time in the investigation, while others in the station could be co-opted when needed. This he explained to me while the two sat outside his office door. I knew both of them fairly well.
The more senior was Sergeant Caroline Williams, a native of Lifford, who had been a Guard for eight years and had recently been promoted. Costello suggested that she might be useful if the case involved a sexual crime, which was looking increasingly likely liked Caroline. She was straight-talking and had a good manner with members of the public. Luckily none of those people had seen her,. as I had, baton into submission a six-foot-two rocker who had caused a public-order disturbance after he tried to break into his ex-girlfriend's house. He would probably have sued for GBH had it not entailed publicly admitting that a woman of five-foot-five had left him crying in a doorway with a broken nose.
And yet, while Williams was meting out such punishments to woman-abusers and wife-beaters by day, she was herself, for many years, being beaten nightly by her husband, an insipid salesman frustrated in his life and content in venting his frustration on the woman who had borne him a son for whom he had little regard. Caroline Williams told no one about it, but one of the sergeants noticed bruising on her arms and neck and, in the bar some nights later, we put together the pieces. Foolishly, that same night, fuelled by the courage a few pints can bring, four of us visited her house and taught Simon Williams a salutary lesson in how Gardai stick up for each other and how it feels to be on the receiving end of things. The following morning, while we congratulated ourselves on our fraternal actions, Caroline Williams covered with make-up the two black eyes her husband had given her in the belief that she had set us upon him. We did not get involved in the affairs of the Williams family again.
Then, one night Caroline and her young son, Peter, arrived in the station and slept in the holding cell to escape Simon's latest rage. Costello visited him the next morning and, though no one knows what passed between them, by the following weekend Simon Williams had left Lifford and moved to Galway.
The second assignee was Jason Holmes, an officer who had moved to Letterkenny from Dublin about eighteen months earlier. In Dublin he had been involved with the drugs squad and had gained considerable kudos for helping bring down a dealer whose name was linked with the murder of a leading lawyer. Holmes moved from Dublin soon after, partly for his protection from reprisals and also, as he told me later, because he had grown sick of city living. It was a fair enough reason. Holmes was quiet, bringing a reputation from Dublin which circumstance had not allowed him to cement. Again, Costello had a reason for including Holmes: following the discovery of the tablet in Angela's stomach, his knowledge of drugs might be useful.
Costello called the two of them into his office and asked me to bring them up to date on what we had gathered so far. It was useful to reconsider what we had learned as I jotted down key times and events on the small easel blackboard Costello had had placed in the corner of the room.
'So, Angela is seen in the company of Whitey McKelvey, known petty criminal. On Thursday, she has an argument with her father, when she accuses him, I think, of spying on her getting undressed.
She leaves home on Thursday, and stays somewhere overnight where she gets a change of clothes. Both those clothes and the clothes she wore on Thursday are still unaccounted for.' Williams nodded.
'Friday afternoon,' I continued, 'she takes her sisters to the cinema. Leaves just after four. Probably at the bus stop by 4.15 p.m., from where, I think, she is going to meet someone, possibly a boyfriend. At some point late that night, we think, she suffers a seizure and dies – possibly after taking drugs. Her body is dumped behind the cinema that night and is discovered the next morning. She is wearing only her underwear, inside out, and a gold ring which I suspect her family didn't know she owned. McKelvey has been linked with her, but I don't take him for a murderer. In his favour, so to speak, the drugs link would seem to suggest him, as would his size in terms of being small enough to kneel on her chest. On the other hand, if this was a sexual crime – which it seems to have been, to some extent – we know that her father, no stranger to our cells before this, might have had more than simple fatherly love for his girl.'
'Especially if she wasn't his girl,' Costello said, nodding sagely, happy to have made a contribution. 'Though I would never have taken Johnny Cashell for a paedophile.'
' A couple more months and he wouldn't have been though, technically, would he?' Holmes said, and smirked.
I saw a flash of something in Caroline Williams's eyes, and then her face softened and became unreadable. 'It's still his daughter, though. Biological or not.'
'So,' I said, 'the questions are: where did she spend Thursday night? Who was she with on Friday night? Who gave her the change of clothes? Where are they now? Who gave her the ring? I don't think she bought it; it looked very good quality, a family heirloom.
Williams spoke first. 'Might be worth checking pawn shops, local second-hand jewellers and so on to see if any of them sold it.'
'Check lists of stolen goods too,' I replied. 'This might have been part of a stash. Someone lifted it and gave it to her. It's a safe bet her boyfriend, whoever he was, didn't buy it for her.'
'The whole ring thing might be a little tenuous, Inspector,' Costello suggested. 'Might be best to follow up the drugs angle too.'
'What about clubs?' Holmes said. 'If drugs were involved, she got them somewhere. She was spotted clubbing on Thursday night; chances are she was out again on Friday. Maybe we could find out who she was with.'
'Good,' I said. 'This is all good. If you each want to take your own suggestion and follow it. Caroline, ask Burgess on the front desk to pull you up lists of stolen goods for the past six months, say. Jason, start with the Strabane clubs and move onto Letterkenny. We meet everyday at 9.30 a.m. and 4.30 p.m. to review status. Okay?'
Costello wished us success from behind his desk, and then we were dispatched to our new office. It was actually a storeroom whose contents – mostly cleaning products – had been removed. Two desks had been set facing each other, each furnished with a phone and a plastic chair. Behind one of the desks, a corkboard had been nailed. I was busying myself with pinning up crime-scene photographs and a timeline for the case when Burgess phoned through from the front desk, despite the fact that it was only fifty feet away.
'Detective Devlin,' he said, with a formality designed only to impress the public, 'there's a lady here to see you.'
I stuck my head out the doorway of the office and saw, standing beyond Burgess's desk, Miriam Powell, wife of Thomas Powell Jr. I said earlier that I had known him when we were younger, but it was not the whole truth. I knew Powell because, when we were eighteen, he had started dating Miriam Kelly, unbeknown to me, despite the fact that I was her boyfriend at the time. In fact, they had been dating for four months before she told me.
We were parked below the waterworks station, along the back road to Strabane, lying on the back seat of my father's car. She had returned from holiday and her skin was tanned. It seemed to radiate with heat and light, even in the darkness of the car, and I could smell and taste coconut off her shoulders and neck as I kissed them, pushing off her blouse and fumbling with the clasp of her bra until she reached back and opened it for me. She unbuttoned my shirt and ran her hand down my chest. Her breath fluttered in my ear and tickled against the soft skin at the back of my neck, which affected me in ways I could not express.
Less than ten minutes later we were driving out onto the main road again. She did not look at me as I apologised for my lack of control. Nor, indeed, did she look at me as she smoked the cigarette that I gave her and told me why she did not wish to see me anymore and that she wanted me to run her home. As I watched her walk up the driveway to her father's house, I was disturbed by the notion that she had provided for me out of pity, a last charitable act which caused her no more thought than the cigarette butt she flicked onto the driveway.
Three nights later, at a local dance that my brothers had forced me to attend, I watched her dance close to Thomas Powell with an ease that only intimacy can achieve. She pressed her stomach against him while they swayed under the flashing lights, and I watched her hand slide into his pocket as his slid onto her buttocks. She whispered something to Powell and he looked over at me watching them. Then, the two of them laughed at a shared secret, which I was sure involved me and the incident in the back seat of the car. Consequently, I can never meet Powell without seeing his smiling face in my memory. Likewise, I can never see his wife without the same, overshadowed by the memory of the urgency of her breath, hot against my neck, and the scent of coconut from sun-kissed skin.
Burgess pointed to me and I watched her now walk down towards our storeroom office, deftly swaying from side to side to avoid the corners of desks and filing cabinets which cluttered up the main working area of the station. She wore a linen suit to accentuate a tan achieved despite the fact that it would be Christmas in two days.
