“Sure.”
“I loved my boy. He was a good lad. Fell in with a bad crowd round here. His mother couldn’t cope. If I’d had custody I would have took him driving with me all over Europe. Shown him another way. Another world. I shouldn’t have said anything at the funeral. Should have kept my mouth shut and bided me time. There’s talking and there’s action, isn’t there? Knew a driver years ago in Birmingham. His daughter was beat into a coma by her boyfriend. Lovely wee lass. Smart, funny, very pretty. Now she’s in a wheelchair, brain-damaged. Can’t feed herself, can’t talk. This guy – my mate – says nothing at the trial. Says nothing after the verdict. Nothing to the press. Just a humble wee man content to accept the justice of the court. The boyfriend gets three years in prison. His daughter has a life sentence. Their family is destroyed. So he waits. He waits and waits and of course the boyfriend is released after two years for good behaviour. Again my mate waits so it’s not obvious. He finds out where the boy lives and he watches him and he waits. A year goes by after the boyfriend is out of prison and then he and his brother visit the boy in his new flat. They knock on his door and the lad opens it and they go to town on him with tire irons … That’s the way to do it, Inspector Duffy. No threats, no outbursts at funerals. Don’t draw attention to yourself. You wait and wait and when the time is right you strike. You’d do the same if someone harmed your Emma, wouldn’t you, Inspector?”
“I would,” I said immediately.
“We all would. You – the police, the courts, your job is to rob fathers of our right to natural justice. If I’d kept my mouth shut I could have murdered Deauville in due course. But somebody did it for me.”
“Someone you know?”
“No.”
“The wife, though. Killing her’s not so easy is it?” I said. “Would you kill her as well?”
He shook his head. “Have a good day, Inspector,” he said and closed the door.
On the ride back to Carrick I let Lawson drive while I thought. A vengeful parent might kill Deauville but you wouldn’t kill him and then wait a couple of days and kill the wife too. Not out of revenge. Not after the blood pact had been fulfilled and honour satisfied. You’d kill Elena for different reasons. Because she knew something: she’d witnessed the killer stalking them, she’d seen the killer’s car parked outside her house, her husband had confided in her that he’d had threats … something like that.
I went back to the station and read the transcripts of her two police interviews but there was nothing new in them.
O’Driscoll’s Q&A had been about the drugs so that was excusable. This was on me. I had botched this one. I had had her in my interview room and I had let her go home without telling me everything she knew. It was my fault that the killer was going unpunished. It was my fault that Elena Deauville was dead.
13: THE PAPER, THE SCISSORS AND MICHAEL STONE
You know what I’m talking about. You’ve seen it before. You work the case from every angle but the case still dies. Like a cardiac team in casualty with the family just outside the glass we did everything we could for the Deauvilles. But Mr Deauville’s murder went unsolved and Mrs Deauville’s disappearance went unsolved. At any other time perhaps we could have generated some interest in the media but for the public in Belfast it was all Gibraltar all the time. The IRA, ahem, volunteers were being shipped home from the Rock – the funerals were going to be the biggest thing since Bobby Sands.
Things weren’t so bleak for me, though. Beth returned with Emma no questions asked. If it had been a punishment it had been an effective one. If it had been Beth just getting a little breathing room it also had been effective. She seemed happier and I was relieved.
“So we’ll start looking at houses then, shall we?” Beth said.
“We will.”
My Coronation Road days were numbered.
I was relieved too that for now my name was out of the papers and I was down to four ciggies a day: after breakfast, lunch, dinner and before bed. Find me the Catholic RUC man that can do better.
But nothing changed the fact that the case was dead-ending. No forensic or eyewitness testimony on Francis Deauville. Nothing at all about Elena. We dug into her background and through Interpol the Bulgarian police gave us what they had, which turned out to be very little. Ordinary childhood and high school. Excelled in English and history, had indeed met Francis Deauville where she claimed she had met him (at the ruins of a Roman town) and apparently fallen madly in love.
Francis’s CV had more scope for enemies. All those heists over the water. Crooks always fell out over who fucked up in the jobs that went wrong and who got more than his share of the loot in the jobs that went right. Francis must have made many enemies in England. Any one of them could have come over on the boat to kill him.