by Paul Charles
McCusker could see in O’Carroll’s eyes the wheels turning through various scenarios, none of which she seemed to love, or even like, for that matter.
‘Let’s take a break here,’ she announced for the benefit of the recorder. She confirmed that she and McCusker were leaving the room, turning off the recorder and leaving Woyda and his brief in the company of the constable, who had been waiting just outside the door of the interview room. All of the above had happened so quickly that neither Leanne Delacato nor her client had a chance to protest.
* * *
‘So you don’t really have enough evidence to detain him,’ Superintendent Larkin said, not so much a question as a statement made to O’Carroll and McCusker in his office three minutes later.
‘But we’re both pretty sure it’s him,’ McCusker offered.
‘Yes we are,’ O’Carroll agreed.
‘Innocent men would want to know about the victim,’ McCusker claimed, ‘but your man downstairs seems to only be concerned about how his arrest would impact his job, his marriage and his standing in the local community. The suspect displayed no concern for or interest in Louis Bloom. In my experience, this makes the suspect seem very much like a guilty man. Surely an innocent man would seek more details about the victim whose death had led to his questioning? Surely he’d want to know how the murder had been committed, and where and when, so that he might be better furnished with information with which to clear up the misunderstanding? Woyda’s not even concerned that we’ve caught him out in the blatant lie on his alibi. The suspect was behaving in a very suspicious manner. If you ask me, he’s behaving like a man who felt he’d left neither clues nor a direct connection back to himself… well, either that or he’s 100 per cent innocent. We don’t feel like that is a possibility.’
‘I hear you, McCusker,’ Larkin said, ‘but from where I sit, if we detain him any longer without anything more solid, we’re just giving them the ammo to walk later.’
‘But–’ O’Carroll started, only to be stopped in her tracks by the palm of her superior’s hand.
‘If we try to succeed with what we have now,’ Larkin announced, ‘I predict it will be as unsuccessful as a musician at the controls of his stereo system trying desperately hard to make his music sound the way he needs it to sound while he only has the bass, treble and volume knobs available to him. Let him go and let’s get what we need to make it stick.’
While disappointing, neither detective felt their boss was being unreasonable. They both agreed that they’d taken it to Larkin in the first place because they knew instinctively that they didn’t have enough.
‘But what was all that stick at the end, about a musician and his bass and treble knobs?’ McCusker asked.
‘Haven’t a clue,’ O’Carroll replied, ‘probably something he picked up at a dinner party and he was trying it out on us for size.’
‘Sounds to me like he needs to do a bit more fine-tuning on it,’ McCusker said, as O’Carroll returned to the interview room to advise Woyda and his brief that they were good to go, but that they weren’t to leave the city, as Mr Woyda would be required for more questioning in the very near future.
‘Be careful how you proceed,’ Delacato, clearly hoping for the last word, warned the detective.
‘You too,’ O’Carroll replied, managing to pip the solicitor at the post.
Chapter Forty-One
Remarkably, neither McCusker nor O’Carroll felt down about developments, or the lack of them.
When they returned to their office, DS WJ Barr was sitting with a student; a very well turned out student, in grey flannels, black blazer, white shirt and QUB tie. His jet-black hair seemed long, clean and all over the place, in a cool sort of way. He kept having to flick his fringe to the right and out of his eyes. McCusker couldn’t make out if he was either clean-shaven or hadn’t started shaving yet. The ultra-important thing for McCusker was the aforementioned scarf: it sported long, yellow stripes on a black background, the very same colours of Magherafelt High School.
‘You must be Thomas Chada?’ McCusker said, stretching out his hand.
‘And you must be Mr McCusker?’ the student replied in a broad Mid-Ulster accent, accepting the detective’s firm handshake with one just as firm.
‘Have a seat,’ McCusker continued, as O’Carroll gave them both a polite smile and swerved directly to her own seat.
McCusker had second thoughts about conducting the interview in the office with all the others buzzing around within listening distance. Part of what he’d called Thomas Chada in for could be sensitive, and probably difficult for him to talk about in front of a lot of people. At the same time he didn’t want to conduct the interview in the formal settings of the interview room.
‘I don’t know about you but I’ve been talking all day and I’m parched,’ McCusker started, as O’Carroll shot him the evil eye, clearly thinking he was going to suggest a trip to McHughs. ‘I fancy a good old cup of tea and a few nibbles – let’s nip down to our canteen and see what we can get them to rustle up for us, eh?’
On hearing the word “canteen” O’Carroll reached into her top drawer and produced a couple of white fivers, also known as luncheon vouchers, and handed one each to McCusker and Thomas Chada. McCusker seemed the more pleased of the two.
‘So,’ McCusker started up, when he had Thomas Chada’s undivided attention. The PSNI canteen was empty apart from the staff at the other end. ‘I hear tell you had a great night in Botanic Gardens.’
‘Ah no, Siobhan’s not your daughter is she?’ Thomas gushed, in red alert.
‘You mean you didn’t even get to know her second name?’ McCusker replied, feeling that a little more uncertainty could favour the brave.
‘Honest, Sir, all above board as it were. Nothing Australian, I assure you.’
‘Nothing Australian?’
‘You know, nothing Down Under,’ Thomas Chada said, through a wicked smile.
‘Ah jeez, Thomas – you’re very lucky Siobhan isn’t my daughter and if you do ever get to meet her dad, for goodness sakes, man, do yourself a big favour and don’t ever mention any of the auld Australian carry on.’
‘Point taken, Sir, but it’s all good… all good… and in fact I’m seeing her again tonight,’ Thomas Chada confessed.
‘So this is a new relationship, this one with you and Siobhan?’
‘Yeah, I met her on Thursday at a lecture. She’s really cute. Afterwards we just kept on walking, talking – she’s very funny. Totally holds her own. She doesn’t take any of the boy shit. We went down Botanic Avenue for a pizza, we walked, we talked some more, and we ended up in Botanic Gardens, not by design. I didn’t realise that we were heading anywhere. I’m quite sure we weren’t. We seemed to be looking as much at each other as to where we were going. To be honest, I was happy just to hang with her. She’s so clever – can talk about everything and rabbits away as much as I do. And, to top that, she’s so beautiful. Really! I just usually see girls like her from a distance. I never dreamed anything was going to happen. I just thought if I hung on to her coat-tails, I’d get a lot further than I ever dreamed was possible by just talking to a stunning girl.’
‘Wow,’ McCusker thought, and said. He hoped he wasn’t sounding patronising, because he wasn’t meaning to. He was just thinking ‘Wow!’
Thomas Chada smiled, agreeing entirely with McCusker’s sentiment.
‘Tell me this, Thomas: what time did you get to the Botanic Gardens?’
Thomas made the sound of expelling air through not-quite-closed lips.
‘I’d say, maybe about 8.00-ish, not later, maybe 8.30, because we stayed there until about 9.30. I know this only because Siobhan said, “We’ve been sitting here for nearly an hour.”’
‘Sitting where, Thomas?’
‘You know, the shelter just over from the bandstand; it has a conical roof, no sides and bench seats,’ he replied. ‘What happened there?’
‘You tell me?’
‘
Really?’
‘Why yes,’ McCusker added, a little confused.
‘Well, I suppose it’s a little embarrassing.’
‘Oh, yes, I mean no, I see what you mean – there’s no need to go into those types of details,’ McCusker said, ‘save those for Siobhan’s father.’
Luckily Thomas got the joke. In fact, he thought it was hilarious, or maybe his echoing laughter was sheer relief after a possible troubled few days thinking he was in trouble with the PSNI.
‘So do you mean from the moment we entered Botanic Gardens?’
‘Well, for the minute let’s just focus on your time in the shelter.’
‘Well. We were chatting away, still,’ Thomas said, laughing, ‘and just as we were passing the bandstand, she asked me if I thought we’d been together long enough to consider it to officially be a date. I said, as you do, that as we were coming up to just over 50 per cent of available waking hours then, yes, we could now officially consider it to be a date.
‘She seemed to consider the full implications of this while I was enthusing away about Otis Redding – my dad’s a big fan and turned me on to him. When I next paused for breath, she said, and get this, it’s her exact words: “How do you feel about kissing on a first date?” Wow, that just blew me away. Here was this intelligent, beautiful girl and she’d asked me a) if we could consider we were on our first date and b) would I kiss a girl on a first date.’
Thomas stopped talking.
‘What did you say?’ McCusker asked, slightly worried he might be more interested in how Thomas’s first date with Siobhan turned out than what Thomas actually saw while he was on it.
‘Well, I didn’t say much, if anything, but I thought a lot; I mean, all this shit flies through your mind in a microsecond. I thought this just doesn’t happen to the likes of me – this surely happens to the class studs, but not to me. Then, did you know what I thought next?’
‘No.’
‘I thought there is something very wrong with this picture. I wondered if I was being set up? Was there a sting in progress? Could she be another Anna Chapman who thinks I have some vital information? And then do you know what I thought?’
‘No?’
‘I thought, I don’t give a fig, I don’t care about the consequences. She’s pretty much invited me to kiss her, so damn the consequences; I’m going to kiss her. So I kissed her!’
McCusker could swear he heard the bells of St Mary ringing somewhere in the background. He felt like jumping up and cheering for the little guy for winning the intelligent, beautiful girl against all the odds, just like he had done himself. Then he suddenly remembered why he and Thomas Chada were in the canteen drinking tea, a tea that was so weak it had trouble passing the spout of the teapot.
Before McCusker could formulate his next question, Thomas said, ‘And it was just the most amazing kiss of my life so far. Her lips were so soft and responsive and I realised… I just realised, right there, actually, that this stuff is really not what you’re interested in. The fact that I shared an earth-moving moment with Siobhan has nothing to do with why you needed to talk to me.’
‘Well, in a way it has,’ McCusker started, really happy to have an opportunity to get the chat back on track again. ‘When you were in the shelter with Siobhan, did you notice anything odd?’
‘No, not really.’
‘Okay, Thomas, we’re all a little more observant than we think,’ McCusker started slowly, hoping his disappointment wasn’t transparent.
Thomas looked like he was concentrating, deep in thought trying to recover something, anything, from the night in question.
‘Okay, well there was something that I missed mostly, because I was facing away from it, but at a point about twenty minutes after our kiss started when we’d come up for air, I felt Siobhan tense up all of a sudden. I thought I’d maybe done something wrong. I asked her if she was okay. She said she’d just seen something weird. One of her lecturers was out walking in Botanic and a man had approached him. I turned around to have a look but by that time, both the men she was referring to had their backs to us and were walking away.’
‘Why was Siobhan troubled by it?’
‘She said that although the man didn’t touch the lecturer, he’d apparently snarled at him – she said the man’s face had transformed from being another man in the park to a man so sinister it scared her. I asked her if she wanted to do anything about it. She said no, she didn’t want to interfere in the lecturer’s business, and he seemed to be walking away of his own free will with the evil man – they were both talking, apparently.’
‘But you only saw them both from the back?’
‘Yes, they were walking away from us before I’d a chance to turn around.’
‘Did Siobhan recognise the lecturer in question?’
‘Yes she did, she said he was her favourite lecturer, she just mentioned his name once but it was so distinctive a name I remember it. Louis Bloom.’
‘And the other man – did she recognise him?’
‘No, she said she’d never seen him before.’
‘And he’d his back to you at all times. Anything else about him you can remember?’
‘I was kind of distracted with Siobhan,’ Thomas Chada admitted.
‘I know, but anything at all?’
‘Well, he had one of those loud car jackets on. I remember thinking that’s the kind of a jacket you’d never be caught dead in. It was a blue plastic one and just below the shoulders across the back there were yellow, green and red strips, which were each about 2 inches deep.’
Chapter Forty-Two
Just before O’Carroll and McCusker were about to leave the office for the day, DS WJ Barr came to them with potential good news. As McCusker knew O’Carroll was off to another of her blind dates, he told her to go and he would deal with whatever it was Barr had discovered. He’d give her a shout later to bring her up to date. She tried to give him an affectionate pat on the arm but she caught Barr’s eye at the last moment and so she turned it into a full-blown thump.
‘Don’t you two go messing it up on me,’ she said, as she winked at her partner.
Barr took McCusker back up a floor to a suite of three rooms, which the forensic boys and girls had recently commandeered.
The biggest of the three was an open-plan office and at its centre was a very large table with what McCusker assumed was the contents of Louis Bloom’s final rubbish bag. A person’s rubbish is never a pretty sight after the fact; plastic bottles, lettuce leaves – there always seems to be an abundance of lettuce leaves and tea leaves too. There was also stained, crumbled newspapers, toast remains, opened vegetable tins, broken glass, various past-their-sell-by-dates food cartons, takeaway remains and all manner of containers. McCusker didn’t want to imagine any deeper than that, but all of Mr and Mrs Louis Bloom’s waste was here, on the table, betraying their domestic secrets.
‘So,’ Barr started, quoting the most-often used word on factual television, ‘the first thing the team noticed was among the rubbish a 10-inch by 8-inch brown manila envelope, addressed to “L Bloom”. On first inspection they couldn’t see anything that might have been the contents of said envelope.’
‘Okay so far, WJ,’ McCusker said. Some of the technicians seemed to be wetting themselves in anticipation for the big reveal they knew was coming.
‘Then they started to notice, mostly among the newspapers, small pieces of something they couldn’t exactly make out. They separated these similar pieces from the rest of the rubbish. Some of them had torn edges, some had straight edges, as though they’d been cut. At first they thought it might be some photo pages from a colour supplement. But on closer examination they discovered the pieces were too glossy and too thick to be from a magazine. Then they realised they were pieces of a real photograph.’
‘O-kay, guys and gals, now you’ve really got my attention.’
‘Then they stopped work on it immediately. Although they were only picking out and examining the
pieces, they realised there could be valuable fingerprints on this photo. So they set up a system, of taking a 4 inch x 4 inch photo of each section of the photo from the bag. Then they endeavoured to complete the jigsaw puzzle using the new photographs they’d taken. That was when they realised the reason it was taking them so long to complete the puzzle was down to the fact that they had in fact discovered three separate photographs, of a lesser number of pieces, in the bag.’
‘Now I know what it must feel like when the mysterious voice announces on The X-Factor “And the winner is…” and then they keep the contestants, and the audience, dangling on until they finally announce the winner,’ McCusker offered, involuntarily taking large breaths.
‘Okay, well we’re not going to do that,’ Barr announced. ‘Let me show you the first part of their completed work.’
Barr led McCusker, with the rest of the team following closely in their wake, over to a smaller table.
‘Oh my…’ McCusker stopped mid-sentence and couldn’t find any words to describe the three scenes in front of them. In any other situation the photographs could have been labelled as porn – maybe soft porn, but porn nonetheless. But these images before McCusker and the rest of the gang were images of pure beauty. The three photographs showed Louis Bloom and Murcia Woyda undressed in their room in Dukes Hotel, giving themselves to each other, both clearly totally lost in the moment of their mutual pleasure.
McCusker felt 100 per cent confident that not one person in the room with him was titillated by the images – envious perhaps, but mostly just acknowledging the exquisiteness before them. McCusker felt guilty, staring at the images, but no one around him was even aware that he was, so intent were their own gazes. ‘And the second part?’ he eventually asked.
‘Well, the second part was even more difficult, because by attempting to place the originals together in order to complete the photos, they risked smudging the fingerprints, and the main problem we had was we had to accept that a percentage of the fingerprints would be on the rear of the photographs. So they placed the original pieces on a clear, non-sticky sheet of Perspex roll. Then they dusted the photos with fingerprint powder and lifted the prints, turned it over, sprayed it again and lifted the prints.’