Who Took Eden Mulligan?

by Sharon Dempsey

  Magee nodded. ‘On it.’

  ‘One more thing that we need to address is the dolls found hanging from a tree in the grounds of the property.’ He clicked on the remote control and a picture of the hanging dolls flashed up on the screen.

  The image looked eerie and sinister, the dolls hanging by thin wires from the branches. It was clear the arrangement had been designed to unnerve whoever came across them. Danny felt sure there had to be meaning behind them.

  ‘What do these dolls say about the killer? What reason were they placed there? Keep the dolls in mind as you go about the investigation. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they were found. Forensics are examining them at present – we hope to get something back from them in a day or so – and we should be able to find out from the owners of the estate how long they might have been there.

  ‘Right, moving on.’ He looked towards Tania Lumen. ‘Tania, I’m making you lead coordinator. I want everything correlated and up to date on the system. Whatever aspect of the case you are working on, Tania needs to know. Everything must be logged in the system and we all need to keep the communication channels open.’

  ‘Yep, no problem.’ Tania looked pleased to have been singled out.

  ‘I need good judgement on this case. If you can’t get hold of me you will answer to Detective Sergeant Malachy Magee. Think of him as my second in command.’

  Someone howled like a wolf.

  ‘Deputy dawg Magee,’ Jack Fitzgerald piped up and the room sniggered.

  Magee stood and took a bow.

  ‘All right, knock it off. There’s too much to be done to be pissing around,’ Danny admonished. They had a lot of work ahead of them. Long days and possibly weekends too.

  ‘Right, one more thing,’ Danny said, catching Rose’s eye. ‘Dr Lainey is working with us on a consultancy basis, dealing primarily with Iona Gardener and the confession angle. She is also conferring on the possibly connected historic cold case, that of the disappearance of thirty-three-year-old Eden Mulligan. It is of interest to us since the words “Who Took Eden Mulligan?” were found scrawled on the living room wall in the Dunlore cottage.’

  He clicked on his laptop and a photograph of the slogan flashed up on the board.

  ‘Dr Lainey is going to speak to you now. If anything relating to the Mulligan case crops up during your investigations, make sure you bring it to our attention. Dr Lainey, over to you.’

  Rose walked to the front of the room and Danny noticed the team sat up a little straighter in response to her. Her dark hair was tied back, she wore little make-up and she was still strikingly beautiful. Danny could see there was a quiet confidence to her now that she never had when they were young. He could sense his team appraising her. Outsiders never got an easy ride, but he was sure Rose could hold her own.

  ‘Thanks, DI Stowe. A historic cold case is not usually concerned with present day crime scenes, but as you can see from the graffiti on the living room wall, our two lines of inquiry are crossing. Right now, we have nothing else that connects Lower Dunlore cottage to Eden Mulligan’s disappearance.’

  Rose nodded to Danny and he clicked on his laptop to bring up a photograph of Eden.

  ‘To refresh your memories, Eden Mulligan went missing from her Belfast house in July 1986. The exact date she went missing isn’t actually known but it is thought that it was sometime between 17 and 22 July. The five children she left behind tried asking the police for help to look for her, but were told she would turn up when she was ready. The children’s father is believed to have been working in London at the time of her disappearance. He returned to see them on a regular basis, but – significantly – never came back once Eden went missing.

  ‘When neighbours became suspicious that the children were on their own, social services were informed. The RUC at the time did not investigate the disappearance, claiming that there were more pressing crimes for them to deal with, and it was suggested by the police that the young mother had gone of her own accord. The children, the youngest being six and the oldest thirteen, were adamant that she would not have left them unattended. The neighbours supported this.’

  Danny straightened himself up. ‘Any questions?’

  ‘Sir, you don’t suppose the graffiti was just a random coincidence? Like, there’s no direct connection between the victims and the cold case, is there? We can’t go wasting resources looking for a mother who ran away over thirty years ago.’

  Rose sighed. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Aaron Dixon, Ma’am.’

  ‘Well, Aaron, it was that attitude that meant five children grew up without a mother and without any answers as to what happened to her. We have a live crime scene with a red flag screaming “investigate the Mulligan case”, so we will follow up all angles.’

  Danny voiced his support. ‘Dr Lainey is right. We can’t afford not to link the investigations. No one is saying that you’re to go haring off, ordering digs to find Eden Mulligan, but you are being asked to keep an open mind, to have an awareness of the 1986 case, and to bring anything of significance to our attention.’

  Rose stepped forward and placed her hands on the table. ‘Exactly, keep Eden Mulligan in mind. The victims found murdered in the Dunlore cottage – Theo Beckett, Olivia Templeton and Henry Morton – are of no relation to the Mulligans. Nor is Dylan Wray, who is still hanging on in the ICU, or Iona Gardener, who is in the psychiatric ward in the secure unit at the Shannon Clinic. So, why was the Mulligan slogan written for us to see? If the victims have no known connection to the Mulligan case, then we need to ask: did the killer?

  ‘My role as a forensic psychologist can offer insights into the mental state of the perpetrator. As police officers, you are used to using your expertise to examine evidence and question key witnesses. Most people think forensic psychologists are brought in to provide profiling, but that’s not the main focus of our work.’ She paused. ‘We are dealing with a vulnerable witness – Iona Gardener.’

  Danny pointed to the picture of Iona on the board as Rose continued.

  ‘Understanding her motivation to confessing and helping her to unburden herself of what she has experienced in the Dunlore cottage will help us to solve this case. Forget all notions you may have picked up from television about what a forensic psychologist does. I’m not about to get into the killer’s mind and solve the case on intuition alone. Any insights I can offer you will be based on logic, behavioural evidence of key witnesses and my extensive research and experience.’

  Danny moved forward. ‘Right, team, get cracking and don’t miss a single thing.’

  CHAPTER 11

  The house on Hyde Street was small – a terrace house reconfigured and extended to accommodate the family of six. It had changed since Rose’s time there. The kitchen and the living room at the back of the house had been knocked into one large space. A row of modern, grey, kitchen cupboards ran along the length of the back wall, and a small window above the sink looked out into the yard. Rose could remember hanging out the washing there and the drudgery of looking after her siblings when she should have been carefree and experiencing the best years of her life as a teenager, without the responsibilities that had been thrust upon her.

  The sight of her siblings gathered around the table, so familiar yet altered, hit Rose like a punch from nowhere. She gasped and averted her gaze. What did she expect? They’d have hardly stayed the same, but even so, it was unnerving for her, trying to readjust the mental image she had of them. The air in the room felt charged. Her arrival had been expected and heads swivelled in her direction as if in unison, an army of eyes examining her, waiting for a proclamation or some sort of acknowledgement. A cold sweat gathered at the back of Rose’s neck. She felt sick, like she’d suddenly been swept up in a tidal wave, her feet on unsteady ground. She took a chair at the table and accepted a cup of tea from one of her sisters-in-law. She had yet to work out which brother the blonde girl was married to. She cast her gaze around, looking for something fami
liar to anchor her. Everything was so different but then her eyes found the clock on the mantel; it had belonged to her granny and it sat where it always had. The room had changed but the slice of backyard could still be seen from the window, the sun low in the sky but still brilliantly bright and dazzling. It didn’t feel right. The Belfast from her memory was a dark, dismal place of dreary, grey, rain-laden skies.

  She was aware that everyone seemed to be treating her with caution, as if she was somehow fragile and incendiary. The chat was circling around the weather, the payment of the undertakers and the success of the funeral arrangements. It was as if she was on the outside looking in. None of them had asked about her life or had enquired as to how she was. It was as if her absence had been decided to be of no great importance to them. She could see how relaxed they were in each other’s company – the shorthand, the banter. Kaitlin’s eyes were red from crying, but she laughed now as she talked to one of the children. Pearse and Colm both looked tired. Up close, it was easier for her to see the boys they had been within their grown-up features. Stronger jawlines, stubble and thinning hair had masked how she recalled them. Colm retained some of his fair hair while Pearse was almost totally bald. Premature balding was a Lavery family trait.

  The last few days had been tiring for them. The rituals of visitors calling to offer their sympathy, the wake, the mass and the burial, followed by the gathering in the hotel function room would’ve been draining. She could see it in all of them and was reminded that she was the outsider.

  Their mother’s death was not something Rose could claim to feel emotional about. She had buried whatever feelings she had for Evelyn many years ago, and the numbness that had descended since Kaitlin had called in the night, was welcomed. Better to feel nothing than everything. Looking at her siblings now, she could see her mother’s funeral had been something they had experienced and endured as one entity. Each there for the other. There was a sense of belonging between them that she never had. The price she’d paid for her escape was high. That strong family connection was something she rarely saw in London. Everyone seemed to come from somewhere else. The absence of family in her life was never questioned there. But here, in Belfast, family was as vital as air. Everyone was connected in a web of relationships to be relied on and tolerated in equal measure.

  Rose’s mother once told her that how a family buried its loved ones said a lot about their relationship in life. She had been referring to the death of a young man from their area, Francie McAvoy, who had overdosed on epilepsy pills stolen from his brother’s legitimate supply. Rose had been fourteen and upset that the family had been so vocal about their grief. They had talked to the local newspaper, the Irish News, about the tragedy, had asked mourners to wear Manchester United tops to the funeral, in honour of Francie, who had supported them. They spoke about the funeral as a way to celebrate the life that had been snuffed out. Rose had thought it undignified and Evelyn had scolded her for judging them. ‘Consider that poor mother. All she can do for her son is to give him a big send-off. She’s throwing herself into the arrangements, wanting to honour him the only way she knows how.’

  Rose didn’t buy it. She thought of the paramilitary-style funerals she had seen on television and one that had been waked from a house in their area. A group of men and women wearing military-style regalia – black berets, army green jumpers and black trousers, with balaclavas and sunglasses – stood in formation, saluting the coffin as it was carried out of the house. All of it had sickened Rose. They were like overgrown children playing dress up as Action Man. She knew better than to criticise it in front of her mother again, though. Evelyn probably considered it an honour to have such a funeral.

  Sitting here among her family now, the memories were tripping over themselves to be acknowledged. Funny how when she was away, she could only recall the bad times. It seemed as if she had deliberately focused on the aspects of her family that she detested. The happier memories felt closer to the surface now, threatening to spill out and upset her carefully held façade.

  She excused herself to find the toilet. The small bathroom had been refitted and looked completely different. There was no sense of the room where she had locked herself in and cried when it all became too much. It was the only place where you could hope to find privacy in the house. She had shared a bedroom with Kaitlin so when she longed to be alone she would stand in the shower, letting the tears fall. When she came back down the stairs, she found two dark heads bent over an iPhone on the bottom steps. ‘You must be Laura and Donal,’ she said. They looked at her with identical brown eyes that were as familiar as her own.

  ‘Yes, and you’re our Auntie Roisin.’ The boy said it with a note of challenge in his voice, as if he dared her to correct him.

  ‘Well, it’s Rose now, but yes.’

  ‘Why’d you change your name?’

  She shrugged. ‘A few different reasons. I got fed up of spelling Roisin to the English.’

  ‘Aye they never get our names right. There’s a girl in school called “Grainne” and someone pronounced it “Grannie” once when she was on holiday across the water.’ They laughed.

  ‘You’re Kaitlin’s kid, right?’

  ‘Yeah and she’s my cousin.’

  ‘My daddy is your brother, Pearse.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. You look like him.’ The girl rolled her eyes.

  ‘Better looking of course,’ Rose added, and they laughed again.

  ‘Roisin, good to see you.’ Pearse greeted her as she returned to the living room. He stood blocking her way with a bottle of Budweiser in his hand. His tone said he was anything but glad to see her. Rose guessed he had been drinking all day. Funerals in her family tended to end up being drinking sessions. The morose story telling of days gone by and memories embroidered to make the deceased look better in death, could easily turn surly.

  ‘Pearse, give her a break. She’s here, isn’t she?’ Kaitlin said.

  ‘What does she want, a medal? Doesn’t come near any of us for years and then thinks she can swan in looking down her nose at the rest of us. We’re beneath you now, is that it, Roisin?’ He spat the words at her.

  ‘It’s okay Kaitlin. I’ll go. I didn’t want to come anyway. I don’t expect you to understand, and to be honest Pearse, I don’t care either.’

  Kaitlin grabbed at her arm. ‘No, please Roisin, stay. Please, for me.’ There was an urgency in her voice that made Rose hesitate. While she wanted to leave this house, and get on the next flight to London, she’d committed to staying, at least for a few weeks, and there was something in Kaitlin’s eyes that tore at her heart. This was her sister. In some ways, she felt she owed Kaitlin everything. She had left her behind to deal with all of the shit on her own. To save herself, she had thrown Kaitlin under. The death of their father had been devastating, which heightened their mother’s republicanism. After all they had been through together, she felt that Kaitlin deserved to have her support now. Kaitlin relaxed her grip on Rose’s arm and led her into the living room.

  ‘Don’t let Pearse get under your skin. Ignore him. He’s pissed. He’s been drinking all evening.’

  Rose sighed. ‘He’s right, though. I’ve no place here. It was stupid of me to come. I knew that I wouldn’t be welcome.’

  ‘You are welcome. I’m glad to see you. Surely that counts for something?’

  Rose’s eyes filled with tears. For so long, she had shut down the part of herself that allowed her to be vulnerable. It was a necessary form of protection. If you can’t feel anything then at least you know that the bad stuff can’t hurt.

  Kaitlin placed her hand on Rose’s. ‘Hey, do you remember when we used to sleep in the same bed just so we could be close?’

  Rose smiled. ‘And make up stories to entertain each other. God, what was that awful ghost story we used to add to every time?’

  ‘The Hairy Hand of Grot McKee!’

  ‘Yes, that’s it.’ They laughed. ‘We used to have to get Daddy to check under the bed to mak
e sure the hand wasn’t lurking.’

  At one time they had been a happy family, before they knew to fear what was around the corner. When they were young, Rose never realised how the outside world would encroach upon them, taking away all sense of security.

  Kaitlin sighed. ‘You have to stay a while. We’ve too much to catch up on.’

  CHAPTER 12

  The next morning Rose woke early and got ready to return to the station to do her first proper full day on the case. Running back to London had been tempting. It would have been easy to pack up this part of her life for good; to consider her mother’s death to be the final footnote in her Belfast history. But maybe Danny and Kaitlin were worth hanging on for.

  Once she had showered, she dragged a brush through her hair and tied it into a low ponytail, sprayed on some deodorant and went in search of something to wear. She’d no time to be messing about with make-up and breakfast would be a coffee at the station.

  Down in Danny’s office, she looked around at the pale yellow walls, paint peeling in dried-out patches, and at the far corner of the room there was a bloom of damp spreading upwards across the ceiling. There was a musty smell, something earthy and fungus-like, that reminded her of wet dogs and old slippers. The wall of filing cabinets, some drawers over-spilling, stood taunting her, as if to suggest this task would be too great for any one person to take on. She shrugged off her jacket, undeterred, and took a seat at her desk. A red box file marked ‘confidential’, with ‘Mulligan’ printed at the top, sat unopened. One case out of hundreds, but for some reason this one mattered more to the powers-that-be. For some reason they had yet to discover, it mattered to the killer at the Dunlore cottage too.

  The Historical Enquiries Team, initially set up to examine unsolved murders committed during the Troubles, had been wound down in 2005, owing to budgetary constraints. Now, political pressure from Stormont meant that they had been given limited funding to set up a small unit to look at specific cases. Rose knew enough about Northern Ireland to recognise that the unit had been a trade-off – a political win for one side against the other. She didn’t care. The exact reasons that brought her to this posting were irrelevant. She intended to do her job diligently and efficiently.