The Rising (17 page)

‘You want Confession; go see a priest. I don’t give a shit what you did. You think you’re the first to lift your hand to someone? My only surprise is that you had it in you,’ he added, laughing to himself.

‘What if he presses charges?’ I asked.

‘Then I’ll have you arrested, same as anyone else,’ Patterson replied, all laughing done now. ‘Get the fuck out of here until then.’

I went outside for a smoke before I did anything else. I felt a little better for having told Patterson. At least this way there would be no surprises. Though I was also aware that he would happily allow me to face whatever I had coming to me alone. I tried not to think about it. I had wanted to speak to our technical officer, Josh Edwards, while I was in Letterkenny and so headed back into the station. I got as far as the front desk when I was stopped.

‘Inspector Devlin,’ the sergeant called. ‘The car pound say they have a motorbike belonging to one of yours. They want rid of it.’

It took me a moment to realize that the motorbike in question had been Martin Kielty’s. ‘I’ll go see his partner today,’ I said.

Josh Edwards was the only technical officer in Letterkenny, who had gained his position not through training but rather a simple love of computers. Over the years he’d made himself indispensable in working with any IT problems in the station and was eventually granted his own room, where he surrounded himself with machines in various stages of disrepair. He had made himself at home, and when I entered he was rooting through his mini fridge. He produced a bar of chocolate for himself and, seeing me, reached in and threw me one as well.

‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ he asked through a mouthful of Snickers.

‘Do you ever get bored in here?’ I asked.

‘Here? How could I? My work is so . . .
valued
,’ he said, straining to remain deadpan.

‘How do you fancy helping me out with something?’

His response, muffled as it was by his mouthful of chocolate, approximated ‘That depends.’

‘An interview. We found a body in Rossnowlagh. He died on Sunday morning and someone used the boy’s phone that night to text his mother and say he was all right.’

‘Sick bastard.’

‘I don’t think the guy who did it was sick. I think he was scared.’

‘So where do I come in?’ Edwards asked.

‘Let me check with the officer in charge. I might bring you in as a technical expert.’

‘Typecasting again,’ Edwards said. ‘Story of my life.’

I called Rory Nicell on my way back to Lifford and arranged to meet him at Rolston Court. I sat outside Lorcan Hutton’s house and had a smoke. Photographs of the house showed the considerable damage that someone had done to it prior to the Forensic team’s arrival. I read through the statements the uniforms had taken from Hutton’s neighbours. Most commented on the numbers of vehicles that had been arriving at and leaving the house over the past year or two. Several commented that they had reported Hutton’s activities to the Guards but nothing had been done. One or two ventured that they were glad he had been killed, that maybe the house prices might start to recover now there wasn’t a drugs den in the centre of the cul-de-sac.

Only one person, Hutton’s immediate neighbour, was able to suggest a possible date for his death. In his statement, Ryan Allan said he had noticed Hutton’s absence since the 15th of January. He was used to Hutton coming and going, and knew that days went past when he wasn’t home, but Hutton had left with a friend on the 15th and had not returned since.

Mr Allan was at home when I called. He was in his late fifties, I reckoned, though looked significantly older. For the duration of our interview he punctuated each sentence by drawing deeply on the oxygen mask he held in his hand. Two large tanks sat beside his chair, which in turn sat facing both the small television in the corner and a window which afforded him a clear view of his neighbour’s driveway where my car now sat.

‘I appreciate your speaking to me, sir,’ I said, sitting on the sofa to his right. ‘I’ll try to take as little of your time as possible.’

He waved away my comment and took a deep rasping pull on his mask. ‘’S fine. Happy to talk.’

‘I just wanted to follow up your statement about Lorcan Hutton, sir. You said you last saw him on the 15th of January.’

‘’S right.’

‘That’s very specific, sir. Are you sure of that date?’

He nodded and tapped the top of the tank beside him with the thickened fingernail of his index finger.

‘Read the label,’ he said.

I leant across him and glanced at the sticker on top of the tank. Written in pen under the ‘Last Checked’ area of the label was ‘15/1’.

‘Man that leaves these was here that day. He was setting them up when Lorcan left.’

‘Did you see the man with whom he left? His friend?’

Allan drew on the mask as he nodded. His eyes bulged slightly as he did so, his skin flushing red. He held the mask clamped to his face for perhaps thirty seconds before the fit seemed to pass.

‘Thin fella. Grey hair cropped up.’

‘Would you know him if you saw him again?’ I asked.

‘Course,’ Allan said, as if I had offended him.

I took the three pictures of The Rising members from my pocket along with the image I had of Kielty.

Allan studied each of them, looking from one to the other carefully. He held up the picture of Kielty. ‘He was there before but not that day.’ He flicked through the pictures again and lifted the picture of Irvine. ‘Him too. But not that day either.’

‘Were they here together?’

He shook his head. ‘That one,’ he said, holding up Kielty’s picture, ‘was here with another fella. But none of these.’ He flicked through the other two and held up the image of Tony Armstrong. ‘He’s the one I saw Lorcan with,’ he said.

‘On the 15th – he’s the one you saw leaving with Lorcan?’

He nodded as he glanced out the window. ‘And he was back since then himself.’

‘You’re sure about this?’ I persevered.

He nodded again, his face obscured behind the oxygen mask.

‘You didn’t think to phone the Guards when you saw him back alone?’

He looked at me a little angrily. ‘Would it have made any difference? The number of people wandering in and out of that house?’ His ire seemed to exhaust him and he lifted the oxygen mask to his face shakily and drew deeply on it. ‘Plenty around here phoned youse about what went on in there.’

I knew he was right, of course.

‘But you saw this man with Lorcan on the last day he was here?’

He nodded again, absent-mindedly though, his attention seemed to have been distracted by something happening outside, which I could not see from my angle.

He raised his hand shakily and pointed out the window. ‘He was with that first one,’ he said, then took another quick gasp from the mask. ‘Him there.’

‘What?’ I got up quickly and went to the window. It was Rory Nicell getting out of his car.

‘He was with that man?’ I asked, grabbing the picture of Kielty from him and holding it up.

He nodded. ‘I’m certain of it. Never forget a face. Spend me days looking out at them coming and going.’

‘You’re absolutely sure?’

Allan was unable to speak for a moment as he breathed heavily into his mask, but his vigorous nodding left little room for misinterpretation.

‘Thank you, Mr Allan,’ I said, standing up to leave. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

I was unsure what to say to Nicell when I met him outside Hutton’s house and he seemed to sense my unease for he looked at me a little quizzically.

‘I followed up your interest in Morrison,’ he said finally as I unlocked Hutton’s front door and entered the house.

‘Anything?’

‘Not at the moment. If he is involved in drugs, he’s keeping his head down.’

‘What about his links with The Rising?’

‘It actually seems to be more a case of The Rising attaching themselves to a legitimate community group opportunistically. I’m not sure Morrison is connected beyond that.’

‘Have you heard anything more about The Rising?’

He nodded. ‘Bits and pieces. Apparently they’ve been picking on certain dealers for a reason. The word is that Irvine is trying to push his own stuff. He’s forcing lower-level dealers to sell his stuff, then picking on those who refuse. He’s clear on Kielty, though, isn’t he?’

‘Not on Hutton, though, because we don’t know when he was killed.’ I stopped myself from mentioning what Ryan Allan had told me about the 15th of January until I could establish Nicell’s connection with Hutton. ‘Might Irvine have taken out Hutton as a rival supplier?’

‘Hutton was a dealer, not a supplier. They might have been trying to force him into selling for them. There was one big supplier for the border area – a guy who lived in Galliagh in Derry.’

‘The one they tarred and feathered?’

‘The very same.’

‘What about Ian Hamill? Does his name ring any bells?’

‘Never heard of him. Who is he?’

‘I think he’s connected in some way with Kielty’s killing. His car was spotted at the scene. His house has been trashed. The PSNI are on lookout for him, but I’ve heard nothing from them.’

‘Can’t help you there, I’m afraid. Though by the looks of it, Hutton and Kielty were killed by different people. Maybe Hamill did Kielty, Irvine did Hutton?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Two dealers in a month. Makes you wonder if the killers are worth tracking, eh?’ Nicell said, laughing lightly.

‘Kielty had a baby,’ I said.

‘Plenty of other fathers were hurt by Kielty and his kind. I wouldn’t be killing myself over it, you know.’

‘We should take a look around,’ I suggested, unwilling to continue the conversation further.

The house itself had been thoroughly checked by Forensics. In their initial report they had noted that the rooms had shown signs of ransacking. The mattresses in the rooms upstairs had been slashed, the wardrobes emptied of clothes.

The downstairs rooms had likewise been gone over. The suite of furniture in the living room had been upended and the cloth bottom ripped back. DVDs from the shelves to the left of the hearth had been scattered on the floor. The TV sitting on a wooden corner cabinet, a new LCD model, had been moved, the dust revealing its previous position.

‘Someone was looking for his stash,’ Nicell said. ‘They’ve left behind the TV and stuff.’

I nodded my agreement. The walls and furniture in places still bore the grey dust of the finger-printing that had been conducted by Forensics. ‘Patterson suggested a looter did it.’

‘Not a chance – and leave all that shit? No, it’s a clear search.’

‘And a quiet one. I spoke to the man next door and he didn’t mention anything. If there’d been noises in here, he’d have heard it.’

The rest of the house was similarly disarrayed. In the kitchen a box of washing powder had been emptied into the sink.

I lifted the powder box by the edge and noted that it had been dusted for prints.

‘I wouldn’t have taken Hutton for a man who’d wash his own clothes,’ I said.

‘Yeah.’ Nicell laughed.

‘Did you know him?’ I ventured.

‘Not well. Heard his name a few times. That was about it. Might’ve spoken to him once or twice – if we lifted him for shit.’

‘What about Kielty?’

He pantomimed confusion. ‘I told you; he never featured before this whole thing.’

I stopped off at the station on the way back from Letterkenny. I wanted time to think through all that I had learnt. Irvine had had contact with both Kielty and Hutton. His group was believed to be muscling in on the border drug dealers, forcing them to sell
their
stuff. Yet both Kielty and Hutton were dead, which, if Irvine had killed them both, might suggest that they had been reluctant to do as he wished. Hutton was last seen leaving his house with Tony Armstrong in mid-January. Armstrong had been back since and the house had been trashed in a fashion which suggested he’d been looking for something. Whether he had found it or not was a different matter. The cigarette burns and cuts on Hutton’s body suggested he’d been tortured before he died, rather than simply executed. They had questioned him about something and he’d been unable to answer them – otherwise, why search his house? Why not just go back and retrieve whatever they were looking for?

Then, of course, what about Kielty? Was it possible that his killing was unconnected? Perhaps it was simply the result of a row with one of his users, Ian Hamill, who had since vanished and whose car we’d found burnt out in Barnesmore Gap. Then again, Irvine had publicly threatened Kielty and had, possibly, sent him a death threat.

And yet, none of that explained why Rory Nicell had been seen with both Hutton and Kielty, and had denied knowing them. Certainly it would not be unusual for a drugs cop to know dealers, but then why claim that he’d never heard of Kielty?

Ultimately, there was little I could do but follow up on Tony Armstrong for Hutton’s killing. As for Nicell, I would have to wait and see what else was revealed. I silently decided to exclude him, as much as possible, from the investigation until I had a chance to work out what his involvement was.