Impostor

by LJ Ross

  “Tom says it happened about six months after Emily was born,” Connor replied. “Going on two years ago. Why?”

  “According to her GP notes, Claire was suffering from moderately-severe postpartum depression,” Gregory replied. “It can lead to rash decision-making and actions that are generally out of character, owing to fluctuating hormone levels. The timing fits, but I don’t understand why this information would be withheld from the file.”

  “Look, you don’t know how things work around here—” Niall shoved away from the desk where he’d been sitting and walked across to stand in front of Gregory’s chair, just a fraction too close for comfort.

  “I think I’m beginning to,” Alex drawled, and deliberately relaxed his body.

  He’d completed all kinds of self-defence training, which was mandatory for a man in his position at the hospital, but violence was seldom his first port of call. At Southmoor, there had been many times when he’d diffused a volatile situation with a few, well-timed words and nothing more.

  “Does your mother know that you doctor the police files?” he asked the inspector. “As mayor, she has a right to expect the Garda will perform their duties to a professional standard. A man in your position should be well aware of that.”

  Niall’s head snapped back as if he’d been struck, so Connor stepped into the breach.

  “Our mother—the mayor—would understand that it serves no purpose to make that kind of thing public knowledge. It risks breaking up Tom Reilly’s marriage, and smashing to pieces the memory Liam Kelly has of his wife. All because they had some fling, over two years ago,” he argued.

  “Shall we ask her?” Gregory wondered aloud.

  There was a short, tense silence, then Niall stepped away.

  “You’ve made your point.”

  Gregory stood up and met him eye to eye.

  “I’m here to help, but I can’t do that if there isn’t full disclosure. If we’re looking at somebody local, that means everybody’s in the frame—including Tom Reilly. I need your assurance that the file will be updated, and that you won’t cut me out again.”

  “He’s right,” Connor muttered. “Before, when we thought we were looking for an outsider, that was one thing, but, now…”

  “Reilly doesn’t have an alibi,” his brother said flatly. “I know.”

  Gregory looked between them.

  “What about his wife?”

  Both men looked up in surprise, then Connor reached for the file and thumbed through a thick pile of statements until he found the one he was looking for.

  “Kate Reilly says that, while Tom was out jogging, she was at home all morning.”

  “With the kids?” Niall asked, but Connor shook his head.

  “They were at their grandparents’ house.”

  “In other words, neither of their movements are accounted for,” Gregory said. “We need to narrow the search pool, starting with those who had the means and opportunity to be at Claire Kelly’s home between the hours of eight-thirty and ten-thirty in the morning, every Saturday.”

  “Every Saturday?” Connor queried. “Just on the day she died, surely?”

  “If we assume her killer kept her under surveillance, they needed to observe the family routine every Saturday morning. Start with the Reillys.”

  “I can’t see either of them—”

  “Forget the people you think you know,” Gregory cut across another protestation from Connor. “You don’t know this man or woman as you think you do. You only know the part they allow you to see. Unless they make some mistake, or otherwise show themselves, we’ll need to flush them out, somehow. Start with some old-fashioned policing, then we’ll look at the psychology of those we have left.”

  Connor swallowed.

  “If I really try to imagine it, I could see a man doing that to Claire. But a woman?”

  Gregory almost smiled. Apparently, it was a case of ‘like mother, like son’, when it came to stereotyping killer profiles.

  “Think of the staging,” he said. “Women are, statistically, more likely to commit a ‘clean’ murder. They don’t strike out in the heat of the moment. In Claire’s case, her killer had a very specific idea of how they wanted her to die. A woman could easily have done it; more easily, if she was already Claire’s friend.”

  “You’re thinking, maybe, Kate Reilly found out about the affair?” Niall asked.

  “I’m opening your mind to the possibilities,” Gregory replied.

  He moved across to look at a large, aerial photograph of Ballyfinny that covered another wall of the Incident Room. The Kelly home was already marked with a red drawing pin, and he studied the roads and pathways around it.

  “I need to visit the house,” he said quietly. “I need to see what they saw.”

  Niall watched Gregory from across the room and wondered how he’d ever missed what was blindingly obvious to anybody who bothered to look.

  “You care about him,” he realised. “The one we’re looking for.”

  Gregory gave an almost imperceptible nod, while he continued to study the map.

  “Almost as much as I care about Claire, and all the other people who might be hurt if we don’t bring him in.”

  “The Kelly house is still closed up,” Connor said. “Liam and Emily are staying with his parents. Poor bloke says he can’t face going back, and he told me this morning he’s planning to sell up. We can go and take a look at the house anytime.”

  “What do you expect to find?” Niall asked.

  “Shadows,” Gregory replied, and left it at that.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Kelly house was located on the southern edge of the town, halfway back to the Ballyfinny Castle Hotel. It was the last plot along a winding country lane that traced the edge of the lough and served a row of five or six large, modern one-storey houses built on high ground, affording panoramic views of the water and hills in the distance. On the other side of the road, the land undulated down to the shore and was heavily wooded, but for a small footpath which led down to a small landing jetty where local residents could moor their boats.

  “Nice area,” Connor said, as he brought his police vehicle to a stop at the side of the road. Niall Byrne had remained at the Garda station to deal with a mountain of other tasks, which continued to pile in from the wider division, entrusting his younger brother to introduce their visitor to the crime scene.

  Gregory made a non-committal sound as he stepped out of the passenger side and into the late afternoon air, which was damp with the promise of rain and heavy with the scent of pine that seemed to cloak that corner of the county.

  “In for a storm, I reckon,” Connor remarked, walking around the bonnet to join him on the narrow pavement.

  Gregory was only half listening while his eyes scanned the immediate vicinity. Connor Byrne was right; the Kelly family lived in a beautiful spot, which must have set them back a pretty penny, given the price of land thereabouts—but it was isolated. There may have been four other houses on the street, but the closest was out of sight, beyond the bend in the road where the land curved in line with the lough. He imagined, when Claire and Liam Kelly had first come to look at their new plot, they’d have seen only an ideal home: near enough to town but detached and not overlooked by any neighbours. For those who preferred privacy and the Great Outdoors, it was the perfect location.

  They could never have imagined that such an idyll could prove to be their worst nightmare but, as he stood beneath the gathering storm, Gregory could see it all so clearly. He saw the long, country lane without the twitch of neighbouring curtains; the dense wood, which provided cover to anybody seeking to hide within its fold; and, most of all, he saw the chocolate-box house with its wainscoted walls painted in pristine white—a perfect picture just begging to be despoiled. He saw the wide windows with curtains that were rarely drawn, and the side gate to the back garden that, even now, swung on its hinges and whose lock was probably stiff and rusted from lack of use.

/>   A playground, for a certain kind of killer.

  Gregory realised Connor had asked him something, and was waiting for a response.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I was miles away.”

  “Yeah, it gets that way,” Connor said, with a small shrug. “Cases like these work their way under your skin, so it’s hard to think about much else. Shall we go inside?”

  Gregory followed him up a short, paved driveway to the front door, which still held the remnants of police tape that was starting to come loose.

  “No signs of forced entry,” Connor said, though both men knew it already. “None at the back of the house, either.”

  He fiddled with a large ring of keys, trying several until he found the right one.

  “What’re the other ones for?” Gregory asked.

  Connor looked down at the keys and jiggled them in the palm of his hand.

  “Another quirk of a small town,” he explained, with a smile. “Most people drop into the station with a spare key, in case they go on holiday and their house alarm starts going off, or they lock themselves out, or some such.”

  “People are trusting, in these parts.”

  “Aye, they are,” Connor said, and pushed open the door.

  * * *

  Inside, their nostrils were assailed by the lingering scent of iodine.

  “Haven’t had the cleaners in here, yet,” Connor explained, and brushed an idle finger against a thin layer of black fingerprinting powder.

  “It’s better that way,” Gregory said, and closed his eyes briefly to imagine Claire Kelly making her way down the hallway towards the front door, not stopping to check the peephole before she threw it open to the person who planned to take it all from her.

  “Is that where the ornament used to be?” he asked, nodding towards a narrow console table pushed against the wall.

  Connor nodded.

  “It’s in the Evidence Store,” he explained. “Lab sent it back to us a week or so ago.”

  The table was three or four paces from the front door, Gregory noted—close enough for any opportunist to reach past Claire in the doorway to grab it.

  “They had to gain entry first, before they picked up the ornament,” he murmured.

  Connor folded his arms.

  “Forensics team found a couple of drops of blood on the carpet—there—and another partial droplet on the wall,” he said. “There’d been a decent attempt to clean it up.”

  “I wonder why they bothered, if they planned to leave Claire for her family to find,” Gregory mused. “There was no need to do an extensive clean-up, since they had no intention of trying to conceal her murder.”

  Connor rubbed the edge of his thumb against the side of his nose while he mulled it over, then gave another one of his light shrugs.

  “Maybe he didn’t want to mess her house up,” he offered.

  Gregory looked at him for a long moment.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said, then gestured along the hallway. “He took her to the bathroom, next?”

  “Far as we can tell,” Connor agreed. “It’s along this way.”

  Gregory followed the sergeant along the wide hallway and, despite all the upheaval, he could see how it might have been on the day Claire Kelly died. The walls were painted in the palest sage green, and photographs of her family lined the walls in classy, black-and-white prints, framed in white wood. As they passed the kitchen, he saw acres of pristine granite countertops and a fridge covered in Emily’s drawings. Neat as a pin, without being a show home.

  “Bathroom’s in here,” Connor said, and stood aside to allow Gregory to precede him.

  And, when he took his first step across the threshold, he felt a wave of sadness; so strong, he almost braced a hand against the wall. The rational part of himself recognised the emotion for what it was: a projection of what he already knew had happened inside the bathroom, with its unassuming porcelain-tiled floor and watercolour seascape on the wall. Were it not for the remaining fingerprint dust clinging to the sink, and the gaping holes where the taps ought to have been, he might never have known a woman had died here—there was no blood, no gore.

  Only emptiness.

  “Forensics took the taps and pipework away,” Connor said, from somewhere over his right shoulder.

  “The pathologist report said the knife blow went straight into her aorta,” Gregory said. “With that kind of injury, it would have taken less than five minutes for her to bleed out, and her clothes would have been covered.”

  He turned back to the sergeant.

  “When Emily and Liam found her, and in the crime scene images, Claire Kelly’s clothes have no bloodstains, which means he must’ve changed her clothing after hosing her down in here. What happened to the blood-stained clothes?”

  “We never found them,” Connor said. “They’re missing, along with the knife.”

  When Gregory said nothing, he stepped inside the room and took another cursory glance around.

  “D’you reckon the killer took the clothes as a kind of trophy? Sometimes, they take little bits and bobs with them.”

  “It would hardly be little bits and bobs, in this case,” Gregory pointed out. “He wouldn’t want to be seen lugging a bag full of bloodied clothes around the place, if he was making off on foot. Maybe he had to take the clothing because he was afraid some of his DNA had rubbed off.”

  Connor’s lips thinned.

  “Aye, that could be it.”

  Gregory took one final look around the room, then stepped back into the hallway, a light sweat breaking out on the back of his neck along with a sense of foreboding. Small spaces could do that.

  Small spaces, and dark places.

  As he made his way towards the end of the long, central corridor which ran the breadth of the house, Gregory’s sense of foreboding grew stronger. Tiny hairs prickled on the back of his neck, as though somebody was right beside him.

  But, when he spun around, he found Connor Byrne still standing at the other end of the hallway speaking on his smartphone, having taken a call from the station.

  Alone with his thoughts, Gregory turned back to the door marked, ‘EMILY’S ROOM’ in wooden lettering shaped like animals, and pushed it open.

  The little girl’s bedroom had been decorated in shades of pink and cream, fit for a princess. A tiny, chiffon canopy had been arranged above the bed, which was the only part that remained untouched by the forensics team, who had seized the mattress, coverings and toys for examination. All the same, he had seen pictures of how it had been and, if he closed his eyes, he could still visualise the scene that had greeted Emily Kelly when she’d come home from swimming practice.

  He stood in the centre of the room for long, long minutes, and did not hear Connor’s quiet tread along the corridor outside until the man was almost within touching distance.

  “Doc?”

  Gregory’s eyes flew open, and he raised his arms in a reflex action, keeping his guard high.

  “Whoa, there! Easy, feller! Sorry, I didn’t mean to give you a start,” Connor said, holding his hands out.

  Gregory lowered his hands slowly, keeping his eyes trained on the other man.

  “Guess you didn’t hear me,” Connor said, and gave a nervous laugh. For a mild-mannered criminal profiler, Alex Gregory bore the look of a man ready to kill, or be killed. “I s’pose working in a max-security hospital makes you kind of jumpy.”

  Gregory worked up some semblance of a smile.

  “You could say that.”

  Connor made a cursory inspection of the room, then stuck his hands in the back pockets of his jeans.

  “One of the theories we had is that whoever killed Claire was really looking for her daughter, and that’s why they set her up in here,” he said.

  Gregory was unconvinced.

  “If Claire was collateral damage, or second choice, they wouldn’t have taken such time and trouble with her,” he murmured, and turned slowly to look at the placement of items in the room.
“Did you do an inventory of everything in here?”

  Connor lifted a shoulder.

  “We made a list of everything we took away for testing, if that’s what you mean. Liam Kelly signed it.”

  Gregory could have laughed at that. A grieving widower would sign anything, if only it would bring his wife back.

  “I mean everything in the room, not just the things taken away by the forensics team,” he said. “It’s possible Claire’s killer might have taken that trophy you were talking about.”

  Connor came to attention.

  “I can get a team in here today,” he said. “We’ll run it past Liam sometime tomorrow or next week, give him a chance to get over the shock of the funeral.”

  Gregory knew that was the right and proper thing to do, but the hunter in him wanted action there and then.

  “Let me know if he says anything’s missing,” was all he said.

  “If they weren’t after the kid, why did they set Claire up in here?” Connor asked.

  Gregory met his eyes across the room, then raised a hand to point at a large, clear-glass window looking out over the back garden. It dominated one wall of the bedroom and was framed in pale pink curtains with a pattern of white stars.

  “They watched her through this window, lying on the bed here, reading Claire a bedtime story,” he said, in a voice so low Connor strained to hear him. “Sitting in a perfect home, in a perfect world, at least from the outside. Maybe they wanted a slice of the fairy tale.”

  Connor moved to the window, where he looked out across the garden, which was becoming overgrown.

  “On the map, there’s a footpath which runs behind the garden fence,” Gregory said. “Where does it lead?”

  Connor didn’t bother to turn around.

  “If you follow the path west, it takes you back into the centre of town,” he said. “If you go east, it leads you through the trees to the hotel.”

  “Have you searched the footpath?”

  “We’ve gone over the whole area,” Connor told him. “We found nothing.”

  “Try again,” Gregory said. “Look for plastic residue, or charred earth. He wouldn’t want to carry her clothing back into town, so there’s a chance he burned it.”