possession of a drug-trafficking miscreant like Ratsy Donaghey, only to be stolen in the month prior to his own death. I suspected that Mary Knox, whoever she was, was the only person who could answer any of these questions.
As Knox had given an address in Strabane, and as Costello was clearly involved with her in some way, we decided it would be best to ask Hendry in the North for information. We could have asked Burgess, but he was unlikely to complete the task without Costello getting wind of what he was doing.
I called Hendry on his mobile and when he answered he was slightly out of breath, his voice fractured.
'I hope I didn't interrupt something, Inspector,' I said.
'Only my day off, Devlin. What is it now?' he said, in a tone which I hoped was mock exasperation. 'I tell you, I should have taken this case myself, 'cause I've ended up doing most of the work anyway.'
'I need some info on a lead we've run up on the Cashell murder. Mary Knox.'
'As in Half-Hung McNaughten,' he laughed.
'Same name, two hundred years on. Lived in Canal View in Strabane twenty-six years ago, if that's any help.'
There was silence on the other end of the line and Williams and I looked at each other. Williams shrugged and was about to speak when Hendry's voice crackled over the speaker again. 'Give me ten minutes and I'll call you back,' he said, all trace of humour gone. Then the line clicked and went dead.
It was almost half an hour later when he phoned, by which stage we were approaching Lifford.
'I needed to check something, but I was right,' he said cryptically. 'You'll not have much luck with Mary Knox. She disappeared in 1978, presumed dead.'
'What happened to her?' I asked.
'Exactly what I said. She disappeared one day. Vanished off the face of the Earth. New Year's Eve 1978 to be precise.'
'Inspector Hendry, Sergeant Caroline Williams here, sir. You said 'presumed dead'. Why?'
'Pleased to meet you, Sergeant, so to speak. Call me Jim. We presume she's dead because no one ever heard of her again; no bank accounts or savings touched, nothing. Plus she lived a… salacious enough lifestyle, shall we say.'
'Nicely put, Jim,' I said.
'I said the lady could call me Jim, not you, Devlin,' he replied, laughing.
He promised to gather up whatever he could when he went back to work (another reminder that we were eating into his day off) and hung up.
When we got back, I dropped Williams off at her home and asked her to get Holmes to leave the photograph from Angela Cashell's murder site in the station for me. Then I went back home myself to leave the cake for Debbie. When I went in she was baking fairy cakes with Penny, and Shane was sitting in his highchair, biting on a plastic block. He smiled at me when I came in, holding aloft his arms to be lifted.
'A kiss for my favourite girls,' I said, kissing them both on the foreheads, before going over and lifting Shane, who clung to my shirt, giggling and kicking his legs against my belly.
'How was Donegal?' Debbie asked.
'Eventful,' I replied and told her what we had discovered. 'How was home?'
'Fine. Pity we didn't have this cake two hours ago, though, when we had a visitor, isn't that right, Penny?' Debbie said. But Penny had taken one of the freshly baked buns over to Frank, whose bed had been set up in the kitchen. He looked up and whimpered a little, though he snuffled down the bun in one mouthful and wagged his tail limply, while Penny scratched the pink area beneath his jaw. 'Miriam Powell called,' Debbie continued.
'Here?' I asked.
She nodded grimly. 'We had a very interesting chat about all kinds of things: how lucky I am, mostly; how shit her marriage is; how distant Thomas is; and so on and so on.'
'Did she mention the other thing? The other night?'
'No. She apologised for being drunk, though she smelt as bad this afternoon. She wants you to call her about her father-in-law. I trust this time it won't involve any physical contact.'
That night we all sat on the sofa and ate chocolate cake and watched films I had rented from the video store. Penny fell asleep, curled up beside Debbie with her legs stretched across my lap, and we wrapped her in a blanket and carried her to bed. I stood at her window and watched as a group of gunmen – a smaller band than the night before – trudged up past our house to Anderson's field in search of the elusive sheepkiller, which I suspected was actually lying downstairs in my kitchen.
Then Debbie stretched across the sofa, her head on my lap, while I played with her hair and stroked her neck and shoulder muscles. Debs fell asleep in minutes, so I sat in the quiet and watched rubbish and enjoyed my home and forgot about Angela Cashell, Terry Boyle, Ratsy Donaghey and Whitey McKelvey for a while.
At around 2.30 in the morning, I woke suddenly, having heard in my sleep the sound of breaking glass. I lay in the semi-darkness for a moment, watching shadows and orange light flicker and dance on the bedroom ceiling. Then I heard more sounds of cracking, and the whine of metal, screeching like an injured beast, and I realized what was causing the flickering orange light on the ceiling.
Downstairs, I saw that someone had smeared dog excrement on the door and windows of the house before throwing a lit petrol- bomb into my car. We managed to get the children safely into the back garden, away from the blaze, when the petrol tank exploded, blowing in all the windows at the front of the house and leaving pools of flaming petrol on the lawn and dripping from the branches of the trees surrounding our home.
Mary Knox
Chapter Eleven
Saturday, 28th December
It took twenty minutes for the fire brigade to arrive. By then the car was no more than a smouldering wreck and Debbie's parents had arrived to take her and the kids to stay with them for the night. Several lads from the station arrived with odd bits of wood and plastic to cover the windows until morning. Finally, Costello himself arrived and made coffee with a nip of whiskey. He sat in the kitchen with me and tried to figure out who had attacked my family.
'It's a… it's a bloody disgrace is what it is,' he said. 'We'll hang the blackguards when we get them.'
'If we get them,' I said, knowing that if my car had been bombed because of something to do with the Cashell case, then Costello himself was a suspect. Not that I thought he would be standing in the middle of the countryside at two in the morning, petrol-bombing cars. But that didn't mean he couldn't get someone else to do it.
'So, who do you reckon?' Costello asked.
'I'm not sure, sir. Someone connected with the case, perhaps. Someone pissed off at me for some reason. Mark Anderson, getting back at me for his sheep being killed. Maybe the person Penny saw the other night. God only knows.'
'Firebombing smacks of Johnny Cashell,' Costello suggested.
'Except he's safely in jail in Strabane.'
'Aye. Maybe some of McKelvey's crowd,' he replied. 'Taking their anger out on someone.'
'Maybe.'
Next morning, the glaziers arrived to begin fixing the windows at the front of the house. I helped the salvage crew clear the last twisted scraps of metal off my driveway and hitched a lift with them to the station, where I picked up an unmarked car to use until my insurance paid for a new one. Then I drove to Strabane.
I passed under the tin sculptures of musicians and dancers which dominate the local skyline, standing some twenty feet tall. The winter sun was a lemon mist above the hills to the east, twinkling weakly off the burnished metal of the statues.
I went first to the library. In addition to the books and CDs, internet access was available, though even at this early hour it was booked solid. I asked for the microfiche machine and copies of the Strabane Chronicle from
