No Safe Place(Detective Lottie Parker #4)(8)

With a sigh, Lottie put her notebook into her bag. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘Promise me. Then I’ll know.’

‘Know what?’

‘If you promise me you’ll look yourself, I’ll believe you.’ Bridie’s wide eyes were pleading.

‘Okay, okay. I’ll take a look myself. But it’s now Wednesday, so I can’t see what good it will do.’

‘I’ll feel better. And I’ll know Tommy is safe. Promise?’

‘I promise.’ Lottie thought of crossing her fingers to cover a lie, but didn’t. Bridie’s sincerity had resonated with her, and she wanted to do what the young woman asked.

‘There’s a funeral later this morning. You’d want to get in before that.’

‘I’ll go as soon as I can.’

‘Thank you, Missus Detective. The minute I laid eyes on you, I knew you were a lady.’

Bridie bundled up her son, and with a squeak of her leather boots, she was out the door and gone.

‘Now you’re a lady?’ Gilly laughed.

‘Could have fooled me,’ Lottie said.





Seven





Lottie told Boyd to park outside the cemetery wall, under the CCTV camera. It was trained on one spot, a warning to potential car burglars to move further down the road. The old iron gates through which you could drive were locked with a clumpy chain.

She walked through the side gate, Boyd trotting beside her. The cemetery was eerily quiet.

‘They believe in banshees, don’t they?’ Boyd said.

‘Who?’

‘The travellers. They believe in curses and fairies and all that shite.’

‘And you don’t?’ Lottie walked swiftly, glancing around for any sign of a screaming woman, almost two days after Bridie McWard had heard the sound. She briefly wondered if it had anything to do with the missing Elizabeth Byrne, but dismissed that notion as ridiculous.

Halfway down the slope, she stopped as a man wearing a yellow workman’s jacket stepped out from behind a tree.

‘Can I help you at all?’ He had a spade in one hand and shears in the other.

‘Jesus, you scared me half to death,’ Lottie said.

‘Sorry, missus. You look lost. Bernard Fahy is the name. Cemetery caretaker.’ He moved the shears under his armpit and thrust out a grubby hand. ‘Are you looking for any grave in particular?’

‘Detective Inspector Lottie Parker, and this is Detective Boyd.’

Lottie’s hand came away covered with clay. Looking into the caretaker’s yellow-hued face, she noticed that the whites of his eyes were similarly coloured. ‘Have there been any disturbances round here lately?’

‘Disturbances? Oh, now I get it. That nosy biddy from the traveller site was on to you, whingeing about banshees screaming in the night.’ His laugh was loud and shrill, startling the birds in the bare tree above his head. They fluttered their wings and flew up as one giant black cloud into the cool blue sky. ‘Bridie’s as mad as old Queenie, her mother. And she’s a McWard too. Into all that old witch shite. Know what I mean?’

‘Did you investigate Bridie’s claims about the screams?’ Lottie rubbed her hands together so that she wouldn’t get frostbite standing in the freezing air.

‘If I was to look into everything reported by that lot living over there, I wouldn’t get a single grave dug and you’d have unburied corpses in coffins lined up along with the rubbish at the main gate.’

‘You’re telling me you didn’t investigate it?’

‘Dead right I didn’t. Isn’t that what I just said?’

Lottie shook her head, trying to decipher his cryptic conversation.

‘In the last few days, what have you been up to?’ she asked.

‘Dug a grave on Monday for old Mrs Green from the town centre. Ninety-one she was. The family were waiting for a grandson to come home from Australia. She’ll be buried today, beside her late husband.’ He pointed down the hill to a mound of clay. ‘It’s been quiet, to tell you the truth. But this time of year, with the freezing cold weather, you can be sure there’ll be a few more kicking the bucket before the week is out.’

‘You didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary at all? No cider parties? Teenagers running wild through the graves?’

‘In this weather? No, that carry-on is reserved for the summer. Those youngsters are at home drinking their parents’ gin during the winter. Playing computer games or watching Netflix. Too cold for their young skin.’

As he tugged the shears out from under his arm and back into his hand, Lottie studied Fahy’s stubbled face. Pockmarked from teenage acne, she surmised, wisps of hair snaking out around his ears from underneath a black knitted hat. His eyes were inscrutable. She couldn’t read what was written in them, and she wondered if she really wanted to.

‘We’ll have a quick look around if you don’t mind,’ she said.

‘Off you go.’ He headed up the way they’d come.

At the bottom of the incline, Boyd said, ‘I don’t like the look of him.’

Lottie shrugged and glanced over at the houses in the traveller site behind the high wall. Smoke swirled up, then, as if held by an unseen force of frozen air, petered out in straight lines and back down to earth.