by Sam Blake
‘I didn’t send those. I never met her, I told you. I left Ayari’s house about half ten, I think, I don’t know, I wasn’t looking at the time. I wasn’t there long. I went up to the Vico for about half an hour, maybe longer, I had a lot to think about. Then I came home.’
‘Which route did you take home?’
Quinn shrugged. ‘Down Sorrento Road I suppose, through the village. I had so much on my mind I can’t remember.’
‘Really? We’ll check the CCTV.’ Cathy paused. ‘So who do you think sent those texts, Conor?’ Her voice was dripping with sarcasm.
‘I’ve no idea, honestly, but it wasn’t me. I didn’t even have that phone with me.’
Chapter 39
Monday, 12.45
‘Do you think he’s telling the truth?’ O’Rourke sat back in his office chair, his arms crossed, scowling.
Sitting opposite him, Cathy ran her fingers into the roots of her hair. She’d been thinking about Lauren walking into the park, her state of mind – she’d been heading there thinking she was meeting someone who would solve her problems. Cathy suddenly felt hugely protective towards her. And she knew that she had to find out exactly what happened that night and ensure the perpetrator felt the full weight of the law.
‘Who, Conor Quinn?’ Cathy snapped back to O’Rourke’s brightly lit office, the sun making a rare appearance through the cloud outside and shining straight in through the picture window that filled the entire end wall. Despite its heat, Cathy still felt chilled by this case; there seemed to be so many strands and so many secrets. ‘I think he has his own version of the truth. If he had a phone that he used for communicating with her secretly – regularly, if her phone records are anything to go by – what are the chances of it not being him sending those texts? I mean, who else knew about it? I think he sent them, then when he left Xavier Ayari’s house, he met her and it all went horribly wrong. He’s saying he went up to the Vico to account for the time lapse between leaving Ayari’s and arriving home.’ She frowned. ‘You’d think he’d need to see those images to be sure he wasn’t in them. I don’t know why he didn’t ask her to send them.’
‘Perhaps he was worried about creating an email trail with something like that.’
‘Or perhaps he sent them. There could be a much bigger picture here if he was involved in those cases in Long Island and in France. It’s a possibility. We already know he has a holiday home in France and travels frequently to the States. Maybe Tom wasn’t involved – maybe it was his dad. Quinn’s got the money to set up sites like Merchant’s Quay and Discovery Quay and the connections to make sure the profits stay hidden. And he obviously likes teenage girls.’
‘We need to check Quinn’s whereabouts at the time of those murders in Paris and Long Island.’ O’Rourke checked his watch. ‘Right – we can log in now.’
O’Rourke put his desk phone on speaker so Cathy could hear and dialled into the conference call, punching in the call’s ID pin code. An automated voice said ‘Caller two has joined the conversation.’
‘Hello, this is DI Dawson O’Rourke in Dublin. With me is Detective Garda Cathy Connolly.’
‘Bonjour, Inspector, Pierre Beaussoleil here in Paris.’ Cathy raised her eyebrows at the velvety tones of the French officer’s accent. ‘We’re just waiting for—’
A voice interrupted: ‘Caller three has joined the conversation.’
‘Hi, guys. Rob Power, Central Intelligence Agency. Good to be talking.’
O’Rourke’s face was serious as he replied. ‘Thanks for this, gentlemen. If I can just outline our situation here.’ It took O’Rourke a moment to summarise. ‘And Rob, you’ve found a connection to a similar case where a webcam was hacked?’
‘Indeed, my guys are checking the FBI and the Interpol databases to see if there are any more too. As you know we’ve got a cold case here on Long Island. Hacked computer images are a common feature and there are similarities in the code to a worm that infiltrated Professor Anna Lockharte’s computer, one of Lauren O’Reilly’s lecturers at Trinity College.’
O’Rourke pursed his lips. ‘We’re giving your team access to Lauren O’Reilly’s laptop today.’ He paused. ‘And you have a latent print in your case, Pierre, that’s a match to a print we lifted from drugs boxes in Lauren O’Reilly’s room.’
‘We do – it was taken from a piece of jewellery worn by a student who was murdered in a park near her home in Paris. She too was suffocated.’ Pierre’s English was perfect.
In the office, O’Rourke was nodding. ‘So there’s a similar MO in both cases. Lauren wasn’t suffocated but she was in a wooded park. She appears to have fallen or been pushed off a cliff, but equally if she feared for her life she could have jumped.’
Rob voiced all their thoughts. ‘It’s looking a lot like the same perp, isn’t it?’ His accent was cultured but very American, if that was a thing. Cathy imagined he looked a bit like a young Robert Redford. ‘We certainly have a lot of common denominators.’
‘Here in Paris we are now running all our data through the Interpol computers. It looks like our friends in the Metropolitan Police have two cases that show startling similarities – murders in public parks or woodland. Both were in central London, again young female students who were suffocated with clothing. We are checking with them to see if there is any record of the girls having issues with their computers.’
Cathy pulled her pendant from under her sweater and ran it along its chain, listening intently. If there were two more cases in London perhaps they’d throw up another piece of evidence, however tiny, that could be added to the puzzle. This case was suddenly looking huge.
O’Rourke’s voice was serious. ‘Sounds like we need to talk to our colleagues in London as well. Obviously we’ve got a very mobile perpetrator who has cash to travel. What’s the next step?’
Rob came back on. ‘I think we need to combine our data to search cold cases – at this end we’ve only been looking for unlawful killings with links to video images but we need to check everything with a similar MO.’ He paused. ‘To put this into context, we also have another major investigation going on here into the Merchant’s Quay and Discovery Quay websites, Operation Honey Bee. We can tell from the site architecture that they’ve been built by the same person, so they are definitely linked. What we need now is for someone in the real world to make a mistake that will open the back door. You’ve found a link between your girl and Discovery Quay – we’re teaming up with the techs here working Honey Bee to see if any of the other victims appeared on the site. This could be the breakthrough we all need. If we can identify that fingerprint and the origin of the narcotics, we could be a step closer to finding a very dangerous individual.’
‘I think we need to keep in touch, gentlemen. It’s looking like this character is here in Dublin somewhere, and I want to stop him before he leaves our island.’
They said their goodbyes and O’Rourke clicked his phone off.
‘Sounds like there’s something much bigger going on here than just our suspicious deaths. It wouldn’t be the first time Dublin has been used as a headquarters for international criminal activity.’ O’Rourke pursed his lips. ‘Do you think Conor Quinn could be capable of this?’
Cathy pulled at her necklace again. ‘I’m not sure he’d have the tech know-how, but you can hire anyone these days. Who’s to say he didn’t get a developer to build the sites and write those viruses for him? He likes young girls – maybe watching them is part of that too. That’s the whole reason Discovery Quay exists, for people like that. He’s very media savvy, it would make sense that he’s got an investment interest in websites too.’
‘And a personal interest in suffocating young women in woodland?’
Any sympathy Cathy had for Quinn at the death of his son was rapidly evaporating.
‘I don’t understand why he would have sent the images to Lauren, though. What did he need her to do that she needed to be blackmailed for?’
‘Maybe he wanted to
break it off with her but didn’t know how? He needed to control the situation – like you said before, those images would give him power, would make sure she didn’t tell anyone about their relationship.’
‘Or maybe he gets off on their fear, on the control it gives him. It’s like a game. Lauren’s death brings it very close to home but perhaps he’s getting overconfident. It sounds like there could be four other cases, and they’ve not even been connected before, so there could be more. At this stage, even if he’s only involved in the ones we know about, he probably thinks he’s invincible.’
‘I’ll buzz Thirsty, we need to get Quinn’s prints taken and cross-checked.’ As he spoke, O’Rourke’s phone rang. He shot her a look as he answered. ‘Fanning, how are you getting on?’ Listening to 007, his eyes met Cathy’s and his face cracked into a smile. ‘Good work. Let’s see what happens when we notch this up a gear.’
He hung up. ‘The blue metallic paint is made by BMW. There’s no sign of major damage to the vehicle but if the Traffic lads are right and he was knocked down first and then run over to finish the job, that would be consistent. It’s a jeep, it doesn’t take much to knock someone over with a vehicle of that weight.’
‘Ouch.’ Cathy winced. ‘It’s looking a lot like he hit Tom, isn’t it?’
O’Rourke shrugged. ‘If he’d just murdered Lauren O’Reilly, it’s possible. We’ll question him again, but I want to see those files and get the dates when those girls were killed in Paris and Long Island first. We need to check his whereabouts.’
Something was niggling Cathy about this whole thing. ‘While we’re waiting for the info I’m going to go back over the house-to-house reports from the premises overlooking the park. See if there’s any reference to Quinn’s vehicle or one like it in the area around the time Lauren arrived.’
‘Good stuff. And we need to get onto the Met in London.’ O’Rourke looked at his watch again. ‘Meet you downstairs in an hour and we’ll regroup and see if Quinn’s ready to talk?’
Chapter 40
Monday, 1.30 p.m.
Cathy collected the bulging house-to-house files and went into the incident room with them. There was no one in there, thankfully – she needed to spread everything out and she didn’t have time to explain what she was doing. She needed to concentrate.
There was something here that had been mentioned before, she was sure of it, but exactly what was eluding her. Every report was catalogued and numbered and recorded in a job book, so she knew exactly which of the manila files to pull from the stack in the detective office. Although stack was an understatement. They had only found Tom’s and Lauren’s bodies on Friday, with the two investigations running concurrently the number of statements that had been taken was colossal. There were a lot of bits of paper to collate.
Cathy started with the statements from the houses overlooking the park. It had been late on a cold January night so it was understandable that most people had their curtains firmly closed. And it was a residential area, so there was no commercial CCTV. Several of the houses had highly advanced security systems, being in one of Dublin’s most sought after locations. Thinking back to a house she’d been in recently, with its indoor swimming pool and marble floors, she could imagine what some of the interiors of the houses that overlooked the park looked like. The residents were highly security conscious but so far the team hadn’t found a property where the cameras had an uninterrupted view of the road itself. Within their perimeters everything was state of the art, but none of the systems were monitoring traffic conditions.
Cathy looked at the house numbers recorded on the statements and glanced up at the huge map pinned to the incident board. If Conor Quinn had visited Xavier Ayari on the Vico Road, the most logical route home to Sandycove would have been along Coliemore Road, driving right past Dillon’s Park, even though he claimed to have gone through the village.
She stood up, walking over to the board to look more closely at the map. If Conor Quinn had left the park, continued along Coliemore Road and driven down past Bulloch Harbour, he would have come out onto Ulverton Road a bit below where Tom was hit. Logically he’d have turned right to go home at that point. But what if he’d turned left and gone up towards Ronan Delaney’s house for some reason? They were good friends – they worked and holidayed together, and Delaney knew Lauren O’Reilly.
Cathy wondered if Ronan Delaney knew Conor Quinn was having an affair with her. What if Quinn had been heading to Delaney’s house in the hope of establishing a better alibi but had remembered too late that he was at Orla’s event? Perhaps he’d done a U-turn, had been in even more of a mess mentally then, and had accelerated around the corner and hit Tom as he tried to cross the road?
That was an awful lot of ifs. Cathy shook her head and looked at the map again. They needed to check Quinn’s phone records to see if he’d called Delaney that evening.
She put her finger on the map and traced the route from Dillon’s Park to Convent Road. Surely he would have wanted to avoid the village; any fool would know there were lots of CCTV between the pubs and the banks. So . . . She ran her finger on. If he’d turned left off Convent Road down Carysfort Road, which would be a more direct route home, his right turn onto Ulverton Road would have placed him in exactly the right location to hit Tom as he stepped off the footpath, according to Traffic’s three-dimensional reconstruction. They knew the vehicle had to be travelling down the road and had the point of impact mapped. And if he’d taken that route, he’d have just missed the CCTV cameras at the Topaz petrol station at the top of Ulverton Road. But, Cathy tapped the map with her finger, the camera at Paddy Power at the junction of Coliemore and Convent Road should have picked him up.
Maybe he’d got home, swapped cars and retraced the route through the village he claimed to have driven in the Z3, to try and strengthen his alibi? It was a possibility.
Cathy went back to the table and picked up her phone. They needed to look at the tape from the bookmakers before they spoke to Quinn again.
O’Rourke answered on the first ring. ‘Why are you ringing me? I’m downstairs.’
‘I know, but listen, I think Conor Quinn must have driven past Paddy Power’s that night. If he was coming from Dillon’s Park, he would have had to have done or we would have seen him on the CCTV from the Topaz garage. That route would have been his quickest way home and would have still brought him down Ulverton Road to hit Tom.’
As usual, O’Rourke didn’t need her to draw him a picture. ‘I’ll get Traffic to check. They’ve already been looking at those tapes for Lauren walking up the road to see if she was followed. Good work, Cat.’
Cathy clicked off the phone and went back to the files. The CCTV was exactly what they needed – it would be irrefutable. The problem with witness statements was that they were notoriously unreliable. People often remembered what they thought they had seen, not what they had actually seen.
She skim read the top one, taken at a house overlooking Dillon’s Park. They’d had their curtains closed all evening. Turning to the next one, she saw a more detailed statement. Seventeen-year-old Michael Caffrey was supposed to be studying applied maths for his Leaving Cert, but had spent most of the evening either staring out of the window or on his phone. Cathy pursed her lips, reading further. Several cars had gone past, he said, but he didn’t mention a jeep parking. There was no way that a seventeen-year-old boy would have missed the BMW Z3 that Quinn had claimed he’d been driving, if it had parked within his view. But the Z3 could have been a smokescreen if the jeep had hit Tom – perhaps he’d parked it further up the road?
Cathy read on – young Caffrey hadn’t seen a lone female going into the park; the only person he could remember seeing was a woman with a fairly big dog. Marvellous. They knew for sure Lauren had been there but if he hadn’t seen her, he could have easily missed Quinn entering the park as well. Helpful.
Cathy closed the file. The CCTV from the bookmakers should clinch it. She just hoped the cameras were pointi
ng in the right direction. They’d already pieced together Lauren’s route to Dillon’s Park passing that point, but would the camera angle be wide enough to pick up a car across the road?
*
Downstairs, O’Rourke was on the phone. As Cathy rounded the end of the staircase he held up his hand.
‘That’s great. Send what you have as soon as possible.’ He clicked the phone off and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket as he turned to speak to her. ‘I’ve been on to London – they’re checking their records. We really need to speak to the original investigating officers, which might take a day or so – they might not be working in the city any more.’ He paused. ‘Blackrock should have stills from Paddy Power’s CCTV in about half an hour. They’ll email them as soon as they have them. Let’s grab lunch and then we can chat to Quinn again when we have all the facts.’
Chapter 41
Monday, 2 p.m.
After the morning session in the interview room they both needed some air and coffee as well as food, so they grabbed their coats and headed to the cafe nearest the station. It was grey and damp outside, one of those days where a sea mist made it feel like there was rain suspended in the air. The broad pavement in front of the station and the next-door courthouse made everything feel greyer. Cathy flipped the collar of her jacket up and huddled inside it. She hated January. For nearly a thousand years the first of February had been considered the first day of spring in Ireland. Cathy had always been convinced it was a psychological trick invented by the druids to stop people going mad, to give them hope that the darkness might end some time soon.
Inside the cafe it was roasting and the scent of food was mouth-watering. It was run by a Polish husband and wife and renowned locally for its fabulous soups and generous sandwiches. Which meant there was always a queue. Today the various people waiting at the counter were steadily unpeeling their layers as they warmed up. The floor to ceiling windows that overlooked the street corner had all steamed up and it felt incredibly cosy. A stark contrast to the clinical interview room they would be heading back into shortly.
