Darkhouse (22 page)

‘What did she say exactly?’ said Frank.

Shaun began sobbing again. ‘She said, “Leave me alone. I feel like a loser. You made me feel like a total loser.”’

‘And what did you say to that?’

‘I said,’ he looked up at the ceiling, ‘I fucking said, “Fine. I’ll leave you alone, then.”’ He went on, through his sobs, ‘And I did. I left her alone. I went back to the house and washed the goddamn dishes. And now look.’ His body shook. His tears flowed. Joe put his arm around him. Shaun was wailing now. He got up and ran for the bathroom.

Joe shook his head at Frank and Richie.

‘He shouldn’t have lied,’ said Frank.

Joe’s jaw was locked shut and his teeth were like spines in his mouth. He had been grinding them hard through the entire interview.

‘I’ll go and check on him,’ said Frank.

‘You know, you never have to look too far to find the killer,’ said Richie, when Frank was gone. ‘What is it again? Ninety percent of murders are committed by the husband, the boyfriend—’

Joe shook his head. He thought of the guys he
grew up around, the ones you couldn’t reason with because they were so stupid. It was too easy to fight them.

‘You’re fairly quiet now, aren’t you?’ said Richie. ‘Shiting on with your stupid fucking suggestions until your son gets pulled in. Then all we get is a guilty man’s silence.’

Joe’s jaw spasmed.

Richie lowered his voice to a growl, ‘I’m just saying young Shaun here bangs the arse off his girlfriend, they have a fight, she storms off and her body turns up three weeks later in his back garden. He doesn’t say a thing about any of this when we question him. What would that say to you? Would you look into him if it was your case, detective?’ He spat the last word.

A narrow strip of grass ran along the centre of the laneway up to the Lucchesis’ door. Two vans were parked by the trees and to their right, hidden behind the trunk of an oak, Duke Rawlins was studying the phone numbers on their side panels. Mark Nash. Lawn Order SUV. 089 676746. Duke closed his eyes and stored the number. Suddenly, he heard an engine from the top of the lane. He hunched down. The Jeep moved up the drive towards the front door of the house. Duke waited until it stopped before slipping back through the trees.

Frank was about to call O’Connor when O’Connor called him.

‘Frank, hello, it’s Myles. I’ve been going through the statements and I think I’ve come up with something.’

Frank tried to stop him. O’Connor ploughed on. ‘Here’s what Robert Harrington says: “I was at the harbour from seven p.m., checking out some new computer equipment on one of the boats that had come in. I saw Katie and Shaun up on the walkway. Then they were kissing and hugging.” That’s fine – four different fishermen confirm this. But further down, Robert says that later on, Katie and Shaun, “must have been down by the lifeboat launch.” Not “were”, but “must have been”. Kevin Raftery and Finn Banks did not see Katie or Shaun at all. They arrived to meet Robert at eight-thirty p.m. So all sightings of Katie and Shaun happened before eight o’clock that evening. And the person with the strongest emotional attachment to the missing girl and her boyfriend – Robert Harrington – is leading us to believe they were nearby, but hasn’t claimed to have actually seen them.’

‘You’re not wrong,’ said Frank.

Anna was sitting on a keg in the cellar, staring at the rows of wine bottles, the stone wall cold against her back. A shaft of light cut through and she looked up at the silhouette in the doorway
above. Joe walked down the steps and stood in front of her. He saw the pronounced angles of her cheekbones and reached out. She held his hand against her face and started to cry. He pulled her to his chest, holding her tight, letting his breath out. The effort of not touching for days had been exhausting them both. His stomach felt hollowed out, his head cloudy from medication, his eyes dry.

‘Say something,’ said Anna. He didn’t move. He didn’t look at her.

‘Please,’ she said.

‘I guess I’m pissed off that I thought everything was so perfect,’ he said.

‘It was,’ said Anna. ‘It is. It was years ago…’

‘I know that,’ he said. ‘But when I look at the guy, I see a fat, drunken loser and I think: that’s what I’m up against. That guy had my wife.’

‘That sounds so dreadful. And you’re not up against anyone. It was so stupid. What I did was stupid. I’ve always known that, but I love you…’

‘You should have told me,’ he said.

‘You would have left me.’

He pushed her back gently and looked into her eyes.

‘Yeah, I would have,’ he said. ‘So maybe it’s a good thing you didn’t tell me.’ He gave her a sad smile. ‘I’ve spent the last few days thinking about it. In the middle of everything. And all I’ve come up with is that in the big picture, I guess it doesn’t
matter. What happened to Katie, what’s happening to Shaun…there’s only so much energy I have. And for now, it should be going Shaun’s way. We can’t be like this. I just can’t live separately, whatever you did. It feels too weird. I’m sorry about what I said to you. I didn’t mean that. I was just so angry.’ He took both her hands in his. ‘Why,’ he said, squeezing them, ‘has everything turned to shit?’ He hugged her close; she sobbed and he kissed her hair.

Martha Lawson was curled up on her sofa, wrapped in an oversized cardigan with the belt pulled tight around her waist. The doorbell woke her from a light sleep and she rushed to the door. She smiled weakly when she saw Richie.

‘How are you keeping?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, letting him in. She pulled newspapers and magazines off the sofa and offered him a seat.

‘Have you any news?’ she asked, grabbing cups and mugs of old tea from the table, wiping with her finger at the rings they left behind.

‘Don’t worry about all that,’ said Richie. ‘Sit down. I have a bit of news, but really, it’s between yourself and myself. I’m telling you this in confidence. As a friend more than anything.’

She looked at him, puzzled.

‘It’s about Shaun.’

The bedroom was in total darkness, the black-out blinds pulled tightly down to the window sill. The smell of sleep hung in the air. Joe put his hand on Anna’s shoulder and turned her gently towards him.

‘I’m going to Dublin,’ he whispered. She frowned and looked at the clock.

‘It’s seven in the morning.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I have something to do.’

‘Now? Are you crazy? What about Shaun? I can’t even send him to school today. What am I supposed to do? We’ve barely talked about what happened at the station.’

‘I’m going because of Shaun,’ he said. ‘They’ve let him go for now, but who knows what way they’ll pull the evidence together…’

‘How is anything in Dublin going to help?’ she asked. ‘Couldn’t you do whatever it is over the phone?’

‘No,’ he said. He kissed her on the cheek before she had a chance to fully turn her face away.

Joe drove north on the Waterford Road and took the turn for Passage East, joining the queue for the ferry to Ballyhack. He left the Jeep for the five-minute trip, climbing the narrow steps to the deck. Each time, a different view was waiting when he reached the top. He stood against the railing and leaned into the cool breeze.

From Ballyhack, he drove east, passing signs for Rosslare to the right and Wexford town to the
left. He took the left and drove until he hit the N11, making his way to Dublin in just over two hours. Then he crawled through a senseless system of one-way streets in the city until he finally found a space in a multi-storey car park in Temple Bar. He took a right onto Westmoreland Street and made his way past the curved stonework of the Bank of Ireland where he crossed the busy street to Trinity. He’d been to Dublin before, but had never walked the cobbles under the famous arch.

He suddenly felt old, surrounded by students, some of them dressed for Armagnac with the chaps, others looking starkly modern against the eighteenth century architecture. He made his way past the library and turned right, taking in the action on the rugby pitch where – stripped of the helmets and padding of the NFL – crazy men put themselves through similar paces. He soon found himself standing at the vast, monastic wooden doors of the zoology department. The impressive stone building was over one hundred years old, with a sense of history that hit Joe as soon as he pushed into the tiny hallway. On his right was Neal Columb’s office – white wooden panelling and frosted glass. There was a scrawled note on a barely sticky Post-it slapped onto the door: Back two-thirty. Even the smallest action gave a clue to who someone was. Joe was already imagining Neal Columb as disorganised and brusque. So
when, at two-twenty, a neat, freshly showered man with a sandwich in his hand walked by, Joe didn’t pay much attention. The man shook his head at the Post-it, pulled it off and put it in his pocket. He unlocked the door, walked into the office and came out immediately with a perfectly scripted note that he stuck carefully on the door. ‘Back at two-thirty p.m. Thank you. Neal Columb.’ He called out to a secretary in another room, ‘Jane, I left you the note. You needn’t have wasted one of your precious Post-its.’ He was smiling. She laughed back at him. Joe quickly revised his appraisal of Neal Columb to well-organised and friendly. He was happy to give him his ten minutes for lunch, even though he felt like storming the office.

Finally, after checking his watch several times, he rapped on the glass.

‘Come in,’ said Neal. ‘Joe, is it? Have a seat.’

‘Ah. I saw you out running,’ said Joe. ‘Around the rugby pitch.’

‘I’d rather run around it than have a reason to be on it,’ said Neal. He was in his early forties, trim, fit and clearly not a man planning to throw himself into a scrum. Joe’s eyes wandered around the office. It had a definite academic feel, but enough photos on the walls and odds and ends on the shelves to make it cosy.

‘Let’s go up to the lab and have a look at what you’ve brought,’ he said.

They made their way up two short flights of stairs onto a small landing. An arrow for the lab pointed right, but Neal gestured left.

‘Would you like to see our Rogues’ Gallery first?’

Joe looked at him.

‘The museum,’ said Neal.

‘That would be great,’ said Joe.

They walked through the doorway into the musty chemical air of the small museum. Joe was sucked back in time. Antique mahogany cabinets ran the length of each wall and a heavy mahogany counter sat on top of more cabinets at the centre of the room. Behind each door were shelves of stuffed animals and creatures suspended in jars of murky formaldehyde.

‘Take a guess,’ said Neal, stopping at one of the displays and covering the plaque. Inside, was a large round, delicate-looking object the colour of ginger root, with a strange bulbous growth at one side. Around the back, a hollow was carved out revealing a centre lined with a gaping honeycombed effect.

‘I have no clue,’ said Joe.

‘It’s a camel’s stomach. Those little pockets inside are where they store water.’

‘Wow. That’s not what I expected.’

Neal pointed to another jar in one of the cabinets. There was a long string of what looked like tagliatelle suspended in a greenish solution.

‘Do you eat black pudding?’ asked Neal.

‘Aw, don’t spoil that for me,’ said Joe.

‘Well, this guy is the reason you should always cook it thoroughly. Tapeworm. It’s a big fan of pigs.’

‘I’ll be nuking it from now on.’ Joe squinted into the jar. ‘That’s just way too long,’ he said, shaking his head.

When he turned around, Neal was pulling out trays from a drawer that smelt of wood and naphthalene. Rows of preserved insects were secured onto a cream backing by straight pins. Neal talked through the different species, then stopped eventually to check his watch.

‘OK. The lab,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a meeting to go to. Remind me again what can I help you with.’

Joe lied for a living, but he was feeling a strange compulsion to be honest with Neal Columb. However, he knew he couldn’t. So his compromise was to start with the truth.

‘There’s a forest near my house. I found this empty pupal case there two nights ago. I guess I was just curious. I did a little entomology in college, back in the States, but I dropped out…I’m still fascinated by it, though, but not one hundred per cent clued in.’

Then he moved on to the lie.

‘There was a dead animal nearby and I wondered if it had anything to do with that. Or if you could maybe pinpoint the species of the fly and how long it’s been there, you know…’

‘OK,’ said Neal, reaching out for the small brown pill jar where Joe had put the pupal case. He slipped it under a dissecting microscope and peered in.

‘You’re absolutely right. It is, indeed, a fly pupal case. Now let’s see if we can put a name on the little fellow.’

He pulled out taxonomic guides and looked back and forth between them and the pupal case. Every now and then, he would stop and point something out to Joe. Eventually, he went to a cupboard packed with bottled insect specimens and brought out a jar that held a pupal case and larva, suspended in a formaldehyde solution.

‘Right,’ he said after an hour. ‘What you have is a
Calliphora
, which as I’m sure you know, is a bluebottle. Species-wise, I would have said
vicina
or
vomitoria
, but now I can say for definite that it’s
vomitoria
, based on comparisons. That would also tie in with where you found it – it’s much more likely to show up in rural areas, particularly forests. It’s actually a great tool for estimating time of death in murder investigations.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘But, of course, you know all this.’

Joe nodded. ‘OK. And what would that mean in terms of life cycle…’ He trailed off, hoping Neal would just give him a time frame, so he could find something out that would help Shaun.

‘Well, bluebottles come to the body almost immediately. They have an extremely advanced
radar for death. This, of course, won’t happen during the night, but it will during the day. So if your little fox or whatever was killed in the evening, the blow fly would be there the next morning, busily laying anything up to 300 eggs in one go, heading straight for the orifices or wound sites.’ He looked up at Joe. ‘I’m doing it again, telling you things you already know. So I’ll get down to it. Basically taking into account what you’ve told me, I’d say this would mean that your little creature died about twenty days before you found this.’