120
Stuart Campbell looked across at Cobb. ‘Sir, may I assist my colleague, please?’
The Detective Lieutenant nodded.
Campbell knelt and took the object the diver passed to him in his gloved hand. It was a length of very old, frayed rope, with tendrils of weed on it. Then, with both of them pulling, the diver steadily climbed the ladder, hauling something up by the rope that was clearly extremely heavy.
Lucas leaned over and helped too, while Gavin sat mesmerized.
A bundle of black fishing net slowly broke the surface, covered in weed, with chunks of wet mud sliding from it. There was something inside it that looked like a tarpaulin. A large cement block was tied to the bottom of the net, secured with very old rope wound around it several times in all directions. A crab scuttled off and fell back into the dark water.
Grace watched, equally mesmerized, feeling a lump in his throat for the old man.
Lucas Daly, Stuart Campbell and Tommy Lovell, the diver, finally hauled the whole thing over the side of the boat and lowered it onto the deck. Mud oozed all around it, as water pooled across the deck. Laid out, it was a good six feet in length.
Gavin Daly was trembling. With fenders lowered, the police launch moved alongside, and Grace, flanked by Pat Lanigan and Aaron Cobb, had to resist the temptation to jump aboard and hold the old man’s hand.
The diver produced a sheath knife and began cutting away at the netting. A crew member of the police launch jumped aboard the dive boat with a line, ran it through a mooring eye at the stern, then wound it around a cleat on the launch; then he did the same with another line at the bow.
But none of the three detectives on the launch moved. They all watched. Sensing something that, at this moment at least, they should only be observing.
Lovell, helped by Campbell, pulled away the severed strands of fishing net, exposing the cracked tarpaulin beneath. The diver turned to Gavin Daly, as if seeking his approval. The old man nodded.
Above them the traffic roared. The thwock-thwock-thwock of the helicopter continued. Like a surgeon, the diver made a careful incision in the tarpaulin, a few inches at first, then wider, cutting steadily all the way along. Then the two men pulled it open, as if it were the chest cavity of a post-mortem victim.
Gavin Daly fell down onto his knees beside it. Grace could see tears rolling down his face.
He could see inside the tarpaulin now. Bones. A whole tangle of skeletal remains. Every bit of flesh, skin, muscle and sinew gone, picked clean long ago by scavengers that had found ways in through the cracks. And Roy Grace was experienced enough to tell, even from several yards away, that it wasn’t animal bones he was looking at.
At one end, he could recognize fibula, tibia, metatarsal, cuboid, cuneiform bones, and wished he had a forensic anthropologist present who could have given them all detailed information on what lay before them.
A few moments later as the two men exposed the full length of the remains, he saw a human skull. Its rictus grin seemed to be saying, Hey guys, what kept ya?
Gavin Daly pressed his face into the mud and water beside the tarpaulin, sobbing his heart out.
The three detectives stood watching, as if unsure what to do next.
Gavin Daly raised his head, moved closer to the tarpaulin, and peered in. Lucas went across and laid a hand tenderly on his father’s shoulder. Then the old man reached in, and pulled out a short length of thin, discoloured chain. He put it on the deck beside him, then looked inside again, and moments later, lifted out another discoloured chain, with a rusty tiny object on it. He held it up to his neck.
Grace, followed by Lanigan and Cobb, boarded the vessel and walked over to him. ‘What is it, Mr Daly?’ Grace asked. But he already knew the answer.
‘You want to tell us what’s going on here?’ Aaron Cobb demanded, more than a little insensitively.
The old man, through his tears, turned to him and held up the necklace. Even thought it was badly corroded, Grace could make out that it was a tiny rabbit.
‘My dad always wore this,’ he said, through his tears. ‘It was given to him by his dad, who was a member of the Irish Dead Rabbits Gang. I used to admire it when I was a kid and he promised me that one day I could have it.’ Then he picked up the corroded length of chain. ‘This was the chain my dad had on his pocket watch.’ He turned back and stared at the skull. Then he put out a shaking, bony hand, blotched with liver spots, and stroked it. ‘They drowned him, the way some people drown a cat. You’re detectives. Here’s a homicide staring at you all. They drowned him. They drowned him like a goddamn cat.’ He buried his face in his hands and sobbed again.
Then he turned and faced the three detectives. ‘Ninety years ago, I made a promise to my dad that one day I would come to New York and find him. That’s what’s going on here. This is Brendan Daly. He’s my pop. And I’ve found him.’
121
They took away his belt and his shoes and his cane, and gave him prison-issue paper slippers, several sizes too big, so that he walked with a shuffle that made him look like a ninety-five-year-old man might be expected to look.
But Gavin Daly did not care. He was already feeling institutionalized.
Since being taken ashore in handcuffs, he’d been interviewed by an attorney, then arraigned in front of a sour judge who had refused him bail, remanding him in custody as a flight risk, then examined by a prison doctor. Now he was ensconced in a cell at the grandly named Manhattan Detention Complex. His attorney told him cheerfully that it used to be known as The Tombs.
He didn’t care.
He’d found his pop, and avenged him. On the same day. Nothing mattered any more.
His mood swung from intense sadness to profound happiness. He felt complete, for the first time in his life, as he sat on the hard, blue-foam mattress, writing notes with the ballpoint pen and paper that he had requested, which had been brought by a sympathetic officer.
There was a barred window, high up, through which he could hear traffic noise. Life. Yellow cabs, sirens, horns. A Monday night in Manhattan. People meeting friends in bars, having dinner, hurrying later to catch trains home to the suburbs. Worrying.
So many people worried.
Living lives of quiet desperation.
Had he worried? Had his life been one of quiet desperation? What had the ninety-five years, that ended in this tiny prison cell where he could reach out and touch the toilet from his bunk – if he so wished – amounted to? A hill of beans? Anything at all?
Young people who dismissed the elderly overlooked one important thing. The older you were, the less you cared. That was the one, great, liberating thing about old age. Really, you didn’t care any more. You were free.
He felt free now, like he had never felt free before in his life. He felt happy. In a way that he had never felt happy before.
Happy in this tiny cell.
Happier than he had ever been in his grand mansion.
There was a clank and his cell door opened. In came the officer who had apologized to him for taking his belt and his shoes. He was tubby, close to retirement age, with the face of a man who had seen it all and had learned that the best way to cope is to smile.
‘Lights out soon, Mr Daly, just to give you a five-minute warning to finish your writing. I wanted to check one thing: you don’t eat kosher or halal?’