The visitors’ car park at Glendalough was chaotic. Elongated tourist coaches and saloon cars packed with sweating, stressed families competed to reverse, u-turn, and extricate themselves from what was rapidly turning into the seventh circle of hell for the single guard on traffic duty. The old monastic site, set in a spectacular glacial valley with two lakes, was a popular tourist spot and on this, a fine summer’s day, it was humming with activity.
‘To think, the missus suggested we come up here this weekend,’ Willie Callaghan remarked. ‘What a lucky escape.’ Tom’s driver stroked his pristinely trimmed moustache, shaking his head in amazement at the close call.
Tom ignored the obvious retort, which was that Willie was now, in fact, in Glendalough.
‘Why wouldn’t you bring her?’ the inspector asked, as his driver honked the horn repeatedly at a busload of startled pensioners.
‘Glendalough on a sunny Saturday in July?’ Willie exclaimed. ‘What kind of mad bastard would you be to inflict that on yourself? Besides, there’s sport on. Which I’m bloody missing now.’
His driver spotted the area of the car park that had been marked out for official vehicles and left his hand on the horn until they reached it.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Tom said, as the car pulled up. ‘We’ll have to get you treatment for road rage.’
Detective Sergeant Ray Lennon, Tom’s deputy, was waiting inside the cordon for his boss’s car. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt, his tie knot pulled loose at the neck. Unlike Tom, Ray had decided to grow his hair this summer. He was taunting his boss with his naturally dark mane, not a grey strand in sight. The extra couple of inches in a heatwave seemed masochistic, and was probably, Tom suspected, something akin to Bikram yoga for his super-fit deputy.
A few feet away, a small group of women in their early twenties were whispering and giggling as they gazed at the tall detective adoringly. Ray had that effect on women and was, as usual, oblivious to it.
‘We heard you before we saw you,’ he greeted Tom.
‘Where’s the scene?’ the inspector asked. ‘And what’s going on with that crowd? Haven’t they been told the valley is off limits?’
‘The body is in woodland close to the lower lake. We’ve been trying to clear the two car parks for the last hour but new vehicles keep arriving. It’s gone out on the radio bulletins now, so people will stay away, hopefully. The normal ones, anyhow.’
‘Who found her?’ Tom asked, as they began walking.
‘A couple of kids and their dog. Aged ten and eleven.’
‘Oh, shit.’
‘No, it’s okay. The mother and father are traumatised, for sure. But the kids were thrilled. It’s like something from their favourite show – The Walking Dead – apparently. I think they’ll survive.’
Tom cast a backwards glance at the car park and the people still milling around. They’d all have a great story to tell about their trip to the Wicklow beauty spot today, each of them shivering and remarking with shocked awe: ‘It could have been me, I could have found her … to think, how close we were!’
‘Who’s up here?’ he asked.
‘Laura Brennan came out with me and a couple of the team are en route. She’s organising the ground search. We’ve set up a quarter-mile radius, but we’re concentrating on the main route of approach, along the path we’re taking. We’re working on the assumption that whoever brought her here used this car park. It would have been a twenty-minute hike if he’d left his car near the monastic ruins entrance. We’ve about ten uniforms assisting. We’ll need more. Moya and Emmet are taking care of the body and the scene.’
Tom felt a shiver, despite the burning afternoon sun. That was ominous. Moya Chambers was the new Deputy State Pathologist and Emmet McDonagh was the Chief Superintendent of the Technical Bureau, the Garda Síochána forensic unit. For both department heads to be at the same crime scene was unusual.
It took them about ten minutes to reach the site – a section of the wooded area below the main trail between the monastic settlement and the valley’s lower lake.
‘He wouldn’t have been able to get his car any closer to this spot,’ Tom observed, before they left the path.
‘I know. That’s why we’re walking.’
‘That’s my point. If he killed her at the site, she trusted him enough to walk along this path with him and go off the public trail. He couldn’t have forced her all this way and if he dragged her down to the wood, somebody might have spotted it. If he didn’t kill her here, he had to carry her body all the way from the car park. So, in that scenario, we’re talking about somebody fit, or two people. Could you carry a dead body this distance?’
Ray was a decent benchmark of what could or couldn’t be achieved, strength-wise.
His DS shrugged. ‘It would depend on her weight and how I was carrying her. Over my shoulder, a regular-sized woman, yeah – just about. But surely somebody would spot you lugging a body over your shoulder?’
‘Not if it was the dead of night. Is it her, do you think?’
‘Fiona Holland? I don’t know. I haven’t seen her yet. Emmet and Moya were just securing the scene and the body when we arrived.’
Neither of them said anything more. What was worse – for the missing girl to be found dead, or for her to still be missing, fate unknown, and this to be some other poor woman?
They made their way down into the woods, negotiating their footing over awkward paths scarred by ancient tree roots, rocks and sprawling moss. It was darker down here, the tall trees obscuring the natural daylight. But as they approached the crime scene the greenery overhead thinned and they found themselves in a small glade.
A perimeter cordon had been established: tape stretched from tree to tree around the clearing and a low tent had been erected over the body.
Tom and Ray stepped into crime-scene gear before joining their colleagues.
The affectionate term for the coupling of Moya and Emmet was Little and Large. Almost at retirement age, the Tech Bureau chief, though a handsome man, was at least four stone overweight and on the tipping point of diabetes, heart disease and all other kinds of obesity-related illnesses. Moya, by contrast, was a petite woman in her forties. Her bleached blonde hair was set in a perm straight out of an eighties soap opera. That, along with her ample bust, gave her a passing resemblance to Dolly Parton, though none of her colleagues would ever make that observation to her face. Sharp, focused and authoritative, Moya suffered no fools. She was Boudica reincarnated.
‘Tom, wait a moment,’ Emmet called over. He was sweating profusely. His glasses hung on a chain around his neck, unable to keep their grip on the sweat-slicked surface of his nose. His dyed brown hair was damp from the exertion of just turning up to work on such a hot day.
The inspector was expecting Emmet to launch into a full-blown tirade railing against being summoned to work on a weekend and was preparing a response that involved the words ‘Piss’ and ‘off’. The Tech Bureau chief had a reputation for being crotchety, but it was better to meet his rudeness with good-natured chutzpah, rather than fawning capitulation.
But Emmet wasn’t himself today. He appeared uneasy, rattled, even.
Tom wondered what the hell was under the tent. It took a lot to put that look on his colleague’s face.
‘Just walk in a straight line to the middle here,’ Emmet instructed the two detectives. ‘Avoid the edges.’
Tom and Ray, seasoned in forensics protocol, obeyed the order.
The four shook hands.
‘What have we got?’ the inspector asked, directing the question to Moya. ‘Is it the Meath girl?’
The pathologist shook her head, thin lips sucked in to make them even thinner.
‘Absolutely not. The state of decomposition would indicate that this woman has been in the ground for approximately a year. It’s difficult to be exact – the ground here is damp, which speeds up the process.’
‘A year?’ Tom parroted. He went through a list of names in his head. Who’d gone missing this time last year? He couldn’t recall any cases last summer that had dominated the news headlines for more than a day or two, enough to make them memorable. ‘Will you need a post-mortem to determine cause of death?’
‘Definitely, but she doesn’t appear to have been stabbed or shot. By the looks of it, though, you won’t need to worry too much about getting an ID on this one.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She’s wearing the clothes she went missing in. Well, what’s left of them. We think it’s Una Dolan.’
‘Una Dolan,’ Ray repeated. ‘Una … that was spring of last year, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s right,’ Tom said. ‘I remember. Twenty-four, never made it home from a nightclub. But you’re saying she was only murdered last summer, maybe later? Does that mean …?’
‘He kept her?’ Moya finished the sentence. ‘Possibly. I won’t be able to give you a definite date but I’ll be closer to the exact period of death when I’ve done a full examination.’
‘Can we take a look?’ The inspector indicated the ground. Emmet’s uncharacteristic silence was putting Tom on edge.
The two experts stood clear and the detectives crouched down beside the small tent. They unzipped one of the flaps and took in the sight of the woman’s remains.
The body lay on top of plastic sheeting. The tattered remnants of tight blue jeans and a black velvet hoodie clung to its frame, clothing immortalised in the last CCTV footage of Una Dolan – the still image that had been used by all the media outlets for weeks. She was recognisably female, some long black strands of hair still evident on her scalp. But no – they wouldn’t be asking the family to identify her. DNA analysis would confirm if this was indeed Una.
‘She’d been disturbed,’ Emmet said, breaking the silence. ‘Prior to being found by the dog and the kids, I mean. If she’d been buried originally that close to the surface she’d have been discovered before now, and there’d have been little left after the wildlife was done. I’d guess she was dug up and reburied, but in a shallower grave the second time.’
That was enough for Ray. He rose abruptly, hand across his mouth, and turned away from the tent.
‘Do not vomit!’ Emmet barked at the detective.
Tom stood up to offer some moral support to his infamously weak-stomached deputy.
‘Give the man a break,’ he said. ‘It’s not a pretty sight. And you’re looking a little peaky yourself, truth be told. What’s on your mind?’
‘There’s somebody I want you to talk to. Mark!’
Tom recognised Mark Dunne, the man Emmet had summoned with his roar. He had worked with the Tech Bureau for a few years and was a friendly chap, good at his job. He was a big rugby player in his spare time, from what the inspector recalled, and had the cauliflower ears and misshapen nose to prove it.
‘Tom, you know Mark, don’t you? Right, well, as it turns out, my assistant is a bit of a nature expert.’
‘Ok-ay.’ Tom drew out the word, one eyebrow raised quizzically. ‘What’s the relevance?’
‘Do you know much about Glendalough?’ Mark asked.
‘Tourist facts.’
‘Okay, so, before I went into forensic science, I studied botany. I’m familiar in particular with the flora and fauna of the Wicklow Mountains National Park.’
Tom and Ray stared at him blankly.
‘Eh, let me give you some context. You see these trees around us? They’re mainly oak trees. Centuries ago, the trees in Glendalough were coppiced – cut down and regrown from their stumps. It was good practice for managing woodland, but they overdid it here and lost a lot of the trees. Around the mid-eighteenth century they replanted but there are still little glades like this one here and there, a legacy of the coppicing. In the main, though, Glendalough is filled with deciduous woodland – that means the trees are so thick overhead that there’s competition for light and space to grow. So the plant life in these woods has adapted. It has stratified.’
‘Go on,’ said Tom, still at a loss as to where this was heading.
‘Well, you’ve the trees at the top – the canopy layer. Then there’s the shrub layer, holly mainly. There’s a ground layer of mosses. The grass-height plants are called the herb layer. These have to be clever to survive in such a fierce environment. You still with me?’
‘So far, and kudos for your extensive knowledge of Glendalough greenery,’ the inspector replied, wryly. ‘What’s the point, though?’
Mark produced an evidence bag and withdrew from it a delicate blue flower. Soil still clung to its roots.
‘This, in layman’s terms, is blue-eyed grass. I found it amid the loose soil covering the victim. It was a genius choice. Whoever planted it here knew their flora. Blue-eyed grass will thrive in damp soil and we’re near a lake, but this plant is native to marshes and wetlands in the west of Ireland. Not here in the east and not in Glendalough.’
‘So, somebody brought it here and placed it on the grave?’
‘No. As I said, it was planted,’ Mark replied.
‘But you said …’
‘Look at the ground around us, Tom,’ Emmet interrupted.
The inspector frowned and examined the earth under the trees. As he scanned the glade, his stomach lurched.
One, two, three, four. Five, counting the mound of earth disturbed under the tent.
Tom counted five separate patches where the same delicate blue flower was blooming. And then he saw it. The unnatural plots, too tidy, too cultivated compared to the unruly foliage that covered the forest floor beyond the circle. In some areas, the blue flowers had taken hold and were spreading, and yet they still appeared contained, as though they were being cared for.
Somebody had cleared the earth of its natural layer and sown their own flowers.
In five places.
Five graves.