Where She Lies
A gripping Irish detective thriller with a stunning twist
Michael Scanlon
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Epilogue
Hear More From Michael Scanlon
A Letter from Michael
Acknowledgements
This book is dedicated to Nuala, Eileen and Sarah.
Three generations of strong, powerful females, without whom I’d be lost.
‘He who follows the crow will be led to the corpses of dogs’ – Moroccan saying
One
She cursed herself for having agreed to meet him in the forest. Even if here was where it had all started, properly started, that is – fumbling about in the inky black of night, the sudden jolt as he pulled on the seat lever, the way the seat shot back, and how he’d been above her, his hot peppermint breath blowing all over her face.
She tugged on the collar of her pink polo-neck jumper, bringing it up over her mouth, creating a warm cocoon of air inside.
He had a nice car, with big leather seats, but he preferred it in amongst the trees, always worried that someone might come along and catch them. She didn’t care. Not any more. She just wanted him. She wanted him more than ever.
She pulled her mobile phone from her back pocket, yanking on it a couple of times because her jeans were so tight. She checked the time: 10.17 p.m.
He was late. He was always late now. In the beginning it had been different. In the beginning, he had been the keen one. But lately that had started to change. He was becoming bored.
Maybe she should teach him a lesson this time? Walk away, head into town, now, before it got too late, before it got completely dark. That would teach him.
* * *
But she knew she would not do that. She would stay. She would wait. Because he did something for her. He made her feel special. Like a woman. Not a girl. Everyone treated her like a girl. But not him.
The light had dwindled before her very eyes as if someone had turned down a dimmer switch on the world. With it came sounds she had not noticed before – the yelping of a dog way off in the distance, the call of a bird high up in the trees – and although she liked to think that maybe her mind was playing tricks, she heard the breaking of branches and the snapping of twigs a little behind her. She looked over her shoulder, could see nothing but the dark caverns between the trees.
And ahead, when she looked again, through the treeline along the edge of the forest, the lights from across the river backlit the world like a movie theatre. In the distance, white orbs floated – headlights she knew – moving on the road over there.
But then, when she looked back, there was no sound but the whispering of the branches in the breeze: swish, swish, swish.
And then, it came again, unmistakable now, the sounds of twigs and branches snapping, coursing a slow, steady path in her direction. Her eyes, straining through the darkness, were just about able to discern the abstract shapes, the outline of trees and finally, the familiar profile…
‘You scared the shit out of me. Why didn’t you bring the fucking car? Just this bloody once. It’s late, you know. D’ya know how late it is?’
There was no reply, just the steady snapping of twigs and branches as they broke underfoot and he crossed the final few feet to her.
Two
Beck’s eyes snapped open. He was lying on his bed, the sheets crumpled around him, the duvet a pile on the floor. He looked about, confused… then remembered. His dream. An image of a figure in a black soutane flittered from his mind and was gone. And with it his confusion returned.
There was a sound. He turned his head and saw it then, his mobile phone on the bedside locker, the screen illuminating each time it rang, as if angry at the delay in getting his attention. He swallowed twice, his throat dry, reached out and picked it up, brought it to his ear.
‘Hello,’ he said, his voice hoarse. He listened, and as he did, he knew that while he had slept a nightmare had come true. For a girl. A girl who would never wake again.
* * *
Beck looked down at the body, noted the clean, healthy sheen of the hair, the full cheeks, the clean clothes, the boots –Timberland. His niece had a pair just like those.
The victim was about the same age too, fifteen or sixteen, maybe seventeen tops.
He noted the ruffled top of the pink polo-neck sweater. There was nothing to indicate how she had died, or indeed, why. Her clothes had not been disturbed, her pockets not turned out. Beck discounted robbery as a motive, especially here. Robbers didn’t usually lurk amongst trees in isolated woodlands waiting for a victim to just wander by. But he couldn’t be certain, not yet. From a distance, it seemed as if she was resting, sleeping maybe. But up close, it was apparent she was dead, the skin a greenish-blue hue, eyes starting to sink into their sockets like pebbles into mud, the face stiff and angular in its death mask.
Had she somehow, by freak of nature, succumbed to something? Sudden cardiac arrest, perhaps? It happened. Because there was nothing – no blood, no bruising – to indicate how she might have died.
Still, there was no doubt. Beck knew in his bones that she had been murdered.
His eyes were drawn to the pink polo-neck again. He had read an article in the FBI International Bulletin on the garda portal recently, titled ‘The Importance of Crime Scene Integrity’. He knew what he was about to do was bad practice. But he went ahead and did it anyway
, squatted down onto his knees, took out a pen from the inside pocket of his parka jacket, nudged the tip into the collar of the jumper, pulled it down. And immediately saw the dark purple and yellow ring of bruising about the neck. He put the pen back into his pocket and stood again.
He turned, walked along the track through the trees and down the embankment to the pathway. Two ruddy-cheeked young guards in high-visibility jackets were standing at the bottom, part of the recent batch of graduates from the Garda College in Templemore, Beck knew. He could tell, by their wide-eyed, slightly confused expressions, that this was most certainly their first murder scene.
He nodded as he passed by.
Superintendent Andrew Wilde and Inspector Gerald O’Reilly stood a little further down the pathway. There was no cordon tape. Wilde didn’t think one necessary, the location being so isolated. Beck disagreed. A rambler – anyone – could literally stumble across the body, although granted that wasn’t likely. But still. And no one had been posted on watch. Hadn’t anyone heard of foxes?
‘We’re waiting on forensics,’ Wilde said, stating the obvious, and, as an afterthought: ‘I hope you didn’t go poking around up there, Beck.’
‘No, boss.’
‘Because,’ Inspector O’Reilly added, ‘you do as you are directed now. Nothing more. Nothing less. This is not your case.’
The superintendent looked at his watch. ‘Yes, yes, Gerry, he knows all that.’
‘They have to come from Dublin,’ Beck said. ‘Forensics. In a van.’
‘Really, Beck?’ O’Reilly said, arching his eyebrows. ‘Do they now?’
‘At least it’s not raining.’ It was Wilde. He looked at the ground, as if debating something. Looked up again, said to Beck, ‘Now, we all know you’ve investigated your fair share of murders, Beck. Let’s say it like it is. You’re only here because of, well, no one really knows the reason for that, do they? The less said about that the better. So, what’s your reading on all this?’
There was the sound of something moving in the gravel. Beck looked and saw the heel of O’Reilly’s right foot grinding into the path.
‘A bit early to tell, isn’t it?’ He caught O’Reilly’s look, his eyebrows still arched as he stared at him.
‘She’s young,’ Wilde said. ‘Attractive, well dressed…’
‘A boyfriend,’ O’Reilly added, a little too quickly. ‘A jilted boyfriend. Something along those lines, maybe.’
‘Hmm,’ said Wilde, and looked at Beck.
Now it was Beck’s turn to raise his eyebrows.
‘Maybe she killed herself,’ he said, although he knew that wasn’t true.
O’Reilly’s boot heel ground into the gravel of the path again.
Beck glanced at the watery blue sky. The weather forecast was for high winds, possibly rain later. The trees should offer some protection. As crime scenes went, it was a good location for a body, if there was such a thing. He wanted to tell Wilde to at least set up a proper perimeter, have everybody signed in and out. But he didn’t. Because that was no longer his place.
He wondered how long it took a van to get here from Dublin.
Three
Cross Beg is a town of hills and alleyways, from a time long, long since passed, when those that clawed the rough scrubland about here gathered in the lee of the riverbank and bartered with one another to survive. The river water is made brown by the bog land through which it flows, and from this it gets its name: Brown Water River. An abbey followed, where the cathedral now stands, and people began to live within its walls, so that slowly the town of Cross Beg began to form, sprouting up like moss between barren stones.
* * *
Ned Donohue opened the door and craned his neck, looking up and down the street before finally stepping out, pulling the door shut behind him. Quickly, in that peculiar gait of his – head forward, feet angled outward like a wind-up duck – he moved down Plunkett Hill. He reached the first alley and fell into its shadows, stopped and leaned against the wall. He looked through the permanent grey twilight to the wedge of daylight at the other end, between the two black bookends that were the buildings on either side. The smell of piss from the gutters. The council came and cleaned the alley most days, ever since complaints had begun appearing in the letters page of the local newspaper, The Connaughtman. Except no one ever cleaned up the dog shite. That was everywhere.
He started walking towards the wedge, thinking of how best to cross the street outside to get to the next alley. He felt like a mouse being hunted by a cat – a cat he couldn’t see and wasn’t certain was even there. But a cat that he knew, when he least expected, could pounce.
He reached the end of the alley, paused before scurrying out onto the street and across the road, not stopping until he reached the sanctuary of the next alleyway.
Four
The big-panel van turned into the gravel car park, which had been newly laid – a sign the state forestry service, Coillte, would soon be coming to chop the wood. The lettering on the side was in Gaelic, ‘An Biúró Teicniúil’, and beneath it, the English translation: ‘Garda Technical Bureau’. Following it was a black Volvo S70, and sitting in the back, the state pathologist Dr Derek Gumbell. Beck took a last pull on his cigarette and stubbed it out under his shoe. He had wandered down here, frustrated with Wilde and O’Reilly’s endless quotations from murder crime scene manuals. As a result, they weren’t actually getting anything done. Beck had spent some time studying the newly laid surface, looking for fresh tyre marks, or footprints – anything – but finding nothing. The cigarette was his first of the day. He was pleased with that.
Beck and Gumbell went back a long way. Although the state pathologist liked fast cars and garish shirts, he was a balding, foul-mouthed, grumpy middle-aged man best suited to a profession dealing with the remains of the dead. Like Beck, he was unmarried, but had a daughter somewhere that no one knew anything about except that she lived with her mother.
Gumbell got out of the Volvo and stretched, glancing around. He did a double take when he spotted Beck.
‘My God. Beck. Is that you? Well, fuck me. I heard you’d been sent somewhere or other. So here you are. Fucked up big time, didn’t you?’
Subtle as ever, Beck thought. He walked across to join him.
‘Superintendent Wilde,’ Beck said, ‘is the senior investigating officer, not me. I’ve no interest in investigating anything. My sole ambition is to get out of the backwater that is Cross Beg. Any interest in this case is purely one of curiosity.’
‘That’s quite a sermon, Beck. I know, you’ve been demoted. Sergeant now, isn’t it? You’d need a parachute for a drop like that, ha ha.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Been demoted myself, in a sense. Dr Price, my deputy… you know her, don’t you?’
‘We’ve never actually met.’
‘Well, anyway, urgent case of – she mightn’t want me to say it, so I’d better not. Anyway, here I am instead. Wouldn’t mind, but I had a round of bloody golf at four.’
‘Yes, Beck, I’ll look after this.’ O’Reilly’s voice from behind. ‘The body is this way, doctor. When you’re ready.’
Beck turned.
‘Someone’s been reported missing, at the station,’ O’Reilly said. ‘Go and check it out, will you? Let me know if there’s anything in it… please.’
Beck felt the ‘please’ was added only because of the presence of the pathologist.
Gumbell called after him as he walked away. ‘Your number still the same, Beck? I’m staying over. We must meet for lemonade and a chat later.’
Beck stopped, half turning. ‘My number is still the same,’ he answered.
‘One hell of an investigator. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you? I mean, he’s one of the best,’ Gumbell said.
O’Reilly forced a half-smile. ‘I’ve heard of him,’ he grunted.
Five
She was pacing the floor when he got back to the station. The duty sergean
t had told him her name over the radio: Theresa Frazzali. Beck thought it rang a bell. Then it came to him. Frazzali’s restaurant and takeaway in the centre of town.
She was a small woman, with shoulder-length blonde hair parted in the middle, black roots visible like a line had been drawn in marker pen down the centre of her head. She had large green eyes, and small tight lips that drooped in the corners, running into deep furrows on either side of her chin. She had a tissue in her hands, twisted into a hard knot.
He didn’t know that she knew him, but once she saw him, she stepped in front so he would have to stop. ‘Sergeant Beck.’ It was a statement, not a query.