“Good God in heaven!” Mulholland exclaimed. “Don’t touch him now. You can’t move him. I don’t know what’s happened here, but I’ll have to get help. Can you stay a while if I go and call this in to Galway?”
“We can, but not long. We’re on duty, and there’s only Séamus back at the station, and we could be needed.”
“I’ll be as quick as I can. Be sure not to touch anything. Best you wait in the ambulance, if that’s OK?” Mulholland said, leaving by the stiff back door to drive up to the road where his mobile phone would work.
Outside, Mary was standing by his car.
“Look, Mary, this isn’t straightforward, I’m afraid. I’m sorry to tell you this, but the paramedics discovered that Paddy had been bound to his chair,” he said, shaking his head as if he couldn’t quite believe it himself.
“Bound. How do you mean?” she asked, frowning.
“There are plastic cable ties around his wrists and ankles. I don’t think Paddy just passed away. There’s more to it. I’ll have to call in the team from Galway now. Can you bide a while till they get here? They’ll need to get your statement.”
“Dear God in heaven, what happened to the poor man? I don’t understand,” Mary said, her eyes now filled with tears that ran down her cheeks.
“Neither do I, but we’ll get to the bottom of it, don’t worry. And you have nothing to blame yourself for, it’s not your doing. I’ll be back in a few minutes, I have to call Galway now. Sit in, if you like.”
Mary sat in Mulholland’s car. She didn’t want to be left alone with her thoughts at this terrible time, and of course she felt guilty – so very guilty.
Chapter Three
Inspector Mick Hays was almost home when his mobile phone began to ring. He had it linked by Bluetooth to his car’s music system, so he was able to answer it hands free.
He had left Galway Garda station about twenty minutes previously having spent quite a boring day catching up on emails and paperwork following his recent week off.
Hays had a brother who lived and worked in Horsham in the south of England. He had gone to England in the 1980s when Ireland was in the grip of one of its regular recessions. With a good degree from Galway University, he had found work easily in the United Kingdom, and was now a senior manager in Royal Sun Alliance, the biggest employer in the town. Along the way he had met and married Sara, a lovely English rose, and they now had two children, a boy and a girl, the classic British nuclear family.
Hays had spent a very enjoyable week as their guest. His brother Aidan had taken the week off too, and the group had spent the time travelling around the south of England, visiting Brighton, Arundel Castle, Glynde Palace, Chartwell, the family home of Winston Churchill, and of course some of the finest pubs and restaurants that England could offer. The weather had been kind, as it often is in this part of England, and Hays had thoroughly enjoyed the week, leaving behind the pressure of the job and catching up on old times with Aidan over pints of locally brewed craft beer in the Dog and Bacon, conveniently located just at the end of Collingwood Road where Aidan’s four bedroomed detached house was to be found.
Hays’ Bluetooth set-up identified the caller as Séan Mulholland, so he knew at once that something serious was up.
“Hello Séan. What can I do for you on this fine spring evening?”
“Mick? We have a situation out here near Clifden.” Mulholland went on to describe what he termed a ‘suspicious death’. Having heard the details, Hays had to agree that it certainly sounded suspicious, and told the sergeant that he was on his way, and not to let anyone touch anything till he arrived.
Swinging the car around, Hays put on his blue lights and siren, in an attempt to scythe his way through the notorious evening traffic in Galway, and headed west.
As he raced down the back streets bordering the Shantalla area, and intercepted the Séamus Quirke Road heading for Newcastle and the N59, he made several calls on the phone.
The first was to Detective Sergeant Maureen Lyons, his very able, if somewhat cheeky, assistant in the Galway Detective Unit. Lyons didn’t answer, so when it went to voicemail, he left a short but unambiguous message, “Maureen, call me when you get this.”
The second call was to Dr Julian Dodd, the pathologist attached to Galway Regional Hospital. Here he had more luck, though it’s fair to say Dodd wasn’t exactly delighted to hear from Hays. He rarely called with good news. He asked Dodd to meet him out at O’Shaughnessy’s house as soon as possible, and for once Dodd didn’t complain, as Wednesday was his wife’s bridge night and he would have nothing better to do in any case.
The sirens and blue flashing lights did quite a good job of parting the traffic in front of him, until that is, he reached Moycullen. There was a steady stream of traffic coming against him, and an old lady in a Nissan Micra in front of him who steadfastly refused to let him pass. He flashed his lights and blew the horn, but still she wouldn’t budge, until eventually she turned off to the left allowing Hays to pick up speed again.
His third phone call had been to Detective Garda Eamon Flynn. As he couldn’t reach Lyons, he would have to settle for Flynn as his bagman on this occasion. Flynn was still in the station and was quite pleased to get a call from the boss telling him to attend the scene of a suspicious death, even if it was in the back of beyond.
By half past seven the entire entourage had turned up and poor Paddy O’Shaughnessy’s property was festooned with vehicles as it had never been before.
Hays gathered the group together. He firstly asked Flynn to take a statement from the nurse, and then let her away home, as she was clearly distressed. Before he dispatched her, he asked if the dead man had any relatives living in the area, but Mary knew of none. Next, he asked Mulholland to get a statement from the senior ambulance crew member. Meanwhile Hays himself, the pathologist, and the other ambulance man, all wearing plastic gloves, white paper scene of crime suits, and carrying a body bag, went back into the house.
The first thing that Hays did was to go and open the front door so that access to the house could be made easier.
The doctor and the ambulance man focused on the body of the old man. Dodd examined the head, hands, ankles and all of the exposed blackening skin. Before anything was allowed to be disturbed, Hays took dozens of photographs on his mobile phone, the flash of the camera lighting up the inside of the house momentarily with an eerie blue-white light as each frame was captured.
As he moved around the house, Hays could see that the place appeared to have been thoroughly searched. It was not ransacked, in fact far from it. But Hays could see that the patterns of dust that an open turf fire inevitably leaves in a small house, had been disturbed. Books had distinct ash lines contrasting with clean areas; jam jars had been moved, leaving a circle of clean surface where they had previously been placed. Hays concluded that the whole house had been thoroughly gone over, but not in a reckless way.
Eventually, the doctor signalled to the paramedics to cut the tie wraps away, putting them into an evidence bag.
Moving carefully, the body of Paddy O’Shaughnessy was gently lowered into a body bag, which by now was sitting on a light weight stretcher. The black plastic bag was zipped up, and the second paramedic was summoned to carry the load out of the house and into the ambulance. A few minutes later the bright yellow and green vehicle left the site, swaying and bouncing back up the rocky track, heading for the mortuary in Galway.
“Any initial observations, Doc?” Hays asked Dodd.
“A few. But I’m not saying much till I’ve examined the body thoroughly tomorrow,” the doctor responded.
“What can you say then?” said Hays, a little impatiently.
“I can say that the man was quite badly treated as he sat tethered in his favourite armchair. He’s been hit around the head quite badly, and there appear to be cigarette burns on the back of his hands,” the doctor reported.
“So, it’s a racing certainty that he didn’t die of natural causes the
n,” Hays said.
“Sometimes, Inspector, your powers of detection amaze me. I can’t disagree with you on that one, unless you can show me how a man can bind his arms and legs to a chair, and then hit himself repeatedly around the head and apply a lighted cigarette to the back of his hands. Oh, and by the way, he wasn’t a smoker,” he added.
“No, I gathered that. There’s no sign of any smoking material round and about.”
“What about time of death?” Hays said.
The doctor gave Hays a sardonic look before saying, “Sometime between the last time he was seen alive and today, I imagine.”
“Just asking, Doc, just asking.”
Outside the house, Flynn had finished taking statements, and had asked the ambulance men to come in to the Garda station in Clifden the following morning to read and sign them.
With the body of Paddy O’Shaughnessy now on its way to Galway, Julian Dodd packed up the few tools of his gruesome trade, removed his vinyl gloves, and prepared to leave.
“Ten o’clock tomorrow OK then for the preliminary PM?” he asked Hays.
“Could you leave it till two o’clock, Doctor? I’ll need to come back out here in the morning for an hour or so with the forensic team, but I should be back in the city by two.”
“Fine, two o’clock it is, see you then,” the doctor replied, heading for his car.
Hays then turned to Eamon Flynn and said, “I’m sorry to do this to you, Eamon, but I need you to stay on point overnight here. You can go into Clifden now and have something to eat, get some supplies. I’ll wait here till you get back. OK?”
“Yes, OK, boss. I guess someone has to do it,” Flynn replied.
Hays spent the hour that Flynn was away having a really good look around the cottage, both outside and in. There was no point looking for tyre tracks – all the vehicles that had come and gone since the nurse had found the body made sure of that.
Hays went slowly around the place, putting scenarios together in his head. How many assailants had assisted Paddy on his way to the next world? What could possibly be the motive for killing an old, solitary man in this way? What was being searched for in the house while Paddy sat immobilized in his favourite armchair?
When Flynn returned he was well provisioned with a wrapped sandwich, two chocolate bars, and a large bottle of Ballygowan fizzy water.
“Breakfast,” he simply said when he observed Hays casting an eye over his supplies.
“What time do you reckon you’ll get here in the morning, boss?” Flynn asked.
“Early. I’ll try and get the boys moving by eight, so we should be here around nine. Before you settle down for the night of undisturbed slumber in the comfort of your car, make sure to secure the house and put lots of tape up, won’t you?” Hays instructed.
“I can’t stay in there then, boss?”
“No, ’fraid not. We can’t afford any more contamination of the scene before the forensic boys have a good go over it. This looks like a pretty nasty murder to me.”
Hays said goodnight to the young detective and drove back up the rocky track towards the road. The light was fading fast now, and he put on his headlights, but still managed to catch the underside of his car on some protruding rocks.
As he approached the road on higher ground his phone beeped several times. At the top of the track Hays pulled the car over. He had two missed calls from Maureen Lyons, one timed at just after eight o’clock in the evening and a second one just a few minutes ago.
Hays rang Maureen back.
“Hi boss,” she said, “I’ve been trying to call you. What’s up?”
“I had no signal there for a while,” he replied. “I’m out at Derrygimlagh, near Clifden for a change. It’s a long story. Would you mind if I called in when I get back to town? I don’t want to say too much over the phone.”
“Sounds intriguing. Sure, drop in. How long do you reckon you’ll be?” she asked.
“About an hour and a half or so. See you then,” he said, and hung up.
Chapter Four
When Mick Hays had left the scene, Flynn did his best to get comfortable for the night. He sat into the passenger’s seat of his car and reclined it as far as it would go in an attempt to lie out flat. He turned on the radio but discovered that the only station that he could pick up in this location was BBC Radio 4 on long wave. It was in the middle of a news programme blathering on about British politics in which Flynn had no interest whatever. Try as he might to get something he could actually listen to, nothing came through.
A steady south westerly wind was blowing in from the Atlantic across Connemara that night. The wind had scooped up tons of water vapour as it crossed the sea, and as soon as it found landfall, the ground pushed up the clouds to the point where the water vapour condensed into rain, which fell back upon the land in fierce waves, driven by the brisk wind.
In Flynn’s car, the rain sounded like small pebbles hitting the roof, the windscreen and the side windows. And of course, as the rain fell it cooled the air, so it wasn’t long before Flynn began to feel decidedly chilly.
“Feck this,” he said to himself.
He got out of the car and ran with his torch to the back of the cottage, squeezing through the back door which scraped across the flags as he pushed it further open.
Using his torch, he entered the old man’s bedroom. The room was small, and very sparsely furnished. The bed, an old iron and brass number straight out of the 1950s, occupied the centre of the room with its head to the side wall of the cottage. To Flynn’s right was a small brown wardrobe with a mirrored door. Beside the bed was a brown wooden night stand with an opening that made a shelf just under the top, and a small door that made the lower part into a cupboard. The top of the night stand was badly stained with cup rings where wet or hot cups had been placed upon it over the years.
The bed was made. It appeared that the duvet had not arrived in Paddy O’Shaughnessy’s lifestyle as yet, for the bed was covered in an old wine-coloured eiderdown, beneath which two heavy woollen blankets made up the rest of the arrangement. A pair of cotton sheets, quite grey in colour, and a well-used single pillow completed the picture.
The eiderdown was too small to be of any use to Flynn, so putting his torch down on the night stand, he started to pull the top blanket off the bed. The bed had been well made, and the blanket was tucked in tightly under the thin horse-hair mattress. Flynn heaved at the cream-coloured blanket and managed to pull it free. As he did so, a small sheaf of papers came out from under the mattress and fell face down at his feet.
Flynn bent down to pick up the papers but stopped himself before he had touched anything. He felt it better not to contaminate the scene any further, in case it might interfere with evidence that would be needed later. He gathered the blanket up in his arms, collected his torch and dashed back through the driving rain to his car.
Flynn settled into a most uncomfortable night’s sleep. He had tucked the blanket in around his body as best he could, but had kept it well away from his face, as the blanket frankly didn’t smell too good. Eventually the rain eased off, and the wind died down to a murmur. At around two o’clock the moon appeared casting an eerie light on the surroundings. Flynn finally fell into a restless sleep.
It was just around five in the morning when Flynn’s nightmare started. He dreamt he was in a huge field of golden wheat. But the crop had caught fire, and the flames were now advancing in his direction. He ran for his life, but no matter how hard he ran, the smoke and flames were getting closer, and he felt he would surely be roasted alive. Just before the flames, now raging high up into the clouds and blocking out the sun, caught him, there were two loud cracks that woke him, terrified, from the dream.
What Flynn saw when he shook himself awake put the fear of God into him. Not thirty metres away, O’Shaughnessy’s cottage was ablaze. Smoke and flames poured from the two windows either side of the front door. The door itself was blistering in the heat, with flames starting to lick unde
rneath it. The slated roof had caught too, sagging dangerously at the end over the parlour.
“Jesus Christ,” he shouted to no one, “what the fuck is going on?”
He disentangled himself from the blanket which seemed to have encapsulated his entire body, and struggled out of the passenger’s side door. Pushed back by the smoke and heat coming from the burning house, he ran around the back of the car and got in the driver’s side. He started the car and reversed at speed until he was a safe distance away from the inferno. He tried his mobile phone, but of course there was no signal, so, in a fury, he drove the car back up the rocky track till he found two bars of reception.
Clifden fire brigade sprang into action when they received Flynn’s 999 call. The night man summoned a crew of four, and within half an hour they had arrived at the cottage which by now had largely burnt itself out. The four walls still stood, and some of the roof trusses, now blackened, charred and smouldering, were still holding on. Largely it was mostly the pale blue smoke of charcoal and a few stubborn pockets of flame that met the crew as they used the tank in the fire tender to douse what was left of the house.
“I thought you were supposed to be watching the place,” said the lead fireman to Flynn. Flynn replied rather sheepishly, “Don’t you start. I’m in enough trouble as it is. Any idea what started it?”
“Not sure. You weren’t by any chance sitting by the fire in there and fell asleep, were you?” the fireman asked.
“No, I bloody wasn’t! I was in the fecking car. In there’s a crime scene – or was more like it.”
“One of the lads says he thought he got a whiff of petrol round near the back door, but we’d need to do a proper examination to be sure when it’s all cooled down.”
“There’s a full Garda forensic team due out here at nine o’clock. They’ll find whatever caused it, I’m sure,” Flynn said.
The Galway Homicides Box Set Page 14