No Easy Answer

by Valerie Keogh

  ‘That’s not good enough,’ she said. ‘I’m taking this to your superior officer.’

  West pointed to the stairway behind. ‘First floor, second door on your right. Inspector Morrison, I’m sure, would be delighted to listen to you.’

  West was smiling as he left the station and sat into Andrews’ car in the car park.

  ‘She backed down, did she?’ Andrews asked, starting the engine.

  ‘No, she didn’t. She’s off to complain to the inspector.’

  Andrews was still chuckling when they pulled up on the driveway of Doris Whitaker’s house.

  40

  Doris Whitaker’s house was an early twentieth-century two-storey building with little charm. The windows, two down and three up, were small and the front door, set back in a darkened porchway, looked uninviting. Gardens spread each way from the central gravelled drive, giving that long road frontage which had added so much value to the property.

  West got out of the car and looked around. There was a pervading air of neglect about it all that said no care had been given or money spent on it for a long time. The gardens were a dense tangle of briars and bindweed; paint was peeling off the wooden windows, darker areas hinting at rot.

  ‘They’ll simply knock the house down and develop the site,’ he said as he and Andrews crossed to join Baxter, Edwards and a subdued Lynda Checkley who were waiting by the front door.

  ‘Did Doris keep the windows shuttered or is that your work?’ West asked her.

  ‘Every window is shuttered, and there are also heavy curtains. You’ll see why when we go in.’

  Andrews, rolling his eyes, stepped closer to West, and muttered, ‘I bet this turns out to be the biggest anticlimax ever. Doris probably stole underwear from the neighbours’ clothes lines or something equally trivial.’

  ‘Not that we would ever consider the theft of any items to be trivial, of course, but I think you’re wrong, Pete. Whatever she’s seen inside, it’s thrown her.’

  ‘Underwear or something along those lines. I bet you a pint.’

  ‘It’s a bet.’ West checked his watch. ‘Where’s that blasted solicitor?’

  It was another five minutes before Bradshaw’s highly polished BMW pulled into the driveway. ‘I apologise,’ he said, getting out. ‘I got caught up with a client who doesn’t understand the meaning of I can’t speak now.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have answered your phone,’ Andrews said bluntly. ‘I find that works for me.’

  West saw irritation flare in the solicitor’s face and held up a hand. ‘You’re here now, so perhaps we should get on with whatever this is.’ He looked at Lynda. ‘You have the key?’

  She reached into her jacket pocket, pulled out a small set of keys and handed them over. ‘It’s the gold-coloured one.’

  West singled out the correct key, stepped into the dark, uninviting, covered porchway and slid it into the lock. It turned easily and he pushed the door open. Meeting resistance, he turned to Lynda. ‘Is there stuff piled behind?’

  ‘No, but she has a daily newspaper delivered. I haven’t cancelled it.’

  The papers had collected on the floor catching on the bottom of the door as West pushed. ‘Can you squeeze through?’

  ‘Probably.’ She wriggled through the space and a moment later, the door opened fully and she stood there clutching a pile of newspapers.

  The hallway behind her was wide and spacious, but tall stacks of newspapers, boxes and other paraphernalia filled it on either side leaving only a narrow passageway through it into the house. Lynda reached to place the newspapers she was holding on top of the nearest pile and waved a hand around. ‘I did tell you.’

  She hadn’t told them about the heat. It came at them in wafts; hot stale air that settled heavily and instantly squeezed out beads of sweat. When they were all inside, West reluctantly shut the front door. ‘You left the heating on full?’

  ‘Doris always kept the house like an oven. I thought it was because she was old and didn’t have much flesh on her, you know. I used to wear a T-shirt when I came to visit and I’d still be melting.’

  West felt beads of perspiration ping on his forehead. ‘But why didn’t you turn it off since?’

  Her face tightened. ‘You’ll see why.’

  Edel would probably have enjoyed the mysteriousness of Lynda’s replies but he was quickly tiring of it. Perhaps Andrews was right and it would be much ado about nothing. West peered down the narrow passage. Even on a sunny day, little light would have found its way from the small window above the front door and that day it was dull and cloudy. ‘Is there a light?’

  ‘Yes, hang on.’ Lynda’s hand slid along the wall. The click of the light switch was loud but the response was dismal. A single unshaded bulb hanging halfway down the hallway did little to brighten the gloom.

  Baxter and Edwards were quick to take out their mobiles and switch on the torch apps and soon beams of light criss-crossed the hallway. ‘I’ve heard of people hoarding,’ Baxter said, awestruck. He shone the light over the clutter. ‘But this is surreal.’

  ‘Okay,’ West said to Lynda. ‘Which way?’

  ‘The kitchen where we used to sit is down on the right. But you need to see the dining room. It’s at the back of the house.’ She pointed forward, angling her hand to the left like a flight attendant pointing out emergency doors. ‘This way, but be careful, some of the piles are very unstable.’

  ‘Can’t we turn off that damn heating?’ Bradshaw was holding a white handkerchief to his face and patting it.

  ‘Not a good idea,’ she said. ‘You’ll see why soon.’

  They moved off, a single file snaking through the shoulder-high towers of rubbish. The passageway was narrow, designed to accommodate the slighter frame of Doris Whitaker, not the bulky frames of the men. They hadn’t moved far when Edwards yelled out in alarm as a stalagmite of empty Tetra packs keeled over. Baxter brought his torch around to see his partner flailing about. ‘You okay?’

  ‘No, I’m not bloody well okay,’ Edwards said, kicking the flattened cartons out of his way and looking up in alarm as another pile moved ominously.

  ‘We’re nearly there,’ Lynda said, proving her point by stopping in front of a door a few seconds later. ‘This is it.’ She turned her head to look at them. ‘I know you all think I’m being a drama queen, making a big fuss about nothing.’ She laid a hand on the door, red nails splayed across the unpainted pine. ‘But what we saw in here… what we had to do… it’s haunting me.’ Her hand slid down to the doorknob. With a loud, indrawn breath, she twisted it and flung the door open.

  41

  After the overwhelming clutter they’d gone through to get there, West’s first thought was that even in the dim light the room appeared remarkably tidy.

  It was dominated by a huge table; three high-backed chairs to each side, a matching carver at each end. The windows, as Lynda had warned them, were obscured by heavy floor-to-ceiling curtains. Only the light from the two mobiles broke through the darkness, the beams sliding around the room, showing little, hiding more.

  ‘It all looks unremarkable,’ West said. But despite the heat he felt a chill crawl through him to tighten his gut and narrow his eyes. Something very bad had taken place in this room.

  Lynda’s laugh bordered on the hysterical. ‘Oh yes, it all looks very innocent in the dark!’ She slid a hand along the wall to feel for the light switch. ‘But what about now?’

  A gasp of disbelief can be surprisingly loud when it comes from five men simultaneously.

  ‘I can’t…’ Bradshaw tried to speak, then gagged. Holding his hand over his mouth he made a swift return down the hallway. They heard him yell out as he stumbled on the fallen Tetra packs, and the clearly spoken and surprisingly colourful invectives he used as he made his way from the building.

  ‘That was my reaction the first time,’ Lynda said. ‘It’s amazing how quickly the mind adapts.’

  Four of the eight chairs were occupied. The ends of
shrivelled arms poked from shirtsleeves to rest on the dust-covered table and dried, twisted fingers gripped dull silver cutlery. Over the years, shrinking tendons and ligaments had tightened their grip, raising the cutlery so that some pointed towards the ceiling. As if they were all anticipating a good meal.

  None of the bodies had heads.

  ‘Bloody hell. There.’ Baxter pointed to the far side of the room where four skulls sat on the mantelpiece of an elaborate fireplace.

  Usually, West’s first thought would be to preserve the crime scene. But the crimes that had been committed in this room had happened a long time ago. ‘I assume this is where the four bodies you dumped in the recycling centre came from.’

  Lynda looked at him in surprise. ‘You found them?’ She barked a laugh. ‘Yes, this is where we found them. I told Darragh that it was a crazy idea but he wouldn’t listen and insisted it was the safest place to get rid of them.’ She waved a hand around the macabre scene. ‘What do you think of your sweet little old lady now, gentlemen?’

  West walked around the table. There was a certain ghoulish fascination about the display. He looked across to Lynda. ‘The bodies you found were in the other chairs?’

  ‘Two were sitting in the same way as these. The other two were on that.’ She pointed to a chaise longue against the far wall. ‘They were posed.’

  ‘Posed?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her mouth twisted as she tried to deal with the memory. ‘Each had an arm around the other as if they’d been embracing and that would have been okay, maybe even a little sweet. But the man’s hand was on her breast, and her hand was resting on his genital area so that the overall impression was of something tawdry.’

  West met Andrews’ eyes. ‘Lovers? Maybe that’s why their skulls were left beside St Valentine.’

  ‘I found a diary in Doris’s bedroom,’ Lynda said. ‘It doesn’t explain why she did this but it does reference her husband having an affair. He wanted to leave Doris and take the children with him. She was distraught.’

  ‘Looks like she got her revenge,’ Edwards said, dragging his eyes away from the scene. ‘We know the bodies we have are her husband and two children and we can probably assume now that the woman was the one he was having the affair with but…’ He waved a hand around the dusty table. ‘Who are they?’

  Baxter was the first to notice something strange. ‘Look at their clothes,’ he said, pointing to one of the bodies. ‘That’s a Foo Fighters T-shirt. They weren’t formed until 1994.’

  Edwards, standing near the carver chair at the end, looked down at the occupant. A flash of colour on the shrivelled wrist caught his eye. ‘What year did Pandora bracelets become fashionable?’

  It was Lynda who answered. ‘2001… or around about then.’

  West looked around the table with a sinking feeling. Had they stumbled upon the oldest serial killer in history?

  He tried to gather his scrambled thoughts. ‘Okay, so this might be more of an active crime scene that we’d first thought.’ He looked to Baxter and Edwards. ‘Call it in. We’ll need the usual suspects, the garda technical team and the state pathologist.’

  ‘Why didn’t you report this?’ Andrews asked Lynda.

  ‘Because Darragh has creditors snapping at his heels and he needed to get this place sold. All this–’ she waved a hand around the room, ‘–it might have delayed things for weeks, months even. He didn’t want to risk it.’

  ‘So, you chopped the bodies up and disposed of them like rubbish.’ Andrews’ voice was caustic. ‘You didn’t think they were entitled to a proper burial.’ He pointed to what were likely to be more recent bodies. ‘That the families of those poor people wouldn’t want to know what happened to their loved ones.’

  ‘We were in shock,’ she said, her voice a whisper. ‘It made us act out of character.’

  West looked at her. Which was the real Lynda, the hard-faced and manipulative woman or the vulnerable and easily dominated one? He guessed whichever would get her out of this mess. ‘You’d better come up with a more convincing argument, Mrs Checkley. There’ll be no place for your diamonds in Mountjoy jail.’

  Her expression tightened, flint in the glance she threw at West. ‘It was Darragh’s idea.’ She jabbed a finger at him. ‘All of it. He pressured me to go along with it.’

  Taking advantage of her sudden desire to pin everything on her husband, West asked, ‘And the murder of Muriel Hennessy?’

  Murder was a word that brought even the toughest down to reality and Lynda Checkley may have been self-obsessed and manipulative but she wasn’t tough. She flinched. ‘Murder… I…’

  ‘Premeditated murder,’ Andrews added with a certain amount of enjoyment. ‘You’ll get used to things in Mountjoy… after a few years.’

  Her eyes flicked between them, horror dawning at the implication.

  West thought he could see the exact moment when she’d decided she’d sacrifice anything… anyone… to prevent spending time in prison.

  ‘That was Darragh’s idea too. I was to drive along Torquay Road at a specific time and identify the body I’d find there as Doris and tell the guards that it had been a hit-and-run.’ Lynda wrapped her arms about herself. ‘It was all his doing. I have no idea where he found the woman, or how he killed her.’ She dropped her chin to her chest and muttered, ‘I never asked.’

  Baxter arrived back. ‘The pathologist and the tech team will be here within the hour.’

  ‘Good. Okay, take Mrs Checkley back to the station.’ West turned to Lynda. ‘We’ll need you to write a statement about what you’ve told us and your part in all of this.’

  ‘It will help, if I do, won’t it? You know, if I stand witness against Darragh, they’ll take that into account, won’t they?’ Desperation added a hint of pleading to her words. If she realised, she didn’t care. She’d seen the future as Andrews had painted it and she was going to do anything not to face it.

  West fought to keep the contempt from his voice. ‘Your solicitor is outside; I’d advise you speak to him. We’re not in the position to make promises.’

  42

  ‘She is some piece of work,’ Andrews said when they were alone.

  ‘Two of a kind, her and her husband.’ West pulled off his jacket and loosened his tie. ‘We’ve had some weird cases, Peter, but this one… it beats them all.’

  ‘Lynda was right about leaving the heat on though. I guess if the temperature dropped, these mummies might start to disintegrate.’ He did a circle of the table, stopping to stare at each of the remaining four bodies. ‘How did Doris get away with it?’ He glanced down at the bracelet Edwards had noticed. ‘If Lynda is right about the date those bracelets came out, then Doris would have been around seventy when she killed this woman.’

  ‘She had a good disguise. Little old ladies aren’t generally murderers.’ West walked across to the chaise longue where Lynda had said Doris had posed her husband and his lover. ‘I wonder, did her husband want to leave Doris because she’d shown psychopathic tendencies or did his affair tip her over the edge?’ He felt in his jacket for his mobile. ‘That Checkley woman was right about one thing though, this is impossible to explain. It’s something Inspector Morrison needs to see to believe.’

  He was put through to the inspector almost immediately. ‘I think you need to see for yourself,’ he said when he’d given a brief explanation. He listened, then hung up. ‘He’s on his way. Seemed a bit stuck for words.’

  Andrews laughed. ‘We’re never going to live this down, you know. Morrison will tell this story for years.’

  ‘So he might.’ West indicated the door with a tilt of his head. ‘Let’s wait for him outside where we can breathe.’

  They negotiated the passageway back, Andrews grunting in annoyance when he came upon the mess of Tetra packs. ‘I’ll clear this away before anyone else comes.’

  They did it together, piling the cartons on top of some of the more stable piles. ‘I don’t envy the person who has to empty this lot out,’ A
ndrews said as they finished and made their way outside. ‘But I guess it won’t be the Checkleys.’

  ‘Unlikely.’ West took a deep breath of the chilly air. A minute later, he shivered and pulled his jacket on. ‘If those four bodies have been reported missing, there might be DNA somewhere. We might be able to find out who they are, put a family out of its misery.’

  ‘We haven’t identified the other woman as yet,’ Andrews pointed out.

  ‘But we will. We’ll do what we’re good at, keep looking until we find out who they are.’

  ‘You know, that will be several cases solved in one fell swoop. Morrison will be happy with that.’

  ‘He won’t be so happy when the press get wind of a ninety-year-old serial killer.’ West pointed towards the tangled, overgrown garden. ‘Doris killed eight people over the last fifty years that we know of, but our sweet little old lady may not have mummified all her victims. They’re going to have to bring in the cadaver dogs and search the entire area.’

  ‘Darragh Checkley was right about that anyway,’ Andrews said. ‘It’s going to take weeks to clear this.’

  Morrison’s car pulled into the driveway. He was wearing an understandably bemused expression as he climbed from the car. ‘I know it’s bad when Garda Baxter is stuck for words.’

  ‘This case has left us all a bit speechless,’ West said. ‘You’ll understand when you see inside.’ He eyed the heavy coat the inspector was wearing. ‘I’d advise leaving your coat in the car, Inspector, it’s hot inside.’ He saw the inspector hesitate and added, ‘Hot enough to mummify the bodies.’

  Morrison grimaced, shrugged off his coat and threw it into the car. ‘Right, let’s see what all the fuss is about.’ He made no comment about the piles that edged the hallway as he followed West and Andrews but when they reached the door of the dining room his eyebrows had unified in one dark criticism.

  West had shut the door behind them when they left. He opened it now, resisting the temptation to sing out ta-dah as he unveiled the macabre scene of the headless diners.