Where She Lies

by Michael Scanlon

  ‘Your relationship was strictly professional, was it?’ Wilde asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Beck lied. It wouldn’t serve Mrs Claxton’s reputation if he were to reveal the truth. Her memory would be nothing more than a titter behind a raised hand for years to come.

  ‘You’re a suspect, of course,’ Wilde said. ‘Of sorts. But I wouldn’t worry too much about it. I imagine you’ll be quickly eliminated.’ He looked at his watch. ‘They won’t get here until morning, of course.’

  ‘Dr Price,’ Beck said. ‘She’s already in Cross Beg.’

  ‘No, she’s not. She went back to Dublin late yesterday evening. There’s nobody around except us.’

  ‘And Inspector O’Reilly?’

  ‘No answer from his phone when I rang. I didn’t expect one, mind. He’s not on call. Can’t be on call all the time, you know? The door to Mrs Claxton’s house next door was open, by the way, there’s signs of a struggle in the hallway. We didn’t go in – leaving that to forensics. Why her? Why leave her body here? Your house, was it locked?’

  ‘Of course,’ Beck said. ‘But she had a key, like I said.’

  ‘Perhaps she came looking for help,’ Wilde said. ‘But it’s too early to make any assumptions.’

  Beck had mixed emotions. He did not want to attempt to rationalise it, because rationality did not apply. Mrs Claxton, he told himself, was dead because some crazy fucker had killed her, not because of any association he had with her. It was the killer who was responsible, not Beck, and not Mrs Claxton. But why had somebody apparently gone to a great deal of trouble to place her body underneath his bed? There was also something else. A sadness. And grief. But more than anything, anger.

  ‘There’s nothing can be done until morning now, anyway,’ Wilde said then. ‘The scene is secure, there’ll be people here all night. You need rest, Beck. We both do. You can’t stay here, not for a while … If you ever want to stay here again, that is. No, come with me. I insist.’

  Sixty-Nine

  They know me now. Or should I say, they know of me. I’m not a one-off. They know something has awakened, something they can’t understand, something cleverer than any of them. Something they can’t stop. I am invisible. No one sees me. I go where I please. I kill who I please. The hotshot, the one from Dublin, the one called Beck. He has noticed me. Oh yes, he has noticed me. I left her under his bed. I particularly enjoyed that. I realise that I no longer care about life and death. I only care about death.

  I’ve been doing this a long time. A very long time. They don’t know how long. They don’t know anything.

  The one called Beck. How good is he really? I know something for certain. That he is not good enough.

  Seventy

  Mrs Wilde had the quiet acceptance that comes with being a senior policeman’s wife. She was accustomed to middle-of-the-night telephone calls, struggling to keep dinners warm for hours on end and sleeping with one eye open, unable to relax until finally she heard the sound of her husband’s key in the door.

  So she was not surprised when she came downstairs to the living room and found her husband with Beck. Beck fell quiet when she came into the room, until Wilde announced, ‘You can relax, Beck. Vera can be trusted. We’ve been married thirty years. I tell her everything. Otherwise I’d crack up.’

  Beck looked at Wilde’s wife, this tall woman who carried herself with a quiet reserve, who moved lightly without much sound. She disappeared for a moment and was back again with a plate of sandwiches under cling film on a tray, pre-prepared and waiting for a moment just like this. Beck said he wasn’t hungry, but she watched as a succession of sandwiches quickly disappeared into his mouth anyway.

  ‘You knew Mrs Claxton,’ he said, swallowing, realising suddenly that if both women were friends, then she might have told this woman about him.

  ‘We were in the same bridge club, yes,’ Vera said. ‘But Sheila was a very quiet woman. Kept things to herself. She didn’t have many friends, not really. I don’t know anything about her private life, no one did.’ Vera looked at Beck, and her expression changed. ‘Andrew says she was found in your house.’

  ‘It was her house,’ Beck answered. ‘I merely rented it.’

  He could tell what she was thinking. So too could her husband.

  ‘Vera, don’t put two and two together and come up with five. We believe the poor woman had been dead for hours. Beck here was at the station, and before that he was in Dublin.’

  She gave a nervous smile. ‘Of course. With all that’s been going on lately, my nerves are beginning to get a little frayed. Someone out there is… Shocking when you think about it.’

  ‘I was thinking,’ Wilde said to his wife. ‘Perhaps you could get away for a few days? Stay with your sister down in County Cork.’

  ‘What, Andrew? You don’t mean someone might… Oh my God.’

  Wilde placed his big arm around his wife. ‘It just occurred to me. It’ll only be for a little while. As a precaution.’ He kissed her cheek, got to his feet. ‘In the meantime, Beck, let me show you to your room. It’s not long until morning. Come on.’

  Seventy-One

  When daylight broke, so too did the story. Though it had been there all along, in newspapers and TV reports, it had been subdued, done with the unspoken understanding that, regarding Tanya Frazzali at least, the killer had likely known his victim. It was a crime of passion – no one really had anything to worry about; it was only a matter of time before the killer was caught and brought to justice. Killers were usually caught and brought to justice quickly; homicide detection rates in Ireland were amongst the highest in Europe.

  But suddenly that had all changed. The murderer had not been caught. Instead, the morning radio news programme on the national broadcaster RTE led with the story of yet another murder victim in Cross Beg. The story also ran on Sky News and the BBC TV news. The late city editions of some of the print newspapers had it, too. One tabloid headline screamed: ‘Butchered: Latest Victim of Serial Killer’. There was no mention that, actually, it was unknown as yet how the victim had died, or that the body had been discovered in the home and under the bed – under the bed – of a serving police officer. But soon it would be public knowledge.

  At 7.45 a.m., even before the arrival of the Garda Technical Bureau’s big-panel van, a TV satellite truck arrived in Cross Beg, pulled in against the kerb a short distance down from the garda station. The front passenger door opened and a man in a crisp blue suit got out. He ran a hand through his hair and checked himself in the door mirror. He had fifteen minutes before he was due on air, the first live TV report from Cross Beg since this had all started. Some of his coverage would be fed to the twenty-four-hour news channels, which would run segments of it on a loop. Serial killing was good for news ratings, good for business.

  Seventy-Two

  Eleanor Murphy, retired schoolteacher, stood at the top of the beach, known locally as Haven’s Cove, next to the sand dunes, and called out, ‘Mozart, Mozart.’

  When there was no response, she called out again, louder this time, a sense of growing concern taking hold, the sound flittering about on the wind. ‘Mozart. Mozart.’

  She decided, as punishment for Mozart’s disobedience, that he would go without his dinner today.

  ‘Mozart. Mozart. Come here, boy. Now!’

  Mozart heard her. He’d heard her the first time, cocked his head and contemplated, then went back to the business at hand.

  Eleanor Murphy took a step up into the dunes now, muttering under her breath, feeling as she used to feel when one of those little shits she once taught tested her patience. A short, sharp slap across Mozart’s snout was in order, for sure. At the very least. That would teach him. The brat.

  A gust of wind stirred the sand up into her face. She blinked as the grains entered her eyes and stung them, cursing under her breath. That bloody dog. She was becoming angry now, really angry.

  ‘MOZART! Where are you? MOZART!’

  She stepped into the dunes, fol
lowing the trail that wound between them. It went in a loop pattern, emerging on to the beach a little further on. And there, a short distance in, she observed the tail of Mozart, high in the air, on the other side of a dune next to the beach, as he dug furiously in the sand.

  ‘MOZART, there you…’ she said, rounding the side of the dune, her voice trailing off as it was lost to the wind. She stopped, noticed the blotches of what looked like fragments of brown fabric, and how two pieces were joined together by a single button. It had been a jacket one time, although most of it had rotted away by now. Mozart sent a stream of sand back between his hind legs as he continued to dig, obscuring her view. She stepped closer, could see a strip of something white, below it two hollow circles through which the sand disturbed by Mozart filtered through, as if in an hourglass. On the edge of this strip of white she could see a patch of black, dull and viscous. As Mozart cleared away more sand, she determined the patch of black to be hair.

  And with it came the realisation of what she was looking at. For the first time in the almost four years since she’d had him, Eleanor Murphy forgot about Mozart, ran screaming from the beach.

  Seventy-Three

  Inspector Andy Mahony was one of two technical team officers sitting next to the driver on the bench seat of the big Mercedes van. The driver had turned off the satnav when it insisted Haven Cove was part of an archipelago off the northern coast of Alaska. Mahony used a book map instead to provide directions. His map-reading skills were excellent, and soon the big van was travelling along the rutted beach track to Haven Cove.

  Except Mahony had made an error, which he noticed now. This was a double call, and somehow he had placed Haven Cove ahead of Railway Road. At the latter, the body of a female had been found, under a bed of all places. That was the priority, and not, he checked his notes again, skeletal remains found by a dog walker, buried on a beach. But too late. They had arrived.

  At the end of the track a marked patrol car was parked. The technical van pulled in alongside it, the front wheel mounting the dunes. Mahony got out and stretched, felt the cold, biting sea wind on his face.

  ‘Tape off the area,’ he told his sergeant as they walked into the dunes. He could see that part of it had collapsed onto the beach, exposing the bones underneath. ‘Clear the surface sand, enough to see what’s what, if all the bones are there or not. Don’t be fussy, won’t make any difference now. While you do that, I’ll go over to this Railway Road. You follow when you’re ready. As quick as you can, now.’

  His telephone rang. It was Dr Gumbell. He knew he was ringing from Beck’s house, where the body had been found under the bed, to find out where the hell he was. Mahony acted like he hadn’t heard it.

  Seventy-Four

  Claire Somers pulled the Focus onto the soft sand along the edge of the track to make way for the marked patrol car approaching at speed. Beck recognised Mahony, the technical officer, sitting in the front passenger seat. He didn’t notice Beck, but stared ahead, his face grim.

  As Claire attempted to move off again, the wheels of the Focus spun. She deftly changed up a gear, pressed on the accelerator and the Focus gently gained traction as she brought it back onto the track.

  The tide was turning, the grey cold water running in from the sea just yards from the dunes. Beck could tell by the dark patches that the water had, moments earlier, reached the dunes themselves. In time, had they not been discovered, the bones would have been carried out to sea and lost to the bottom of the ocean, possibly forever.

  A solitary uniformed guard stood in the dunes, wearing a fleece jacket zipped to the neck, a clipboard held under one elbow, both hands in his pockets.

  Beck knew the critical work in this instance would take place in both a pathology lab and on a computer keyboard. It would be down to specialists, a forensic anthropologist, an odontologist and possibly an entomologist to officially determine the identity of the remains and cause of death. But Beck knew that sometimes the dead could speak for themselves too in the evidence they left behind. Because of this, identifying the dead, in some instances, was easier than identifying the living.

  Beck noted the crime scene tape loosely tied to clumps of rushes in a meandering rectangle.

  ‘Wilde and O’Reilly aren’t here,’ Claire said.

  Beck grunted. The priority was the murder scene on Railway Road. Which made him think of poor Mrs Claxton. He was trying to block out the reality of his brief relationship with her, and that the crime scene was his home. He simply referred to it now as ‘Railway Road’, and would not mention Mrs Claxton with any other term but ‘murder victim’.

  They walked into the dunes and stepped over the crime scene tape. The guard noted the time and wrote their names onto his sheet. Two Scene of Crime technicians had already mapped out with yellow tape an area in the sand in a block body shape, long and narrow, and were clearing sand away with surprising speed, placing it into clear plastic bags, to be stored for analysis later. Already the upper torso and head were visible.

  ‘Anything you can tell us? Male or female?’

  ‘Male,’ one of the technicians said without looking up. ‘Been here a long time, too.’

  Beck thought about that. It was unlikely the sand they were bagging would be of much value then.

  ‘How long do you think?’ Beck asked. ‘Roughly.’

  ‘Years. That’s roughly enough. Can’t pin it down any better than that. Not yet.’

  Beck pointed. ‘Looks like he was wearing a tweed jacket. Is that right? And is that hair? Black?’

  The technician nodded again. ‘Sand is an excellent preservative. Partly because it soaks up moisture so effectively. Probably the reason the particles of clothing and hair have remained. But nothing is that good. It’s been a long time.’

  ‘If you were to hazard a guess,’ Claire asked, ‘what age would you say?’

  The technician straightened, creasing his face in concentration. ‘The bone formation tells me probably a teenager, late teens, maybe seventeen, eighteen, nineteen tops. And that black hair. Curly and thick, another reason why some of it lasted. But we really need to get it on the table.’

  ‘How tall was he?’ asked Beck.

  ‘He was tall. And lanky. We’re talking six foot, easy, here. We’ll know more when we get him on the table, like I say.’

  Beck nodded, turned to Claire. ‘Let’s get back to the station. We’ve enough to get on with our own digging now.’

  Seventy-Five

  Beck’s phone rang. He took it from his pocket and answered.

  ‘Beck. You are not to return to the station, got that? Not today. Not tomorrow. Maybe not ever. You hear me?’

  The old O’Reilly was back, reinvigorated by the sniff of opportunity in the air, and the self-righteousness that went with it.

  ‘I hear you. But why?’

  ‘Haven’t you seen the headlines? The story’s already online. You are a murder suspect. Go have a look. Superintendent Wilde is in full agreement with me, by the way.’

  ‘Where will I go in the meantime? Disneyland?’

  ‘I don’t care where you go, smart arse,’ O’Reilly growled, and hung up.

  ‘What was that about?’ Claire asked.

  She brought the Focus to a stop at the end of the beach track, looked both ways as she moved onto the main road. Beck was about to answer when an SUV rounded the bend ahead, travelling fast, too fast. Claire cursed, stabbed the accelerator, and as she reached the correct side of the road, the SUV shot past and turned off onto the beach track. Beck saw it had blacked-out windows. Claire watched in the rear-view mirror as its brake lights glowed and it came to a sudden stop, throwing up mounds of damp sand. Then it started to reverse along the track, swung violently back onto the road, wobbling like a boat caught in rough surf. It began approaching fast in the rear-view mirror. Claire pressed the accelerator again, but this time the six-year-old Focus with a quarter of a million miles on the clock objected. Although the needle slowly began to climb, the engine
started to make a low rumbling noise that increased in tandem with the climbing needle. At seventy miles an hour the noise was deafening and she eased her foot back and held her speed steady.

  ‘Right,’ Beck said, looking over his shoulder. ‘He’s breaking the speed limit now. Put on the blues and we’ll pull him over.’

  The blue lights inside the rear window swirled to life as Beck lowered his window, motioning with his arm for the SUV to pull over. It indicated immediately and followed the Focus onto the hard shoulder where both vehicles came to a stop.

  Beck got out and stomped over to the driver’s door. As he drew level with it – an explosion of white light. Again. And again. He covered his eyes with both hands, hearing the whoosh and chirping sound of the camera flash each time it activated.

  Claire’s voice then, high-pitched. He thought to himself, almost smiling, because she’d hate him for thinking it, that her voice sounded so girly. ‘Put that camera away. Now!’

  Beck leaned against the SUV, his eyes shut tight, waiting for the snowstorm to clear. As he slowly opened his eyes again, the driver crystallised into view. He was young; goatee beard, sideburns, a prominent square chin. Next to him was another man – similar age, clean-cut, holding a Canon camera in his lap, like a harmless pet that couldn’t possibly have bitten anybody.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ the passenger said. ‘Really. The camera motor got stuck. It happens sometimes. Really, really sorry about that. Okay?’ But his voice sounded like a verbal smirk. On the SUV dash, next to a large yellow sticker with the word ‘Press’ in thick black lettering, Beck could see the evening edition of the Dublin News, with a similarly lettered headline: ‘Murder Victim Found in Cop’s House’.