“Come with me, Bel.” Charlie met her the moment she shoved her swipe card into her breast pocket after entering the secure main offices of the task force.
“Charlie, you’re scaring the hell out of me here. Am I about to get fired?”
“Not now. We don’t have time for this.”
Bel was expecting a direct route to Conrad’s office, but they were marching swiftly in the opposite direction. They were heading toward one of the incident rooms.
Hotstream’s incident rooms were state of the art. Without the trendy television-set lighting and excessive, if not completely useless, props, they looked nothing like the shows she used to watch religiously. The equipment inside was imperative once you knew what you could access and how quickly you could access it. The information at your fingertips was mind-blowing.
She stepped inside, and the images she saw displayed on the monitors hit her like a truck. She swallowed hard to counteract the reflex of vomiting.
“Clear the room,” Conrad bellowed.
Apart from her and Charlie, everyone obeyed the order immediately.
“Do you know this woman?” Conrad waited until the last person left before he directed his question to her.
The woman he was referring to was Esther, and pictures of her were plastered all over an entire board. Bel was in some of them—the ones taken from the underground CCTV system that morning. Many, however, were older pictures. Bel could tell by the length of Esther’s hair, the less prominent wrinkles on her face, and the tattoos missing on her arms.
Conrad waited for an answer.
“I know her. That’s my…um…that’s Esther.”
“Actually, no, it isn’t.” Conrad hadn’t seemed to notice that Bel’s world was swiftly falling apart before his eyes. “The woman you know as Esther is actually Esmeralda Gaffney. Does that name ring a bell?”
Gaffney, Gaffney, Gaffney. Bel shook her head, and then it hit her. “Brian Gaffney’s daughter.” She said the words to herself as the little minions in her brain ran off to fetch all the information she knew about Brian and Esmeralda Gaffney.
Turns out she knew enough to put the pieces together. Brian Gaffney had been a decorated police officer in Dublin, but he’d poked his nose into the IRA or, more accurately, the corrupt English politicians and high-ranking police who saw personal benefit and wealth in sustaining a volatile relationship between England and Ireland. Esther, or Esme as she was known at the time, was rumoured to have been forced to witness the cruel and inhumane torture and subsequent death of her father. Esme disappeared off the face of the earth. Some stubborn yet skilful detectives had uncovered the truth eventually—Brian Gaffney left a solid trail of evidence, so he must have known what he was getting involved in—but no one knew what really happened to five-year-old Esme. The criminals denied killing her, at the time coming up with what appeared to be a bullshit story about how she escaped. It was assumed she had been killed, but without a body, there was no evidence.
For all intents and purposes, Esmeralda Gaffney had been dead for nearly thirty years.
Until now.
“Esther is Esme Gaffney?” She already knew the answer.
“We’re almost one hundred percent sure.”
“But I don’t understand. It’s not a crime to be Esme Gaffney, surely?”
“It is when we think you’ve got thirty kilograms of explosives strapped to your body.”
This time she couldn’t stop the vomit but at least found a rubbish bin.
Esther’s odd behaviour that morning came flooding back. The coffee without change, the big jacket, and the bizarre questions: it all seemed suspicious now. Then there was last night: the intense sex, the sentimental words, and Esther declaring her love. She couldn’t bring herself to believe it, but it was textbook stuff. The indicators were that Esther was a suicide bomber.
“Why’d you switch off your mike today?” Conrad was relentless.
Bel at least turned away to spit the chunky bits of her breakfast into the bin. She wiped her mouth. “You must have heard what I did this morning?”
“Oh, I heard about it all right. Nice attempt at a decoy.”
“A what?”
“Do you expect me to believe your little fuck buddy there is working alone?” He pointed to Esther on the screens.
“I didn’t see the kid with the woman this morning.”
“How convenient. What are you, blind? Your screw is walking around ready to go off while you try your best to set up a decoy.”
“Fuck you!” The insult was out before she could engage her filter. Then, in light of having said the worst possible thing to the head of LUATRU besides “I fucked your wife,” Bel kept going. “Esther is my girlfriend, not my fuck buddy or my screw, and I’ll be damned if I’ll sit here and let you tell me she’s a terrorist.”