Shadow Sins (DCI Wilson Book 2) (14 page)

CHAPTER 34

Moira McElvaney picked up the addresses of three of the priests and the housekeeper from Harry Graham. Although the house was crawling with forensic technicians, she had taken a quick look at the crime scene in order to familiarise herself. The corpse had already been removed but there was a large enough bloodstain on the bed to show that the victim had bled out. After taking a quick look around the house she made her way to Andersonstownspark where Grace Mooney the housekeeper lived.

“Mrs Grace Mooney?” Moira asked when an elderly lady opened the door.

“Aye,” Grace Mooney replied. “How can I help you.”

Moira produced her warrant card. “I’m Detective Constable Moira McElvaney. I work with Detective Chief Inspector Wilson who you met this morning at the retirement house.” The priests’ housekeeper was certainly over seventy years of age. She wore a floral print housecoat tied at her substantial waist. Her hair was completely grey but full and curly, and her face even at her advanced age could have been the model for a grandmotherly doll.

“You’d best come in,” the old lady shuffled out of the way.

“Thanks,” Moira entered the small hall and was ushered into the equally tiny front room. The house was spotless. Every surface gleamed.

“You’ll be needing a wee cup of tae,” Mrs Mooney said from the door of the front room. “I’ll go and put the kettle on for us.”

Moira looked around the small room. A series of photographs in silver frames adorned the sideboard that dominated the room. Moira bent to examine them. There was a husband and as far as she could tell two children – a boy and a girl. The room was sparsely furnished. Two chairs stood on either side of the fireplace and an ancient television sat in the corner on a small coffee table. Mrs Mooney was not living the high life.

“Here we are,” Mooney returned with a tray containing a tea pot, two cups, a milk jug and a sugar bowl. She laid the tray on the coffee table. “I know I have some biscuits somewhere but I can’t seem to put my hand on them.”

“It’s no matter,” Moira said. “The tea will do fine on its own.”

“Terrible business, Dear,” Mooney shook her head as she poured the tea. “Milk and sugar?”

“Neither, thanks.” Moira took the cup from her hands.

“Such a lovely man,” Mooney added milk and copious spoons of sugar to her own cup before sitting in one of the easy chairs. “I’ve been doing for priests my whole life and I never met a nicer priest than Father Reilly.”

“You live here on your own?” Moira asked sipping her tea.

“Aye, since my auld man died. The children have been away these thirty years, one in Canada, the other in Australia. I’ve six grandchildren. I used to visit when I was younger, but it’s too far to fly now. Doing for the priests keeps me going. I hope they don’t close down the home.” A look of panic crossed her face.

“I’m sure they won’t,” Moira said quickly. “We’ll be finished there in a day or so and then everything can go back to normal.”

“I don’t think so. Whenever there’s a death like that lots of things get changed. There’s a problem with the priests now. Long ago there used to be a lot of them but now there’s not so many. I don’t know what I’d do if I had to give up doing for the priests.”

“Did Father Reilly have any visitors?” Moira asked.

“Divil a one. Sure they don’t have no family and any friends they made in the parishes forget them as soon as they’re gone. Sure t’is a lonely life for them. In the Glen Road, all they have is each other and some of them are so far gone they don’t really want company.”

“So have there been any visitors for any of the priests in the past few weeks?”

The old housekeeper thought for a moment. “Not that I can remember. I’m usually out by 6 o’clock in the evening, so maybe there was someone after I left.”

“Who locked up at night?”

“Father Reilly was the one with the most sense and he locked up religious like at half past eight. Fair or foul the doors was locked at half past eight.“

“Did Father Reilly get much mail?”

“I wouldn’t know. The letters was dropped off be the postie and the priests divvied them up.”

“So you had visits from the postman. Think back over the past three weeks were there any other visitors to the house. The gasman, someone from the electricity company.”

Mrs Mooney put her cup down on the floor beside her. “I’m having a pain in me head trying to answer all these questions. Youse peelers are right melters.”

“We’re not trying to annoy you. We just want to find the person that killed Father Reilly.”

“He was a lovely man.” A tear fell from Mooney’s eye. “Wouldn’t hurt a fly. How will the house manage without him? Do you think they’ll close it down?”

“I’m sure they won’t,” Moira said beginning to lose patience. She only hoped that Davidson was having as difficult a time as her interviewing the other priests.

“There was that one lad,” the old lady said as though in a reverie.

“What lad would that be?” Moira asked.

“Ach, the wee homeless boy,” she smiled. “Knocked at the door looking for something ta eat. Dressed rough. I brought him into the kitchen and made him a wee sandwich. Sure wasn’t he a Catholic like the rest of us. It wouldn’t have been charitable to turn him away.”

“Could you describe him?” Moira asked.

“Ach, get on with you, girl. I won’t be able to describe you five minutes after you’re gone. He was a wee homeless fella I didn’t take a blind bit of notice of him. He wasn’t a happy boy. He was always scratchin’ at something on his hand, but I couldn’t see what. But I did notice the cuts on his arm. He’d been abusing himself. I’d seen things like that before when I helped out in the soup kitchen. That poor boy had a mountain of problems.”

Moira felt like she was on to something but getting information from Mrs Mooney was worse than pulling teeth. She wanted to say ‘will you concentrate you crazy old biddie’.  “Is there anything that you can tell me about him? Did he mention any of the priests? Did he ask about Father Reilly?”

Mooney put her hands up. “For the love of Gawd will you give my head peace. I gave the wee boy a sandwich and a cup of tae. We talked. I can’t remember what we said. I don’t remember.” Another tear slipped from her eye.

“Can you tell me when he came by?” Moira asked.

“Maybe last week. Aye, would have been last week.”

It was something. Moira felt it was certainly something. But she had gotten all there was to get from Mrs Mooney. Now she would have to find the bugger on the CCTV if there was any. But it certainly was something

CHAPTER 35

Noel Mulholland took a pill from his little plastic box and slipped it into his mouth as he watched the television in the East Belfast Mission on the Newtonards Road. What a pair of plonkers, he thought as he watched the press conference being given by Chief Superintendent Spence and Chief Inspector Harrison. They were both wearing their dress uniforms. They don’t even look like detectives. The older one who did most of the talking was grey-haired and grey faced in the lights of the camera. He had a kindly look and reminded Mulholland of his grandfather. The second Peeler looked like he had eaten an ox for breakfast. He was bursting out of his shirt and uniform. The older Peeler had said that the fat one was in charge of the investigations into the murders of Fathers Gilroy and Reilly. If that was the case, he had nothing to worry about. The fat Peeler would have to be wheeled around Belfast in a wagon like that American cop Ironside. They were looking for someone with a grudge against Catholic priests. That was a joke in Belfast where more than 60% of the population would have some kind of prejudice against Popish clergy. He was finally making waves. A Chief Superintendent and a Chief Inspector, that was heavy duty in the police force. He took a cup of tea from the Minister who was in charge of the Mission. He had a habit of dropping into the Mission from time to time. A man needed to remember what it was like to sleep in a clean bed as well as wash the grime of the streets off him. The local population are keen to drop a few pennies in the tramp’s cup as long as he doesn’t smell of drink, piss or vomit. With his trips to the Social and the few pounds he collected from his pitch in Central Belfast, he had just enough to keep him in pills and heroin. Not that he was a real drug addict. He didn’t escalated the dose like other addicts. The pills and the drugs were simply to keep him on an even keel. If he didn’t have them, anything was liable to happen. That was a joke. His head would split open without medication. He couldn’t live without them. It was a delusion to think that he wasn’t addicted in the worse possible way. He knew he was gobbling heavy-duty drugs like children eat sweets. Every day he needed more. Day in, day out, he had nothing except for the drugs. He felt nothing, saw nothing, did nothing. Only the drugs and the withdrawals: the turbulent dementia of memory loss, the itching tremors, the slurred speech and the demons that hovered around him. But the alternative was worse. When he had been put inside for thieving, they had taken him off the drugs. The pains of withdrawal were the worst he ever experienced. The hallucinations made him bang his head against the cell walls. And then there was the inability to eat or sleep. He sometimes wondered how he could keep going in this life. Inside his head worms crawled everywhere. He had often contemplated suicide. He had nothing to live for so why bother going on. Only one thing kept him going. He was going to clear his account with the bastards who had created this life for him.  He was never going to be normal again. He glanced around the room. People just like him stared blankly in front of them, just as he was doing. He was watching and listening to the two Peelers on the screen asking for help in solving two heinous crimes. But he was only seeing them as flickering images as though several frames per second of the picture were missing. Their voices went in and out like a bad line on a mobile telephone. Then he remembered they were talking about him. They were asking people for help in finding him. They had no idea who he was or where he was. They didn’t even know why he had killed Gilroy and Reilly. Maybe they would never find out. He flicked open the plastic box and looked at the multi-coloured lozenges inside. He never thought he would know names line Oxycontin, fentanyl, Lortab or Xanax. The colours were beautiful. They were red and blue, vibrant yellow, pink and lime green. The cornucopia of drugs that kept him alive.

CHAPTER 36

Wilson walked away from the television in the cafeteria in the Station thanking God that he hadn’t been called on to participate. The press conference had gone pretty much as he thought it would. He had prepared a short report on each crime emphasising that at this time there were no leads and requesting the public to assist by calling a confidential phone number if they had any information to offer regarding either crime. The Chief Super had followed his line exactly and had steered clear of making any promises. The shit had hit the fan during the questioning by the journalists. Fatboy had completely forgotten his role as the straight man in the Spence/Harrison act and had speculated that there was a serial killer on the loose who was targeting Catholic priests. The journalists had lapped it up. Wilson could just imagine the headlines ‘Priest killer strikes again’. The Chief Super’s face had turned a whiter shade of pale as Fatboy expanded on his theory of the serial priest killer. Every Catholic priest in Northern Ireland would now be watching his back. The police hot lines would be inundated with calls from priests who thought that there might be someone prowling around their garden at night. And worst of all, the politician would now climb on the bandwagon. At the bottom of this heap of shite would be DCI Ian Wilson, the man charged with ensuring that no more priests are required to have an early appointment with their Maker.

“That was a bit of a cock-up,” the Duty Sergeant said as Wilson passed on his way to the Squad Room. “You can always depend on CI Harrison to fuck things up.”

“Mind your tongue,” Wilson said smiling. “You could get dropped in rank by expressing the opinion that your superiors are screw ups.”

“Sorry, Sir,” the Duty Sergeant said and laughed loudly.

Wilson had just entered the Squad Room when his mobile phone started to ring. He looked at the caller ID before pressing the green speak button. “Moira,” he said as he put the phone to his ear.

Moira quickly explained the content of her interview with the housekeeper.

“Good girl,” Wilson said when she was finished. “It may be nothing but then again, it may just be the break we’ve been looking for. The fact that she can’t give us a description is a bit of a pain. There must be hundreds if not thousands of people who are either homeless or look like they’re homeless in Belfast. “

“Mrs Mooney is just this side of scatty,” Moira said. “And that’s without considering the effect of Father Reilly’s death has had on her. The poor woman must be traumatised finding a body seeped in blood like that. We’re lucky to get anything out of her.”

Wilson could hear the excitement in Moira’s voice. “Let’s not run ahead of ourselves,” he said.  “It may lead to something but it might just be a red herring. There’re some shops on the Glen Road that might have CCTV. I’ll meet you at the Priests’ House in twenty minutes, and we’ll canvas them together.”

“OK,” Moira said and the line went dead.

Wilson met Spence on his way into the Station. Spence normally pale face was a puce colour.

“Sir,” Wilson said as the two men faced each other. “You look like you’re on the brink of a heart attack.”

Spence pulled Wilson aside. “Did you see it?” he asked.

Wilson nodded.

“The man’s a bloody fool. We’ll be all over the papers this evening for all the wrong reasons. The DCC was on the phone just after the press conference, full of praise for CI Harrison. Hit exactly the right note. Important to alert the Catholic clergy to be watchful. The serial killer hypothesis is now the core of our investigation. You’re to get a profiler on the job straight away. We need to know what sort of person murders Catholic priests. Where has Jennings been for the past twenty years or so? We’re buggered on this one. Between the DCC and Harrison every Catholic priest in the Province will be dead before we catch the culprit.”

“DC McElvaney may have turned up a lead,” Wilson saw the look in Spence’s eyes. “It’s a long shot but there may be something in it. No promises.”

“If we nail the bastard, will it get Harrison out of our hair?” Spence asked.

“Probably not,” Wilson said.

“Ah, Christ,” Spence said and strode off in the direction of the lift.

Moira was standing outside a convenience shop in the centre of the Glen Road when Wilson pulled up in a police car.

“You took your time, Boss,” she said as Wilson alighted from the car.

“Watch your mouth, Detective Constable,” Wilson said. “I happened to be in a high level discussion with the Chief Superintendent. We were debriefing on his performance at the press conference this afternoon.”

“And how did that go?” she asked.

“We are now looking for a serial killer who stalks Catholic priests. We are instructed by the DCC, who by the way, has never led an investigation himself, to engage the services of a profiler who will enlighten us as to what sort of person we are looking for.” Wilson threw his eyes up to heaven.

“Boss?” she asked without adding a question.

“Inevitably, it will be a man because if it was a woman, she would have used poison or some other pansy method of murder. Secondly, he will be white. No a bad guess since 90% of the population of Belfast is white. He will have had an abusive childhood. Maybe he will have wet the bed until he was seventeen and was locked in a cupboard. He will have schizophrenia with an overlay of paranoia, and he will have already have murdered his father.”

“I take it that you don’t have a lot of faith in profiling.”

“About as much as I have in psychics. Most cases are solved by good old-fashioned police work. Examine the evidence, look for motivation and then look for more evidence. Plod, plod, plod. That’s how a case breaks.”

Moira pointed at the convenience store and at the camera sticking out from the wall above the name plate. “Shall we?”

Wilson frowned and followed her into the shop.

“How can I help you,” the middle aged Indian behind the counter spoke with a perfect Northern Irish accent.

Wilson introduced himself and Moira, both produced their warrant cards. “We have an interest in an individual who was in Glen Road last week, and we were wondering whether he might have been caught on your CCTV camera.”

“That’s funny,” the shop manager said. “Just last week I called your crowd about some teenagers that have been causing me grief. I offered them the CCTV footage of the little beggars running off with some of my fruit, but the constable told me to catch myself on. After all it was only a bit of fruit. This week two heavyweight detectives roll around, but they have no interest in my livelihood disappearing up the street but they want my CCTV disks to see if some yob is on it.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Wilson said. “You give us the CCTV footage and I’ll lean on the local lads to do something about the nicking. Deal?”

“Sounds reasonable,” the manager disappeared into the back of the shop and returned with a DVD in a plastic box. “This is last week’s disk. I can’t vouch for the quality. The camera outside must have been one of the prototypes for CCTV and we use the same disks again and again. There’s a snapshot every minute or so.“

Moira took the disk and dropped it into a plastic bag. “We’ll return the disk when we’re finished.”

“Don’t bother I’ve recorded over it so many times that it’s already paid for itself many times over.”

One hour later, they had collected two more disks and learned that although two shops had cameras outside their premises, they were connected to nothing.

“Let’s hope there’s something on here,” Moira said holding up the three plastic bags.

“I suppose it will fall to some poor Detective Constable to plough her way through the disks,” Wilson said.

“Understood, Boss,” Moira said resignedly.

“But not this evening,” Wilson said. “It’s been a tough few days.  Get you off home and have an evening in or out. Whichever you prefer.”

Wilson left for home just before eight o’clock after a twelve-hour day. He felt jaded and wondered whether he was still up to the hard grind of policework. If he had studied pharmacy, he would already have closed up the shop and have been at home with his pipe and slippers. He was walking towards his new Audi when he noticed a young woman standing propped up against the left wing of the car. She was maybe twenty-five years old, and short, something around five foot two, and she might have weighed eight stone soaking wet.  Wilson smelled set-up by the DCC as he walked towards his car.

“DCI Wilson?” the young woman said when Wilson drew close.

Her accent was strange, a mix of Ulster and American, he thought.  She wore some kind of leather jacket over Levi jeans and she had a messenger bag over her shoulder. “Yes,” he said. “And you are?”

“Maggie Cummerford,” she extended her hand. “I cover the Belfast crime beat for the Chronicle and I also write for several papers in the States.”

Wilson shook her hand reluctantly. “So, you’re American?”

She smiled, and it gave her small face an elfin look. “Ulster born and bred, I studied in England and won a scholarship to Columbia University to study journalism so I suppose I took on some of the cadences of the New Yorkers’ language. “

Wilson looked into her enthusiastic face. “And how can I help you?” He was wary of journalists. You said one thing to them, and it appeared in print as something altogether different.

“I attended the Press Conference to-day and I was wondering what your take on the ‘serial killer of priests’ theory was.”

“I think the Chief Superintendent adequately described the direction of the inquiry,” Wilson said keeping the comment to the minimum.

“Wasn’t it strange that the SIO, that’s you by the way, was not present at the Press Conference. We expect the top brass to parade themselves on these occasions, but they usually have the man at the coalface somewhere about in case they screw up.” She had removed a Dictaphone from her messenger bag and was preparing to record Wilson’s comment.

“Unfortunately, I was not available at the time of the Press Conference.”

“Nothing more sinister than that?”

“Nothing sinister at all.”

She glanced at her watch. “I don’t suppose you have time for a drink?”

“Thanks, but it’s been a long day, and I think I need food and sleep more than I need a drink.”

“We could do food,” she said but there was a sound of defeat in her voice. “Look this serial priest killer theory is going to go over big in the States. I’ve already had the Boston Globe on to me for copy. If it’s a crock of shit, I need to know about it.”

Wilson pressed the remote and opened the driver-side door. “I’m away home,” he said simply before sliding into the front seat.  “Nice to have made you acquaintance, Maggie.”

He looked in the mirror as he sped away. Maggie Cummerford was busy speaking into her Dictaphone.