‘No, why would there be? It’s just a feeling, that’s all.’
‘Sometimes,’ Grady’s voice was gentle and low and when he leaned towards her she caught the light scent of his aftershave, musky and male, ‘sometimes, Locke, things are too difficult to see. No one wants to believe that he could kill his own kids, the wife he married all those years ago. We’ve seen the photos. It’s inconceivable, but it does happen.’
Chapter Seventeen
A chill wind was beginning to blow north, up the Shannon, sweeping past King John’s castle, winding its way through the narrow side streets of Limerick and finally funnelling great gasps along the main thoroughfares. He’d known the weather would change; it was time for winter. He could feel it setting in around him, no bad thing. He liked the darkness, craved it like a friend, long lost, little valued by most. For him it was a time of abundance. His prey came out – foxes, badgers, owls. He’d trapped for years, made a few bob on it too. Supplemented the social welfare nicely, wouldn’t want to lose that now. The animals were a select market. He had a pal, up in Liscannor, did a little taxidermy for him. He asked him once if he did crows, he didn’t catch the joke.
He pulled the collar of his army jacket closer, there wasn’t a lot of heat in it, but it was a barrier to wind and rain, and really he needed nothing more. He’d wait here for hours if he needed to. He knew that. He’d once spent four days after a stag. Twenty points. They said he wasn’t real and it had taken all his wits to shoot the animal. Quite a feat, he reminded himself now – the beasts had been in the country for over ten thousand years, perhaps from the end of the ice age, for all anyone knew. He’d lain in mud, eaten grass and worms, pissed himself and all the time waited.
Once or twice now, he caught the eye of a guard, coming or going from Corbally station, but they wouldn’t really take any notice of him. If anything registered, he looked like little more than a street bum, getting over his methadone fix from the clinic down the road. Guards’d see plenty of them round here, he figured.
It didn’t take long. In the end, she walked through the doors after little over an hour. Some red-haired youngster keeping up with her. She was all elegant hair and expensive clothes, but beneath all that sophistication – he could smell it. He could smell her, as if she was an animal, waiting to be tracked. He whistled a low, toneless tune between his yellow teeth. He ran a coarse hand through his rough beard and began walking behind his prey. Some two hundred yards down the road, they turned left, then left again. He knew they were headed towards the car park at the rear of the old station. There was no point following further for now. He could wait, it wouldn’t take forever. He was very good at waiting.
Veronique Majewski straightened her jacket around her. She had managed to get a lift to the village; it was benefits day and she felt like splurging. She passed by the convenience store where she normally stocked up on cheap spirits and headed instead for the pharmacy. She parted happily with twenty euro for new make-up and nail varnish. She had plans. Big Plans.
Finally, she’d managed to make contact with her mark. A few days earlier he wasn’t interested in what she had to say, at first, but then, the more she persisted, drip feeding him what she knew, the more she could feel she was reeling him in. She walked from the pharmacy, her cheap shoes making a tic-tac noise on the pavement in the empty street. Soon, she would be leaving here, not to return to her old life, but instead to start somewhere new, somewhere better than this godforsaken dump.
Now that she had dangled the carrot she knew she had found her prey. Maybe he had killed Anna Crowe and her family, Veronique didn’t know for sure, but she knew enough to know he would pay to keep her quiet.
He had agreed easily to five thousand euro. Later today, she would tell him what else she wanted. She was careful, not letting him know where she lived or how she knew. She wouldn’t take any chances. Living on the streets had taught her to be wary, to protect herself as far as she could. No. She would tell him what she wanted and she would meet him in the village, in that little coffee shop that always seemed to be closed before. Funny, but what is it they say, every cloud has a silver lining. Veronique smiled. She was not the only person in Kilgee benefiting from the death of Anna Crowe. The coffee shop had never done such a roaring trade before the tragedy. Anna Crowe and her murderer had put the village on the map, it seemed.
Yes, she would call the man today. She would set a time that suited her, a time when she could walk out of that coffee shop and straight onto a bus headed for Dublin. She walked across to the dreary bus stop. It was little more than a green pole, leaning skewed where someone had reversed into it and, obviously, Kilgee did not figure highly enough to straighten it out again. On its side, a peeling notice told her that the next bus to Dublin was in three days’ time. She crossed back to the phone kiosk.
‘Hello,’ he answered immediately, as if he was waiting for her to contact him.
‘Yes, it is me, have you organised the money?’
‘I have,’ he said and she caught something in his voice, perhaps it was a smile, perhaps he was glad to think that she would be paid off with this small sum of money.
‘Fine, I will meet you.’ She looked back over her shoulder, to the left of the phone box, an expensive car was parked facing the opposite direction, its windows blacked out, something about it made her shiver. ‘In Kilgee, in the coffee shop.’
‘Shall we say the day after tomorrow?’ he supplied smoothly.
‘No. The next day is better, say three o’clock,’ she said crossly. She hung up the phone quickly.
She could wait. She’d had enough of this place, there was nothing to be gained from waiting about any longer, but she had to be practical.
She turned on her heels then, headed towards the village shop. She would buy enough vodka to last her the next few days and then she would leave this place behind and never look back.
Veronique crossed the road, hardly noticing the heavy car that had crawled away from the phone box and parked just at the end of the village. It passed her later, slowly as she turned up the narrow track that brought her to Ollie’s cottage. She cursed as its wide tyres threw up mud on her faded jeans. Still, she didn’t notice the eyes that took in everything about her quickly in the rear-view mirror as the car sped off into the distance.
Chapter Eighteen
Iris shivered. The cold feeling that had overtaken her in Kilgee was still chewing laconically on her bones and she knew that there was no coat warm enough to cover the chill. She would be glad when this day had closed in on her and she could convince herself that they were moving nearer to some real answers.
Alan Gains’s office had all the trappings of fading wealth, a Victorian three storey, tastefully converted. In the outer reception rooms the furniture was antique and polished to a shine, the rugs were old, but still sumptuous. The receptionist was young and quietly glamorous. When Locke looked around, she figured the cleaner probably didn’t call as often as she once had, perhaps the heating was a little lower and the waiting room less packed. Maybe the admin staff spent more time now searching through accounts for bills that might yet be paid and less lodging documents with the Department of Land Registry. Sign of the times – people remembered the recession, if you were lucky enough to survive in business, austerity still seemed like the wiser path. The man himself showed similar tell-tale signs of the learning curve of property crash and looming Brexit. His suit had been expensive a decade earlier, but now it looked crumpled and worn. His hand was steady though and when he spoke, he searched her face constantly with his own owl-like brown eyes, magnified by glasses that needed wiping. Alan Gains’s eyes were intelligent and arresting, and probably his best feature. They sat in an oily face with a flat nose and mouth – too many years of expensive restaurant food and not enough exercise had wrecked his shape, so there’d be no going back.
‘Are you any nearer to finding out who did this?’ he asked when Locke and McGonagle were sitting with coffee in his well-ap
pointed office. Last time round, Iris reckoned he was well shook and upset by the whole business. He was composed today, though, so that, to Iris’s mind at least, gave less reason to suspect a guilty conscience.
‘We’re following a number of lines of enquiry at the moment.’ Iris kept it brief.
‘Well, it wasn’t anyone who knew her anyway, that’s for certain.’ He blew out a resigned sigh.
‘I’m afraid we don’t know that yet,’ McGonagle admitted quietly.
‘Well, in that case, what can I do for you?’ He joined his hands prayer-like across his desk, looked down as though inspecting them for a moment. It seemed to Iris that he was lost in thought. The coffee had been placed on a table to the side, but no one made a move towards it yet.
‘Funny, isn’t it?’ Gains said. ‘I’ve made a living, a good living, for the most part out of the law, and yet, when it comes to something like this, after all this time, it seems useless.’ He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘None of this,’ he spread his arms out, a net catching the trappings he’d worked so astutely for, ‘none of this, not the district court, or the high court, will bring them back. We’ll have answers, but what good are they to you in the end?’ He looked across at Locke.
‘We’re really sorry for your loss, Mr Gains.’ Iris heard the words slip from her tongue, hoped that they didn’t sound pithy, they weren’t meant to be. She could see that Anna Crowe’s death and the death of her children had deeply affected this man. Could be for any number of reasons, but chief amongst them was the fact that there had been a relationship there. Perhaps it was just friendship, mixed with a little business, but nonetheless, it had been enduring, more enduring than her marriage. ‘How sad,’ she’d said the words aloud, hadn’t meant to. Gains bowed his head, a quiet agreement.
‘Anyway, you didn’t come here to grief counsel me, right?’ Gains made his way across to the coffee pot. ‘What is it that you want to know about Anna?’ He poured three cups of steaming coffee, sat behind his desk and smiled an even-toothed smile across at them.
‘We’re interested in anything you can tell us.’ Iris sipped her coffee. ‘You dated her briefly, when you were younger I believe.’
‘Oh that, that’s old news, I’m afraid. There weren’t that many kids in the parish. If you didn’t end up dating someone in your class…’
‘And then things changed?’
‘Well, yeah, don’t they always? Adrian headed off for the army. A year later it was our turn. By the time we were heading to college, we’d both set our sights on a big world beyond Kilgee. Anna dreamed of being an artist, living the bohemian life in Paris or what have you. I thought I’d be walking straight into a John Grisham movie, all good deeds and massive pay-outs.’ He laughed now. ‘I ended up specialising in tort law and I’ve made most of my money out of the property boom.’ His voice was hollow, a decade, if not wasted, perhaps not taken for all it was worth.
‘So how did Anna and Adrian end up…?’
‘You’d have to ask him that. We’d kept in touch the whole way through, me and Anna. I suppose for a long time, I thought she was the one I’d marry, just never quite yet. Then she up and married Crowe and that was that. One of those things, I’d say. They weren’t five minutes married when young Martin was on the way…’ He held his palms up. ‘When she told me they were getting married, I don’t know, I felt she was marrying the wrong man, it was all so fast in the end.’ Gains was quiet now.
‘You lost someone very special,’ Iris said.
‘We all did.’ Gains sipped his cooling coffee and looked across at the large oil painting that hung opposite his desk.
‘The separation…’ Locke leaned forward in her chair slightly. ‘There seems to be no reason that we can find.’
‘I’m not the right one to ask on that score, I’m afraid. We kept our marriages out of most conversations, kept it civil; she’d tell me about Martin and Sylvie. I’d tell her about my girls.’ He nodded towards a framed photo of two small girls, pink cherubs with massive curly heads of white blonde hair and pretty strawberry mouths. ‘Like their mother, thankfully.’
‘Is it possible that Adrian Crowe might have been having an affair and Anna found out about it?’ Locke queried gently. She watched as Alan Gains’s face moved from surprise to pensive and then to something she thought might be close to resignation.
‘Adrian? I wouldn’t have thought so, but,’ he spoke slowly, sadly, waited a moment, ‘then, isn’t anything possible?’ he asked, as though they might be able to answer the unthinkable.
It took less than two hours to get the search organised. A record, of sorts, but Slattery knew it was a combination of the high-profile nature of the case and the amount of clout that Anita Cullen pulled when she wanted something badly enough. They would have preferred if it was the strength of the case that had swung it so quickly, but then this was Ireland and still cronyism and cover-up went much further than fact or truth. The forensic boys took another hour to get organised. Slattery and Locke reviewed the case book, while they waited, as Grady had directed.
Slattery knew the case book would be meticulous, like Blake himself – a small, neat, fastidious man. In all the years, Slattery had never met his wife, didn’t know where he lived, and didn’t know much about him beyond the fact that he brought his own skimmed milk to the station for his daily cuppa. If he was to guess, though, he’d say Blake had a wife and two point three children. He probably drove a Toyota and mowed his lawn each Saturday morning – waiting until the neighbours had opened their curtains before setting off the engine. Blake stood nearby while they read, occasionally drawing his glasses further up his nose, even though Slattery couldn’t see how he could possibly raise them any more, sporadically grunting and nodding where he felt he’d got something spectacularly correct.
The forensic boys – or the techies as some of the newer detectives referred to them – worked the entire mid-region. Their area sprawled as far as the Murder Team’s and then a whole lot further. Everything from burglaries to murders, it was the same deal: fingerprints and fibres, basically picking up anything that was out of place. They would work from the top to the bottom of the house, taking apart doors and windows if they had to.
If Adrian Crowe had been shell-shocked before this, he looked downright scared when Slattery and Locke arrived, produced the search warrant and explained why two large Gardai vans had pulled up outside his house. The forensic boys were less like beagles on a trail and more like sniffing mice, taking over each corner, seeing cracks where they had been missed before.
‘How long will this take?’ Crowe asked as he stood in his neat kitchen that had suddenly become cramped.
‘I’m afraid, it’ll take as long as it takes.’ Slattery’s attempt at civility was limited. He would not leave Crowe’s side while the search was in progress. If Crowe left the house, walked beyond the garden, Slattery knew that he’d be searching with the rest of the team. ‘It might quicken things up a bit if we had anything to go on from you.’
‘How do you mean?’ Crowe looked at him now, calculating.
‘I mean, the night your wife died, if there was anything you felt you might like to share with us…’
‘I’ve told you everything you need to know. I’m not the heartless bastard that murdered my own kids, if that’s what ye think you’re going to find here.’
‘I sincerely hope you’re not.’ Slattery turned from him and walked towards the window. ‘It’s a fine house, this…’ He looked back at Crowe, baiting him. ‘Very neat.’
‘I’m a neat person,’ Crowe said evenly.
‘Yes, everything in its place and a place for everything. Isn’t that what they say?’
Still Crowe stood silently, listening to the scratching, sounds of his home being systematically ripped apart one square centimetre at a time. Overhead, occasionally a floorboard would creak and Slattery knew that someone had leaned back, taking a look from a different angle at something. There would be no big steps; it was all
nudging, slow, measured movements. In the attic, two officers called Wolver and Kennedy were working their way through the top of the house. They’d pull up insulation and take out water pipes before they had finished. It must be, Slattery had often thought, like having legal burglars, people tearing up your house and sanctioned by the state to do so, hardly taking anything, but the information of how you lived your daily life in the fabric of that most hallowed of sanctums – your home.
‘Why did your marriage break up?’ Iris asked the words low and deliberate. She had materialised from the hall, but Slattery had been aware of her, ghosting about. Her tone was soft now, not wanting to dig the wound deeper, but knowing that for Anna Crowe, they had to ask all the same.
‘It had nothing to do with this.’
‘How can you be so sure? Perhaps she’d met someone else, maybe… she just wanted to get away from you to be with… she was a beautiful woman.’
‘She was a beautiful woman; if only I’d seen just how beautiful at the time,’ Crowe murmured to himself, a regret-filled whisper that meant nothing now to Anna Crowe. ‘But she wasn’t like that; she’d never have done that to me…’
‘It never ceases to amaze me what people are capable of, Mr Crowe.’ As Slattery said the words he watched the other man. In a moment he’d turned and grabbed his jacket from a hook beneath the stairs. The noises continuing upstairs, broken only by the occasional sound of a camera flicker across something that he’d overlooked, were a low drawl now, a background chorus of busy intruders who would not leave until they’d examined every fibre of this house.
Silent Night: An absolutely gripping crime thriller Page 14