Who Took Eden Mulligan?

by Sharon Dempsey

  Later that day, Rose returned to her case notes on the Mulligan family. Cormac’s alibi had checked out. He had been coaching a night-time football match and had several witnesses to vouch for his whereabouts. Paddy’s checked out as well. He had been propping up Bittles bar until closing and had been sleeping it off in a doorway until the Home Safe bus, a Christian charity looking after the homeless, scooped him up and took him to a shelter for the night.

  Rose knew that without the psychological or physical protection they need, children who experienced the loss of a parent often go on to internalise fear and anxiety. Their abandonment giving rise to shame and that, in turn, making them believe that they aren’t worthy of love. This was the crux of the pain from which they needed to heal to have full and meaningful lives.

  It was to be expected that, having endured emotional and physical abandonment, the Mulligan children would experience persistent psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, post-traumatic stress, aggression, impulsiveness, delinquency, hyperactivity and substance abuse. What a legacy, she thought. While the daughters Eileen and Lizzie appeared to have fared better than the brothers, she knew that women were better than men at masking problems – they could maintain the semblance of a normal life while battling private demons. And that left Eamonn. The baby of the family. Or was she looking at the wrong son entirely? There was that feeling again. A deep sense of unease. Something bothered Rose about Paddy and she needed to know why.

  CHAPTER 62

  Danny had a lot to consider as he headed back to the station. He drove past the security camera and waited the five seconds until the fortified gates slowly swung open for him. When he reached his desk, he checked his messages, and then told Tania to gather the team for an update at noon. Magee sat over on the far side of the room, talking into his phone, while Jack Fitzgerald and Jamie King were bent over a computer.

  Danny needed Rose to talk through their findings to date. She was the first person he looked for the minute he came through the station gates. He could no longer deny that she was under his skin. All the shit he had been through with Amy made him extra wary. He wasn’t in a fit state to embark on a new relationship, let alone one which he knew would mean so much to him. Rose was pretty much perfect. Too bloody perfect for him. If he’d any sense he’d play the field for a while. Get all this angst out of his system. Settling down hadn’t done him any favours in the past.

  When he finally tracked Rose down, she was raring to go.

  ‘Paddy Mulligan, we have to bring him in,’ she said, barely stopping for a breath as they walked down the stairs to the basement office. They could be sure of peace down there.

  ‘I’ve been thinking along the same lines. We do need to bring him in, but first, hear me out. I’m sure there was more than one intruder in the cottage that night. If it was Paddy Mulligan, he was only part of the story. Someone else knew what Paddy planned to do. They may not have been involved in the killings, but they interrupted him, and set about clearing the scene of evidence. It would explain why Iona was able to escape.’

  ‘But the blood and mess, it was everywhere. The scene was hardly clean,’ Rose said.

  ‘Yes, but no prints worth filing were found, no weapon. Someone was methodical enough to do a sweep. Someone who had more presence of mind than the killer. The bodies were placed in that bed. Whoever was there that night helped Paddy do that.’

  ‘Are you thinking that Lizzie was there? It would explain the two contrasting aspects of the crime scene – a bloodbath and yet, a tidy exit. And the motive was definitely to draw attention to the Mulligan case, to make us reopen the investigation,’ Rose said.

  ‘And Eden Mulligan? What about her case?’ Danny was pacing around the room, the pieces beginning to slot together.

  ‘She was the price paid to cover up Ryan’s indiscretions.’

  ‘So how did Paddy Mulligan know about the five in the cottage?’ Rose asked.

  ‘Lizzie knew Iona in a professional capacity. Perhaps Lizzie set Iona up, sent Paddy to the cottage?’

  ‘Yes, and it goes towards explaining why Iona felt responsible.’

  ‘He wanted to replicate the family set-up. The five children left behind. Their childhoods were virtually killed the night their mother was taken. That’s what he said to me,’ Rose said.

  ‘Exactly. Could the cottage murders have been interrupted by one of the other Mulligans, who knew what Paddy planned to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s possible.’

  CHAPTER 63

  By the time they arrived at Paddy’s flat, he was gone. There was only one place he could be. Rose was sure of it. They drove down Ormeau Road weaving in and out of traffic, past the old Victorian gas works that was now an office complex, the red brick wall running the length of the road. She turned left onto Hyde Street, and pulled up at number thirteen. The house was derelict, condemned by the council as dangerous. A faded council notice had been stuck onto the metal door, stating ‘STAY OUT: Unsafe’. The windows were blocked up with bricks and the front door was fixed shut with an outer metal barrier.

  The street was quiet. Kids were playing with a frisbee farther down the road but this section of blocked-up houses was ghost-like. Shells of another life long gone.

  ‘Danny, you cover the front, I’ll go around the back,’ Rose said, running off before he could say otherwise.

  ‘You can’t go after him. You’re not police. Stay in the car, Rose!’

  ‘No, you need me to talk to him. He’ll respond to me.’

  ‘No! Rose, stay put. I’ll radio for back-up.’

  But she didn’t listen. Rose was sure that once Paddy knew the game was up, he’d realise the only way out would be to kill himself. She needed to be the one to reason with him. To tell him that she understood his justifications. To make him feel heard. She ran up the entryway, dragged an old, partially burnt out metal bin close to the wall and heaved herself over. Her ankle rolled as she hit the ground, making her cry out in pain. The backyard was a tangle of broken bottles and weeds creeping through the cracks in the concrete, but she could see the back door had been forced. She cast around, looking for something to prise it open with and found a discarded brush, its bristles rotting. With a final push, she managed to force it wide enough to gain entry.

  Inside, it was dark. A smell of something putrid hit her nostrils, making her recoil. It was an animal-like musk, undercut with decaying flesh. A cat, or a rat perhaps, had become trapped and had died. The heat of summer had produced an overpowering stench. She felt her way through the hallway and climbed the stairs, hoping they wouldn’t give way beneath her weight.

  As she approached the landing, she heard him.

  ‘You worked it out, then.’

  She followed the voice into the bedroom at the back of the house, where she found him sat crouched against the far wall. A knife in his hand glinted in the meagre light. Suddenly, she wished she had listened to Danny. She had no gun for protection and her psychological insights meant nothing in the face of a dangerous man cornered. Light spilled in through the roof where the tiles had come dislodged and the ceiling had rotted away. It was enough to illuminate the darkened room. His pallor was blue, as if the blood had been sucked out of him.

  ‘I thought that other cop would have been the one to bring me in. It’s his case after all.’

  His voice wavered. Fear.

  Rose walked slowly into the room, wishing she had a gun trained on him.

  ‘DI Stowe and I are working together. He knows I’m here.’

  ‘Worried I’m going to knife you too?’

  ‘Reach for anything, one false move, and they won’t hesitate to pump you full of lead. Paddy, it’s over. You can’t run.’

  ‘I’m running nowhere. None of you understand. Time and time again we told you all. Tried to make you see what it is like for us, living like this. When I have trouble sleeping, I come here. It’s not as bad as it looks. It’s still the same wallpaper.’ Rose looked at the wall where he
indicated with a flick of the knife, seeing the faded grey and green geometric pattern that screamed eighties.

  ‘It’s the same roof over my head. It might be falling down now, but it’s still my home. The last place I had her. This is where it all started. Where it’s all going to end.’

  In the distance, a helicopter circled overhead, a steady rattle. A dog barked in the street and someone told it to shut the fuck up.

  ‘You planned all of this didn’t you, Paddy?’

  ‘You didn’t leave me with any choice. The five in the cottage were a necessary sacrifice. If the police had done their job in the first place, none of this would have happened.’

  He was deluded and justifying his dark actions to himself. Rose felt adrenaline pump through her veins and willed herself to keep him calm and talking.

  For a brief second, Rose thought of her office in London with its safe, predictable rhythm.

  She stared at Paddy, watching the tendons bulge in his arm like cords beneath the skin as his grip tightened on the knife.

  ‘Your mother wouldn’t want this.’

  ‘She was special, you know. She wasn’t like anyone else I have ever met.’

  ‘That’s the way it is with mothers,’ Rose said. ‘We love them beyond all else.’ She thought of her own mother. The days Evelyn had spent in the hospital before she’d died. How, even if Kaitlin had told her, she wouldn’t have gone to see her. And how, now, part of her regretted that she hadn’t had the chance to make amends.

  ‘Paddy, you can’t get away with this.’

  ‘I never intended to get away with it. Don’t you see? I only wanted to make you take us seriously. To dig a little deeper. The others. They would never have understood. Only Lizzie knew I had it in me to do it.’ His jaw was set tight, as if he was actively containing his anger. He rocked back and forth slightly, making Rose think of a child wanting to be soothed by its mother.

  ‘The other police, they had no respect. Blamed her for everything. Said she’d another man on the side. That she’d run off and left us. We knew she’d never do that. If only you could have seen her, dancing in the kitchen, the radio playing the top ten, her face all lit up with love for us.’

  He fell quiet as he remembered her, this woman who had meant everything to him.

  ‘It was Lizzie’s idea, originally. She said once what we needed was someone important to die and to be able to link the two cases, to make the police have to open our mother’s file and examine it properly. We all had some difficult conversations over the years but that one stuck in my head. It wouldn’t let go of me.’

  ‘Did Cormac help you?’

  ‘No. What’s any of that matter? I did it. Me, only me.’ His lip twitched, a tell that his brother was possibly involved.

  ‘Really, the only thing that separates me and Cormac is conviction. I had the balls to do it.’ He slumped forward, the fire gone out of him. He was like an exhausted animal, spent by the chase and ready to give in.

  ‘The planning gave me a focus. I knew what I had to do and finding the five of them was like a gift from the gods. Iona, she thought she could fix me. Make the pain go away. So bloody naive. Full of all her education. Trying to save the world. Just like Joel before that.’

  ‘How did you meet Iona?’

  ‘She came to me. Lizzie had met her through her counselling work and put her in touch with me. She was looking for information to help with her dissertation. Some fancy title about the disappeared and transgenerational trauma. She said so many young people today are committing suicide because of the difficulties their parents and grandparents faced during the Troubles. She wanted to know what it was like for me, being brought up without parents, living through all of that. What could Iona ever know about what it was like for us?’ A shadow fell across his face. He looked utterly dejected, his head hanging down to his chest, almost as lifeless and grotesque as the dolls he’d fashioned and hung from the tree at the cottage.

  To the side of him sat a wooden dolls’ house. By the looks of it, it was handcrafted and was a reconstruction of the house they were standing in. Paddy noticed Rose looking at it. ‘I made every part of this. It had to be perfect. I worked hard to make it so. The tiny hallway leading to the narrow, steep staircase took forever to get right. See them stairs and the bannister? That kept me at it for months.’

  She peered into it now, seeing that, through the dolls’ house, he could visualise and recreate the life he’d had back then.

  He placed his finger and thumb into the door and pulled it to open the front of the house. The front wall swung back in one fluid movement, allowing her to see the whole tableau he had created. The downstairs was set with the replica 1980s sofa. He had made a television that sat in the corner, its spindly aerial fashioned out of copper wiring. The fireplace had been constructed out of miniature, mosaic tiles. He had built out the tiny hearth and had even thought to place a poker by the side.

  ‘Upstairs, the beds lay exactly in the places they should be. My mother’s and the girls’ facing the narrow window at the front of the house, and the boys’ bed in the backroom overlooking the yard.

  ‘The hard part was placing the dolls. I worked so hard on the house, considering every detail and thought about where each of them should be positioned.’

  Suddenly, the stairs creaked. Rose held her breath, thinking it was Danny, but suddenly the door banged open and there stood Cormac.

  ‘I knew you’d be here, hiding among the memories. I’ve come for answers, Paddy. Why? Why did you do this?’ He took little notice of Rose as he strode across the dust-covered floor and Rose watched as he squared up to his brother.

  ‘For you, Cormac. For all of us. Don’t you see that? It was the only way to make them listen. To make them see what we had lost. Deep down you know I’m right. It was the only way. No one cared about our Ma, no one but us.’

  Cormac looked away, as if it was too painful to look directly at Paddy. He leaned against the wall with his hands on his head.

  ‘Why them?’ Rose asked, breaking the silence. ‘Why the young people in the cottage?’

  Where was Danny? Surely, he should have been here by now. Adrenaline was pumping through her veins and she could feel her heart thump in her chest.

  ‘There were five of them. The perfect little unit. Tight they were, just like us. I’d helped Iona with her research and every now and then I’d spot them around the university. There was something about them, the way they stuck together, always hanging around each other like there was no one else they’d rather be with.’

  Rose could see Cormac out of the corner of her eye. He was bent over holding his head in his hands.

  ‘It was Iona showing an interest in Ma’s case – well that’s how I knew that they were the right ones. I realised that I could do something to make a difference. It was a sacrifice of sorts. That’s what it was. A sacrifice so that we could get to the truth.

  ‘Iona pretended that she cared. That she was interested in what had happened to us and wanted us to be able to find closure, but we were no more than fodder for her essays. That was all. A means to getting her degree. She knew what our mother meant to us, she knew that we had nothing when she was taken from us.’

  Rose let out a weary sigh. He was so damaged that in his mind this was all perfectly logical.

  ‘Fuck, Paddy. What have you done?’ Cormac wailed. Rose put her hand up to silence him.

  ‘You followed them to the cottage?’ she asked.

  ‘I knew that was where they would be. She liked talking to me. I thought she was trying to understand what it was like back then. How it was for us growing up without a mother or father.’ His eyes had a haunted look about them, as if he was held hostage to the past. Rose could hear Cormac crying softly. He was watching the final disintegration of his family.

  ‘How long were you watching them for?’ Rose asked. She could hear sirens close by.

  ‘About a week. I had to be sure. To know that their lives were worth the sa
crifice.’

  ‘Who helped you, Paddy? There was someone else in that cottage with you. Someone helped you carry the bodies and place them on the bed.’

  He shook his head and continued talking as if he hadn’t heard Rose’s question.

  ‘In some ways, knowing something about them made it easier, not harder. I felt a connection with them.’ He talked without looking at her. ‘They died to save my mother. I’m not crazy, I didn’t think she’d be found alive. But I knew, one way or another, their deaths would help unearth the secrets that had gone with our Ma. If we can find out what happened on that night in July, then maybe I can rest, you know?

  ‘I’m tired. So tired. We all are. We deserved answers after all this time. Their deaths aren’t on my head. Not really. If the police had investigated properly in the first place it would never have come to this.’ He rubbed at his neck.

  ‘This stops here, Paddy. It’s gone too far,’ Rose said, her voice sounding calmer and more authoritative than she felt.

  He looked directly at her and she saw despair in his eyes.

  ‘It’s already over. We can bring my mother home now. I didn’t expect to get away with it,’ he said, and pressed the knife to his throat.

  ‘No!’ Cormac shouted. ‘No! Paddy please don’t hurt yourself.’

  ‘Get down on the floor! Put your hands behind your head. I am arresting you in connection to the murders in Dunlore cottage.’

  Rose turned to see Danny standing at the door with his gun trained on Paddy. Suddenly, there was a roar of footsteps on the wooden floorboards and the room was full of police officers.

  There was a scuffle of bodies. Rose turned to see Paddy was on the ground, being handcuffed.

  ‘You took your time,’ she said to Danny.

  ‘Just letting you do your thing, Dr Lainey. I’d the sight on him from above. Next time, wait in the car and don’t go running off acting like a cop.’ She looked up and saw a gap in the boards of the ceilling. Danny must have climbed up from the back of the house and watched them while waiting on back-up.