Border Angels (13 page)

Irwin sprang from his seat when Daly entered his office. He had a lukewarm cup of tea in his hand and deposited it beside Daly’s paperwork. He looked pleased with himself.

“I thought you’d be back earlier,” said Irwin. “You might still get the good out of that cuppa.”

Irwin was not a natural tea boy, and Daly suspected he was there purely out of professional curiosity. Glancing at his untidy desk, he wondered if Irwin had been going through his paperwork.

“What did the commander have to say?”

Daly paused. “A few suggestions about the direction of the investigation. That’s all. I think it’s time we reviewed Fowler’s drowning. Go through the evidence again to see if we missed anything.”

“We’ve already examined everything.”

Nevertheless, they spent an hour sorting through the case so far. They dug through Fowler’s life and business dealings, but found little to point to a murderer. Daly picked up the bag containing the opera CD. They had yet to identify the owner of the fingerprints left on the cover.

“This was the music playing when he drowned,” said Daly. “It must have some sort of significance, sentimental or otherwise.”

“For whom? If there was a killer there that morning, perhaps the fingerprints are his,” suggested Irwin.

Daly studied the CD, thinking it was time to visit Mrs. Fowler again.

“I almost forgot,” said Irwin as Daly was about to leave. “A call came through from Customs officers. They raided a farmhouse this morning close to Keady, after a tip-off about an illegal fuel-laundering plant.”

“Did they find anything?”

“The message was unclear. The tip-off claimed a man with a gun had abducted three Croatian women. The place was completely deserted by the time Customs got there. Not as much as a squeak from a rat, but they uncovered an operational fuel-laundering plant with several tankers, also set up for illegal alcohol bottling. They suspect the people working there did a runner across the border.”

“Why didn’t they call us out to assist with the raid?”

“They have to act immediately on this sort of intelligence and swoop; otherwise the evidence will be destroyed.”

“Any more details about the women?”

“Nothing as yet. All they have is the tip-off, and that’s secondhand. It’ll be impossible to get any witnesses. No one will want to incriminate himself.”

“Get back to them and speak to the officers who carried out the raid,” said Daly. “Find out as much information as possible about what happened to those women.”

“OK,” replied Irwin. “The officer in charge of the raid was someone called Dukes, at least that’s what I think the duty sergeant said.” But Daly had already left.

Driving up to Fowler’s mansion, Daly noticed that little had changed since his last visit. There were no portents of the heartbreak that had occurred within its high walls. The solid mahogany doors and triple-glazed windows remained unperturbed by the destruction Fowler’s death had visited upon his family. The wind poured down the slopes of nearby Slieve Gullion as fresh as ever, and the cherry trees blossomed reassuringly, shedding fresh petals across the mown lawns.

It was only in the silence and shadows of the rooms within that Daly detected evidence of the tragedy, and in the emaciated figure of Greta Fowler, who was waiting for him in the sitting room. The floor was pale marble, the walls covered in embossed paper. She sat on the same pale avocado sofa, her bare knees almost touching the mica top of the coffee table. The same wind whistled against the windowpane, and the same cut flowers stood in a tall porcelain vase, past their best now, looking as though the slightest of breezes might send them and the vase smashing to the floor. Greta Fowler looked just as fragile, and close to catastrophe, as though she had not moved from the sofa all week. Daly wondered if the questions he had to ask would sink in.

She seemed to compose herself when he explained the reason behind his visit.

“Is there anything unusual you can recall about the day before your husband died?” he asked. “Perhaps something that didn’t spring to mind during our last interview.”

“Lots of things,” she replied with a sigh. “I did the shopping that day in Marks and Sparks. Then I read a magazine while waiting in the hairdresser’s. I had blond highlights put in that day. Little did I know the woman staring back at me in the mirror was going to disappear forever that evening. But enough about my banal little life. I thought you came here to discuss the investigation into my husband’s death.”

“What do you mean, disappear forever?”

“When I went home that evening, Inspector Daly, I believed my dignity was intact and my marriage sound. I had no idea of the new existence awaiting me.” She paused. Tears welled in her eyes, but not a drop fell. “I found a message on the phone from that woman you’re searching for. When I replaced the receiver, I was replaced too. By a new version of myself. One freed from the normal day-to-day frustrations. I waited until Jack came home and then I replayed the message to him. He was stupefied. When I looked into his eyes, I saw they were burning with fear. Like a small boy surrounded by bullies.”

“What did the message say?”

“She said their relationship was over, and she wanted £10,000. It was blackmail. Very business-like and matter-of-fact. All along she’d been working for her Mafia boss, a man called Mikolajek. She said she’d some important financial documents of Jack’s, which she would return when she got the money.”

“What did your husband do in response?”

“Nothing. He was in shock. Baffled. He thought he’d treated this woman better than anyone else in his life. He had been deluded into believing he had rescued her from people traffickers.”

“What about you? How did you react?”

“I felt calm. Lightened. As though we’d been handed a reprieve.”

Daly stared closely at her. He pushed the suicide hypothesis aside for a moment and entertained the idea of jealousy, the rage of a spurned wife tipped off by the woman who had casually seduced her husband and then set about blackmailing him. But would she have been rational and calculated enough to orchestrate her husband’s death to look like a suicide? He doubted it. The death scene was too contrived to have been a crime of passion, but the revelation that Lena may have tried to blackmail Fowler opened up new possibilities. He began to wonder whether their entire affair had been a trap. If so, who had set it?

Greta caught Daly’s curious gaze, forced a smile, and said: “That woman did us a favor. I was getting suspicious about the hours he was keeping. The fear that he was having an affair left me sick to the stomach.”

“Did you not think of kicking him out?”

“No. Not at all. I believed I could salvage our marriage. In my circumstances, women prefer security to fidelity. I hated him for his stupidity, but I wasn’t prepared to run away from what we had created. Our family life together.”

“What happened after you both listened to the message?”

“It was an emotional few hours. He tried to plan a course of action, got upset, and rang her number. When he got no answer, he came to me. He was like a piece of rope in a tug-of-war. When I went to bed, he was burning papers in the study. I watched the flames light up his face. He looked crumpled. Broken.”

“Enough to commit suicide.”

“He didn’t mention anything that would give me that idea. He had other things on his mind. Financial worries. But then it was always hard to tell with Jack. When I get low, everyone knows about it. But when Jack was down, he would just go quiet and say he was tired.”

“I’ll need to hear the message.”

“Too late. I erased it.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I thought it too dangerous. Especially if it was heard by the wrong person.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. It was her voice. The sound of her accent. Knowing it was still on the machine was too painful for me. And embarrassing.” She tried to change the subject. “Have you found her yet?”

“No.”

“She’s disappeared without a trace, hasn’t she? Only criminals can vanish like that. Organized criminals.”

“That’s why I’m here. I need more information about her.”

“Did she kill someone?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s what people are saying. I blame her for Jack’s death. She had a blank check to his heart, but that wasn’t enough for her. She should be hunted by the police like any other killer. What do you think?”

Daly had learned from experience that there was little to be gained by arguing with a grieving widow. In any case, she had added some credence to his deepest concerns.

“You may be right. Perhaps she is a killer, but that’s for the justice system to decide. And we are searching for her. But she’s being hunted by others. People who hunt to kill. We’re trying to make contact with her and encourage her to come in and talk to us. Her time for running and hiding is over.”

Greta Fowler had nothing more to add. Daly produced the CD of
La Traviata
.

“This was the CD playing on the morning of your husband’s death. A set of fingerprints was found on it. We haven’t been able to identify them.”

Greta nodded. She was staring absentmindedly out at the pool.

“The choice of CD must have some importance,” said Daly.

She looked at him in surprise. “I could draw a number of conclusions from it.”

“What are you thinking?”

She shrugged. “I took Jack to see a performance of
La Traviata
by the Philharmonic Society before Christmas. He wasn’t a big opera buff, but he was taken by the story line. Afterward, he bought the CD and played it late at night. He said he found Violetta’s plight very moving.”

Daly stared at the CD. From his basic knowledge of the opera, he recalled that Violetta was a high-class prostitute, the original whore with the heart of gold. The opera charted her relationship with her lover, which was jinxed by emotional blackmail. Perhaps it was a clue, a reference to Fowler’s relationship with Lena, thought Daly.

“Thank you for your time,” he said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

“Have I? I thought we were getting nowhere. But I’m glad if what I’ve told you brings you closer to tracking down that bitch.”

She had a black-and-white view of Lena Novak, one that Daly envied.

Before he left, she held out her hand. When he shook it, her fingers seemed to fumble in his as though she were about to lose her balance. He released them quickly.

Afterward, he sat in his car and played through the conversation in his head. Her revelations were not going to dramatically alter the investigation. In fact, they confirmed his instinct all along. Fowler’s mysterious death was connected to Lena’s disappearance and the border brothel in which they must have met.

Daly drove home, his thoughts focused on the similarities that were emerging between
La Traviata
’s plotlines and Fowler’s doomed relationship with Lena Novak. It struck him how difficult it would be for a woman like Lena to build up a trusting relationship with a man, especially one whom she had met as a prostitute. Relationships change and evolve, and many romances are triggered by an act of betrayal, but how many love affairs begin with exploited sex? Not very many, he thought. Blackmail and revenge were more likely to be kindled by such a relationship, rather than new love, so he tried not to judge Lena too harshly.

He pulled up at the cottage, switched off the engine, and broke away from his thoughts. He stared through the windshield and kept his grip on the steering wheel. He groaned. The policing partnership meeting. He had completely forgotten about it. He tried ringing Boyd on his mobile, but the commander had switched off his phone. He reversed and hurried to the venue, hoping that the meeting had started late.

“Good evening, Inspector, we’ve been waiting for you,” murmured Commander Boyd, without bothering to look up from his notes. Across the table sat the rest of the policing partnership, made up of local community leaders, four from the Catholic community, four from the Protestant. Susie Brooke, the antiracism officer, was there too. She looked up at Daly with a benign flicker of her long eyelashes. The man sitting next to her waved a finger at Daly. It was Michael Mooney. The antiracism officer and the former IRA prisoner. Now that was a pairing Daly hadn’t expected. He sat down beside the chief, realizing he was going to have to take this meeting more seriously than he had intended.

“Any more late-arriving stragglers?” said the chairman, Owen Higgins, the new Sinn Fein deputy leader, staring at Daly as though he were a scab on a difficult-to-heal wound. For some of the partnership members the monthly meetings were simply a chance to refresh their contempt for the new Police Service of Northern Ireland.

Boyd began with an overview of the latest crime figures. He emphasized the police’s success in tackling property theft, which had escalated alarmingly since the downturn in the economy. The figures sounded good. A 38 percent increase in the number of detections in the past year. Boyd rattled through the numbers.

“We haven’t come here to be bombarded by statistics,” interrupted Mooney. “At least the statistics you’ve successfully manipulated for public consumption.”

“What do you mean?”

“What about missing person cases? From what I can gather, your detection rate there is as bad as South America’s in the seventies.”

There were chortles from the other Republican politicians.

“All missing person cases are taken very seriously,” said Boyd.

“What if the missing person is a foreign national?”

“I presume you’re talking about Lena Novak,” he replied. “Cases like hers are statistically very unusual. However, the coverage given to them by the media make them very important ones in the public’s perception. Inspector Daly has been assigned this particular investigation, along with his Special Branch colleague, Detective Derek Irwin.”

Daly spoke up. “I can assure you we have been delving deep into this case, and that we are extremely anxious for this woman’s safety.”

However, Mooney had a point to make. “According to reports, another three Croatian women were reported missing this week from an illegal alcohol-bottling plant near the border, but I’ve yet to see a police appeal about their whereabouts. Is it the case that police officers are indifferent to foreign nationals who go missing?”

“No,” said Boyd. “Not at all.”

Owen Higgins leaned back in his seat. “Disappearances are a notorious border crime. During the Troubles we had many instances of men and women going missing. Usually they were branded as informers. In those days, proper searches were seldom conducted. It doesn’t surprise me to see a similar nonchalance at work in the police today.”

“Exactly,” said Mooney. “People just don’t vanish off the face of the earth because it’s South Armagh. When and where was the last sighting of Lena Novak?”

“Why are you so interested in this woman?” asked Daly.

Neither Mooney nor Higgins answered.

“What is it you’re trying to find out here?” continued Daly. “The whereabouts of your missing peace funds?”

Boyd butted in. “Mr. Mooney, you should know that we can’t reveal the details of an ongoing investigation.”

“I’m just concerned that people traffickers and pimps are operating freely under the cover of police indifference.”

One of the more moderate politicians, a representative of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, submitted a question. “Only a few years ago, South Armagh was a constant center of bloodshed and murder,” she said. “Now we learn from the media that it’s the focus for international criminal gangs. What exactly are the police doing to tackle the problem of people trafficking and is it true that these gangs have teamed up with former IRA men?”

Mooney shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He hunched his shoulders, drummed his fingers on the tabletop, and leaned over and whispered to Brooke. Daly caught his gaze and saw a pair of worried eyes flash back at him. Or was that just his imagination? The former terrorist and close friend of Jack Fowler looked anxious to get back to his heavily mortgaged, stinking concrete cell. Was it because, a decade ago, Mooney would have been one of the dark shadows from the terrorist underworld they were discussing? Daly watched him with curiosity.

“That’s a good question,” answered Commander Boyd. “And one we have been asking ourselves a lot in recent months.”

“Is it not your job to provide answers?” asked Higgins.

“That’s correct,” replied Boyd stiffly.

“Well, you seem to be doing the opposite right now.”

Daly watched the commander falter, anger flaring his nostrils. In a way, he felt sorry for Boyd, doing his paperwork every day, issuing new directives from headquarters, trying to keep in touch with what Special Branch officers were up to, and even interfere in what some of his detectives were doing. Telling himself that after ten years or so of shuffling papers he might be promoted back to the city, with perhaps an MBE as a glittering prize in sight. Getting heckled by Republican politicians was not part of his career plan.

Daly cleared his throat. “Police forces have their strategies and budgets. We have to reach targets for vehicle crime, street crime, and burglary, and that is where the resources go, but I think we need to realize that human trafficking is a problem that is sneaking up on us.”

“How many people traffickers have your arrested in the past year?” asked Mooney.

Daly shrugged and tried to be honest. “None. Yet. You have to remember we’re groping in the dark through a maze of cross-border roads and hideouts. Dissident Republicans, people traffickers, drug smugglers, fuel smugglers, cigarette smugglers, there’s a hundred different types of criminal out there running in different directions. But we struggle on, doing the best we can.”

Susie Brooke nodded. “This is a very new environment for the police: tackling international crime while dealing appropriately with foreign nationals; tackling racism in all its forms, especially the more covert forms such as institutional racism.” She glanced at Daly. “I think as police officers we need a new kind of training and a new set of experiences to make us more effective.”

The meeting progressed for another half an hour, discussing strategies to help the police reach out to the new arrivals from Eastern Europe. They decided to start with a mail drop to every house in the district with information about police services printed in different languages.

When it was over, Brooke came over and sat down beside Daly.

“I know why Lena Novak ran away from you.”

He twisted in his chair. “Why?”

“She doesn’t trust you. Isn’t it obvious?”

“Why shouldn’t she trust me? I saved her from a man who was about to kidnap her.”

“There’s no simple answer to that, but it’s a question you can’t ignore.”

“Why don’t you try giving me an answer then?”

She stared at him. “One aspect of her distrust is based on the fact that you’re a man.”

“And how do I resolve that?”

“You have to understand her world. All she sees are enemies, dangerous men who might do her harm. Try to imagine what it’s like being in her shoes.”

Daly was tired. He had a slight headache. If he was honest, he had let Lena slip out of his grasp in the clumsiest way possible, not once, but twice. Deep down, he blamed himself for not arresting her on the night they first met in the abandoned farmhouse. If anything, he had been too tentative, too interested in understanding her world. He looked at Brooke.

She smiled and tipped her head slightly to one side. “Perhaps we should talk about this later.”

“I agree.”

“What about Hegarty’s tonight? I’m heading there for a drink and a dance with some girlfriends.”

He was taken aback by the sudden invitation. “Sure.”

When she got up and left, Daly found himself staring across the table at Higgins and Mooney. The two Republicans exchanged meaningful glances.

“How do you get a date with a woman like that?” asked Higgins.

“Now you’re asking a good question.” Mooney nodded his head. “We’d all like to hear the answer to that one.”

Daly felt the back of his neck turn red as they laughed.