Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation (13 page)

‘’Ow did it ’appen?’ Mr Dooley asked, still with his arm around his wife’s shoulders.

Emma knew the police code: never answer a question except with another question if you’re interviewing witnesses or suspects, in case you give something away that could later prove critical to the investigation, and this was still a murder investigation. She shook her head. ‘We’re still in the process of establishing exactly what happened,’ she said. ‘But please accept my condolences.’ She paused for a heartbeat. ‘When did you realise that your daughter was missing?’

‘She didn’t come ’ome,’ Mrs Dooley said; the first words Emma had heard her utter in English. Her voice was raspy, roughened by too many years of smoking, Emma assumed. ‘Normally we wouldn’t bovver about that, but we knew ’er boyfriend weren’t around.’

Mr Dooley’s hand tightened on his wife’s shoulder. Emma noticed the flesh beneath the blouse bulge beneath his thin fingers.

‘’E were out wiv ’is mates,’ Mrs Dooley amplified. ‘Cat hadn’t said she was goin’ to be out, so we phoned a few of ’er mates. They ’adn’t seen ’er. Nobody ’ad seen ’er.’

‘So you called the police,’ Emma said, not so much a question as an anticipation of the next statement.

‘No,’ Mr Dooley said. ‘We went out lookin’. Me an’ some others. We checked all the usual bars an’ clubs, but she weren’t there. We phoned ’er bloke, just in case, but she weren’t wiv ’im either. We drove around lookin’, but she weren’t nowhere.’

‘And
then
you notified the police?’ Emma asked.

Mr Dooley looked away. His expression suggested that he wanted to spit on the floor, but was restraining himself. ‘After some … discussion, yeah.’

‘The Parve usually try to sort things out themselves,’ Sergeant
Rossmore said from the other side of the room. ‘They don’t like bothering the police with trivialities like missing people.’

‘We keep ourselves to ourselves,’ Mrs Dooley offered when her husband said nothing. She looked up at him. ‘And look where it got us.’

He remained silent, but his fingers clamped hard enough on her shoulder that she winced.

‘Are you sure her boyfriend couldn’t have seen her?’ Emma asked.

‘I’m sure,’ Mr Dooley said. ‘I know the blokes who was with ’im.’

‘What’s his name?’ Emma asked.

Mr Dooley glanced at her, briefly, suspicion in his eyes. ‘I told you, it ain’t ’im.’

‘None the less, we need to talk to him.’

‘Why?’ Blunt, flat.

Emma thought quickly. She wanted to talk to the boyfriend because he was probably her chief suspect, but the Dooleys were convinced he was innocent. ‘Because he might have talked to her on the phone, and he might be able to narrow down the time when she was … when she died.’

‘Donal,’ Mrs Dooley said, after glancing at her husband. ‘Donal O’Riordan. ’E’s a decent enough lad.’

‘And where does he live?’

Mrs Dooley glanced at her husband again, but this time he shook his head briefly. ‘I dunno,’ she said lamely.

‘If she was attacked,’ Mr Dooley said before Emma could follow up the question, ‘if my baby girl was assaulted, I want to know about it. I got a right to know about it.’

‘And then what?’ Rossmore asked. ‘You round up a lynch mob? You hunt down someone you think might be guilty and you cut their bollocks off?’

‘We keep ourselves to ourselves,’ Mr Dooley said as if reciting a mantra. ‘We sort out our own problems in our own ways.’

‘Which would be all fine and dandy,’ Rossmore said, ‘if you always get the right bloke. But you don’t. You just choose someone you don’t like the look of, usually an outsider, and you set on them like you set those lurchers you keep on hares. And, of course, if one of
you
has raped or assaulted an outsider then you close ranks. You let them get away with it.’

Mr Dooley shrugged, as if he wasn’t interested.

‘Mrs Dooley,’ Emma said, calming her, ‘can you think of anyone who might have held a grudge against Catriona? Did she mention anyone bothering her, or following her around? Had she been in any fights?’

‘Nothing.’ Mrs Dooley shook her head violently. ‘She were a good girl. Everone loved ’er.’

‘Did she work?’

‘She was on the tills at Sainsbury’s. Just to get by ’til the summer, when she could get a job at the amusements.’

‘Lovely,’ Sergeant Rossmore muttered from the other side of the room.

‘Have either of
you
seen anyone round the area, anyone you didn’t recognise, or who looked out of place?’

‘Not a soul.’

Mr Dooley made a little gesture with his head. ‘We know what goes on in our manor. If there was a stranger around, we’d know about it. People would call other people, and pretty soon we’d ’ave someone checkin’ ’em out.’

Emma shook her head. ‘I won’t keep you any longer. Thank you for your help, and once again – I’m sorry for your loss. Sergeant Rossmore will assign a police officer to act as family liaison, keeping you abreast of developments and making sure you know what’s going on.’

‘We don’t need no family liaison,’ Mr Dooley snarled. ‘All we need is a name. Just a name.’

‘And we need our daughter back,’ Mrs Dooley said, almost apologetically. ‘For the funeral.’

‘It may be a few days,’ Emma said, ‘depending on the state of the investigation, but I’ll get your daughter’s body released as soon as possible. Can we give you a lift back to your home?’

‘We’ll make our own way.’ Mr Dooley took his wife’s elbow and guided her away, towards the door.

She watched them go, thinking about how little she’d actually got from them, and how tight-knit the Traveller community appeared to be. She’d never really had any dealings with them before. From the outside they looked just like anyone else, but scratch the surface and there was a whole set of beliefs, habits, traditions and customs there that marked them out from the rest of the society whose boundaries they lived so quietly within.

‘This Donal O’Riordan,’ she said, looking at Rossmore. ‘Is he known to you?’

‘Local Jack-the-Lad,’ Rossmore replied. ‘We’ve had him up for joyriding on too many occasions to mention, plus we’ve suspected him of some minor burglaries, a bit of breaking and entering. He likes his beer and he likes to get into a fight on a Saturday night. We know where he lives. Council house on the same estate as the Dooleys.’

‘Then let’s go there,’ Emma said. ‘Before the Dooleys warn him off.’

‘We’ll need backup,’ Rossmore declared, scrawling the address on a scrap of paper. ‘The old boy was right – if we turn up there’ll be a flashmob surrounding us within ten minutes, and they’ll be bringing bricks and baseball bats to the party.’

As Emma walked with Murrell back to his car, Rossmore was
talking on his mobile behind them. The drive from the hospital took less than twenty minutes, heading out of the centre of Maldon and into an estate that grew out of it like a cancer, its cells being hundreds of houses made out of grey breeze-blocks and discoloured PVC cladding, the only thing distinguishing one from another being the various different kinds of weather damage and the remains of old Christmas decorations clinging like dead vines to the gaps between the masonry blocks. By the time they got to O’Riordan’s house they were part of a convoy of five police cars. It wasn’t quite a raid, but the speed with which the police got out of their cars and formed a protective barrier against the rapidly developing crowd of locals made it feel like one.

Emma strode up the cracked path towards the front door, past the rusted carcass of an old Ford Mondeo that sat in the front garden. She could sense Murrell sprinting to keep up. She banged hard on the door, trying to ignore the mutterings from the growing mob behind her. ‘Donal O’Riordan? This is the police. Please answer the door – we need to talk to you.’ She paused, then added, ‘It’s about your girlfriend – Catriona Dooley,’ just in case he had more than one girlfriend.

Two constables headed around the back to intercept O’Riordan if he tried to make a run for it. Either Rossmore had sent them or they’d been on enough encroachments into Traveller territory that they knew how it worked.

No sound from within. Emma turned to Murrell. ‘What do you reckon?’ she asked. ‘We’ve got no grounds to go in, even if we suspect he’s inside, and the locals aren’t going to be much help. We’ll never find a local gossip who can tell us where he’s gone around here.’

‘Actually,’ Murrell said, ‘I think we have got grounds to go in.’ He pointed to the white PVC door. ‘Look.’

Emma looked closer at the area Murrell was indicating, beside the Yale lock. What she had at first taken to be a grease mark looked more like a smear of blood, as if someone with bloody fingers had pulled the door too and left a thumbprint.

‘Right,’ she said, beckoning two constables. ‘I want this door open, pronto.’

The constables looked at each other uncertainly, then back at the car.

‘I don’t think we’ve got the door-breaking equipment with us,’ one of them, a lad with ginger hair and freckles, said.

Emma tried not to imagine what Mark Lapslie would say at that point. ‘Policemen have been breaking doors down for hundreds of years,’ she said patiently. ‘Use your initiative.’

‘Are we allowed to do that?’ the other one asked. He was shorter, with spiky dark hair. ‘Health and safety, like.’

‘Just do it,’ Murrell said before Emma could explode at them. ‘I’ll make sure you’re covered. And whatever you do, don’t try and kick it in like they do on TV. You’ll just injure yourself. Brace yourself and use your shoulders.’

‘That was my point,’ the ginger-haired constable murmured, but he took a step back and threw himself against the door. It shuddered under his weight, and bowed at the top, but the lock stayed intact. He stood back further and took two steps this time before hitting the door. This time the wood holding the lock splintered and the door flew open.

‘Get in and look for O’Riordan,’ Emma instructed. The constables piled inside; one heading left and up a set of stairs that were all but invisible in the shadows of the hall, the other heading right. She and Murrell followed on.

The living room, directly off the hall, was dark; curtains drawn against the afternoon sunshine. It smelled of unwashed clothes and takeaway Chinese food. Emma looked around the living
room: leather sofa, massive LCD TV, Xbox 360. No sign of O’Riordan.

One of the constables thudded down the stairs and into the living room. ‘Nobody,’ he said. ‘Place is a mess, though. Don’t reckon he’s got a cleaner.’

‘I think you need to see this,’ the other constable called from the hall. He appeared in the doorway, face white and adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. ‘I
really
think you both need to see this.’

Emma glanced over at Murrell. He was frowning. Together, they headed towards the kitchen. Emma got through the door first.

The cooker was covered in half-empty plastic take-out containers with snap tops, and the dried remains of spilled meals, but it was the kitchen table that her gaze was drawn to. It was covered in dark red blood. Smears and tracks on the centre of the table indicated that something had been dragged across it. Trickles of blood had made their way to the edge and hung like glutinous stalactites down towards the floor.

‘Dear God,’ Murrell said from behind Emma.

On a hunch, she crossed to the fridge and opened the door.

Revealed in the actinic white glow, the fridge was stacked up with plastic take-out containers. Unlike the ones on the cooker, these were washed and clean. And unlike the ones on the cooker, they were all full.

Emma felt her stomach lurch. Each plastic contained was filled with gobbets of dark red flesh.

‘Find him,’ she snarled. ‘And arrest him for murder.’

It was only when Lapslie got back to his Saab that he remembered he hadn’t paid the hospital’s extortionate parking toll. He looked around the car park, but there were no ticket machines – only a few well-disguised signs telling him that he had to pay in the hospital reception area. Grumpily, he walked back to the reception and found the only machine that seemed to have been fitted. There was a queue of people waiting in front of it, muttering to themselves in what was either irritation or the first indication of mental illness. The woman at the front of the line was rooting in her handbag for the right change. Judging by the look on her face she already knew that she hadn’t got it but was hoping either to locate a previously unknown hoard of 10p pieces underneath her knitting or that a kindly soul waiting in the queue would donate the money to her. Looking at the people in the line Lapslie thought they were more likely to mug her for the coins she already had than give her more.

After a minute or so of fruitless waiting he turned and strode off to the reception desk. A middle-aged woman in a blazer was sitting behind it, scanning her computer screen and making notes on a sheet of paper with a ballpoint pen. She glanced up as he approached.

‘Can I help you?’

‘Police,’ Lapslie said, holding his warrant card up where she could see it. ‘I need my parking ticket validated.’

Her face creased into what was obviously a well-used expression that encompassed regret, sadness and a slight hint of reproach. ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that,’ she said. ‘It’s not hospital policy. Everyone using the car park needs to pay for a ticket. Our facilities cost money, you know.’

‘You must be joking.’

‘You could have come by public transport,’ she retorted. ‘It’s hospital policy to reduce our carbon footprint, and that means encouraging our visitors to leave their cars at home wherever possible.’

‘In that case,’ Lapslie replied, ‘I have reason to believe that a crime was committed at this hospital. I need to collect the evidence, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to charge you for my time.’

‘You can’t do that,’ she protested.

‘Police time costs money, you know,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘Our policy is to reduce crime by charging people if they let crimes happen on their premises. What can I do?’

She just looked at him, obviously waiting for him to change his mind or tell her that he was only joking. Instead, he maintained a level gaze.