TORN (14 page)

Trying to stop herself from getting distracted, and reaching for connections where there may well be none, she brought her focus back to this particular scene.

There were so many unanswered questions here too.  The first was the simple matter of logistics. How had the killer got Crowe into the plant in the first place?

He was a big man, and an ex-cop who knew how to defend himself.  Subduing him would not have been easy, let alone getting him into a bath of icy water.

The pigeons cooed softly. They weren’t revealing their secrets.

Reilly had reached the far end of the processing room, which was dominated by a large loading dock, metal shutters rolled down. Broken packing cases littered the floor, several of them scraped together into half-burned remnants of bonfires.

The door to the freezer room was just ahead.  Reilly shone her torch beam across the floor, all around the doorway, trying to separate out visually the footsteps of the police and the investigators from the older marks.

A sudden noise startled her, a movement half-glimpsed in her peripheral vision, something closing in fast on her.

Giving a little squeak of surprise, she dropped her torch as she instinctively put her hands up to protect her face. She turned quickly, and flinched as a pigeon flew past, its wings so close she could feel the draft. The bird swooped past her, and soared up into the rafters to join its companions. They jostled for position for a moment before settling down again.

‘Dammit!’ Feeling stupid, Reilly glanced around to see where her torch had landed. She scanned the floor, with only beams of daylight from above to help her. The torch was nowhere to be seen.

She bent down, and peered under the conveyor belt that ran past her.  It was broken, the belt hanging down creating deep shadows and pockets of darkness, but she could see no sign of her torch.  She turned the other way, towards the doorway to the freezer, her eyes gradually adjusting to the gloomy half-light. Then suddenly something caught her eye that she hadn’t seen before.

There were faint tracks in the dust leading into the freezer room.  Around the doorway they disappeared under footsteps, but there was no doubt that something had been wheeled in from the door towards the freezer.

Reilly stepped over, bent low and examined the tracks, then followed them visually towards the back door of the building. They were narrow – but not a bike or anything like that; maybe a trolley?  She looked again at the track impressions – no, not a shopping trolley; there were only two wheels. Suddenly an image popped into her mind. She knew exactly what had left the tracks: it was one of those hand dollies, the sort that delivery drivers used.

Significant?

Reilly followed the tracks as they disappeared into the footprints around the freezer door, and finally saw her torch.  It had rolled into the shadows that crept out of the freezer, as if telling her where she needed to go next. She went over, picked it up, and directed it towards the dust at her feet as she tried to pinpoint the faint tracks rolling into the freezer.

The freezer room itself was almost completely veiled in darkness.  No outside light came in except a faint beam through the doorway, illuminating a short strip of ground. The alkaline scent was in here too. What the hell was it?

Using her torch, Reilly followed the wheel tracks into the darkness – they kept appearing and disappearing until they were obliterated by all the footsteps around the area where Crowe had been found.

Reilly shivered, despite knowing that the freezer was turned off. Yet still she felt cold. There was something personal, intimate about this space. The killer had been in here with Crowe, one on one, just the two of them, their breaths steaming in the small, frozen room.

What had Crowe been thinking? Had he known his killer? Had he known he was going to die? We spend our whole lives avoiding death, eating the right foods, not smoking, going to the gym, kidding ourselves that we will live forever – but what is it like when we suddenly know, with absolute certainty, that we are about to die?

Reilly shone her torch around the freezer. The beam of light spotlighted parts of the room as she moved around. The shelving was still in place and, at the back of the room, the bath in which Crowe had been found.

Reilly stepped over to the bathtub. It was certainly not a place she would choose to die.  Crowe's last glimpse of life would have been this dirty, abandoned room, and perhaps the face of his killer leaning over him as cold water slowly turned to ice around him.

Trying to picture it threw up more questions for Reilly. How had the bath got there?  It would have taken some effort to get it in, but the place had been abandoned for so long that the investigators were unable to determine if it had been there when the plant was open. Maybe the bath had been wheeled in on the trolley?

Then there was the electricity. Whoever had killed Crowe had known how to hook the electricity back up to the freezer. In fact, he had turned on the electrics for the whole plant.  It was the lights suddenly blazing from the long-abandoned works that had attracted attention and led to Crowe’s discovery.

She thought back to the Coffey scene. The blockage in the septic tank, which iSPI had initially revealed, had turned out to be a piece of brick that was incongruous to the limestone surroundings of the drained tank.

Similarly, the killer here had gone to great lengths not only to execute the murder, but to make sure that the body was found quickly. A fresh chill ran down Reilly’s spine and she turned and headed out of the freezer.

Simply being back out in the main plant made her feel better.  The tight space and intimacy of the freezer had been disconcerting, and out here the alkaline smell seemed less cloying. Walking at a low crouch, Reilly followed the faint wheel tracks with her torch as they rolled towards the rear of the plant, all the way to the back door.

The door was old metal.  Reilly gave it a shove but it didn’t budge. She took a step back, raised her right leg, and gave a powerful kick. The door flew open, the rusty hinges screaming in protest. As it did it let in a gust of fresh air that was welcome, blowing Reilly’s hair back from her face. The sound of metal screeching echoed through the cavernous space, startling the pigeons and sending them flying in a flash of wings, swooping up and out through the broken skylights.

Reilly stepped outside and breathed in a lungful of the cold November air.

She wrapped her coat around her, enjoying the breeze and the sunlight on her face after the cold claustrophobia inside. The pigeons swooped and circled together, a tightly knit pack dark against the pale blue sky, then broke apart, and one by one slipped back in through the broken roof to resume their positions on the rusting metal beams.

Reilly looked around.  The back of the plant opened onto an overgrown car park, the grass and weeds thrusting up through the broken tarmac. The wheel marks ended here, lost on the hard ground, but it seemed obvious to her that this would have been where the killer had come in, the shortest, easiest route to the freezer. He would have known that, would have scoped out his territory, had his plan ready long before he seized Crowe and brought him here.

She walked across the uneven ground to the back of the property, picking her way though the tall weeds and the potholed tarmac. About fifty yards away from the plant there was a wire fence, tired and sagging, several holes punched in it where kids had broken in since the business had floundered.

Was this where the killer had scouted the building intially?  There were several trees, a line of shrubs, plenty of places for someone to hide out for a while, check out the layout of the building, make sure it was truly deserted.

She turned and looked back at the building, understanding the layout.  Deliveries and shipments would have come in and out through the front gate – where Reilly’s uniformed companion currently sat warm in his car – down the side of the building, to the loading dock at the rear.

A picture appeared in her mind of Crowe, bound, trussed and bundled like an oven-ready turkey, being wheeled inside, possibly on a handcart. Then Jennings, also bound before he was hoisted up into the tree. What about Coffey?

Reilly pulled her phone from her pocket, and quickly touched and scrolled.

From the GFU office, Jack Gorman’s deep tones filled her ear. ‘What can I do for you, Ms Steel?’

She spoke quickly, hoping she wasn’t already too late. ‘Tony Coffey’s body – is it still in our custody?’

‘Let me check.’ The older investigator sounded irritated, her questions clearly unwelcome to him. ‘It’s due to be shipped off this later this afternoon,’ he informed her after a few minutes’ wait. ‘Apparently the funeral is Wednesday.’

‘Can we delay it?’

‘And what would be the point in that? Oh, let me guess, off on yet another one of your cat and mouse games?’ Gorman’s tone barely disguised his contempt.

Reilly wished that for once he would take her seriously. She knew well how much Gorman disliked her, considered her an upstart – young and female as well as a scientist, not his favorite combination.

He’d been almost apoplectic this morning, upon learning that she planned to rerun the Crowe scene, one he insisted he’d combed to the last. But his report mentioned nothing about wheel tracks or an alkaline smell.

‘Humour me, Gorman. Can you meet me at the morgue with a copy of both Crowe and Coffey’s autopsy reports?’

He sighed wearily, annoyed by her intrusion into his orderly schedule. ‘I’m very busy today, Steel.  Unlike you, I really don’t have time to waste—’

‘I won’t take up too much of your time,’ she interjected.  ‘Please. It’s important. ’

It was less than thirty minutes’ drive from the city out to rural Drogheda where Crowe had lived for the past few years, but seemed much further.

The landscape changed quickly as Chris and Kennedy headed north, becoming flatter and more windblown with each mile, the greens turning to a dull brown expanse. The winds whipped up and the sky closed in, a November shower falling from a leaden gray sky.

Chris gazed out across the windswept shore. A lone gull battled the wind, making almost no progress, before finally seeming to quit and dropping quickly down into the long grass. He shivered, and thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his coat. 

‘I think I’d go crazy living out here.’

Kennedy was perched on the bonnet of the car, his cigarette cupped in his hands as he tried to light it. The flame from his lighter flickered and danced before finally catching the end of the cigarette. He inhaled deeply as the red glow devoured the white paper. ‘I guess it’s like anything – you’d get used to it.’

Chris shook his head. ‘Not me. I’m too much of a townie.’ He turned to take in the dull brown riverbanks that extended in either direction, the only sound the mournful wail of the wind as it whipped past them. ‘Why would Crowe want to retire out here in the sticks?’  He looked at Kennedy, genuine bafflement on his face. ‘Wasn’t he a Dubliner?’

‘Born and bred.  Always used to boast about being a barrow boy in Moore Street when he was a kid.’

‘That’s what I mean.’ Chris turned back towards the car, pulling his coat collar up high around his ears. ‘Would you ever hurry up and finish that bloody thing?  We need to get moving.’

His partner took a deep drag. ‘Yeah, yeah, calm down. This isn’t going to be the easiest conversation, you know.’

Crowe had a place on a dead-end road out past the town, an old cottage he had fixed up. Kennedy eased the car down a narrow lane, splashing in and out of deep puddles and ruts, until they finally stopped in front of a large iron gate. A sign read, ‘Keep Out.  Beware of the Dogs’.

As Kennedy pulled up in front of the gate, Chris had glanced over at his partner.  ‘Friendly.’

Kennedy gave a hollow laugh. ‘Yep, this is Crowe’s place for sure.’

Even from inside the car they could hear the barking of the dogs, and the animals soon appeared, a pair of muscular German shepherds, hurling themselves against the gate, their teeth gleaming in the dull light as they charged and threatened the visitors.

Behind the gate was a low cottage, a squat bungalow that seemed perfectly suited to the desolate location. 

Now Kennedy finished his cigarette, and flicked the butt into a nearby puddle. The driveway was slick from the rain, dotted with small puddles, and the barking of the dogs grew even more insistent.  He straightened and stomped over to the gate.

Up close the dogs were even scarier, hurling themselves at the heavy metal gate with primal ferocity, their furry coats rippling with muscle. Kennedy stepped quickly forward, rang the bell, then stepped back from the gate. The dogs kept up their furious assault, spittle flying from their mouths as they roared at the intruder.

Suddenly they paused, and looked behind them. A voice cut through the air. ‘Brutus! Caesar! Away!’

The dogs gave the detectives one last look, then trotted silently away. A woman appeared from the side of the house, wearing wellingtons and a heavy, mud-stained rain jacket, her gray-peppered hair pulled back in a tight bun. She stopped about five yards from the gate, and eyed her visitors suspiciously. ‘What do you want?’