The Murder Loop, page 18
More pertinently, did anybody in town recognise the driver?
I’ve got this bastard now. Just one final push, and I’ve got him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Cass pulled the first thread, ensuring an unpleasant surprise for Charles Desmond, the seventy-two-year-old churchgoing widower of Boyne, County Meath, who wasn’t used to getting official phone calls from members of An Garda Síochána.
Yes, the Toyota had once been his, but he was no longer the owner because he had sold it, signing all the necessary paperwork.
Sold it to who?
Well, the Toyota had failed the National Car Test and, because of its age and low residual value. Charles Desmond felt it wasn’t worth the investment to remedy the problems. He’d been preparing to bring it to a scrapyard when he saw one of those “cash for cars” posters around town. He rang the number on the poster and the cash-for-cars people couldn’t have been nicer or more professional. They arrived in a tow truck, asked Charles to sign some paperwork in the relevant places, gave him a one-pager in return confirming that the vehicle would be scrapped for parts, and gave him 300 euro in cash. No waiting around for a cheque to clear. So, you see, he was no longer the legal owner…
Until Cass informed him that in fact he was, and that the cash-for-cars people had probably been running a scam, selling unroadworthy cars like Charles’ Toyota for quick profit to people who couldn’t afford anything better and didn’t ask too many questions about provenance.
‘But, but, but,’ spluttered Charles, ‘they gave me a form.’
‘Yes,’ Cass said, ‘please do search for it, and if you can find it – and the mobile number you originally rang – contact me asap with the details.’
Charles Desmond would, no doubt, have diligently retained the paperwork. But it would be a dead end for sure. The form would have been faked, the mobile number long since out of service, the fraudsters untraceable for all intents and purposes. She was not going to locate her suspect this way.
So time to go another route.
‘Is this him?’ Maisah asked.
Cass had contacted her in advance to say she would be sending through a photo and would be grateful for Maisah’s help in identifying the person.
‘He knew Nabila and we think he can help us with our inquiries. That’s all right now. So – do you recognise him?’
Maisah studied the photo in silence for a few moments. But when she answered, it was categorical. ‘No, I do not know him. You do not have his name?’
‘We’re working on it.’
‘I will show this picture to my friends, to Nabila’s friends. Maybe one of us recognises him for you.’
Cass knew she should retain control of the search, ensure it was handled in the correct way. But she also saw Maisah would reach relevant people much more quickly than she could.
‘Okay, but no posting the image on social media or anything like that. And you tell your friends the same, you understand?’
Maisah confirmed that she did.
Cass then left the station, having lined up two specific meetings. She had to drive a distance to the first one: Harbour Murphy was doing a constituency clinic in one of the neighbouring towns and had begrudgingly consented to make time for her, but only if she came to him. She was happy to. Unlike Maisah, whom she trusted, Cass didn’t want to send the politician the photo. Nor did she wish to speak to him about the matter by phone. She wanted to witness his reaction to the photo, because it was sure to be telling one way or the other.
The venue for the constituency clinic was a small, drab community hall – a secretary was sitting at a folding table near the entrance, registering those who came in, taking initial details of their query, and asking them to take one of the stacking chairs laid out in a row alongside the wall until the great man was free. At the opposite end of the hall stood a makeshift office – a couple of curtain screens erected to give an illusion of privacy around another folding table and chairs. From here, Harbour Murphy held court and presumably solved all manner of local ailments and disputes.
The secretary, young and friendly, welcomed Cass and told her the politician was just finishing with a constituent. After ten minutes of waiting, Cass’s patience was wearing thin and she was giving the secretary venomous looks.
‘I’m sorry,’ the secretary said, ‘but he does insist we never disturb him when he’s with someone.’
‘It’s extremely urgent,’ Cass replied, ‘so I’d appreciate if you could interrupt him and tell him it can’t wait. Now.’
Reluctantly, the secretary rose and walked to the far end of the hall, disappearing behind the screens. There was just enough distance to ensure discussions in the makeshift office couldn’t be made out distinctly. When the secretary re-emerged, she walked briskly back to Cass and said: ‘He’s almost done.’
He fucking will be when I’m through with him, the arrogant prick.
The noise of chairs scraping on the floor signalled the meeting was finally over, and Murphy appeared, arm around an elderly constituent, providing assurance on some matter. As the constituent left, Murphy ostentatiously turned to the handful of people in the queue and said: ‘Would you mind if I spoke with Officer Cassidy first? She tells me she has extremely urgent business to attend to.’
There were murmurs of assent, and then Murphy beckoned Cass behind the screens. ‘I’m sorry to delay you. But you know how it is.’
‘Every vote counts, I’m sure.’
‘You know the old saying about constituency clinics? A third of people want you to do something impossible, a third want you to do something illegal, and the rest are just fucking lonely.’
He guffawed at his own joke. Cass ignored it and passed a copy of the CCTV image across the desk.
‘Do you recognise this man?’
‘Should I? What’s he got to do with anything?’
‘Nabila Fathi. We believe this man can help us with our inquiries.’
‘You think this is the bastard who killed her?’
‘I didn’t say that. Do you recognise him?’
He, too, looked long and hard at the photo, just as Maisah had appeared to on the earlier phone call with Cass. But it produced the same result – Harbour Murphy shook his head and said: ‘Doesn’t ring a bell.’
She had been scrutinising him for any tell-tale flicker of recognition or hesitancy. There was none.
Time to accept the inevitable, she thought. He’s an arrogant, conniving, selfish bollocks but there’s not a shred of evidence to suggest he’s connected with any of this.
‘Why did you think I might have known him?’
‘Two reasons. I thought perhaps he’d been into your shop to see Nabila. And more generally, I thought if anybody in town would recognise a face, it would be you.’
‘Can I keep this and show it around? Maybe my staff might remember him.’
‘Not right now. I’ll take care of your staff. But if you think of anything…’
‘That poor girl. I hope to Christ this is a breakthrough. Anything I can do to help – anything at all…’
Harbour Murphy, the privately educated son of a millionaire farmer, all these years deliberately adopting a thick country accent and a cute-hoor shtick to give the locals the impression he was one of their own.
Well, he was a cute hoor, adding millions to the family wealth at his constituents’ expense.
But the funny thing was, behind the contrived accent, Cass felt he was actually being genuine for once.
Her second stop was the direct provision centre back in Glencale. Because the suspect was not on the database of asylum-seekers, it meant he was unlikely to have resided in the centre. Still, it was surely plausible that he had visited the centre or was known to people there. Hence, she spent a couple of hours showing the suspect’s photo to residents and staff. It proved another futile exercise.
Her third and final destination for the day was Harbour Murphy’s supermarket, where she asked the staff if they recognised the man in the picture. Once again, a dead end.
Back at the station, Cass felt a touch deflated, if not yet defeated. There were further avenues to pursue, and she knew better than to expect instant results, but still, just when a result had seemed so close…
She called a halt shortly after six – early by her standards – and went home to change, as she had agreed to call to Brady’s place later that evening. The fact that Sarah Delahunty was where she belonged – at home with her family – meant Cass was much more comfortable about the prospect of passing her farm.
She was taking a quick shower when her mobile rang. Rang again, and rang a third time.
It was Maisah, and she had some news.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
As a rule, Brady tried to be judicious in his questions about Cass’s job, so as to avoid raising any suspicions. So when she rang to cancel, he didn’t pry.
‘Something’s come up at work,’ she said, offering no further explanation.
‘Tomorrow night instead?’
‘I’ll let you know.’
Short and to the point. They did their best talking in the dark, after first exhausting each other physically – and it suited him fine. Her too, he thought. More transactional than a commitment.
Now he had the evening unexpectedly free. Back in the States, he would have called some of the guys, gone for a few beers, seen if he could find enticing trouble.
But he had been scrupulous in doing the opposite since arriving in Ireland. So no trip into the town tonight, no entertainment, just himself and his ghosts. And another long yawning chasm of exhaustion until daybreak when he could finally sleep…
Better off staying in the void.
She’s a risk to me.
A risk I’ll have to mitigate if things go wrong.
So why am I disappointed not to be seeing her?
Which, he suddenly realised, was entirely the wrong question to ask.
Why had she actually cancelled? What was the ‘something’ that had come up at work?
He’d learned in their short time together that she didn’t talk about any aspect of live police business – she’d only discussed the Bridge Bannon case with him once satisfied that Peter Bannon was in custody and about to be charged. So even if he’d asked, she wouldn’t have told him.
But what if he was the ‘something’?
Is that why she couldn’t visit?
Has she unearthed something?
Is she onto me?
Have I entrenched my enemy at the heart of my terrain?
Transactional? This is a fucking trapeze act.
High-wire insanity.
But maybe that was the point, he thought. His fragile mind, his obsessional mind, the lust for settlement, the willingness to kill, the desire to kill, the decision to run new, avoidable risk.
Maybe I am just insane. But nobody is locking me up. They can come for me but they’ll never corner me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Maisah had gold for Cass: a name, and a last-known address. Maisah had shared the suspect’s photograph with everyone she could think of, and one of her friends had eventually responded in the positive: yes, she knew this person, and yes, she had an idea where he could be found. And how did she know him? She was Libyan, had been based in Glencale while awaiting a decision on her asylum application, and had been approached by the suspect, a fellow Libyan, to help him exchange some banknotes. She had said no… and as a result, was still alive.
A name: Akeem Issa. An address: an old farmhouse a couple of miles north of the town.
We’re coming for you, Akeem.
And when we catch you–
God give me the strength not to wring your fucking neck.
But first things first: procedure and basic fact-checking. A search of all relevant databases for the suspect, now that she had a name. A search of the property register for the owner of the farmhouse.
Akeem Issa was not known to the Guards or the border authorities, and didn’t have a passport or public identity number registered in his name. So, it was either a false identity or he had arrived illegally in Europe and, from there, to Ireland.
The property search showed the farmhouse, known as Muckanish House, was owned by a married couple with a London address. They weren’t registered as landlords, so perhaps Issa was squatting on the property. Either way, that could be ascertained later. Over a late call that night, she discussed it with Finnegan, and they swiftly agreed the core facts: Issa was suspected of an arrestable offence, could be present on the property, and was possibly armed. No need to wait for a warrant. As soon as dawn broke, they would be good to go.
Preservation of life wasn’t the immediate priority one would associate with the armed support unit, Cass thought the following morning, as she watched them run through their final checks.
Among the weapons carried by the unit members were the Heckler & Koch MP7 submachine gun – capable of penetrating multiple layers of Kevlar from 200 metres – and the Sig Sauer P226, the official sidearm used by the US Navy Seals.
But preservation of life was indeed the unit’s number one objective – protecting their unarmed colleagues in high-risk operations, and seeking to de-escalate violent situations while minimising risk to civilian life. In recognition of the broad range of emergencies they found themselves responding to, they carried less lethal weapons too, such as tasers, and each member was trained as an emergency first responder.
After Cass’s unexpected and potentially fatal run-in with Peter Bannon, Finnegan wasn’t taking any chances. The armed support unit would be on hand, ready to escalate or de-escalate as appropriate – the rest would depend on the suspect.
‘Safety first, speed second,’ Finnegan had ordered a short time earlier. ‘We believe this individual has killed at least once. We’ve got no line of sight on what weapons he may have in his possession. So no one moves until we’re ready to move, and we make damn sure none of us gets hurt.’
Cass would have liked a weapon too, her baton and pepper spray seeming incredibly insufficient for what they were about to undertake. Maybe Brady was getting into her head with his locked-and-loaded bullshit. Akeem Issa didn’t look particularly threatening or thuggish in the images they had of him, but Cass had no doubt he had murdered Nabila Fathi. And not out of sudden, uncontrollable rage, but in a calm, premeditated way, which made him considerably more dangerous.
As they departed the station in convoy, she felt edgy. It wasn’t from the memory of Peter Bannon’s attack, for she had refused to linger on it. It was simply the standard feeling when embarking on any potentially treacherous operation. She’d done a tonne of them during her years in Dublin – drug raids mostly – and the feeling at the outset was always the same. A metallic taste of fear; never knowing who, or what, was behind the door. Knowing from the litany of colleagues’ experiences the number of things that could go wrong, sometimes catastrophically so. Having no other choice but to trust that her training would get her – and the team – through it unscathed.
It didn’t pay to be imaginative in this line of work.
But intuition, on the other hand…
She knew on first sight the raid would be a bust. Muckanish House stood on about three acres, bounded in the distance by a wall of sitka spruce forestry to the rear.
The foul smell and brown streaks of a dribble bar told them that slurry had been spread on the land in recent days. But the farmhouse, by contrast, smacked of disuse. A squashed, low-ceilinged, whitewashed affair, it was old, dilapidated and overgrown. Planks had been hammered across the doors and windows in lieu of the smashed glass. A handful of tiles were missing from the roof, no doubt the casualties of winter. A small shed made of timber and corrugated iron was listing to one side. They took nothing for granted, completing thorough reconnaissance before executing their approach. But once they moved, it took mere minutes to confirm what a glance had already told her: nobody home.
The armed support unit was stood down while the local team worked diligently for a further hour picking through the house and shed and bagging what they could as potential forensic evidence. The shed was empty bar a rusting bucket and a few empty, tattered, animal feed bags.
The inside of the house was in better shape than outward appearances suggested: although damp and mould had spread, the walls and floorboards were structurally intact; the kitchen had an old cooker and fridge which still looked usable had the electricity been running; there was a wood stove in the small living room, and beside it, a stack of logs covered in cobwebs.
Upstairs, two small bedrooms, one of which had a filthy, water-stained mattress in a corner; and a bathroom, in which the taps still ran in the cracked sink. Not remotely comfortable, but habitable if you were an illegal immigrant in need of a place to squat, she thought.
The odd thing was, apart from the mattress and the timber logs, there wasn’t a sign otherwise of someone spending time here. No rotting leftovers in the fridge, no sign of a jar of coffee or tinned foods, no towels or toilet paper, no sheets or blankets. Still, they’d check the obvious places for prints – the fridge door, stove and toilet handles – and run what tests they could on the mattress.
But it was a minimal yield. If Akeem Issa had been here, he was long since gone, and his car too. As she exited the house and removed her gloves and shoe covers, she exhaled in frustration, the edginess long since gone and replaced by profound disappointment.
There were just four of them left on-site: herself; Devine and Noel Ryan, who were packing the last of the gear into one car; and Bruton, a new recruit at the station, who had decided to walk the perimeter to conduct one final check and was due to drive back in the other car with Cass.
Devine heard her approach, turned, and began clapping slowly. ‘Good job. Complete fucking waste of manpower and money.’
