The Rising Read Free Page A

presence until he had finished.
    ‘He’s dead, obviously,’ he said, standing up. ‘It appears he was stabbed in the chest. There’s a deep wound near the sternum. Might have killed him before the fire – might not. Hard to tell.’
    ‘Any gunshot wounds?’ Patterson asked.
    Mulronney shook his head.
    ‘Are you sure?’
    ‘As much as I can be,’ he said, a little irritably. ‘Why?’
    ‘The old couple heard shots,’ I explained. ‘That’s what brought me here in the first place.’
    ‘No gunshot wounds that I can see,’ he repeated. ‘Unless the state pathologist finds them.’
    ‘Anything else?’ I asked, as we started to move back out into the freshening air.
    ‘Nothing obvious; the state pathologist will check his lungs to see whether or not he was alive when the fire started.’
    We stepped away from the ruins and I took out my cigarettes and passed one to Mulronney. One of the fire crew, still sifting through the debris, shouted to us.
    ‘Put those bloody things away. We’ve just got this out.’
    I raised my hand in apology and pocketed the packet. It had been an impulsive act anyway, for I certainly didn’t feel like smoking.
    ‘You’ll need dental records to confirm ID,’ Mulronney said, placing his unlit cigarette in his breast pocket and making his way back to his car.
    To our right, outside the door of Kielty’s cottage, sat a Kawasaki motorcycle, the helmet hanging from the handlebar. As we approached, Patterson gestured once more to the flowers I had brought.
    ‘You’d have saved your money if you’d seen inside,’ he said.
    The hallway of the cottage was lit by an arc light, and trapped smoke from the barn still swirled through the lamp’s illumination.
    I followed Patterson through a doorway to our left, into a room I took to be the living room. Against the right-hand wall sat an old threadbare sofa. A stained hearthrug took up most of the middle of the floor, and on it stood a small coffee table. On its surface lay scattered a mixture of syringes and spoons and the stub of a candle, squatting amidst thick veins of hardened wax. A number of empty beer cans, bent double, lay on the floor. One had been cut open; the metal of its base scorched into a rainbow pattern through frequent heating. Also on the floor lay a mobile phone, its screen and casing cracked. A group of Forensics officers had marked each of these objects and a photographer was moving around taking shots.
    I went into the next room, a bedroom. The wall was papered in a pattern of large pink roses, the boarded-up window framed by tattered pink satin curtains. The only furniture in the room consisted of a stained mattress against one wall and a single shelf running across the centre of the opposite wall. On the shelf lay an empty cigarette packet and several broken filters. Beside that was the empty foil wrapping of a condom. As I moved around the room, I could feel the resistance as my feet pulled against the stickiness of the carpet.
    The back room was a small kitchen. An assortment of crockery was piled up in one of the cupboards. The worktops were empty, save for a block of knives, the uppermost one absent. On the floor by the sink, arranged in order, were several empty vodka bottles and a black bin bag, spilling beer cans onto the floor. The room stank of stale water and the sweet yeasty smell of beer.
    ‘Look at the state of this place,’ Patterson said, surveying the room with disgust. ‘Imagine thinking your kid was living here, sticking some filthy skag needle in their arm.’
    I glanced around him, grateful that I was unable to imagine my own children in such a place.
    ‘Have we any next of kin for Kielty yet?’ I asked.
    ‘Your pal, Hendry, is meant to be working on it,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised he hasn’t been in touch – he was asking about you earlier.’
    I patted my pockets and realized I had left my phone in the car. Sure enough, when I went out to retrieve it, Hendry had left a message