Brian McGilloway - Gallows Lane

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.