by LJ Ross
He asked the necessary question.
“Are you speaking to me as a psychologist, as a criminal profiler, or…as a man?”
She looked across at him, her eyes tracing the lines of his face, and swallowed.
“There’s a lot I’d like to say,” she admitted. “But what I have to tell you now is…I think it’s for the profiler.”
He nodded, and refused even to acknowledge the nagging, demeaning sense of disappointment that settled in the pit of his stomach.
“I’m listening.”
“It’s about Tom Reilly,” she said in a rush. “I heard Niall and Con talking about how he had an affair with Claire a couple of years ago. That’s true.”
He waited for her to tell him how she knew.
“Claire told me first, but Tom…he told me, later.”
Gregory’s face remained impassive.
“You’re not saying much,” she burst out.
“Neither are you,” he replied, and she let out a nervous laugh.
“It’s hard to find the words,” she said, in a thick voice. “But the way things are going…I heard Niall say he’s going to be looking harder at Tom, because he doesn’t have an alibi for the Saturday when Claire died. He thinks Tom was over there, killing her, but he wasn’t.”
She looked him in the eye.
“Tom was with me, that Saturday morning. He told his wife he was going for a jog, and I told Niall the same.”
A shutter fell across Gregory’s eyes, and she noticed.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I’m so ashamed.”
“Why are you telling me this, and not your husband?”
She wiped away tears, and he produced a tissue from a small pack lying on the back seat, near Declan’s box of books.
“Thanks,” she muttered, and blew her nose. “I’m telling you, because I trust you and I don’t know what to do for the best. Things have been bad between Niall and me for a long time now, and his drinking keeps getting worse. I don’t know where he goes, some nights…”
“He’s a Garda detective,” Alex argued.
“And his brother is, too. Not to mention his mother, the mayor,” she said, leaning back against the car seat. “They’re a close family.”
“But not you?”
“I regret what happened with Tom, but he’s a kind man, and one of the uncomplicated ones,” she said, with a sad smile. “Neither of us are terribly happy, and we needed to be close to someone. Can you understand that?”
Yes, he thought. He understood only too well.
“It’s material evidence,” he said quietly. “You have to give a statement to the police.”
She turned to him.
“I will, but please don’t say anything to Niall. Not yet. If he’s still convinced Tom’s involved in a couple of days, I’ll tell him myself. We’ve been trying to work on things, for Declan’s sake. This will crush him.”
Gregory looked away from her, and out across the dark fields.
Only days ago, he’d lectured them about the ethics of withholding Claire Kelly’s affair with Tom Reilly from the official file. Now, he was considering the same action himself, and for similar reasons.
“Do you mean to stay with him?” he asked.
She hesitated, and then nodded.
“So long as his drinking doesn’t get any worse…yes.”
A muscle ticked in his jaw, and he rubbed an absent hand over the skin.
“We’d better be getting back,” he said. “Your husband will be wondering where you are.”
* * *
Colm McArdle stumbled out of O’Feeney’s bar shortly after ten and congratulated himself on his remarkable self-restraint. He whistled merrily as he walked the short distance home, a route he had taken almost every Friday for the past forty years, at least. He waved to those he passed but didn’t stop; eager now to get back to the woman he knew would be waiting for him in the comfort of hearth and home.
At the end of the street, he paused to look up at the moon, which was full and bright.
“That’s a pretty thing,” he muttered to himself, and continued along the pavement.
When he reached the cottage, a quick peep through the window told him that, although the living room was in darkness, a light still burned in the kitchen.
“There’s a rare woman,” he mumbled to himself, as he reached for the door handle.
His Aideen wouldn’t leave a light burning for him, unless she was in a forgiving mood.
Inside, the hallway was dim, and he fumbled for the light switch on the wall. He spent another five minutes untying his shoelaces, a task made much harder by his sudden inability to balance himself.
With a muttered curse, he toed off his shoes and hung his coat on the stand in the hallway.
“Aideen?” he called through to the kitchen. “Be a love and put the kettle on?”
Colm relieved himself in the downstairs cloakroom and, yawning widely, shuffled through to the kitchen.
Aideen was seated at the kitchen table, with her back to him. At first glance, she seemed to be sprawled in the chair with her neck at an awkward angle resting on her chest, and he assumed she must have dozed off, while she was waiting for him to return.
She’d even set out the tea things, so they could have a bite of supper together.
Funny, he thought, the little habits they made together.
“Come on now, girl, let’s get you up to bed,” he said, though he could barely hold himself upright.
He moved forward and dropped a light kiss on the top of her head, which caused her to slump further in her chair.
“Aideen?”
He put his hands on her shoulders and tried to shake her awake, but her arms seemed frozen in place.
Through the haze of alcohol, he saw that they’d been taped to the arms of the chair to keep her in place.
With shaking fingers, he cupped her beloved face in his hand and lifted it to the light.
“Aideen,” he said, brokenly.
* * *
The remainder of the journey to the Ballyfinny Castle Hotel passed in silence, with Alex and Emma each lost in their own thoughts. However, as the car pulled up to the entrance, she made a small sound of surprise when she spotted a squad car parked outside.
“The Garda’s here,” she murmured, and sent Gregory a nervous look.
Ignoring her, he slammed out of the car and retrieved his bag, intending to head inside. Then, at the last moment, he turned to face her across the length of the bonnet.
“You have to tell Niall,” he said. “Not just because honesty is important for your ongoing relationship—which it is—but because another man’s life could be seriously affected if you don’t. If Tom Reilly has an alibi, the Garda need to know about it.”
She nodded.
“I know you’re right. I think it’s why I came to you, because I knew you’d tell me to do the right thing. I’ll speak to Niall—”
She was cut off by the arrival of his brother, who ran out of the hotel entrance with a face like thunder.
“What the hell took you so long?” Connor said, but didn’t bother to wait for a response. “We need to get back into town, now.”
“Why? What’s happened?” Emma asked, and put a hand to her throat. “Is it Maggie? Declan?”
Connor shook his head.
“It’s neither. Emma, you go on home now. Alex, you’re with me.”
Gregory didn’t need to ask why; the answer was written all over the sergeant’s face.
There’d been another murder.
CHAPTER 24
When they turned into the street where Aideen McArdle had lived for most of her life, it was teeming with people craning their necks and chattering like magpies. In the rear-view mirror, they saw a white, nondescript van pull up, and a man and a woman jumped out carrying heavy television cameras. Up ahead, a small cordon had been erected around the entrance to a cottage at the end of the street, manned by two young guards who were trying to h
old back the tide.
“Christ,” Connor muttered. “It’s a circus.”
He turned to the man beside him.
“Prepare yourself,” he said. “It’s bad, in there.”
Gregory nodded, though it wasn’t the first time he’d seen death, and probably wouldn’t be the last.
“Do you have spare coveralls?”
Connor nodded.
“Everything’s in the boot,” he said. “I keep plenty of spares in there.”
As soon as they exited the car, the television crew spotted them and hurried over to try to catch a scoop.
“Sergeant! Sergeant, is it true the Ballyfinny Butcher has struck again?”
“No comment,” Connor growled, elbowing them out of the way so he could reach for his safety gear. “Move out of the way, before I do you for obstruction.”
“Doctor Gregory? Have you provided a profile to the Garda? Are you planning to re-open the Profiling Unit?”
When he looked back, he was startled by the blinding white light of a television camera, and raised a hand to shield his eyes as another flash popped nearby. Gregory said nothing, keeping his head down as they moved through the gathering crowd towards the cordon.
“Sergeant? Is it true the Garda have no leads? Did Doctor Gregory’s profile prevent an arrest being made before now?”
Connor swung around, prepared to defend their consultant, but Gregory shook his head. His skin was thick enough to take whichever darts were thrown and, besides, there were more important matters at hand.
They hurried past, ignoring the shouts from reporters, and ducked beneath the cordon. Connor scrawled their names in a logbook to record those entering and leaving the crime scene, then passed him some blue shoe coverings.
“Niall’s already in there with the doctor and the CSI’s,” he said. “I’ve called in some more guards to get the crowd moving. They can’t stay out here, all night—weather’s turning cold, for one thing.”
“Never underestimate the tenacity of a devoted rubbernecker,” Gregory muttered, and tugged polypropylene coveralls over his jeans.
“Ready?” Connor asked.
Gregory looked at the tiny cottage with its novelty sign hanging by the doorway, which read, ‘HERE LIVES A LOVELY LADY AND A GRUMPY OLD MAN’.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” he replied.
* * *
When they entered the McArdle house, Gregory almost stumbled over the crouched figure of a Crime Scene Investigator, whose eyes were the only thing visible behind their protective face mask and hood.
“Sorry,” he said, and stepped carefully around, keeping to the plastic sheeting that had been laid out for them to walk on. Behind him, more CSIs went about the business of erecting a small tent around the doorway to preserve any evidence before the elements washed it away.
“Through here,” Connor said, and they made their way towards the kitchen at the back of the house. It had been built along similar lines to Maggie’s, with a living room at the front, a kitchen-diner and small downstairs cloakroom towards the back. Upstairs would be a bathroom and larger master bedroom, with a second smaller bedroom and a third box room, if they were lucky.
They paused on the threshold of the kitchen while the forensics team snapped a series of photographs, studying the shell of Aideen McArdle from every possible angle.
Life, laid bare, Gregory thought. Only hours ago, the old woman slumped in the kitchen chair had been a living, breathing thing; she’d developed complex layers of personality and emotion and harboured many thousands of memories in her hippocampus and prefrontal cortex.
Now, only the shell remained.
“Alex, Con, you can come through now,” Niall said, and beckoned them inside.
Their coveralls rustled as they walked into the room, leaving a wide berth around the kitchen table where two senior CSIs picked over the body with swabs and brushes.
“Aideen McArdle, aged seventy-three,” Niall said, in an odd, emotionless voice. “Born here in Ballyfinny, married a local man by the name of Colm. Worked a bit here and there but she was a homemaker for the most part. They’ve children and grandchildren, as you’d expect.”
Gregory angled himself to get a better view of the woman, and of the scene the killer had staged, but it was impossible with so many people milling around.
“I need to see it as the killer left it,” he said.
“We took photographs,” Niall offered, and then thought better of it. “I s’pose five minutes won’t hurt.”
He ushered the others out of the room, leaving Gregory alone with Aideen for a moment. Without other bodily odours to mask it, he could detect the first, subtle hint of decay; a sickly-sweet, unmistakable smell unlike anything else.
“How long has she been dead?” he asked, as he studied the duct tape wrapped around the woman’s swollen flesh.
“Doctor thinks no more than two or three hours,” Niall said, stepping back into the doorway. “She was still warm when her husband came home at around quarter-past ten. The pathologist is on her way from Galway, she might be able to give us a better estimate.”
Gregory checked his watch.
Eleven thirty-five.
Aideen’s body had been taped to one of the wooden chairs arranged around a circular kitchen table so that she remained upright. The right side of her head bore an ugly wound, matted with crusted blood, and a small bloodstain seeped through the front of her dress, roughly where her heart would be. At some point, she might have held a cup in her hand which had since fallen to the floor, where it lay in a drying pool of weak tea-coloured liquid.
“Have the CSIs sampled the teapot and the kettle?”
Niall nodded. Even the most careful of killers could forget to wipe the edge of a handle—or the tap.
On the table, tea had been set for two. A pot stood in the middle, beside a plate of jam tarts Aideen had made that morning.
“What was used to immobilise, this time?”
“CSIs bagged one of the copper pans,” Niall replied, and his suit rustled again as he raised a hand towards a set of heavy-looking cookware hanging from a rack on the wall above the cooker, near the back door.
“Another knife wound to the chest?” he asked, and the inspector nodded.
“No sign of the knife, before you ask.”
When Gregory said nothing, Connor moved forward.
“It’s a different kind of victim, this time,” he remarked. “Different age group, too.”
“They weren’t so different,” Gregory replied, skirting around the table to look out of the kitchen window. “They were both mothers, for one thing. Both nurturing character types.”
He lifted a finger to the window.
“What runs along the back of the garden, here?”
Niall moved over to join him beside the window and looked out into the night.
“There’s a pathway running behind the fence,” he said. “Every garden has a gate leading out onto it, and if you follow the path west, it’ll take you to the lough, past the cemetery. Follow it north and you go past the school and into the centre of town.”
“Easy access,” Gregory said. “Just like the Kelly house.”
“There’s more chance of being noticed around here,” Connor argued. “You saw for yourself how nosy folk are on the street.”
“Only for things out of the ordinary,” Gregory said. “Remember, we’re looking for somebody who fits in and is part of the tapestry, here. Nobody would notice if they saw this person walking by and, even if they did, they might not recall or think it was worth mentioning. There’s another thing to consider, in terms of the killer’s choice of location: this is the last house on the row, so it’d be easy enough to slip along the pathway and let yourself in via the back door.”
“It’s due to rain overnight, but the CSIs will get as much as they can from the garden area before morning comes,” Niall said.
“They watched her.” Gregory turned back to look at what had once been Aideen. �
��They saw her in here, having tea with her family, and wanted to capture the feeling for themselves and bottle it, somehow.”
“Sick bastard,” Connor said. “What about the profile? You think this is the same person?”
Gregory nodded.
“Highly likely. The details of the last murder weren’t made public, so that reduces the chances of a copycat looking to try their hand. The body has been meticulously cleaned and dressed,” he said. “I’ll bet you find the modus operandi is the same, with one exception. The Kelly house was one-storey, whereas the bathroom’s upstairs in this house. The killer couldn’t carry Aideen’s body up and down the stairs to wash and dress it. They must have found another alternative.”
“Downstairs cloakroom has a small shower area,” Niall provided. “The McArdles only installed it recently, as they were starting to struggle with mobility getting in and out of the bath upstairs. The CSIs are taking the shower apart, now.”
Gregory looked at the other two men, his face set in a hard line.
“The killer couldn’t have planned Aideen’s murder without being local,” he said. “There’s no other way they’d have known about the new shower, for one thing.”
This time, neither of the Garda detectives argued the point.
CHAPTER 25
Saturday
It was after midnight by the time they finished their initial survey of the crime scene, and later still by the time Alex and Niall stopped into the attractive, modern two-storey house owned by Colm McArdle’s daughter, Lisa, and her family.
“He’ll be staying with them here, tonight,” Niall said, as he brought his car to a stop at the end of her driveway. “I rang ahead and spoke to the son-in-law, who tells me the family want to see us tonight. I told them it could wait, but—”
“They need to hear it from you,” Gregory said. “They know what’s coming, but they still need to hear it. It’s part of the process.”
Niall nodded, and, by tacit agreement, Gregory joined him on the walk to the front door. He watched the inspector draw in a deep breath and arrange his features into something akin to a blank canvas, before raising his hand to knock.
It was answered within seconds by Colm’s son-in-law, a thin man with sad eyes and a prematurely balding head.