Hidden ( CSI Reilly Steel #3) (21 page)

Chapter
21

Outside the home, Kennedy lit his cigarette, battling against the fierce wind as it whipped around them. ‘No wonder social services thought he was nuts.’

Chris glared at him.

‘I’m trying to understand what he said at the end, about the tattoo,’ Reilly said. ‘About them being not angel wings but swan wings.’

‘I don’t even want to begin to think about what that means,’ Kennedy groaned.

Chris nodded to a café across the road from the home. ‘Let’s talk about it somewhere warmer.’

‘
Good idea.’ Reilly wrapped her coat around her as a squall of rain appeared and she and Chris scampered across the road. Kennedy followed at a more leisurely pace, trying to squeeze in as many puffs of his cigarette as he could before they reached the café.

It was
fuggy inside, with hot air steaming up the windows. The place packed with workers grabbing a late breakfast or an early lunch – a full Irish, buttered toast, fried eggs.

Reilly and Chris settled for a cup of tea, but Kennedy couldn't resist the lure of fried meat
. ‘Josie won’t let me have the good stuff at home,’ he grumbled. ‘It’s all bloody muesli and wholewheat toast these days.’

Reilly cursed her
keen sense of smell as the appetizing whiff of fried bacon swirled beneath her nose as they waited in the queue. Her diet was becoming poor these days – way too much convienence food – and she really needed to get out running more. Getting the time to train for the marathon she’d mentioned to her father might be a stretch, but she had to find a way to nip in the bud her slowly thickening wasteline. Or at least find somewhere local that did good sushi. But the cold weather seemed to make her crave greasy stodge, like fried potatoes and bacon, or ‘rashers’ as they called them.

‘You did a great job getting him to open up like that
,’ she said to Chris after they sat down at a corner table. ‘And you knew exactly when to stop.’

‘I
was just afraid of losing him, to be honest.’

Kennedy pulled up a chair
and set his steaming plate on the table.  He dove straight in. ‘What I thought was interesting,’ he said through a mouthful of sausage and beans, ‘is that what seemed to bother the kid was not what happened at whatever place he was in, but the fact that they threw him out.’

‘Sounded like Conn felt safe there
; it was his home,’ Reilly said. ‘Tir Na Nog you said he called it?’

‘Yes.’ Chris frowned
. ‘I feel like I’m going back to my childhood – Tír na nÓg and the Children of Lir.’

Kennedy dabbed
at his mouth with his napkin. ‘Yeah, I used to read those stories to the kids years ago.’

‘It’s referenced in Irish mythology and folklore,’ Chris told Reilly, toying with his teaspoon. ‘Translated, Tír na nÓg literally means “Land of The Young”.’

‘
It was said to exist off the edge of the map, on an island to the west,’ Kennedy continued. ‘There’s no sickness, no crime, no worries, heaven on earth.’

‘
Like some kind of earthly paradise,’ Chris agreed. ‘Conn actually used the word “paradise” when I asked him where he was from.’

‘So if it’s a myth,’ Reilly asked, ‘why does he think he was there?’

‘
Good question. I didn’t get the chance to ask him that. But in the stories you needed a guide to get there.’ Chris sipped his tea and looked at Kennedy. ‘As I recall, there was some magical horse who could gallop across the water and carry you there.’

‘It’s all a bit hazy to me
, to be honest.’

‘
Across water…’ Reilly mused out loud, instantly thinking about the algae in Sarah’s hair.

‘But
what about this guy he mentioned,’ said Kennedy. ‘The father.’

‘
I know what you’re thinking, but I get the feeling he was being metaphorical.’

‘We can only conclude that this person somehow brought Conn there and either arranged for the tattoo to be done by somebody else, or did it himself,’ Reilly posited. She frowned. ‘So if this is connected to our girls, and it certainly sounds that way, are we looking at a cult or an abduction – or both?
But why the mythology? And the tattoo …the swan wings, what is the significance?’

‘Part of
another Irish legend, actually.’

‘Ah come on
,’ Kennedy said, looking balefully at Chris. ‘You’re thinking the Swans of Lir?’

Chris
nodded and turned to Reilly to explain. ‘There’s another story, taken from the same mythology, called the Children of Lir.’

She
leaned back in her chair.  ‘Go on.’

‘
The story is about a wicked stepmother who turns her stepchildren into swans. The curse lasts for nine hundred years, and they live on a lake, in the sea, different places for three hundred years each.’

‘More water …’
she mused.

‘
And more children living for ever – or at least a long time in solitude.’ Chris cradled his tea in his hands. ‘Based on that scenario, I’m leaning towards abduction.’

‘
This Conn seems to want to go back though,’ Kennedy pointed out.

‘Stockholm syndrome?  He wouldn’t be the first to fall under the spell of his abductor
,’ Chris suggested.

‘So he takes them when they’re young and the fairytales
are being presented as truth as the kids grow older,’ Reilly said, trying to get her head around it all. ‘There,Tir Na Nog is good, paradise even. Out here – the real world – is bad.’

‘Conn
said there were four girls at Tir Na Nog when he was there, including Sarah presumably. So that suggests there are at least three others still there.’

‘Assuming
he’s not added any more in the meantime,’ Kennedy said darkly

‘But our cold case
, she was found dead when Conn was just a toddler. Which means there are two possibilities here: either Conn was abducted, possibly to replace the first girl. Or he is actually the biological son of this guy.’

They were each lost in their own thoughts.
Finally Reilly sighed. ‘I think we’ll need to go back through all the missing person files again, focusing on males as well this time, to see if one matches Conn’s profile.’

‘
The biggest question still remains,’ Kennedy grunted, wiping his mouth, satisfied with his feed,‘where the hell is this supposed Tir Na Nog place? And how come Conn is no longer there?’

Chris shook his head. 
‘Looks like we’re dealing with a nutjob here. The guy took Conn at some stage then presumably, and for whatever reason, got rid of him. Let’s just hope he doesn’t decide to get rid of any of the others he might have.’

Reilly shook her head. 
‘I don’t think so. Based on what Conn described, it doesn’t sound like a threatening place.’

‘
I agree,’ said Chris. ‘Whatever is going on at their version of Tir Na Nog, Conn was happy there. His sadness comes not from having been there, but from being cast out.’

‘So what happened with Sarah?’ Kennedy wondered. ‘If she was there in this place, how did she end up on the side of the road that night? Was she thrown out too?’

Chris nodded. ‘Because of the pregnancy perhaps. Which begs the question …’

Kennedy stood up. 
‘I need another fag.’  He pulled the packet out of his pocket, and looked down at Reilly and Chris. ‘I don’t know about you, but all this stuff is frying my brain.’

As Kennedy worked his way through the tables to the door, Reilly turned to Chris
. ‘When do you think you might be able to talk to Conn again?’

Chris shrugged. 
‘Soon, I hope. At this point he’s the best chance we have of finding this place, wherever it is.’

‘I’m guessing it must be reasonably close to where Sarah was found, and the region of the cold
-case discovery.  In the mountains somewhere?’ she suggested. ‘But with a body of water in the vicinity too, given the algae.’

Chris shook his head. ‘But
the same question applies as when we were considering a cult: how could such a place go unnoticed? We’ve had three rounds of door to doors in a twenty-mile radius of where Sarah was found, and drawn a blank. I’ll see if we can set up another – give the local police this new information and extend the radius.’

Reilly
looked thoughtful as they got up to leave. ‘Well, given the mythology angle, I’m wondering if we should talk to O’Brien about bringing Reuben in…’

‘
Are you serious?’ Chris glanced outside to where Kennedy was huddled under the café’s awning, trying to light his cigarette in the wind and the rain. He pulled a couple of coins from his pocket and threw them on the table. ‘Irish mythology and Reuben Knight,’ he said, shaking his head in resignation. ‘A match made in hell.’

Later that day Rory tracked Reilly down with an update on a potential match for the remaining unidentifed angel. 

Or swan actually, Reilly corrected herself. She was doodling;
trying to allow her right brain to kick in and make sense of all the facts and details that were emerging. She put her pen down and looked up at him. 

‘
I’ve gone through the files and what’s left of the corresponding evidence from the cold case. Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of comparative DNA. The dress she was found in has perished over the years. We
do
have some interesting information on the missing girl Lucy thought might be her though. Jennifer Hutchinson was listed as having a distinguishable strawberry-shaped birthmark on her back when she went missing.’

‘OK …’

‘This reminded me of those
slight differences in the second tattoo which we’d explained as deterioration, but I’m wondering if the wings might originally have been an attempt to disguise the birthmark?’ He handed Reilly the cold-case photos once again.

She squinted as she studied the photo
, but couldn’t make out any such skin irregularity amongst the design.

Inconclusive.

‘Did Lucy follow up on the missing girl’s family?’ she asked.

‘
No next of kin in Ireland apparently. Her mother died of cancer two years later, and her father was killed in a car crash a few years after that.’ He read through the case notes. ‘Jennifer was an only child; her parents moved here from the UK before she was born. We have traced down a sister of Jennifer’s mother who lives in Hertfordshire in the UK. She is willing to help in whatever way possible,’ Rory continued.

               ‘Well
, that’s good news at least.’

              ‘So w
hat do you want to do next?’ he asked.

‘Something I was hoping we wouldn’t have to,’ Reilly said with an air of resignation. ‘I’ll need to talk to the coroner’s office.’

She
had been hoping it wouldn’t come to this, but given that this now appeared to be a full-blown abduction case, and their cold case was a major part of it…

              ‘So how does the exhumation process work?’ Rory asked when she explained her line of thinking. ‘I’ve never been involved with one before.’

‘
This will be my first in this country too. Initially, I’ll need to convince the coroner’s office to reopen the file.  We’ll need to apply for a license through the courts, but it should be quick and unobjected, seeing as she was a Jane Doe. And if we can get the aunt on board…’

No doubt it would raise all sorts of hell, but with the possibil
ity of other missing kids involved, further investigation of a corpse from ten years before might not only confirm the girl’s identity, but could also help them discover more about exactly where she’d been before her death.

Tir
Na Nog?

A
t the very least, Reilly thought, if  they could confirm an ID,  then after ten long years, the poor girl would be able to get a proper burial and at least one family member would be able to say goodbye.

Shortly afterwards, Reilly stopped by the lab to see how Lucy was.

After their recent conversation about Grace, she was concerned, not only about the younger tech’s ability to remain objective, but also from a personal point of view. She cared about the girl and was worried about the effect all of this might be having on her.

Lucy was just hanging up the phone when Reilly approached. She had a tired look in her eyes.

‘
Are you doing OK?’

Lucy gave a
half-hearted shrug.  ‘Surviving.’

‘
We’re making progress, you know.’