But that wasn’t it either.
This was local. This was personal. This was something specific about Francis himself. All my instincts told me that and the little clues told me that too.
So the days went on and the nights went on and there was no change. We were a small department and there were other cases. It wasn’t time to put the Deauville file away but pounding the beat and working the phones was giving us nothing. Although I was wary of journalists I did a couple of interviews for the papers including an English-language Bulgarian paper called The Sofia Echo.
Ordinary day in the barracks. The snow long gone. Rain now. Warm drizzle.
“Phone call for you, Inspector Duffy,” Sandra said.
“Lads, I better get this. To be continued.”
I went to my office and picked up the receiver.
“Duffy, Carrick CID,” I said.
“Hello, Sean. It’s Pytor Yavarov.”
“What can I do for you, Pytor?”
“I’d like to talk to you about the Elena Deauville disappearance.”
“Do you have information?”
“I would prefer it if we talk in person.”
“I can be in Dublin in two hours.”
“I am already in Belfast. I do not want any nosy inquiries from my colleagues in the embassy if I am seen talking to a stranger who then turns out to be a Northern Irish policeman.”
“OK, we’ll meet in the centre of Belfast. But it’s going to have to be a quick meeting. Those IRA funerals are this afternoon and traffic will be a nightmare.”
“Do you know of a discreet place?”
“Let’s meet in the last snug on the right of the Crown Bar in half an hour. OK if I bring Lawson and McCrabban?”
“Do you trust them?”
“With my life.”
“I will see you in half an hour.”
Twenty-seven minutes later Lawson, Crabbie and I walked into the Crown Bar and ordered three Guinnesses and three Irish stews.
Yavarov was waiting for us in the snug, huddled over a lager and vodka chaser. He was nattily dressed in a wool raincoat and a tweed jacket with a red cravat underneath. He declined a Guinness and a stew, even though we explained that that’s what you ate and drank in here. The Crown was a Victorian saloon that still had its original gas lights and fixtures and fortunately for our purposes was equipped with many individual booths or “snugs” that allowed one privacy.
“So what’s this all about?” I asked Yavarov.
“I read about Mrs Deauville’s disappearance in The Sofia Echo,” he began. “It is fortunate that I did so. No one told us in the embassy that she had gone missing.”
“I contacted Interpol and I assumed they would have contacted you,” I said, quick to defend my reputation against a charge of professional misconduct.
“Interpol did not contact us.”
“Well, you know now. She’s been missing for a week and there’s no sign of her anywhere. We’ve checked the ferry ports and the airports and we’re certain she didn’t get out of Northern Ireland that way. The border’s another matter. There are hundreds of unofficial crossing points and she could have used one of those.”
“She could be alive?” Yavarov asked.
“She could be. She was last seen at a bus station in Antrim but she didn’t get on any of the buses. Who knows, maybe a friend drove her over the border and she hid out in the Irish countryside before getting a plane somewhere.”
“Why would she run away?”
“Because she was worried she was going to be charged with heroin trafficking? That’s five to ten years in prison,” Crabbie said.
“You had no evidence of her direct involvement in the drug trade,” Yavarov said.
“So why do you think she ran?” I asked.
“If she ran it was because she did not trust the police to protect her,” he said definitively.
“Protect her from what?”
“In Bulgaria the police can be bought and sold for a few Lev.”
“The RUC is incorruptible,” Crabbie said.
“That is not what I hear. I hear you work with Protestants to kill the IRA. I hear you let the IRA and the UVF divide up Belfast between them for the purpose of selling drugs and running protection rackets. I hear you let Protestant and Catholic gangsters kill drug dealers who do not pay them protection,” Yavarov said.
Some of that, of course, was true.
“That may happen. But not in my manor. There are no free passes for murder in Carrickfergus,” I insisted.
“You I trust to do the right thing, Duffy. Perhaps I would have kept this information to myself if I did not trust you,” Yavarov said and finished his vodka. He took a sip of the nasty-looking lager.
“You have tried Harp?” he asked.
“Yes,” we all said together.
“It is good, no?”
“Maybe it’s an acquired taste,” I said to be polite. (Belfast pub Harp was an acquired taste like coprophagia or getting pissed on by hookers.) “Now, Mr Yavarov, you’ve come a very long way this morning to tell us something. Why don’t we end the small talk and you just tell us what it is you think we should know.”
“When I met Mrs Deauville before you began your tape recording she told me something she did not wish to tell you.”