Free Gallows Lane (Inspector Devlin Mystery 2) by Brian McGilloway Page A

intensified soon after seven. Just eating dinner was an effort which caused my skin to prickle and my shirt to cling to my back with sweat. The brilliant blue of earlier had gone and the sky was a watercolour, high clouds turning the dome white. Just after sunset, heavy thunderheads shifted in from the West, carried over the Donegal hills from the Atlantic. I had showered to cool down and was sitting out back with a coffee and a cigarette when the first heavy thuds of rain splattered on the dusty grass. The temperature dropped almost instantaneously with a torrential downpour that struck the skin like needles and hammered off the roof of our garden shed.
    I went into the kitchen and stood at the door as I finished my smoke while Debbie tutted behind me and complained about the smell. Eventually, the pleasure of the smoke robbed, I flicked the butt out into a flash puddle that had formed at the back door, where it extinguished with a fizz.
    ‘How’s Costello been since?’ Debs asked, stretching Clingfilm over a bowl of fruit salad she had prepared for the children’s lunch the next day.
    I told her about my conversation with him and the implicit threat that by questioning the integrity of the find, I could cause problems for myself when the superintendent interviews came up. ‘What should I do?’ I asked. ‘If I report Patterson, it’ll look like I’m grassing him in, just to get myself a foot-up. If I don’t, he’s a cert for promotion.’
    ‘Do what you always do, Ben. Drift!’
    ‘I don’t drift,’ I argued, with little conviction, sitting at the table watching her work.
    ‘Your life is about drifting. That’s not a criticism. Things always work out for the best – just don’t get in the way of them.’ She patted my head, then turned back to finish her work. ‘Now – on more important issues. How about a foot rub?’
    Before I went to bed I finished my letter of application for a Superintendent position and placed it in an envelope which Debbie said she would post the following morning. Then I went upstairs to check on the children. Shane had recently developed a habit of sleeping on his side, one leg stretched through the bars of the cot and twisted back around a bar. I quietly said a prayer of thanks for him and Penny as veins of lightning threaded the sky and the windows shuddered with the first thunderclap. I thought of James Kerr sleeping rough and said a prayer for him too. As it transpired, he was not the one who was in need of my prayers that night.

 
Chapter Eight

Saturday, 5 June
    The rivers were flooded the following morning. The Finn in particular, which flows along the border between Clady and Donegal, a few miles south of Lifford, was twisting with an unusually fast current under the bridge linking the North to the South. The rain had cleared just before dawn and the air had a clean quality that hurt your lungs when you first breathed it. The temperature was lower than the day before but the sun was rising high and sparkled off the river’s surface as if on broken mirrors. Already the moisture off the ground was starting to dry and the tarmac road surface steamed with evaporation.
    At the top of Gallows Lane, an estate agent called Johnny Patton had gone out to show a prospective client a property. The prospective client was, in fact, Johnny’s boss’s wife, and the only part of the property she wanted to see was the bedroom ceiling. Johnny was enjoying a post-coital cigarette, standing at the back bedroom window surveying the garden in wonder and exhaustion when he noticed something hanging from the oak tree at the end of the garden. Closer inspection brought a phone call to the Garda and the discovery of Peter Webb’s corpse.
    The body was still hanging when I arrived on site. A SOCO photographer took pictures of it from various angles, before one of our officers appeared with a stepladder, climbed the tree and loosened the rope.
    Finally Webb’s body was lowered from the branch