Murder In The Academy : A chilling murder mystery set in Belfast (Alice Fox Murder Mysteries Book 1)

by Maggie Feeley

  Without any further attempt at dialogue, he opened the passenger door and melded into the busy throng of shoppers.

  35

  It was six thirty before Alice looked at her phone and saw five messages from Mairéad Walsh. They went progressively from urgent to fairly desperate. By the time she cycled back across town she had already texted Mairéad to say she would be home by seven thirty and could talk then. She knew now that both Liam Doyle and Ralph were on the police radar in relation to Helen Breen’s murder and she had heard from Hugo the story of the violent death of Liam Doyle’s parents when he was still a child. As she cycled, some of her lengthy discussions with Tara about the complexities of Northern Irish life came flooding back. So many things had a tailback into the recent past and it was clear that sectarianism, and the complex web of events that was called the Troubles, was more than just a bygone memory. She could see the ever-present theme of sectarian conflict in her knowledge of the lives of the young people in EXIT. It emerged like fossils in old rock in the areas she passed through daily, in the multidisciplinary elements in DePRec and in almost all the people she encountered in this new life of hers. She wondered in what way DePRec’s areas of concern might somehow be linked to the murder of Helen Breen. It seemed that despite all the efforts at peacebuilding, everything in this place was still in some way under that historic cloud of division and dissent.

  By the time she reached her flat and settled into her easy chair, Alice had concluded that life in Northern Ireland seemed complicated in a way that it wasn’t back home. Then again she knew that might be a case of the devil you know being easier to understand than the unfamiliar demon.

  She dialled Mairéad’s number and relaxed back into her chair.

  “I am so glad to finally get you, Alice,” Mairéad exclaimed. “I didn’t know what else to do other than keep leaving messages and I knew you would get back to me as soon as you could.”

  “Things got a little busy in the west of the city this afternoon. I didn’t get a minute to look at my phone.” Alice avoided getting into detail about Liam Doyle. If she was going to have even a peripheral role in this investigation it couldn’t be one of gossip and scandal- monger. She waited for Mairéad to speak.

  “Ralph was asked to go in for more questioning and he was in such a state. I am so worried about his negative frame of mind at the moment. He isn’t used to being on his own at home yet and then to have all this fuss going on as well … I fear for his mental stability.”

  Alice said she was sorry that Mairéad was so worried.

  “All I could think of was to say was that I would call you and that you would do what you could to look after his interests.” Mairéad sighed deeply. “In any case, he phoned me just now to say he was home and that he thought that he had dealt more calmly with the questioning this time. It was the woman detective who interviewed him and that seemed to suit him better. Thanks to your advice the other evening, he didn’t allow himself to get so riled when talking about Helen Breen.”

  As well as pooling their knowledge on Helen Breen when they called with Alice the previous evening, Alice and Mairéad had tried to get Wilson to see that his wild and reckless presentation of himself was adding to his problems. He was doing quite a lot to create an image for himself of someone who could easily get out of control and it wasn’t too many steps on from that to believe that he could be a killer. Wilson had taken it all on board.

  “DI Paton seems to be a soothing influence, sure enough,” said Alice more by way of encouragement than anything else.

  Mairéad had almost regained her usual control by this point. “Quite a lot of his time was spent waiting around, I think. They had Liam Doyle in there as well and he kept them busy it seems. I heard that they were going to search his house. Poor lad. His family background won’t gain him any favours with the police.”

  “I’m glad that Ralph is home and feeling a little more positive. Try to get him to take it easy over the weekend and we’ll see how things have developed by Monday. I plan to do likewise.” Alice did not allow herself to be drawn into discussing Liam Doyle’s dilemma.

  “Oh, me too, Alice! That’s more than enough excitement for one week and that’s for sure.”

  As they said their farewells Alice’s phone buzzed to indicate she had a new message.

  “Liam Doyle home and under orders not to leave the country! Thanks for being there. H.”

  She allowed herself a few slow, deep breaths and then reached for some paper and a pen to gather her thoughts.

  36

  Just after six that evening, Caroline Paton rang the doorbell at the Breen residence and focused her thinking on the areas she wanted to probe further. In some ways she was there out of respect and courtesy because Sandra Woods was as likely to find out any important information as she was. However, it added immensely to her understanding of the victim to meet the family and spend time in the home where the person was raised. She had a personal belief with regard to murder investigations that, within the limitations imposed by time pressures, nothing was wasted. Every moment spent learning about the detail of a victim’s life contributed to her knowledge of the person and also therefore to solving a case.

  A woman whom Caroline deduced to be Mrs Breen’s Filipino care worker, opened the door.

  “I am Detective Inspector Caroline Paton and I think you must be Lisa,” she said, smiling and extending her hand. “I think that I am expected.”

  Lisa took the detective’s hand shyly and nodded in affirmation. “Mrs Breen is waiting for you in the living room.”

  She opened the door off the hallway and stood to the side to allow Caroline to pass.

  “This is Detective Inspector Caroline Paton to see you, Mrs Breen. I’ll bring in some tea.”

  “Please call upstairs to Michael to come and join us, Lisa, if he can bear to be separated from his work emails for just a few moments.” Mrs Breen’s tone was not quite caustic but rather one of resignation to competing for attention with her son’s work priorities. She smiled meaningfully at Caroline and waved her hand towards the sofa to invite her to sit down. “DI Paton, I am glad that you could make time to call when I know that you must be extremely busy. Your Constable Woods has been a great support to me since this dreadful business has happened.” She paused and then took off again. “I only have one child who has a heart and he is in Australia. Helen and her brother Michael, whom you will meet shortly, favour their father’s belief that emotions are for the weak. As such, imperatives other than relationships drive them and we have not been close since they took control of their own lives.”

  “I am sorry for your loss of your daughter, Mrs Breen. Sudden and violent death is always shocking no matter what …’ Caroline stopped what might have sounded like a judgement on the deceased. It was clear that Agatha Breen had lost her daughter a long time ago. “I am sorry too that I need to intrude on your grief but we are eager to make progress in our inquiry as rapidly as possible and perhaps you or your son will be able to help us with that.”

  Mrs Breen mumbled something inaudible that merged into a sharp cough. She sipped some water. “We are not a close family, DI Paton. There is no point in trying to appear otherwise. My husband was against any displays of emotion and Helen was the most strongly influenced by him. She wanted nothing more than to win his approval. He was an amateur scholar of Machiavelli and above all, he admired the art of manipulation. His daughter was his avid acolyte. When he died suddenly she was angry and then withdrawn and then it was as if she determined to take over the role of arch-schemer for herself. Her brothers and I were her laboratory rats for a while until she decided the outside world offered more scope to her and she left us in relative peace. Frank left Ireland as soon as he finished college and Michael found his own furrow to plough in pursuit of money and becoming a chip off the old block to his own family … It’s not the most edifying of family histories, DI Paton.” She looked more than a little downcast. “I’m afraid I chose self-pres
ervation over any good fight to try and change things.”

  She did not make her final remark apologetically but Caroline was not sure that it wasn’t tinged with just a hint of regret. She was spared making any response to Mrs Breen by the door opening and Lisa wheeling in a trolley that held an array of small sandwiches, savouries and a collection of cakes. Michael Breen followed in her wake.

  Caroline stood to help with the distribution of plates and cups but Mrs Breen hastily stopped her. “Do sit down, DI Paton. This is my son Michael who is sufficiently housetrained to help Lisa. You are our guest, after all.”

  Caroline couldn’t help but reflect on the extent to which Mrs Breen’s comment about self-preservation meant she was implicated, albeit unwittingly, in sustaining the pattern of family hostilities. She greeted Michael Breen and sympathised with him on the loss of his sister.

  “We weren’t close,” he replied as if to explain his lack of distress, “but murder is always a bit out of the ordinary, I suppose. We have no prior experience to draw upon.”

  The Breen family lack of emotion was truly remarkable, thought Caroline.

  Lisa handed around food, tea and coffee. Mrs Breen and her son showed no loss of appetite and Caroline found it was difficult to reconcile this almost festive interlude with the violent demise of Helen Breen.

  After an interval she asked, “If I might ask you both to think about whether there was anyone in the past who might have a reason to be angry with Helen?”

  Michael shook his head almost imperceptibly. “As I said we were not on friendly terms for as long as I can remember. She was older than me and quite dominant.” He stopped momentarily, lost in some recollection and then began again with more feeling. “I mostly stayed out of her way to avoid being on the receiving end of her vitriol or being manipulated into doing something to advance one of her schemes and ending up in trouble for that.” He looked at his mother then who was seemingly entirely focused on the contents of her small plate. “Really since she left school and went off to college I have had as little to do with her as possible. There was the odd Christmas meal or something like that but aside from finding her to be a quite an unpleasant person, I wouldn’t have known anything about her life or her associates. Frank was a few years older than Helen and might have had more of a chance to know what she got up to when we were all in school.”

  Mrs Breen shook her head. “DI Paton, Helen did not bring friends home either from school or college. She kept everything compartmentalised and secret. It was as if she didn’t ever want the separate parts of her life to converge.” The old woman turned to look at the garden behind her as if watching some reel from the past.

  Caroline finished her tea and waited for Mrs Breen to come back to the moment.

  “Come to think about it,” Mrs Breen continued, “she very much related to one person at a time and when that ceased to be her father she became even more distant from the rest of us.”

  Caroline turned to Michael again. “Mr Breen, have you been in touch with your brother Frank? Did he have any new perspective on who might have wanted to harm your sister?”

  “I spoke to Frank this morning, DI Paton,” Mrs Breen said before Michael could begin to formulate an answer, “and he had of course been shocked to get Michael’s email. He and Constable Woods had a good chat about school days and she asked him if he knew Janet Hartnett. It took us all a while to realise she was talking about Janet Baldwin, as she was then. She was in Frank’s class in sixth form. I didn’t know Helen and she knew each other but Frank remembered it all in more detail. I’m sure the Constable will pass on his recollections. She made a careful note of them, as you would expect.”

  “Thank you, Mrs Breen. That is very useful indeed.” Caroline rose to go. “I don’t want to take up any more of your time but if you think of anything that might be useful to our inquiry, please do get in touch.”

  As she drove back to the station, something that had been said in the Breen household was niggling at the back of Caroline’s mind, just beyond reach, but she couldn’t retrieve it.

  She thought about the woman she had first encountered under a sheet in the morgue. She was emerging as a fairly unpopular person both at home and in work. But that was the nature of the task. Even when the victim turned out to be seriously unlikeable, she had to continue to seek justice for them and disregard how unsympathetic they had been to others in their lifetime.

  As she neared the end of the second full day of inquiry she hoped that tonight’s review would bring significant advances towards finding their killer. She had texted ahead to say they would start as soon as they all got back. No point in hanging about when they had the wind at their backs.

  Caroline was known for being both an intuitive and a methodical investigator. So it was that as she sat in the evening traffic she decided to make a call to Alice Fox and arrange to talk to her when the evening briefing was done. She needed some perspective on this case and if she had judged her correctly, Alice Fox might be the one to give her that much needed outsider viewpoint.

  With any luck they would be done with the review by nine o’clock and there might even be time for a late bite to eat. Friday night was lively enough in the Chinese quarter up around Shaftsbury Square and they might well be able to mix business with a little culinary pleasure. It was worth a punt and she would make the call as soon as she got into the Grosvenor Road Station car park. Then she would harness every ounce of energy she had for that crucial session when all their findings and hunches could be pooled. She had a good feeling about the progress they were making and by the time she made her way through the foyer of the station she was whistling optimistically.

  37

  Earlier in the afternoon DI Paton had interviewed Ralph Wilson at some length and then left him for Burrows to process and let go. Wilson was angry by nature and probably more harm to himself in terms of raised anxiety levels than he was to the rest of humanity. At the same time, Burrows had interviewed Liam Doyle and then left him to cool in the interview room while he and McVeigh searched Doyle’s house for signs of Helen Breen’s devices. In the end, both men were released under caution to remain accessible should they be required for further questioning. They were both worth keeping an eye on but neither had given the impression that they could be driven to murder. Doyle was young and impressionable and Burrows suspected Breen had systematically groomed him as a convenient minion who was easy on the eye. He would wait to hear later what McVeigh had in terms of supporting evidence before he settled definitely for that position.

  Ian had spent the afternoon making phone calls and sorting through the material he had brought from Helen Breen’s house. When Burrows had seen him at his desk earlier, his brow had been furrowed in a way that led Bill to hope there would be something worthwhile to discuss later. It seemed as if suddenly they had amassed a quantity of new information and he recognised that as a phase in all inquiries where progress might be accelerated. Just after five o’clock the two men headed westwards to the home of Liam Doyle. In their chat in the car, they didn’t stray too much into new areas of evidence keeping those for the disciplined environment of the review meeting later that evening.

  When they returned to the police station Burrows spent a little time preparing headings on the electronic evidence board so that they could share their findings as rationally as possible. Sandra Woods had emailed a written report and said she would be available by phone if they needed any clarification. He had shared other reports throughout the day as they had come in and he saw that Ian had also added some files to the shared drive. He would wait to hear his verbal report before starting to wade through all that.

  His phone buzzed. It was a text from the boss to tell him to order in tea, coffee and snacks and that she would be ready to start in ten minutes. Ian was already gathering himself together to join him at the meeting-room table.

  “Hey, team!” Caroline said as she made her entrance with a little more than her usual gusto. “We have a l
ot of evidence to get through but this is our process and we have shown it works. Careful step by step through the detail is what exposes the connections that lead us to our killer. It’s not the stuff of TV drama but then who would cast us as the Dream Team?” She was in buoyant mood. “I have a good feeling in my bones about this meeting. Let’s get started.”

  Gathered in the Murder Squad offices, Burrows gave an overview of the report from DC Woods. She had elaborated further on the Breen family relationships. Her discussion with Michael Breen had revealed that his sister had bossed and bullied him and generally made his life a misery. He had related an incident soon after the father’s death when she had implicated him in the sale of her father’s expensive wristwatch. Helen had sold it and left the jeweller’s receipt in her brother’s room where their mother discovered it. Michael was not able to convince her that he was not the guilty party and, when Helen had covertly given him a new pair of pricey trainers, the case against him was compounded. He said that he thought Helen’s motivation in such actions was not to get money but to bring the wrath of his mother down on him and find pleasure in watching his misery and helplessness.

  Wood’s discussion with the older brother, Frank, had been a little more useful in that he remembered Janet Hartnett from his class at school. He didn’t remember Helen being friendly with her but they did both hang around the rugby crowd and so may have known each other then. Janet Baldwin had been a popular party animal, Frank remembered, whereas Helen was younger and had been more peripheral to that social circle. Like Michael, Frank had avoided contact with his sister whenever possible. He had a theory that she wanted to prove herself to be the child who was made most in the likeness of their father. While he was alive, her efforts to win the father’s admiration had been extreme and often involved discrediting Frank and Michael to add to her own kudos in their father’s eyes. After his death her behaviour had become centred on pleasing herself and much less predictable.