In Deep Water

by Sam Blake

  Cathy released her breath like a balloon exploding, ‘It’s not her. It’s not her. Oh holy God, it’s not her.’ She clamped a hand over her mouth to stop herself from screaming.

  ‘Absolutely sure?’ O’Rourke’s voice was loud beside her. She turned and buried her head in his shoulder. She could feel his arms around her as she fought back the sobs escaping from inside. It took her a moment before she could speak. Then she pulled back from him, looking up into his face.

  ‘Yes. Totally. She hates nail polish and would never have a Hollywood – she’s allergic to the wax.’

  24

  Cathy pummelled the punch bag like she’d never hit anything before, pounding it until her muscles burnt, until she reached the wall, and then went beyond it. The gym was empty, the strip lighting reflecting off the polished pine floor, one of McIntyre’s mixes on the stereo, ‘Eye of the Tiger’.

  Left hook, right hook, snap kick. Her foot hit the red and white vinyl bag squarely, sending it flying in a broad arc, the chains attaching it to the ceiling rattling.

  But it was stopped dead halfway, caught in mid swing by The Boss.

  Taut as piano wire, Cathy was poised, ready to send the bag on a reverse axis as soon as it came back to her. But it wasn’t coming back. She bent double at the waist, panting, sweat pouring off her.

  ‘Hey, girl.’ Niall McIntyre took a step towards her, steadying the bag.

  Cathy tried to catch her breath, ‘Hey Boss.’

  Their fists met in a salute.

  ‘What’s the news?’

  Cathy grimaced, avoided his eye, still bent over again, her gloves on her thighs. Her heart was pounding, thundering in her ears.

  ‘Easy does it, take your time.’ He let the bag swing free. Rubbed her shoulder.

  She didn’t know how to say it. Paused, grappling with the emotion inside her.

  She spat her gum shield into her glove.

  ‘We found a body.’

  Her voice wasn’t much more than a whisper. Still bending over at the waist she didn’t see him pale. He didn’t speak, gave Cathy the time she needed.

  ‘In the mountains. I had to go up to the mountains and identify her, to see if it was Sarah Jane.’ She took a deep breath and straightened up, but the next sentence came out in a sob, ‘It wasn’t her. Thank God it wasn’t her.’

  He threw his arm around her shoulders, ‘Thank God.’

  She barely heard him as he guided her to the low bench that ran around the edge of the gym. Sitting down, Cathy pressed her shoulders to the cold brick wall and stared blindly at the raised ring in the middle of the gym, red and white ropes connecting the padded corners of the square like sentences in a story.

  ‘Tell me.’

  McIntyre was leaning forward beside her, his elbows on his knees, his navy-blue vest revealing his tattooed, muscular arms. He might be pushing seventy but he was the wiriest, fittest person Cathy knew, had a core of pure steel. She took a deep breath, her breathing calming.

  ‘It was someone else. Similar age, the pathologist thinks, it’s hard to tell . . . But anyway, it wasn’t her.’

  McIntyre took it in, ‘Do they know what happened to her, the girl?’

  Cathy shook her head, ‘PM is today. She was pretty badly beaten and her head and hands had been hacked off.’ Cathy paused, ‘Well not hacked – pretty cleanly removed, actually.’

  McIntyre nodded, getting it. ‘So someone doesn’t want anyone to know who she is.’ He paused for a moment. ‘That’s a gang thing, you know, Eastern European. It’s their way of keeping order. Remember that guy in the canal?’

  ‘The guy in the suitcase?’ The investigating team had ruled out gang involvement early on, but the press had continued to speculate. ‘They thought for ages that that was a gang feud.’ She paused, ‘They’re checking missing persons now. Unless she was an illegal there should be some trace of her. Pathologist doesn’t think she’d been there long, maybe a day or so.’

  ‘Well that’s good. Harder when the body’s decomposed. Still, taking off her hands and head is pretty definite.’

  ‘Prof Saunders said it was like the guy knew what he was doing. I mean not that he regularly went around chopping people up, but that maybe he was trained as a butcher or something.’ Cathy grimaced. ‘He removed a piece of skin on her ankle too that could have been a tattoo, but the good news is that her blood group is AB negative. It’s really rare – only found in one per cent of the population. Doesn’t tell us who she is, but the guys are going through the European missing persons lists so we might get a hit.’

  ‘Lucky to find her at all. Those mountains keep their secrets.’

  *

  After her workout Cathy felt more able to tackle the incident room. Dragging her hair back into its messy ponytail she shoved her spare training gear back into the bag she kept permanently in her boot. She’d come straight from the station in Dún Laoghaire. O’Rourke had dropped her – silent, unable to speak – back to her car, and she’d hit the M50, heading straight for the gym.

  Now her muscles ached almost as much as her heart, and she was grateful that the changing room was empty – rare around lunch time. Despite the shower and the lightweight black V-neck T-shirt and stretch pants she’d changed into, she was still sweating. She paused for a moment, resting her head against the cold steel of the locker, her eyes closed, grateful for the moment.

  Reaching for her phone she turned her back to the locker door and checked her messages to see if she’d missed anything. A tiny part of her, the eternally positive bit of her psyche that found the upside in everything, kept thinking maybe, just maybe, Sarah Jane would text.

  She hadn’t.

  But Aleksy had. Tried several times but getting voicemail. Don’t want to leave a message. Will keep trying xx

  Damn. At least he’d keep trying. And he’d signed it with two kisses.

  Part of Cathy smiled to herself while the other part sighed. Even her eternally positive side was struggling with this, was boxing with the shadows, ducking and diving and trying not to get beaten down. And right now she really didn’t think she had the emotional capacity to start a relationship, no matter how much her body was telling her it wanted to.

  Shoving her phone in her pocket, Cathy headed out of the locker room to her car. There was something about mindlessly beating the shit out of a punch bag that helped her sort things out in her head, reorganise them so she could think clearly, and she’d really needed that today. Not that it had brought any solutions, but it had made her feel better. She’d spent a lot of time in the gym after the bomb blast, trying to come to terms with everything that had happened. The FBI case against Kuteli, the Russian who had orchestrated the attempt on her life, might have been a massive success and had landed Kuteli behind bars, but Cathy knew she’d never be completely satisfied until she knew he was a dead man. As well as the bit of her psyche that found something good in everything – the bit that had got her through all the shit that had happened – there was another part that didn’t forgive. She was quite sure Kuteli was continuing his operations from inside prison, and until he’d lost everything that meant anything to him, like she had done, a little bit of her would still be after him. Some things you never forgot.

  The tech guys reckoned the only reason she wasn’t dead was because the two gougers who had booby-trapped her car had only been able to get their hands on a small amount of Semtex at such short notice. They’d probably reckoned on her filling her near-empty petrol tank as well – but she’d had so much on her mind that day, petrol had been the last thing she’d been thinking about. The car had been running on fumes.

  Sometimes she wondered if she’d ever get back to the place she had been in mentally before Pete’s party – that still felt like the start of it all – when her biggest problem had been staying away from chocolate right before a fight or having the hots for her boss. The pregnancy, losing her baby, almost losing her life, they had all become mixed up into something that had changed he
r, had made her more vulnerable on the inside, but harder on the outside. She couldn’t let anything else hurt her now. It would take her too close to the edge.

  She couldn’t lose Sarah Jane. It was that simple. They were going to find her, and when they did, when they caught up with whoever had taken her, Cathy was going to make personally sure he or they knew exactly how it felt to lose something precious.

  25

  ‘This it?’ Cathy’s heart was thumping as 007 pulled the DDU car up outside a low-rise apartment block. She had literally just left the gym and hit the M50 when O’Rourke had called to say they might have a breakthrough. She’d headed straight to Dún Laoghaire, collected her firearm and dashed out to Fanning who was already waiting for her, the Vectra’s engine running.

  A call had come in from Ballymun Garda Station about a missing girl. A missing girl who was about the same age and height as their Jane Doe. Who lived in Ballymun. What were the chances of it being unconnected to Sarah Jane’s disappearance? As she had listened to O’Rourke on speakerphone, Cathy’s mouth had gone dry.

  As Fanning had pulled out of the station car park, she’d got straight on the phone, willing McIntyre to pick up. He had the gym phone on divert to his mobile, and thankfully it hadn’t rung for long. ‘I need the low down on the O’Connors . . .’

  Fanning turned off the engine and the unmarked Vectra’s headlights, checking Google Maps on his phone. He took a look out of the window. ‘Looks like it, and the lights are on. What did that coach of yours say about the family?’

  ‘Well respected, keep out of trouble. Eithne O’Connor runs that flower stall at the top of Grafton Street. The missing girl is her granddaughter, her brother reported it.’

  ‘Parents?’

  ‘Boy said their mother was dead, overdose. Grandmother brought them up.’

  *

  It took a few minutes for Eithne O’Connor to open the front door, a few minutes in which Fanning had paced across the landing to the huge floor-to-ceiling window on the fourth floor and had a good look up and down the road, a few minutes in which Cathy had felt her heart beat so hard she could hear it.

  As the glossed council blue door opened an inch, the rattling safety chain restricting its movement, Cathy could see the face of an attractive older woman, heavily made up, her bleached hair swept back in a complicated up-do, her fringe heavy. She looked like a sixties film star.

  ‘Eithne O’Connor?’ Cathy tried to keep her voice level, unemotional.

  ‘Who’s asking?’

  ‘Gardaí,’ Cathy flipped open her warrant card. ‘We had a call from your grandson Jazz, he’s very concerned about his sister Daniella.’

  ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘Perhaps we could talk to you? We believe Daniella may have been missing for a few days?’

  ‘She’s not here but that doesn’t mean she’s missing.’

  ‘Could we come in, perhaps? We’d like to chat to yourself and to Jazz.’

  Eithne O’Connor didn’t move, ‘Like I said, he’s not here.’

  ‘Would you be able to call him? Or perhaps I could?’

  Eithne O’Connor unhooked the chain and opened the door, ‘Reported Daniella missing, did he? Well he would have been the last to see her. She’s strong willed, that one, like her mother. Hardly ever here.’ She shook her head, ‘She works in that swanky restaurant, The Rookery. Reckons she’ll get a job in TV or modelling if she plays her cards right. They all do, the girls who work there.’ She paused, ‘Sure they have to do a bit more than take orders to make that happen.’

  Cathy worked hard to keep her face deadpan. Daniella O’Connor worked at The Rookery. When the boy, Jazz, had called into the station he’d been nervous and anxious, anxiety that had got much worse when they’d taken him into an interview room. According to the Garda who had logged the report he’d been upset and confused, unable to remember the name of the place she’d worked or where it was exactly. But from the weight of concern in Eithne O’Connor’s face, the sadness in her eyes, Cathy had a feeling she’d reached her own conclusions. It was more than likely that she’d seen the news about Sarah Jane going missing from The Rookery, heard the reports of the body they’d found in the mountains that had ended up on the lunchtime news. She already suspected the body was Daniella’s, Cathy was sure of it.

  ‘Can we come in, please?’

  *

  Walking up the hill towards Keane’s Field, the wind whipping the stray curls from her ponytail across her face, Cathy was still reeling from her conversation with Jazz’s grandmother. Her stomach had been churning going into the flat. She’d had to break bad news before, had seen relatives hysterical with grief, some silenced, almost catatonic with shock. Eithne O’Connor had been neither, had listened to Cathy explain that they’d found a body, quietly, calmly. Standing in the middle of her living room, her arms crossed tightly, she’d lit a cigarette, the tremble in her hand the only sign that she was affected by the news. She’d wanted to be on her own, had refused when Cathy had offered to call a friend or relative.

  ‘No point, is there, it might not be her. No point in getting upset about something that hasn’t happened, is there?’

  She’d given Cathy one of Daniella’s hairbrushes, long blond hairs entwined in the bristles. The DNA contained in the root follicles would give them an answer. If this were a movie they’d have a result, whether positive or negative, in hours. In the real world, Cathy knew, it would take much longer. Then she’d asked where Daniella’s brother Jazz was, and the pieces had come together suddenly like someone had punched her hard in the head. ‘He’s up by Keane’s Field with that mad horse. Krypton he calls it. It’s wild but he reckons he can tame it. Doesn’t talk about anything else.’

  Sarah Jane was writing an article about urban cowboys, and both she and Daniella had worked at The Rookery. Now they were both missing.

  And in the missing persons report, Jazz had said that Daniella had a tattoo on her ankle – exactly where the PM had identified a piece of skin missing from body of the girl they’d found in the mountains. They wouldn’t know until they had a DNA match, but the circumstantial evidence that the body they had found was Daniella O’Connor’s was piling up.

  Cathy wasn’t ready to think about what that could mean for Sarah Jane.

  Had they chatted in work and Daniella mentioned to Sarah Jane that her little brother was into horses? Had Sarah Jane spoken to him?

  Whatever had happened, Jazz O’Connor could be the key to it all. Sarah Jane couldn’t be lying in the forest somewhere, or hidden in the mountains in a bog. It wasn’t going to happen like that. Cathy wouldn’t let it.

  Cathy shivered. The wind up here was biting, the fields lit only by glimpses of moonlight shining through the clouds. But she knew it wasn’t the wind that was chilling her. O’Rourke was already waiting for Daniella’s medical records to check her blood group, but the timing of her disappearance and the discovery of the body, the efforts to prevent them from identifying it, all raised red flags. And Daniella’s photo, sitting on the mantelpiece in her grandmother’s flat, had made Cathy start when she spotted it. If the same guy was involved here and was into tall slim young girls with long blond hair, he’d certainly found them.

  Cathy needed to talk to Jazz.

  She was probably mad to try and find him now, but every hour was another hour Sarah Jane was missing, another hour when . . . Cathy curtailed that line of thought abruptly.

  Cathy had tried Jazz’s mobile number but it had gone straight to voicemail. She looked around the empty hillside now – how on earth was she supposed to find him up here? She’d told Fanning to stay in the car, reckoned he had Gardaí written all over him; and whatever chance she had of getting these lads to talk to her, they’d run a mile if they saw him. Now she was beginning to wonder if she should have gotten him to drive further around, to start looking on the other side of the hill.

  Ahead of her Cathy could see a path worn in the mud, dark against the dark of t
he grass, vanishing over the crest of the hill. Pulling her jacket around her she could feel her boot heels sinking into the soft ground. She was mad, one hundred per cent certifiable, but she knew she wouldn’t sleep unless she tried to find him tonight. How far could he have gone? How long would he stay out here?

  Cathy wondered whether Sarah Jane had walked along this path, had she come up here? This is where the lads from the flats hung out, where the horses grazed – you could see them on the crest of the hill from the motorway.

  Then Cathy saw them. As she reached the top of the ridge, below her a herd of horses had gathered around an old plastic bath full of water. The horses shifted, and in their midst she could see a boy brushing down a piebald stallion. It was a huge horse, bigger than all the others, looked like it was part cart horse. Even from this distance, in the half-light she could see the long white hair over his hooves. The other horses, piebald and black, their thick coats shaggy and flecked with mud, stirred, and the boy looked up fast, like he’d been caught at something.

  Cathy stayed where she was, waited for him to take her in. She lifted her hand in a half wave. He went back to brushing the horse. She couldn’t see his expression from this distance but his body language was pure scowl. Tentatively Cathy started to head down the gentle slope towards him, stopping about fifty yards away – close enough to be heard but not close enough to spook him. Cathy pulled her warrant card out of her pocket.

  ‘You Jazz O’Connor?’

  ‘Who’s asking?’

  ‘My name’s Cat Connolly, I’m with the Gardaí. You reported your sister missing and I need you to tell me a bit more about her. We want to find her.’