Blood Ties

by Brian McGilloway

Genres: Hard-Boiled; Police Procedurals; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

Not Yet Available

Release date: March 4, 2021

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 352

Sample

In the early spring of 2020, the manifestation of death I faced was one of violence and passion, seemingly fuelled by hatred. We’d been called to a house on the road out of Lifford by a postman who’d noticed the curtains undrawn in a house. The first officer on the scene found a broken pane in the back door and, on entering, discovered the occupant, murdered.

The dead man lay on his side, hanging half off the bed. His upper body, exposed over the tangle of bedclothes that acted as a loincloth of sorts, carried a number of puncture wounds, a thin trail of blood arching up the wall and across the ceiling above him, drawn in the wake of whatever had been used to stab him to death during one of the more violent swings, as surely as the moon pulls the tide. The blood was unnaturally bright, lit by the fluorescence of the floodlights that the Scene of Crime Officers had set up at each corner of the room to reduce the shadow fall from those moving around this memento mori. The air was sharp and ferric with the taste of blood.

I stepped from one metal footpad to the next, angling my head to better see the dead man. Fifteen years ago, I might instantly have known him for a stranger. Back then, Lifford was still small enough that everyone knew everyone else, the population static, save for the occasional passing or birth. But that had all changed.

Lifford straddles the border between the north and south of Ireland. Once a frontier point and customs post during the darkest days of the country’s recent history, the end of violence and the demilitarisation of the border made the crossing point almost invisible, a slight change in the tarmac quality on the roads, and the change in signage from kilometres to miles the only indication of the place where one jurisdiction merged into the other.

The housing bubble in those years of the early 2000s had brought with it an explosion in developments, while the relative weakness of the Euro, compared to the pound at the time had brought in an influx of buyers from the north. The recession, and austerity measures in the south, drove those same buyers back across the border again ten years later and left the area peppered with houses either lying empty or, more often, being rented out on short-term leases. Added to that, the Brexit vote had caused nothing but concern about the likely direction the area would take as one of the few places where the UK abutted the EU with a land border – a fact given scant consideration throughout the debate by those braying for a return to the days of splendid isolationism.

The combination of all these factors led to further movement as people shifted sides in preparation for the possible fallout of the vote. As a result, the population of the town was ever changing, and strangers no longer stood out.

‘Does anyone recognise him?’ I asked. ‘There’s something about him that’s familiar.’ The room, though alive with movement, was surprisingly quiet, each person going about their own work, passing one another with balletic agility at times, in the cramped space. A few shook their heads; the others, non-locals, said nothing.

I stepped closer, examined him more carefully. I knew his face, somehow, his profile eliciting in me a form of déjà vu that always left me feeling unsettled, as if grasping at the scraps of a dream, ephemeral as mist.

He wore black boxer shorts, his legs thin and wiry. His arms, one of which seemed entangled in the bedsheet, were decorated with a number of tattoos, several of which, I could tell, were home-made. One, of a spider’s web, traversed the skin between his forefinger and thumb. His trunk, in addition to the wounds which I’d already seen, was marked with small, perfectly round scars, perhaps half a dozen, no bigger than a 10c coin. His body, though almost lupine, was toned and hard, even in death.

On the floor rested the nest of his trousers and a T-shirt pulled inside out. They had clearly been discarded that way before he’d got into bed. His boots lay not far beyond, a black sock balled up inside the leg of each, a gesture of neatness and control that seemed antithetical to the manner in which he had discarded the rest of his clothing, as if it was something done through muscle memory or habit.

I glanced around the room, noting the décor: magnolia paint with cheaply framed art prints on the wall; a scented candle, unused, sitting on the bedside cabinet atop a lace doily. A small non-brand TV set sat on an occasional table in the corner, the remote control hanging in a plastic holster stuck to its side.

There was something about the dead man which did not seem to match the room, nor indeed the house itself. The hallway leading to this room had been similarly sparingly decorated, the magnolia walls bearing the occasional print of vases of flowers. The windowsills housed potpourri bowls sitting in front of damp traps. There was nothing personal, nothing that seemed to reflect him in the house.

While there was a small closet in the bedroom, I guessed it was empty by the rattle and clatter of unused coat hangers as I gripped the door handle. Sure enough, it was bare inside. In the far corner of the room, an overnight bag spilled clothes onto the floor. Carefully, I took a quick scan through the contents: a change of underwear, socks and a spare T-shirt. Whoever he was, he was most likely a visitor and one who’d not been planning on staying long – a night or two at most. Unzipping the front pocket, I found a set of headphones, a packet of antacid tablets and a box of condoms.

The small bathroom next door seemingly confirmed the transient nature of his visit – a toothbrush, single disposable razor and a small bar of soap lay on the sink.

Perhaps he was unlucky, a visitor to the area who’d been caught up in a burglary gone wrong, I thought. But I dismissed the thought; the level of wounding on his body, the intensity of the stabbing he’d suffered, suggested this killing had been personal and targeted. Someone had passionately wanted to hurt this man. They’d succeeded.

I checked the final rooms of the bungalow. In the living area, the TV and Sky box were present and correct; there were no signs of disturbance, of someone having searched the house, of anything taken.

I stepped back out into the narrow hallway. A SOCO was kneeling on the floor, setting up a small marker card with a number on it.

‘Watch your step, sir,’ she said. ‘A few blood drops out along here.’

I edged along the corridor, noting the spacing of the drops, every metre or so along the laminated wood of the floor.

‘Is it the victim’s?’ The dead man was lying as though killed in his bed. Nothing suggested he’d made it out to the hallway.

‘Hard to say. It’s isolated from the rest of the scene,’ she said. ‘Maybe the killer’s on their way in or out.’

The killer or killers had, undoubtedly, come in through the back door. One small pane in the door out to the yard had been broken and the door then unlocked, the key having seemingly been left in the locked door. The garden beyond was surrounded by tall hedging which provided it with such a degree of privacy from the neighbouring properties, all bungalows as well, that they could have broken in safe in the knowledge that they would not be spotted. I stood at the door, scanning the property boundaries in vain for any glimpse of the surrounding housing. I would need to assign uniforms to do house to house but I could already tell that the houses were so secluded in their own grounds that there was a high probability we’d get little actionable information.

‘Sir!’ someone called from the bedroom. I moved back up and was met at the doorway by a SOCO holding a phone. ‘It’d fallen down the back of the bedside cabinet,’ she explained. ‘It must have been on the charger but the cable had pulled free of the plug.’

I took the phone, which I recognised as an older model of my own, and clicked on the home button. It was locked, unsurprisingly, the battery indicator at 2 per cent. Moving quickly, I brought it across to where the victim lay and, using his thumb, unlocked the device. I clicked on the phone app, hoping that a home number might be immediately visible, but he had no contacts listed on his phone.

I looked at recent calls. One had been dialled repeatedly, though none had been assigned Caller IDs, so they meant nothing to me. Moving into the messages as the battery indicator dropped, I found an array of messages. Many were from an 0115 number. Clicking on them, I found they were messages from Airbnb. Coming back out, I scrolled up to the most recent message, which had come from a southern mobile. I only managed to read, ‘Hi George. Sorry – my dad—’ when the phone went dead. I had, at least, a first name for the dead man now. ‘George.’

‘The pathologist is on his way, sir,’ the SOCO offered.

‘Perfect,’ I said, handing her the phone. ‘I want all communications copied off this. I’ll leave you to get on with it. I have enough to get started.’

To be honest, I was relieved to be out of there, away from the hushed business, the smell, the damp chill: Death’s calling card.

It didn’t take long to get the names of the house owners for they were still on the electoral register: Andrew and Sinead McDonald. A quick check in the phone directory for the north revealed that they were now living just over the border, in our neighbouring town of Strabane.

As a courtesy, I contacted my counterpart in the north, Jim Hendry, to explain that I intended to call with the McDonald’s. Hendry agreed to meet me at the border and head across with me, just to smooth over any jurisdictional issues. Truth be told, we frequently crossed the border to speak to people without need of chaperones from the other side and, for a while, most people accepted it without comment. Once again, Brexit, and the accompanying reinforcement of the psychological border that most people had forgotten about, brought with it an increase in those who would challenge your right to come across to speak to them. Whatever else about it, the whole issue had already begun to impact on the minor practicalities of policing a frontier.

‘You bored?’ I asked, climbing into Hendry’s car at the petrol station on the border. ‘Or just looking to get out of the station for an hour?’

‘I’ve not seen you in a bit,’ Hendry said. ‘Thought I’d catch up before they build the wall and we never meet again.’

‘That’s America you’re thinking of,’ I joked.

‘Is it now?’ Hendry arched an eyebrow as he started the engine. He’d aged since last I saw him, his hair more grey now than sandy, his moustache thinning and similarly more sabled. ‘So you’ve a murder?’

‘Indeed. Stabbed while he was sleeping, by the looks of it.’

‘Just like Macbeth.’

‘Except he was the one doing the stabbing,’ I said. Debbie, my wife, was an English teacher and had forced me to sit through an admittedly good performance of the play the previous year by Chris Eccleston. I’d gone primarily because he was Doctor Who; I’d watched it with my kids when they were younger. I explained this to Hendry.

‘Was he any good?’

‘He was,’ I said. He had been too and, despite my better efforts, I’d got caught up in the story, even if almost everyone did die at the end. This, Debs had explained, was necessary; everyone touched by the initial corrupt act had to die for justice to be done and order restored. That part had appealed to me. I didn’t tell Hendry that though. ‘I enjoyed it, at any rate,’ I said instead.

‘Fat lot of use that’ll be in finding out who killed your dead man. Unless it was Shakespeare. What have you got so far?’

‘I think the victim is called George,’ I said. ‘He looks like he wasn’t planning on staying long so …’

‘Either he was followed here or he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

I nodded. ‘I want to get his details off the McDonalds,’ I said. ‘He’d a lot of contacts from Airbnb, so I’m guessing they rented out the house to him. And, seeing as it was their house, I want to see if there’s any chance they were the intended targets.’

They lived in a house off Bradley Way, just past the bus station. It was a new development of white town houses, squeezed together like slices of wedding cake on a narrow plate. Inside their home, the décor was almost identical to that in the house in Lifford; more magnolia and scented candles proliferated. The key difference was that, in this house, the pictures had a more personal quality than the generic prints in the Lifford house.

The McDonalds were a young couple, with two children, a boy and a girl, whose photogenic qualities had been exploited at every opportunity in their development, based on the range of family portraits that graced the walls.

‘Is there a problem with the house over there?’ Mr McDonald asked as we all sat in their living room. He glanced nervously at his wife.

‘You rent it out on Airbnb, is that right?’ I asked.

The man glanced at his wife again, then nodded. ‘We moved out a year or two ago and the place was getting run down, lying empty. The market had collapsed and we couldn’t afford to sell it – we’d have been in negative equity. So we only rent it out to keep someone in it every so often; stop the floors from swelling with the damp, you know? We’re making almost nothing from it. In fact, most of it goes back into redecorating, upkeep of the garden and that.’

Hendry looked at me and lightly raised an eyebrow. It was an unnecessarily detailed response to a simple question.

‘I’m not here about tax, if that’s what you think,’ I offered. The barely perceptible slump of both husband and wife indicated that this indeed had been their fear.

‘Well, what’s wrong, then?’ Mrs McDonald now asked. Despite both of them being almost twenty years younger than either Hendry or myself, neither had indicated that we should call them anything other than Mr or Mrs McDonald. ‘Has the current tenant done something wrong?’

‘He’s died,’ I said.

‘My God,’ Mrs McDonald said, turning to her husband. ‘I told you there was something odd about him,’ she added, as if eccentricity was an indicator of impending mortality.

Her husband was more interested in the details, though. ‘Was it a heart attack or something? It wasn’t suicide, was it?’

‘It’s too early to say,’ I replied. ‘We do suspect another party to have been involved.’

‘Was he murdered?’

‘As I said, it’s too early to speculate.’

I could tell the man wasn’t satisfied with the response.

‘We’d best check the house,’ he said, motioning to stand. ‘Is it bad?’

‘The house will be out of bounds for a while,’ I said. ‘It’s a crime scene. What can you tell me about the tenant there?’

McDonald shrugged. ‘Not much. He booked last week for one night then contacted us the night before last and booked another night. I was planning on calling across this evening to check the place over once he’d gone.’

‘What was his name?’ I asked.

‘Geoff Dallas.’

‘Geoff? Not George?’

‘That’s the name on his Airbnb profile.’

‘Do you have any contact details for him?’

‘We contacted him through Airbnb,’ Mrs McDonald explained.

‘You had suspicions about him, though,’ Hendry said. ‘Why?’

‘He didn’t answer any messages,’ she said, though without conviction.

‘Is that all?’

She shrugged. ‘He didn’t have a social-media profile anywhere. No Facebook, Twitter, nothing.’

‘We always check,’ her husband offered by way of explanation. ‘We’re not stalkers or anything.’

‘You get a sense of someone very quickly,’ his wife continued, taking control of the conversation. ‘If someone’s posting pictures of themselves out drinking all the time or partying or whatever, we’re less inclined to agree to the booking. We don’t want the house trashed. There’s nothing wrong in it – everyone does it who rents out places.’

‘It’s our college fund for the kids, you see,’ Mr McDonald explained, nodding towards where a portrait of the aforementioned children dominated the room from over the fireplace.

‘My eldest has just gone to uni,’ I said, somewhat unnecessarily. ‘You’ll need every cent you can get.’

‘Was Mr Dallas here for business or pleasure?’ Hendry asked.

‘Pleasure, I think,’ Mrs McDonald answered. ‘I’m not sure.’

I’d deliberately left the only other question I had until last so as not to spook the couple too much. ‘Can you think of anyone who might wish to cause either of you harm?’

‘Us? Harm?’ the man asked, his arm automatically snaking around his wife’s back where she sat next to him.

‘Has anyone ever threatened you? Threatened to harm either of you?’

‘Lord, no,’ he replied. ‘We’re not that sort of people. Why?’

‘Just something I have to ask,’ I said.

I stopped myself from asking which sort of people ended up being victims of threats, and instead thanked them for their help. In truth, all we’d learned was that the victim’s name was Geoff, not George, and I began to suspect that perhaps I’d misread the text in the fleeting view I’d had of it before the phone had died.

‘So Penny’s at university now?’ Hendry commented when we’d stepped out into the freshening afternoon.

‘In Dublin,’ I said.

‘How’s that going?’

‘Fine, I think. She started last autumn. English Literature, like her mother.’

‘I meant for you.’

‘Fine,’ I repeated. I considered the number of nights I’d not been able to get to sleep, wondering if she was in her digs okay, wondering if she was homesick, wondering. And the mornings when I’d woken at 5 a.m. and watched the dawn’s light creep across the walls from where it seeped around our bedroom curtain, and realised the immensity of the silence in the house, a silence that seemed to be growing slowly around me. I’d spent so long thinking of myself primarily as a ‘father’, I wasn’t sure I knew what to be once the kids moved on. Was ‘fine’ an adequate summation of all that? Possibly.

‘And how’s things since? You know, with … your dad and that?’

I shrugged. ‘You know …’ I offered, as if this was in itself a response.

My father had been sick on and off for some time, but his eventual diagnosis of chronic heart failure simultaneously confirmed a long-held fear and blindsided me in equal measure. We’d lost my mother a few years back; my father was the person who tied my family, my brother Tom and I, together, our childhood home the hub through which we met and kept abreast of each other’s news.

‘He’s moving in with us for a while,’ I said. ‘This coronavirus thing. The lockdowns in Europe panicked me a bit in case it happens here and we can’t get down to see him. He needs a bit of help getting himself sorted in the mornings and that.’

‘You should take compassionate leave,’ Hendry suggested. ‘If it gets too much.’

‘It’ll be fine,’ I said. That word again.

Hendry nodded. ‘It’s not easy.’

‘It’s not,’ I agreed. ‘How’s all with you?’

‘Fine,’ he said, an echo of my earlier response. ‘Fine.’

‘What’s up?’

He shook his head and looked past me, as if avoiding my gaze would allow him to avoid the conversation. ‘I’m thinking of getting out early.’

‘Of the police?’

He nodded. ‘I’ve a few years on you. I feel like I’ve done my bit. We’ve a new head honcho in D district. Might be time to get out before everything changes.’

‘What would you do?’

‘Always work for a retired cop,’ he said. ‘Take up painting, maybe. Bit of rugby coaching.’

‘I never took you for a rugby player,’ I laughed. His physique, whippet thin, did not square with my impression of the sport.

‘Space for all shapes and sizes on the rugby pitch,’ he said, trotting out what sounded like a rote response.

‘You don’t think you’d be bored?’

‘I’m not fully decided. Just thinking about it,’ he said, snuffling his hand against his nose and clearing his throat. ‘Let me know if you need anything more on this, all right?’

As I drove back across the border, I could not help but feel a rising sense that everything was changing at a pace with which I could not keep up.

The station in Letterkenny was buzzing with activity when I went in, the usual business of An Garda supplemented by Brexit planning, which had seen a marked increase in meetings and briefings that I’d done my best to avoid attending. I’d spent most of my career working out of the small station in Lifford, a frontier post of sorts, sitting only a few hundred yards from the bridge through which the border ran. The same austerity measures that had sent families like the McDonalds back over to the north had seen the closure of such satellite stations and all teams being centralised in the larger stations like Letterkenny.

I missed Lifford station, its quirks and peculiarities, the rattling of its water pipes when someone flushed the toilet, the uneven heat distribution that left those in the main office wearing coats on days those in the upper offices were in short sleeves. The building was still there, the Garda sign still outside the door, but in reality, it was rarely used.

I made my way up to the incident room. Sergeant Joe McCready, with whom I’d worked for a few years now, had just arrived back from an. . .