‘If you’re going to take this further, then it would be better to work together, I think,’ Maude said.
At that the pager started to buzz. Aisling muted it. Her head ached. ‘Maybe I’m just in denial. I don’t want Jack to have killed himself, but murder? There’s just no way. But we do need the gardaí to look at this properly, just for peace of mind.’ It sounded like a plea. She tried to make her voice stronger, more confident. ‘There’s a garda ombudsman, I think, that you can go to with complaints.’
Maude shook her head firmly. ‘I have evidence,’ she said. ‘Evidence that I think proves that the story the police gave us is bullshit.’
Aisling felt hot, then cold. ‘What sort of evidence?’
Maude smiled for the first time. ‘The best kind. Video.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was Peter Fisher who first mentioned the case. Cormac was on his way back from a late lunch and met him in the stairwell.
‘I hear you’ve caught one,’ said Fisher.
Cormac raised an eyebrow.
‘The super wants you in his office. Looks like you’ve picked one up.’
Cormac tried to hide his relief, but knew he had failed when Fisher gave him an encouraging grin. Fuck’s sake. Cormac gave him a brisk nod of acknowledgement and restrained himself from taking the rest of the stairs two at a time. He felt the same rush of excitement and adrenalin he always felt, this time complicated by a need to prove himself that he hadn’t experienced in years.
Cormac knocked on the door of Brian Murphy’s office. He didn’t wait, but opened the door and entered. A pair of cycling shoes and a helmet sat on a shelf. Murphy was ten years older than Cormac, but he was probably in better shape. He was lean, very lean, and fit, and kept his thinning hair cut close to his scalp.
He was sitting behind his desk, and he raised one hand in a wait gesture, while he finished reading whatever was on his screen. His desk – oversized, but standard-issue white melamine – was immaculate, and completely free of paper. The computer screen, keyboard and phone were pushed slightly to Murphy’s right, and a grey cold-case file box sat on the far left of the desk. Shite. Another bloody cold case. Murphy looked up.
‘Reilly,’ he said. ‘Take a seat.’ He opened the cold-case box and took out a thin file. ‘Settling in?’ he asked, then continued without waiting for a reply. ‘Not missing the elite confines of Dublin Castle, are you?’
‘No, sir,’ said Cormac. Of course he bloody missed it. He’d been the youngest garda ever admitted to the Special Detective Unit, and he’d made a success of it. Requesting the transfer had seemed logical to him at the time. The peace process had been successful. A ceasefire had been in place for years, and the unit was a shadow of its former self. There were new threats, of course, but it was obvious to the dogs on the street that the anti-terrorist unit was about to be restructured, which really meant down-sized.
And then there was Emma. She was a research scientist. A biologist. When she’d won a highly prestigious grant from the European Research Council he’d been there with champagne on ice. When she’d explained that the grant was worth three million a year, and was intended to fund the cost of eight researchers who would work under Emma on a project she had designed, he had been delighted for her. And when she’d explained that the lab was at the university in Galway, he had, he thought, been effective in hiding his dismay. When he’d ultimately decided to look for a transfer out of the Special Detectives Unit to Galway Operations, a step down in the eyes of everyone who knew anything about it, there had been the predictable slagging. Plenty of ‘whipped’ comments. Cormac didn’t give a shit. The fact that the unit would likely be restructured within the year took the pain out of it, but he would have made the decision either way. In the face of Emma’s concerns that he would miss Dublin and his job, he’d been unrelentingly optimistic, and reality had taken time to hit. But after a month working on no-hoper cold cases – a month of returning to an empty flat, with Emma working late on some project deadline or other, a month during which the rain pissed down relentlessly every day – regret was beginning to kick in with a vengeance.
‘I’ve heard good things about you, Reilly,’ the Super was saying. ‘You’ve done very well.’ And that was patronising as fuck. Was the intent to needle him? Or to poke and measure him by his reaction? He didn’t know enough about Murphy to be sure. Brian Murphy was more administrator than cop, and that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Word on the street was that he was good at his job, a straight shooter, or at least as much of one as the job would allow. Cormac still wondered how he handled having his son work out of the same station, while said son hung out of Anthony Healy’s pocket. It couldn’t be comfortable for him. Under normal circumstances, Trevor would never have been able to work out of a station that was under his father’s command, but as the National Drugs Unit reported up to the Assistant Commissioner, Crime and Security, rather than through the Western Region command structure, Trevor wasn’t technically under his father’s leadership. Murphy Senior had to know about Healy’s reputation, but if he felt the pressure of the situation he’d hid it well.
‘You know your transfer here is part of a broader effort to decentralise some of our specialist skills, out of elite units, and back into operations. The intent is that you share, particularly with your younger colleagues, some of what you learned in the SDU. But of course, we do things differently in Galway, so you will have to adjust, and learn to follow our processes.’ He paused, looked at Cormac as if considering him deeply. ‘I’ve no doubt, with your level of commitment, you’ll be one of our top men in no time.’
‘Yes sir.’ Christ almighty. He’d seen nothing yet that impressed him about Galway’s best detectives.
‘You’re about to get a little busier,’ Murphy said, and he opened the file on his desk.
‘Sir?’
The file looked old but in good condition. An elastic band had been placed around it at some point, but it had rotted off, leaving only an outline on the cardboard. As Murphy opened the file, Cormac saw that it contained no more than twenty or thirty pages.
‘Hilaria Blake,’ Murphy said. ‘You investigated her death.’
‘I . . . what?’
‘On the twenty-first of February 1993, you went to a house in answer to a call. When you got there you found two children and their dead mother. The dead woman was Hilaria Blake.’ Murphy closed the file and pushed it across the desk to Cormac. ‘Your notes are unusually complete, given your inexperience at the time. I gather you had suspicions about the death. You thought it may have been something other than an accidental overdose.’
Cormac hesitated, then opened the file. He scanned the first page as memories came flooding back. ‘It was a call out for a domestic dispute, or at least, that’s what we thought. I wouldn’t have been sent out otherwise, I was so green.’ He looked up from the file. ‘My concerns – I raised those questions with my superior back in ’93. He did not agree. The case has been closed for twenty years.’ Cormac thought back, remembering the response of . . . what was the guy’s name? It was gone. He could recall very clearly though the complete lack of interest in carrying out any sort of investigation. If it hadn’t been for him a file might not even have been opened. And he’d been directed to bring the thing to an end in no time at all.
In truth there had been nothing to go on. Nothing except Cormac’s gut feeling that something worse than the obvious had been going on in that house, and the fact that the postmortem indicated that Hilaria Blake had not been a habitual heroin user.
‘I want you to reopen the file,’ Murphy said.
Cormac said nothing, but stared at his new boss, waiting. There must be something more.
‘Jack Blake, the boy you found that night, is dead. He appears to have committed suicide. But his sister . . . ah . . . Maude . . . has returned to Galway. As I understand it, she ran away on the night of her mother’s death. Now she has returned and her brother is dead also, again in suspicious c
ircumstances. I want this looked into. And you are the best man for the job.’
‘Sir, I’m flattered . . .’
‘Are you?’ Murphy cut across him. ‘This is not a compliment to your abilities, Detective. You are simply in the right place at the right time. You are the only person in this station who was present at the time of Hilaria Blake’s death – you worked out of Swinford at the time, is that right?’ He didn’t wait for Cormac’s nod. ‘You met the children. You carried out at least some sort of preliminary investigation. You are, after all, an experienced detective. I am reopening this case and I want you to run the investigation.’
Cormac turned the pages on the file, scanning its content, looking for something new, something that could have prompted Murphy to call in a twenty-year-old suspicious death file. He saw forms filled in with his own writing, reports signed by him, hospital records, and postmortem results, but nothing new. And nothing to link what should be a Mayo investigation to Galway, except of course Jack Blake’s death.
‘Talk to me about this woman, about Maude Blake,’ Murphy said. ‘What do you know about her?’
‘I’ve nothing to tell you sir. I don’t know anything about her,’ Cormac said. ‘I was with her for about three hours, twenty years ago. She wasn’t much more than a child.’
‘She’s not a child now,’ said Murphy. ‘She’s a woman of some means apparently. She lives somewhere in Australia, or at least, that’s where she flew in from. She’s staying in an expensive hotel. So the question I have is, how does a fifteen year old with no family and no money flee the country and not just survive but apparently, thrive?’
‘I have no idea, but she’d hardly be the first from difficult circumstances to make the most of her life.’ Cormac kept his tone cool, though he felt a surge of irritation.
‘You recognised her.’
‘Sir?’
‘You saw her coming out of the family room, and you told Garda McIntyre that you knew her.’
Mystery woman. Of course. He was surprised he had recognised her at all, after twenty years. But that night, and Maude, had stayed with him for a long time. And Danny’d gone off his own bat to find out who she was. Probably thought he was doing him a favour. Fucking Danny.
‘I didn’t recognise her. I thought that she looked familiar. I don’t know anything about who she is today. I met her when she was a girl, a teenager. She called the station and I was asked to respond to the call. We weren’t expecting to find . . . what I found. I took her and her little brother to the hospital. That’s it really.’
Murphy waited.
‘She disappeared from the hospital. Left her brother behind.’ Cormac paused, thinking again about the little boy’s despair. Had Maude ever come back to see him? ‘In the postmortem report the pathologist said that the mother – Hilaria – did not show any signs of using heroin, that that night may have been her first time. She was an alcoholic and had advanced liver disease.’
‘You clearly had suspicions of foul play,’ Murphy said, gesturing to the file.
‘I raised it with my DS at the time,’ Cormac said. ‘I felt that it was a suspicious death and we should make further enquiries. He disagreed.’ Cormac paused. ‘The little boy was in a bad state. Hilaria Blake was very obviously not a model mother. There was no appetite for an investigation. Different times.’
They had been, truly, different times. In 1993, Brendan Smyth, a former priest and notorious child abuser, was still on the run in Ireland, the true extent of his crimes not known. The documentaries, States of Fear and Suing the Pope, which did so much to prompt long overdue government inquiries had not yet been screened, and those inquiries had not yet been held. In the twenty years since the Blake case, Ireland had woken up, but Cormac could remember the days when the welfare of a child was not the first consideration in a child protection case, when investigating the death of an unmarried mother and drug addict would never have been high on the garda agenda.
‘Sir, are you suggesting that Maude Blake may have had something to do with her brother’s death?’
‘I don’t believe I said that, detective, and I’m not implying it either. Do you understand?’
Cormac nodded, the only acceptable response in the face of bureaucratic bullshit. None of this made sense and Murphy had to know that as well as he did. Wasn’t it Jack’s death had prompted this investigation? ‘Am I to look into Jack Blake’s death?’ he asked.
‘That investigation is being handled by other officers,’ Murphy said. ‘And you are to leave that work to them.’
Cormac kept his face blank. Murphy must suspect Maude. Why else would he have started looking into her past? But if that was the case it made no sense to split the investigation. Murphy was watching him, Cormac realised. Reading him, or trying to.
Murphy slapped one hand on his desk, as if punctuating his decision. ‘I want you on this case, Reilly,’ he said. ‘You are the investigating officer. You decide when to bring Blake in, when to question her. Is that understood?’
The phrasing was odd. Did Murphy think Cormac would shirk the case, try to palm it off on a subordinate? He had no intention of it. Murphy might be an asshole – that remained to be seen – but if he was, he was the asshole Cormac had to impress if he wanted to keep his career.
‘Yes, sir.’
Murphy dropped the file back into the box, and pushed it in Cormac’s direction.
‘Preliminary report by Friday please, Detective Sergeant.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cormac walked out of the office, thinking about the little boy he had last seen in a hospital room twenty years before. He’d kept track of Jack for some time and had been relieved when he was told that Jack had gone straight from hospital to a foster family. Relieved, and surprised that a family had been found so quickly. The foster family had gone on to adopt Jack, and it had really seemed that he had every chance of leaving his childhood behind him. If he had killed himself, that was a tragedy. Maybe the abuse he’d suffered had hurt him too much, had come back to destroy him in the end.
Cormac dropped the file on his desk and flipped it open. If Murphy thought there was a chance Jack had been murdered, why hadn’t he put Cormac on that case, instead of a twenty-year-old suspicious death that had long since been written off as an accidental overdose? There was an agenda at play here, but whatever it was wasn’t clear. Cormac looked towards the other end of the room, then closed the file and walked over. The place was almost empty. The drugs unit must be out on a job, everyone but Danny. Carrie O’Halloran, the man-hater, was seated at a desk in the corner, her head bent over her paperwork.
Danny didn’t look up at Cormac’s approach. Cormac put one hand on Danny’s desk, lowered his voice and spoke almost into his ear.
‘I just had an interesting little chat with our friend Murphy.’
Danny jumped. ‘Jesus.’
Cormac just looked at him.
‘About?’
‘About Maude Blake. I think you’ve dropped me in it. I’ve got yet another cold case because Murphy thinks I have some sort of inside knowledge.’
Danny’s face flushed. ‘You’re investigating her brother’s suicide?’
‘I bloody wish. No. Cold cases only for me it seems. I’m looking into Hilaria Blake’s death. A twenty-year-old accidental death. Heroin overdose.’
Danny looked confused for a moment, as well he might. The flush faded slowly from his cheeks. ‘Sorry mate. All I did was ask Rodgers who he was talking to. He asked who wanted to know, I said you thought you’d recognised her.’
Cormac sat on the desk beside Danny’s. ‘I’m missing something,’ he said. ‘Murphy didn’t come right out and say it, but he suggested that there’s something suspicious about Jack Blake’s death. I got the impression that’s what prompted Murphy’s sudden interest in Hilaria Blake. But if that was it then why am I on the cold case?’
Danny shook his head. ‘I heard it was suicide. Pretty cut and dry.’
‘You haven�
�t heard anything else?’
‘Sorry. Maybe you took Murphy up wrong?’
‘Maybe.’
Danny was distracted, Cormac realised. He looked tired, strained.
‘Any news on Lorna?’
Danny shook his head. ‘Nothing. I’ve tried calling that friend I spoke to but she’s not answering her phone.’
‘You’re worried?’
Danny shook his head. ‘No. Paranoid maybe, because of all the bullshit, but I know she’s fine.’
Danny had lowered his voice, and he glanced around the room as he spoke. He didn’t want to get into it there, and Cormac couldn’t blame him.
‘Where’s the rest of the task force?’ Cormac asked.
Danny checked his watch. ‘They’re down in the case room, planning an operation. It’s the same thing we worked through yesterday, and the day before that,’ he said. ‘Healy likes to over-prepare.’
‘Is there a problem?’
Danny met his eyes. ‘If you mean am I not Mr Popular with the unit, nothing new there.’
‘Do you want to do something about that?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like tell me whatever you have on Anthony Healy. Let me do something about it.’
Danny grimaced, shook his head. ‘If I did know something, and I’m not saying I do, I’d torpedo my career if I talked about it. Anthony Healy and Trevor Murphy are thick as thieves. I go to Internal Affairs about Healy’ – he held up one hand, palm facing Cormac – ‘if I had something that is, and apart from getting that reputation so that no cop trusts me again, Trevor goes straight to his daddy. Where would that leave me?’
The Ruin Page 8
