Hurt (DS Lucy Black) (3 page)

‘I’ll get him a drink,’ the guard said and, crossing to the wall, lifted the receiver of the phone attached there and passed the request along. A moment later, someone knocked at the door and, opening it, the guard accepted a clear plastic cup of water and brought it across.

Harkin accepted it and sipped. ‘Sorry, George,’ he said to the man, his head bowed. His back curved as he inhaled deeply, then he straightened himself, puffing out his cheeks as he released the breath. Finally, he looked up to Lucy. ‘How?’

Lucy moved and sat in the seat next to him. ‘The postmortem won’t be till the morning, sir, but it appears she died from a knife wound.’

‘A stabbing?’

‘Not quite,’ Lucy said.

Harkin processed this piece of information, considering all the alternatives. Finally, he settled on the right one, for his face darkened.

‘Who did it?’

‘It’s a little early—’ Fleming began.

‘You must have some fucking ideas,’ Harkin spat, rising from his seat in a manner which caused George to immediately stand to attention again. Aware of his reaction, Harkin raised a placatory hand then slowly lowered himself into his seat again. ‘You’ve been looking for her since Thursday. Where did you find her?’

‘On the railway line. At St Columb’s Park.’

Harkin stared at the tabletop, his breath heavy and nasal. ‘Was it me?’ he asked finally.

‘What?’

‘Was it because of me?’

Lucy shook her head. ‘We’ve no reason to believe so, Mr Harkin. Your daughter hasn’t shared your name since she was a child.’

‘She still was a child,’ he retorted, though without rancour. He sat a moment in silence, before speaking again. ‘That trash rag ran the story about her today. About her and me. If I thought it was done because of me, I’d ... You read all this shit in here, educating you.
Sophocles
and that. You know, the daughters die because of who the father was. You start ... you know, you can’t help ...’ He stared at them, his mouth working dryly, though producing no sound.

Lucy shook her head, but did not express her own thoughts. The girl was missing until the papers ran with the connection to Harkin. Suddenly, she turned up with her throat cut, set up to look like she killed herself on the train line. Except the train never came. They couldn’t discount the idea that her death was connected with her father, even if she didn’t believe the two things to be related.

‘Can you think of anyone who
might
want to get back at you, Mr Harkin?’

‘You mean apart from the family of the poor sod I shot?’

‘Anyone else?’ Lucy continued, silently considering the possibility as one she’d need to mention to Burns.

If there was, Harkin wasn’t going to share the information with them.

‘When did you last see Karen, Mr Harkin?’ Fleming asked.

Harkin looked up at him, then dipped his head again. ‘About a fortnight ago. She’d started visiting after I wrote to her a while back. She was here three times, I think.’

‘Did she mention anything to you during any of her visits? Anything that suggested she might have been in trouble?’

‘She barely knew me. She was four when I went inside.’

His expression darkened suddenly, his eyes hooded by his brows where they gathered. Lucy felt Fleming’s hand rest on her arm on the desk. She glanced at him and he shook his head lightly. They would get nothing further of use from Harkin.

‘Is there any thing we can do for you, Mr Harkin?’ Lucy asked, standing to indicate to the prison officer that they were concluding their visit.

‘I’m out of here next Saturday. If you find out who it was, give me half an hour with whoever killed her.’

‘Careful, Eoghan,’ George called from the corner. ‘I’m sorry for your news, but we don’t want you back in here again too soon, now do we?’

‘Half an hour,’ Harkin repeated to Lucy.

* * *

The prison officer, George, walked them back out to the main reception area where they returned their visitors’ badges, crunching on an apple as he walked with them.

‘You found her on the train line?’ he asked, clearly having overheard.

‘Just at St Columb’s Park. There’s a dark bend on the line.’

‘Oh, I know it surely,’ the man said. ‘I’m from Londonderry myself. I get that train in the evenings if I’m doing the day shift. When did you find her?’

‘Sometime before midnight,’ Lucy said. ‘A little before that, maybe.’

‘The body can’t have been there too long then.’

‘Why?’

‘There’s a train that leaves Coleraine about 9.10 p.m. I aim to make that if my shift finishes on time. It gets into the city for just shy of 10. If I miss that, I have to get the late train, hanging around Coleraine till 10.40. It makes it in for 11.30. If the body had been lying for a bit, the 10 o’ clock train would have run over it. Whoever put it there must have done so between 10 and 11.30.’

‘What about trains coming out of Derry?’ Lucy asked.

‘The last Londonderry train is at 8.30,’ the man replied. ‘There’s none after that.’

He took another chunk off the apple, chewing happily as he said. ‘If you need me to solve the whole case for you, just let me know.’

The smoke was so dense, Lucy could barely see in front of her. She felt the burning in her lungs, the need to take a breath, but she knew she had to resist. Somewhere, below her, the heat was rising, its presence marked by a vague yellow glow from the living room, the splintering of wood as the door cracked.

To her left she saw Catherine Quigg’s closed door. The woman bolted it from the inside; Lucy remembered that. She reached for the door, tried to open it. Locked. Raising her boot, she kicked at the spot below the handle where she knew the sliding bolt inside had been screwed. Once, twice, a third boot at it before it too splintered and she tumbled through the doorway into the room. Empty. She didn’t stop to think how an empty room might be locked from the inside; didn’t find it strange.

Where was Mary’s room? Ahead of her, at the end of the corridor. She looked up. Cunningham had fitted a brass bolt on Mary’s door too, but on the outside so he could lock her and her brother Joseph into the room when he stayed over with their mother. She fumbled with the bolt. It wouldn’t shift. She felt across its length with her fingers, then found the heavy padlock attached to it.

From inside the room, she could hear the muffled cries of the baby, the sounds indistinct. She knew this was because Mary had wrapped towels around the child’s head to protect him. She’d used all the towels on him, left none for herself. Lucy hammered on the door.

‘Mary? Mary? Can you hear me?’

She heard a reciprocal light thumping from the other side.

‘Mary?’ she screamed.

She heard the alarm ringing. Finally she thought. After all this smoke and it’s only starting to ring. Maybe help would come.

The thumping from the other side seemed to intensify in frequency, though not strength.

‘Mary, I’m here,’ Lucy cried, tears streaming down her face now.

Suddenly, the thumping stopped.

‘Help me,’ Mary whispered in her ear.

Lucy looked down to her arms, where she held the baby, Joseph, his swaddling clothes frayed towels, singed and black with soot.

The alarm grew louder, pulling her away from the door.

‘Help me,’ the child repeated.

Lucy jolted awake, almost falling off the sofa where she’d lain down when she finally got home after 4 a.m. She put her hands to her face, felt the wetness of her cheeks. The tears, at least, were real.

She sat up, glanced across at the clock on the mantelpiece; it was already gone 7 a.m. The sky beyond was beginning to lighten behind the miasma of rain misting the windows.

The house was quiet, save for the creaking of the floorboards upstairs and the occasional rattling cough of the water pipes when the timer switched on the central heating at 7.45. Lucy had yet to redecorate, had yet to see this as her own home, rather than her father’s home in which she was staying. She showered, then clattered about in the kitchen, pouring herself out cereal, eating it in front of the TV, watching the news.

She thought again on what Harkin had said, about Sophocles and his being to blame for Karen’s death. It seemed unlikely somehow. The man had not been a feature of the girl’s life. Indeed, she had jettisoned his surname at the first opportunity, just as Lucy had retained her father’s name after her mother reverted to her maiden name, Wilson. Even when Lucy had met Karen, in the months before when she was still in care, she’d never once named her father. It had struck Lucy more than once that they had that disowning of a parent in common. It was, perhaps, why Lucy had been drawn to the girl. That coupled with the fact that, as her mother had quite correctly commented, Lucy had an affinity for the vulnerable, for all the little lost girls she encountered. None more so than Mary Quigg, the girl about whom she had recurrent dreams who had died along with her mother the year previous.

The mother’s partner, Alan Cunningham, had been a low level recidivist who the PSNI had arrested erroneously for child abduction. Lucy had managed to prove the man innocent. Upon release, however, Cunningham had gone on the run, but not before ransacking his partner’s home, stealing all he could sell from it, then setting the house alight with his partner and her children still sleeping inside. The only survivor was the baby of the family, Joe.

Lucy was at the City Cemetery as the gates opened at nine o’clock. The council worker in the high visibility jacket who unlocked them waved her in, before opening the second gate back.

Lucy drove up the incline to the very top of the cemetery. She knew where the plot was, knew well enough the handiest place to park. She got out of the car, stood and stared down at the river below and across to Prehen, the houses of the estate emerging from the ancient woodland which surrounded them. It was a breathtaking view, even on so bracing a morning.

Locking up the car, she climbed the last hundred yards of the incline to the row where Mary Quigg was buried. Even before she reached the grave she could tell something was wrong. The graveside railings that Lucy had had set around the grave were missing, the only evidence of their absence a thin trench in the soil, a few centimetres wide. The gravestone itself was still intact, fine black marble, with the names of the mother and daughter. However, the bunch of flowers that Lucy had laid there a week earlier were crushed, as if underfoot. The small teddy bear she’d placed on the grave for Mary lay dirtied now, its face pressed against the clay. Lucy could see the muddied ridges of a boot mark on the sodden fur.

She must have been visibly upset by the time she found the man who had opened the gates for her, for his first instinct was to place his arm awkwardly on her shoulder.

‘We didn’t know who to contact, love. I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We found it like that yesterday. They came in the night before and took the wee railings off a couple of graves.’

‘Who did?’

The man shrugged. ‘God knows. They took the lead flashing off the roof of the church that same night. It was probably the same people. The cops told us there’s a gang going about, lifting metal. Its price has rocketed with the recession and that. It’s being investigated, but you know the police; God knows if they’ll ever get them.’

Lucy shuddered with a mixture of anger and the effort she needed to suppress her tears.

‘Look, love. I’ll get the grave tidied up for you,’ the man said, his hand still on her shoulder. ‘Don’t be upsetting yourself. I know it seems it, but it’s not personal. These things never are.’

Lucy stared at him.

‘Of course it’s personal,’ she said.

The Public Protection Unit, in which Lucy was a sergeant, had a wide remit, taking responsibility for cases involving domestic abuse, children, missing persons and vulnerable adults, frequently working closely with Social Services. It operated from Maydown PSNI station in the Waterside of Derry City. Maydown was actually a compound rather than a simple station: a range of buildings stretched across a site of about ten acres, housing many of the PSNI units for the city, as well as a branch of the training college. It was surrounded by twelve-inch thick corrugated metal fencing, a vestige of the Troubles that had yet to be replaced. This was not the only visible impact the Troubles had had on the design of the place. Rather than consisting of one large building, which would have proved an easy target for potential rocket attacks, even those requiring a degree of pot luck in the targeting due to the height of the perimeter fencing, the compound was divided up into a number of small blocks, squatting at various points around the station area.

The PPU was Block 5. Lucy parked just outside and went up to the front door of the block to punch in her access code. As she did so, she regarded herself in the reflective foil coating on the door itself. She had cut her hair a few weeks earlier and was still undecided. She’d worn her hair in a ponytail for as long as she could remember until recently; during an altercation with a drunken father whose wife had had enough and locked him out of the house, the man had grabbed Lucy by the hair, pulling her down to the ground and managing a kick that glanced off the side of her head before the uniforms accompanying her had managed to subdue him with pepper spray. She’d lost weight and that, combined with the haircut, made her features thinner than she realized. For a moment, she saw her mother reflected back at her. She turned away quickly, pulling open the door.

Once inside, she headed up to Fleming’s office first, but it was empty; having not got home himself until 3.30, Lucy figured he’d slept in. She crossed the corridor to the open area where interviews were conducted. Generally, the people interviewed here were children, so the room was spacious, with plastic crates of toys and a worn red cloth sofa. Two mismatched bookcases sat against the wall, holding a variety of kids’ books of all shapes and sizes. To the immediate left of the bookcases sat a video camera on a tripod, which was used for recording the interviews as unobtrusively as possible.