Crowe sprinted over the bridge, her runners crunching on scattered shards of glass. She turned right and down the other side of the canal. She dipped her head to an oncoming gust, her black ponytail brushing her shoulder.
She was stressing about the sergeant exam. Her second interview was just yesterday. She thought it had gone well. That’s what she told the doubting voices in her head. Now it was up to how the bosses would write her up.
Recommended. Better still, highly recommended. That’s what I want.
The run was doing the trick.
A swan splashed onto the waters, rousing her. It pushed its chest up, unfolded its great wings and flapped them. In the distance, the gentle ‘jing jing’ of the Luas tram chimed.
Crowe pushed herself down the path as Canal Road Garda Station loomed into view from behind the flats. She watched a blade of sunlight cut across its facade. The station didn’t look like a bastion in the war against gangland: a long, dull yellow block, peppered with aluminium windows, fastened with mesh grilles. It could be a forgotten office building, she thought – save for the communication mast towering behind it. Coming to a stop, she eyed the latest graffiti scraped into the thick wooden entrance doors.
Rats Out.
She heard male voices behind the frosted glass at the public counter, laughing. She thought about saying hi, but her hand hesitated at the door. She felt too self-conscious in her running gear. Knowing the guys, they would be twisting their big heads to have a good gawk at her.
She strode towards the shower, hoping it wouldn’t splutter as usual between hot and cold.
‘Calling Detective Crowe. Come in Crowe.’
She smiled on recognising Grant’s chirpy voice. She hadn’t heard her behind the screen. The lads had probably been laughing at one of her stories.
‘Hey there, girly,’ Crowe said, swinging around.
‘You know I hate landing stuff on you, and you in early, all fit and sweaty,’ Grant said. ‘But there’s a possible suspicious death on Larkin Road. Number 36. Elderly woman. Peters is already there. I can leave it for someone else?’
‘No. Duty calls, Garda Grant,’ Crowe said, smiling. ‘Just let me have my luxury power shower first.’
Crowe processed what Peters said as they walked through the house next door to Ms King’s. She climbed over the rusted low railing separating the back gardens, pulling up her trouser belt to counter the weight of the Sig and shoving her bag around her back.
They stepped through the door into the kitchen. She glanced at the wooden units, dull green and with a shiny metal strip along the border. A tea cosy sat up on top of the fridge.
It reminded her of her grandmother’s kitchen. She felt a sudden pang for the woman inside.
With the curtains closed, the sitting room was in semi-darkness. The room felt cramped. A rickety coffee table jutted out in front of a sofa. Scraps of paper and bills lay scattered on it. An old portable gas heater was lodged in one corner, a bulky television in the other. A Sacred Heart painting dominated the chimney breast, its red light encasing a small white cross at the bottom of the frame.
Crowe coughed at the thick air and moved towards the front door. She halted when she saw bare white legs, parted at awkward angles, the hem of a dressing gown thrown back. She eased closer, pulling out latex gloves from her bag and slapping them on.
The woman’s shoulders were twisted away from Crowe, while her face tilted towards her. Dark eyes stared out. Crowe twitched at the sight, then resumed her observations. There was a matt of congealed blood and hair on the left side of the woman’s head, circled by black bruising.
Nasty bang, she thought, looking around for the cause. The edge of a hall table was blunted, revealing pale wood under the dark veneer.
All of which drew her to what might have been the cause of the woman’s fall. The broken wipers looked odd lying near her head, right under the letterbox. The note Peters mentioned had landed on the woman’s chest, opened out.
Crowe pulled out her phone and took some photos: of the blow to the head, of the table’s edge, and the position of both. She stepped carefully over the body and took photos of the wipers and, lastly, the note. The writing was clearly visible.
Her heartbeat quickened as she read the message; she glanced at the wipers. The words were all written in capitals. There was something about the unevenness of the letters and the text-spelling that suggested the work of someone young, a child even. The paper looked like a page torn from a school copybook.
So they’ve got kids to do their dirty work now.
Crowe tightened her lips at the thought.
She continued her observations. The locks of the door and chain were untouched.
No forced entry. The wipers must have been shoved through the letterbox. That will give forensics something to work on.
She visualised the woman’s shocked reaction as she read the note and fell, hitting her head off the table.
Once outside, she got Peters to bring the cordon out further, boxing off the small two-bed terraced houses and the road. She walked over to an old Renault Clio parked in front of Ms King’s house.
The wipers were gone, broken off.
Jig had a stick in his right hand and the bars of a flicker scooter in his left. He crouched down, bouncing slightly.
‘And they’re off,’ he shouted, cracking Bowie’s behind.
The Staffie took the strain of the rope tying it to the flicker and pushed forward into a run, right down the middle of the road.
Spikey cycled beside, doing the commentary.
‘Jig Time’s made an early lead. The jockey does be riding the bollix out of him.’
A car screeched to a halt to avoid them.
‘Jig Time has jumped Becher’s Brook and the jockey’s still on. He has the bit between his teeth today, the mad bastard.’
Dizzy Dylan ran towards them, his hands waving in the air.
‘Some woman’s dead,’ he shouted, panting. ‘Coppers outside a gaff on Larkin.’
Jig pulled up.
‘Who?’
‘Dunno. Missus someone.’
Crowe watched Tyrell’s dirty Mondeo slam over a kerb and park on the corner. He walked towards her in looping strides, his shoulders stooped, glancing furtively around him without moving his head. She could see the DI was sucking on his mints.
‘Hey, mister? What happened?’ a girl in tight shiny leggings and false eyelashes shouted up to Tyrell, but he didn’t notice her.
‘She’s dead,’ a little boy beside her said.
‘She been shot?’ the girl asked, chewing, her mouth open.
‘No one’s been shot, now move back,’ Crowe said, as Tyrell approached.
‘Crowe,’ he said, looming nearly a foot over her, ‘what have we got?’
‘A woman in her sixties died from what looks like blunt force trauma to the head,’ she said, looking up at him.
She pulled up the images on her phone. ‘It appears she may have fallen and hit a hall table in the small front porch. As you can see, there are suspicious aspects . . .’
‘What’s this?’ Tyrell snapped.
Crowe looked up and down at her photos.
‘You know if there’s a prosecution out of this and the defence looks for disclosure, this is evidence,’ he said, with a nod at the images. ‘They could argue the scene was interfered with by you taking these photos. That’s why we leave it to the scenes of crime people. You’re going for sergeant. You should know better.’
‘Sorry, DI,’ she said, curling a stray strand of hair behind her ear.
‘Don’t apologise. Just be careful.’
Crowe was still holding the phone in the palm of her hand. She felt both awkward and stupid.
‘Here, show us anyway,’ Tyrell said.
He stretched out a yellow-stained finger but the screen suddenly went black.
‘Sorry, it turns off quickly.’
He looked at her, she knew impatiently, as she tapped in her code and held out the image again. His blue eyes narrowed.
‘There’s two broken wipers inside, most likely pushed through the letterbox,’ Crowe said. ‘And this car here,’ she said, pointing back to the windscreen, ‘looks like it had its wipers ripped off.’
Crowe had secured brown evidence bags over the ends of the wipers for further tests. Tyrell nodded ever so slightly when he saw them.
She tapped on another image.
‘And then there’s this note.’
Tyrell leaned in, cracking the mint in his mouth.
‘They knew, or suspected, she was talking to us,’ Crowe said. ‘Looks like a threat that went wrong. Also, the writing looks like the hand of someone young, a child even.’
‘Who’s the deceased?’ Tyrell asked.
‘Mary King, the neighbour said. She lived there alone. Her son is Leo King. She reported him missing three weeks ago.’
Crowe saw the lines on the DI’s forehead rise slightly. In a man who gave little away, she was learning to spot any tell-tale signs.
‘DI, did you deal with Leo before?’
‘Little fucking weed,’ Tyrell replied. ‘Caught with a load of gear a while ago. He wouldn’t spill who he was holding for. Got bail, of course, and did a runner.’
She could see he was still thinking.
‘How was she discovered?’ he asked.
‘The neighbour, Ms Mulligan,’ Crowe said, pointing to the house with Grecian plaster casts of reclining women in both the living-room and upstairs bedroom windows. ‘She called in to Ms King and became concerned when she got no answer. She looked through the letterbox and saw the deceased’s body.’
‘Great,’ Tyrell interrupted. ‘So her prints and DNA are now on the letterbox.’
‘Yes. The ambulance crew went through Ms Mulligan’s house and gained entry to Ms King’s through the back door.’
Crowe could see Tyrell’s eyes rise slightly to his right and she figured he had recalled something – he didn’t look pleased.
‘DI?’
‘She met Flynn a few days ago,’ he said.
Crowe scrambled her brain for information, trying to impress Tyrell.
‘Isn’t Detective Sergeant Flynn the new liaison for locals being intimidated by gangs?’
But Tyrell was already heading for the neighbour’s house, taking in the distance in a matter of steps, barely acknowledging Ms Mulligan at the door.
‘Missus. Are ya a detective, a lady one?’
Crowe looked down at the boy from earlier, peeping up from under the cordon.
‘Ya ever kill anyone?’ he said excitedly, pointing at her gun. ‘Ya ever shoot a woman?’
‘No, little fella,’ Crowe replied, pulling her jacket across her holster and zipping it up. ‘Now, please step back.’
‘I live there,’ he said, pointing to a house where a large woman leaned against a door, smoking and chatting to a neighbour, who was in her pyjamas.
Crowe scanned the swelling crowd. Children in their school uniforms jumped and shaped as if they had pins and needles. Many were on their mobiles, texting, taking photos or listening to music. A young girl pushed a buggy towards the scene, a big teddy strapped in the front. Kids clambered up on walls, with packets of crisps and cans of Coke, to watch the drama. Teenagers with hoodies and baseball caps looked on darkly, some of them cycling around in loops, phones pressed to their ears.
‘Bet ya someone’s been shot, gunned down like a dog,’ Spikey shouted back, making a gun gesture with his hand. Jig crouched low on the flicker, Bowie panting beside him. ‘Here, let’s go over to the others,’ Spikey said.
Sharon, Taylor and little Bill were there. The girls were sharing earphones, swaying to music. They smiled at the boys in between shouting out the words from the song. Crouched behind them, Jig’s mind was all fuzzy.
How the fuck is the woman dead? Am I going to be locked up for years, like me da was?
He twitched around to see if anyone was looking at him.
I needs to talk to Ghost.
‘I’ll ring the coroner and the pathologist,’ Tyrell said, coming back out. ‘We’ll organise a house-to-house and harvest any CCTV. We’ll need to get a handwriting expert on the note. See what you can find out about the deceased and who was hassling her.’ He nodded to the massing kids. ‘And keep those fucking ants back.’
Crowe looked behind her, halting at the sight of a kid taking a piss against the wall of a house. She turned back to Tyrell, thinking about what he had said earlier.
‘DI, how did the people behind this know she was talking to us? You said the deceased had spoken to Sergeant Flynn just days ago. You think it could have come from inside?’
Tyrell clenched a piece of mint between his teeth. Crowe lowered her eyes, silently cursing herself.
‘Did I say that?’
She shook her head.
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Sorry,’ she said, curling a hair behind her ear.
‘What did I tell you about apologising?’
Crowe felt her cheeks warm and bowed her head, hoping Tyrell wouldn’t notice.
But all she heard was him stride away, crunching on his mint.