"Your sergeant has just left here. Her words were something along the lines of, 'I'll rip his fucking throat out.'"
"Poor Holmes," I said.
"She was talking about you. They haven't found him yet."
Costello had crawled back to his wife. He sat on the living- room floor, cradling her in his arms, her blood clotted and thick against his stomach, his breath rattling in his chest.
"I just came back and found her. Forgot my glasses. Just came back for my glasses," he said, then seemed to panic. He patted his pockets, his shirt, his legs, searching for them. "No… I forgot them. I came back and… and Kate's gone… and…" He did not, could not, finish the sentence. I had been wrong. Knox wasn't going after Costello. She was going after his children.
I was on my way out of the house when I found the photograph of Mary Knox that her children had left behind, sitting on the hall table in front of a vase of white roses.
I asked myself why they hadn't killed Kate Costello here, in her house. Taking her away suggested that she was still alive, that she was being held somewhere. But I could not think where. And then I realised again the significance of the date: New Year's Eve. The date Knox had disappeared. It could be no coincidence that Kate was taken on this date. And if they chose the date of her death on which to enact their final plan, perhaps the Knox children had also chosen the place of her death. It was tenuous, but I had nothing else to follow, nowhere else to look. If, indeed, they had taken her to Mary Knox's final resting place, it meant that Ratsy had admitted where he had dumped her body. There was only one other person who would know.
Cashell answered the door in his boxer shorts and a T-shirt, squinting against the glare of the snow. His face was drawn, his skin the colour of ash.
"What?" he asked, leaning against the door jamb so that I was left standing in the falling snow.
"Where did you dump the body? Mary Knox's?"
"Piss off, Devlin," Cashell said, pulling the door behind him as he walked back into his house.
I stuck my foot against the jamb, holding the door ajar, then pushed my way in. "I know what happened, Johnny. I know Powell ordered Ratsy Donaghey to kill her. My guess is you were just a driver. Maybe you didn't even know what was happening; I… I don't give a shit. But four people have died in the past weeks over this, and one more will now if you don't help me." He stood looking at me pleading in his hallway, as he might consider a drunk begging for change in the street. "Please, tell me where you dumped the body. Please."
"Have a bad night, Inspector?" he asked.
"What?"
"You look a little worse for wear. Bit of a headache?" Cashell sneered, snorting as he turned and walked away. I felt my hand reach instinctively into my coat pocket for my gun, my fingers tightening around the grip.
"Borderland," a voice above me said.
Cashell spun around, his teeth bared like an animal. "Shut up!" he hissed. But Sadie Cashell was walking slowly down the stairs now, ignoring her husband, whose foolishness and pride had cost her her daughter.
"Borderland," she repeated, looking only at Cashell. "It's too late, Johnny. Too much has happened." Then she turned to me. "Borderland. That's where Johnny was working. The Three Rivers Hotel. Borderland was a new disco hall they built around the time she vanished. They threw her body in with the foundations. I washed the blood and cement off his trousers," she explained. She stood halfway down the stairs now, and as she spoke something inside her seemed to be extinguished. With the slightest slump of her shoulders, Sadie Cashell seemed to age by twenty years.
"You stupid bitch!" Cashell roared at her, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, a pint of milk in his hand. "You useless fucking bitch."
I removed the gun from my pocket and with preternatural calmness, levelled it at Johnny Cashell. His jaw gaped open and he dropped the milk onto the linoleum floor, the white liquid stippling his legs.
"Don't," I said. "Don't, Johnny. If I come back here and something has happened to Sadie, I will kill you. Understand that. I won't waste time on kickings or petrol, I will gladly put a bullet through your fucking heart."
Then I backed down the hallway and pushed through the doorway, back out into the snow.
The roads were deserted, save for farmers shifting hay between barns and fields. It took me ten minutes to get to the Three Rivers. On the way, I radioed through to Burgess in the station and asked for support at the hotel. I also asked about Holmes and was disappointed to hear that he had still not been found. It meant that Yvonne Coyle might still have an accomplice. That was if she was still in the area and supposing that Kate Costello was still alive.
Just as I negotiated the final twist in the road, my phone rang. I recognized the number as Williams.
"You spineless prick!" she snapped as soon as I answered. "If you think I'm not capable, tell me yourself."
"What?"
"First you send me to babysit a pensioner, then you send someone down to give me a hand. How dare you!"
"What are you talking about?" I snapped.
"Harvey. I'm sitting here in my car, watching him going inside. Do you not think I'm capable of sitting here myself?"
"I didn't send Harvey down there, Caroline," I explained. "Why aren't you inside, with Powell?"
"His daughter-in-law chased me out. I'm sitting outside, watching. Harvey arrived a few minutes ago. He's just gone in." Her tone changed. "I thought maybe you'd sent him to keep an eye on me."
"For Christ's sake, Caroline, I sent you there because I trust you. Go in and see what Harvey's doing," I said, then thought better of it. "In fact, leave him in there and get over to the Three Rivers. I think that's where they are."
There was a period of silence, long enough for me to wonder if my connection had been broken. Then Williams spoke: "Sorry, sir," she said.
"Later, Caroline."
"Yes, sir."
The Three Rivers emerged out of the snow, skeletal and exposed. The windows had long since been smashed, boarded up and ripped open again. I drove up to the front of the hotel and got out of the car. I could just about make out the faintest tracks of tyres leading around the side of the building, though the snow was falling so thickly it was impossible to say how long ago they had been made. Returning to the car I followed the tracks carefully, the snow cracking under the wheels.
I slid to a halt and checked to ensure I had my gun. Treading carefully, I reached a side entrance where I could make out more tyre tracks gradually disappearing under the snow. I approached the side of the hotel. Inside, the wallpaper was falling off and pieces fluttered in the wind like strips of flayed skin. On the exposed walls, graffiti was scrawled on top of the pink paint which someone had once applied as an undercoat.
The carpet was still intact, though it was almost black, matted with dirt and sodden, so that, with each step, water welled up around my feet and my shoes squelched loudly. My eyes were just growing accustomed to the dimness when I turned a corner and walked into a patch of still grey light seeping in through a hole in the ceiling. Through it, stray flakes of snow pirouetted down.
The musty smell of mice and another sharper, cleaner smell were carried on the wind. Beer cans, cigarette packets, used condoms, all lay discarded along the corridors. As I passed each doorway, I jerked my head in and scanned the room with my. 38 drawn and cocked.
Finally I came into a central reception area. In the corner was the door to what had once been a cloakroom. I could hear someone shifting in the darkness. I thought I could see a movement.
"Sean? Yvonne?" I shouted. "Yvonne, this is Inspector Devlin. I know you're here. We're all around you, Yvonne. It's over, love. Why not come on out?"
I waited, holding my breath, straining in the half-light to see if anyone would appear. I was about to call out again when I saw the diminutive figure of Yvonne Coyle step out of the shadows of the room, Kate Costello beside her, a Garda revolver pressed against her side. Further back, to her left, I could make out the outline of a man, sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, though it was too dark for me to see who it was.