Bleed a River Deep (26 page)

As I lay on the floor by the toilet, I gradually became aware again of the noises of my home: the sound of a television; footsteps on the stairs; Penny reading softly to herself in bed. I lay on the floor for ten or fifteen minutes, until I began to shiver with the cold. Then I got up and dressed.

As I came out of the bathroom, Natalia passed me on the way into her room. She smiled lightly and I noticed that she was wearing a little make-up, her face slightly rouged.

‘Where’s Natalia going?’ I asked Debbie when I came downstairs.

‘Karol is taking her to a dinner.’

‘On a date?’ I asked.

Debbie shushed me and, glancing up at the ceiling, lowered her voice. ‘Not quite, though I think he’s hopeful it’ll be the start of something. I told you he was very fond of her.’

‘Where are they going?’

‘Apparently a group of immigrants meet once a month for dinner and a few drinks. He invited her along.’

I looked at my watch. ‘It’s very late to be going out for dinner,’ I said.

Debbie threw a cushion at me. ‘She is an adult, you know.’

‘I’m just saying. It’s very late.’

Debbie tutted. ‘God love Penny when she grows up,’ she said, turning her attention back to the television.

As I heard Natalia’s soft footfalls on the stairs, the headlights of Karol Walshyk’s car swept across the blinds of our front window. Natalia came into the living room and stood before Debbie, waiting to be inspected.

‘You look lovely,’ Debbie said.

Natalia glanced at me and I felt Debbie’s foot strike my calf.

‘Sorry. You look very well,’ I said.

Natalia blushed and straightened her hair with her hands, presumably to hide both her embarrassment and her pleasure.

The doorbell rang and Natalia waved at us with her fingers and went out to the door.

‘Aren’t you going to tell her not to be late?’ Debbie said teasingly. In response, I leant towards the doorway as if to call out to Natalia.

The words died in my mouth, though, when I looked out. Pol Strandmann was there in my hall, Natalia held in front of him, a knife pressed against her throat, as he tried to shove her towards the front door.

‘Don’t move,’ he snarled, bearing feral teeth. ‘I’ll cut the bitch’s throat.’ He pressed the knife’s edge against her skin, the pressure leaving a long white line on her neck.

‘Let her go, Pol,’ I said. ‘You’ve nowhere to go.’

He glanced behind him to his left and right, as if to ascertain whether he had an escape route. ‘They’ve nothing,’ he spat. ‘Nothing without this bitch. They can’t get me for anything.’

‘And what then?’ I asked. ‘You think you’ll get away with it? I’ve seen you here. You think I won’t come after you? Don’t be stupid. Put the knife down. We can talk. Give me Morrison and I’ll see you’re treated lightly.’

‘Bullshit! Do you think Morrison’d let that happen?’

‘Where are you going to go? Eh?’ I edged closer towards him and he moved back towards the open doorway. I couldn’t let him get out with Natalia. ‘Where are you going to go, Pol? Walk out that door and I’ll have half the fucking force on you in ten minutes. Morrison’ll be the last of your worries.’

‘I’ll disappear,’ he said, his voice rising hysterically. ‘How the fuck do you think we bring them in? You think I can’t disappear? Make a new name and vanish?’ He giggled a little manically. Under the light of our hall, I could make out his eyes, his pupils pinpoints, the irises ringed with red.

I moved towards our fireplace, where the hearth-set contained a poker.

‘Not another fucking step,’ he said. ‘I’ll saw off her fucking head.’ He laughed again, a queer, high-pitched giggle that he seemed to have some difficulty in controlling.

‘You can get help,’ I said. ‘Morrison is the one we want. You could give him to us. It’ll make things easy for you.’

‘Easy? Morrison? He’ll skin me alive.’

‘You’ll be protected,’ I reasoned. ‘It’s the only way.’

He stared at me as if weighing up my proposition. He shook his head violently and in doing so applied more pressure to the blade he had pressed against Natalia’s throat. She cried out.

At that moment Karol Walshyk stepped through the open door, holding aloft a piece of rock he had lifted from our garden. He brought it down with force on the back of Strandmann’s skull before the man had even had a chance to register his presence.

Strandmann dropped heavily to the ground and his knife clattered across the wooden floor. Natalia fell forwards and clawed her way into the living room, where Debbie rushed to her.

Karol was kneeling over Strandmann’s motionless body, the rock raised above his head. Again he brought it down hard on Strandmann’s skull, the thud sickening, the force causing blood to splatter against him and onto the wall to his left. He raised his hand a third time, his face contorted in rage.

‘Karol, don’t!’ I shouted, approaching him, my hand held out for the rock.

‘He deserves it,’ Karol barked, his words a tumble in the thickness of his accent. ‘He deserves it for what he did.’

‘He does,’ I said. ‘But not like this. He can give us the man who brought Natalia in. He can help us get the person responsible.’

Karol stared at me, his body heaving with the effort of his exertions. He looked down at the prone figure lying beneath him, then looked at his own hand, thick with gouts of blood.

Finally he stood erect and, stepping away from the body, let the rock fall from his hand. It lay on the ground while around it Strandmann’s blood was pooling. Upstairs I could hear my children getting out of bed, wondering what the commotion below was. Debbie rushed to get to them, to prevent them coming onto the landing and looking down.

Karol stepped past me and went into the living room, where he wrapped his arms around Natalia, who hugged into him, her body shuddering with tears, her face pressed against his bloodstained shirt. He held her tight and looked at me, willing me to ensure that her tears were not in vain. I had convinced him that keeping Strandmann alive would serve justice. I had only now to convince myself.

Epilogue

Friday, 24 November

In the week following those events, the NBCI and the PSNI worked closely in piecing together the relationship between Orcas and Eligius. Eventually, the evidence and documentation they found prompted them to reach the following conclusion.

Orcas had opened after initial exploration suggested they had found a sizeable gold deposit. The early vein they found had been used to produce the jewellery I had seen on my first trip out to the mine. However, after setting up the mine, Weston and the funders must have quickly realized that the vein had run dry sooner than expected and the mine was going to incur huge, potentially embarrassing losses for the Irish-American businesses behind it.

Meanwhile, Cathal Hagan, or someone acting on his behalf, agreed to the sale of military software to Chechen rebels. Seamus Curran, a friend of Hagan’s, was engaged to use the freight firm in which he was a partner to take the goods into the country, as part of a delivery of charity goods. Someone, presumably Morrison himself, had then reached an agreement with the rebels to bring back illegal immigrants. Increasing prof its further, Morrison, through Barry Ford, had not only continued to extort money from the immigrants after their arrival in the country, but had also begun laundering fuel for use in the transit of goods across Europe.

Hagan turned Orcas’s misfortunes to his advantage by using the company, in which he was an investor, as a means to launder the money he had made through the illegal sale of software. Weston had participated in the deception, falsifying the productivity reports to make it seem as if the mine was as successful as its prof its suggested. It all came to light when Leon Bradley, initially attracted to the area on the promise of a new gold rush, began to investigate the pollution in the river caused by Morrison’s fuel dump.

All of this was reported back to me by Patterson after the NBCI had completed their search of Orcas.

‘What about Morrison?’ I asked him when he had finished relating the findings of the NBCI team. ‘What can he be held accountable for?’

‘Nothing apart from the fuel thing. There’s no evidence that he knew what was being taken to Chechnya was illegal,’ Patterson said.

‘What about Hagan? What’s going to happen there?’

Again Patterson shrugged. ‘It’s not our concern. I suppose it’ll be embarrassing for him, with his War on Terror thing. Looks bad for people to find out you’ve been selling parts to terrorists yourself. The NBCI will pass on what they have to the Yanks, I imagine. It’ll be up to them, really, but Hagan’s well connected.’

‘So, who answers for what happened?’ I asked, attempting to control my frustration.

‘Weston takes the blame for everything. You were so desperate to get something on him.
Well done!’
he added.

Before I could respond he continued, ‘Of course, you were out of order in so many ways this time too, Devlin. And yet you still manage to come out of it smelling like roses.’

‘I don’t think anything that happened here turned out the way I wanted, Harry.’

‘Whatever. I’ve put in a request for a transfer,’ Patterson said suddenly.

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ I said. ‘My family are settled here.’

‘Not for you. Costello set up the Super’s office here when his wife was sick. I’ve decided to move it back to Letterkenny. That leaves you responsible for this station.’

I was more than a little taken aback. ‘Why? I mean, thank you. But – why?’ The move was in a way a promotion, though I would remain under Patterson’s command as Superintendent.

‘You were right,’ he said.

‘Truthfully?’

‘Truthfully. It’ll keep you out of my hair for a while and I’ll not have you barging into my office every time you feel like it.’

And, I reflected, it reduced the risk of my revealing his involvement in the murder of Janet Moore (for which her husband was awaiting sentencing), or his tipping off Weston about the impending Garda searches of his premises.

Suddenly I felt as uneasy as I had when Weston had gifted me the gold necklace.

‘I’m moving next week,’ Patterson added. ‘I’d love to say I’ll be sorry to leave you here, but it wouldn’t be true.’

Despite my assurance to Karol Walshyk, Pol Strandmann ultimately could play no part in bringing Vincent Morrison to justice. He never recovered consciousness following Karol’s attack on him in my home and remained in a vegetative state at the time Morrison finally came to trial.

In the absence of any living witness to corroborate our knowledge of Morrison’s activities, the Public Prosecution Service in the North decided that the only charges that could be successfully prosecuted related to the use of illegal fuel in his fleet.

I attended the court on the day of Morrison’s case. About fifteen minutes before he was due to appear, I stepped out to the side of the building to have a smoke. Several barristers stood, in gowns and wigs, cigarettes clamped in their mouths as they conducted business over their mobiles.

To my far left a family stood, the man obscured by his wife and children. The youngest child, a girl, was sobbing uncontrollably. Her father squatted down to her level and I could hear him speaking to her in a placatory manner.

Even when I saw his face, it took me a few seconds to register that the man was in fact Vincent Morrison.

‘Thought it was you,’ he said, winking conspiratorially.

Initially I tried to ignore him, dragging deeply on my cigarette to finish it faster.

He said something to his wife and broke away from his family to approach me. His daughter hugged his leg, but he disentangled himself from her and walked over.

‘Here to gloat?’ he asked, lighting a smoke.

‘Here to see you get what you deserve,’ I said. I was aware of his wife watching me with open hostility. The elder child, a boy, scraped the toe of his shoe along the edge of the kerb, his hands in his pockets.

Morrison tilted his head from side to side, as if weighing up my words. ‘What I deserve? Aye, maybe that’s true. But then, as you know, it could have been much worse.’

‘It should have been,’ I retorted. ‘It’ll catch up with you.’

‘No it won’t,’ he replied with a sharpness at odds with the friendly nature of his opening banter.

‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Curran’s kids are left without their father. For what?’

‘You’re the only one can answer that.’

‘Do
they
know what you do? Your son? Does he know his father’s a killer?’

‘Does yours? Barry Ford’s shooter. Do you go home and tell your kids about all the fuck-ups?’ he snorted. ‘Thought not. I’m just providing for my family – same as you.’

‘You destroy people’s lives. You deserve everything you get.’

He ground out his cigarette and came close to me, close enough for me to smell the tobacco off his breath.

‘Don’t be so fucking naïve. You know what I’ll get? Six months, a year max. You’ve done me a favour. The Assets Recovery Agency took my vans. I’ve been bankrupted to pay back duty on fucking fuel. I’ll do six months. But that’s it. That’s the best you’ve been able to do. I’ll have earned twice what they took from me a year after I get out, and neither you nor anybody else will be able to do a sweet fucking thing about it.’

I met his glare and tried to appear defiant, but what he had said was true. For all that Morrison had done, the worst that would happen to him was a six-month sentence. He had cleaned up behind himself so carefully, had taken out every witness who could possibly incriminate him, that no one could prove anything. And what he said frightened me. Most criminals are stupid; that’s how they get caught. Morrison was growing sharper all the time.

‘Six months,’ he repeated. ‘I’ll be sure to look you up when I get out. We’ll catch up.’

‘You do that,’ I said. ‘I’ll be waiting for you.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ he said, smiling broadly, then winked at me, clicking his tongue as he did so. He put his hands in his pockets and turned back to his family.