Page 20

NINETEEN

After delivering the stark news to Penny Brogan’s father, who greeted it in stunned silence, and arranging for his wife to be brought home from work by a family liaison officer, Lottie organised for the couple to attend the formal identification whenever Penny’s body was ready to be viewed. She then returned with Boyd to the crime scene at Petit Lane.

‘I think we should have a chat with Mrs Loughlin, the woman who alerted us. She’s the only one living nearby,’ Lottie said. ‘Perhaps we can jog her memory.’

In the car park, Boyd switched off the engine. A third crime-scene cordon had been erected, ensuring the reporters were a further ten metres away from the sad little row of houses.

About to get out of the car, Lottie felt Boyd’s hand on her arm. ‘What?’

‘Are you okay?’

‘Of course I’m okay.’ Though she wasn’t. Not really. Seeing the two bodies had rattled her, and what annoyed her most was that she couldn’t pinpoint exactly why that was. Perhaps it was because her daughters had been in the same nightclub on Saturday night. And then there was Leo Belfield. She was itching to get to talk to him.

‘You don’t look okay. Lottie, I know you better than you know yourself sometimes. If there’s something wrong, please tell me.’ He raised his hand palm outward in submission. ‘And don’t go saying I’m worse than your mother.’

‘She probably put you up to it.’

‘No, she did not. I’m concerned. I want you to talk to me when and if you feel you need to. Okay?’

She shrugged away the tears that were beginning to bubble at the corners of her eyes. Must be the menopause, she thought.

‘Could be,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘Did I actually say that out loud?’

‘You did.’ He gripped her hand tightly. ‘You need to unwind a bit. You never left the phone out of your hand last evening when I was at yours. How about dinner out tonight? Indian? You like that place. My treat.’

Lottie felt her stomach flip. The thought of food made her grimace. ‘Boyd, we still have two young women lying in there. Food is the last thing on my mind.’

He drew back and took the keys out of the ignition. ‘You’re slipping into frosty, Lottie. I thought for a few weeks there that you were thawing. But I was wrong. I can’t do this any longer. Honestly, you need to grow up a bit and move on.’

‘What the hell do you mean?’ She tried to cover her hurt with indignation.

‘I thought the new house might have released some of your sadness and grief. Take it from me, as a friend: you need to ditch Adam’s ghost and find your own life.’

He opened the door and got out of the car.

‘Whatever,’ she said, and followed him to Mrs Loughlin’s door.

It opened immediately.

The smile on the woman’s face slid downward and a crease folded into the lines on her forehead. ‘Oh, I thought it was that nice guard. The young Thornton lad.’

‘Can we come in, please?’ Lottie showed her ID and smiled. Tom Thornton must be at least ten years her senior.

‘Come along. Don’t mind the smell. Rising damp, you know. But I still won’t sell to that smug-faced developer, no matter how many offers he shoves through my letter box.’

‘Who would that be?’ Boyd asked, pulling out a chair and sitting down.

‘You can sit if you like,’ Mrs Loughlin said, turning up her lip.

Boyd had the grace to blush.

‘Thank you.’ Lottie smiled. The kitchen was small and warm, but there was the same damp smell that had been in the crime-scene house.

Mrs Loughlin opened the door of the small range and threw in two briquettes, then put a kettle on the hot plate.

‘That shiny-suited Gill man. I’ve got his letters here somewhere.’ She pulled a bundle of mail from the centre of the table.

‘No, it’s okay,’ Lottie said, trying to hide a smirk. ‘I know who you mean. We need to talk about what happened at number three.’

Mrs Loughlin sat at the table and flicked crumbs from the green and white oilcloth. ‘Awful business. Those poor lassies. I don’t know what this town is coming to.’

‘I want to ask you a few questions.’

‘Go ahead.’ She stood and opened the cupboard.

‘We don’t need tea, thank you.’ When the woman was seated again, Lottie began. ‘I’ve read Garda Thornton’s report of your visit to the station this morning. I’m wondering if you can remember any further details.’

‘Do you think those two lads had something to do with the murders?’

Lottie sighed. ‘The cause of death won’t be released until the state pathologist carries out her post-mortem, so I’d prefer it if we just referred to them as suspicious deaths for the moment.’

‘Two girls are dead, no matter what fancy words you try to dress it up in, young lady.’

Lottie felt a flush creep up her cheeks. Mrs Loughlin had a way of making her feel she was back in school and getting blamed for something she didn’t do.

‘I understand that, but we are up against the clock to find out what happened. You told Garda Thornton that you heard a lot of noise coming from that house. Can you be more specific?’

‘Why don’t you ask those two junkies he found knocked out in the hallway? Are they okay, by the way?’

‘They’re under observation at the hospital. As soon as we get the go-ahead, they’ll be interviewed.’

‘Drugs. The bane of young people’s lives nowadays. Conscription is the only thing that’ll iron the creases out of their young lives. I hold their parents responsible.’

Cringing, Lottie recalled how Katie had once got caught up in smoking weed and she herself had done nothing about it. Turned a blind eye. She could not argue with Mrs Loughlin on that score.

‘Anyway,’ the old lady said, folding her arms, ‘I’ve a habit of going off track, so reel me in any time you find me doing that.’

‘I will.’ Lottie felt sorry for Mrs Loughlin, living out her days alone in a damp-ridden house, but she admired her tenacity in standing up to Cyril Gill.

‘It’s always gone on. The noise, the drugs. Especially at weekends. Youngsters fall out of that nightclub and come down to the underpass to make out or shoot up. Is that what you call it?’

‘Something like that,’ Boyd said, tapping his notebook with his pen.

Lottie nudged his ankle under the table. She was beginning to think she was interviewing her own mother. Mrs Loughlin spoke the same language.

‘Last night I heard an awful carry-on altogether. About two thirty, or maybe it was three o’clock, I’m not sure. Monday night. Who’d have thought it? I looked out the window and saw two lads staggering up the footpath to number three. They just walked in bold and brazen as you like. I was going to get up and go in after them, but it was raining. I was raging. They’d woken me up. Don’t know when I last got a full night’s sleep.’

‘And did you notice anyone else around?’

‘No, just them two with hoods up over their heads. I came down to make a cup of hot milk to try and get myself back to sleep. I sat in the armchair in the living room and looked out the corner of the curtain, and that’s when I saw one of them leaving. But now I know it had to be someone else.’

‘Can you give me a description of that person?’

‘Whoever they were, they were taller and broader than the two lads, now that I think of it. Didn’t look like a teenager. Not that I saw the face, but at my age, I notice these things.’

Lottie wondered about that, seeing as Mrs Loughlin had called her a young lady and Garda Thornton a young man.

‘To make this easier for you, we’ll assume it was a man. What else do you remember?’

‘He’d pulled the jacket collar up around his face, and he had a hat on. One of those … what do you call it? Pea hat?’

‘A beanie?’ Boyd offered.

‘Yeah. Down over his face it was. I couldn’t make him out, but he was walking quickly and ran off through the car park.’

‘Great, that’s excellent, Mrs Loughlin. We’ll be able to get CCTV footage of that,’ Lottie said.

‘I doubt it.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Most of the cameras are smashed. I’ve a path worn to the council to try and get them fixed, but I might as well be talking to that wall over there.’ She pointed to a spot over Lottie’s shoulder and shook her head wearily. ‘Anyway, he ran down to the right, towards the recycling banks. Maybe he had a car parked there, I don’t know, but that’s the last I saw of him.’

‘Did you see two young women enter number three on Saturday night?’

‘I would have told you if I had.’

‘Anyone else acting suspiciously at the weekend?’

‘I heard the usual carry-on from the nightclub, but nothing that I don’t hear every weekend.’

The air was pierced with a whistle and Mrs Loughlin got up to move the kettle off the stove. ‘Sure you don’t want tea?’

‘No thanks.’ Lottie stood and handed over her card. ‘Contact me if you remember anything about last night, or about any other night, particularly last weekend.’

‘Do you think someone was staking the place out?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘Am I in danger?’ Mrs Loughlin’s eyes were sharp.

‘No, not at all,’ Lottie hurriedly assured her. ‘Uniformed officers will be guarding the area for the next few days, or at least until we finish our examination and searches.’ The dampness was catching at the back of her throat, and she wondered how the woman survived in such an environment.

‘I’ll see you out.’

‘Thank you for all your help,’ Boyd said, and shook Mrs Loughlin’s hand.

‘You’re a nice boy. Very mannerly.’

Lottie caught Boyd’s wink as he walked past her.

They got nothing out of Freddie Nealon or Brian McGrath at the hospital. The lads’ last memory was of hearing a sound upstairs in the old house, and then they’d been knocked out.

Lottie sat at her desk with Boyd opposite. He began tidying up her workspace. She shot out her hand towards him.

‘Stop.’

‘What?’ he said.

She stood up and paced the small enclosure. ‘If the girls were killed on Saturday night, who was it in the house last night?’

‘The two boys.’

‘Yeah, I know that. But according to Jim McGlynn, the girls were killed where their bodies were found and had been dead for at least two days. So they were already dead when Freddie and Brian stumbled into the house last night. The lads were attacked by someone who came from upstairs. So who was it?’

‘The killer? Maybe he came back for something he’d dropped.’

‘Or to leave something. The coins?’

‘We have to get an exact time of death and then try to map out a timeline.’

‘First we need those nightclub tapes and any other footage we can lay our hands on.’ She stood with her hands on her hips. ‘I seem to be repeating myself an awful lot and not getting anywhere.’

‘I’ll check with Kirby to see what he’s found.’

When Boyd left the office, Lottie slumped into her chair. If Freddie and Brian hadn’t meandered into the derelict house, how long would the bodies have lain undiscovered? And who was the mysterious person the two young men had disturbed?