Borderlands

from between the slats of his drawn blinds.

I asked Williams to take the ring to Patsy McLaughlin, one of our oldest forensics experts, a man known for his care in lifting evidence.

While he checked the ring for fingerprints, I phoned my father, the man Powell Sr had described as the 'furniture man'. My father has worked with antiques all his life and, consequently, knows most of the older and more knowledgeable antique dealers in the area. I didn't know if the ring was an antique, but it looked old enough to at least be worth checking. I also wanted some indication of its value, for it seemed no more plausible that such an object should belong to a drug dealer like Ratsy Donaghey than to Angela Cashell.

My father said he would phone me back in five minutes. Halfan-hour later, he got back to me to say that he had found a man in Derry, Ciaran O'Donnell, who would look at the ring. I arranged to meet them at O'Donnell's shop on Spencer Road at 5.00 p.m., by which time I hoped Pat McLaughlin would be finished with it. As it transpired, he was done with it much sooner, for an hour later he and Williams arrived at the murder room with the news that they had found nothing, which didn't explain why the two of them seemed so happy. McLaughlin explained.

'I laughed when she brought it. Do you know how many sets of prints you get off something like a ring? But there was nothing. Do you realize what that means?'

'Obviously not, or I'd be smiling like you two. Astound me,' I said.

'Think about it, Detective. Your prints aren't there, are they?'

'Of course they're not. I didn't touch it…' I said impatiently

'What about the pathologist? Her prints aren't on it either.'

'Because she wears gloves when she's working,' I said, my excitement rising fast as I reached the clear conclusion.

'Exactly. And so did whoever put the ring on the girl's finger, because she clearly didn't do it herself. Someone was very careful about putting this ring on her.'

At five o'clock we met Ciaran O'Donnell and my father outside his shop, an old unit built on a slope off Spencer Road in Derry. The slope runs down to the River Foyle, which splits the city in half.

Having been closed for Christmas, the shop was bitterly cold, making my fingers so stiff and blue that I pulled my coat sleeves down over my hands and balled them into fists. The air was musty and damp underneath the sweet smell of furniture polish that pervaded every surface.

O'Donnell was an old man, bent slightly from the mid-section of his spine. His hair grew symmetrically on both sides of his bald dome in wisps of grey and white. He wore thick-lensed glasses, which he removed to examine the ring, putting a jeweller's loupe in his right eye. He sat at an old oak desk and flicked on a tiny desk-lamp and examined the ring in minute detail for a few minutes, turning it in various directions, brushing it lightly with a tool that resembled a tiny toothbrush. Then he set it down and lifted a green book from the bookcase in the corner of the room. He carried the book to the desk, put the glass in his eye again, and examined the ring with his left eye shut, then perused the book with his right eye shut. Finally satisfied, he put everything on the desk in front of him and called us over.

'An interesting piece,' he began. 'The ring is eighteen-carat gold with a moonstone insert, surrounded by twelve rose-cut diamonds. What's interesting about this is – well, two things, really – one of the diamonds has been replaced. It's a very neat piece of work, but it's sourced differently from the others: there's a slightly pinkish tint to it under this light. The second thing, which isn't really interesting, is that this is not an antique. I'd say it's thirty years old at most.'

'Any idea about where it came from?' Williams asked.

'Well, there's good news on that front,' he said. 'It was made in Donegal. By Hendershot amp; Sons to be precise. They were very exclusive jewellers during the '70s and '80s, though they've disappeared into the woodwork recently, so to speak'

'How can you tell that?' I asked, while my father smiled and nodded his head.

'Very simple, really. They stamped the ring with their own mark beside the gold mark.'

'What about the engraving, the 'AC'?' I asked.

'No idea. Except I think it was engraved when the ring was made; the inside surface of the engraving is as dulled as the rest of the ring. More recent work would leave a slightly shinier surface.'

'What would you recommend we do now?' I said, glancing at Williams.

'Well, you're the policemen – police officers – so I wouldn't want to say. But I'd contact Hendershot amp; Sons and see what they can tell you.'

'I thought you said they'd vanished into the woodwork,' Williams said.

'Yes,' he said. 'In terms of market share and so on, they have. But they're still open. It was a side street off from the Atlantic last time I was there, but that was some years ago and they may have moved. Check the phonebook.'

We thanked Mr O'Donnell for his help and I promised my father we would visit him and my mother soon. 'Do,' he said. 'And give the kids a hug from me.' I promised I would. Then Williams and I drove home.

'Well, do you fancy a trip to Donegal?' she asked as we drove past Prehen Park and up the Strabane Road.

'Why not? Especially if I get mileage allowance for it.'

'We could kill two birds with one stone and head on to Bundoran – check out the officer in charge of the Ratsy Donaghey killing while we're at it.' Williams said, smiling.

Before I signed out of the office for the evening, I received a call from the doctor who had attended me on Christmas Eve, whose name, I learnt, was Ian Fleming.

'My father was a Bond fan, if that's any use to you,' he explained, though I had not passed comment. I nodded into the receiver. Then I realized that he couldn't see this gesture and managed a grunt, despite the dryness in my throat.

'Good news, Inspector,' he said. 'All clear so far – a late Christmas present.'

I almost wept as I thanked him.

'Don't forget. Check again in a few months time. Without giving too much away, I spoke to the boy's GP this afternoon at the dogs. Explained about the bite. He checked for me. Figures the boy was clean, too. So hopefully…'

Debbie let slip a tear or two when I told her, then made tea, as it seemed the only thing to do. I invited her to join Williams and me the next day, in case she wanted to go shopping in Donegal, but she had promised her mother she would take her to Derry. We ate dinner in companionable silence, though I suspected that my kiss with Miriam Powell still played on her mind.

At around 8.45 p.m., we heard Penny calling from upstairs. She had gone to bed twenty minutes earlier and normally took after her mother in that she fell asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.

Her bedroom is at the front of the house and we found her kneeling on her bed, her head and half her body hidden underneath the curtains while she watched something out of her window. She lifted the curtains above her head slightly when she heard us and invited us into her makeshift tepee. Then we saw what had got her attention.

On the road outside, a number of the local farmers were gathering with shotguns and torches. In the middle of the group, Mark Anderson was standing like some tin-pot general, issuing orders and pointing first at a scrap of paper in his hand and then to various points in the fields around our house. Someone was taking pictures, and in the light of one of the flashes, Anderson evidently saw our three faces peering down at him from the bedroom for he pointed us out to the photographer and said something that caused him to laugh. Unable to hear anything, we watched him silently throw back his head with his toothless mouth wide open, then splutter and cough, before spitting onto the ground.

I went downstairs, pulled on a jacket and went out to see what was happening. The photographer was writing names in his reporter's notebook and seemed to be packing up. I called him over.

'What's going on?'

'They're searching for the wild cat that's been killing Mr Anderson's livestock.' He was barely out of his teens and still had the fresh red scars of acne across his cheeks and around his mouth.

'The last time he was called Mr Anderson was in court, sonny,' I said, 'so I wouldn't waste it on him now. Where are they going with the guns?'