Brian McGilloway - Borderlands

"I don't know. An Anthony Donaghey, certainly," Williams said, annoyed at my tone. "Why? Who's Anthony Donaghey?"

"Ratsy Donaghey," I said, looking to Holmes for agreement.

"Right, right. The drug dealer. Right."

"More than a drug dealer. Fulltime asshole. If that ring belonged to his mother, I'll… I don't know what I'll do. But it's not his mother's. She spent her days cleaning the local primary school; she didn't buy gold-and-diamond rings."

"Maybe she ran a sideline, same as her son," Holmes said, laughing.

"Maybe we should have a talk with Mr Donaghey," Williams suggested, pointedly ignoring the previous remark.

"You'll have a hard time doing that," a voice behind us said. We all turned to see the oily face of Mr Gerard Brown, lawyer to Lorcan Hutton, about whom we had completely forgotten.

"Why?" asked Holmes.

"He was found dead in Bundoran last month."

"Client of yours, too, was he?" Williams asked, smirking.

"Occasionally," Brown replied, without a hint of irony. "I take it my present client is free to go now."

I nodded at Holmes. "Try him one last time. Make it clear," I said, as much for Brown as for Holmes, "that we will ignore any admission of knowledge about drugs in the area, if Mr Hutton reveals such while giving us information which pertains to this murder inquiry."

"I'm sure my client will do his best to help the Garda," Brown said. Then he and Holmes went back into the interview room.

"So, what do you think, guvnor?" Williams said, stressing the last word.

"I think Holmes is right." Her face fell slightly. "That was bloody good work, Caroline."

She blushed. "What about Donaghey?" she said.

"Check where he died. Contact the station involved and see what they say about his death."

"Do you think there's a connection?" she asked.

"I don't see how there could be, but best check, eh? Meantime, we wait to see if McKelvey turns up in Ballybofey."

"Why Ballybofey?" she asked, and I filled her in on all that I had learned that morning. Then Williams went to her desk, while I began to work through some of the many message sheets that had gathered on my desk since Angela Cashell had died.

The top pile related to Terry Boyle. Apparently he had been seen in three different pubs on the evening he died, though no one remembered him leaving with anyone. Someone had run a standard record check on him the previous night and had reported that he was charged with possession of marijuana in Dublin when a first-year student. He got off with a fine and community service. An appeal for information had just started to filter out through the media – by tomorrow, I expected my messages pile to have grown considerably. I read and was able to scrap immediately the note from Williams, saying that she had got a possible hit with the ring in a second-hand jewellers' in Stranorlar, and couldn't wait for me to return. She added that Holmes had gone out to pick up Lorcan Hutton.

Burgess had left two notes that morning to say that Thomas Powell had phoned enquiring about the state of inquiries regarding his father's intruder. Burgess had spelt both words correctly, though had used them the wrong way around.

On Saturday night, five cars along Coneyburrow Road had had their wing mirrors smashed off by a drunken man seen staggering along the road. The following day, all five owners had phoned to say that the culprit, a local schoolteacher celebrating the Christmas holidays, had called on each that morning and apologized before offering to pay for all damages.

That same night, four bottles of gin were stolen from an offsales office at the back of the local pub. The thief had tried to escape out of the toilet window, dropping and smashing three of the bottles in the process.

On Sunday morning, a Derry man phoned to report seeing a wild cat along the main Lifford road the previous night as he returned home in a taxi following a wedding. He was unable to describe colour or size – only that it was dark and bigger than a normal cat.

Finally, while I was sitting there, the pathologist's report was left on my desk by Burgess. Terry Boyle's identification had been confirmed using hospital notes which mentioned two breakages in his femur from childhood accidents. Cause of death was attributed to a single gunshot wound to the head, delivered at point-blank range from a handgun. He had certainly been dead before his car was set alight. Stomach contents revealed he had drunk in excess of the legal drink-driving limit, which made me wonder whether he had stopped in the lay-by where he was killed to sleep off the drink. There was no sign of the drug which had been found in Angela Cashell's stomach, which further convinced me that the two killings were linked by nothing more than geography.

An hour and three coffees later, I became aware of a figure standing before me and looked up to see Garda officer John Harvey, a young uniform with light brown hair and glasses, holding his cap in his hand.

"You wanted to see me, sir?" he said.

"Did I?" I asked.

"Yes. Sergeant Williams said I was to see you about the stolen ring. I was the one called to the jewellers about it."

I invited Harvey to sit, and he did, carefully, as though attending an interview. Harvey was a part-timer, but clearly loved the work and compensated for a limited intellect by being fastidious and deferential to all the full-timers in the station, especially detectives.

"I brought my notes, sir. And a copy of the report I wrote." He smiled as he offered me the two typed A4 sheets and his notebook, in which he had recorded the interview in longhand. The notes confirmed exactly what Williams had told us, with a vague description of the boy, as provided by the jeweller in Stranorlar.

"Could it be this Whitey McKelvey, sir?" Harvey said, eagerly.

"Could be. Why did you go to the jewellers in the first place?"

"Sergeant Fallon asks some of us part-timers if we'd go around local second-hand shops every so often with stolen-goods lists. I wasn't doing anything that day, so I volunteered. I don't know if he followed it up, though."

I figured Fallon probably hadn't. Stolen rings were low priority; simply by sending someone like Harvey out to check, Fallon had covered himself should anyone make a fuss that their loss wasn't being treated seriously. In reality, we all accepted that stolen goods generally stayed lost. I could also understand why Fallon picked people like Harvey to do the job: he had clearly approached it with the same seriousness as he would a murder inquiry. In fact, I decided to follow Fallon's lead.

"John, perhaps you could help me with something else. Tommy Powell in Finnside Nursing Home claims he had an intruder in his room last week. I promised we'd send someone out to check. Would you take a run out, if you get a chance?"

He nodded eagerly. "I'd love to," he said.

"Thanks," I replied, looking back to my paperwork in the hope he'd take the hint and leave. He didn't.

"My pleasure, sir. If there's anything I can do to help with the Cashell case. You know, I could…" He didn't get any further, as Burgess shouted that Costello wanted to see me.

When I went into his office, he was speaking to someone on the phone and had a copy of the Belfast Telegraph on the desk in front of him. He spun the paper round to face me while he agreed with whatever was being said to him on the other end of the line. Then he pointed at an article on the front page, apparently a story concerning the latest UN debate over the efficacy of Hans Blix's Inspection Team, and the inevitability of a war in Iraq. I failed to see the relevance of the story and shrugged my bewilderment. Costello frowned and stabbed a finger at the bottom of the page, without interrupting his conversation. I sat down when I saw the short piece to which he had pointed, under the heading, "Puma on Prowl in Donegal?"