Little Bird: a serial killer thriller

by Sharon Dempsey

  ‘You saw the Wells family at the funeral, it’s a heartbreaking loss, so it is. The only solace we can offer them is to find the killer. What have you come up with so far? Any thoughts?’

  ‘I was just having another read through the report notes, Sir.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘From what I have seen of the briefing notes we have no sexual motive since she wasn’t sexually assaulted. That’s not to say the murderer didn’t intend to assault her and for whatever reason killed her before he managed to do anything. Thomas King has spoken to the two teenagers that found her. But there isn’t much more to go on.’

  The team briefing had been held that morning and had thrown up little of use. CCTV was still being checked, as were mobile records. The wedding guests had all been interviewed with no one seeing anything untoward or noticing anything suspicious. They needed a break and soon.

  ‘So, what have you gleaned so far?’ he asked, his tone, somehow inviting her to slip up. She was the blow in. The new girl, and she didn’t want to wreck her chances of playing a lead part in this case.

  ‘The alarm was raised shortly after eleven o’clock by two teenagers. A boy of sixteen, called Joshua, a cousin of the bride and a girl, Hannah, who had been invited as an evening guest. Hannah was connected to the groom’s family, the daughter of a friend of the family.’

  ‘What were they doing to be so far away from the wedding party?’

  ‘It appears that Joshua had led Hannah to a quiet part of the grounds hoping to get more than a kiss and a feel.’ She paused to look through the folder, ‘I haven’t spoken to them but from the notes it appears Joshua had spotted Hannah early in the evening and had made it his business to be introduced. They had quickly established a few mutual acquaintances, and that they shared mutual Facebook friends. I suppose that’s how young ones connect to each other these days.’ Anna glanced down at her notes.

  ‘They had been out for ‘a wander round the grounds’, was how Joshua described it in his statement and had caught sight of the body in the undergrowth. He wasn’t sure who saw it first, him or Hannah, but within seconds they realised that she was dead.

  ‘He was asked: How did you know she was dead? And he said, ‘There was blood, a lot of blood plus she was twisted as if she had tried to crawl on her back to safety. To escape. And there was a bloody big branch, which at first sight looked like it was impaled in her body. A gnarled branch, thick and long looked like it was sticking right out of her chest. It looked like someone had put a stake through her heart.’ Joshua’s words,’ she added.

  ‘At first he hadn’t realised that the dark wetness all around the body was blood. He took out his iPhone and clicked on the torch app.’

  Anna looked up from her notebook, ‘The girl Hannah verified what Joshua told us.’

  She glanced down at the witness statement and read it: ‘It took me a minute to work out what I was seeing. I thought maybe she was drunk and had vomited all over herself, but then I realised.’ The images came together to make the scene before them something much more sinister than a plastered bridesmaid falling down in a drunken heap.’

  Anna read from her folder, ‘He continued saying, ‘It was like an image straight from a horror movie. Some blood-lusting thriller with vampires and zombies.’’

  She was sure he wouldn’t forget the bridesmaid, with a bloom of dark crimson blood radiating from her centre lying like a leading actress playing dead in a mess of moss, brambles and nettles.

  Richard leaned back on his chair, ‘So a walk around the perimeter of the hotel grounds, looking for a private nook to become more intimately acquainted with the pretty Hannah had turned into a gothic nightmare.

  ‘I’m told that you have worked on cases similar in Cardiff. The Hawthorne case, right?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes, I was the arresting officer. Good old-fashioned police work in the end won the day.’

  ‘I’ve been told it was more than that. You put yourself on the line according to your DSI.’

  A young girl had been reported missing only for her body to turn up under her neighbour’s shed. Anna had a crescent moon of a scar on her right breast, inflicted by a screwdriver, to show for her trouble. The murderer had panicked and rammed the tool into her as he tried to flee.

  She shrugged.

  ‘We had a couple of high-profile cases recently and were lucky to get results quickly.’

  ‘How do you feel about working on this here case, then? I’m being pressed to get a result soon and it seems that the powers that be like the sound of you. You’ve got the experience, but those eejits out there won’t thank you for being in the co-pilot on this. Can you handle a bit of whinging?’

  ‘Goes with the job, sir. Can’t keep everyone happy all of the time. I’m prepared to take a bit of flak.’

  ‘Good. You’ll be working alongside Thomas King. He’s the lead so whatever he says goes. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Go track him down. He’s expecting you. Keep me updated with any breakthroughs and get to work. Fast.’

  Anna went back to her corner desk and found Thomas sitting on her chair.

  ‘So, Tonto, we’re to be partners on this here case. Are you up for the job?’

  ‘Tonto?’ she raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Aye, my side kick,’ he grinned, delighted with his joke. There was something warm and attractive about him. His smile was disarmingly wide and mischievous. His pale grey shirt looked like it had been hastily tucked into to his trousers, reminding Anna of a schoolboy, the class joker who always got into trouble.

  ‘Yes, ready to hit the ground running,’ she said, moving towards the back wall of the office where Thomas had already began cataloguing the details of the case. It was how she liked to work too. Piece by piece she would add to it until she had a kaleidoscope of information. Leads, people, places, and if she was lucky at some stage she would see a pattern, connections and links that would create a story. Known associates and incidental contacts all had to be identified, talked to, and ruled out or in.

  The workload could seem overwhelming at this stage of an investigation. Anna knew from experience, that constructing a narrative flow, looking at relationships between the victim and her family and friends, finding potential witnesses, and backing everything up with physical evidence was the safest way of getting the job done effectively. There were no short cuts in policing.

  Anna lifted an enlarged photograph of Esme Wells and placed it at the centre of the wall and stood back. It was the type of face she could paint. The skin was smooth and fresh, no hard angles and not much depth for shadows to rest. A high forehead and deep-set eyes, fringed with dark lashes. The mouth would be hard to get right. The top lip seemed too thin to go with the bottom on, making her look, somehow, vulnerable and childlike.

  ‘Pretty girl,’ said Thomas disturbing Anna’s mental analysis of the face.

  ‘Yeah. Wide-eyed and ready to take on the world,’ Anna replied removing the last blob of Blu-tack from the board’s previous incident display.

  ‘The briefing is scheduled for first thing tomorrow morning. Let’s see if we can unearth a lead of some sort before then.’

  ‘I’ve already pulled Esme’s mobile records. The only red flag was too many calls to Rory Finnegan, the brother-in-law. We need to chase that up and have a word with him. Her school records were good, solid exams results with the ability to go on to university,’ he said.

  Anna breathed in deeply and felt a sense of satisfaction of being immersed in her work. She was in Belfast. She’d done it. Jumped ship into the unknown but here in the station, whether it be Cardiff or Belfast, she knew what she was doing.

  Thomas sat down beside her and unrolled a long piece of paper. ‘Let’s map out times and places of everyone we’ve spoke to so far then we can put it all in the system and see what continuity HOLMES 2 throws up. I take it you use the same system in Cardiff?’

  Anna gave him a look as if to say, ‘Do you think we ar
e still in the dark ages?’

  ‘Yes, we use it. TIE – Trace, Implicate and Eliminate. We look at those with access to the scene at the time of the offence; anyone in the vicinity of the scene at the time of the offence; those living in, or associated with the geographical area or the premises and anyone associated with the victim with previous convictions for similar offences. Does that cover the plan for you?’

  Thomas laughed, ‘Right, well done, Hermione Granger. You’ve done your homework. A plus.’

  Anna took a black marker from the desk, ‘Ok, let’s start with the wedding venue,’ she drew an outline of the venue and the surrounding area. She could sense Thomas relaxing into his seat. They could be at this all night. She didn’t think either of them had any reason to rush home so it made sense to get started properly, checking and double checking, looking for patterns and strange occurrences, waiting for that one delicious lead to take them right to the killer.

  8

  The university was situated in a leafy part of Belfast, not far from Anna’s rented house by car. She studied the campus map before heading off, to work out where she would find Dr Isabel Wells. When she drove down Stranmillis Road she saw that the area was busy with students going to and from lectures, dog walkers heading to the nearby Botanic gardens, and mothers with young kids, and babies in pushchairs. Parking was difficult, but Anna eventually found a spot in Elmwood Avenue.

  She crossed the road at the pedestrian crossing outside the student’s union building and saw the gothic style red bricked university building with its quadrangle and manicured lawns. The department of English and Irish literature was situated on a street of tall, cream Georgian houses, running to the university’s main building. It all looked typical of university style buildings designed to have the air of entitlement and superiority. The online brochure had listed Dr Wells’ specialist interests and publications: Medieval Literature and the Role of Kinship, Hiberno-Norse Relations, Tales of Three Gormlaiths in Medieval Irish Literature and Pagans and Holymen.

  Isabel Wells didn’t look like Anna’s idea of an academic. She thought of the austere woman at the funeral, tall, terribly thin and angular and somewhat hauntingly beautiful with her cool blonde hair cut short. The meeting place had been Dr Wells’ choice. Usually Anna would have preferred to go to her home – you could pick up so much about a person from their personal surroundings. Then again, maybe there was something she could deduce from the fact that Dr Wells preferred her office.

  ‘Dr Wells? Anna Cole, we spoke on the phone?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know, please sit down.’

  She stood behind a tidy desk, clear apart from a computer, a pot of pens and a mobile phone. The room, by comparison to the desk, was full of clutter and piles of books, manuscripts and paperwork fought for space on shelves and even the floor.

  Anna took the seat indicated, placed her bag on the floor and crossed her legs. A poster of a Celtic dragon on the far wall caught Anna’s eye. ‘The Welsh emblem.’

  ‘Well it has become so yes, but the dragon symbol has roots further back. The English word ‘dragon’ and the Welsh ‘draig’ both come from the ancient Greek word ‘drakon’, which means ‘large serpent’.

  ‘To us, the Welsh dragon seems quite typical in its dragon-like appearance with four legs and wings, but in many cultures, what we call dragons were essentially large serpents, as found in iconography from ancient Mesopotamia, Greece and Egypt.’

  ‘So, we stole our national identity,’ Anna said smiling.

  ‘Well, we were all a land of foreigners at one point. There aren’t many countries not divided by its languages, politics, culture and even geography. Northern Ireland isn’t the only region plagued by history.’

  ‘True but Belfast seems to be healing its old wounds or at least making a brave attempt.’

  ‘I assume you are here to speak about my daughter not have discourse on political emblems and sectarianism.’

  ‘Sorry, excuse me. I know this is a difficult time for you and your family but I need to run through some questions.’

  ‘I understand the procedure,’ she sounded irritated. ‘My husband worked for the force for God’s sake, but I have told everything I can possibly tell you to your colleagues.’ She remained standing. Her face was devoid of any make-up but that did not prevent her being an attractive woman. She must be intimating as a lecturer, Anna thought. She guessed the students wouldn’t be late handing in their assignments to her.

  ‘I can appreciate that it is troublesome to deal with us, but really it can sometimes help to run over the events again, to talk, and you never know what can be uncovered inadvertently.’

  Dr Wells sat down. Defeated, it seemed, and tired. The creases around her eyes told of sleepless nights.

  ‘What can I tell you? We were at our daughter’s wedding. The band were playing, we were dancing and having fun. I can’t remember the last time I saw Esme. It was possibly during the first dance, maybe later on. I don’t know. She was floating around talking to guests, as we were.’

  ‘One of the wedding guests said he saw Esme speaking to Rory, the groom. He thought they were having a heated exchange at 9.15 p.m. or there about. Any idea what that was about?’

  ‘Who knows? They could have been talking about the wedding reception. Esme wanted to invite a crowd of her friends to the after party and Rory was perhaps reluctant to allow a bunch of teenagers to join his wedding reception. Perhaps Lara will know.’

  It sounded reasonable enough but Anna had been in her job too long to accept reasonable.

  ‘Did Esme have a boyfriend? Anyone special she talked about?’

  ‘No, we have already said all of this. Like most teenage girls, she went from one boy to another – most of them simply friendships. There has never been anyone serious.’

  ‘Could there have been someone you didn’t know about?’

  ‘No, Esme was an open book, especially to Lara. They are very close. Were.’ She looked down at her hands. Anna noticed the thin silver wedding band, the pale unpainted nails.

  ‘We’ll need a list of her friends. Obviously, we will be going through her social media sites to see if there is anything worth following up there,’ Anna paused looking at her notebook. ‘We’re trying to work out if, and why, she had gone with the attacker, apparently voluntarily. It is unlikely, given the setting, that he dragged her off. We are working on the assumption that it could have been someone she knew.’

  ‘We have given your people the guest list. It was a big wedding – Rory’s choice as he has so many friends and business associates. There were one hundred and twenty guests, but most were family, close friends and a few colleagues. I can’t imagine someone we know having done this.’

  ‘Yes, I realise that it is difficult to take in, but we have to explore every avenue.’

  Dr Wells placed her hands over her eyes. She looked exhausted and worn out.

  Anna felt for her. This was the one aspect of her job she didn’t like, dealing with grieving families always felt intrusive.

  ‘I’m surprised you are here – at work. Surely you should take some time out. It’s only been two weeks.’

  ‘I’m quite aware of how long it has been. It’s easier being here. Here I have to face my own pain, no one else’s.’

  ‘Well take care. If you need to talk or you think of anything else at all give me a call. You have my number.’

  As Anna stood to leave the office a tall, grey haired man opened the door. Anna noted he hadn’t knocked.

  ‘Sorry I didn’t know you were with someone,’ he said.

  ‘It’s ok Fintan, Detective Inspector Cole was about to leave.’ Anna saw something flash across her face. Almost like she was alerting him.

  Anna nodded hello to him, ‘Well, I’ll leave you to your work. Goodbye then and please, if we can do anything, call me or the Family Liaison Officer.’

  When Anna returned to the station she sensed a heightened atmosphere. An almost tangible electric current in
the air – something had happened. Everyone was busy, voices chattering into phones, people moving around with purpose.

  ‘Did you hear?’ asked Warwick, an acned-faced officer with a thatch of sand coloured hair.

  ‘No, what’s happened?’

  ‘Shooting on the Ormeau Road. Looks like it was dissidents. One man dead at the scene, another injured.’

  ‘In broad day light?’

  ‘Yep, the shooter was on a motor cycle. Pulled up alongside the car at the traffic lights and let them have it at point-blank range.’

  ‘Welcome to Belfast,’ said Holly.

  9

  Declan manoeuvred himself across the parquet floor into the living room at the front of their house. Someone, probably Izzy, had closed the tweed curtains halfway across the bay window making the room look gloomy. He looked out towards house opposite. One of the roof tiles had slipped. He made a mental note to mention it to Dessie next time they were talking. It was the neighbourly thing to do. That was the type of street he lived in, one where people kept themselves to themselves, but passed the time of day occasionally and looked out for anything suspicious should anyone be away on holiday. Good neighbours. The same neighbours who, now, found it hard to look him in the eye least they would catch the ominous cloud of sorrow that had settled on him.

  Thomas King sat on the edge of the sofa, as if he feared the old velvet settee wouldn’t take his full weight. King’s sidekick, Manus Magee was standing by the blackened cast iron fireplace, flicking through his notepad. The room was once the heart of their home, where the girls did homework and wrote stories about fairies and unicorns at the old mahogany writing desk. But now it looked shabby and past its best. The paintings, by Basil Blackshaw and Gerard Dillon, which they had saved up for and bought in Ross’ Auction Rooms, still stood the test of time. They had been delighted with themselves; taking great pleasure in bidding against others to claim the paintings they’d set their minds on. The artwork and the shelves of books lining the far wall were the room’s only adornments.