Can Anybody Help Me? (14 page)

So, no boyfriend, no social life. The dead woman's life could even be described as boring. Which gave Claire absolutely no clue as to why it had ended. She needed more details. And that was why she was now navigating the congested streets of Dublin in an attempt to reach the Twohy family home.

Celtic cross or not, Ballyawlann was a nightmare to navigate, and Claire did three full revolutions of an overgrown grassy roundabout before finally finding the street she wanted. The road was narrow, vehicles parked haphazardly on either side, and she held her breath as she inched into a parking space.

Turning off the engine, she silenced the radio and paused. It had been another frantic morning. Following a restless night and yet another instalment of the circular ‘Doing Too Much' argument with Matt, she had arrived at the morning case conference to hear the preliminary results of Miriam Twohy's post-mortem. Claire didn't have any medical training, but years of reading such reports had made them accessible and her brain had cut through the jargon, filtering the medical details until the salient words leapt out.

Suffocation. And diphenhydramine.

Claire's instinct had also been proved right. Miriam had been lying in the apartment for almost two weeks before she had been found.

She had been smothered by the pillow that lay beside her head – tiny fibres from the cotton cover found on her eyelids, nose and lips as well as inside her mouth. Bruising to her face and body indicated that, at some point, a struggle had taken place, but she hadn't been sexually assaulted. It was highly
likely that she had been unconscious before she died. Fast asleep after ingesting a large dose of an over-the-counter flu medicine.

Diphenhydramine had an unwieldy name, but there were few homes in Dublin that didn't have a packet of it. A couple of tablets gave you a good night's sleep and relief from a stuffy nose and a headache. It was your best friend if you had a cold. However, taken in large doses, particularly when mixed with alcohol, diphenhydramine could lead to drowsiness and eventually the deepest of sleeps. According to the toxicology report, Miriam Twohy had ingested four times more than the recommended daily guidelines.

Claire checked her watch – a quarter past two – and then shifted in the seat again, curling and uncurling her spine with a soft sigh. She had promised the Twohys she wouldn't call round until half past. If she respected her side of the arrangement, she was hoping the family would be cooperative. And alone. Picking up a plastic bottle from the passenger seat, Claire took a sip of tepid water and stared out of the wind-screen. The street she'd parked on was lined with two- and three-bed terraced ‘parlour' houses, so called because of the room to the front that had once housed good china and now usually contained a plasma screen TV. Built in the 1950s, they were common to working-class areas all over the capital. They had originally been built as social housing for families who were being moved out of the inner-city tenements. These days the houses came with indoor toilets and a Sky sports subscription as standard, but Claire knew the rituals surrounding death wouldn't have changed much.

The news that Miriam's body had been found would have
brought streams of neighbours flowing through the house, some offering genuine condolences, others barely able to contain their excitement at the sight of the news cameras outside. Most would have been carrying food. The family, abandoned in the vacuum of the ongoing murder investigation, would have initially welcomed the diversion. But the post-mortem was now over and the body had been released for burial. The formal Irish Catholic funeral, stretching over two days, could now begin and Claire was hoping this afternoon would find the family together at home and, for the first time, alone.

There would be no wake. Miriam's body had been left in no fit state for an open coffin. Instead, her body had been released to a local funeral home from where it would be ‘brought to the church' later that evening. Claire had attended countless similar ceremonies at home. Relatives, friends and that specific breed of Irish person who enjoyed funerals, no matter how tenuous their connection to the dead person, would gather at the local funeral home or at the parish church at five. Prayers would be said, hands shaken, elbows grasped and reassurances given that Miriam was in a better place or was at peace now. Irish funeral goers were usually an optimistic bunch. The pace would be frantic, the family would stand at the top of the church while a sea of mourners ebbed and flowed around them, eventually blurring into one long line of banalities, sympathy and rough hugs. Having lived through it, Claire knew the ritual well.

But all that would come later. For now, in the Twohy household there would be a lull, a rare hour of silence as the family gathered its thoughts and prepared to say goodbye to its daughter.

Which gave her the perfect opportunity to intrude on their grief.

Breathing heavily, she climbed out of the car. The rows of pebble-dashed homes were sandwiched behind pocket-sized gardens, most of which had been concreted over to create drives for oversized cars. Here and there you could see where the excesses of recent years had left their mark, the satellite dish on the front of the house, the rim of a child's bouncy castle just visible from the side. The houses had once been identical, but now most had been ‘bought out' from the council by their owners who had asserted their individuality with new paint jobs, large PVC porch doors and in one case giant metal gates topped by matching gold eagles. Claire smiled when she saw that one. There had been a similar house on an estate just outside her home town.

When she was younger, she had longed to live there and had told her mother as much during a bitter teenage row. She'd be better off in a house like her friend Rita's, she'd said, with six children in three bedrooms and the top of the bunk bed for herself so she could listen to her older sisters sneak in late at night and bitch about boys. The way Rita told it, it had seemed impossibly glamorous, like something out of
Jackie
magazine. Much better than being stuck in a room of her own with nobody to talk to, she'd sniped, childishly unaware of the pain her words were causing to a woman who had never planned on being the parent of an only child.

But her mother had hidden the hurt and smiled. You'd be driven mad, she'd said, with a load of brothers and sisters. Using your toys and breaking your things. The whinge had passed with a cuddle and a cup of weak tea. But Claire had
never forgotten the conversation and had thought back to it years later when she and Aidan had taken full advantage of her room, and the space and the privacy her parents had provided for their cherished and only daughter.

Aidan.

She shivered. Funny how he could just pop, fully formed into her head at any time. But not now. Now, she had a job to do.

Reaching number 23, she hoisted her bag higher on her shoulder before opening the front gate. The Twohys' home was a standard end-of-terrace three-bed, well maintained but unadorned by porches or eagles. The front garden had been sacrificed to a large concrete driveway into which two cars had been carefully jigsawed into place. A sibling, Claire guessed. Drawn back to the parental home by the magnet of bereavement. She checked her phone and switched it to silent, then edged her way clumsily past the cars and knocked on the front door.

‘That's Miriam there?'

‘On the right.'

Claire moved closer to the fireplace and gazed at the photograph that was hanging a few inches above it. Looking at it, Claire realised that up until then she had had no sense of what Miriam Twohy actually looked like. The body in the apartment had been far too decomposed for that. The Facebook snap used as part of the Missing Persons press release had been taken at a Christmas party and Miriam had been over made-up, her face rendered slack and slightly puffy by a bright camera flash used late at night by somebody's camera phone. This picture, clearly taken at her college graduation, showed a far more attractive and confident girl. In her early twenties, she was tall with strands of dark hair peeping from under her mortarboard. Her brown eyes sparkled and her skin needed little make-up other than a tawny lipstick on lips that were parted to reveal even white teeth.

The Facebook shot had made Miriam look like a million other women out on the tear. But this young woman was different: poised, attractive. And happy. Her joy radiated from the camera. It had been a happy day. There were two women in
the picture, both formally dressed in black graduation robes, but their pose was a casual one. The taller girl, Miriam, had her arm thrown over the shoulder of her small blonde friend. Claire smiled. Had she herself graduated from university, there would no doubt be a similar picture hanging on her mother's wall. But she hadn't given her parents that particular day out and they had to make do with the group shot taken at Templemore in which most of her head was obscured by Big Jim Kearney from Mayo, who was well over six foot even without his new Garda headgear.

She stepped back from the photograph and focused on the blur of grey concrete in the background. It didn't look posh enough to be Trinity, had to be one of the city's other universities, most likely University College Dublin over on the Southside.

‘UCD?'

‘Yes. Miriam studied Arts. She got … what was it? A 2:1 in her final exams. That's nearly four years ago now.'

There was a note of pride in the voice now, but it had evaporated before the sentence ended.

‘Fair play to her.'

‘Yes.'

The tiny woman who had introduced herself as Fidelma Twohy was probably only in her late fifties, but grief had added at least another decade to her age. Anyone listening to her flat, expressionless voice might have assumed she was uninterested, perhaps bored by the conversation. But no one looking at her would make that mistake. Her face was white, her eyes redrimmed. Her short brown hair needed a wash, and had been severely combed and parted to reveal grey roots springing from
a greasy scalp. Her clothes fitted well, a dusky-pink cardigan hung neatly over a cream blouse and grey knee-length skirt. But there was a smudge of dust on the collar of the blouse and the edge of a paper tissue peeking out from the sleeve of the cardigan. It had been more than a fortnight since her daughter had gone missing and she looked like she hadn't slept since.

Claire was about to suggest they sit down when the sitting-room door opened.

‘Yeah, that's our little college o'knowledge graduate all right! Much good it did her.'

Claire turned to face the door as a stocky, balding man came into the room. The file she had read on the Twohy family had said Miriam's brother was in his early thirties, but without that information Claire would have added at least ten years to his age too. As he drew closer, she could see a resemblance to the figure in the photograph. The brown eyes were a match for his sister's, as was the sallow skin and prominent, slightly beaked nose. But where Miriam's face had been open and warm, his was shuttered, suspicious and drawn.

His mother turned to him.

‘Where's the child?'

The man responded to the note of panic in her voice and nodded in the direction of the hall.

‘Conked out in the buggy. Took her a good while to fall asleep, God love her.'

‘Ah, sure, her routine is all over the place.'

His mother walked quickly into the passage and then returned after a moment, presumably satisfied that all was well. The three of them paused, and looked at each other. There was no social etiquette for moments like these and Claire
decided it was time to take control. Walking toward the man she stretched out her hand.

‘Detective Boyle. I'm working on Miriam's case. You must be Gary?'

‘Yeah. Gary. Howerya?'

He paused for a moment and then returned the handshake. Claire turned to his mother again.

‘We might sit down and have a chat, so?'

As if relieved to be finally given some direction, the older woman turned and perched herself at the edge of a long brown leather sofa that took up almost half the space in the small, cluttered sitting room. Her son followed her while Claire settled for a seat on a matching brown leather armchair that had been angled towards the TV. She smiled, and nodded at Dr Phil.

‘My mam's a big fan.'

The Twohys stared at her blankly and Claire realised that they hadn't even noticed that the television was on. She settled back in the armchair. It was the most comfortable seat she had had in days and she was unable to rein in a sigh of pleasure as the ache in the small of her back subsided.

‘When are you due?'

Mrs Twohy gave her a small smile.

‘August.'

‘Sure that'll fly in.'

‘So they tell me!' Claire smiled and gave thanks to the little icebreaker now doing somersaults in her stomach.

‘And Miriam's little one is …?'

‘Réaltín is twenty months.'

The woman's face closed tight at the question. Too much, too soon. Claire cursed inwardly and her baby kicked against her
ribs as if to say I told you so. Okay, bright spark. Maybe I should leave it to you, huh? She pulled her notebook out of her bag.

‘So, I just need to go over a few things.'

Garry lent forward, his brown eyes glittering.

‘The cops have been through all this several times. Jaysus, me ma's in ribbons. Have yiz not got enough already? For all the good it will do yous.'

Claire opened her mouth to speak, but his mother got there first and laid a hand gently on his arm.

‘She's only doing her job, love. Go on.' She turned to Claire. ‘Ask whatever you want. Do you need my husband as well? He's gone out for a walk, said he needed a few minutes to himself before the removal. He hasn't slept a wink since it happened. Well the little one was roaring all night, she can't understand what's after happenin' to her mammy …'

Her voice trailed off and Claire leaned as far forward as she could.