‘We are working on the assumption that Esme was his first. The other two girls, Grace Dowds and Aisling Mackin, have been follow up acts. He kills them to make it look like he is a serial killer out to get any young woman, but really it was Esme who was his prize kill all along.’
McKay sat his chair and sighed. ‘If you’re wrong King, if this has nothing to do with Brogan and you have me risking this station’s reputation I swear to fuck I’ll have your bollocks on a silver platter by the end of this.’
‘Yes, sir, I understand.’
‘And Cole, do you buy into this? Do you think Brogan is our man?’
‘Yes sir, I do.’
‘And there’s something else, sir.’ Thomas said. They told him about the cat, making the link between the dead bird found at Esme’s scene of death and the robin inserted into Grace’s mouth.
There was silence as McKay processed what he’d been told. ‘Right, you pair of idiots go prove to me you deserve not to be flung out on your ears, get this case wrapped up.’
‘Sir?’
‘What now Cole?’
‘I’m not off the case? I’m not sacked?’
‘Not yet. If King is right, you could be at risk, if this is our man he knows where you live and he’s sending you some sort of sick little love note in the form of a skinned cat, and while at this minute I feel like kicking you from here to Tipperary, I’m not about to set you loose for some psycho to get easy access to you. If you are still on the case, we can keep a close on eye on you,’ he paused, ‘Besides, I think you are a bloody good cop, despite your best efforts to fuck up a stellar career. If I hear of you as much as texting Declan Wells, I will not hesitate to cut you off cold. Do you understand?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘From here on in, it’s damage control all the way. I’ll speak to McGonigle’s editor.’
They turned to leave the room when McKay said, ‘One more thing, I’ve heard back from the Financial Intelligence Unit. It looks like Aidan Anderson has been implicated along with Finnegan in a deal worth £4.2m.’
Anna’s eyes widened. Thomas blew out a stream of air, ‘Shit boss, we’ve got him.’
‘Apparently, a payment has been made into an offshore account linked to a private equity property portfolio. Finnegan had first bite at the cherry and paid less than £750,000 to get in on the deal.’
McKay put his hands behind his head, looking smug. ‘It’s been confirmed that Aidan Anderson had diverted monies to an account of which he was the sole beneficiary for get this ‘professional fees,’ due for his part in the handling of the deal. They won’t be able to brush this under the carpet; once it goes public there will be calls for an independent inquiry. Don’t go patting yourselves on the back yet, though. Go find Brogan Junior and get a solve before I put the pair of you in uniform.’
46
Anna woke with a start. She listened, checking to see if something had woken her, but after a couple of moments she realised that she had been dreaming. Fragments of the dream came back to her. She had been standing at Camille’s graveside. The soil, which was piled high to the side, to allow for the burial, had begun to move towards Anna engulfing her, and pushing her into the open mouth of the grave. Mourners were watching. No one was helping; they were merely spectators as if they had come to see this. To watch her be buried alive.
Her skin was clammy and hot and her mouth was dry. She couldn’t shake the feeling that it had been full of the dry soil from the graveyard. Lying in the bed she watched the early morning light seep into the room. She checked her phone and saw that it was five thirty. It would be a long day.
Thomas gave Anna that hard stare of his. She had heard he’d been trying to get hold of her. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, taking a chair next to him in the canteen.
‘I can’t be your go-between Anna. I delivered the message but that’s it. I’m not passing love notes between the two of you like fourth year students with the hots for each other.’
‘I don’t expect you to. That’s it. It’s over.’
Finishing with Declan had been difficult. With a no-contact ban from McKay she’d been forced to ask Thomas to deliver the bad news. She knew Declan wouldn’t take it well, not least because it would mean he had lost his hold in the case. But was that all she was to him? She had spent a restless night trying to work out how she felt about Declan. When she was with him everything felt so clear, so right. Then she’d go to the station, get on with work and wonder at her poor lack of judgment and her ability to mess up her life.
When the story broke, it didn’t have the same bite. Obviously, McKay had some clout with the editor for McGonigle merely hinted at an affair with someone in the force connected to the case. Neither Anna nor Declan’s names were mentioned. It was all innuendo and gossip. Anna breathed a sigh of relief. They had a reprieve, but she wasn’t going to risk the wrath of McKay again. Declan had been warned to stay away.
‘You told him about McGonigle, right?’
‘Yes, I told him. I told him how you’d almost lost your entire career.’
‘Well, that’s it. It’s over.’
‘Back to work, Tonto. Let’s crack this thing.’
Later that day Anna walked along the station corridor thinking how the bland, pale green walls and artificial lighting reminded her of her old place of work. Inside the building, she could be in any police station in the country, but the compound security of the outside, reminded her at every turn, that Belfast police stations needed to be semi-fortresses even in times of relative peace and political stability.
Her phone buzzed as she made her way to the incident room. It was a text from Denis in forensics, to let her know the report on the cat had been emailed to her. She hurried into her office and logged on to her computer to access the report. They had found out that the cat had been missing for five days. The owners, who lived next door to Anna had reported the cat missing to the local vet, three days before it turned up on Anna’s back lawn and it had been the grey and white one she’d been calling Misty.
She hit the call button on her phone, deciding to speak to Denis directly to get a run down of what he had found.
‘Denis, Anna Cole here. I got your text about the report so talk me through it,’ she opened the email attachment as she spoke.
‘Hi there, DI Cole, well the report tells you the wee cat had its neck broke. That’s the cause of death.’
‘Go on.’
‘We can’t categorically say it’s the same assailant that left the bird at the previous crime scene, or the killer who put the robin in the second victim’s mouth but all three were cleaned with the same detergent solution – borax and disinfectant, to remove all traces of the killer an also to make the animal clean to work with.’
Anna scrolled through the report notes on her screen while he spoke.
‘Whoever skinned the kitty knew how to handle a small animal in that way. It takes a fair bit of skill and practice to skin a cat and keep it intact.’
‘Anything else?’
‘As you know the removal of the eyes in the guillemot was clean and precise, no damage to the bone sockets and whoever did this to the cat was as equally well practiced, I’d say,’ Denis said.
Anna ended the call and read through the report. Denis had provided her with a list of possible tools used to skin the cat, along with information on the process: a seam would have been made in the belly, working the knife along the inside, treating its pelt like a coat to be removed.
She leaned back in her chair, going over all the information in her head and then reached for her notepad and began writing down a list of all the known associates connected to the girls. Within a minute, she had a list of names, some with question marks beside them, dates, places and queries. She stared down at her scrawled handwriting. Finnegan – dirty and sure of himself. He’d used Esme to launder money through her name. Had employed her as a waitress at his murky soirées, where he’d entertained, doling out cocaine and prostitutes, to sw
eeten his dodgy deals. It was likely he had a relationship with her. Lara would know about this soon enough, and Anna suspected she would have enough sense to kick him out of their home. His connections with Stephen Dowds were not suspect; it could be coincidence that they knew each other. Northern Ireland was a small pond after all, but Aidan Anderson was a different story. The hood-turned-politician was enjoying the power of his newfound politicking, and liked to feel his palm slicked. Power was his nectar. Finnegan’s relationship with Anderson was one of bribes to secure the success of business deals. Having friends in the council, at such a high level, had enabled Finnegan to bypass planning regulations and to skip through red tape when it suited his business needs.
Then there was old Maude Briers. She obviously loved Robert Brogan. He was the child she never had. Should he need it, Anna was certain she would step in and given him an alibi. There was something in her manner, her defense of Robert Brogan, that made Anna think she was used to standing up for him. And Brogan himself, the off spring of a bent copper; Nelson Brogan, a bully of a man who dealt with the stresses of the job by terrorising his wife and most likely his son too.
Sometimes with a case like this one, Anna found herself drowning in detail. Stepping back and looking at bigger picture, trying to see beyond the obvious connections was useful.
Anna put her pen down and stared out of the rain-washed window. Her desk was a cluttered mess of papers. So much for logging everything into the document sharing system. Sometimes the old-school method of paper and pen was more effective for helping her process the information. She kept going back to Robert Brogan. If he was special to Maude then perhaps he was fond of her too. Sooner or later he would go back to the house in the Glens.
The graveyard was vast, row upon row of neat plots. His mother was near the manmade lake, which was really no more than a big pond. A willow tree leaned over the still body of water with its thin curling branches reaching down to touch the surface. Her grave was marked with a simple wooden cross. It had weathered well considering. He’d have to replace it at some stage, but it would suffice for another year. There were no flowers, just a simple rectangle of grass.
When the end was approaching, he’d been in denial, thinking, hoping she’d improve. He hadn’t believed she would go back to good health; she’d been declining for so long he could barely remember her well. But he thought she’d at least be well enough again to sit up unaided, sip some soup or ask him how school was going.
As she slipped away, his father became even more withdrawn and morose than normal. The fear of sparking his temper was ever present, but he no longer lashed out. Instead his darkness festered in him, emitting a sourness over everything.
Afterwards, he realised her being there was enough. He shouldn’t have asked for or expected any more.
47
Returning to the Brier woman’s home wasn’t planned. It was one of those restless evenings where Anna felt a sense of panic building. A feeling that they weren’t doing enough, fast enough. Thomas had gone home with a plan to catch up on some much-needed sleep and she missed Declan’s company. She couldn’t sit around doing nothing. McKay was threatening to reduce manpower and to hand control over to someone more experienced. Thomas had been seething, but she knew they were idle threats. No one wanted to risk another victim, but McKay had to be seen to be keeping the pressure on.
The local uniforms had been instructed to keep an eye on Maude’s house and to be on the lookout for Robert Brogan and a small white Ford van. Anna was approaching the laneway leading to the Brier house, debating whether she should call on the pretense of further questions, when suddenly she saw an old green Polo drive past. Even in the relative darkness there was no mistaking the grim set of Maude Brier’s face behind the wheel. Hoping the woman hadn’t noticed her, as she ducked down into her seat, she watched in the rear-view mirror as the car sped away. Giving Maude a few minutes to be clear from the house, Anna swerved out and made her way up the lane. The early night sky was the colour of a deep bruise, pinpricked with stars.
The outbuilding stood to the left of the main house. At first glance it was dilapidated, but there was evidence of some minor repairs. It would have been a vital part of the farm, at one time, used to house pigs or farm equipment. Now it was an almost wreck of over-grown ivy and crumbling stonework. The slate roof sagged over the side door, weighed down by the push of roof tiles dislodged over time. Corrugated iron had been used to patch it up in places where the roof tiles had been beyond repair. Someone, probably Robert Brogan, had made small improvements, but it wasn’t as cared for as the main house. It did look too secure for such a run-down building. Brogan could have been using it as a store or a base to hide out in.
A tuft of grass grew straight up from the guttering and clumps of emerald green moss sat, fat and slug like, on the ridge. The windows, two small square panes were whitened out as Thomas had said. In the gloaming of the early night it was impossible to see beyond them. It wasn’t a place you’d want to linger. Loneliness and a certain misery seeped out of it. Anna could imagine how isolated it would feel during the depths of a harsh winter. She couldn’t help conjuring up images of charcoal silhouettes of the buildings against a threatening sky.
The wooden door looked like it had been replaced at some stage. Anna pushed against it but found it was unmoving, solid. The windows were jammed shut too. There was no point in smashing the glass and alerting a returning Maude to her obvious presence. She walked around the building and remembered seeing an old oil drum near the main house. If she could push it back to the outbuilding, with a bit of luck she could use it to climb up onto the roof and perhaps dislodge some slates and make her way through. She was relying on the roof beams to be exposed so that she could see beyond them into the room below.
The oil drum wasn’t full but it would be hard going to move it with her shoulder injury still nagging. She tried rolling it across the gravel, but found it cumbersome. It took a bit of pushing and pulling before she managed to get it on its side and build up some momentum. When she had secured the drum in place at the back of the outbuilding, she looked around for a branch or a stick of some sort that she could use to push the roof tiles back.
Once she was on top of the oil drum she looked across the yard to the main house. It was still in darkness and there was no sign of Maude’s car. Climbing up was difficult; she wobbled precariously and caught hold of the guttering to stop herself swaying backwards. The roof tiles were moss slickened and looked slippery. Her shoulder was still stiff and sore but she wasn’t going to let it stop her getting a look inside.
She hoped old Maude wouldn’t return and catch her. She didn’t want to have to explain her actions to her or McKay.
Anna heaved herself across the roof and felt it shift beneath her weight. ‘Shit,’ she whispered to herself, trying to keep her weight evenly distributed despite the pain in her shoulder. She steadied herself and used the branch to dislodge the tiles beyond her reach. They moved easily enough, concertinaing on top of each other, until she could sense a gap big enough for her to peer through. A bat startled; ‘Fuck,’ she said, nearly falling backwards. It flew straight at her, causing her to jolt again and almost lose her footing. Her heart raced, making her feel light headed and dizzy. She needed to be quick, to be far away before Maude returned.
Carefully, she shimmied on up, lying low against the slates and hoping she wasn’t about to fall through. With her left hand, she carefully reached for her phone from her pocket, to use as a torch and illuminate the room below the rafters.
Hanging in neat rows were animals, skinned and bloodless. She could identify a hare, long and lean, like a child slivered fresh from between its mother’s legs. A bird of some sort lay on a table directly below. It was close enough for Anna to see its glassy-dead, bead of an eye. Its feathered wing spread out like a fan and was pinned to the board it lay on. Farming tools and other implements lined up against the back stonewall. She could see knives of various sizes, what
looked like scalpels and a clamp of some sort, along with a frame being used to stretch a furred skin. A coppery smell of blood with an undercurrent of something chemical, made her stomach roil. She’d seen enough. Clambering back down the roof, she slipped and almost ended up falling off. Her foot found purchase on the rusty guttering and she was able to manoeuver herself down onto the oil drum.
She froze, suddenly aware of another presence.
‘Looking for something, Detective?’ It could only be Brogan.
She gasped as she turned and saw him and then again as his hand slammed against her face, the heal of his palm striking forcibly against her chin in one fluid upward movement. Her head was forced back and cracked against the stonewall. A quick jab of a punch to her stomach made her buckle over in pain, all air swiftly knocked out of her, rendering her powerless to fight against him. He forced her upright back against the wall, pushing his fist into her windpipe. She took in the strangely calm expression; his eyes close enough for her to see flecks of green against a blue background, his skin, clear and unlined, damp with the drizzling rain, which had been falling softly on them. His hair was cut short, almost like a crew cut, something vaguely military about it and slicked back against his head. She could see the soft skin of his neck, the hair follicles where he’d shaved uneven. Up close she could see he was young looking. Maybe about twenty-five. He had that angelic look about him, something, almost otherworldly. She thought of the photograph she had seen sitting on Maude Brier’s dresser, a young boy looking out, happy and confident as if the sun shone only for him.
‘You couldn’t stay away, could you? Had to go sticking your nose in where it’s not wanted. Think you can come over from the mainland and tell us hicks how to run our country?’ his pretty boy features rearranged into snarl.
Anna couldn’t reply for he kept her locked in an upright position, one hand pressing hard against her windpipe, the other gripping her coat. She thought of her Glock lodged in her trousers and at the same moment, in one swift movement, he whisked it away from under her coat, punching her deftly in the side. The sharp pain made her cry out in a strangled moan as he still squeezed against her throat.
Little Bird: a serial killer thriller Page 29
