Brian McGilloway - Borderlands

"Fair enough," Hendry said. "He was a bad bastard by all accounts. Reading between the lines here, he was fairly in the frame for the Knox disappearance, and a few others. We had him down as a Provo, for a while anyway, until even they kicked him out. No evidence, though, so it was left in the wind. Sorry."

I thanked him and hung up. Twice now he had mentioned the Provo connection. I couldn't see it. Still, I thought, it would do no harm to check. I picked up my car keys. Williams looked at me.

"I think I need to go to confession," I said.

Our local priest is an elderly man called Terry Brennan. He moved to Lifford four years ago after serving in one of the roughest areas of Derry for fourteen years and, while many assumed him to be a bumbling old relic from the golden age of Catholicism, few knew that he had mediated between the IRA and British government ministers for several years in the late '80s and early '90s. He had no affiliations with either group, yet managed to retain the respect, and, more importantly, the ear of both.

The 10.30 a.m. Mass was not yet over, so we sat in the car park until the small number of woman parishioners exited into the morning sunlight, pulling on coats or fastening scarves around their heads against the cold. Then I went into the chapel.

The sunlight from outside shone through the stained glass at such an angle that the spectrum of colours splashed across the white marble of the altar. Father Brennan was in the confessional; two elderly supplicants knelt at the pew directly outside. The door of the box clicked open and a child came out, holding the door open for a woman who was, presumably, his grandmother. Within less than a minute, she too came out and the man in front of me entered the box. From where I was sitting I could hear his soft murmuring, interspersed with the deeper, more guttural mutterings of Father Brennan. Then the man came out and left the confessional box door swinging in air heavy with the scent of incense.

I went into the box and pulled the door behind me. The atmosphere was warm and close, the smell of polish and wood mixing with the scent of the priest's aftershave. I could make out his silhouette through the grill that separated us. He was looking down at his lap, at a prayer book, his ear close to the grille.

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been a few weeks since my last confession," I began.

"Better make it quick, Inspector, my breakfast's being made," Brennan replied in a voice gravelled by years of smoking Woodbines. He laughed softly to himself, a chuckle that resonated like a cough.

"I need a favour. I need to speak to someone who could help me with a case. A prostitute named Mary Knox disappeared from Strabane in 1978. I need to know whether the Provos had anything to do with it. It connects with the Cashell and Boyle deaths, I think."

"They're connected?" Brennan hissed.

"We think so. But no one knows, so…" My unspoken request for confidence hung unanswered. Brennan did not speak for almost a minute, the silence interminable in the darkness of the box. He leaned closer towards the grille and, in the half-light, I could see that he had turned his head towards me, a glint of external light catching the frame of his glasses. "I can't promise anything, Inspector. It's a very unorthodox request. Give me a number to contact you. As I say, no promises."

"Thank you, Father," I said.

I heard him moving in the box next to me, preparing to leave. He reached up and pulled the stole from around his neck.

"Father," I said. "I was wondering if you'd hear my confession while I'm here."

He did not speak, but sat again, and I could faintly make out in the gloom that he had placed the purple stole around his neck again and blessed himself. I began to tell him about McKelvey, about Anderson and his sheep and, mostly, about Miriam Powell. He asked me if I had told Debbie what had happened. He asked me if I was sorry. He asked me would I have taken the affair any further and I said, "No."

"God forgives you, Inspector. Your wife, I suspect, will forgive you. Try now to forgive yourself. I absolve you from your sins, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. Leave your phone on."

Williams and I went to a restaurant on the border called The Traveller's Rest. She ate cereal and toast while I had a full breakfast with bacon, eggs, sausage and tomato. I was wiping my last slice of toast through the remaining egg yolk when my phone rang.

"Devlin here," I said, not recognizing the caller ID on the phone's display.

"The priest said you wanted to ask some questions." The voice was cold, disconnected not just by the anonymity of the mobile phone but by something deeper.

"Yes," I said, though he had not asked a question.

"What do you want?"

"Mary Knox. She was a-"

"The priest told us. What do you want?"

"Did the IRA have anything to do with her disappearance?" I asked and realized that the people at the table beside us were staring open-mouthed at me. I stepped outside, fumbling in my pocket for my cigarettes as I spoke.

"No."

"Are you sure?" No response. "What about Ratsy Donaghey? Was he one of yours?"

"It's a well-known fact, Devlin. The priest told me that-"

"So Ratsy Donaghey didn't have anything to do with Knox's disappearance?"

"I didn't say that. Listen. We did not sanction the… disappearance of Mary Knox. Whether one renegade volunteer did is another matter and one for which we accept no responsibility. Such behaviour reflects badly on us."

"I hardly think you're in a position of moral highground," I began.

"The priest told us you were a decent fella," the voice said. "He was wrong. I can understand why they torched your car. Don't look for this to happen again."

"Wait," I said. "What about Johnny Cashell and Seamus Boyle?"

"Are you fucking stupid? They all worked together." Then the line went dead.

I recorded the phone number that had shown on my display, a northern cellphone number. I phoned through to the Garda Telecomm Support Unit and asked them if they could trace it. Later that day, they contacted me to tell me that the number belonged to a ten-year-old who had reported it lost in her school some days earlier.

"Donaghey did it," I said, having relayed the details of the conversation to Williams. "He was IRA but acted outside of them.

When he went into drugs they cut him loose completely. But he must have done it."

"How come the RUC couldn't get him?"

"Extradition proceedings in the '70s were fairly rare. Probably not worth the effort if they couldn't be sure the state would hand him over. Besides, they needed to prove it was him for a case. We don't have to prove anything. Suspicion is enough to get us going – give us something to work with. So, let's work on the assumption that Ratsy Donaghey did kill her. Let's say he stole her jewellery. That was the kind of lowlife he was. Twenty-five years later, his house is broken into and the jewellery stolen. So much time has passed he believes he's in the clear. No one will remember a bloody ring, he thinks. And it must be worth something. Maybe he wanted the insurance to cover it. Somehow, someone sees the ring on the stolen items list, though. They make the connection. Ratsy gets tortured and killed. What if it wasn't a rival drugs thing or questions about the ring? What if Ratsy was tortured until he spilled the whole truth on Mary Knox? What if he named names? Let's say he names Cashell and Boyle. A little while later, Cashell's daughter and Boyle's son both end up dead, with photographs of the dead woman, and Cashell wearing her ring."

"How did they get the ring? Check all the jewellers' shops until they get a hit? Follow it back to Whitey McKelvey, get the ring and set him up? None of the jewellers mentioned anyone asking questions except us, and it's our job to do that!"