First Death In Dublin City (Thomas Bishop Book 1)

by Colm-Christopher Collins

  Anne walked back to her car, which was parked in a pebble-dash slab of land. She first took from her pocket a cigarette and took several drags, before she then took out her phone and, pulled up Mousey’s number.

  ‘Anne.’ The voice said.

  ‘It’s far too early to tell, if I’m honest.’ Said Anne.

  ‘Gut instinct?’ Asked Mousey.

  ‘Same as Amy’s killer.’ Said Anne.

  ‘Shit. Shit, shit, shit. The last thing people want at this time is a fucking serial killer to worry about.’ Mousey said.

  ‘It looks like they’ll have to worry.’ Said Anne.

  ‘Fuck. Well there is one good new story in all this.’

  ‘That being?’ Asked Anne.

  ‘For the first time in years there actually will be sufficient resources put to solving a case.’ Mousey said.

  ‘What good’s a team without Tommy to lead it?’ Asked Anne.

  ‘If I know Tommy, it’ll take more than a stroke to make him consider not taking this case.’ Said Mousey. ‘That boy’s been a maniac since first I met him.’

  ##

  Tommy washed his hands, as was per usual, then entered the freezing room. Around him the gurney tables lay empty, knives ready to incise into bodies that weren’t there; as only one table was full, and around it three white coats worked.

  ‘Orlaith.’ Said Tommy, and she and one of her fellows jumped high into the air, before turning to look at him.

  ‘Tommy you gave me such a fright.’ Tommy didn’t recognise the girl beside Orlaith, but she looked very young, an intern?

  ‘Well, sorry about that. How are you Tim?’ Tommy said to the man across the other side of the table.

  ‘Thomas.’ Said he in reply, busy carving into the dead girl’s forearm.

  Tim Mahon was an Englishman who had in his youth returned to his father’s homeland to study medicine in Trinity College; a scholar he soon found himself a niche in doing the autopsies in St James’ Hospital. Now he was Trinity’s main lecturer in both anatomy and autopsy procedure; acting occasionally as a consultant coroner to either the state or a wealthy family who want suicides and overdoses re-examined. His knowledge of the human body was freakish, as was his understanding of how to operate it, but despite the fact he spent 12 hours a day with dead bodies, he was eternally charming with the ladies and never failed to find someone to go home with whenever Tommy had been out with him at Garda socials and the like. If Tim was in charge of the autopsy, it meant that the powers that be obviously thought that this case was to be sorted, and perhaps even they would give him a complete team to use.

  ‘What do you think?’ Asked Tommy to the room as he pulled the latex gloves onto his hand.

  ‘Clear blunt force trauma to the head, caused the skull to collapse in and an immediate and severe concussion. Seconds later the cadaver entered into cardiac arrest; she would have been dead seconds after the blow.’ Said Tim.

  ‘So you’re telling me she didn’t suffer.’ Said Tommy looking sceptically at the mangled body before his eyes.

  ‘No, she most certainly suffered at least acute fear and then severe pain. The back of her throat is lined with polyethylene, rayon and aluminium powder. The three main ingredients used to make any kind of duct or masking tape. Her teeth have all been pulled pre-mortem, and four nails drilled into her gums.’

  The great thing doing an autopsy with Tim was that he spoke to you like you were one of his first year anatomy students, and while for some Gardaí that was frustrating, for Tommy it meant that he would miss nothing. He continued.

  ‘The sheer amount of the chemicals in her throat would show, that she was hyperventilating for a sustained period. My guess is she began to scream very loudly, which tore loose fibres from her gag, which she then inhaled in a large gulp of air. The way rigour mortis set in, she was under severe stress in the moments leading up to her death. Not to mention that a lot of her wounds were pre mortem. These nails in her jaw too, she definitely was alive when they were hammered in.’

  Tommy glanced at the long gashes along her torso, then at the crooked smile caused by three nails jabbed into her jaw, and grimaced.

  ‘Anything sexual?’ He asked.

  ‘No, certainly no signs of penetration anywhere. May I say DI, despite this not being my remit..’

  ‘Go ahead.’ Said Tommy.

  ‘In my, rather extensive experience both of dealing with bodies and in reading papers on autopsies, I have only ever heard of a woman committing a crime of this kind of this kind when suffering from battered wives syndrome, I would guess whoever has done this was a male.’ Said Tim. Tommy nodded his thanks for a fact he had already confirmed to himself.

  Binning his gloves Tommy walked from the room out to a much brighter corridor and then out into the April sun: the first time it hadn’t rained in days. In the front car park was a strange sight, which Tommy quickly assuaged to be the dead girl’s family grieving, as there were at least twenty Romani in the car park, most of them sobbing, while before them Anne, Mousey, and the Assistant Commissioner attempted best to answer their questions. Tommy knew that they would have to wrap up soon and hold a press conference; as the story had been leaked hours ago and no official Garda statement had yet been released.

  ‘Assistant Commissioner.’ Said Tommy, and the man whirled around, stressed visage fading when he saw who was behind him.

  ‘DI Bishop, we had been worried for you. Weren’t you sick?’ He asked.

  ‘I was, ok now though.’ Said Tommy.

  ‘Great, that’s great. Well, I’m sure you’ve heard.’

  ‘It’s terrible.’ Said Tommy.

  ‘You fit to lead the team?’

  ‘Team?’ Tommy said.

  ‘Mick told me that this was the same guy who killed Amy Clancy?’

  It hadn’t been confirmed, but if HQ was about to give them much needed funding, Tommy wasn’t about to disagree.

  ‘I’m happy to lead.’ Said Tommy.

  ‘Great news.’

  Tommy nodded, then went over and tapped Anne on the shoulder. She seemed fine at first, perhaps thinking it was just another grieving family member, but once she saw Tommy, shaven and suited up, she jumped a mile into the air, then threw her arms around him. Remembering the scene they were at, Tommy quickly untangled himself from her.

  ‘Cmon.’ He said.

  ‘Cmon says he; where are we going?’ Asked Anne.

  ‘Harcourt Street, I’ve just been given a blank cheque, time to pick a dream team.’

  12

  It was half five by the time Tommy had arranged the dream team. There was Tommy, their leader, and Anne, who was to operate with him where necessary. They had their own designated forensics officer in Matty O’Hara, who was now expected to deal only with what the media had begun to call the ‘Dublin Ripper’. Too, Tim Mahon had been given to them as a general medical technician, as had Mark Daly, a man in his early twenties who was acting as their cyber technician. Too, Tommy had been assigned another two detectives to cover the tranche of detective work that would soon be coming their way. Sarah Lyman from the DPP’s office was in on their team, as well as two translators who spoke fluent Romanian. Finally, Tommy had been given four rank and file Gardaí whose job it was just to answer phones and receive anonymous tips from the public.

  Tommy had brought a whiteboards into the room.

  ‘He doesn’t think we’ll catch him’ – wrote Tommy as the first point.

  ‘Well, obviously?’ Said Anne.

  ‘No, you don’t get me, he seems to think this will never even come to a trial, that he won’t even be interviewed.’ Said Tommy.

  ‘What makes you say that?’ Asked the prosecutor.

  ‘Tim and Matty can back me up here but, hammer blows of the kind that killed the victim we found today would leave a large blood splatter, am I correct?’ Asked Tommy.

  ‘Definitely’ and ‘Without a doubt.’ came as answers.

  ‘So, if one were to commit violent crime
s like this, one should probably leave the body where it is, because wherever it is probably covered in incriminating evidence. Correct?’ Asked Tommy, and the question received nods from around the table.

  He continued. ‘If you kill someone somewhere where they’re not meant to be and you need to dump the body; then you do it quietly in the style of an execution; this bludgeoning leaves possibly the most DNA possible. The guy who’s done these crimes therefore, the so called “Dublin Ripper” doesn’t think we’ll ever have any notion to search his house or vehicle. Yes?’

  Nods and a few shrugs.

  Tommy ran his hand through his freshly washed hair; the scalp was still flaking.

  ‘Usually what this guy writes makes no sense, yet in this last post, which he must have written fairly soon after he committed the murder, actually was fairly revealing in nature.’ Tommy said.

  ‘It doesn’t take much reading to realise that he’s at least a little racist – he tortured the girl by hammering nails into her gums, which was intended as some kind of sick parody of the gold teeth often seen on Roma women. Anne, what was the body found in?’

  ‘Three or four towels.’ Anne said.

  Tommy nodded then continued. ‘Ok, maybe an imitation of the way Romani women dress.’

  Everyone seemed still to be following.

  ‘But what does all this tell us?’ A rank and file spoke up from the back of the room.

  Tommy answered. ‘A homicide is like a tableau that someone has torn large strips out of; and it’s up to you to find out what was in those strips. You must use what is remaining in the painting, else you’ll be groping in the dark for thousands of possible objects, in fact every object known to man. So what remains of our case after the strips have been torn away? Well we know the method of murder; and we know where the bodies were dumped.’ Tommy said.

  ‘Both parks.’ Said Jessica.

  ‘Mm, and both places where he obviously felt comfortable going at night; or anyway comfortable enough to dump a body there and not get caught. Both parks are within five miles of each other, both in west Dublin. Now, with the willing acceptance that this may be disproven, can we at least state that the likelihood that he is from West Dublin is more than that he is not?’ Asked Tommy, and everyone else seemed to agree.

  ‘Now, we have said that he is more likely he is male, and that he is more likely to be from West Dublin. While adding the two together significantly dilutes the odds that we are correct, does our perpetrator being a male from West Dublin still sound more likely than unlikely?’ Asked Tommy. Again, he got nods.

  ‘So all we are now looking for is a male with access to a vehicle and space to hold the victims who is from either Dublin 7, 8, 10, 15, 20 or 22. Who has no obviously direct relationship to either Amy Clancy or Aishe Petulengro, assuming the two killings are related. Such wanton brutality is rare though.’ Tommy said.

  ‘So we have several tens of thousands of suspects?’ Matty asked.

  ‘That’s our basic list, which we will run with until new evidence comes up or it goes dry on lines of enquiry. After that, there are plenty more clues we can follow to narrow the list down, but the more clues we extrapolate from to create our filter, the less likely it becomes we have the right filter. Therefore, we will be dividing up and taking a clue each as we search for the perpretrator.’ Tommy said.

  Nobody objected.

  ‘Jessica and Dylan, you’re on this one. I want you to peel through recent judgments for brutality and violence and cross reference the losers with those who live in West Dublin and match the rest of the profile.’

  ‘Every judgment?’ Said Dylan.

  Tommy considered for a moment.

  ‘This is a guy who has just smashed the skull in of a defenceless thirteen year old mother. So, we’re looking for arson, animal cruelty, violence assault.’

  Dylan and Jessica nodded.

  ‘Anne, you have the short straw; I want you to look into all the minimal CCTV surrounding both killings, as well as the EFlow records for any correlation at all; find me the vehicle, if you can.’

  Anne grimaced at the boredom of the impending task, but nodded, knowing it was necessary.

  ‘Matty, Tim, I want you to try and reconstruct the crime as best you can, included among it the method it was done and the height, shape and weight of the murderer. It was mentioned that, to help calm the public that are far too used to CSI, we may have to send the case to the FBI and pay them a hefty fee to provide us with a ‘profile’ so that the powers that be can release that and the public can relate to the case.’

  ‘Will the feds be cutting in on the case?’ Asked Anne, in a parody of every cop show ever, and everyone chuckled.

  A pall settled over the room, as everyone realised that their line of enquiry was as vague as could be, and even then might not succeed, and the thought of weeks and months of searching while bodies climbed higher and the media grew hungrier stretched out in front of them. Tommy would entertain no such thoughts, as old sponsor Pete loved to say, one day at a time and all that; and once the team saw Tommy as unwavering, then they’d follow him into whatever hell they were headed.

  ##

  The same old house on the same old Rathmines Road, Tommy wrapped lightly on the door, and Claire Clancy opened the door and almost looked hopeful upon seeing Tommy’s face. However, as soon as he shook his head, Claire’s face fell back into the depressed state it had been in since Tommy had first met her.

  ‘I’m just dropping by to check in after today’s news. I know a Garda dropped by earlier to inform you, we thought the recent murder of a thirteen year old girl by the name of Aishe Petulengro was killed in a manner similar to Amy, and we believed the same perpetrator did both murders. Just half an hour ago, DNA found on the body of Aishe was matched to DNA found in the park beside Amy’s body. It’s the same man who killed them both.’

  Claire stepped aside to let Tommy in, and for a brief second he considered turning and going back to the car, but he found his feet walking in the door regardless. Jennifer had called twice while Tommy had been holed up, but her voicemails had been in no way encouraging. Before him, Claire was wearing a grey wool turtleneck. The bland colours, where usually they would anything but complimentary, on Claire they showed up her swell perfectly. Tommy wondered if they were fake, a present after her divorce, to make the young schools rugby players that worked out in her gym stare while she was on the treadmill. Tommy wondered if such things as vanity and appearance matter after the death of a child.

  ‘Is Gary around?’ Tommy asked.

  ‘No, he’s taken his soon to be stepson to the movies. The kid has found this whole time rather confusing, in fact, we all have.’

  Thinking of Gary’s gangly six foot seventeen year old, Tommy struggled to imagine anyone whom the adjective ‘kid’ matched less. They walked through to the kitchen, and Tommy sat down at the table where he had broken the Devil’s Gospel to Gary. Claire began foostering slowly around the counters, looking like she may be trying to make a cup of tea, but Tommy caught her eye and shook his head and pointed to the chair next to his, and Claire came over and slumped down beside him. She exhaled loudly, and this time Claire might have caught Tommy’s eye just as he glanced at her breasts.

  ‘You said you lost your best friend. Who was he?’ Asked Claire.

  ‘She.’ Corrected Tommy. ‘Her name was Rebecca; and she was my girlfriend.’

  ‘Was she.. murdered?’ Asked Claire, and Tommy noticed that she was getting awfully close to him, he could smell her; plain and simply a Pantene shampoo.

  ‘She got in a car with a drunk, her side of the car went straight into a lamppost, she died almost instantly.’ Said Tommy.

  ‘I’m sorry, how on earth could you cope?’

  Rebecca always used to say that he had a thing for vulnerable women, and when he eventually left her it would be for a junkie orphan who was emotionally crippled after years of sexual abuse and beatings from past partners. Tommy didn’t know what it was
, just some kind of hero complex he supposed. Thomas Bishop, an ugly man riding around Dublin in White Armour.

  ‘Lots and lots of heroin.’ Said Tommy, and Claire smirked. Then she leaned in and, headbutting him the first time, the second time locked her lips onto his. The kiss was both sweet and sloppy, lasting for more than a minute, before Tommy came up for air.

  ‘I don’t want the Zanex to put me to sleep tonight.’ Said Claire.

  Tommy pulled back, eyes glistening.

  ‘Wait, this feels off.’ Tommy said.

  ‘Why?’ Claire asked, sitting on the table beside him.

  ‘A few days ago I was standing on the twelve arches, ready to jump.’ Tommy said.

  ‘Why on earth so?’ Claire asked.

  ‘It’s unexplainable. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Do you still feel like that?’ Claire asked.

  Tommy looked at her. ‘No, I’ve reawaken, had the chains of pain removed from my wrists.’

  ‘How?’ Claire asked.

  ‘I.. Went away for a few days. When I returned, Claire, there she was, there was the case – where before I felt nothing but fear and failure, not it was hunger. A knawing hunger, an anger, a rage. Not the bad kind, not the type that poisons minds and ruins families; no, the rage that gets me up in the mornings, the rage that motivates desire, the rage that means I’d run flat through a wall before I give up. I haven’t felt happiness in a long time, but at least this is something: a hope, a desire.’ Tommy said.

  Claire raised her hand and touched his cheek, but Tommy grabbed her hand in his fist.

  ‘The darkness is still there though. Oh and the desire to slide back into the filthy cavern of despair. I know what I need to do, must avoid actions that lead to my moral ruin – but why Claire do they taste so fine?’ Tommy said.

  ‘Where do I fit in here Tommy, on this scale of good and bad actions?’ Claire asked.

  ‘I think we both know the answer to that.’ Tommy said, still holding Claire’s fist in his hand.