might speed things up a little in identifying the registration number of the vehicle.

  “Nothing,” Fleming said, glancing at the various building fronts around the alleyway where Heaney had seen the car. There were, as he had said, two large industrial bins against one side of the alley, their lids gaping open. “Best get someone out to seal off the alleyway, so forensics can take a check through it. I’ll put in a request to CCI, too. We know what we’re looking for, so they can go through it themselves and pull an image of the car if they can find one.”

  “Speaking of images, I want to call in with Duffy. The boy claimed he went straight to Belfast. The shop he said he stopped at checked and pulled this picture of a girl who was with him. He was only at the other end of the Glenshane at 4:33. Two and a half hours to make a one-­hour journey.”

  WHEN THEY REACHED Duffy and Sons, Undertakers, a ser­vice was taking place. A family was sitting in the ser­vice room while a vicar led them in prayers. Fleming lowered his head reverentially as they passed the window of the room, while Lucy glanced in, blessing herself instinctively.

  Gabriel Duffy was standing at the back of the room, dressed in the black suit of his trade. He had his head bowed, his hands clasped lightly in front of him, his mouth moving along to the responses of the prayers. He glanced up and acknowledged their presence with an almost imperceptible nod.

  “The boy won’t speak with his father around him,” Lucy said. “I’ll maybe try to get him on his own.”

  At the end of the corridor was a series of doors. One was clearly marked with WC. Of the other two, one was marked PRIVATE, which Lucy assumed to be an office, and the other bore a sign reading NO ENTRANCE: STAFF ONLY. It was this door that Lucy tried first. The plush carpeting and pine veneer of the corridor and ser­vice room gave way suddenly to a set of concrete steps with a metal handrail. The walls were unpainted, the lights garish and bright after the softened glow of the upper floor. Lucy could hear an echo of dance music coming from below.

  She picked her way down the stairs, which, in turn gave way onto two rooms. The music was coming from the room on the left and it was into this room that she went.

  But for the corpse lying on the covered table at its center, the room could almost have been a dental surgery office. The walls were painted white and lined with white wooden kitchen units. Several metal trays of implements sat on the black worktop. Above the body hung a wide metal showerhead, attached to pipes running the length of the ceiling. The body itself was attached, via further pipes, to a machine next to it, which thudded mechanically every few seconds as it pumped fluid into the body.

  Behind the chemical stench of the room, which burned at Lucy’s nostrils, she could smell iron.

  “You’re not to—­” Ciaran Duffy appeared behind her, obviously having been in the other room. Lucy turned to see the man, wearing an apron and face mask, carrying a long T-­shaped metal object. Involuntarily, she raised her hand, stepping back.

  Duffy looked at the object in his hand and quickly put it on the table next to the body. “It’s a . . . don’t worry, it’s only a trocar. We use it for . . . well, you don’t want to know. You shouldn’t be here. Did my father tell you to come down here?”

  “Your father’s upstairs,” Lucy said. “I want to speak to you again about Stuart Carlisle.”

  Duffy moved past her, his voice sullen. “That again? I told you, I don’t know what happened. I left here and went to Belfast with him. They must have made a balls-­up with the bodies in All Hallows.”

  “You left here at 2 p.m.? As soon as the ser­vice was finished?”

  “Yes.”

  Lucy took out the picture of the girl. “Who is she?”

  “I don’t . . .” Duffy glanced at the stairs beyond, his expression hard to read behind the mask he wore. “She’s a friend. My girlfriend.”

  “What’s her name?” Lucy asked.

  “Why? What difference does it make?”

  “She was with you when you took the remains of Mr. Carlisle to Belfast, is that right?”

  Duffy nodded.

  “You left here at 2 p.m.?”

  “I told you that already.”

  “You reached the other side of the Glenshane at 4:33 p.m.,” Lucy said. “Which means it took you two and half hours to make a journey that should have taken one.”

  Duffy reddened, but still did not remove his face mask.

  “That would have given you plenty of time to swap over one body with the other.”

  “I don’t know what . . . Look, I hone
stly . . . I don’t know what happened.”

  “Where were you for that hour and a half?” Lucy persisted, moving closer to Ciaran who, in turn, backed up against the table, inadvertently putting his hand on the shoulder of the remains which lay there.

  “I was . . . we were shagging, all right?” Duffy said. “I stopped at Lisa’s house and we had sex. I’d told her I was going to Belfast and she said she wanted to go shopping. I said I’d pick her up. I called at the house, we went to bed, had a shower, and then left. That’s it.”

  “What’s her name?” Lucy asked, taking out her notebook.

  “Lisa Kerns,” Duffy said.

  “Where was your van while you were in her house?”

  “Parked in her drive,” Duffy said.

  “Which is where?”

  “Clearwater, over in the Waterside.”

  Lucy knew it. It was a housing development that ran down to the river’s edge.

  “Would anyone have had access to it?”

  Duffy shrugged. “I locked it, so they shouldn’t have had. I wasn’t keeping an eye on it to be honest so, you know . . .” His voice trailed off as he looked at Lucy.

  “I’ll have to check that story with Lisa.”

  “You can’t tell her I said we were . . . you know. She’ll be angry at me telling.”

  “I’ll be discreet,” Lucy said.

  “Okay,” he said without conviction, seemingly unsure what “discreet” meant.

  “Why didn’t you tell us this the last day? You could have saved us a lot of time.”

  “My dad would have gone nuts.”

  “What age are you?” Lucy asked.

  “I’m twenty-­two,” Duffy said.

  “You’re old enough to have sex.”

  “I met Lisa here. We handled her father’s burial a few weeks back.”

  Lucy suppressed a shudder. She didn’t know which was creepier: Duffy picking up someone in a funeral home, or the girl having sex with the person who had buried her father. Both seemed strangely inappropriate.