Bleed a River Deep

BLEED A RIVER DEEP

Brian McGilloway was born in Derry, Northern
Ireland, in 1974, and teaches English at the
city’s St Columb’s College.

Also by Brian McGilloway in the Inspector Devlin series
BORDERLANDS
GALLOWS LANE
THE RISING

BRIAN McGILLOWAY

BLEED A
RIVER DEEP

PAN BOOKS

First published 2009 by Macmillan

This edition published 2010 by Pan Books

This electronic edition published 2010 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
Associated companies throughout the world

ISBN 978-0-230-74011-2 PDF
ISBN 978-0-230-74010-5 EPUB

Copyright © Brian McGilloway 2009

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For Will Atkins

Contents

Chapter One: Friday, 29 September

Chapter Two: Friday, 29 September

Chapter Three: Saturday, 30 September - Monday, 2 October

Chapter Four: Tuesday, 3 October

Chapter Five: Wednesday, 4 October - Thursday, 5 October

Chapter Six: Friday, 6 October

Chapter Seven: Saturday, 7 October

Chapter Eight: Sunday, 8 October

Chapter Nine: Monday, 9 October

Chapter Ten: Monday, 9 October

Chapter Eleven: Tuesday, 10 October

Chapter Twelve: Friday, 13 October

Chapter Thirteen: Saturday, 14 October

Chapter Fourteen: Sunday, 15 October

Chapter Fifteen: Monday, 16 October

Chapter Sixteen: Tuesday, 17 October

Chapter Seventeen: Wednesday, 18 October

Chapter Eighteen: Thursday, 19 October

Chapter Nineteen: Friday, 20 October

Chapter Twenty: Saturday, 21 October

Chapter Twenty-one: Sunday, 22 October

Chapter Twenty-two: Sunday, 22 October

Chapter Twenty-three: Monday, 23 October

Chapter Twenty-four: Monday, 23 October

Chapter Twenty-five: Tuesday, 24 October

Chapter Twenty-six: Wednesday, 25 October

Chapter Twenty-seven: Wednesday, 25 October

Epilogue: Friday, 24 November

Prologue

Monday, 9 October

The last time I saw Leon Bradley with a gun in his hand, he was standing in our garden at home. Only five years old and a little under three feet tall, he had a cowboy hat tipped back on his head, his hair, strands of fine spun gold, hanging in his eyes. My younger brother, Tom, who was playing the Indian, had taken refuge in our shed, sharpening his plastic knife in preparation for a scalping.

Leon had pointed the gun at me, one eye shut, the tip of his tongue poking out through his lips in concentration while he lined me up in his sights. He kept shaking his fringe from his open eye. ‘Hands up, Tonto,’ he said.

I raised my hands in surrender as I edged my way down the driveway and out on to the street. My friend – Leon’s older brother Fearghal – waited for me in his Ford Fiesta, revving the engine.

‘Bang, bang,’ I heard Leon shout just as I slammed the car door. As we sped off, I saw Leon in the rear-view mirror, mimicking a gun’s recoil with the plastic Smith & Wesson clenched in his tiny fist.

This was different though. Leon must have been in his late twenties now. His hair had darkened or was dyed brown, and hung in unwashed straggles down his neck. Yet his face was again contorted in pantomime concentration as he held the gun steady. Again he had one eye open, his mouth a thin pale line. I followed his gaze, followed the aim of his weapon to where US Senator Cathal Hagan stood, his face frozen in terror.

I pushed through the crowd towards him, my hand raised, a shout of warning caught in my throat. Then I heard the shot and glimpsed the muzzle flash, even as two American Secret Service agents, too late to compensate for the inadequacy of An Garda, grappled Leon to the ground. The gun, knocked loose from Leon’s grip, fell on to the floor, where it lay glinting in the autumn sunlight that streamed through the windows.

Chapter One

Friday, 29 September

‘They’ve uncovered a body out at the new mine.’

It took me a few seconds to realize the speaker was addressing me. I looked up from my desk to where Superintendent Harry Patterson loomed over me.

‘Excuse me?’

‘They’ve dug up a body out at the mine,’ he said irritably. ‘We’re going out there. It’s a dead body,’ he explained, turning to leave as he did so.

‘They generally are, if they’ve had to dig them up,’ I muttered to his retreating back.

‘And keep the smart-arse comments to yourself,’ he snapped. ‘Get a move on.’

The leaves had just begun to turn, and some green still showed from the massive oaks behind our home when I left that morning; the cherry trees though were predominately golden, the leaves beginning to twist and sag. The air was still ripe and warm, the tannic scent of autumn starting to sharpen.

The fact that Patterson himself was attending the site was indication enough of the priority this find was being given. It wasn’t so much what was found, but more
where
it was found: Orcas, a new goldmine opened two years previous near Barnes Gap, between Ballybofey and Donegal town, built on the promise of untold wealth to be shared with the whole community at some undefined point in the future. The body, Patterson explained in the car, had been found by some of the workers as they dug a new section of the mine. Patterson had been summoned by the owner himself, John Weston.

Weston was a second-generation Irish-American, whose family had moved back to ‘the old country’ following his father’s death. Bill Weston, John’s father, had been a senator in the US, as well as being extremely wealthy. John had inherited every cent and had developed a number of business projects in Ireland, supported by friends of his father. The Orcas goldmine was the biggest and, it appeared, the most successful.

Twenty minutes later Patterson turned the car up a narrow side road, and Orcas hove into view: sixteen acres of Donegal bogland which now housed Ireland’s largest goldmine. Preliminary tests conducted in the 1990s had shown the presence of several high-quality veins running through the rock under this land. One vein apparently stretched right across the sixteen acres and along the bed of the River Finn.

‘I wonder where . . .’ Patterson began, then stopped. There was no need to ask for directions. A convoy of Garda cars was already parked further up the road, alongside several 4x4s marked with Orcas livery. Half the force in Donegal must have been called out here, I thought. A good day to commit a crime anywhere else in the county.

The car made it almost to the site before getting stuck in a mud-filled puddle. We walked the rest of the way, our feet slipping on the wet path. Ahead of us a group of Guards had gathered, most still in their shirtsleeves. Some of them must have clocked Patterson, for they began to make themselves look busy. Some of the others just moved to the side of the road to let him past.

‘This is a right balls-up,’ he spat. ‘Weston’s just turned a record profit. Word was he was going to make a bigger investment. This could be enough to scare the fucker off.’

As we drew level with the pit, the two men standing in it dropped their spades and scrabbled up the bank of clay they had shifted. The soil was almost black and scented the morning air with the smell of mould. It took me a second or two to pick out the body from the surrounding earth, for the only parts visible at this stage were the head and part of the upper arm.

But Patterson had no need to worry about Weston getting scared off. If there was a murder involved here, it had happened a few thousand years earlier, by the look of it.

The corpse was curled in on itself. The underlying muscle was outlined by skin the texture of old leather. The face had been flattened, presumably by the weight of earth pressing on top of it. The eyes were open, though the sockets long emptied. The mouth likewise was fixed ajar, the teeth, slightly gapped and blunted, were still lodged in the jawbone. There was certainly no sense of serenity in death: the face was twisted as if in agony. One arm protruded slightly from the dirt, the fingernails still attached to the talon-like hand.

‘Jesus, what is it?’ Patterson asked. ‘Should we call the State Pathologist or the archaeologist?’

A few of the men standing around grunted good-humouredly.

‘Still, at least he didn’t die on our watch, eh, boys?’ he continued.

‘Do we need an ME to declare it dead?’ someone called. More laughter.

‘Best get Forensics up anyway,’ Patterson concluded. ‘Just to keep it all official and that.’ Then he nodded to me: ‘We’re to see Weston.’

As we travelled towards the main building, I looked out across the mine. When it first opened, it had been the subject of some controversy from environmental lobby groups, and I had had my own reservations about it, based on the little I had read in the papers. In reality, the mine itself was not at all what I had expected and much smaller than I’d imagined, though the scarring it had already inflicted on the landscape was still significant.

Two large warehouses squatted side by side, their low corrugated roofs painted blood-red. Despite the size, only a few workmen were visible, and I counted a half-dozen cars parked in the staff area. One, a black Lexus with personalized number plates spattered with mud, revealed that Weston was already here.

We were directed to the only brick building in the compound, a white stucco three-storey block. A workman was at the front door, fastening a bronze plaque to the wall with an electric screwdriver. It caught the sun as he shifted it into position. He nodded as we passed, then snuffled into the back of his wrist and continued with his work.

Weston’s receptionist was waiting for us when we entered the building. The floor was covered with thick carpet on which the image of a gold torc was repeated in a series of diagonal patterns. To one side of the reception desk stood a mahogany display cabinet, its contents lit by tiny halogen spotlights. The shelves of the cabinet glittered with gold jewellery. I wandered over and scanned the contents and their price tags while Patterson ingratiated himself with the twenty-year-old receptionist behind the desk. The smallest item in the cabinet – a pair of stud earrings – was priced at €350.