Buried Angels

by Patricia Gibney

  ‘Do you want to hear this or not?’ Sean nudged Ruby’s ankle.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘What my sister’s planning to do.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Mam will have a fit when she finds out. She dotes on Louis. I sometimes think he’s the only one she loves in our house. Except for Boyd, but he doesn’t live with us. Not yet, anyway.’

  ‘I thought he was dying,’ Ruby said, more alert now.

  ‘No, he’s not. You never listen, do you?’

  ‘I think if you listen, sometimes you hear things you’re not supposed to hear.’

  ‘Are you having a dig at me now?’

  ‘A dig?’

  ‘That’s what my granny calls it. Our house is small, not big and fancy like yours. The walls are paper thin, and I can’t help it if I hear things I’m not supposed to hear.’

  ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘Our house. It’s not big and fancy. Okay, you don’t have to roll your eyes. I know it is really, but it’s no different to any other house. Shouting. Rows. Arguments. I hear it all.’

  ‘Shit, Ruby. Your mam and dad?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I always thought you had the perfect family.’

  ‘See what thought did.’

  Sean watched as Ruby stuffed her uneaten sandwich into the zip pocket of her rucksack. ‘Was there a big row last night?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Over your smoking? Your dad seemed angry about it.’ Tears were now threading down Ruby’s face. Sean didn’t know where to look. ‘It can’t be that bad.’

  He went to hold her hand, but she stood.

  ‘It is.’ She hoisted her bag on her back. ‘Come on, we better go back in.’

  Sean put his hand on Ruby’s arm, gently easing her back to the wall. ‘You’re better off talking about it. That’s what my therapist says.’

  ‘Are you still going to her?’

  Sean smiled. ‘I’m supposed to be. Mam thinks I am but I’m saving the money. My running-away fund.’

  ‘She’ll kill you when she finds out.’

  ‘Who says she’s going to find out?’ Sean made a face and Ruby laughed. At last.

  ‘Won’t the therapist tell her? She must give your mother a report or something.’

  ‘It’s all confidential.’ But Ruby’s words had planted a seed of doubt.

  ‘He kicked her,’ Ruby said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘My dad. He hit and kicked my mother last night.’

  ‘That’s terrible. Did you see it happen?’

  ‘I heard them arguing. He’d been drinking. She’d been out. He doesn’t like it when she does things without telling him.’

  ‘Is he a control freak?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She was silent for a moment, her head drooping. ‘Sean, it was bad. I’d never seen anything like it. Scared the hell out of me. It was worse than anything on our games. It was real. Real blood, you know.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  Sniffing, she wiped away a tear. ‘I did nothing. I was a useless lump of shit. I couldn’t help my mother. That frightens me more than my dad does. I went back to bed when he yelled at me. Should have stood up for her. Should have done something.’

  Sean didn’t know what to say.

  ‘See, even you think I’m a freak.’

  ‘You’re not a freak. It sounds like it was a bad situation. Real bad, and maybe if you’d interfered, he’d have hurt you too.’

  ‘Maybe.’ She pulled a single crooked cigarette from her pocket and searched for a lighter.

  ‘Is she okay? Your mother.’ Sean couldn’t imagine how she could be okay, but he had no idea what else to say. Maybe he should ask his mam. Then he remembered that last night she’d told him to stay away from the O’Keeffes.

  Ruby said, ‘I was afraid to go into her room this morning. I just made my lunch and escaped.’ She lit the cigarette, and smoke streamed out of one of the creases where it had got crushed in her pocket.

  ‘Did you see your dad this morning?’

  ‘I never want to set eyes on him ever again.’ Ruby stomped the useless cigarette under her shoe and walked away.

  Sean watched her hurry up the lane to the school. He couldn’t understand her comment. How could she say that about her dad? He’d love to set eyes on his dad again, even for a moment. His mind filled with the memory of his dad carrying him on his back up the stairs, telling the girls, ‘Hey, pumpkins, look at this bag of potatoes I found.’ Sean had been five or six at the time and he remembered it clearly. Remembered himself and his dad falling onto the floor at the top of the stairs and rolling around with laughter.

  He missed his dad so much.

  Suddenly the birds in the trees down by the canal sounded too loud. Way too loud.

  Fifty-Two

  It was cold inside the derelict house, with part of its gaping roof yawning at the sky. Birds cawed to each other across the rafters and Lottie assumed some of the upper floors must have caved in.

  She found herself standing in what was once a hallway. The tiles beneath her feet might have been black and white, diamond-shaped; now they were mossy and fungal green, with wild mushrooms growing among the weeds that sprouted here and there. The wallpaper had long since been worn or torn away. There were no furnishings that she could see. No doors hanging in any of the empty frames. Holes in the walls hinted that there had once been radiators there. Funnily enough, there was no graffiti scrawled on the walls and no sign of litter, cans or other rubbish. Someone was keeping an eye on the place.

  She had a look into the rooms to her right and left. Both bare, though one had a shrub spiralling out from the chimney breast. She moved to the room at the back of the house, glancing upwards every second step to ensure the remainder of the roof didn’t collapse on top of her. A few cables hung precariously like icicles above her head. As she stepped through the doorway, she saw instantly what was lined up against the far wall.

  Opening her mouth to shout for McKeown, she was stunned when no sound came out. Her breath hung suspended in the cool air as she stared at the three chest freezers. Gulping down her horror, she heard the sound echoing in the emptiness. She drew her eyes away from the freezers and looked around her. What she saw chilled the blood in her veins.

  A solitary wooden chair stood in the centre of the floor, pieces of hemp rope hanging from the legs. The floor around and under it was wet in places and stained dry in others.

  She stilled her shock with a hand to her mouth.

  Blood. So much blood.

  She jumped as the air behind her whooshed. ‘McKeown, you scared the living daylights out of me.’

  ‘Holy fuck,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We need SOCOs.’

  ‘Call them.’ She was rooted to the spot. He made to move forward and she placed a hand on his arm, halting him. ‘No further, McKeown. It’s a crime scene.’

  The big detective, with his shaved head and thick arms, was trembling. ‘I bet this is where young Gavin was killed.’

  ‘And Faye. Don’t forget about Faye and her unborn baby. Holy fuck, McKeown, who is responsible for this?’ It was a rhetorical question.

  McKeown said nothing. He fumbled for his phone. When he had it in his hand, he stood, numb.

  ‘SOCOs,’ she reminded him.

  He nodded and pointed. ‘Those are freezers.’

  ‘Yeah. Look, they all have green lights on.’ She dragged her eyes along the wall. Three plugs in sockets and a makeshift mother board with fuses and trip switches. ‘Even though this place looks abandoned, there’s electricity coming in. To this room at least. We need to find out who’s paying for it and who owns this damn place.’

  ‘Maybe they don’t know what it’s being used for.’

  ‘Oh, they know all right. Why would you leave three old freezers buzzing away in a derelict house unless you were guilty of trying to hide something?’

  ‘
Good point.’

  ‘McKeown, can you remember why this house was familiar to you?’

  He scrunched his eyes tight, thinking. ‘It was something I read about when I was going through the missing persons files.’ He opened his eyes. ‘I’ll check when I get back to the office.’

  ‘Shake up your memory fairly promptly. I need to know.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  ‘Stay here until SOCOs arrive. And get the uniforms to wind a roll of crime-scene tape around the hoarding.’

  ‘I will. Are you going to have a look in the freezers?’

  ‘Yes, though I doubt there’s anything in them. Everything has been dumped on the railway and in the canal. Someone wanted them empty in a hurry.’

  She took another look around the room, with its stained concrete floor, single chair and three ominous-looking freezers. A wave of intense sadness and hopelessness washed over her. ‘Check that Jack Sheridan is okay. Lisa called the school, but we need to double-check. I don’t think I could stay in this job if I find another dead child.’

  She made her way carefully over to the freezers, avoiding the pools and stains on the floor.

  ‘Shouldn’t you wait for SOCOs, boss?’ McKeown said from the empty door frame.

  ‘I have to see what’s in here.’

  ‘Thought you said they were empty.’

  ‘I’m not God. I can’t see through them.’ She shrugged off the feeling that she should wait, and lifted the lid of the nearest freezer.

  ‘Empty,’ she said with a sigh of relief.

  She went to the next one. Lifted the lid.

  ‘Fuck!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stay back there, McKeown, you’re not suited up.’

  ‘What’s in it?’

  Lottie stared into the face of a man she’d only seen in a photograph. Pellets of frost like fresh snowdrops clung to his eyebrows and along the fringe of his hair. His mouth was frozen in the scream he had died with. He had been pushed down at an awkward angle, his face gazing up at her. She prayed he hadn’t been dismembered, like the previous occupants of the freezers. A pair of spectacles, lenses cracked, was squashed in by his ear.

  ‘Boss? Are you okay?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  ‘Is it a body?’

  She glanced over. McKeown was standing on tiptoe, trying to see into the freezer from a distance.

  ‘I think poor little Gavin disturbed our killer and that’s why he was murdered,’ she said.

  ‘Jesus. Who is it in there?’

  ‘I’m not sure, but I think it’s Aaron Frost. I was trying to reach him yesterday. His name came up when I was talking to Jeff Cole. He’s an estate agent and would’ve had access to Faye Baker’s house.’

  ‘He’s well frosted by now.’

  She did not appreciate McKeown’s macabre sense of humour. She dropped the lid and looked into the third freezer. It held joints of meat. Animal meat from what she could see.

  Marching back across the floor, she brushed out past the detective.

  ‘Stay here and wait for SOCOs. Tell McGlynn, or whoever he sends, that I want evidence pointing to the killer on my desk within the hour. And keep things confidential. If this gets out before we get a proper handle on it, we are fucked, McKeown. Fucked.’

  Fifty-Three

  With Lynch remaining at Tamara Robinson’s apartment, and McKeown waiting for SOCOs to arrive, Lottie radioed the office with instructions for someone to get her information on the derelict house.

  As she headed for the station, she mulled over everything that had happened this morning, from Gavin’s body being found to the discovery of Aaron Frost’s in the freezer. She would need to speak to his next of kin. Why had he been murdered? Faye and Gavin were linked to the skull and torso. But Frost? What had he to do with it? Okay, he might have had access to Jeff and Faye’s apartment, but had he been involved in her murder? If so, why was he now dead?

  As her brain scrambled like watery eggs, she recalled Tamara’s mention of Marianne O’Keeffe. Why had Tamara delayed almost five hours in reporting her son missing? As the lunchtime traffic crawled up the street, Lottie fervently hoped the woman had had nothing to do with her son’s death. She phoned the station. Kirby was back, so she told him to locate Aaron’s next of kin and to wait there until she returned to accompany him.

  At the roundabout, she turned around and headed for the O’Keeffes’.

  Lottie watched Marianne O’Keeffe sit gingerly on an armchair in her spacious living room. The recliner seemed to swallow her up, and the frightened look that had appeared in her eyes when she’d opened the door had not faded. Indeed, it had intensified.

  ‘Your home is lovely. So tidy.’ Lottie thought anywhere would seem neat to her after an hour in the derelict house, but the O’Keeffe house was exquisite. She welcomed the smell of lemons and bleach in the air, hoping it negated the stench of blood and decay that clung to her own skin and clothing.

  ‘Thank you. Kevin is very particular,’ Marianne said without further explanation.

  ‘Is this where you write?’ Lottie pointed to the large antique desk under the bay window. She’d noted Marianne’s desperate attempt to disguise a bruised face with heavy make-up. She had seen all the tricks there were, and she recognised a battered woman when she saw one.

  ‘I’ll never make anything of it, but it gives me something to do.’ Marianne stared at the window behind the desk as if it might be an escape route if she needed one. ‘It’s good to see you, Lottie, but is there something wrong? Is it about Ruby? Has she been over at your house bothering you? She can be a bit grumpy at times. All the time, if I’m honest.’ She attempted a wry laugh, but it caught in her throat and a strangled sigh escaped. ‘I think she had Sean round here yesterday.’

  There had been no offer of tea, or even water, and Lottie felt the thirst dry up her mouth.

  ‘No, this is not about Ruby.’ She rested her bag on her lap. ‘I want to talk to you about Tamara Robinson.’

  ‘Who?’ Marianne opened her eyes wide with surprise.

  She was quick, Lottie had to give her that. This was a woman who was used to lying. ‘Tamara Robinson. She tells me the two of you are friends.’

  ‘Oh, that Tamara.’ Marianne lowered her head and studied her hands.

  ‘Yes.’ How many women round here had such an uncommon name? ‘When did you last see her?’

  Marianne looked at Lottie from under thickly powdered eyelids. ‘Can I ask what this is about?’

  Placing her bag on the floor, Lottie leaned forward, elbows on her knees. ‘Tamara’s son was found this morning—’

  ‘Oh, that’s such a relief. Tamara was so worried about him.’

  Lottie sighed. Now Marianne knew Tamara. ‘He was found dead. Someone murdered him.’

  Marianne paled instantly, and her hands trembled as they flew to her mouth.

  ‘Do you want me to fetch you some water?’ Lottie said.

  ‘No. Give me a minute. This is such a shock. Oh God. Poor Tamara.’ She made to stand up, but flopped back on the chair. ‘I should call over to her.’

  ‘Were you with her last night?’

  Marianne swallowed noisily and nodded, knowing she could no longer lie. ‘Yes. We became friends via Instagram. I loved her make-up tutorials and she was interested in writing a book about them. I said I’d help her with it, as I love writing. Anyway, I went over to vent about Kevin because he was being a prick, but she was frantic about Gavin. Tamara can be melodramatic, but she’s a good mother despite what people say. She loved her son.’

  ‘What time did you arrive there?’

  ‘Not sure. Maybe before seven o’clock. I just barged in with all my troubles. I think I actually frightened her.’

  ‘How worried was she about Gavin?’

  ‘Not overly concerned initially. It was more like … giving out about him because she wanted the meat for dinner. She was starving. I made her a sandwich and that calmed her down.’

  ‘Did
she ring around to see if Gavin was at a friend’s house?’ Lottie persisted.

  ‘She phoned the Sheridans, but they hadn’t seen him at all. She’d kept him home from school yesterday and he was cooped up all day, so that’s why she sent him on the errand. To get him out from under her feet.’

  ‘While you were there, did she make any effort to find out where he was?’

  ‘She was getting frantic as time wore on. I wasn’t too worried, though. I know what kids can be like. Your Sean and my Ruby. Sean is so sweet.’

  Lottie thought how Gavin was only eleven years old, not sixteen like Sean. She’d be crawling the walls if Sean disappeared like that. She shivered thinking about the terror little Gavin must have gone through. She noticed Marianne staring out of the window wistfully, clutching her elbow as if in pain.

  ‘Is everything okay?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’ Marianne visibly bristled.

  ‘Are you hurt? You grimaced when you placed your elbow on the armrest just now.’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you.’

  Marianne wasn’t going to admit to anything, so Lottie went back to the issue at hand. ‘How long did you stay at Tamara’s house?’

  ‘We sat at the table chatting and she opened a bottle of wine to calm her nerves. Must have been eleven before I left.’

  ‘Was she not worried about Gavin at all?’

  ‘Every so often she’d look at the clock and say she was going to kill him. Figure of speech.’

  ‘She was with you all that time?’

  ‘Yes. Well, she did go around the estate at one stage for a quick look, but she was back in fifteen minutes or so.’

  ‘Did she go out again after you left?’

  ‘I’ve no way of knowing that. She said she was going to call the gardaí if he didn’t appear in the next ten minutes. That’s the last thing I remember her saying before I went home.’

  ‘Do you have any idea why someone would kill Gavin?’

  Marianne shook her head. ‘He’s only a little boy, for God’s sake. It’s too shocking to think of him being dead. How was he killed? No, I don’t want to know. I’ll have nightmares.’