Free The Rising by Brian McGilloway Page B

big day?’
    ‘December, sir.’
    ‘How does . . .?’
    ‘Ellen,’ he prompted.
    ‘How does Ellen feel about you doing this?’ I said, gesturing around the room, though I meant being a Guard.
    ‘Oh, you know,’ he said. ‘The same way your wife does, I imagine.’
    I stopped myself from telling him that that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
    ‘We have a slight problem, sir,’ McCready said.
    For a second I assumed he was still speaking about his forthcoming marriage and I demurred from responding.
    ‘The pathologist’s report,’ he muttered, glancing around.
    ‘Let’s step outside,’ I said. Debbie scowled at me when she saw me leave the room, though I gestured to her I would only be a moment.
    ‘What’s the problem?’ I asked, once we had stepped out into the garden. The rain was falling heavier now, in thick swathes that washed up the street, hammering off the roofs of the cars, splintering off the glistening pavements beneath the street lamps. Already one of the drains across the road had flooded and a stream of overflow water rushed alongside the kerb and bubbled in the drains. We stepped in tight against the front of the house, sheltered from the worst of the rain by the eaves.
    ‘The pathologist has put time of death as Saturday night,’ he stated. ‘I went to the post-mortem. She said Peter died at some stage between Saturday night and Sunday morning.’
    ‘So he couldn’t have sent the text message to Caroline on Sunday night.’
    ‘Exactly. I’ve been thinking about it. I put pressure on Murphy and Heaney. I asked had he been drinking and told them that when we found him, dead or alive, the truth would come out. Then this message comes. Do you think one of them was trying to throw us off the scent?’
    Despite the clichés, McCready was right. Someone wanted to stop our searching in Rossnowlagh.
    ‘Anything else come up?’
    He glanced around him, then leaned closer to me. ‘She thinks he killed himself on purpose.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘There are no injuries on his hands. She suggested that there should have been laceration, or bruises where he tried to stop his fall, if it had been an accident. Even drunk, she thought, he’d still have tried to break his fall. She reckoned his injuries were more consistent with someone who had jumped rather than fallen.’
    ‘That’s speculative,’ I argued.
    ‘Isn’t most pathology?’ McCready countered.
    ‘Maybe. To be honest, his mum told me that he’d been depressed recently. His GP had prescribed him antidepres-sants.’ I was reluctant to betray Caroline’s confidence, but at the same time McCready had obviously invested heavily in the investigation into Peter’s death. ‘They’d argued before he left home. She said he’s been out of sorts quite a bit recently.’
    ‘It’s a bit extreme – jumping off a cliff, though.’
    I nodded as I stubbed out my cigarette and blew the last stream of smoke upwards against the rain.
    ‘Will I cancel the tox reports? The pathologist said she’d have them done as soon as she could.’
    ‘Leave them for now. But I guess we accept that Peter Williams killed himself and leave it at that.’
    ‘What about the text about Dublin? One of the boys must have sent it.’
    I nodded. ‘God knows why, though. Maybe they wanted to give Caroline a bit of hope. Who knows what goes on in a youngster’s mind?’
    ‘When the tox report comes through, I’ll send you on a copy, sir,’ McCready said, fitting his cap back on his head.
    The journey home took almost an hour longer than it should. The roads were flooded most of the way, especially around the Gap, where streams had washed smaller rocks down the mountainside and onto the hard shoulder. The car steered light, and on bends slid towards the centre of the road, even at low speeds. The rain battered against the windscreen and, when we stopped at traffic lights, thudded off the roof.
    A wind was rising, coming in from the west, and the forecasters had