Authors: Anthony Quinn
Daly heard the squawking of his hens through his sleep. For the past few days they had been breaking out of their enclosure and showing up in a ragged troupe at his front doorstep, which they used as target practice, spattering it with excrement.
It took him a while to rouse himself. It was Sunday. He had spent the morning clearing weeds from the potato patch at the back of the house, and afterward, seated in an armchair, he had nodded off in front of a turf fire.
The fire had dwindled to a few gray ashes when he awoke. He felt the raw cold creep under the drafty door. His body ached. He walked over to the window, still drugged from sleep, wondering what had disturbed the hens. To his surprise, he saw the figure of Irwin remonstrating with the upset flock, waving his arms in the air with as much dignity as a drunken man could muster.
He opened the door and found the Special Branch detective covered in feathers.
“You don’t need a doorbell with hens like these running about,” said Irwin.
Daly did not reply, just backed away slightly, which Irwin took as an invitation to enter.
“It’s a wonder I found you in the middle of all these twisting lanes and gable-ends of cottages,” said Irwin.
He dipped his head at the lowness of the door and stumbled across the threshold.
“I’ve finally located your nest,” he said, and then peering into the darkness, “or is it a cave. Where has all the bloody light gone?”
“What brought you out here?” asked Daly.
“Oh, this and that.”
Daly stared at him. The Special Branch detective was being uncharacteristically evasive.
Irwin sprawled across the small sofa, like a tired dog taking up too much room. “Now I know why you’re so introspective.” He surveyed the dim interior of the living room. “Can’t you at least switch on a few lights to kill the gloom?”
Daly switched on a low lamp.
“I had the day off,” explained Irwin. “So I thought I’d check out the scenery around the lough shore. You’ve mentioned it. Once or twice.”
“Who is she?”
“Who are you talking about?”
“Are you seeing a new woman? Someone who lives nearby?”
“No,” said Irwin with sudden bitterness. “There’s no one else.” He looked to be on the verge of tears. “In fact, I haven’t had sex for over a month.”
He looked at Daly. “I know you’ve gone for longer without. What with your separation and all. But this is driving me crazy.” An agony of embarrassment filled his long features. “I still love Poppy. More than makes sense to me.”
Daly went into the kitchen and brewed a fresh pot of tea.
“The truth is I drove out here to visit you,” said Irwin as Daly handed him a cup.
“All the way out here just to see me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I thought you’d understand what I’m going through.”
Neither spoke for a long time.
“Any cigarettes?” asked Irwin hopefully.
When Daly returned to the living room with an unopened packet, he found Irwin busy searching the sofa, fishing behind the cushions with the expertise of someone searching for contraband.
He grinned sheepishly at Daly. “Just curious as to what I might find.”
“That was my father’s sofa,” said Daly. “The only things you’ll find down there are tobacco and old religious magazines.”
Irwin lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Then he stubbed it out in the ashtray. He removed a can of beer from his coat pocket and opened it.
“Poppy says we’re finished, Daly. It really is over. And now she’s taken Benjy.” He guzzled from the can.
“Who’s Benjy?”
“Our dog. I’ve spent more time with him than with any other living thing. Apart from Poppy, of course.” He was silent for a while. “It’s one thing to lose your girlfriend, but to have to say good-bye to your best friend as well—” He broke off to blow his nose. “She said Benjy doesn’t belong to me, but that’s not true. I know I’ve done bad things to Poppy, I know I’ve betrayed her—I admit it—but she can’t do this to me.”
He placed the can of beer on the floor. “I don’t want to waste any more of your time, but I need a favor, Daly.” His voice was stretched, pleading. “I’ve some stuff to collect from her apartment. I could do with a hand.”
Daly sighed. “You’re too drunk to drive. I’ll give you a lift.”
It was raining when they went outside. Daly’s ten-year-old Renault spluttered in the downpour. Irwin sat quietly throughout the journey, biting the side of his thumbnail and nursing another can of beer. When they arrived at the apartment block, he pulled out a baseball cap from his pocket and pulled it low over his forehead. He checked his appearance in the sun visor mirror. The blood had drained from his face.
“Keep the engine running, Daly. I’ll be in a hurry.”
Daly waited, alert. Above the beat of the rain pounding the car he heard the sound of glass breaking, and an alarm going off. A few minutes later, Irwin appeared at the side of the car. He threw a large bag covering what looked to be a birdcage into the back and jumped in.
“Let’s go!” he shouted. He was wearing a self-satisfied grin. “That was easier than I thought.”
Daly glanced in the rearview mirror as he accelerated off. The bag shifted slightly. He looked again. The bag jerked, and something squawked from within.
“What the hell’s in the bag?” he asked with alarm.
“Alfie.”
“Who?”
“Poppy’s precious pet. He’s a parrot.” A vindictive grin split Irwin’s face. “She’s taken Benjy, so I grabbed Alfie.”
“A parrot? It’ll smother in that plastic bag.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not asking you to look after it.”
“You’ve lost it.”
“Don’t say that. I already know I’ve lost it.” He gulped from the can of beer. “Tell me something different. Like how daring I am, or how great it is to pull one over on that bitch.”
“Christ!”
“You’re put out.”
“How would I not be? You’ve just used me as an accessory to breaking and entry. Not to mention theft.”
Irwin lifted the can to his mouth, but it was empty.
“You told me you just wanted to collect some things. Why did you lie?”
“Don’t give me grief, Daly. It was the need-to-know principle.”
“What do you mean?”
“The only people told my business are those who need to know. Anyway, I only went back to look for Benjy, but she’d taken him with her. You know she’s threatened to have him put down?”
“Derek, this isn’t a game.” Daly tried to hold a note of patience in his voice. “With a criminal conviction for theft, you’ll be kicked off the force.”
“Really?” His voice was sarcastic. “I think you’ll find, Daly, that this is technically a case of kidnapping. I’ve taken her parrot as ransom for my pet friend. My best friend.” He glared drunkenly at Daly. “If you think I’ve done wrong, then arrest me. You’re a policeman, remember. Or have you forgotten how to arrest lawbreakers?”
Daly shook his head. “Someone will have seen my car and taken down the registration. Our colleagues at the station are probably doing a search on it right now.”
“Tell them you were driving by and saw someone behaving suspiciously, and that you were just investigating. I’ll take my chances. If they track me down, I’ll just say I was sleepwalking.”
Daly sighed. “You’ve thought of everything, I see.”
“I told you I had it planned to a tee.”
He leaned so close Daly could feel his alcoholic breath condense on his cheek. A question formed in Irwin’s mouth like sticky saliva. “What about your missing prostitute?”
Daly said nothing.
“I bet she’d make a hot date.”
“How do you know? You haven’t seen her, have you?”
“I’m just asking. Maybe she’d make an awful one, and then charge you £100 for the pleasure.”
Irwin rolled down the window and chucked the empty beer can into a hedge. Daly decided that he was not equipped to deal with the fallout from Irwin’s disintegrating love life. It was too risky and depressing a business for him to bear. He glanced at Irwin. It was difficult to decide how much self-destruction the younger detective was capable of wreaking on himself and those around him.
A thought crossed Daly’s mind. He stared at the bag in the rearview mirror.
“What’s the parrot going to do for food? Have you thought of that?”
“Shit.” Irwin pulled a hand over his forehead and groaned.
Twenty minutes later, Daly dropped the detective off at his mother’s house. Irwin’s shoulders slumped a little as he dragged out the bag. He walked up to the front door, head bowed, like a man retracing his steps, searching for a way to correct the fundamental error of his adulthood that had brought him back to his parents’ doorstep with a kidnapped parrot as baggage.
Daly had just stepped through the door of his cottage when his mobile rang.
“Hello.” He could hear breathing on the other end, but no one answered.
“Hello. Who is this?” he demanded.
Silence.
“Is that you, Derek?” He looked at the caller display, but did not recognize the number.
He was about to hang up, when a voice spoke.
“Celcius, this is Lena.”
He dropped into a chair in surprise.
“Lena, where are you?” asked Daly.
“I’m staying in one of Jack’s properties,” she replied. “A house in Foxborough Mews.”
The place rang a bell with him. It was the ghost estate where Mooney lived. He wondered how the former IRA man would feel knowing he had company at last.
“You have to come down to the police station,” said Daly, his voice terse. “You’re a suspect in a conspiracy-to-blackmail case. No amount of running is going to change that. You’re also in grave danger. There’s a man with a limp who won’t rest until he finds you.”
Lena took a deep breath. “I’ve seen him, again. At least signs of him and his Jeep. He’s always there, on the periphery. I think he’s been watching me for some time.”
“Here’s what you must do.” Daly spoke urgently. “Lock your doors. Stay away from the windows, and keep your mobile on you at all times. Tell me which house you’re in, and I’ll be there as soon as possible.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
She was silent.
“Listen, Lena. Every time I get close to finding you, along comes this man. I talked to Martha Havel a few days ago, and do you know what happened to her? Are you listening?”
Still there was silence on the other end.
“He forced her van off the road. Then he dragged her injured body into a Jeep. Right now, he’s probably torturing her to extract the information I tried to get from her. That woman is suffering, and all because you won’t talk to us. What secrets are you hiding? Why won’t you let me help you?”
“There are dangerous men after me,” she replied. “The lives of women are more worthless to them than animals, and so are our families. Why else do you think I’m trying to make myself invisible?”
“We can protect you. You can help us put Mikolajek behind bars for a very long time.”
“The police haven’t done much up till now.”
“We’re working round the clock.” A note of anger crept into his voice. “All we can do is investigate the crimes we know have taken place. Jack Fowler died in mysterious circumstances, and his widow has accused you of blackmailing him.”
“I never blackmailed Jack.”
“You left a message on their phone demanding money. Are you saying it was some sort of misunderstanding?”
Her voice was lower, squeezed in her throat. “No. I can never have a relationship unless I repay my debts to Mikolajek. He will destroy me and anyone I come in contact with. He made me break off the relationship with Jack. He threatened to kill the two of us. I pretended to blackmail Jack to make sure he wouldn’t come after me. It was easier that way.”
“What about Fowler’s money? You still gave his account a bloodletting.”
“Staying away from Mikolajek costs money.” There was a note of caution in her voice, as though she was afraid of saying too much.
“All this is evidence that can be used to bring Mikolajek to court.”
“If I became a witness, you’d have to put me in a concrete bunker for the rest of my days. And my family, too. No, I have a better plan. One that will help you catch Mikolajek without my evidence.”
“Which house are you in?”
She hesitated for a moment. “Number 74.”
“OK, I’m heading there now.”
She hung up.
In his mind’s eye, he pictured a house, empty and lifeless, surrounded by other vacant houses, and in a window, the watchful face of a woman in hiding. An estate of unsold houses was the ultimate anonymous bolt-hole, he thought, as much of a void in the aftermath of the property boom as an empty sea.
Daly drove along deserted streets lined with houses devoid of life, like cutouts propped up in front of each other. It was hard to imagine he was deep in the South Armagh countryside. That was the snag about every one of the unsold properties in Foxborough Mews—their views were of many other similarly designed houses. He passed Michael Mooney’s house, but there were no vehicles parked outside and the place looked empty.
At the end of the street stood number 74, one of the final properties to be built. The house was doing its best to camouflage itself in a general tangle of weeds, twisted hawthorns, and mounds of rubble. If Daly had to choose any of the houses for a hideaway, he would have picked number 74, too.
He got out and skirted the property, catching reflections of himself in the dark windows. Occasionally he thought he saw another shadowy reflection slip out of sight, but each time he stopped and looked behind him there was no one there. The estate seemed to absorb all signs of life, the windows throwing back blank reflections of a silhouetted skyline. He rapped the knocker on the front door of number 74 and waited. There was no answer. Had the estate swallowed up Lena Novak, too? he wondered. He scrutinized the windows, but the interior was hidden from view. He knocked again, louder, and waited as the echoes faded into the estate.
“Hello!” he shouted. “This is Inspector Daly.”
Getting no answer, he pushed on the handle and found the door unlocked. He glanced behind once more to make sure no one was watching him and entered. The deep silence within reminded him that he was a trespasser. Slowly, he moved about the rooms, which were empty of furniture or decoration. One thing was sure, he wasn’t going to need a team of officers and a search warrant to give the place a thorough going-over.
“Lena!” he shouted. “Where are you?” The solid wood floors creaked beneath his feet. He stepped into an immaculately tiled kitchen where a glass and a dirty plate were the only items out of place. Upstairs he looked into the bedroom and found a bed with a carefully folded sleeping bag. This time there were no signs that she had left in a hurry or that the house had been disturbed in any way.
“Where are you, Lena?” His voice grew urgent. She had summoned him to this lair only to perform another disappearing act. He must be patient, he told himself, and wait for her to make contact, but he feared that he was missing out on something, and that if Lena and he carried on as they were, they would be condemned to repeat the same experience, forever: she running away, but never fast enough to escape; he chasing, but never hard enough to catch her.
In the kitchen, he pulled out a chair and sat down. He checked his mobile phone and sighed. Her elusiveness was torturing him. Not only had her disappearances caused the investigation to stall, they had distracted him during the empty evenings in his cottage. Jack Fowler’s relationship with Lena must have been a roller coaster of highs and dark lows, he thought. Exciting at the start, but terrifying and dizzying toward the end.
After a while, he got up and walked through all the rooms again. It was the scene of another almost crime. She had been a trespasser here, a squatter, but now she was gone. There had to be a clue somewhere, he thought. Something to explain why she had called him and then left.
He went through the rooms methodically. He was going to have to start reading between the lines. On a towel in the bathroom, he found a muddy footprint, too large to be a woman’s. He wondered who had left it behind. In a drawer in the kitchen he found a sales brochure for Foxborough Mews and a set of keys. One of the houses was marked with an X, number 68. In another drawer, he found a plastic bag with money. A total of eight fifty-euro notes, crisp and clean. He placed the money back in the drawer and walked outside.
Blackberry brambles and gorse ran wild across the common ground. He followed a narrow forking path that he assumed had been made by rabbits or smaller rodents and almost tripped over an unearthed sewer pipe. He found where it ended in a bubbling mess of sewage and maggots, the reek of decay filling his nostrils.
In the soft soil at the back of the houses he noticed a series of footprints. Although they merged in places, he managed to follow a clear trail to the back door of number 68, the house that had been marked with an X in the brochure. He felt as though he was searching sideways and backward around the void left by Lena’s disappearance.
A shadow twisted at an upstairs window. Then the face of a woman appeared briefly, a thinner, elfin version of Lena. He heard a shrill, protesting voice, and then the anxious face disappeared. Was it fear of him or fear of someone else in the house that was etched on her features? The image stayed fresh in his mind. It was the face of a victim rather than a criminal. Where had he seen her before? He banged at the locked door, but there was no answer from within. He stood back and saw another movement at the window. This time the face of a different woman appeared, her eyes wide and tired looking. Her face registered shock at the sight of him. He shouted, but she didn’t respond.
He was surprised to find the front door unlocked. The usual dividing lines of ownership and property did not exist in places like Foxborough Mews. He felt a chill of cold air on his face as he stepped into a hallway of gleaming marble. He moved slowly along a corridor, glancing into the empty rooms on either side. The air smelled of that odd mixture of sealed-in dust and fresh paint possessed by all new houses. Upstairs, he checked each room, opening closed door after closed door. He took a deep breath and entered the room in which he had seen the women. It had square white walls and a clean cement floor and nothing else. No place to accommodate even a shadow. He looked through the window and kept a steady watch on the street, his ears straining all the time for a noise in the house. Who were the women? Squatters or lost souls? How had they disappeared?
He walked several times around the house, trying to light on a detail that would explain their disappearance or link them to Lena Novak. The only thing unusual was a picnic basket in the kitchen. Daly opened it and found a selection of cold meats and cheeses, and a bottle of champagne. In a side compartment were a pair of handcuffs, a blindfold, and a sharp knife.
Hardly the gear for a traditional picnic in the park,
he thought.
Apart from the presence of the basket, there were no signs that anyone had recently been in the house. Whoever the women were, they barely qualified as tenants. Like Lena, they were visitors that came and went without a trace, ghosts for a ghost estate.
He stepped outside and walked along the street. The setting sun briefly parted the dark clouds and was reflected in a hundred dazzling windows. A door rattled behind him, and the windows quivered. He spun round. The noise could have come from any one of a dozen houses. He tried several properties before he found one that was not locked. The front door of number 72 hung slightly ajar. He stepped inside. Vandals and thieves had ransacked the place, punching holes in the walls, ripping out copper piping and electrical wiring. He checked the rooms but found once again found no signs of life.
He was about to return to his car when something made him halt in his tracks. Something about number 72 had struck him as odd. He went back in and walked around. He memorized the layout. Then he went back to number 68. He secured the front door from the inside and retraced his steps through the sparsely furnished rooms. The houses in the estate followed a similar room plan. A kitchen, utility room, bathroom, and two reception rooms downstairs, with three bedrooms and a further two bathrooms upstairs. However, in number 68, there was a bedroom less upstairs.
Using his feet, he roughly measured the upstairs layout. He paced along the white walls of each room. Between one of the bedrooms and the bathroom, there was a space measuring about twelve feet by ten feet. He tapped the wall. It was hollow. He shifted a wardrobe and found a concealed door. He tried the handle, but it was locked. His discovery of a secret room was an unexpected development and piqued his curiosity. He had a dawning sense of danger and deception. He shouted and banged the door, but there was no answer.
The developers of the houses may have had grand ambitions, but they were unlikely to extend to the creation of concealed rooms. Someone with a secret to hide had constructed it recently. He walked over to a window and surveyed the estate. It was getting dark, but no streetlights came on. He pressed his hand lightly against the glass and felt it vibrate. He stepped back. The window quivered like a living thing.