Unti Lucy Black Novel #3 (9 page)

 

Chapter Twenty

C
OLM
H
EANEY WAS
in his forties, but dressed as if twenty years younger. His skin was swarthy and, despite his age, in such good condition that Lucy guessed he must have a more rigorous facial routine in the morning than she did. Admittedly, she thought, that wouldn't be hard.

“How're you, Tom?” he asked, leading them into his living room. He lived in College Terrace, just off the Strand Road, his house facing into the lower grounds of Magee University.

He had two bookcases against the far wall, both laden with CDs and DVDs, though no books.

“Not bad, Colm. Are you working these nights?”

“Run off our feet,” he said. “Plus we've the Fleadh coming up in a few weeks. They're expecting four hundred thousand extra ­people in the city for that.”

The Fleadh was an annual celebration of Irish music, held in a different city or town in Ireland each year. This would be the first time it was to be held north of the border.

Lucy stood in front of the shelves, glanced at the contents, realizing with some surprise that the CDs were stacked according to artist, who in turn seemed to be arranged alphabetically.

“You called in about the body found in the bin?” Fleming asked, sitting.

“Can I get you a tea? Coffee? Soup?” he added, nodding at Fleming with a smile.

“I'm good, thanks,” Lucy said.

The man nodded. “Yeah. I was walking home on Monday night and came down through Sackville Street. The alleyway there behind Mullan's pub? There was a silver Toyota parked in it and two guys were throwing something into the big metal industrial bins that sit there.”

“Right?” Fleming said. “Could it not have been someone from the bar?”

“Well, I thought that,” Heaney agreed. “Only, I used to work in there and I know a lot of the staff. I stopped to say hello and that, but the two guys got back in the car and scarpered. They reversed out the other way rather than coming past me.”

“Reversed out where?”

“Onto Great James Street. They pulled out there and then took off up past the post office.”

“What time was this at?” Fleming asked.

“It must have been, like, 3:30 in the morning. The place was dead, like. I just thought it was a bit odd.”

“Did you get a look at either of the men?”

“Not really. It was dark. They were big guys, heavy, you know. The driver especially. Not fat. Big build.”

“You don't happen to remember the registration number of the car, do you?” Lucy asked.

“I'm not Rain Man,” Heaney said, smiling. “Sorry.”

“Your CDs are arranged alphabetically,” she observed. “I just wondered.”

“The artists are alphabetical,” Heaney corrected her. “The CDs are chronological, from date of release, within each artist.”

“That's . . . impressive,” Lucy managed.

Heaney blushed. “They thought I was on the spectrum when I was at school.”

“Did they now?” Lucy asked, attempting to appear surprised.

T
HEY DROVE DOWN
Great James Street to get a sense of the whereabouts of any CCTV cameras that might have picked up the car. Derry had its own city-­wide CCTV, but it was operated by the City Center Initiative rather than the PSNI. This was, at the time of its installation, the only way to make its presence palatable to the city's residents, who feared it was another form of police surveillance. The images were monitored by the CCI and, if the police needed to see any images, they had to lodge a request through the Chief Super. The CCI would feed through footage to the Strand Road station and would only provide copies of specific frames from the footage. While the system was working well, it was slow. If they could find a shop nearby whose own external security cameras had picked up the car, it might speed things up a little in identifying the registration number of the vehicle.

“Nothing,” Fleming said, glancing at the various building fronts around the alleyway where Heaney had seen the car. There were, as he had said, two large industrial bins against one side of the alley, their lids gaping open. “Best get someone out to seal off the alleyway, so forensics can take a check through it. I'll put in a request to CCI, too. We know what we're looking for, so they can go through it themselves and pull an image of the car if they can find one.”

“Speaking of images, I want to call in with Duffy. The boy claimed he went straight to Belfast. The shop he said he stopped at checked and pulled this picture of a girl who was with him. He was only at the other end of the Glenshane at 4:33. Two and a half hours to make a one-­hour journey.”

W
HEN THEY REACHED
Duffy and Sons, Undertakers, a ser­vice was taking place. A family was sitting in the ser­vice room while a vicar led them in prayers. Fleming lowered his head reverentially as they passed the window of the room, while Lucy glanced in, blessing herself instinctively.

Gabriel Duffy was standing at the back of the room, dressed in the black suit of his trade. He had his head bowed, his hands clasped lightly in front of him, his mouth moving along to the responses of the prayers. He glanced up and acknowledged their presence with an almost imperceptible nod.

“The boy won't speak with his father around him,” Lucy said. “I'll maybe try to get him on his own.”

At the end of the corridor was a series of doors. One was clearly marked with
WC
. Of the other two, one was marked
PRIVA
TE
, which Lucy assumed to be an office, and the other bore a sign reading
NO ENTRANCE: STAFF ONLY
. It was this door that Lucy tried first. The plush carpeting and pine veneer of the corridor and ser­vice room gave way suddenly to a set of concrete steps with a metal handrail. The walls were unpainted, the lights garish and bright after the softened glow of the upper floor. Lucy could hear an echo of dance music coming from below.

She picked her way down the stairs, which, in turn gave way onto two rooms. The music was coming from the room on the left and it was into this room that she went.

But for the corpse lying on the covered table at its center, the room could almost have been a dental surgery office. The walls were painted white and lined with white wooden kitchen units. Several metal trays of implements sat on the black worktop. Above the body hung a wide metal showerhead, attached to pipes running the length of the ceiling. The body itself was attached, via further pipes, to a machine next to it, which thudded mechanically every few seconds as it pumped fluid into the body.

Behind the chemical stench of the room, which burned at Lucy's nostrils, she could smell iron.

“You're not to—­” Ciaran Duffy appeared behind her, obviously having been in the other room. Lucy turned to see the man, wearing an apron and face mask, carrying a long T-­shaped metal object. Involuntarily, she raised her hand, stepping back.

Duffy looked at the object in his hand and quickly put it on the table next to the body. “It's a . . . don't worry, it's only a trocar. We use it for . . . well, you don't want to know. You shouldn't be here. Did my father tell you to come down here?”

“Your father's upstairs,” Lucy said. “I want to speak to you again about Stuart Carlisle.”

Duffy moved past her, his voice sullen. “That again? I told you, I don't know what happened. I left here and went to Belfast with him. They must have made a balls-­up with the bodies in All Hallows.”

“You left here at 2 p.m.? As soon as the ser­vice was finished?”

“Yes.”

Lucy took out the picture of the girl. “Who is she?”

“I don't . . .” Duffy glanced at the stairs beyond, his expression hard to read behind the mask he wore. “She's a friend. My girlfriend.”

“What's her name?” Lucy asked.

“Why? What difference does it make?”

“She was with you when you took the remains of Mr. Carlisle to Belfast, is that right?”

Duffy nodded.

“You left here at 2 p.m.?”

“I told you that already.”

“You reached the other side of the Glenshane at 4:33 p.m.,” Lucy said. “Which means it took you two and half hours to make a journey that should have taken one.”

Duffy reddened, but still did not remove his face mask.

“That would have given you plenty of time to swap over one body with the other.”

“I don't know what . . . Look, I honestly . . . I don't know what happened.”

“Where were you for that hour and a half?” Lucy persisted, moving closer to Ciaran who, in turn, backed up against the table, inadvertently putting his hand on the shoulder of the remains which lay there.

“I was . . . we were shagging, all right?” Duffy said. “I stopped at Lisa's house and we had sex. I'd told her I was going to Belfast and she said she wanted to go shopping. I said I'd pick her up. I called at the house, we went to bed, had a shower, and then left. That's it.”

“What's her name?” Lucy asked, taking out her notebook.

“Lisa Kerns,” Duffy said.

“Where was your van while you were in her house?”

“Parked in her drive,” Duffy said.

“Which is where?”

“Clearwater, over in the Waterside.”

Lucy knew it. It was a housing development that ran down to the river's edge.

“Would anyone have had access to it?”

Duffy shrugged. “I locked it, so they shouldn't have had. I wasn't keeping an eye on it to be honest so, you know . . .” His voice trailed off as he looked at Lucy.

“I'll have to check that story with Lisa.”

“You can't tell her I said we were . . . you know. She'll be angry at me telling.”

“I'll be discreet,” Lucy said.

“Okay,” he said without conviction, seemingly unsure what “discreet” meant.

“Why didn't you tell us this the last day? You could have saved us a lot of time.”

“My dad would have gone nuts.”

“What age are you?” Lucy asked.

“I'm twenty-­two,” Duffy said.

“You're old enough to have sex.”

“I met Lisa here. We handled her father's burial a few weeks back.”

Lucy suppressed a shudder. She didn't know which was creepier: Duffy picking up someone in a funeral home, or the girl having sex with the person who had buried her father. Both seemed strangely inappropriate.

“I see,” she said, impassively.

 

Chapter Twenty-­One

“D
UFFY SENIOR WAS
N'T
happy to hear you'd gone downstairs,” Fleming told her in the car after they'd left.

“He'll be even less happy to hear that his son is having sex with one of their client's children,” Lucy said.

Fleming grimaced. “With a dead body out in the driveway, too,” he added.

“I never took you to be squeamish,” Lucy joked.

“Sex and death,” Fleming said.

“What?”

“I remember I had an English teacher who told us that all poetry is about either sex or death. Or sometimes both,” Fleming said, glancing out the window. “Maybe it's that primal urge, attempting to create new life in the face of death.”

Lucy glanced across at him, her eyebrow raised. “That's very deep.”

Fleming nodded. “Or maybe it's just that most poets are perverts.”

“Or most English teachers are,” Lucy joked.

They drove in silence for a few minutes, then Fleming spoke again. “I remember the poem, too. ‘My Son, My Executioner.' ”

Lucy nodded, unsure what else to say.

“Bloody good poem,” Fleming concluded. “And that's saying something. One of those things you only understood after you'd left and had your own kids.”

“How is your daughter?” Lucy asked cautiously. Fleming's ex-­wife and daughter had moved to Australia the year before and, in doing so, had precipitated his first slide back into drinking in years. It had taken a suspension from work to get him back on his feet.

“Great,” he said. “She seems to like it over there. I might go over and see her at some stage.”

Lucy nodded.

“How's all with you?” Fleming asked, in reciprocation. “How's Robbie doing?”

“He's okay,” Lucy said, realizing that she'd intended to call with him to speak to Helen about Doreen's burglary. “He uses a walking stick to get around sometimes. He still has a limp.”

“He's lucky it's only a limp he has,” Fleming commented.

Robbie had borne the brunt of a small explosive device attached to Lucy's car during a previous case she had worked. The device had not detonated properly, but had still caused damage to Robbie's leg. In addition to the walking stick, he was increasingly relying on pain relief to help him function.

“And what about you and him? Still going strong?” Fleming added.

Lucy hesitated. “I'm not sure ‘strong' would be quite the right word for it. I still call to visit him, but things are complicated.”

“
Things
aren't complicated,” Fleming countered. “Being a cop screws with every relationship you have. Dealing with horrible stuff and death all day, then trying to have a relationship. Civilians can't handle it.”

“Death and sex again,” Lucy reflected. She realized she'd described their relationship twice as “complicated.” The complication was her: the guilt she felt at what had happened to Robbie, and the nagging worry that she continued to stay with him primarily because of that guilt. Rather than dealing with it, Lucy hoped that sidelining it would give her space to think it through more clearly. So far, that strategy hadn't proven too successful.

“So, what's your thinking about Duffy then? Is he telling the truth?” Fleming asked to fill the silence in the car.

“Duffy claimed he was in her house for almost an hour and a half, with the van in the drive. If they were having sex, or in the shower, as he claims, then perhaps someone could have swapped over the bodies in the driveway without his knowledge. Or maybe he was set up by this girlfriend, Lisa Kerns.”

“It would need to be a secluded driveway for someone to swap a body without it being seen by the neighbors,” Fleming commented. “You'd imagine someone would have reported it otherwise.”

I
T TRANSPIRED THAT
it was, indeed, secluded. The house was set back from the neighboring ones, the garden enshadowed by thick fir trees, which formed a solid hedge the whole way around the perimeter, hiding the driveway completely.

Lisa Kerns looked slimmer than the CCTV image suggested, though she was undoubtedly the girl in the image. Her face was drawn in panic as she opened the door and saw Lucy and Tom Fleming standing there, Lucy with her warrant card on display.

“Is it Cathy? Has something happened Cathy?” she asked in response to Lucy asking if she was Lisa Kerns.

“Who's Cathy?”

“My sister,” she said, pleadingly. “Is she okay?”

“I'm sure she's fine,” Lucy said. “It's nothing like that, Miss Kerns. We need to speak to you about your boyfriend, Ciaran Duffy.”

“Ciaran? What about him?”

“Can we come in?” Lucy asked, motioning to step forward.

“Of course. It's definitely not Cathy?”

“Definitely not! Look, is your mum or anyone about?” Lucy asked, reluctant to broach the subject of how she and Duffy had spent Monday afternoon, without first checking that there were no inappropriate ears listening.

“My mum's dead. And my dad now. It's just me and Cathy.”

That explained her reaction, Lucy thought. The girl was obviously terrified of being alone. Lucy wondered if that explained her relationship with Duffy; was she so scared it had driven her to the first welcoming arms she found after her father's death?

“Look, we're trying to trace the whereabouts of Ciaran on Monday afternoon. You went to Belfast with him, is that right?”

Lisa nodded. “Cathy's iPhone was broken; she dropped it in the toilet of all places. She was devastated. I wanted to take it up to the Apple Store to get it replaced.”

“What time did you leave at?”

“About 3:30. I made it just before they closed. Ciaran dropped me off on his way to the crematorium.”

“Did you and Ciaran spend some time here before you left?”

Lisa's expression furrowed in thought. “A minute or two, maybe. I think he asked to use the toilet; that was it. I'm not fussed on having ­people I don't really know in the house.”

Lucy looked across to Fleming, who raised his eyebrows speculatively.

“You're sure Ciaran wasn't here for longer than that?”

Lisa looked to Fleming, then back at Lucy. “Of course. Why?”

“Ciaran told us he was here from after 2 p.m. He said you and he had sex, then showered, before going to Belfast.”

The girl rose suddenly. “What?” she exclaimed. “He said what?”

“It's no crime if you did, Lisa,” Fleming said. “We're not interested in what you were doing. Only how long you were here for.”

“We did not have—­I barely know him. After Dad died, he was very good, calling to check we were okay, sorting out things with the grave. That was it. He called on Sunday to see how we were doing and I told him about Cathy's phone. He offered me a lift; said he had a run to do to Belfast the next day and would be away for a few hours. He'd drop me in town and collect me again after to bring me home. I thought he was being nice.” She sat again, then raised her hands to her face. “Why would he say that? Asshole!”

Fleming stood and glanced out the window at the driveway. “Have you other family round about?”

“An uncle and aunt in Dungiven,” Lisa said. “My dad's sister. Why?”

He shook his head, as if dismissing his own thoughts rather than her question. “Did you open the coffin on the way to Belfast? Or did you see anyone else interfering with it in anyway?”

The girl stared at him with disgust. “I've seen too many dead ­people in my life already. Riding in the same van as one was disturbing enough; I'd not have agreed to go up with him if I'd known he'd have a coffin in the back, but by the time I found out, I'd already promised Cathy I'd get her phone fixed. Why would you think I'd want to see a corpse? I've seen two recently, both my parents, three years apart. I don't need to see another fucking body ever again.”

She began to shudder, plump tears dripping from her eyes, though she made no attempt to stymie them.

“I'm sorry for asking, Miss Kerns,” Fleming said. “It's part of our inquiry. The body that was taken to Belfast was not the one it should have been. Someone swapped the bodies and we can't work out who or where.”

“You're sure it was 3:30 when Ciaran called?” Lucy asked, moving to the girl and putting her arm around her.

She nodded. “Cathy had band practice. She was collected at 3:15 by her friend's mother. I hung out a washing, then Ciaran arrived.”

“What age are you, Lisa?”

The girl looked at her, as if attempting to guess the angle to the question. “Eighteen,” she said, slowly. “Why?”

Lucy shook her head. At thirty, she was barely able to keep on top of the work in the house and she lived alone. Here was this girl, barely an adult herself, acting as both mother and sister to her younger sibling and, seemingly, doing a good job of both. “Cathy's very lucky she's got someone like you to look out for her. If you ever need anything, give me a call.” She handed the girl her card. “I mean it. Anything at all. Just call.”

Fleming moved across. “I am sorry about the questions, Miss Kerns,” he said. “They had to be asked. I'm sorry if they offended you.”

T
HEY DID NOT
even have time to discuss what she had told them, for, as they left the house, Fleming's phone rang. Lucy listened to Fleming's responses, unable to fill in the gaps.

“We didn't . . . He's . . . Are you sure? . . . When? We'll look into it.”

He hung up. “That was the station. Ciaran Duffy has done a runner,” he said. “His father came down to help him with the embalming and he'd vanished. He's wondering what we said that could have made his son run away.”