I pause it. Look at Baz, Clancy. “Recognize him?”
Baz pulls back, hooks his hands over the back of his head. “No. No wonder the neighbor couldn’t give a description. The guy’s better wrapped than a burrito.”
Clancy has his hand under his chin, his eyes moving over the screen. “I’d make him, what? Six foot two at least? Maybe a little over, judging by the height of the garden wall there. Pretty lanky lad. I’d say your first analysis was on the mark, Frankie. Mid-twenties, early thirties.”
The man is a blurred shadow, paused midstride. “I don’t think this guy was there to deliver anything,” I add. I hit play. The man moves onto the main road away from the house. Gloved hand on the lip of his hood, obscuring his face from the camera. He turns back up the corner, a slight pitch forwards to his posture to compensate for the slope in the road. Then he’s out of view.
“He knew about the cameras right enough,” Clancy comments. “Not worried we’d work out who he was.”
“Or cocksure we wouldn’t,” Baz says. He pushes the heels of his hands against his eyes. Blinks hard. “Or maybe he wants us to find him.”
I give him a look that says he should know better than that, and he shrugs back at me. “I’m going on two days now with no sleep; it’s the best I can do.”
“I would think he knew about the buses too,” I say. “Knew what time they’d be pulling up, when the camera would be obscured.”
Baz takes up a pen, taps it on his knee. “It gives us a tighter window to work around. If the killer knew the buses were a regular thing, we know he returned to her house in that half hour. Between six thirty and seven P.M.”
“When did Ryan say Hennessy went to the chip shop?”
Baz raises an eyebrow. “You’re thinking Hennessy?”
I look to Clancy but he’s studying the backs of his hands as if life’s answers were written there. “I don’t know. No. It’s a possibility, isn’t it?”
“He said six fifteen. If he went to the bench outside, was seen there for a while afterward, it rules him out.”
Clancy is pushing out of his seat.
I look up at him. “You’re going?”
He flicks the cuff of his coat, checks the time. “I’ve a meeting. Get working through the database for anyone who matches this fella then. And keep sifting through CCTV. Can you get that license plate recognition technology on it?”
I glance at Baz. “ANPR?” I reply.
“That’s the one. There’s no way this fella carted Alan Shine’s body to that church without a vehicle. Close down over Clontarf area, maybe stretch into Raheny if there’s a no-show. Let’s go back six weeks. I want everyone on this team able to memorize what vehicles have come and gone between Clontarf Road and the Shine house. This little shit is coming in.” He gives his shoulders a jiggle under his coat as if shaking away his bluster. “And that will be the end of it.” He gives us a look that says we’re to get the bloody job done and done quickly. He leaves, giving the door a firm slam as he goes.
“What’s up with him?” Baz asks. “Wound so tight he squeaks when he walks.”
I look over at the closed door, chew the tip of my pen. I need a cigarette. “I don’t know.”
“We’ll have something on this guy soon,” Baz offers, throwing a glance at the computer. “Abigail is processing evidence as fast as her team can snap slides into microscopes.”
“I know.” I replay the video. Look at our suspect. The figure comes up the road. His head tucked in against his chest. I try to fill out his features but fail. The clock ticks on.
Baz is tapping the pen against his leg again, his face drawn down in thought. After a moment the tapping stops and he turns from the desk. “I think we should bring in the priest.”
“The priest?”
“Father Healy.”
I point to the screen. “You can’t tell me that’s Father Healy.”
“Agreed. But as much as I hate to admit it, Ryan is right. He’s looked into it and Father Healy wasn’t accounted for all afternoon. He knew the victims. Alan Shine was dressed in priest’s vestments. Now, he may not have been a priest but he had been a lay minister.”
The queue for confessions at St. Catherine’s must’ve been a long one.
He nods, points the pen at me as if we’re both on the same page. “And,” he continues, “the most important point: Geraldine Shine might’ve thought she was meeting him. He said himself that she often stopped by the church to talk to him.”
I look at our perp frozen on the CCTV footage, then consider the likelihood of Father Healy carrying out these crimes. I think of Father Healy meeting our victim. She was attractive, vulnerable; perhaps their relationship had begun to take a different shape in the priest’s eyes. The answer closest to us is often the one we seek.
“He would have been well-placed, sure,” I say. “And maybe there’s a motive there. It won’t be easy to get information from him though. He doesn’t seem like the share-y type.”
“What priest does? Expect us all to pour our darkest secrets into their ears but keep their own to themselves.” Baz is on his feet. He pushes up the cuff of his shirt, checks the time. “First thing tomorrow, I bring him in,” he adds. Then giving me a quick salute, he’s gone; a bounce in his step at the thought of putting the priest in the hot seat.
The office quiet, I pull the door-to-door transcripts onto my lap, take up a highlighter pen, scan each statement for anything that might give us more on the shadowy specter on the CCTV. But I can’t concentrate, the echo of Clancy’s presence around me still. The sense that he’s a little too quick to leave. Too eager to push Hegarty’s instructions aside. It’s not like Jack to avoid diving into a cold case like the Hennessys’; these are the ones he relishes. It’s a grand feeling to tie up a loose end, Frankie. Give families answers. That’s what it’s all about. I put the witness statements back on the desk, pick up the phone, and dial an old friend.
Mike Owens answers on the second ring.
“The doghouse,” he says, his voice loud against a wave of chatter, shouts, and phone rings.
I imagine the organized chaos of the local station at Harcourt Street. The computers listing on full desks, keyboards smeared in years’ worth of greasy, sandwich-eating fingers. Piles of reports and folders on either side. Stab vests thrown over broken-backed chairs. Seventies’ law enforcement melded with the modern day.
“Hey, Mike. It’s Frankie Sheehan.”
“Frankie,” he says. “Long time, no speak.”
“How’s it going down there in the pit?”
“Dirty,” he says. “Fucking dregs of society sucking our resources dry. Gang crime up to our eyeballs. Bloody endless. No sooner are you onto one of these fuckers, someone puts a bullet in their head and we’ve got a whole other heap of dung to shift.”
He talks the talk but I hear the hunger in his voice.
“Still sleeping well?”
“Like a clear conscience. Heard you got the big job, eh?” I imagine him pulling at his tie. His neck covered in shadow already. A well-worn look in his eyes, dirty blond hair raked through with over-caffeinated fingers. “Should I call you Chief now?”
“Let’s pretend we’re both in that lecture hall, staring up at the same ladder.”
“Easy for you to say. Anytime I got by the third rung, I’d snakes round my ankles.”
I laugh. “I’ve a job for you.”
“You know how I like those. Anything to take me outta the current shithole. Hang on, let me put you on the mobile. Can’t hear jack shit in here.”
There’s a muffled sound, a click on the line, and I imagine him levering away from his desk, escaping the office and out onto the courtyard at the back of the building. There’s another click on the line and then, “Right, I’m all ears.”
Owens is a walking and talking stereotype. I hear his
cigarette lighter pop and the sound of the city beating away in the background. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m reviewing a few old files. And wondered if I could jog your memory.”
“Jog away.”
“Seán Hennessy. You may have heard of him.”
“I’m not deaf, so yeah.”
“Off the record, you got anything in the archives? I’ve his file here but have little in the way of interview transcripts. That kind of thing. I thought I’d pulled everything but maybe there’s more somewhere.”
He laughs, chesty. “There’s some big cracks in the ground all of a sudden?”
“You know how it is.”
He doesn’t answer right away and I hear the cigarette smack at his mouth. A sigh comes down the line. “Am I looking for any names?”
I hesitate. I’ve known Owens for so long but trust is not always cast iron. Time can tarnish the hardiest of metals. “Jack Clancy.”
There’s silence. Then, “I’ll check it out.” I hear the swoosh of a door and the sounds of the city quiet as he steps back inside. “We should catch up for a drink sometime.”
“Yeah,” I say. “We should.”
He laughs. “I’ll be in touch if I find anything.”
“Thanks, Mike.” I hang up. Collect my bag and coat and set out from the office to meet Geraldine Shine’s family.
* * *
—
IT’S EIGHT THIRTY and still light. I stand at the window of my flat, four floors above the bustle of Grafton Street, looking out over Dublin city, armed with a cigarette and a coffee. The other side of the window pane, a beetle, a tiny black bauble, thin limbs reaching up the wall like a mountaineer. Below it, a thick pocket of webs, a little pouch of softness to cushion a fall.
A peachy sunset builds across the Dublin sky, lilac clouds pulled back over the horizon. But the air outside is cloying, stiff. More rain coming. More low pressure.
Geraldine Shine’s deliveryman remains unidentified. And the ghost who slipped through her window to leave her bloodied blouse remains faceless. Geraldine’s family. I take another drag of the cigarette. Her family was broken and bitter when I visited them. Fiona Garry stayed wedged up against her mother throughout. The smell of polish and baking stuck in the air. Years’ worth of it. Pope John Paul II waving a holy hand from prime position above the fireplace. Both women, red-faced, red-eyed, held hands through their grief. The father, Ken Garry, silent on the chair across from them. On the wall a school picture of Fiona, plait over the shoulder, on the cusp of teen-dom, her hand resting on her younger sister’s left shoulder. Geraldine Shine, black hair sculpted like a shining cap around her head, a square fringe reaching to her eyebrows, two front teeth missing from her smile.
The family breathed life into Geraldine Shine. Colored in the blanks that only they could fill. Geraldine had slowly dropped out of her family’s life or they had eased away. That husband, Fiona spat, finally had her where he wanted her. Every time they thought she would leave, she was pulled back. It’s hard to watch a loved one go through that, Fiona said. Like being forced to watch a car crash in slow motion. We all wanted to look away. Then came the tears. Shuddering tears. Alan had to be involved in this somehow, she’d said, wiping snot and wetness away with a frayed piece of tissue. There’s nobody else who’d want to hurt Ger.
I put out my cigarette, move away from the window, go to the bedroom. I change into a T-shirt and jeans then return to the living room. Seán Hennessy’s notes are spread out over the carpet in front of the sofa. On the coffee table the Hennessy documentary footage is paused. Seán’s head is down, searching for the right phrase, perhaps. The right sentence to persuade. His case file is fat. Fatter still will be the boxes of evidence and sundry affiliated with court proceedings. Seven folders of court summaries, interview summaries, witness statements, and garda reports. But even then I know some of it is missing. Tabs mark out pages that aren’t present. Indexes reference interview transcripts that aren’t on file. It doesn’t look good. Clancy’s reticence about the case has lodged under my skin like a splinter. And I can’t help but look, to check there’s nothing there.
I sit down. Take a breath and open a folder on the Hennessy crime scene. Photographs taken on the thirteenth of August 1995. Seventeen years ago. Among the photos a stray picture cut from a newspaper. The headline reads: SON SUSPECTED IN FAMILY MURDER. It’s dated the fourteenth of August. The day after the bodies were discovered. The image in the article shows distraught residents gathered as close to the Hennessy home as the gardaí will allow, their expressions caught by the camera: hands covering mouths, a string of rosary beads woven between fingers, tissues pressed to eyes, heads tipped together in communal grief. Behind the neighbors and rubberneckers, all along the street, news vans. Photographers. Cameras. I don’t want to remember the grotesque scuffle in the media about who and what had failed so much an entire family had been as good as wiped out. The son turned monster. Transcendence. Is that the word? Becoming.
Taking up the photos from the crime scene, I look down at John Hennessy, his head to chest, propped against the back wall of the family home, as if he’d drifted off in the August sunlight. Ireland was in the midst of a heat wave. A scorcher of a day. Dry as bone. The sun lightens the photo, gives the picture a surreal, sepia quality, makes it dreamlike. Seán’s words come back to me, I thought I was walking into a dream.
The blood from John’s injuries is dirty down his front, around his neck. His hands rest palm-up on the patio. John. Heavy-fisted. That’s what they’d said. The lighter version of the truth. Followed by the reassurance that he was a grand man, really. Brought home the bacon. Honest to goodness.
I turn to the next photo. Bríd is facedown on the grass, her head turned to one side. One shoe missing, twisted off in a struggle. And the daughter, Cara Hennessy. Ten years old.
I peer down at the young girl’s face. A gentle outward curve to her young cheeks. Peach shorts. White T-shirt. She survived. Just. But I know she’s relived that scene every night, every day, that it’s waiting at the end of every heartbeat. Putting down the picture, I search for the papers in her file. Papers that seek to shield her from her past. An attempt to scoop a girl out of what’s shaped her. Name her anew. I find it at the bottom of her summary. WSP. Witness Security Program. My eyes bear down on the signature at the bottom of the page; my fingers tighten, hold on. Hold on to what I’m seeing: Jack Clancy.
I stare down at the signature for a long time then close my eyes. The stiff letters of his signature float behind my eyelids. I remove the page from the summary, set it down on the farthest edge of the coffee table. There’s nothing about Jack Clancy’s signature that should make me worry, but seeing his name there, attached to Hennessy’s, does make me uneasy. The thought that working on this case, the magnitude of Seán’s badness, might have caused good people to make bad choices. It happens. But then our criminals could use the same excuse. Seán could use the same excuse, surely. Exhaustion, a need to escape his family home even if it meant killing his mother and sister. He’d do anything to free himself of his father. That was the wall at Seán’s back. We all have one. A place where we find ourselves making unthinkable decisions. A place where we might decide to kill.
In the months leading up to the Hennessy murders, I was still living with my parents and I found my own back inching up against a wall. I was tired, ambitious, probably impatient and too full of my own life and problems to deal with much else. Dad was ill with depression. It lurked in his motionless eyes, in the stiff movement of his face. He’d tried twice to kill himself. Despite medication, he couldn’t break free, and every time I stepped into the house I was afraid of what I’d find. And I knew why. I knew he was sick, squirreled back into some dark hole inside himself that I couldn’t reach. And I became expert at reading his mood. Just from the back of his head, a little angle to the right, the gray hair that covered the troubled
husk of his skull, spread out over his shirt collar. Just by that I could tell where he was, with us or somewhere else.
One day I came home early from work. I didn’t think there was anyone in the house. I walked upstairs and saw him, through the open door of my parents’ bedroom. Just sitting, staring out the window. But around him on the clean white bed, pills. Lots of pills. Counted out. Ready. All of a sudden I wanted it over. Whatever bad thing was hurtling toward us, I no longer had the strength to keep it back. In that moment, I hated him a little. I stood there and looked. Looked at the back of his head, at that little skirt of hair over his collar, and I willed him to succeed. Willed him to die. Yes, there’s badness in all of us. We’re all human. That’s the fault line, right there.
I swallow, pack away the pain of that day, and angle the laptop toward me. Looking into Seán Hennessy’s face, I reach for the keyboard and hit play on the next clip.
“It was three days in when I got my first kicking,” he says. “The lads, you know, they need to show you who’s who, what’s what. I was no saint before all that happened. I was a skinny bloke, to be sure, but I knew how to dodge a beating, knew when to fade against a wall, slip behind a corner. And I’d learned to sniff out trouble. Normal folk now, they’d be going along with their lives and trouble found them. Growing up with my da, I wasn’t so green as that. I’d learned to look for it, size it up. I knew when to hide and when to throw the first swing. No fist was going to find me looking the other way, you know.
“And I knew it was coming to me. My cell mate, Reece, he was the proverbial shit. Shaved head. You could pick out the marks of every fight he’d won in the white lines that mapped his bulging skull. At first it seemed he’d taken me under his wing, like. Then he heard I’d a sister. That she’d nearly died.”
His hands slide over each other, right comforting the left. His eyes water. I lean closer, try to worm out the truth between his words, the workings of his mind between breaths. He swallows.
The Killer in Me Page 8
