Why She Ran

by Geraldine Hogan

  ‘But…’ a young, glamorous reporter, local, from the front row tried to interrupt, but Iris put up her hands to finish. None of the waiting press had expected this – they’d expected this body to be Eleanor’s.

  ‘Karena Marshall’s body was found by a jogger in Curlew Woods. We are investigating her death, as the circumstances are suspicious.’ She nodded towards McGonagle who had already created folders with a copy of a press release and that one striking photograph of Eleanor, and who was now handing them out around the room. ‘Obviously, we’re appealing to anyone who might know anything about the events surrounding this tragic death to come forward. In relation to this latest tragedy, we’re looking for anyone in the Curlew Cross area to call us, if only to eliminate them from our enquiries.’

  ‘And the other Marshall girl?’ A voice came from the back of the room. ‘Eleanor?’

  ‘If you look in your press packs, you’ll see an up-to-date photograph of Eleanor. She’s still missing and at this stage, as you can imagine, her family are really concerned for her safety. Since Eleanor went missing, she has been spotted only once, on a back road in the far north of Curlew Woods. We’re really looking for as much help as we can get to bring her home safely to her family at this point.’

  ‘Is she dangerous?’ the glamorous reporter from the front row asked.

  ‘She’s extremely vulnerable.’ Kit Marshall cleared his throat before leaning forward. ‘She has epilepsy and so she could be very ill. We’re just afraid at this point that she might be in danger from the person who murdered her sister and that poor McDermott girl.’

  ‘There’s been a mention of her having been kidnapped?’ a reporter with a thick Midlands accent asked from the centre of the room.

  ‘We’re looking at every avenue, but there has been no ransom note and nothing in Eleanor’s disappearance to point to that so far.’

  ‘Although,’ Kit put in quickly, ‘it does seem pretty obvious to us that she is the target of some violent plan.’

  ‘Our investigation is moving forward,’ Iris cut him off. ‘As Mr Marshall has pointed out, Eleanor is a vulnerable young girl and the fact that she may not have medication to treat her epilepsy is a huge worry in terms of getting her back safely. We really need to get this newer image into the public eye, if it’s possible today…’

  Iris looked around the room; it was a sea of risen hands, each one wanting to ask their own question which was a version of the same thing. Was Eleanor Marshall their killer? Or was she a vulnerable young girl caught up in something that was more dangerous than anyone wanted to imagine? Iris had to admit; those were exactly the questions she was asking herself.

  Twenty-Two

  Nate Hegarty rented a flat in the centre of town. There was a slight smell of damp, covered over by the smell of yesterday’s cooking and today’s cigarettes. On the walls there was a string of broken lyrics from songs that Iris couldn’t quite place, written in ornate yet strikingly different styles of calligraphy – talented boy.

  Nate went through the night’s events again, reluctantly, but to be fair, it was probably his hundredth time. Iris had a feeling Slattery was right; they were missing something and so they couldn’t quite move on with the investigation without talking to him one more time. Everything about that night, except the last hour, slid firmly into place to build up a picture of Rachel’s routine. They’d already documented this but Iris wanted to hear it again from Nate. He had left the bungalow for the night, leaving Rachel to carry out a number of mundane domestic tasks. He hadn’t heard anything unusual.

  ‘Could Eleanor Marshall have taken those tablets?’ The question was sour on her lips. She knew the answer she wanted to hear.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve thought about it a lot – the thing is, if she didn’t take them, then that only leaves whoever killed Rachel.’ His eyes wandered down towards his grubby hands. ‘And, why would they bother? It’s not like that sort of thing is going to sell on the streets, now is it? How would they get into the medication cupboard in the first place? It’s locked up like the central bank. The only one there that night, except me and Rach, to know how to get at them was Eleanor, but I don’t see how…’

  ‘And Rachel would never have left the keys in the lock while she checked the stock or maybe cleaned out the cupboards?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was there when she counted them, but then we were chatting, you know, maybe she turned her back on them for a minute, it’s hard to remember at this stage. A week ago, I’d have said no, obviously, we thought the unit was safe for Eleanor, otherwise…’ Nate clicked his tongue, thinking as much as speaking.

  ‘Are you doing okay?’ she asked.

  ‘Ah yeah, I’m fine.’ Frosty sunlight streamed unkindly from a nearby window across his face, highlighting uneven skin scarred by acne when he was younger.

  ‘It’s a big shock, you know, all of this,’ Iris said softly.

  ‘It is,’ Nate agreed. ‘It doesn’t help that my supervisor isn’t that impressed that I’d skived off on the night when… well, you know…’

  ‘In some ways, it was the worst timing, eh?’ Slattery said, but of course, it meant that Hegarty had an alibi and if he’d been at work, monitoring a perimeter fence or whatever he was meant to be doing, he’d be in the frame now every bit as much as Eleanor.

  ‘Story of my life,’ Nate said.

  ‘Sorry about that, mate.’ Slattery was managing to keep his friendly side going.

  ‘We’re looking to track down Eleanor’s file…’ said Iris.

  ‘Her file, like the files in Curlew Hall?’

  ‘Her case file. It was archived, but someone, Rachel probably, had requested it a few weeks ago.’

  ‘And you’re wondering if I might know where it is now?’ His interest was piqued.

  ‘That’s the million-euro question, I’m afraid. We’re trying to track it down.’

  ‘Oh well, I’ll keep a lookout, I suppose.’ Nate cast his eyes towards the window, no file here at least. ‘I can’t do much more than that for you.’

  ‘We’ve heard it’s not the only thing to go missing these past few weeks,’ Slattery said softly.

  ‘Oh?’ Nate stuck his chin out, perhaps awaiting a charge of theft next.

  ‘Yes, apparently you’ve lost a sum of money – we’ve heard that you’ve been very eager to get it back.’

  ‘Oh, that. Nah, I got that sorted, last week. I’m all set now,’ he said relaxing again, as if whatever threat he’d expected had passed.

  ‘So, would you like to tell us? It’s just we heard half a story and it wouldn’t be the good half, if you know what I mean,’ Slattery said coldly.

  ‘Ah, well, then you haven’t heard the right story so.’ Nate shook his head. ‘It was nothing, just a mix-up. I sold my phone and some old computer games, made a couple of hundred on them, collected the money on my way to work. I thought someone had swiped it, but then, later, when I looked in my car, there it was, under some old rubbish in the back seat.’

  ‘Who did you sell them to?’

  ‘It’s all above board, I was saving for a new games console, deposited the money in the bank and then got myself a state-of-the-art set-up.’ He pointed across at a sleek system.

  ‘Hmm.’ Slattery was non-committal, but Iris knew that he too was inclined to believe Nate. Like he said, bad timing.

  The incident room was almost empty when Iris returned to the station. She walked over to the Perspex-covered wall. Scanning the various photographs, maps of the woods and lists of relevant people questioned, her mind returned to Curlew Hall. She unclipped a photo of the woods, holding it between her hands. It was one hundred and forty shades of green, peeling off into the distance, with no end in sight. The police photographer had taken it along one of the tracks winding around the countryside.

  Where is she? Please, just one clue…help us find her before it’s too late.

  She thought again of the girls’ mother. Susan arrived out at the search early this mornin
g. There were twenty-six officers assigned now to patrolling and searching the woods, a pity they’d spent so much time – thanks to Ahearn – searching in the wrong bloody direction.

  She had been hauled over the coals by Byrne earlier in the morning for almost an hour. What progress had they made? How could they spend so much and have so little to show for it? His mood had been black; his face flushed when he had offloaded the news that the powers that be were not happy with the way the investigation was being handled. There would be a new team put in place and the investigation would be handed over to Dublin Castle.

  After it, Iris was actually happy to see Slattery slumping in his chair, gazing out the window as if he hadn’t a care in the world, which of course, couldn’t be farther from the truth. He was a ball of angry emotion, bundled up into an I-couldn’t-care-less sham. Iris didn’t ask him about his wife anymore, she’d seen him bark viciously at June anytime the subject was brought up.

  ‘Well?’ he glared at Iris. ‘An update…’ His head inclined towards the rickety chair opposite and she knew she was being invited to offload her worries onto him. She flopped down dead beat into the chair before him, grabbing a refill pad and cheap half-chewed biro from an otherwise deserted desk as she passed.

  ‘So, what have we got?’ He was chewing gum, never a good sign.

  ‘Well, we have the search team out at Comeragh Pass. They changed their route to head in the direction we worked out on the map. I checked with—’ Iris began.

  ‘Ox balls. You know what Byrne said to me earlier when I met him in the corridor?’ Slattery was livid. ‘They’re thinking of giving the investigation over to Dublin Castle. As if that crowd of Jackeens would have the first clue.’ He managed to divert his attention to the door where a uniform was about to come in with a cup of tea, but on Slattery’s bark reversed meekly in his tracks. ‘Anyway, the upshot if we don’t get this thing shaped up—’

  ‘I know,’ Iris said flatly. ‘I met with him this morning, an hour-long sermon,’ she managed to say before he started to chew crossly again. ‘I was going to break it to the team tonight.’

  ‘I just don’t understand, they can’t mean to leave a girl out there somewhere, God knows where, not a girl like that, she hasn’t got a…’ He dropped his voice, as if some of the pent-up fury was releasing through an invisible valve.

  ‘Come on, Slattery, you know what it means. They think she’s dead already.’

  ‘She’s out there and she was alive and well twenty-four hours ago,’ Slattery said obstinately. ‘What do you make of her, of Susan Marshall?’

  ‘Honestly?’ Iris thought about it for a moment. ‘She must be at her wit’s end. Scared too, I’d say, for all of them.’ Iris walked to the window, looking out across the rougher part of town. ‘Why, what do you think?’

  ‘I suppose she is frightened.’ He was thoughtful, carefully selecting his next words. ‘We know she’s married to a bully.’

  ‘He definitely beats her, those marks…’ The marks covering Susan’s arms were old, meted out over years, but that kind of violence doesn’t just leave a marriage. It outlives love; usually it lasts longer than either spouse.

  ‘Come on, you know as well as I do that the best bullies never have to actually raise a hand to anyone. So we know he throws her the occasional punch, but it’s deeper than that, much more than just beating her.’ Slattery blew out long and slow, can’t save them all.

  ‘Okay, so she’s scared of him, of Kit Marshall,’ Iris continued, noticing a number of smoking chimneys in the distance. People were lighting their fires to keep out the west of Ireland’s draughts and damp. Iris shivered. ‘Maybe she’s scared of something else as well. It’s not unreasonable to suggest she’s worried about her daughter, afraid of what might become of her.’

  ‘And of course, now there’s grief too.’ Slattery looked at her, weighing it up. He faltered; he didn't want to continue with this line of thought. ‘What if she’s scared that we do find her, what if…?’

  ‘Go on?’ She was hooked now, an uncomfortable, sickly knot rising deep in her stomach.

  ‘Ah, I’m going off on a tangent, sure. With what they’ve been through these past few days, she probably doesn’t know how to react.’

  ‘Will you just say it?’

  ‘Right, but it’s so off the wall. What if they wanted to get rid of her? What if the emotion we can’t figure out is guilt, what if…?’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right. What if we got some real evidence before we go adding yet another suspect to our list?’

  ‘It was just a feeling.’ He turned the seat around towards the desk. They stayed in silence for a few minutes. The stillness was calming, Iris was glad; it was hard to get anything done while Slattery bitched about Byrne. ‘Okay, then you might as well let me know how this morning went.’

  Iris quickly filled him in on Byrne’s briefing.

  ‘Byrne thinks Ahearn is onto something with the drugs angle. He wants us to pursue it,’ she said. They still had no other explanation for that envelope of money Tim McDermott had dropped off with them.

  ‘Fair enough, except we’re sure that Nate’s explanation pans out?’

  ‘Yes, I’m happy with the story about the missing money, that’s easily checked.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘I still think he’s lying about what he was up to that night. I don’t believe him and I don’t believe Tania Quirke.’

  ‘Yeah, well I’m with you there and that means he’s the one person who has means and, maybe, he has motive too.’ Slattery looked at her for a moment.

  ‘So, he’s still in the frame,’ Iris said softly.

  Slattery swung about in his seat. ‘June, have we found any connection between Karena and Rachel McDermott other than the Marshalls?’ It was as if he’d uncannily read Iris’s mind.

  ‘No, still looking though,’ June said, hardly taking her eyes from the screen before her.

  Iris’s phone rang out somewhere in the busy incident room, the trilling sound caught her attention for a minute. She looked at the clock on the wall behind Slattery’s desk – plenty of time yet. Iris was glad of the opportunity to catch her breath and go over the casebook in the quiet.

  There was no point going home now, wherever that was – Mrs Leddy’s boarding house hardly qualified as home. She clicked the blue screen before her. It had been two days since she’d checked her emails. She might have felt guilty if she wasn’t so tired and achy. Twenty-nine new messages; she hated emails. She scrolled down through them quickly: the usual newsletters, follow-ups from other cases that had slipped onto the back burner for a few days. Then, a name – unfamiliar – in her inbox. She was about to transfer it to trash, had right-clicked when her hand froze. The date was just two hours ago, the subject was Eleanor Marshall, but it was the sender’s name that fired a jangle through her spine. From: Rachel McDermott. Someone was using her email.

  Twenty-Three

  Slattery invested almost three hours in getting pissed before any of his colleagues arrived at the Ship Inn to end their day with an unofficial debriefing session. He called for another pint, pessimistically aware that his efforts were not working. He couldn’t shake Maureen’s words from his thoughts. He’d left Iris in Corbally, poring over the case book and a mountain of other paperwork. Slattery was a nose man – he never went in for combing through files: give him a couple of bystanders and he’d sniff out a suspect faster than any beagle. Iris was welcome to the inspector’s job – if only because of the amount of paperwork that came with it.

  Well, actually, she was welcome to the bullshit kowtowing and politics that came with it even more heartily, none of those skills were in Slattery’s arsenal and he’d never had any desire to acquire them. Slattery knew it and Byrne knew it. Grady certainly knew it and so he’d never even asked him to step into the slot that was sure to become vacant at some point since they didn’t seem to be able to hang onto a superintendent for any longer than it took tea to cool on a winter’s morning.
It would work out well, having Iris as the cigire. The inspector’s job was vital to the smooth working of the team.

  Even if they had resented her when she first arrived, now there was a quiet respect for Iris. She’d cracked a case that ended up pulling her own world down around her, but she’d done it. She had the determination to see the unthinkable through to the end and Slattery – for one – had every intention of being behind her as long as she needed him. She was young, true, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t fit for the job. People liked her, she was straightforward, no games, no agenda other than the one she put on the table from day one. She was ambitious, but then again, wasn’t everyone? Even Slattery at one time had a flame of ambition within him. Without it, he wouldn’t have made Murder. There were plenty who started out with him still turning up in uniform, pencil pushers now mostly, doling out forms or sitting at a desk in some forgotten outpost. Slattery had been hungry enough to go after the Murder Team and even if he had no intention of rising through the ranks, he was ambitious enough not to want to leave and hanging on sometimes took as much effort as getting in.

  ‘Penny for them.’ June plonked herself on the bar stool next to him.

  ‘Hardly worth even that.’ He barely lifted his head to acknowledge her, staring instead trance-like into his drink.

  ‘True, but still, be nice to know what’s so interesting that’s keeping you here instead of sending you home to Maureen.’ She nodded at the barman who was already reaching half-heartedly for an orange juice.

  ‘Don’t bloody start, it’s been a long day.’

  ‘I’m sure it has.’ She fiddled with change, handing over the exact price of her drink.

  ‘Yeah, well, it’s not like she’d want me there anyway. At this point, it’s only on rare occasions she lets me in the door.’ He scowled. ‘Anyway, I’m sure some of the neighbours think I’ve been dead for years.’ He shook his head. ‘And neither my wife nor daughter have bothered to put that notion to bed.’ It might have been laughable, if it wasn’t for the fact that Slattery could see it would have suited Maureen so much better to be a widow than, as she termed it, a deserted wife.