Too Close For Comfort

by Niamh O'Connor

  ‘You should have backed me up,’ Derek said, taking the J-cloth from her, getting down on his hands and knees and clearing up the mess.

  ‘He’s got football today,’ Liz explained.

  ‘Good,’ Derek said, dumping the broken bowl in the bin. ‘It might knock the corners off him.’

  ‘Maybe I should keep him home,’ she said, under her breath. ‘I think Jeff’s off sick.’

  Jeff was Conor’s only friend, and without him around, sport – one of Conor’s pet hates – became a million times worse. It was up there with injections as his biggest phobia. The million and one ways the trajectory of the ball could move put it outside his comfort zone. He understood when life was black and white, but couldn’t handle shades of grey. Before the recession, he’d had a full-time special-needs assistant to help him communicate in the classroom, too. He couldn’t read facial expressions or emotional cues, and it caused all kinds of problems. But the government cuts had hit the weakest. Private schools had much more protection from the ebb and flow of the economy. That was another reason Conor had to get that place …

  ‘Over my dead body,’ Derek said.

  ‘It’s not his fault. Kids on the spectrum …’

  The television grew steadily louder from the adjoining room.

  ‘They’ve got labels for everything these days,’ Derek grumbled. ‘If you start making allowances all the time, he’ll be in real trouble. Boys belong on football pitches.’

  He pulled the wet clothes he’d been wearing the day before out of the washing machine. Liz stared. There was a full basket of laundry he could have shoved in while he was at it, and saved them the cost of another load. ‘Did you put a wash on last night?’ she asked.

  Derek continued out the back door to hang the clothes on the line. Liz could feel her blood pressure rising. He was still swanning about like he didn’t have a care in the world. It was all she could do to stop herself reminding him that his company was looking for redundancies, her seven-year-old Peugeot was sitting on the main road outside their estate with a ‘For Sale’ sign glued to the windscreen, and it was only two weeks since their neighbours’ home had been repossessed.

  Jenny and Paul had spent several hours shouting at the sheriff from a barricaded window. They’d been forcibly removed, their belongings scattered in the front garden. It had been heartbreaking. They were just an average tax-paying couple, never in trouble in their lives. Jenny was a hairdresser, but Paul had recently been made redundant. Liz knew if it could happen to them, it could happen to anyone.

  Derek arrived back in the kitchen, carrying his shoes caked in muck, and started towards the sink, which was full of dishes.

  ‘My floor,’ Liz shrieked, as clods began to fall from the soles.

  He placed them back outside, patting the air on his way back in. ‘Give me a break,’ he said, heading to a press where he kept mealworms to feed the robins.

  Liz had to bite her tongue so she wouldn’t ask him what planet he was living on. She was sick of being the only one terrified that their mortgage would go into arrears. They’d bought their new house before the country had gone belly up and Derek’s building company had gone bust. If he lost his job now, they would lose the roof over their heads. As it was, they were in negative equity.

  She got distracted by the sound of the news on the telly blaring that a woman’s body had been found in the mountains. Liz headed into the sitting room and told Conor to go and brush his teeth, putting her hand out for him to pass over the remote control.

  ‘She’s a goner, right, Mum?’

  Catching Conor, she gave him a kiss before he slouched off, and then sat down on the arm of the couch, drawn in by images she recognized.

  ‘Derek!’ she shouted, pointing at the screen. The hairs on the back of her neck were standing up. According to the newsreader, there were unconfirmed reports that the victim came from Nuns Cross – where they lived. Theirs was a tiny, five-year-old estate of detached houses in Rathfarnham, a settled suburb on the south side of the city, in the foothills of the Dublin mountains. It was the polar opposite of the ghost estates that had mushroomed up in the boom times, pushing the commuter belt back to the Atlantic. They’d believed themselves lucky.

  Liz covered her hand with her mouth as she realized she probably knew the dead woman.

  Derek came into the room.

  ‘A woman from Nuns Cross has been murdered,’ she told him, horrified.

  He sat down stiffly. ‘Did they say who?’

  ‘They said her name was being withheld until her family had been informed,’ she answered, realizing Conor was back. She zapped the TV off, and helped him put his coat on. She put his bag on his back, and Derek zipped his coat up. He tousled Conor’s hair as Liz gave him a tighter than usual hug goodbye.

  ‘I’ll be back in time to help with your homework tonight, son,’ Derek promised, kissing his forehead.

  ‘We’ve got the circus tonight, Dad! Mum got us tickets, remember?’

  ‘Well then, I’ll be back in time for the circus, son,’ Derek said.

  The school bus drew in on the main road opposite and Conor plugged the earphones of his iPod in, sprinting to catch it. A squad car pulled into Nuns Cross, and Liz shivered as she watched it stop in the cul-de-sac next to theirs.

  ‘I’ll just see where it goes,’ Derek said.

  Liz flew into the kitchen, tore off a sheet of kitchen towel and blew her nose, returning to the front door to wait for Derek, keeping the door open only a chink. She knew exactly what the victim’s family would be going through, and it was terrible. She scanned the doorsteps opposite for any sign of a casserole, or something left in sympathy, wondering if it was possible the dead woman could live on her road.

  Derek arrived back, looking like he’d been hit by a bus. ‘It’s Amanda Wells,’ he said, panting like a sprinter after a race.

  ‘The solicitor?’ Liz asked, shocked. She didn’t know her very well, although their gardens were literally back to back. Derek had renovated Amanda’s office a few years earlier, and it was right around the corner from Supersavers. But Liz had found it so hard to trust anyone since Ellen had died, feeling that most new people just had a creepy interest in knowing the details of what had happened to her sister. And the only way Liz could create some mental space from the claustrophobic feeling of living on top of her neighbours in Nuns Cross was by pretending not to be remotely interested in their business. She’d pulled it off until last Friday …

  Derek nodded, dropping to his hunkers for air.

  Closing the door behind them quickly, she slid the chain lock across, staring at him in disbelief. He still hadn’t mentioned what had happened on Friday, the thing he didn’t know she knew about, the reason she had barely been able to look at him all weekend. It defied belief he’d think it wasn’t worth bringing up, given what he’d just found out.

  Liz pushed past him and headed back into the kitchen to look out the window into Amanda’s for any sign of activity. She clocked those people you always saw on the telly at a murder scene – the ones in white body suits with elastic hoods and Michael Jackson masks – moving behind the windows, and kinked the blinds quickly.

  Starting to fret, she bundled up the newspaper on the table and dumped it in the bin. Seconds later she pulled it out again and shoved it into the fire grate, still full of ashes from the previous night. Striking a match off the box, she lit the corner of the paper and put it into the grate, holding it down with a poker so it wouldn’t fly up the chimney.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Derek asked, following and standing over her. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘You can ease off on the devastation,’ she said. ‘I get it.’

  He shifted from one foot to the other. ‘What? Don’t tell me you’re not gutted, too. I know we weren’t bosom buddies, but it’s so close to home!’

  She sighed, shaking her head. Secrets were as bad as lies in her book. What did he take her for? Why didn’t he just come out with it and tal
k about what had happened on Friday? After everything she’d been through with her only sister, he knew as well as she did the way things worked. It was only a matter of time before the gardaí came calling asking questions. If they found out about Friday, the press would follow hot on their heels, chasing a new angle on Ellen’s case. Derek had been so bloody stupid. Liz could see the headline now: ‘Missing Ellen’s Sister in Second Murder Mystery’. And so would the school board deciding whether or not Conor got that place.

  4

  DS AISHLING McCONIGLE tucked her shoulder-length red hair behind her ears as she hurried over to take Jo’s coat. Jo was crossing the detective unit, heading for her office and the conference she’d organized. As she passed, Joan McElhinny, the oldest female in the station, handed Jo the mug of black coffee she’d been pouring, and six-foot Sue Grainger strode ahead to open the door for her, closing it once Sergeant John Foxe followed.

  Jo transferred a cardboard box from her desk on to the floor. It was full of old files she wanted to take with her when she relocated, as well as a cactus that had no chance of surviving without her. She tapped her ID into the keyboard, not wanting to have to wait for the Pulse 2 – the computer equivalent to Scotland Yard’s HOLMES system – to load up if she needed some instant information during the meeting.

  Heading for the wipe board to the left of her desk, she ran a cloth over it and then turned back around, pleased everyone was ready. Alfie had not been impressed by her insistence that the incident room be sited here for her convenience, rather than in her new district. But Jo had stuck to her guns, using the excuse that by Friday he’d have retired, and that therefore the right to choose was hers. The truth was that she wanted to cut him out of the inquiry. If he was bringing the press to crime scenes, he might as well be briefing the killer, as far as she was concerned.

  And Jo was confident she couldn’t do any better than the crew assembled. Rosy-cheeked Joan had worked on the periphery of a serial-killer case Jo had headed up a couple of years back. She was a trooper, not afraid of hard work, with an incredible ability to get through paperwork. Alongside her was freckle-faced Aishling, who had helped Jo find a toddler taken from his mum’s car while she was paying for petrol. Six-foot Sue was a new addition to the station, and Jo wanted to give her a break before she left. It would increase Sue’s chances of being assigned decent cases in the future. The number of females who’d reached senior rank in the force was minimal.

  As for Foxy, it was hard for Jo to imagine how she was ever going to solve a case without him in the future, but as he was planning to retire, she didn’t have much choice. Silver-haired Sergeant John Foxe, the station’s bookman, was responsible for keeping track of how the lines of inquiry were progressing. He was a clear thinker and a straight talker.

  ‘Where’s Sexton?’ Jo asked, about her closest colleague in the force.

  The females avoided eye contact.

  ‘Not again?’ Jo asked Foxy, her tone filled with fatigue.

  ‘He rang in sick,’ Foxy replied.

  Jo pushed her fingers through her hair. Detective Inspector Gavin Sexton was a friend as well as a colleague, but he was acting the bollocks by not giving a medical reason when he hadn’t showed up for work for the second week running. Jo wouldn’t be around much longer to cover for him.

  ‘Tell me he sent in a doctor’s note,’ Jo prompted.

  Foxy shook his head.

  She sighed. There wasn’t time to get into it now. ‘Any luck with a photo of Amanda?’ she asked, moving on quickly.

  Foxy handed over a ‘pick-up’ of the victim – a photograph from a family member – collected by the officer tasked with the death knock, when news of Amanda’s murder had been broken to her elderly parents.

  Jo studied the picture, which Foxy had had blown up. In life, Amanda Wells had been a glamorous, if plain, woman who had worn bright red lipstick and had bouncy blonde hair and shiny ivory skin. She was very petite, Jo noted. In the shot, she was sitting at one of those beach-front bars popular in the Caribbean, and looking straight at the camera with a forced smile, holding a cocktail up in a toast. She was on her own, and something about the look she was giving whoever was taking the picture suggested she was worried they were about to run away with her camera. If pictures told a thousand words, this one said Amanda Wells was not going to let the fact that she was alone stop her from enjoying herself.

  Heading for the whiteboard, Jo attached the picture to it with a magnet, alongside one taken posthumously in the tent. The contrast couldn’t have been starker.

  ‘Amanda Wells,’ she began. ‘Aged forty-eight … single … a solicitor. CS Alfie Taylor got a tip-off from a journalist that one of the missing women’s bodies would be found in the mountains. The hack’s name is Niall Toland, and he works on the Daily Record. The tip was made directly to him and no other newspaper as far as we’re aware, and he claims he was specifically told that the body was one of the missing women.’

  ‘I read a story in one of the newspapers about them last week,’ Aishling piped up. ‘I was only a kid when those girls were disappearing, but I can remember my mum being afraid to let me out to play alone.’

  ‘I was afraid to let my own girls out,’ Joan said, closing a button that had come undone on her shirt. ‘And they were only little at the time. It creeps me out that that monster might be still out there.’

  ‘I didn’t read it,’ Jo said. ‘What exactly did it say?’

  ‘It showed the three snatch sites where all six were abducted, and joined the locations up with a dotted line to make a perfect triangle around the Sally Gap,’ Aishling said.

  Jo pointed to the photograph. ‘Amanda had a meal with a man in Temple Bar on Friday night. We need to establish who he was ASAP. How long’s the battery life on those iPhones?’

  ‘Depends on how often it was used,’ Sue said.

  ‘It was last used on Friday night,’ Jo said. ‘I saw it on the caller log.’

  ‘Then it could have stayed powered on from Friday night to Monday morning.’

  ‘How do you know about Amanda’s last movements already?’ Joan asked. ‘You only found her a few hours ago.’

  ‘She was tweeting from it and the last landline number she dialled was to a restaurant,’ Jo explained. ‘I phoned it. The manager remembered Amanda. He said the man she was with had dark hair and was younger. They came in together at around ten, but ended up arguing, and she stormed out at half past. She paid for the meal. The CCTV over the restaurant door was down, so we’ve no idea who the man is or if he took the row to heart and decided to follow her and have the last word. Identifying him is our first line of inquiry.’

  Jo turned to Foxy. ‘Job one, I want Aishling to arrange the collection of any CCTV available from Eustace Street, where the restaurant is located. The manager’s agreed to help with a photofit. And we need to organize searches in the vicinity of the restaurant to see if we can find Amanda’s car.’

  Moving to her coat on the stand, Jo rummaged her notebook out of a pocket, snapping the elastic off. ‘It’s a navy convertible BMW.’ She wrote the registration on the wipe board. ‘I contacted the officer on duty at Amanda’s home, and her car is not there. You need to have the streets in and around the restaurant checked, Aishling, and also the multistoreys. If there’s still no sign, go to the pounds.’

  ‘Got it,’ Aishling replied.

  Foxy noted it down.

  ‘We’re going to need a team with questionnaires doing door-to-door inquiries in Amanda’s estate,’ Jo continued. ‘And show me the questions for approval when they’re ready,’ she added wearily.

  The sentence got a laugh. There’d been an infamous mix-up in a recent inquiry, and the police social club’s pub-quiz questions had been circulated in error.

  Jo turned to Sue. ‘Can you check the databases here and in the UK to see if we can find a match for the killer’s modus operandi? He stuffed a plastic bag in her mouth, and he strangled her with her bra. It could be potentially as
good as a signature.’

  Sue wrote the details down in her notebook. ‘Daphne asked me to sort through Dan’s filing cabinet, so this way I won’t die of boredom while pretending to be totally focused.’

  Daphne was the Human Resources administrator. ‘Why’s she got you sorting Dan’s files?’ Jo asked, annoyed. As acting CS, she should have been consulted.

  Sue shrugged. ‘She just asked me to pull everything out, and to do a quick list of the status of his investigations before the changeover. Convictions, acquittals, that kind of thing.’

  ‘What?’ Jo pushed, wringing her hands together. They’d have to contact him to sign something like that off, but Dan had endured enough, in her book. He’d been put through the mill last year on a disciplinary hearing. She didn’t want him getting paranoid.

  Jo pressed her fingers between her eyes.

  ‘You OK?’ Joan asked.

  ‘I’m fine, it’s just the early start. We headed up at first light. Do you mind if I turn the lights off in here?’

  After getting the nod, Jo flicked the switch off, and the blue hue from the fluorescent bulb overhead flickered out. Headaches were something she lived with on a daily basis. The room dimmed, but was still brightly lit from the glow in the detective unit outside.

  Jo turned to Joan. ‘Will you get in touch with Niall Toland, who got the tip-off? I know reporters famously never reveal their sources, but it’d help if you can establish if Toland knew who called in the information and is protecting them out of some misguided sense of confidentiality, or if the source really was anonymous. Also, I want to know what time he got the information, and how. Did the call come through the office switchboard? If so we’ll need to speak to the Daily Record receptionist, too. What can they tell us about the voice? What exactly was said?’

  ‘Newspapers use automated answering systems these days, to save on staff costs,’ Sue said. ‘It’s a curse for anyone trying to give them a story.’

  ‘You know a lot about it,’ Jo pounced.