‘I don’t mean to be clingy.’ She gave a nervous giggle, like she was still a little under the influence. ‘I’m not a lovelorn teenager, I’m of a certain age, after all. I just want to know where I stand, that’s all. In this relationship.’
‘Relationship.’ Beck repeated it like he’d just been presented with an outlandish restaurant bill.
‘Yes… darling.’
Beck stood, went and picked up his bag. ‘Mrs Claxton…’
‘It’s Sheila.’
‘… Mrs Claxton. I have to get to the garda station. Please. We can talk about this later. I must go.’
She got to her feet slowly, came and stood inches from him. ‘Only if you promise to see me later. Promise me that. We can discuss it then.’ She lingered.
Beck looked at her in silence. When he sensed she was about to lean in, he picked up his bag. ‘Yes. We can talk later. Now, I really must get going.’
She paused, her eyes searching his. Without a word she turned and left the room. Beck waited for the sound of the front door closing before going quickly up the stairs to his bedroom. He took his old uniform from the bag. It was crumpled and smelt of mould. He debated whether to wear it or not, a part of him wanting to show the world his newly restored authority. But he hung it up and closed the wardrobe door.
Sixty
‘Look, Beck, maybe we got off on the wrong foot, okay? And congratulations, by the way. Inspector Beck.’ O’Reilly was driving his own car, a grey, mud-splattered Volkswagen Passat. They were on their way to the murder scene on Bog Road. ‘You know how it is,’ he continued, ‘when you’re of higher rank, everybody hates you. I’ll admit, I could have been more civil… You’ll need an office, by the way.’
Beck looked out the window, uncomfortable with O’Reilly’s new-found affability.
‘No,’ Beck answered. ‘I’ll float about, the way I have been doing. I like it that way.’
‘Fine,’ O’Reilly said with a wide, false smile. ‘The body was removed late last night, by the way.’
‘Autopsy?’
‘Not yet. The deputy state pathologist is still at the scene.’
‘Nigel McBride was released from custody?’
‘A little after eight this morning. He was held overnight.’
The silence between them became thick and heavy.
‘An exact time of death will be hard to measure,’ O’Reilly said.
‘He was a friend of yours, wasn’t he?’ Beck asked.
‘Well… We played football together one time. We knew each other, yes.’
O’Reilly glanced over at him, the old O’Reilly, peeking out from underneath his sudden false guise of geniality. ‘What you need to know about a town like this is that everybody who thinks they matter are friends of people who think they matter, until they don’t matter, get it?’
And Beck had an image of McBride languishing in a prison cell while O’Reilly climbed the next rung on his career ladder and the next step on the stairs in McBride’s house to shag his wife.
‘It’s in the DPP’s hands now,’ Beck said. ‘Either way, he’s going to get prison time.’
O’Reilly’s false smile disappeared, as if he was reading Beck’s thoughts.
Sixty-One
There was a sole guard with a clipboard outside the scene on Bog Road. O’Reilly and Beck pulled on crime scene suits from the back of the Technical Bureau van. O’Reilly remained at the door of the house talking to a technician who was using a blue light on the skirting board just inside. Beck continued, found Dr Price at the end of the hallway, giving instructions to an assistant, a breathing mask hanging loose around her neck. Beck recognised the deputy state pathologist by the way Gumbell had described her: small and mousy with short hair and bottle-lensed glasses.
‘Dr Price?’
‘Who’re you?’ Her eyes were wide and curious.
‘Ser… Inspector Finnegan Beck.’
‘Gumbell told me all about you.’ Her tone was that of a mother being introduced to her daughter’s new wayward boyfriend.
‘A couple of questions?’ Beck said.
‘Yes, but be quick. I’m busy.’
‘Time of death?’
‘I would roughly estimate between 10.30 p.m. and 1 a.m. That’s Thursday night into Friday morning.’
‘Would it be possible,’ Beck began, ‘to tell anything about the stature of the person who did this? Is that possible?’
‘Yes, somewhat,’ Dr Price answered. ‘By the way, we lifted a bloodstained fingerprint impression from the lampshade by the bed. Other surfaces had been cleaned, but this print was captured on the fabric of the shade and is perfectly intact. It had been on the side facing the curtain, so presumably the killer didn’t notice it. It’s been uploaded to the system. There’s no match.’
Who was this person? A phantom?
‘It was missed earlier, the print, I mean?’ Beck said.
‘Looks like it. My technical team found it.’
‘It was the Scene of Crime officer from Galway who dusted the place first,’ O’Reilly said, coming down the hall, preventing any blame from sticking to himself. ‘He went through the place while we waited for forensics to arrive from Dublin.’ He looked at Beck. ‘He was in the area.’
‘No one is saying anything,’ Beck said. ‘It was a correct call to make.’
‘About what you asked,’ Dr Price said. ‘There are multiple wounds to the torso, too many to count here. Some, in the middle of the chest area’ – she indicated with her hand – ‘display a ripping effect, consistent with the killer tugging on the handle in an upward motion in extracting the blade. This tells me he was standing over her, leaning in, or stretching, like this.’ She played out the motion, bending forward and thrusting an imaginary knife through the air. Beck felt she was working it out for herself too. ‘A smaller person would have been unable to do this. They would have been unable to lean over the body, they would have had to maybe crouch on the bed in order to get into a position to stab the victim. In that scenario, the stab wounds would be from above, the incisions cleaner. Which is not the case here. In this instance, it’s likely the person was leaning forward, and in order to extract the blade, like I say, pulled forward and up, because he wasn’t directly above the victim, he was to the front and side. Therefore, the killer was tall, I have no doubt, oh, and very athletic. It took quite a lot of force to do what he did.’
‘Thank you, doctor.’
‘I can show you. The body. Demonstrate. It may make more sense.’
‘That’s okay. You just did.’
Sixty-Two
The big house was silent. Karen McBride sat on the edge of the armchair by the empty fireplace, staring into it, her hands knitted together. She’d been crying, but now it took too much effort to even do that, for she was tired, so tired. So she sat there, not moving. She felt that if she sat for long enough, and didn’t move, then somehow, some way, this might all pass by, move to another realm and leave her and her family alone.
But that would not happen. She knew that. She could not turn back the clock, could not go to a time before this terrible thing had occurred.
They say he might have killed her, too.
She thought about that: that he might have killed her.
He’d had sex with her. He’d put his penis into her. Put his penis into a girl who was young enough to be his daughter, who was the best friend of his daughter. Had done things to that child that no man should do to any child. He had done all that. Her husband. The father of her children.
Still, she did not move.
The silence had a sound all of its own. She could hear it. She could hear it louder than anything she had ever heard in her life before.
Still, she did not move.
Melanie had screamed earlier. When she’d arrived home from school. A long, visceral scream. That’s where she’d heard about it, at school, the poor child – that her father had been arrested. Her daughter had heard about it even before she had. An
d then she’d run all the way home, left her bag and coat behind and arrived, hysterical, to the house. The school had rung ahead, thankfully, told her what had happened. And that’s how she had found out, too, from the school, in a roundabout way.
Melanie had screamed at her, demanding to know how could she have married an animal like him. Blaming her, but not yet able to blame him. Screaming about how the children of an animal turned out to be animals too. Screaming that she and her brother were the spawn of evil, the offspring of the devil.
She would have to check on Melanie later. When she got up from this chair, that is. Paul was in his room too, and the house was completely silent. But Melanie was the one she worried about. Her daughter was fragile, she’d always known that, delicate, like a flower petal. More so since the death of Tanya.
And now…
Jesus, and now…
She wanted to move, to get up and check. But she couldn’t; she couldn’t move, just couldn’t.
* * *
In her room, Melanie lay on her bed, a slow Justin Bieber song playing on the stereo, the speaker lights changing from soft green to yellow to red. The curtains were drawn and the room’s lights were off, but the shifting lights from the speakers gave the room a mystical aura. She coasted on her high, carried on its jet stream, way up, soaring and diving, feeling the wind on her face. She touched her cheek and smiled, turned her head and looked about, as if seeing everything for the first time. She reached down and picked up the empty blister packs of Xanax and Diazepam on the floor by the bed, raised her arm and dropped them onto her chest, watching them fall. The trouble with Xanax was that when you got high you could never be sure how many you’d taken; it was never possible to remember. She reached in under her pillow. There were four Xanax tablets hidden there. She popped them into her mouth one by one and swallowed, turned her face towards the ceiling, feeling nothing. Nothing at all.
Sixty-Three
There were twenty investigators in the Ops Room. Beck had called everyone back. He detected grumpiness and a lethargy of movement as they milled about, searching out seats and sitting down. When the room had settled, Beck saw the confusion on their faces. They looked at him standing alongside Wilde and O’Reilly at the top of the room. Wilde had pulled in his beloved whiteboard, while Beck had arranged a small table next to it.
Beck addressed the assembly. ‘Good evening, people. I know it’s been a long day. I don’t want to keep you any longer than I need to. Just a few items to go through, then you can go, get some well-earned rest and we start this thing afresh in the morning. Okay?’
He surveyed the faces. No one spoke.
‘Right,’ he continued. ‘I won’t go into the ins and outs of this, but I’ve been restored to my previous rank of inspector. Has anyone ever heard of a murder book?’
Heads shook.
‘I have created a murder book on Pulse. Anything anyone has done up to this point I want put into that book, properly dated and with a shoulder number, so I know who put it there. I don’t need to tell anyone that this case is not straightforward. If we are to include Ned Donohue, we now have three murders on our hands. In the space of one week. This doesn’t look like it’s going to stop either.’
A hand went up.
‘Yes,’ Beck said. ‘Introduce yourself, by the way.’
‘Michael McCarthy, on temporary assignment from Athlone. You think Ned is a victim too?’
Beck nodded. ‘I do.’
‘And what about Nigel McBride?’ McCarthy asked. ‘There’s a feeling now that he’s our man.’
‘Is there? And maybe he is,’ Beck said. ‘But it’s doubtful. Consider for now that he’s not. A print lifted from Bog Road was not his. I don’t want anyone putting him into their back pocket for the murder of Tanya Frazzali, knowing that if all else fails they can pull him out. That won’t work.’
People shifted about on their chairs.
‘Instead I want people to pursue this thought for a moment,’ Beck said. ‘That Tanya Frazzali was not killed by McBride. When Ned Donohue claimed to have seen someone kill her, believe it. Ned was then killed by this same person, and it was made to look like a suicide. Not as difficult as it may sound, if you think about it. The killer comes across Ned by the river, possibly followed him there, simply pushed him into the water. We have another victim now, of course: Imelda Butler.’
Beck paused, looked about the room. He’d got their attention. ‘What’s running through this is the apparent randomness of it all. And also something else. The increasing violence. Imelda Butler was viciously murdered. The modus operandi appears to have changed. The killer is becoming increasingly erratic. Something I want to bring to people’s attention… Claire?’
Claire Somers had been sitting quietly at her desk. She stood now and strode to the top of the room, a laptop tucked under her arm. She put the computer down onto the table Beck had placed beside the whiteboard and plugged a mini-projector into a USB port. She asked for someone to lower the lights, and as these dimmed two enlarged images appeared side by side on the wall at the top of the room. One was of Norman Blake, in the crowd at Tanya Frazzali’s funeral, the other a grainy CCTV still image of the bridge attacker of Nina Sokolov. Claire looked to Beck, who nodded to her.
‘Inspector Beck asked me yesterday to prepare these PowerPoint shots.’ She quickly outlined the background to the images, and continued, ‘If we take both images and…’ She pressed a couple of keys and one image merged onto the top of the other, becoming an almost exact fit. ‘We can see that both individuals share the same features. In fact, we can say it is very likely this is one and the same person.’
‘Does everyone agree with that?’ Beck asked the room.
‘Well, I don’t.’ It was Inspector O’Reilly. He pointed. ‘See there? The face profile is a bit off. And the arms. The differences are subtle, granted, but differences between people are subtle anyway.’
Beck looked. He was right, of course. But still, many similarities remained.
‘Can anyone put a name to the images?’ Beck asked.
There was a murmuring in the room, but no one felt brave enough to say it out loud.
Beck nodded to Claire again, and a third image appeared on screen, a head-and-shoulders shot. She duplicated the image and reduced it in size, superimposed it onto the other two.
Beck could see Superintendent Wilde’s mouth open as he stared at the face looking down at him from the wall.
‘We need a warrant,’ he said. ‘Right now.’
Sixty-Four
‘Mr Blake.’
The shop assistant, Rebecca, the prettier of the two, popped her head round the drugs storeroom door, lips coated in glistening ruby-red lipstick. He tried not to look at those luscious apples of temptation because lately he had begun to realise he was forming a habit of staring at them.
‘A customer to see you. I brought her to the consultation room.’
‘What, now?’ It was almost closing time.
The consultation room was what his mother used to call the pantry. He’d had it converted, capitalising on a health service grant initiative designed to relieve pressure on doctors’ surgeries. People were now encouraged to see their local pharmacist instead, to seek advice and buy the latest expensive non-prescription remedies.
‘I’ll be there in a minute.’
He took the boxes he had come for and went back out into the dispensary, put these away into their relevant cabinets, stepped out from behind the dispensary counter and opened the door to the consultation room, which was covered in smoked glass for privacy. And smelt it immediately, the pungent aroma of soap and, what was that? Peach body wash? It overpowered all other aromas, that of the expensive perfumes and colognes from the fragrance section, the biscuity medicine smell that always seemed to hang in the air everywhere in the shop. All now gone. His nose twitched. It was almost enough to make him gag.
When he saw her he got a sudden sick, hollow feeling in the pit of his belly. She was sittin
g on one of the two low stools – there wasn’t enough room for proper chairs – wearing a loose, light grey tracksuit, hood up, legs crossed, one knee cupped tightly in both hands. He noticed her fingernails, alternating pink and red, a sprinkling of sparkle.
‘Melanie.’ He was forcing himself not to shout. ‘I told you not to come here. I told you. I told you all not to fucking come here.’
Melanie pouted. ‘You heard about my father? My life is crap right now. I need something. And you’re going to give it to me.’
She bit her lower lip, sat back, leaning against the wall, then came forward again, uncupped her hands from around her knee, placed them under her thighs.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I can’t give you something just like that. We have arrangements in place.’ Blake didn’t like this. Didn’t like this one bit. Darren Murphy was supposed to take care of this stuff now. Blake himself was never meant to get involved. Never.
‘You’re high, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Look at you. Jesus!’
Melanie looked at him, felt something she had never felt before: an exhilarating rush, better than any bungee jump, better than any roller coaster ride, better than any drift around the Tesco car park in Ballinasloe in Sean Murphy’s Subaru after midnight. It was better than anything. It was power. A power she’d never felt before.
‘You’ll do as I say,’ she said, slurring her words, staring at him, her bravado disguising the fact that she feared all the same that he might suddenly slap her across the face and send her on her way.
But that’s not what he did. Blake rubbed his eyes wearily with two big chubby fingers and left the consultation room. He came back with one box of 20 mg Xanax and one box of 30 mg Diazepam.
Where She Lies Page 18