First Death In Dublin City (Thomas Bishop Book 1) (13 page)

‘Ok, see you in time.’ Said Flynn.

‘Wait! I’ve only been using for a few weeks, so the cold turkey shouldn’t be that rough, right?’ Asked Tommy.

Peter and Flynn chuckled. ‘Goodnight sisters.’ One of them said, then shut the door after him.

That was it, he was alone, with nothing but the silence of an oppressive room to keep him company.

They split from the group, the two of them walking alone, beneath the white concrete wall separating the road from the shopping centre. He wore black jeans barely held up by a green belt and above his falling waistline she could see a lot of his red boxers. He wore then a white polo, grey hoodie and runners so white he must have polished them. Her sister told her to remember all these details, but he really was hot.

She could smell his aggressive fragrance mixing with his hair gel, it made her nervous, filled up her nostrils, gave her jitters. She kept looking at him, in an attempt to get him to speak to her, but he either stared at his feet or kept glancing back at the group following them. They jeered among themselves but really, she knew, they were jealous. She hoped they wouldn’t intervene or put him off. Thirteen years old, and finally she had her chance. Her mother’s complete ban on going out until she was fifteen had really put a dampner on any chances to do it randomly, and finally her friends had worked the group to find her a boy.

And what a boy he was. Everyone fancied Greg, and Greg knew that everyone fancied him, so for him to choose her? Amazing! Still, for a boy who had kissed so many girls before, he sure was awkward.

What was that? A howl, a buggy. In front of them a buggy lay, pushed into the huge wall. It was odd, just perched there, on its own, no one to claim it. Buggys, in her experience, usually had a mother with them, yet this one was just unaccompanied beside a main road.

There was no mistaking the howling for anything else: there was a baby inside. Even though they couldn’t see it yet. Greg hung back, but she knew better, a baby out here alone? Definitely not safe. She pulled the buggy back from the wall and a horrible stench hit her, one she knew too well from her young yet babysitting career – this baby’s nappy needed a change.

She looked down at it, the brown baby screaming so loudly and in that second she forgot all about Greg: she knew she had to get this baby with the leaking green eyes to safety.

##

Rebecca lay before him, not as he wanted to remember her, but as he had last seen her: her face beaten into a gorish tricolour of bruises. The left side of her face was caved in and a red, bloody, mess. The centre, fractured and black with bruises, the right, pale and kissed by death. Like the Bishop poem
First Death in Nova Scotia
, the unblemished side of her face looked just like a little frosted cake.

In the cold, cold morgue, the doctors laid out Rebecca

Finally, it always came to this – weeks of hallucinations, until finally the big reveal, the light of his life broken into pulp. He knew he was hallucinating somewhere in his mind, but still, the sight of Rebecca made him want to get up and take her hand in his, but he was just too damn ill. Lucky she was getting up and coming to him. She got up off the gurney table, spotted hospital gown doing nothing to stem the flow of blood down her body.

Sitting down on the bed beside him, she brought her fingers to his sweaty face and cleaned his brow.

‘You forgot about me?’ She asked, and just the sound of her voice in Tommy’s ears brought a smile to his eyes.

‘Never.’ Said Tommy. He expected her to say more but she remained silent, so he kissed her swollen lips.

‘Good, because I won’t forget.’ Rebecca said.

‘I don’t know who did it Rebecca, I don’t know who killed Amy.’ Said Tommy.

Rebecca remained silent, but soon the drops of blood from her wounds formed a torrent, escaping from her eyes, ears and mouth, washing away her complexion. The bed was soaked, the blood saturating his clothes, he was drowning in it. Then, it all faded away, and Rebecca was now white, pale as the snow outside the young Elizabeth Bishop’s window. Was that Rebecca?

No, it wasn’t. It was Amy, Amy Clancy, the figure of any father’s nightmares. Strange to think that her corpse would cause so much pain, when laid out like that; maybe someday he’d write a poem about her; First Death in Dublin City, he’d call it.

First death.

##

Anne leaned over a pile of nettles and heaved.

‘A homicide detective getting sick at the sight of a body?’ Said Matty O’Hara.

‘Only been one for six months. And that is rank.’ She said, pointing to the ditch.

Matty grimaced. ‘Yeah, it is one strange scene. One of the worst crime scenes I’ve ever seen.’

‘All the same, I’d prefer if you didn’t tell Tommy I retched.’ She said, and Matty nodded. He took a chewing gum from his pocket and handed it over to her, and she smiled her thanks to him.

The scene before her was beyond both her pay grade and ability. It was a teenage girl, dressed in a load of multi-coloured towels. Her joints had been knocked out of place, and her skull caved in – worst however was her mouth, which was covered in a ring of blood larger than what remained of her face. The teeth had all been pulled out, and instead a number of small hardware nails had been knocked in.

She could tell that whoever it was had been tanned before her death and that it was a her, beyond that, it was a mangled mess of limbs, skin, bone, and guts she didn’t even know could be that colour. Tommy has chosen a terrible time to have a stroke.

‘Anything you can tell me?’ Asked Anne, not quite trusting her stomach yet.

‘Female, teenager, and not of Irish descent.’ Matty said.

‘Of what kind of descent? She looks almost Latin.’ Said Anne.

‘No, too dark, and not.. what’s the word.. Satin enough. But the killer has already made it clear enough what race the victim is.’ Matty said.

‘Go on?’ Said Anne.

‘If the nails in her gums are meant to represent fake teeth, and the different colour towels are meant to represent a long flowing bright coloured dress?’ Matty said.

‘Romani.’ Anne said.

It was strange how, depending upon who murdered this girl, the media would either pour over every detail or not give it an inch of type space. Dead Romani girls had a habit of not making it into the Irish papers, victims of serial killers stayed in the tabloids for years

‘Jacko!’ Shouted Anne and a young Garda looked over in his direction, he walked to her.

‘Hit up Pavee Point, ask them whether they’ve heard reports of any missing Romani girls.’ She said, and Jacko nodded his acknowledgement to the instructions.

‘Do you think the autopsy will be sped up?’ Asked Anne.

‘Already has been.’ Said Matty.

‘Fucks sake.’ Said Anne, rubbing her fingers into her temples. She glanced up, such beautiful surroundings ruined by the ugly sight of the mangled body. Before her stood the awesome white Ambassador’s Residence which, Anne was pretty sure, was one of the best homes in the city. Above the dead girl’s body an American flag billowed in the wind, while brambles cracked at their feet. For miles all the eye could see was grass fields and forests, in the distance a herd of deer were grazing casually.

‘How long until you’ve collected everything of note?’ Asked Anne.

‘An hour at most.’ Said Matty.

‘Ok, once your done I want her bagged and on her way to the morgue, we need to get the autopsy done as soon as possible so we can rule either in or out Amy’s killer. The media are going to be all over this one. Cunt wobbler.’

Anne walked back to her car, which was parked in a pebble-dash slab of land. She first took from her pocket a cigarette and took several drags, before she then took out her phone and, pulled up Mousey’s number.

‘Anne.’ The voice said.

‘It’s far too early to tell, if I’m honest.’ Said Anne.

‘Gut instinct?’ Asked Mousey.

‘Same as Amy’s killer.’ Said Anne.

‘Shit. Shit, shit, shit. The last thing people want at this time is a fucking serial killer to worry about.’ Mousey said.

‘It looks like they’ll have to worry.’ Said Anne.

‘Fuck. Well there is one good new story in all this.’

‘That being?’ Asked Anne.

‘For the first time in years there actually will be sufficient resources put to solving a case.’ Mousey said.

‘What good’s a team without Tommy to lead it?’ Asked Anne.

‘If I know Tommy, it’ll take more than a stroke to make him consider not taking this case.’ Said Mousey. ‘That boy’s been a maniac since first I met him.’

##

Tommy washed his hands, as was per usual, then entered the freezing room. Around him the gurney tables lay empty, knives ready to incise into bodies that weren’t there; as only one table was full, and around it three white coats worked.

‘Orlaith.’ Said Tommy, and she and one of her fellows jumped high into the air, before turning to look at him.

‘Tommy you gave me such a fright.’ Tommy didn’t recognise the girl beside Orlaith, but she looked very young, an intern?

‘Well, sorry about that. How are you Tim?’ Tommy said to the man across the other side of the table.

‘Thomas.’ Said he in reply, busy carving into the dead girl’s forearm.

Tim Mahon was an Englishman who had in his youth returned to his father’s homeland to study medicine in Trinity College; a scholar he soon found himself a niche in doing the autopsies in St James’ Hospital. Now he was Trinity’s main lecturer in both anatomy and autopsy procedure; acting occasionally as a consultant coroner to either the state or a wealthy family who want suicides and overdoses re-examined. His knowledge of the human body was freakish, as was his understanding of how to operate it, but despite the fact he spent 12 hours a day with dead bodies, he was eternally charming with the ladies and never failed to find someone to go home with whenever Tommy had been out with him at Garda socials and the like. If Tim was in charge of the autopsy, it meant that the powers that be obviously thought that this case was to be sorted, and perhaps even they would give him a complete team to use.

‘What do you think?’ Asked Tommy to the room as he pulled the latex gloves onto his hand.

‘Clear blunt force trauma to the head, caused the skull to collapse in and an immediate and severe concussion. Seconds later the cadaver entered into cardiac arrest; she would have been dead seconds after the blow.’ Said Tim.

‘So you’re telling me she didn’t suffer.’ Said Tommy looking sceptically at the mangled body before his eyes.

‘No, she most certainly suffered at least acute fear and then severe pain. The back of her throat is lined with polyethylene, rayon and aluminium powder. The three main ingredients used to make any kind of duct or masking tape. Her teeth have all been pulled pre-mortem, and four nails drilled into her gums.’

The great thing doing an autopsy with Tim was that he spoke to you like you were one of his first year anatomy students, and while for some Gardaí that was frustrating, for Tommy it meant that he would miss nothing. He continued.

‘The sheer amount of the chemicals in her throat would show, that she was hyperventilating for a sustained period. My guess is she began to scream very loudly, which tore loose fibres from her gag, which she then inhaled in a large gulp of air. The way rigour mortis set in, she was under severe stress in the moments leading up to her death. Not to mention that a lot of her wounds were pre mortem. These nails in her jaw too, she definitely was alive when they were hammered in.’

Tommy glanced at the long gashes along her torso, then at the crooked smile caused by three nails jabbed into her jaw, and grimaced.

‘Anything sexual?’ He asked.

‘No, certainly no signs of penetration anywhere. May I say DI, despite this not being my remit..’

‘Go ahead.’ Said Tommy.

‘In my, rather extensive experience both of dealing with bodies and in reading papers on autopsies, I have only ever heard of a woman committing a crime of this kind of this kind when suffering from battered wives syndrome, I would guess whoever has done this was a male.’ Said Tim. Tommy nodded his thanks for a fact he had already confirmed to himself.

Binning his gloves Tommy walked from the room out to a much brighter corridor and then out into the April sun: the first time it hadn’t rained in days. In the front car park was a strange sight, which Tommy quickly assuaged to be the dead girl’s family grieving, as there were at least twenty Romani in the car park, most of them sobbing, while before them Anne, Mousey, and the Assistant Commissioner attempted best to answer their questions. Tommy knew that they would have to wrap up soon and hold a press conference; as the story had been leaked hours ago and no official Garda statement had yet been released.

‘Assistant Commissioner.’ Said Tommy, and the man whirled around, stressed visage fading when he saw who was behind him.

‘DI Bishop, we had been worried for you. Weren’t you sick?’ He asked.

‘I was, ok now though.’ Said Tommy.

‘Great, that’s great. Well, I’m sure you’ve heard.’

‘It’s terrible.’ Said Tommy.

‘You fit to lead the team?’

‘Team?’ Tommy said.

‘Mick told me that this was the same guy who killed Amy Clancy?’

It hadn’t been confirmed, but if HQ was about to give them much needed funding, Tommy wasn’t about to disagree.

‘I’m happy to lead.’ Said Tommy.

‘Great news.’

Tommy nodded, then went over and tapped Anne on the shoulder. She seemed fine at first, perhaps thinking it was just another grieving family member, but once she saw Tommy, shaven and suited up, she jumped a mile into the air, then threw her arms around him. Remembering the scene they were at, Tommy quickly untangled himself from her.

‘Cmon.’ He said.

‘Cmon says he; where are we going?’ Asked Anne.

‘Harcourt Street, I’ve just been given a blank cheque, time to pick a dream team.’