Hurt (DS Lucy Black) (2 page)

Cursing, he stood again, retrieved his torch and stumbled onwards. It was clear now that the figure was lying on the train line. It looked like a girl, for the hair was long, brown, hanging over her face. She was lying face down on the tracks, her throat resting on the side closest to the river, her legs supported by the other side, her body sagging into the space between them.

‘Jesus, get up,’ he shouted. ‘You’ll be killed.’

It seemed a pointless thing to say. The train wasn’t going anywhere because of the cables. Besides, lying where she was, she was obviously trying to kill herself anyway. Not brave enough to throw herself in front of the train, she was lying on the tracks, waiting for it to come. She’d picked a spot on the curve so the driver wouldn’t have time to brake by the time he’d seen her. In fact, he might not even realize he’d hit anyone at all, until the body was found.

‘Come on! Get up, love,’ Harry shouted, as he covered the last hundred yards. He wondered if she’d be pleased or sad to find out that the train wouldn’t have made it as far as her. Maybe God was looking out for the girl when he sent whoever out to steal the cabling. Mysterious ways and all that.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked, approaching the girl now. He couldn’t tell her age, but she was dressed young: flowered leggings and a hoodie. He noticed one of her baseball boots was lying on the gravel off to one side.

He crouched down beside her, placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘You need to get up, love.’

No response.

He left the torch on the ground and, using both hands, gripped her shoulders harder, struggled to turn her over. Finally, she fell onto her back, though in doing so, he knocked the torch onto its side, its beam spilling out onto the river.

At first, he couldn’t quite comprehend what had happened. Her head lay unnaturally tilted back, though in the weakening gradations of light thrown from the torch, he couldn’t quite see why. It was only when he shifted the torchlight towards her that he saw the gaping wound severing her throat.

Harry struggled to his feet but only managed a few yards before he finally brought his meal back up.

A flash of lightning bloomed inside the thunderheads far to the east as DS Lucy Black, trailing a step behind her boss, DI Tom Fleming, picked her way along the train tracks towards the arc of light thrown off from the crime scene beyond. A sharp, earthy smell carried off the River Foyle, which was slate grey and choppy in the rising breeze. From the canopy of the trees bordering St Columb’s Park, to their right, the crows shifted uneasily on the branches, curious as to the disruption to their night roost.

As they approached the crime scene tape, Fleming flashed his badge at the uniformed sergeant standing at the cordon.

‘And Sergeant Lucy Black, also Public Protection Unit,’ Fleming added as the man wrote the names on the clipboard he held.

Lucy glanced to her left; the lights of Derry City winked in the shivering water of the river next to the train line as a breeze shuddered down the Foyle valley. The embankment across the water had been pedestrianized and newly refurbished. The increased street lighting meant Lucy could make out the figures gathered across there, watching over at them.

Fleming stood back, holding up the tape for Lucy to duck under it.

‘It’s a mess up there, Sergeant,’ the officer at the tape said.

‘I’ll manage,’ Lucy commented, noting that he had not offered the same advice to Fleming.

As they made their way along the edge of the train tracks, the first thick drops of rain raised dusty plops from the wooden sleepers the tracks dissected. Lucy recognized the figure coming towards them as Tara Gallagher, a DS from CID.

‘Hey you,’ Tara said, smiling warmly when she saw her. ‘I didn’t know you’d been called.’

‘DI Fleming suggested we should ID Karen. Is it her?’

Tara nodded. ‘We think so. She fits the description, anyway. I’ll get the boss down.’

Tara lifted her radio. ‘Inspector Fleming and DS Black from the Public Protection Unit are here, sir,’ she said.

Lucy glanced up to the scene, saw one of the suited figures put away his radio and turn towards them. He lumbered down the tracks. Lucy assumed this to be the new CID Superintendent, Mark Burns, who had been recently appointed as the replacement for the late Chief Superintendent Travers.

Burns had been fast-tracked up through the ranks though and was a very different creature from the late Chief Super, by all accounts. He’d only taken up the post a week or two earlier, following the last round of promotions.

‘What’s he like?’ Lucy asked Tara, nodding towards the approaching figure.

The girl shrugged. ‘All right, so far.
Thorough
,’ she added, in a manner that meant Lucy couldn’t tell if it was intended as a compliment or a pejorative.

‘Chief Superintendent Burns,’ the man said, approaching them, gloved hand outstretched. ‘Tom, I’ve met before. You must be Lucy Black. I’ve heard a lot about you.’ His eyes twinkled above the paper mouth mask he wore. Lucy wondered just how much he could have heard in a fortnight.

‘Lucy can ID the body,’ Fleming said. ‘She’d been heading up the search for the girl. She knew her a bit.’

‘Great,’ Burns said. ‘Of course. Come with me.’

He held out his hand, gesturing that Lucy should lead the way. ‘I’m sorry for the loss. Did you know her well?’

‘I’d met her in one of the care homes a few times,’ Lucy said. ‘Her mother’s an alcoholic; Karen would be taken in anytime her mother went on a particularly long bender. She was a nice girl.’ Lucy’s placement with the Public Protection Unit of the PSNI meant that she primarily worked cases involving vulnerable persons and children. As a result, she spent quite a bit of time in the city’s Social Services residential units, in one of which Karen Hughes had been an occasional inhabitant.

‘How do you like the PPU?’ he asked, as they walked. ‘It’s a strange posting for a young DS. I’d have thought CID would have been the obvious place for someone like you.’

What did he mean,
someone like me
? Lucy thought. Young? Female? Catholic? All of the above?

‘I’d rather work with the living than the dead,’ Lucy said a little tritely, though she knew it was not entirely true even as she said it. The dead motivated her as much as the quick. More perhaps.

Burns nodded. ‘I’m afraid in this case that will prove a little difficult. There’s no doubting which she is.’

They had reached the body now, which lay across the tracks so that the girl’s neck was supported by one of the metal rails. It could easily have been mistaken for a suicide attempt, had it not been for the knife wound that had severed her windpipe. A handful of SOCO officers continued to work the immediate scene. One documented the area with a hand-held video, while a second used a digital camera to take still shots.

The girl lay on her back. Her clothes were as described in the Missing Person’s alert that Lucy had released just three days earlier. She wore a white hooded top, too long for her, over flower-patterned leggings. The top was soaked in blood now, but the material near the hem still retained the original white.

Lucy couldn’t really see the face too clearly. Part of it was smeared in the girl’s own blood, the rest covered by the loose straggles of her hair. She could make out, on one side, the soft swell of her cheek, still carrying puppy fat. A smattering of freckles was more vivid now, against the pallor of her skin.

Her hair had also become stuck to the blood that was already congealing at the edges of the wound at her throat. Lucy didn’t look too closely at it. No doubt she’d be treated to all manner of post-mortem pictures over the coming days without having to look at it here, too. She resisted an urge to push Karen’s hair back from her face, instead gently touched it with the tips of her gloved fingers. ‘Jesus,’ she said, softly.

She tried to dissociate the memories of Karen alive from the scene before her as she examined the body. ‘She used to wear a cross and chain around her neck,’ Lucy said. ‘It might have been lost when her throat was cut.’

‘Any other identifying features?’ Burns asked. ‘Or do you want to wait until she’s cleaned up?’

Lucy lifted the girl’s left hand. She noticed that the tips of each of her fingers were scored with deep gashes.

‘Defence wounds,’ Burns said, watching her. ‘She must have tried to grab the knife as he was slitting her throat.’

‘He?’

‘Most likely,’ Burns said.

Lucy turned the dead girl’s arm. She wore a number of leather wristbands and friendship bracelets. Lucy recognized them. She pushed them up the girl’s arm, exposing the skin of the wrist, finding what she was looking for: a series of criss-crossing scars in broken lines traversed the girl’s lower arm.

‘That’s Karen Hughes, all right,’ Lucy said, tenderly laying the girl’s hand back onto the grey gravel.

Burns walked back up the tracks with them to Lucy’s car. The breeze off the river had risen now, bringing with it further flecks of rain and a sudden chill that heralded the first grumble of thunder overhead.

‘We’ll need to get her covered before the rain hits,’ Burns said. ‘So, what’s the story with the girl, then?’

‘She’s been in and out of care for years now,’ Lucy said. ‘She’d be in the residential unit for a few months at a time, then out home again.’

‘What are the home circumstances?’

‘As I said, the mother is an alcoholic. Every time she’d be taken in to dry out, Karen ended up in care. Plus, occasionally, Karen would be hospitalized for self-harming and would be kept in care until her mood stabilized.’

Burns nodded. ‘And I don’t need to ask about the father.’

The element of the story the media had focused on, despite Lucy’s best attempts to keep it all about the girl, was the fact that her father was Eoghan Harkin, a man coming to the end of a twelve-year stretch for murder. He’d been part of an armed gang that had robbed a local bank in a tiger kidnapping which had left the bank’s manager dead.

He’d done his time in Magherberry, in Antrim, only to get moved closer to home a few months earlier, to Magilligan Prison in Coleraine. He currently resided in the Foyleview unit there, which prepared offenders for release. As the girl had used her mother’s surname, it hadn’t been an issue when Lucy had drafted the first press release on Friday expressing concern for Karen. By Sunday, one of the trashier papers had somehow made the connection and ran a front-page story under the heading ‘Killer’s Girl Goes Missing’.

‘Who found her?’

‘A poor sod working for the railways,’ Burns said. ‘He was called in because someone stole cabling. The late train is stuck down at Gransha. Lucky really. The bend she was on, the train would have been straight into her before the driver would have seen her.’

‘Was that the point? Lay her on the tracks so that, when she gets hit by the train, the damage it’d do would hide the wound to the throat?’

‘Make it look like suicide,’ Burns agreed. ‘We’d have thought nothing of it with her having been in care and that.’

‘Whoever did it knew she was in care then,’ Lucy ventured.

His face mask down now, Lucy could get a better look at Burns. He was stocky, his features soft, his jawline a little lacking in definition. But his eyes still shone in the flickering blue of the ambulance lights.

‘Maybe.’ He huffed out his cheeks. ‘Look, I appreciate you coming to ID the remains, folks. We’ll be another few hours here at least and we’ll have the PM in the morning. Maybe you could call to the CID suite about noon and we’ll take it from there.’

‘Of course, sir,’ she said.

Burns pantomimed a winch. ‘And a second favour. Seeing as how you already know them, perhaps you’d inform the next of kin.’

They stopped first at Gransha, the local psychiatric hospital, where Karen’s mother, Marian, was being held while she dried out after her latest two-week session. She’d be in no fit state to talk to them for some time. At that moment, they were informed, she was insensible.

As they left the ward to return to the car, Lucy glanced across to the secure accommodation where her own father was a permanent resident. The block was in darkness now, low and squat. Her father had once been a policeman too, but had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for the past few years. Lucy’s estranged mother, the ACC of the division, had sanctioned the man’s incarceration in the secure unit following the events in Prehen woods a year earlier.

‘Will we get the prison officers to break the news to the grieving father? Or do you fancy a drive to Magilligan?’ Fleming asked.

‘We’d best tell him ourselves, sir,’ Lucy said, deliberately turning up the heat in the car.

It had the desired effect. By the time they were passing the road off for Maydown station, on their way to Coleraine, Fleming was already swaying gently asleep in the front seat. Lucy flicked on a CD of the Low Anthem, turned it up enough to hear without wakening the DI beside her, and let her mind wander.

Their voices echoed in the emptiness of the visiting room. Eoghan Harkin had been brought in, dressed in his own clothes, evidence of the relaxed regime in Foyleview wing. As he took his seat opposite Lucy and Fleming, he’d already guessed the nature of their visit.

‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’

‘I’m afraid so, Mr Harkin,’ Lucy said. ‘I’ve just left her.’

He wiped at his nose with his hand, sniffing once as he did so, glancing at Tom Fleming. He raised his chin interrogatively. ‘Who’s he?’

‘This is DI Fleming, Mr Harkin,’ Lucy said. ‘He’s my superior officer.’

Fleming stared at him steadily. ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Mr Harkin.’

Harkin accepted the sympathies with a curt nod. ‘Where’s her mother? Has she been told yet?’

‘Not yet. She’s in Gransha at the moment. They felt she might not be receptive to the news until morning.’

Harkin accepted this, likewise, with a terse nod. ‘So what happened to her? Did she cut herself again?’

‘No. We believe she was murdered,’ Lucy said.

Harkin initially seemed unaffected by the news then, at once, reached out to grip the back of the chair nearest him. He missed and the prison guard, Lucy and Fleming had to grapple with him to pull him back onto the chair from the floor.