‘What sort of fuckin’ …’
‘Ah, yeah. Well, you wouldn’t want to mess with him anyways.’
Flynn slid a piece of paper across the desk to her.
‘He’s a big man, mind. Around seven foot, I’d say, judging by that. Some set of pecs on him as well, ’tis no wonder the shirt is ripped off him.’
Claire watched as he struggled and then succeeded in bringing the smirk under control. She understood his mirth, but didn’t feel like laughing.
‘Berry must think we’re complete fucking idiots. How did you cop it anyway? Are you one of those weirdos that spends half the night on the X Box?’
‘I am not!’
Disgusted, Flynn sat up straighter in his chair as the colour rose in his cheeks.
‘Them games are only for kids. No, I googled it, actually.’
‘Right.’
Unable to think of a witty response, Claire turned her attention again to the page Flynn had printed out for her, a biography of Chris ‘The Brick’ Solana. He was thirty years old, the printout told her, a former soldier with a speciality in hand-to-hand combat and a penchant for ripping his victims heads off after their death. No wife and child was listed, but the Brick’s biceps definitely deserved a webpage all of their own. Because, as Flynn’s research had revealed, Chris ‘The Brick’ Solana was the lead character in Kombat Konflikt, one of Ireland’s bestselling electronic games.
‘He’s not even black. Well, not really. I’d call him more of a coffee colour myself.’
Claire gave him a sharp look but Flynn’s face was entirely serious. She sighed.
‘We’ve sent a car to Berry’s place?’
‘Straight away. And he’s done a runner. His mother said he hasn’t been home in two days. Said she was going to ring us herself actually, to see if we could find her precious boy. According to her, he’s barely spent a night away from home. She kept the uniforms an hour; apparently they had to leg it before she showed them his confirmation photograph.
Claire picked up a pen and began to colour in Solana’s biceps.
‘We’ll find him, alright. Is he driving his own car?’
‘Yeah.’
Flynn raised his hands over his head, cracked his knuckles with force and put his arms back down on the desk again.
‘I think it’s safe to say we’re not dealing with a criminal mastermind here. I’ve an alert out this past hour, we’ll catch him alright. It doesn’t make sense though.’
Claire looked up from her doodling.
‘How d’ya mean?’
‘I don’t think Cormac Berry killed Miriam Twohy. Do you?’ Claire thought back to the pale, shaken young man she’d first seen slumped outside the crime scene. He’d looked like a bit of an eejit, acted like one too. Just the type, in fact, to spend his evenings in a darkened room, fighting the baddies on screen instead of dealing with the real world. He was a liar, and a good one, given the speed at which the fake name had tripped off his tongue. But no, she hadn’t seriously considered him a suspect; in fact, she didn’t think he’d have the balls for it. He had something to hide, though – and he’d been frightened enough to give his tenant a fake name and then run away.
She stood up and pushed her chair back against the desk.
‘We’ll give them a while, so. C’mon. What’s his name, Bradley, the bloke who actually owns the apartment, came up from Cork a half hour ago; he’s inside waiting for us. Let’s go in and see if he can tell us something we don’t already know.
It was almost ten hours later when Claire finally pulled her car into the driveway of her home and cut the engine. Shattered, she let her head fall back against the headrest. She had been on her feet since 7 a.m. and even walking into the house seemed like an insurmountable challenge, let alone climbing into bed or, God forbid, having a conversation with Matt when she got there.
Lifting her head with a groan, she peered out through the raindrops. The small red-bricked terraced house was in darkness, the blinds and curtains shut tight on the main bedroom window. It looked like Matty was fast asleep. Well, that was something. Hopefully she’d be able to crawl in beside him and borrow his warmth without having to explain how her night had gone or, worse still, apologise for having missed dinner again. It had all been worth it, he’d understand in the end. But right now, she didn’t feel she had the energy even to explain.
The discovery of Chris Solana’s ‘identity’ had left her furious, and she had carried the anger up two flights of stairs and into Interview Room 2 where Sean Bradley, the registered owner of 123 Merview, had been waiting since arriving on the early Cork train.
Claire knew he probably should have been interviewed earlier in the investigation, but his alibi for the week of the killing had checked out, his colleagues had confirmed he hadn’t missed a day’s work at the university and his wife had claimed he spent the weekend pacing the floors with a colicky child. So Quigley had given him the benefit of the doubt and allowed him to attend his daughter’s christening, instead of travelling to Dublin to be interviewed on the same day as Cormac Berry. And Claire herself hadn’t really considered him a suspect either. Cork wasn’t the far side of the moon: with the new road it would have been technically possible for him to have left work, driven to Dublin, committed the murder and be home before bedtime if the wife wasn’t the curious type. But, after having his story checked by a couple of local officers, she had thought the prospect unlikely. Sean Bradley appeared to be exactly what he said: a university lecturer who had bought his Dublin apartment at the wrong time and had been forced into acting as a reluctant landlord when his job and new wife prompted relocation to the country’s second largest city. So Claire had been patient. But, now, that patience was exhausted and it was a tired, wound-up and narky detective that had finally shaken the limp hand of Sean Bradley and flicked the tape to record.
His appearance hadn’t endeared him to her either. Claire had been a guard long enough to know that the whole book/cover thing was baloney. If a guy looked guilty then he usually was. Bradley didn’t look like a crook but there was something shifty about him. In his mid-thirties, the landlord was a slight, balding, sandy-haired man whose pallid skin colour matched his beige jumper so exactly, Claire wondered if they kept a colour chart in the store. In fact the only patch of colour in the nicotine-stained room was the high flush that rose and fell on his cheekbones every time he spoke. His eyes were pale too, a pale watery blue and Claire had to force herself not to look at the smattering of dandruff that had drifted across his shoulders.
Claire had started the interview by throwing out a few easy questions, but Bradley had approached even the standard ‘name, age, occupation’ questions as delicately as if he’d been handed an unexploded bomb. The apartment in Merview had been bought when he was still single and obviously thought he was going to stay that way. Looking at the stained tie and light dusting of scurf on his shoulders, Claire wasn’t inclined to disagree with his hypothesis. But it turned out the women’s magazines had been telling the truth, there was someone out there for everyone, and when Bradley found his true love one hundred and fifty miles away from his Dublin home he decided to move to the southern capital, leaving behind his one-bed slice of negative equity in a market where it wouldn’t sell for half the price he’d paid.
‘Did you consider selling?’
Bradley had nodded and blushed.
That had been his preferred option, he’d muttered to her. But nothing was shifting and an estate agent had told him to rent it out and hope that the market regained some of its momentum.
‘And that was Mr Berry?’
Bradley blushed again when he heard the name, and looked at the table. A moment passed before he stuttered one word.
‘No.’
Claire had allowed the silence to build to see if he’d wade in any further. But Bradley seemed determined to stay silent. Moments before she would have done so, Flynn jumped in.
‘So, you got advice off another fella and didn�
�t like it, was that it?’
Claire glared at him – she had hoped silence would encourage Bradley to hang himself. But apparently good cop was the way to go. Or maybe it was a male bonding thing. Bradley visibly brightened and nodded his head furiously.
‘Well, yeah. I didn’t get on with the first fella. So I decided to go with O’Mahony Thorpe.’
‘And he said he’d find you a tenant?’
‘That’s right. Yeah.’
‘And where did you meet Mr Berry?’
She watched, fascinated, as his colour rose again, until the three of them jumped at the sound of a knock on the door. Siobhan O’Doheny came into the room and Claire glared at her, but the young guard was undeterred.
‘You’re needed in the office …?’
Claire had grumpily emerged to be told that Cormac Berry had been found. No criminal mastermind. His phone had tracked him to a base station in south Donegal and a local patrol car in Inishowen had spotted him at a filling station just twenty minutes after an alert had been issued. They’d allowed him to pay for his fuel and three Mars bars before informing him he was wanted to help the Gardaí with some inquiries.
‘Couldn’t believe he’d been caught.’
Siobhan smiled as she recounted the message passed on by the Donegal guards, two of whom were at that moment speeding towards the capital, the young estate agent folded into the back of their car. Claire didn’t doubt it. Her mental picture of Cormac Berry involved too many nights spent in front of a computer screen and, she reckoned, very little knowledge of the outside world. It was quite possible he’d imagined Co. Donegal was the far side of the moon. In the end it had taken less than three hours to find him.
He was expected in Dublin by 7 p.m. She relayed this information to Bradley back in the interview room and was rewarded by a sigh and the spilling of thick salty tears. It only took moments for the entire story to come spilling out like rice from a leaky bag.
Berry, when he had arrived, unshaven, shaken and hungry had confirmed every word of it.
O’Mahony Thorpe had seen its business flat-line after the bust, but the company thought they had a foolproof way to get it afloat again. Being a landlord was, these days, an expensive business. Putting a property on the market cost at least a thousand euro up front, between registration charges, a second-home charge, a total repaint and refit. And the bills kept coming. Maintenance fees. Property taxes. But O’Mahony, or possibly Thorpe, had come up with a plan. The government couldn’t get at your money if they knew it wasn’t there in the first place. So the solution was simple. They were, Berry had explained, gloomily, something of a matchmaking service, uniting broke landlords and tenants who needed to live under the radar or were willing to do so for a reduction in rent. O’Mahony Thorpe took ten per cent off the top. The result? Happy landlords, happy tenants, and a government that didn’t get a penny from the transaction.
It was that sentence that had finally brought forth a protest from Ella O’Mahony. She’d turned up minutes after Berry had arrived at Collins Street and had debriefed him after his questioning. But, at eight o’clock at night, the smart business suit had been replaced by jeans and a pink fleece jacket. Most of her authority had been left behind in her wardrobe with the Chanel. She had raised an eyebrow when Berry had mentioned the word ‘desperate’, and a hand when the whole issue of tax evasion had come up.
‘Now, we’re not taxation specialists, it’s up to the individual owner to …’
But Claire, who was wearing one of her better-cut work jackets that day, had silenced her with a look. They could figure out the details later. There was no doubt the company had a loophole that would see them emerge on the right side of the law, probably leaving some eejit like Berry to carry the can for the damage. Frankly, she didn’t give a crap what they’d been doing with their Monopoly board, she just wanted to know who had brought Miriam Twohy back to 123 Merview, when and why.
And it was a sobbing Berry who had finally admitted that he hadn’t a clue. Merview, he’d stuttered had been a particularly difficult block of apartments to rent. The half-finished exterior hadn’t helped, nor had the management company’s reputation of leaving CCTV cameras broken and the property unsecured. So when Berry had got a call from a man – that was the only description he could give, a man – offering the entire asking price if he could move in the following week, he hadn’t argued. He was calling from abroad, the tenant had told him. He needed a central apartment on a short-term let while working in Dublin. His new job was cash-in-hand so the O’Mahony Thorpe ‘arrangements’ – Claire could imagine Berry’s manly chuckle at the word – suited him down to the ground. No he didn’t need to see the place, he’d checked it out on the web and it suited him just fine. He’d call into the office to pick up the keys himself.
At this, Claire finally saw a glimmer of hope.
‘You met him then?’
But Berry had sunk even lower in his chair.
‘No. He said he couldn’t call in during office hours … I left the keys at reception. The girls just said a man picked them up and left.’
‘And he didn’t sign for them?’
‘No.’
Berry looked positively nauseous now.
‘He posted out the tenancy agreement, the one I showed you.’
Claire thought back to the unreadable squiggle, and sighed.
‘Have you CCTV in the office?’
‘No.’
For Jaysus’ sake. Berry admitted he had asked the agency receptionist if she could remember the man who took the keys, but all she could come up with was tallish, pleasant, with brown hair. Or maybe he’d been wearing a hat. She wasn’t sure.
‘How do they know?’
Flynn’s voice echoed around the room.
Berry sniffed loudly and wetly and Claire resisted the urge to hand him a hanky.
‘Know what?’
‘Know to contact you? How did he know that your agency were the crowd to go to if you wanted to be a little … lax with arrangements?’
Berry looked at his hands. Beside him Ella O’Mahony stiffened, and then sank her head into her hands.
‘Just tell her, Cormac.’
The young estate agent shifted in his chair.
‘We use the internet.’
‘To advertise?’
‘Not exactly.’
And haltingly, in a monologue punctuated by more tears, he had explained. He was a regular, he said, on discussion forums. Sites where people came together to give out about the State of the Nation and the property crash and the mess everyone was in. Claire had a vague idea of the sites he was talking about; Matt had used them quite a bit when they were buying their own home. Back then it had all been about releasing equity and homes abroad. Now they were full of wounded people.
Bradley’s user name had been Desperate Landlord. Berry had read the post and sent him a private message, offering a quick and cheap solution to the mess he’d landed himself in. And when a poster calling himself ‘Short Term Let’ had posted a message looking for that very thing, he’d realised he had a match.
‘Can I be prosecuted for this?’
Claire could feel the blood in her temple pulsating. She had just spent seven hours dragging forth the information that he had taken part in a scam that allowed a murderer to rent a flat without anyone being able to identify him. A small, red-cheeked snot-nosed baby girl had been left without a mother. And all Cormac Berry was concerned about was his own skin.
She didn’t say any of that, of course. Instead she had muttered something about files and DPP, and had walked away.
The baby kicked her hard in the ribs and she groaned. She had forgotten to eat again. Well, half forgotten and half been unable. Flynn had gone to the chipper at some stage during the evening, but greasy food wasn’t her friend anymore and she’d already had two chocolate bars from the station vending machine that day. Her stomach turned over at the memory and she could feel bitterness rising up her throat. Pregnancy. The
gift that kept on giving. She leaned over to check the glove compartment for a spare package of Rennie, and then sat up straight again as the bump got in the way.
Matt was staring straight at her.
She smiled, and then realised her husband couldn’t see her. He was standing, fully clothed at their bedroom window, the blinds pulled back, the room backlit by a small glowing light that presumably came from his mobile phone. He would be able to see the car, and possibly her outline, but not the expression on her face. Mobile phone. Bollocks. She reached for her handbag and remembered that she’d switched hers to silent during the interviews and had forgotten to turn the volume up again.
Bollocks. Eleven missed calls, three text messages. All from Matt. The first, a gentle, ‘how’re things? Ring me.’ The second, an hour later, ‘just let me know all is okay.’ The third, sent at midnight, ‘Jesus, ring me, Claire. Am worried.’ All unanswered. And then the succession of missed calls. There were voice messages too. She didn’t have the energy to listen to them though.
Her husband moved away from the window. She could feel his anger radiate through the pane. There would be no cuddles this evening, so.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Do you ever hit your LOs?
MammyNo1
I don’t mean a belt or anything *blushes* but when they are bold? Like a tap on the bum or anything? Just curious to know what people think
IrishMammyinTraining
God no. I mean my DS is only 7 months old but no I can’t imagine ever hitting him. No. A big no no for me
MrsDrac
It’s a no here too. We were given the wooden spoon when we were kids and I still remember it. Horrible. I’d never hit LO.
Mam23
No but I can understand why people want to! DS is going through an awful clingy stage at the moment and he never stops whingeing. I just pull him away, use naughty step etc etc. Not sure if it’s effective but I’m trying anyway. Have sky plussed SuperNanny *lol*
MammyNo1
Oh. Okay. Thanks girls.
Reeta
Is everything okay pet? I mean, I know some people see no problem with slapping children, we all probably got it growing up LOL and each to their own, but you really don’t sound happy today.
Can Anybody Help Me? Page 15