‘So why haven’t we found her yet?’ Iris asked, trying to keep the worry from her voice.
‘The prints disappear into water, a three-foot drain going from east to west for about a quarter of a mile. After that, the forest floor is covered in leaves, they just spring back up as you walk on them. Once you come in about a couple of hundred yards, there’s just layer upon layer of fallen leaves and branches too damp to break under foot and nigh on impossible to track.’
‘Well, you have a big team, use them. They should be moving like blue-arsed flies, she shouldn’t be that hard to find.’ Slattery was turning to leave. The team were organised to search during daylight hours, beyond that they could do more damage than good. They assumed Eleanor would be back before dark. After all they’d heard about her epilepsy, surely it was more likely she’d be trying to make her way home now, wasn’t it?
‘Anything on the computer?’ Ahearn said quietly as they were turning to leave.
‘What’s that?’ Iris did her best to look down on the tall man before her.
‘The victim’s computer. Some of the lads heard the staff from the care home talking about it. It’s missing, right?’ Ahearn’s voice was hollow. Iris couldn’t blame him for trying to elbow his way onto the murder investigation, search parties were for uniforms, not detectives.
‘Aye, it’s missing. Why? What were they saying exactly?’ Slattery moved nearer Ahearn, interested. Even Iris brightened slightly – overheard conversations, although not admissible, tend to be a hundred times more candid than official interviews.
‘The gist, so far as I can gather, is that she went nowhere without that computer. Some of the lads on the search thought that she might be using it for record-keeping…’
‘Record-keeping?’ Iris’s words were a flash of heat on a cold morning, and she huffed out heavily, watching the smoky air trailing away from her.
‘Some of the lads’ – Ahearn jerked his eyes dramatically towards the woods behind him –‘some of them think she was keeping an eye on her colleagues, making notes of things she didn’t quite approve of.’
‘Bet that made her popular,’ Slattery said flatly.
‘Easy enough to check out.’ Iris was freezing. Hot coffee was a million miles away. It felt as if they’d been standing here for hours, and she began to stamp her feet quietly to distract her from the shivers that were running through her too quickly.
‘Not just that though, is it?’ It looked like Ahearn had it all figured out.
‘Motive?’ Slattery cocked an eye towards Iris. ‘You okay?’
‘Sure, just cold.’ Somewhere deep in her pockets her mobile phone vibrated – she ignored it. Text messages were rarely of life-or-death importance in Iris’s experience.
‘Well, I’d put more money on some of the staff up there doing her in than a kid who hasn’t got the wherewithal to hold her own with kids her own age, wouldn’t you?’ Ahearn seemed oblivious to the low early-morning temperature.
‘Maybe. It wouldn’t explain everything though, would it? Like where the girl is now.’ Slattery said reasonably.
They’d gone through a psychiatric report earlier in the incident room. Eleanor hadn’t been pegged down as someone with violent tendencies; there was a diagnosis of depression, but that was hardly surprising considering where she’d ended up. To Iris, all she seemed to be was a lost kid, trying to find her way, but making a pig’s ear of it.
‘Well, no, but it’s worth thinking about.’ With that Ahearn’s radio crackled and he was gone.
Iris couldn’t get into the car fast enough. She fiddled with the heating knobs and realised it was the first time she’d felt cold in months. She pulled out Pardy’s notes from Julia Stenson’s conversation earlier.
‘Julia Stenson says they would have counted and checked the medication press just before Eleanor turned in for the night. At that stage they administered Eleanor’s evening tablets and everything was perfect when they signed off on the count.’ Iris exhaled sharply.
‘Aye, and by this morning we’re missing half the contents of the meds cupboard.’ Slattery was looking straight ahead, but his expression was taut. ‘It had to be an inside job, Iris, someone who knows the run of that place – you saw the work an outsider would have to do to pull that off.’ It was true, the medicine cabinet was double locked, with keys that were kept in a safe – even if you knew your way around, it would surely take some planning to succeed in getting what you’d need.
‘So, you think Eleanor Marshall did it?’
‘I hope not.’ Slattery sighed. ‘What about Nate Hegarty?’
‘What about him?’
‘Well, he’s got the wherewithal, surely. Being security means he has the keys at least.’
‘Motive?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe Rachel saw something she shouldn’t have… maybe it’s noted on her laptop.’
‘I need to meet this Hegarty bloke,’ Iris said drily.
‘Well, I’m sure he won’t disappoint,’ Slattery said as they made their way back towards Limerick.
‘Anyway, I prefer the idea a lot better than the notion of Eleanor Marshall killing Rachel with a weapon she didn’t have access to and then opening a numerical keypad she wasn’t meant to know the combination to, to get out the door and keep quiet as a mouse while security didn’t register so much as a dicky bird.’
‘See what I mean.’ A smile played around Slattery’s lips. ‘Tell the truth now,’ he said as he elbowed her softly in the upper arm. ‘The only rotten thing about it is that it came from Silky-Socks Ahearn. Apart from that it fits perfectly.’
‘Mmm,’ Iris responded, distracted as she fished deep in her pockets to find her phone, remembering the text message that had sounded earlier. ‘Let’s think about it…for a while.’
Six
Duneata House was as unwelcoming as it was striking. It rose like a bulwark from the brown craggy countryside around it. A grey monolith, it stood proud and stern alone on the empty vista. It was certainly imposing, if she had time to count off the number of windows and chimney pots, she knew she’d have run out of fingers before she made it even halfway through. The huge dark double doors, which should have been the smile of the house’s face, seemed to stand in a permanent frown. The grounds were nice, she had to concede, plenty of work had gone into them to keep them pristine. Still, she couldn’t imagine anything like a normal childhood in such a daunting place. There wasn’t another house around for miles and the neat, narrow road, like a grassy spinal cord, leading to its tall entrance gates, was evidence that it was infrequently visited.
‘This was the Judge’s house,’ Slattery said flatly. ‘Back in the day, that’s what it was known as – The Judge’s House. Marshall bought it for a song, apparently, but he ploughed a fortune into it to bring it back to this.’
As they pulled up on the gravel drive, it loomed above them double-bayed and austere, the stone blacker, the windows darker and the land lusher than Iris would have expected. Two deep lines of tall chimneys trailed across the rooftop, but only two of those pots looked as if they were used regularly these days. It was a study in old-money charm and new-money opulence – Iris figured Marshall might have saved some of his cash and ended up with a more tasteful home. Slattery looked completely out of his comfort zone, as if he’d prefer to do a couple of rounds with Jaws rather than ring the doorbell.
‘You’re too old school for your own good sometimes,’ Iris murmured as she trotted up the steps before him.
‘It’s not old school if it’s listening to your gut and I’ve never liked the look of Kit Marshall – this place isn’t making me any fonder of him, that’s all.’
They waited for a moment for the door to open and when it did, Iris caught her breath; there was something unnerving about seeing someone you’d glimpsed so often in the papers over the years standing at their front door in an old-fashioned smoking jacket and slippers. Kit Marshall was as tall and reedy as she’d imagined him, but his face had a s
teeliness to it that couldn’t be captured by a camera, or perhaps he’d managed to blot it out with good PR and fast answers fired at questions so there was no lingering when he didn’t want it. He’d set himself up as a generous donor to worthy causes, probably to write off the enormous tax bill he’d have had to pay otherwise. The man before her now looked a lot less like Father Christmas than he did the wily businessman that he most certainly was.
‘Ah, yes, I’ve been expecting you since early this morning,’ he said, peering down his long nose disdainfully at their identity cards. ‘Of course, the commissioner was onto me first thing. Those fools up at Curlew Hall lost Eleanor, he tells me.’ He held the door open for them even if they had the distinct impression they were not really welcome. When he closed it behind them, Iris could have sworn she heard it echo.
The entrance hall was a lot larger and even more opulent than she’d have guessed from the outside, but it was not the double staircase, the original panelling or the low-slung chandelier – that wouldn’t have looked out of place in an Emirate palace – that caught Iris’s eye. Rather, it was the girl, a paler, blonder, green-eyed, younger copy of Eleanor who leaned over the top of the balustrade with a frightened expression on her face that made the biggest impression. The younger sister – Karena. Iris had seen her photograph in a newspaper piece about the family that she’d found on their journey out. It was hard to match this vision to the kid who Eleanor had spoken to every weekend as soon as she got her phone in her hands. It seemed as much as she could do was to fit in a long conversation with Karena before her phone was locked away again for another week.
‘Right, well, I suppose you may as well come in here, it’s got a fire and Susan will be along any minute.’
Kit Marshall positioned himself before the fire, overseeing the room with an unreadable expression, but certainly to Iris it didn’t seem like worry or grief. He had already been briefed about his daughter’s disappearance from Curlew Hall. The police commissioner himself had called, before there was any danger of it becoming the leading news story of the day. Marshall was as well connected as you got to any seat of power you’d like to name in Ireland. Now, he rubbed dry red eyes and kept his voice low and even, it occasionally rose at the end of his unfinished anguished sentences – he almost managed the right blend of worry, despair and mannish strength.
His wife, when she arrived, seemed to be a larger version of the familiar face that stood by her husband’s side so often on their news feeds. She was still glossy, glitzy and at least a decade younger than her husband, but there was something more vital about her. It probably came with having all day to spend in the gym and the beautician’s, still, you couldn’t but admire her, she was in great shape – especially compared to her more uptight, overbearing husband. Perhaps they were the same age, but they looked like people from different eras. Susan Marshall had a peculiar glamour to her that would have marked her out of her own set. It was – Iris hated the term – trashy. As if she was trying too hard to let you know that they were wealthy. Perversely, Iris found herself liking Kit less the more she studied his comparatively vulgar wife.
‘Susan, dear, maybe the detectives would like some tea. Can you call for some?’ he suggested.
‘No, we’re fine for now. Thank you,’ Slattery said slowly, but his eyes took too much in and there was no mistaking he set Marshall on edge. Perhaps Kit had met guards like Slattery before, or maybe he’d just met Slattery, it didn’t matter – there was an unspoken mutual dislike hanging between them in the air.
‘As you can imagine, it’s come as something of a blow to us,’ Kit began. ‘My wife…well, she’s just…’He looked about the room, as if the words could be conjured from the chintz on the sofa or the oil paintings on the wall. ‘It’s an awful tragedy, that poor young woman, impossible to get your head around it.’
‘Yes, it’s come as a terrible blow to her family too.’
‘I mean, that place has top-class fees, you’d bloody think…’ Kit stopped, seemed to gather himself. ‘Well, it’s just so…’
‘Kit, come on now, it’s just a shock,’ Susan soothed him.
‘It must be a terrible shock for you both.’ Iris leaned towards Susan. ‘There’s a huge search party combing the woods now, so hopefully…’ Her words drifted off. They didn’t really know what they were dealing with; needle in haystack territory, but the Marshalls didn’t need to know that. Susan nodded, mumbled something nobody quite made out and Kit coughed, to take the guards’ attention away from her.
‘Can you tell us about Eleanor, Mr Marshall?’ Iris asked, trying to sound neutral, trying for all the world to pretend that there was anything vaguely normal in a daughter born to all of this ending up at a place like Curlew Hall.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t know where to start. She was a sweet child, until a few short years ago and then it seemed she changed and became very disturbed…’
‘You mean she had mental-health issues?’ Slattery cut in.
‘Dear God, no. Nothing like that at all. I’ve always thought it was jealousy, you know, she’s never been quite… well, I mean everything. She’s the complete opposite of her sister, Karena – academically, sports ability, social graces.’ Marshall looked about the room, waited a beat. ‘I don’t know, two children so close in every way, and yet, so completely damnably different. It’s not as if we didn’t try, but it seemed the more we put in, the worse it got.’
‘Worse?’ Iris prompted.
‘Oh, yes, let me tell you, Inspector—’ He stopped a moment, checking that he had the rank correct. ‘It started with small things, running the bath until it overflowed, locking Susan out when they were here alone, you know, the sort of pranks that could drive a normal person mad on a daily basis, but then…’
‘She attacked Karena,’ Susan said flatly.
‘Of course, she denied it, even had Karena lying for her – between them they blamed everyone they could think of – but in the end… well, you can’t have a child like that and not take responsibility for them.’
‘So, you sent her to Curlew Hall?’ Iris managed to keep the judgement from her voice, even if it dominated her thoughts.
‘Of course not, we sent her off to a psychologist first, then away to boarding school – that was a complete disaster. She was expelled – so much for that. In the summer she came back, she set fire to a cottage, just a few miles over from here.’
‘Arson?’
‘If only that was all. No, it turned out she’d had an argument with a local kid, locked him inside and set fire to the place. If it wasn’t for Susan going to look for him… well… who knows? We were lucky she wasn’t accused of attempted murder.’ Now Iris could see why he’d aged so badly.
‘But she wasn’t?’ Slattery asked.
‘No. I spoke with the family, assured them it wouldn’t happen again. They were very kind…’ He looked towards the window; let his words peter off softly.
‘Indeed,’ Iris said eventually; they all knew what had been left unsaid, Kit Marshall had paid them off. She could fill in the blanks from there. Then with some input from a psychiatrist, maybe the GP and certainly some of his friends in the department of justice, he’d paid the fees to Curlew Hall and managed to slip in his daughter there. Amazing how any problem could be swept beneath the carpet if you had the money to buy a big enough brush.
‘She was very challenging.’ His voice had dipped further, his eyes as near puppy dog as any wolf can go. ‘We couldn’t watch her all the time. It came to the point where everything, everyone, made her more frustrated. I suppose we just weren’t prepared or, that is, equipped to take care of her as she needed.’ He had all the right words, drawn from a lifetime of diplomacy. A dab of his white linen handkerchief to redden his eyes and he might even fool someone. ‘And then there was the epilepsy. We brought her to every consultant, but, really, she could have died at any time and that was when we knew she was safer in proper care. She was fourteen years old by the time she moved to Curlew Hall.
’ He looked across at his wife. It wasn’t clear if he was inviting her to speak or warning her to keep quiet.
‘She was only just fourteen when we had to let her go.’ Susan’s voice was Limerick city, even if it had been polished over with a posh veneer. ‘It was the hardest thing, you can’t imagine.’ She met Iris’s eyes, the sisterhood. Kit smiled tightly across at Susan as she continue speaking. ‘I have to confess I found it very hard. They weren’t keen on us visiting. I suppose it’s all about getting her head straight.’
‘So, you haven’t actually seen her since?’ Iris kept her voice clipped, neutral. Her eyes soaked in every tiny movement in Susan’s face.
‘No. It was for the best, or so we thought,’ Kit said.
‘I saw her.’ Susan turned towards the dying fire. She got up from her seat and gathered four logs, throwing them across the glowing cinders. They sent a flurry of sparks up the blackened chimney. ‘The last time, well, it was almost too awful for words.’ She shuddered, drawing up her hands close to her chest, as though her palms cradled something precious.
‘Tell us, Mrs Marshall. Anything that can give us an insight at this stage can only help our enquiries.’ Slattery’s voice was gentle, an unexpected balmy quality to it so it was as smooth as chocolate, soothing away your worries.
‘It was in summer, about a week before her birthday. Remember, Kit?’
Kit shifted uncomfortably in his chair. ‘I really don’t see how going over these things will help anyone; raking up the past does no good.’ His voice was granite and he cleared his throat, perhaps trying to shake the coldness from it.
Why She Ran Page 6