The Ruin Page 3

  ‘Jack?’ No answer.

  It was cold. The house was very quiet. She pulled on Jack’s old sweatshirt from where it lay at the foot of the bed, and went downstairs. No Jack. The oven clock told her it was nearly nine o’clock. She had slept so late, far later than usual, had missed the whole day. She checked the fridge – nothing, except leftover rashers. Jack must not have shopped after all. Would he want to go out? After almost ten hours of sleep the idea was no more appealing. Aisling took a rasher and ate it cold, standing in the kitchen, then went to put on the heating, and the kettle. She made tea and toast and watched television, but by ten o’clock there was still no Jack.

  Aisling turned off the television and sat in the silent living room. Looked at her phone, and picked it up.

  Text me to let me know you’re all right, ok?

  She let her eyes wander around the room, taking in all the paraphernalia of their daily lives, all the little signs that a childless couple lived in this house. There was dirt on the hearth, where Jack had left his hiking boots to dry the day before. The hearth was cold now, and grey with ash. There was no fireguard. The remnants of the previous weekend’s newspapers were stacked haphazardly on the coffee table. At the other end of the room they’d pushed an old dining table up against a wall, installed a narrow Ikea bookshelf in the little space that was left. That was where she worked, where she should be working now. Her laptop and the pile of textbooks sat there, waiting for her. She turned away, lay back on the couch and stared at the ceiling. There was no space in this little room for toys. How would they squeeze a buggy into the narrow hall? The spare bedroom had a bed, buried under their ski gear, dumped after their January trip, and two baskets of laundry. What would they do, clear it out, move in a cot? Or move house altogether? Her hand strayed to her stomach. If they did this there would be no chance to try to for a fellowship in the States. No paediatric surgery. No surgery full stop. Never again to feel that clarity and focus as her scalpel pressed down. Aisling sat up abruptly, turned the television on again, stared at it without seeing anything. She didn’t want this pregnancy. Guilt rose again at the thought and with it a matching, overwhelming anger. Aisling thought of the years she had spent working towards her goals, of everything she had overcome to get this far, and clenched her fists hard enough that her nails bit into the palms of her hands. If it were possible she would have lit that guilt on fire, burned it out of herself from the inside out. Why shouldn’t she put her life first, instead of sacrificing her future for what was nothing more than a scrap of biological material, now busy, cells dividing, inside her?

  She gave up at eleven, feeling more tired than she would have thought possible after a day asleep, and climbed the stairs slowly to bed. She would never sleep, not after a week of night shifts. Was Jack that upset, that angry, that he went out and left no note, made no attempt to change their plans? That didn’t feel like him. Maybe he’d just met friends, and his phone had died. She stood for a moment in the bathroom, toothbrush in hand, and stared at her reflection. She turned to one side. Her stomach was flat, unassuming. She pushed it out so that it curved, smoothed her t-shirt over the bump. For a moment she could see it; a warm body curled in her lap, a soft hand to her cheek. Later, a laughing Jack with a boy on his shoulders. Aisling closed her eyes. No. Just no.

  In bed, she thought again about calling him, then decided against it. If he needed the time to himself, then fine. They had tomorrow to talk, to catch up. He needed space, and she needed rest, and tomorrow they could make a more sensible job of it.

  The deep weariness she felt translated only slowly into sleepiness, and she tossed and turned for a couple of hours before sinking into a disturbed sleep. She woke the following morning to an empty bed. It was dark in the bedroom, and it took her a moment to remember that she was at home, and not in the on-call room. She turned and groped across her bedside table toward the glow of her phone’s battery light. It was 9.30 a.m. and fingers of weak morning light were starting to creep in at the edges of the curtains. It was very warm in the room; she’d forgotten to turn the heating off before she went to bed, and the timer was broken. Shite. And then she heard the doorbell, followed by a brisk knocking at the door. Still half-asleep, Aisling climbed out of bed, pulling a jumper of Jack’s over her head, and pushing her feet into Uggs, before she went down the stairs. She opened the door to two gardaí, standing on the porch in the early morning light. It was another bright day – scudding white clouds buffeted overhead in an otherwise blue sky. Two gardaí, one older, overweight. He looked her up and down as if she were inappropriately dressed for a function. The younger one, a woman, had a nicer face.

  Aisling folded her arms. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Can I ask your name?’ the older man asked.

  ‘Um, I’m Aisling Conroy.’ She wondered vaguely if she was supposed to just give her name, or if she should have asked to see their ID or something.

  He looked down at his notebook. ‘And Jack Blake lives at this address?’

  ‘He’s not here at the moment,’ Aisling said. She felt the first trickle of fear.

  ‘Are you a relation of Jack’s?’

  The female guard was shivering, but trying to hide it. She stared straight at Aisling, as if she were determined not to break eye contact. Aisling returned her attention to the man.

  ‘I’m his girlfriend. His partner. We live together.’ She half-glanced over her shoulder into the house, feeling increasingly uneasy. ‘What’s this about?’

  And now they were silent, both of them, exchanging meaningful glances as if urging the other to take the lead. Finally, the young woman turned back towards her and stepped forward, taking Aisling gently by the upper arm.

  ‘I’m very sorry Aisling, so very sorry,’ she said.

  Sunday 17 March 2013

  CHAPTER TWO

  Cormac dropped the heavy box file onto his desk and flipped the lid off. His expression was carefully impassive as he looked into the mess of documents, half-empty files and duplicate and triplicate forms that had been dumped into the box without ceremony over thirty years ago. Thirty years ago, or possibly just yesterday, if someone had taken the box and messed with it before placing it neatly back on a cold-case filing shelf. If he made a big deal he’d look like an asshole. The best option was to act like he didn’t know what was going on, until he could find out who was doing it, and put the fucker in his place. That was the way the game was played after all, and he’d known exactly how it would be as soon as he’d been shown to his new desk one month earlier.

  Mill Street Garda Station squad room had been carved out of three smaller rooms by the demolition of two dividing walls, and their replacement with steel supporting columns and beams. The intent had been to create one large open-plan space, but it had been only partially successful. The supporting columns effectively segmented the room into three. The section Cormac sat in was occupied almost entirely by uniformed gardaí and the odd sergeant. To Cormac’s immediate left sat Garda James Rodgers, who seemed to spend the majority of his time alternating between two favourite activities – slurping foul-smelling pot-noodle as loudly as possible, and picking his nose. The row of desks ended with Cormac’s, for which he was thankful. The other end of the room, which had the dual benefit of natural light, and distance from the kitchen, the toilets and the highly-trafficked entrance, was where most of the detectives sat. Cormac’s desk, notwithstanding his stellar twenty-year career, the last five as a detective sergeant running complex and high-profile cases, was among the shittiest in the room, far away from the business end of things and right in the middle of the high traffic zone. Desk allocation hadn’t been an accident. Nor was the fact that in the four weeks he’d been at Mill Street he’d been assigned only cold cases.

  He was also working solo. The National Drugs Unit, which was based in Dublin Castle, was running a temporary task force out of Mill Street, and the gardaí who would make up Cormac’s future team were largely seconded to it. A temporary state
of affairs, he’d been assured. It was refreshing, actually, to work alone. He’d wondered sometimes if the seniority he’d gained in recent years had been worth the HR headaches, the bureaucratic bullshit, that came with it. So he’d taken the few weeks as a gift, an opportunity to get a read of the station, the gardaí who worked out of it.

  Cormac started to lift documents out of the box and into piles on his desk for sorting. This was the third file he’d started. The previous two had been equally messy. He had taken them apart before putting them back together, organised to his meticulous standards, only to find that it had been a complete waste of time. In the first case he found that the physical evidence had long been destroyed; in the second that the key witnesses, including the prime suspect, were long since dead. It had been a lost cause, as this latest file almost certainly would be. They were hospital passes, every one, selected for him especially for their absolute lack of potential.

  Cormac reminded himself that he had asked for this transfer, and that he was no longer, if he ever had been, the golden boy of the Special Detective Unit’s anti-terrorist section. This was a new job, with a new boss, and a new set of colleagues, most of whom were keen to prove that elite Dublin-based units were seriously overrated. He thought about Emma, who was enjoying every moment of her new project, and told himself that the move was worth it. He lifted a witness statement from the box, and found it stuck together with coffee that hadn’t quite dried. He stared at it for a moment, felt sure that he heard a snort of laughter from somewhere in the room, and dropped it back into the box.

  Fuck it.

  Cormac closed the lid of the box and wandered over to the other side of the room, slowing as he approached Danny McIntyre’s desk from behind – Danny was intently studying what looked like football scores on his screen. Cormac put his face up close to Danny’s before he spoke.

  ‘Is that what you call work, down here in the bog?’

  Danny didn’t move an inch. ‘It is,’ he said. ‘What do you call it in the big smoke?’

  ‘We call it inappropriate use of Garda resources and sentence you to twenty lashes. What are you doing here on a Sunday? You’re not working the parade?’ Cormac checked his watch. It was St. Patrick’s Day, but the arts crowd were switching it up this year and running a night parade. The streets would be thronged, alcohol- and rain-soaked, and a lot of overtime would be paid, but he’d assumed that gardaí assigned to the parade wouldn’t be on for another few hours.

  ‘Jesus, Dan. Had a late one did you?’ Danny had turned his chair around to face Cormac. In the cold morning light he looked stale, his skin had a greasy sheen to it.

  ‘Told you I had a few things going on, didn’t I?’ Danny winked at him. Something about that wink made Cormac think he was more likely talking about a woman than a stakeout.

  Cormac glanced around. The temporary task force had taken on the feel of something more permanent. When Cormac had arrived a month earlier they’d taken up one double row of desks – enough for eight people. Since then more officers had been assigned and the group had spilled over into other areas of the room. Today however, the place was quiet.

  ‘You’re the only one in?’ Cormac asked.

  Danny shrugged. ‘No one took over my other work when I was assigned to the task force. I’d some paperwork to finish so I thought I’d come in.’ He stretched, yawned. ‘Going home soon though. I told the little lad I’d kick a ball about.’

  That might be true but to Cormac it had the feel of an excuse about it. Maybe Danny wanted one day at the station without Healy looking over his shoulder. Detective Sergeant Anthony Healy was the task force commander. Cormac knew him from Dublin – the Drugs Unit and Special Detective Unit reported to the same Assistant Commissioner and worked out of the same building. Healy was old school and old time, and his reputation was shady. He’d brought his second in command from Dublin, but otherwise the gardaí assigned to him were all Galway men and women. Despite his reputation, Healy seemed to be popular enough in Galway. He was affable, liked to keep people close to him, everyone but Danny. Cormac had watched the entire task force troop out together more than once for lunch, and Danny was always the one left to man the phones. Danny hadn’t admitted it, but Cormac was beginning to wonder if he’d seen or heard Healy do something he shouldn’t have. That would certainly have been enough to put him on the outs.

  Voices, two detectives returning from lunch. They took their seats not far from where Danny and Cormac sat, first giving Danny a nod of acknowledgement. There was an energy about them, as they exchanged jibes and took up their work, that Cormac would have recognised from a mile away.

  ‘What’s that about?’ he asked, nodding in their direction.

  ‘Clarke and Higgins? They picked up a murder this morning.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ Shite. Another case not assigned to him. He definitely wasn’t top of the pecking order in Galway. He wasn’t even supposed to be working; had come in only because it was Paddy’s weekend, the night before had been crazy, and he’d been hoping to pick up whatever cases were generated by the drink and that chaotic party energy. So much for that idea.

  ‘Student. She met her friends in town for a few drinks and walked home afterwards. Took a short cut across the park. He grabbed her, raped her, strangled her.’

  Cormac shook his head.

  ‘We’ve a fair idea who did it.’

  ‘What? Already? Was he seen?’

  ‘No, but he’s done it before. Raped a girl I mean, in the same park. He lives down the street. Lazy, you see. Doesn’t like to stray far from home.’ Danny wasn’t smiling. ‘We got him last time too. He used a condom, left it at the scene.’

  ‘Shit.’ Cormac didn’t need Danny to tell him what had happened next. State labs were completely backed up. Rape testing did not get priority. It could take six months to get a result. In the meantime, the suspect’s lawyer would make a bail application, which would probably be granted. Most people didn’t understand that it was unusual for a judge not to grant bail, unless the crime was particularly violent and the evidence very compelling. The absence of a DNA result weakened the prosecution’s case in a bail hearing, which essentially meant that backlogs in state lab testing put more rapists on the street.

  ‘You’re sure it’s him?’ Cormac asked.

  ‘The lads got the call at six a.m. Guy walking his dog found her. Scene virtually the same as last time, except this time the girl is dead. Condom thrown in the bushes a few metres away. Higgins and Clarke had a fair idea. They were at his place by seven. They brought him back here, half an hour later they had him. They told him they had DNA. He told them she’d wanted it, that she was all over him in the club.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Yeah. He’s thick as pig shit. His lawyer will probably use that too – claim he’s intellectually disabled.’

  They fell silent for a moment, then Danny seemed to shake off his mood.

  ‘So what’s the story? Are you settled? How’s Emma?’

  He’d told Danny the whole story of how they met, one night over too many pints. He should have regretted it – they hadn’t planned on sharing that with anyone in Galway, certainly not at his work – but didn’t. Danny had been good about it, had said all the right things.

  ‘Good. She’s good. Busy. I’ll be honest with you though, Dan, I’m finding this place a bit slow.’ Cormac spread his hands in a ‘no offence’ gesture.

  Danny grimaced. ‘Still on the cold cases?’

  Suddenly, Cormac didn’t want to talk about it. He stood, checked his watch. ‘Are you going out for lunch? Madigans? My shout?’

  ‘Grand,’ said Danny. He turned back to his computer to log out, but he’d already been automatically booted for inactivity. He stood.

  ‘You don’t think you’re taking the plain clothes thing a bit far, Dan?’ Cormac said, his tone dry. Danny wore a t-shirt with the slogan ‘Pigs should not cause Beef’ in oversized black letters, and jeans that had seen better days. The bott
om of his jeans and his boots were mud-spattered.

  ‘Drug squad, man. Undercover. Gotta look the part.’

  They crossed the road in the inevitable silence of two people trying to get to where they are going in the rain. They walked as quickly as the busy footpaths and heavy traffic would allow – Galway was a city of narrow streets and complicated one-way systems. When it rained it sometimes felt like the whole place came to a halt. Danny reached the pub first, and as he joined the queue for food he started a conversation with a pretty brunette who was just ahead of him. Cormac was more focused on food and he kept only half an ear on the banter. Danny hadn’t changed.

  They’d met in training college; hadn’t been close but were in the same class and so part of the same extended group. In Templemore Danny had always had above average results with women, despite the handicap of a goofy-looking pair of sticking out ears. It was his confidence, maybe. You could just tell by looking at him that he didn’t give a shit what you thought about him. They were all so young, a bunch of twenty-year-olds working hard to give just that impression, but only Danny’d had it for real.

  Cormac had been surprised when Danny’s career didn’t progress. He’d moved around a bit in the first few years, as they all had, but when Cormac had made Detective Sergeant, Danny had still been a uniformed garda. A few years later Cormac heard that Danny had never made sergeant, but had been assigned to a tiny country station – a two-man-band kind of place within easy drive of his parents’ place – and looked like he was staying. And that was how it turned out. Cormac had been ambitious, and dedicated, and (he would acknowledge now) had pursued promotion with an obsessive focus. He’d earned a transfer to the SDU – the Special Detective Unit, an elite unite responsible for counter-terrorism and armed responses to serious incidents – and had moved up the ranks there too, working on larger, more complex operations, eventually running them. His appetite for advancement only eased when he realised promotion to Inspector would take him away from investigative work and further into the realm of people management and politics.