Border Angels (2 page)

The front door of the crashed car swung open, and Sergei leaned out, spitting a mouthful of blood. He sought to compose himself, reached for a cigarette, and flicked the lighter. A look of derision passed across his face as he caught sight of her backing away. The cigarette flared. With the speed of a chemical reaction taking hold, the car erupted into a fireball, the blaze running through the vehicle like a quick-moving liquid, flowing over his hunched back and shoulders, drowning his face in flames.

Lena felt the heat and pitched into the darkness, her arms stretched out to break her fall. The night air was resonant with fragments of noise—the sound of a car skidding to a halt, followed by the urgent shouts of the police officer broken into echoes by the roar of the fuel tank igniting.

Her ears must be deceiving her, she thought. The policeman’s garbled voice sounded familiar. She even thought he was calling her name.

She took one last glance at the burning car, the leather seats spitting out tongues of flame, the arms of her pimp melting to amputated stumps, his face disappearing behind a mask of flames and charred flesh, the mouth wide open but silent now.

Then she ran in her bare feet. The snow felt soft at first, but soon the freezing cold bit into her feet like a steel trap. She was still only a short distance from the farmhouse, but instead she ran into the trees, sending clumps of snow bouncing from branches. Her flight set the quiet forest astir, her numb legs toiling through snowdrifts, twigs whipping her face. She was used to running barefoot in forests. The only thing that could keep pace with her was the wintry eye of the moon, blinking through the shaking trees. She kept running, listening for the sound of footsteps behind her.

She knew by intuition the hiding places in border country, and its traps—the blown-up bridges, the crumbling sheds and outbuildings occupied by gunmen, the lorries and cars driven by smugglers at breakneck speeds, as well as the obstacles posed by mountains, forests, and rivers. She dashed headlong into the deepest shadows, searching for a secret place to hide. She also understood that human life was expendable in border country. It was easy for people to disappear when they had no passports or documents to prove their identity.

With her breath lurching in her chest, she came to a void in the darkness. A deeper darkness pushed by her with dizzying speed. It was the river that marked the border. Despite its fast swells and impenetrable depths, swimming it was not out of the question. An excess of water splashed her feet. She took a deep breath, but the cold made her gasp. Her entire body quivered. Death was the final hiding place in border country. The last escape route. She had nothing to lose now. A light flashed in the distance and the policeman’s shouting grew louder. Her heart shook, caught between her past and her future. Before she could come to a decision, pain burst from her frozen feet and she felt the ground give way beneath her.

Inspector Celcius Daly opened the front door of his cottage on the southern flanks of Lough Neagh to find a basket of open-mouthed trout sitting on the doorstep. He guessed that his neighbor Owen Nugent, a fisherman of forty years, had left them after a night of poaching on the river Blackwater. Daly sniffed the fish. They had been caught only a few hours previously, he surmised. He had a keen sense of smell when it came to the decay caused by death. Several times it had warned him to be on his guard on entering dangerous situations. Violent death, in particular, had a dank slickness that stained the air even after the corpse had long vanished.

Unfortunately, his nose had been less successful in guiding him through the pitfalls posed by the living, in particular, the women in his life, who had writhed before his senses in alternating gestures of seduction and dismissal. His ten-year marriage to Anna had broken down the previous year, and his heart still felt stranded in the jaws of their unpleasant separation.

Anna had phoned him the night before, to discuss what to do with his boxes, the remnants of his past life that were still taking up valuable space in her attic.
Out with the old and in with the new,
he thought afterward. However, on the phone he had reacted with a baffled blankness, unable to decide what to do with all those memories heaped up in cardboard boxes. She explained that she was not being hard-hearted, only brave and decisive.
Our past will smother us to death,
she warned him. She even offered to take the boxes to the local dump, but a form of cowardice made him ask her not to. Although he still wished to cling to the past, he was unwilling to expose himself to its sorrows. It was the same inertia that prevented him from deciding what to do with his father’s run-down cottage. His ex-wife had scarcely been able to hide the mockery in her voice when she heard he had still not sold it and was planning to spend another spring within its damp confines. When he replaced the receiver, he felt a crushing sense of discontentment with his life and a yearning for the human heat and scents of the living.

In the meantime, the thought of fried fish for breakfast was enticing. Daly carried the trout into his kitchen, smacking his lips in anticipation. He felt a twinge of domestic pride that would have either amused his ex-wife or irritated her. He lit the gas cooker. It was February, and the fish would be fat and succulent. He collected some overwintering cress from the windowsill. Then he filleted the trout and slapped them onto the hot griddle, skin side down with a little melted butter. Even though it was late morning, he had to switch on a light to see what he was doing. The weather had changed since dawn, transforming a hopeful, sunny morning into something darker, more brutal. Heavy clouds filled the sky. A flurry of fresh snow spattered against the windowpane. Daly fried some bread in olive oil and was about to dress the fish with the cress leaves when the phone rang.

It was Detective Derek Irwin.

“Remember the complaints we received about a brothel near Dunmore?”

Daly had to think for a moment before his memory swung into action. Complaints about suspected brothels had grown more commonplace in the past year, especially along the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.

“We’re going to have to check this one out.”

“Why?”

“There’s been a violent death there. A man in a burned-out car.”

“What’s this got to do with the suspected brothel?”

“We believe he was the pimp.”

“Is he local?”

“No. Croatian, we think.”

“Okay.”

After the phone call, Daly placed the half-cooked fish on a platter and covered them, hoping to revisit the culinary high point of his week later that day.

Since Irwin suspected the body was that of a foreign national, Daly stopped at the police station and contacted the newly appointed antiracism officer. Twenty minutes later, Constable Susie Brooke was climbing into Daly’s car with an almost schoolgirl excitement. She had accompanied detectives to the scenes of numerous race-hate crimes in the city—vandalism, arson, and assaults—but this was going to be her first assignment in border country, as well as her first violent death. She snuggled in under the seat belt and smiled at him warmly. The car filled with her perfume and a sense of intimacy that felt oddly perilous.

“This is a serious crime investigation, but you might as well come along,” he said. “Let’s just hope it’s not the start of something.”

“The start of what?”

“I don’t know,” he mumbled. “The border’s a brutal place. Especially for people who don’t fit in.” Then he warned her: “This won’t be a pretty sight.”

She did not look worried, just pleased to have been invited on the investigation. Her blue eyes sparkled.

“If this turns out to be racist killing, then I’m going to have to deal with the crime scene at some point,” she said. “Foreign nationals in this country are four times more likely to die a violent death. Even those living in remote areas.”

Daly did not respond. She might have sounded like a statistician, but she certainly did not look like one. Glancing away, he eased the car into first gear. He wondered if his behavior had come across as awkward or, worse still, standoffish. He racked his brain for something lighter to talk about as his eyes prowled the windshield, absorbing sideways the details of her profile, the long aquiline nose, the dark swirling hair, the bright eyes. Her lips moved slightly, but she did not speak. Perhaps she was waiting for him to continue the conversation, but somehow, his tongue had been banished to the long-lost muteness of his adolescence.

He turned right at a junction. Again, his attention was snagged by the delicate length of her nose. On another woman, such a feature would have been ugly, but on Constable Brooke, it was like a snaring device, luring in the eye. He rammed the gear stick between second and fourth, the tires slithered on the fresh snow, and then finally they were off, heading into the hills of South Armagh.

The road climbed and grew bleaker as they drew near to the border. The ragged patches of snow deepened, swallowing up the grass verges and dry-stone walls until only a few lone thorn trees could be seen rising out of the white depths. Nothing moved across the mountain fields but the wind trailing swirls of snowflakes.

Ten minutes later, they dipped into a valley and a haggard farmhouse swung into view. They pulled up behind an ambulance and a police car parked at the warped mouth of an iron gate. Daly could not see Detective Irwin anywhere.

As he clambered out of the car, a gust of wind dislodged a lump of icy snow from the trees onto his shoulders. He shouted with the cold shock.

A paramedic stepped out of the ambulance with a puzzled look. Daly introduced himself and was directed to the bottom of the lane, where the burned shell of a car lay like a spent cartridge case. A damp acrid smell reminiscent of a firing range stung Daly’s nostrils.

The blaze had been furious but contained, leaving the car a study in violent black against the whiteness of the snow, the driver burned beyond recognition. His body rested against the skeletal rim of the steering wheel like a man-sized cockroach. Daly briefly examined the face that resembled a black mask slipping off the skull, the eye sockets darker than any blindness.

“Get stuck behind a flock of lost sheep?” asked a voice from the hedge.

Detective Derek Irwin stepped out of a gap in the gorse bushes where he had been sheltering. The question was his unsubtle way of trying to make Daly feel like a schoolboy late for class.

Daly felt a familiar flicker of annoyance as he stared at the younger detective’s smug face. The Special Branch detective knew how to put people on the defensive right from the start. It was a professional technique he had borrowed from the interrogation room.

“Not at all,” Daly replied. He waved in the direction of Constable Brooke who was gingerly making her way down the lane. “I decided to bring along our new antiracism officer.”

Irwin, however, did not appear to be listening. His face had grown attentive, a look of soft awe widening his eyes as Brooke’s tall figure approached.

“Who’s the girl in self-important boots?” he asked a little too loudly.

Daly looked away in embarrassment. Being a chauvinistic pig seemed to be Irwin’s natural talent.

Brooke grimaced at the sight of the burned car. “I’m not used to dead bodies,” she said, almost in embarrassment. “It looks barely human.”

“It’s a shocking sight for anyone to see,” agreed Daly.

Even though it was more than six months since he had last smoked, Daly felt a sudden urge for a cigarette. The sight of the dead body threatened to shake him loose from the usual moorings of his self-control. Murder was the ultimate act of rule-breaking. Someone had crossed the line, so why shouldn’t he? In comparison, lighting up a cigarette was only a minor transgression, a futile act of defiance.

He was about to return to his car and search for a half-empty packet when he saw something that made him stop in his tracks. He stared at the ground. Etched in the snow was the bare footprint of a child or a young woman.
The cold must have stripped the person’s skin,
he thought. He came across several more prints. The person had been running, possibly in the dark. A wild, heedless flight like that of a frightened animal. On a thorn tree he found a torn strip of a dress and a thick strand of black hair, low down.
A girl or a woman,
he thought. He tried to picture her, the clothes she had worn, a blue dress, entangled in the twigs with her long hair. He looked up, scanning the dark horizon of the hills. He sighed. The cigarette would have to wait for the next emergency of the soul.

From the tree, he followed the footprints along the edge of a field and into a forest where the snow lay in drifts. He felt a clear sense of mysterious invitation, urging him deeper into the trees. Concern for the girl, whoever she was, had short-circuited his awareness of the police team, the forensic investigators, the photographers, and all the protocols for dealing with important evidence. He plunged into the trees, head bowed to the ground, arm fending branches off his face. He lost the tracks at the bank of a fast-flowing river. On the other side, the snow was clean and unmarked. The roar of the river rushed in his ears. He spent half an hour scouring the briars and undergrowth for scuff marks, hoping the footprints would reappear and take off again, but they had disappeared.

When he returned to the burned car, Irwin strode toward him and took him aside. His face wore an incredulous expression.

“How are we going to investigate a murder case with Miss PC looking over our shoulders?” He jabbed his thumb at Constable Brooke.

“Be nice to her. We’re trying to prove the police take racism seriously,” replied Daly.

“You shouldn’t have brought her along. This is a critical murder investigation. It has nothing to do with racism. Tell her we don’t need her help.”

“Don’t overreact”, snapped Daly. “She might provide us with some valuable information. An insight into these people’s lives.”

“I’m not overreacting”, Irwin grumbled. “I just don’t want her to get in the way.”

They walked back to the car.

“Tell us what we know about the deceased,” asked Daly.

Irwin kicked the back of the vehicle, knocking a shower of metal fragments to the ground.

“There’s not much until we identify the body. But I can tell you he drove an Audi coupe. Nice car. Once. It’s always the same. The lower the life form, the more expensive the taste.”

“Who’s the registered owner?”

“Sergei Kriich. He has a conviction for threats-to-kill and ABH. According to our files, he works at the local poultry factory.”

“Ever known a chicken catcher to drive a coupe?”

“He must have caught a lot of birds,” replied Irwin. “We asked the factory if Mr. Kriich turned up for work today, but they said they’d no one working under that name. We have a photo of him in our records but, unfortunately, we can’t match anything to a burnt cinder.”

Irwin turned and stared at Brooke with the stance of a shortsighted man. She ignored him, as if refusing to acknowledge a predator might make it go away. Daly cleared his throat.

Irwin snapped his attention back to the crime scene. “We’ve been trying to put this brothel out of business for the last month or so,” he said. “Then the criminal fraternity comes in and sorts the problem out in one night.”

“You think a rival gang did this?”

“The evidence seems pretty clear.”

“I’ve learned that evidence rarely tells the whole story.”

“Then listen to this. The fire service has already examined the seat of the blaze. They found something unexpected.”

“What was that?”

“There were two types of accelerant. Petrol and diesel. They believe the diesel leaked from the car’s tank, but it appears that someone also threw a petrol bomb onto the fire. They found broken glass and a burned rag a short distance from the car.”

“Why would someone do that?”

“Obviously, someone wanted to do more than kill him. They wanted to destroy all evidence of his identity, or anything else that might have been in the car.”

Daly drew Irwin’s attention to the footprints in the snow.

“There was a girl with him,” he said.

“A girl with no shoes,” replied Irwin. “Whoever she was, she belongs to the bottom of the food chain. A prostitute, probably. Or the victim’s girlfriend. Maybe even a relative.” He smirked. “Or all three rolled into one. You never know with these people. My guess is we’ll have to go a little higher up the chain to find who did this.”

The smile grew across Irwin’s face as he glanced at Brooke. She walked past them, back up to the ambulance, her body leaning to one side as though battling a shift in gravity. The grim look on her face said it all. The world had shed its skin and revealed its cruelty.

“Did something I say offend her?” asked Irwin.

Daly stared at the tracks again trying to link them to the burned-out car and the deceased. Each footprint was planted cleanly and deliberately in front of the other—
a strong runner,
he thought. Right here, on the spot that he stood, someone’s journey in life had ended suddenly, and another’s had begun. Something happened here that altered two people’s lives forever. A big death and a small death. He sat down on his haunches and touched the prints.