"You lot are all the same. Always thinking the worst of people." But again, despite her indignation, it didn't have any conviction. "Kids'll be kids, Inspector. You know that. Or do your wee'uns not shite like the rest of us?"
Muire was playing in the garden by herself as I was leaving. stopped and watched her. If she was aware of my presence, she did not show it.
"What's your dolly called?" I asked.
"Angela," she replied without looking up.
"Angela was very special to you, wasn't she?" I sat on the edge of the chair where Sadie had been when I arrived. The girl nodded, hut still did not look up. "Did she take you to the pictures on Friday?"
"Some scary thing. It was rotten!" She pulled a face, finally looking at me.
"Where did you go after that?"
"Home."
"Angela too?"
"No. She went to see her friend, I think."
"Whitey?"
"No."
"Who, Muire? Think. It's really important."
"I dunno. She never said."
"Did she say where her friend lived?"
A shake of the head.
"Which direction did she go in when you came out of the cinema?"
She bit her bottom lip and frowned in concentration, but again couldn't answer me. "The bus stop, just. We left her at the bus stop."
"Good girl, Muire. That's going to be very helpful," I said trying to sound sincere. "One other thing, Muire, and then I'll go. Did Angela have a fight with someone the day before? On Thursday? Did she row with your Mum?"
Muire shook her head, but would not look at me again and busied herself with her dolls.
"Was it your dad she rowed with?" Again a shake of the head, but this time in pantomime fashion, as a child does when trying too hard to appear truthful; my own daughter had done just such a thing many times before. "What did she row about with your dad?" Nothing. I squatted down right beside her, pretending to play with her doll. "What happened, Muire? It's really important if I'm going to catch the man who hurt Angela."
She looked up at me and tears began to well in her eyes. "Angela said Daddy was watching her."
"Watching her?"
She nodded solemnly. "In the house. Watching her when she went to bed." The tears began to run down her face but she did nothing to stop them.
"Is that what you were going to tell me the last day?" I asked and she nodded at me shyly. Then her expression changed and her line of vision shifted to above and behind me.
"Don't talk to strangers, Muire!" Sadie said. Shoving past me and grabbing the girl by the wrist, she pulled her to her feet. She slapped her sharply across the tops of her legs, the girl's dress cushioning most of the blow. "Now, get into the house."
Sadie marched behind her and left me standing alone in the garden. I looked round to see the neighbour from earlier, still standing at the hedge, smiling over at me. "Can I help you, sir?" I asked.
He shook his head, still smiling. "No. I'm just enjoying the entertainment."
"Would you enjoy it more down the station?"
" Piss off, prick," he said, then went into his own house.
When I returned to the station, I learnt that Costello had assigned two uniformed officers to assist me full-time in the investigation, while others in the station could be co-opted when needed. This he explained to me while the two sat outside his office door. I knew both of them fairly well.
The more senior was Sergeant Caroline Williams, a native of Lifford, who had been a Guard for eight years and had recently been promoted. Costello suggested that she might be useful if the case involved a sexual crime, which was looking increasingly likely liked Caroline. She was straight-talking and had a good manner with members of the public. Luckily none of those people had seen her,. as I had, baton into submission a six-foot-two rocker who had caused a public-order disturbance after he tried to break into his ex-girlfriend's house. He would probably have sued for GBH had it not entailed publicly admitting that a woman of five-foot-five had left him crying in a doorway with a broken nose.
And yet, while Williams was meting out such punishments to woman-abusers and wife-beaters by day, she was herself, for many years, being beaten nightly by her husband, an insipid salesman frustrated in his life and content in venting his frustration on the woman who had borne him a son for whom he had little regard. Caroline Williams told no one about it, but one of the sergeants noticed bruising on her arms and neck and, in the bar some nights later, we put together the pieces. Foolishly, that same night, fuelled by the courage a few pints can bring, four of us visited her house and taught Simon Williams a salutary lesson in how Gardai stick up for each other and how it feels to be on the receiving end of things. The following morning, while we congratulated ourselves on our fraternal actions, Caroline Williams covered with make-up the two black eyes her husband had given her in the belief that she had set us upon him. We did not get involved in the affairs of the Williams family again.
Then, one night Caroline and her young son, Peter, arrived in the station and slept in the holding cell to escape Simon's latest rage. Costello visited him the next morning and, though no one knows what passed between them, by the following weekend Simon Williams had left Lifford and moved to Galway.
The second assignee was Jason Holmes, an officer who had moved to Letterkenny from Dublin about eighteen months earlier. In Dublin he had been involved with the drugs squad and had gained considerable kudos for helping bring down a dealer whose name was linked with the murder of a leading lawyer. Holmes moved from Dublin soon after, partly for his protection from reprisals and also, as he told me later, because he had grown sick of city living. It was a fair enough reason. Holmes was quiet, bringing a reputation from Dublin which circumstance had not allowed him to cement. Again, Costello had a reason for including Holmes: following the discovery of the tablet in Angela's stomach, his knowledge of drugs might be useful.
Costello called the two of them into his office and asked me to bring them up to date on what we had gathered so far. It was useful to reconsider what we had learned as I jotted down key times and events on the small easel blackboard Costello had had placed in the corner of the room.
"So, Angela is seen in the company of Whitey McKelvey, known petty criminal. On Thursday, she has an argument with her father, when she accuses him, I think, of spying on her getting undressed.
She leaves home on Thursday, and stays somewhere overnight where she gets a change of clothes. Both those clothes and the clothes she wore on Thursday are still unaccounted for." Williams nodded.
"Friday afternoon," I continued, "she takes her sisters to the cinema. Leaves just after four. Probably at the bus stop by 4.15 p.m., from where, I think, she is going to meet someone, possibly a boyfriend. At some point late that night, we think, she suffers a seizure and dies – possibly after taking drugs. Her body is dumped behind the cinema that night and is discovered the next morning. She is wearing only her underwear, inside out, and a gold ring which I suspect her family didn't know she owned. McKelvey has been linked with her, but I don't take him for a murderer. In his favour, so to speak, the drugs link would seem to suggest him, as would his size in terms of being small enough to kneel on her chest. On the other hand, if this was a sexual crime – which it seems to have been, to some extent – we know that her father, no stranger to our cells before this, might have had more than simple fatherly love for his girl."
"Especially if she wasn't his girl," Costello said, nodding sagely, happy to have made a contribution. "Though I would never have taken Johnny Cashell for a paedophile."
" A couple more months and he wouldn't have been though, technically, would he?" Holmes said, and smirked.