Page 37 of Final Betrayal

‘Why don’t you ask those two junkies he found knocked out in the hallway? Are they okay, by the way?’

‘They’re under observation at the hospital. As soon as we get the go-ahead, they’ll be interviewed.’

‘Drugs. The bane of young people’s lives nowadays. Conscription is the only thing that’ll iron the creases out of their young lives. I hold their parents responsible.’

Cringing, Lottie recalled how Katie had once got caught up in smoking weed and she herself had done nothing about it. Turned a blind eye. She could not argue with Mrs Loughlin on that score.

‘Anyway,’ the old lady said, folding her arms, ‘I’ve a habit of going off track, so reel me in any time you find me doing that.’

‘I will.’ Lottie felt sorry for Mrs Loughlin, living out her days alone in a damp-ridden house, but she admired her tenacity in standing up to Cyril Gill.

‘It’s always gone on. The noise, the drugs. Especially at weekends. Youngsters fall out of that nightclub and come down to the underpass to make out or shoot up. Is that what you call it?’

‘Something like that,’ Boyd said, tapping his notebook with his pen.

Lottie nudged his ankle under the table. She was beginning to think she was interviewing her own mother. Mrs Loughlin spoke the same language.

‘Last night I heard an awful carry-on altogether. About two thirty, or maybe it was three o’clock, I’m not sure. Monday night. Who’d have thought it? I looked out the window and saw two lads staggering up the footpath to number three. They just walked in bold and brazen as you like. I was going to get up and go in after them, but it was raining. I was raging. They’d woken me up. Don’t know when I last got a full night’s sleep.’

‘And did you notice anyone else around?’

‘No, just them two with hoods up over their heads. I came down to make a cup of hot milk to try and get myself back to sleep. I sat in the armchair in the living room and looked out the corner of the curtain, and that’s when I saw one of them leaving. But now I know it had to be someone else.’

‘Can you give me a description of that person?’

‘Whoever they were, they were taller and broader than the two lads, now that I think of it. Didn’t look like a teenager. Not that I saw the face, but at my age, I notice these things.’

Lottie wondered about that, seeing as Mrs Loughlin had called her a young lady and Garda Thornton a young man.

‘To make this easier for you, we’ll assume it was a man. What else do you remember?’

‘He’d pulled the jacket collar up around his face, and he had a hat on. One of those … what do you call it? Pea hat?’

‘A beanie?’ Boyd offered.

‘Yeah. Down over his face it was. I couldn’t make him out, but he was walking quickly and ran off through the car park.’

‘Great, that’s excellent, Mrs Loughlin. We’ll be able to get CCTV footage of that,’ Lottie said.

‘I doubt it.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Most of the cameras are smashed. I’ve a path worn to the council to try and get them fixed, but I might as well be talking to that wall over there.’ She pointed to a spot over Lottie’s shoulder and shook her head wearily. ‘Anyway, he ran down to the right, towards the recycling banks. Maybe he had a car parked there, I don’t know, but that’s the last I saw of him.’

‘Did you see two young women enter number three on Saturday night?’

‘I would have told you if I had.’

‘Anyone else acting suspiciously at the weekend?’

‘I heard the usual carry-on from the nightclub, but nothing that I don’t hear every weekend.’

The air was pierced with a whistle and Mrs Loughlin got up to move the kettle off the stove. ‘Sure you don’t want tea?’

‘No thanks.’ Lottie stood and handed over her card. ‘Contact me if you remember anything about last night, or about any other night, particularly last weekend.’

‘Do you think someone was staking the place out?’

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