Suddenly he wasn’t moving. Lifting her mouth from his, she stared into his open eyes. Was he dead?
She fell backwards as he shoved her away and leapt from the bed, rushing from the room. She heard his feet on the stairs, the snap of the lock and the soft thump of the door as he pulled it shut behind him.
‘Fuck.’
Aaron Frost walked in circles for miles around the town, going as far as the Dublin bridge and back round towards the Railway Bridge. He was rattled, though not because of the O’Keeffe woman. Creepy bitch. Who did she think he was? No, he had a lot of other more important things on his mind and he didn’t want to go back to the office.
Like a child, he kicked stones into the murky green water of the canal and watched the ripples spread through the slime. The reeds rustled and he thought he saw a rat scamper up on the opposite bank. He shivered and continued walking.
He should go home, change his clothes, then he’d go and meet them and tell them to forget about everything. His phone pinged and he checked the message.
DID YOU SEE THE NEWS TODAY?
No, he hadn’t. He tapped into the news app, went into the regional category and scrolled down. A torso had been found on the Ragmullin railway tracks. The Dublin side of town. The opposite end to where he was walking. Still, he looked around frantically.
Slipping the phone into his pocket, he continued walking. Faster now. Kicking up pebbles as he went. Something in the news report raised goose bumps on his skin. No, it had nothing to do with what he’d found out.
His phone pinged again.
DID YOU READ IT?
All capitals. Why? He typed back.
Yes. Nothing to do with me.
ARE YOU SURE?
Yes. Fuck off.
THE DEAD HAVE BEEN WOKEN.
What type of shit was that? He loosened his tie as if that could keep the feeling of dread from choking him to death. Frantically he looked all around, twisting his head like an idiot. No one, only himself on the path, and ducks and rats and fish in the water. Why then did he feel like someone was watching him?
Fuck this, he thought, and broke into a run.
Fourteen
Lottie missed having Boyd in the office; his presence had a calming effect on everyone. They could do with his organisational skills too, she thought as she eyed the mess on Kirby’s desk.
‘Right so, until we get word from the state pathologist, we don’t know what we’re dealing with. Because the body had been dismembered and frozen, it’s a suspicious death.’
McKeown wandered in with an ice pop in his hand.
‘You could have got one for everyone,’ Kirby moaned.
‘Piss off.’ McKeown plonked himself at Boyd’s desk now that Lynch had reclaimed her own.
‘Can we take our meeting into the incident room, where we can be serious?’ Lynch said.
‘We will,’ Lottie said, ‘when we have more details. What’s the latest?’
‘Irish Rail have been on to us,’ Lynch said. ‘They want to know when they can get trains moving again.’
‘Not until we’re sure there are no more body parts along the tracks. Have the train drivers been interviewed?’
‘There were two trains this morning. The 6.05 and the 7.55. Neither driver noticed anything on the tracks, but the cab’s high up and the torso was lying between two sleepers, so that’s not telling us anything.’ Lynch checked her notes. ‘I also contacted yesterday’s train drivers. No one saw anything.’
‘When was the last train yesterday evening?’
‘Arrived into Ragmullin on its way to Sligo at 8.20 p.m. Driver has been interviewed. He reports seeing nothing either.’
‘I called in the air support unit,’ Kirby said. ‘No drones, but the helicopter should be in the air already.’
‘Good. We also need to establish how the body came to be placed or dropped on the tracks, and when. Tell the pilot to scan the canal too.’ Lottie scratched her forehead, trying to think on her feet. Literally. She could still feel the emotion of the weekend funeral weighing her down. ‘Who interviewed the two boys? What are their names?’
Kirby flicked through the pages of his notebook but McKeown had the answer after one tap on his device.
‘Jack Sheridan and Gavin Robinson. They’ve given statements. All the details are here.’
Lottie groaned. She sensed the animosity in the air as if it was a tangible object. There was going to be trouble between those two detectives.
‘Print them out for me.’ She preferred working with paper. ‘I’ll give the boys a shout later.’ Leaning against the timber-framed wall, she heard a creak and hoped it wasn’t her knees. ‘And I want regular updates from the air crew.’
McKeown’s iPad pinged. ‘That was quick,’ he said.
‘What was?’
‘The helicopter crew spotted something in the water. Two hundred metres down the canal from where the torso was found.’
‘Who’s going to call Irish Rail?’ Lynch said.
‘You do it. There’s to be no resumption of trains for now. Let’s go.’
Lottie picked up her bag, slid her phone into her jeans pocket. She knew it was a universal cliché, but all she could think was that the case had taken another grisly turn.
Walking along the bank as quickly as the undergrowth allowed, Lottie glanced over her shoulder to make sure Kirby was keeping up with her.
‘What do you think is going on?’ she said.
‘I can’t understand why the torso was dumped on the tracks where it could be easily found.’
‘If they were disposing of it at night-time, they might have thought they were further away from town.’
‘They didn’t bank on two kids with a drone, did they?’
Lottie reached the location and looked up at the helicopter hovering overhead, its rotors swishing the reeds back and forth. McKeown was already there and radioed the air crew to continue searching. With a last twirl in the sky it headed back along the canal.
She peered into the tangled mess in the centre of the water. ‘Is that a leg?’
‘Looks like it.’ McKeown said. ‘Whatever it was wrapped in has disintegrated. The skin is bleached from the water. It’s hard to know how long it’s been there.’
‘Where’s McGlynn?’
‘Still at the site of the torso.’
‘I thought it had been moved to the mortuary.’
‘Yes, but he’s scanning the area for evidence.’
‘We’ll need divers to retrieve this body part,’ Lottie said.
‘I can go in.’ McKeown sounded like an over-eager schoolboy wanting to please the teacher. ‘But we still need divers to search further, in case there are more remains in there. It’s very black and mucky.’
‘Don’t go in,’ Lynch said. ‘Wait for the divers with the proper equipment. You’ll catch Weil’s disease.’
Lottie eyed Lynch and McKeown and wondered how a rapport had sprung up between them so quickly.
‘Get a cordon erected immediately, otherwise we’ll have Cynthia fecking Rhodes sniffing around.’ She glanced over her shoulder as if the mention of the reporter might cause her to appear. But she knew there was no chance of that. Following a recent scoop, Cynthia had secured a slot on primetime television, a step up from her two-minute reports on the news. No doubt a new Rottweiler would be sent to Ragmullin shortly.