On Sundays, the bistro opened between eleven am and nine pm but Damian Fox, the owner and chef, wondered if it was worth it.
Last year, in his first year of operation, he had not opened on Sundays at all but then he had seen that other establishments in Temple Bar did and that there were people around, potential customers, particularly from March onward, so he thought he would give it a go. So far, it had not been what you might call a brilliant success.
It was quiet this morning but it might pick up for lunch. He took a tray of fresh ciabatta out of the oven and breathed in its hot, doughy sweetness.
And where was Sinead?
It was eleven thirty and she should have been here half an hour ago. But then, if she did not turn up he would not have to pay her. He had two waitresses here already, Carmel and Julie. He looked out from the kitchen. Two customers, drinking re-fills of coffee and reading the Sunday papers. A waitress each. What service that was.
Still, it was not like Sinead. She was one of the more reliable girls. He had never known her to just not turn up.
Staff telephone numbers were written on the kitchen wall so he dialled hers. He did not know how long he let it ring but it was enough; you could have run the length of O’Connell Street in that time.
Carmel came into the kitchen. She was a bony girl with hair like ginger fluff and she and Sinead seemed to get on all right.
‘You wouldn’t know anything about Sinead, would you?’ he asked.
‘No word from her yet?’
‘No. I phoned her a moment ago and got no answer.’
‘That’s not like her.’
‘Just what I was thinking. Listen, since we’re not too busy, you wouldn’t go round to her place and knock on the door, would you? Maybe she’s sick or something.’
‘I’ll do better than that,’ Carmel said. She opened a cupboard door and took a key ring from a nail. There were two keys on it. ‘She keeps this here as a spare just in case she ever forgets her own. I’ll be able to let myself in if I have to.’
‘Okay,’ Damian said. ‘Don’t be long.’
It was not far. Sinead had shown her the flat once. It was lovely, not big, just a nice size for one, and she wished she could have a place like it herself instead of having to share with three other girls she did not particularly like and who kept borrowing her stuff without ever asking for it. That and bringing men back for parties on nights when she had been working late and all she wanted to do was go to bed. On her own – thank you very much.
A thought loomed.
She had wondered about Sinead. There had been a wee man in the bistro a couple of times, an Italian, Sinead said he was, and she had been fussing over him a bit. She had done that with a couple of men before, always the mature type, and then she would turn up one day in some new outfit or other, like that leather jacket which must have cost a fortune.
Carmel had asked her once.
‘How can you afford these things?’
She had smiled and winked. ‘Ah now. Some of us have it.’
Carmel wondered about Sinead.
She let herself into the apartment building and walked up the stairs to the first floor, then checked that she had got the right door.
There was a bell. She pressed it and she could hear it ringing just on the other side but when it stopped there was no sound of movement beyond. She tried again, then she rapped on the door a few times.
‘Sinead. Sinead, are you in there? It’s me, Carmel.’
There was still no response so she opened the door with the key.
She saw the body instantly, right there across the room on the settee, and from the way she was lying and the cold, almost blue colour of her face and the awful empty stare, she knew Sinead was dead.
And then she wondered if there was anybody else in here.
She pulled the door shut with a bang and scrambled back down the stairs and out into the street, running and tripping over the cobbles, back to the bistro where she burst in and blurted it all out to Damian.
He picked up the phone.
Only a matter of weeks after being promoted, Inspector Frank Dolan now found himself in charge of a murder case. He had been involved in a couple before, stabbings in the street, that kind of thing, but this was the first time he would be actually running the investigation.
The medical examiner told him that it looked as if the victim had been strangled manually and raped and that she had been dead for at least twenty-four hours. So that gave somebody a head start. Very unpleasant.
There was no evidence of a break-in or anything being disturbed or stolen, which pointed to the likelihood that the killer was someone she knew. They went over the apartment for fingerprints but that did not turn up much although Dolan harboured the hope, very slight, of getting latent prints from the bruised skin on her neck before the body underwent a post-mortem.
The fingerprint people tried but there were no traces at all. If there had been any, then with the normal shrinkage of the skin after death, they had been distorted or had simply disappeared.
The flat belonged to a young man called Kennedy who was working in Australia. A check showed that he had not been back for six months and he confirmed to the police in Adelaide that the girl was living in the apartment and looking after it while he was away.
Dolan spoke to Damian Fox, the owner of the bistro where she worked. He was a slim man in a white tee-shirt. Dolan smelled the aromas in the kitchen and looked at the cakes in the display cases and wondered how Fox managed to stay so thin. Dolan was putting on weight.
‘Exercise and worry,’ Fox told him. ‘Especially the worry. That will curb your appetite every time.’
‘So what’s worrying you?’ Dolan wondered.
‘This.’ His eyes roamed swiftly over his premises. ‘You’ve no idea how hard it is to keep your head above water. And with this murder – Christ, I don’t know what effect it’s going to have.’
He told Dolan he had last seen Sinead on Friday evening when she finished her shift. He also gave an account, which his wife and his staff could support, of his own whereabouts from that time. ‘Since you’re bound to ask,’ he said.
The young waitress called Carmel, who had found the body, was in a state of shock, yet there was something about her, Dolan thought, an unwillingness to hold his gaze for long, that he felt he would like to pursue. When she recovered enough for him to do so, she told him about the little Italian man who had been in on a couple of occasions in the past week and then again on Friday night and that he had left at about the same time Sinead did.
Dolan felt sure that that was not all, that there was something more. But it would wait for the moment.
Sinead’s parents, Robert and Maura Patterson, came down from Donegal, which was by coincidence Dolan’s own home county, and through talking about familiar places and some rather tenuous mutual acquaintances he was able to ease things a little for them, although not much.
Their daughter was dead, for Christ’s sake.
Mr Patterson, an accountant from Buncrana, identified the body. Mrs Patterson brought pictures, some of them taken by a local photographer when Sinead was in an amateur drama production in the year she left school. For just a moment, Dolan could see the joy and the hope that had been in her.
The story made the news bulletins on Sunday night and the papers the next morning. They released one of the pictures, one that showed her at her most attractive and vivacious. If someone out there knew something, then the sight of it might encourage them to share the information. The murders of children and pretty girls always tugged the heart strings when there were good photographs.
On Monday morning two young men who knew Sinead came forward to say that they had been in a pub on Friday night when she had come in with an elderly guy, about sixty, maybe. She and the man had left again fairly quickly.
Dolan checked with Carmel and, yes, that sounded like him. But he still felt sure there was something else that she was not saying.
It was not until Tuesday evening that they got the best description of all, from a waiter who worked in a small hotel nearby. He had been in Birmingham since Sunday, visiting his brother, travelling over on the ferry from Dun Laoghaire to Holyhead, and did not see a local paper until he got back.
‘It gave me a hell of a shock when I spotted her picture,’ he told Dolan.
He had noticed her in the bar before with men who were, well, a bit oldish, really. When he said it, he averted his gaze, just like Carmel had done.
‘She’s dead,’ he told Dolan. ‘I don’t like to say . . . it’s an awful thing . . . but I used to wonder what she was up to. It looked a bit – dodgy, you know?’
Dolan went to see Carmel at the bistro before it closed. When she was certain no one else could hear, she told him of her suspicions about the men Sinead seemed to like to cultivate.
Great, Dolan thought. How the hell do we trace this lot?
But they had Friday’s man to find first, which would be hard enough. A growing number of people from various European nations were living and working in Ireland now, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Spanish, not to mention the steady tide of tourists drifting in and out, and the place had been full of French people at the weekend, all in town for the rugby match and all safely back home by now, no doubt.
The waiter was able to give them good descriptive detail. It had not been anyone he had seen her with before and it was the drink that he remembered first. Bourbon and iced water. It helped him give a picture of the person who had ordered it.
As they compiled a computer image of a man, about sixty, sleek, well-kept hair, eyes of a light colour – grey, blue, the waiter was not sure – Dolan tried to convince himself that they were starting to get somewhere.
They distributed the picture to Dublin police stations and the media that night.
Disaster struck the next morning.
One of the papers had sent a reporter to talk to the traders and residents of Temple Bar to get their reaction to the murder. After all, this had been a girl who both worked and lived there, like a growing number of people did. The place had become a community of its own.
One person, anonymous of course, told the paper of their fears that there might be a sex maniac on the loose and that a lot of the young women were in fear of their lives. Whether anyone actually said any such thing or whether the reporter made it up was a bit academic in the end.
On Wednesday morning, there it was:
SEX KILLER MAY STRIKE AGAIN – FEAR.
Out at the Garda headquarters in the Phoenix Park, Commissioner Conor Hogan flung open the door of the office of the Deputy Commissioner Operations and stuck the paper on the desk in front of him.
‘We had better get a result here,’ he said. ‘Pronto. The new Minister’s been on the phone already to inquire whether she should be worried about any of this.’
‘Christ, that’s a bit hands on, you might say.’
Hogan snatched the paper back and scanned it again. ‘I have told her – no, it’s just a lot of media hype and we’re on top of it. She’s going to London for the regular meeting on terrorism with the British Home Secretary and I’ve said I’m certain we’ll have made some progress by the time she comes back. Right?’
‘I’ll make sure of it, Commissioner.’
‘And I want this damn sex killer fear nonsense stopped.’
When the door had closed, the Deputy Commissioner Operations picked up the phone and roasted the Assistant Commissioner in charge of the Dublin Metropolitan Area for not keeping him in the picture.
And following that short and one-sided conversation, the Assistant Commissioner called Chief Superintendent Barrett Greeley.
‘Yes, I know, I know,’ he said in response to Greeley’s anguished wail. ‘I know you’ve got the fucking judge’s murder and the Donovan case and every other fucking thing but the Commissioner wants this one sorted out and I want you to make sure it happens. Who’s looking after this case?’
Greeley checked the computer and groaned when he saw. A first-timer.
‘I guess I am now,’ he said.