Bleed a River Deep Read Free Page B

body.
    ‘Multiple gunshot wounds. I’m guessing the one to the forehead actually killed him, but even if it hadn’t, one of the wounds to his trunk probably would have anyway. Any ideas who he is?’
    ‘ Was ,’ Patterson said. ‘Looks like a foreigner.’
    This pearl of wisdom was soon tested. One of the SOCOs brought over the man’s wallet that contained a photograph of a woman and spare change just short of a euro. In the notes section of the wallet was a driving licence featuring a photograph of the dead man in front of us. His name was Joseph Patrick Mackey, and his address was in Coolatee. Folded behind the licence was a small prayer card, written in a language I did not recognize.
    ‘Russian?’ Mulronney suggested.
    ‘God knows,’ I said. ‘“Joe Mackey” hardly sounds particularly Russian, though, does it?’
    ‘Find out,’ Patterson said, handing me the keys to the car he had been driving. ‘Take a woman with you to break the news.’
    *
    Even before I had knocked at the door, something felt wrong. The house in Coolatee listed as Mackey’s address was huge, set up from the road with a winding driveway leading up to the front porch. A drystone wall five feet high surrounded the plot and a new-registration Avensis was parked in front of the garage. Somehow it didn’t seem to suit an unshaven robber in torn clothes with less than a euro in his wallet.
    ‘Nice spot,’ Helen Gorman said. I had picked her up at the station. Helen was a uniformed Garda officer with whom I had worked on previous cases. Certainly this wasn’t the first time she had accompanied me to break such news.
    A woman we took to be Mrs Mackey answered the door, though she looked nothing like the young woman in the photograph we had taken from the dead man’s wallet. Mackey was in her fifties, with tanned skin and platinum-blonde hair.
    ‘Mrs Mackey?’ I asked, somewhat incredulously.
    ‘Yes,’ she said, smiling confusedly. ‘Is something wrong?’
    ‘We’d best go inside, ma’am,’ Gorman said, the implication of her words already filling Mrs Mackey’s expression with dread.
    The woman stood her ground, refusing to move along the hallway towards where we could see the kitchen. ‘It’s Joe, isn’t it?’
    I scanned the walls behind her head, taking in each photograph: a child playing in snow, squinting a smile towards the camera; Mrs Mackey, a little younger, her husband standing beside her, holding her hand, relaxed, smiling; her husband, bald, pale and a little podgy. Not thin, not black-haired, not the man lying dead outside Lifford bank.
    ‘I’m afraid we have some bad news, ma’am,’ I heard Gorman say.
    ‘What?’ Mrs Mackey stuttered, stretching one hand to steady herself against the wall, her other reaching for her chest. ‘Not Joe. He can’t be.’
    I glanced at Gorman, wishing I’d spoken a second earlier. ‘He’s not, Mrs Mackey. Look, can we come in and sit down? We need to talk.’
    I finally assured Mrs Mackey that her husband – her bald, pale, podgy husband – was, to the best of my knowledge, still alive and well and playing golf. Then we fairly quickly established that Mrs Mackey – Diane Mackey – had no relatives matching the description of the man we’d left lying in Lifford Main Street. Finally, for confirmation, I showed her the licence we had taken from her ‘husband’s’ corpse.
    ‘That’s his information all right – even his date of birth,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know the man in the picture. He’s not my husband.’
    ‘Why would he have your husband’s licence?’ I asked.
    ‘I have no idea,’ Mackey replied. ‘But that man’s not my husband.’ Then something seemed to strike her. ‘Shouldn’t you people check these things out more carefully? Telling someone their husband’s dead when it’s not true.’
    ‘It doesn’t usually happen, ma’am,’ I said. ‘It was a genuine mistake.’
    ‘Genuine or not, I’m quite angry about it.’
    ‘I understand,