Silent Night: An absolutely gripping crime thriller

by Geraldine Hogan

  He turned, thought he heard something in the woods behind him, probably nothing. He always knew Anna would never love him back, and maybe that just made him love her more. For years she’d been dismissive of him, and now when she’d come back, well… What kind of twisted toxic adoration culminates in this? He shivered, and it wasn’t that cold. He pulled close his heavy army coat. Within its pockets he carried an armoury of weapons; knives mainly, but he had more at home, a shot gun and several smaller guns that he’d managed to pick up over the years. A man had to protect himself after all, and he liked the feeling of power carrying a gun gave him. He liked to be in control; liked to have the upper hand. He thought of Anna now, how she’d begged him to make things right. How finally she’d stopped, left him alone, accepted what fate had handed her; and then her joy – she’d been released, ultimately, she’d been freed. The guilt still made him tremble; that and the feeling that he’d never been so desolate in all his life.

  The crack of a branch beneath his foot brought him back to the present. He knew he had to do something – but what? He looked down at his weather-beaten hands. It was almost dark, an occasional sliver of moonlight spilling out between fast moving bulbous clouds – it had all been in his hands. He’d been within sniffing distance and then just when she trusted him…There had to be some way to make things right. He sat back against the damp earth, pulled out a small tin box where he kept his tobacco and rolled himself a slim joint. They’d all left now. It was just him and the occasional night creature, sitting here, waiting. He would think long and hard, and somehow, he’d make it all up to Anna Crowe and her kids.

  ‘Fucking typical,’ Slattery said to no one specific and Locke in particular.

  ‘What’s that?’ Locke said, smiling at the business card in her hand. It was for a local solicitor, but not one who would be of any help in a murder case. There was an air of expectant triumph from her, as if she’d pulled one over on Slattery and he didn’t like it one bit, it was almost enough to make him retch.

  ‘Well, there’s Grady expecting me to cut corners and I’m doing my best to keep on the straight and narrow and here I am stuck with you, a bloody magpie, stealing from a suspect’s house.’ He put his cigarettes on the dash and eyed the card that sat between Locke’s fingers on the wheel.

  ‘Ah, don’t worry, we can tell him it was you anyway,’ Locke said, her voice light, joking. ‘You look dodgy enough to have done a lot worse than move around a bit of paper and anyway, I’ll drop it back exactly where we found it.’

  The words could have cut a more sensitive man, but Slattery knew that how he looked was a direct reflection of how he lived. He had always followed any lead before him. He worked off his gut. He patted his stomach now, feeling every one of his years. His beer gut, his grey pallor, his shortness of breath – the accumulation of a lifetime of bad food and too much smoke and booze. He wasn’t thirty any more – he was in his fifties, heading for retirement if he was unlucky. If Slattery prayed, it was that he’d die with his boots on. He wasn’t looking for any glory; a quick, painless heart attack, an aneurysm, dead before he hit the ground. That would do nicely, thank you. Better than waiting it out, somewhere, just him and his memories. And his regrets.

  ‘Thanks for that, mate.’ He closed his eyes, blocking out Limerick, blocking out life.

  At least it was something to get started on, before the post mortem. Slattery opened his eyes to see Locke turning down Nicholas Street instead of Athlunkard Street.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he grunted.

  ‘Street closures, it’s pedestrians only,’ Locke said evenly.

  ‘Fuck that, I’m not walking half a mile. Stick on the flasher and away we go, we’re on official business.’ Slattery grunted again, and began to undo his seat belt, so much for Locke being a rule-breaker.

  They pulled up outside Forbes, Stapleton & Gains, and made their way in, despite the dirty looks from council workers nearby. Slattery almost swaggered, as if he was an extra on CSI. Alan Gains was waiting for them when they arrived. Quiet times. The man was visibly upset and Slattery wondered if he hadn’t been carrying a bit of a torch for Anna Crowe. He brought them into a well-appointed office, offered them tea or coffee and sat opposite them, waiting for them to tell him what had happened.

  ‘She was a good friend, you know,’ he said after he had heard as much as they could tell. ‘Not that we met up regularly; you don’t after a few years, do you? Partners, kids, jobs, they all take up your time. But we kept in touch, the odd phone call. I bought a couple of oils for here, sponsored her exhibition a few years ago, that kind of thing – when it was worth our while getting a tax break.’ He smiled ruefully.

  ‘How did you meet her?’ Locke asked the obvious question.

  ‘We were in school together; I grew up in Kilgee too. We were all buddies, me, Anna and Adrian.’ He smiled at some memory that seemed to cross his mind. ‘Back then, it was me and Anna – Adrian was a year ahead, so…’

  ‘Have you kept in contact with Adrian too?’ Slattery asked.

  ‘Ah, no. You know the way it is…’

  ‘No.’ Locke looked across at Slattery, took the lead from the old man’s nod. ‘Mr Crowe – Adrian – her husband, he’s just not able to help us much at the moment.’ She smiled apologetically and Slattery thought, Well done on the sympathy vote. Slattery for one always pegged the husband as the most likely suspect. He’d become cynical so long ago, it was his natural default setting now.

  ‘He’s a man of few words at the best of times,’ Gains said.

  ‘They were separated, were they?’ Iris edged into the silence of Gains’s thoughts.

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that, I hadn’t talked to her in about six months. Last time… well, I’d say she was under pressure, but aren’t we all now? An artist, sure it’s either a feast or a famine when it comes to commissions. She was selling very little these last few years. Even if she was having problems with Adrian, I don’t think she’d have said anything to me. We just didn’t talk about those kinds of things, she was very… private.’ He looked now at Slattery. ‘Not too surprising really, when you consider what they went through.’

  ‘Oh?’ Slattery said, but he knew that no words were needed. Gains was going to tell him anyway.

  ‘You know who she is, don’t you?’ Gains gazed up at a painting behind Slattery’s back. Slattery, hardly an art lover, had spotted it when he’d come into the room. It was a huge canvas, big enough to fill an entire wall of Slattery’s grotty little flat – if he’d been a man to hang a picture. Of course, Slattery’s flat was still just a flat, even after a couple of years he hadn’t managed to make it into a home, probably never would, but it didn’t keep him up at night.

  Gains studied the canvas now, a mish-mash of darkened oils, with a splash of wild flowers painted across the melee. ‘She’s Anna Fairley.’ He looked at them both now, waiting for some kind of recognition. When none came, he moved forward a little in his chair. ‘The Baby Fairley case – it happened back in the eighties…’ he waited. ‘The Fairley baby was Anna’s sister – they never rightly got over it. Anna couldn’t talk about it at all.’

  ‘The Baby Fairley case?’ Iris said and tried to pretend that it meant something.

  ‘That’s right, they never found her, people said she was dead before they even called in your lot, but that didn’t make not knowing any easier. It always kind of hung in the air about the place out there, can’t imagine why she’d have wanted to go back, to be honest.’

  Slattery rested his back against the leather chair, took a sip of tea from the small cup set before him. Let the words settle; he wasn’t quite sure what this meant for the case, if anything, but he was sure of one thing, once the newspapers got wind of it, they’d have a field day and it would be ten times harder to get anything done with a posse of reporters on their backs.

  Chapter Three

  ‘He was smooth,’ Slattery said when they sat back in the car.

  ‘You say t
hat like it’s a crime.’ Iris tipped the indicator. ‘We’re bloody lucky not to get a ticket here,’ she said half under her breath.

  ‘I’d like to see them try,’ he snarled, and she had a feeling any traffic warden would think twice before tangling with Slattery. ‘Anyway, I never said it was a crime, but being a fancy-pants solicitor doesn’t automatically make him innocent either.’

  ‘He was fond of her,’ Iris said as she swung the car into heavy evening traffic along the quays. She caught a glimpse of the river beneath them, pewter dark and unforgiving.

  ‘He was bloody in love with her, whether he knows it or not.’

  ‘You’re not seriously going to suggest they were having an affair.’ Iris glanced across at Slattery. He was sweating now, a glossy film across his forehead.

  ‘I haven’t said anything of the sort, but if it came to a beauty contest… well, maybe it gives the grieving widower more of a motive.’

  ‘You’re clutching at straws.’ They were pulled up, waiting for the traffic lights to change and Iris knew there was a question hanging in the air between them, like a shard of something deep and penetrating; it was the one thing that set them both on edge.

  ‘Go on,’ Slattery grunted.

  ‘You go on,’ she said. She would not be goaded into playing out the conversation in her mind again. ‘Well… do you remember it?’

  ‘Aye, I do, but it’s a long time ago and I was hardly in the door of Corbally, just a uniform picking up nuggets from the big boys back then.’

  ‘It was never solved?’

  ‘They never found the kid, if that’s what you mean.’ Slattery cleared his throat, a rattling empty sound. ‘I wouldn’t get too excited about it yet,’ he said, staring determinedly at the water beneath them.

  ‘Do I look excited?’ Iris said tonelessly.

  ‘Good, because all that’s going to be is another complication and if we end up following a lead that went cold thirty years ago, we’ll miss what’s in front of us while there’s still a chance the trail is warm.’

  ‘No harm looking it up, though – we’re not all prehistoric on the team,’ she replied as she pulled the car into a parking space at the rear of the station.

  Corbally station. Iris sighed. It was the last place she’d have imagined herself working. It was over a hundred and fifty years old, built originally as a commercial bank, based on a design by Francis Johnston. It was an impressive building, although to accommodate its current occupation, many of the grander rooms were subdivided to cater to the demands of smaller office space. The corridors were long and high, with floors of marble and walls of stone, painted white mostly, but in some places an unfortunate sanatorium green. Voices tended to rise upwards to the high-domed ceilings, so that any commotion on the bottom floor boomed throughout the whole building, echoing long after the fracas was at an end. Locke didn’t trust her own voice in the place, particularly in the larger open areas, like the stairwell, the foyer and the hallways. Still, she would have to make the most of it. Tonight, it was just a question of putting to bed what they’d learned for the day. Perhaps, if they were lucky, someone may have hit on a vital strand to close up the investigation quickly.

  It seemed wrong to be heading out to dinner at her parents’ house when there was so much more that they should be doing in the Murder Team. Grady had hung a roster for every member of the team on one of the whiteboards that lined the walls about the incident room. There was a skeleton shift on duty from midnight until six in the morning. People with families were expected to show up at home and everyone else seemed to be heading to the pub. He had partnered her, for the most part with Ben Slattery. Iris couldn’t make up her mind if that was a decision based on their ranking or because he wanted them to keep an eye on each other. After all, she was an unknown quantity and she had a feeling that everyone had a measure of Slattery, for better and for worse.

  Iris had no real excuse not to turn up at her parents’. It wasn’t as if she didn’t enjoy these evenings. The meal would be excellent. Her father was a big man who’d always loved food and being in charge of some project. Her mother wafted about and let him get on with things while making noises that might be appreciation or they might be offers of help she never expected to be taken up.

  Iris drummed over the case on the drive out to Woodburn. She hardly noticed familiar landmarks on her way as she considered what they’d learned so far. Already, it was getting under her skin. She couldn’t be sure if that had as much to do with the fact that there was something so familiar about Anna Crowe or that annoying bugger Slattery or something quite different. She’d felt a nerve pull inside her when she’d looked at the photograph of that little family. It was more than sadness; perhaps, she reasoned, it was the injustice of it all.

  Woodburn was a sprawling old house that was as much a part of their little family as any of them. It sat in the Limerick countryside overlooking the Atlantic far off in the distance. Only half a dozen miles outside Limerick, but it couldn’t be further away from the bustle of the city in terms of its ambience and charm. Tonight, perhaps more than ever before, Iris understood how important this place had been to her father. It was everything that Corbally station was not. Jack Locke had served his time before her, working his way up eventually to superintendent before retiring with a near perfect record. She knew his colleagues called him Nessie, but that had more to do with his bark than it had with any bite.

  She drew her car up over the loose gravel stone, circling about to the back of the house so she could slip quietly through the kitchen door. On her way she passed by her father’s old wellingtons, standing to attention for his early morning tramp across the fields. The kitchen was littered with used dishes and saucepans emptied and left to stand; the mess was out of character from her parents’ typical order. Iris twisted the copper cold tap on. Its familiar noise grounded her, making her feel as if she’d left the atrocities of the day behind her in some indefinable way. She filled a large glass with fresh water and drank it thirstily. She stood for a moment, catching her reflection in the uneven glass before her. Outside the garden was in darkness. Her eyes strained to make out anything in the glass beyond her own reflection and the familiar kitchen around her. In the room beyond, she heard her father tell a joke he’d told a thousand times before. It was new enough to his guests and so they laughed wholeheartedly when he delivered the punch line.

  Tonight’s get together was in honour of distant relations who were visiting Ireland from the States. It might have been an all-day occasion, but Iris had cried off dinner promising to arrive for dessert. The truth was she knew tonight was not the night to tell her father she’d joined the Murder Team. She couldn’t do that to him, not yet.

  ‘Yes, the image of her mother,’ Jack Locke pronounced proudly when Iris arrived into the dining room. She had missed pudding, but she helped herself to a glass of red wine and settled down at the corner of the dining table, fending off offers of food that she couldn’t face even if she wanted to.

  ‘Really?’ An elderly grandaunt who’d last been in Ireland fifty years earlier peered at her over thick sparkly framed spectacles.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ her mother chimed in proudly, ‘she’s just like me when I was young.’ It was enough to admit that she was following in her father’s footsteps, Theodora was not letting him have all the credit for their daughter.

  ‘I am indeed,’ Iris agreed and sipped her drink lost in her own thoughts of the investigation while the party went on around her.

  ‘Penny for them,’ her father said later when everyone had left. ‘You’ve been in another world all night long.’

  ‘Oh, Jack, leave her alone. Isn’t Iris allowed to have thinking time without you wanting to know about it?’ Her mother bent and kissed her on her forehead. ‘I’m off to bed, dear, long day, you know.’ She smiled wanly and drifted towards the stairs.

  ‘Night, Mum,’ Iris said automatically.

  ‘Come on, night cap,’ her father said then, dropping a
fat glass of brandy into Iris’s hands. ‘You can tell me all about your latest exploit in community policing.’

  ‘Oh, there’s not much to tell, actually…’ Iris couldn’t meet his eye, it was one thing not telling him that she’d joined the Murder Team, but quite another to actually lie about it. It was funny, really; any other parent would be delighted to think that a child was following in their footsteps. Jack Locke wanted Iris as far away from the Murder Team as it was possible to get. Much better, in his opinion, if she had any job that didn’t bring her into contact with murderers and Ireland’s criminal underworld. Iris wasn’t sure that he’d be any more enthusiastic about the Limerick Murder Team than he had been when she’d mentioned Dublin Castle to him before she’d taken up the post in undercover.

  ‘I ran into some people who knew you, back in the day,’ Iris smiled. It was one way to distract her father from whatever he wanted to know.

  ‘Really, did they call me Nessie too?’

  ‘I don’t know, hardly likely to tell me anyway.’ She smiled at him now; his eyebrows seemed to be growing into each other these days and she wondered whether they had always knitted so closely together.

  ‘So, who was it?’ Jack asked her now, pulling her from her thoughts once more.

  ‘Coleman Grady, he’s…’