Читать книгу Dead And Buried - John Brennan - Страница 12

Present Day

CONOR tussled with the key in the stiff lock and slammed closed the door to the studio apartment. He looked up and down the street. No sign of Galloway, thank God. Maybe she’d realised he really didn’t want to be part of whatever plan she was cooking up.

He crossed the road from the flat to the parked Land Rover, wondering if it was even worthwhile keeping the place on. Be easy enough to doss down in the practice, he thought. The rent wasn’t too much – although, to a man who’d been out of the country for a while, it seemed a damn sight over the odds for a damp attic flat in Knock. It wasn’t like he had money to burn. The cash in his pocket had gone a lot further, back in Kenya. It’d bought him a clean-swept apartment with running water and its own generator – and he’d got used to the mosquitos, didn’t mind being woken in the night by the saw-toothed roars of leopards and lions (especially after Kip had told him that a lion that roared was a well-fed lion. When they were hungry, she’d said, you never heard them coming).

He’d given Ella a driving lesson the day before. No Galloway then either. Three weeks in, Ella was starting to get the hang of it; at least, she no longer seemed like quite so much of a risk to life and property. She’d asked him, halfway through making a bollix of a three-point-turn, if he could spare a bit of cash.

‘Kieran and me, we’d like to, to have a weekend away.’

‘Would you now? First a flash new car, and now fancy holidays. Ah, when I was your age—’

‘I’m just asking, Dad.’

Conor had sighed. He’d had to say no. The job in Kenya hadn’t paid much, and right now any spare money he had had to go into the practice. Ella had been disappointed, but she’d seemed to understand.

‘I knew Mum’d say no,’ she’d said with a mock-pout, ‘but you used to be such a soft touch.’

Still am, Conor thought. Soft but skint.

The Land Rover roared and gurgled unpromisingly as he manoeuvred through the directionless grey drizzle and traffic to the practice. He missed Kenya on days like this. Hell, who wouldn’t? It wasn’t just the sunshine; he missed the colour. Here, it seemed like there was nothing but grey: grey sky, grey buildings, grey asphalt, the slow grey river.

He thought of Kip. He wondered where she was now. And he realised, with a guilty pang, that it was the first time he’d thought of her in weeks.

Outside the city, as he approached the practice, the feeling of colourlessness started to lift. The trees lining the road seemed refreshed by the rain. A bright cock pheasant was startled out of the thick roadside foliage by the roar of the Land Rover. Ah, let’s be fair, Conor thought: old green Ireland has its moments, too, after all.

He pulled up in the practice courtyard, killed the engine, climbed down – and paused.

Tyre tracks, in the muddied yard.

Not fresh, but not too old, either. Made last night, if he was any judge. He’d done a little tracking out in Kenya. Never thought he’d be putting it to use in a Castlereagh car park.

He didn’t have to move far from the car to see that the main door to the practice was ajar. Dermot? No – his car would have been here. Conor checked his phone. No signal as always. The place was a blackspot – but there was a landline in the practice building.

What the hell would a burglar want to nick from a vet’s surgery? he wondered. Not much money kicking around. An old computer, a few bits of kit, but specialist stuff, nothing you could sell on the streets, surely.

He remembered Dermot had said something about drugs – about kids getting off their heads on bloody horse tranquillisers, nowadays – the old vet had shaken his head in sorry bewilderment. Well, yeah, Conor thought, there was plenty of stuff in there that’d put you on another planet – if you were so desperate for a hit you didn’t mind taking your life in your hands, and didn’t mind delivering the stuff into your bloodstream with a nine-inch cattle syringe…

He started to cautiously towards the door, cutting across the yard at an oblique angle. At the corner of the building there was a clutter of unused fencing material: a half-sack of cement, set hard – a reel of wire – a rusted boltcutter. Conor stopped. He picked up an offcut of two-by-four as long as his arm, and hefted it in his right hand.

With his left, he pushed gently at the half-open door. ‘Who’s there?’ he called. ‘I’m armed!’

No answer.

Whoever it was in there might have a knife, a gun – God knew what. And they’d most likely be desperate. The length of plank felt suddenly puny.

He crept inside. The light was off – but there was a dim glow from the far end of the adjoining corridor. Just the familiar smells: lingering odours of wet fur in the waiting area, a cloying whiff of asepsis from the clinical rooms beyond.

And something else.

Perfume?

He strained his ears but the place was silent bar the imperturbable ticking of the waiting-room clock.

There was no one in the consulting room and no one in the cage-lined corridor where the practice’s few in-patients served their time. At the far end, a bandaged Westie whiffled in its sleep. Conor relaxed a little, but kept the length of two-by-four ready in his hand as he eased open the door to the operating theatre.

The racks of instruments were undisturbed, the drug cabinets closed and locked. No sign of a burglary. No sign of anything untoward.

Then he saw the bundle on the operating table, wrapped in black polythene. He knew straight away it wasn’t an animal carcass.

Not again. It couldn’t be happening again. Marsh was dead.

Conor stepped into the room. There was a note fastened to the wrapping with a scrap of gaffer tape. Not Dermot’s handwriting, and besides, the old boy was over in Donegal visiting his sister for the next couple of days. Conor tore it free of the tape – could hardly read it, his hand was trembling so hard. He squeezed his fingers against his thumb to stop the shaking. Messy handwriting.

For old times’ sake?

Conor’s stomach lurched, and he crumpled the note in his fist. He looked again at the bundle. A part of him still hoping. From a farmer maybe? But it was too big for a dog. Wrong shape for a pig or a sheep.

There’s a phone in the other room, he thought. You don’t even have to look, do you?

But he needed to.

He took a scalpel from the drawer. His pulse pounded in his temple, his throat, his thumb tight against the scalpel’s shaft. It wasn’t fear he was feeling, not any more. He already knew what he was going to find. This was a feeling of oppressiveness: dull, cold, nausea. He incised the plastic sheeting and gently drew it back.

‘God almighty,’ he mumbled.

She couldn’t have been any older than Ella. Naked. Skinny – frail, even. Her hair was dyed a blazing peroxide white and she’d a model’s high cheekbones. Her head was tilted back and her long pale throat looked exposed and vulnerable. Conor drew the sheeting further away. Ribs jutting. A tattoo above her right breast. Track marks on the inside of her arm.

‘God almighty, Patrick,’ he said again.

He stepped back from the table, from the girl’s body. He dropped the scalpel onto the steel worktop.

It was as if the last five and a half years hadn’t happened, as if Jack Marsh had risen up from his grave. But he knew this couldn’t be Marsh. Not a woman. Before it’d been men: men who’d crossed Jack Marsh, or got in his way.

Conor steadied himself with a hand on the worktop. What the hell was Patrick involved in? Conor swallowed hard. Fuck Patrick, he thought – what am I involved in, now?

Conor dragged his gaze away from the sallow face of the girl on the table. He looked up, and caught his own reflection in the polished steel panels of the wall cabinets. He flinched at the sight. From nowhere a phrase came into his head. From a poem, a poem he’d read at school, or at college – a war poem.

His face, Conor remembered, like a devil’s sick of sin.

He re-wrapped the slender body in the polythene as best he could and walked back out into the corridor, closing the door quietly behind him. There was a basin in the consulting room. Conor soaped and rinsed his hands and splashed his face with cold water.

The girl – what would she have been? Seventeen, eighteen? Reluctantly he pictured her skinny body, the hollows at her hips and her jutting ribs, the deep eye-sockets in her once-pretty face. What could a slip of a girl like that possibly have done to hurt Patrick Cameron?

He stood up. He knew what he had to do. Maybe he’d known all along, from the moment he’d seen the bundle on the table, when he’d spotted the tyre-tracks in the yard, even.

For old times’ sake?

‘Not this time, Patrick,’ he said.

Being in the library took him back to his student days. Hours he’d spent, back then, in the low-lit hush of the Queen’s reading room, hunkered down over textbooks and medical dictionaries, cramming for the finals that he knew he’d never pass, hadn’t a hope in hell, wondered why he bothered…

He’d done his best to drink the campus bars dry of Guinness the day his results came through. God, but he could use a drink now.

He found Lisa Galloway in the ‘Criminology’ section. A copper’s idea of a joke. She was leafing unconvincingly through a thick volume on Theories of Criminal Justice. Galloway had always struck Conor as someone who’d learned her job the hard way.

She looked up as Conor took a seat opposite her at the table. The low angle of the green-shaded lamp gave a sinister cast to her smile.

‘Hello, Conor.’

‘Detective.’

‘How’ve you been?’

‘Fine.’ Conor leaned forward, placing his hands flat on the tabletop. ‘Listen, Detective. I just want to say what I’ve come here to say.’

Galloway shrugged. ‘Go ahead. I’m listening.’

‘Come closer. I don’t want to shout.’

‘Okay. It’s a library, after all.’ She smiled again, then drew in her chair and leaned across the table, propping herself on her elbows, until her face was just a few inches from his. ‘Better?’

‘Aye.’ Conor nodded grimly.

‘So go ahead.’

He told her about the tyre-tracks in the yard and the body on the operating table. He told her about the track marks on the girl’s arm and, reluctantly, he told her about the note. When he’d finished, he sat back in his chair and folded his arms. Easy part over. Galloway met his gaze: he’d thought, momentarily, that he’d seen her eyes widen, read a quickening of interest in her expression as he’d told his story. But that’d gone, been quickly hidden, if it’d ever been there at all – and now she was watching him levelly. This was where the test began.

‘And the note’s from Patrick Cameron?’

Conor nodded.

‘How d’you know?’

‘I just do.’

‘Quite a big favour to ask,’ the detective said thoughtfully.

‘I’m family.’

‘I’ve got a brother-in-law. My sister’s husband. Pete. He lives in Lisburn.’ Galloway rested her cheek on the heel of her hand. ‘I might ask him to give me a hand shifting a washing machine or to borrow his hedge trimmer. I’m not sure how he’d take to me leaving dead bodies on his patio.’

‘Well, I’ve got, y’know. The facilities.’

‘The furnace.’

‘Yeah.’

‘And that’s all?’

‘Unless you know better.’

‘This wouldn’t,’ Galloway said, ‘have anything to do with you running away to Africa?’

‘I didn’t run anywhere,’ he said. ‘A job came up abroad. I took it. Lots of people do the same. Wouldn’t you? Do you want references? Doctor Paul Nkono, Mara Conservancy, Dr Kipenzi Kamande, University of Nairobi. Did you think I was hiding out in the jungle while I was away, Detective? I was working.’

‘Okay.’ A wintry smile. ‘Let’s leave that for now.’

Conor nodded, breathed out through his nose: ‘Okay.’

He felt sure that, in the gloomy quiet of the library, Galloway could hear his heart pounding against his ribs – could hear the giveaway tremor of panic in his voice. Hell, the way she looked at him, he felt like the woman could read his bloody mind.

‘Cameron’s testing you,’ she said suddenly.

‘I’ve a feeling he’s not the only one.’

‘What d’you mean by that?’

‘Never mind.’ Conor ran a hand through his hair. He tried to think clearly. ‘Testing me. Why would he do that?’

‘Why indeed? What I do know, is that you and I are going to have to start being straight with one another. This is business. You want your life back. I want Patrick Cameron – and I’m going to get him.’