Too Close For Comfort Read online

  She squinted as she tried to see the makes of the last few motors parked in the bays. No wonder she couldn’t see straight. She couldn’t even tell what colour they were until she was standing right alongside. The strobe lighting overhead was completely inadequate now daylight wasn’t flooding in through the wire-mesh walls, and the bulbs were starting to power off, presumably to save on the electricity bill as most of the drivers had gone. How was anyone supposed to find anything with this ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’ system going on?

  Amanda was trying not to fret, and to breathe deeply; why did it always seem so straightforward on her Pilates ball or a yoga mat? She stopped walking in order to pull herself together.

  An automated voice from a car-park speaker announced: ‘This car park will close for the night in five minutes. Motorists will not be able to retrieve their vehicles from that point.’

  Her breath tightened in her chest. How the hell was she going to find it in five minutes? She wouldn’t have time to collect it in the morning, she’d too much on.

  Then everything went black.

  Amanda froze. All the lights had gone out. She was in the pitch dark. Her heart stalled as she tried to remember which direction the stairs were in. At least in there she could keep one hand on the rough brick wall, which the cheapskate owners couldn’t be arsed to plaster, until she got back out on to the street. Maybe there’d be time to catch a staff member before they left for the night. She’d already established that she couldn’t get a signal on her mobile to ring anyone.

  She couldn’t be the only one here. Could she? she wondered, biting into her lower lip. Things like this didn’t happen to her. She was organized, and careful. But she’d been under too much pressure from the banks demanding she repay the loans she’d taken out. Being dumped had been the last straw. She couldn’t think or see straight. She started to say a silent prayer – something she hadn’t done since she was a kid – when the sound of a set of tyres screeching on the shiny surface made her sigh with relief. Another motorist was close by. Thank God. And then another miracle: in the light from the car’s headlights she spotted her own car. Relief washed over her. Amanda hurried towards it, pointing the key fob and smiling as the Beamer’s indicators flashed and snicked in response. She stooped down to cup her shoes back on, only ten feet away from it now. The car moving behind her stopped, and Amanda turned to see why, shielding her eyes from the glare of the full headlights with one hand.

  She heard a door open, and hoped she wasn’t about to be told the car park was closed already.

  ‘Into the boot,’ the driver said.

  Monday

  2

  CHIEF SUPERINTENDENT JO Birmingham stood on a gangplank set in muck, watching a blonde, middle-aged, naked woman being hoisted out of a shallow grave and into a white body bag. According to the iPhone that Jo had just prised from her hand, and which was still working, her name was Amanda Wells. At least, that was the name on the Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail accounts with various numbers on the end set up on the phone.

  Jo glanced around in concern at the battering the hexagonal pop-up body tent was taking. It was blowing a gale outside, like a different bloody season in the mountains compared to the one she’d left behind in the city. The tent had needed securing with metal stakes instead of sandbags because just yards beyond the clearing – between a sweep of gorse and heather – the ground turned into a sheer drop of sliding shale.

  They were at the Sally Gap, pulled in on a side track that had been barely navigable at all by car. The highest pass over the Dublin/Wicklow mountains was a barren, desolate spot, so isolated that walkers were regularly winched to safety by the mountain-rescue helicopter. Most turned back at the sight of burnt-out cars, beds, sofas and electrical equipment discarded along the route up.

  ‘One, two, three …’ an officer in a white Tyvec forensic suit, kneeling at the head of the body, said to his counterpart at the other end.

  There were four of them, kitted up like spacemen, weaving in and out of the tent, including Jo.

  On cue, the pair lifted either end of a flexible plastic stretcher up and out of the earth. As far as Jo could see, there was no blood on the body, but a black bra was knotted tightly around the neck. Death had turned the whites of the victim’s eyes grey, and made the irises cloudy.

  The fourth member of the team in the tent was the state pathologist, Professor Michael Hawthorne. He was on his knees alongside the victim, rummaging in his medical bag. He’d been wearing a deerstalker cap and smoking a pipe when he’d arrived. Like a bloody Sherlock Holmes tribute act, Jo thought.

  Giving a mercury thermometer a shake, Hawthorne instructed the men to put her on her side, so he could take a temperature from the rectum. He’d had to raise his muffled voice to be heard through the white mask over his nose and mouth and the squall battering the PVC tent with shrill screeches.

  Jo was trying to glide a finger across the iPhone screen to get into the caller log, but it was virtually impossible with latex gloves on. ‘Why didn’t she ring for help?’ Jo wondered aloud.

  ‘They didn’t have them in the nineties, either,’ one of the officers joked.

  Jo nodded. It was an obvious point, but an important one. An anonymous tipster had contacted a newspaper about the whereabouts of the body, and the information had been passed on. The source had apparently also maintained that the victim was one of Ireland’s missing women. Six had disappeared from the Leinster area in a six-year period in the nineties. Their ages ranged from sixteen to twenty-eight. Their backgrounds were as diverse as their professions. None were married, one was pregnant, and one a mother. One was a teacher, the others a waitress, a hairdresser, and a student. One was still in school and living at home, and one was unemployed. A comparison of the presumed killer’s modus operandi had yielded no pattern in the times of day or the seasons that they’d been snatched, but all had disappeared from locations in or around the Dublin/Wicklow mountains, with the result that the area had become known as the ‘Vanishing Triangle’.

  Although geographic profilers had been brought in to go beyond the dots on the map and predict the killer’s employment, place of work, mode of transport and area of residence, none of the bodies had been found. Any new lead on their whereabouts still made front-page news, and their cases were so etched in the public consciousness that all were referred to by their first names. Though there was no hard evidence that a serial killer was responsible, it was widely held to be the only reasonable explanation.

  A shoe belonging to one of the victims had been found just a few hundred yards away from where this woman’s body had been buried, giving initial credence to the informant’s claim. But as the body was still intact and stiff, Jo reckoned it was possible this woman’s friends and family hadn’t even realized she was missing yet. Rigor mortis took seventy-two hours to relax, which meant she’d been dumped at some stage over the last three days.

  The source had been bang on about the location of the body, though, right down to a landmark marking the spot. It was, ironically enough, a headstone situated just outside the tent, and erected in memory of a driver who’d gone off the road a few years back, plunging to his death.

  Jo sighed. If this woman had been one of the long-lost women, for the first time they’d have had a crime scene, and a chance of finally giving the families some closure.

  Having been approved for promotion to the rank of CS, Jo was all set to swap the city’s Store Street Station for this jurisdiction come the end of the week. She’d had to insist that the outgoing Chief Superintendent, Alfie Taylor, due to retire in a few days, allowed her to attend this dig in anticipation of what could pan out to be a long-running case. The prospect of finding one of the missing women and potentially cracking all six with actual scene-of-crime evidence was the kind of lead that came along once in a lifetime, and they had both known it. As a result, Alfie had begrudgingly kept her in the loop.

  Jo resented his condescending attitude. It was true her promot
ion up the ranks had happened faster than most, but she’d spent the last year acting as a temporary stand-in for her husband and former CS, Dan Mason, who had suffered devastating gunshot injuries in her last big case, when she had been only a DI. Dan was still recuperating, just about walking – with crutches. They were trying to make a go of their marriage again following his brush with mortality. Jo had forgiven him for leaving her for his secretary, in the hope of getting their reunion back on track, but wasn’t sure he’d forgiven her yet for what had happened to him. He’d been shot by one of the country’s biggest gangland bosses as a direct result of Jo’s investigation into the links between organized crime and high-class prostitution. And, though he’d never have admitted it, she suspected he wasn’t comfortable with her assuming his role. She hoped the move would make him feel less threatened. Come next week, she’d be swapping drug lords warring over turf for a swathe of suburbs full of neighbours trying to outdo each other with bigger flat screens, Sky boxes and Blu-ray players.

  Jo checked her watch – not even half seven yet, but there weren’t enough hours in the day for what she’d to get done before she left Store Street. Her existing caseload had to be wound up before Friday, and reports prepared for her successor. On top of that, today was her wedding anniversary, and she’d promised Dan she’d cook a special meal to mark the occasion. There hadn’t even been time to make him a cup of tea in the race out the door this morning. She’d also somehow to find the time to squeeze in a half-five appointment with her ophthalmologist for test results linked to a spate of worsening headaches. Jo had had cornea transplants in her teens, and her consultant suspected their deterioration might be responsible.

  She took a deep breath. Rule one of making a success of her new job would be learning how to delegate.

  Hawthorne, who’d been studying his watch, removed the thermometer and cursed. ‘Buggeration.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked him, aware the others were smirking at his choice of expletive.

  ‘It’s snapped in two,’ he went on. ‘I’ll need to get her back to the morgue. I would have put the time of death as last night, but it’s only a guess. Without a temperature I can’t be any more accurate than that. A body cools at one and a half to two degrees an hour, but it’s much colder up here, so I can’t account for the distortion, which may have caused her temperature to drop quicker.’

  The sound of the body bag being zipped made Jo turn for a last look.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked, spotting something white in the corner of the victim’s mouth.

  The officers at either end of the body sat back on their hunkers as Jo teased free what turned out to be a scrunched-up plastic bag.

  ‘Just as well I didn’t have a breakfast,’ one said.

  Jo knelt down on the carpet of prickly grass to get a closer look. Suffocation and strangulation was a strange combination. Had someone tried to kill the victim twice? Smoothing out each rustling crease, she read a barely legible logo, bleached by time: ‘Henry Norton’s’.

  ‘Jesus,’ Jo said under her breath, remembering that it was the name of a chain of supermarkets that had stopped trading in the nineties.

  ‘What?’ one of the officers asked as he shuffled by, carrying the body outside to the waiting van.

  He was gone before Jo could answer. But, as she recalled, one of the missing women had been making her way home from a Henry Norton’s when she’d vanished into thin air. Her name was Ellen Lamb, and it had been her shoe that had been found up here all those years ago. Jo knew the ins and outs of the case because Dan had been attached to the original investigation. It looked as if there was a link between this body and the cold cases after all. The Vanishing Triangle murderer, who’d preyed on women walking alone, had been presumed dead, in prison, or to have emigrated because women had stopped disappearing. Jo prayed he wasn’t back.

  Tapping the iPhone’s caller log with an exposed knuckle, Jo made a quick note in her small black hardback notebook of the last numbers the woman had used. Sometimes the prospect of advancing an investigation had to take precedence over preserving forensic evidence. When her notes were made, she removed the SIM card and dropped it into a clear plastic evidence bag, depositing the handset into another, jotting down the time, date, and location on the white labels on the outside.

  Then Jo ducked through the flap and braced herself against the elements. She gasped at the sight of a camera’s long lens pointing straight at her from an open window in a jeep parked up opposite. With a sweep, the lens jerked from her to the ambulance, where the body was being strapped on to a trolley.

  Jo glared at CS Alfie Taylor. He’d had the nerve to take her aside during a walkabout in his station so as to slip her a list of officers who’d be able to ‘compensate’ once she replaced him and took charge, as if she was some sort of token female who wouldn’t be able to hack it. But he was propped on the bonnet of the jeep, talking to a man with a spiral-bound notebook, who was wearing a puff jacket and CAT boots.

  After delivering the evidence bags to her car, Jo hurried over. The photographer gunned the engine, and the reporter glanced in her direction. He leaned in to speak to the photographer as Alfie said something, and then walked to the passenger door, climbing in quickly. Alfie moved out of the way to allow them to head off, and folded his arms as he turned to face Jo.

  ‘What the fuck is going on?’ Jo demanded. ‘Did you tell the press we were here?’

  ‘Damn right I did,’ the whiskey-nosed detective answered. ‘Without them, we’d never have found her.’

  3

  LIZ CARPENTER WAS in the kitchen, pouring Rice Krispies into a bowl for her twelve-year-old son, Conor, although ‘spilling all over the shop’ would have described it better. She’d been half reading one of last week’s newspapers, which was propped up on the table in the place where she normally sat. Liz had pored over it every time she’d sat down to eat since, trying to work out why the story of the missing women was being dragged up all over again. She wished the newspapers would just let Ellen rest in peace. It was twenty years since her then sixteen-year-old sister had gone missing, but any mention of her still stopped Liz in her tracks.

  She was too preoccupied by all this to ask her husband what was wrong. And anyway, he was in her bad books. Derek was dead late for work, but had just padded into the kitchen in his boxers. He was moving like someone with the hangover from hell, only he hadn’t been drinking last night, he’d been working late. He started scanning the inside of the presses, opening the doors and banging them shut.

  ‘We’re all out,’ Liz said, suspecting he was looking for eggs. She wasn’t about to ask. He had some face on him.

  She had to hold her tongue so she wouldn’t tell him to get a move on. The meat plant where he worked was forty minutes away, and he was due in at nine, whereas she had only a five-minute walk to get to Supersavers, and didn’t start till midday. They couldn’t afford for him to lose his job.

  She snapped back to action, pouring some milk into Conor’s bowl, telling him to eat up, and swiping the Krispies on the table into a cupped hand.

  Derek moved to the fridge and slugged from a carton of juice, pinching the top closed. ‘Any coffee left?’ he asked.

  His black hair was matted in a clump. Liz picked up Conor’s soccer jersey before she answered, folding it against her chest.

  ‘There’s a full pot right there,’ she snapped, pointing over with her head.

  Normally Derek’d have been kissing her cheek and giving her bum a little squeeze at this point. It was practically a ritual after being married for nineteen years, not that she wanted him to touch her today.

  She could tell he was really in a mood as well, and sighed as he headed over to the press where they kept the cups. She’d presumed he meant to fill a travel mug so he could take the coffee in the car.

  She was still managing to keep schtum as she zipped the strip into Conor’s gym bag, and reached for his schoolbag to walk her fingers through the b
ooks. They’d been disappearing over the past few weeks, and she still hadn’t got to the bottom of it. Conor had an entrance test coming up for a private school that was top of the exam leader boards every year in mathematics. He was really gifted at maths. If he got the marks his teachers were predicting it was going to mean a scholarship. Their days of worrying about paying for the education he needed to develop his talent to its full potential would be over.

  She checked to see if he’d finished his breakfast. Conor was sitting at the kitchen table, removing his Rice Krispies from the bowl and lining them up in perfect formation. He was on the autistic spectrum, but so was every second kid in south Dublin these days. It was like an epidemic.

  She headed to the sink for a J-cloth, brushing against Derek en route, and hoping he’d take the hint. But he was too busy feeding two slices into the toaster.

  Conor bolted from the table, upending the cereal bowl. It rolled off and smashed on the floor. Liz threw her eyes up to heaven. According to the health board course she’d done on managing anxiety in Autistic Spectrum Disorder kids, she should have been presenting him with his card thermometer at this point and asking him how having Rice Krispies for breakfast made him feel. But an accident was just an accident in her book.

  Derek blocked Conor’s path to the sitting room. He was built like a tank from all the years spent on sites, and lately from hauling animal carcasses. She felt like a slob beside him, having piled on the weight from the stress of the past few years.

  Conor stared submissively at the ground.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she told Derek, keeping the peace.

  ‘You have him ruined. He should clear it up himself.’

  He put his spade-sized hands on Conor’s tiny shoulders. ‘Your mother has enough to do, son. Clean that up.’

  ‘I don’t mind doing it,’ Liz said.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ Conor said, pushing past and charging into the sitting room.