Impostor

by LJ Ross

  Gregory glanced across at his profile, then back to the road ahead.

  “It’s impossible not to be affected during a murder investigation,” he agreed.

  “Aye, but it’ll be a reminder of their Da,” Seamus said, and Padraig made a grunting sound of disapproval in the back of his throat, as if to warn against the revelation.

  “Tis over and done wit’,” he muttered. “And best forgotten.”

  Seamus ignored him.

  “Maggie’s husband, my brother-in-law, was murdered back in ’83. IRA came into the house and shot him dead, right there in his own home, with Niall playing on the rug at his feet.”

  Gregory digested the new information, imagining the unspeakable trauma and what it might do to a person.

  “What about Connor?” he asked, in a low voice. “Did he see it happen, too?”

  Seamus’s brow furrowed, then cleared again.

  “You mustn’t have heard—and Maggie never talks of it. She adopted Connor a few years later…must’ve been back in ’87 or ’88, when he was five, or thereabouts.”

  “Six,” Padraig put in. “And nothing more’n a skinny bag of bones, when he arrived on her doorstep.”

  “I had no idea,” Gregory said. “Niall and Connor look so alike.”

  But, the more he thought about it, the more he realised he’d seen only what the world expected to see of two brothers. In reality, the differences in looks and temperament were stark.

  “Maggie was lonely after Aiden went,” her brother explained. “She always wanted a houseful of children, and a brother or sister for Niall.”

  “Found him at the children’s home down in Galway,” Padraig put in. “Awful place. Government shut it down, a few years back.”

  Gregory thought of the scandal surrounding the old orphanages run by Catholic nuns who had, it seemed, forgotten the basic tenets of their faith.

  “Connor knew Father Walsh from the old days at the orphanage,” Seamus continued, as the abbey spire came into view, peeping over the surrounding rooftops.

  “They must be around the same age—surely, he couldn’t have known Father Walsh?”

  “I don’t mean he knew him as a priest,” Seamus said. “I mean they were boys together, at St. Hilda’s Orphanage. Must’ve been a surprise to find an old friend living in the same town.”

  Gregory nodded, and began to wonder about the coincidence.

  Was there any such thing?

  Perhaps; but one thing he was sure about—early life trauma could impair the development of important emotions, such as compassion and empathy, both of which were crucial to prevent a person enacting violent thoughts and fantasies, including murder. Without human compassion, the victim was just a body—a means to an end—and so much easier to kill.

  The very definition of what it meant to be a psychopath.

  “Like I say, the sooner all this is tied up, the better,” Seamus said. “Those boys have been through enough.”

  Gregory nodded, his eyes on the priest who stood at the entrance to the abbey, greeting his congregation as they made their way into Mass. He watched Sean Walsh shaking hands and smiling, every action unthreatening and prosaic, and wondered what memories lay behind the man’s myopic brown eyes.

  * * *

  The church was not heaving with the same crowd that had gathered the day before, its number having reverted to usual proportions as the practising Catholics of the town piled inside to worship. Gregory, Padraig and Seamus joined the queue to enter, waiting their turn to be welcomed by the priest.

  “Seamus, it’s good to see you again,” Walsh said, when the man stepped forward. “We missed you, last week.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry, Father. We had a few troubles at the hotel.”

  “I understand, I understand. And Padraig, how’s that leg holding up?”

  The man tapped a hand to his hip, which Gregory assumed to have been ailing him.

  “It’s better, Father. Much better, thank you.”

  “Well, well. That’s good. And, I see you’ve brought Doctor Gregory with you. Welcome back, Alex.”

  “Thank you, Father,” he replied, with stiff politeness.

  “Will you take Communion with us, today?”

  Gregory had a sudden, flashing memory of a hard circle being pressed onto his tongue as a small boy, and barely repressed a shudder.

  “Not today, Father, but thank you.”

  Walsh nodded and then, to Gregory’s surprise, closed his eyes and made the sign of the cross while he performed a very quick blessing.

  “I—thank you,” he managed, and walked quickly inside the wide oak doors.

  * * *

  In contrast with the previous day, Gregory found the atmosphere positively convivial within the abbey walls. Immediately inside the doorway, new arrivals dipped their fingers into a font of holy water and crossed themselves before taking a seat, but he couldn’t bring himself to do the same. Instead, he moved to the wall, not far from where he’d stood the day before, and leaned back against the cold stone to observe.

  He watched a smartly-dressed woman somewhere in her late seventies arrive on the arm of a man who must have been her husband, both moving slowly but sure-footedly with a couple of grandchildren in tow.

  “Colm? Tell Mary-Louise to stop splashing in the holy water!”

  Gregory smiled at the tableau, and watched the girl’s grandfather amble across to pluck the small child up and into his arms.

  “C’mon, munchkin. Time for Sunday School,” he said.

  Gregory watched them move away, a small smile playing on his lips. There was still good in the world, he thought, and it was worth protecting.

  A moment later, Emma entered the church holding Declan’s small hand, while Niall followed a couple of paces behind them looking slightly the worse for wear. It had been an uneasy dinner the night before, and an uncomfortable insight into their domestic circumstances. The inspector had polished off almost two bottles of wine to himself before the meal was over, not counting what he put away before and after, which went some way to explaining why his wife was so very unhappy.

  His eyes strayed to where Emma was talking with another woman from the town, and he savoured the sight of her before he was discovered.

  It came sooner than he would have liked.

  “Morning, Alex,” Maggie said, spotting him as soon as she entered. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “I was raised Catholic,” he said, but did not elaborate.

  “Are you coming to sit down?” she asked, and he sensed a kind of desperation to her voice.

  He shook his head. It wouldn’t help to torment himself, or to imagine taking up what had been offered—in everything but words.

  Distance was required.

  “I plan to make a quick getaway,” he joked. “Besides, there’s a better view from here.”

  Maggie shuffled her feet, which were clad in navy woollen tights tucked inside a pair of chunky walking boots he suspected only she could wear with such aplomb.

  “I’ll drive you to the airport, later,” she said. “I’d like the chance to talk to you privately.”

  When she moved off to join her family, he wondered what new revelations would be in store.

  * * *

  The profiler was there.

  They could feel his eyes sweeping around the church, tracing the rows of heads, wondering which of them was the wolf amongst the flock of sheep.

  At first, they’d been afraid.

  They’d imagined the man would be able to see through skulls, or peel away their skin to uncover their deepest, most shameful heart.

  But he could do neither.

  He was but a man.

  “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned…”

  Yes, one man had sinned, and death now spread like a virus.

  It would not stop.

  It could not.

  CHAPTER 15r />
  “That’s Tom Reilly, over there.”

  Gregory met the Garda detectives outside the church, where Sergeant Connor Byrne pointed out the headmaster of the local school as he left Sunday Mass with his wife and children. He was a good-looking man, who glanced briefly towards them, before ushering his family away.

  “He’s nervous,” Niall said, and began to walk slowly in the other direction towards the Garda station. “We haven’t come across anybody who can corroborate his story about being out jogging on the Saturday Claire died, so maybe he’s got something to be nervous about.”

  But Gregory was more interested in Reilly’s wife, a petite blonde who seemed not to have noticed the line of Garda men eyeing her husband with such interest.

  Her physicality put a question mark over her ability to have handled a body, but working at Southmoor had taught him that physical appearance alone was not determinative of anything.

  “We never found any of Reilly’s DNA at the house,” Connor argued. “Don’t know why anybody’d wait two years.”

  “We only have his word that the relationship ended two years ago,” Gregory remarked. “If there was a relationship at all. And, if there was, Claire might have ended things more recently, which could have been the reason.”

  The other men fell silent while they considered his words, then Niall spoke again.

  “I’ve ordered a second tranche of lab testing,” he said. “It’ll cost us—a heck of a lot—but this can’t go on. I want all the old samples re-tested, and some we disregarded the first time.”

  “Disregarded?”

  “It’s the way of it,” Niall explained. “We don’t have endless resources, so we need to prioritise samples that look the most promising. We sent through what was found in the doorway, the hallway, the bathroom and the child’s bedroom. We held off sending through what we took from the other communal areas.”

  “What about the back fence? Where there’s a gap?”

  “We didn’t find anything there,” Niall replied, and then caught Gregory’s expression and sighed. “I’ll ask them to check again.”

  “How long will it take for them to come back?”

  “Usually, it takes weeks,” Connor said. “But the mayor’s approved some financing from the town’s emergency fund. We’ll order the express service, which can come back in anywhere from forty-eight hours to a week.”

  As they entered the Garda station office, they found a visitor waiting for them.

  “Inspector—Niall?”

  Liam Kelly stood up from one of the low-backed, folding chairs arranged in the tiny entrance foyer. He was a man of thirty-eight but appeared to have aged at least ten years over the past month—his skin was pallid and unshaven, his eyes bloodshot, and he was dressed down in jeans and a woollen jumper which told them he hadn’t attended church that day.

  They could hardly blame him.

  “Liam,” Niall stepped forward to take the man’s hand in both of his own, while Gregory watched with interest. “How are you holding up?”

  The man’s eyes immediately began to water.

  “Just the same,” he managed, and looked across at Gregory. “I wondered if there’d been any developments?”

  “Why don’t we have a seat?” Niall said.

  He curved an arm around the man’s shoulder and led him through to a side room set up as a ‘Family and Friends’ area, presumably for the conveyance of bad news, judging by the pamphlets on bereavement and counselling strewn across the coffee table beside a jumbo-sized box of Kleenex.

  Gregory followed them inside and shut the door behind him, then turned to face the blunt edge of grief.

  * * *

  “I thought you’d be able to tell us who did it.”

  Liam Kelly looked Gregory in the eye and dared him to respond.

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Alex said, gently. “I look at the facts and the evidence, the geography of the town and its residents. Most of all, I look at Claire, to see why anybody would want to hurt her. I compare her murder with others I’ve seen before, to see if there are any patterns of behaviour that might help us to understand the nature of her killer, so the Garda can focus their attention on the sort of person most likely to fit the bill.”

  “Alex is here to give us the benefit of his experience,” Connor added. “We’ve never had to deal with anything like this before. We needed a specialist.”

  Liam nodded miserably and sank into an overstuffed chair.

  “Claire’s still gone,” he whispered. “Even if you catch him, she’ll still be gone.”

  “We’re doing all we can,” Niall said. “Believe me—”

  “I know you are,” Liam mumbled, and ran his hands through his hair, to keep them occupied. “Some of the family are getting angry and impatient—and sometimes I feel it, too. But I know you’re doing your best. In my heart, I know you wouldn’t let me down.”

  Niall stood up and paced to the wall, where there was a large notice board filled with outdated posters advertising karaoke nights at O’Feeney’s, and sunshine yoga classes down by the lough.

  Place was turning into a bloody tourist trap, he thought, and felt a powerful urge for a drink.

  Just a quick slug, to take the edge off.

  “We think it’s somebody in Ballyfinny,” he said, and swallowed to ease the dryness in his throat. “We wanted to believe it was an outsider, but now we’re not so sure.”

  Liam’s eyes burned with anger and disbelief.

  “Somebody she knew? No. No, I can’t believe—who?” He shook his head, answering his own question. “Nobody we know could have done that to Claire.”

  It was the same instinctive reaction the Garda men had felt, but they had to face the facts, and so did he.

  “I’m sorry, Liam. We were blinded to the possibility, because we didn’t even want to think it,” Niall said. “But we have to think it.”

  “Did Claire change her routine at all, in the weeks leading up to her death?”

  Gregory’s question came out of the blue, and served to distract Liam from his devastation, if only for a moment.

  “Um, no. Not as far as I can remember. She tended to stay in the house on Saturday mornings, while I took Emily to her swimming lesson. She did most of the nursery pick-ups and whatnot during the week, so I liked to do my bit at the weekend and give Claire some time to herself. She usually had a bath and read a book, or pottered around the house or in the garden. She was always there when we came back.”

  His voice broke on the last word, and Gregory could feel Niall’s warning look boring into the side of his face. They had not discussed the matter of Claire’s alleged affair, yet.

  But they must, and soon.

  “How were things between you? Did Claire seem happy or was anything bothering her?”

  Liam clasped his hands between his knees.

  “She was happy, or seemed that way,” he said. “We had a baby on the way, and she was nesting. Started on at me to clear out the spare room and paint it. The only thing she seemed bothered about was getting everything ready for the little one.”

  He smiled at the memory.

  “I was a bit worried about money,” he confessed. “But not enough to speak to her about it. We would have been fine.”

  He fell silent, retreating into himself as he replayed the final days of their lives together.

  “How’s your daughter coping?” Gregory asked him, once again diverting the man’s thoughts towards something tangible, real and—most importantly—very much alive.

  “She keeps asking when Mammy’s coming back,” Liam said, and covered his eyes. “I don’t know what to tell her. I want to say she’s gone to Heaven, with all the angels, but I can’t see past the last image of her, lying there on the bed. I can’t see her anywhere else.”

  “We need to help you to replace that image with a better one,” Gregory said. “A happier one, that you can associate with Claire whenever you think of her.”

  “I do
n’t know if I can.”

  “You must,” Gregory told him. “If not for yourself, for your daughter. She needs your strength, and she needs to be able to talk openly about losing Claire. If she can’t, if she’s too afraid of hurting you, it’ll be harder on both of you in the years to come. We need to help you to replace the final image of Claire in your mind, so that whenever she’s spoken of, you can visualise her in happier times.”

  Liam brushed a thumb beneath his eyes, hardly aware that tears had leaked from the corners. “I want to,” he admitted. “I want to be able to think about her without my stomach churning. I see Emily watching me, asking questions…”

  “Where did you ask Claire to marry you?” Gregory asked.

  Liam was surprised.

  “Ah…it was down at the Cliffs of Moher, south of Galway. I took her there to see the ocean. It was a perfect day,” he said, wistfully.

  “You should think about taking Emily there—take the family, too. Celebrate Claire’s life, relive a special moment and remember her as she was, then. Share it with your daughter, don’t squirrel it away in the recesses of your mind.”

  Liam looked over at the quiet Englishman and wondered what it must be like, to step inside the shoes of another person and know precisely what to say, and how to say it.

  He stood up to shake Gregory’s hand.

  “I appreciate the time,” he said. “I’ll speak to Emily today, and start planning a trip.”

  Gregory returned the handshake.

  “It’s a good, positive step.”

  Liam nodded, then turned to the Garda.

  “While we’re gone—”

  “We’ll still be here,” Niall promised him. “We won’t forget, Liam.”

  Once he’d left the station to make his way home to his daughter, Connor turned to Gregory and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “I know you said you couldn’t work magic, but that was a good imitation.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Hearing Liam Kelly’s grief first-hand had not come as a surprise to Gregory, since he dealt with grief in all its forms as part of his training and practice. However, it never got any easier. There were no pro-forma words he could say that would help the living who remained; only instinct, and a willingness to listen. Contrary to Connor Byrne’s belief, there was no magic involved, and he didn’t get it right every time.