'The same boy would've wanted her to tell someone. Another notch in his bedpost.' I felt my back prickle with sweat and my face blazed. 'McKelvey doesn't fit. We were following the wrong line all along. I've missed something.' What I could not vocalize was the fact that, because of it, an innocent eighteen-year-old boy had died on a Christmas morning, while the rain washed the streets outside.
I phoned Costello first and told him what I had concluded. He listened, cursed, then told me to leave it with him until morning so he could sleep on it. We arranged to meet at the station at 8 a.m. I asked about Holmes and was told that, as we had discussed, he had been suspended with pay pending an enquiry. Costello did not mention the beating to him, nor had Holmes told him about it.
Next, I phoned Williams and started to tell her. In the background I could hear music playing, some kind of dinner jazz. She sounded a little tipsy and I could hear the rubbing of her hand on the receiver, as though she was covering it, to speak to someone.
'Sorry, Caroline,' I said. 'Have you company?'
'Kind of,' she said, giggling in a way I had not heard her do before.
'Someone I know?'
'Maybe, Detective.'
'Is Holmes with you?' I asked, unable to suppress the surprise in my voice.
'Uh huh,' she said with a laugh.
'How did he take the suspension?'
'He's a little pissed off. He has to carry on doing the work, but nobody's allowed to know. Bit of a pisser. He'll get over it, though.'
'Listen, Caroline, this is important. I don't want you to tell Holmes what I'm about to say – if it turns out McKelvey was innocent, it'll hit him hard. His head could be on the block for this.'
Despite her earlier playful manner, she seemed to sober quickly and listened without interrupting. I asked her to meet me the following morning in the station.
At bedtime, I went out to give Frank a dog biscuit and fresh water for the night. But when I opened the door of the shed where we kept him when the weather was bad, he wasn't there. I went back into the garden and called him several times, but to no avail. I called to Debbie for a torch and we set about searching the hedgerows and ditches near the house. I shone the torch briefly into the field where Anderson's sheep were grazing and was relieved not to find him there at least.
Returning to the garden, I heard a familiar snuffling from the shed. Frank was lying inside, his head down, his tail wagging half-heartedly, waiting to ascertain my reaction to his absence. His coat was wet with rainwater from the long grass of the fields bordering our property and cuckoo spit hung off his ear. I tried to find how he had got out of the shed, shining the torch into the corners and behind the junk we had piled against one wall, but I couldn't see anything obvious. I ruffled the hair on the dome of his skull and locked up the shed behind me.
Later, in our bedroom, I had to explain to Debbie why I had lifted my toothbrush away from the others in the bathroom, and why I was setting up the spare mattress. I cried as I told her my fears about Aids and whatever else McKelvey might have been carrying. She knelt down on the floor beside me and held my face in her hands. Kissing me softly, she promised me that everything would be alright – and I almost believed her.
At 2.30 a.m. we were woken by Penny's screaming. Crossing the gallery to go to the bathroom, she had happened to glance downstairs towards the front door of our house, she said. Someone had been looking back in at her. She saw the door handle twitching, she said. He looked evil, she said.
We told her that she had had a nightmare, that she must have still been half asleep. Then I went out to the front of the house to check, while Debbie took Penny into our bed. I had to refill the kettle with water three times to completely wash away the muddy footprints from our doorstep in case Penny should see them the following morning.
Chapter Nine
Thursday, 26th December
Boxing Day broke with spectacular blue skies and an explosion of a sunrise on the mountains behind the house. I had not slept again, keeping watch all night, until the sky turned to grey and the remaining puddles from the previous evening's rain froze and sparkled under the first rays of the morning sun. There was no wind, only a sharp chill that would keep the grass stiff until afternoon, so that it crunched beneath your feet as you walked. I told myself that it was a new day and tried to dismiss from mind our late-night visitor.
At 7.15 a.m. I threw warm water on the windows of the car to defrost them, then left the engine idling while I gathered my notes for the meeting with Williams and Costello. By the time I came back out to the car, the water on the windscreen had frozen again. Inside, my breath condensed and froze to ice on the interior of the glass. I sat in the car, letting the engine warm up, and smoked a cigarette. The details of the case had bubbled inside my head all night. Having gathered all the evidence the day before to prove that Whitey McKelvey had killed Angela Cashell, I now had to start proving that he hadn't.
I reached the station twenty minutes early, but Costello was already there and Williams arrived soon after me. Just before 8.00 a.m., a blue van pulled up outside. Several minutes later, a smaller white van with a radio antenna on the roof wound its way around the bend in the street and slid to a halt against the concrete posts outside the front doors.
A young woman, wrapped tightly in a sheepskin jacket and wearing gloves and a scarf, picked her way carefully along the pavement and into the reception area of the station. We heard her introduce herself as a radio news reporter for 108 FM, a local independent station. I had heard her once or twice before on the news, though she was much younger than her voice suggested. She was wondering if we would like to comment on either the death in custody of William McKelvey or the attack on livestock the previous night by the 'Wild Cat of Lifford'.
I wandered up to the reception desk and listened in. Mark Anderson had contacted the radio station that morning to say that one of his sheep had been mauled the night before and its innards removed from its body. He had told the receptionist at 108 FM that he had asked twice for assistance from Gardai, and both times nothing had been done.
I was hoping to hear more details, but Costello cut the discussion short, telling the young lady that he would be making a statement later and there would be no comment until then.
Our meeting was brief. First, Costello informed us that ballistics had found a match on the gun used to murder Terry Boyle. Apparently it had been used in a filling-station robbery in Bundoran a year or so previously.
Costello then turned his attention to Angela Cashell and the fallout from McKelvey's death. He had decided to run with McKelvey as our killer for now, while we checked background details again. If another party entered the frame, in his words, we would deal with the McKelvey fiasco as necessary. If our investigation yielded nothing, we were to fold it quietly away and McKelvey would, to all intents and purposes, remain Angela Cashell's murderer.
I asked him about the ring which McKelvey claimed to have sold.
'Forget about bloody rings, Benedict. I want a quick result. Don't ignore the obvious just because it is obvious!'
Williams and I returned to the murder room with the files. We worked through the morning, examining the anomalies and loose ends which hung over the initial investigation. I became increasingly convinced that the ring which Angela Cashell had been wearing was somehow central to the whole thing.
'Why?'
'She was stripped naked; her clothes were kept or destroyed; someone washed her body; used a condom. Everything seems to have been done to reduce the possibilities of forensic evidence. Everything was removed, except her pants and this ring. Why leave her pants?'
'Well, the panties suggest some form of respect. Some residual affection or liking for the girl. Someone wanted her to have some dignity.'
'Her father?'
'Maybe. Worth looking at again, certainly. Or a woman,' she suggested.
