photograph – or whoever was attaching it to murders twenty-odd years after her disappearance.
Mrs Boyle caught the glance between myself and Williams. 'Do you know who she is?' she asked.
'The question is, do you?' I replied.
'No idea. I've never seen her before. I just thought… Well, you said if I thought of anything unusual to get in touch.'
'You're sure you don't know her?' I asked again, desperate now to find the link, the relevance of this picture.
'No, I've never set eyes on her, I swear.'
'The card was sent to your husband, Mrs Boyle. Would he know her?'
'I… I don't know,' she said, suddenly taken aback by the thought. 'She might be one of his… women. But the picture looks so old.'
'Can we contact your husband, Mrs Boyle?' I asked. 'To see if-'
She nodded vigorously. 'Oh, he'll be here later. For the funeral tomorrow.' She looked from Williams to me and back, as if somewhere in the space between us she might find an explanation for the death of her son.
After assuring Mrs Boyle that she had done the right thing in calling us, we sat in the car and discussed our progress. There was no discernable link between Ratsy Donaghey, Angela Cashell and Terry Boyle, yet someone had murdered the three of them, and Mary Knox's picture had turned up in connection with all three crimes. Ratsy Donaghey was the same generation as Johnny Cashell and, though I didn't know Seamus Boyle, Mary Knox's photograph had been sent to him, not his wife. I decided the only thing left to do was to confront Johnny Cashell and Seamus Boyle. Before we did, I called Hendry to see if he had found out anything more about Knox's disappearance. He had spent the morning going over case notes for me.
'I told you yesterday. The main line of inquiry at the time was IRA involvement. Of course, that meant that it never went any further.'
'Does the name Ratsy Donaghey mean anything? Druggie from Letterkenny.'
'Tony?'
'That's him.'
'Tony's name appeared once or twice. One of the neighbours said she had seen him a couple of times around the house before the girl vanished. Not just him, mind,' he added.
'No word on the kids yet?'
'Nothing. My guess is if she's alive they're with her. Otherwise, one of her neighbours wasn't spotted for a few days after the disappearance. Went to Dublin to a sister, she said. She and Knox were very close; she looked after the kids, apparently, when Knox was working. Joanne Duffy her name was. Lives in Derry now, somewhere. Why do you ask about Tony Donaghey?'
'His name's come up on this side.'
'What did you call him? Ratsy?' Hendry asked, and I explained.
When Donaghey was a teenager he used to hunt and catch rats in the farms around Lifford. On summer days, when the weather was stiflingly hot, he went into Letterkenny and hung around by traffic lights, a live rat in the pocket of his coat. If a single female driver stopped at the lights, with her window down because of the heat, Donaghey would throw the live rat onto her lap. Generally, the driver's first reaction was to leap out of the idling car. Donaghey could then jump in and drive off. He did it six times before he was caught. Rumour also has it that the officer who caught him, who is now a superintendent, broke the bones of Donaghey's two hands with a truncheon as a salutary lesson in the summary justice of Donegal.
'Fair enough,' Hendry said. 'He was a bad bastard by all accounts. Reading between the lines here, he was fairly in the frame for the Knox disappearance, and a few others. We had him down as a Provo, for a while anyway, until even they kicked him out. No evidence, though, so it was left in the wind. Sorry.'
I thanked him and hung up. Twice now he had mentioned the Provo connection. I couldn't see it. Still, I thought, it would do no harm to check. I picked up my car keys. Williams looked at me.
'I think I need to go to confession,' I said.
Our local priest is an elderly man called Terry Brennan. He moved to Lifford four years ago after serving in one of the roughest areas of Derry for fourteen years and, while many assumed him to be a bumbling old relic from the golden age of Catholicism, few knew that he had mediated between the IRA and British government ministers for several years in the late '80s and early '90s. He had no affiliations with either group, yet managed to retain the respect, and, more importantly, the ear of both.
The 10.30 a.m. Mass was not yet over, so we sat in the car park until the small number of woman parishioners exited into the morning sunlight, pulling on coats or fastening scarves around their heads against the cold. Then I went into the chapel.
The sunlight from outside shone through the stained glass at such an angle that the spectrum of colours splashed across the white marble of the altar. Father Brennan was in the confessional; two elderly supplicants knelt at the pew directly outside. The door of the box clicked open and a child came out, holding the door open for a woman who was, presumably, his grandmother. Within less than a minute, she too came out and the man in front of me entered the box. From where I was sitting I could hear his soft murmuring, interspersed with the deeper, more guttural mutterings of Father Brennan. Then the man came out and left the confessional box door swinging in air heavy with the scent of incense.
I went into the box and pulled the door behind me. The atmosphere was warm and close, the smell of polish and wood mixing with the scent of the priest's aftershave. I could make out his silhouette through the grill that separated us. He was looking down at his lap, at a prayer book, his ear close to the grille.
'Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been a few weeks since my last confession,' I began.
'Better make it quick, Inspector, my breakfast's being made,' Brennan replied in a voice gravelled by years of smoking Woodbines. He laughed softly to himself, a chuckle that resonated like a cough.
'I need a favour. I need to speak to someone who could help me with a case. A prostitute named Mary Knox disappeared from Strabane in 1978. I need to know whether the Provos had anything to do with it. It connects with the Cashell and Boyle deaths, I think.'
'They're connected?' Brennan hissed.
'We think so. But no one knows, so…' My unspoken request for confidence hung unanswered. Brennan did not speak for almost a minute, the silence interminable in the darkness of the box. He leaned closer towards the grille and, in the half-light, I could see that he had turned his head towards me, a glint of external light catching the frame of his glasses. 'I can't promise anything, Inspector. It's a very unorthodox request. Give me a number to contact you. As I say, no promises.'
'Thank you, Father,' I said.
I heard him moving in the box next to me, preparing to leave. He reached up and pulled the stole from around his neck.
'Father,' I said. 'I was wondering if you'd hear my confession while I'm here.'
He did not speak, but sat again, and I could faintly make out in the gloom that he had placed the purple stole around his neck again and blessed himself. I began to tell him about McKelvey, about Anderson and his sheep and, mostly, about Miriam Powell. He asked me if I had told Debbie what had happened. He asked me if I was sorry. He asked me would I have taken the affair any further and I said, 'No.'
'God forgives you, Inspector. Your wife, I suspect, will forgive you. Try now to forgive yourself. I absolve you from your sins, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. Leave your phone on.'
Williams and I went to a restaurant on the border called The Traveller's Rest. She ate cereal and toast while I had a full breakfast with bacon, eggs, sausage and tomato. I was wiping my last slice of toast through the remaining egg yolk when my phone rang.
'Devlin here,' I said, not recognizing the caller ID on the phone's display.
'The priest said you wanted to ask some questions.' The voice was cold, disconnected not just by the anonymity of the mobile phone but by something deeper.
'Yes,' I said, though he had not asked a question.
'What do you want?'
'Mary Knox. She was a-'
'The priest told us. What do you want?'
'Did the IRA have anything to do with her disappearance?' I asked and realized that the people at the table
