‘If the girl says he was the one who groomed her, then we need to follow it up. I still think Kay is involved, though, regardless of what the girl said. Why would he have had pictures of her?’
‘Why would she not remember having seen him take them if he had?’ Lucy asked.
‘You said yourself she was drugged,’ Burns retorted. ‘Even she’s not sure if she said she thinks it’s him.’
‘What if he played us?’ Lucy said, pointing towards the picture lying before her mother. ‘What if he knew Kay would be a suspect with his history and he set him up, going online somewhere public where we’d find Kay. He’s been offline since, as far as we know. Maybe he saw Kay as the perfect fall guy. Then planted the pictures in his house after he’d been lifted.’
‘What? Do you think he set the house alight too?’ Burns scoffed.
‘It’s possible,’ Wilson said.
‘I don’t think so,’ Lucy began. After all, she suspected she knew who had been involved in lighting the fire. Gavin Duffy. ‘I think Kay’s burning was in retaliation for Karen Hughes’s death. But we do know that uniforms took the names of all those who were in the restaurant at the time. Maybe we could follow up on any single men listed in that.’
‘That’s all been done already,’ Burns said. ‘Nothing showed up from it.’
‘If whoever was interviewing thought Kay was our man, they may not have been too thorough,’ Lucy objected.
‘Careful, Sergeant,’ Burns said. ‘I seem to remember it was PPU who missed Kay’s paedophile collection when you searched his house.’
‘Maybe we didn’t miss anything. If this is how it went down, maybe there was nothing to find when we searched the house,’ Lucy argued. ‘In which case what about Inspector Fleming?’
The comment was greeting initially with silence, her mother glaring at her as she lifted her glasses and put them on, the skin around her mouth tightening. Finally she spoke. ‘That’s not your concern, Sergeant. Leave it at that.’
‘But the stuff in Kay’s might have been a set-up, to put Kay in the frame for Karen Hughes,’ Lucy began. ‘It’s not fair if Tom —’
‘That’s enough, Lucy,’ her mother warned. Then she turned to Burns. ‘Would you give me a moment, Mark?’
Burns lingered a second, as if in protest at yet again being ask to leave his own office, before pushing himself off the cabinet with his rump and padding out of the room.
Wilson stared at Lucy a moment before speaking. When she did speak, it was not what Lucy had expected.
‘What happened to your face?’
‘I was hit.’
‘By whom?’
‘A suspect.’
‘I see.’ She rubbed at the bridge of her nose, then removed her glasses again. ‘These bloody things are new and they’re leaving me with sores on my nose. I should have stayed with the old ones.’
Lucy watched her, aware of the tactic, the circling around small talk as she worked out the best angle for attack.
‘I heard there was an incident at Alan Cunningham’s family home last night.’
‘Really?’
Wilson stared without speaking this time.
‘If you heard that,’ Lucy queried, straightening herself up in the seat, ‘then why are you asking what happened to my face?’
‘I just wondered if you were really so stupid as to go to that house alone.’
‘No one else is interested.’
Wilson shook her head, smiling ruefully. ‘The martyr role doesn’t suit you, Lucy. Is that what you think? You’re the only one who cares? That we should take every case personally, make it our mission?’ She widened her eyes on the final word to emphasize its grandness.
Lucy shrugged. ‘I think we should at least give a shit.’
‘But no one feels as deeply as you do, isn’t that right?’ Wilson replied, sitting back now. ‘Because that’s what we should do. Invest everything in our work. Care so deeply that we forget about everything around us.’
‘Well, I learnt from the master,’ Lucy commented, holding her mother’s stare.
Wilson accepted the comment with a light laugh. ‘Always the answer, Lucy.’
Lucy folded her arms, waiting to see what the next angle would be. Again, it was not what she had expected.
‘The Kellys in Petrie Way. How do they fit into this case you’re working?’
Lucy shook her head, once, briefly. ‘I don’t know who you’re talking about.’
‘The Kelly family. You’ve been parked outside their house, watching them three or four times now.’
‘Twice,’ Lucy corrected, then regretted speaking.
‘My mistake,’ Wilson replied. ‘And they connect to Karen Hughes, how?’
‘They don’t,’ Lucy said, softly. Then she straightened herself again and, clearing her throat, repeated the comment. ‘They’re connected to something else.’
‘They are the family who have adopted the Quigg child, is that right?’
‘Again, if you already know that, why ask?’
‘How did you find out?’
‘How did you?’ Lucy retorted.
‘Officially,’ Wilson snapped. ‘Not through the back door. Not off a cheating ex-boyfriend.’
‘He’s not a cheat,’ Lucy said.
‘You told me he cheated on you.’
‘I said we disagreed on monogamy. I didn’t say he was the one who cheated.’
‘Of course he was the one who cheated; you’re not the type, Lucy,’ Wilson said.
‘So says the expert on commitment,’ Lucy replied.
Wilson shook her head, as if appraising her daughter anew. ‘I’ve had my fill of the cheek, Lucy. And the chip on your shoulder.’
Lucy blushed in spite of herself, but did not respond.
‘If you really cared as much as you say, you wouldn’t be putting other people at risk. If this comes out, about you stalking that family, what would happen to your boyfriend? Giving out details of foster families? Is that you caring deeply?’
‘He can fend for himself,’ Lucy snapped. ‘I didn’t ask for it.’
‘I’m sure you didn’t have to.’
‘I wanted to make sure he was OK. Joe Quigg.’
‘And when you did? The first time you went you must have seen that he’s in a good home. A home vetted by people who actually know what they’re doing. What took you back the second time?’ she added scornfully.
‘I don’t know,’ Lucy muttered.
‘They’ve reported your car registration number,’ Wilson said.
‘How did it come to you?’
‘Never mind,’ Wilson said, glancing at her desk. Lucy knew that such a small matter wouldn’t make it to the ACC unless she was keeping tabs on Lucy.
‘Are you checking up on me?’ Lucy asked suddenly.
‘I’m your mother, Lucy. I’ve a right to be interested in how you’re getting on. God knows, talking to you gets me nowhere. I worry about you.’
The baldness of the comment caught Lucy off guard. She shifted in her seat uncomfortably. ‘Well, you don’t have to. I’m just doing my job. You were the one who put me in the PPU because of my “affinity for the vulnerable”, wasn’t that what you said?’
‘Having an affinity with them doesn’t mean becoming one of them,’ her mother said. ‘I know how you feel. I used to— look, Lucy, you can’t take every case personally. Because some things don’t get solved. Killers walk the streets every day – even ones we caught and jailed. We have to see them back on the streets because an agreement was made. Should we all feel that?’
‘At least you’d know you could feel.’
‘Don’t be so melodramatic, Lucy,’ her mother snapped. ‘Look at where feelings got Tom Fleming.’
‘He’s a good man.’
‘He’s responsible for you!’ Wilson said suddenly, standing now. ‘He should be looking out for you. If he’s drinking, he can’t do that. His drinking puts you at risk and I won’t tolerate that.’
&
nbsp; ‘Don’t pretend you’re looking out for me,’ Lucy said, standing, feeling suddenly unsteady, the room seeming to shift beneath her. She could feel her face flush with heat.
‘Of course I am, Lucy,’ Wilson said. ‘I worry about you.’
‘Like you did when you walked out on me? Left me with a father who liked teenage girls? I preferred you when you didn’t give a shit. At least then we knew where we stood.’
Her mother opened her mouth to speak, then seemed to swallow back her words. Instead she moved back behind her desk and sat, putting on her glasses again. ‘You have one chance left, Lucy,’ she said finally. ‘You’re making mistakes, putting yourself and others at risk. Your stalking the Cunningham house could be used against us if we ever do get him and try to convict. Police victimization. You should be taken off the case immediately. I’m giving you one last chance. Do the job you’re expected to do. That’s all. No personal vendettas. Before someone gets hurt.’
Lucy remained standing, struggling to find something to say.
‘And leave that family in peace.’
‘Alan Cunningham’s or Joe Quigg’s?’
‘Both,’ her mother said.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Tara Gallagher was sitting in the incident room working on a report at her PC. The remains of her dinner sat on the desk next to her: an empty crisp packet and an opened can of Diet Coke. She leaned close to the screen as she typed, stabbing one-fingered at the keyboard.
‘Thinking of someone?’ Lucy asked.
Tara glanced up. ‘Oh, hey,’ she managed, then turned her attention to the screen, swore softly and deleted the mistake she had just made.
Lucy pulled across a seat and sat next to her. ‘Everything all right, you?’
‘I’m stuck with bloody witness reports,’ Tara said. ‘Everyone else is working on other things and I’m stuck writing up this crap. I can hardly read half of the notes.’
‘Where’s the rest of the team?’
‘Reassigned. There’s been a spate of beatings in the town. A young lad got a battering this evening on his way to his work do.’
‘Christmas parties week,’ Lucy said. She realized that she’d not given it much thought.
Tara nodded. ‘You know. I thought you’d made the wrong choice, going with PPU. But at least you’re working stuff. This is mind numbing.’
‘Burns?’
Tara nodded again, lowering her voice as she spoke, glancing furtively towards his office door lest she be heard. ‘It’s like an old boys’ network. Your face needs to fit. And mine doesn’t.’
‘That’s ’cos you’re too good-looking,’ Lucy said, laughing. ‘How could this face be fitted in a frame?’
Tara laughed, thumping Lucy lightly on the leg. ‘Bitch,’ she said.
‘You know I mean it,’ Lucy replied, glad that whatever uneasiness she’d felt over Tara reporting her to Burns following the scrapyard had been passed. She knew Tara was finding it hard to make her mark in CID. There was little point in holding a grudge. ‘So what are you working?’
‘Door-to-door statements from the Finn abduction.’
‘Sure we’ve got her back now,’ Lucy protested.
‘Tell that to him,’ Tara said, sulkily. ‘All Ts need to be crossed apparently.’
Lucy began shifting through the paperwork piled on the desk. ‘The day we got Kay in Foyleside. Someone went round taking the names of everyone else in the restaurant afterwards. Do you have that here?’
‘You’re messing it up,’ Tara said, slapping Lucy’s hand away. ‘It’s in reverse order.’
‘Reverse order? Do you want to feel challenged?’
Tara laughed. ‘I lifted it out of the box like that. The newest stuff went on top. The Kay arrest was before the house-to-house.’ She sorted through the pages, eventually pulling out handwritten lists of names and contact details stapled to handwritten statement sheets.
‘Bingo,’ she said. She laid them on the desk and began leafing through each page. ‘Mickey did the checks,’ she said. She read through the first brief statement, then flicked to the next. ‘Jesus,’ she muttered. ‘Look at the state of this.’
Lucy leaned across and began reading the statement. The first was taken from a fifty-five-year-old school teacher who had been in the restaurant with his wife and children for lunch.
The interviewee reported first being aware of the suspect’s presence when the suspect assaulted an officer and fled the scene. The interviewee saw officers pursue the suspect along the central concourse of the shopping centre.
When Lucy turned the page to the next statement, she understood Tara’s reaction, for that statement was exactly the same.
‘Look at the time he recorded for each statement,’ Tara said. Lucy glanced at the details on the bottom of the page. Each statement was separated by at most ten minutes.
‘He interviewed them by phone,’ Lucy said. ‘And copied the same statement over and over.’
Tara beamed. ‘The lazy bastard! Wait till I tell Burns,’ she added, gathering the sheets.
Lucy raised a placatory hand. ‘Would it not be even better if we could show that the actual perpetrator had been interviewed by Mickey and he’d not picked up on it?’
She knew it was a low shot at Mickey, with whom she had no particular gripe. Nevertheless, having got this close to the list of names, the last thing she needed was for Tara to hand them over to Burns before she had a chance to look at them.
Tara hesitated, clearly torn between her desire to land Mickey in it straight away and the possible increased kudos she’d gain if she could only delay gratification for a few hours.
‘Let’s just take a look at the men he spoke with, eh? See if anything stands out,’ Lucy suggested.
A little reluctantly, Tara sat again, laying the pages down flat.
‘Have you the list of names first? We know that the possible suspect was sitting with a woman and child. Let’s see if we have any groupings of three, with the man having a different surname from the woman and child accompanying him.’
It was not quite so simple, for the names were listed continuously, so that the size of each group could not be determined. Still, there were, in the end, only eight men listed who did not share surnames with any of the family groups.
‘Have we statements for these eight?’ Lucy asked. ‘We can check their dates of birth, see if that helps eliminate some of them.’
Comparing names against statements, they were able to identify two of the men as being over forty-five. While it didn’t exclude them completely, Sarah Finn had suggested that ‘Simon Harris’, as she knew him, was in his twenties. Four of the men listed were, in fact, teenagers, ranging in age from fourteen to eighteen. The elder ones certainly would have to be considered. Of the final two – Peter Bell and Gordon Fallon – Fallon’s date of birth put him at twenty-nine, while the other, Bell, did not have a date of birth listed.
‘He didn’t speak to him,’ Lucy said. ‘He filled out the statement sheet without talking to him.’
Lucy could understand entirely. Kay had been caught, a paedophile with history. Why waste time taking witness statements from people who were all saying the same thing?
‘Let’s check the driving licences,’ Lucy suggested. ‘See if their pictures match the image ICS pulled from the CCTV footage.’
Tara contacted Licensing while Lucy made them both tea. By the time she’d come back, the images had been emailed through. Both men were in their twenties; Bell was twenty-five. Both were relatively slim in their picture, both had dark hair, though the shadows on the images made it impossible to tell whether this was natural or a trick of the light.
According to the addresses on the licences, Fallon was a local, born and bred in the Creggan, while Bell’s address was actually listed for Belfast. Despite this, he had given the officer in Foyleside an address in the Waterside.
‘Do you fancy a run out?’ Lucy asked. ‘We’ll try Mr Fallon first, shall we?’
&nb
sp; Chapter Forty-Nine
Fallon’s driving licence details placed him in Westway, in Creggan. They took an unmarked car, planning on speaking to Fallon simply to ascertain whether he had remembered anything further following his initial interview with Mickey.
Fallon lived in a row of houses opposite the local boys’ school.
Tara nodded across at the building as they pulled up in front of Fallon’s house.
‘Significant?’ she asked.
‘All the victims we know of were girls,’ Lucy said. ‘That doesn’t mean we should dismiss it entirely.’
They knocked at the door of the house, aware that in both houses abutting Fallon’s, neighbours had appeared at the living room windows, watching their approach, one more surreptitiously than the other.
The door opened to reveal a girl, in her late teens, standing in the hallway, a baby nestled against her hip.
‘Yes?’ the girl asked.
‘Can we speak with Gordon Fallon, please?’
‘Who are you?’ the girl demanded, hoisting the child from one hip to the other. The child watched them both with wide-eyed wonder, a baby’s bottle of orange cordial clenched in her tiny fist.
‘We’re with the PSNI,’ Tara said. ‘We’d like to speak to him about an incident he witnessed last week.’
‘The paedo in the Foyleside?’ the girl commented. ‘Come on in, then.’
The house was small, the lower floor constituting a living area, giving way to a kitchen. The wall separating them carried a breakfast bar and a hatch in the wall through which food could be handed between one room and the next. The girl led them into the living area, then opened the hatch.
‘There’s two cops to see you,’ she called. ‘About the paedo.’
‘What age is your child?’ Lucy asked.
‘Fourteen months,’ the girl replied. ‘She should be walking by now but she’s too lazy. She wants to be carried everywhere.’
Fallon appeared at the doorway, looking in. ‘All right?’ he asked. ‘Do youse want a drink of something before I sit down?’ he added to Lucy and Tara.
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