Someone You Know

by Brian McGilloway

  Lucy introduced herself to the Senior Officer.

  ‘Chief Superintendent Burns will be here shortly,’ the man said. ‘Must be important for the Super to come out.’

  Lucy nodded then glanced next door to where the lace curtains hanging on the windows shifted incrementally at her gaze.

  She knocked on the door. A moment later, she heard the light click of the lock and the door opened fractionally. The elderly neighbour, with whom she had spoken the previous night, peered out at her through the gap. She wore a thin net over her hair, her cheeks sunken in a manner that suggested she had not yet put in her teeth.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Sinclair. I’m sorry we’ve bothered you. Do you remember me? From last night?’

  The woman tutted as if the question had offended her.

  ‘We’re looking for Mr Bell now, Mrs Sinclair. A bit more urgently. Has he been home since I called last night?’

  The woman nodded.

  ‘Can I come in, Mrs Sinclair?’

  ‘No,’ the woman said.

  Lucy tried to glance behind her, wondering if perhaps Bell had hidden out in his neighbour’s house.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ Lucy asked. ‘Is there someone in the house with you?’

  The woman glanced across at where other officers had gathered on the roadway. She said something, her voice faint and dry.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Lucy said.

  ‘I’m not dressed,’ the woman replied. As she spoke, she pointed towards where the male officers stood.

  ‘I understand. Of course. Has Mr Bell been home since I spoke with you?’

  The woman nodded lightly. ‘He came back late. I didn’t get a chance to speak with him about you calling.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Lucy said. ‘Is he still in his house, Mrs Sinclair?’

  ‘I don’t know. I heard shouting though. It woke me up. Around four o’clock.’

  ‘Shouting?’

  A brief nod. ‘Thudding and shouting. Then I heard his front door slam. It makes my windows rattle. I’ve asked him not to do it. He normally doesn’t.’

  ‘But you heard signs of fighting in the middle of the night?’ Lucy repeated, loudly enough for the Response Team officers standing around to hear her.

  The woman rolled her eyes, repeating it louder herself lest Lucy was hard of hearing.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Sinclair. Keep your door closed. We’re going to check on Mr Bell.’

  Lucy called over the man who had been banging on Bell’s door. ‘The neighbour says she heard a fight in there at four in the morning, then someone leaving. For all we know, Bell could be lying dead in there.’

  ‘We should wait for the Chief Super,’ he replied. ‘To be sure.’

  ‘We can’t wait,’ Lucy said. ‘She said she heard a violent struggle.’ She moved across and pushed at the door, shoving it with her shoulder. The man with whom she had spoken took out his radio and contacted the station. The other three officers stood watching her as she tried to force the door, without success. Two of them began to laugh at her efforts. The third however, a younger uniform, came across to her. ‘Do you need a hand, Sergeant?’ he asked.

  ‘A shoulder would be more useful,’ she said, smiling.

  Between them, on the second shove, they managed to crack the frame of the door jamb sufficiently to push the door open.

  ‘Mr Bell?’ Lucy called, entering the house. ‘PSNI. Are you here, Mr Bell?’

  The man who had helped her moved in behind, the others following them in through the open doorway.

  ‘Mr Bell?’ Lucy called. ‘We’ve had reports of a fight, Mr Bell. Are you here?’

  The house was silent. Lucy moved in through the living room. ‘Check upstairs,’ she said to the man behind her. ‘I’ll check the kitchen.’

  She moved through into the kitchen area. A scattering of dishes lay on the worktop. Beyond that, nothing seemed disturbed. She checked the back door into the yard, which was locked.

  ‘Sergeant,’ she heard one of the men shout from above.

  Taking the stairs two at a time, she came into the room from which the call had come. The young uniform stood in what had presumably been a bedroom that Bell had converted into a workroom. An old piece of kitchen worktop had been screwed into the wall. Along it sat three different computers. A tangle of cables snaked beneath the worktop and down to a wall socket.

  Lucy took out her phone and called through to ICS. The call went to answering machine, though the recorded message listed a mobile number for emergencies. Lucy scribbled it onto her hand as she listened, then redialled the new number. David Cooper answered.

  ‘Are you free?’ she asked.

  ‘Now there’s a question I don’t get every day,’ he replied. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘I followed up on the names from Foyleside when Kay was lifted. I think I’ve found something. One of them works with computers. Can you come across?’

  ‘What’s the address?’ Cooper said. ‘Give me ten minutes.’

  Burns arrived before that. His initial anger at the fact that the team had entered Bell’s house was tempered somewhat by learning that the neighbour had provided them with a cause for concern regarding the health of the person inside.

  ‘I heard about this morning,’ he said to Lucy when he saw her. ‘Are you sure you should be working today?’

  ‘I wasn’t the one hurt,’ Lucy replied, disingenuously.

  ‘Regardless,’ he said. ‘No one would think less of you for needing a break.’

  Lucy shook her head. ‘Gavin Duffy has vanished,’ she said. ‘I showed him the image of the young guy from the Foyleside and, a few hours later, he’d gone. I think he knew who the man in the picture was. I think he’s gone after him, because of Karen.’

  ‘I see,’ Burns said. ‘Do you think the Duffy boy was involved in placing the device under your car?’

  Lucy shook her head. Gavin could be difficult, but she’d sensed that they had got on well. She didn’t believe that the youth would want to kill her, or, more particularly, Robbie. She told Burns as much, adding, ‘Maybe he caught up with Karen’s killer and revealed that he’d identified him from an image I had. Peter Bell, if he is the groomer, might have panicked.’

  ‘If that’s the case,’ Burns said, ‘we need to find Gavin, in case Bell has hurt him too.’

  ‘I’ve asked David Cooper from ICS to come across and look at the machines here to see what he can find. It might help us locate Bell.’

  Burns shook his head. ‘Not without cause, he won’t be examining them. You broke in because you heard there had been a disturbance. There being no sign of anyone injured, we have no excuse to start searching the man’s computers.’

  ‘He was in the Foyleside when Kay was arrested. He was best friends with Louisa Gant before she died. It can’t be just coincidence that he crosses both cases.’

  ‘Possibly not,’ Burns said. ‘But you can’t check his computer. You’ll need to call ICS off. We’ll set officers outside. If Bell returns, we can bring in him for questioning. But we can’t start checking his PCs. Without a warrant.’

  ‘That’s —’ Lucy began.

  ‘The law, Sergeant,’ Burns snapped. ‘What would you do? Fuck up a prosecution because you stormed ahead and ignored procedures. Let’s say he is the one who killed Karen Hughes. Will it help us if he gets off because we didn’t follow procedures? We arrest him, get cause, then we get a warrant. OK?’

  Lucy grudgingly nodded assent.

  ‘I suggest you either return to the PPU or go home, Sergeant,’ Burns said. ‘But either way, you’re not staying here.’

  The officers from the Response Team, who were standing in the living room below, watched silently as Lucy passed them and moved back out of the house. She knew they had heard everything, knew that it would be the station gossip for the next day or two.

  As she stepped out into the weak mid-morning light, she remembered she didn’t have a car. She was damned too, though, if she was going to go back insi
de and ask for a lift now. She was taking out her phone to call for a taxi when a black Avensis pulled to a stop outside the house and Dave Cooper waved out.

  ‘Where do I start?’ he asked, climbing out of the car.

  ‘Giving me a lift back to the PPU would be a great place,’ Lucy said.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  ‘I know it’s him,’ Lucy said, after explaining to Cooper why he was no longer needed at the scene.

  He was driving back down the Limavady Road, slowing as they approached the roundabout at the Foyle Bridge. ‘Burns is right, you know,’ he said.

  ‘That doesn’t make me feel any better,’ Lucy grunted. ‘We’re this close to catching him. We just need something to fall into place.’

  ‘Take a step back from it,’ Cooper said. ‘Forget about it for a while. It’ll sort itself out in your head when you’re not trying so hard. Have a night off.’

  Lucy scoffed, assuming he was joking. ‘Gavin went after him,’ she said. ‘I’d bet money that’s what the fight was. He went and faced him down.’

  ‘How did he know who he was?’ Cooper asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How did Gavin know who he was?’

  Lucy shrugged. ‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘He knew Karen was with someone in the weeks before she died. Maybe she told him Bell’s name.’

  Cooper nodded. They passed Gransha Hospital to their right as they drove. Lucy glanced back, feeling a pang of guilt that she had yet to go back and see her father again.

  ‘What happened to you?’ Cooper asked. He lifted his own hand off the gear stick and gently touched Lucy’s bandaged hand to indicate what he meant.

  ‘I had an accident,’ Lucy said, flushing as she wondered why she hadn’t told him the truth. Told him about Robbie. She felt a further pang of guilt that she hadn’t contacted the hospital since to see how he was doing.

  ‘You’re pushing yourself too hard,’ Cooper said, his hand remaining lightly on top of hers a second longer, before he had to change gears again. ‘You need to take a breather.’

  ‘I need a cup of tea,’ Lucy said.

  ‘I have no milk,’ Cooper said. ‘Unless you have some in PPU?’

  ‘Possibly,’ Lucy said. Fleming was the one who usually bought the milk and biscuits. Lucy didn’t even know if he did so out of his own pocket. Had never thought to ask.

  ‘Then tea you shall have,’ Cooper said, pulling in through the main gates, waving to the officer on duty at the entrance checkpoint.

  The Unit seemed cold, less inviting without Fleming’s presence. The lights were off, the rooms gloomy. Lucy turned on the main light and directed Cooper towards the kitchen.

  ‘I’m expecting a fax,’ she said, remembering that the schools had said they would send through a list of events prior to Karen and Sarah’s first contact with ‘Bradley’. Or ‘Harris’. Or Bell.

  When she went up to her room, Mary Quigg stared at her silently from her space on the wall. The fax machine in her room was still on, several pages of text lying on the tray at its base. She flicked through them. A number were Missing Persons posters from other districts: most were children who had run away from care, foster parents, or their own homes. Requests to be on the lookout. While many of the notices were from England or Scotland, one was from An Garda Sciochanna, in the Republic. A fifteen-year-old, Annie Marsden, had gone missing from the care home in which she was placed in Stranorlar. Something about the girl’s name seemed familiar, though Lucy could not place it. Regardless, she marked the fax to remind herself to send out a BOLO to all local cars, considering the proximity to their own jurisdiction.

  Lucy eventually found the lists from the two schools. Karen’s had already given her a list of the events of the week prior to ‘Bradley’ contacting her, but had now sent through details of each event and the people involved. The secretary had noted at the bottom that all appropriate background checks had been done on anyone coming into contact with the children. Besides, Lucy knew that someone in CID had done checks on Karen’s school and would have checked such vetting had been completed.

  She flicked through to Sarah Finn’s school’s list next. It was significantly longer, seemingly a calendar of events for the entire term rather than just the week before she’d first been contacted online. As Lucy scanned through it, one name stood out. A name that had also appeared on the list from Karen’s school: Country Photographers.

  Lucy sat at her desk and phoned through to the school, asking to speak to the secretary. If schools were anything like police stations, the people in the front office would have a better sense of what was happening in the school on any given day than anyone else.

  After Lucy introduced herself the woman on the other end, who’d called herself Rose, interrupted her. ‘I sent you through the list already.’

  ‘I know. Thank you,’ Lucy said. ‘I wanted to ask you about Country Photographers.’

  ‘Yes?’ the woman replied slowly.

  ‘Are they a new company to the school?’

  ‘God, no. They’ve been coming into us for years. Why?’

  ‘And they’d have done vetting and background checks, presumably.’

  ‘Of course,’ Rose replied. ‘What’s this about?’ ‘Where could I find them?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Have you not got a phone book?’ Rose snapped. ‘Or a computer.’

  ‘I’ve got a pen,’ Lucy asked. ‘Ready to write down the address which I’m betting you know by heart.’

  There was silence for a moment, then the woman rattled off the address once, before hanging up.

  Cooper was sitting in the Interview Room on the sofa, drinking his tea. A second mug sat on the table, blobs of cream gathering on its surface.

  ‘I’m not sure about your milk,’ he offered when she came down the stairs.

  ‘Do you fancy giving me another lift?’ Lucy asked, handing him the faxes. ‘My car’s out of action.’

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Country Photographers was operated by a man named Niall Hines, out of the ground-floor unit of a block on Spencer Road. The shop itself was small; the walls cluttered with wedding and graduation pictures, displayed to show the range of Hines’s craft. In fact, Lucy thought, they all looked remarkably similar. What scope there was for originality in an image of someone in a cloak holding a scroll, Hines seemed not to have explored it.

  An older blonde woman was sitting at the reception desk when they came in. She looked up and smiled at them. ‘How are you? Wedding photos is it?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ Lucy said, glancing at Cooper to see him struggling to conceal his smile. ‘We’re a little past that, I’m afraid. We were hoping to speak with Mr Hines. I’m DS Black of the Public Protection Unit. This is Officer Cooper.’

  The woman’s smile faltered. ‘Oh. I’ll see if he’s available.’ She stepped in through the gap in a curtained partition. Cooper moved across to where she had gone and peered through.

  ‘The master’s at work,’ he said.

  Lucy followed him and they stood looking into a small studio space. The back wall had been painted white. Three coloured beanbags of varying sizes were placed in the middle of the floor. On one a young boy sat cross-legged. Next to him, on a bigger red bag, lay a girl whom Lucy took to be the boy’s sister. She was lying flat on her stomach, propping herself up on her arms. Hines himself was standing next to a camera on a tripod. He was a small man, thin framed, with wiry grey hair. Despite standing erect, his back seemed to arch outwards, as if he was so used to hunching that even when he stood straight, his back retained the shape.

  ‘Give me a smile, young man,’ he said. The boy obliged, smiling brightly, in doing so revealing the gap where his two front teeth had once been.

  ‘And now, you my pretty? Can you give me a smile, like your brother?’

  The girl nodded with such vigour, her pigtails wagged wildly on either side of her head.

  ‘Haven’t you the prettiest eyes?’ he said.

  The girl beamed at th
e compliment and, in that instant, a flash illuminated the ceiling as the camera shutter clicked.

  ‘And now one of the two of you. Nathan, can you lie next to your sister and both of you look at me?’

  Lucy looked across and saw the clearly proud mother of the two children standing at the far wall, absurdly using her phone to take pictures of the pictures being taken.

  The boy did as he was directed and, after a few minor adjustments to positions, the final few shots were taken in quick succession, each image preceded by a compliment from Hines to the children.

  After the children had been led out by their mother, Hines came across to them.

  ‘Wedding photographs, is it?’ he asked, smiling. ‘Such a beautiful couple.’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ Lucy said, glancing at Cooper who, again, couldn’t resist grinning. ‘I’m with the PSNI Public Protection Unit. I’m investigating a case involving two school children.’

  Hines’s expression darkened. ‘I’ve been completely vetted,’ he said.

  Lucy raised a placatory hand. ‘I’m simply following up on connections between the two girls,’ she said. ‘You visited the schools of both in the days before they were first targeted.’

  ‘What schools?’

  Lucy told him. The man muttered to himself, his hand to his mouth, his eyes downcast, as if searching the studio floor for an explanation. ‘Are you sure I even took pictures of the children?’

  ‘I’m not,’ Lucy admitted.

  ‘What were the dates of the shots?’ he asked, moving across to a small anteroom set off the studio. In it a single computer hummed on the desk.

  Lucy offered him the date of the visit to Karen’s school. The man scrolled through folders, finally hitting on one for that date. He opened the folder and a series of images of girls, numbered from 001, all seated in front of faux bookcases, appeared.

  He began scrolling down through the images. ‘Tell me if you see her. I have no names with the images here.’

  As he scrolled, Lucy scanned the pictures. Eventually, at image 098, she saw the picture of Karen Hughes.