Chapter 15 Ian
Ian
NOW
He’s standing in the porch, sneaking a quick smoke, when he spots the trainers.
He has come home for dinner this evening (Helena, his deputy SIO, insisted she had it all under control), and he was hoping to disconnect for a few hours.
No hope of that now he’s seen the shoes. His mind is firmly back on the case.
They haven’t made much headway. They’re still waiting on the forensics, even though he has nudged (well, harassed, if he’s honest) the lab people, asking repeatedly for the samples to be fast-tracked.
He’s not optimistic about the results. The victim’s body was found several days after death and it rained heavily on at least three of those days.
For the moment, he doesn’t have much to go on.
This is his first case as SIO and he’s feeling the pressure.
He’d always wanted to be a police officer.
Secretly. It wasn’t really something you could mention to your parents or your careers adviser at St Mary’s Boys’ School when you were from the Bogside.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland has come a long way since its Royal Ulster Constabulary days and they’re recruiting more Catholics, but in a place like Derry, that still carries visible, raw scars from the Troubles, you can’t really get away from religion and politics.
His family would never have approved. A copper on the mainland, however, didn’t seem to carry the same stigma as a peeler in Northern Ireland.
Or perhaps it did, but his mother was able to be vague about what he did for a living with him over here.
(He’d once heard her tell an elderly neighbour that he worked in security.)
He has always felt like he needs to prove himself in his job, like he has to justify his career choice.
To his mam. To himself. The murder of Joshua Knoll is both shocking and tragic, but it’s also a good opportunity for Ian to make a name for himself, maybe even advance his career.
In this neck of the woods, you only get murders once in a blue moon. He may not get another chance.
He keeps thinking he should step down, though.
Or at the very least tell his manager he has an emotional involvement in the case.
He has arranged with Ash and Carla to talk to Iris tomorrow.
It’s not really his job. Technically, it’s probably against protocol.
Two of his officers have been handling the interviews with Josh’s family and friends, although Ian himself went to see Richard and Yvonne.
Despite what Ash seems to think, Iris isn’t a suspect, but she does have a motive and Ian has a feeling she might become one.
And as Ian is Iris’s godfather, there will be a clear conflict of interests. He’ll be taken off the case.
He stubs out the fag on the side of a plant pot, tries to ignore the shoes, left neatly side by side on the doorstep, opens the front door and steps inside the house.
He’s greeted by raucous laughter from Millie’s bedroom upstairs.
It brings a smile to his face, albeit briefly.
The girls are having fun. They deserve to.
They’ve both been working so hard at school.
Millie has set her sights high. She wants to get at least two A stars.
And, according to Ash, Iris is getting excellent marks, despite missing so much of the last school year.
He wonders if Iris knows he’s calling round tomorrow morning to interview her.
He goes into the kitchen and makes himself a mug of tea. He’s still clasping the mug in his hands, the tea long gone cold, when Jo finds him. His brain registers that she has spoken to him, but won’t replay her words.
‘Sorry, darling. I was miles away. What did you say?’
‘I said, you smell of cig … Never mind. A penny for them?’
Ian sighs. ‘It’s the case.’
‘You want to talk about it?’
‘You know I can’t.’
‘That doesn’t usually stop you,’ Jo says.
He sighs again. ‘If I talk to you, you can’t go blabbing to Carla.’ He looks at her sternly. He knows women talk. But it’s not on this time, for obvious reasons.
‘OK. I promise.’
‘Ash came to me with the butt of a spliff. He’d wrapped it up in a plastic glove to preserve the fingerprints.’
‘Whose fingerprints were on it?’
‘The two younger Knoll boys smoked it outside our place on the night of Millie’s party, according to Ash.’
‘What were they doing at our place?’ Jo has raised her voice.
Ian doesn’t answer. He shakes his head and frowns, both almost imperceptible movements.
‘Wrong question,’ Jo says, as if reading his mind. ‘What did Ash want you to do with the roach?’
‘He wanted me to plant it as evidence to keep Iris out of the frame,’ Ian says.
‘No way!’
Ian is silent for a few seconds. He has never told Jo about Tracey.
He tells his wife everything – well, most things – and he would have told her if it had ever come up.
He’d intended to tell her when they first met, but the longer he put it off, the less it seemed to matter.
Or maybe the more it seemed to matter. Until he reached a point where there was no way he could bring it up anymore. Too much time had passed.
This time she misinterprets his silence. ‘Ian, you didn’t do it, did you?’
‘No, of course not.’ He doesn’t admit he went back and forth on that a bit.
He has actually kept the roach. Just in case he goes back on it again.
But he doesn’t think he will. He can’t plant evidence.
He could lose his job. It’s a bit late now anyway.
Plus, it would take a lot more than a handful of Hail Marys and Our Fathers for him to ever forgive himself if he did something like that.
He’s about to tell Jo about the shoe, but just then Millie and Iris burst in, looking for food.
‘Don’t eat too much,’ Jo warns, as Millie takes a family-sized packet of crisps out of the cupboard. ‘It’ll be dinnertime in half an hour.’
‘Are you staying for dinner, Iris?’ Ian asks. ‘You’re welcome to if you’d like.’ He catches the look Jo throws him, but pretends not to.
‘Um … better not,’ Iris says as the girls head for the door. So, she knows he’s arranged to question her.
‘You making the meal, are you?’ Jo says as soon as the girls are out of earshot.
‘Well, I’ll help if you like,’ Ian says, which earns him another look. ‘I’m a dab hand at setting the table.’
‘I mean, I know Ash is your best mate, but he can’t expect you to put your job on the line for him like that,’ says Jo, picking up the conversation more or less from where they left off.
‘Aye, I know.’
He sets the table and heads outside, ostensibly for another smoke. He feels Jo’s disapproving eyes on his back as he slopes out of the kitchen. He has to check out that shoe.
He takes his packet of Embassy out of his shirt pocket and lights up a cigarette.
He smokes it right down to the butt and stubs it out before he picks up one of her trainers.
The left one. It’s a size six and a half.
Vans. Old Skool. Maroon or Bordeaux or deep red or something, although the colour is irrelevant.
Ian turns over Iris’s trainer and looks at the sole.
The shoe they’re looking for has a distinctive tread pattern.
The top and bottom have a criss-cross design and the middle looks like honeycomb.
Just like this one. Shit! He examines the top of the shoe, but although it’s a little dirty, there are no stains or anything like that.
He replaces the trainer, lining it up next to the other one, leaving it exactly how he found it.
It’s much later, long after Iris has gone home, when he tells Jo about it.
They’re getting ready for bed, although Ian doesn’t think he’ll be able to sleep.
Too many thoughts vying for attention in his brain.
Jo has been giving out at him for being elsewhere, not listening to a word she has been saying – the usual. And it just spills out.
‘We found a footprint in the woods,’ he begins, ‘within metres of where Joshua Knoll was murdered.’
‘Go on,’ Jo says, sitting on the edge of the bed and giving him her full attention.
‘Size six and a half.’
‘Women’s?’
‘I think the shoes are unisex, but the size is more likely to suggest a woman’s foot, yeah.’ He gets straight to the point. ‘Unless I’m very much mistaken, Iris’s left shoe is a match for the print we found. We’d have to check the wear on the soles and so on, but—’
‘What do you mean, it’s a match?’
‘Same size. Same make. Same model. Vans. Old Skool. They have a particular pattern on the soles.’
‘Come with me,’ Jo says.
He follows her downstairs and through the kitchen to the utility room. She picks up a pair of shoes. Vans. Old Skool.
‘This make and model?’ she says, thrusting a pair of blue trainers into his hands.
‘These are Millie’s, obviously, but every other girl in her and Iris’s class must have a pair.
Probably some of the boys, too. They all wear the latest trend, Ian.
Last year, it was Nike Air Force One, a few years ago it was Converse in the summer and Uggs in the winter.
Stop overthinking and come to bed. It’s cold in here. ’
Jo leaves the room, no doubt expecting him to follow her back upstairs.
Looking at his daughter’s shoes in his hands, Ian heaves a sigh of relief.
Every other teenager has the same shoes.
The footprint could be anyone’s. His relief is short-lived.
He looks at the label inside one of the shoes.
These are also a six and a half. He reasons with himself.
It’s just a coincidence. For Millie as well as for Iris.
He should take his wife’s advice and go to bed. He needs to switch off.
But as he lies awake in the dark that night, staring at the red digits projected from the alarm clock onto the ceiling, he can’t help going over what he hasn’t told Jo.
He hasn’t told her that the footprint was left after the crime was committed.
Probably a few days afterwards. After the rain.
That it was found in an exposed area, a small clearing in the woods.
Next to Joshua’s body. That if the shoeprint had been left by Joshua’s murderer when they’d killed him, it would have been washed away by the rain.
Ian knows the footprint means that someone was there after Josh died.
At first, he thought it might have been left by one of the first responders.
But now an image has planted itself in his mind.
Someone standing over and looking down on the dead body.
The print definitely wasn’t left by the couple who found him.
Both the man and woman wore Wellington boots to go out and pick blackberries.
But just because the footprint wasn’t left there on the day of Josh’s murder doesn’t mean that it wasn’t left by his murderer. Ian’s theory is that, for whatever reason, the victim’s murderer returned a few days later to the scene of the crime.