Bleed a River Deep Read Online Free PDF

back and my GP, John Mulronney, had prescribed beta-blockers. On Monday morning I had a check-up with him to get a new prescription. As I waited for him to sign the script he asked about the dead man.
    ‘Any luck with an identity?’
    ‘None. It seems he’s an illegal immigrant – Chechen, apparently. But we can’t find anyone who’ll come forward to identify him.’
    ‘No family?’
    ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’ve tried the car-boot sales and markets, and the Migrant Workers’ Information Centre. The problem is, if he’s an illegal, he’s not going to register on any systems.’
    ‘Are you sure he’s illegal?’ he asked.
    ‘Fairly certain,’ I said. ‘Why?’
    Mulronney seemed to consider something, then stood up and handed me the script. ‘I didn’t tell you this, Ben. There’s a locum doctor does the evening emergency surgery in Strabane sometimes – a Polish fella. Apparently he sees illegals requiring medical help during the night surgeries on the sly – doesn’t charge them. He’d be fired if it were officially known, but no one on the ground cares. End of the day, the Health Service is meant to be helping people. If anyone knows your man, it’ll be him.’
    ‘Does it not piss the Irish doctors off – a Pole taking their work? Would someone not report him?’
    ‘He’s happy to work the graveyard shift no one else wants to do, and for a third of the cost. No one really cares who he treats at three in the morning, if he’s happy enough to get out of his bed to do it.’
    I don’t know which I found more offensive: that the Polish doctor was being paid a fraction of the going wage, or that it was clearly preferable to whatever the man had been earning in his home country.
    *
    It took a phone call to Jim Hendry to get the man’s name: Karol Walshyk. As he lived in the North, Hendry told me he’d accompany me to the man’s house in Sion Mills.
    It was the neatest in a row of five terraced houses. Lace curtains covered the windows and the woodwork had been freshly painted. When Walshyk answered the door, a waft of warm air escaped, heavy with the smell of spices. The man himself, in his forties with a neat grey beard, stood in the doorway wearing an apron over his clothes.
    His initial response upon seeing us was to ask if something had happened to his parents in Poland. Reassured on this point, he invited us in with an offer of lunch. Finally he asked us what exactly was wrong.
    When we explained why we were there, he was, understandably, wary of helping us. He denied knowing anything about illegal workers in the area, and claimed not to recognize the man whose picture I showed him. It was clear that he was holding back on us, and I began to suspect that the presence of Jim Hendry was the reason. No immigrant, legitimate or otherwise, is going to admit to illegal activity, even of the most justifiable kind, in front of a police officer. I, on the other hand, being out of my jurisdiction, represented no threat to him. I thanked him for his help and left him my card, in case he should think of anything useful.
    Sure enough, an hour later he called and told me to come alone to meet him and he would take me to the family of the dead man.
    *
    I was surprised to learn that the dead man’s residence was in a new housing development along the Urney Road. On our way there, Karol, as he told me to call him, explained the family’s background to me. The man had come to the surgery with his wife one evening several months back. She had been in the early months of pregnancy and had suffered a miscarriage. Karol had wanted her to go to the hospital, but she refused. Instead, he had visited her at home each day for a few weeks, until she had recovered. At the time, her husband, one Ruslan Almurzayev, had been working in a local chip van. Karol had not seen either him or his wife, Natalia, since.
    I remembered when these houses had been on the market. Despite their size and the paucity of ground around