Gallows Lane

Chapter Eight

Saturday, 5 June

The rivers were flooded the following morning. The Finn in particular, which flows along the border between Clady and Donegal, a few miles south of Lifford, was twisting with an unusually fast current under the bridge linking the North to the South. The rain had cleared just before dawn and the air had a clean quality that hurt your lungs when you first breathed it. The temperature was lower than the day before but the sun was rising high and sparkled off the river’s surface as if on broken mirrors. Already the moisture off the ground was starting to dry and the tarmac road surface steamed with evaporation.

At the top of Gallows Lane, an estate agent called Johnny Patton had gone out to show a prospective client a property. The prospective client was, in fact, Johnny’s boss’s wife, and the only part of the property she wanted to see was the bedroom ceiling. Johnny was enjoying a post-coital cigarette, standing at the back bedroom window surveying the garden in wonder and exhaustion when he noticed something hanging from the oak tree at the end of the garden. Closer inspection brought a phone call to the Garda and the discovery of Peter Webb’s corpse.

The body was still hanging when I arrived on site. A SOCO photographer took pictures of it from various angles, before one of our officers appeared with a stepladder, climbed the tree and loosened the rope.

Finally Webb’s body was lowered from the branch and several officers simultaneously rubbed the cramp from their necks, having spent the past half hour looking upwards.

Webb’s muscles were stiff and his face contorted and rigid. His skin was tinged blue; his tongue swollen. His eyes, wide behind his glasses, were strangely reminiscent of marbles, smoky blue and unfocused.

‘That’s strange,’ I said.

‘What?’ asked Black, one of our uniformed Guards.

‘He’s wearing his glasses. Suicides tend not to.’

‘How do you mean? People wearing glasses don’t commit suicide?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘People committing suicide generally don’t wear glasses.’

‘Is this an intelligence thing?’ he asked, looking at the body as if trying to gauge Webb’s IQ.

‘He means when someone wearing glasses wants to commit suicide, they normally take their glasses off,’ Williams explained with some impatience.

‘Why?’ Black asked, thereby verifying a previous assessment of him I had made which suggested he would never progress out of uniform, despite possessing the inquisitive nature of a child coupled with the attendant propensity for wonder in things newly learnt.

‘It’s like going to sleep. You don’t wear glasses when you go to sleep.’

I waited for him to reply ‘But I don’t wear glasses at all’ but surprisingly he just looked at me, then back at the body.

‘Maybe they don’t want them to break,’ he said.

‘Maybe,’ I agreed.

Costello arrived ten minutes later, though he struggled to walk up the incline of the garden to where we were standing. He gripped my arm as I spoke, like an elderly relative who requires support.

‘It appears fairly cut and dried, sir: suicide. The ME was here already; said the same thing — pending the autopsy.’

‘I’ll never understand suicide, Benedict,’ he said sadly. ‘It’s so. . unnatural.’ He patted my arm and turned back towards his car. ‘Break the news gently to the wife, Ben. Make sure she knows we’ll do everything we can to help her.’ I nodded. ‘Thank God he didn’t do it when he was in custody,’ he added, shaking his head and walking away.

Mrs Webb did not cry when we broke the news of her husband’s death. Her entire body stiffened and she sat erect in the hard wooden chair in her kitchen, her mouth a thin white line, nodding curtly as if too much movement would cause her reserve to crack and her tears to flow. She listened while Williams softly assured her that we would do anything we could to help her, and shook her head when she was asked if she needed us to call a friend or relative to be with her. Then her eyes fluttered slightly and she wiped at them as they began to fill.

‘I’ll call someone in a while,’ she said, then turned to me. ‘Did he suffer, Inspector?’ she asked.

I generally believe that people who take their own lives must be suffering so much in life that the pain and fear of death hold nothing worse and I told her this. ‘Can you think what might have caused this distress, Mrs Webb? Did your husband give any indication that something might have been bothering him to the extent that he might harm himself?’

‘No, nothing,’ she said, clutching a tissue in her right hand. ‘Though he was very upset about the. . you know. . the stuff found on the land. The guns and such. I think he felt bad about that.’

‘Why?’ I asked, before I had time to think. Inwardly I cursed myself but at least I’d stopped short of telling her that we suspected the items hadn’t even belonged to him.

Fortunately, she misread my question. ‘Well, he was racked with guilt. I’d no idea he was doing those things — drugs and that. It’s incredible. . sometimes you don’t even know the person you’re married to. .’

‘Did he actually say that to you?’ Williams asked. ‘That he felt guilty?’

Unable to speak, Sinead Webb nodded her head vigorously.

‘Do you think that’s why he. .?’

Again, she nodded wordlessly. Williams looked at me and shrugged her shoulders; I could only reciprocate the motion.

‘Mrs Webb, did your husband do anything unusual over the past twenty-four hours? Any indication he was planning this? You know, calling family or friends; buying gifts, spending time with loved ones?’

She shook her head.

‘We’ve been told someone was asking about your husband in the local shop. An Englishman, wearing a suit. Does that mean anything to you?’

Initially she shook her head, then stopped and blew her nose, her face intent with concentration. ‘Actually, now you mention it, that sounds like a man Peter met up with yesterday — an old friend. Someone he was at university with apparently, landed here out of the blue, Peter wasn’t expecting him. The two of them went for a few drinks. Peter came home about eight; said they’d been catching up on old times. We went to bed, then. When I woke up this morning he wasn’t in bed. Then you arrived.’

‘Did you know this friend?’ I asked. ‘Do you remember his name?’

‘No. They went to university in Bristol together. He was in a suit, just like you say. A businessman, I think. Peter didn’t say much about him when he came back.’

Before leaving, I invited Mrs Webb, when she felt up to it, to formally identify the body, although we had no doubt that it was her husband. As we were leaving, she walked us to the door. ‘You don’t think that prowler had anything to do with this, do you?’ she asked.

‘Probably not,’ I said with more conviction than I felt, then shook her hand and offered my sympathies one last time.

Williams and I sat in the car along the roadway while I had a smoke and we compared notes.

‘We know the guns and stuff didn’t belong to Webb, so why would he feel guilty — unless he was lying to his wife for some reason? Maybe he felt guilty about something else and was using this as cover. An affair?’

‘She’s the one having the affair. Maybe Webb found out about it and couldn’t take it.’

‘Surely he’d confront her about it. Or at least leave a note. Tell her he knows so when he dies she has to carry the guilt,’ Williams reasoned.

‘Maybe he did. What if she’s the one lying about him being guilty over the drugs and that? What if she’s covering for herself? She’s not aware that we know the drugs weren’t his.’

‘Jesus — what a cold bitch!’ Williams said in disgust.

‘These are all just maybes, Caroline. Maybe his old English friend is connected in some way. An Englishman wearing a suit fits the description Christy gave of the man in his shop — the one he believes is a Special Branch agent. Why would Special Branch want to speak to Peter Webb?’

‘Maybe he was an old friend who joined the Police. Maybe it’s perfectly innocent.’

‘Why not tell Christy that in the shop? Why make up a story about being a journalist?’ I said. ‘Too many maybes.’

‘We don’t even know that he is Special Branch. All we’ve got is Christy Ward’s suspicion. He might be mistaken.’

‘I’d be surprised if he’s wrong.’ I flicked my cigarette butt out of the window and started the engine. ‘On top of all of this, we have to ask what the hell James Kerr is doing stuck in the middle of it all. Don’t forget — he’s the prowler the Merry Widow asked us about when we were leaving.’

‘Maybe it’s a straightforward suicide — no mystery attached.’ Williams said hopefully.

‘Maybe.’

We drove in silence for a few minutes, Williams gazing out of the passenger window. When she finally spoke, she did so without looking at me.

‘The other day,’ she began. ‘With Patterson. He mentioned the promotions panel.’

‘That’s right,’ I said.

‘Are you going for it?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I’ve my letter in.’

‘That means you are, then.’

‘I’m just throwing my hat in the ring, Caroline. I’m not even sure I’d want to be a Super. Or to leave here.’

She nodded, but didn’t speak.

‘Why? Would you miss me? I added, grinning.

She looked at me, considering her response. ‘I guess I’ve gotten used to you,’ she said, shrugging slightly, then turned and looked out of the window again.

Our hopes that Webb’s death was suicide were soon dashed. The State Pathologist reported quickly following the autopsy. While she concluded that Webb had died through oxygen deprivation, she raised questions over the cause of the hypoxia. Firstly, she noticed that the rope burns around Webb’s neck were even and did not have what she termed vital reaction marks — an inflammation round the wounds caused by a living body attempting initial repair. This, she concluded, would suggest that Webb was dead before his body was hung from the tree. Secondly, she noted that there was damage caused to the hyoid bone, under Webb’s jaw line. It was, she contended, highly unusual for the hyoid bone to be broken by hanging. The damage was more consistent with manual strangulation. Finally she’d recorded that two of Webb’s fingers were broken, with again little sign of vital reaction, suggesting this occurred during or at the point of death. While this could have been caused as he struggled for breath and grappled at the rope, all these together confirmed my initial suspicion when I saw that the corpse was still wearing glasses. Her final conclusion was, she said, that the preponderance of evidence suggested that Peter Webb had been murdered.

I had just finished reading the report when Williams came into the office, beaming. ‘I think we have a hit on the builders,’ she said.

Peter McDermott was a twenty-eight-year-old plasterer working on Paddy Hannon’s site. When he was younger and living in Cork, he had been questioned several times about a sexual assault on a local woman. Strangely, his victim had not gone on to press charges.

The address we had for him was in Coolatee. It was a five-minute drive.

McDermott answered the door wearing a pair of shorts and a vest top. His skin was beaded with perspiration, his face flushed, his hair slightly spiked with damp. He held a half-empty bottle of beer in his hand. He wore no shoes or socks. His hands were thick and calloused, the knuckles red. Along his left forearm ran a tattoo of a green dragon, its gaping mouth at his wrist, its tail twisted around the crook of his elbow.

‘What?’ he asked simply.

‘We’d like to talk to you, Mr McDermott,’ Williams said, stepping towards him, her ID held up at his eye level. He did not move, his bulk blocking the threshold.

‘What about?’ he asked, then took a quick swig from his beer. He wiped the sweat from his face with the shoulder strap of his vest top.

‘Assault and battery, for starters,’ I said. ‘Let’s go inside.’

‘Let’s not,’ McDermott said. ‘Assaulting who?’

‘Let’s go inside,’ I said again.

Finally McDermott stepped back from the doorway and gestured in with his beer. Williams went in first and I followed.

His living room was basic. In the corner was a TV and DVD player, a few DVDs scattered around on the floor beneath it. A pile of magazines sat beside the sofa, varying women in various states of undress adorning the covers. The ashes of a fire lay in the hearth. In the far corner, on an iron stand, hung a boxing bag, its surface dented, and on the floor beside it was a pair of tattered boxing gloves and several sets of dumbbells.

‘Getting in a bit of practice?’ Williams said, gesturing towards the gloves and bag.

McDermott eyed her warily before answering, ‘I’m training for a fight, next week.’

‘Boxing?’

‘Kick-boxing. You use your feet.’

‘We’d guessed that from the name,’ I said. ‘Do you normally drink beer when you’re training?’

He looked at the beer bottle in his hand, then smiled slightly. ‘All work and no play and that. So, are you going to tell me what I’ve done now?’

‘Karen Doherty,’ Williams said.

‘The girl found on the site. What about her?’ He smiled broadly. ‘You don’t think I had aught to do with that.’

‘Is that funny, Mr McDermott? Based on your past record?’ Williams asked. I could sense she was getting riled.

McDermott stopped smiling immediately. ‘I don’t have a past record,’ he snapped. ‘One fucking row with a girlfriend and I’ve never heard the last of it.’

‘How terrible for you,’ Williams said. ‘And I’m sure your victim hasn’t forgotten it either.’

‘My victim was a teaser. Two of us got pissed. I got carried away.’

‘Carried away?’ Williams said, bristling visibly.

‘Nothing ever came of it though, did it?’ he said. ‘She dropped the charges. Knew she was as much to blame as I was.’

‘Where were you the night Karen Doherty was killed?’ I asked.

He snorted derisively. ‘I was here. Training.’

‘Anyone able to verify that for us?’

‘Funnily enough, no,’ McDermott said, smirking. ‘Though I can tell you that my mum knows I was here, cause she phoned me after eleven o’clock or so that night for a chat.’

‘Mobile or landline?’ I asked.

‘Landline,’ he said. ‘For at least half an hour.’

‘What about later that evening? One o’clock, say?’ I asked. The person who had picked up Karen outside the club had done so just after one.

‘Fast asleep, I’m afraid. And no, before you ask, I don’t have anyone who can verify that.’

‘Have you ever been in Club Manhattan?’ I asked.

‘Never heard of it.’

‘Did you kill Karen Doherty?’ Williams asked.

‘Yeah, I confess. What do you think?’

‘Yes or no?’ she persisted with futility.

‘No, of course I didn’t bloody kill her. I don’t know her — never met her.’

‘What kind of car do you drive?’

The question caught him a little off guard. ‘I don’t drive a car. I own a van.’

‘What colour?’

‘White; when it’s cleaned. Look, you don’t actually have anything to link me with that girl, do you?’

There was nothing else to say. We would have to check phone records to see if his mother had called him, although even that didn’t represent a watertight alibi.

‘I thought not. If there’s nothing else, I need to get back to my boxing,’ McDermott said, swallowing the last of his beer.

‘Before you do, Mr McDermott,’ I said. ‘At your convenience later today, perhaps you’d come down to the station to be fingerprinted. For elimination purposes.’

‘Gladly,’ he said. ‘Except my fingerprints will be all over that house; I fucking worked in it.’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ I replied. ‘The item in question only has one set of fingerprints on it — Karen’s murderer’s.’

As it turned out, McDermott’s mother had called him at 11.25 p.m. and had stayed on the line for forty minutes, placing McDermott at home at 12.05 a.m., confirmed both by his phone records and a quick call to his mum. In theory, that still gave him an hour to get out, drive to Letterkenny and pick up Karen Doherty. All of which was sensible, were it not for the fact that someone had managed to drug her first. McDermott was a possibility, but unlikely, unless further evidence came to light. Still, I asked Williams to keep an eye on McDermott. I had no doubt she would do so with tenacity.

The techie from Letterkenny phoned through later that afternoon. He had tried several techniques to clean the image of our assailant’s tattoo from the footage Thompson had given us, but to no avail. While certain the mark on the arm was a tattoo, he couldn’t say of what exactly. I hadn’t really expected much anyway, but thanked him for his efforts. I was getting ready to head home when Helen Gorman sent me a note inviting me to join her and Lorcan Hutton in Interview Room 1.

Hutton had spent several years in detention centres and jail for drugs offences, but still continued to sell in the town. Now in his mid-thirties, he had founded his narcotic empire on money given to him by his parents, both wealthy doctors in the North.

Gorman came out to speak to me, out of Hutton’s earshot. She carried a thin manila folder containing prints of the shots I had taken in Harkin’s. The image had been enlarged so that the shoe print was clearer. She looked at me expectantly.

‘That’s great, Helen,’ I said. ‘Good work.’

‘I left the camera back too,’ she said. ‘Like you suggested.’

‘Fine,’ I said, smiling a little uncertainly.

‘What should I do now?’ she asked.

‘Well, if you want, you could call into some of the local shoe shops, maybe try to match the print. To be honest, Helen, it’s a lot of effort for a break-in. We might never get anywhere on it. Not unless Lorcan Hutton has something he wants to confess to.’

‘That’s okay,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind. It’s my first case, you know. I want to do well.’

‘That’s fine, Helen. Any help you need, just ask,’ I said, sincerely, not wishing to discourage her enthusiasm.

She smiled warmly. ‘Will we see what Hutton has to say for himself?’ she said.

Hutton slouched in his chair behind the scored desk placed against the wall of the interview room, his blond curled hair hanging over his face. I noticed that, for once, he had neglected to bring his solicitor with him. I also noticed that Gorman was not taping the interview, presumably because it was, for all intents and purposes, nothing more than a fishing expedition. I decided to add to the bait.

‘Lorcan, good to see you,’ I said, sitting down opposite him.

‘Wish I could say the same, Inspector,’ he replied, combining the formality and politeness of the title with the show of insouciance his comment made.

‘I’m interested in GBL, Lorcan.’

‘Seems a bit drastic, Inspector. Lifford women aren’t that picky quite yet.’

Gorman looked outraged. I winked at her to let it go. Hutton knew he was here for information and nothing else. Unfortunately, that meant we had to endure a few jibes to retain his goodwill.

‘Well, when you get to my age, Lorcan,’ I joked, despite the fact I was only a few years older than him. ‘Where would you get it, if you needed it? I’m sure you wouldn’t deal in such things.’

‘I don’t deal in anything, Inspector. Hardly a recreational drug though, is it? My bet, if I were you, would be to go online. You can get anything on the Internet, you know. Failing that, of course, you can find it in just about any industrial solvents on the market over here.’

‘What about locally? Anyone you know might be dealing in it, providing it to others? More importantly, anyone you know might be buying it?’

‘No idea, Inspector. Why would I know such a thing?’

Like most career criminals, Lorcan Hutton believed that his relationship with the police was one of mutual good humour. Often they’d display a camaraderie and bonhomie sadly lacking in their dealings with their victims. Hutton behaved almost as if his activities were a source of fun, a shared joke. He assumed that his continued freedom to practise in the area resulted from our tolerance, when the truth was that his clients — the very people who could provide us with the evidence to put him away — had a vested interest in keeping him on the streets. The time for good humour was over.

‘It’s our belief, Lorcan,’ I said, ‘that the person who killed that Strabane girl we found the other day drugged her before doing so. Now, whoever sold him that drug is an accomplice. That would mean real time, Lorcan; not just a few months in a detention centre.’

He stared at me defiantly, his jaw set, eyes glaring from behind his fringe. ‘As I say, anyone could access it with ease. I know nothing about it.’

‘What about the break-in?’ I asked, turning to Gorman. ‘Was Lorcan able to help us with that?’

‘Strangely enough, he wasn’t, sir. Knows nothing about that, either.’

‘Maybe we should keep you in for a few days, Lorcan, until your pharmaceutical knowledge returns.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said nonchalantly, pretending to stifle a yawn. Then he smiled mischievously, adding, ‘Moobs!’

‘What?’

‘Nolvadex. You can take them for moobs,’ he replied, already standing up and gathering his belongings.

‘What are moobs?’ I asked.

‘Something very close to your heart, Inspector. Very close,’ he concluded, winking at me once before he opened the door and walked out.