‘Apparently it’s more than that,’ I said. ‘Our Drugs Unit over here tell us that The Rising are trying to force their own supply on border dealers. Irvine must have invested in a stash he’s looking to offload.’
‘You’re sure about that?’ Hendry asked. ‘Our intel is pretty good, Ben. Word here is that they were purely political.’
‘We do have
some
intelligence of our own here, Jim,’ I said light-heartedly, though I was conscious that it was Rory Nicell who was the source of that intelligence in this case. Nicell, who I had subsequently learned had been spotted with two dealers he denied knowing.
Hendry got back to me quickly with an address in Seven Oaks in Derry. He also mentioned that he had an idea on how to follow up the white van for me. Depending on which way the van had driven from Plumbridge, it may have had to drive past Sion Mills PSNI station, outside which were CCTV cameras, a legacy of the Troubles. He promised he’d let me know if they had picked anything up.
I headed on down to Derry, to speak to Kielty’s mother. It was almost four thirty by the time I got there.
Dolores Kielty was alone when I arrived. She was smaller than I remembered from the funeral, only touching five feet two, perhaps, and she stooped slightly when she walked. She brought me into her sitting room, a newly furnished room with yellow wallpaper with an intricate frieze at the top. A large LCD TV dominated one corner of the room, on which a chat show host was shouting jokes at his audience. Mrs Kielty dragged deeply on the cigarette she held clamped in her hand. She hacked a cough into a tissue in response to my asking if I could join her in a smoke.
‘Have you found who did it?’ she asked, as I lit my own cigarette.
‘I’m afraid not,’ I admitted. ‘We’re following several lines of inquiry.’
‘The radio said that that fella Hutton was being blamed. Is that right?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t believe so. Not by us, at least.’
She nodded lightly, as if my response was one she had expected. ‘I watch this every afternoon,’ she said, gesturing towards the TV.
‘Were you aware of what your son was doing, Mrs Kielty?’ I asked. ‘For a living.’
She coughed again, noisily. ‘Well, I knew he wasn’t buying this stuff with his brew money,’ she said, pointing again at the TV.
‘Martin bought you that?’
‘Had the whole house decorated for me.’
I could formulate no response to her evident pride that her son had used his drugs profits to wallpaper her home.
‘I’m afraid we have Martin’s motorbike, still. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I tried contacting his partner, Elena McEvoy, but—’
Dolores Kielty tutted. ‘Her,’ she said.
‘You didn’t get on with Ms McEvoy?’ I asked.
‘She’s a stuck-up bitch, that one.’
‘You don’t know where she might have gone?’
‘No idea,’ the woman said. ‘She wouldn’t tell me anyway.’
‘But she has your granddaughter,’ I said.
‘If she even
is
my granddaughter. That slut was already pregnant by the time she got her claws into my Martin,’ Dolores Kielty said, drawing another cigarette from the leather purse in which she kept the packet.
‘So you have no idea where she is?’
‘None,’ she replied with finality. ‘Good riddance to her, I say.’
So much for that, I thought. ‘I’m sorry to mention it again,’ I began, ‘but what would you like us to do with Martin’s bike?’
‘I don’t want that thing here. I hated those bikes of his. Hated the thought of him on them.’
I nodded. Dolores Kielty warmed to the subject.
‘I used to lie awake at night if I knew he was out on that thing. In case he had an accident. His father died in a bike crash, when Martin was young.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said.
‘He had an accident himself when he was in his late teens,’ she continued. ‘Very bad. I thought I’d lost him.’
‘That must have been difficult, after losing your husband that way.’
‘It was,’ she agreed, looking at me and nodded intently. ‘He smashed up his leg. He had to have pins put into his ankle to hold it together. It took him months before he could walk again.’
‘That’s horrendous.’
‘So you may keep the bike. Thanks, but no thanks.’
I stood to leave. ‘We’ll have the bike sold then, Mrs Kielty. I’ll see that the money is sent on to you.’
Dolores Kielty rose from her seat and walked out to the hallway with me. As I reached the door she drew loudly on her cigarette, then coughed to clear her throat.
‘I know what he did was wrong,’ she said, as if feeling she had to explain herself. ‘I know it hurt other people. I know that’s what you think. But he was my son. Before any of that, he was good to me.’
I nodded, unsure what to say.
‘I keep waiting for him to come into the house. “Ma,” he’ll shout. “Ma.”’
She laughed sadly at the thought, her eyes betraying her pain.
My first port of call on Monday morning was Lorcan Hutton’s funeral. It was poorly attended. He may have had many acquaintances in life but most were interested only in their next hit and, it seemed, had little sentimental attachment to their dealer.
Hutton’s parents stood alone in the front pew. Both looked remarkably composed in the circumstances. Every so often, Hutton’s father would rub at the back of his neck, then glance over his shoulder, as if hoping that a few more people would have arrived to bolster the twenty or so mourners.
Just after the Mass had started, Jim Hendry slid into the pew beside me.
‘Thought you’d be here,’ he said, glancing around the church. ‘In the middle of all this papist idolatry,’ he added, tutting and shaking his head.
‘I’m surprised you didn’t get burnt by the holy water when you came in,’ I said.
‘Is that what it was?’ he whispered. ‘I was wondering.’
‘Did you just come in here to slag off the Catholic Church?’
‘Oh ye of little faith,’ he said. ‘I come bearing gifts.’
He passed me an A5 sheet of paper. Turning it over I saw it was a CCTV image of the main roadway in Sion Mills. In the centre of the image was a white van, driving away from the camera, its back windows coated in silver foil, which had peeled off slightly on the left-hand pane. The Southern registration plate was obvious, though the numerals were a little difficult to decipher. Hendry saw I was trying to read the number and tapped the top of the sheet, where the number had been printed. It was a Dublin 08 plate.
‘One of yours,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t run the owner on this side.’
‘Bit battered-looking for an 08 registration,’ I observed.
‘It might not be the same one, but it fits the description all right.’
‘It’s great, Jim,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’
After the funeral, having offered Hutton’s parents our condolences, Hendry and I walked back down to the car park.
‘I passed on your suspicions about The Rising to our people,’ he said. ‘They reckon you’re half right. Someone is pushing drugs into the border but they say it’s not Irvine. He might be muscle, but he’s no genius. The surprise is that he’s heading the whole Rising thing at all – he’s not what you’d call a born leader.’
‘What about Armstrong or Cunningham?’
He frowned. ‘Unlikely. As best we can tell, neither of them have much disposable income. Armstrong’s an idiot, but he’s dangerous.’
‘You told me he shot a policeman.’
‘In broad daylight. He walked up to his car, shot him in the face then turned and ran off. Wasn’t even wearing a mask. He’s a bit simple, always used as an errand boy. But he wouldn’t have the wherewithal to run a drugs business.’
‘And Cunningham?’
‘More likely, though again, he has no money. He only got out of jail last year for burglary. Stealing TVs and shit, nothing particularly high-end and certainly nothing that would bankroll a new career in dealing.’
‘What about political donations, that sort of thing?’
Hendry shook his head. ‘Naw. They’re bottom feeders – low-level thugs. That’s our reading of it.’
‘Thanks, Jim,’ I said.
‘No problem,’ he said. ‘I live to serve.’
I was pulling out of the churchyard when something stuck me about my conversation with Kielty’s mother. She had mentioned injuries he’d sustained in an accident, yet I could not recall there having been mention in the post-mortem report of surgical pins in the victim’s legs. I phoned the pathologist Joe Long and asked him to check for me.
By the time I reached the station he called me back. He’d pulled his file on Kielty’s post-mortem. X-rays had been taken due to the extent of surface burning. He’d double checked the images; the body on which he had conducted a post-mortem did not have pins in the ankles. Nor indeed did the victim’s ankles display any thickening of the bones one would associate with a healed fracture. There were only two explanations: either Dolores Kielty was wrong about her son’s injury; or else the body we found in the barn at Carrigans was not Martin Kielty. If the latter, how was it possible that the dental records I had obtained in Strabane matched the dead man?
I rang Jim Hendry again and asked him to contact Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry, which was out of my jurisdiction, to pull Martin Kielty’s file for the purposes of formal identification. I guessed that any surgical treatment he had received would have been there. Sure enough, when I drove down to the hospital after lunch, they presented me with a thick beige medical file.
I flicked through his notes myself and, though most of them meant nothing to me, I came across a series of X-ray images of Kielty’s leg following his accident, including several images of his newly pinned ankle.
I phoned Dr Long again from the road and asked him to meet me in Letterkenny. An hour later, after comparing the notes from Altnagelvin with his own notes from the postmortem, he concluded that the body we had recovered in the fire could not have been Martin Kielty.
‘Jesus,’ Harry Patterson said when I told him. ‘I mean . . . Jesus.’
‘The dental notes I was given matched the dead body.’
‘Then they weren’t Kielty’s notes.’
‘Obviously,’ I said.
‘Don’t get sarky with me. Have you contacted his relatives yet?’
I hadn’t, dreading having to admit to Kielty’s mother in particular that I had caused her several days of pointless suffering.
‘Not yet. I want to find out how it happened first. I’m going to go back to the dentist, find out what the hell went on with their files.’
‘It’s too coincidental. Someone switched those files deliberately.’
‘Do you think?’ I asked. Patterson was developing quite a knack for stating the obvious.
The dentist, Roger Hughes, denied that the surgery was in any way responsible for the mix-up. He had given me sealed patient notes in good faith.
I explained that the notes matched the body we had found; it was just that they didn’t belong to Martin Kielty, despite being in his file.
‘I understand that,’ Hughes said. ‘But there’s nothing further I can do to help. You asked for our notes on Martin Kielty. You were given the notes we had in Kielty’s file.’
‘Is there no way you can find out if his file has been mixed up with someone else’s?’
Hughes looked at me as if I were mad. ‘I have over five hundred patients in this practice. Without a patient’s name, I can’t help you.’
He showed me out to the reception area. After he had returned to his room, I asked the girl on the desk who was responsible for compiling notes and ensuring they went into the right files.
‘I am,’ she said. ‘Why?’
As tactfully as possible, and without making her feel that she was being blamed, I explained the situation to her.
‘That’s impossible,’ she claimed. ‘You’ve made a mistake.’
‘I have,’ I conceded. ‘But I’m not the only one. We have a dead body and no name.’
‘There’s nothing I can do,’ she said. ‘Without a name.’
I thanked her and turned to leave. Then, taking a chance, I went back to her.
‘Was someone called Lorcan Hutton a patient here?’
‘I’m not at liberty to say.’
‘Can you ask Mr Hughes? Mr Hutton is dead so I’m sure he’ll not mind.’
A few minutes after she buzzed him, Hughes emerged from his surgery wearing a blue paper facemask, which he tore off. ‘I’m extremely busy. I’m up to my eyes in root treatments today.’
‘I’m up to my eyes in dead bodies,’ I retorted. ‘I’d like some help.’
He conceded the point with a light wave of his hand. ‘What?’
‘Was Lorcan Hutton one of your patients?’
Hughes nodded to the receptionist – Karen – who tapped a couple of keys on the computer keyboard in front of her, then looked at the screen. She glanced up at Hughes and shook her head.
‘No,’ Hughes said.
‘What about Ian Hamill?’ I asked. Hamill was the only other name I had in connection with Kielty.