Hurt (DS Lucy Black) (32 page)

They went into the small room. Lucy could see one of the PCs displaying a web page very similar to the main Country Photographers’ website. On it were a number of pictures, all of school children, all taken by Hines. In each, the girl, for they were all girls, was sitting in front of the faux library of books that Hines used as his backdrop.

Lucy leaned in and examined the screen. She felt her throat tighten as she recognized one of the pictures as that of Karen Hughes. The next one was the image of Sarah Finn that she had seen before.

‘That’s not quite what I was expecting,’ she said.

‘It’s like a stud wall into the site,’ Cooper said. ‘Let’s just say someone does accidentally make it through the first level, they reach this, it’s innocuous looking. Click on one of the individual pictures, though, and you get this.’

He clicked on the image of Karen Hughes and a pop-up box appeared requesting a username and password.

‘You register for membership here,’ Cooper said, pointing to a small text box at the bottom of the page he had shown her, where viewers could sign up for a newsletter. ‘Again, it looks innocuous. Presumably, though, once you request a newsletter, Bell has your details and sends you a password and username. Then you get to whatever he’s hiding back there.’

‘It’s definitely him,’ Lucy said.

‘Look at this,’ Cooper said, pointing to the bottom picture of a schoolgirl. Lucy stared at the girl’s face a moment before she realized where she had seen her before. Immediately she also realized why the name had seemed familiar. The recently reported missing Annie Marsden had commented on a Facebook posting by one of the suspected sock puppet accounts, ‘Liam Tyler’.

‘The girl from the Missing Persons fax,’ Cooper said. ‘Annie Marsden. I think he’s got her.’

Lucy contacted An Garda to tell them about her concerns regarding Annie Marsden’s safety. The Inspector with whom she spoke, a softly spoken man, promised that he would visit the Marsden house and check whether Liam Tyler was a real friend of Annie’s, or whether the account was simply another sock puppet.

Cooper had been busy working at Bell’s PC with a black external hard drive which he’d connected through a USB. He muttered to himself as he worked.

‘What are you doing?’ Lucy asked.

‘Deciphering Bell’s password,’ Cooper said. ‘The website will have a memory of his password, so that, when he logs in, it knows it’s him. I can access the database of the site for his password. It brings up the text as a series of hashes. This device tries to decode them by cycling through every possible letter, number or symbol for each hash.’

‘Like breaking a safe?’

‘Pretty much. It guesses each letter at high speed. Because we’re using his own computer, it will automatically complete his username.’

‘Impressive,’ Lucy said.

‘But slow,’ Cooper countered. ‘How’s your boyfriend?’

Lucy nodded. ‘He’s OK,’ she said, feeling her face flush. She couldn’t understand if it was at the thought of Robbie or because it was Copper asking about him.

On the device, the series of six hashes flickered as the first one converted to the letter L.

‘It’s a start,’ Cooper said.

A few seconds later it flickered again and the second hash converted to ‘o’.

‘Now we’re moving,’ Cooper said. ‘Anyone any good at crosswords?’

Lucy stared at the word: Lo ####. Some of the other officers had moved across and were standing behind Cooper, watching.

‘Lovers,’ one suggested. Cooper tried typing it in, but the screen simply returned to the empty password box.

‘Louisa,’ Lucy said.

Cooper glanced at her and nodded. He typed in the word. For a second, nothing happened, then the screen changed and a series of folders appeared on the screen. Each folder had a different name. One was marked ‘Karen’.

‘Open that one,’ Lucy said.

She recognized some of the images that the folder contained as being part of the collection that had been found in Gene Kay’s house. There were others, though, where the perpetrator was clearly visible. Lucy wanted to reach out and cover Karen in each image, cover her from the watching eyes of the officers who stood in silence as Cooper quickly scrolled through the images.

‘Do we need to look at these?’ she asked.

‘There were two houses, you said,’ Cooper replied. ‘I’m trying to see if there’s anything to help us find the second one.’

Lucy nodded. ‘Try Sarah,’ she said. ‘She told us that she remembered being in two different houses.’

Cooper went back and opened the second folder. The images contained in there were of similar quality and content to those featuring Karen. In one, Lucy recognized the man with her as Carlin. Any possible misgivings she’d had about his drowning in Enagh Lough were swiftly dispelled.

‘There,’ Cooper said, quickly.

He stopped at one image in particular and, double-clicking, enlarged it. It was clearly taken in a different room from the bulk of the other images. It was brighter, the bed on which Sarah Finn lay placed next to a window. What Cooper was pointing to was something visible through the window, in the middle distance.

At the far right of the window frame, almost moving out of sight, was a silver four-by-four.

‘It’s facing onto a road,’ one of the uniforms said.

‘No,’ Cooper commented. ‘Look beside it.’

Sure enough, the rest of the surrounding space was the slate grey of water, the white heads of waves just visible.

‘So how would a four-by-four go on water?’ Cooper asked.

‘On a car ferry,’ Lucy said. ‘And there’s only one car ferry within driving distance of here.’

‘Magilligan Point,’ Cooper said.

The light was beginning to fail by the time the Response Teams were on their way. Magilligan lay about twenty-five miles away from the city, along the Sea Coast Road that skirted Lough Foyle. At its narrowest point, between Magilligan and Greencastle in County Donegal, the Foyle was only 2 kilometres wide and it was at this point that the ferry crossed, taking cars between the Republic and Northern Ireland.

Having studied the maps that they had, which, due to the location there of Magilligan Prison were fairly detailed, they had worked out approximately where the house must be, based on the angle at which the ferry had been viewed through the window.

The wind that carried up the lough buffeted the sides of the cars as they travelled the coast road, the cold draughts of air pushing through the gaps in the doors at the rear of the Land Rover.

Lucy glanced out through the viewing slits along the side of the vehicle. To her left, bright against the starless December night, the illuminated shape of Magilligan Prison stood out. Somewhere inside, she realized, Eoghan Harkin would be passing his final night in prison. She wondered, in fact, if his daughter, Karen, had ever been in the Magilligan house where Sarah Finn had been photographed, whether she had realized her proximity to her father.

They trundled along the roadway until, after a few moments, Lucy heard Burns speaking from the front where he was sitting. She looked up to see him pointing out to the right. Moving across, she looked out through the opposite side of the vehicle and saw, set against the darkness, the squat shape of a small house about a mile down a laneway. By its angle, its rear would have looked out onto the lough, facing the path of the ferry.

Burns twisted in his seat, his face pressed against the mesh that separated them from the front seats. ‘This is us, folks,’ he said. ‘Our priority is to get any children out first. We can round up any adults in the place. And obviously, Peter Bell is our target.’

They felt the Land Rover turn sharply to the left, Lucy almost losing her balance with the suddenness of the movement. A moment or two later, they pulled to a halt and the back doors were flung open. In addition to the CID team, there were several uniforms to assist. Further Land Rovers, behind, had been brought to carry any suspects lifted in the raid.

The house was a low-set dormer style. Lights shone from almost all windows, their glare deadened by the thin scraps of curtains that hung over the windows themselves. Even from out here, above the sharp whistling of the wind against the visors of their helmets, they could hear the raised voices inside, the sounds of laughter.

The uniforms approached the front of the house and positioned themselves with the small blue metal battering ram. Two swings were sufficient to force in the front door. Lucy thought of Cooper, brute-forcing his way through the website, as she watched them work.

Then, at a word, they poured in through the open doorway, immediately splitting in all directions, moving into the body of the house. Almost at once, the noise inside increased, people shouting and screaming. Lucy filed in through the door, the clumsiness of the riot gear helmet she wore obscuring her view. She glanced across and saw, in one room, several men sitting, cans of beer in their hands. She saw at least two young girls sitting among them, fully dressed at least, their faces drawn in bewilderment at the source of the intrusion, their eyes glassy. Whoever they were, neither looked like Annie Marsden.

Across to the other side was smaller room, with a pool table sitting in the middle of it, just as Sarah Finn had described. A number of younger people stood around in here, boys and girls. Some of them were loudly remonstrating with the officers who had entered the room, shouting in their belligerence that the raid was an invasion of privacy. Lucy scanned the group for either Annie Marsden or Gavin Duffy but could see neither.

Instead of entering either room, she quickly pushed her way upstairs, using the banisters to help her pull her way upwards. Mickey shoved past her on his way up, immediately cutting left at the top of the stairs and pushing open the door of a bedroom. Lucy glanced across to see an older man standing, naked, twisting to see the source of the intrusion. A thin pale figure lay prone on the bed in front of him. Mickey shoved his way into the room and Lucy saw him grab the man and shove him face down onto the floor.

The door of the room facing Lucy was closed. She turned the handle and pushed it open. In the half-gloom, she could make out two figures lying on the bed, both in a state of undress. Lucy reached across and clicked on the light. Gavin Duffy, stripped to the waist, turned to look at her, his eyes wide and red rimmed. Beneath him lay a young girl, still in her underwear. She too stared up at Lucy, her face drawn in terror. The side of her face, and the hair which clung to it, seemed matted with vomit.

Lucy pulled off her helmet. ‘Gavin?’ she said.

‘Lucy?’ Gavin asked, his face draining of colour. He stumbled off the bed, struggling to keep his footing. ‘Lucy?’ He moved across to her, his hand extended, touching her arm. ‘Are you OK?’

At such close proximity, Lucy could smell the haze of alcohol that surrounded him. His eyes were wide, the whites threaded with burst blood vessels, the pupils little more than pinpricks of black at the centre of each iris.

‘Are you OK?’ he slurred. The words bubbled into sobs which broke from him.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know he’d do it.’

‘Where’s Peter Bell?’ Lucy managed, struggling to control her anger.

‘Not Peter. Tony. I didn’t know he’d do it. The car.’

‘Tony?’ Lucy asked. She remembered the tall youth who had seemed to run the gang in Gobnascale. ‘Tony who?’

‘I don’t know. I told him you’d shown me Peter’s picture. He asked where you were. I didn’t know he’d do that.’ Gavin nodded, then straightened, as if aware that he was drunk and trying very hard to appear sober. Lucy suspected he’d taken more than just alcohol.

‘Tony planted the device in my car?’

Gavin nodded ‘I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘I swear. But you’re all right.’ He gripped her arm, forcefully. ‘You’re all right,’ he repeated.

‘Robbie was in the car,’ Lucy said. ‘He was the one who caused it to blow. He is in hospital.’

‘Jesus,’ Gavin said, the tears streaming now, bubbling round his lips as he spoke.

‘You set him up, Gavin,’ Lucy said, shoving him roughly backwards, towards the bed. The girl who had been lying there was trying with difficulty to sit up, pulling at the bedclothes, searching for her top.

‘I didn’t,’ Gavin said. ‘The picture you showed me. I knew who it was. I went and told him and he said he’d take care of it. He asked where you were and I told him.’

‘You told Tony?’

Gavin shook his head. ‘Jackie. I told Jackie.’

‘Jackie Logue? Why?’

‘Peter took a computer class run by the youth club. I went and told Jackie that he had killed Karen. Jackie said he’d take care of it.’

‘Bell taught in the youth club? Did Karen know him?’

Gavin shook his head. ‘No. He didn’t teach
in
the club. He worked in a place across the town. Jackie only allowed some of us to go. Karen didn’t do the class.’

‘What about Sarah Finn?’ If Sarah had known Bell already, Lucy wondered why she hadn’t told them his name when they’d interviewed her?

‘I don’t think so. It was just me and a few other fellas.’

‘Where is Bell now?’ Lucy asked.

‘He went to get drink,’ Gavin said. ‘Him and Tony. And the new girl.’

‘Annie?’

Gavin nodded. ‘I think so. Maybe. They said we needed more drink. I came up for a sleep.’

Lucy pointed at the girl sitting up now. She looked little more than fourteen.

‘A sleep?’ she asked.

Gavin glanced at the girl, then back at Lucy, his mouth hanging open. ‘I don’t ... I can’t remember if—’

He did not finish the sentence for Lucy struck him across the face with such force, he lost his balance and stumbled, having to put out his hand to arrest his fall.

‘You better hope you didn’t,’ she said, moving past him to reach for the girl. ‘Are you OK?’ Lucy asked her, putting out her hand to help the girl up off the bed.

As they came downstairs, Burns was standing in the hallway, his hands on his hips, glancing between the two rooms as officers in both dealt with those who had been arrested. He smiled when he saw Lucy.