‘What?’ Boyd said.
‘Remember the notebook I showed you? It had “Belfield and Ball” written in my father’s handwriting. Someone please tell me what is going on.’
‘Just a minute,’ Boyd said. ‘No point in jumping to conclusions. They were probably the only firm of solicitors in Ragmullin in the seventies. Your father was a garda sergeant. He would’ve been dealing with the courts on a weekly basis, so it’s not unusual that he had the name written down.’
‘But I don’t understand why Tessa had the gun.’
‘It’s probably nothing to do with our current investigation,’ Lynch said. ‘Just an odd coincidence.’
‘I don’t like coincidences,’ Lottie snapped. ‘Odd or otherwise.’
‘Then there are the files that were stolen from Belfield and Ball. Files that Tessa had been dealing with,’ Kirby said, scratching his head with the end of his e-cigarette.
‘I agree this may have nothing to do with the murders,’ Lottie said, ‘but I’ll talk with Kitty Belfield myself and maybe have a chat with that old journalist, Buzz Flynn. He might remember something from his newspaper days. You know him, Kirby; will you tell him I’ll be calling?’
Kirby nodded.
‘Do you think I should inform Bernie and Natasha Kelly about Emma’s murder?’ Lynch asked.
‘I forgot about them. Boyd and I will call later. I’m sure they know already, but no harm in a formal visit to wrap things up with them.’ Lottie paused then added, ‘I wonder what Lorcan Brady has to say for himself about it all.’
‘I’m sure our Dublin friend will tell us when he returns,’ Boyd said.
‘One other thing,’ Kirby said, flicking through McGlynn’s report. ‘Brady’s house.’
Lottie turned to look at him. ‘The blood in the kitchen is that of Marian Russell?’
‘Confirmed. But this has to do with the bags of rubbish out the back. They proved to hold vital evidence.’
‘Bloody clothes?’
‘Yes. They’ve been sent for DNA analysis.’
‘Let me know as soon as you know.’
‘That’s not all…’ Kirby hesitated. ‘In amongst the rubbish they also found Marian’s tongue.’
Sixty-Four
In her office, Lottie tried to keep the churning in her stomach to a minimum.
‘Will I get coffees?’ Boyd offered.
‘No, I think I might puke. The bastards. Why torture her? Why not just kill her and be done with it? Something is not adding up here, Boyd.’
‘Talking of adding up, what’s with that ledger you took from O’Dowd’s house?’
Lottie pulled on protective gloves, laid a sheet of plastic on her desk and retrieved the ledger from the evidence bag. From her drawer she took the copies of the letters they’d found in Tessa’s apartment. Laying them beside the ledger, she pointed to the handwriting.
‘Notice anything?’
Boyd sat on the edge of the desk and leaned over her shoulder, his voice close to her ear. ‘The writing looks similar.’
‘Not similar. It’s the same.’ She turned to look up into his eyes, their hazel flecks dancing. ‘Is this the missing link?’
‘Perhaps another link, but I don’t think we have the full chain yet.’
Lottie picked up the letter from the top of the pile. No signature. No date. She read it aloud:
My dearest love,
I know we cannot be together, but I want you to know that I think of you every day. Others have decided that we are to be apart. Not me. I want you to believe that. If I had my way, we would be together. You deserve to be loved. I would give you mountains of it. I want to. But that is not to be, unfortunately.
I will write again as soon as I can.
Please believe that I really do love you.
Love you always.
‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘The rest of the letters are in a similar vein.’
Boyd picked up another. ‘So if we get the handwriting analysed, and allowing for passage of time, are we going to be able to categorically say that Mick O’Dowd wrote these letters?’
‘I think so.’ Lottie put them back in the folder. She closed the ledger and replaced it in the evidence bag. ‘But they read kind of… weird, as Kirby would say. Don’t you think?’
‘We have no clue as to what this separation was. Her husband might still have been alive at the time.’
‘He died early in the marriage, leaving Tessa free. Something isn’t right with them. I can’t fathom it.’
‘We know there’s a connection between Tessa and O’Dowd. She sold or gave him the cottage, for Christ’s sake.’
‘She was a solicitor. Maybe she was a go-between for O’Dowd and someone else.’
‘But she kept the letters. Never sent them on.’
‘Yeah.’ Lottie wiped a hand over her throbbing head. ‘And that gun… I’m going to have a chat with Buzz Flynn. See if he can enlighten me about anything my father might’ve been involved with.’
‘You’re right. Newspaper hounds know even more than us guards. And I’ll check to see if there’s been any sighting of our two missing men.’
‘Do. One of them must be a murderer.’
‘Or both?’
‘We also need to find out what McMahon gets from Brady. Better still, we could go talk to Brady ourselves.’
As she grabbed her jacket, her phone vibrated. She saw a red circle indicating that she had an earlier voice message. She should ring Annabelle. She answered the call.
‘Hi, Jane. Any news on Emma’s PM?’
‘Can you take a quick trip over here? There’s something you need to know.’
‘I was just on my way to interview someone, but I’ll call to you first if you think it’s important.’
‘It is.’
‘I should be there in half an hour.’
Sixty-Five
The morning had lapsed back into its familiar greyness. Rain was spitting against the windscreen as Lottie drove along the motorway, chasing the clouds.
The Dead House seemed colder than usual, which Lottie thought heightened its odour, and she couldn’t help the feeling of unease scratching behind her eyes. Two bodies were laid out on the autopsy tables. Covered. Good, she thought, glad she hadn’t to look at the terrified, dead eyes of young Emma.
‘Come into my office. I need to speak to you in private,’ Jane said. There was no one else around and she hadn’t yet robed up. Why the delay? Lottie wondered.
She ushered Lottie into the cramped office. Lottie pulled off her jacket and hung it on the back of a chair. Jane sat down facing her, clutching her hands together like they might escape their wrists if she let go. Her face, usually like a fine porcelain teacup, now looked like a cracked ceramic mug.
‘Coffee?’ she offered.
Lottie shook her head. ‘I’m grand, thanks. You look awful. Has something happened?’
‘There was a break-in here,’ Jane said, her voice just above a whisper. ‘Last night.’
‘That’s terrible,’ Lottie said, thinking of all the evidence that could potentially be interfered with. ‘Tell me.’
‘The alarm was disabled and all the CCTV cameras were either smashed or covered. I was first in at seven thirty this morning…’
‘Was anything taken? Evidence damaged or tampered with?’
‘No evidence or bodies were interfered with that we could determine. But it might throw a shadow over chain of custody and verification of samples. No equipment was damaged, except for the CCTV, of course. I called Tullamore gardaí and they were excellent.’
‘All logged and reported?’
‘Yes.’
‘So why the break-in?’
Jane hauled a large leather bag from beneath her desk. With trembling hands she extracted a bulky green folder. ‘I brought this home with me last night. What if they were after it?’
Lottie frowned. ‘What is it?’
‘Your father’s post-mortem file and relevant inquest documents.’
Lottie felt her mouth hanging open. She blinked and leaned forward, grabbed Jane’s hand. ‘You got it? After all this time? Why do you think someone was after it?’
Shoving the file across the desk, Jane said, ‘I made a copy. I wanted to replace it without anyone knowing I had it. Of course it must have flagged on a computer system somewhere.’