Who Took Eden Mulligan?

by Sharon Dempsey

  ‘Right, that’ll be all for now, but we may have to check in with you and Hughes again. Get your reports logged in the system by the end of the day.’

  ‘Sir, there’s something else.’

  ‘What?’ Danny said, impatient.

  ‘Outside, in the garden, we’ve found some dolls.’

  ‘Dolls?’ Rose asked. ‘What kind of dolls?’

  ‘Old ones, hanging from the tree.’

  CHAPTER 5

  They made their way outside and let Officer Clement lead them to the tree at the back of the house.

  ‘There, Sir,’ he said, pointing towards the dolls before briskly heading back to the front of the house.

  Rose and Danny looked up to where the dolls hung perfectly still in the warm air. They had been suspended by fine nylon twine from individual branches of the same tree but each was different: a bisque face, cracked and dirty; a rubber one without an eye; another with blank holes where the glassy eyes should have been. Two of them had shorn heads showing the pin holes where the hair had been threaded into the dolls’ skulls. The one closest to them had her nose bashed in and the gaping hole where it should be was stuffed with some sort of sponge. The mouth hung open showing small, pearly teeth. Eyebrows painted in single brush strokes gave the doll a surprised look, as if she had experienced a fright.

  They appeared to be partly handcrafted and had been made out of an assortment of parts, some with arms attached backwards, giving them the appearance of deformity. The twisting of limbs, the assault of features and the missing eyes all conspired to make them look like they’d been in the ownership of a sadistic child.

  Rose recognised the face of one of them as being from a Tiny Tears doll. Its one remaining blue eye stared blindly. She had one as a child herself. They were popular in the eighties.

  ‘Weird as fuck,’ said Danny.

  ‘Do you think they were left for us to find?’ asked Rose.

  Danny walked underneath the vast branches, the shade providing a cool, dark belt, and started taking pictures with his phone. ‘Possibly. Could have been here before the slasher arrived on the scene, but we’ve got to check them out.’

  ‘Plenty to work with.’

  ‘Ha, I knew you’d bite,’ Danny said grinning.

  ‘I’m not signing up for anything. This was a cursory look, nothing more. Besides, your ACC might have something to say about me sticking my nose in where it’s not wanted.’

  ‘A case like this one needs someone like you. Leave McCausland to me.’

  Rose decided she needed to lay her cards on the table. ‘As far as my boss is concerned, I’m here for a few days’ holiday to attend to some family business. He’ll be expecting me back. I’ve no intention of getting messed up in a murder case.’

  ‘Yeah, but you could ask for a secondment. Say, six to eight weeks? That’s all I’m asking for.’

  ‘It’s not that simple, Danny.’

  ‘Rosie, it’s only as hard as you want to make it. Tell me you love London, love working with parole boards and you’ve some English fella keeping your bed warm, waiting for your return, and I’ll back off. But if there is a tiny bit of you interested in doing some real, meaningful work at the front end, then come on board and do this with me.’

  ‘Who says my work isn’t meaningful? The world doesn’t revolve around Danny Stowe, you know.’

  He held up a hand. ‘Sorry, that came out wrong. Rosie, you and I, we go way back. Do you not remember the nights we spent talking about how we were going to set the world alight? Now’s our chance.’

  She said nothing and he took it as his cue to continue.

  ‘The truth is, Rosie, I was put on historical enquiries because I’ve messed up. A previous case went badly wrong, and I was responsible. You landed back in my life on my first day of a big case, with a crime scene straight out of hell, and a crazed girl thinking she has committed murder. This is my chance to right a few wrongs and prove I’m worth a second chance.’ He put his hands behind his head. ‘Christ, I’ve just realised what I’m doing – it’s like finals all over again – I’m relying on you to make me do my best work.’

  ‘Danny, you don’t need me. You never have done. Look, I’m not saying I won’t consider it – a change from London and the prison service would be nice – I just don’t know if I want that change to be here.’

  How could she explain to him that she had spent so long running away from Belfast that she feared coming back?

  CHAPTER 6

  Going back to Belfast had never been part of the plan.

  The phone call had come in the dead of the night, just as she always knew it would. She’d scrabbled for the switch on the bedside lamp, and propped herself up in the bed, bleary-eyed, her heart thumping.

  ‘Roisin, it’s me,’ her sister had said.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tonight. At half-nine. It took me a while to track you down as I’ve four different numbers for you. How did you know?’

  ‘I get a phone call from you at God knows what time so it has to mean she’s dead. Either that, or she needs help. I prefer the first option.’

  ‘Well, you got your wish.’ She could hear the reproach in Kaitlin’s voice.

  ‘I’m sorry. You know it’s complicated for me. I was never the favoured child.’

  They fell silent for a second, the sounds from the London street below – a taxi door being slammed, a siren in the distance – offering a kind of solace. This was Rose’s life now. Here, she didn’t have to be wary of the city around her or worry about her family.

  ‘The funeral will be on Saturday. You’ll come?’ Kaitlin says it lightly, but the hope is clear.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll have to see what’s happening at work.’ She racked her brain for a believable excuse as to why she couldn’t go but settled instead on the truth.

  ‘Look, I don’t want to go. You can’t expect me to jump on a flight home after all this time and act like everything is normal.’

  ‘Come on. That’s not fair on us.’

  She’d no doubt that Kait knew full well that any return to Belfast would be under duress. But Evelyn was gone, so where was the harm in seeing her family now? There must be a squad of nieces and nephews that she had yet to meet.

  ‘For God’s sake Rosh, it’s our mother. Your superiors will understand and you’re bound to be entitled to compassionate leave. We haven’t seen you for years. You owe it to her to go to her funeral.’

  ‘I don’t owe her anything.’

  ‘What about the rest of us? You left us too.’

  ‘It wasn’t that simple.’

  She thought of their family home and felt the tightening in her chest that she had spent years learning to breathe through.

  ‘I’ll text you the details when we get everything sorted with the undertakers. O’Kane’s are doing it. She warned us not to go with the other crowd on the road.’

  Rose laughed. ‘Sectarian till the very end.’

  Fifteen years. Had it really been that long? She had left as soon as she could at eighteen and was thirty-three now. Sleep had deserted her, and she was left with the pale, early morning light and a head full of infuriating memories. Funny how a familiar voice could drag her back into that world so easily. A world she had worked hard to leave behind.

  Back then she had learned to keep her head down, to stay in the shadows, and she had survived by counting down the days until she could escape. Lying on the top bunk in a room she shared with Kaitlin, she’d promised herself that when she got out, her life would be different. The posters on her walls of bands like Joy Division, Pete Doherty and Oasis helped her visualise a life beyond the grey, breeze block walls of Belfast.

  Sometimes she worried it hadn’t really been as bad as she remembered. Had she perhaps been too quick to judge? But there was no escaping the reality of it: late night runs down south, transporting people, weapons, laundered money and God knows what. The rushed dinners as her mother was called away to deal with some urgent b
usiness that they had learned early on never to question. Her family operated on a need to know basis and Rose knew not to challenge that.

  She had been Roisin back then. Roisin Lavery. Skinny and tall with shoulder-length dark hair, styled with a side fringe she wore long to hide behind. She’d had skin so pale people remarked on it, suggesting that she needed to get out more instead of spending so many days inside reading and listening to music.

  When the last exam came around in June, she felt a surge of excitement laced with fear. She’d packed her PE bag with a couple of pairs of jeans, a few T-shirts, toiletries and the bundle of twenty-pound notes she had been saving for years. Working three nights a week washing glasses in Madden’s pub hadn’t paid much, but she had been planning this for a long time and saving every penny amounted to freedom. When the examiner said, ‘Time’s up, please put down your pens,’ Rose’s heart had soared.

  Liverpool offered her a chance to start over. An opportunity to be her own person, without the stigma of her family name. Months earlier, she had hidden the letter declaring she had been offered a place on a degree course in criminality and psychology. It didn’t take Freud to work out she was exorcising some demons – even she could see the irony. Ensuring she achieved the grades needed to meet the criteria had been all she’d focused on and studying was easy when she could almost taste the freedom it offered.

  Within a month of leaving she had changed her name to Rose Lainey. Officially, she was still a Lavery, but when meeting new people, she used her adopted name. Reinvention was essential. If she could pretend to be someone else then, maybe, she had a hope of creating the life she craved. She wasn’t going to let her family, or Belfast, define her for evermore, so she’d separated herself from her family with distance, morality and politics. Funny how, back then, she’d grouped them all as one.

  The family had always been run as a tight ship with their mother at the helm. What Evelyn said went and they were all powerless to stop her. Only Rose stood up to her mother’s politics, and the others would look at her like she was crazy. She might as well have said that the earth was flat, rather than question the republican rhetoric that her mother so proudly espoused. The younger ones knew no better, but Rose could think for herself and she wasn’t going to stand by and say nothing. Leaving had been her only option. She couldn’t imagine what would have happened if she’d stayed. Evelyn had a mean streak and she wasn’t averse to hurting her own children. There’d been many a household battle that had ended in hair pulling and slaps that stung beyond the red welt left by a palm.

  Yet Evelyn could also be wildly loving and entertaining when the mood took her. When they’d lost their father, in the worst circumstances possible, Evelyn had made sure each of the children knew she was there for them, that she was going nowhere and that they had each other. None of it, for Rose, was enough when weighed up against the other stuff, the things she never wanted to dwell on.

  She’d worked hard all these years to eradicate her past. Her way of speaking took a bit longer to go than the name, but now she spoke with an indistinct English accent that people could never quite place. She’d managed to create a life built around her work. If she didn’t get too close to anyone, they didn’t care enough to dig and discover who Rose Lainey really was. Though who’s to say that the girl she left behind defined her any more than the woman she had become?

  When Kaitlin had called with the news of their mother’s death, Rose had waited, expecting an avalanche of emotion, something to shift inside and show her that she was changed by Evelyn’s passing. That shift didn’t come. She wondered if that was partly down to the fact that she had spent so much of her adult life shored up against emotion, controlled and considered in her approach to everything to such an extent that she no longer knew how to feel.

  Despite her initial reluctance, she’d arrived the previous day and found that, despite the obvious changes, driving the roads of Belfast felt natural, like her muscle memory had been woken from a long sleep. The hire car, picked up at the airport, was functional and nippy but she wasn’t going to be impressing anyone pulling up at her family home in a Fiat 500. They’d probably piss themselves laughing at her. She remembered that snarky humour that only family can get away with. She was sure her siblings’ banter wouldn’t have changed. At least, she hoped not.

  The cars parked outside the wake house gave it away, along with the huddle of smokers in the tiny front garden. Rose could have found the house in her sleep anyway. Her mother had never left the family home. Twenty-three Hyde Street. It was in the Markets area of Belfast, a nationalist enclave situated right beside the bustling city centre. Hyde Street was in a row of red brick terrace houses that had been renovated by the council to make them fit for purpose.In any other city, the close positioning to the city centre would have made the area genteel, expensive and sought after, but not here. For a long time, these homes had been the dregs offered to working class Catholic families without a say in the government at Stormont.

  Rose parked at the end of the street and walked back up. She paused at the gate, conscious of the eyes watching her. Someone whispered within ear shot and she heard her old name, Roisin. She’d be a curiosity to them all. The one who ran away and never returned.

  She entered the narrow hallway and turned into the living room at the front of the house.

  ‘Rosh! You made it.’ She felt herself be pulled into an embrace without knowing whose arms were wrapped round her. She looked up and for a second, she couldn’t place the greyish-green eyes. Then, as if the kaleidoscope had shifted, it all fell into place – Kaitlin.

  ‘Kait, I’d hardly know you!’

  ‘That’s what happens when you move away and forget to come home.’ Her voice was warm but the hint of admonishment in her words was clear.

  ‘Come on in, they’re all waiting to see you. Or would you like a few minutes alone with Mummy?’ She jerked her head in the direction of the coffin where it had been placed along the far wall, beneath the window. The curtains were closed against the late evening light. A gloomy low glimmer from two church candles cast a sombre feel over the room.

  Rose could see the coffin was open and shook her head. She had no desire to see her mother’s corpse. She was here for the living, not the dead. Kaitlin nodded in understanding.

  ‘Okay then, come in and see the others.’

  When she followed Kaitlin into the kitchen the room fell quiet. She felt as if they had all turned towards her, watching.

  A man on a wooden chair rose to his feet and walked over to offer her his hand. She shook it and realised it was her brother Pearse. He was different from how she’d remembered him, balding and heavier. The softness of youth was long gone. She wondered what he thought of her in return.

  ‘Hello, Roisin.’

  The murmur of conversation started again and she realised she had been holding her breath.

  ‘Hi Pearse. Good to see you.’ She searched his face for the brother she remembered.

  Someone offered her a cup of tea and she took it, glad to have something to do with her hands. Conversation buzzed around her and she picked up threads – the funeral director had done a good job, the mass was all organised, the order of service pamphlets would arrive any minute now and yes, they had chosen a lovely photograph of Evelyn for it. The priest was going to say a decade of the rosary over the coffin and would anyone like to join them in the front room?

  The room thinned out as some went to say the prayers. Rose stayed where she was with Pearse at her side.

  ‘You’re not the religious type then?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she said, looking up at him. ‘You?’

  ‘Only when I have to be.’

  ‘I forgot, that’s the way it is here. Religion: a necessary evil that keeps everyone in their own lane.’

  ‘That’s one way of looking at it. How have you been, Rosh? Life treating you well?’

  ‘I can’t complain. And you?’

  ‘Aye. I’m doing all ri
ght for myself. Married, did you know? Two kids.’

  ‘I heard. Sorry I didn’t go to the wedding.’

  ‘Or the christenings, or the first communions … You’ve missed a lot, Roisin.’ He said it with a touch of bitterness, as if she had deliberately slighted him by missing out on his family’s milestones.

  Kaitlin rescued her. ‘Roisin, Aunt Marie wants to see you before she goes.’

  She let Kaitlin take her by the hand and lead her into the living room. ‘Thanks,’ she mouthed as the responses to the prayers rumbled in the background.

  CHAPTER 7

  Rose and Danny were both quiet on the drive back to the station. She was processing, working out what needed to be done, considering tasks in her head even though this wasn’t yet her case to consult on. She was tempted to stay. All it would take was one phone call to her boss, Bernard. He had been telling her for months that she needed a break and she was sure he wouldn’t hesitate to recommend her for a short-term placement with the PSNI, if they wanted her.

  ‘So, what have we got?’ Danny said, breaking her stream of thought.

  ‘A bloodbath. At first glance, you’d think the three of them had been in bed together, but as it didn’t look like the primary scene, we’re going to have to work out who placed them there, and why.’ She paused, thinking about what they should do first. ‘Iona Gardener. She’s where we start. You need to find out where they’ve taken her and talk to her.’

  ‘It would help to have you with me.’

  ‘Danny, come on. Get real. I can’t exactly turn up and interrogate someone when I’m not officially working on this case.’

  ‘No, I know that. I’m just saying you’d be a great help. This is a complex murder investigation. We have a confession that I’m pretty sure is false and a whole heap of questions that need someone with your experience to unravel.’