To Mulcahy’s surprise, Dr Mendizabal even offered to go and propose this course of action to Salazar, and seek his permission. As soon as she was gone, Mulcahy started dialling Siobhan’s number but stopped, wondering what the hell he thought he was doing. Was he suddenly in league with her? Instead, he clicked on Brogan’s number and waited as it rang and went straight through to her voice-mail. He cursed and hung up. What was the point of calling her, anyway, when he didn’t even have a crumb of evidence for her yet. He sat down on a chair in the corridor, breathing heavily, wondering what to do next. All going well, he might be forced to make that call, and soon. But, for the moment, he was damned if he was going to entrust his future to an answering machine.
It didn’t take long for Jesica to go under. In the room’s dim light, Mulcahy looked on, absorbed, as the doctor took her through the lead-in, getting her to lie on the sofa, asking her first to look up at a fixed point on the ceiling, then to relax, to feel her eyelids grow heavy, then her body, limb by limb, get warm and weighty, to relax, to go down into warmth and stillness, to relax, push away the demands and pains of the world around her, to forget the clamour and needs of other people, to feel only the warmth and heaviness in her limbs, her neck, her head, to relax…
It couldn’t have taken more than two or three minutes before the girl was still and quiet, the only sign of life being her chest heaving low and slow, and her eyes, which seemed to flicker with a life of their own beneath closed lids. Mulcahy was amazed that Jesica had consented so readily to undergo this procedure. Perhaps with her physical healing under way, she felt a need to take on the mental trauma too.
Mulcahy watched as the psychiatrist did a few quick checks to make sure Jesica was fully under, asking her to raise the index finger on her right hand if she understood, which she did, then telling her she had nothing to fear, that there would be two voices talking to her from now until the session was over – her own and that of Señor Inspector Mulcahy – and that if at any time Jesica encountered something that was too painful to recall, she could lift her index finger again, and they would either move on to another subject or bring her back to a waking state.
Mulcahy had discussed a list of prompts and questions with Dr Mendizabal beforehand, and this list she now consulted in tandem with a series of her own notes on a clipboard. Mulcahy noted that her approach wasn’t all that different from his own interview technique, first asking Jesica some general questions as a lead-in: about when she first arrived in Ireland, what the school was like and who her friends had been. At this stage Dr Mendizabal focused only on the positive, and steered away from anything that Jesica might find uncomfortable. Throughout this time, Mulcahy was struck by how mobile the girl’s facial features had become, taking on an expressiveness rarely seen on people’s faces in waking life, the muscles making subtle little smiles, tics and frowns of concentration that seemed to mirror her emotions and interior mental processes. Yet in her answers her voice rarely varied from a flat nasal monotone that reminded him, somehow, of the few occasions when he’d heard Gracia talking in her sleep.
Slowly the psychiatrist led a smiling Jesica on from friends to dancing, to dancing with friends in nightclubs, to dancing with boys, and then to dancing in Dublin on the night in question. Again Mulcahy noted how Mendizabal never said anything jarring like ‘the night of the attack’ or even ‘that night’, or anything that might foreshadow what had happened to Jesica later. As a result, he felt he could see her living in the moment as she described the club, the lights, the music and the grin of satisfaction reproduced on her lips when she started to describe how one boy, handsome and blond ‘like David Beck-ham’, had approached her so confidently and swept her away from her friends.
Mulcahy only knew Patrick Scully from the video grabs taken from the GaGa Club cameras but he was struck by the immediacy and accuracy of Jesica’s description. He wondered if people under hypnosis were always so transparent. Although Scully was no longer a suspect, he felt they would never have pursued him at all if they could have heard this response from Jesica earlier. But that was now academic: no point in dwelling on opportunities missed. Not when Jesica was now talking about how happy she’d been when Scully suggested he walk her home, and how she had left the club on a high. But it wasn’t long before she started feeling uncomfortable, when, leaning against a wall near the shopping centre in Stillorgan, he’d started putting his hands on her and she’d liked it at first, even when he put his hands down there, but then his hand became rougher and she didn’t want him to do that, and she told him not to, but he tried it again and she pushed him away and he became angry.
Again Mulcahy noticed a distinct change in Jesica’s facial expressions, the muscles dancing on her face. Dr Mendizabal caught his eye and pointed to the index finger on Jesica’s right hand, which was wavering now, hovering just above the level of its fellows. Mulcahy raised an eyebrow but the psychiatrist shook her head, indicating with the flat of her hand that everything was okay. He realised that she was using the finger like a needle-gauge to monitor Jesica’s anxiety level.
That anxiety stayed fairly stable as the girl described how Scully had finally stormed off, then it slackened as righteous anger and disappointment took over. She described then how she’d looked for a taxi. Mulcahy’s hopes flared up then faded as she said she couldn’t see one and had decided to walk on. And so Jesica continued, crossing road junctions, cursing Scully, passing the video hire shop and the 7-Eleven, and the walls and gates of what Mulcahy realised was Mount Anville primary school. Suddenly he saw her body stiffen, muscles shifting like riptides across her face now, in fear or pain, and her index finger was rigidly pointing up again, higher than before.
‘No… no!’ she moaned, her voice cracking, terrified.
Knowing this had to be the result of her first contact with her attacker, Mulcahy looked over at Mendizabal, who was herself looking concerned. The psychiatrist told Jesica to relax, to be calm, that nothing could hurt her here and now, and the girl responded, calming slightly. Then she told her to not be afraid but to look around her, to describe what she was seeing and feeling. Jesica began to speak again. Beyond the school, a car had passed and pulled in up ahead. Mulcahy was already feeling the tension, but then Jesica paused, her chin jutting out a little, as if she were looking again, harder, and then said: ‘No, not a car, a van.’
‘What colour van is it?’ Mulcahy asked, not really expecting an answer, but he got one.
‘White,’ the girl said.
‘You’re sure?’
Yes, she nodded emphatically, white with black windows at the back, the streetlights from across the road burning orange reflections in them.
Mulcahy felt a kind of relief run through him, knowing this pushed things back towards Byrne, and, thinking of her earlier clarity, he wondered if she might be able to come up with something more specific, a model name or plate number.
‘Can you see any writing on the van, on the back or the sides?’
‘No,’ she said definitely. ‘There is a sign on the roof, across the top, but it’s too dark to read.’
All Mulcahy’s relief drained away, instantly replaced by puzzlement. Byrne’s van had nothing on the roof. But something else in him was shifting, clawing at recollection until, in a flash of memory so powerful it was all but physical, he felt himself being pulled back from danger by Martinez at the roadside in the airport again. That taxi! Why hadn’t he thought of it before? An MPV, a taxi van. What if Rinn had his fake taxi sign on a people carrier? He desperately tried to recall the vehicle mentioned in Rinn’s traffic offence, but it wouldn’t come. He was about to jump in and ask Jesica more about the sign but Mendizabal signalled him to wait, pointing at the girl’s eyes which were now moving round like marbles under the tightly closed lids.
Suddenly, Jesica snapped her head back and her shoulders raised a couple of inches off the sofa, as if she had been struck in the face.
‘He hit me, he hit me,’ she gasped, the wor
ds so familiar to Mulcahy from her earlier interview. Her bottom lip was quivering and tears slipped from beneath her eyelids. Still Mendizabal did not intervene. Instead, calmly and steadily, she told Jesica to relax again, to take herself out of the scene, to rise above it and look down on it. The girl nodded and immediately went on.
‘He is hitting me,’ Jesica said again, her voice much more distant now. ‘It’s dark, he put something over my head, and it smells so much I want to choke. I can’t breathe because he’s hitting me, again and again.’
Mulcahy’s heart went out to Jesica as he listened to her describe falling over in the darkness, the sharp pain in her legs and the back of her head when she hit the floor of the van as she was pushed inside. He remembered now what she had said, in the hospital room, about the attacker throwing something over her. It must have been to cover her face, to prevent her from seeing him properly. But that couldn’t be right. She’d said he’d made the sign of the cross. Like a priest. It had been so vivid, so visual. She must have seen him.
‘The sign of the cross, Jesica,’ Mulcahy whispered. ‘You said he made the—’
He was about to ask the question when Dr Mendizabal shot a hand in front of his face, shooting him a glare full of concern. She pointed to the girl’s middle finger: it was rising and falling slowly.
‘It’s stopped,’ the girl said, an echo of the terror she was reliving trembling in her voice. ‘I hear nothing but the pain in my head. Am I dead? No, I hear him moving, crawling around me, like a snake, like a… aaaah.’ Breath rushed from Jesica like she’d been physically punched again and her hands leaped to her neck as if she were being strangled. ‘No, no, Mama, no don’t let him hurt me…’
Mulcahy had to look away. He couldn’t bear to see the pain and fear playing out on her face, all nerves and tics and terror as she relived her struggle, told how the chain around her neck gave way, snapped, and she could breathe again, great whooping gulps of air filling her starved lungs. And how she must have passed out for a moment then, because all she could describe was becoming aware, distantly, of violation, of crude fingers parting her thighs, cutting her clothes off, and how she began to struggle again, harder, so hard that the sack over her face slipped and…
Mulcahy’s gaze snapped back to Jesica’s face in an instant, expectation rising, checking from the corner of his eye that Dr Mendizabal wasn’t going to stop her now.
‘He is leaning over me, and I can breathe again, feel the air on my face, and hear again… yes, I can hear the words on his lips are prayers. “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name…” He is blessing himself, and staring down at me, and making the sign of the cross… like a priest. And he’s holding a burning sword in his hands and it is red with fire, there’s so much heat, and he is praying over me, praying and touching me with the cro…’The girl gasped, her body rigid, snapping up from the waist for just a second, like a clasp-knife buckling, and she let out a low and terrible moan.
He saw the concern on the psychiatrist’s face, heard her try to calm the girl and ask her if she wanted to come back, telling her she could come back any time if it got too much. And Mulcahy just couldn’t let that happen, not now, when they were so close.
‘Tell us about his face, Jesica. Tell us about the priest’s face,’ he pleaded.
He saw a flash of panic cross the psychiatrist’s features, followed by anger. She glared at him again, warning him to stop. But she didn’t interrupt, because Jesica, brave Jesica, had already begun to answer.
‘No priest,’ she gasped, through teeth clenched in fearful realisation, confusion and fear contorting the muscles on her face, her body twitching like it was possessed. ‘A devil,’ she gasped, as if she’d wrenched something up from her very soul. ‘A devil’s face, thin and red, and his eyes are burning fire, and the flames of hell are climbing up around him, on his face, on his skin. Burning!’
Jesica’s entire body was shuddering with fear now, and Dr Mendizabal was slashing the air with her hands, warning Mulcahy not to say another word.
‘Enough,’ she said. ‘That’s enough, Jesica, that’s good, very good. Now relax again, good girl, you have nothing to fear. Come away from that place, relax, take a deep breath… and relax.’
When the psychiatrist looked across at Mulcahy again, it wasn’t with anger but relief, something he now felt washing over himself in a great wave as he realised what it was the girl had said. Something must have changed in him, in his expression, because Dr Mendizabal was now quizzing him with her eyes, as if to say: Are you alright?
‘One more question?’ he mouthed at her. ‘An easy one, I promise. The last.’
She mouthed the words ‘easy’ back at him, a sternness in her gaze, and he nodded again.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Jesica, you’re doing so well, so amazingly well. The inspector has just one more question for you, then it will be time to come back to us.’
The girl nodded imperceptibly, still breathing hard but in every other respect apparently calm again.
‘Jesica,’ he said, as gently as he could, ‘those flames you saw climbing up this man, this devil, tell me, were they on his face or were they only on his neck?’
Mulcahy already knew the answer. But he wanted to hear it from Jesica’s lips. So that later he could tell her honestly that it was her, and only her, who had put beyond doubt who it was that had caused her so much pain.
He didn’t notice that he was actually shaking with emotion until he left the room and saw Martinez and Salazar waiting in the anteroom outside. Salazar creaked to his feet, looking anxiously towards the door behind Mulcahy rather than at him.
‘How is she, Inspector? Is my daughter alright?’
‘Yes, Jesica is fine. Dr Mendizabal is helping her settle again.’
Salazar exhaled a heavy sigh of relief, so much so he seemed to deflate physically. ‘And did you gain any useful information?’
Mulcahy breathed out hard himself, trying to get a grip on what he’d discovered, knowing he’d have to be discreet if he was going to be able to put it to good use.
‘Your daughter was very courageous, Señor Salazar, and you should be proud of her. I think we now have a partial description, but the event was, clearly, so very traumatic…’ He broke off, unsure of how much more he should say.
‘Does it match the suspect you have in custody?’
‘That’s hard to say, sir, as I have not met the man,’ Mulcahy said, side-stepping the question as best he could. ‘I’ll pass the information on to my colleagues, and they will take it forward. Perhaps you would like to go in to your daughter now, as she was asking for you.’
Salazar grunted and made straight for the door. Mulcahy was relieved not to have to explain further. He fished his mobile out of his pocket and turned it on. It beeped immediately. A voice message left for him: Siobhan, going nineteen to the dozen, the whump and rush of Dublin traffic in the background.
‘Jesus, Mulcahy, what a bloody day for you to be out of reach. Why haven’t you called me back? Didn’t you get my text? Look, it looks like another girl was snatched last night, right in the city centre, just up from the Twentyone Club on D’Olier Street. Same MO, everything – and all Brogan and Lonergan will do is tell me to go stuff myself, that it’s an unrelated enquiry. I really need you to get in touch with them and tell them to take this seriously. There could be another girl’s life at risk here, and they’re just pissing about. Call me back, will you? Soon!’
Mulcahy clicked off and looked around him, the grandeur of his surroundings beginning to feel a bit surreal. What influence could she imagine he still had over Brogan, or Lonergan who he’d never even met? Who was to say this new disappearance was in any way connected? And what the hell could he do from Madrid? But the thought of another young woman going through what Jesica had just described was simply too horrible to be ignored. And he knew that now it came down to it he was just faffing about, putting himself before the safety of a missing kid. Even if that was only a p
ossibility.
He picked the phone up and dialled Brogan’s number again, expecting to go straight through to voicemail as usual. Amazingly, she answered within two rings.
‘I just heard another girl’s been taken,’ he said.
‘For fuck’s sake, Mulcahy.’ Brogan cursed beneath her breath. Like she thought she was dealing with a half-wit. ‘Look, forget about that, will you? Some drunk says he saw a girl being dragged into a van in D’Olier Street. Someone else says it was a taxi. That’s it. End of story. No body’s been dumped, no kid has turned up laced with crosses. Not even a missing person’s report. It’s a non-event that’s being whipped up into a story by the press – and especially your pal Fallon.’
‘Maybe this girl just hasn’t been found yet,’ Mulcahy objected. ‘He hid the last one pretty carefully, didn’t he?’
‘Yeah, so carefully that we found her within hours. And then we went out and caught him and put him in a cell, where he still was last time we looked – just an hour or so ago. Okay?’ She gave a sigh of exasperation. ‘Anyway, I thought Lonergan said something about you being in Madrid today, taking a statement? Didn’t you go in the end?’
‘I did, that’s where I’m calling from now.’
Another long pause.
‘So have you spoken to Jesica yet? Did you get an ID or not? Come on, Mike, get a grip.’
‘I showed her Byrne’s mugs. She didn’t recognise him.’
‘Fuck,’ she said. ‘We had pretty high hopes on that score. Lonergan wasn’t so keen initially, but I persuaded him it was worth a shot.’
‘Look, the thing is, Claire, I think I may have got a partial ID of someone else.’
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