‘Where is my daughter’s file now?’
‘We’re looking for it. I’m afraid since Rachel McDermott took it out, it hasn’t been seen since,’ Slattery said, perhaps enjoying the prickly disquiet that had settled in the room.
Marshall walked towards the door, stood for a moment, his hand on the frame, holding it open for their exit. ‘Is that all?’ He obviously had more important things to do than shoot the breeze with Iris and Slattery.
‘One thing, where had you been last evening?’ Slattery turned slowly, enjoying the slight stretch in the silence.
‘I was in Dublin. I was giving a lecture in Trinity College. If you’re trying to insinuate something sordid, Sergeant, it was a record turnout, one hundred and fifty witnesses. I was there all day and I had only just arrived back an hour or so when you started hammering on my front door. Have you quite finished now?’
‘Well, for now, sir, yes.’
And then, suddenly, Marshall was marching them to the door as if they were participating in a fire drill and it was vital that they leave the building.
Twenty
Slattery was too long a garda to disregard his gut and if it was a feeling about a case, Lord knows he’d have been onto it like a fruit fly in summertime. But in this instance, he had ignored that slight shadowy feeling that glided somewhere at his back. He had moved through the incident room as if he hadn’t a care in the world when, clearly, this inkling at his shoulder was becoming a new familiar reminder. Maureen.
When his phone rang, he knew before he answered that it could not be good.
‘Have you seen her today?’ Angela never uttered the name ‘Dad’. Really, Slattery wasn’t sure what name she’d use if she had to call out to him in public. He knew it was because he’d never earned the title. He supposed, on good days, she probably thought of him as Slattery, but there hadn’t been many of those over the years.
‘I drove by this morning, but you know, she won’t entertain me any time before lunch,’ he said stoically.
‘Well, she’s not there. It looks like she hasn’t been there since yesterday. Her dinner dishes are in the sink, there’s half a beef stew stuck to the pot as if she just walked out the door on it.’
‘I thought you were calling in to see her every night—’
‘Don’t you bloody dare!’ She cut into his words savagely.
‘No, I didn’t mean that, I just assumed, and so… look, I wouldn’t mind dropping by but you have to let me know…’ The truth was, he drove by every evening after work. Sometimes he just parked across the road, watched the routine unfold with lights switched off, Maureen padding upstairs, lights turned on and eventual complete darkness. She didn’t want him anywhere near her. Not yet. Not until she had to have someone watch over her.
‘Oh, please.’ Angela sighed. ‘So, from that, we can assume, you haven’t been near the place since God knows when, right?’
He knew – maybe not because she was his own flesh and blood, perhaps, more so because he’d been a cop for so long – her irritation was not just with him. This angry voice had as much to do with her current fear as it had that familiar deep-seated bitterness towards her father.
‘Fine,’ she said and she hung up the phone.
He rang her back immediately.
‘I’m on my way over there now. Are you at the house?’
‘Yes, but I’m going to have to start searching for her, after I’ve finished opening the windows to let out the smell of the burning saucepan and disintegrating stew.’
‘Fine, I’ll see you in a few minutes.’ He mumbled something at June as he made his way out of the incident room, could feel her eyes on him and he didn’t need to check that she knew he wasn’t on the case for now.
The city was mercifully clear, with traffic moving along at a decent pace. Slattery hardly noticed the ominous sky and murky river, but he spotted a huge raven perched on Thomond Bridge and thought back to some old saying about rooks and death and long waits and… ah, it was just nonsense anyway. Still, he shivered at the menacing water below him. He’d been on too many river trawls as a young garda for November darkness to ever leave him entirely.
Maureen’s house was freezing when he pushed open the front door. The heavy stink of burning dinner clung forcefully to the air, as though it would never quite give in to the morning cold. Angela looked like death, her round face managing to be pinched and drawn with a worry she would never voice to Slattery.
‘She’s been missing since five yesterday evening,’ she said, checking her watch. Suddenly it seemed to Slattery that his daughter was changing before his eyes, as if her mother’s diagnosis of dementia had somehow spilled over into her own features.
‘She won’t be gone far.’ He tried to sound solid and reassuring – there was no point in hoping for dependable, not with Angela. ‘Is her coat missing? Her bag? Anything else?’
‘Her coat’s gone and at five o’clock in the evening, the best we can hope is that she was wearing an apron and her ordinary everyday clothes.’ Angela was searching through the kitchen units. ‘No sign of her handbag either, so we can assume…’ Perhaps she knew enough to know that with dementia they couldn’t really assume anything.
‘Right, so that’s a navy coat?’ Slattery waited for a withering glance from his daughter to confirm. He pulled out his phone and called an old colleague who had stayed out of trouble long enough to remain in uniform but never have the chance to move into stripes or command. He passed on a description of Maureen: ‘Grey hair, five four, overweight, but not obese, a homely housewife and mother with blue eyes, and a determined expression,’ was how he tactfully described her; well, it was better than saying grim-faced. Maureen was just sixty, but she was an old-fashioned sixty, with tweed skirts and a fondness for head scarves, knotted into submission between her first and second chin. Of course, he couldn’t use this description before Angela – she might too easily see herself in it.
‘They’ll circulate that; it’ll be in every garda’s ear in the city within the next five minutes.’ It was funny, but a year ago, he wouldn’t have wanted any connection between his job and Maureen – and here he was now, when she’d get no mileage out of it, hauling in any favours he might still have to find her.
‘You said she wouldn’t have gone far. I’m going to head towards the church,’ Angela said, pulling her coat about her and heading for the door.
‘Right,’ Slattery said and looked around the kitchen one more time. ‘You’ve checked outside, round the back, the shed and…?’ His voice drifted off when he met her eyes. ‘Of course, you have, sorry.’ He followed her out the front door, stood for a while, looking up and down the street. Many of the old neighbours had left here now, moved off to slightly more affluent homes, perhaps; Maureen would have liked that too, once. Slattery was never going to be one of those men who wanted to somehow advance his social standing by moving to the right area. In fact, he held any kind of social movement – particularly any desire for an upward climb – with a mixture of disdain and derision.
‘I’ll ring you… if I find her,’ Angela said, and it struck him that perhaps, until she said it, she hadn’t planned on letting him know, assuming that it mightn’t bother him either way; depressingly, it wasn’t even meant to be a taunt.
‘Sure,’ he said, heading for his car. ‘And I’ll ring you.’ He sat in the driver’s seat, drummed his fingers on the steering wheel – the truth was, he had no idea where Maureen might be now. He knew nothing about her, not really. He was familiar only with who she had been over thirty years ago.
He turned over the key in the engine and drove out of the little cul de sac of houses and onto the main Dublin Road. There was one place that now occurred to him, but it was a good five-mile walk. It was unlikely even Maureen would have the pig-headedness to take that on in the darkness of Limerick countryside with her injuries only healing after the car crash that had sent their worlds spinning. Her car had been written off and, for now, there was no ment
ion of her replacing it. Dementia isn’t a condition that lends itself easily to driving and a possible manslaughter charge hanging over her was enough to put her off the idea for good. He thought of Maureen, as black as any night in that dark coat, it made him shiver to think there was even a possibility that she would make the journey on foot.
Soon, he was out on the motorway, but only for half a mile before turning off. He turned into a narrow road, which was mean and miserable, wet and potholed – and depressingly familiar to Slattery, even though it was too long since he’d travelled it. The car jolted uncomfortably along the uneven track and when he pulled in next to a high weathered wall he felt as if he knew every inch of this place from memory, because it seemed nothing had changed here in all the years. He walked towards heavy iron gates, crosses wrought into their centre and painted white against the rusted black.
It was an old-fashioned cemetery, graves laid out in two halves with a central path just wide enough to accommodate a hearse for new arrivals. At its end, a marble altar was surrounded by various saints and winged angels who were perhaps meant to inspire some kind of hope in mourners that their loved ones were being looked over.
Slattery saw her immediately. She was the only other person here; it felt as if they were the only people around for miles. He stood for a moment, watching her; she was standing stock still, staring down at that modest headstone. He walked quickly towards her, half afraid to wonder if she’d been standing in that same spot all night long. As he neared her, he could see she was shaking and he couldn’t be sure if it was cold or shock or something much, much worse – but what?
‘Maureen.’ He tried to keep his voice calm and even. ‘Are you ready now? I’ve brought the car round.’ He reached out for her, hoped that if he didn’t make a big deal out of things, she might just trot along with him and he could get her home and warm and maybe call out her doctor to give her a once over.
‘There you are.’ She smiled at him, a rigid frightened movement of her lips that didn’t reach her eyes, which were filled with tears. ‘I thought you got lost on me, it feels like I’ve been waiting forever…’ She shook her head a little crossly. ‘But sure isn’t that the story of our lives?’
‘Well, come along, I’m here now.’ He placed his hand around her back and the movement felt somehow strange and right. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d touched his wife, even a casual rubbing together of their skin. There were no opportunities – they didn’t brush against each other on the stairs or lie next to each other at night.
‘God, it’s cold out here.’ Her teeth were chattering.
‘It is that,’ Slattery said and he looked back at his sister’s grave, catching just a glimpse of her name – Una – and the small line of words his father had insisted they add as if it were an epilogue to her life. Gone too soon. Other families had written things on their loved one’s headstones like, Always missed or Pray for the soul of. It struck Slattery at the time that his father was right. It was too simple – gone too soon – because they would never really be able to let her go completely.
Wasn’t that it with murders, though? Wasn’t it why he’d joined the Gardai and why he’d so badly wanted into the Murder Team? It was the reason he’d married Maureen – Una’s best friend, the first one to find her that terrible evening. In the beginning she’d talked about nothing else, but as the time went on, it seemed to drift away from them – without it, without Una – there wasn’t really much more to tie them together. Apart from Angela. That sent a creeping tingle of guilt through him. He looked back once more at his sister’s grave. Its modesty was almost a recrimination: telling him, he should have done better. Perhaps that’s why Maureen had ended up here today. Maybe Una was letting him know that it might not be too late to make something of the commitments he’d made all those years ago.
Back at the car, Slattery pulled his collar closer to his neck, opened the passenger door for Maureen and waited until she’d tucked the damp material of her coat around her.
‘There was something,’ she murmured as he sat in the driver’s seat next to her. He tried to ignore a bulky quilt of cloud advancing from the west. It looked as if the rain was not finished with them yet.
‘Oh?’ he said, now turning his thoughts back to Eleanor Marshall and the interviews they’d been carrying out over in Curlew Hall. He was good at letting her prattle on while he escaped into his thoughts and punctuated her one-sided conversation with meaningless words of acknowledgement; he’d had a lifetime of practice.
‘It was a boy…’ She looked out the window as he turned the car. Perhaps they both rested their eyes one more time on Una’s gravestone in the distance. ‘Yes, that was it, Una told me it was a secret, but she was going to meet a boy that day.’
Slattery froze, felt as if the very blood in his veins had turned to ice. The car conked out beneath him and he stared at Maureen, who seemed to be completely unaware of what she’d just said.
Twenty-One
Day 5
‘You look like shit,’ Slattery told her as she hung her jacket on the old coat stand that stood to crooked attention by the incident-room door.
‘And you think you look any better?’ Iris said.
‘I’ve never traded on my looks,’ he said, and she knew he was just trying to knock a retort from her.
‘Well, it’s a bit late for you to start trying now, I suppose,’ she said sweetly.
‘Apparently, Byrne’s been prowling about already,’ Slattery said lazily. None of them bothered Slattery too much. Iris wondered if it was because he had no ambition and nothing much to lose or if he’d always known that, somehow, he was smarter than any of them. He looked sometimes at Byrne as if he’d wipe the floor with him, if he could be bothered. She’d seen him wriggle out from certain dismissal, with an ease that said much about his survival instincts.
Iris walked to the case board and spent some time organizing her thoughts about the details there. Too soon, the incident room began to fill up with their colleagues, the buzz of technology gearing up for a busy day. Coats were flung across chairs and there was a stampede, with yesterday’s mug and spoon in hand, to the corner where a kettle was on constant boil at this hour. There comes a point in an investigation when the early-morning latte and freshly dry-cleaned suit are forsaken in favour of instant coffee and whatever looked cleanest on the bedroom floor. Any news?
‘What’s that?’ Byrne was standing behind her.
‘Nothing, just making small talk,’ Slattery said as if he was a man who couldn’t manage a gloomy silence with the best of them.
‘Getting ready for the morning briefing, and the press conference, eh?’ Byrne said, but his voice was clipped as if there was something he wanted to say, but he was holding back. Then he lowered his head. ‘You called to Marshall yesterday?’ It was a question, but it didn’t require an answer.
‘Yes, sir. We have the press room booked and we’ll have packs made up beforehand,’ Iris said, standing up to look him in the eye.
‘Well done, carry on.’ He made his way out of the incident room with a slightly lighter step than usual. ‘Just give me a shout an hour before the conference,’ he said as he headed back to his well-appointed office.
They already knew about the body. Iris had heard it on the news; of course, they couldn’t confirm anything either way, not yet. You could smell it, here in the press room – probably the best room in Corbally, the equivalent of the good parlour in many an old Irish house. Still, for all the piped-in air freshener, there was no mistaking the scent of the baying journalists. It seemed half the media in the country had turned out – no mean feat considering that they’d only had three hours’ notice. Still, they were sitting or standing where seats had run out, cameras poised, microphones and phones ready to record every detail that Iris was prepared to give and hoping for a few that she wasn’t.
The truth was, Iris knew, she’d only called this to get a more up-to-date photograph of Eleanor in front of people’
s noses. The earlier one – the one that Kit Marshall had issued – had been of a girl four years younger than the image snapped by Suz Mullins in the week before Eleanor had disappeared. It was a lovely photograph – no doubt about it, Eleanor was certainly photogenic. Suz had managed to catch her off guard, a moment suspended between patting a stray dog who’d wandered into the unit and looking towards the camera. Eleanor’s skin was flawless, her eyes clear and her hair silky – unlike a lot of the images of teenage girls that the press would normally have to work with, she was make-up free, no ugly smears of shade and shadow to make her into anything she wasn’t. It was an endearing image; one that Iris hoped would resonate with the public.
Slattery cleared his throat as Iris, the Marshalls and Byrne all trooped towards the podium. It was loud enough to cause a ripple of interest that spread like a Mexican wave to silence in the room.
‘Thank you all for coming here today,’ Iris began, knowing only too well that if a story had been bigger on the east coast, they wouldn’t have managed to get a full front row. ‘I’m Acting Inspector Iris Locke and I’m leading out the Murder Team on the investigation into the death of Rachel McDermott.’ She halted for a moment, before introducing the Marshalls and Byrne and giving the one or two old-school reporters a chance to scribble down the names. ‘I think you’re all aware that another body was discovered out at Curlew Cross.’
‘Can you give us a name yet?’ an eager reporter shouted from the back of the room.
‘Yes. I’m able to confirm now that the victim was Mr and Mrs Marshall’s daughter.’ She stopped; she knew it was too soon for them to know. The next words caused a shudder of greedy excitement. ‘Their younger daughter – Karena. We are, of course, officially extending our condolences to Mr and Mrs Marshall. You’ll all understand how difficult it is for them to be here today.’
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