‘It was the window,’ she finally managed. ‘Rachel never opened the window. She was the neatest person you’d meet, but she hated spiders, she was convinced that they’d invade in colonies if she opened the window. We’d stopped having conversations about it. I’d given up “preaching” as she’d called it.’
Slattery walked over towards the window again. He drew in close, moved the catch around in a fashion that looked almost aimless. The lock was the original, fitted with the sash windows God knows when. Years of paint had sealed it over, but someone had recently scraped the clotted paint and loosened the pin, so it moved with ease. Now the chipped white gloss lay like guilty fairy dust on the floor beneath Slattery’s feet.
‘There’s no sign it was broken, it could as easily have been cleaved free from the inside.’ He turned his head towards the door, registering her blank expression. ‘They may have used this as an exit rather than a way of gaining entry.’ Something else tripped along behind his words. ‘Rachel wouldn’t have given a key to the house to anyone, I suppose?’ he asked, his tone already telling her he knew the answer.
‘Never. That would mean a front door key, she’d never have done that.’
‘There were no… boys?’ He stumbled over the word. The girl was twenty after all, but Slattery knew it’d be a brave young man who would dare to cross the threshold of Imelda McDermott’s house.
‘There were no boys, Inspector.’ She smiled at him. ‘And if there were, they weren’t brought back here.’ Her smile was sad now, but thoughtful all the same.
‘I’ll have to call it in,’ he said as he moved away from the flaked paint. He looked once more around the room. ‘We’ll need to cross match the DNA samples from both you and Tim, to rule you out and see if anyone broke in who shouldn’t be here.’ His voice was strong, commanding. ‘Mrs McDermott?’ he called to her from beyond the door. ‘We’ll have a technical team here in the next few hours, it’s important that the room is left locked, nothing is touched, okay?’
‘Of course, Sergeant Slattery, it’s only me and Tim here anyway.’ She opened a door along the hall, reached in and took out Eleanor Marshall’s file. She handed it to him before they headed for the stairs.
He was lingering on the stairs, their business not quite complete, she guessed what it was he wanted. ‘Some tea, Inspector?’ she tried at last.
‘Am… no, not today.’ And he turned. He halted a second and took in her face while he asked, ‘Do you know if Rachel had any connection with Kit Marshall outside of Curlew Hall?’
‘Oh, dear.’ Imelda’s expression clouded over. ‘I was wondering when you were going to ask me about that. Perhaps we should have that cup of tea after all,’ she said, making her way past him and heading for the kitchen and her trusty tea pot in an attempt to set the world to some sort of rights.
Twenty-Eight
There were three missed calls on her mobile, so it was only reasonable to expect them to ring her at the station. The call from the nursing home was, if not unexpected, then certainly – Iris could admit to herself – unwelcome. Her mother was very upset, asking for her, calling out to see where she was.
‘She’s not my mother,’ Iris said flatly.
‘I do understand that, but she doesn’t and…’ The matron’s voice petered out. She sounded much too young to be a matron and Iris tried to visualise the kind of woman who could fill matronly shoes and still sound so very fragile. ‘She’s being assessed by psych tomorrow and she’s begging every staff member on their rounds to call you and ask you to visit.’
‘It’s really not my place anymore.’ Iris felt empty saying the words. It was impossible to reconcile the notion of Theodora Locke with this woman they were talking about. Indeed, it was impossible to reconcile the woman she’d visited only a short time ago with the woman she’d always believed to be her mother. That woman had been articulate, perfectly groomed and taken care of as if she was priceless china by a man whose natural default setting was to protect fiercely the people he called family. Theodora Locke had been many things when Iris was growing up and she wasn’t blind to the fact that her mother had a weakness for alcohol and a propensity to self-absorption, but the one thing she’d never been was pathetic.
‘Perhaps the last thing she needs is my presence there to muddy the waters of her psych evaluation…’
She allowed her words to drift off, knowing too well that she might fool this woman, but she wasn’t deceiving herself. The truth was she didn’t know how she felt about Theodora or Jack Locke. She had invested a lifetime of love into two people who weren’t who she believed them to be at all and every time she thought about Anna Crowe and how things had ended up she felt hollowed out – as if every emotion she’d ever experienced had been emptied from her; she wasn’t sure she’d ever feel anything that passed close to love again. She wanted to tell Theodora Locke that she hated her, but she knew it wouldn’t make either of them feel any better and the fact was that you had to have some feelings left for hatred and Iris just didn’t have anything left.
‘Look, Iris.’ The woman on the other end of the line was still waiting for some kind of answer, presumably. ‘Visiting her isn’t going to affect the outcome of any psychiatric tests and I’m not going to say it’s going to make either of you feel any better, but I can tell you this much and you may take from it what you will. After what you’ve both been through, moving forward, be it together or apart is going to be hard enough, but you’re never going to make any progress until you make some kind of peace in your own heart.’
‘Does she think I’m going to forgive her?’ Iris whispered.
‘I don’t think she’s even thought that far ahead. I think she just needs to know that you’re around. Even if it’s to scream at her and tell her that what she did was terrible.’ She paused. ‘It’s the guilt, you see. She’s been carrying all that around with her for years…’
‘You sound as if you’ve seen it all before,’ Iris said cynically, because if there was one thing she was quite sure of, it was that this woman had never come across a situation like theirs.
‘No, I’m not saying I have, but I’ve seen alcoholics and I’ve lived with one and I’m fairly certain I can spot a suitcase full of guilt a mile off.’ She sighed. ‘Anyway, I’m only passing on the message. At the end of the day, the decision is yours and you know that you’ll be welcome to visit here at any time.’ The matron’s voice returned to a brusque business-like pace and Iris imagined her, checking her watch, straightening out her perfectly white uniform.
‘Well, thank you, I’ll think about it,’ Iris said, putting down the phone and knowing that there was no way she was going anywhere near Theodora Locke.
The last visit had been enough to put her off for life. They hadn’t fought. Maybe it would have been better if they had. Instead it seemed like they might slip into some new reality that buttoned over what they both knew to be the truth. Iris couldn’t cope with that. Theodora had led her to a bright and airy bedroom on the first floor. The nursing home was one of the most prestigious in the country. Jack Locke had invested heavily in health insurance as much as he had worked hard to keep their dark family secrets buried, it seemed. Now, Theodora had the advantage of living out her guilt-riddled days in the lap of luxury, while she waited to hear her fate from the state prosecutor.
Iris felt that familiar shiver run through her; overnight she’d become a stranger to herself and all of those things she’d believed predetermined by virtue of her Locke blood were brought to nothing in the stroke of a second.
Iris had shut herself away in her office with the Eleanor Marshall file so Slattery decided that since he couldn’t think of anywhere else to be, he may as well head off out to Curlew Hall. Perhaps out there, he might be able to silence the growing questions that riddled him about Maureen. It was funny, being married to someone he thought he knew inside out and yet, here he was, wondering at four simple words. It was a secret. Maureen had managed, throughout thirty years of marriage,
amid squabbles and heartbreak, to keep a secret from him that he had a feeling might have held the key to questions he’d spent a lifetime trying to answer. Of course, the way things were now, with the dementia, there was a good chance that the sliver of light he’d caught would fade behind that wall of mixed-up memories that seemed to slide casually over his wife’s consciousness, so he hardly knew what was remembered and what was imagined anymore. There was only one thing for it. He had to deal with the case in hand – otherwise he could drive himself insane thinking of Una and the notion that there might have been some thread within his grasp all those years ago if only Maureen had not been such a loyal friend to her. This was the thought that sent shivers into where his heart should have been – loyalty to her killer.
He tried to shake off those circling black thoughts, pulled the car tight against the perimeter wall of Curlew Hall. He had a niggling feeling that there was something more to learn out there and it seemed as good a place as any to begin double-checking over what they’d already picked up. Tony Ahearn was still leading out a huge search team and even if they didn’t say it, they all knew the fact that the girl had not turned up did not bode well for her safety. The unit, as they had come to call it, had become something of a base for the staff who had worked with both Rachel and Eleanor to drop in and probably unofficially debrief. Slattery was relieved to see one of the older dears there, fussing about the kitchen, cleaning out cupboards that didn’t need to be cleaned and basically marking in time probably in the hope that no news was good news.
‘You must be under fierce pressure,’ Mrs Brady said unhelpfully as she scalded a cup in preparation for yet another round of tea-making. In so many ways, she was the last person Slattery would have imagined working in a set-up like this. But then, maybe, the fact that she oozed maternal consideration – even if she wasn’t the fastest on her feet – maybe it made her the perfect person to work here. Her voice was soft; her movements slow, as though arthritis were making a hostile takeover bid on joints that probably creaked if she used them too quickly.
‘Ah, every case is like this, once there are victims and families, everyone just wants to get answers… it becomes personal,’ he said evenly and that was the truth.
‘I suppose, it’s like any job, you get attached,’ she said philosophically and then smiled. ‘Of course, there are the other sorts of attachments here too, they don’t always end so well.’
‘How do you mean?’ Slattery liked nothing better than a good old gossip, it tended to yield some nugget amid the hearsay.
‘Well, Rachel and young Nate, they were stepping out for a while, if you call it that these days. It’s not right to speak ill of the dead, but I think we were all a little relieved when it came to an end.’
‘When was this?’ Slattery said, sipping his tea.
‘Oh, a couple of months ago. I’d say he fell for her hook, line and sinker, but Rachel wasn’t the kind of girl that was going to settle down with the likes of Nate Hegarty.’
‘So, it was serious between them?’
‘It was for him. I’d say he was as near broken-hearted after as he could be… you know, it’s harder coming in to work every day, running into someone and pretending that you’re over them.’
‘She seemed to have got over him though?’ Slattery asked, thinking back to the conversations that had been recorded with Julia Stenson.
‘Ah well, I think she began to see what everyone else here could see. It wasn’t meant to be and I told her here, myself, there’s someone for everyone. I think that whole thing made her even fonder of Eleanor. I swear she’d have laid down her life for that girl.’
Twenty-Nine
The incident room was buzzing; word was out about Hegarty’s statement. He’d sworn that he now believed Rachel had been blackmailing Kit Marshall. The truth was, they could find no other explanation for the amount of cash they’d found since her death. He was adamant he knew nothing about the missing file. Iris had a feeling he was lying, even if there was no pushing the truth from him – they had the file in their possession now so it was up to them to find what they could in it. Iris felt the excitement, palpable in the air. For her part, she felt it was as unlikely as the notion of Rachel McDermott selling drugs, but the statement was in the file now, so there was little she could do about it. There was backslapping among the men, easy jokes, Tony Ahearn was like the cat that got the cream.
When they got the full story, it was scant at best but it was enough to allow Ahearn to crow among the uniforms and bask in the glory of having made a breakthrough when it seemed the case was at stalemate. For some of the younger officers it was their first time to work a murder, and your first murder is always personal. Eleanor Marshall was still out there, somewhere, as the night was drawing in. Iris couldn’t contemplate that thing she saw in the woods, didn’t want to think of it running into Eleanor, maybe watching her now. She had reported it to the local parks ranger and maybe he was just a little pissed at the idea that she called it in as night arrived and he was just about to clock off duty. She pulled a file that had been compiled by various officers at the front desk. Mainly locals, but a couple of tourists too, had reported seeing something that could have been a big cat or maybe a small bear – neither was going to make her sleep any better. At the briefing, it was just another detail to add to their worries.
The technical team were still working on tracing that email from Rachel’s account. She’d checked with them earlier, but looking at her watch now, knew that the second floor would be empty – they kept regular hours, when they could. Iris plopped down next to June in the incident room.
‘Time you were going home,’ she said gently. They all tended to forget that June was a single mother. Granted, her two sons were big enough to look after themselves, but still, a case like this had to be hard-going. Iris couldn’t imagine living anything close to a normal home life with the hours a murder investigation took up when they were in the thick of it.
‘I could say the same for you.’ June smiled easily.
‘I’m not exactly going to be missed over in the digs.’ Iris shook her head. ‘Where as you…’
‘My mother lives with us,’ June said quietly.
‘I didn’t know that.’
And it was true, she knew very little of June, apart from the fact that she liked her from the moment they’d met. She liked the fact that she got on with her work; she’d never been threatened by Iris, just welcomed her on board with a quiet understanding that there was always room for another pair of hands. She was the one person who gave Slattery a hard time for not doing the right thing and didn’t give a damn whether he wanted to hear it or not. She knew too that June’s husband had passed away a good decade earlier and her wedding rings still shone as if they got the same attention to detail as she gave every minute of her time at work in the Murder Team.
‘One bit of good news though,’ June said. ‘Finding that file, bet you’re dying to dive into it as soon as you get a bit of peace and quiet.’
‘It’ll be interesting to see exactly what’s in it, especially after that email,’ Iris admitted, and then they both looked over at Tony Ahearn holding court at the far end of the incident room. ‘What is it?’
‘Ah, that shower, you’d swear he was Hercule Poirot.’ June shook her head. ‘He’s done that much crowing about Hegarty I’m ready to go over there and tell him it’d be more in his line if he managed to do his own job properly.’ She shook her head again. ‘Bet that email to you got right up his nose.’
‘Probably.’ Iris smiled; getting up Ahearn’s nose was just a nice little by-product. Even if the sender was just playing games, it was a lead, possibly to whoever had taken Rachel’s computer and certainly to information that they hadn’t managed to gather through the interview process.
It took another hour before the incident room emptied out. It seemed everyone was reluctant to leave and when they did, they were all planning on heading down to the Ship Inn to carry on the gloating con
versation – although, in Iris’s opinion they’d made only a tiny step on the way to getting all the answers they needed. She rang Slattery to let him know his quiet pint could be interrupted, she had a feeling the reason he hadn’t turned up tonight was because he needed thinking time.
‘As it happens, I’m not in the pub,’ he said glumly, ‘but I was going there next and you’re right, the last thing I need is to be looking at Tony Ahearn for the night.’ He sighed on the other end of the phone. ‘Fancy a pint?’ he said then and Iris had a feeling that he had things on his mind.
‘Sure, but not in the Ship Inn,’ she said, switching off lights as she made her way out of the incident room. She could come back for the file later.
‘There’s a small pub called Delaney’s down the road from King John’s Castle. I’ll be there in about five minutes. I’ll have a glass of Guinness on for you if you’re not there by closing time,’ he said hanging up.
Something in Slattery’s tone gave her a sense that he had news. She made her way back to her office and grabbed her jacket. Delaney’s would be low key, probably even further under the radar than the Ship Inn.
Delaney’s was a short narrow bar, with six stools at the counter, an open fire in the hearth and a row of uncomfortable seats along the wall with a narrow bench before them that wasn’t much wider than a bookshelf to hold your drink. A couple of ugly low chairs ranged along the other side, but it seemed that the regulars, all four of them, preferred the company of the barman.
When Slattery had chosen their table, he’d picked one as far away as it was possible to be in a room where cat-swinging was off the agenda. He sat next to the fireplace, a comfortable outsider that they all seemed to know well enough to leave him alone. If they raised their eyebrows at Iris’s arrival, they managed to close their mouths and turn their backs on them both before it was noticed. Fortunately, Munster had knocked the stuffing out of a visiting French team earlier in the evening and the rugby match was being replayed on a small TV perched on the end of the bar. Regardless of the fact that they knew the result, it seemed lives depended on following every pass, try and scrum to the bitter, glorious end.
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