The Irish Scissor Sisters (6 page)

Linda picked up the left leg but struggled to get it into a bag because of its length. She hadn’t opened the refuse sack properly and while she was attempting to get the bag to open wide enough, she dropped the thin black leg. She jumped with fright at the shock of Farah’s leg touching her before it struck the ground.

Charlotte took over and packed up the rest of the body until all that was left was the head. She took Noor’s head, which by now was unrecognisable because of the ruthless beating it had taken with the knife and hammer. She wrapped it in one of the black bags and was about to put it in a navy sports bag when Linda intervened.

‘Hold on. Leave the head here. We can’t throw it in the water. The guards will be able to find out who he is if they have his head. Leave it here and we’ll get rid of it somewhere else,’ she instructed.

The sisters were surprised to see that little or no blood was seeping out of the dismembered limbs. They had expected that the flow of blood in the arms and legs would continue for hours after he died but most of Farah’s blood had drained while he lay on the base of the shower. The black bags were still important, however, so the sports bags wouldn’t get stained and get them into trouble with the police later.

They discussed when to bring the body down to the canal and decided to wait until later in the morning. It would be better to make a start on cleaning the flat. Although there wouldn’t be too many people around now, three women carrying bags would look suspicious. If a squad car went by, they might stop to see what was going on, and how do you explain being out by the canal in the middle of the night with heavy sports bags? If they waited until first light people would be starting to go to work and they would blend in more easily. Granted, there was more of a chance that they would be seen at the canal, but if one of them kept a look out to make sure no one was around when they were putting the body in the water, they would be OK.

At about 1 a.m., they had just agreed on when to go down to Ballybough Bridge when the buzzer of Flat 1 rang. They knew it was John Mulhall. The girls dreaded their father seeing what they had done. They went into the bedroom and closed the door.

Kathleen let her ex-husband in, greeting him with the words: ‘Farah is dead; the girls killed him.’

John went ballistic and stormed into the house, past the sports bags and refuse sacks piled neatly near the door. ‘What the fuck happened?’ he asked.

Charlotte and Linda came out of hiding and looked at their beloved Dad and started to cry.

The glass fitter could not believe his eyes as he looked around the flat. He knew that he didn’t want to get mixed up in something as awful as this. He glanced around again and saw the load of black bags in the hallway. He didn’t even want to think about what was in them.

‘You’re on your own,’ he shouted and left, getting into his van and driving away. He didn’t like abandoning Charlie and Linda in their hour of need but this was way too serious for him to get messed up in.

The girls were devastated when John Mulhall walked out the door and turned his back on them. They had stood by him when he had an affair and had taken his side during the marriage collapse and now he had walked away when they needed him most. They were genuinely shocked and the events of the previous few hours finally caught up with them. The sisters were exhausted and went into the bedroom and lay on the double bed to get some sleep for a few hours. When they awoke there would still be a lot of work to do.

While her daughters were getting some much-needed rest, Kathleen made a start on tackling the bathroom. She went into the kitchen and took bleach from the press, together with some sponges and cloths. She didn’t have a basin and had to fill up two cooking pots that lay on top of the stove. It was about 1.30 a.m. at this point, and, after boiling a kettle of water and filling the pots, she went into the bathroom and put them on top of the toilet. She turned on the shower and took the head off its unit and sprayed all the walls with hot water, using a cloth covered in bleach to remove the stains that the boiling water couldn’t clear. She was meticulous in wiping the walls with the cloth, rinsing them off with water, cleaning the cloth and then re-wiping them. It wasn’t long before the shower walls looked normal, better than normal, and the plastic base unit was the only thing left that betrayed the fact that a body had just been chopped up there. She washed the remaining bone and skin fragments down the plughole, occasionally having to spray the water directly on the drain to stop it becoming clogged. She poured bleach onto the plastic unit and wiped furiously at it with a J Cloth until the bloodstains started to disappear. She repeated the process a few times until eventually there was no trace of blood at all.

Cleaning the shower had taken well over ninety minutes and her two daughters had woken from their short nap as she had just about finished. Linda and Charlotte weren’t really in the mood for sleeping and had just lain in the bed with their eyes closed, not saying anything to each other. All Linda could think about were her children at home. She couldn’t bear to live if they were taken away from her again. Charlotte didn’t have a family and didn’t have very many friends either. As she lay resting, she imagined what life in prison would be like. She lived a nomadic existence and came and went as she pleased, answering to nobody. The thoughts of a life in jail, conforming to rules and regulations didn’t suit her at all and she promised herself that she wouldn’t be caught. It suddenly dawned on her that it was her birthday today. Last year’s shambles of a twenty-first, just having a few quiet drinks at home, was starting to look like the party to end all parties compared with today. Even after everything that had happened over the last few hours, Charlotte couldn’t help thinking about her birthday – nobody seemed to have any presents for her and they hadn’t even said ‘happy birthday’. Knowing her luck they hadn’t even remembered.

They got out of bed and took over finishing the bathroom and changed the water in the cooking pots because it was cold at this stage. The pools of blood had carpeted the floor and had started to get hard and dry. They threw a pot of water over the bathroom floor and used cloths and towels to soak up the excess water, rinsing them into the toilet. It was a messy job because the floor was where most of the cutting had taken place. Congealed blood and lumps of skin and bone littered the floor tiles and they had to be picked up by hand and flushed down the toilet. It took about seven or eight pots of water and more clean towels before the dried blood was removed. It wasn’t nearly clean yet and, as the water began to dry into the floor, big streaks from where they had been cleaning with the towels started to appear.

Now that the pools of blood on the floor were gone, Linda and Charlie started to clean the wall tiles. The cloths were thick with blood by now and they put some bleach into boiling water in a cooking pot to give them a good clean. Farah’s blood had reached nearly six feet up the wall and they started at the top of the tiles and worked their way down. It was easier to mop the wall than the floor because there was far less blood to contend with, but parts of the tiles were in need of serious attention nonetheless. The bathroom was in such a bad state that even the most experienced crime scene cleaner would have had their hands full for days, trying to deal with the amount of blood-staining that Farah’s murder and dismemberment had left.

When they had made their way along the whole bathroom wall and had cleaned it to their satisfaction, they got another bottle of bleach from the kitchen. They poured it directly onto a cloth and cleaned in between the wall tiles to get rid of any trace of blood. This took a long time and when they were finished they still had to clean the floor.

They rinsed the cloths and got more fresh water. They got down on their hands and knees and scrubbed and scrubbed. They poured bleach onto the tiles and rubbed it in between them so that you couldn’t see any blood with the naked eye.

Cleaning the bathroom the first time took about three hours. They knew that it would need to be done again to make sure that anything they’d missed would be taken care of second time around. Farah’s remains were sitting in bags in the hallway but the smell in the bathroom was still indescribable – a mixture of chemicals, sweat and the odour of death filled the air. When the toilet seat was lifted the smell that emanated out of it was far worse than you could ever imagine. Linda would be awake for days on end trying to get the stench out of her mind. They poured bleach and toilet cleaner into the bowl and flushed it, but they had put so much skin and body tissue down that it was now blocked. It was threatening to spill out of the toilet onto the floor. The sisters had no choice but to endure the pungent smell, as they had to leave the toilet to settle down for a few hours and slowly unblock itself.

Kathleen was taken aback when she went into the bedroom she had shared with Farah Swaleh Noor. She hadn’t been in the room when the murder had taken place and couldn’t bring herself to go in after her daughters had dragged the body from the bedroom into the bathroom. She had expected the bathroom to be in bad shape because Farah had been cut up there but she didn’t think that the bedroom would be anywhere near as terrible as it was. There was a five-foot-wide pool of blood on the blue carpet beside the bunk bed. She didn’t have to be told that this was the spot where her boyfriend had been stabbed to death. The puddle of blood made a squelching noise when she walked on it because the blood had gone all the way through and waterlogged the thin carpet. Kathleen had no choice but to take the carpet up. She had brought a cooking pot and cloths with her and used them and some damp towels to absorb the blood. It didn’t take long before the two towels were soaked through and she rinsed them in the kitchen sink before using them again. By now she had run out of clean towels as they had all been used to cover Farah when he was being chopped up or to clean the blood stains. The girls had used four or five of them cleaning the bathroom and she was using the last two to mop up the blood in the bedroom. There was little else to do, however, except rinse them as much as she could and keep going, although the towels were not much good at absorbing the liquid, which made the job harder than it ought to have been.

The carpet wasn’t the only part of the bedroom to be decorated in Farah’s blood. The chest of drawers had been drenched from his multiple chest wounds and the blood had even travelled as far as the wardrobe. Kathleen used the cloth and pot to wash these clean but found it difficult to get into the grooves on the pine planks of the wardrobe. The bunk bed was also bloody and it was hard to get underneath it to clean the base because the main pool of blood was on the floor below. The only way to do it was to lie in Farah’s blood, which was not an attractive option. An area of wallpaper directly beside the bunk was ruined and would have to be taken off the wall. She removed it using a kitchen knife and some hot water.

When Linda and Charlotte were done in the bathroom they came and helped to remove the carpet. They took the Stanley blade and cut a straight line about a foot from where the last spots of blood were to the left of the bunk bed. They did the same to the area of the carpet to the right of the bed. They took up over six feet of carpet and underlay and were relieved to see that the blood hadn’t soaked through to the concrete floor. They brought the carpet to the hall and, using the blade and kitchen knife, cut it up into little strips. They then put it in a black bag along with the wallpaper. Kathleen said she’d leave it in the communal back yard for the bin men to collect and take away later in the week.

They all knew that the bedroom would need to be cleaned again and Kathleen said she’d do it later in the day. She was concerned about Farah’s clothes and pulled them out of the wardrobe and put them in the bag with the carpet. Noor hadn’t been into the latest fashion and was content wearing old jeans and football jerseys. She took out some tops, a few pairs of trousers, two Manchester United jerseys and other bits and pieces, and his side of the wardrobe was empty. It was important that nothing was left behind if the story about him leaving to live with his ex-girlfriend was to hold up.

Charlotte went through his wallet and took out the few euro that was in it before tossing it in the bag. She also opened his drawer and noticed his rings and chains. She would easily be able to sell these on the street. She took them and put them in her pocket. She asked her mother where his mobile was, saying she would take it home with her and sell it later on. The black bag was now full and Charlotte took it out to the communal yard at the back of the house and put it in a corner where it wouldn’t be disturbed.

The only trace that Farah Noor had ever lived at 17 Richmond Cottages was now gone. It was as if he’d never been there at all.

The trio had been cleaning non-stop for nearly five hours at this stage. Once they had dealt with the trail of blood leading from the bedroom to the bathroom, they changed out of their bloody clothes. Linda and Charlie’s outfits, specially picked for a day’s socialising the previous morning, were now unrecognisable. They were covered with the blood, bone and brain matter of Farah Noor. They stripped off and Kathleen gave them some clothes. Linda had a purple polo neck in her mam’s flat that she had been given as a present and she put this on, along with some jeans. Charlotte regularly stayed there so she had lots of clothes in the wardrobe. She put on a black top and a pair of dark denim jeans and Kathleen also changed into fresh clothes. They put their old clothes in a black bag and went and sat down and relaxed in the living room – exhausted and emotional.

Shortly after 6 a.m. the buzzer rang and the three women jumped with fright. Who would be calling to a house at this hour unless it was bad news? Linda and Charlotte were sure it was the guards and thought they were going to be carted off to prison. The buzzer sounded again and they paced around the front room whispering to each other, ‘Who the fuck is that?’ They were afraid to make any noise in case whoever was ringing at the door heard them. With a bit of luck they might get fed up and go away. The buzzer went for a third time and they knew that the caller was aware that somebody was up. They went to the bedroom window and looked out through a small gap at the side of the curtain.