‘Can I help you?’
Peter turned. The voice was that of a neighbour, an older man wearing workman’s boots and paint-spattered trousers.
‘I’m looking for Jason,’ Peter said. ‘Have you seen him today?’
‘I haven’t,’ the other man said. He glanced towards the unmarked car, then back at Peter. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘I’d like to speak to him. It’s urgent. Would you have a number for him, Mr . . .?’
‘Loughnane. It’s Francis Loughnane.’ He offered his hand but looked at Peter as if he had twigged that this wasn’t a social call. Was it that obvious? Did he give off a garda vibe? Maybe it was the haircut. It couldn’t be the unmarked car. The powers that be had finally figured out that a fleet of Ford Mondeos with Dublin registration numbers and double antennae was just a bit of a giveaway. These days the reg numbers were a mixed bag, the cars were more varied, and the technology was tucked away out of sight. ‘I don’t have his number,’ Loughnane was saying. ‘Sorry about that. But I don’t really know him well. I suppose we’re both out and about most of the day. We mostly bump into each other when we’re taking the bins out for collection.’
‘Right,’ Peter said. He looked up and down the road, conscious that any pointed questions now would confirm Loughnane’s evident suspicion that something was indeed up, but not wanting to leave empty-handed. ‘Do you know if Mr Kelly is in a relationship? If he has a partner I could call? I really do want to get hold of him today, if possible.’
Loughnane shook his head, and his face was impassive now. Perhaps he had decided that Peter wasn’t a cop after all. Maybe a debt collector.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Can’t help you.’ And with a nod of farewell, he retreated.
Peter made it back to the station at the same time as Cormac Reilly and Rory Mulcair. He walked with them up the stairs, filled Reilly in on the wasted trip. They entered the squad room to the sound of Deirdre Russell’s raised voice, arguing on the telephone.
‘I’m calling you about the abduction of a young girl. You do realise that, right? You’re obstructing our investigation. You’re slowing us down.’ She turned to look at Peter and Reilly as they entered the room, her face a picture of frustration. She put one hand over the receiver, turned her head away from the phone. ‘Lidl,’ she said. ‘Giving me chapter and verse about company policy, privacy and data protection legislation.’
Reilly’s face darkened. ‘They won’t give you anything?’ he said. At her shaken head, he held his hand out for the phone.
‘This is Detective Sergeant Cormac Reilly,’ he said, the receiver pressed to his ear. ‘My badge number is G82 and I work out of Mill Street Station. Do you have that down?’ He waited for a moment before continuing. ‘When all of this is done, if you want someone to make a formal complaint about, I’m your man. But right now, we are trying to find a little girl. We are trying to find her alive. A half-hour now means the difference between us finding her raped and battered body abandoned in a ditch, and bringing that child back safely to her family, so don’t give me any bollox about privacy policies or warrants, or so help me god I will make it my business to ensure that every gurrier in this town knows that Lidl is a free mark. That they can rob you to their heart’s content and not a garda in this county, in this whole fucking country, will lift a finger to stop them.’ Reilly’s face was thunderous, but he wasn’t shouting. His voice was low and intense and ice cold and Peter believed in that moment that he meant every word he said.
‘We will roll out the red carpet for them,’ Reilly continued, biting off every word. ‘And when your bosses in Berlin or Switzerland or wherever the fuck they are, when they come looking for answers as to why their profit is walking out of the back of every warehouse in the land, I’ll be happy to tell them it’s because an officious little prick like you decided to exercise his wee bit of authority, and lost a little girl her life.’
A pause. He was letting it sink in.
‘If you don’t want that to happen, you will tell Garda Russell here everything you know about Michael Foxford and every other employee she should see fit to ask you about. And later, if you’re still worried about covering your arse, we’ll get you your warrant.’
Reilly waited a beat, a moment. He got the response he wanted, said, ‘Right,’ and handed the phone back to Deirdre. ‘Get what we need,’ he said. And he walked out of the room.
After Reilly’s bollocking, Lidl became remarkably cooperative. It took only a few minutes for Deirdre to confirm that Foxford worked at the supermarket in Oranmore, that he’d clocked in at three minutes to nine that morning and was rostered to work until five. They gave her the name of the manager, and a number to call. She put the phone on speaker when she called the manager, who told her that he could see Foxford from where he was standing, and that the man had been working a till all morning. Job done. She hung up and turned back to Peter and Rory, eyes wide.
‘That was out of character, wasn’t it?’ she said.
‘What was?’ Peter said.
She gave him a look. ‘Come on. Reilly’s Mr Calm and Collected. Have you ever seen him go off like that before?’
‘He’s very snappish,’ Rory chipped in. ‘He’s bulling about something.’
‘A girl’s been taken,’ Peter said. ‘We’re all a bit wound up. And maybe we should be.’ He shook his head. ‘Regardless, it worked.’ He turned to Rory. ‘How did you go at the scene? Did you get anything else?’
Rory shook his head. ‘Nothing much. No one saw anything, except the kid. Well, there was no one there to see anything. It’s a ghost town during the day, it seems. Everyone but the kid’s mother and the old lady next door were out.’
Peter grimaced. It wasn’t a surprise but it was disappointing. He took a seat at a desk, logged in and returned to his Jason Kelly research. He found more photographs of fishing trips. Started trying to link them to specific locations. Where did Jason Kelly like to spend his time? Reilly returned to the room before he’d made much progress.
‘How did you go?’ Reilly asked.
‘Foxford is off the list,’ Deirdre said, and quickly updated him.
Reilly nodded. ‘The task force is out in Westport for the night,’ he said grimly. ‘We won’t see any resources back with us until tomorrow at the earliest. It will be Monday before we’re up to full complement, best case scenario, and I can’t tell how long we’ll have people for before they’re pulled out again. General operations for our district have been officially transferred to Salthill until then. We’re handling the reported abduction, but all other calls will continue to be diverted.’ He turned to Fisher. ‘Call the lads downstairs. See where they are.’
Peter made the call to the technical team, was told that they’d been unable to enhance the plate and had sent the tablet off to the team in Dublin to see what they could do with it. They assured him that they’d done their best and had now turned to running the partial plate through the ANPR. Peter passed the message along to Reilly who shook his head and didn’t look up. Peter went back to his Jason Kelly searches, found little else of interest. His feeling of discomfort was growing. He’d done precisely nothing to help this case along. He’d taken his time responding to the call in the first place, dawdled along with his window down, enjoying the sunshine. His trip to Ashfort had been a waste of time, and Reilly was behaving in a way that was completely out of character. The bollocking he’d given the Lidl guy, for example. It might have been satisfying to hear, and it had certainly worked, but Reilly would usually be the first person to say they needed to find a way to be effective without resorting to that kind of intimidation.
The phone on Deirdre’s desk rang. She picked it up, listened for a moment, then transferred the call to Reilly. Peter couldn’t help but listen in. Moments later he gave up any pretence of doing anything else. Reilly put down the phone after a terse conversation, then stood up, already reaching for his jacket.
‘We’ve had a missing person’s repor
t. Girl’s name is Peggah Abbassi. She’s twelve years old. She was at home with her father, Amir, all day. Her mother was at work in town. Peggah went out to walk her dog, a white West Highland terrier, and she hasn’t come back.’ When he mentioned the dog, Reilly nodded in Peter’s direction, an acknowledgement, Peter supposed, that Fred’s statement had been straight down the line of every detail so far.
‘I’m going out to meet with the family,’ Reilly said. ‘Keep doing what you’re doing, and keep me posted.’ Fisher expected to be asked along for the interview, almost rose out of his chair, but Reilly sent the nod to Mulcair. Peter subsided back into his chair, sure he’d made his expectations obvious, feeling stupid and frustrated.
CHAPTER SIX
Cormac nearly brought Deirdre Russell with him for the family interview. She was a good officer, committed, experienced and, when her face wasn’t bruised and battered, she looked more like a kindergarten teacher than a policewoman. There was a warmth about her too that people responded to, and that was the message he wanted to send to the family from the moment they stepped inside the door. Here are friends. Here are allies. We are not here to examine you, to accuse you, to peer inside your every relationship and to pry apart your every secret. Deirdre Russell’s pretty face and her natural charm would have broadcast that reassurance every moment she was in the house, which would have freed him up to get what he needed. But the stitches in her lip and the bruising around her mouth would have the opposite effect to the one he wanted, so Deirdre wasn’t an option. He would have liked to have taken Fisher. He had a little less experience, maybe, but he was more confident, more likely to use his own initiative and seek out solutions. If they were to have any chance of a good outcome they would need all of that in spades. But Fisher was needed at the station. Which left him with Rory Mulcair. Rory was all right, but he was too young, too self-conscious and too self-critical to be much use in the upcoming interview.
Cormac tried to swallow back his still-burning anger, to take a breath and calm down. He couldn’t allow himself to go into a family interview like this. He clenched his fists. There was a shake in his hands from the adrenaline and fury that he’d managed – just – to contain in Murphy’s office. None of this made sense. Brian Murphy was a politician. He protected himself and his own interests first and foremost, yes, but he wasn’t stupid and he wasn’t a monster. This was a child abduction. Murphy should be throwing every resource under his command at a case like this. He should be working the phones, pulling in support from other districts, shining a great big light on every area of this city and as much of the surrounding countryside as they could cover. Instead he was trying to bury it. Ignore it. Why? What the hell was Murphy playing at?
‘Jesus.’ Rory Mulcair braked suddenly and swore under his breath as a BMW, slow to move out of the way despite the siren, blocked their progress through a set of lights. Rory pushed the squad car up close, too close, touched the bumper, all but nudging the other car out of the way.
‘Easy, Mulcair,’ Cormac said. He braced himself in his seat as Rory pulled away from the lights, and used his phone to run a search on the family. He found nothing at all on Peggah Abbassi, but then she was too young for social media. Nothing much for her father either. There was a LinkedIn profile that might be the same Amir Abbassi, listing him as a senior project manager for Medtronic.
They pulled in outside the house – it was unremarkable, a nice-looking detached two-storey in a row of similar houses – and Cormac was out and moving almost before Rory had brought the car to a complete stop. Rory had to jog a few steps to catch him as they approached the front door, which opened as soon as Cormac’s finger made contact with the doorbell. A woman opened it. She was attractive, elegantly dressed in tailored trousers, her hair hidden behind a patterned headscarf. Her worried eyes flicked to his face, to Rory, then back again.
‘Are you police? Have you found her? Have you found my daughter?’
‘We haven’t found her yet, Mrs Abbassi, but we’re working quickly.’ Cormac held out his hand, shook hers, introduced himself and Rory. ‘We’d like to talk to you, inside would be better.’
She led the way into the house, through a tidy hall and into the living room beyond, where a man was waiting.
‘My husband, Amir,’ she said, by way of introduction.
Amir Abbassi looked at them, but Cormac wasn’t sure if he saw them. He had never seen a man look more terrified. Amir was sitting on the couch utterly still, as if any movement would set off a catastrophe from which he would never recover.
‘Would you mind if we sit for a minute, Mrs Abbassi?’ Cormac asked. ‘We need to run through some questions with you. I know you want to find Peggah as quickly as possible and we want to do that for you. But we’ll need your help. I know how difficult this is, but . . .’
Mrs Abbassi held up a hand to silence him. ‘My name is Lena. Call me Lena, please. And ask your questions. Ask any question. We will do everything, anything, to get her back.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
Peter dug back into his work on Jason Kelly, clicked through his angling pals’ social media accounts, trying to find references to Kelly, to anywhere he might work. His phone rang – caller ID showed it was Mark from the tech team.
‘This is Fisher.’
‘We’ve had a hit on the ANPR for a black Volkswagen Passat with the partial you gave us, heading out on the Clifden Road about forty minutes ago.’
The Clifden Road was on the other side of the city from Fred Fletcher’s house. Peter looked at his watch. It had been more than five hours since the reported abduction. Plenty of time.
‘So it passed through camera SG23 at exactly four twenty-two p.m., just past Glenlo Abbey,’ Mark said. ‘The full reg number is 12 G 456.’
Peter took the number down. ‘Hang on a second.’ He turned to Deirdre. ‘Can you call Oughterard Station? See if they can get a roadblock up on the Clifden Road immediately. They’re looking for a black Volkswagen Passat with this reg.’
Deirdre nodded and Peter turned back to his phone call.
‘The next camera’s at Oughterard,’ Mark was saying. ‘We think we’ve got half an hour before he reaches Oughterard, assuming he stays on the main road. But I’ve got the map open here in front of me. He’s got a lot of options. I’m counting . . . I see at least sixteen side roads he could take between where our camera picked him up and Oughterard.’
Peter had the phone tucked under one ear, his hands working the keyboard. He brought up an online map of the area and could see what Mark was talking about. Any of the left turns off the Clifden Road would bring the Volkswagen into hilly farmland, plenty of houses. A right turn would bring him through wetter, boggier and less populated land for a little while, then onward ultimately to Lough Corrib.
‘What can we do?’ Peter said. ‘How do we track him if he turns off?’
‘We don’t have any magic satellite answers, if that’s what you’re asking me,’ Mark said. ‘If he turns off, our best chance is getting the chopper down to search for him. After that our only option is men on the ground, I suppose.’
Except that they didn’t have any. Peter thanked Mark and hung up, just as Deirdre finished her conversation with Oughterard Station.
‘They’re going to set up the roadblock. There are only two of them there, but they’re going to shut down the station to do it.’
‘That’s good,’ he said. His hands were busy on his keyboard, pulling up Jason Kelly’s registration number.
‘They wanted to know if there was backup on the way. I didn’t want to say no. It makes us sound . . . I don’t know . . .’
‘Incompetent?’ Peter said.
‘I don’t know,’ she said again.
Peter’s screen finally served up Kelly’s reg number. He leaned forward, tapped the screen.
‘It’s him. It’s Jason Kelly in that car.’
They stared at the map in silence. It was after five o’clock now. It was getting dark outside, and awa
y from the lights of the city it would be darker still. Peter imagined the twists and turns. In his mind’s eye he could see that black Volkswagen, snaking through the silent back roads, swallowed up by the landscape.
‘He’s going to turn off,’ Peter said abruptly. ‘Kelly’s a fisherman. He must know the area. He’s going to the lake. Maybe he has a place he can bring her.’
Deirdre shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but we don’t have any evidence that Kelly has the girl. We only have a partial match from the video. It might have been someone else’s car. And Peter, even if he does have her, what can we do about it?’ She gestured around the empty room. ‘There’s no one here but us.’
Peter picked up the phone, dialled Reilly’s mobile number, listened to the ringtone as the call rang out.
‘Shite.’
‘He’s not answering?’
Peter shook his head. He tried Rory’s number, got the same result.
‘They’re tied up with the family,’ Deirdre said. ‘Phones on mute.’
‘We need to get a helicopter out there, right now.’
‘You could ask the Super,’ Deirdre said.
Neither of them said anything for a long moment. Peter stood up, hesitated.
‘We have to try,’ Deirdre said. ‘Do you want me to . . .?’
‘No, I’ll do it.’
Peter moved quickly down the corridor. He knocked briskly on the door to Brian Murphy’s office, waited, but there was no answer. He tried the door, but it was locked. There was an office next door with civilian admin staff. He tried there. Knocked and opened the door, leaned in.
‘I’m looking for the boss,’ he said. ‘Is he about?’
The sole occupant of the room, a very thin woman with frizzy over-dyed red hair, was typing from dictation at her desk. She removed her headphones and looked at him inquiringly.
‘Is the boss about?’ Peter asked again. He couldn’t remember her name. Was it Fran? Something like that.
The Good Turn Page 4
