by Sam Blake
Cathy had a feeling that might be news to his parents. Politics and the media were uneasy bedfellows at the best of times.
‘So he chatted to you a bit when he was there, it wasn’t all work?’
‘I suppose so, I never really thought about it. I think you sometimes talk more to people who aren’t your parents. I used to make him tea and take it down if I was at home when he was there, catch up on his news from college.’
‘Had you noticed if anything was bothering him recently? If he was worried about anything?’
Karen looked surprised. ‘Not at all, he was very happy . . .’
His mum had said the same thing. So perhaps that was her drug link theory put to bed. The last time she’d been involved in a case concerning Trinity College, Cathy had been undercover at a student party in the Pav, the student bar, trying to identify a dealer who was trading a drug called Modafinil, an upper a lot of the students were taking to get through their exams. Only wherever he’d bought his supply, the tablets he was dealing were weapons grade and had caused some near tragic side-effects.
She’d half-wondered if the hit-and-run could have been drugs related – someone making an example of Tom. The criminal gangs in the north inner city had a constant feud going on that involved picking off rival members. But if Tom had upset someone badly enough to get himself killed, Cathy was sure that he would have shown some outward sign of anxiety in the run-up to last night.
Karen opened her mouth to say more but a phone began to ring from the depths of the red handbag at the end of the sofa. A shadow flitted across Karen’s face – concern, worry? Cathy wasn’t sure what. As the sound grew, Cathy smiled.
‘Go ahead, take that.’
Karen reached for the bag as the phone stopped ringing. She pulled it out. ‘Oh, it was Ronan.’ She hesitated for a moment. ‘It’s fine, I can call him back.’
There was an awkward pause, which Cathy filled quickly. ‘He’s doing very well at Life Talk, he’s always in the papers.’ Sometimes during her break Cathy would leaf through the tabloids kicking around the station canteen. Ronan Delaney’s was a regular face, one that appeared to be constantly surrounded by glamorous models at various society events.
‘He is, his career’s really taking off. He loves the limelight.’
There was something about the way she said it . . . ‘Do you miss being on TV, being in the limelight yourself?’
Karen’s face clouded for a moment. ‘Sometimes. But it’s a tough world. And there’s huge pressure to be perfect. Not that there isn’t the same pressure in this business, and as Ronan’s wife I need to stay looking good, but being constantly in people’s living rooms makes them feel like they know you personally. Not that that isn’t lovely – but they’ve no qualms about asking probing personal questions or sharing their thoughts on what you’re wearing or how you’re looking. You do sacrifice a level of privacy. It can be exhausting.’
As Ronan’s wife I need to stay looking good. The sentence jarred with Cathy. On many levels. Here was a beautiful, successful woman who would always be a household name in Ireland, but who saw herself as just ‘Ronan’s wife’. And who needed to look the part. Cathy wondered how the parade of twenty-something glamour pusses who hung around her husband made Karen feel.
‘You’re doing very well here, though. Your salon has a national reputation.’
Karen blushed. ‘It does, it’s been a lot of work and long hours, but it keeps me sane. I’ve amazing girls working for me, they’re a brilliant team.’ Before she could continue the phone rang again. The bag was still on her knee. She pulled the phone out. ‘I’m sorry, that’s Ronan again, do you mind?’
‘Of course not.’ Cathy shook her head.
Karen swiped the screen to answer, and despite the fact she had her ear to it, Cathy could hear Ronan Delaney’s distinctive voice booming out. He obviously had his wife on speakerphone.
‘Why didn’t you pick up?’
Cathy pulled out her notebook and pretended to flick through the pages, as if she couldn’t hear. In her peripheral vision she was sure she could see Karen’s hand shaking as she held the phone.
‘I’m with someone, I’m sorry. The phone was in my bag.’
Ronan Delaney didn’t give her a chance to explain further. ‘I’m always telling you to keep it somewhere sensible.’ His tone was pure acid. ‘There’s a reception tonight, Emirates Airlines, make sure you get your hair done. Conor and Orla can’t go, they want us to go instead. It’s important, the airline are interested in sponsorship. We need to wow them.’
Across the room, Cathy strained her ears, keeping her eyes firmly fixed on her notebook. Delaney didn’t let his wife get a word in edgeways.
‘Wear that black dress, the one with the high neck. This isn’t the type of thing we need you flashing your tits at.’
Cathy cringed inwardly, embarrassed for Karen and wondering who else could hear the call at the other end. Delaney was some charmer.
He continued, ‘Did you hear, Tom got hit by a car last night on his way home?’ Hardly pausing, he continued, ‘Make sure you aren’t late. If this comes off, we’ll get some flights thrown in too. Damn sight warmer in Dubai than it is here.’
He hung up.
For once Cathy found herself speechless. It was just as well Orla Quinn had already called Karen about the accident – was that any way to break news like that to your wife? Then the end of his sentence hit her: ‘. . . we’ll get some flights thrown in too’. Cathy shook her head mentally. At a time like this, you’d think he’d be more focused on the tragic death of his best friend’s son than on getting freebies from a sponsor. Cathy wondered if the ‘we’ would be more likely to be some of the wannabe models and hangers-on that flocked around him than his wife.
Before she could comment, Cathy’s own phone began to ring, O’Rourke’s name flashing up on the screen.
‘Sorry, my turn.’
Cathy kept one eye on Karen as she answered her own phone. At least it gave Karen a moment to recover her dignity. O’Rourke had Cathy on speakerphone himself, but at least he didn’t share Ronan Delaney’s need for an entire world to hear his telephone calls. Cathy could hear his car radio in the background.
‘Saunders is starting the post-mortem in half an hour. I’ll pick you up, I’m on the main street. You can come back for your own car later.’
Chapter 7
Friday, 4 p.m.
Cathy felt about as comfortable in the morgue as she did in a hospital. The bright lights, the smell, the squeaky floors, all brought her back to waking up in the intensive care unit after the explosion that had nearly killed her and had murdered her unborn baby. It had left her – for what felt like a lifetime – trapped in a room smelling of disinfectant with no soft surfaces: cream painted walls, shiny lino, a steel bed. A world with no colour.
The nurses had been amazing, keeping her going with hospital gossip, trying to keep her cheerful, but the black dog of depression had been snapping at her heels. Between them, McIntyre and O’Rourke had pulled her through. Her family had been fantastic too, but not like them. And O’Rourke was the only one who knew the full story.
Now, well over a year on, she had one more assignment to go to complete her Master’s in forensic psychology and had thought she would be moving into a new position with the publication of the promotion list. But obviously the universe had other ideas for her.
Cathy could feel her temper rising again at the thought of the promotions list as she followed O’Rourke into the state pathologist’s office. She focused on counting slowly to ten. See-sawing emotions were another result of the explosion, and losing her temper was the main one. She regularly felt a lot like punching people. But it was getting better, and she hadn’t punched anyone badly recently, except her opponents in a couple of exhibition fights that McIntyre had organised in advance of the National Championships; she’d wiped the floor with all of them.
Now the business of not getting the profiler job,
coupled with that horrible feeling she got in hospitals, was making her feel very narky indeed. O’Rourke glanced at her as he held the door to the office open for her.
‘You all right? You’re uncharacteristically quiet.’
She raised her eyebrows. That sounded like a challenge. ‘Are you suggesting I talk a lot?’
His lined face cracked into a grin. ‘I wouldn’t dare.’
Cathy took a deep breath as she followed O’Rourke into the pathology theatre, both of them gowned and masked. He’d offered her an extra strong mint earlier and she rolled it around her mouth. It didn’t do much good – cotton wool plugs in her nose would have been a whole lot better – but she didn’t want to give Saunders any room for his usual sarcasm. The professor looked up as they appeared, nodding sharply to O’Rourke.
‘Well, well, Garda Connolly, is it? And how are you? You seem to be generating a lot of work for me today.’
Cathy acknowledged him with a polite nod. Professor Saunders was a short, slightly rotund man whom Cathy disliked with a passion. Almost as much, she was sure, as he disliked her. Sassy women who could carry their weight in the ring were creatures he neither could, nor wished to, understand, and he made his thoughts plain whenever he met her. But a bedside manner wasn’t important for Saunders; all his patients were past caring.
Like an operating theatre designed for the living, Saunders’ eyrie was brightly lit with huge circular lights hanging from the ceiling like hovering spaceships, illuminating stainless steel counters running along the walls and a stainless steel trolley crowded with instruments that would have looked at home in the average DIY enthusiast’s garage: saws, clamps, pliers.
‘Nasty one this morning. Massive crush injuries. He probably would have survived the initial impact if the driver hadn’t run right over him again. You’ll see from my photographs there are tyre marks right across his back.’ Saunders tutted, half to himself. ‘Regrettably his clothing was too thick for a clear imprint so I don’t think you’ll be able to get much on the make and model, but there’s no question in my mind that it was deliberate. I’ll finish up my report when I get this one finished.’
At the end of the table Saunders leaned over and pressed a button to test the Stryker saw, its lethal teeth rotating in a blur of silver. Cathy gritted her own teeth, the mint on her tongue pressing painfully into the roof of her mouth.
The one part of all of this that always made her feel physically sick was the sound of that saw on the bones of the skull, slicing off the top of the victim’s head to give the pathologist access to the brain.
She averted her eyes, fixed them on the grey hairs protruding from Saunders’ right ear, and sucked hard again on the mint. If she’d had time for lunch today, she was quite sure she’d be struggling with it by now. She’d seen hundreds of post-mortems and it never got any easier, but there was no way she was going to let Saunders see her vomit.
On the steel table in the middle of the room, the girl lay naked, her clothes neatly folded on the counter to their right. Her face was a mess of flesh and bone where she had hit the rocks, the skin on her face, neck and shoulders stained purple with post-mortem lividity, where her blood had pooled at the lowest point. It wasn’t pretty. But then death rarely was. For a moment Cathy’s mind shot back to a wooded hillside, to finding another girl’s body, a girl around the same age as this one. She shook the image away.
She still felt guilty thinking it, that it could have been so much worse, it could have been Sarah Jane’s body. When Sarah Jane had disappeared everyone had known the chances of her winding up dead had been statistically higher than those of them finding her alive, but Cathy had blocked that thought out. The day that she had had to go up into the Dublin mountains to identify a body that could have been her best friend’s was one that still gave her nightmares.
Thank God O’Rourke had been beside her through the whole investigation, pushing it forward earlier than he should have, saving valuable time. Neither of them had expected it to go the way it had, that Sarah Jane would get shot and injured. But everything that had happened had brought her and O’Rourke closer together.
Not close enough in her opinion, but she was still working on that.
It had all happened so fast – their lives had been turned upside down literally in a few days, and the four months since had been insanely busy. The trafficking network they’d uncovered had stretched right across Europe; with the evidence they had gathered in Dublin, O’Rourke had been liaising with law enforcement across five countries and two continents to close down the supply chain. It was a mammoth task, one that had him travelling all over the place, but it was one that he had relished. Cathy had a strong feeling that he was getting bored in Dun Laoghaire and needed more of a challenge – he’d been there two years, he had to be thinking about the next move. Which wasn’t one she wanted to think about.
Saunders cleared his throat noisily and Cathy was brought back to the job at hand as he nodded to his assistant to wheel over the steel trolley full of instruments. Parking it with practised skill, the assistant returned to photographing the girl’s clothing, his thick rubber soled shoes squeaking on the grey tiled floor. Cathy really didn’t need to see the first incision, and as Saunders picked up his scalpel with a flourish, she transferred her attention to his assistant. He was a tall man – young, she’d always thought – but now she realised she wasn’t sure if she’d ever heard him speak, or ever seen his face for that matter. He’d always been wearing a surgical face mask whenever she’d met him.
As a wave of classical music began to fill the theatre, Saunders humming tunelessly to it, she watched as the mortuary assistant began to unfold the girl’s coat, checking her pockets. Oblivious to everything else around him, Saunders began speaking into an overhead microphone.
‘The body is that of an adult female, one hundred and sixty five centimetres in height and of slim build. She was wearing a black nylon coat, purple long-sleeved T-shirt and a short denim skirt with navy blue tights when found. She was wearing a black bra and pants which were soiled. She has medium length blonde hair and her ears are pierced, nails: two to three millimetres . . .’
In her peripheral vision Cathy could see Saunders making a Y-shaped incision across the girl’s chest, skirting her navel with his scalpel.
‘Do we know how she got onto the rocks?’
Saunders’ question made Cathy jump and she turned back to see him opening the girl’s stomach cavity. Cathy sucked hard on the mint to combat the smell that was rising from the body and glanced hastily at O’Rourke, who seemed to be studiously looking at the girl’s hand as he answered. Her nails were a delicate pink.
‘That’s what we have to find out. We’re not convinced it’s a straightforward suicide.’
‘When are suicides ever straightforward, Inspector?’ Saunders looked at him disapprovingly over his half-glasses, his eyebrows raised, and pursed his lips. ‘She seems physically very healthy, toxicology will tell us if she was taking antidepressants, or anything else that might have interfered with her reasoning.’
As Saunders opened her chest cavity, Cathy transferred her attention to Saunders’ assistant, who was patting down the side of the girl’s coat. He reached into the pocket again and began wriggling something up from the inside of the lining. Pleased for the distraction, Cathy took a step over to him.
‘Got something?’
He turned to her, his voice muffled by the face mask, his eyebrows furrowed.
‘There’s a hole in the lining of her pocket, something has slipped down inside . . . Here we are.’ He pulled his gloved hand from the coat pocket, holding a plastic identity card between his fingertips. Cathy leaned over to take a look.
‘Assuming this is her student ID card.’ Cathy glanced across at O’Rourke, who had turned to see what she was doing. ‘Her name’s Lauren O’Reilly, nineteen. She was a second year at Trinity.’
‘You serious? The same year as Tom Quinn?’
‘So it
seems.’
Chapter 8
Friday, 5.30 p.m.
It was late afternoon and raining hard by the time Cathy and O’Rourke arrived at Trinity College. When she’d called earlier, the university had confirmed they had all Lauren O’Reilly’s medical contacts on file and Saunders’ secretary had caught Lauren’s dentist between patients. Her X-rays had been emailed before the pathologist had even finished up the post-mortem. Even he had been impressed at the speed at which they’d been able to confirm her identity.
Now local Gardaí in Longford had the unenviable task of notifying her parents, and before they headed back to Dun Laoghaire, O’Rourke wanted to have a chat with Professor Anna Lockharte. As Cathy had been talking to the bursar in Trinity, it had quickly become apparent that Lauren O’Reilly was not only in the same year as Tom Quinn, but she was also studying the same course.
They must have known each other.
Friday afternoons were always busy in Dublin city and today was no exception. Headlights and tail lights blazed through the rain and winter darkness, creating a feeling of chaos. On Nassau Street the side entrance to Trinity College was thronged with students, hoods up, umbrellas jostling with backpacks, their numbers swelled by a group of Japanese tourists in plastic macs, their guide trying to herd them quickly along the street.
They’d parked off Dawson Street and as they walked down, Cathy pulled her collar up, shivering, cold despite her padded leather jacket. She hated January; actually she hated the whole of winter, but at least in November and December you had Christmas to look forward to. At this time of year Cathy felt like she went to training in the dark and came back from training in the dark. It wasn’t surprising people got depressed.