The Rising by Brian McGilloway Read Free Book Online Page B

others seemed to have been fired up by it and spoke animatedly to those around them. It was as I was removing my Garda overcoat before getting back into my car that one such group passed by. As I slammed the door, I looked out through the windscreen. One member of the group caught my eye as he passed and nodded. A narrow face, brown, untidy hair, darkened glasses; he was past my car and had disappeared into the dissolving crowd before I could catch a second glance. The man’s identity played at the edges of my mind all that night, but I was unable to place him.

Monday, 5 February

Chapter Nine
     
    I slept late and it was almost ten thirty by the time I made it to Letterkenny, where Kielty’s post-mortem was being completed. In fact, I hadn’t even had time to contact the station to let them know that was where I would be.
    When the state pathologist, Dr Joseph Long, had finished his examination, I went in to speak to him. In the adjoining room the charred remains of Martin Kielty – for identification of Kielty had been confirmed – now lay on a trolley, shrouded in a stained green scrubs sheet. The assisting technician was washing down the steel table on which the post-mortem had been conducted. The dental records I had left at the hospital matched the corpse and, said Dr Long, with no possibility for visual or fingerprint identification, and a lack of hospital records in Letterkenny, would have to suffice for identification evidence.
    ‘The body was very badly burned,’ Dr Long stated, washing his hands at the sink. ‘Cause of death though was a knife wound. There was one stab wound, above the eighth rib on the left-hand side of the sternum. The blade passed through the lung causing fatal haemorrhaging. There was no evidence of respiration of soot or ash, as one would expect from a victim in a fire. Nor is there evidence, in the less badly damaged skin, of vital reaction to the burns. He was dead for some hours before the fire started.’
    ‘No gunshot wounds?’ I asked.
    Long shook his head. ‘None.’ Mulronney had been right.
    I wondered again where, then, the gunfire had come from. Perhaps the Quigleys had been mistaken.
    ‘What about time of death?’
    ‘Very difficult to say. Liver temperature would be unreliable in a corpse as badly burned as this one. I’ve taken a sample of the vitreous humour to test potassium levels, but even with that, it’ll still be an estimate.’
    ‘The fire was reported after 4 a.m. It certainly wasn’t burning at two thirty – we have a witness. Kielty’s phone hadn’t been used since ten fifteen the evening previous.’
    ‘That sounds like a reasonable time frame,’ Long suggested. ‘I’ll not be able to narrow it down any further than that for you anyway.’
    ‘Anything else?’
    ‘I’ve taken swabs from the victim’s skin. The severity of the burns would suggest that he was coated in an accelerant of some sort. Again, when I know more, I’ll send on the information to your superintendent.’
    I didn’t spend any longer than necessary breathing in the stench of the embalming fluids in the autopsy suite. Excusing myself, I headed out to the car park for a smoke. As I leant against my car, I breathed an inward sigh of relief. Kielty had been dead before the fire started; he had not moved as he lay in the flames; I could not have saved him. I realized too, though, with a sudden shock of sadness, Sam Quigley had given his life in attempting to rescue someone who could not have been saved. Still, whoever had killed Kielty and set the fire in the barn was also responsible for the death of Quigley. And I could do something about that.
    Kielty had been selling drugs out of his house in Carrigans. I suspected that he was working with – or for – Lorcan Hutton, of whom there was, as yet, no sign. On Friday evening, Kielty had arrived at his house at 8.30 p.m. The blue car pulled up at 10 p.m. when Nora Quigley looked out. Kielty last used his mobile phone around