The Murder Loop, page 4
Cass didn’t associate her superior officer with subtlety. Yet she agreed it was the right approach, and she realised quickly that Finnegan had a deftness for what the force, like so many organisations blindly adopting modern management theory, now called ‘outreach and engagement’.
But if Finnegan’s management of the community was effective, there were reasons to question the management of her team, Cass thought, and it wasn’t just lingering resentment from their first encounter. Finnegan had eight officers reporting to her, working in standard shifts. Like any district, it wasn’t enough. Yet on her second day, Cass had walked into the station and seen, in a new colleague, a familiar problem.
At some point in his life, the bottle had got the better of Noel Ryan and now, edging towards retirement age after years of hard drinking, he bore all the signs of it. Thin as a pick, face red, eyes bloodshot, and no amount of toothpaste, mints, deodorant or aftershave could hide the distinct odour of alcohol leaving his body through his breath and sweat rather than his overworked liver. Which was not to say he was drunk on duty: just wishing to be. A functional alcoholic: sober for just about long enough to get through the working day; stuporific by night.
The minute Cass saw him, she thought of her ex-husband, as if she needed more reminders. And immediately and irrationally, without knowing anything about his competence or capabilities, she took an instant dislike to Ryan and his presence on the squad. She knew what tolerating alcoholics could lead to; she’d tolerated her ex-husband for too long, and tragedy had followed.
Nobody blames you… as such.
Ryan’s presence would be a daily provocation and Cass already knew she would end up saying something impolitic to Finnegan when the opportunity arose.
At least the others seemed all right – a typically hard-working, diligent bunch who shared the familiar black humour to be found in every station. She’d laughed a bit over the last few days for what felt like the first time in a year. But there was still much more she had to ingest about her colleagues and her new beat. It felt… okay to be back.
The gentle start gave her opportunity to dig into Nabila Fathi’s murder. But like any case review, she quickly hit obstacles, such as interviewees no longer being available. She’d visited the direct provision centre to speak to Nabila’s closest friend, a fellow asylum-seeker named Maisah Sahraoui, only to learn Maisah had been transferred to a centre in Donegal, more than 400 kilometres away. When she’d asked why, the manager of the Glencale centre had been unable to offer a reason – he’d simply received an order from the state agency responsible for the system to effect Maisah’s transfer, and he had done so.
Cass had immediately contacted the Donegal centre and requested to speak to Maisah. Two days had passed without a return call, and she was growing increasingly annoyed. Now, as she sat at her desk and went through some of the other dead ends, she sighed audibly without realising.
‘I think you need a sizeable cup of the world’s worst coffee – just to show how bad life around here can really get.’
Liam Devine: he’d been an ally from the start and almost made up for Finnegan’s verbal assault of an introduction. Married and in his early thirties, Devine had done five years in Glencale, made no bones about his desire to move on, and so was an excellent tour guide, disarmingly shallow and brimming with useful detail. It didn’t take a detective to spot the roguish side to Devine, but Cass quite liked that.
‘I’ll buy,’ she said.
The ability of her colleagues to find the single worst places for coffee never failed to amuse Cass. In Glencale it was proving no different. A tourist town with a multitude of smashing coffee shops, and still the Guards frequented the one where they used beans as old as Methuselah.
‘Horse the sugar in,’ Devine said. ‘Only way to drink it.’
‘You could add a pint glass of whiskey to that stuff and it’d still taste like rubber tyres.’
‘That’s Noel Ryan’s trick,’ said Devine with a laugh. ‘I don’t think he can tell the difference anymore.’
But Cass didn’t see anything amusing about it. ‘How does everyone tolerate it? He can’t possibly be doing his job properly, the rest of you have to pick up the slack, and the reputational risk to the force doesn’t even seem to be considered.’
‘Finnegan puts up with it, and that’s all that counts.’
‘But why?’ Cass persisted.
‘They’re friends of old. And Finnegan looks after her friends.’ He wasn’t laughing anymore, and the flash of anger across his face said more than words ever could.
There was an awkward pause before Devine said: ‘Listen, I didn’t come here to pick on poor Noel – the fella’s harmless and he does a day’s work. Something we’re all trying to do. How’s your case review coming along?’
‘Running into brick walls,’ she said. ‘Two days ago I called to the asylum centre to speak to Nabila’s best friend. But she was long gone – transferred to Donegal.’
‘Maisah?’
Surprised, Cass asked: ‘How do you know her – from the original investigation?’
‘Sort of. She used to call to the station every week for months after Nabila’s body was found. Asking if there was any update… There never was.’
‘You were her contact point?’
‘Me? God no. Maisah was smarter than that. Insisted on speaking to Finnegan every week and would wait for hours if she wasn’t around. On those shitty plastic chairs in reception – can you imagine? Drove Finnegan nuts.’
An unpleasant suspicion was forming in Cass’s mind and, being so new to the station, so new to her colleagues, she hesitated before voicing what felt like a first act of mutiny.
‘Do you think Finnegan intervened to have her moved?’
‘She didn’t have to,’ Devine replied.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Harbour Murphy and herself go a long way back – they’re as thick as thieves.’
‘Wait – you’re saying Murphy intervened politically to get Maisah transferred at Finnegan’s request? You know this for a fact?’
‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘But Murphy’s a silent investor in the fund that owns the centre. All he had to do was click his fingers and she’d be gone.’
Cass felt nauseous, and it wasn’t the coffee. What the hell was Finnegan doing giving her a case file that had the potential to raise serious questions about her own judgement and integrity? Did she think Cass wouldn’t find out?
Or was Finnegan – despite her father’s assurances – trying to provoke some kind of clash that she could use against Cass to get rid of her?
‘You look a bit puzzled,’ Devine said. ‘Everything all right?’
But his words were suddenly extraneous noise, blending into the background with the shouting of orders, the hiss of the coffee machine and the clanking of cups.
I came here to escape the madness. But I’ve just been plunged back in again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cass took to the sea early Saturday morning, alone as was her custom. She’d never been the type to join things and introduce herself – the hangover, perhaps, of growing up a Guard’s daughter and people treading warily in her presence. She’d returned home not to be embraced by her community, but simply to retreat from the guilt. It hadn’t worked. There wasn’t a day when Cass didn’t ask herself if she could have done something different, preventative.
There had been a time when Hugh’s benders were a one day thing – warm up, get hammered, sleep it off. Then it slipped into two – wake up, start the fire again, keep it lit. She realised at that point there would come a time when two days became three, and then four, until the fire would eventually consume him. She knew she had lost him the day she told him it was the sober Hugh Moran she loved.
‘But I hate that fucking guy,’ he replied. ‘I like the guy I am when I drink.’
She persevered anyway – love gives you little choice. She always thought she’d somehow find a way to rescue him – until the drunken, shambolic shadow of the man she loved got behind the wheel of a car, missed a red light, and ploughed into a mother and child.
So Glencale was a retreat. Since moving back, she had spent a year avoiding people, leaving her apartment as little as possible. And yes, there had been days when she feared she might lose it, when her mental health was perched on a precipice and she felt herself stumbling.
The sea had been her salvation. Glencale bay was a coastal inlet stretching some fifty kilometres from Glencale to the Atlantic Ocean. Provided there were no weather warnings, the bay was generally a safe place for swimmers who were aware of their limitations to take the plunge. In spots, the tides could be deceptive, but these were well signposted.
A few times, on days when her sense of despair was particularly acute, Cass had swum further out than advised, wondering what oblivion might feel like. But she was a strong swimmer, had never got into trouble, and realised subsequently a fundamental truth: she had never put herself at real risk.
Despite her anguish, she would neither completely break down nor experience some flick-of-a-switch recovery. She was built to simply grind on, head down, arching through the water, coming up for air, repeat, repeat, repeat. Self-contained, aware of her own limitations and pushing to no extremes. Resilience, she knew, was one of her core traits, for good or for bad. And on the bad days, the better days, and all the days where she simply endured, the bay invariably called to her, offering its raw and revitalising respite.
But that morning’s respite would be very brief indeed: after her cold dip, Cass emerged to dry off and check her voicemail – and got the shocking message there had been another murder.
Cass could smell the bleach from the door. After consulting by phone with the assigned SIO, a detective inspector whose arrival from district HQ was awaited, Finnegan had issued instructions to her team. An outer cordon had been established, ensuring that no curious member of the public could come close enough to Bridge Bannon’s farm to see anything.
The farmhouse and yard had been designated as the inner cordon. The kitchen was the core crime scene, containing the bloody and bruised body of the elderly farmer. The back door leading directly into the kitchen was designated the sole point of entry and exit to avoid unnecessary contamination, a blue tent erected outside it to prevent photographers with long lenses from snapping the body.
Like a nightclub bouncer, Cass’s job was to run security outside the tent, ensuring only those with a strict need to enter the kitchen did so – investigating officers and technical specialists only, each of whom had to be logged.
Cass hadn’t actually been in the kitchen herself, hadn’t seen the body. A small part of her was almost grateful for the smell of the bleach, recognising that the disinfectant overpowered the sickly sweet, repulsive smell of the decomposing corpse. But without ever having to see the victim’s body, the bleach ruled out any suggestion of an accidental killing. Somebody had deliberately intended serious harm to Bridge Bannon, and then had the presence of mind to douse the crime scene afterwards in an attempt to destroy any DNA traces.
The technicians would determine whether it was an amateur or professional effort at evasion, but Cass felt at least some forethought had gone into the murder. Already, the prevailing view among her colleagues was that the burglary gang had struck again, had come prepared, and had decided to leave no more witnesses.
Down at the harbour, she had felt the sun on her back while swimming. But up here, it was, unsurprisingly, a different story. A low mist had settled over the mountains, and it was distinctly cool. Sullen weather, she thought.
Finnegan, dressed in protective overalls and overshoes, emerged from the house, removing her mask and double gloves.
‘What does it look like in there?’ Cass asked.
‘They beat the shit out of him and mashed his head to a pulp, with bars or hammers or something. Ransacked the place while they were at it. Bannon was known to distrust the banks and keep his money at home. My guess is he wouldn’t say where the money was and so they kept going. Wouldn’t surprise me if the pathologist tells us his heart gave out first.’
‘Definitely multiple attackers?’ Cass asked.
‘The crime-scene boys will tell us that,’ Finnegan said. ‘But it looks like our gang has escalated from armed robbery and assault to murder.’
It was the straightforward assumption, and likeliest explanation. But Cass wasn’t yet convinced. The detective squad didn’t like geniuses and was only marginally more tolerant of contrarians. Cass considered herself to be neither – she’d made the squad because she was a plodder, diligent, assembling the jigsaw piece by piece. And she felt several pieces of the puzzle were missing here.
‘Did they come close to killing on any of the previous burglaries?’ she asked.
‘Pretty sure it was a close-run thing in some of the cases,’ Finnegan said. ‘Just pure luck that somebody wasn’t killed previously.’
‘But the bleach is new, isn’t it? They didn’t use it in any of the burglaries before now?’
‘They didn’t kill anyone before now,’ Finnegan said. ‘Probably weren’t as worried about the burglaries. But knew they’d be facing life sentences for this one if caught.’
‘But they’d have had to bring the bleach with them – which suggests planning, which suggests a change in MO, which is… kind of unusual, isn’t it?’
‘Not necessarily. A working farm like this – bound to have bleach somewhere.’ Finnegan’s mobile rang and she took the call and walked off in the direction of her car.
Cass remained in position, knowing she had a good few hours of sentry duty ahead of her. It would be Kearney, the SIO, rather than Finnegan who would assign the duties from here, and Cass knew that, having left the detective squad and returned to the beat, she – and most of the local team – would be assigned the grunt work, including the door-to-doors.
But as with Nabila Fathi’s murder, there wouldn’t be many doors around here on which to knock, Cass knew – two ruins of old whitewashed cottages for every working farmhouse or renovated family home. And that at least did fit the pattern – because the gang’s prior victims all lived in isolated spots and kept cash on their properties.
Maybe it was them after all, she thought. This isn’t the States, where so many murders are never solved. It’s Ireland, where at least nine in ten murders are solved. And that’s because they tend to be straightforward. The killer is usually known to the victim – husband kills wife. Or the killers have form – an organised crime gang gunning down a rival.
In the end, the facts would determine the case, but the working theory generally proved correct. So Finnegan was probably right.
But as the wind turned and wafted the smell of bleach through the yard once more, Cass instinctively felt something was off with their initial assumptions.
CHAPTER NINE
From the rear of the deconsecrated church high in the Loop, in a position giving him a panoramic view of the valley, Mason Brady spotted the lights, and a jolt of raw panic stabbed him in the chest.
The two Garda cars were moving rapidly, lights flashing but sirens silent, the empty country road not giving them cause to announce their presence.
There was no question about their course: they were proceeding with speed and stealth in Brady’s direction.
He forced down the fear and his training kicked in, calculating rough distance and running numbers.
Three minutes to get clear, give or take…
They were close by, and possibly – presumably – coming for him.
He ran inside.
Two minutes, fifty-five seconds…
In the storage room in the chancel, the go-bag was long since packed to facilitate his departure at a moment’s notice. Months ago, he had mentally mapped the handful of local back-roads that might be of use. He had practised various escape runs. Evacuate Glencale, aim for Dublin, hide out in the city, and rely on capable friends to find him the safest route out of the country. More recently, he had come to think it unlikely such a scenario would ever materialise, because at every stage of his labour, he had taken extreme care, worked in the shadows, and hidden all traces. But there was always a risk of detection – and now, it must have materialised.
Two minutes, forty-five seconds…
Closer but still a distance off. Adrenaline surging through his veins and steeling for a fight if required. But flight preferable. He pulled on jeans and an old jumper over his sweat-soaked workout gear.
Two minutes, five seconds…
From the kitchen table, he grabbed his car keys, wallet and phone. But no weapons of any kind. He would only fight if provoked. His goal was to evade the police, not engage in combat with them.
One minute, fifty seconds…
From the storage room, he grabbed the go-bag, and then scanned the front yard before deciding it was safe to exit the house.
One minute, thirty seconds…
He ran to the car and threw everything in, before picking up his binoculars. No panic now, even with the clock working against him.
One minute, ten seconds…
He surveyed the terrain to ensure he was about to take the best exit route.
One minute, three seconds…
And then took a deep breath and exhaled.
Both police cars had turned into Bridge Bannon’s farm.
Escape plan stood down.
For the next hour, Brady observed the scene through his binoculars, and didn’t like what he saw.
His instinct had been right when the two Americans walked into Milly Cooper’s store: they would create a disturbance, and bring it close to his door.
It wasn’t hard to figure out the gravity of the scene he was observing. No body had been brought out of the house, but the manner in which the cordons had been established, the escalating number of police arriving at the scene, and the protective clothing worn by officers going into the house through a blue tent told him everything he needed to know. The farmer was dead.
