Page 29 of Final Betrayal

Lottie zipped up her protective suit and fastened the ties of the mouth mask behind her ears. Then she followed Boyd’s long, lean figure under the crime-scene tape.

‘Why can’t people discover murder victims on a fine day?’ he said. She didn’t bother answering him, knowing it was a rhetorical question. As she passed him, he added, ‘And they could pick warmer and drier places to be found.’

‘Boyd, will you shut up?’

Lottie dipped her head under the lintel, careful not to brush up against the door, which was hanging precariously from a single hinge. The weather-beaten wood bore evidence that there had once been a lock and a handle, but they were no longer there.

‘What were those lads doing in here anyway?’ Boyd continued, his voice like a sharp breeze on the back of her neck. She’d pinned her hair up this morning, disguising the fact that it was overdue a cut and colour. She pulled up the white hood. He was still talking. ‘This is no place for youngsters. What age do you think they are?’

‘Who?’

‘The two lads that Thornton found.’

‘How would I know that?’

She sighed loudly and trudged up the wooden stairs, her protective booties snagging on the worn timber. In the time since Garda Thornton had called in the incident, uniforms had trampled all over the scene, one even vomiting in a corner of the landing, before they had realised the area needed to be preserved and the scene-of-crime officers called in. She would deal with the aftermath of their ineptitude in due course, but first she had to assess everything for herself.

The house was one of a terrace of six. She knew this area had been earmarked for urban development years ago, with plans for retail units and a paved pedestrian area linking to new council offices. The offices, which looked like a giant aquarium, were the only thing that had been built. The terraced houses were slap bang in the centre of the plans, but something had happened to stall the project, and Mrs Loughlin had stubbornly refused to uproot herself.

Lottie paused at the top of the wooden stairs and noticed the activity in the room to her left. She took a step towards it. In front of her was a bathroom with all its fittings plundered and removed, pipes standing forlornly from raised floorboards and the window boarded up. Two SOCOs were hunched over what she presumed was the body, lying where once a bath had stood. The stench of vomit at the doorway rose to her nostrils and she found that perversely it drowned out the smell of putrid flesh. Crime-scene tape hung across the doorway of another room to her right. She squeezed into the bathroom, leaving Boyd outside.

‘Hello, Detective Inspector Parker.’ Jim McGlynn, SOCO team leader, turned his head for a fraction of a second, and in that moment she witnessed the victim. Immediately she sympathised with the uniformed officer who had deposited his breakfast on the landing.

‘Jim,’ she said, barely daring to look at the carnage. ‘Tell me what we have here?’

‘Female. Deceased at least two days. Possibly longer. Good job the weather’s been so miserable, or there’d be more than one officer chucking up his guts.’

‘No need to be so crass,’ she said.

‘Just telling it how it is. And he should be reprimanded. He could have destroyed evidence.’

‘How did she die?’ Despite herself, Lottie couldn’t keep her eyes off the body lying face down on the floor. A dark hand curled around her spine and clawed into her chest to clamp her heart.

‘Stab wound to the throat,’ McGlynn said.

The words sent a shiver through Lottie. Just last July, young Gilly O’Donoghue had been viciously stabbed in a similar way.

McGlynn continued. ‘A lot of blood. I reckon the killer must have been saturated in it. Unless he came prepared.’

Lottie focused on the victim. Blinked once and allowed herself to print the image on her brain. She struggled to get the words out of her mouth, needing to say them out loud so that it all made sense.

‘Dressed for a nightclub. Jomo’s is just around the corner,’ she said. ‘Maybe she was coming from there and some psycho picked her up.’ A diamond heart stud earring was hanging loose from the victim’s ear, and Lottie had to stop herself from reaching out to twist it back in place. She knew who the victim was. ‘Sexual assault?’

‘Not evident externally. Underwear is intact, but the post-mortem will tell you conclusively.’

Her hands trembled. Recently she’d become more and more affected by the work carried out by the state pathologist, Doctor Jane Dore, in the morgue. It must be my age, she thought.

The victim’s toenails were painted with crimson nail polish and her legs were smeared with fake tan. Lottie could see, beneath the hardened blood, that the girl’s hair was dark brown.

‘Turn her over,’ she instructed McGlynn.

‘We should wait for the state pathologist.’

‘I said turn her over.’ She hadn’t meant to sound angry, but she needed to be one hundred per cent sure.

As McGlynn and his assistant carefully turned the body, Lottie felt a gasp lodge in the back of her throat.

Even though the face had begun to bloat, stark eyeshadow and black eyebrow pencil accentuated the victim’s features in death. Averting her eyes, she scanned the immediate area, looking for the weapon. As she did so, she caught sight of something shiny beneath the girl’s right hand.

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