Bleed a River Deep (3 page)

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.’

I nodded my head, unsure of the significance of this piece of information, but unwilling to disappoint the woman, who was clearly pleased at knowing it.

‘So, anything else I can help you with?’ she asked.

‘Can you tell me the name of the man who was carrying it?’ I joked. ‘Or where to find his family?’

‘Try the Migrant Workers’ Information Centre,’ she answered, seriously. ‘Of course, the only difficulty with that will be, if he is Chechen, he’s here illegally.’

*

The man I spoke to in the Migrant’s Centre, Pol, was Polish. He wore dark blue drainpipe jeans and a loose Ireland football shirt. His black hair had been shaved tight, revealing a ragged red scar across the right side of his skull, running from his temple to just below his ear.

He read the prayer card quickly, shrugging non-committally when I said I thought it was Chechen.

‘I don’t speak it,’ he explained. Neither could he suggest where I might start looking for the man’s family.

‘If he’s using a stolen identity card and he’s Chechen, he’s an illegal immigrant. To be honest, illegals wouldn’t really come in here; the migrants who use us are here legally and looking for legal employment.’

‘Any ideas where I might start to look for information about him?’

‘A lot of migrants do their shopping at the local car-boot sales and markets. There’s a new Polish food store opened on Main Street; they might be able to help you. The
Weekly News
is running a Polish column each week now – maybe put something out through there. There’s a migrant Mass in the cathedral once a month. And, of course, we can put up a notice.’

I thanked him and turned to leave, then thought better of it.

‘You must know something about illegal immigrants – off the record. Where they live, how they get into the country in the first place?’

Pol held my stare. ‘They’re brought in by Irish gangsters who charge them several thousand euros each. They bring them in the back of freight lorries. Provide them with stolen identities, charge them massive rent, then force them into cheap labour. They can’t go to the police or they’ll be deported. Can’t complain to the people who bring them in or they’ll be killed.’

‘Then why come here at all?’

‘Because it’s better than what they’re leaving behind. The Celtic Tiger is known all over Europe. Everyone wants a share of the wealth. Some of us can come in legally – other countries are not so fortunate yet. In this case, I suspect he’s escaping the killing. The Chechen war may be over, Inspector, but as with Northern Ireland, the killing can continue.’

‘What brought
you
here?’

‘Work. The chance to earn some money to send back to my wife.’

‘You left your wife in Poland?’

‘And our two children. I work here for two years, earn enough to cover ten years’ work in Poland.’

‘But you must miss your family. Your children must miss their father.’

‘It will keep them off the poverty line – it’s a small sacrifice for me to make for them, to provide for them like a father should. A man needs to have some pride for his children.’

I gestured to the scarring at the side of his head. ‘Did that happen here or there?’

‘Here. Just after I came over. I was working in a food-packaging factory for minimum wage. One night I was jumped. Told to stay away the next day. My type weren’t welcome. They told me they’d kill me if I came back.’

‘What did you do?’

‘What would you do, Inspector?’ he asked me defiantly.

I nodded my head. ‘Thanks for your help,’ I said.

By the time I got home that evening, the children were already in bed. Debbie had kept my dinner for me and while I waited for it to heat in the microwave I presented her with the box from Orcas.

‘A gift,’ I explained when she raised her eyebrows at the box. ‘From John Weston.’

She opened the case, already half smiling, then made a silent O with her mouth when she saw the necklace. ‘Jesus, Ben,’ she whispered. ‘It’s beautiful.’

Unable to fully share her enthusiasm, I simply nodded my head.

‘What’s it for?’ she asked.

‘Putting round your neck,’ I answered, earning a slap on the arm.

‘You know what I meant,’ she said gaily, unhooking the clasp and lifting the piece from the box, cupping the weight of it in her hand.

‘I’m wondering that myself,’ I said. ‘Should we keep it?’

Debbie looked at me, her eyebrows arched, as if daring me to try to take it back.

‘Why shouldn’t we? How many perks do you get?’ she said, holding it around her throat. ‘Now hook me up.’

I fixed the clasp at the back of her neck. She’d had her hair cut up short, exposing the slender line of her nape. My fingers trailed along the curve of her skin after I’d fixed the clasp. She reached up and patted my hand with her own, then moved in front of the mirror in our hallway to better see the necklace.