Murder at the Holiday Home

by David Pearson

  “You’re on. Come down when you’re finished and we’ll head out.”

  Lyons made her way back down to her own desk. Once again, she felt that Hays had provided the inspiration that she relied on to move the case forward. She didn’t like to admit it, but she frequently had doubts about her own abilities as a super sleuth, and Hays had just endorsed that feeling in her – unwittingly of course.

  Chapter Six

  By morning, Inspector Eamon Flynn had been onto a colleague in Westport and explained the situation with Batty McCutcheon. The Westport man, an Inspector by the name of Gerry McKeever, was a bit uneasy about having to tackle McCutcheon, due to his standing in the community.

  “I hear what you’re saying, Eamon, but do you not think there could be an innocent explanation? I mean, he’s a well-respected businessman here in the town, you know?” McKeever said.

  “I’m sure he is, but we need to know where he was that evening, Gerry. And I don’t want to have to drive all the way out there again myself this morning, if I can avoid it,” Flynn said.

  “Right, so. I’ll drop in on him during the day and see what he has to say for himself. I’ll let you know, Eamon.”

  “Thanks, Gerry. I owe you one.”

  * * *

  It was late morning when Gerry McKeever called to the Eurosaver shop in the main street of Westport. He found Batty McCutcheon strutting about inside, barking orders at the black-clad girls, who looked terrified.

  McKeever caught the big man’s eye.

  “Could we have a word outside, Mr McCutcheon?” the inspector said.

  McCutcheon said nothing, but followed McKeever as he went out of the shop onto the street.

  “Thanks, Mr McCutcheon. Listen, I’m sorry to have to ask you, but we need to know where you were the evening the woman was killed out at your cottage in Owen Glen. It’s important,” the detective said.

  “Right. Well, listen now, this is to go no further, do you hear? I was with one of the girls from the shop. Round at her place – just having a chat, if you know what I mean,” McCutcheon said, looking down at his shoes.

  “I see. And which girl are we talking about here?”

  “Ineke, her name is. But I don’t want anyone going around bothering her now. And my wife doesn’t have to know, does she?”

  “Well, I’ll have to check this out with the girl. But if she confirms that you were with her, then we should be able to leave it at that, at least as far as I’m concerned. But I should tell you, there’s a Senior Inspector in Galway who’s inclined to be very thorough, so I’d be a bit careful for a while if I were you,” McKeever said.

  “Well, Inspector, I’m sure you’ll be able to handle that for me. And don’t think I won’t be very grateful, if you know what I mean,” McCutcheon said, looking directly at McKeever.

  “Let’s leave it at that for now. Where can I find this Ineke?”

  McCutcheon told the detective that the girl was working in the shop. He pointed her out to McKeever, and when he asked her, she admitted that she had been with her boss. She was a pretty girl, with short fair hair and bright blue eyes. McKeever couldn’t blame the proprietor for being attracted to her, although the girl’s motives for getting involved with the boss were not immediately obvious.

  * * *

  Sinéad Loughran heard back from M&S during the following morning.

  “Ms Loughran, this is Celia Butler from M&S in Dublin. You were asking about some of our pyjamas and a dressing gown,” the woman said.

  “Oh, yes, that’s right. Did you manage to find out anything about where they were bought?” Loughran said.

  “Yes, I did. It’s a bit odd really. Those lines were specially manufactured for our stores in Eastern Europe – you know, Poland, Czech Republic, Lithuania and so on. Most of those shops are closed down now. It didn’t really work out for us out there I’m afraid, so the garments must be a couple of years old at least. Is that any help?” Butler said.

  “Well, yes, I suppose so. Are you able to say which store, or even which country they came from?” Loughran asked.

  “I’m afraid not. The product codes and style numbers aren’t that specific. And with the shops closed now, there’s not much more we can do.”

  Then Loughran had an idea.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any chance that the stock was brought back here, or to the UK, when the Eastern European shops closed down, and sold a bit nearer to home?”

  “Oh, no. Definitely not. We don’t operate like that. The stock would have been disposed of locally through discount chains once the stores had been closed. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more,” Butler said.

  “Oh, no, that’s fine, thanks. You’ve been very helpful.”

  * * *

  Deirdre Mac arrived in Hartman’s jewellers during a lull in trade halfway through the morning. The ever-helpful Monika was cleaning the glass topped counter with a bright green cloth, and put it aside when Deirdre came in.

  “Hi. I’m Deirdre MacAllister from the Garda forensic unit here in Galway. I was wondering if you could help us with this,” she said, producing the small plastic evidence bag with the little gold ingot in it.

  “May I see?” Monika said, extending a hand across the counter.

  Deirdre handed it over.

  “May I take it out of the bag?” Monika said.

  “Yes, of course.”

  The girl eased open the bag and removed the gold bar, turning it over in her hand. Then she took a loupe from a shelf beneath the counter, put it to her eye, and examined the item closely.

  “Well,” she said removing the loupe, “it’s definitely gold. Very pure too, but it’s not local. There is a smelter’s mark, but it’s very indistinct. I’d say it was possibly Russian, or Eastern European at least. You can buy these on the internet these days, you know.”

  “Have you seen any of these around here at all recently?” Deirdre asked.

  “No. We have quite a few customers who buy gold in this form. Usually bigger 250 gram or 500 gram bars. But of course ours come from fully authenticated suppliers in the UK or Germany, complete with documentation,” Monika said.

  “Really? It’s a popular product then?”

  “Very. Ever since the financial crash, people don’t trust banks at all. You’d be surprised how many customers have a little stash of gold in their house. Mind you, it’s not always in bars – lots of people just buy rings, or bracelets. But the gold ingots are better value. There’s no craftsman’s costs added on.”

  “What’s this one worth then?” Deirdre asked.

  Monika reached below the counter and lifted up a small electronic scale. She placed the gold on the scales, looked at the reading, and then reached for a calculator.

  “There’s 20 grams here, and at today’s price, that’s just a little over 700 euro,” Monika said.

  “Wow, expensive stuff, this gold.”

  “The price fluctuates almost daily, but not by a lot. It’s been rising steadily now for a few years.”

  “Well, thanks for your help. I’d better take it back and put it away safely. I had no idea it was worth that much,” Deirdre said.

  * * *

  Sally Fahy was having a tough time with Airbnb. Even getting a phone number to call them had been a challenge, and when she did get through, it was to a humble agent who had no authority to say or do anything much. The agent offered to get someone more senior to call Sally back, but she declined the offer, preferring to hold on whilst the wheels moved ever so slowly to get her further up the food chain.

  After about forty minutes, most of which was spent listening to dreadful music, she got to speak to Blanad McGonigle, who described herself as a Senior Customer Care Manager. Fahy wasn’t too inspired by the woman’s name, but she persisted nevertheless, asking about the records of the firm’s lettings at 22 Owen Glen to Maria Geller.

  “We have to be so careful these days, you know, what with the new data protection regulations and so on. We can get i
nto terrible trouble for disclosing information about our customers,” McGonigle said.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Fahy said, losing patience after such an interminable wait to speak to someone who could actually help, “but I’d prefer not to have to get a warrant if it can be avoided,” she said.

  McGonigle said nothing, but Fahy could hear the clack clack of the woman’s keyboard, so she assumed that she was continuing with the enquiry.

  “Yes, here we are. Ms Geller booked the house on two occasions through us. The first time was in September last year, then again in November. Nothing since. Each booking was for two nights. Odd that. Most of Mr McCutcheon’s bookings are for a week at a time. Anyway, what else did you want to know?” McGonigle said.

  Fahy asked for the exact dates, and Geller’s home address as well as details of the method of payment that had been used. McGonigle parted with the information, still somewhat reluctantly, but handed it over all the same.

  When the call was finished, Sally Fahy launched Google Earth on her PC and put in the address that she had been given, which was in Utrecht in the Netherlands. The program searched around aimlessly for a few seconds, and then finally came up with a different address that looked a bit like the one it had been given, but was not the same. Fahy checked it again, just to be certain that she hadn’t typed it in wrongly – but she hadn’t. It looked as if Maria Geller had been lying about where she lived.

  Conscious that Lyons had asked her to get in touch with immigration at Dublin airport, Fahy handed the details over to Mary Costelloe and told her to get John O’Connor’s help and pursue enquiries about the credit card that Geller had used.

  Now armed with three dates that she knew Maria Geller had been in Ireland, Fahy contacted her colleagues in immigration at Dublin airport. She got speaking to an Inspector Dillon, who hailed originally from Galway, and was only too pleased to help.

  Fahy gave Dillon the dates that Geller had been renting 22 Owen Glen, and Dillon got busy looking her up on his system. These days, everyone who comes through Dublin Airport has their passport scanned, so although the numbers are substantial, an efficient database system allows immigration officers to track people’s movements relatively quickly for just this type of enquiry.

  “Yes, here we are. Maria Geller. She was travelling on a Dutch passport, and she came into Dublin on each occasion from Schiphol,” Dillon said.

  “Schiphol – that’s Amsterdam, isn’t it?” Fahy asked.

  “Yes, sorry, that’s right. There are no notes on the file here about her. She just looks like an ordinary visitor as far as we are concerned. Why the interest?” Dillon said.

  Fahy explained that the woman had been brutally murdered in very mysterious circumstances out in Connemara.

  “God, that’s awful. I guess we won’t be seeing her through here again then,” Dillon said.

  “Well, maybe just once. But she’ll be in a wooden box if we can find out exactly where she came from. We have no address for her as yet,” Fahy said.

  “Oh? I just might be able to help you out there, Sergeant. We’re on very good terms with the Dutch immigration lads and lassies in Amsterdam. There’s lots of comings and goings we share with them, and I’ve got to know some of them pretty well over the past few years. Would you like me to give them a call – see if they have anything on your Maria Geller?” Dillon said.

  “God, would you? That would be great – thanks very much,” Fahy said.

  “Ah, ’tis no bother. Anything for a fellow Galwegian. Give me your number and I’ll get back to you,” Dillon said.

  * * *

  Lyons was becoming very frustrated at the lack of progress in the case. While they had a number of threads of enquiry going, nothing had produced anything meaningful so far, and Lyons wasn’t the type to just sit and wait for something to happen. She dialled Mick Hays’ extension to see if he could provide any inspiration, but he was away from his office at one of his confounded meetings, and wouldn’t be back until much later in the day.

  Lyons barely managed to stop herself going out into the open plan and harassing the team who were all working on their own pieces of the puzzle.

  To keep herself distracted, she logged into the Europol database, and keyed in the name Maria Geller. The system came back with all sorts of questions, such as the woman’s date of birth, her maiden name, if any, her address and so on, none of which Lyons had to hand, so she just requested a search on the name alone. The Europol system presented a small spinning egg-timer on the screen that seemed to go on for ever, adding to Lyons’ frustration. Eventually, just as Lyons was about to give up on it, the screen filled with a list of five Maria Gellers and an invitation to click on the names to expose further information. Three of the names related to German citizens, one was French, and the last one was from the Netherlands. Lyons went through them one at a time. The first four had various indictments listed briefly against their names, and the name of the appropriate police station to contact if further enquiries were needed. When Lyons got to the last one on the list, there were no crimes recorded, simply a message to contact Inspector Luuk Janssen in Utrecht, but no other details were provided.

  Lyons was pondering what to do next, when Sally Fahy knocked at her door.

  “Hi, Sally. Any news?” she asked.

  Fahy told Lyons about the information she had gleaned from the passport control officer at Dublin Airport, and the fact that the murdered woman had given a false address to the rental company when she was booking her stay at Owen Glen.

  “The bloke in passport control rang me back too. He’s been in touch with his colleagues in Amsterdam airport, but they said they had no information on Geller,” Fahy said.

  “Never mind, Sally, at least we can now assume that she is from the Netherlands, and I’ve found an entry on the Europol database that fits too. Well done you. Do you know if the others have got anywhere tracing the payment details?”

  “Sorry, boss. I haven’t had a chance to catch up with them yet, I thought you’d want to have this information first.”

  “Yes, of course, thanks. We can follow that up in a while. Look, can you hang on here a few minutes with me. We have to contact police stations in Utrecht – see if we can locate Inspector Luuk Janssen. Here, you use the desk phone, I’ll try my mobile – may as well get some value from my ‘free calls to anywhere’ plan,” Lyons said.

  The two detectives placed the calls to the Dutch police stations in Utrecht. They were thankful that the Dutch spoke remarkably good English.

  On the third call, Fahy scored a hit.

  “Yes, we have Inspector Janssen here. He is assigned to the serious crime unit,” the man at the other end said.

  “May I speak with him please?” Fahy asked.

  “Hold the line,” the officer said. Fahy could hear various clicks and beeps as the phone was connected through, and then she heard the unfamiliar long ringtone of the Dutch telephone system. Fahy thought she might have been cut off, and was about to hang up, when a woman answered.

  “Kan ik u helpen?” the woman said.

  Fahy was unsure how to respond, but quite slowly and deliberately, she asked if she could speak to Inspector Luuk Janssen.

  “I’m sorry, he’s not here at the moment. Who is calling, please?” the woman said in impeccable English.

  Fahy explained who she was and why she was calling, and left her Lyons’ number for Janssen to call back, which, she was assured, would be within the day.

  “Great, Sally, well done. Now we sit and wait – again!” Lyons said.

  Chapter Seven

  By late afternoon there had been no word back from Utrecht, and given that the Netherlands operates on Central European time and is therefore an hour later than Galway, Lyons’ hopes of hearing from Inspector Janssen were fading.

  She called the team together for an update, and told them what they had learned about the dead woman.

  “How have you been getting on tracing the money, Mary?” Lyons asked.


  “Not very well, I’m afraid. We got onto the company that issued her credit card. It was one of those prepaid cards where you lodge money onto it and then use it like an ordinary Mastercard to pay for things. We tried to find out if she had transferred money onto it from another bank, but it seems she just went into a Western Union office with cash, and did it that way,” Mary said.

  “Well, they must have posted the card out to Geller’s address in the first instance. Did you get that from them at least?” Lyons said.

  “Sorry, boss. It was sent to one of those places that allow you to receive post using their address for a small fee, and then it was collected along with some other stuff. We couldn’t get any further with that I’m afraid.”

  “Bloody hell! Look guys, this is turning into a right old mystery. We need to start getting some results here or we’re going to look very foolish indeed. Let’s leave it for this evening, but tomorrow morning I want a brainstorming session here at nine o’clock. You know the rules – nothing is ruled out, no matter how daft it might seem. We’ll put everything up on the whiteboard, unchallenged, and then try to make some sense of whatever we’ve got. You can think about it overnight. OK?”

  A murmur of agreement went around the room, and the team started to break up and head for the door.

  Lyons went back into her office to tidy up her papers and log off her computer. She was feeling quite down. This wasn’t going well – not well at all. She needed some quality thinking time.

  As she was wondering how best to achieve something, Sally Fahy put her head round the door to say good night.

  “Are you OK, boss?” she asked, seeing that Lyons was down in the dumps.

  “No, not really, Sally. This thing is getting me down. I feel as if we should be doing better. God knows what Mick will say, and the last thing we need is for some sharpshooters from Dublin to be given the case because we can’t hack it.”

  “You need alcohol, Maureen.”

  “No, I’m OK thanks. I better get off and see if I can figure any of this out before the morning.”