‘With respect, sir, we’re not finished,’ Cormac said to Brian Murphy. ‘I need an experienced team, and I need them right now.’ He turned to Trevor. ‘You’ll need to release some of my officers, Sergeant Murphy.’
Trevor Murphy leaned back against the wall, drummed his fingers on the plaster, adopted a faux-serious expression.
‘No can do, I’m afraid. Pivotal point in our operation.’
‘A child has been abducted,’ Cormac said, articulating each word clearly and firmly, determined to break through the bullshit. ‘Over an hour ago. I need people, right now.’
Trevor Murphy’s eyes flicked briefly to his father’s then he shook his head. ‘Sorry. Can’t be done.’
‘That’s not your decision to make,’ Cormac said. The jumped-up little bastard. That he was even a sergeant was a bloody travesty. He should never have been promoted.
Trevor Murphy smirked at him.
Brian Murphy cleared his throat. ‘The discussion is over, actually, Reilly,’ he said. ‘Resource allocations have already been made. You can’t expect other operations to accommodate this kind of last-minute ad hoc request.’
It took Cormac a second to realise he was being dismissed. He didn’t move. Fury sparked and ignited deep in his stomach. This was unbelievable.
‘Sir, you can’t be serious about this. This is a little girl shoved into the boot of a car, and you know the clock is ticking. I need people. I need a team.’ Cormac reached for self-control and struggled to find it. He did not rant and rave. It wasn’t his style and it wasn’t effective. But this . . . whatever political game Murphy was playing, he had to see that it could have tragic consequences.
‘You need to do your job. You’re an experienced sergeant. You should be able to handle a missing persons inquiry.’
Cormac stood. ‘This is not a teenager who’s run away with her boyfriend.’
He tried to read Murphy’s expression, but the older man avoided eye contact. None of this made sense. Trevor was a useless piece of shit. He cut corners and he took favours and he might be doing a hell of a lot worse than that. But Brian Murphy was a totally different creature. His strengths might lie more in administration and politics than frontline policing, but Cormac had come to regard him as an honest broker. And he’d been a police officer for thirty years. He had to know that press would be all over this in a matter of hours, if they weren’t already on the trail. Questions would be asked by people who couldn’t be ignored.
‘I can’t do my job,’ Cormac said stiffly. ‘You’re making that impossible.’
Murphy cleared his throat. ‘I’ll call Salthill and Oranmore. See if they can spare a couple of bodies. In the meantime, you need to work with what you’ve got.’
Calling on other stations did not guarantee resources. Everyone was understaffed these days. The five-year hiring freeze had come to an end, but the few hundred new recruits were yet to make it through training college. Mill Street was struggling more than most, given the burden of the task force, but it was really a question of degree.
In desperation Cormac turned to Trevor. ‘This is a kid we’re talking about. Whatever you’re doing tonight . . .’ Another pointless wander around the bogs and fishing villages of north Galway. ‘Whatever it is you’re doing can surely wait for a few days, or a week.’
Trevor shrugged. ‘Need my people.’
‘They’re not your people,’ Cormac snapped.
‘They’re not yours either,’ Brian Murphy said, his voice cold and controlled. ‘If your job is beyond your abilities, Reilly, maybe it’s time you looked at other options. I want you to make an appointment with one of the independent counsellors. Discuss your options.’
‘Excuse me?’
Murphy’s gaze was ice. ‘Maybe it’s time you took a step back. Or down. You’re not the first to burn out. You won’t be the last. We have support for that sort of thing now.’
Blood rushed to Cormac’s face as he felt a rush of fury so intense that the edges of his vision blacked out. He steadied himself, tried one more time.
‘Sir . . . a child . . .’
‘The door, Sergeant,’ Murphy said.
‘You’ll leave me no choice but to make a formal complaint,’ Cormac said.
‘You do that, Sergeant Reilly. Let’s see how far it gets you,’ Murphy said, and he pointed again to the door.
CHAPTER FOUR
The door-to-door was going exactly as Angela Fletcher predicted. Peter had started at the house opposite the Fletchers, which was occupied by the aforementioned Mrs McCluskey. She was, as he’d been warned, half blind, and she was half deaf into the bargain. He’d had to explain the situation three times before she confirmed that she’d seen and heard nothing. At the next two houses he’d found no one at home, at the three after that his inquiries were met with shaken heads and bemused looks. If the abduction had happened, it had happened too fast for anyone but Fred to see anything. Peter was knocking at the seventh door and waiting for an answer that did not appear to be coming when the sound of an approaching police siren alerted him to Reilly’s impending arrival. Peter turned and went back down the drive, waited as two squad cars pulled up in quick succession. Reilly was first out of the lead car.
‘Fisher. Anything more for me?’
‘Nothing from the neighbours. I’ve tried these.’ Peter indicated the side of the street he’d already doorknocked. ‘Nothing useful so far. No obvious cameras in any of the neighbouring houses. Our witness, Fred Fletcher, is sick. He’s lost his voice, is running a temperature. His mother’s put him to bed, but I don’t think he has anything more to give us in any case.’
‘Nothing more from his description of the suspect?’
Fisher shook his head, feeling inadequate. ‘Just what I called in. A tall, thin man with dark hair and a beard. Aged about forty, wearing slacks and a puffa jacket.’
‘And he didn’t know the girl?’
‘He only ever saw her from behind, but she didn’t seem familiar. She had long dark hair, a blue knee-length coat.’ Peter was distracted. He’d expected Reilly to bring a full team with him. Instead it looked like he’d driven himself, and only one officer climbed out of the second car. Rory Mulcair, who was young and inexperienced.
‘You’ve got the video there?’ Reilly asked, indicating the tablet still in Peter’s hands. Peter handed it over. They watched it together and Peter felt a twinge of anxiety. Not so much that he’d misread the situation – on balance he believed that Fred Fletcher was telling the truth – but that without the benefit of speaking with the boy Reilly might not see what he saw. By itself, the video didn’t seem like much. Reilly handed the tablet back to him.
‘Bring that into tech right now,’ he said. ‘I got a call on the way here. They couldn’t do anything with the emailed version you sent them. Resolution was too low, or it got corrupted or something. I want you to hand-deliver that. Call me the minute they have anything.’ Cormac looked around, grimaced. ‘We should be looking for that dog too,’ he said. ‘It might be the fastest way to identify her.’
Peter hesitated, unsure whether Cormac meant him to stay and help, until the older man snapped, ‘Go, Peter.’
Peter made for his car. He pulled away from the curb and glanced back at the scene through the rear-view mirror. Rory Mulcair was already taping off the section of footpath where the black car had pulled in, and Reilly was at Angela Fletcher’s door. Peter’s adrenaline was now well and truly pumping, but the fear was there too, curling its way into his stomach. Because this was about a child, a little girl, and the outcome on a case like this could be as bad as it gets.
When Peter reached the station he dropped the tablet to the technical team and made his way upstairs to the squad room. Deirdre Russell was alone, sitting at a desk in an open-plan area meant for twenty-five.
‘Right,’ Peter said. He looked around at all the empty desks. ‘So it’s just us then.’
Deirdre shrugged. ‘Looks like it,’ she said. She had bru
ising around her mouth, a few painful-looking stitches. The injury was a week old now, had turned brown and yellow where it had been shades of purple and green the week before. Deirdre was tough – her face was the result of an elbow to the mouth she’d taken when she’d jumped in on some gurrier beating his girlfriend – but Peter found the bruising hard to look at.
‘I’ve run a search on the family of the boy who called it in,’ Deirdre said. ‘The father has had a few speeding tickets, but that’s it. No criminal record for him, none for the mum.’
‘And no one’s reported a girl missing?’ Peter asked.
‘Not yet.’
There wasn’t a whole hell of a lot they could do without more information. Peter logged in at the computer beside Deirdre’s. It wasn’t where he usually sat, but it would have felt weird and purposeless working twenty metres away from her under the circumstances.
She gave him a sideways look. ‘This feels wrong, doesn’t it? It’s like a ghost town in here. Gives me the creeps.’
‘Yeah,’ Peter said with a grimace. He didn’t want to say anything else, didn’t want to get dragged into a discussion about something that had already been talked to death.
‘I think Reilly’s had another run-in with the boss. He went straight to Murphy’s office after your call and came back fuming. I’ve never seen him lose his cool before.’
Peter kept his mouth shut. Reilly had been on a collision course with Brian Murphy for months. It wasn’t that Peter couldn’t see his point, but sometimes it seemed like Reilly poured fuel on a fire when he could have just damped it down. Lately, the conflict between Reilly and Murphy had been getting worse. If things kept on the way they were, Peter might look for a transfer out of Galway altogether. In the meantime, he was going to keep his head down.
‘Reilly said we’re not to take any other jobs. The call centre’s already been warned. Everything is going to be diverted until we’ve a few more back on board.’
‘That’s good.’ Peter was looking at the PULSE home screen. He logged in, then paused with his hands hovering over the keyboard. Suddenly he couldn’t think of a single thing to do.
Deirdre leaned back in her seat. ‘I’ve been thinking. Whoever this guy is, wherever he was going, he would have had to drive through Knocknacarra Park, then the Shangort Road. If he went east towards the city and stuck to the main route, he would have passed a camera at the junction at Taylor’s Hill. If he went west towards the coast and didn’t turn off on any of the minor roads, he would have passed one at Barna.’
‘Can we get the camera footage?’ Peter asked.
Deirdre shook her head. ‘I asked the technical team, but they said there’s not much point until we have the numberplate.’
‘Okay, well, they’ve got the video now. Hopefully they’ll be able to enhance it and match the number against the ANPR.’
There weren’t many cameras in Galway capable of automatic numberplate recognition and they were mostly on the outskirts of the city, on the motorways and national routes, but he thought there might be one on Taylor’s Hill. Possibly one at Barna.
‘And in the meantime . . .’ Peter turned to his computer, ran a quick search for the partial plate on PULSE. ‘There,’ he said. He turned his screen a little so she could see. ‘I’ve got twelve hits for black Volkswagen Passats for the partial.’
Deirdre looked at the list on his screen. ‘Exclude women,’ she said.
Peter filtered the search. ‘Seven left,’ he said. ‘But if I exclude men aged under thirty and over sixty, I can get it down to two.’ He felt uneasy. Fred was young. He’d seen the man through a dirty window from the first floor and only for a few seconds. Excluding everyone over sixty was one thing, but the under-thirties might be a risk. Still. They had to start somewhere. ‘Why don’t we take one name each and have a look? See if anything interesting comes up?’
Deirdre nodded briskly. ‘It’s as good an idea as any.’ She leaned forward to get a closer look at his screen. ‘I’ll take the first one . . . uh . . . Michael Foxford. You take Jason Kelly.’
They ran their searches. Peter found very little initially. There was nothing on PULSE – Jason Kelly had not previously come to the attention of the gardaí – and he had no social media presence, kept himself private. Except no one really kept themselves private in this internet age. Not without concerted effort and a degree of expertise. Peter kept searching. His first search, Jason Kelly Galway, yielded an unworkable two million hits. There was a plastic surgeon by that name, it seemed, and a student with an active social life and an apparent addiction to social media. Peter tried a couple more searches: one for the name combined with Jason Kelly’s date of birth, and another for the name combined with Kelly’s known address. Still nothing useful. Finally he ran an image search using the photograph scanned into the system from Kelly’s driver’s licence application. In the photo Kelly had a tight, almost military haircut, a beard, deep-set eyes, and a full mouth that would have looked better on a woman. Peter didn’t hold out much hope – the photograph was blurry, poor quality – so he was mildly surprised when the computer threw up more than one hit.
Peter clicked on the links and saw that Jason Kelly appeared in a number of group photographs posted to social media, personal blogs and once to a website for angling holidays in the West of Ireland. He was named in the captions on some of the photos. Kelly was, it seemed, a fisherman. Based on the photographs and posts, he liked to go angling with friends in and around north County Galway, where he enjoyed a reasonable level of success, if the photographs of glassy-eyed fish were any indication.
Deirdre had already completed her search. She was sitting quietly, watching over his shoulder, waiting for him to finish. Peter took his hands from his keyboard and looked at her.
‘Michael Foxford,’ she said, turning her screen so that he could see it. ‘No criminal record, never come to our attention for anything other than a couple of speeding tickets ten years apart. There’s nothing else on PULSE about this guy. Social media tells me he’s married with two children. Lives in Oranmore. He works for Lidl, but I can’t tell where or in what capacity.’
Foxford looked unexceptional. Dark-haired, he had a high forehead, a receding hairline. He looked like someone’s dad.
‘What have you got?’ Deirdre asked.
‘Jason Kelly,’ Peter said. ‘Nothing on PULSE. Very little online. I think he’s something of a fisherman, an angler by the looks of it. Thirty-five, nothing online about a partner or kids.’
‘Where does he work?’
Peter shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Though he has been tagged in a comment . . . Something about him being handy with his tools and could he help out a friend. So maybe he’s a carpenter of sorts. But really, there’s very little to go on. He keeps his life off the internet.’
‘Address?’
‘Headford Road.’ Peter said. ‘A small housing estate there. Ashfort.’
They looked at each other. There was disappointingly little to go on.
‘We should probably let Reilly know. Let him make the call whether or not we should take it further,’ Deirdre said.
‘Right,’ Peter said.
‘You do it,’ she said.
He didn’t argue. There was no time for a back-and-forth. He made the call, delivered the news.
‘I’m on the way back in,’ Reilly said. ‘It’s thin, but if tech have nothing for us yet you might as well keep going with it. One of you needs to stay put. Fisher, you go to the Headford Road, see if you can track Kelly down. Deirdre can get on to Lidl, see if she can confirm if Foxford was at work today.’
Peter relayed the orders to Deirdre, took one last glance at the photos of Foxford and Kelly as he pulled on his jacket. They’d only been up on screen for a couple of minutes, and already the images had taken on a malevolence that hadn’t been there a few moments ago. Suddenly Kelly didn’t look like a fisherman nor Foxford like someone’s dad. Instead they both looked like the kind of men who would be cap
able of walking up to a young girl on the street and punching her full in the stomach. And a man who could do that could do anything.
CHAPTER FIVE
Peter headed first for the bank of squad cars, then changed his mind and took an unmarked. On the off chance that Jason Kelly was their man, he didn’t want to spook him into doing something drastic. The car was equipped with lights and a siren, and Peter used them to bully his way through city traffic and out the other side. He didn’t like what he was feeling. This was different from other cases, different even from murder cases. For those, morbidly, there had always been a sense of excitement, a feeling of being on the hunt. Now, he felt only a sense of dread, a sense that the outcome of this case was a foregone conclusion. It was sick-making.
Peter turned off the lights and siren as he drove up Headford Road and took the turn into Ashfort. It was a small estate, sixteen semi-detached houses laid out around a little cul-de-sac. Here there were no flowers planted in borders, no neatly maintained lawns. The houses were smaller, lawns were scrubby and overly long. Most of these houses were probably rentals. They had that lonely, unloved look about them. Jason Kelly’s place was quiet. No car in the driveway, curtains drawn. There wasn’t a garage. Wherever the girl was, and whether or not Kelly had taken her, he wouldn’t find her here.
Peter got out of the car and knocked on the door. No answer. He peered through a window, saw a glimpse of a well-ordered living room through a gap in the curtains. No signs of life. A door opened across the street. Peter turned and watched as a woman ushered two little girls, one dressed like a Disney princess, the other as a witch, down the drive. Both children carried plastic pumpkins. Of course. He’d forgotten about Halloween. The woman opened the car door and the children climbed inside. She was bringing them somewhere else for their trick-or-treating.
The Good Turn Page 3
