Brian McGilloway - Gallows Lane

I tapped Dempsey on the upper arm. ‘Come with me,’ I said. ‘I have an idea where he might be.’ Sinead Webb motioned as if to follow us. ‘Stay in here, please, Mrs Webb,’ I added, gesturing to a female Garda to keep her company.

At the back of the house, the three uniformed guards still stood, ensuring that if McLaughlin was about, he wouldn’t get away across the fields backing on to Webb’s land — the fields where Patterson and Colhoun had made their find. I began to wonder if maybe they had seen someone lurking that day; if maybe I had been wrong in my suspicions.

Any sign?’ I whispered to the uniform standing nearest us as we came out the back door.

He shook his head. I gestured for him to follow us.

The side door into the garage was unlocked; the garage itself in darkness. Sinead Webb’s car, the old Vectra I had noticed on my first visit here, was sitting up on a hydraulic jack, its bonnet yawning open, tools scattered on the floor around it. I squatted down and looked beneath it.

Dempsey moved around the side of the car, his gun raised in his hand. To his left, against the back wall, stretched a long workbench covered with engine parts and rags. I thought again of the rag pulled from my own car exhaust and an image of Caroline, unconscious, flashed in my mind. Beside the workbench, directly in front of Dempsey, were a number of large metal lockers. Dempsey moved to the first, the door of which sat slightly ajar. Using his toe, he kicked it open. Nothing.

As he moved forwards, I noticed, at the edge of the workbench, a packet of cigarettes and a brass Zippo lighter. I gestured to Dempsey and pointed to the cigarettes. He glanced at them, then turned to me and nodded that he understood. It was as he reached to open the second locker that its door smashed open. Knocked off balance by Daniel McLaughlin lunging at him, Dempsey fell to the ground, dropping his gun which discharged a shot into the ceiling. Instinctively, I ducked. Meanwhile McLaughlin had barged his way back to the door, a long monkey-wrench in his great hand, and had come face to face with the uniformed Guard I had asked to join us, whose name I believed to be McGuigan. The man didn’t seem to know how to react, raising his hands in a futile effort to cover his head. As I reached for my own gun, McLaughlin raised the wrench and slammed it down. McGuigan fell instantly and McLaughlin was out the door.

I ran to check on McGuigan and heard various shouts as the two Guards outside alerted the others to McLaughlin’s presence. I heard McLaughlin bellow once and heard the sickening thud of metal slamming into flesh. The next moment came the slam of a car door, and the roar of an engine as he started the BMW. He ground the car into gear and took off at speed, spraying gravel which ricocheted off the garage door. I ran after him, watching his rear lights turn the corner of the driveway. To my left another of the Guards lay on the ground, bleeding from a gouge in the side of his neck where McLaughlin had hit him. His colleague squatted beside him, holding his hand against the wound in an attempt to staunch the flow of blood.

I ran to my own car and got in. By the time I had it started, Dempsey was strapping himself into the passenger seat, a welt the size of a man’s hand already purpling on his forehead.

‘I’ll kill the fucker,’ he spat.

At the end of the driveway I halted, unsure which direction to take. To our left, the main road stretched back towards Lif-ford; the road was straight for some distance and we could see no traffic, though McLaughlin had a head start on us and it was possible that he could have made it out of our sight. I guessed, though, that he would have turned right for the road in that direction bent out of sight just a few hundred yards past the entrance to Webb’s property. And so that was the direction I took, while Dempsey radioed through to the station for backup, and for someone to set up a roadblock on Lifford Bridge, in case McLauglin tried to cross the border.

But I began to think that I knew where he was going after all. One of the back roads near Clady would take him into the North quickly and without the likelihood of being stuck behind slow-moving traffic or running into more Guards. He might have suspected that, if we were looking for him, we’d have the main roads closed. A pity we hadn’t been that smart ourselves, I thought.

I used all my weight and pressed my foot flat against the floor, the speedo needle quickly quivering at just under 150 kph. Dempsey gripped the dashboard as we drove, squinting into the distance for a sign of McLaughlin. Finally, on a long straight stretch we thought we caught sight of him, his tail lights visibly wavering across the two lanes of road which were, thankfully, empty at this time of the evening.

As I had expected, I saw his brake lights flash, and the car attempted to turn sharp left on to the road through Clady into the North. He had evidently misjudged the junction, however, and the car overshot it, spinning out of control on to the grass verge. For a few seconds, it was difficult to see through the cloud of dust and grit whether he had crashed. Then the dust cleared and we saw him reverse the car to take the turn again. All in all, his manoeuvre had cost him about half a minute; more than enough time for us to close the gap on him sufficiently to visually identify him and the car with certainty. Of course, I myself had to brake to avoid a similar incident at the junction, which gave him back some of his lead.

The road he had taken crossed the River Finn on a one-lane brick bridge with passing bays placed along its length. I prayed that he might get stuck. And it seemed my prayers were answered. As we turned the junction we saw a traffic jam. The green BMW sat abandoned at the back of a queue of vehicles, the engine still running, the driver’s door flung open. McLaughlin was attempting to cross on foot.

We screeched to a halt behind his car. The driver of the car immediately in front of McLaughlin’s was out of his vehicle and leaning over the parapet of the bridge. As I approached him, I raised my hands in a questioning gesture.

The man mouthed, ‘He’s down there,’ pointing exaggeratedly to beneath the bridge.

McLaughlin would have been quicker just running across the bridge, but, when I looked ahead, I understood why he’d had to go under instead; the blockage on the bridge was a PSNI checkpoint.

Two paths led under the bridge, one on either side of the road. Dempsey had already set off to the left, where the driver had pointed. I took the right; both paths would eventually meet under the bridge.

The path was overgrown with brambles and raspberry canes, the berries small and hard and green. I tore through them as best I could. It was fairly clear that McLaughlin had not come this way, but having come so far myself I decided to persevere.

The air beneath the bridge was cold and damp and smelt of decaying leaves. The river’s surface barely rippled in the breeze. The noise I made startled a heron which took to the air. I began to suspect that we had come the wrong way, then heard the splash and a shout from Dempsey. Looking up to my right, I saw McLaughlin, dressed in jeans and white T-shirt, having broken free from the tree line, wading across the water. To have crossed directly under the bridge would have brought him up at the PSNI checkpoint. For several hundred yards on either side of that path, the opposite bank was blocked by a wire fence. McLaughlin clearly intended to wade upstream until he reached the end of the fence.

Following his lead, I tucked my gun into my waistband, and jumped down into the water. I had to work against a fair undercurrent and my feet skittered on the slimy pebbles on the riverbed. I stayed as close to the edge as possible and made my way up towards McLaughlin. He himself was now halfway across, but would need to work upstream to get past the fence. His strides were big but slow, his muscles shifting against his straining T-shirt, his back massive and intimidating.