Little Bird: a serial killer thriller

by Sharon Dempsey

  ‘Yes, there’s good money in running workshops. I usually do three or four every year depending on the demand.’

  ‘We could do with having a look at your records, names, addresses, that sort of thing.’ Anna said as she made her way round to the shelf full of specimens, rodents and birds. A crow looked down on her with its black, unblinking eyes and yolk yellow beak. Then the tortoiseshell cat shifted its position and curled up on the crowded shelf. ‘Shit its real!’ Anna jumped back.

  ‘That’s Heathcliff, he likes to keep me company. I keep telling him one day he’ll end up just like the rest of them,’ Jude laughed.

  ‘So, explain to us how you work and how you go about preserving an animal?’ Declan asked.

  Jude sat down on the tall stool stroking a mousey grey pelt laid out on the table, ‘Once you do a quick check on the animal to see if there are no oddities, you write it up into the register. Then you put the animal or bird into the project freezer. I don’t always work on them right away.

  ‘When the time comes to start work you remove its skin and wash it thoroughly. The anatomical structure of the animal, along with other measurements such as eyes and key feature placements are carefully noted. You can’t take it apart and not understand how to put it back together,’ she showed them her workbook. Each page was labeled with a date and a description of the animal and the measurements noted beside a pencil sketch of how she intended to present the finished piece.

  ‘Before I begin, I make a mock up – it’s called a voodoo doll. This is a version of the creature, made out of cotton wool and string. Like this …’ she reached over to a shelf and showed them small field mouse fashioned out of cotton wool. ‘This has to be the exact shape and size of the creature being immortalised.’

  She continued, ‘Here, I’ll show you something I’ve been working on.’

  She moved over to a wooden block where a brown field mouse lay.

  ‘So, I start by making an incision along the back of the mouse using my scalpel, and then the skin is pulled away from the body in the same way a butcher would skin any animal.’

  Anna watched fascinated as the skin peeled back from the tiny frame of the mouse.

  ‘Borax powder, which is a compound of boron also known as sodium borate, is often used to help preserve the skin and the fur – particularly from insect infestations. You don’t want the creature rotting on you. Formaldehyde can also be used to preserve the specimen, but it’s a harsher chemical to work with.’

  Jude indicated to the bottle of Borax sitting on the shelf. ‘The body and the insides are dispensed with, and the legs are removed and replaced with wires. Or you can use acetone to clean the bones if they are to form part of the final mount. Once the pelt has been cleaned and dried, it is placed around the cotton wool ‘voodoo’ version, and sewn up. One technique of cleaning pelts involves corn flour.

  ‘Rubbing cornstarch to clean pelts with a damp cloth draws moisture and dirt from the inside of the pelt.’

  Anna peered over her shoulder to have a closer look.

  ‘Then when it’s dry, the cornstarch can be brushed or vacuumed off the skin, and I use a baby toothbrush to comb the fur into place. It’s more or less the same process for most mammals.’

  The cat stretched and jumped down from its shelf. Jude went on, ‘In the Victorian times, animals were gutted and tanned and then stuffed with straw and sawdust, before being sewn back up. There were no preservation chemicals or techniques used, and the animals eventually rotted away. In the 1970s, the stuffing technique stopped, and taxidermists began to stretch the animal’s skin over sculpted moulds, or mannequins, made from foam. It’s becoming a popular art form again.’

  Anna couldn’t see a stuffed animal as art. She thought of an exhibition she once saw as child, at Bristol museum. Cats and rabbits and birds had been fashioned into human-like poses, wearing clothes and hats, having tea and playing cricket. She’d had nightmares afterwards. Camille had to let her sleep with her for a week. Her poor dad, relegated to the spare room.

  ‘What if someone wanted to remove an eye from a dead bird. How do they go about it?’ Anna asked.

  ‘It’s easy enough if you know what you’re doing. I use a flat blade screwdriver and insert it at the top of the eye between the eyeball and the orbit, like this,’ she demonstrated holding a screwdriver.

  ‘Push the screwdriver all the way to the rear of the eye socket, working it down to the back of the eyeball. There’s a knack to it. You have to push in and pry down at the same time, and then if you are lucky, the eyeball comes out in a pop, with no bursting. After that you trim the fatty tissue that holds it to the skull.’

  Jude continued, seemingly delighted to have someone interested in her work, ‘When you are working with a body, it needs to be re-sculpted, either by a foam cast of the original body, wood wool or a combination of both. The measurements made earlier are carefully followed while making the replacement body. Once the skin has been washed, treated and tanned, it goes back over the new form.’

  Anna shifted from the far end of the table away from the glassy eyes of a stoat, ‘You mentioned wood wool. Is it a common material for stuffing?’

  ‘Yes, most taxidermists would use it,’ she said.

  Anna fingered a small metal scoop, ‘So what kind of tools would you use?’

  ‘That’s a brain scoop, you’re looking at.’ Anna placed it back down, and resisted the urge to wipe her fingers on her skirt.

  ‘Don’t worry its clean,’ Jude said. ‘I also use bone cutters, skin stretchers, clamps.’

  Anna shuddered. The tools were like torture implements.

  ‘Have you seen anything like this used to capture birds,’ Anna showed her the clear plastic evidence bag containing the tiny fragment of the netting removed from the guillemot’s throat. ‘It is part of a plastic net found around a guillemot,’ Anna said.

  ‘Can’t say I have seen anything like it, but yeah, I’m not surprised you get people keen to work on a particular bird so they go out of their way to hunt it down.’

  ‘Anyone come through your workshops who you felt was a bit off? Maybe overly involved, standoffish or just different?’ Declan asked. ‘Anything out of the ordinary could help us.’

  ‘Plenty would say I’m a bit of a weirdo. Not many appreciate the art and craft of taxidermy.’

  ‘No one stick out?’

  ‘Maybe. There was this one fella, a while back. He was only interested in working with birds. Kept to himself didn’t want to be part of the group workshop, asked for one on one tuition.’

  ‘That wouldn’t necessarily be enough to make you wary of him. Was there something else?’

  ‘Well, I was pretty sure the birds didn’t meet their deaths naturally. Besides he was pretty intense. Seemed to enjoy the process a bit too much. Was really into the slicing up and skinning. An older guy, maybe mid-sixties, religious and serious like, you know the type.’ She looked at Declan as if he could read the shorthand.

  ‘Do you have his details?’ Anna asked.

  ‘Sure, it will be on the computer but I remember his name – Cunningham. Josh or Jason, I think. I can check it out. But really, anyone can teach themselves taxidermy these days there are plenty of tutorials online. Trial and error and a few books and your half-way there.’

  ‘You’re quiet, what are you thinking?’ Anna asked in the car, driving back to Belfast.

  ‘Those stuffed animals unsettle me. Why anyone would want to keep a stuffed cat is beyond me. And the birds, so beautiful, their wings fanned out as if about to take flight, yet stone cold dead.’

  ‘I know. It’s creepy as fuck.’

  ‘What do make of the Cunningham guy? Might be worth paying him a call.’

  ‘Possibly the wrong age for the guy we’re after, but yeah, check him out.’

  That afternoon Anna sat at her desk and trawled through the HOLMES system. The floaters had been updating it with their enquiries and she needed to catch up. She couldn’t help thinkin
g about Declan’s comments on the theatrical mastery of the scenes. The killer had control over the girls, over the crime scene and how he presented it to them. Declan said he showed a heightened self-awareness. Knew how to work the girls, lure them away from a place of safety. Both had been murdered at a social event, in the grounds of hotels, only thirty or so feet away from help.

  The lines of investigation were a tangle of loose threads. With no sexual assault, or robbery they were lacking a clear motive. Both girls’ phones had turned up in their handbags – Esme’s found at the scene and Grace’s recovered from the hotel. Grace’s bag, a silver clutch bag had contained her phone, a Mac lipstick and her purse. Why had she left it behind?

  They appeared to be popular girls. Both intelligent, attending good schools with every intention of going on to university. Esme had completed her UCAS form and had hoped to go to Edinburgh or Liverpool to study. Was her choice of university applications a reflection that she wanted away from Finnegan? Neither had boyfriends or at least no one significant. Anna thought about the kiss that Carly had thought might have happened between Esme and Finnegan. She didn’t want to tell Declan about it. Not yet.

  Thomas and Manus were digging around, looking for any common business associates between Dowds and Finnegan. They needed to rule out the possibility of a deal gone wrong and a revenge motive. So far, they hadn’t anything substantial to put to Richard McKay. Thomas had warned Anna that McKay considered a half story to be worse than no story.

  There was little evidence of a forensic nature. Anna had seen other cases where the weight of evidence was heavier in the exchange of fibres found on the suspect, transferred from the victim. Hair was the most common element to be found. Footprints had been either washed away by the night’s rain or the killer had been very careful in both instances. A large branch had been used to sweep away tracks at the scene of Esme’s murder. Even the most thorough of clean ups will leave some small trace.

  Internet histories had shown no red flags of significant persons. Neither girl had a stalker known to their friends or families. Only Rory Finnegan’s many telephone calls to Esme ticked that particular box.

  Anna flicked to the photograph of Grace Dowds. Her red hair had fallen over the side of her face. Her uncovered cheek, translucent under the light of the photographer’s flash. Her lips full and opened slightly, were tinged a violet blue. If Anna were to paint the scene, it would look pre-Raphaelite, like Ophelia lying in the river. Hastily, she googled Ophelia to see the painted image. She read that the scene depicted was from Hamlet. Ophelia, driven out of her mind when her father is murdered by Hamlet, drowns herself in a stream:

  ‘There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;

  When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide, And, mermaid-like a while they bore her up;

  Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds,

  As one incapable of her own distress,

  Or like a creature native and indued

  Unto that element. But long it could not be

  Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,

  Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay

  To muddy death.’

  There was no drowning in a river, but Grace’s death felt like a muddy death. The prom dress, like a costume from another time. She itched to draw what was in her mind’s eye. To try to make sense of the crime scene, through shade and shadow. Esme’s crime scene photographs had the same eerie feel – the young woman returned to nature, lying on the forest floor surrounded by moss, twigs and tree roots. Anna couldn’t recall another case that had her returning to the crime scene photographs so much. It was as if she was trying to read the images, to extract information from what was captured in the frame of the camera. Maybe it was her artist’s eye drawn to the macabre images of beautiful girls in dark woodland settings.

  ‘Hey, Anna, nothing on that Cunningham fella you asked me to check out. He seems legit and he’s been living in Canada for the last six months,’ Thomas said scratching his eyebrow with the lid of a pen. The office phone rang and he picked it up. Anna heard the delight in his voice. ‘Great, exactly what we need.’ He hung up and spun round on his chair to face Anna. ‘That was the data trawl people, Rory Finnegan’s little empire isn’t so clean after all.’

  ‘What have they found?’

  ‘Esme’s bank account shows deposits that are coming from a company linked to Finnegan.’

  ‘Well we can start by having little chat with him again,’ Anna said. She thought of Declan and how he had told her that he didn’t like Finnegan, son-in-law or not, he wasn’t happy with Lara’s choice. According to Declan she had had her head turned by Finnegan. Anna didn’t think Lara would have been so easily impressed.

  ‘That’s not all,’ Thomas said grinning, ‘Finnegan uses the same security company as the hotel group. One of their men hasn’t turned up to work for the past week. No sign of him and not answering phone calls.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Luke Nead.’

  23

  Declan felt guilt. Not over Izzy, no, that sense of duty had passed long ago, but guilt that he could experience the euphoria of being with a woman like Anna and be experiencing the sweet joy of sex again, while Esme was cold in the ground.

  He was in his office responding to work emails. Research that he was heading up had come to a crashing halt. He had neither the time nor the inclination to put the work in. His students, some he was supervising thesis projects for, would have to be assigned new supervisors. Focusing on Esme’s case and being close to Anna was all that mattered to him. Izzy had found a way to go back to her students, but he couldn’t face it.

  Ever since the bomb he felt like he was living on borrowed time; that the ground beneath him was on a timer, waiting for a precise moment of complacency to go off. Now it had happened. Esme’s death was the explosion he felt in his bones, the curdling of his insides and using up of his reserves. Yet he also experienced a sense of relief, not that Esme was dead. God no. But relief, that the awful feeling of foreboding, had caught up on him. He knew what he was dealing with now, and his purpose was to catch whoever had done this. He had nothing left to fear and nothing left to punish him.

  There was little he could do for Esme beyond finding who had done this, and his instincts had proved right so far. The killer was in an active phase; he would act again given the right circumstances. Declan’s job was to read what those circumstances would be and pre-empt him. As for a profile, he needed to look beyond the obvious, explore his potential background. It was likely that he was someone with an abusive childhood, even someone under the radar – not so abusive as to attract attention of the authorities, but enough to do damage. Possibly even a parent in a position of power and respect, a teacher even. Someone who was in a trusted position, that wouldn’t be questioned. If he found the source of the evil, maybe he could be led to the killer. For the assaults to be made in a public, close to crowded venues, suggested snatched opportunity. Yet, something nagged at him, telling him these girls were not mere objects to the killer. They were not mutilated, not sexually assaulted. There was a sick care in what the killer did. So clean and clinical in his execution.

  The mysterious bird theme suggested a sacrificial element. His mind kept going back to the idea of the destruction of life, and how easy it would be to kill a bird. Fragile and helpless in the wrong hands. Just like the girls. The birds were objects that had to be related to the killer’s behaviour. There was a message in what he was doing. There was a definite cognitive thought process at work. Planning and exactitude of what he was doing. A bird might be easy to kill but not so easy to catch. The killer had gone to a lot of trouble.

  Much of the legwork was routine, basic investigative policing. Forensics, detailed examination of the crime scene, thorough interviews with all at the venue. But sometimes the grind of police work was not enough. Sometimes it r
equired thinking like a killer, finding their motivation and working backwards. He felt an uneasiness lying in the pit of his stomach. They were missing something. He was sure of it.

  Two girls murdered both in a short period of time of each other was unusual especially for Northern Ireland. Geographically they were not far apart, a mere ten miles. Everything would suggest that the perpetrator was a lone male – his strength in over powering the girls suggested as much. Declan couldn’t help thinking that there was something in the murders that was deliberately designed to taunt the police. Making them look inadequate and out of their depth. The press leak of Anna’s involvement only strengthened the media’s perception that the PSNI were struggling, that they were forced to bring in an outsider from the mainland.

  Esme could have easily been dumped in the river Lagan, which would have helped wash away some of the physical evidence. Instead he left her on mossy bank, as if he wanted her body to be easily discovered. There was research to suggest that failure to hide the body or bury it indicated the desire to send a message of shock to the community. A warning almost.

  Declan leafed through his research papers trying to find one in particular he remembered explored crime phases. His clinical mind was looking for patterns, for configurations that might help illuminate something vital to the case. He found the paper and read: We can glean insight into personality through questions about the murderer’s behaviour at four crime phases:

  The Precursor Period: What fantasy or plan, did the murderer have in place before the act? What acted as a trigger for the murderer to act one particular day? Could the wedding somehow have been significant in triggering the killer?

  Approach, method and manner: What was the deciding factors in the type of victim or victims, which the murderer selected? What was the method and manner of murder: shooting, stabbing, strangulation or something else? Is there an indication of personality in anything left at the scene either deliberately or accidently? They could assume the girls hadn’t felt threatened by the killer. It appeared that they either knew him, or were relaxed enough to feel it was okay to go off with him.