bedroom doors and waited for me to go in. I was a little surprised to find the room so tidy, and at the same time a little ashamed at the unworthiness of the thought. A window dominated the far wall, facing onto the backyard.
The room looked freshly painted, a lavender tint; the carpet and bed linen were light green. A poster of someone called Orlando Bloom had been tacked carefully to the wall behind the bed. The wardrobe was packed with clothes, neatly arranged and hung according to type and size. I spotted the corner of a paperback on the floor, peeping out from the overhanging bedspread. I recognized the author as one whom my wife Debbie read. Flicking through the pages absentmindedly as I looked around the room, I noticed that Angela had been using a strip of passport photographs as a bookmark. The strip showed the half-faces of two girls, grinning in from the white border on either side. One of them was Angela. In the final picture their faces touched lightly and Angela was no longer smiling, yet seemed all the more content. It saddened me to see her so alive. I held the pictures up to Sadie and asked her who the other girl was, but she simply shrugged her shoulders and asked if I was finished. I replaced the strip of pictures, careful not to lose the page, before I realized the futility of the gesture.
In the corner of the room there was an old CD player and a plastic rack with a dozen or so discs sitting under a freestanding mirror. Most of the bands I either did not know or had heard of only from Penny. Strangely, I noticed in the middle a CD by the Divine Comedy, whom I had seen perform in Dublin a few years previously. It seemed a little incongruous amongst all the boy bands. I asked Sadie about the CD. Again she shrugged and moved into the hallway, making it clear that she did not wish for me to remain in her daughter's bedroom. I thanked her and offered my condolences again as I made my way downstairs and outside to arrange for Johnny Cashell to identify the body.
He was still standing in his front yard when I left the house, picking the last remaining deadheads off a florabunda rose bush. The heads themselves were heavy and brown, hanging low. He broke them off with his hand, clasping fists full of dead petals.
'I am sorry, Mr Cashell.' I said, shaking his free hand. 'There is one other thing. Can you tell me what Angela was wearing when last you saw her?'
'Jeans, probably. A blue hooded thing her ma bought her for her birthday, I think. 'Twere only last month. Why? Don't you know what she's wearing?'
As a father myself, I could not deprive him of his assumption that his daughter had retained some vestige of dignity in death. I opened my mouth to speak, but the air between us was brittle and sharp with the scent of decaying leaves and I could think of nothing adequate to say.
When I returned to the station, Burgess, our Desk Sergeant, told me that I was wanted immediately by the Superintendent. Costello – or Elvis to everyone who spoke of him (though not to his face) – was famous in Lifford, having served here, in and out of uniform, for almost thirty years. It was suspected that he knew many of the family secrets that most people preferred to keep buried. It meant that, in the village, he was universally admired but secretly mistrusted. However, he never knowingly used the information he had gathered unless absolutely necessary, and he excused many ancient crimes on the grounds that if they had not merited punishment at the time, how could they do so now? By rights he should have been stationed in Letterkenny, which is the centre of the Donegal division, but following his wife Emily's mastectomy several years earlier, he had requested and been granted permission to use Lifford as his headquarters.
His nickname came not only from his surname, but also his Christian name, Oily; more than once, Gardai called to public-order disturbances had been greeted with a drunken chorus of 'Oliver's
Army', despite the fact that his name was actually Alphonsus. The name stuck to the force in Lifford in much the same way that Elvis stuck with Costello. He never said it, but I think he was secretly pleased by the nickname, taking it as a tacit sign of affection, recognition of his position as an institution of sorts.
'Cashell is a Cork man,' he said now, straightening his tie in the mirror hung behind his office door. His position meant that he was the only person in the station to have his own office, while the rest of us shared rooms. In fairness, Elvis had been careful not to rub our faces in his perks: the furnishing was perfunctory, not expensive.
'Really?' I asked, unsure of his point.
'Yes. Moved here when he was three. A lot of us suspected at the time that they were travellers, but his family rented out towards St Johnston. He got placed in Clipton Place after he got Sadie pregnant the first time. Didn't fit in too well to begin with.'
'Apparently not,' I said. 'Drove the neighbours on one side out with the noise, drove the neighbours on the other side out with a claw hammer.'
'For which he was cautioned. Still, this is a terrible thing to happen. How did he take it?'
'As you would expect. He seemed shattered. I thought one of the daughters was going to tell me something, but the rest of the family closed tight.'
'Years of mistrust, Benedict, learnt at the dinner table.' Costello is also the only person I know who refers to me by my full Christian name, as if it would be unmannerly of him to do otherwise. 'Leave them a day or two and try again. Maybe when fewer of them are about.'
'Yes, sir.'
'Have you a jacket?' he asked, nodding at the informality of my jeans and jumper – one of the few perks of being a Detective.
'Not with me.'
'Nip home and get changed. You're doing a press conference at five. RTE'll be here, and the northern stations, so look sharp.' I had reached the door when he added, 'They haven't found her clothes yet, Benedict. I've requested the Water Unit to search the river in the morning. The PSNI have said they'll help. It'll be an early start.'
The press conference was the first that I had done and, while probably quite low-key in comparison with other such events, it was daunting to face the banks of lights, cameras and microphones. Costello read a prepared statement, then invited questions. My role, I had been told, was to sit there so he could identify me for the cameras. That way, justice would not be faceless, he said, without a hint of irony. I was also to handle any operational questions which Costello couldn't answer, though I was told not to go into specifics. It was strange hearing our voices echo back at us with a slight delay, almost mocking the fact that, despite all that we said to reassure the public, we had no idea who had killed Angela Cashell, how she had been killed or, more worryingly, why someone would kill a fifteen- year-old girl and dump her naked body on a river bank.
Penny and Shane were granted a maternal dispensation to stay up past bedtime to watch Daddy on TV. They almost fell asleep, though, during the main report, which was on the US President's announcement that 50,000 troops were to be sent to supplement the 60,000 already stationed in the Middle East.
When the brief article on the Cashell murder was finally aired, it was sandwiched between a report on the rising price of housing and a story about a drug trafficker who had been murdered in Dublin. The newscasters expressed more sincere concern about the house prices than the death of the unnamed dealer.
As I placed Shane in his cot, I heard a knock on the door, and a few seconds later the sound of Debbie inviting a visitor in. I peered out through our bedroom window and saw our neighbour Mark Anderson's pick-up truck parked in the driveway. Mark actually lived over half a mile away, but he owned all the land bordering our house, fields in which he grazed his sheep and cattle. He was an odd, socially awkward man, and I was surprised to see him. The only time he had called on us before was to appeal for leniency after I arrested his son, Malachy, who had been caught peeping in Sharon Kennedy's bedroom window from the tree outside her house. Her husband had felled the tree that same evening.
When I came back downstairs Anderson was sitting in the living room, perched so close to the edge of the sofa he looked as though he would fall off. He stood up when I came in and I smiled and extended my hand. 'Happy Christmas, Mark,' I said. 'Good to see you.'
He did not reciprocate my smile or greeting but said simply, 'Your dog's been annoying my sheep.'
'Excuse me,' I said, moving over to where Debbie was sitting.
'Your dog's been worrying my sheep. I saw it.'
Our dog is a six-year-old basset-hound called Frank, which I bought for Debbie on our fifth wedding anniversary when it seemed we could not have children. Four months after we bought him, Debbie found out she was pregnant with Penny, and so Frank became very much my dog. Now that Penny was older, she too had become attached to him. At night we kept him locked in a shed we built for him, and I told Anderson as much.
'I know what I seen,' he said. 'Anything happens to any of my sheep, I'll put a bullet in the mutt. I've
