‘Maybe we should ask if we can take a look at something with a similar date by the same social worker,’ Slattery said, reading her mind again.
‘Yep, good idea,’ Iris said and she rang the information officer who’d turned over every stone she could to find Eleanor’s file last time round.
‘Sure, we can let you see something, but what did you say the social worker’s name was again?’
‘Dermot Drummond,’ Iris said, squinting to see the scrawled handwriting and date at the end of the page.
‘That’s what I thought you said.’ The woman on the other end of the line even sounded as if she was shaking her head. ‘You see, I don’t ever remember a Dermot Drummond turning up here, to be honest. I’ve been here for almost thirty years and the name doesn’t ring a bell at all.’
‘Can you check it for definite for me, with your HR department?’ Iris asked.
‘Sure, hang on.’ She put Iris on hold for a moment, and even Slattery seemed to be willing the woman to come back and say yes, actually she’d forgotten all about old Dermot Drummond. ‘I’m sorry,’ the voice came back on the line again. ‘They’ve just put him into the system and he’s never worked for Curlew Hall.’
‘Okay, well that’s good to know,’ Iris said.
‘Do you still want to come and look at social-work files that were written up back then? It’s just I’ll have to organise permission and…’
‘No, don’t worry, I think we’re good.’ Iris put the phone down.
‘You do know where we have to go now?’ Slattery said, grabbing his coat.
Iris was too tired to guess. ‘No, but I’m sure you’ll tell me on the way.’
It seemed to Iris that John Street was even more derelict this evening than it had been the last time she was here. Slattery pulled up on the double yellows, snarled at a traffic warden, flashing his badge – ‘Don’t even think about it, matey’ – and Iris knew you’d have to be either mad or stupid to put a ticket on the windscreen of his car.
‘Here goes.’ Iris rang the bell, wondering again if it even still worked. Upstairs a narrow sliver of light peered out from behind heavy curtains and Slattery waved a hand, obviously spotting Nate Hegarty checking who was looking to get in.
‘It’s only us,’ he called up to the window above and they waited until they heard uncertain steps pad to the door and pull it open for them.
‘Have you found her?’ he asked, standing back to let them in out of the dark evening.
‘No, I’m afraid not, but we’ve found something else you might be able to help us with,’ Iris said, leading the way up to the dingy flat and the aroma of recently fried eggs and onions, which pinched at her nostrils. She remembered a time when standing here would have meant a trip to the drycleaner’s for whatever jacket she happened to be wearing. Slattery launched himself at the old couch, which groaned disapprovingly against his cumbersome plonk. He was clearly oblivious to the fact that Nate Hegarty was just about to sit and have his dinner. Nate walked to the window and sat in the chair opposite him.
‘Please, go ahead and eat, we can talk while you have your meal,’ Iris said, willing Slattery not to ask for a cup of tea.
‘Okay,’ Nate said, and he folded himself back into the chair he’d obviously just left to let them in.
‘You dated Rachel McDermott.’ Slattery made it a statement, rather than a question.
‘Well, I wouldn’t say dated exactly…’ A strand of hair fell across Nate’s face, but he left it there, concentrating hard on his eggs. ‘More like we had a bit of a thing, for a short while.’
‘It’s what other people are saying,’ Iris said softly.
‘We were… together, for a while, but…’ They let his sentence hang in the air. ‘I suppose it turned out we weren’t as well suited as I thought at the beginning.’ He laid down his fork, his appetite suddenly gone. ‘When I first arrived at Curlew Hall, she was kind and I thought she liked me. I suppose I liked the idea of having someone like her, she just seemed so…’ He looked up at Iris now, his eyes were transformed by vulnerability. ‘So different to anyone I’d ever been with before. Settled? Normal? I don’t know, but I just thought, for a while that maybe…’
‘I get it,’ Iris said softly, and she did. Nate Hegarty had looked at Rachel and Imelda and Tim and seen all that he’d never had. Stability – that was probably it. Iris knew what it was to be outside now. She didn’t want to think what it might have been like to be outside all her life. ‘But things changed?’
‘Yeah. It was great at first, but it didn’t take long until it became obvious I would never be good enough, not for Rach’s family, at least.’ Nate smiled sadly. ‘Whatever we had between us, whatever it was, it didn’t mean enough to her to face up to old Ma McDermott.’ He lowered his voice and when he spoke next Iris wasn’t sure if his words were tinged with pain or embarrassment. ‘I wanted her to keep things going between us.’ He made a small sound, perhaps it was meant to be a self-deprecating laugh, but it didn’t quite make it. ‘I asked her, almost begged her, but she wouldn’t listen. It turned out I meant nothing to her.’ He bowed his head, finding the plate before him suddenly interesting. He wiped the tears from his eyes with a rough swipe, steadied his breath and eventually met their gaze. ‘At the end of the day, it fizzled out into a fling, but…’ His voice shook as he prepared to say the next words. ‘I didn’t kill her. You can’t think that I did?’
‘No,’ Slattery said flatly, because the truth was, even though Nate Hegarty was the one person who had means and, it turned out now, maybe the motive; they’d never taken him seriously as their murderer for both crimes. ‘That’s not why we’re here. We’re more interested in Eleanor Marshall’s file.’
‘Oh.’ It was a flat word, but it seemed to hold within it a caseload of answers. ‘You know, so?’
‘Tell us, from the start. And this time, Nate, you need to tell us everything. Obstructing an investigation carries serious penalties, we can charge you with that even now,’ Slattery said.
‘Oh God.’ He began to cry, huge, ugly wracking sobs that rattled through his miserable frame, but he needed to know that everything had to come out now. ‘When Rachel and I were…y’know, we talked a lot about Eleanor. I thought she wanted to help her, I wouldn’t have got it for her if I realised.’
‘You forged Susan’s handwriting?’ Iris realised. Of course, calligraphy was evident in the various sketches dotted about the flat. Nate had a flair for it. ‘You helped her release Eleanor’s file and then…’
‘She asked me do it, in the end… I thought maybe it would make things right between us.’
‘It doesn’t matter, but you need to tell us everything now, even about Dermot Drummond,’ Iris said quietly and watched as Nate flinched at the name.
‘How did you know? Oh God,’ he managed through his sobs. ‘Rach told me, one night, when it was just the two of us in Curlew Hall, she told me that she believed Kit Marshall was her father. I didn’t think much of it at the time. When you come from where I grew up, having a mother would be enough, wanting any more just seems like greed. I knew who Marshall was: bloody richest man in Limerick, everyone knows who he is. He was on telly at the opening of some big business one night when Rachel said it to me. I didn’t pay much mind to it, but it was always there for Rachel, bubbling away, how she was going to put things right with her father, her sisters.’
He shook his head, remembering.
‘It bothered her, that there were things about Eleanor she didn’t know, while old Hilda Brady considered herself an expert. I suppose Rach always wanted to be the best, you know, number one with Eleanor? You should have seen her with Mrs Marshall when she called: syrupy sweet.’ He looked now from one to the other, his eyes brimming with tears, a silent plea not to judge him before his next words. ‘Anyway, I got it for her, filled in the forms and rang the girl in the record department, pretending I was Kit Marshall and I was getting my assistant to pick it up. It turned out to be easy as pie to g
et it released in the end. I brought the file back here, read through it first and then I had the idea about playing a trick on Rach. I thought it would be a laugh, a bit of revenge for her having dumped me.’
‘We’re not judging you, Nate, that’s not why we’re here,’ Iris said softly, but she caught Slattery’s silent warning flashing across his eyes.
‘Still, I know it was wrong, but it wasn’t meant to cause any harm to anyone apart from getting a swipe at Rach. I just thought she’d go marching out to the Marshalls’ house and make a complete tit of herself before all those people who meant so much to her.’ He shook his head now, bitterly regretting what he’d done.
‘So, you wrote the case note that she believed confirmed she was Marshall’s daughter?’ Slattery asked, but he was just confirming what they knew now.
‘I did. I was afraid to tell you before, I thought… I don’t know what I thought, but I hoped that it was such a stupid thing, it couldn’t have any bearing on anything.’
‘Tell us now – Rachel made contact with the Marshalls?’
‘Not with Marshall, he was away, I think he’s always away really, but from what she said, she managed to get a meeting with Mrs Marshall. It was around a month ago?’ He was trying to remember. ‘Then, after that, she seemed to be flush all the time and she walked about the place as if… well, as if she owned everything and everybody in Curlew Hall.’
‘So, you believed that the Marshalls had paid up?’ Iris asked.
‘Well, it was the only thing that fitted at the time, but they couldn’t have, could they, because I made it up. Rach was no more Kit Marshall’s daughter than I’m St Patrick’s nephew.’ In his eyes he was grappling with the predicament he’d invented.
‘True enough,’ Slattery agreed. ‘Was there anything else in that file that might have given her an opportunity for blackmail?’
‘No, not that I could think of, like I said, I wrote that note, but it was pure fiction – nothing to it and I have to confess, I only wrote it out of spite, but Rach fell for it hook, line and sinker and then it seemed to be too late to tell her the truth of it.’ Nate’s lower lip trembled. ‘I have wondered if it was… You know, the reason she was killed, especially after Karena Marshall…I couldn’t bear it, I really couldn’t.’ Nate finally descended into the kind of silence they’d both hoped he might manage to avoid.
‘Will you be all right?’ Iris asked as they got up to leave a little later.
‘Yeah, I’ll be fine, better than Rach now, anyway.’ His lip trembled treacherously again. ‘I’m probably going to get the sack anyway from Curlew Hall, this is just another reason for them to get rid of me.’
‘Well, if you think of anything, anything at all, you need to pick up the phone immediately. It could mean the difference between Eleanor Marshall’s life and death,’ Slattery said darkly.
Iris wanted to kick him in the shins for being so hard on the kid.
‘Sure,’ he said, walking them down the stairs so he could lock the front door behind them.
Just as they were getting into the car, he called out to them again. Bounding down the street towards them, he tugged on Iris’s arm. ‘Hang on, there’s something else,’ he shouted and dragged Iris back to the flat again. Iris looked back at Slattery who was standing open-mouthed beside the badly parked car.
Thirty-Two
It was a strange thing; once Slattery sped out of Limerick, the sky seemed to lighten, as if there might yet be another hour left in the day. All the same, there was no mistaking the heavy clouds rolling in from the Atlantic.
‘Storm’s coming,’ Slattery said darkly.
‘Shouldn’t we bring it straight to the technical team?’ Iris glanced uncomfortably at the laptop sitting in the back seat. In the end, she had a feeling that Nate Hegarty had been relieved to hand it over. Iris knew that for as long as he had it in his flat, it probably felt as if Rachel was still there lingering accusingly. There were other things too, Nate said, apart from Rachel’s emails, she’d been planning on spending a sizeable amount on a new car, far more than the stash Tim had handed into the station.
‘Rachel must have been putting the squeeze on them good and tight.’ Slattery broke into her thoughts. ‘That’s enough of a reason to pay them both a visit.’ He shook his head and Iris had a feeling that this trip was more about Slattery’s gut instinct than it was about anything they might find on that computer.
‘It looks like it’s an awful night ahead,’ Iris murmured, ‘weather-wise.’ She was thinking of Eleanor.
‘We’re getting closer to her. I can almost feel it in my—’
‘Don’t.’ Iris put her hand to her forehead. The last thing she needed to hear was where Slattery had feelings.
‘Him or her?’
‘How do you mean?
‘If you were a betting gal, who would you put your money on?’ he said idly, staring out into the countryside, as they travelled further away from Limerick and closer to Duneata House.
‘Well, I’m not,’ she said sharply, because this wasn’t a game and if she was honest, she didn’t want to think of either parent maybe paying up to keep Rachel quiet.
They drove on in silence, Slattery sighing every so often, as if another problem had settled on him and he was carrying on bravely beneath the weight of all the responsibility. The gates to Duneata House were firmly locked, when Iris pulled the car up before them. Darkness had finally fallen across the sky, the moon and stars trapped behind dense carpets of clouds. Iris had a feeling it would be one of those long and black nights, but out here there were no church bells to punctuate the hours, only the rush and crackle of nocturnal creatures setting about their business beneath the blanket of darkness. Just then, a security guard appeared behind the gates, he waved at Slattery, obviously recognising him.
‘Cold night for it,’ Slattery said lazily.
Iris thanked her lucky stars she was no longer in uniform on night beats.
‘Aye and it’s going to get colder from the looks of it,’ the man said grumpily.
‘Overtime?’
‘Why else?’ He pulled back the gates and waved them through. The drive up to the main house was even bumpier than she remembered as they sped along. She wanted to get this over with, not because it was her main focus, which was strange, because normally, on a murder investigation it is the victim that keeps you going, but rather because of Eleanor. She had a horrible feeling that the longer their murderer evaded them, the more danger the girl was in.
Here, at the Marshall house, they were only a short distance from the search party. Through the trees, she could see lights shining, probing, small and inconsistent, futile amid the lushness of velvet night. She wondered if she looked as weary as Slattery did, she certainly felt it. She also felt as if she’d been wearing the black trousers she’d put on first thing for a week. Her shoes were too low-heeled to keep them off the wet ground and now a damp patch had risen from the trouser legs trailing the sodden earth and it wasn’t helping her comfort levels. The cold and wet chewed at her calves and devoured any good humour that might survive beyond the tiredness and achy feeling that stretched through her.
Duneata House was in darkness, save for a porch light and a sliver of bright betraying life at the rear of the house. Slattery rapped loudly on the door.
‘There is a bell.’
‘Aye,’ he said, ‘but there’s more satisfaction this way.’ He beat the door again with his fist. Inside, Iris watched as the unmistakable shape of Kit Marshall made his way towards them. He peered through the glass side panel before opening the door slowly.
‘Yes?’ he said, reluctantly moving back to let them in when Slattery pushed the door and marched past him. ‘Has something happened? Have you found my daughter?’
‘No, not yet, but we have some more questions for you.’ Slattery stood square, as if he was baiting the taller man. Iris looked at them both, they were similar age, but you could see the differences in their lifestyles. Slattery’s shape an
d lazy gait spoke of his time on a bar stool. Maybe the thinness of his mouth conveyed some of the depravity he’d seen, but it was in his eyes. Those calculating hooded eyes that told you he was no fool, regardless of what Kit Marshall might believe. Marshall stood tall and thin, his ash-blond hair had all but turned to grey, reading glasses perched upon his forehead. He was every bit the country gent, an austere intellectual, Iris caught her breath – a murderer?
‘Mr Marshall.’ Iris managed to gather her composure. ‘Could we ask you a few questions?’
‘Will it help find my daughter and put this terrible business behind us so we can mourn Karena properly once and for all?’
‘It might,’ Slattery said, his eyes travelling about the dark hallway.
‘Right so,’ Marshall said and he led them back towards the soft light streaming from the library. The room was warmer than Iris had expected for some reason and it occurred to her that perhaps the frostiness she’d felt here before wasn’t all about temperature.
‘We’ve managed to get our hands on your daughter’s file and a piece of evidence has been thrown up that’s… well, we know about the blackmail,’ Iris said. She had walked along to the furthest side of the room, was standing next to one of the twin windows. In the distance, the searchers’ flashlights were sprite-like within the eerie darkness.
‘Blackmail?’ Marshall echoed. He stood next to a small table beside the fireplace, picked up his glass of whiskey and sipped some of the drink thoughtfully. ‘I think you’ve got yourselves confused, I’m not being blackmailed.’ He smiled, said it so smoothly, that if Iris hadn’t just left Nate Hegarty, she might have believed him. He laughed first, but then something like realisation stripped the laughter from the room and he dropped heavily into a chair. ‘Dear God… but…’
Why She Ran Page 23