On the landing, a shiver passes over me, and I realise there’s a cold breeze coming from our bedroom door. I have goose-bumps on my legs and arms. I hear something – are the footsteps coming from outside? At the bedroom door, I stop and listen, leaning my hands and ear against it. Hearing nothing, I turn the handle, pushing the door halfway open, peering around the room. The curtains on the windows are flapping, the sash window open. For a split second I wonder if I’m in her house at Greystones. It feels like a replica of what went before. I swallow hard, still holding the door handle, half afraid to walk in. The house creaks, jolting me. I sense she has been here, shadowing me again, trying to push me to the edge. I can’t let her do that. I won’t let her.
I walk quickly across the room, crashing the window down, pulling the catch into the locked position, my hands trembling uncontrollably. She opened the window, just as I opened the window in her house. She knows I was there. Then, I think about the time – eleven o’clock: the heating shouldn’t have clicked off until midnight. Who switched it off? What if she’s still here? It feels as if I’m not alone, and even though I’m half afraid to look behind me, and my legs are like jelly, I turn, and in the half-light of the moon, attempting to take in every part of the room, every last detail, my eyes move too quickly over the bed, but then they dart back. Her silk dressing gown is lying on my side, laid out like a person. Looking at the bedside locker, I see a tube of lipstick and pick it up without thinking, checking the shade. Carmine. Why is she doing this? But I already know the answer. She’s telling me she knows what I’ve been up to, that she’s getting closer.
I look back to the bed again, unsure what to do next. A card sticks out from under the dressing gown. It is face down, with an intricate gold fleur-de-lis pattern on the back. I pick it up, turning it quickly, needing to know what’s on the other side. A face stares back at me. At first, I can’t tell if it’s an animal or a man. There are roman numerals, XV, at the top. The card is blurring as I read the two words at the bottom and fall to the floor. The words ‘The Devil’ swirl in my head as darkness takes over.
PART 3
MERVIN ROAD, RATHMINES
ADAM’S INVOLVEMENT IN the investigation had been curtailed practically the moment they landed at Dublin airport. A phone call from Chief Superintendent Gary Egan as they went through Passport Control reassigned him to desk duties, wading through a backlog of traffic fines.
Kate hadn’t heard from him for a couple of days and, despite the information gained while in Paris and Rome, Mark Lynch’s maverick efforts to date, the nine hundred statements taken, including re-interviewing Shevlin’s ex-girlfriends and known escort companions, hours spent searching CCTV footage and the close co-operation across Europol, the investigation was no nearer to finding the killer. The sketch from Simon Reynolds, the owner of the Grey Door club, hadn’t brought in any fresh leads, and Kate had wondered about its accuracy. Maybe Rick Shevlin’s lady friend, like the mystery woman in Rome, had disguised herself. Either that, or Reynolds had been less specific than he might have been. Whatever the reason, the only new breakthrough came from the second round of interviews with the hotel staff and a missing room key. The security personnel had assumed the police had taken it as evidence, and vice versa, which reflected badly on Lynch. It felt like the investigation had reached another dead zone.
With Charlie asleep in bed, Kate switched on the nine o’clock evening news, filled with talk of green shoots after Ireland’s six years of recession, the Pope and his new Twitter account, and the war in Syria. She flicked it off, and started reading her notes on the Shevlin case again. When the phone rang, she saw before she answered that it was Adam.
‘What’s up?’ she asked.
‘I’ve found something.’
‘I thought you weren’t on the case?’
‘I’m not, at least not officially.’
‘Adam …’
‘Before you start giving me a lecture on following orders, listen to what I have to say.’
‘Go on, then.’
‘Do you remember the fake details given by Sandra Ryan on her application to that Paris college?’
‘What about them?’
‘I started looking at the flights out of Paris around the time she would have left.’
‘That’s a long trawl. We only ever had a vague idea of the dates.’
‘I know, needle-in-haystack stuff, but lucky for me traffic investigations were in a lull.’
‘I heard there was a large backlog.’ She didn’t attempt to hide her light sarcasm, curling up on the couch.
‘The good news is, I found the flight – well, two, actually. I could so easily have missed the booking connections, had it not been for a lost luggage report by a Lori Smith. Her suitcase turned up in time for her second flight home to Dublin.’
‘What about the first one?’
‘It went from Paris to Heathrow. Then a couple of days later, the second went from Heathrow to Dublin. Direct flights weren’t as common back then as they are now, or perhaps they wanted time in London. Anyhow, four passengers checked in as a group on the first flight, but only three on the second.’
‘All women, I assume?’
‘That right, a Lori Smith, Karen Kennedy, Alice Thompson and, finally, Sandra Connolly, who didn’t take the return flight to Dublin. It was Delphine mentioning the friend’s name as Alice that aroused my suspicions even more.’
‘Where did Sandra go?’
‘I don’t know yet.’