Burgess snorted. ‘That part-timer, Black, wants to know, should he go back out to that house again? He sat outside it for most of his shift yesterday helping the Forensics.’
I’d forgotten that I’d asked him to go out to assist. ‘Where is he?’ I asked, eager to find out what, if anything, Forensics had uncovered.
‘He’s doing a border checkpoint. Superintendent Patterson asked for “increased Gardai visibility”. For the benefit of the press, what with this whole thing with The Rising going on.’
Paul Black was standing at the end of Lifford bridge, his squad car parked in the middle of the road, while he waved through car after car. I parked outside the old customs post and watched him for a moment and noticed that the only vehicles he stopped were those being driven by young, attractive women. I supposed he was showing some initiative. I parped the car horn a few times and he reluctantly pulled himself away from the small Tigra he had stopped and ran over to join me.
‘You’re doing good work there, Paul. So long as all our drug dealers are good-looking young women, the streets of Lifford are safe with you.’
‘What?’ He looked at me blankly.
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘How did it go yesterday, Paul?’
‘Fine,’ he replied, though I notice his leg had started jittering up and down. ‘The Forensics team were there for most of the day.’
‘What did they find?’
‘The murder weapon – a kitchen knife.’
‘Where?’
‘In the shed, close to where the body was. The blade had been cleaned. The handle was plastic and had melted in the fire.’
‘Anything of use from it?’
‘It was taken from Kielty’s house.’
I nodded. I remembered that one had been missing from the set in the kitchen of the cottage. ‘Anything else?’
‘A lot of fingerprints. A couple of hundred apparently. They’re going to have to run through them to cross reference them or whatever you call it.’
‘Any of them useable?’
‘I dunno,’ he said.
‘Any bullet casings? I was called out because of reports of gunfire.’
He shook his head.
‘What else
did
they find?’ I asked with growing exasperation.
‘Someone started the fire deliberately. They found traces of accelerant near the back of the barn, and a few melted plastic bags with traces of dope and stuff. And they found a few melted containers they said might have had petrol in them.’
The presence of an accelerant was in keeping with what Dr Long had said following the post-mortem. The containers exploding would probably also have accounted for the reports of gunfire.
‘Though they said there wasn’t much,’ he added, his jittering becoming more exaggerated.
‘Much what?’
‘Drugs. They found traces just. Lots of bags, but only traces of coke, like he’s had his stash there at one stage. They reckoned the coke was high purity though – really good stuff. If you like that kind of thing.’ He squeezed his two hands between his legs as he spoke.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I need a slash and I’m the only one on the border,’ he said.
‘Jesus, go into the Customs post and go. It’ll not matter if you’re off the checkpoint for five minutes.’
‘I just thought – the Super sent me out. I thought it was important.’
‘I’ll keep an eye,’ I said, rolling down my window and lighting a smoke. ‘Make sure no undesirables slip through.’
It was while I was sitting in the car, enjoying my smoke, that Joe McCready phoned me to say that a body had been found on the beach at Rossnowlagh.
A bracing wind, heavy with the scent of salt water, had risen somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. It thudded across the heavy-bodied waves that had washed the corpse of Peter Williams onto the beach. A local doctor, acting in the role of medical examiner, was carrying out a superficial examination of the body before confirming death. I watched the breakers rush the shoreline and waited for Caroline and her estranged husband, Simon, who were making their way back from Dublin.
For once, there were no Scene of Crime Officers or journalists present. There appeared to be no crime involved in the death of Peter Williams, beyond the wasted life of a young man who, perhaps in a drunken stupor, had fallen into the darkness and plunged several hundred feet into the Atlantic Ocean below. The headland from which he had most likely fallen was already shrouded in a pall of rain.
An American couple, attracted to the Atlantic coast on the promise of good surfing, had found the body an hour earlier, as they came back to shore after a day on the boards. They were currently in the Sandcastle Hotel, in the company of the Garda Joe McCready, who had accompanied me to the site.
As the doctor, a locum from Sligo, stood up, I approached him. ‘Storm coming,’ he said, nodding out towards the darkening sky on the horizon.
‘Anything unusual, Doc?’ I asked, handing him a cigarette, then taking one for myself.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Apart from a fifteen-year-old fella falling off a cliff. Are you sure the parents want to see him?’
I glanced down at the body. Were it not for the clothes, positive identification would have proven difficult. I recalled my last view of him, nestled in the back seat of his grandparents’ car, beside Caroline’s father. His hair had been soft and blond, his features, like Caroline’s, small and neat, his eyes pale blue, his mouth slightly crooked when he smiled. It was one of the most disturbing things I had ever done to look at him now. He was, naturally, taller than I remembered, but his build was impossible to discern by the bloating the seawater had caused, and his skin had swollen and wrinkled, leaving his face distorted. One of his eyes had been removed from its socket, presumably by a sea animal, and chunks of flesh had been torn from his cheeks and neckline.
‘Crabs,’ the doctor commented, following the line of my gaze. ‘It could have been worse.’
‘Could it?’ I asked.
‘I worked in Derry for a while,’ he stated. ‘We had jumpers going off the bridges almost every other week. You get used to it.’
‘I hope not,’ I said.
The doctor nodded past me. ‘You might want to stop them,’ he suggested with a flick of his head.
I turned around to see Simon and Caroline Williams emerge from the Garda car that had collected them when news of the body’s discovery broke. They slowed as they approached us and could glimpse more clearly their son lying on the sand.
I strode up the beach towards them, my arms outstretched in a futile attempt to block their view. Caroline walked slightly ahead of her husband, her arms gathered around her. Her face was drawn and pale, her eyes red-rimmed. She looked at me without speaking, her expression one of pleading, both for news that her son had been found, and also partly the hope that he had not.
‘I’m so sorry, Caroline.’
She fell against me, her fists bunched against the side of her face, her thin shoulders hunched in tight knots. Simon continued walking towards the body, seemingly having not heard what I said.
Still holding Caroline, I reached out and put my hand on his arm. He turned towards me and away from his son’s body, his eyes glistening with both anger and sheer terror.
‘Might be best not to, Mr Williams. Remember him how he was, eh?’
He looked at my hand where it rested on his arm, and stared levelly at me until I let go. Then he moved past me and stopped.
His cry seemed to die in his throat, as if the sight before him had taken the wind from him. Despite my best efforts, Caroline broke from me and rushed down to her son, stopping a few yards short of the body, her arms hanging at her sides. Simon stood above the corpse, his hands covering his mouth. Caroline inched forwards towards her son and dropped to her knees. She reached out and touched her son’s head, her hands barely making contact with his hair. I gradually became aware of a low keening noise building in strength over the rush of the noise of the waves beating against the beach. Finally Caroline opened her mouth and a single, savage shriek of pain seemed to tear itself from her and hang suspended in the air.
I approached them slowly. The Sligo doctor had muttered his sympathies and was making his way up the beach towards the hotel. I nodded to him as he passed, and said I would be up in a while. Simon now knelt on the sand beside Caroline, gulping for breath against the wind, his face smeared with his tears. I knelt to the other side of her and put my arm around her shoulders. Despite her husband’s proximity, she leaned against me and I waited with them, while the thick grey Atlantic rushed up the beach towards us under purpled twists of clouds.
Simon placed his two hands in front of his face, as if in prayer.
‘I’m afraid . . . I’m afraid to touch him,’ he said.
‘It’s OK,’ I said.
‘He’s my boy and I can’t touch him.’
I could think of nothing to say to the man. I knew that Simon had had little time for Peter as a child, indeed had not seen him in almost a decade. Despite my professional and human urge to console a bereaved parent, I found it difficult to look at Simon without the memory surfacing of the injuries he had inflicted on his wife and his emotional neglect of his son.
‘I saw him born,’ he said, turning towards me, his expression almost one of pleading. ‘I had to see him . . . you know.’
I nodded silently, placing my hand on his shoulder. He turned to face Caroline, shrugging away my hand as he did so.
‘This is your fault,’ he said.
Beyond us, a breaker rose briefly, then exploded against the shore, flecking the body of Peter Williams with its foam.
Soon after, Peter’s body was removed by the undertakers to be transferred to Sligo General Hospital for a post-mortem examination. I had asked for toxicology tests to be run; while the boys with whom Peter had been camping had admitted that some alcohol had been taken, I wanted a more accurate assessment of how much he’d taken before he died.
For our part, we moved up to the hotel, where the manager had provided us with a room and a supply of tea and sandwiches. Simon had spoken little on our way up from the beach.
When we got inside, the heat made the sweat break on my face, even while my skin remained numbed from the wind. Caroline had stopped crying and busied herself pouring tea. Simon stood to one side, speaking into his mobile phone, telling a partner or family member about the discovery. He had not changed much in the past decade. He was a small, squat figure – five eight maybe – carrying excess weight around his gut. He had thinning, sandy hair brushed over to one side to cover his increasing baldness. His arms were heavy, his fingers’ stubbiness accentuated by gold rings. He wore glasses with reactive lenses that even now, under the lights of the hotel conference room, were slightly darkened. He returned my gaze without discernible emotion as he continued his conversation on the phone.
‘That was unfair – what he said to you. It’s not true,’ I said, taking the cup of tea that Caroline offered me.
She looked at me, her eyelids dropping slightly. ‘He’s upset. He doesn’t mean half of what he says.’
I waited for her to say something else, but she simply sipped her tea. She sat upright, her legs crossed at the ankles, her shoulders rounded as if she was physically regressing into herself.
The air in the room had taken on an unusual quality, the light seeming to have stilled and greyed. In the distance we heard the first heavy rumbling of a thunderstorm. The windows stippled with heavy drops of rain, which ran grimy steaks in the fine dusting of sand on the glass.
Simon concluded his conversation by snapping his phone shut, then came over to where we were sitting. He stood above us.
‘Where’s my tea?’ he asked, staring at Caroline.
‘I’ll get it for you,’ she said, standing up so suddenly she spilt some of her own tea on her hand and trouser leg. ‘Shit,’ she said, trying to find somewhere to place her cup and saucer.
I stood and reached for a handful of napkins from the table for her, but in order to do so, I had to reach past Simon. He continued to stand in my way, until I had to ask him to let me past.
By the time I had gathered a handful and turned to Caroline, she had already wiped her hands dry on her jumper and was pouring Simon his tea. He must have recognized the annoyance on my face as he returned my stare.
‘He’s still an asshole,’ I told my wife Debbie later. I had accompanied Caroline and Simon back to the B&B where they were both staying, though in separate rooms, before coming on home myself to get something to eat. Peter’s body would not be ready to be waked until the following day, when his remains would be taken back to his grandparents’ house in Sligo.
‘He’s lost a child, Ben,’ Debbie said. She was washing up the dishes while I finished eating. By the time I’d got home, the rest of the family had already eaten and our children, Penny and Shane, were in bed.
‘He didn’t give a rat’s ass about Peter when he was alive. Caroline was the one who cared for him. She’s grieving too, but she’s not throwing her weight about.’
‘You can’t get involved,’ Debbie said, putting down the dishcloth and coming over to the table to sit. ‘You know how marriages work. You need to stay out of it.’