“Good morning, sir. I believe you are here about the missing girl. Thanks for coming in. What can you tell us?” said Hays as he took a seat opposite him.
The man was in his late thirties or early forties. He was well groomed and neatly dressed in a business suit, and well-polished black leather shoes. He had a long thin face and deep blue eyes with a mop of dark hair going a little grey at the temples.
His accent was West of Ireland, but not strongly so, and he spoke in a soft, quiet voice. “Well, I think I may know her,” he said a little shyly.
“You think, or you do know her?” asked Hays.
“Well it’s not such a good photograph, but I think it’s her, OK. What’s happened to her?” he asked.
“Do you know her name?” Lyons asked.
“If it’s the girl I’m thinking of, her name is Lisa. That’s all I know, I don’t have a surname. I think she’s Polish,” he added.
“I see. And how do you know her, Mr …?” Lyons asked.
“Oh, sorry yes, I’m Liam O’Flaherty. Well it’s a bit tricky really. You see I’m married, and well, you know…,” his voice trailing off without completing the sentence.
“No, Mr O’Flaherty, I’m afraid we don’t know. Why don’t you tell us?” Hays responded.
“Well, if it’s the same girl, she’s kind of like… like an escort that I visited a few times. But my wife mustn’t know, she’d kill me. She’s pregnant with our third, and well, we don’t do much anymore if you know what I mean.”
Hays looked at Lyons who seemed just as surprised as he was by the revelation.
“I see. And where did you visit the escort girl, Mr O’Flaherty?” Lyons asked.
“Here in Galway. She has an apartment down by the harbour in one of those new blocks.”
“Where were you on Tuesday afternoon and evening, Mr O’Flaherty?” Hays said.
“Tuesday. At work, of course till about six, and then I went out to the GAA Club in Oranmore for some training till about half-eight.”
“And you’ll have witnesses no doubt,” Lyons added.
“Yes, of course. Why? What has happened? I just came in because I saw the poster in a shop and thought I recognized her. I haven’t been with her in ages. I’m not in any trouble, am I?” he asked.
“How did you get in touch with this Lisa, Mr O’Flaherty?” Hays asked.
“On the internet. There’s a web site and she looked really nice, so I called her.”
“Do you happen to have her phone number stored in your phone?” Lyons said.
“You must be joking. Angela, my wife, might have found it. No, I called her from the office.”
“Look, I need to go now,” he went on, “I’m late for work and they’ll be wondering where I’ve got to.”
“I think you’d better call in sick, Mr O’Flaherty. I want you to go with Detective Sergeant Lyons now and see if you can find the web page that Lisa was using on one of our computers. Then I want you to show Detective Lyons exactly where the apartment where you met Lisa is located,” Hays said.
“And don’t worry, we’ll keep this between ourselves for now unless there are further developments,” Hays said, nodding to Lyons to get started.
O’Flaherty got up from the table looking extremely nervous and followed Maureen Lyons out of the room.
* * *
Maureen Lyons returned to the incident room with a print out of the web page used by Lisa. It was good to see the girl looking alive and well, even if she was scantily dressed. She was a looker to be sure, with long dark hair, a pretty face, and an amazing figure shown to best advantage by her black lacy underwear. On the web page, she was reclining on a single bed, lying on her side, with her arm propping up her head, and pouting slightly as if she was about to kiss the viewer.
“I’m off down the docks with Casanova to find the girl’s apartment. Anyone fancy it?” she asked, looking around.
“I’ll come with you,” Flynn said, “better not to show a uniform for now till we know what’s what.”
Hays studied the alluring photo of the girl on the printed page that Lyons had stuck up on the whiteboard. Well at least we have a phone number now. Pretty girl, he thought to himself.
The phone number on the web page was an 083-number meaning that the phone service was probably provided by Three Ireland.
“John, get onto Three will you, and ask for the records for this number going back, say, three months,” Hays said tapping the print out on the board with his pen. “Both incoming and outgoing. And any other details that they can give you – payment type, frequency and so on. And don’t let them put you off with all that data protection bullshit. We can have a warrant arranged by eleven o’clock if necessary. But don’t tell them it’s a murder enquiry, just say it’s ongoing investigations.”
* * *
At twenty past ten, Garda Jim Dolan arrived at the station with the small green Nokia in a plastic bag. He had driven in from Clifden as quickly as conditions would allow, hoping for some recognition from the inspector for his efforts. He was out of luck.
“About bloody time!” snapped Hays as he took the bag from Dolan. “And tell Mulholland he owes me one for this.”
“I suppose a cup of coffee is out of the question then?” responded Dolan.
“Ah go on, you’re all right. Sure, help yourself,” Hays replied.
Hays put on a pair of blue latex gloves before taking the phone out of the bag. The battery had gone dead by now, so he searched in his desk drawer for an old Nokia charger to bring the phone back to life. When he connected it, the moving bars for the battery status began to pulse, showing that it was charging. He hoped that there would be no PIN number needed to access the phone, and he decided to leave it on charge for an hour or so before beginning to explore it.
* * *
The block that housed the apartment that Lisa had occupied was clean and fresh. It was close to Jury’s Inn down by the docks. As they got out of the car, the salty sea air was blowing up from the quay.
“Nice place,” Lyons said to no one in particular. “I bet the rent here isn’t cheap.”
At the front entrance, the small cluster of bells showed that L Palowski occupied apartment twenty-one on the second floor.
“Is this where you came to see Lisa?” she asked O’Flaherty.
“Yes, this is it.”
“Right. You can go off to work now then, Mr O’Flaherty. But don’t leave town. We will need you to make a statement later on, and we may have some more questions for you to answer.”
O’Flaherty vanished immediately, skulking off down the street in case anyone might see him.
The front entrance to the block was open, so the two Gardaí entered and made their way up the stairs to the second floor. Flynn knocked loudly on the door of number twenty-one and stood back from the door leaning against the metal bannister opposite.
When there was no reply, he knocked again, but still no one answered.
He looked at Lyons. “Probable cause?”
Lyons nodded, and then to her surprise, instead of booting the door open, Flynn took out a set of about thirty keys from his jacket and started trying them one by one in the apartment door.
“Jaysus Eamon,” Lyons said. Flynn just looked at her and shrugged.
The apartment was immaculately clean and tidy inside, if somewhat sparsely furnished. Lyons recognised several items that had come from IKEA. There was a beige sofa opposite the mock fireplace in the living room-cum-kitchen, a rug on the wood effect floor and a small collection of paperbacks on a shelf beside the fireplace. On the shelf there was a head and shoulders photo of the dead girl, happy, smiling for the camera.
The apartment had two bedrooms. One was cosily furnished with a dresser, bedside locker with a lamp, and a single bed made up with a duvet in a pink floral cover and matching pillow. A small brown teddy bear was relaxing in the bed under the duvet with just its head peeping out. A modern white wardrobe with a full-length mirror on the door
completed the picture.
The other bedroom was at the back of the apartment block, and although it had a window that looked out onto the courtyard, the room was dark compared to the rest of the flat. By contrast, this room was almost totally bare. There was a four-foot bed with just a single fitted blue sheet on it, a small night stand with a cheap lamp and two bottles of baby oil and a box of Kleenex. At the far side of the bed there was a round plastic waste paper basket that was about half full of discarded tissues. The room smelled of sex, and it was clear that this was Lisa’s work room where she entertained her clients.
“We need to get the lab boys down here to do a thorough sweep of the place. Emphasis on the business bedroom – DNA, fingerprints, hair, anything else they can find,” Lyons said.
“Will you wait here till they arrive? I’m going back to check in with Mick,” she said to Flynn.
Chapter Seven
Thursday, 11:30 a.m.
The little Nokia was sufficiently charged to allow Hays to turn it on. Using a new pair of vinyl gloves he switched it on and heard the familiar Nokia welcome tune. The first thing he did was to check the number of the phone against the number given on Lisa’s web page, and it matched, so at least he knew that this was definitely her phone.
He carried it carefully over to John O’Connor’s desk.
“You need to keep gloves on, and don’t handle it more than you have to. There could still be a useful print or two on it. Copy down a list of all incoming calls for the last week and note the day, time and duration of the call. Copy out any text messages from that time too. Then get it over to forensics for fingerprinting,” Hays said.
At one o’clock Hays called the team together for a catch up. He brought them all up to date with the news about the mobile phone, the location of the apartment and what Lyons and Flynn had found there.
“Persons of interest, Maureen – what have we got?” he asked.
“Ciara O’Sullivan who found the body. Not a very likely suspect, and you’ve already checked her out, boss. Then there’s O’Flaherty. Probably just a punter. He came to us, but even so, there may be more to it. I’d like to see what else we can find on him. That’s about it till we get the details off her phone. Oh, and the website might give us a few more if there’s a booking feature on it, or an email.”
The phone rang on Hays’ desk.
When he had finished the call, he spoke to the group. “That was forensics. They want me down at the apartment. Maureen, let’s go. John, keep working on the mobile. See if you can get any names from the numbers or the contact list. We’ll be back before five for the next briefing,” Hays said.
On the way down to the docks in the car, Hays asked Lyons how she thought the case was going so far.
“Not great, to be honest. We’ve only just identified the girl, and God knows how many potential suspects her line of business will produce. What does the Super think?”
“He’s hopping from one foot to the other as usual. He wants to see me tomorrow evening for a progress report, and he emphasised the word ‘progress’.”
“Let’s hope we have something positive to tell him by then.”
“You have a good nose for these things, Maureen. Any instincts shouting at you yet?”
“C’mon Mick, it’s a bit early for that. But it’s looking like a punter to me. Maybe she was blackmailing one of the great and the good of Galway, although what she was doing out there in Ballyconneely is anybody’s guess. That’s the bit that has me puzzled.”
When they got to the apartment, a girl in a full white lab suit approached them, and pulling her hood off to reveal a shock of curly blonde hair and a pretty face said, “Morning, Sergeant. We found a few things that I’d like you to see.”
“What have you got, Siobhán?” he asked.
The girl held up two see-through plastic evidence bags. “There’s a Credit Union pass book in the name of Lisa Palowski. It shows she has just under fourteen thousand euro on deposit. There are regular weekly lodgements into the account of five hundred euro every Friday in cash,” she said, handing the first of the two bags to Hays.
“Then there’s this,” she said holding up the other plastic bag. “The original little black book. I’ll let you examine it for yourself. Looks interesting. Oh, and it was well hidden in her knicker drawer in her own bedroom,” the girl added.
“Well done, Siobhán, that’s great. Anything else of interest?”
“The bed in the spare room has been very well used, and the waste paper basket has some interesting specimens, but it will take a day or two to get anything useful.”
“I don’t envy you that one,” said Lyons. “Can we take these away with us?”
“Yes sure. They have been catalogued and dusted so they’re all yours. Do you want the contents of the bin too when we’re done with it?”
“It’s OK thanks, you can keep that,” Lyons said, rolling her eyes to heaven.
On the way back to the station in the car, Lyons started studying the little black Moleskine notebook.
It wasn’t originally a diary, but Lisa had made it into one by putting the day and date at the top of each page and putting the hours in a neat clear hand down the left-hand side. It was marked up in this way for several weeks ahead and seemed to go back about two months in time. There were no pages for Sundays, and Lyons noted that there was a whole week missing every four weeks or so, reflecting, presumably, the days she was unable to work due to mother nature.
The working days had initials or first names written in alongside the time. A typical day had one or two appointments, but some days had three, spread out from eleven in the morning to ten at night. Two or three of the names appeared quite regularly, every ten days or so. Lisa, probably without knowing it, had kept meticulous records of her clients that would surely prove invaluable in tracking down her killer.
“If I ever decide to go on the game instead of enforcing law and order, I can use this as a template. The pay looks great, and don’t forget it’s all tax free.”
“Well let me know, won’t you? I can be your first client,” Hays said as he looked across at Maureen and smiled.
* * *
Back at the station, Hays called the team together.
“We have some good information from the girl’s flat now. We need to cross-reference the diary to the phone records and see if we can identify any of Lisa’s clients. It looks like James was the last one to have an appointment with her at four o’clock on Tuesday afternoon. Let’s see if we can identify James, if that’s his real name,” Hays said.
Another hour of searching and cross-referencing went by quickly, and when Hays called them back together again, there was some good news.
“So, how goes it with the phone records?” he asked.
Flynn who had been coordinating the cross-referencing spoke up.
“Most of the calls are from pay-as-you-go mobiles, and of course none of them are registered, so they are anonymous. There is one thing we spotted though. About two weeks ago she had an appointment with this James at five o’clock. Earlier that day she got a call from a landline here in the city. I called the number, and it was answered by a receptionist at a firm of architects on Dominick Street.” He paused for effect.
“Well come on man, what’s the name of these architects then?” Hays said impatiently.
“They’re called McMahon and O’Reilly. And the McMahon in question is one James McMahon!”
An audible hum of excitement went around the room.
“Great work, Eamon, well done all of you. This is our first solid lead. Now we need to be very careful here. Let’s see if we can identify James’ mobile from calls made about the same time on other days when she saw him. And I don’t want any contact with him till we are good and ready. Is that understood?”
“Yes, boss,” they echoed in unison.
“Dig up all you can on this guy. I want to know more about him than he knows about himself before we talk to him. What car does he
drive? Where does he live? Is he married? Family? What clubs does he belong to? Who his friends are, and above all if he is well-connected around town, although that’s probably a ‘yes’ if he’s an architect.”
“Let’s convene at nine-thirty in the morning with whatever you’ve got.”
“Maureen, can you stay back for a few minutes please?” Hays added.
“Sure, no problem,” she said, moving towards Hays’ private office.
“Would you like a coffee?” Hays asked.
“No, I’m fine thanks, it only keeps me awake if I have it at this time of day. What’s on your mind?”
“You know I think highly of you. We’ve worked on some pretty tricky stuff together in the past. I just wanted to get your gut feel for what we’re getting into with this Lisa Palowski thing. I haven’t worked this type of case before, and I don’t have a feel for it yet.”
“I know what you mean, it’s kind of uncharted waters for me too. But look at it this way. What she was doing was what you might call a high-risk occupation. Now I know that’s not a good reason to whack her over the head with a rock, but in that line of work there’s always a risk of violence, and there’s no one around to protect you either unless you have a pimp, which she doesn’t appear to have had. Oh, and another thing, if we find this James is well connected, then we really will have to tread very carefully. In this town, whatever he has done, he’s likely to get more sympathy than an Eastern European escort from the powers that be. And what I can’t figure out at all, is what she was doing out there. It doesn’t add up. Someone must have driven her out there, or maybe she drove herself, but in that case, where’s the car?”
“Let’s see what tomorrow brings shall we,” she said. “Are you OK?” “What. Oh yes, sorry, I’m fine, just processing what you were saying. Let’s watch each other’s backs, eh?”
“Of course. And anytime you want to talk, you know,” she added.
“Oh yes, thanks. See you tomorrow.”
Hays dawdled around in the office for a little while longer. He was just about to head home when his phone rang. It was Ciara O’Sullivan.
The Galway Homicides Box Set Page 4