Page 98 of Final Betrayal

‘The phone was yours?’

‘Cyril’s idea.’

Blinking hard, Kirby let that sink in. The boss had been sure it was something to do with Amy and Louise or even Cristina.

‘Tell me about it.’

FORTY-SIX

In the end, Lottie persuaded Cynthia to drop her off at the station before sending her packing with a quote about sympathy for the victims of the accident and their families. She assumed Cynthia had already received that line from McMahon, but much to her relief, the reporter didn’t press for anything further.

After passing through a relatively calm reception area, she made her way gingerly up the stairs to her office. It was so quiet it was almost silent. Everyone must be at the scene of the accident.

Without having to sniff under her arms, she knew she smelled rotten and should have gone home first, but she was too wound up on adrenaline to slow down. She knocked on McMahon’s office door and stuck her head around it without waiting for an answer. Empty. She headed into the incident room, which was also empty, and walked up to the boards.

Four young women. All dead. And now at least ten others dead as the result of an accident. Boyd’s words stuck in her brain. Was it really an accident, or could it have been an orchestrated plan to take out Cyril Gill? Surely there were other means.

Her eyes rested on the photograph of Conor Dowling from the old case file. He looked young and vulnerable. An image of what he looked like now sprung to her mind. He’d hardened in prison, but she thought he’d retained his youthful vulnerability beneath his hostile exterior. Could he have murdered the four young women in revenge? She traced a finger over his fathomless eyes. Where was he when the crane collapsed? Could he be among the dead? She’d ask Kirby to find out. She walked to the general office. No sign of him or anyone else.

She needed to check in at home to ensure that with all the traffic disruptions Chloe and Sean had been picked up safely by the taxi. Then she realised that her phone was in her bag, and her bag was buried somewhere under the rubble at the courthouse.

Her face ached and her head thumped. Every limb in her body felt like it had been hit with a concrete block. Which wasn’t far from the truth. She decided a quick shower in the locker room would suffice.

She headed down the stairs to the basement, stripped off her filthy clothes and stood under the cold water. She realised she should have checked first to make sure she had a clean set of clothes in her locker. As the water drummed up goose bumps on her skin, she hoped with all her heart that Boyd was going to be okay. She needed him.

Tony escaped to the pub as soon as he could. The guards and emergency personnel had done everything possible in the circumstances. They now had to wait for lifting equipment to come from Dublin to raise the crushed remains of the crane. The fire service were using cutting equipment, but it was too dangerous as the ground underfoot kept giving way.

He’d just got inside when the clouds burst open. The site was going to be some mess now. He half expected Conor to be sitting nursing a pint, but there was no sign of him. The place seemed to be full of journalists and reporters. He quickly took off his jacket with Gill Construction emblazoned on the back. Better to be just another rubbernecker, he thought. He didn’t want to have to answer any awkward questions.

Elbowing his way to the counter, he heard snippets of conversation, though nothing to concern himself with. He ordered his drink and waited. For the first time in ten years, he felt as if a weight had lifted from his shoulders. Now he just had to hope that Conor Dowling was one of the bodies beneath the rubble.

The T-shirt was too long and the jeans too tight, but Lottie had no choice but to squeeze into them. Deciding that her jacket was a lost cause, she found a lightweight garda one. Before she went home, she’d call to Conor Dowling’s house, because that was where she’d been heading when she’d taken the detour to the building site, and because, after making enquiries, no one on the site had been able to contact him.

Nabbing a car from the pool in the yard, she sped around via the bypass, pulling up at Dowling’s house fifteen minutes after she’d stepped out of the freezing-cold shower. She was so numb she couldn’t feel any pain, and she wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

The house looked slightly more decrepit than its neighbours. She had never been house-proud herself, but she had to still an urge to find a cloth and clean the dirt off the windows.

She hammered with her fist on the cracked timber and cringed with the pain reverberating through the bones in her hand. The grass was long and trampled in places. Plenty of weeds, too, and a buckled bicycle wheel leaning against the inside of the wall. About to walk away, she heard a shuffling behind the door just before it was opened.

‘Mrs Dowling?’

‘What’s with all the banging? Have you no patience? I’m not supposed to be up. What do you want?’

‘I’m Detective Inspector Parker. I’d like a word with Conor, please.’

The woman’s face appeared to shrink in on itself. Looking down on the balding head, Lottie thought Mrs Vera Dowling was about to take a bite out of her arm, so she shoved her hands into her flimsy jacket pockets.

‘Conor? What do you want with him? Aren’t you the one who locked him up?’ Now the face had definitely taken on an evil quality. ‘Bitch of a guard, you are. My boy did nothing wrong. But you believed those two young hussies over him.’

‘Can I come in, please?’ Lottie glanced back over her shoulder to where curtains were twitching across the road. ‘You don’t want the neighbours knowing your business, do you?’

Mrs Dowling twisted round on her walking sticks and beckoned. ‘Come in so.’

Lottie had to wait for her to slowly shuffle along the narrow hall before she could enter and close the door behind her. She followed her into what she could only describe as the woman’s living quarters.

From what she could see, it seemed Vera Dowling ate, slept and carried out her bathroom functions in the one room. A television stood in a corner with the sound blasting out a game show. The air was foul with the odour of unwashed flesh and clothes. She felt like opening a window to allow freshness in. There was nowhere to sit, so she stood, careful not to lean up against the wall, where condensation dripped down faded wallpaper and a wooden crucifix hung with black rosary beads fixed around Jesus’ drooped head. A yellowed stock image of a house in a forest hung in a cracked wooden frame over an unlit fireplace.

At last Mrs Dowling was seated on a fetid pile of cushions. Dust motes rose in unison as if eager to escape being flattened by her bottom. Lottie felt like she had walked into a sepia-hazed nightmare.

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