The Child Before

by Michael Scanlon

  Maybe he smells a bitch in heat. If that’s the case, Casper my boy, it’s the dog pound for you.

  Casper turned his head and looked at the man. The dog’s big, soft eyes had a quiet intelligence about them. Casper was very still, as if, the dog handler considered, his feelings had been hurt by what he’d just been thinking.

  ‘Okay, Casper. Let’s see what you can do.’

  The dog pawed the ground again as the handler unclipped the lead.

  ‘Off you go, boy.’

  And Casper streaked away. It took him mere seconds to reach the far end of the field. He did not stop there, instead dove into the thicket of bushes and was gone.

  The handler waited…

  But Casper did not reappear.

  … And waited, considering with a sinking heart that Casper’s instincts indeed might have triumphed over his training.

  And then he heard it.

  Casper’s excited barking.

  He ran to the end of the field through which Casper had disappeared. There, he could see the dog peering up from the bottom of the ditch through a tangle of bramble, his brown and white coat camouflaging him perfectly into his surroundings.

  Right next to his face was what appeared to be a rectangle of cloth. The dog was now doing exactly as he had been trained to do, which was to wait for the man.

  ‘Fetch, Casper!’

  Casper gripped the item gently in his jaw. He lowered his head and immediately began to make his way out again, his tail wagging in that frantic way of springer spaniels.

  ‘Good boy, Casper, good boy.’

  The handler brushed the dog’s coat briskly and took Casper’s reward from the side pocket of his cargo pants. He bounced the ball into the air and Casper jumped to catch it.

  ‘Good boy, Casper, good boy.’

  From his other pocket the handler took a pair of plastic gloves and a folded evidence bag. He pulled on the gloves and bent down, picked up the item carefully and placed it into the bag.

  It was a bloodied baby’s T-shirt.

  Thirty-Two

  The crows were shrieking in the trees as Beck walked through the field. The dog handler was waiting, the springer spaniel sitting at his feet. The animal looked at Beck, watching him with gentle, intelligent, eyes.

  ‘His name’s Casper. He found it. In there.’ The handler pointed to behind him. ‘I can show you exactly.’

  They walked to the ditch and the handler indicated.

  ‘Right down there. It was caught in the branches.’

  Beck looked at the tangle of thick foliage.

  ‘The dog pick up a scent anywhere else?’

  ‘Casper got this on the wind. He didn’t track it.’

  ‘Really,’ Beck said.

  The handler looked genuinely proud. ‘Not many canines could do that, springers anyway. There wasn’t a track for him to follow. Not as such. Anything here is twenty-four hours old by the way. The T-shirt was dropped. That’s the only explanation I can think of.’

  Beck considered that.

  ‘That you, Beck?’ The voice came from the other side of the ditch, in the next field.

  ‘Andy Mahony?’

  ‘We’re coming through from this side,’ the SOC Inspector said. ‘Clipping everything back, piece by piece, branch by branch.’

  He grunted.

  ‘Damn, I just tore my overalls again. Meet me at the van, Beck, I’ll need a fresh set. Be there in a minute.’

  The Technical Bureau Fiat Ducato was shoehorned onto the narrow roadway. Beck went along the side, the thorny bushes of the ditch pulling on his shirt sleeve. The back doors were closed. He saw Inspector Mahony crossing a gate and starting to walk towards him now, pulling at the shoulders of his one-piece forensic suit.

  He nodded to Beck, opening the van door and pulling off the suit. He placed it into the bin just inside the door. The suit itself would be analysed later. Mahony was sweating. He ran a hand over his forehead, then reached into the van again, took a bottle of water, opened it and gulped down. He held out the bottle to Beck.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘The piece of clothing,’ Mahony said, ‘suspected to be baby Róisín’s T-shirt, is on its way to the lab in the Phoenix Park on a Yamaha 1200 motorbike, running on lights and siren. It’ll be matched with the victim’s DNA sample that was sent yesterday. This time tomorrow we should have the result. That is, if the body doesn’t turn up in the meantime. Either that or the child is long gone.’

  ‘What about the car? Anything?’

  ‘There were prints. On the roof by the passenger door, four finger marks excluding the thumb, and underneath the passenger door handle, index and middle finger. Both sets are a match. For the same person. Unfortunately, there’s isn’t a match on the system to identify who this person is. We took a mould of fresh tyre marks too. From the end of this road here, right by the gap in the hedge where the victim’s car went through. Something big. Bigger than a car. Smaller than a truck. Tyre analysis should tell us the particular type, but not the actual vehicle model itself.’

  ‘An SUV? Is that what you mean?’

  ‘Yes. A large SUV. We’ve combed the area searching for the murder weapon. It’s likely we’ll have to dredge the river… Thought you’d have an easy life of it down here, didn’t you, Beck?’ Mahony adjusted the hood on his new overall. ‘Or does death just follow you like a stalking cat?’

  ‘If that’s a joke, Mahony, I’d stick to the day job. Not that you’re any bloody better at that.’

  Inspector Mahony watched Beck walk away.

  ‘I’ve heard you’re on the wagon, Beck,’ he called after him. ‘It’d be a foolish man who’d place a bet on you staying there.’

  Thirty-Three

  Beck walked to the end of the road and paused, looking ahead over the low bank of moss and weeds that marked the entry to the lost village. On the other side, what had once been a gravel track was now high grass and scrub winding its way ahead of him, wild gorse and white hawthorns pushing in from either side where once the stone thatch cottages of Kelly’s Forge had stood. Beck clambered over the low embankment and made his way along the covered trail.

  It wasn’t far to the end. This was marked by a ditch, on the other side of which a cow stared back at him, its lower jaw moving in a sideways motion as it chewed with a soft munching sound. Behind it the boggy ground stretched for a short distance before it was lost to the curve of a hill. Next to it a shimmer of green. Beck stared. He discerned ivy, stretching off in the other direction. Was that a wall there?

  Beck looked either side of him and, crouching low and holding back the sharp hawthorn branches with a sleeved arm, pushed in through the bushes on his right. The thorns pierced his clothes and scratched his flesh, and just as he wondered if it wasn’t too difficult to continue, the bushes gave way and he was standing on a carpet of pine needles. A bird flapped its wings somewhere above him and flew away, leaving the world completely still. Ahead were trees of Scots pine, widely spaced, indicating it had been thinned here in the past. The sun glinted on the pine-needled floor, leaving streaks of light and shadows through the trees.

  Beck doubled back through the trees a short distance in the direction he had come. He stopped and looked about. He could see that they were part of the forest now, almost indecipherable, wilds roots having taken hold, tumbling down walls, covering the fallen stone in vines and moss. But there they stood, jagged mounds rising from the earth, the last vestiges of the buildings that had once stood here. Where the trees grew now, the villagers cattle had probably wandered, half-starved in winter with nothing to eat but the long acre, the grass along the sides of the public roads. And where once voices echoed, nothing now but stillness. All else was dead. Forgotten.

  Beck felt a hard, ribbed, roughness beneath his feet. He used his shoe to brush back the thin layer of vegetation that appeared like a mat, revealing an old cart wheel beneath. It was moulded into the ground, blackened and rotting, its central metal hub reduced to mere t
wisted shards of rust.

  Beck turned away and walked away from it, deeper in amongst the trees. He stopped after a couple of minutes and turned back again. This distance provided him now with the perspective he needed to see the pattern. Still, it was difficult to pick them out, but gradually he could discern the remains of the stone cottages at regular intervals interspersed through the trees. These reminded Beck of the headstones on forgotten graves, where no one any longer came to place flowers or pick tender weed roots before these could take hold. Now, the weeds had slowly devoured the graves, as they had devoured this place. Soon nothing would be left, all traces would be gone, everything having returned to the earth.

  Or would it?

  Beck closed his eyes, and a sudden rustle through the trees like the whispering of ghosts gave him the uncanny feeling that he was being watched. So powerful was it that he opened his eyes and looked about, trying to find the prying eyes. But he could see none. The trees rustled again, but louder this time, as if angered by his presence.

  And then, on the breeze, he could smell it. Unmistakeable. It was the stench of rotting flesh. Of death. Beck walked ahead, in deeper amongst the trees. The branches weaved and sighed before him. The ground became rougher, stumps of long fallen trees hidden underfoot. Beck moved carefully, the ground beneath him soft and porous. He came to a stream at the bottom of an incline. It was very low, almost dry, the water hardly moving, the rocks on its bed jutting up, edged in lichen. If this weather continued, soon no water would remain. He jumped to the other side. The stench was much stronger here. A little further on the ground sloped away to an area of clear, rough ground. The stench was overpowering now. He held his nose, and looked down.

  Hard, bare branches extended from the ground at the bottom. They were oddly shaped, and rigid, like spirals, a labyrinth of wood. He stood looking down, following the trail of spirals, trying to make sense of them, to what looked like a… He saw then what it was. A buck deer’s head, and the spirals of wood were its antlers. He looked along, to the bloated body, could see towards the back, over the distinctive short white tail, skin had broken, a mass of pulsated larvae exposed, expanding and contracting like a grotesque beating heart. He felt his foot begin to lose grip and so he raised it and moved it back, attempting to anchor it more securely. But where he placed it was hollow beneath, and Beck stumbled and fell forward, grabbing branches as he went, successfully stopping himself from completely falling over but ending up stumbling onto one knee at the bottom of the slope. The movement had thrown the flies, big fat bluebottles, into the air, swarming around him now, the angry buzzing of their wings like an audio rash.

  And in front, its yellow teeth bared in a death grimace, clamped around a long floppy black tongue, nostrils flared, inside of which, towards the back, Beck could see a sliver of that same undulating pulsating larvae.

  But it was the eyes. They were immense. While the body had rotted, they seemed almost alive. The buck deer stared back at Beck, as if to say: Well, what the hell?

  Thirty-Four

  Beck stood at the top of the Ops Room and informed the assembled detectives and uniformed members of the discovery of a baby’s bloodied T-shirt in a ditch not too far from Kelly’s Forge.

  Silence followed.

  It was the first and only find in the search.

  ‘We’ll know tomorrow if it’s baby Róisín’s.’

  He paused, tempted to add that it probably was baby Róisín’s. But he knew they were already thinking that. So why add to expectation? There was always the chance it might not be. Because coincidences, Beck knew, created unnecessary turns within an investigation already a maze.

  He moved on.

  ‘We haven’t located Billy Hamilton. As you all know, Róisín’s biological father lives with his mother and two older brothers. She says he hasn’t been home in a couple of days.’ Beck paused. ‘And Edward Roche, Samantha’s partner. His statement needs to be corroborated. That he was indeed at the Elegant Print and Design on the day Samantha Power died. Even if he was, he still had a narrow window in which he could have done it. He finishes at five. Theoretically, he still had time. Just about.’

  ‘He’s hitting the sauce I hear, Hamilton,’ a uniform informed the room.

  ‘He’ll have heard by now, of course,’ Superintendent Wilde said.

  ‘He was in The Noose last night,’ the uniform added. ‘We parked outside at closing time. But we missed him.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go in?’ it was Beck.

  The uniform looked surprised.

  ‘Billy Hamilton. The Noose. At closing time. You’d need the public order unit. Do I have to explain?’

  ‘There’s more ways to skin a cat,’ Beck said, but not loud enough for anyone to hear.

  Beck lowered his head, raising his eyebrows secretly. An image of a room of policemen filing into a maze and taking a wrong turn filled his mind.

  ‘It would be hard to take the child out of the country,’ Superintendent Wilde told the room. ‘The CRI was activated within hours. But it’s possible. She could be in a different jurisdiction by now. And consider we believe the motive behind the attack on Samantha Power was sexual. Taking that into account, it’s possible therefore, I consider, the baby may have been abducted for the same reasons.’

  For a moment there was complete silence.

  ‘She’s a baby for Christ’s sake,’ it was a perplexed Garda Ryan, mother of four children herself. ‘Six months old. Sir, with respect, come on…’

  The room broke out into chatter. Wilde raised his voice a couple of octaves.

  ‘It may be part of a long term, planned scenario.’

  ‘Sir,’ Beck said. ‘But we believe this was not a planned crime. All indications are that it was spontaneous.’

  Superintendent Wilde frowned, took a step back, leaving the atmosphere in the room much heavier that it had been when the briefing had first started. There was a white-board next to Beck. Superintendent Wilde had wheeled it in earlier. Beck wrote bullet points in black marker on it out of respect for the traditions of the station. In reality, it was a complete waste of time. Everything had already been inputted onto Pulse. Lastly, in large heavy lettering, he wrote ‘CCTV’, underlined it twice.

  ‘Sergeant Connor?’ Beck called.

  From the back of the room a hand rose. Beck was glad to see that Sergeant Connor’s pallor had grown into a healthy pink glow now that he was back on day shift.

  ‘Progress on CCTV,’ Connor said. ‘Because we now know the direction of travel of the victim’s car after it left Crabby’s supermarket, I requested footage from a filling station and a lumberyard along the Mylestown Road. It’s a relatively short distance along here to the turn off for Kelly’s Forge. I obtained one download already, from the filling station. But I won’t have the other until later this afternoon. Once past the lumberyard, there are no more cameras until Mylestown, six miles further along. I also made a request through local radio for any dash cam footage that might be out there. Nothing has come back on that so far, unfortunately.’

  ‘You look at the download you do have yet, from the filling station?’ Beck asked.

  ‘Of course. Everything appears normal. Samantha Power drives past. On her own. Nothing outwardly unusual.’

  Sergeant Connor fell silent.

  Beck turned his attention to Garda Ryan.

  ‘Did she have any enemies, Samantha Power, that you know of, Garda Ryan?’

  Garda Ryan began tapping her fingers on her hi-vis jacket folded across her lap.

  Beck considered the jacket had a significance beyond the practical function of a mere item of clothing. He considered it the equivalent of an adult comfort blanket.

  ‘If she had I would have told you,’ she said. ‘Of course, she had people who didn’t like her. Don’t we all? But you’d really need to hate someone awfully bad to do what was done to that poor girl, and I can’t think of anybody like that. Not even Hamilton or Roche, to be fair. I met Naomi Scully, the girl she�
��d been staying with by the way. She came up to me on the street. Wants to know if anyone will be round, to search through her stuff. Not that there’s much of it.’

  ‘Look after that, will you?’ Beck said. He held out little hope of anything coming out of it.

  She pulled the hi-vis jacket closer to her, looking down at it, running a finger along one of the silver reflective stripes across the front.

  ‘The prints on Maurice Crabby’s bike are all his own,’ Beck said. ‘Anyone have any dealings with him in the recent past, by the way?’

  Garda Ryan shifted in her seat. ‘He’s smarmy, that fella. Everything he says is loaded with sexual innuendo. ‘Crime fighting keeping you out of your warm bed at night, guard?’ That sort of thing? Gives me the creeps.’

  Superintendent Wilde looked at her. ‘If we can stay focused on the fundamentals of the matter, please.’

  Garda Ryan looked like she was about to say something, but didn’t, instead folded her arms and remained silent.

  ‘The murder weapon has not been located,’ Superintendent Wilde said. ‘We’re looking for something sharp, but blunt. That’s an oxymoron by the way.’ He noted the confused expressions. ‘An oxymoron is…’

  ‘With all due respect, sir. We know what an oxymoron is.’

  ‘Not a knife,’ Superintendent Wilde said, tetchy. ‘At least not a sharp knife. And the State Pathologist believes it’s not a knife. But what it is, we don’t know yet.’

  But Beck wanted to get back to the baby.

  ‘I do think there is also the possibility,’ he said, ‘that the killer also killed the baby. Dumped her body. Somewhere.’

  Superintendent Wilde placed his hands on his hips in that way of his and looked at Beck.