four children, but which had become increasingly empty as, one by one, his children had left for college or to get married. The youngest, Kate, had gone to university in September. Now, Costello and his wife Emily shared the five-bedroom house and a silence broken only by the occasional echoing creak. The house had recently been whitewashed and the garden was carefully tended, the roses pruned for winter, the hedges carefully shaped.
Costello did not look surprised to see me. He turned and walked back into the house, leaving the door ajar. I followed him in, slowly, closing the door behind me. Emily was standing at the door to the kitchen, a dishcloth in her hands. Behind her, sitting at the table in her nightdress, with a spoonful of cereal in her hand, was Costello's youngest daughter, Kate, presumably home for Christmas.
'Hey, Ben,' she called out, raising her spoon in a half-salute.
'Hiya, Kate,' I said, as Emily came forward and took my hand in hers.
'Merry Christmas, Benedict. How are Debbie and the children?' she asked gently.
'Fine, Emily. Merry Christmas to you, too,' I replied, watching as Costello lumbered into the room which he called his office.
'Tell them I send my love,' Emily said, then ushered me towards the room with a kind smile I was unsure I deserved.
I knocked on the oak-panelled door and went in. Costello was sitting at the roll-top desk which he had bought at an auction in Omagh and which I had helped him move into this room. He had on half-moon glasses and was reading an electricity bill.
'What do you want, Benedict?' he said wearily, peering at me over the rim of his glasses before returning his full attention to the bill.
'I need to tell you what happened; my involvement. I should have told you last night. I'm sorry.' And for the second time that morning I recounted the events which had unfolded the previous night. Several times Costello stopped me for clarification.
'So you hit him when he bit you?' he asked when I had finished.
'Yes.'
'And he was alive and healthy when Harvey left?'
I nodded.
'And you didn't check in on him before you left?'
I shook my head. It made little difference – he had died in any case on Holmes' watch.
'Did you see Holmes search McKelvey when he lifted him?'
Again, I shook my head. 'I was out of it with the bite and that. I just assumed he had when they brought him in.'
'Do you know if Holmes did anything to the boy when he was in custody?'
Neither of us spoke for a moment.
'I thought so. Have you any cigarettes?' he asked.
'I didn't know you smoked.' In the five years I had known him I had never seen him do so.
'Cigars sometimes, at night. But it's too early for a cigar. Use that for an ashtray,' he said, emptying paper clips out of a ceramic finger-bowl sitting on the desk. He smoked, looking out the window, puffing the cigarette as though it were a cigar, while I smoked nervously beside him.
'McKelvey was an animal, Benedict. In my opinion, he deserved everything he got. The death in custody thing is bad because we look stupid. He should have been searched thoroughly when he was brought in. Holmes should have kept an eye on him and his hands off him. There should have been more than one officer in the station overnight, for God's sake, Christmas Eve or not. Your bust-up with him should have been reported… Jesus, every part of this thing is ballsed up.' He ground the cigarette out, folding the filter down onto the tip to ensure it was extinguished.
'But,' he continued, 'he killed that poor girl with those drugs. I hope the wee shite suffered before he went, because that's as much justice as Angela Cashell will get. It would've been better for all of us if Johnny had succeeded in burning the bastard alive last week. So, the question is, where do we go from here?'
'Internal Affairs?'
'Probably. I'll let Dublin decide that. In the meantime, whether it's right or not, we pin everything on McKelvey. I want that as the official line.' As he spoke, he counted off each point on his fingers: 'He was seen with the girl; we know he lied about seeing her on the Thursday night; we know from Coyle that he was providing her with drugs; we know they were sexually active; we found the drugs which killed Angela Cashell on his body when he died; physical description fits the size of the killer. Everything fits, so long as the post mortem shows an overdose of those rat-poison tablets as cause of death.'
'What about the bruising?'
'My inclination would be resisting arrest. Holmes brought him in, didn't he? He's going to have to take some of the heat for this, whether he likes it or not. Probably best if he takes it for an over-enthusiastic arrest rather than criminal negligence.'
'Makes good PR,' I said.
'Well, that's how it is. We'll put Holmes on suspension for a week. With pay. He can work behind the scenes on the Boyle killing – long as he's not seen around the station. And McKelvey as a dead murderer rather than a dead victim will help. So, this is what you do, Benedict,' he said, leaning towards me and tapping me on the knee. 'Go into the station and collect your files. Then get this concluded. Put everything we have on McKelvey and leave no loose ends. If we can tie this up, we can focus on the Boyle boy. Today.'
The station was buzzing when I arrived, and I was able to get into the murder room and collect the blue lever-arch folder containing the notes on McKelvey without too many people noticing me.
McKelvey's body had been moved and the cell lay empty, the floor marked with white chalk outlines where tablets and body had been found. I left through the back fire exit to avoid having to talk to anyone and drove home.
Debbie was preparing dinner and the kids were playing in the living room, so I sat in the kitchen and reported all that had transpired with Costello. Debbie listened as she peeled potatoes and checked on the turkey in the oven, piercing the tender flesh to check if the juices ran clear. Then I set to work, drawing all the strands together and trying to fit McKelvey at the centre. The difficulty was that we did not have hard evidence: no smoking gun, no signed confession. But then, most detective work is circumstantial – fingerprints and DNA are useful only when a suspect has been arrested. But I did my best with what we had and tried to ignore the moral implication of the task I was performing. I knew that McKelvey probably had killed or contributed to the death of Angela Cashell, yet, as things were, I would never know for certain, and so I would always harbour doubts. I was bothered by the fact that I could not find any logical motive. As McKelvey had said himself, she was providing him with sex – why would he kill her?
With breaks for dinner and family, I had the report finished for 8.30 p.m. and, after we put the kids to bed, I asked Debbie to read it through to see if everything made sense. She read it twice, both times looking bewildered, flicking between pages to double-check some piece of information.
From her expression, I knew there was something that did not read right. 'What is it, Debs?' I asked. As she replied, I realized what had been niggling me since Costello had run through the facts that morning.
'Why was he wearing a condom?' Debbie asked. 'McKelvey. Why would he wear a condom? According to this, he didn't care that his girlfriends got pregnant. In fact he seems kind of proud of it. Especially if he thought she was pregnant. Wearing a condom when you're already pregnant doesn't seem to make sense.'
Something cold shivered down my spine and settled deep inside me, causing me to shake involuntarily.
'Unless maybe it was an AIDS thing. You know, an STD issue or something,' Debbie suggested, but I knew now that was not the case.
'No,' I said. 'It's been bothering me too. If he believed Cashell was pregnant, they'd obviously already had unprotected sex. Why would he suddenly worry about STDs that night?'
'Maybe he didn't want to leave evidence, DNA, you know.'
I considered it, then shook my head resignedly. 'Maybe. But that would mean he intended to kill her; that he had planned ahead and knew he would need to wear a condom to prevent being caught. It just doesn't fit. We had assumed it was an accident, a drug-trip that went wrong. At the end of the day, McKelvey didn't have cause to kill her. That's what that report doesn't say. He had no motive.'
'He thought she was pregnant. Maybe he was afraid she'd tell someone,' Debbie suggested.
