Brian McGilloway - Borderlands

Costello returned to the station where he went to the toilet and washed himself several times and strained until he forced himself to urinate. He looked at himself in the mirror, water dripping off the fringes of his hair and off his nose and for a moment he thought he would vomit. But the wave of nausea passed, or he swallowed it down; he smoothed his hair back on his scalp, replaced his cap and walked home, allowing the breeze which was rising off the river to cool the redness in his cheeks.

Costello woke the following morning early and sat at his kitchen table in silence while the air around him lightened. He took a walk into Lifford town just after 8.00 a.m. and bought fresh bread and orange juice and a bunch of cut flowers from a bucket outside the local supermarket. He made Emily breakfast in bed and laughed a little too loudly at her jokes. He studied her face carefully and reminded himself of all the things about her which he loved, all the reasons he had married her.

Two weeks later, when he could stand no more, he sat in his car at the customs point and flicked through his notebook until he found Mary Knox's name and address. He wore plain clothes so he could cross the border. He sat outside her house on Canal View, watching the windows for what seemed an eternity. Finally, he went over and knocked on the door. Butterflies fluttered around his insides. A knot thick as a fist caught in the centre of his gut. The door was opened and she was looking at him, standing on her doorstep, his hair brushed, a bunch of flowers bought from the same bucket as his wife's clasped so tightly in his sweating hand that the green paper was staining his skin.

Later, as he left the house, he placed a twenty pound note on the phone table in the hall, while she dressed quietly in the living room.

Over the following months he visited Mary Knox with increasing frequency. Their routine did not change. He sat and waited in his car until she was ready for him. He stood at her door like a child approaching an adult, fear and excitement tightening inside him. He always brought her flowers, even when those from the night before were still fresh.

At Christmas he bought Mary Knox a gold chain which cost more than the gift he bought for his wife. He bought the Knox children a train set and a doll, but was not allowed to present them personally. She bought him nothing and he thought she might give him a free turn, but as he crept out the front door that night she called him back and asked him had he forgotten something. He was so angry he swore he would never go back to her, but he returned four nights later.

One night he saw a figure – another customer – emerge from her door, glancing furtively up and down the street, the orange lamplight glistening off his wedding ring. Costello could do nothing and Knox made no apology.

On his way home he picked up a drunk who was staggering over the bridge towards Lifford and beat him so severely with his nightstick that when the man left the drunk-tank the following morning, his ribs and back were ribboned with purple and red welts, though he could not recall how he had received them.

More and more often, Costello found himself waiting until a man left Mary Knox's house before he could enter. Finally, on one such night in May, as the evening freshened and the last blue faded from the sky, he hit on the idea of a trip to Donegal. He would take her away for the weekend, spend two whole days with her, with no distractions – no other men, no Emily, no twenty-pound payment. He could say he had to attend a conference. He could book under the name Smith, as he had seen it done in the movies. For the first time in months, he felt again the nauseating wave of nerves and excitement return.

It took three weeks to convince Mary Knox. He promised to pay for everything if she would come. He promised to arrange it so no one would know. Finally he promised to buy her something to compensate for the loss of earnings she would suffer over one weekend. She smiled and allowed him to kiss her and agreed. She said she would leave her children with a neighbour; they had an understanding.

It was on that trip that Costello bought Mary Knox the ring which I now held. And, he believed, it was that trip which had signalled the start of the end of their relationship: perhaps because Mary Knox realized how possessive he had become.

As autumn darkened the nights around him, he saw her less frequently. Several nights her house stood in darkness all night. When he did see her, she seemed distant. Her clothes looked more expensive and, though she still wore his ring, it was supplemented now with other items of jewellery. One night when he called, he watched her going out of her house and getting into a black southern- registered car, driven by a Lifford man named Anthony Donaghey. He was tall and thin in an ungainly way, his hair shorn close to his scalp. He wore drainpipe jeans rolled up on his shins and high-laced Doctor Marten boots. Yet, he held the door open for Mary Knox as if he were her chauffeur, and she sat in the back while he drove.

Without any regard for his dignity, Costello followed them back across the border and out to the Three Rivers Hotel that squatted on the Letterkenny Road. He sat in the shadows of the car park for three hours, running his car battery low by listening to the radio, waiting for Mary Knox to reappear. Shortly after one in the morning, she swayed drunkenly out through the front door. Donaghey got out of a waiting car, helped her in and drove her home.

When Costello asked her about the incident several days later she told him he was pathetic, sitting in the darkness watching her. She told him she didn't need a jealous lover. She told him she had someone more important than a policeman to take care of her. He shouted at her so loudly her daughter upstairs began to cry. Mary Knox slapped him on the face and called him a lunatic. His face stung and burned where the print of her hand had already started to turn red. Blindly, he grabbed at the earthenware jug of flowers and threatened her with it. For the tiniest second something like fear flickered in her eyes, then she laughed at him, laughed so hard that tears began to leak down her face. Her laughter followed him out onto the street and all the way home.

He did not see Mary Knox again. Several weeks later, on New Year's Eve, she and her children vanished.

We were sitting now in the lay-by halfway across the bridge between Lifford and Strabane. Traffic drifted past us. Below, where the Foyle began its final journey to Lough Foyle and on to the Atlantic, a lone heron waded in the shallows, dipping its beak curiously into the murk, but was having no success finding food.

"So, that's the whole story, Benedict. Why did I not tell you this before? Hardly my finest moment, was it?"

I said nothing, but ground the cigarette I was smoking into the car ashtray. I wound down the window to let the smoke escape and watched as the heron gave up its search, stretched its wings and lifted itself from the water. "What has this got to do with Angela Cashell?" I asked finally.

"I don't know, Benedict. Honestly. If I thought there was a connection, I'd have told you before now."

"There, must be a connection," I said with irritation. "Ratsy

Donaghey reports stolen the ring of a woman who disappeared twenty-odd years ago; Whitey McKelvey gets hold of it, tries to flog it, claims he sold it to a woman in a disco, and it ends up on the finger of an almost naked dead girl, the daughter of a local hood. Coincidence is one thing, sir, but this is just a little much."

"I could call the NCIB in. Get some fresh minds on the case. Of course that means that everything will be in the open. Everything."

Regardless of the implicit threat that my attack on Whitey McKelvey would surface once more, I was reluctant anyway to hand things over to the National Criminal Investigation Bureau. My handling of the case had hardly been exemplary, but I felt I was at last on the right track.