Close Ranks

by Valerie Keogh

  He did and proceeded to explain, ‘The term registered charity doesn’t actually exist in Ireland, instead they’re governed by a statute going back to the seventeenth century. I’m guessing, and it is a very complicated area, that Offer would be classified as a charity beneficial to the community and the Office of the Revenue Commissioners would view it as that.’

  ‘But she isn’t earning money from Offer, is she? They don’t charge for their services and it doesn’t get funding from any source I could find. Ms Larsson bankrolls it all.’ Baxter said.

  West shrugged. ‘Then they won’t get involved. Offer can exist as it is. It doesn’t have a legal identity, it’s viewed as an unincorporated association. They can’t hold property, employ anybody or take part in a law suit.’

  ‘Didn’t they set up a...what was it called...a governing code or something, a few years back?’ Andrews asked.

  West nodded, ‘The Governance Code. Yes, but it is voluntary. Associations are advised to join it but they can legally ignore it.’

  ‘So they can do what they want.’ Jarvis said. ‘Great.’

  ‘Why did the brothel close down?’ Andrews asked, getting back to the point. ‘Or was it closed down?’

  Baxter grinned. ‘This is Scandinavia. They have a different view of these things. No the brothel was a legitimate, taxpaying, and according to my new best-pal in Finland, Eetu, a very lucrative business. He doesn’t know why she suddenly shut it down, but she did. Closed it completely and vanished off their radar.’

  West, stood, two hands palm-together, fingertips softly tapping, brain spinning new facts, adding them to the mix. They needed more. ‘Personal data, anyone?’

  Jarvis held up a hand. ‘There’s not much available, I’m afraid. Viveka Larsson was born in Stockholm in 1948. Not much information on her early years but a number of vice related arrests in the early seventies indicate she may have started much sooner. She moved to Finland mid seventies and fell off the radar for a number of years reappearing in the early eighties as the Madam of, and there is quite a bit of info on the net about it, a very well appointed, classy, upmarket brothel. It appears to have been unusually discreet, several doors allowing access and egress, keeping one punter away from another. She managed to keep it fairly scandal free but there were indications that a few high-powered politicians frequented her establishment.

  ‘She doesn’t seem to have married. No children. No financial problems reported but obviously I couldn’t get access to her bank accounts. There is no indication as to why she closed up shop and came here.’ He looked up from the notes he was reading, ‘Actually, there is surprisingly little written about her, personally. Any reference to her though is invariably accompanied by the words charming or charismatic.’

  ‘She wouldn’t be the first murderer to be described in either of those terms.’ Baxter pointed out.

  ‘Let’s not jump the gun,’ West said sharply. ‘She is still just a suspect, a person of interest. Let’s keep our language appropriate, ok?’ Ignoring Baxter’s embarrassed nod, he continued, ‘Anything else?’

  Declan Foley raised a hand. ‘She’s not on any social network that I could see. In fact, she’s not anywhere. Offer have a very basic website but apart from mentioning that Larsson is the founder, there is no other information. However,’ Foley said with a smirk, ‘I contacted the people who made their advertising flyers and managed to get the billing address from them. It’s an apartment on Nutley Lane. I checked with the Property Register and it hasn’t been sold recently so I contacted a friend who works for a property maintenance company.

  He gave me the name of the maintenance company that manages the apartment complex and they were happy to tell me that she lives there alone in a two-bedroom apartment. She has been there almost eight months. There have been no problems. No complaints.’ Foley finished and rolled his pages up.

  ‘Nutley Lane, eh?’ Andrews muttered. ‘High end. Is she running a brothel from there, d’y’think?’

  Foley sat and picked up the phone, ‘I’ll check with Vice. See if they’ve heard anything.’

  West paced, thinking. ‘Why? Why would she move from a successful brothel in Finland to a small-time affair here? And why on earth has she started this Offer group. None of this makes sense.’

  Nobody had a comment.

  Foley hung up, shrugged. ‘Nothing to report. Vice don’t have any record of a problem there. They did say they may not have heard, if she were very discreet.’

  West paced and then stopped. ‘Ok,’ he said slowly, ‘I’m going to go to the inspector with this, see if I can convince him we have enough for a search warrant. If we can find a grater or liquidiser and the lab can find some trace of manioc esculenta then we have her. Plus we can search for a match to that jotter page.’

  It all hinged on Morrison. If West could convince him. They were all thinking the same thing. Mother Morrison would either be so incensed at being taken for a fool he would want to go after her, guns blazing, or he would be so embarrassed he would want to cover the whole thing up, would dismiss all their work as circumstantial conjecture. Being an ex-brothel owner, after all still didn’t make Larsson a murderer. They were still missing that essential element.

  Proof.

  26

  Kelly didn’t leave the house on Thursday. She had breakfast at eight and then sat in front of her computer and worked through till five with just a break every now and then for coffee. She resisted the sudden and unusual need to vacuum the house, the unexpected desire to sort through her clothes, divide them into dump, keep and charity. She even resisted the temptation to go out to the new coffee shop in the village and eat cake. She faced each distraction down, forced herself to sit and keep typing.

  When it felt like she was writing rubbish, when the words bored her as she wrote, she stuck at it. This was the first draft. She knew many of the words she wrote now would be deleted in the second, third or however many drafts it took to make it perfect.

  By five, she had written five thousand words. Actually she had probably written nearer to eight if she counted all the deletions. Still, she was happy with what she had done. And five thousand a day was just about what she had planned. If she could stick to that...gosh, she thought, she should have the first draft finished in three to four weeks. And then would come the hard work. The tedious rewriting, and rewriting, and rewriting.

  She stood and stretched, feeling shoulder and back muscles groan. Of course, she had planned to stand and stretch every hour but it hadn’t happened and now she regretted her long immobility. Five minutes stretching made a difference and she hummed happily as she ran down the stairs. She’d skipped lunch and now felt definite hungry pangs, or hunger growls she amended as her stomach did just that. Opening the fridge she took out a lasagne she had bought from the village deli earlier in the week. She switched on the oven, slid the lasagne onto a plate and when the oven had warmed, shoved it in.

  Lasagne just wasn’t lasagne without a glass of wine. She’d bought a bottle of Merlot in the same deli, took it out now, admired the label. She searched her drawer for a bottle-opener. Threw it back in with a grunt of displeasure when she realised the bottle was a screw-top, not a cork. She missed corks, she realised, unscrewing the cap. Missed all the comforting, ritualistic palaver of it all.

  Pouring a glass, she took a sip. At least that hadn’t changed. A good Merlot was still a good Merlot. She took it into the sitting room, switched on the television and channel-hopped with little enthusiasm. Reaching a music channel, she heard the mellow notes of a blues band and left it on that, sipping her wine, waiting for the lasagne, thinking of her novel, the story line, thinking of a phrase, reaching for a pen to write it down, knowing it would be quickly forgotten and she would be cross she hadn’t done so.

  The wine had worked its magic, the alcohol hitting her empty stomach and going straight to where it did most good. She set the glass down and went to fetch her lasagne, putting it on a tray and bringing it back balancing i
t in one hand, the bottle of wine in her other.

  The lasagne was, as usual, delicious. She had given up making her own the first time she had tried theirs. She couldn’t compete with perfection. Anyway, why bother trying.

  A few mouthfuls and she was ready for another glass of wine. Could there be a better combination than lasagne and red wine. She didn’t think so.

  Whether it was the music or the wine, she felt very mellow. Maybe it was the good day’s work. She felt satisfied for the first time in a long time. Being busy was good. Putting her past behind her was good.

  Her thoughts switched to the undeniably sexy garda sergeant. Had they a future together? She wasn’t ready to admit, even to herself that she hoped so. There was something so reassuring about him. Even in that awful cottage in the wilds of Cornwall he had stepped in, taken charge, and she felt safe. And, bugger feminism, it felt bloody marvellous.

  She was sorry now she hadn’t told him about Saturday night. Hoped he didn’t think she was playing games. She didn’t want to be thought of as a woman who would play that type of game. Sunday, she’d tell him then and that she had given up volunteering with Offer, that it wasn’t her thing. Never had been.

  Another glass of wine and then, because for the first time in a long time, she hadn’t dissolved into tears after a couple of glasses, she had another, feeling very mellow indeed. The music played a favourite, she stood, glass in hand and swayed to its beat wondering if Mike were a good dancer. She hoped so. Was anything in the world as good as being in the arms of a man, feeling something connect as the music started and took you over. Sublime. She swayed a bit, drank a bit.

  When the world started swaying faster and more energetically than the music warranted, she sat...or rather, she decided firmly, she collapsed...onto the sofa. To her surprise the glass was empty so she refilled it, discovering with even more surprise that there was only half a glass left. She drank it.

  In the morning, her first thought was, I’m never drinking again.

  Her second thought was, Oh God, my head.

  She should have drunk some water before going to sleep. That was the trick. Or maybe, she admonished herself, the trick was to stop after a glass or even two. ‘Never again,’ she said aloud. She had to get a drink, her mouth felt like a camel’s armpit. Taking a deep breath she sat and swung her legs to the floor in one swift, but less than smooth, motion. Then she sat until the world stopped spinning. She’d not undressed, she realised. She’d just kicked off her shoes and collapsed on the bed.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she had drunk so much. Not for a very long time. And it would be a hell of a long time before she’d do it again. Luckily there was drinking water in the bathroom so she didn’t have far to go, she filled a tooth mug and drained it three times, then felt sick.

  Back on her bed, she lay feeling very sorry for herself. Self-inflicted it may be but she still allowed a modicum of sympathy. After all, she reasoned, she’d had a hell of a year and this was the first time she’d drank much. She knew the reason. If she had taken to drink when Simon had died she didn’t think she would ever have stopped. The alcohol would have covered the pain with a shell and under the shell it would have festered and poisoned her.

  She felt a little better and had drifted back into a light sleep when the phone rang, startling her into an upright position, her hand going immediately to her still pounding head. To stop the noise before her head exploded, her hand flailed around connecting with it, grabbing it before it toppled to the ground. ‘Hello,’ she said into the phone, her voice less than cordial. She’d have hung up immediately, but they might have rung again, and she didn’t think she could handle the noise again.

  ‘Kelly?’

  Kelly groaned. Why had she answered? What had she done to deserve this? Was this her punishment for getting wasted?

  Maybe she could just hang up, leave the phone off the hook, invent a story about a problem with her phone line. But that wasn’t her. ‘Hi, Heather.’

  ‘Oh Kelly, I’m so pleased I caught you in,’ Heather said in her irritating breathy voice.

  ‘And I’m so sorry you did,’ Kelly said, her hand covering the phone.

  ‘We need every volunteer we can get hold of,’ she said. ‘We need you to get over here as soon as possible.’

  Despite her hangover, despite her reluctance to volunteer once again, Kelly was not immune to the urgency and distress in Heather Goodbody’s voice. ‘What on earth has happened?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s the primary school in Cabinteely,’ she said naming a suburb adjoining Foxrock, ‘there’s been an explosion.’

  An explosion. Shocked, Kelly sat up, her hangover forgotten. ‘What? Where? I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

  Heather gave her the address and hung up.

  Quickly, Kelly stripped and stood under the shower, the water virtually cold, the chill driving away the last vestiges of her hangover. She quickly dried herself, tied her wet hair in an untidy tail and threw on jeans, shirt and warm jacket. Grabbing the keys she was out of the house ten minutes after the call.

  Holycross Primary School wasn’t far and within minutes she was outside. It was a scene of chaos; parents, already alerted in a variety of ways, had started arriving on foot and by car. Some uniformed gardai had erected a cordon and were effectively keeping the people back, ignoring irate parents who just wanted to know where their child was, that he was safe.

  The plumes of smoke she had noticed from afar seemed to be decreasing in size. She hoped she was right in thinking that was a good sign. Had there been an explosion? Nobody seemed to know.

  She approached one of the young gardai, explained who she was. He looked puzzled but just then Heather Goodbody came around the side of the fire-engine and spotted her. She interpreted the head nod as a direction to follow her away from the increasingly frantic crowd that was gathering. They’d not stay quiet or still for much longer, Kelly thought.

  ‘Thank God, you’ve come,’ Heather said, putting her arm around Kelly’s shoulders, giving her a comradely squeeze. ‘They’re leading the children out now. They’ll need someone to hold their hands till their parents come.’

  Kelly nodded. ‘Of course, whatever I can do to help. But what happened? There’s ambulances, have there been injuries?’

  Heather shook her head, curls bobbing against her plump cheeks. ‘Helen was in the garda station, doing her shift,’ she said, ‘when a call came that there was smoke coming out of the school. That it was on fire. She knew that we’d be needed, rang me and I alerted everyone and got here as fast as I could. The teachers followed their emergency evacuation procedure and brought all the students to the assembly hall out at the back. It’s a separate building so they were safe from whatever was going on in the school. They stayed there while the emergency services arrived.’

  ‘Nobody was hurt?’ Kelly asked.

  Another emphatic head shake. ‘Thank God, no. The ambulances weren’t needed. We were lucky.’

  Kelly was puzzled. ‘So what happened?’

  There wasn’t time for Heather to answer. Just then a teacher appeared leading a line of children. Firemen and ambulance crew walked alongside, helping to keep the line intact as the children spotted the frantic face of their parents in the crowd that now surged forward. Some of the adults leading the children were Offer volunteers, Kelly realised, and seeing one child begin to cry she moved forward herself to catch her hand and lead her on.

  There was more need for vigilance when the surging crowd broke through the hastily erected and obviously ineffective cordon, broke through and crowded around the emerging children, searching, grabbing, pushing.

  ‘Careful,’ Kelly pleaded, as one adult pushed through almost knocking the child whose hand she still held off her feet. Someone was going to be hurt, she thought, picking up the unresisting child and holding her close, her eyes scanning the crowd, looking for an exit from the crush.

  ‘Stand back,’ a loud, authoritative voice silenced
the cries and shouts, stopped everybody in their tracks. West moved into view. ‘All right, now listen to me. All the children are safe. Please, everyone stand back. Now,’ he said loudly when nobody moved.

  Slowly people moved back. The gardai who had been guarding the cordon moved to stand between them and the groups of children that were huddled together in groups, who had been prevented from exiting by the press of adults.

  The headmistress rushed forward into the silence. She nodded at West and at his reciprocal nod she took charge. Within minutes, the parents who were present were reunited with their child and encouraged to leave at once, the headmistress promising a full account at a later date. On the street gardai directed traffic, arriving cars with anxious parents directed one way, reunited families directed another. Ambulances and fire-engines, happily redundant, squeezed through and departed.

  Kelly handed her small charge to a relieved mother and held the hand of another who waited. There were four volunteers from Offer making themselves useful, Kelly noted, mostly with the children, holding a hand, chatting to them, keeping them occupied until someone came to pick them up. Heather had her arm around a teacher who had become very distressed, relinquishing her charge to a young garda who was directed by West to drive the woman home.

  West had spotted Kelly in the crowd but hadn’t yet had a chance to speak to her. Wasn’t sure he would get that chance. What a morning, he thought in exasperation.

  He had arrived in the station that morning full of expectation. Inspector Morrison had been very supportive the previous evening. He had listened, read the reports. West reckoned he could have pin-pointed the exact moment he had reached the line about the Finnish brothel, a tightening of the mouth, a narrowing of his already small eyes, a deepening of the furrow that separated one hairy brow from the other.

  ‘What do you expect to find with a search warrant, Sergeant West?’ he asked, his voice even, giving nothing away that his face hadn’t already.