Bleed a River Deep (13 page)

Chapter Fourteen

Sunday, 15 October

I went to early Mass alone that morning and headed across into Strabane to see Janet Moore.

The small blue sports car I had seen her in was parked on the driveway. I noticed the motorbike her husband had been working on, lying on its side at the edge of the drive, the helmet on the lawn several feet to its left.

I knocked at the door, but no one answered. I hammered louder, stepping back to view the upper windows, but there was no sign of life. Through the glass door I could see that the lights were on in a room at the back of the house, despite the brightness of the morning.

Stepping across the flowerbeds to my left, I reached the window of a room I took to be the living room. It was then that I saw, half hidden from view by the sofa, what I took to be a body.

Calling the emergency services on my mobile, I ran back to the front door, but it was locked. I skirted the side of the house to see if I could gain entry from the rear, but a six-foot fence enclosed the back yard. Finally I went back to the front of the house and, after several attempts, managed to kick the door in.

My calls were met with silence as I entered the house. Janet Moore’s body lay just inside the living room. She had been laid on her side, her arms in front of her, crossed over each other. Her hair covered her face and her lipstick was smeared around her mouth, as if someone had covered her mouth with a hand. Her muscles were still flexible, but her skin was cold to the touch, suggesting she had been dead for at least a day. I could guess at the cause: there were livid red and purpling bruises on her neck and I could make out the distinctive pattern of finger marks around her throat.

There was nothing more I could do for her. While I could justify breaking in on the grounds that Janet Moore might still have been alive, I was acutely aware that I had no grounds to search the house. Having ascertained that she was dead, I would have to wait for the PSNI to arrive.

I was, however, also aware that Karl Moore’s bike had been abandoned outside the house, which meant that perhaps he too was injured somewhere in the house.

The other downstairs rooms were empty. Taking the stairs two at a time I checked the first-floor rooms next, starting in the bedroom to the front. The double bed was unmade but cold. The next room was a small study, where Janet must have worked. Newspapers stacked a foot high were piled around the floor. Her desk was strewn with files and Dictaphone tapes. The third room looked like a guest bedroom, everything neat, a small teddy bear perched on one of the pillows.

It was in the bathroom that I finally found Karl Moore, lying in front of an opened medicine cabinet. Various bottles of pills lay spilt on the floor around him, alongside an empty bottle of vodka. In the pool of vomit around his head, I could see the remains of several tablets.

Just as I bent to check him for vital signs, I heard someone enter through the front door below. ‘Police!’ he shouted.

‘I’m up in the bathroom,’ I called out in reply.

Just as I turned, Karl Moore sighed so lightly I thought I might have imagined it. I shivered involuntarily.

‘There’s one alive up here!’ I roared, dropping to my knees to check for a pulse. I struggled to find one and in the end grabbed the shaving mirror from the windowsill and held it in front of Moore’s face. Sure enough, light condensation misted its surface.

I shouted for the man making his way upstairs to check for the ambulance I’d called, but even as I did so I could hear the urgent wail of the siren in the distance, getting closer.

Karl Moore was on his way to Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry within ten minutes, an oxygen mask strapped to his face. Janet Moore, however, still lay where I had found her while a PSNI Scene of Crime officer edged around her, taking photographs of the body. Jim Hendry had arrived by now. He wore jeans and a loose-fitting shirt. He tugged at his moustache while I explained to him why I had been at Moore’s house at 10.30 on a Sunday morning.

‘Leon Bradley was contacted by Janet Moore to meet the night before he died. She might have been the last person to see him alive. I wanted to find out if she knew what he had been doing, or where he had gone that night,’ I said.

‘Are you not still suspended?’ Jim asked.

‘Leon was the brother of a friend. I’m doing him a favour.’

Jim grunted something unintelligible. ‘Anything you particularly want us to look out for?’

‘Her phone would be useful. I need to verify that it was definitely her who sent him the message,’ I explained.

Hendry nodded and called to one of the SOCOs, asking him to look for a mobile phone. A few minutes later, the man came out to us in the kitchen and handed us a pink phone.

Hendry snapped on a pair of gloves and began working with it as I stood at his shoulder. He searched the Sent Messages folder and asked me when the message to Bradley had been received.

‘After eight in the morning on Friday,’ I said.

‘It wasn’t sent from this phone,’ he said.

‘Let me see,’ I said, reaching out for the phone, but Hendry held it slightly away from me.

‘I can do it,’ he said. ‘I’m telling you there’s no message here like that.’

‘Maybe she deleted it,’ I suggested.

‘No reason why she would,’ Hendry said. ‘There are plenty of other messages here she hasn’t deleted.’

‘Maybe she wiped the ones to Bradley in case her husband saw them,’ I said, even as Hendry shook his head.

‘No, there are older messages to “Leon” here going back weeks. If she was going to wipe one, she’d wipe them all, surely. Unless it wasn’t her who texted him.’

‘There is one way to find out,’ I said, heading outside for a cigarette and to make a call. I apologized to Fearghal for calling so early in the day, and asked if he could check the number of the phone from which the message was sent to Leon arranging the meeting last Friday. He called me back a few moments later with the number, which I scribbled on the back of my cigarette packet. When I’d finished my smoke, I headed back in and gave Hendry the number to check. He nodded; the message had come from Janet’s phone.

‘Why then did she delete it? It’s innocuous enough in comparison with some of the other messages she’d sent him. Or the ones he’d sent her,’ Hendry said. He had clearly been making his way through the messages while I’d been outside.

‘It proves nothing, either way,’ I said. ‘Though worth keeping in mind. What about voice messages? Anything saved there?’

Hendry played with the phone’s controls, angling the screen and squinting to read it. Having pressed the necessary buttons, he placed the phone to his ear and listened. For several minutes he said nothing. Then he pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows. He pressed a button and held the phone out for me to hear.

‘Only one of interest. Sent at two a.m. on Friday,’ he explained, nodding towards the handset.

I heard a tinny voice speak excitedly and realized it was Leon Bradley. I had to listen several times to get the whole message, for in the background I could hear people chanting slogans to do with burning Bush.

‘We got in, Jan. I think I got something – something big. I’m not sure what it is, though. I’ll need you to look at it. I’ll not be able to bring it out, but I’ve stuck copies in the post. I’ll speak to you later, love.’

‘What do you think he’s talking about?’ Hendry asked when I’d finished listening.

‘No idea. If he posted something out to her it might be worth searching the house.’

Hendry and the team worked the house for several hours, though they found nothing that looked to have come from Eligius, nor could they find any signs of forced entry, other than my own, nor anything that would suggest that anyone other than Karl and Janet Moore had been in the house at the time of Janet’s death. Which meant, Hendry concluded, that Karl had probably killed his wife, then taken an overdose himself.

I used the opportunity to check Janet’s study, which was in reality a small bedroom with a desk and several well-stocked bookcases. Her diary lay on the desk beside her laptop.

I read through her appointments for the week previous and noticed that she’d had a meeting arranged with someone called Nuala at 6 on Friday night, two hours before she arranged to meet Leon. She’d written a number in pencil beside the name. Using my own mobile, I tried calling the number, which had a Belfast prefix. An answering machine cut in:

‘Hi, this is Nuala. Leave a message and I’ll call you back when I get a chance.’

I left my name and number and said I wanted to speak to her about a case. Jim Hendry must have heard me speaking for he appeared at the doorway.

‘Anything?’ he asked.

‘I found her diary. She was to meet someone called Nuala at six on Friday. The contact is a Belfast number, though that doesn’t necessarily mean they were going to meet there. I’ve left a message for her to contact me.’

I realized what I had said just as Hendry’s expression changed.

‘Contact
you?’
he said, a little angrily. ‘You’re not even meant to be here, Ben. This is our case.’

‘Sorry, Jim. Force of habit.’

‘
We’ll
contact her, if we need to,’ Hendry said, taking the diary from me. Fortunately, her number would be saved on my own phone anyway, if I wanted to contact her again.

Jim continued to stand in front of me, diary in hand, looking at me expectantly.

‘What?’ I asked, smiling uncertainly.

‘You need to leave, Ben. Some of the fellas down there are wondering why a suspended Garda officer is working their crime scene.’

‘I . . . I’m sorry, Jim,’ I said, finally. ‘You’re right, of course.’

Jim smiled apologetically and stood back to let me leave the room. He walked down the stairs behind me.

‘Anything further on the missing immigrants?’ I asked.

‘No sign,’ Hendry replied. ‘That’s a dead end, I think.’

A dead end of my creating, I thought.

‘So, do you reckon the hubby did Bradley too?’ Hendry asked.

‘Maybe he followed her, saw them meet, saw them doing whatever. He catches up with Bradley afterwards, kills him, then confronts the wife, kills her, tries to do himself in.’

‘Depressingly likely,’ Hendry said. He looked back at the house. ‘I am sorry about asking you to . . . you know.’

‘I know,’ I said. Then I held out my hand and we shook.

That evening I phoned my brother, Tom, to organize meeting for Leon’s funeral the following morning. We had not seen one another for a month or so and I was looking forward to catching up with him. As children we had fought continually, over toys, over grades in school and, once, over a girl. Tom was three years my junior and, when he turned sixteen, my parents insisted that I take him out with me one Saturday night, ‘to keep him out of trouble’, they’d suggested. We’d gone clubbing and both hit on the same girl, whose name now I can’t even remember. The night ended with the two of us tussling with one another near the dance floor, before the bouncers threw us out. Tom had stomped off in disgust and had not come home till after four in the morning, by which stage my parents had already called the police to look for him. It was several more years before we spent another evening out together.

As we had grown older, though, we had begun to recognize our similarities more clearly, and accept one another a little better because of it. If Tom was stubborn, then he was no more so than I. And in him I saw reflected my own determination to do my best, though Tom carried with that a good-heartedness that made those who knew him well love him well.

Afterwards Debbie and I sat and watched a movie. She lay stretched on the settee, her legs on my lap, wriggling her toes in a vain request for a foot rub.

‘What’s up?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ I said, though privately my thoughts were with Fearghal Bradley, who would be sitting vigil that night by his brother’s coffin.

Chapter Fifteen

Monday, 16 October

The church was almost full by the time I arrived that morning. In fact I’d had difficulty getting a parking space, for the street outside was lined with cars and several camper vans.

I recognized a number of the people in the congregation. Fearghal stood at the front, Linda Campbell in the pew behind him. The crusties had gathered to one side and I noticed the older man, Peter, with whom I had spoken on Saturday. He nodded over at me solemnly, his greyed hair tied back from his face. I scanned the pews for An Garda representatives but saw none.

Tom had told me he would meet me in the churchyard, though he had yet to arrive. I did, however, spot someone unexpected. Ted Coyle stood near the back doors, dragging a last pull from a rolled cigarette before the funeral started. His arm was in a cast and he leant on a crutch. I approached him on the pretext of needing a light for my own cigarette.

‘You’re that cop,’ he said.

‘That’s right. You’re the nutcase that started the gold rush.’

He bowed slightly. ‘Guilty as charged.’

‘I was sorry to hear about the attack you suffered. You were mugged, is that right?’ I asked as he held out a lit match.

He snorted dismissively while I puffed on my smoke to get it lit. ‘So they say.’

‘Who?’

‘Your crowd. It was no mugging. I caught them in my tent. They took my water. Not my gold piece; just my water.’

‘What water?’ I asked.

At that moment, the choir inside broke into song and the service began just as Tom came running up the church driveway towards us.

‘We’ll speak later,’ I said to Coyle, nipping the tip off my cigarette, though not quickly enough to prevent Tom saying, ‘Still smoking, I see,’ as we made our way back inside.

The service was more ceremonial than I had expected. Fearghal had never been particularly observant and I knew Leon had little interest in organized religion, though I suspected he had been spiritual in the manner of one who sees God in the forest, or in rivers.

The priest spoke about Leon affectionately. He commended him on his stance on the environment and the principled stand he had taken against war and aggression.