‘Because I never wanted the divorce in the first place. None of this was meant to happen.’
His voice cracked with emotion and Rose placed her hand on his back. ‘Tell me, but only if you want to. Why did it all go wrong?’
‘It’s fucked up, the whole bloody relationship. Fucked up from beginning to end.’ He leaned forward with his head in his hands.
‘You think when you’re young that if you love someone that will be everything. That all they need is your love and if they love you back, well, you’re made for life. Funny how when you grow up you realise all that love is a load of bollocks.’
Rose didn’t respond. She waited for him to continue.
‘All the love in the world couldn’t have fixed Amy. She’s anorexic.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Rose said, not knowing what else to say.
‘She’s had it since she was a teenager. There’s times when she can’t eat. When it’s physically impossible for her to let food pass through her lips. Jesus, it was worse than if she’d been having an affair with the lies and the secrecy. Avoiding food was like a full-time job for her. I’ve been there for her during those times, but we all thought she was getting better. We were planning a family. She had to maintain a good weight in order to get pregnant, and we thought this time it was all behind us, the secrets, and the lies about food.’ He took a drink of the whiskey and set the glass back on the table.
‘I wanted kids. We both did. I thought that if she had a little one to live for, to love, she would stay well. I figured if she can’t do it for me then hey, she’d do it for our baby. That probably sounds messed up.’
Rose shook her head. ‘No, it doesn’t. I can see why you’d think like that.’
‘Yeah, well, Amy got pregnant. In spite of all of the starvation, her body managed to function enough to allow the pregnancy to take. For a few weeks, we were delighted. Amy seemed to be doing okay but then she had a miscarriage.’ He dragged his fingers through his hair.
‘Or at least, that’s what she told me. Turns out she had gone to London and had an abortion. She’d lied to me, said she was on a weekend trip with her sister to see a show. Instead, she had gone to a clinic and paid them to get rid of the baby. Just like that, no need for me even to know, let alone give consent.’
Rose groaned. ‘Danny, no wonder you’re a mess.’
‘Yeah, and before you tell me it’s her body and all that feminist stuff, I know. I know she was the one having to carry the baby through the nine months of pregnancy, give birth and all the rest, but Jesus, I would have been right there alongside her, doing whatever the hell I could for her.’
‘Did she tell you why she did it?’
‘She didn’t need to. Her anorexia, it screws up her head.’ He gestured at his temple. ‘She has this mortal fear of her body changing. I know if she had been well, things would have been different. But after what she did, well, I couldn’t stay with her. I couldn’t look at her without thinking about what she’d done, so I left.’
‘Why didn’t you say something sooner? You could’ve told me,’ Rose said. She couldn’t help feeling hurt that he hadn’t talked to her. She felt sad too, that she had let him down by keeping her own defences up. How could she have ever expected Danny to lean on her when she never allowed him to see the vulnerable parts of herself? God, at times she could be so selfishly wrapped up in her own problems.
‘Shame, I suppose. What kind of woman aborts her wanted child, and what kind of man abandons his sick wife? Told you it was fucked up.’
Rose took her hand away from his back. ‘Hey, you know me better than that. I wouldn’t judge either of you. Life’s complicated. Amy needs to deal with her own issues. You can’t fix her.’
‘I felt that I should have been able to help her. I was embarrassed that she couldn’t get a hold of herself and then for her to get a termination, well, she went too far. There’s no coming back from this.’
‘I’m sorry Dan, but you have to see that it’s Amy’s body. She was the one having to carry the child. She couldn’t cope with that and we can’t sit in judgement. But you have to go easier on yourself, too. You’re not to blame for any of this, and maybe you couldn’t have saved your marriage even if this hadn’t happened. Sounds to me like it was doomed from day one.’
Danny shrugged his shoulders. ‘It was good in the beginning and in the bits in-between.’ His voice was low and filled with hurt.
For a while he rested his head on her shoulder and they sat staring out across the city lights. Gradually the night drew in around them. When they’d drunk enough whiskey, they ordered in Chinese food and the conversation drifted back to work as they ate.
‘The wounds were consistent with a frenzied attack. The pathologist’s report says that the assailant was probably male, owing to the depth and force of the wounds. He was manic in his approach.’
Rose forked a piece of sauce-glistened beef. ‘Yet, he had arranged the bodies. He went to great care to carry them up to that bedroom and place them into the bed. That doesn’t suggest a manic approach – more of an ordered, planned out strategy. For some reason, he wanted the three bodies to be found together. So, what does that tell us?’
‘I don’t know. Not yet.’ Danny said.
‘The McGoldricks didn’t seem nervous or particularly stressed. Just concerned. I don’t suspect them but that doesn’t mean we won’t find anything to implicate them.’
‘And Conal Brady – the druggie DJ – while he knew Dylan Wray at school, we can’t link them now. Tania checked Dylan’s phone. There were no unusual call patterns and the most interesting thing to flag up was that outside of the friends in the house, he didn’t phone anyone.’
Danny got up, walked over to the kitchen area and poured himself a glass of water. ‘Maybe their final movements might hold some clue of what was to come. I don’t think this was random. The killer had to know the victims, he had to have had some sort of connection with them. This wasn’t a burglary gone wrong, or a domestic dispute. This was the unusual – a cold, calculated murderer creating a bloodbath.’
Rose thought about what Danny had said about the Dunlore murders, cold and calculated, yet the scene was a bloodied massacre. There was an art to the killings, a choreography of death played out within the confines of that old cottage, so far removed from the type of violence associated with Northern Ireland’s past.
In the past, the opera of violence that was conducted by terrorists every day was replicated in every living room via the local news and it was all consuming. Programmes were interrupted by police reports asking key holders of businesses to return to their premises to look for incendiary devices. A new language evolved to express the chaos of violence: knee-cappings, pipe bombs, shrapnel, collateral damage. Deadlock, insurgency, paramilitary. The language of war cloaked in officialdom. A whitewash from Whitehall. The official words owed more to police reports than to local people but they adopted the words as their own and were soon fluent in the language of political violence. That had been life for the Mulligan family in 1986.
CHAPTER 31
Despite working in a clinical environment for part of her career, Rose hated hospitals. The endless corridors punctuated with illness-inspired art. It was designed to make the spaces better yet only served to remind you of your own mortality. It made her want to run. The antiseptic smell made her feel queasy and there was always something of the apocalypse about the endless hallways and a sense that they’d be the place you would find the zombies waiting for you in times of danger.
They took the lift to the third floor, following the directions to the intensive care unit where Dylan Wray was being treated. At the entrance way, an upset family of three stood in a tight huddle crying softly, their arms wrapped around each other. Rose apologised as she moved past them to press the intercom buzzer on the wall.
The ICU nurses had been informed that they were coming so when they gave their names, they were allowed through to see Dylan. The ward was eerily quiet a
nd populated with bays of beds with patients hooked up to machines, ventilators and IV stands. Dylan was in the third bay to the left. His eyes were closed and he was receiving a blood transfusion. A male nurse sat on a stool in front of a monitor taking notes.
‘How’s he doing?’ asked Rose quietly.
‘He’s still critical, but stable. His white blood cells are up, which means there’s an infection to deal with, and he’s lost a lot of blood,’ the nurse replied before turning to adjust a line running the length of Dylan’s bed before snaking under his arm. Rose noted the deep lacerations around his face and neck, neatly stitched with black thread. He was wearing a cotton hospital gown that gaped at the top, showing yet more stiches and staples on his shoulder, running to his collar bone.
Danny walked around to the side of the bed. ‘Dylan, are you able to hear me?’
The male nurse turned. ‘He’s out of it, mate. We’re keeping him in an induced coma to stop the swelling in the brain. It’s possible he can hear you, but he won’t be able to respond.’
Danny bent down and said directly into Dylan’s ear, ‘We are going to get whoever did this to you and your friends. Hang in there.’
‘The family are around if you need to speak to them. You’ll probably find them in the visitors’ waiting room.’
‘Thanks,’ Rose said.
They found the visitors’ waiting room and approached the lone couple sitting holding hands.
‘Mr and Mrs Wray?’ Danny said. ‘DI Stowe. We met a couple of days ago. This is my colleague, Dr Lainey.’
The man stood up and then sat back down quickly, as if he couldn’t trust his legs to take his weight. ‘Any word on who did this?’
‘We’re working on it,’ said Rose.
‘We were in seeing Dylan. This must be so hard for you both. If we can do anything, please just let the family liaison officer know.’
‘The only thing you can do for us is to find out who did this to our son and why,’ the mother said, her voice quiet and low. She stared straight ahead, as though making eye contact was too much effort.
It was obvious that they could do nothing more, so they left and walked back to the car park. ‘How do we make sense of this for the families? They look at us as if we can give them all the answers, and the truth is, even if we catch who did it, we still may never truly know why.’
‘Can’t say I blame them. It must be the most awful pain to cope with,’ Rose replied, fastening her seatbelt.
‘The post-mortems should be back later today, so we’ll review them in the briefing with the team tomorrow morning. It might be useful to have your input, if you’re around. Care to join us?’ Danny said, pulling out onto the roundabout where the two huge metal spherical sculptures stood, known locally as the Balls on the Falls.
‘Sure, I’ll be there.’
Danny turned on the radio to hear a commentator on Radio Ulster asking why the mass killer hadn’t been found.
‘Back in the day, at least you knew who the bad guys were. This here is something else. Young people murdered in their beds. Honestly, you’ve got to ask what are the PSNI doing?’ Rose leaned over and switched the radio off.
CHAPTER 32
The morgue was a good ten degrees colder than outside and Danny welcomed it. The good weather was continuing, surprising everyone, and making the Democratic Unionist Party talking heads look exceptionally stupid, when discussing their belief that climate change was nothing more than a huge con, concocted by the Green Party. They were more likely to attribute the heat wave to a surge in heathenish activity than global warming.
Danny buzzed the inner door of the pathologist’s lab and was greeted by Siobhan, the receptionist. ‘Back again?’ she said, greeting him as she carried a sheaf of paper from the printer. ‘He’s expecting you.’
‘Thanks, I’ll go on through then.’
Lyons was leaning against his desk and talking into a Dictaphone when Danny entered the office. He looked up and indicated one minute with his free hand. Danny took the liberty of walking to the window and peering into the lab. The three bodies lay on separate steel tables, covered by long paper sheets.
‘Sorry about that,’ Lyons said. ‘Come on through.’
The antiseptic smell mingled with the cadaver scent prickled Danny’s nostrils, making him switch to breathing through his mouth. He was well versed in decomposition – the breakdown of the body’s tissues and process of putrefaction – and he had to admit that thanks to ventilation and good cleaning practices, modern mortuaries didn’t smell half as bad as they could. Attending to a rotting corpse was a different story. Danny had been new to the force when he found the decomposing, maggot-riddled body of a woman who had lain dead and rotting in her bed for over a month while her learning impaired brother had sat playing video games downstairs. He had told the complaining neighbours that the bad smell was a blocked drain. That vile and sickening sweet-rot had stayed with Danny for much longer than he had cared for. After that experience, he knew to be thankful for the clinical mortuary setting.
‘You’ve seen the initial report but sometimes it’s good to talk through everything with the bodies in situ,’ Lyons said, wasting no time getting to the job. Danny got the impression that he was the type that relished the opportunity to talk through his handiwork. It occurred to Danny that like some doctors and surgeons, Lyons possessed a bit of a god complex, and was lacking in bedside manner. He had found his calling working with corpses, that was for sure.
The lab room itself was windowless, cool and airless, with only the drone of refrigerators and the ventilation system filling the silence.
The first body they came to was Olivia Templeton’s. The strong LED lights stripped the last remnants of dignity that the white tissue sheet had provided. She looked younger on the table than she had in the bedroom. Too young to be lying on a mortuary slab with hairy arsed men poking around and making notes on her. Her skin had that ghostly bluish-whiteness, with patches of lividity collecting around the right-hand side. The Y-shaped opening running across her chest and down the torso had been neatly stitched together, but it did little to stop the image of Lyons’ hands rummaging inside her from tormenting Danny.
‘She died from exsanguination, bleeding out. This incision here was the likely culprit. I’ve noted a blow to the side of the head. She could have fallen against a piece of furniture during the attack, or maybe she turned quickly to avoid the knife attack and fell. You can also see some grazing around the eye socket. Indications are that she was lying prone when the assailant’s knife entered her thorax. When she was unconscious, she was placed in some sort of plastic woven bag and transported to the bedroom. We’ve found some fibres on all three of the bodies.’
‘What kind of woven bag?’
‘If I was asked to guess – and a guess is all I’m offering – I’d say some sort of builder’s merchant bag. Something to carry rubble or logs in. It would need to be big enough to place a body in, making it easier to carry it up the staircase. I would suggest that the three were killed in the downstairs of the house, then placed one at a time into the bag, and carried up to the bedroom before they were laid out on the bed.
‘You can see here’ – his gloved hand lifted Olivia’s slender finger – ‘it was clear that she fought. Some of the nails were broken and the index finger on the right hand is at an odd angle, clearly broken.’
‘Any sexual assault?’ Danny asked.
‘No. No evidence of rape, bleeding or abrasions to the genital area, although there was semen present, suggesting she had sex within the twelve hours previous.’
‘So, do we know any specifics other than size of weapon we are looking for? There wasn’t anything found at the scene.’
Lyons held up his gloved hand to silence Danny.
‘We’ll get to that. The amount of force needed to inflict the injuries, and the extent of internal injuries will help me establish the type of knife used.’
He pointed to the hands of Theo Beckett,
the second victim, where Danny could see puncture wounds, and a clean slice across the palm. ‘The defence wounds indicate capability of the victim to act. These sorts of details allow me to reconstruct the sequence of events and to distinguish between self-inflicted wounds and involvement of another party. There is evidence of metacarpal fractures as well as incision wounds to the hand on this victim. I think we can say this one put up quite a fight.’
‘I don’t think we are in any doubt that the wounds weren’t self-inflicted,’ Danny said.
‘No, but we can’t make assumptions. A multiple murder-suicide has to be ruled out. When dealing with deaths of this kind I am looking specifically at the type of injuries, the number and anatomical distribution of those injuries, and the shape, size, length, and depth of each.’ He held a small metal ruler against one of the slashes to show Danny what he was measuring.
‘You can see here that by examining the wound itself it is possible to determine the type of instrument used to inflict the injuries. As you’ll no doubt be aware, a neat wound indicates the use of a sharp object, such as a knife, whereas ragged wounds would suggest a blunter instrument. In this case, we are looking at the same knife being used on all three victims.’
‘Anything else you can tell us about the weapon?’
‘Trying to gauge the dimensions of a knife from the wounds can be tricky. There can be problems with skin shrinkage and elasticity of skin when the knife is withdrawn. This can lead to inaccurate approximations of knife size and blade width. Sometimes the blade has entered the skin at a slanted angle, making the length of the entry slit wound longer than expected.’
‘If you had to wager a guess?’ Danny asked.
‘Slender filleting knives penetrate more easily than thicker blades. My opinion would be that it was sharp, fit for purpose. What we can see in many of the incisions is a blade with an approximate thickness of two millimetres that is perhaps around twenty-five centimetres long. My best guess would be some type of carving knife with a laminated steel blade. But like I said, there are many variables in the wounds.’
Who Took Eden Mulligan? Page 15