Gallows Lane

Chapter Three

Tuesday, 1 June

The following morning broke in a spectacular sunrise. The last drifts of mist, hanging like cannon smoke along the base of the hills behind Strabane, were dissolving and the heat had thickened sufficiently that all the men in the station were in their shirt sleeves by nine-thirty.

Williams and I were standing in the station’s kitchenette making coffee. Patterson and Colhoun had yet to turn up for work, and many of the others who had were suffering the effects of the celebrations of the night before. Even Williams had joined in. The atmosphere was hushed and fragile, the air heady with the smell of breath mints, and something stronger beneath it.

Our conversation was cut short by Burgess struggling towards us, his face ashen. ‘A body’s been found,’ he said. ‘Out at Paddy Hannon’s new development.’

Paddy Hannon was a home-grown success story. His family had owned a struggling dairy farm just outside Castlefinn. When Paddy first took over the business he hit on the idea of cutting out the supplier and shops and selling his milk himself Famously he visited every house in all the villages peppered around the immediate border area, leaving each household a free pint of milk. Several days later he revisited each and offered to deliver milk to them three times a week at shop cost. Within six months he had employed thirty workers and bought four milk floats. Within three years he had bought out his original supplier. Then he moved into property and his personal fortune soared. Yet he never lost his doorstep manner and for each house he sold, he would visit the new occupants with a bottle of champagne and a basket of fruit to welcome them to their new home. Perhaps unsurprisingly he had twice won Donegal Person of the Year, an honour more hotly contested than it sounds.

When we arrived at the building site, we found Hannon, trudging through the quagmire of mud which covered the area. Despite the growing heat, the ground was still sodden from the storm a few days earlier. A crowd of workmen were standing outside one of the completed houses at the top of the field.

Paddy shook hands with each of us, then led us towards the house. Meanwhile, a patrol car of uniforms arrived and immediately went about positioning crime scene tape around the perimeter of the field.

‘Fucking shocking, Ben,’ Paddy repeated several times. ‘A complete mess. I’ve never seen so much blood.’

‘What happened?’ Williams asked.

‘One of the lads went into the house to use the toilet. Found the body lying in the sun room. Blood everywhere. Poor fella’s not right yet.’

‘I take it no one lives in these houses yet?’ I asked.

‘No,’ Paddy said. ‘They’re nearly finished. Still some painting needed and a bit of joinery.’ Then he added as an afterthought, ‘Jesus, we’ll never sell them now.’

The house was the second detached townhouse in from the far end of the estate. The external paintwork looked all but finished and the windows and doors were already in place. A grey shale path had been laid around the building and we followed Paddy Hannon along this. When we came around the back of the house, a crowd had already gathered. On the west side of the building was a sun room with French doors, one of which was wide open. Paddy Hannon had not exaggerated: there was blood everywhere.

The victim’s body lay beneath the French doors, one hand stretched out as if towards the handle. The girl’s face — for she was female — was covered in blood, her brown hair matted and stuck to her face with thick clots, her lips crusted with cement dust. She was clearly an adult but, because of the state of her face, her age was difficult to guess. She was naked from the waist down, yet strangely she wore a green light cardigan and a vest top beneath, both heavily stained with her blood. Printed on the vest was the picture of a smiling girl and the words ‘Claire, 2006’. Her legs were heavy and pale, marked with a number of bruises. I followed a trail of blood into the kitchen and there found her trousers and underwear, lying discarded on the floor beneath the skeletal kitchen units.

I went back into the sun room. A newspaper lay on the concrete floor, its pages opened at a picture of a topless glamour model, smiling jauntily.

Williams squatted beside the body, softly stroking the girl’s hair with her gloved hand. She looked up at me, her eyes damp.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

‘Someone beat her to death,’ she said simply.

Williams’s opinion was seconded by John Mulrooney, our local doctor, who officially pronounced the girl dead. We stood outside the house, looking in at the body as the Scene of Crime people started to take photographs and dust for fingerprints. Williams went and sat in the car for a few minutes to regain her composure. She clearly recognized the marks a man’s fists leave on a defenceless female body.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ Mulrooney said, shaking his head. ‘No, actually that’s not true. I have seen something like it: the injuries are what you’d expect on a hit-and-run victim. As bad as that.’

‘What killed her?’ I asked.

‘Pathologist will know for sure. I’d expect massive internal trauma. Possibly fractured skull; there’s yellowish residue around the nose and ears, though it’s difficult to tell with all the blood. That came from her nose, I think, which is broken.’

‘Any ideas who she is? Age? Anything?’

‘Mid-twenties, I’d say. I don’t recognize her, though. Not a local.’ He spat dryly on to the ground and shook his head in disgust.

Above us a pair of buzzards circled, scanning the surrounding fields for mice, the piercing mew of their cries at once terrifying and beautiful.

When Williams returned to the scene we questioned the man who had found the body. Robert McLoone’s hands shook as he tried to smoke the cigarette I gave him. He looked back towards the house continually as he spoke, as if in the hope that what he’d seen might not be real. When he finished his smoke, he rubbed the back of his neck with his left hand, nervously.

‘I went up the house, like,’ he explained. ‘To shit, like. You know? We all do. There’s nothing wrong with it, you know,’ he added with concern.

‘Don’t worry, Robert,’ I said. ‘You aren’t in any trouble. No one thinks you did anything wrong. But we need you to walk us through what happened. All right?’

He rubbed furiously at his neck, looking at me sideways, as if to gauge the validity of my comment, then nodded.

‘Now, why did you go to that particular house? Why not one of the ones further down the site?’ I asked.

‘That one’s plumbed, like. The bog flushes.’

I nodded. ‘Okay. So, you went to the house. What then?’

‘I went in, like.’

‘Was the door open?’ Williams asked. ‘Unlocked? Anything disturbed outside?’

McLoone thought for a second. ‘No, I used the key, so it must have been locked.’

‘And where was the key?’

‘Under the brick, like. It’s always there.’

‘Did you not see anything as you unlocked the door?’

‘I don’t remember. I was caught short, like. In a bit of a rush. I mustn’t have done, though. Otherwise I wouldn’t have gone in.’

I nodded agreement. The body was so close to the doors that he probably wouldn’t have seen it and may not have noticed the drops of blood trailing into the kitchen.

‘When I went in and saw her I nearly puked, like. Came straight out again and phoned the Guards.’

‘There’s a newspaper lying in there. Is that yours?’

Aye,’ he said, blinking at me, his face devoid of expression.

*

The key was still in the door when we went back up. I asked Paddy Hannon about the brick McLoone had mentioned. Beside the opened door lay an upended breeze block.

‘We leave the key there,’ Paddy explained, ‘under the brick. For the workmen to come in and out — so I don’t need to keep opening the house every time one of them wants to take a shit.’

‘Who would know about this?’ I asked.

‘Me; the estate agent; everybody working for me, fairly much. And subcontractors. And I guess anyone who’s ever bought a house off me; I leave keys like that in all my builds. In case the owners want in to measure up windows and the like. A goodwill thing, you know.’

While we were speaking, one of the Scene of Crime officers emerged from the house, squinting in the sunlight. He wore a blue paper forensics suit, with plastic coverings over his shoes. He approached me, holding aloft a transparent evidence bag containing something flesh-coloured.

‘Found this, sir. Near the sink unit. Seems fairly new.’

I took the bag and examined it. Inside was an unrolled, but unused, condom. ‘Jesus, that’s a first,’ Paddy said. ‘I’ve seen all sorts in new builds before, but never an unused johnnie.’

I grunted in return. Any fingerprints?’ I asked the SOCO.

‘Too many to use. Dozens of different sets. We haven’t checked the condom, sir. Do that back at HQ.’

It didn’t take long to identify the girl. By the time we returned to the station, Burgess had already contacted all the local Gar da stations and Northern Ireland police stations across the border, looking for missing persons reports. By lunchtime we believed we had a name: Karen Doherty.

Her sister Agnes had reported her missing in Strabane earlier that morning. She now stood with us, outside Letterkenny General Hospital, having identified the girl. My counterpart in the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Inspector Jim Hendry, had accompanied her. He had stood quiet beside her, his hand resting lightly on her arm, as her sister was revealed to her. Karen had been cleaned up before being identified, her face now strangely serene, despite the brutality of her death. The morgue attendant had held the covering sheet just below her chin so that Agnes had been unable to see the bruising which covered the rest of her body. Only one bruise blossomed on her cheek.

Karen’s hair had been rinsed clean and pulled back from her face, revealing a high forehead. Her features seemed slightly out of proportion; her nose was long and thin, her mouth small, her lips thin and pale. Her eyes were closed when we saw her, her face wiped clean of all cosmetics.

Her sister shared many of the same characteristics, although her face was thinner, her mouth slightly fuller. She watched me struggle to light a cigarette and then asked for one.

‘Gave these up years ago,’ she explained as I lit it for her. ‘When I got pregnant.’

‘Boy or girl?’ I asked.

‘Boy. Seanny. Karen was his godmother.’

Every conversation this woman would have for the foreseeable future would revert, without conscious decision, to her sister.

‘She was all I had left, apart from him. Our parents died when Karen was in her teens. I took her in, looked after her.’

‘How far apart were you, age-wise?’ I asked, for Agnes Doherty clearly wanted to talk. It was also important for me to understand Karen, to know who she was, if I was to find out how and why she died.

‘Eight years. I got pregnant, left school, had a baby. Next step was to move out. Karen stayed at home though. Then our parents died.’

‘How?’

‘In a car accident,’ she said bluntly, raising her chin slightly, as if the smoke from her cigarette was irritating her eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, a little unnecessarily, but the woman waved the sentiment away.

‘Karen moved in with me,’ she continued. ‘I was … I was so proud of her. She stayed on at school, went to college, the whole bit.’

‘What did she do?’ Williams asked.

‘English,’ Agnes replied, perhaps misunderstanding the question. ‘She was trying to make it as a journalist, wrote things for the Strabane papers.’

‘Anything controversial?’ Hendry asked.

‘God no,’ Agnes replied, blowing on the tip of her cigarette. ‘Film reviews and the like.’

‘Can you think of anyone who might have held a grudge against her?’ I asked. ‘Ex-boyfriends? Current boyfriends?’

‘She didn’t have any’ Agnes said. ‘Karen was a lovely girl. Never had no enemies.’

Any idea who she was with last night?’ Williams asked.

‘She went clubbing in Letterkenny, with her friends. Out on a hen night. I phoned round this morning, but none of them knew where she was. Hadn’t seen her since the club. When I hadn’t heard from her by lunchtime, I knew there was something wrong.’ She exhaled her smoke in a single, steady stream.

‘We’ll need names, Miss Doherty.’ I said.

Claire Finley worked in the same newspaper office as Karen Doherty, accepting phone-placed classified adverts. She sat now in the staff kitchen, smoking a cigarette and drinking a mug of tea. Williams sat with her arm around the girl. We recognized Claire’s face from the vest top Karen had been wearing. The girl should have been looking forward to her impending marriage; instead she was mourning the death of a friend. And blaming herself.

‘We shouldn’t have left. I knew that. But I wanted to get home,’ she said, looking at each of us, pleadingly, hoping that we would nod our understanding and offer her some comfort. ‘You see? I had to get up for work. I wanted to get home.’

Claire explained to us that she and five of her friends, including Karen, had gone to Letterkenny for her hen night. They had shared a meal first in a local restaurant, then had gone clubbing in Club Manhattan. One by one, her friends had started to pair up with men. She had lost track of Karen, she said.

When they met up afterwards, Karen and another girl, Julie, were missing. Julie had texted one of the others to say she had ‘scored’ and wouldn’t need a lift. No one had heard from Karen. They waited five minutes or so for her, then, presuming that she had achieved the same result as Julie, they went home. Karen’s sister Agnes had phoned that morning, looking for her. Claire hadn’t been too worried at that stage — maybe Karen was sleeping off a hangover somewhere. But by lunchtime she still hadn’t appeared, or phoned in sick, and had missed two deadlines for articles she had been writing. Claire had phoned around her friends. Only then did it become apparent that she hadn’t made it back to Strabane.

‘You didn’t see her with anyone?’ I asked, a little incredulously. ‘The entire night, you didn’t spot her once?’

‘No, I. . I. .’ Claire began, then spluttered into tears for the third time since our arrival. She looked at Williams, her head tilted slightly. ‘Please.. ’ she managed.

‘Maybe Claire and I could have a few minutes, Inspectors?’ Williams said, nodding towards the door of the kitchen.

Hendry and I went outside and stood on the street, taking the opportunity for a smoke.

‘Well, what’s your reading of it?’ Hendry asked.

‘I’m not sure, Jim, to be honest. The pathologist’s report should be through this evening. There’s a lot of strange stuff with the scene. Locked doors, unused condoms.’

‘Anything we can do, Ben, just let us know.’

‘We’ll need someone to speak to the rest of the girls on the hen night. Could you take care of that over here?’

‘No problem. Keep us up to date on what’s happening your side, eh?’

Williams joined us a few moments later.

‘Anything?’ I asked.

‘Girl stuff,’ she said. ‘Seems Claire met a man last night. One last fling before the ball and chain. Spent most of the disco in the back of his car; doesn’t want her fiance to know, obviously. She has no idea what happened to Karen, but she feels guilty as hell about it.’

When I got back to the station, Patterson and Colhoun were putting the finishing touches to a display for the media. All the weapons they had found had been bagged and tagged and were laid out like a banquet on top of two pasting tables clothed in white paper. Boxes of ammunition were piled on one side, the shotguns in the middle and the revolvers side by side at the front. On a separate desk, in pride of place, lay the bag of Es, some of them spilling on to the desk from the mouth of the bag.

Costello had dressed for the occasion and I noticed he had brought a new black hawthorn walking stick which perhaps he felt was more fitting to a man of his position.

When he spotted us he called Williams and me into his office. It was a sparsely decorated affair, lacking any personal touches, except for a photograph of his children and one of his dead wife. I had not seen his daughter, Kate, since her mother’s death. Kate herself had been injured at the time and had learned, as I had, of her father’s possible complicity in the murder of a prostitute. Though Costello never mentioned it, I believed that Kate held him accountable for her mother’s death.

He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, instinctively rubbing at his chest as we spoke. His walking stick hung off the arm of the chair and with his other hand he fiddled with the handle.

First we discussed the attack on Karen Doherty. Costello had received a copy of the pathologist’s report. She had been punched and kicked around the back of the head, her trunk and legs. One of the blows had caused a fracture in the base of her skull. But it was not the beating alone that had killed her. She had suffered an aneurism, caused by a genetic weakness in her brain: it would apparently have happened at some stage; the beating simply acted as a catalyst. Toxicology tests revealed the presence of a chemical, gamma-Butyrolactone, in the girl’s blood. Interestingly, despite her state of partial undress she had not been engaged in sexual activity before her death, nor had she been sexually assaulted either immediately pre- or post-mortem. In fact, Karen Doherty was still a virgin when she died.

‘What do you think, folks?’ he asked.

‘What the hell is gamma-Butyrolactone?’ I asked, apparently a step ahead of Williams, who nodded her head as I spoke.

Costello lifted a sheet of paper from his desk and squinted slightly at it as he read. ‘GBL. Something used in solvents apparently. Can cause sexual euphoria, heightened sensations, lack of coordination and blackouts. It can be taken as a recreational drug, but at higher doses the effects are so strong, it’s currently the date-rape drug of choice in the UK.’

‘So someone slipped it to her then; spiked her drink perhaps?’ Williams suggested. ‘Or might she have taken it herself? Give herself a bit of a high before a night out?’

‘If it’s a sex drug, would someone who was a virgin really take it willingly? More likely someone slipped it to her somehow.’

‘Best keep our focus on what we know,’ Costello cautioned. ‘What have we got?’

‘We know she was in Club Manhattan in Letterkenny, sir,’ Williams said. ‘Presumably someone picked her up there.’

‘We’re going to check there tonight,’ I explained. ‘Show around her picture, see if it stirs up anyone’s memory.’

‘What about the scene, Inspector? Anything useful there?’

I looked at Williams, then responded. We had already had this conversation in the car on the way to the station. ‘There are a number of issues there, sir. The house was locked, so someone unlocked it. Which means that either the victim or the killer knew that the key was under that brick. . And, if Karen Doherty was doped with GBL, she’d hardly have been in a fit state to start looking around in the dark for keys and locking and unlocking doors. Which means her killer was the one who knew the key was there.’

And he locked up the house afterwards, sir,’ Williams added. Assuming it’s a he.’

‘I think that’s a safe assumption, Caroline, considering the extent of her injuries.’

‘The condom we found coupled with the state of undress of the girl’s body, would suggest a sexual element to this. Seems a bit out of character for someone who’s kept her virginity to suddenly up and off with someone she’s met for the first time. So either she knew her killer very well. .’

‘Or else this was a rape that went wrong, which the toxicology reports support.’

‘So why didn’t he go ahead with the rape, if that was the case?’

‘Maybe he killed her by accident, panicked and ran,’ Williams said. ‘Locking up the house seems like a futile enough attempt to hide his crime.’

‘Or it could just suggest how callous this guy is. Business taken care of and on his way,’ I said. ‘Maybe she started to wake while he was getting ready to rape her. He hits her, kills her, runs.’

‘What about fingerprints?’

‘McLoone’s prints fairly much cover any others that might be on the key. No good to us. There are prints on the condom, though, and not Karen’s.’

‘All we need now is a suspect to match them with,’ Costello muttered. ‘Who’s in the frame?’

This time Williams looked to me. I nodded.

‘We reckon one of the builders, sir,’ she said. ‘Someone muscled, with access to the house, knows where the key is. We’re going to start there. Get a list of his workers’ names off Paddy Hannon. Contracted and subcontracted.’

‘Sounds good. Keep me informed,’ Costello said. Assuming he was finished, we rose to leave. ‘Caroline, give myself and Inspector Devlin a minute or two alone, would you?’ Costello said. Williams looked at me, shrugged slightly and left.

‘How’s James Kerr?’ he asked, the change in direction catching me completely off guard.

‘I … I lost him, sir. I dropped him at a B amp;B, but he’s done a runner.’

‘Well, find him,’ Costello said softly. ‘Find him, Benedict, and convince him to go back across the border. Let them deal with him. This business is enough to keep us on our toes.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, still standing.

‘It looks well out there, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said again.

‘It’s good for the station, Benedict. That’s important for all of us.’ He waved towards the seat I had just vacated. ‘Sit down, Benedict.’

I smiled a little uncertainly, but sat again anyway.

‘Try to get involved out there, Benedict. Successes like this are important. We’re up to our eyes in it with this Doherty thing, and God knows Kerr is just a bomb waiting to go off, but this find of Patterson’s is something we can be proud of; something we can show the papers. D’ye see?’

‘I understand, sir,’ I said.

‘Have you thought about what I told you the other night?’ he asked.

‘Sir, I’m not sure I have an interest in your job,’ I protested, not wholly sincerely. ‘Besides, even if I did make the promotion list, there’s no guarantee I’d be posted here. I could end up in Cork. I’m not sure I’m ready to uproot Debbie and the kids.’ Each year, An Garda compiles a list of officers selected for promotion. Successful officers are expected to take the first available post, regardless of their current location.

‘I wouldn’t worry about that, Benedict. A word in the right ear would see you here. If you’re selected for the list, of course,’ Costello said, smiling. ‘Even if you aren’t selected, the person who ends up here will be based in Letterkenny again. I only moved here for Emily.’ He gestured towards the photograph on his desk.

Costello had requested a temporary move from Letterkenny to Lifford several years previous, in order to be closer to home for his wife who had a cancer scare. She survived that only to meet death violently in her own home on a frozen New Year’s Eve. Certainly I had as much chance for promotion as someone like Patterson — until his serendipitous finds.

‘Of course, this all depends on Harry,’ Costello added.

‘Why?’ I attempted, vainly, to feign indifference to the turn the conversation had taken.

‘Things are looking good for Inspector Patterson, Benedict. These finds have given him a bit of an edge, I don’t mind telling you. And they’re doing the station as much good.’

I nodded in agreement.

‘I know it’s not your style, but try to be a team player, Benedict, eh? And get your bloody application in. This chance’ll not come up for another while, you know.’

I nodded my head a little uncertainly. Much as I liked the idea of promotion, I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to run a whole division. But I couldn’t tell Costello that.

‘Now, let’s put on a good show for the press boys, shall we, Inspector?’ Costello said, interrupting my thoughts.

I looked up at him, framed by the window. Over his shoulder the sky had whitened, the sun no more than an indistinct haze.