Little Bird: a serial killer thriller

by Sharon Dempsey

  There was something tragic about its faded beauty. Anna could imagine sitting right in this spot for hours, painting the intricate stain glass designed windows, examining the wooden coving and tracing a soft lead pencil over a page to copy the swirl and glean of the banisters. She would love to lose herself in the process, to let the colours, the textures of the paint and contrast of light and dark to soothe her.

  ‘Wait till you see the main drawing rooms,’ King said. They made their way up the wide staircase and reached the main drawing offices. King pulled back the heavy double doors. Anna gasped as she walked into the wide ballroom like space. The domed ceiling was an ornate display of stained glass, creating a kaleidoscope of colour against the late afternoon sky.

  ‘Finnegan reckons he had netted himself a little winner by stepping in and buying this building for a knock down price of a couple of million. Trouble was, planning was a bugger. No one was allowed to damage the architectural heritage, but low and behold suddenly they have found a way round it. Finnegan plans to develop the rest of the building as a hotel, five star all the way, with the assurance that this floor is maintained as city council property to be hired out for weddings, events and such. Revenue on tap.’

  Anna considered what he told her. ‘But how could he afford to buy the building in the first place?’

  ‘A little bit of jiggery pokery. The building and the surrounding site were put up for auction at a reserved price of two million. No one wants to touch it with all the red tape regulations around a listed building. Finnegan is told on the quiet that should he raise the money; the red tape can be ticker taped away.’

  ‘So, he gets investors on board knowing that they can’t lose.’

  ‘Exactly but not only that, once Finnegan buys the place, he can sell the top floor to the City Council to keep as a heritage site of interest. And none other than Anderson presides over the whole shebang.’ Anna’s phone rang echoing around the huge empty room.

  ‘DI Cole.’

  ‘There’s a young lady here, Carly Moss asking to speak to you. She says it’s in connection with Esme Wells.’

  ‘Keep her there. I’m on my way.’

  13

  The upstairs of the house was like a foreign country to Declan. A place he had once been and felt he knew, but no longer visited. Since the bomb, he had been confined to the downstairs of the house. The extension, purpose built with his own bedroom, especially wide doors and a wet room, so that he could sit while showering, had made going upstairs unnecessary. Slowly he had come to think of the first and second stories of the house as being the girls’ domain. Izzy had chosen to remain in their master bedroom. That had been another nail in the coffin of their marriage.

  All was quiet. Izzy was out at her sister’s and he didn’t expect Lara to call round until the evening. This was his opportunity to take some time in Esme’s room. He wanted to conjure her up, to feel her presence and to find a release for the coldness that had gripped his chest for the past four weeks. He was exhausted, wrung out and the old pains were back. Usually he was resigned to his injuries. He lived with them the way someone lives with an annoying, moaning aged relative. Now they were flaring up like flames of hate. Angering him and jeering at his inability to get up and walk, to run, to be active and do something about Esme’s death.

  He had long ago accepted that the time of self-fulfillment and ambition was gone. Choice, action and movement were limited for him. In the early months after the bomb, he would lie awake wondering what would happen if an intruder broke into their house. He was denied the ability to physically protect his daughters. He had to settle for financial security for them. That was his hope, to ensure a good education, and if he were to die, leave enough to help them build a life.

  Now as he manoeuvred upstairs, slowly and painfully dragging himself on his front, his arms taking the strain, he wondered why he had allowed so much of his life to slip away from him. The bomb had taken more than his legs.

  The sweat broke on him. The effort to pull himself up, stair by stair, was huge. His arms were strong from using the chair but now he was using muscles in a different way, and he felt every sinew ripple with the strain, feeling old and helpless. He thought about how his lead doctor, a man called Solomon, had tried to push the use of prosthetic legs on him, and how he had preferred the truthfulness of being confined to the chair.

  ‘Think of walking your daughters up the aisle,’ had been the refrain, a painful echo now. In the end, it came down to some things weren’t meant to be, and that the damage went much deeper than his flesh.

  At the first landing turn, he paused, lay back on the gold coloured carpet and closed his eyes. Light from the tall, stain-glassed window on the landing poured down on him. He could feel his pulse thumping and his chest heaved. He hoisted himself up thinking, knowing, that he had only a short flight of four stairs left to crawl until he reached Esme’s room on the right. The door was closed and he reached up with a final heave of effort and pushed it open.

  The room was dark. The curtains, a pale pink and green check, were closed. Light crept in under the drapes, illuminating the double bed pushed against the far wall, the desk under the window and the tall white wardrobes. The scene reminded Declan of all the mornings he had popped his head round the door when she was little, cajoling her to wake up, and get herself ready for school. Those days seemed so fleeting. He hadn’t grasped how quickly children grew up, instead, looking ahead, not realising, one day, he would look back and wonder what was the hurry.

  He leant against the wall to catch his breath and looked around. The room had been thoroughly searched. Declan hadn’t been privy to what they had found of interest, except for the cash, but he knew they would have been looking for drugs and anything which would implicate Esme in her own death.

  The floor was scattered with the detritus of her life. He knew the police wouldn’t have messed up the room, this was all Esme’s doing, the normal rushed about mess she would have left. The chest of drawers stood detonated with the drawers half open, clothes spewing out. A pair of silver high-heeled sandals lay casually at the wardrobe door as if she had kicked them off moments earlier. A rolled-up ball of a T-shirt lurked under the desk and he caught sight of a peach coloured thong, ridiculously grownup underwear for a young girl, he thought, but no doubt, it was what they all wore.

  Her bed was roughly made, as if someone had thought to pull the duvet cover over as a last-minute gesture. Two plump pillows sat one on top of the other. A collage of photographs was stuck up on the wall above her desk. He recognised many of the faces, all teenage girls he had seen coming in and out of the house over the years. Some he knew he should know the names of, but after a while it was hard to keep track of who was who. The hairstyles, the makeup and the clothes altered them completely.

  Her life was reflected in the mess around him. Her friends, all attractive girls, posing for the camera, appeared way too provocative for their age and upbringing. Their clothes, cut-off jeans, shorts, and skirts that couldn’t even pretend to be much more than a slip of fabric, all said the same thing. The half-opened drawers, the clothes, probably only stepped out of and left where they fell, the makeup powder dusting everything on the dressing table, and the brown bottles of HeShi tanning lotion, both with their lids left off, all careless, reckless and chaotic. Did the room represent Esme’s life? A life he knew nothing about. Did he know his daughter at all? A poster of Ed Sheeran with his shock of orange hair looked down on him. The corners peeling away from the wall, as if it too had been haphazardly stuck up. Everything about Esme seemed to be in a rush. A rush to get to school; a rush to go out; a rush to grow up.

  Makeup spilled out of an oversized polka dot makeup bag across the desk where a couple of textbooks and a file of school notes were pushed aside. The entire room had most likely been photographed and catalogued by McKay and his team.

  He leaned against the bed.

  It was the stuffed rabbit that did it. She had carried it everywhere
until the age of six. The sight of the now faded to grey cuddly toy, one ear threadbare and pathetically hanging off, unlocked his grief and left him reeling. At first the tears rolled silently and then his entire body convulsed, anger, hurt, the ache of longing, all rising up and reaching a crescendo, leaving him gulping for air. The crushing pain inside his chest was so strong he didn’t think he could survive it. The agony that he had so far kept at bay, kept tamed deep inside of him, could be contained no longer. He tried to get control, to steady the heaving of his stomach and the violent shaking but there was nothing he could do but ride it out. He drew his useless deformed stumped legs close to his chest. Tears pooled onto his shirt leaving a damp stain. He brought his hands to the hallows of his eyes and wept. He allowed the tears to fall but he needed to be clear in his thoughts, to use the grief to propel him forward.

  14

  Carly Moss sat at the desk, scrolling through her iPhone. Anna noted her mother was tight lipped beside her, obviously agitated, and in no mood to be in a police station.

  ‘Mrs Moss, Carly, I believe you wanted to see me?’

  ‘Tell her,’ the mother said. The girl looked up from her iPhone. ‘It’s no big deal.’

  ‘It might not seem important to you, but if you can tell us anything, it might help.’

  ‘Esme and me did the odd waitressing job for her brother-in-law. It wasn’t a one off, like I said before.’

  ‘What kind of waitressing?’

  ‘High-end parties, he called them. He had business contacts he wanted to impress so we got all done up and wore the uniform and served drinks. That’s all.’

  ‘Tell her,’ the mother said again. The girl rolled her eyes.

  ‘He told us that the parties were secret. We weren’t to go telling anyone.’

  The mother sighed. ‘They’d other girls at the parties – prostitutes.’

  ‘Is that right Carly?’ Anna asked.

  ‘I don’t know if they were prostitutes. Most of them were from Eastern Europe or somewhere. I only spoke to one of them, a girl called Sveta.’

  ‘Tell her how much he paid you,’ Mrs Moss said.

  ‘We got £300 a night.’

  ‘I knew nothing of this. Something was going on if that’s the kind of money he paid schoolgirls to pour champagne. I only discovered this today, I found the last of her money.’

  Anna decided to change track, ‘What about Esme? Were you two friends?’

  ‘Yeah, she was nice. We didn’t hang out or anything, but we got on.’

  ‘Did she tell you anything about Rory Finnegan?’

  ‘No, like I said before I know she fancied him. But there was one time I saw them, or I think I saw them, kissing. He had his back to me and I walked into one of the rooms in the apartment, the room where we put the coats and for a second I thought I saw him with his hands on her face, as if they’d been kissing. But I couldn’t say for sure. It was just a moment. They saw me and we all went about as if nothing had happened.’

  ‘These parties, can you tell us who attended them?’

  ‘Businessmen mostly. I don’t want to get into trouble. He made us sign confidentially forms,’ she paused, ‘non-disclosures, he said they were called. He said that we couldn’t tell anyone who the guests were or he could sue us.’

  ‘Carly, you aren’t going to get in to trouble if you tell us what you know, but if you hold back, you have to realise, that later, you could be prosecuted for withholding information.’

  The girl stared down at her hands. The phone now silenced on the table in front of her.

  ‘There was one man I recognised.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I know him from the pictures that are everywhere.’

  ‘I’m listening, Carly.’

  ‘Yer man, Aidan Anderson.’

  ‘The Lord Mayor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Anna noted the strain on McKay’s face as he watched her scrawl on the whiteboard:

  No CCTV footage;

  A strong possibility that she was too close to brother-in-law Rory Finnegan, ‘Though he’s accounted for at the time of the murder.’

  Worked as a waitress at Finnegan’s parties, ‘The family was unaware that she was working for Finnegan.

  No secret online contacts, but plenty of texts to and from the brother- in-law.

  ‘There’s the usual Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter stuff that young ones go in for,’ she said, tossing a sheath of papers down onto the table, looking towards Manus Magee who was tasked with trawling through the victim’s social media and liaising with the software specialists.

  ‘Not a lot to go on, and not a lot to bring before the superintendent. We are painstakingly talking to all of the guests and hotel staff, which takes time and resources that we don’t have.’ She directed her point to McKay, who was sitting on the edge of desk. His face darkened.

  ‘And to make matters worse,’ he replied, ‘that jumped up wee shite, McGonigle, from the Irish News is saying that there’s a killer on the loose and that we are out of our depths. They got wind of Cole’s posting, and decided she’d been brought in from the mainland to save our arses.’

  Anna felt the full weight of that opinion rest on her, as if she had somehow brought the investigation into question. She looked around the room,

  ‘There’s speculation that it was someone the victim knew. That she had friends outside of school and outside of her normal circle known to the family. King is working on that now, speaking to the school and any girls she hung around with. There wasn’t a boyfriend on the go and we are still trying to work out what was going on between our victim and her brother in-law Finnegan. We need to know what went on at these parties.’

  She paused and looked at the assembled room of colleagues. ‘We need to think beyond the normal remit, examine previous unsolved murder cases, anything with a possible link to this case. We are day thirty-two. This isn’t good enough, we have to get a break.’

  ‘The intelligence analysts people haven’t come up with anything historic, so I suggest we treat this as a one off,’ McKay said, quickly slapping Anna down.

  ‘What if he strikes again?’ Holly asked.

  McKay shot her a grim look. ‘We have to make bloody sure that doesn’t happen.’

  He dressed carefully for work, black trousers, a white freshly ironed shirt, and his black fleece. He liked to take care with his appearance, always clean shaven, with a hint of fragrance, something citrus and fresh. His dark blond hair kept neat and short, the way he liked it. The girls appreciated it. Funny how his looks made people feel predisposed to like him. He hardly needed to say much at all. Look the part, be presentable, turn up on time, do the job and no one thought to look beyond his pleasant exterior.

  It was one of those private party nights down in the Titanic Quarter. All flash professionals with balding heads, designer suits, silk ties and too much money. They tipped well to buy his silence, so he couldn’t complain. Discretion was the buzzword. Not that he had too many people to spill their dirty little secrets to.

  He liked to watch their every transaction. The girls, drugs – pills and lines of coke, drink, it was all subterfuge while deals were done on the side. At first, how they talked was strange to him – it was all contractual obligations, loss leaders, gross development value, growth strategy. They liked to talk big, throw in the odd comment about stashing away a hundred thousand here and there. Throwing down a deposit on a new build holiday home in the Algarve, buying a new Mercedes kitted out with all the toys. Over time he began to understand some of it. He began to see who was winning and who was there trying to keep the façade in place, desperate to be given a kick back from the big players. Hoping to hear about a possible deal worth risking it all on.

  The champagne flowed. Bottles of Grey Goose vodka, Copeland gin and Moet and Chandon were littered around the room. The girls drinking it like it was going out of fashion. They were told to drink, to make the men feel like they were simply being entertained a
t a private house party. It was all an illusion, which the participants willingly and eagerly bought into. It was easier to take a girl by the hand and lead her to an upstairs bedroom if you thought she was into you and not being paid by the hour.

  By midnight the sofas, deep and low, were littered with warm bodies turned into each other, faces being snogged before moving on to the bedrooms. Some of them didn’t take it beyond the living room, enjoying the trill of a pretty girl giving them attention but not wanting to jeopardise the family at home.

  They were gorgeous girls too; handpicked and brought in to entertain the professional palm slickers. Most nights there were a few politicians too. He recognised the faces from the television. The Lord Mayor was one of them, though he looked a bit different in real life, younger and less cocky. He had a preference for the blonde girls; Lena and Svetlana from Lithuania were his usual choices. They would lead him to the upstairs rooms, away from the drinking and drug taking. White powder divvied up on silver trays with snorting straws provided. Strange how if you dress a room just so, expensive grey leather sofas, subdued lighting, sheepskin throws and oversized velvet cushions, it all looked so acceptable. Respectable even. Money could buy anything.

  He was paid to watch the girls, make sure no one got rough with them and keep any eye on the security cameras too. Easy money and the work suited him.

  15

  Lara Well’s swanky, newly built house in East Belfast, sat nestled in a development of similar homes, all redbrick and neat, with mock Georgian windows. Anna rang the doorbell while King finished off a call on his mobile. It sounded like he was getting domestic grief from his former wife.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ he said to Anna as the glossy blue door opened. Up close Lara Wells looked younger than Anna expected. She had the same glacial blondeness as her mother, but her doe-like, soulful eyes, were most definitely her father’s.