The Stolen Girls

by Patricia Gibney

  ‘Welcome back, Inspector.’ He gave a mock salute. ‘Missed you too.’

  Closing the drawer with an unnecessary bang, she powered up the computer, racking her brain for her password. She couldn’t remember it after four minutes, let alone four months. Trying to make conversation while searching, she asked, ‘How are you doing since the—’

  ‘The wound healed up quickly,’ Boyd cut in. ‘Mentally? I’m as screwed up as ever.’

  ‘Thought I was the mental one. Password?’

  ‘Under the mug.’

  She tapped in the code. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘How are things at home?’

  ‘Sean’s back at school. Well, he goes in most days. It’s a running battle. He’s seeing a therapist,’ she added, running a hand through her newly cut hair.

  ‘You should see one too,’ Boyd replied

  Lottie shrugged. ‘You’re as good as any therapist, Dr Phil.’

  ‘My middle name.’ Boyd laughed before putting on his solemn mask. ‘Seriously, though. Sean’s a good kid but he’s been through a lot.’

  ‘Yes, he has. But I think teenagers are more resilient than us adults.’ She hoped he wouldn’t ask about Chloe and Katie. She didn’t want to talk about her children and their problems; she just wanted to bury herself in work. She’d taken enough leave as it was.

  She hoped Sean and the girls would be okay without her around all day. But she couldn’t stay at home any longer; the last few months had slowly eroded the edges of her resilience. There was only so much advising, washing and cooking she could do. At least she’d got the kids out of the habit of eating junk food and takeaways. Today she wanted to ease back into office life gently. Get her feet safely under the table. Take it in her stride.

  ‘Body found on Bridge Street.’ Detective Sergeant Larry Kirby thrust his head around the door, his bulk following a second later. His plaid shirt was rolled to the elbows, and pearls of perspiration trickled down his wide forehead. He pushed back his mop of bushy hair and stopped when he saw Lottie.

  ‘Jesus, boss. Welcome back,’ he panted.

  ‘Sandals?’ Lottie stared at his white-socked toes.

  ‘Gout,’ Kirby said.

  ‘But white socks with sandals?’

  ‘Missed you too, boss.’

  ‘Where’s Lynch?’ Lottie asked. Detective Maria Lynch was the other core member of her team.

  ‘At the scene. The guys working on the new water main unearthed the body of a female.’

  ‘First day back and you’re welcomed with a body.’ Boyd smirked as he followed Kirby out of the door.

  Lottie sighed. Taking a handful of the carefully filed folders from the drawer, she scattered them over the desk and spilled a few pens from the mug on top of them. Now she felt more at home.

  She picked up her bag and popped her mobile inside, catching sight of the envelope from her earlier visitors. That would have to wait.

  She marched out behind her detectives. She had work to do.

  * * *

  Tar oozed from the ground. The morning heat burned bare arms and brought freckles out on pale faces. Having come through the worst winter since records began, Lottie thought they were possibly on the brink of the hottest summer yet. She stepped out of the air-conditioned car and the humidity swamped her. Putting on her sunglasses, she was glad she’d applied sunblock to her fair skin.

  ‘Got your sunscreen on?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah.’ Boyd locked the car and fell into step beside her.

  She glanced sideways at him. Was he being offhand with her? He’d put on his sunglasses, so she couldn’t read his eyes. Their personal history had a habit of interfering with their mutual civility. Maybe it was because now that she was back at work, he was no longer acting detective inspector, and was once again only a detective sergeant.

  As they approached the outer cordon, uniformed gardaí redirected traffic back down the one-way street, succeeding in generating tailbacks throughout the town. Tempers rose as quickly as the sun in the sky, and Lottie’s blouse was already saturated. She stole another look at Boyd in his cool cotton shirt and navy trousers. He hadn’t even loosened his tie. How did he succeed in looking so chilled? She shook her head. It was beyond her.

  The road narrowed. Vehicles caught up in the traffic jam before the diversions had been put in place attempted to reverse, creating further gridlock. The fact that a body had been found did nothing to calm tempers.

  They ducked under the crime-scene tape on Bridge Street, a narrow tributary road snaking past the football stadium, over the river, around the shopping centre, narrowing where it linked to the main thoroughfare. Traffic lights blinked at the end. To the left, Barrett’s Pub, with boarded-up windows and weather-beaten paintwork, and a cul-de-sac. Apartments on the right, products of the boom years, some with timber planks covering windows. Had she sleep-walked through the good times? No wealth had come her way. Looking up at the dusty three-storey block, she thought perhaps she was better off. But these apartments offered her an immediate problem: numerous people to interview. Door-to-door enquiries could take days.

  She glanced around for CCTV. A broken camera hung by its wires from the wall above the back door of the pub.

  Detective Maria Lynch, long fair hair swishing in a ponytail, was busy inside the inner cordon, where a partly excavated trench lined the cul-de-sac. Three men in hi-vis singlets, safety helmets askew, smoked cigarettes in a group at the corner. Uniformed gardaí were taking notes. Lottie looked away from the group, realising that Lynch had approached her and was speaking.

  ‘… young woman.’

  ‘What?’ Lottie tried to focus.

  Lynch continued reading from her notebook. ‘We’re waiting for the scene-of-crime officers to arrive before the body can be fully excavated. The state pathologist has been notified.’ She closed the notebook. ‘With this traffic, God knows how long it will take her to arrive.’

  Lottie made her way towards the temporary tent erected over the trench. Standing outside it, she could smell decay and decomposition.

  ‘It’s too hot to leave a dead body here for any length of time,’ she said, carefully picking her way across abandoned tools.

  ‘Too warm for the live ones,’ said Boyd, peering over the edge of the trench from a vantage point on the road. ‘Fucking hell.’

  ‘What?’ said Lottie and Lynch together.

  ‘My shoes,’ he said, extracting a foot from the sticky tar. He stepped on to a large stone poking out of the ground.

  Lottie was impatient for the SOCOs to arrive. She wanted to see what they were dealing with. She glanced again at the group of men at the corner. One of them excused himself, stepped to the side and lit another cigarette.

  ‘Who is he?’ she asked, indicating the man.

  Lynch consulted her notes. ‘Andri Petrovci. He unearthed the body. Almost killed her a second time with his jackhammer. He just missed the head by a few inches. A flash of colour in the clay stopped him.’

  Lottie averted her eyes as Petrovci caught her staring. She couldn’t help but notice that his face was riddled with old scar tissue, running from his left ear lobe to his bottom lip.

  Turning her attention back to the tent, she said, ‘I’m going in closer to have a look.’ She pulled protective gloves from her bag. Marching towards the tent, she glanced over her shoulder at Petrovci standing on the corner, and shuddered. She wondered how a pair of eyes could hold so much pain.

  * * *

  Light gleamed through the tent opening when Lottie pulled back the flap. Lynch had provided her with the requisite protective clothing, which she had pulled on along with the gloves, a mask over her nose and mouth, and covers on her shoes. Steel plates had been laid so as to preserve the already contaminated scene.

  Careful not to disturb anything, she crouched into the confined space, noticing the victim’s face first. Dark eyebrows. A wisp of black hair on a smooth forehead. No sign of trauma. Eyes closed, the feather-fine skin of the lids al
ready blistering with the beginnings of putrefaction. A silver stud in one ear. Had she lost the other one? This, more than anything, touched Lottie. No matter how many victims of crime she came across or how many bodies she viewed, it was the little things that made them human.

  ‘Strangled?’ asked Boyd, hunching down beside her. He too had donned protective gear. ‘Better wait for the pathologist,’ he said.

  ‘Fuck that,’ Lottie said and swept a dark tendril of hair from the victim’s forehead. ‘Dear God, she’s no more than a child.’

  ‘Eighteen to mid twenties, I’d estimate,’ Boyd said soberly.

  A sudden shout made them both jump.

  ‘Get out of my crime scene!’

  Jim McGlynn, head of the SOCO team, stood at the tent entrance, glaring at them.

  ‘Nice to see you too,’ Lottie said, and realised she’d only ever seen McGlynn in his crime-scene outfit.

  ‘Out now, the pair of you.’

  ‘We’ve not touched a thing!’ Lottie said defensively.

  ‘You should know better, Detective Inspector.’ He brushed past her and began setting up his equipment.

  Boyd scurried away. Lottie inched back against the tent wall, allowing the technical guru to get on with his job. McGlynn ignored her as he worked. She kept her mouth firmly shut, just in case. When he finished photographing he began slowly sweeping away the gauze of clay from the victim’s chest. The collar of a blue garment appeared.

  The click of high heels out on the road alerted Lottie to the arrival of Jane Dore. The state pathologist dressed quickly in her protective garments and pulled off her four-inch heels. Sliding her feet into a pair of moccasin slippers, she covered them with overshoes. Lottie moved to one side, towering above the other woman. They exchanged greetings as the pathologist joined McGlynn.

  ‘Young female. No fissures or ligature marks,’ Dore declared, running her fingers along the victim’s throat, having first assessed the scene.

  McGlynn was methodically brushing the rest of the clay from the corpse. Gradually the entire body appeared. From her vantage point, Lottie noted that the clothing was made from cheesecloth. Undone buttons revealed braless breasts with blue veins like a road map.

  A small mound protruded from below the ribcage.

  She felt her mouth drop open. ‘She was pregnant.’

  The suffocating air instantly chilled around them. Lottie felt her clammy skin rise in goose bumps.

  ‘It might just be decomposition,’ Jane cautioned.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Lottie said, and she knew Jane didn’t think so either. ‘How long has she been dead?’

  ‘Hard to say. Decomposition is slower when the body’s not exposed to the elements. But it’s been unusually hot. Two days. Maybe. Rigor mortis has left the body, so I’d say more than forty-eight hours. I’ll know more when I get her to the Dead House.’

  The Dead House, where the state pathologist performed her post-mortems, was the mortuary attached to Tullamore Hospital, forty kilometres from Ragmullin.

  ‘Was she killed here?’

  ‘First I need to determine cause of death, Inspector,’ Jane said formally. ‘But looking at the soil and the location, I doubt this is where she was killed.’

  ‘Keep me informed.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Walking out of the tent into the blazing sunshine, Lottie hurriedly removed her outer clothing, dumped it in a brown evidence bag and called Maria Lynch over.

  ‘Get uniforms to carry out door-to-door enquiries. Someone must have seen the body being buried.’ She glanced up at the shaded apartment windows. ‘Be thorough, and I want those contract workers in the station as soon as possible for statements.’

  ‘Yes, Inspector,’ Lynch said, and busied herself giving orders to the assembled guards.

  ‘See if Barrett’s Pub has working CCTV,’ Lottie said drily, eyeing the broken camera dangling by its wires. ‘And Kirby, get someone to search those wheelie bins.’ She pointed to the commercial-sized bins lining the alley, the stench of rotting rubbish mingling with the smell from the tent.

  Kirby nodded.

  ‘First forty-eight hours are crucial,’ Lottie said, ‘and I believe we’ve already lost those.’

  EIGHT

  Back at the station, Lottie joined Boyd in Interview Room 1. It was as claustrophobic as she remembered. No windows. No air con. So much for architects. And the renovations were still unfinished.

  There would be plenty of people to interview in this case and it could take days. She wanted to start with the men working on the site.

  Andri Petrovci was currently sitting at the table secured to the floor with bolts, his large fingers clenched in fists and his brown eyes drooping. Fatigue or fear?

  ‘So, Mr Petrovci, where are you from?’ Lottie asked. She wanted to get started straight away.

  ‘I from Kosovo.’ A deep, penetrating voice.

  ‘How long have you been in Ireland?’

  ‘I come to work,’ he said. ‘Maybe a year, maybe more.’

  ‘You’ve been in Ragmullin all that time?’

  ‘Yes. No.’

  ‘You seem unsure,’ Lottie said.

  ‘I arrive. I work in Dublin. Then I come to Ragmullin.’

  Lottie smiled as he struggled with the pronunciation of her town. She struggled with her town full stop, no matter what you called it.

  ‘Why Ragmullin?’

  ‘Job. Water main work.’

  ‘Where do you live now?’ This was going to take forever.

  ‘Hill Point. Small room.’

  Lottie knew the estate. Hill Point consisted of a series of apartment blocks, constructed in a crescent, skirting the canal and railway. A few shops, a crèche and a doctors’ surgery. A low-market complex trying to be upmarket and failing miserably. She focused on Andri Petrovci.

  ‘The body of the girl you discovered, do you know anything about her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tell me about the trench you were digging. When did this work start?’

  ‘Three days ago, we lay pipes. Filled it in… how you say… temporary. Today we come back to fix.’

  ‘Fix?’

  ‘Put back road. Understand?’

  ‘I think so,’ Lottie said.

  ‘So no one was working on that site since Friday?’ Boyd asked.

  ‘We do different street, then come back. Traffic… management?’

  ‘Can you tell us anything else?’

  ‘I know nothing,’ Petrovci said, lowering his head.

  Further probing questions revealed little of interest to the investigation. Lottie felt a familiar growth of frustration swelling in her chest.

  ‘Will you consent to having a sample of DNA taken? Just to rule you in or out of our investigation.’ It was probably a useless exercise, she thought. He had already contaminated the body.

  He looked defensive. ‘Why? I do nothing wrong.’

  ‘It’s just procedure. Nothing whatsoever to worry about.’

  ‘I not know. Later. Okay?’

  ‘I’d prefer to get it out of the way, Mr Petrovci.’

  ‘I not see reason for this. But okay.’

  Lottie instructed Boyd to arrange the buccal test, a simple swab to determine DNA for analysis. Boyd nodded and read Petrovci back his statement.

  ‘You’re free to go. For now,’ Lottie said. ‘We have your contact details and we may need to talk to you again.’

  Boyd switched off the recording equipment and began sealing up the DVDs. Lottie followed Petrovci with her eyes as he moved to the door. Wide shoulders, muscles taut beneath his hi-vis singlet.

  He turned his head. ‘Little one… in the clay. Too young to die.’ He opened the door, exited and pulled it closed silently behind him.

  Lottie stared at Boyd as he shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘I’ll get the next one in,’ he said, and followed Petrovci out of the door.

  * * *

  When they’d interviewed all the workers f
rom the site, Superintendent Corrigan put his head around the door and said, ‘Incident room. Now.’

  Lottie followed him, watching the light glint off his bald pate, wondering how often he had to shave his head to maintain such an even sheen. In the incident room, an unwelcome surge of shivers shot up her spine as she recalled her last case. Same room, different murder. A free-standing noticeboard held a death-mask photograph of the victim. A rough drawing of the area where the body had been found and a large map of the town were pinned on a second board. Officers were busy on phones and typing up reports from the ongoing door-to-door enquiries.

  Superintendent Corrigan rubbed a hand over his head, pushed his spectacles up his fat nose and said, ‘Inspector Parker, you are the senior investigation officer on this inquiry.’ He stared at her through one eye. The other was red and half-closed. An infection? Hopefully it wasn’t contagious. She took a step back, just in case.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ Past experience had taught her to say as little as possible in Corrigan’s presence. A habit of uttering the wrong thing in front of him had got her in trouble too many times.

  ‘But all the press stuff goes through me first,’ he warned. ‘Don’t want a feck-up like last time, do we?’

  ‘I want to get straight to it, sir. Maria Lynch is working on the jobs book and Boyd is going to review the transcripts of the interviews we’ve just conducted.’

  ‘Kirby? What’s he at?’

  ‘I’ll let you know shortly.’ As soon as I find him, she added silently.

  ‘You know my views on cases like this. Ragmullin district handles it. No feckin’ need for the city to be involved. But after the almighty balls-up you made of your last case, I’m not sure I can keep their noses out of this for long. So wrap it up quickly. Without feck-ups. Okay?’

  ‘Sure, sir.’ She couldn’t help wondering what was wrong with his eye. Had Mrs Corrigan lost her temper and thumped him?

  ‘And stop feckin’ staring at me.’