The Rising Read Free

the cherry tree at the top of our garden, its bare branches springing in the light wind. Debbie came in and stood beside me.
    ‘Are you OK?’
    I nodded.
    ‘Penny has something to ask you.’ She waited a beat for me to speak, then continued. ‘She wants to go to a disco on Wednesday night.’
    ‘She’s eleven,’ I said.
    ‘The school is running it. She wants to go with all her friends.’
    ‘I think she’s too young.’
    ‘There’ll be a boy at it. Someone she likes.’ Debbie smiled as she told me this.
    I thought I felt something crack inside me. My stomach twisted so forcefully I had difficulty in swallowing my mouthful of tea.
    ‘She’s too young for boys,’ I stated.
    ‘Wise up, Ben,’ Debbie said, laughing lightly. ‘She’s eleven. I’d be more worried if she didn’t like boys.’ It was a mother’s logic. ‘I told her she’d need to ask you.’
    ‘We’ll see,’ I said, aware of the fact that, having enlisted her mother’s support, Penny had ensured that the decision had already been made. ‘I’m going out for a drive,’ I added, ignoring Debbie’s look of concern.
    I pulled up to the laneway that led to Martin Kielty’s house. A number of squad cars were parked haphazardly along the roadside and a single fire tender still stood at the end of the lane, though the fire was now extinguished.
    An ancient oak demarcated the line between Kielty’s property and Quigley’s and it was here that I laid the two bunches of flowers I had bought. I stood in the silence, conscious of the sharp scent of burnt wood carried downwind from the barn, and whispered a prayer for the two men, and asked their forgiveness for my having failed to save them.
    ‘You should be home.’
    I looked up and saw Harry Patterson at the entrance to the old barn, his bulk exaggerated by the blue paper Forensics suit he wore.
    ‘I couldn’t settle,’ I explained as I approached. Patterson and I had got off to a bad start when he took over as Super. Over the course of the year since, we had established an uneasy sort of truce, led in part by his decision to move to Letterkenny and leave me in Lifford with responsibility for an almost defunct station.
    ‘We’ve only got in this morning. There were traces of accelerant all over the barn. The bloody thing kept re-igniting.’
    He glanced past me to where the flowers I’d laid rested at the foot of the oak.
    ‘You heard about the old man, then,’ he said.
    ‘I spoke to his wife. I couldn’t ask about Kielty though.’
    Patterson waved aside my comment. ‘I spoke to her myself after I saw you. She was the one who called the fire in; said they were woken by loud bangs just before three. She confirmed seeing Kielty here earlier that night. She also saw an old blue car outside the cottage around 8.45. Old-style Volkswagen Beetle with an orange door, apparently.’
    I nodded. ‘That should be easily traced.’
    Patterson nodded. ‘We also got reports of a white builder’s van here around 2 a.m. Milkman saw it – tinted foil on the windows of the rear doors, peeled off on one side. We have bulletins out on both.’
    I nodded absent-mindedly and turned towards the barn.
    ‘Is he still in there?’
    The charcoaled remains of the roof rafters crunched under our feet, and the dry air, coupled with the unmistakable stench of burnt flesh, made remaining inside the barn difficult.
    The body lay to the rear of the building, in the corner. The medical examiner, John Mulronney, was squatting beside it as we approached. The upper torso and face were severely damaged by the fire, the features impossible to distinguish. The lower part of the body, though scorched, had not been burned quite as deeply. The clothes had been burnt away and the charred shreds scattered beneath the body. It was evident that, regardless of identity, the victim was male.
    Mulronney used a long thin piece of wood, more commonly used for throat examinations, to angle the head. He did not acknowledge our