Little Bones: A disturbing Irish crime thriller (The Cathy Connolly Series)

by Sam Blake

  Cathy grunted. ‘Well, whether she forgot or Lavinia Grant opened it after she left, Trish didn’t need to eat the face off her. How many times have you locked your car door and had to go back to check it? The mind has a weird way of erasing repeated actions.’

  O’Rourke looked at her out of the corner of his eye. ‘That has to be a woman thing. Never happened to me.’

  Cathy thumped him.

  ‘So you reckon Trish is nuts as well, do you? Could she have whacked Lavinia on the back of the head, or given her a good shove, tried to push her down the stairs?’

  Cathy shook her head. ‘She sounded genuine to me on the phone, and she was pissed, was having problems standing herself. She could have done it earlier in the day, of course, and then gone out and got ossified, I suppose. Maybe she didn’t realise how bad it was until she got back.’

  ‘I wish we had a clearer idea of Lavinia Grant’s movements this afternoon.’ O’Rourke stifled a yawn. ‘We’ll know more in the morning after the PM. Her purse was empty too, which is a bit strange. You’d expect there to be some small change in it.’ He frowned, thinking. ‘But maybe she needed to go to the bank. Trish will have to go through the house and see if anything’s missing. Maybe she just went upstairs and her heart gave out, and she hit her head as she fell. All very clean.’

  Cathy screwed up her face, thinking. ‘D’you reckon she knew about the bones?’

  ‘That’s not a very attractive look; I’d avoid it if I were you.’ O’Rourke paused, waiting for her to react. Cathy threw him a scowl, but didn’t rise to the bait. He stuck a chip in his mouth, continuing, ‘Honestly I’ve no idea. After what happened at the Murphys’, I’m prepared to believe anything. I checked. The mother was in that one up to her eyeballs. When the Murphy girl turned up in the public office in Dún Laoghaire in 1994 she claimed her mother killed the child, then stuck the body in a plastic bag and took it to Dún Laoghaire to dump it down Lee’s Lane. A hundred yards from the old Garda station.’

  Cathy frowned. ‘Weird.’

  ‘Dumping it so close to the station?’ O’Rourke put another chip into his mouth, spoke with his mouth full. ‘I know. They could have chucked it off the pier. Might never have been found. Even if it had been washed up, a lot of the trace evidence would have been lost.’

  ‘But the chain of evidence was dodgy from the start, wasn’t it?’ The more Cathy thought about it, the more she remembered. ‘Cynthia Murphy claimed that there were no fingerprints taken from the bag, and then the body was released to be buried up in Glasnevin – in a foundling grave so they couldn’t even be sure they had the right one if it ever needed to be exhumed.’ It sounded unbelievable, like a badly written B-movie.

  ‘And when they did reopen the inquiry, the original file had been lost.’ O’Rourke scrunched up his face, as if the whole case gave him a pain. ‘Which isn’t going to happen here. What’s that phrase they teach you in Templemore? Absence of evidence is never evidence of absence. So we keep Lavinia Grant in the picture as well as Zoë’s mother – what was her name?’

  ‘Eleanor.’

  ‘Eleanor, exactly. We need to talk to her pronto, see what she knows, see if the dress was out of her possession at any stage before it arrived at Zoë’s house. It’s gone up to the lab – they’re going to look at the thread that was used to stitch the hem, see if they can get DNA off it. Assuming we can find a match, that could give us our dressmaker. And we’ll check Zoë’s DNA against the bones too, see if anything shows up.’

  Cathy nodded, taking it in. DNA might be a clincher if they could find any, but it took weeks to process and even then wouldn’t tell them the exact chain of events that had led to the bones being stitched into the hem of the dress.

  ‘I still don’t get why she was up there.’

  ‘Who? Lavinia Grant?’

  Cathy popped another chip into her mouth, nodding. ‘Hell of a lot of stairs for someone her age.’

  ‘It could have been anything. The housekeeper said she’d been clearing the study ready for the decorators. A lot of the books were boxed up there. Quite possibly she wanted to find something in particular. Maybe someone followed her up, or perhaps the climb up those stairs was just too much for her and it was natural causes. According to the housekeeper and Trish she was a heavy smoker, had high blood pressure. Not a good combination.’

  ‘Her doctor will confirm that. I’d still like to know exactly what route Zoë took home though.’

  O’Rourke grunted. ‘Bloody nuisance that we didn’t get to speak to Lavinia Grant about the dress.’ He paused, contemplating the rain running down the windscreen for a moment, was about to speak when his phone rang. Flicking on the speaker, he threw Cathy a glance warning her to keep quiet.

  ‘O’Rourke.’

  ‘We’ve found the car, Cig, the one this Angel Hierra hired.’

  His face cracked into a smile. ‘Was he in it?’

  ‘’Fraid not. It was at the seafront, beside the Stena terminal. Maybe he got the ferry to Wales from there.’

  ‘Let’s hope so. Get Stena to pull their security tapes. If he was a foot passenger he’d have had to go through the terminal building to buy his ticket. Call me if you find him and alert Holyhead he might be on their side of the water. Anything in the car?’

  ‘Clean as a pin. Still has the plastic on the seats from when he picked it up.’

  O’Rourke nodded half to himself. ‘Get the boys to check how far it’s been driven. See if he went anywhere between collecting the car and arriving at the ferry.’

  ‘Will do.’

  ‘And assuming he didn’t get on the ferry, get everyone out around the pubs and clubs tonight, show his picture about.’

  O’Rourke clicked the phone off, his face thoughtful, working through the information. Cathy kept quiet. Angel Hierra was a double killer. A particularly vicious double killer – she knew his arrival in Dún Laoghaire had been on O’Rourke’s mind all day. A moment later he snapped back to her.

  ‘Where did Zoë say her mother was? Paris, was it?’

  Cathy nodded. ‘She said Paris all right but she didn’t seem very sure.’

  O’Rourke sighed, his irritation flaring for a moment, almost warm enough to clear the mist that had formed on the inside of the car windows. Cathy knew he was trying, but Zoë Grant had pissed him off. She was spiky, defensive. They’d found human bones in her bedroom for goodness’ sake, but she didn’t seem to be going out of her way to be helpful. Cathy knew with the parallels with the Dalkey baby case – the remains, the location – the alarm bells were ringing in his head. If Zoë had been abused too, it might account for her behaviour. It was one of the possibilities they had to consider. And one thing O’Rourke was known for was assessing the possibilities and following every one until it ruled itself out. Just like he was doing with this Hierra character.

  ‘Any chance of a trip to Paris, d’you think? My passport’s up to date.’ Cathy screwed up the brown paper bag on her lap. She knew his answer before he even opened his mouth, the withering look he shot her met with a giggle. ‘Right, that’s me done. What time are we meeting tomorrow?’

  ‘Eight sharp. Incident room. The techs are satisfied they have everything they need from the scene at Oleander House so we can release it, but we keep Zoë Grant’s place sealed for the moment. Hopefully we’ll have a positive location on this Hierra character by then too. It’s a small town. We’ve really got enough nutters of our own without importing them. God knows why he wanted to come here in the first place.’

  Cathy smiled, her hand on the door. ‘I’ll hit the gym at seven then. See you in the morning. Fancy a game of snooker before we kick off?’ Whoever had designed Dún Laoghaire’s state-of-the-art Garda station had somehow forgotten to include a designated incident room. The only space big enough to house a serious investigation was the kitchen and rec room where layers of ply turned the snooker table into a conference table. He caught her grin as she levered the car door open. ‘Less of your backchat, mi
ss. Now get moving, it’s freezing.’

  Slamming the car door closed, Cathy rapped the roof with her palm and headed for home. O’Rourke’s tail lights blazed red, the colour reflected in the puddles that had formed on the pavements. It was good to be working with him again. She pulled her jacket close around herself, tugging at the collar to stop the freezing rain heading down her neck.

  It had been one long day. And now . . . But she didn’t get any further in her train of thought. Only a few steps from the path to her house, Cathy suddenly felt the urge to vomit. Quickening her pace, almost running down the narrow poured-concrete path glistening in the light from the street lamps above, she headed for the passage that ran beside next door’s high wooden fence. She almost didn’t make it. Wrenching open the top of the wheelie bin, Cathy felt her stomach contract, the contents reappearing, undigested, bitter with the taste of bile and regurgitated salt and vinegar. It only took a few moments for her stomach to empty, and then the tears came, falling freely, hot on her cheeks as she shivered violently, reaching out to the rough block wall of the house for support.

  The face that stared back at Cathy from the bathroom mirror wasn’t her own. Or at least it didn’t feel like it. About three shades paler than normal, her eyes surrounded by a scattering of red pinprick broken veins – it happened every time she vomited – she looked like something out of a horror movie. This felt like a horror movie.

  Steadying herself on the edge of the sink, Cathy could feel the rumble of the Xbox coming through the tiled bathroom floor. JP and Decko had been so absorbed when she came in that she’d been able to yell out a greeting and scoot straight up the stairs to the bathroom. As if everything was normal.

  In her head, Cathy could see Sister Concepta, her Leaving Cert biology teacher, face taut, running through the parts of the human reproductive system like items on a shopping list. Weetabix, sperm, baked beans, ovulation, milk and butter, and, of course, pregnancy. Smothered giggles in the back row of the lab, flicking erasers off a ruler at Geraldine O’Mahony, and afterwards, behind the lavs, with Áine and their gang comparing notes on the real thing . . .

  ‘Sister Immaculata says if a boy ever puts his tongue in your mouth you have to bite it off!’

  ‘My sister says you definitely can’t get pregnant if you do it in the bath.’

  ‘Or standing up, that’s safe too.’

  ‘How can you do it standing up?’

  And the same Sister Immaculata issuing reams of instructions before the debs dances began.

  ‘Now girls, remember when we’re dancing with a boy we must keep well back to allow plenty of space for the Holy Spirit.’

  Sex before marriage? An abomination . . . who would want a girl who was sullied? You had to keep your virginity for your husband. Loose girls were fallen women, would be left on the shelf, ostracised by society. And then there was eternal damnation. Mustn’t forget that. The fires of hell were already roaring in her ears.

  Turning on the cold tap, Cathy pulled her hair back and splashed cold water onto her face. She needed to talk to someone. That was the bottom line. This was one problem she couldn’t deal with on her own. But who?

  She already knew what Áine would say. She’d be sympathetic but there’d be no question of ‘options’. And her mum would be the same. There would be shock and embarrassment and lots of recrimination but the conclusion would be the same.

  It wasn’t that Cathy, deep down, didn’t know that there was only one option here, but she knew she needed to explore everything, if only for her own sanity. Perhaps there was something she didn’t know about, a miracle cure, a solution to the whole fecking mess.

  Closing her eyes, Cathy leaned heavily on the sink, trying to focus on something other than her stomach. Who could she talk to?

  Abortion was banned under Irish law, so her GP was going to be useless, she was sure. Not that abortion was really an option, a choice, but it had to be considered. Cathy was good at her job because she weighed up all the options. She might do mad impulsive things occasionally, follow her instinct completely, but one of the first things O’Rourke had taught her back in the day was that she needed to balance all the information. Especially when considering a problem as fecking meteoric as this one.

  Cathy felt her stomach contract as another wave of nausea passed over her. She still didn’t even know how long this puking business was going to go on for, or if it was going to get worse. Could it get worse? Christ, she hoped not.

  So if she couldn’t talk to Áine or her mum or a GP, who did that leave? A face loomed in her memory, hot kisses, too much champagne. Christ, she wasn’t ready to talk to him yet. That was a whole other problem. No, she needed to be sure in her own mind what she was going to do before she went near him.

  Pulling her phone out of her back pocket, Cathy turned around to lean on the sink. The Internet was slow in this corner of the house; she tapped the side of the phone with her fingernail, waiting for the bright colours of the Google logo to appear. She should have done this before, but she had been praying so hard that this problem might solve itself, that she might miscarry, that she hadn’t had the guts to put the words ‘crisis pregnancy’ into a search engine. It would have made the whole thing a whole lot more real than she was ready for. Until today. Now she was quite sure this was a crisis and it wasn’t going away on its own.

  A moment later Google did its thing, dark blue text on white: positiveoptions.ie, giannacare.ie (what the hell was that?), standupgirl.com. Cathy tapped the last one, which sounded like her in more ways than one. She would have smiled but it wasn’t funny. Really wasn’t funny. The site was pink, with butterflies, at the top the words ‘Pregnant, scared? Email Becky’. Cathy scrolled down the page. Nausea and vomiting may come as early as a week into the pregnancy . . . Dizziness and fainting. Helpful.

  But it was an American site. They weren’t even on the same planet as she was. She needed an Irish site.

  Prolife.ie? She didn’t think there would be a whole lot of unbiased advice there.

  She scrolled down. Choiceireland.org. Maybe this would be it? Downstairs a cheer rose from the lads, whoops and high fives. At least someone was winning.

  She tapped through to the site.

  The 3 organisations listed below offer non-directive counselling sessions . . . they will talk openly about all the options available to you – adoption, abortion and parenting . . .

  Oh. Thank. God.

  The Well Woman Clinic.

  Why hadn’t she thought of that before?

  15

  His shoulders hunched against the chill penetrating his denim jacket, Steve Maguire looked blankly at the screen of his mobile phone, fiddling with the keys, selecting tunes, then deselecting, skipping to the next one, looking for . . . looking for what? He adjusted his earpiece, wriggling it to improve the sound.

  This was possibly the earliest Steve had been up in the morning since he sat his Leaving Cert, definitely the earliest he had ever tried catching the DART. Glancing above him, squinting through the curtain of mist-like rain billowing in from the sea, Steve could see the illuminated information board, its light glowing bright red against the winter darkness. Next train: 10 minutes. Dalkey was a good few stops away going south, but with the night he’d just had, right now Steve’s priority was to get some air and some time to think, and to pick up his bike. By which time it would be light and would have stopped raining, and, hopefully, he would have got his head around the whole Lavinia and Zoë Grant thing.

  Zoë Grant. Steve felt a rush of heat from somewhere deep inside as Zoë’s name careered around his head like a character from Super Mario Bros. Zoë Grant. Fragile, brittle. Incredibly talented. And gorgeous with it.

  But her world was quite, quite mad.

  Her grandmother was Lavinia Grant. Lavinia fucking Grant. One of the wealthiest and most reclusive women in the state. A woman who never gave interviews. And she wouldn’t be giving any interviews any time soon. The jou
rnalist in him facepalmed. Here he was, with an exclusive every paper in the country would be after, and with unique access to her granddaughter who also kept an extremely low profile. She could have been living it up on yachts in the Caribbean, hanging out in Lillie’s VIP Library Bar every night, but what was she doing? Arranging flowers in Foxrock and painting the sea. Very rock and roll. There had to be a story there.

  Shifting from one foot to the other, Steve leaned in against an advertising hoarding in an effort to avoid the worst of the rain, mentally back inside that house; back with the ghost of Lavinia Grant, with the distraught, foul-mouthed and utterly pissed Trish, back with Zoë.

  It had seemed the thing to do at the time, to offer her his spare room for the night. Had he expected her to accept? Steve wasn’t sure. But the Guards were crawling all over her place and would be at Oleander House for most of the night, and on top of all that, while they’d been waiting for O’Rourke to reappear from the house, Zoë had told him some guy had been skulking about in her garden the night before, that she’d been so worried she’d called the cops. What else could he have done? She couldn’t go home, and her grandmother had just dropped dead – he could hardly leave her at a hotel for the night. Her mother lived abroad and, God knew how, they’d lost touch. And her closest friend was a picture framer called Phil who was away with his boyfriend this week collecting driftwood in Donegal.

  Zoë had been exhausted by the time Cathy’s lot had finished with her, had hardly been able to think straight.

  Jesus. Zoë Grant.

  Steve shoved his phone into his pocket and wiped away the trail of raindrops heading down his nose with his sleeve, remembering the events of the previous night.

  She’d sat down at his kitchen table and put her head in her hands, her thick hair falling over her face.

  ‘I can’t believe this is happening.’

  Nor could he.

  Unsure what to say, he’d hauled open the fridge and pulled out a bottle of white wine. The questions had been jumping in his head, whizzing around like the lights on a slot machine. What were the chances of him, Steve Maguire, landing in the middle of the biggest story of his life and not being able to damn well do anything about it? Max wouldn’t want anything to affect Zoë’s show, and Steve couldn’t compromise Cathy, they went way back. Her brother Pete was one of his best friends for Christ’s sake, if he messed Cathy about Pete would kill him, literally as opposed to figuratively, assuming she didn’t first. ‘Step with care and great tact and remember that Life’s a Great Balancing Act.’ Balancing act was right. Dr Seuss nailed it every time.