Brian McGilloway - Gallows Lane

I went back into the sun room. A newspaper lay on the concrete floor, its pages opened at a picture of a topless glamour model, smiling jauntily.

Williams squatted beside the body, softly stroking the girl’s hair with her gloved hand. She looked up at me, her eyes damp.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

‘Someone beat her to death,’ she said simply.

Williams’s opinion was seconded by John Mulrooney, our local doctor, who officially pronounced the girl dead. We stood outside the house, looking in at the body as the Scene of Crime people started to take photographs and dust for fingerprints. Williams went and sat in the car for a few minutes to regain her composure. She clearly recognized the marks a man’s fists leave on a defenceless female body.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ Mulrooney said, shaking his head. ‘No, actually that’s not true. I have seen something like it: the injuries are what you’d expect on a hit-and-run victim. As bad as that.’

‘What killed her?’ I asked.

‘Pathologist will know for sure. I’d expect massive internal trauma. Possibly fractured skull; there’s yellowish residue around the nose and ears, though it’s difficult to tell with all the blood. That came from her nose, I think, which is broken.’

‘Any ideas who she is? Age? Anything?’

‘Mid-twenties, I’d say. I don’t recognize her, though. Not a local.’ He spat dryly on to the ground and shook his head in disgust.

Above us a pair of buzzards circled, scanning the surrounding fields for mice, the piercing mew of their cries at once terrifying and beautiful.

When Williams returned to the scene we questioned the man who had found the body. Robert McLoone’s hands shook as he tried to smoke the cigarette I gave him. He looked back towards the house continually as he spoke, as if in the hope that what he’d seen might not be real. When he finished his smoke, he rubbed the back of his neck with his left hand, nervously.

‘I went up the house, like,’ he explained. ‘To shit, like. You know? We all do. There’s nothing wrong with it, you know,’ he added with concern.

‘Don’t worry, Robert,’ I said. ‘You aren’t in any trouble. No one thinks you did anything wrong. But we need you to walk us through what happened. All right?’

He rubbed furiously at his neck, looking at me sideways, as if to gauge the validity of my comment, then nodded.

‘Now, why did you go to that particular house? Why not one of the ones further down the site?’ I asked.

‘That one’s plumbed, like. The bog flushes.’

I nodded. ‘Okay. So, you went to the house. What then?’

‘I went in, like.’

‘Was the door open?’ Williams asked. ‘Unlocked? Anything disturbed outside?’

McLoone thought for a second. ‘No, I used the key, so it must have been locked.’

‘And where was the key?’

‘Under the brick, like. It’s always there.’

‘Did you not see anything as you unlocked the door?’

‘I don’t remember. I was caught short, like. In a bit of a rush. I mustn’t have done, though. Otherwise I wouldn’t have gone in.’

I nodded agreement. The body was so close to the doors that he probably wouldn’t have seen it and may not have noticed the drops of blood trailing into the kitchen.

‘When I went in and saw her I nearly puked, like. Came straight out again and phoned the Guards.’

‘There’s a newspaper lying in there. Is that yours?’

Aye,’ he said, blinking at me, his face devoid of expression.

*

The key was still in the door when we went back up. I asked Paddy Hannon about the brick McLoone had mentioned. Beside the opened door lay an upended breeze block.

‘We leave the key there,’ Paddy explained, ‘under the brick. For the workmen to come in and out — so I don’t need to keep opening the house every time one of them wants to take a shit.’

‘Who would know about this?’ I asked.

‘Me; the estate agent; everybody working for me, fairly much. And subcontractors. And I guess anyone who’s ever bought a house off me; I leave keys like that in all my builds. In case the owners want in to measure up windows and the like. A goodwill thing, you know.’

While we were speaking, one of the Scene of Crime officers emerged from the house, squinting in the sunlight. He wore a blue paper forensics suit, with plastic coverings over his shoes. He approached me, holding aloft a transparent evidence bag containing something flesh-coloured.

‘Found this, sir. Near the sink unit. Seems fairly new.’

I took the bag and examined it. Inside was an unrolled, but unused, condom. ‘Jesus, that’s a first,’ Paddy said. ‘I’ve seen all sorts in new builds before, but never an unused johnnie.’

I grunted in return. Any fingerprints?’ I asked the SOCO.

‘Too many to use. Dozens of different sets. We haven’t checked the condom, sir. Do that back at HQ.’

It didn’t take long to identify the girl. By the time we returned to the station, Burgess had already contacted all the local Gar da stations and Northern Ireland police stations across the border, looking for missing persons reports. By lunchtime we believed we had a name: Karen Doherty.

Her sister Agnes had reported her missing in Strabane earlier that morning. She now stood with us, outside Letterkenny General Hospital, having identified the girl. My counterpart in the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Inspector Jim Hendry, had accompanied her. He had stood quiet beside her, his hand resting lightly on her arm, as her sister was revealed to her. Karen had been cleaned up before being identified, her face now strangely serene, despite the brutality of her death. The morgue attendant had held the covering sheet just below her chin so that Agnes had been unable to see the bruising which covered the rest of her body. Only one bruise blossomed on her cheek.

Karen’s hair had been rinsed clean and pulled back from her face, revealing a high forehead. Her features seemed slightly out of proportion; her nose was long and thin, her mouth small, her lips thin and pale. Her eyes were closed when we saw her, her face wiped clean of all cosmetics.

Her sister shared many of the same characteristics, although her face was thinner, her mouth slightly fuller. She watched me struggle to light a cigarette and then asked for one.

‘Gave these up years ago,’ she explained as I lit it for her. ‘When I got pregnant.’

‘Boy or girl?’ I asked.

‘Boy. Seanny. Karen was his godmother.’

Every conversation this woman would have for the foreseeable future would revert, without conscious decision, to her sister.

‘She was all I had left, apart from him. Our parents died when Karen was in her teens. I took her in, looked after her.’

‘How far apart were you, age-wise?’ I asked, for Agnes Doherty clearly wanted to talk. It was also important for me to understand Karen, to know who she was, if I was to find out how and why she died.

‘Eight years. I got pregnant, left school, had a baby. Next step was to move out. Karen stayed at home though. Then our parents died.’

‘How?’

‘In a car accident,’ she said bluntly, raising her chin slightly, as if the smoke from her cigarette was irritating her eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, a little unnecessarily, but the woman waved the sentiment away.

‘Karen moved in with me,’ she continued. ‘I was … I was so proud of her. She stayed on at school, went to college, the whole bit.’

‘What did she do?’ Williams asked.

‘English,’ Agnes replied, perhaps misunderstanding the question. ‘She was trying to make it as a journalist, wrote things for the Strabane papers.’

‘Anything controversial?’ Hendry asked.