With Our Blessing

by Jo Spain

‘Noreen,’ she interrupted. ‘What does Liz do for a living?’

  Chapter 55

  Ray was on the move. He needed to make sure everyone was safe.

  The killer wasn’t finished yet.

  He flew through the most populated rooms in the convent – the kitchen, the dining room and the sitting room. He found most of the nuns gathered in the chapel. Sister Gladys had been moved to the sitting room, where she was trying to convince one of the guards to roll a cigarette for her. Only two people were unaccounted for, from what he could see.

  He ran back to the kitchen. Sister Mary was distractedly chucking flour at a ball of dough and was startled when he banged open the door and stormed in.

  ‘Where’s Sister Clare?’ he demanded.

  ‘What’s the matter, Detective?’

  ‘Just tell me, where is she?’

  Ray had no time to explain, but his agitated tone convinced the nun he was serious.

  ‘I haven’t seen her for hours. She went out earlier to mark out the foundations that have been buried under the snow, so no one would fall again. She knows where they are better than any of us. It was getting dark, she should have left it . . .’

  Ray felt ice coursing through his veins.

  ‘Shit!’ he exclaimed.

  He rushed to the back door, yanking it open. It was still unlocked.

  ‘Get Detective Geoghegan! Get me Michael now!’ he roared at the shocked and confused nun.

  Sister Mary dropped the lump of dough and rushed to the kitchen door, panic spreading across her face.

  ‘It’s okay, she wasn’t alone,’ she squeaked.

  ‘That’s why I’m worried,’ Ray shouted back.

  He darted outside. The lights from the convent windows illuminated a very limited area of the grounds, and the fast swirling snow further impeded visibility. He looked left and right frantically, his breath coming in sharp, adrenalin-fuelled bursts.

  He hastened forward before halting. He might as well have a bell around his neck, the noise he was making, panting as he sloshed heavily through snow and ice. He took a deep, calming breath and began moving more stealthily towards the old orphanage foundations.

  The grey brick stones he first encountered were just that, small stones. They were probably larger under the snow, but he could only see their tips. No wonder Gladys had fallen over one earlier. In the distance, though, the remains of some walls still stood.

  Instinctively, he knew this was where to go. Making careful progress, he reached the first of the higher standing brick mounds.

  ‘Sister Clare,’ he called out.

  He paused, listening for a response or movement of any kind. Nothing.

  He moved to the next wall. His whole body trembled with the cold, and the tips of his fingers were starting to go numb. The snow stung his eyes as he searched, unblinking, for signs of life.

  ‘Sister Clare?’

  He thought he heard a whimper this time, just to his right.

  To hell with quiet.

  He lifted his knees and started barrelling through the snow as fast as he could in that direction, casting nervous glances behind him every few yards. Ray had never seen anybody who had frozen to death, and he didn’t want Sister Clare to be his first.

  As he frantically fumbled around in the darkness, Ray spotted the nun’s hands. Her arms had been tied behind her, looped around a narrow wall, the wrists knotted with rope. When he rounded the stone, he came face to face with a vision straight from a nightmare.

  Sister Clare was in a seated position. More ropes had been placed over the tops and bottoms of her legs, held in place with iron pegs. The ropes and pegs had probably been brought outside by the nun herself to cordon off the foundations; they had been cruelly turned against her.

  The elderly nun’s coat was discarded to one side. Her scarf was tied around her mouth. Blood oozed from a nasty-looking wound to the side of her head.

  Her eyes were, literally, frozen wide open. The nun’s tears had turned to ice and her eyelashes were glued to her skin. Her face was white, and her hair and clothing were disappearing under the falling snow.

  Amazingly, she was alive and found the strength to moan weakly when she saw him.

  He fell to his knees and pulled the scarf out of her mouth. Alerted by the sound of ragged breathing and running feet approaching, he stood up.

  Michael emerged from the snow. ‘What the hell?’

  ‘She’s alive,’ Ray shouted. ‘Help me.’

  He started pulling the pegs out of the ground. Michael joined him. When they had the ropes off Sister Clare’s legs, Ray moved round the back of the wall.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit, the knot’s frozen. We need to stand her up and lift her until we can get her arms over the top. Do it gently.’

  The two detectives carefully manoeuvred the near dead woman into a standing position, both men heaving and sweating from the exertion. Ray lifted her until Michael was able to raise her arms over the wall without hurting her. They were blessed it wasn’t any higher.

  Sister Clare fell forward.

  ‘Take her,’ Ray directed Michael.

  The other detective scooped her up in his arms. Ray pulled off his fleece, draping it over her.

  ‘Bring her back to the convent. I need to end this.’

  Sister Clare mumbled something through chattering teeth.

  Ray moved closer to her. ‘You’re safe now, Sister.’

  The nun mumbled again.

  Ray leaned his ear to her mouth and heard the one word.

  A name.

  He stood back.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know.’

  *

  Emmet was putting his driving abilities to the test. Parts of the road were like glass. Anything over fifty kilometres per hour risked sliding off the road as the tyres struggled for grip. Adding insult to injury, the snow had started to fall again, obscuring their vision. The saving grace was that nobody else was mad enough to be tearing down the main road at this hour in these conditions.

  They emerged unscathed from a particularly hairy stretch. Both men exhaled loudly in relief.

  ‘Considering you’ve asked me to put my life and yours in danger, can you not just tell me what the mad panic is to get back?’ Emmet asked, his eyes firmly focused on the road.

  ‘I wondered,’ Tom said, also staring out the windscreen intently, ‘why the first victim had been left in the Phoenix Park. The killer didn’t need a national team to discover what had gone on in that laundry. The body could have been left in Limerick for the local squad. I’ve been looking at this from the wrong angle . . . For God’s sake, why can’t I get a signal on this phone?’

  ‘What was the right angle?’ Emmet asked, exasperated.

  He’d told Tom all the people they knew who’d been adopted. Tom had taken one deep breath, nodded his head, then roared at him to get in the car.

  Now they were haring back to Kilcross as fast as conditions would allow, with Tom swearing every few minutes because he couldn’t get through to anyone on his phone.

  ‘Why would somebody kill a woman from Limerick and leave her in Dublin? Once we had the second victim, it should have been obvious. The person who’d killed Attracta had to gain access to Kilcross once more and be able to move through the village with impunity to finish the job. We gave the killer the free pass. We invited her down to the village.’

  *

  ‘What does she work at?’ Noreen said. ‘I thought you knew. She’s a scientist of some sort. She kept it vague, but it’s something to do with the police. Her mother would have been so proud. I told her that.’

  Ciaran shook his head and turned to Laura, who was streets ahead of him.

  ‘What does she mean?’ he asked.

  He, too, had cottoned on that Noreen was indeed, as he liked to put it, a few cakes short of a picnic.

  Laura ignored him, her gaze never leaving the woman in the chair.

  ‘Noreen, you said you wanted to call your son Matthew but he wa
s called something else when he was adopted. How did Liz get her name?’

  ‘Ah. She was lucky. Her mother had a name for her. Sister Gladys felt so guilty that she put Maggie’s chosen name for her daughter on the birth and adoption certificates. The nun claimed she’d made it up herself, but we all knew that Maggie had picked Elisa.’

  ‘Elisa? I thought you said Liz?’ Ciaran said.

  ‘Yes, Maggie’s daughter shortened it,’ Noreen said. ‘But it’s actually “Lis” with an S, not “Liz” with a Z.’

  Laura felt the room close in. She turned to Ciaran.

  ‘What else is a shortened version of Elisa?’

  Ciaran looked at her blankly for a few seconds.

  Then he shot to his feet as realization dawned, sending his cup and saucer flying.

  *

  The convent was silent – bar the distant echo of voices raised in harmony.

  The nuns were singing a mournful hymn in the chapel, blissfully ignorant of what had just occurred to one of their own. That unknowing state would shortly be shattered by the arrival of an ambulance and the expanding shockwaves of the frenzied activity now taking place in the kitchen, where Michael, Willie, Sister Mary and Sister Bernadette were trying to revive a now unconscious Sister Clare.

  Ray climbed the stairs, his steps as heavy as his heart. The chorus of voices grew distant, replaced by the noise of his own shallow breathing.

  The convent was haunted tonight. He could almost feel the presence of the women who had lived and died here. He sensed their souls around him in the air and shuddered, imagining whispered memories of suffering and desolation.

  He knew what floor she’d be on, but he didn’t know which room to try first.

  He didn’t have to think about it for long. It had to be the one with the open door. He walked slowly along the corridor. He had his pistol but he didn’t want it. He wouldn’t be capable of using it.

  He arrived at the open door. It was the second dormitory the team had walked into on the first evening.

  She was sitting on the floor, beside the unit between the windows, tracing with her finger the MM initials carved there. Her dark hair covered the side of her face. The windows were open and the snowflakes came through in flurries as the wind changed direction. Some landed in her hair, but she didn’t move.

  She reacted when she heard him cross the threshold, though, turning her head, a smile breaking when she saw who it was.

  He didn’t know if it was the eerie white light spilling in, or the angle from which he viewed her, but he could see now that her smile, as endearing as it was, didn’t reach her eyes.

  She stood up to face him.

  ‘Ellie,’ he choked, his heart breaking.

  Chapter 56

  ‘So are you saying . . .?’ Emmet asked, turning to look at Tom.

  The other man was still waving his phone around, trying desperately to get a signal.

  As he spoke, the car hit an icy patch and the front wheels skidded to the left.

  Tom dropped the phone and grabbed the door rest. Emmet was an experienced driver and let the car slide before he corrected the wheel.

  ‘Jesus!’ the Tech Bureau chief exclaimed, panting heavily.

  Tom groaned. ‘Emmet, let’s arrive alive,’ he said, before returning to his theory. ‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying.’

  ‘But that can’t be right. I mean . . . what the hell, Tom? No, I don’t believe it. Not Ellie. She’s happy in her life. I wouldn’t have even known she was adopted, except an old university colleague told me she’d been asking how somebody would go about tracing birth parents. Ellie wanted it kept private but appreciated my intentions when I brought it up.

  ‘She’d already decided she didn’t want to pursue it. Bridget is far more eager to meet her real mother. You’re jumping to conclusions, Tom, dangerous conclusions.’

  The inspector shook his head.

  ‘It was all there, Emmet. I asked you to send Mark down with her. Was it you who decided she could select who she brought?’

  Emmet hesitated before replying.

  ‘No. I said they could both go down,’ he remembered. ‘But Mark was busy this weekend, and he’d done some late shifts last week.’

  ‘Covering those shifts for Ellie, was he? I remember now, she looked bloody exhausted on Friday morning when we found the body. She must have just made it back from the lock-up.

  ‘Ellie probably talked Mark out of travelling. She couldn’t risk having him on site. I think she brought Jack as a decoy. It was a good strategy. I should have been watching her, but she kept directing me to look at Jack – pointing out when he abandoned her, as though he was off doing something suspicious.’

  Tom continued his train of thought. ‘Jack’s incompetence shouldn’t have been a problem, though. She’s meant to be an excellent crime scene technician, yet she found no forensic evidence. You’d barely arrived when you picked up on the DNA under the priest’s fingernails. And how come she didn’t spot that glass fragment in the hall?’

  ‘She could have easily missed what was under the priest’s nails, Tom. You said yourself, she was trying to cover two sites. The pathologist would have found it, anyway. And the glass was minuscule.’

  ‘She didn’t miss the priest’s nails for want of trying,’ Tom said. ‘She knew he’d scratched her, but she must have been in too much of a rush to clean up properly after she killed him. She was conscious of us outside and of her need to establish an alibi. In any case, she thought she’d have unfettered access to the body when she was called on site. She wasn’t counting on there being guards in the priest’s hall the whole time she was working with her victim.

  ‘And she went over and over that convent hall, Emmet. She wasn’t looking for evidence; she was making sure there was none, and missed the glass fragment. God knows how much she removed. That’s why both scenes were so clean.’

  Emmet shook his head, still unable to believe what he was hearing.

  ‘There’s so much that only started to make sense tonight. She’s met Ray a few times but never showed any interest. Suddenly, on this case, she’s making eyes at him. She was keeping him close, ingratiating herself with us so she could keep up with developments. I wasn’t having team meetings that included her, and I didn’t talk to her – not the way I’d talk to you – so that’s why she helped us find out that the priest had been up to Dublin. It was evidence she was certain of, and it brought her closer to the team. But it would come to nothing for our investigation.

  ‘I know you’re struggling with this, Emmet, but think it through. Ray told me he met her outside the priest’s house just before we found the body. She must have gone in, done the deed, then driven round the front. If anyone saw her and asked why she was up in the village, she had a reason and an alibi – lunch with Ray.

  ‘I think she was posing as Catherine Farrell and renting the house next door. Does she work full time?’

  Emmet shook his head.

  ‘Not this year,’ he said. ‘She’s studying. She puts the hours in when she’s there . . . I can’t believe this. If you thought it was her, why did you leave her down there?’

  ‘I wasn’t sure,’ Tom said. ‘I kept going through the people who fitted the age profile in my head, but I didn’t know who was adopted – Concepta, Jack, Ellie. I took precautions, making sure neither Ellie nor Jack were in the convent when we were leaving. I told Ray to keep an eye on them once they showed up, and to monitor Concepta. When we saw how clean the storage unit was, the pieces clicked.

  ‘If I’m honest, Emmet, I didn’t want it to be her. She was on the shortlist, but I entertained doubts right up until you told me she was adopted. She knew you’d send her down, Emmet. You said she had a way with men . . . was she working her magic on you?’

  Tom could see his friend blushing. ‘Once you’d brought her in to work the Phoenix Park site, it all fell into place. She knew you’d be too busy to leave Dublin. She knew what she was doing.’

  ‘Tom, list
en to me, I’ve known this woman for years. I’ve had drinks with her. She is smart. She’s kind. She’s mature. And more importantly, she’s stable. Do you hear me? She’s not insane.’

  Emmet’s tone didn’t match his words. The cogs in his brain were turning.

  ‘You’re wrong. I think she’s probably the most traumatized person either of us has ever met. I just hope to God she’s finished what she set out to do.’

  Tom looked down at his phone.

  The signal was back.

  As fast as his fingers could move, he found Ray’s number and dialled.

  *

  ‘Why, though, Noreen?’ Laura asked again.

  She had been trying to get through to Tom for the last five minutes. Then she tried Ray. They either had their phones turned off or had no reception. She cursed and banged the phone on the table.

  She was afraid.

  Ray had been spending time with Ellie. Was he with her now? She didn’t know what was holding Ellie together. When would she snap?

  ‘I’ll try my lads,’ Ciaran said, excusing himself from the sitting room, still dazed.

  ‘Why what, dear?’ Noreen responded.

  ‘Why did you tell her everything? Why did you tell her what had happened to her mother?’

  ‘Because she wanted to know,’ Noreen replied, raising her hands, as if it was obvious.

  ‘But did she have to know that her mother had gone mad because of it? Did she have to know she was the result of rape? That you’d all been raped? What was the point all those years later? You didn’t need to tell her. You spared your own son that terrible truth. And why did you tell her Maggie was obsessed with getting revenge?’

  Noreen looked at Laura oddly.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I tell her? Her mother wanted them to die. It drove her mad. That’s the truth of it. They deserved it.’

  Laura stood up.

  Noreen Boyle was insane. Did she even realize what she was admitting to?

  ‘You keep saying that they deserved to die. But you didn’t kill them. You planted the seeds for her to do it. You don’t seem to realize it, but you share the responsibility for this. The girl was obviously disturbed. She needed help, but you used her.’