Gallows Lane (Inspector Devlin Mystery 2) Read Free

one arm. It had not taken him long to dress for the cameras. People were gathered around the spot, near the top of Gallows Lane, and, as I walked up it towards the site, I could hardly believe it when I learnt who had made the find.
    Harry Patterson and Hugh Colhoun were grinning broadly, caught in the flash of the cameras, holding up some of the weapons found as if in offering. They had reason to smile: in addition to this latest find, just one month earlier the pair had discovered a substantial arms and drugs cache that had made them the toast of the station.
    During the Troubles the IRA was known to have kept its arsenal in bunkers along the border. Often these were quite professional affairs: concreted air-raid shelters, perhaps, with steps leading down and electric lights fitted. Usually the entrances were covered with turf or logs or, in the case of a bunker in the middle of a field near Armagh, under a haystack. In that particular case, the British Army had used the field as a landing spot for their Chinook helicopters, dropping and airlifting troops in and out for patrols and house searches, not realizing that the contraband they sought was quite literally under their feet.
    In most cases, these bunkers had been sealed up after the Good Friday Agreement seemed to offer the prospect of peace in Northern Ireland. Indeed, when the issue of paramilitary decommissioning became a stumbling block to progress and the governments invited General De Chastelain to Northern Ireland to try to encourage the various terrorist groups to ‘put their weapons beyond use’, the vast majority of the bunkers were filled with concrete, their contents preserved forever like metallic fossils. However, some smaller bunkers were forgotten, their keepers dead, their existence supposedly the stuff of urban myth.
    Just occasionally, people stumbled across these bunkers by accident. So it had been in February of this year when Paddy Hannon, a successful land developer who had bought a thirty-acre plot near Raphoe, had begun to excavate the area in preparation for building houses. One of his workers, using an earth-mover to shift tree roots and rocks off the land, had scraped across the top of a bunker, tearing the thick padlock off the rusted iron door which had been buried under a foot of clay and turf.
    The man summoned Paddy Hannon, who had gone down into the bunker to investigate, believing he had uncovered an old air-raid shelter. Indeed, even when his torch light racked across a number of weapons lying in one corner, they appeared so rusted he believed them to be Second World War artefacts. Then he discovered bricks of cannabis piled against one wall and called the local Gardai. Patterson and Colhoun duly arrived and could not believe their luck. They called in support and wrote the find up as their own, gaining all the attendant kudos in so doing.
    In total the haul had included several pistols and rifles and cannabis resin with an estimated street value in excess of three million euros.
    Patterson and Colhoun had become heroes, regaling all who would listen with tales of the discovery, neglecting to mention that it had been made long before they arrived on the scene and that, in fact, they had simply babysat the find until the Drugs Squad arrived.
    Today’s find was altogether more impressive, seeming to have resulted from proper police work.
    I knew both men fairly well, having been based in the same station as them for the past few years. Patterson, the more senior of the two, was a little older than I, and, though an inspector, was known to have ambitions to make it higher. He claimed he had chosen to stay in uniform as it brought him closer to the people he had enlisted to serve, but it was common knowledge that he had applied and been turned down by the Detective branch several times; a fact which had caused more than a little animosity between us when I had first arrived at the station as a DI.
    He was over six feet tall and around