Scalpel (7 page)

First came the false name and address:
joan o'sullivan,
249 CRUMLIN CRESCENT, CRUMLIN, DUBLIN.

Then the date of birth: 27/2/76.

Next the test requested under a box labelled: 'Syphilis and HIV1\HIV2 Serology'.

HIV SCREEN.

DOUBLE CHECKED BY SERODIA - HIV.

The printer paused and then started up again.

The words
final result
appeared. Then the result.

POSITIVE.

With one hand Mary Dwyer tore the sheet from the printer. 'Well she's going to hell, whoever she is.'

The phone behind her rang, the sudden noise jolting and for a moment they both stared at it, mesmerised. Just as Dwyer reached for the receiver, a surgical gloved hand slammed down over her.

At the other end Nurse Sarah Higgins waited for someone to answer down at the laboratory. Finally the phone was picked up.

'He… hello… hello… is anyone there?'

There was a pause.

The noise that followed she later described as from a wild beast. The animal like snarl of hatred and anger made her blood run cold and she instinctively reached for her throat. The receiver was thrown down and Nurse Higgins could hear the sound of glass breaking, something being knocked over, crashing, more crashing, and finally a door slamming.

She placed the receiver back down slowly and then quickly dialled switch.

'Hi, it's Ward Four, North Wing, Staff Nurse Sarah Higgins here. Look I'm just after hearing something very strange over the phone coming from the lab. Would you ask security to check it out?'

Less than twenty minutes later Dean Lynch started up his car. As he did two security men were breaking open the door into the laboratory. And as Lynch eased his BMW out along the ramps and down to the exit, Mary Dwyer's lifeless eyes stared back at Pat O'Hara, night security officer. 'Jesus
C
hrist,' he muttered as he staggered backwards. 'Jesus Christ. Jim, call the cops! Quickly! Call the cops!'

For Dublin's Central Maternity Hospital the nightmare had begun.

The cages were starting to rattle.

Day 3

2

1.15 am, Wednesday, 12th February 1997

Library, East Wing

Detective Inspector Jack McGrath hated hospitals.

Maybe it was the smells, or maybe it was the instruments, or maybe it was just the doctors. Whatever it was he hated hospitals. Which was why he was feeling distinctly uneasy sitting in the hospital library watching as Staff Nurse Sarah Higgins was comforted by the night matron. To his right, Detective Sergeant Tony Dowling, his sidekick in the detective division of Store Street Garda station, was conferring with Detective Sergeant Kate Hamilton, one of the new breed of women detectives in the Garda Siochana being trained in serious crime investigations. Dowling finished writing in a notepad, looked up and nodded.

'Okay, Sarah,' began McGrath, 'I'm going to go over this for the last time and you tell me if everything's exactly as you remember. Okay? If there's anything you think you've left out, anything at all, no matter what, stop and tell me.'

Sarah Higgins sniffed and nodded. Her eyes were brimming with tears and she rolled and unrolled a handkerchief from one hand to the other, still shocked with what had been discovered. She dabbed at her eyes, hands shaking.

'At approximately 10.55 pm yesterday you rang Mary Dwyer in the lab looking for the result of a full blood count.' McGrath paused to check his terminology with Dowling. 'When the phone was finally picked up no one spoke for about twenty seconds, and then someone roared at you
across the line. You immediately hung up and called security.'

McGrath stopped. Staff Nurse Higgins was sobbing again, her head slumped on Matron's ample bosom. Tony Dowling and Kate Hamilton exchanged weary glances.

A knock on the door mercifully interrupted. McGrath stood up and opened it. Dr Noel Dunne, the state forensic pathologist, stood outside.

'Detective Inspector McGrath, I've finished in there and I'd like to get the body down to the morgue. Is there anything else you want to see before the room's sealed?'

McGrath thought for a moment, stroking his moustache. 'One moment.' He slipped back into the library and whispered something to Dowling, then waved a beckoning finger at Kate Hamilton. McGrath was back beside Dunne.

'Any thoughts?'

Noel Dunne was forty-eight going on a hundred. He had the worn face of someone who spent each day cutting up corpses, trying to determine exact cause of death. Tall but paunchy with steel grey hair, he had a reputation for gallows humour.

That morning there was no attempt at humour. That morning no one was in the mood for jokes. His usual ebullient manner was subdued. From behind Dunne's equally steel grey beard and moustache, McGrath could sense disquiet.

'Nasty one, Detective Inspector, this is a nasty bit of work altogether.'

McGrath stroked his moustache thoughtfully. His moustache matched his hair, grey and bushy. 'Any sign of sexual attack?'

'Nothing immediately obvious. Torn clothes, legs splayed a bit but nothing else. I'll swab her mouth, vagina and rectum.' He paused slightly, and threw a quizzical glance in Kate Hamilton's direction.

'Sorry,' said McGrath, 'I should have introduced you. This is Detective Sergeant Kate Hamilton.'

Dunne took a quick glance at the tall, slim, dark young
woman, snorted then raised his eyes quickly to heaven, not so that Hamilton could see but enough that she could sense his displeasure. Dunne was a man of the old tradition, used to male companions all the time during his work, uneasy at any female presence. He'd been brought up to treat women as ladies, always to stand up when they entered a room, always to offer a seat when none other was available, always to protect their sensitivities from the unpleasantries of life. To have a young lady watching in on a murder investigation was unsettling him, especially at that hour of the morning. He decided to ignore her completely. He slipped a dictaphone inside a jacket pocket. 'Did anyone see anything?'

'Nothing,' said McGrath, his mind revving away in top gear. 'Nobody saw this guy come and nobody saw him go.'

Dunne frowned. 'Can we move the body?'

McGrath nodded. 'I'll have one last look in there before forensics wreck the joint.'

Dunne smirked. Jack McGrath was a good cop, a sharp and experienced detective but one hell of an irritable bugger at times. He always double checked the forensic team, looking out for any sign of slipshod work. He wasn't exactly their favourite detective but he had a reputation within the force, a good reputation. He was considered to be tough but with a liberal sprinkling of common sense: he acted on intelligent hunches and had a mental database on the Dublin underworld that was unrivalled in the Gardai. If anyone needed a quick profile on the most likely mover behind a big robbery or gangland killing, it was Jack McGrath they turned to first. His insider information rarely let him down, his hunches had caused more than a few Dublin criminals to rue their fate. McGrath worked out at a local gym near where he lived and kept his six foot frame in top condition. He carried neither mental nor physical flab.

The laboratory door was slightly ajar and guarded by a lone, uniformed Garda. A yellow incident tape was stretched across it. Ignoring the Garda completely, Dunne pushed the door open with the bottom of a pencil to avoid leaving his own fingerprints and ushered McGrath inside. He was trying
to close it again when Kate Hamilton firmly pushed it back and squeezed past, glaring at him. Dunne grinned. Inside the lab fluorescents burned intensely.

Dunne started to sit down on a stool, then paused and offered it to Hamilton without a word. She ignored the gesture and leaned against a bench to watch McGrath's next moves. Dunne shrugged and sat down.

Three of the forensic team were still there, one squatting as he angled a camera for a better position.

He focused.

FLASH!

Mary Dwyer captured, but not one for the family album.

McGrath moved slowly round the scene, eyes darting as he took it in. He deliberately avoided the lifeless body, still lying where it had been discovered. A rack of glass test tubes lay smashed on the floor and the blood each tube had contained was spilled, lying in a thick, congealed, splinterly ooze. The smell of blood and laboratory chemicals irritated McGrath and he popped a peppermint into his mouth and inhaled the vapours. A small PC and its printer lay end up in another corner, bits of their grey plastic casing scattered around. The paper from the printer was pulled out. Two other machines lay where they had fallen. On the benches stood the usual equipment to be found in any hospital laboratory: burners, cooling machines, racks of test tubes, microscopes, Petri dishes and the rest. There was no sign of any surgical equipment.

Dunne glanced at his watch, trying to decide how much longer McGrath would take. Noel Dunne and Jack McGrath had worked together on so many murder investigations they knew each other's routines like the back of their hands. By Dunne's reckoning McGrath might spend another hour in the laboratory trying to get a feel for the actual incident. He knew McGrath often came back to murder scenes on his own, after the forensics had left and there were no distractions, just to try and relive the last pained moments of a victim's life.

'I don't see any blades here,' McGrath said. 'Waddit you
call that thing sticking out of her neck?' He was now standing over the body, crunching and inhaling furiously.

'Scalpel.'

'Yeah, scalpel. I don't see any sign of any others around the place. Do you?'

'No, and I looked.'

The detective went down on his hunkers to inspect more closely. Only his laboured breathing was louder than the background hum of the laboratory machines. The scalpel was deeply embedded in Mary Dwyer's neck with only about an inch of blade handle sticking out. Her face was purple and still slightly swollen. Tiny blood haemorrhages,
petechiae
, had burst on the skin surface. Her eyes were glazed and lifeless, conjunctival haemorrhaging had caused white to be replaced by red. A pool of blood lay on the floor from a wound to her head. Her neck showed significant bruising and scratch-like marks. Her left leg lay awkwardly, knee upright and splayed to the side, skirt riding up. She was wearing pantyhose, a tear extending from knee to groin. One of her nails was broken and bent.

Standing up McGrath noticed a yellow chalk mark on the edge of the desk. One of the forensics had spotted something and marked the spot. A trace of blood and a small clump of hair clung to the wood.

'Take her away. I'll call down to the morgue later.' He looked at the clock on the wall. 'What time should I call in?'

'About ten, ten thirty. Give me till then. I'll try and start early.'

'See you then.'

Dunne yawned and nodded at the same time.

'Kate,' McGrath turned towards Hamilton who was scribbling notes in a small black pocket book. 'I'd like you to go over the scene on your own now. Forensics will tell you where to look and what not to touch and things like that. We'll go over your impressions later. When you've finished come back to the library, I'll be there with Tony.'

Kate Hamilton didn't move from her position against the
bench for almost ten minutes after Dunne and McGrath had left. Her eyes were fixed firmly on the body of Mary Dwyer. The laboratory had gone strangely quiet with even the forensic team saying little as they squatted and peered and photographed. Finally Hamilton began her own search of the area.

Kate Hamilton was one of only three female detectives being instructed in serious crime investigation within the Garda Siochana. She had been under Jack McGrath's wing for almost six months and he had grudgingly come to accept, then admire her, recognising a natural talent for criminal investigation.

'She's sharp, sharp as a tack,' he'd told Tony Dowling one morning. 'And fierce ambitious. Jesus, it wouldn't surprise me if she wasn't running the force soon.'

Dowling had laughed slightly, then looked McGrath straight in the eyes. 'Tell me, Jack, has yer missus seen her yet?'

McGrath grinned. He had a wife and two teenage boys. 'No, and she's not bloody well going to. One look at her and she'd have me transferred to traffic duty.'

Kate Hamilton had beauty to go with the brains. She was a confident young woman, three inches in height below most of her six foot Garda colleagues, with short dark hair usually pulled back and held in place with two combs at the side. She had deep blue eyes under dark eyebrows and a very pretty face. A very pretty face. So pretty that she was the pin-up girl for many in Store Street Garda station where she was based. While she may have been their pin-up most knew she was unobtainable, still grieving. For Detective Sergeant Kate Hamilton was a single mother with a four-year-old son called Rory whom she adored. The father of Rory she had adored once too, but he was now dead.

Just before she was assigned to Jack McGrath, he'd discussed her background with Chief Superintendent Mike Loughry, his immediate superior in the same division of the force. Loughry was attached to the Serious Crime Squad
and McGrath reported to him on all the investigations he was handling.

'She's thirty-two,' Loughry informed him, reading from a file. 'Joined as a cadet aged twenty-four after completing a degree in History and Politics in UCD. She was one of the top students in her final university exams and went through the Garda training college in Templemore winning high praise from all quarters. Showed particular interest in forensics and drug offence detection.'

McGrath listened with a keen interest. He didn't want to have to take on some wally who would follow his every step like a brainless lapdog.

'She was one of five chosen for extra training in the US and spent a year with the Boston drug enforcement squad.' Loughry paused and leaned closer to McGrath as if they were fellow conspirators. 'Unfortunately she became involved with one of the detectives there.'

'Involved? What do you mean involved?'

'Romantically. They were going to get married.'

'What happened? He ditch her?'

'No, he got killed.'

'Christ.'

'Exactly.'

'What happened to him?'

'Drugs bust that went wrong. The heads weren't supposed to be armed.'

'But they were.' McGrath sighed wearily.

'They had a small arsenal. He never stood a chance.'

'So she had to come home and find a nice Irish boy?' McGrath was even surprised himself at his cynicism.

'Except she was pregnant.'

'Christ.'

'Exactly. Apparently there was a lot of pressure to have an abortion. She refused and had the baby back here in Dublin.'

McGrath rested his chin on both hands, flicking at his moustache with the little fingers of both hands. 'A woman with a mind of her own.'

'Very much so. She comes from a long line of Gardai. Her father and grandfather were both in the force. However she's your new generation woman, an independent spirit with her own opinions and certainly not intimidated at being one of the few women detectives in the force.'

So Kate Hamilton had joined the serious crime investigation unit based in Dublin's Store Street Garda station, a woman with a past already marked out as a woman with a future. After some sniffing and circling of one another she and McGrath did hit it off and within six weeks he had come to regard her as part of the team. Even Tony Dowling overcame his misgivings at having women involved in serious crime investigations and went out of his way to make her feel comfortable when confronted by some of the older, hardened officers.