They worked late into the night.
All involved, from the ordinary uniforms to hardened senior officers, were shocked at the scale of the discovery.
Tom stayed on site, overseeing operations and offering his unit leadership and support. As the hours wore on and fatigue set in, he and Laura made their way to the café by the lake to source coffees for the team. Its owner had stayed on with the kind offer of supplying the guards with sustenance.
They stood on the shore, the water lapping at their feet, as they waited for the order to be made up. Laura’s long chestnut curls lifted softly in the gentle, early evening breeze.
‘I can’t get my head around this,’ she said, hushed and appalled. ‘This is Ireland! I still remember when one murder could keep the public horrified and enthralled for months. I know things have escalated since then, but a serial killer? Here?’
In her early thirties, Laura was the youngest member of Tom’s team. She’d already seen far too much for her years but nothing came close to what they’d found this day.
‘We’ve had cases before of people who killed multiple times,’ he answered. ‘Remember Kilcross? But, no, there’s been nothing like this. Not that we didn’t suspect it was coming. Too many women have vanished into thin air over the years.’
He reached down to pick up a smooth stone from among the pebbles at their feet and tossed it into the water, watching the ripples before looking up at the mountains that met at the top of the lake, still visible in the half light of the summer night.
‘When we were children, we used to come up to Dublin to see the Kerry footballers playing in Croke Park on match day Sundays,’ Laura said. ‘When Dad could get a Saturday off, we’d make a weekend of it. Our parents would take us here or to Powerscourt. I remember this great sense of freedom. Running up and down hills, climbing trees, ice creams if we were lucky. Being here as an adult … well, you realise how peaceful it is, don’t you?’
She let out a sigh and pulled her cardigan closed against an imaginary chill.
‘It’s hard to imagine violence here. You can see why the monks chose this spot as a centre for prayer. It’s like –’
She paused.
‘What?’ The inspector asked.
‘I … I was just thinking it’s so magnificent, it’s like God pressed his thumb on the earth to mark this place out.’ She flushed red.
Tom smiled at her candour, thinking he couldn’t have articulated it better. And he was as much, if not more, of an atheist.
Her words had stirred an idea into being.
‘Hmm,’ he said.
‘What are you thinking?’
‘I was wondering, why here? Why not some place where he could have gotten the car that bit closer, even if it was nighttime when he buried them? Maybe the religious resonance of Glendalough is important to him.’
‘There’s a cemetery down at the monastic ruins, isn’t there?’
Tom nodded. He’d been there many times, squinting at the names on the old stones, trying to make out dates, marvelling at the similarities in the inscriptions for those who died in 1750 and those in 1950. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes. Everyone equal in the end.
‘So, he made his own graveyard, nearer the lake,’ Laura remarked, icily. ‘Maybe it was his way of making peace with what he’d done. Bastard.’
Chief Superintendent Joe Kennedy arrived shortly after they returned to the site. Tom had been expecting him sooner, but he’d forgotten his boss had been attending a meeting with his counterpart in Belfast.
‘How the hell did it go unnoticed?’ Kennedy asked, as he rocked on his heels, hands clasped tightly behind his back. ‘Five bloody graves in Glendalough. How come they weren’t disturbed over the years?’
‘It seems like the rumours were true,’ Tom shrugged.
‘What do mean?’
‘That there’s a serial killer operating in Ireland. I suppose nobody wanted to believe it. And now …’
‘And now it transpires that the Garda Síochána have been letting a dangerous individual operate with impunity for all these years, without the first clue of what was happening, who he is, or how to stop him.’
Tom bristled and flashed his boss a sharp look.
‘If any of one of those bodies had been discovered, we would have thrown everything at finding the killer. We can’t launch murder investigations into missing persons.’
Kennedy raised an eyebrow.
‘It’s not what I think, Inspector Reynolds. I’m just saying out loud what the talk-show hosts and op-eds will be spouting for weeks and months to come. We’re facing a media onslaught.’
No shit, Sherlock, Tom retorted silently.
‘I presume you’ll be looking at the ground staff,’ Kennedy continued. ‘People who know the area and have frequent access? We have to say we’re following definite leads.’
The inspector nodded, trying to suppress his growing irritation. Sean McGuinness would have pointed out the obvious course too, but he’d earned the right. Kennedy was a few years short of Tom’s fifty and had gone into the desk-jockey end of policing early. He had very little on-the-ground experience, the sort that mattered.
‘We’ll look at the staff,’ Tom said, patiently. ‘But this is a public park. There’s no entrance fee, no teams of security guards patrolling at night. The priority is to establish the victims’ identities and then trawl through the details of their lives to see if anything connects them.’
‘Hmm,’ was Kennedy’s reply, dissatisfaction coming off him in waves. The inspector wasn’t being reassuring enough. The new chief superintendent wanted his lead man to be confident to the point of arrogance and to promise a speedy result. He didn’t mind hearing Tom bullshit if it sounded convincing and could be then parsed and delivered to the press in comforting sound bites.
As the night wore on, the thorny issue of resources arose. The chief was in the middle of outlining what he thought he could get, versus what Tom needed, when Emmet McDonagh approached. Kennedy gave him the briefest of nods and left. The two department heads didn’t see eye to eye and Emmet was winning in the war of cool looks and snarky asides. Tom should have felt sorry for his boss; Emmet was a formidable foe. But Kennedy’s knack for rubbing people up the wrong way meant he must have done or said something to the Tech Bureau chief to warrant such treatment.
‘We’ve done all we can here,’ Emmet said, his wide shoulders sagging. ‘The bodies have all been removed from the ground and will be transferred to Moya’s lab shortly. She’s flying over a couple of colleagues from London to assist. We need to date them. None of the cadavers are fully decomposed, so we reckon they go back a few years, not decades.’
It was to Emmet that Tom voiced the concern that was plaguing him.
‘Where’s Fiona Holland? She’s not one of those bodies, but has he struck again? Has she been taken by a serial killer?’
Emmet sighed. He wasn’t the most tactile person, but he patted the inspector’s back in solidarity as the two men stared in the direction of the clearing where the five bodies lay.
‘I don’t know, chara. Maybe she’s run off with a fella. Maybe she’s done herself in. Who knows …?’
They left the rest unsaid.
‘You need to go home,’ Emmet insisted. ‘Get some rest.’
Tom glanced at his watch. It was nearing midnight. To give Kennedy his due, he’d stayed there all day, refusing to deal with the massive media presence outside the car park until they had a handle on the number of bodies and could make an informed statement.
Tom didn’t want to leave. He knew he wouldn’t sleep. How could he when there was the possibility they were working against the clock to save Fiona Holland’s life? His team would work alongside him without stop, if he asked them to.
Yet he knew that was the least sensible course. After a few hours’ rest, they would all meet in HQ, their brains more alert, ready to begin this unprecedented investigation.
‘You should, you know,’ Emmet said, about to launch into a lecture about the need for sleep.
Tom smiled grimly and cut him off.
‘I know. I’ve delivered that advice often enough myself, old friend. You go, too. Let your team finish up here and come at it fresh tomorrow. We’re all going to need our wits about us for this one and the site will be secured for as long as we want.’
‘Do me a favour, Tom?’
‘What?’
‘Say a prayer with me.’
Tom blinked, surprised at the Tech chief’s request. He hadn’t pegged Emmet as a religious man. But standing there now, the bodies of the murdered women yards from their feet and the hour late, the inspector suddenly felt that praying was absolutely the appropriate reaction.
So he bowed his head and closed his eyes as Emmet intoned a Hail Mary, summoning the mother of Christ to help them find a killer. And when he’d finished, Tom, feeling like an utter hypocrite, silently made his own plea to a God he’d long stopped believing in. He prayed for the families of the murdered women and then he prayed that he’d never have to live through the grief that they were about to experience.
Willie drove the inspector home to his house on Blackhorse Avenue, a road that ran along one side of the sprawling Phoenix Park in west Dublin. They didn’t speak. Tom rested his head against the back of the seat. He felt like he’d been holding his breath all day and now, away from the scene, he was exhausted.
Willie sat erect in the driver’s seat, every now and again shaking his head and coughing to clear his throat. He’d chain-smoked as he hung around Glendalough, giving up his spare time to be on call in case Tom needed him. He too had been horrified as the news filtered out about the multiple bodies.
At home, Tom looked in on his daughter and granddaughter before going to bed.
Maria had taken Cáit in with her. The two faced each other on the pillow, one small head nose-to-nose with a bigger one, their features a mirror image bar their size. His daughter’s auburn hair fanned out on the pillow behind her. His granddaughter’s fairer hair was stuck to her head in sleep-damp curls.
The inspector felt his throat constrict as he looked at his sleeping beauties. They were safe and happy, oblivious to the evil that existed outside their dreams, unaware of the malevolence that he felt clung to the threads of his clothes after where he’d been.
Maria was twenty-one. They didn’t know the ages of the women they’d found today but Tom expected them to be all of a grouping. Late teens, twenties, maybe early thirties. Una Dolan was twenty-four. Fiona Holland, nineteen.
There was usually a type.
Tomorrow they’d start with the lists of missing women and the process of identifying their victims.
There were five families out there, six if you included Fiona Holland’s, waiting for news of a daughter, a sister, a girlfriend. Each of the victims had been loved by somebody, had been held at some point with the same devotion that Maria felt for Cáit and Tom felt for both of them. When each woman vanished, the loss and anguish felt by their parents and loved ones must have been indescribable.
Now, five families would receive the worst possible news.
Tomorrow, Tom sighed. Tomorrow.