by Finn Óg
There was a collective intake of breath from the courtroom. The message flickered up onto the screens.
Áine, perhaps through discomfort, ploughed ahead. “And she seemed to be agreeable to that, so long as he agreed to do what they had discussed.”
“And do you know what that was?”
“For that you need to go onto another platform where they used end-to-end—”
“Encryption?” said the barrister, all part of the act.
“Yeah,” said Áine. “You can see here that Delaney asked if Ann would let him put her out of her pain.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, what does a vet say when he puts a dog down?” Áine snapped at him.
“Is there any evidence to suggest that he meant assisting her in suicide?”
“There is a message further on.” She looked at a solicitor in the middle of the courtroom. “Scroll to August eleventh.”
The messages rolled through on the screen, and then there was a pause.
I can end this for you if you’ll let me. I can snuff out all that pain.
The barrister turned to the court and theatrically repeated the phrase, emphasising the second sentence.
“Snuff out your pain. In common parlance, what is your understanding of the word snuff?” he asked Áine.
“Objection!” called the defence. “The witness is not a linguistics expert.”
“But she is an internet expert,” said the brief. “I can reframe the question, judge.”
The judge nodded cautiously.
“In the online world,” the brief had his eyes closed, as if searching for a safe way to pose the question, “what meaning is attached to the word snuff?”
“To kill someone during sex on camera,” said Áine matter-of-factly.
“To kill someone during sex on camera,” repeated the brief for the jury’s benefit.
And yet the defence team didn’t look concerned. They looked smug.
The boss and his wife went for a walk down by the lough. The droning noise of dredgers digging up sand from beneath the surface pleased him; background noise was always welcome. She wore a scarf; he had a ski buff. Both were pulled up over their chins to just below the nose, despite the autumn warmth.
“Try to remember every word now. Don’t just summarise what he said.”
“Ok,” she replied, chastised and a little bit angry.
“It’s important.”
“I know.”
“Keep your voice low.”
“Sorry.”
“Well?”
“He said there is a separate room and that’s where the material of interest is. He said there needs to be fire in this room and it needs to look like the bomb caused it.”
“Did he say where it is?”
“He said the back of the building, third floor. He says there is more paperwork coming.”
“Right. That it?”
“No. He said the room is being kept secure from staff and only the chair has access. Thought that was weird.”
“He means the chairman.”
“Oh,” she said, feeling stupid.
“Did he say anything about timings?”
“He said, tell him soon. He’s posh, isn’t he?”
“You’d be wise to forget that fact.”
She stiffened slightly. “I’ll not remember any of it, you know that.”
His grunt was enough to keep the pressure on her. “Anything you’re forgetting to tell me?”
“That was it. Word for word,” she said, desperate for an acknowledgement that she had performed well.
She got nothing.
Lunch was a silent affair. The parents of the heiress pushed soup around a bowl and said very little, embarrassed by the time and money their daughter appeared intent on wasting. A crown solicitor sidled over and informed them it was unlikely the heiress would be kept in the cells overnight. The judge, according to the lawyer, recognised that there were special circumstances – the mention of which sent the mother into red-rimmed anguish.
Forty-five minutes later they were back in the courtroom, Áine was ready for battle and the brief was about to reveal some of the most twisted behaviour ever to be heard in the Irish courts.
“Judge, if we may, we would like to make an application.” The defence barrister was unexpectedly speaking for the first time since his opening appeal for the jury to keep an open mind.
“Oh?” said the judge.
“Yes, perhaps a moment in chambers?”
And they swooshed out, like batmen in their capes, with folders under their wings.
One whole hour later the courtroom was called to rise as the judge returned, his face like a slapped ass. Something was badly wrong.
“Judge,” began the defence counsel, “we apply for the dismissal of the case against Mr Delaney on the basis that the spine of the prosecution case is established on material illegally obtained.”
Áine turned to Sam, her eyes on springs.
“Go on,” said the judge, like a teacher at parents’ night.
“We submit that the information contained on the devices purportedly owned by Ann Seeley was private and obtained without a warrant. Passwords were circumvented without the necessary paperwork being completed or permissions granted by a member of the judiciary, and the searches were, in effect, illegal.”
“What say the prosecution?” The judge rotated to his left knowing very well what the prosecution had to say – the whole thing had been thrashed out in chambers beforehand.
“While there is significant circumstantial evidence in this case, and corroboration from a witness now in contempt of court, there is no escaping the fact that the weight of the evidence against Mr Delaney was contained on the devices alluded to in this morning’s evidence.”
The judge spoke to the prosecution again. “And why, at this late hour, has there been no acknowledgement that the proper procedures for obtaining this information were not adhered to?” said the judge for the sake of the optics and the journalists scribbling furiously in the press benches. The judge was covering his ass: not my fault.
“Judge, how the information had been obtained was not known to us at the time of discovery. We had rather assumed that the third-party approach to the hacking witness—”
“The internet expert,” corrected the prosecution barrister.
The defence ignored the clarification and let the allegation linger.
“—had come from the Gardai. Instead, it transpires that the expert was engaged by the parents of a witness who is now in the cells and who appears intent on not giving evidence. This case, judge, is built on sand. The devices of the dead woman were handed over by her mother to the parents of said witness. A series of undisclosed streams of evidence – improperly obtained, that besmirch my client and amount to little more than character assassination and titillation of the public through the press. We move to dismiss.”
The judge turned again to the forlorn prosecution brief, whose wig hung in despair as he spoke.
“On consideration that the evidence given is not what we had anticipated, we request that the charges be left on the books.”
Sam didn’t know exactly what that meant but assumed that the pompous barrister was asking for a second chance to try again at a later date.
“Denied. I see no option but to dismiss the charges against Mr Delaney.” The judge turned his attention to the man in the dock. “You are free to go.”
There was clamour in the court as hacks bolted to their feet and a little man from the wings emerged to ask everyone to stand – which was unnecessary as most people were up anyway, and the judge exited without dignity or respect.
Sam watched Delaney intently. He wore a knowing but not an elated smile, and held out his hand to his lead defence barrister. Sam was surprised to see the SC decline to shake Delaney’s hand. The whole counsel team would be out of pocket in the absence of a long, lucrative trial, but Sam sensed that they also knew that they had
just unleashed an unstable psychopath on society.
The case had collapsed in a blur and Sam struggled to rationalise why. Something didn’t seem right, though. But that was that. I can go home – job done, he thought.
6
“Sinead’s gonna be so disappointed,” said Áine.
It was the first time Sam had noticed Áine – the hard one, the bolshie, brash and brazen sibling – longing for the regard of her softer sister.
“She’ll be proud of you. She always is. You’re a gobby little bitch, but she knows you have a heart of gold. Even I know it.”
Sam wasn’t given to long, soothing plámás.
“Thank you,” said Áine quietly, not looking him in the eye.
The pair stared out to the water, the surfing distraction sparing a mountain of awkward moments.
“He’ll eventually get what he deserves.”
“Well, perhaps he should be helped on his way,” Áine quickly shot back, and the suggestion hung in the air like slurry in summer. Both knew that Sam’s past was riddled with such despatches.
They’d had a fraught few hours. Sam had been forced to bundle Áine and the heiress out of court through a press pack four deep. He despised the fact that his face would be on the front cover of half a dozen newspapers in the morning, on the telly that night and in the Sundays again. They would show the shot as archive in years to come. It unnerved him and flew in the face of everything he tried to avoid.
But it had been unavoidable. The press had swarmed and shouted. It was undignified and distressing. Sam’s arms had swept snappers aside to get the heiress through and in the direction of the car with Áine following in their wake. The press had realised that Sam planned to cross the road with the women, and on two occasions he’d had to yank the dangling straps of cameras, forcing them to the ground and the operators to the pavements to examine the damage.
“You’ll get charged with assault,” Áine had hissed.
“I’ll be back in the north by teatime,” said Sam. “They’ll hardly extradite me for that.”
The heiress had sat in the back, Áine in the front, as Sam wove through Dublin headed for the tree-lined street into which the previous night, Loopy Loo had managed to vanish. When they got there they realised they had yet another battle on their hands. The smarter members of the media had deployed to the point of arrival rather than departure. Sam didn’t want to leave Áine in the car while he delivered the heiress, nor did he want to drag the sister of his close friend through a press pack twice, so he took a detour, double-parked and whipped the heiress through the rear of the house.
“You’re not leaving?” the father had said.
“I’ve got to get Áine back, John. I was here to help you until the case was over,” Sam panted.
“Yes, but…”
The father, John, was evidently distressed. He stood, hopeless, in the hallway of his grand manor looking like a frail, afraid old man. Sam relented.
“John, I doubt anyone thought Delaney would walk, but I can’t be here indefinitely – I’ve a wee girl to look after. Look, I’ll give you another night, but you need to start hunting for security, ok?”
The father brightened. “Yes, yes, Sam, thank you. One more night. That will give me time to make arrangements. Thank you.”
And then they were Northside again, over the Liffey and looking for a place to stall until the hacks hit their deadlines and gave up on the idea of staking out Áine’s flat. Sam followed old tracks and headed for Clontarf, the beach and the sea. They pulled in on Bull Island; the wind and swirl of the sand had kept all but the hardiest golfers away. Sam didn’t ask, he simply opened his door and Áine followed. They leaned against the breeze, hands deep in pockets, as kitesurfers skimmed about, their vibrant propulsion dipping and drawing, pulling them forward.
“S’pose you can do that?” Áine asked distractedly.
“Badly,” Sam conceded. “Clears the head totally.”
Áine just stared at the spectacle, moderately impressed by what the kids were able to do with just a board and a half-balloon.
“I don’t get what she was at,” Áine said eventually.
Sam knew she was referring to the heiress.
“Was she on board when the barrister was briefing you?”
“Completely,” Áine said. “She was up for giving evidence. She was so cross that he had turned up with the wife. She hated him – I thought she did anyway.”
Sam mulled the wisdom of telling Áine about Loopy Loo’s night visit but decided it might be more frightening than informative.
“He seems to still have some sort of hold over her.”
“I dunno how,” Áine said with disgust. “If you’d seen what he wrote to her, it was …”
“What?” Sam pressed gently.
“Depraved.”
“How?”
“The stuff he was asking her to do. Like, it might have been sexual – in a way – but it was, like, harmful. Physically harmful.”
Sam didn’t want the details. Such things always made him think of Isla and the people out there who might hurt her. “It’s one thing talking about it on a computer, but it’s another to actually do it. I thought the heiress was all talk.”
Áine looked at him quizzically, as if he had misunderstood what the whole thing was about. “You know she never met him?”
“What?” Sam said, utterly confused.
“He was getting her to, like, perform for him,” she said.
Sam just looked at her, totally blank.
“She would video herself doing the stuff for him using the camera on her phone or tablet. Then they would talk about what they would do when they met.”
“But they didn’t actually get together?”
“No. At least I don’t think so. I found no evidence of it anyway.”
“I just assumed she knew him.”
“She did know him. They talked for hours and days.”
“That’s not the same as meeting someone.”
“You might not think it’s not the same but she did, and it looks to me like she had, like, fallen in love with him or something because she could have said enough in court to put the bastard away for life.”
“He met Ann Seeley, though, if he managed to murder her.”
“That twisted fucker killed her alright, but he only actually met her once.”
“Serious?”
“Serious. He talked to her for months – same story. How are ye? Lovely to be chattin’ to ye. How have ye been? Then, like, how are ye sleepin’? How’s the dark moments? Can I help ye with the sadness? Do you want to talk in the night when you need it?”
“Sounds like he understood both women quite well.”
“He picked them. Like, he deliberately went on to that suicide group to find vulnerable people. And he chose women who lived close so he could get to them. Then he worked and worked his way into their minds, and then he offered to help them with the ultimate gift.”
Sam stared at a kid carving a short wave and asked a question he didn’t really want the answer to. “Which was what?”
“To help them with their suicide. With Ann Seeley it got to the point that she was pleading with him to do it. She was seriously fucked up and he just made it worse. Stick this in here for me, do that for me, tie yourself up. One night he watched her for twelve hours, shackled to her own bed. Then he drove ten miles to a phone box and called the Guards and they went and released her. He’s a fucking mentalist.”
Sam blew breath through pursed lips and stared straight ahead. Áine turned to look at him and sensed she had said enough.
“Anyway, he’s out now, and I fucked up.”
“You didn’t.”
And she knew he meant it.
The operations officer called Libby’s room and she made it to the briefing suite within three minutes.
“The X-rays are in the shed,” he said by way of greeting.
“They must be about to move – it’s too early for any
thing else.” She looked at the digital clock on the wall: 0300 hours.
“We should have put a camera in the shed,” said the ops officer.
“The dogs would have gone wild. We know what they’re doing in there anyway.”
“But we don’t know how big it is.”
“Does that matter?”
The ops officer didn’t know whether it mattered or not because he didn’t know what the overall plan was, so they just stared at the screens as the shed doors opened and a car was pushed out. A burst came through on the radio.
“Eyes left.”
The ops in the dugout were directing the techs back at the base. Libby watched the images on the screens judder as the night-vision camera hunted for focus. Two people had entered the yard and were walking towards the shed doors. The camera panned with them.
“The driver?” Libby asked.
“Maybe.”
One of the men got into the driver’s side of the car. The other went into the shed. The car pulled away, not turning on its lights until it reached the end of the farm’s lane. Then a van emerged from the shed and followed the same process. The van manoeuvred around the car, flicked on its lights – which came as a blast of white on the screen, then increased its speed down the road. The car stayed where it was, lights extinguished.
“Scout vehicle,” Libby said. “Is the Gazelle up?”
“In the air now. We don’t know where the car’s going, do we?” he asked Libby.
“Let’s see,” was all she said.
He didn’t know whether she knew or not. He tried not to care.
Floppy feet and a twisty run. A frenzied little bundle of excitement hurtled up the pontoon towards Sam. She leapt unquestioningly upwards, her little arms clamping his neck. Sam closed his eyes and savoured the moment. Such greetings wouldn’t last forever – nor would his back withstand the gesture; Isla was growing like bracken.
When he opened his eyes he could see Sinead through his daughter’s hair. She was standing nervously on the pontoon, her hand on the guard rail of the boat. He held on to his daughter for a few more moments.
