You'll Get Yours, page 34
“Grand,” McLaughlin said. “As the perp might have indeed spiked Margaret’s drink, we might catch him in the act. Hawkins, that’s for you.”
“Delighted, boss!” she called across the room.
“So, what does that leave?” McLaughlin mused. “Where Lily got her passport from, I suppose that’s now a moot point. We must prioritize with this new turn the investigation has taken.”
“The ferret!” someone called out.
“Aye, that infernal ferret. Hawkins?”
“Still working on it, boss,” Hawkins said.
Another hand. “And what about the knickers?”
McLaughlin peered into the crowd.
“Did I get a report from whoever was meant to check the shops?”
“Aye,” someone said. “I left it on your desk.”
McLaughlin reeled. “And have you seen the state of it? Didn’t see it. What did you discover?”
“Sold in five locations in town. Nobody seems to recall a man buying them. And now we know he bought two pairs...I don’t know...should I say ‘at least?’”
A shudder ran through the room.
The copper continued. “A man buying more than one pair of the knickers would definitely have raised some eyebrows. Probably purchased them over the internet so as not to incriminate himself, boss.”
“So another dead end,” McLaughlin sighed. “And that key? Could that still be relevant to this investigation now? The key we found in Re-Lily’s work locker at the Top-Yer-Trolley?”
He pointed at the photo of it on the board and turned to D’Arcy. The color rose on her face.
“I’m sorry, sir, I—”
Cahill spoke up, “Could it belong to a lock-up, boss? Mind, she moved and many times people need a lock-up, a storage space, to put things that don’t fit in their new place.”
“But she moved from a tiny space in that B&B to a larger flat,” D’Arcy said, trying to redeem herself.
“Maybe she got the lock-up when she first moved back to Derry? Four years ago?” Cahill said. “If she was a pop star, I’d imagine she’d have had a large flat. And then she moved to the B & B in Derry.”
O’Shaughnessy raised his hand. “That key up there, boss, and all this talk of lockups. I’ve got all my mountain bikes and what have you in storage. I use Pence-A-Day lockups, you know out on the Lecky Road, and my key’s the same as that one.”
McLaughlin stared.
“Why didn’t you say so before, lad?”
“Only came to me now, just.”
“Right. Okay, O’Shaughnessy, get the key from D’Arcy and get yourself and a partner off to Pence-A-Day and see if you’re right. Now!” He motioned to the board where Lily and Margaret now smiled down at them side by side. “Did the perp choose these two at random? If not, is there something that connects the victims? As you all know,” he glanced over at the pop stars’ crossed-out faces, “I’m thinking Lily Feagins wasn’t targeted because she was in the group. I think it more likely she was targeted as supermarket shelf stacker Regina Steps, so we’re, sadly, back to the start. What did these two have in common? D’Arcy and myself asked Frank McGuff if his wife knew either Lily or Regina, but he didn’t know. He did say, however, that after Lily’s death, a change had come over his wife. So maybe there’s some connection there. Where did Lily grow up?”
He turned to D’Arcy.
“Creggan Heights, sir.”
“And Margaret?”
“Creggan Heights, too.”
“So, there’s a connection already. They are the same age. Did they go to the same school? What schools are there in Creggan Heights? Hawkins, that’s another one for you. Check it out.”
“Boss.”
“One more item, boss,” D’Arcy said. “We still haven’t discovered how Joe Cullen, you know, Lily’s ex with the shoplifting daughter...we still don’t know how he got Regina’s, as she was to him, email address to send her that threatening email.”
“Hmm...Joe Cullen...At this stage I’m tempted to say...I don’t bloody care where he got her email address from. In fact...” McLaughlin was staring at the murder board. Tapping the top of his marker against the board, lost in thought. He was looking under SUSPECTS.
KYLE MINOGUE (trace his phone)
JOE CULLEN
BARRY HAMILTON AKA BAZ
KEVIN McGINTY AKA KEV
FLYNN SHEERIN.
COLLEAGUE FROM TYT?
SOMEONE FROM OLD BEDSIT?
“Where were all these suspects last night when Margaret McGuff was murdered? Should we reinterview them all?” He glanced over at Lyons. “Should we continue ticking these boxes? It would be a long shot.” He was shaking his head slowly. There was silence in the room, except for the radiators, of course.
“I think we’ve just found ourselves with a whole list of obsolete suspects.”
A gasp went up as he drew a large X across all the SUSPECTS.
“Time to start from scratch.”
“No, boss!” Lyons wailed. “Not Kyle Minogue!”
“And, sir,” D’Arcy said, “it’s just come to me...wasn’t Brid Cullen caught shoplifting an electric eyelash curler and...lip glosses?”
“Hmm,” McLaughlin said. “Perhaps I have been a bit reckless.” He grabbed the eraser and tried to remove bits of the X that covered the first two names.
“I’ll help you with that, sir,” D’Arcy said, taking the eraser from him.
“Right,” McLaughlin said, “Lyons, as you’ve got your artist man in your sights, you and Cahill can check out his alibi for last night. And you two,” he motioned to two random coppers, “I want you to pay Joe Cullen a visit.”
He moved across the board to MOTIVES.
“Now let’s look at these. Obsolete motives?”
BROKE THE GROUP UP
EUROVISION
He crossed those out.
That left REVENGE FOR SOME PAST OFFENSE.
To pacify Lyons, he wrote ART PROJECT with some reluctance underneath, then pointed at REVENGE FOR SOME PAST OFFENSE.
“So we have one motive from the left-field, and one I’m more comfortable with. Putting aside the art project for the moment, we are left with this. Revenge for some past offense.” He turned to Lyons. “Lyons, I mind what that priest said, that Father, Father...” He snapped his fingers.
“Steele, boss.”
“Aye. Lily going to confession for something she’d done to someone. It seemed a long shot to me when you brought that motive up. But now the other Sparklettes motives don’t seem to fit. Both vics from Creggan Heights. Could the two women together have...when they were young...?”
There were murmurs and shifting in the rows.
“Hawkins! Forget all your other tasks!” McLaughlin said. “Find out where Lily Feagins and Margaret McGuff went to school this very instant!”
“Boss!”
“And Lyons! Go you back to Father Steele with this Margaret McGuff’s photo. Let’s see what your man has to say. Did he hear her confession and all?”
“Boss.”
D’Arcy had grabbed the marker from McLaughlin and was cleaning up the letters of the names of the first two suspects.
“Sir,” she said. “Might I bring up another suspect?”
McLaughlin wasn’t the only one who looked at her in surprise.
“Fill your boots, D’Arcy.”
“It’s another one coming out of left field, I fear, but...it came to me when DC Lyons and myself were interviewing the latest victim’s husband, Frank McGuff. McGuff works at KwikKabz. And the night of the Lily’s murder, I had to take a mini-cab home. And the driver I had...he seemed a rather, shall we say, unhinged individual. Expressed very deep-seated opinions about the murder to me, he could tell I was a member of the police force. On he went, about the degeneration of society, throwing in religion and then referencing, er, groups from the past, so there was some political rant in there too.”
“Sounds like a nutter.”
“Sir. I gave it no further thought. But now we know this driver works together with the husband of the second victim, perhaps he needs to be checked out.”
McLaughlin nodded. “We’ll wait before adding him to the suspects on the board, but you,” he motioned to two coppers, “get the time and date from D’Arcy, give KwikKabz a ring and see if we can find out who this mini-cab driver is.”
“I have his number plate, sir,” D’Arcy said. “Took a photo as he was racing off.”
“Grand woman you are, D’Arcy. Give it to the officers.”
He gave out a few more tasks, CCTV coverage, the GPS on the new victim’s phone, and so on, then gave a little pep talk before he set them off on their duties.
“We need to get this lunatic off the streets. The streets are no place for a madman the likes of him. He’s been tramping around the pavements of Derry with all who meet him unaware of the madness lurking in his deranged brain. Doing his shopping down the Top-Yer-Trolley, drinking in the pubs, all as if he was one of us, with nobody the wiser. But he’s giving us a glimpse into the depths of his filthy deranged mind now, unable to control his perverse desires no longer, so odds are he’ll put a foot wrong sooner rather than later and we’ll be able to lock him up and toss away the key. Do your best today to make the streets of Derry safe for us all. Let’s find this deranged killer now!”
CHAPTER 38
HAWKINS WAS AT HER row of computers, happy at the way things were coming along in the investigation of this new murder so far.
Considering the ages of Lily Feagins and Margaret McGuff at their deaths, both 45, they must have been in secondary school from 1989 to 1994 or 1995. There weren’t that many secondary schools in Derry. A quick call to the administrative assistant at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow’s Secondary School for Girls, after expressing her sorrow for Lily Feagins—apparently she hadn’t heard the news about Margaret nee O’Dowd’s murder yet, or didn’t put two and two together—verified that the girls had indeed been classmates at that school. They both attended from 1989 and left after sitting their GCSEs in 1994. In Northern Ireland, students typically remain in the same classroom while their teachers rotate between classes, so it was probable that the two girls had known each other very well. There were only 25 girls in their year, and Hawkins asked if Roisin Gowan or Gerarda Perry had also been in that class.
The woman apologized and said she had joined the school in 1996, so it was a bit before her time. She checked the records. Roisin Gowan had indeed been in the class as well. Gerarda Perry, from Rosemount, had presumably gone to St. Eugene’s School for Girls. Hawkins had asked the woman to send the class list over.
Hawkins had also asked her who she could get in touch with to learn what type of students the girls had been, did it show in the records who their form tutor had been, for example.
“That was Mrs. Padgett. I heard she passed away five years ago, it must be now,” was the reply.
Fern had then asked if there had been a head of pastoral care, or if there were some records the police could go through, some disciplinary logs.
“I’m afraid we never got around to digitizing those, and they were lost in the flood of 2011. Do you recall that awful time?”
Fern had said she did, half of Derry had been swimming underwater, sure, then asked who the principal at the time had been, and was informed rather stiffly that the title had been ‘headmistress’ back then. Apparently the woman on the other end of the phone felt that something had been lost with the elimination of gender-specific titles in Northern Ireland’s educational system.
“Headmistress Daphne Heffernan,” the woman had stressed the title, “retired some twenty years ago.” She seemed to think this a pity. “We still keep in touch, a card at Christmas and so on, but the poor woman’s been suffering from slight dementia for the past few years. She has no family left here in Derry, you understand, and never had a family of her own. She’s now out at the Golden Breezes Retirement Home on the Culmore Road. I visit when I get a chance, though I’m getting on myself now, and it’s so far out. If you visit, please tell her Aisling sends her love and will be along to visit her soon.”
“I will,” Hawkins had promised.
The moment Fern had given her boss this information, and reminded him to give Daphne Heffernan Aisling’s greetings, McLaughlin had grabbed both his anorak and D’Arcy and raced out of the station.
Aisling had emailed the class list, and Fern ran her eyes down the list of names. Besides Lily Feagins and Margaret O’Dowd, she didn’t see any other names relevant to their investigation. She had then taken a short break to stretch her legs and have a tea and a scone, leaning up against the counter of the little kitchen area of the station.
Ping!
Now Fern was back at her desk, and was staring at the screen, twisting her lanyard in anticipation. Somebody had just replied to one of her posts on Furry Ferret Fanatics, the Facebook group for ferret owners in Northern Ireland.
Fern had gone through the profiles of the 557 members and discovered that most lived in the smaller towns dotted around Northern Ireland, which made sense as presumably they had larger houses and perhaps even land where the ferret might roam. There were only 153 from Derry, which was less than she’d expected, but it was better than more. Of those from Derry, there were more males than females, 99 to 54. Of the 99 males, she could discount 62 or so, as from looking at their profile pictures, they seemed too young, teenagers, or too old. This was taking everything at face value, of course, even the cities the people said they were from. People could pretend to be whoever and from wherever they wanted online. That left 37 males of presumably the correct age. Seventeen were from the Waterside, 20 from the Cityside. She had run the names of these 37 through the PNC and HOLMES, but hadn’t come up with anything that stood out, just a petty crime or two from some of them. As to those who weren’t flagged in the databases, who knew if their names were real.
Personally, she wasn’t certain a murderer would spend his time online chatting about a pet ferret, but you never knew how people’s minds’ worked. Maybe their perpetrator spent his days engaged in the same sort of activities as everybody else, working eight odd hours every Monday through Friday at a job, and during his free time, if he was single—she couldn’t imagine he had a wife and children, though she’d been fooled before—shopping for food and household items, maybe playing snooker or darts at a pub, hanging out with friends and family. During those times he wasn’t murdering. So perhaps he chatted with strangers online. Maybe he loved his pet ferret more than he hated people. Women. It was possible. She didn’t know. She had never owned anything more exotic than a hamster.
A ferret was a very particular type of pet, if indeed their perpetrator had one. A ferret wasn’t like a cat or a dog. If you had an unconventional pet, there was a greater likelihood, she thought, that you would want to chat about it with like-minded people, those who had the same exotic pet as you.
Fern had gotten to chat with three or four members of the group who lived in Derry over the past few days. She’d created not only an online persona, Petula Sharkey, but also a ferret. She had called him Fidget. He was two years old, she had bought him somewhere online recently, and she was full of questions. What to feed him, how often should she clean his litter box, did they recommend buying a leash and taking him out for walks? Did they let their ferret run around the flat, as she stated she did—who knew what the conventions were—or was it better for him to be kept in his cage? The chats she engaged in online strained her powers of imagination, but they seemed to be doing the trick.
This response was from a Sonia Gallagher. They had already exchanged a few messages.
There had been no responses to her play dates as of yet—Fern had stressed how lonely Fidget seemed, hoping to pull on a few heartstrings—but Sonia had enthusiastically answered many of Fern’s questions. Too bad those were not the questions the PSNI really wanted to ask, and too bad Sonia was female and not male, so a non-starter, though...maybe she had a live-in boyfriend or husband? Fern had been fretting lately that this was yet another dead-end lead, even though the unmarked white van and those five ferret hairs were the only two compelling pieces of evidence they had collected so far.
They were more interested in a ferret that was shedding than one that wasn’t, so Fern had had a bit of a brainwave the day before. She’d posted on the group’s wall:
My poor Fidget is shedding something terrible! The amount of lint rollers I’ve gone through in the past few weeks! And I have blankets over all the furniture until the shedding stops! The in-laws refuse to come over until summer which if you knew my mother-in-law is quite a relief. Me and my Owen should have got Fidget a few years earlier, lol!:) I understand it, because the last time they came over I spent hours baking a pie and when my mother-in-law bit into hers she got a mouthful of Fidget’s fur. The look on her face! And it gave me a fun idea. I want to write a blog about funny shedding stories. Tell me all of you out there especially the Derry ones about your funny shedding stories and I’ll be sure to give you credit and maybe an exciting surprise. Just PM me here on Facebook. Please help me out. I’d be ever so grateful.
There had only been one reply, from a Colm Lawlor in Carrickfergus, and it had been a long muddled story about his older sister, his ferret’s hair and the lint trap of the family dryer. After reading it, Fern wondered about some people’s sense of humor. But Fern had to clutch at a few final straws. Soon she would ask McLaughlin if they just couldn’t send some of the lot from Strand Road to each of the 37 males and interview them, check their alibis for the nights of the murders, see if any owned an unmarked white van.
Fern was now reading Sonia’s message:
hi Petula i love the idea i want to be part of it let me tell you what happened when we moved into our new house the other month its hilarious but a bit tragic also
Fern read the story and laughed at the end. She shot back a quick reply, thanking the woman and promising to use the story in her blog, but then threw herself back in her chair in frustration. How could this possibly help them catch a deranged murderer?
