Sophie makes a noise like a shrug. ‘The black fibres on the vic’s body are consistent with your suspect’s coat, but that’s not as special as it sounds: they’re common as muck, they’d probably be consistent with half the black wool coats in this town. No match to his scarf. No blood on any of his stuff – meaning if he is your boy, those aren’t the gloves he was wearing when he did the job. Sorry.’
‘Them’s the breaks,’ I say. No surprise there: even Rory’s bright enough to spot a bin and dump bloody gloves in it. ‘We’ll keep looking. Anything new from the scene?’
‘Most of it you can read in the reports – a load of miscellaneous unidentified fibres, that kind of shite. We’ll cross-check them with fibres from your suspect’s place, in case of secondary transfer – a fibre from his carpet gets on his coat and from there onto her sofa, or wherever – and we’ll check your suspect’s stuff for fibres from the vic’s place, but we haven’t got to that yet. Dammit—’ Rustling and a thump: Sophie fighting with her roll of bubble wrap. ‘There’s just one thing that’s a little on the weird side. The place is clean.’
‘She was having her new fella over for dinner. She cleaned up.’
‘Not that kind of clean. I mean, that too; it looks to me like she was the housekeeping type to begin with – the top of the wardrobe’s got almost no dust on it, that kind of Stepford crap – and then she did a full blitz for her date with Romeo. But I’m talking about fingerprints. You know how Moran wanted me to check the places an ex might’ve touched? The headboard, under the toilet seat?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Nothing. No prints on the headboard, not even the vic’s – and it’s gloss paint, it should hold prints. The doorknobs, the bathroom sink, the toilet seat, the fridge door, the condom packet in her bedside table: nothing but smudges.’
I say, ‘Somebody wiped the place down.’ The ghostly gangster boyfriend is starting to cast a shadow. Gang boys know all about wiping a place down for prints. Rory, who’d never been in that house before, wouldn’t need to.
Sophie makes a noncommittal sound. ‘Maybe. Or maybe Ms Stepford was just hardcore about cleaning. Either one would fit. I figured you’d be interested anyway.’
‘I am,’ I say. ‘Any fluids on the bed?’
‘Yeah. The sheets were clean, but we found stains on the mattress. Could be just her own sweat – you were there; she kept the place tropical – but if we’re lucky, some of it’ll be semen, or at least someone else’s sweat.’ Energetic rustling: Sophie is wrapping another layer around her vase. ‘Even if we get DNA, though, there’s no way to tell when it was deposited. If you can find out when she bought the mattress, you can get an outside limit, but beyond that . . .’
‘Keep me up to speed on the DNA,’ I say. I’m not getting my hopes up; that condom packet says we’ll be lucky if anyone’s semen ever made it onto the mattress. ‘Thanks, Soph. What about Aislinn’s electronics? Anything there?’
‘Most of it’s your basic bullshit. Nothing good on her mobile – searches on clothes shops and nightclubs, cutesy game apps full of fluttery fairies. No one who looks interesting in any of her photos, but I’ll send you copies so you can see for yourself. Her Facebook is all selfies and which-Hunger-Games-character-are-you quizzes and “Repost this if you hate cancer” – what the fuck is that supposed to do? If enough people like the post, cancer’ll just take the hint and become extinct?’
‘Get us the login details, yeah? We need to check out her Facebook friends.’
‘No problem,’ Sophie says. ‘It doesn’t look like she had any best buddies on there – no private messages or anything; it all looks like colleagues and old classmates, the type where you post on their timeline once a year telling them they look amazing in their birthday pic – but knock yourselves out.’
If the gangster boyfriend is out there, he’s doing a nice job of being invisible; but then, he might. ‘What about her e-mail? Any love notes, sex talk, setting up appointments, anything like that? From Rory Fallon or anyone else?’
‘Nothing like that. The Gmail account linked to her phone is full of order confirmations and special offers from fashion sites, mainly. The lovey-doviest it gets is some cousin in Australia who sticks x’s at the end of her e-mails. You still looking at exes?’
‘Keeping an open mind,’ I say. A clot of tourists wander past with their heads tipped back and their jaws hanging, staring up at the Castle buildings. One of them points a camera in my direction, but I throw him a stare that almost melts his lens, and he backs off.
‘We’re only seeing what she left on there,’ Sophie reminds me. ‘She could have deleted anything that reminded her of the ex. E-mails, texts, photos.’
‘I know.’ Or he could have, on Saturday night. ‘We’ll get onto the phone company and get her records – I’d say Steve’s doing that now. Send me her e-mail account details – cc Steve – and can you talk to her e-mail providers? Get the logs, so we can compare them to what’s actually left on her accounts?’
‘My computer guy’s got friends in high places. I’ll get him onto it as soon as I’ve finished this fucking vase. You should see it: four feet tall, porcelain pug dogs sticking out everywhere, covered in blood spatter. Which actually improves it.’
‘What about my vic’s laptop? Tell me there’s something good on her laptop.’ I’m cold; tasteless instant coffee from the incident-room kettle is starting to sound good.
‘You want interesting evidence, get me an interesting victim. This woman lived a boring life. She spent a lot of time online, but she wasn’t playing in any dodgy corners of the internet, as far as we can tell – my computer guy had a good look through the last couple of months of her history. A lot of time – like, a lot – on travel sites: she was reading up on Australia, India, California, Portugal, Croatia . . . She ran some searches on evening classes in Dublin, looked at arts courses in universities, did a load of shopping for discount designer clothes, read all the coverage on a couple of gangland trials. Desperate for thrills; fuck knows she wasn’t getting them anywhere else.’
Which is what I thought when I found Aislinn’s little true-crime library. I’ve forgotten all about coffee. ‘Right,’ I say, keeping that out of my voice. ‘Can you remember what cases?’
‘Francie Hannon, and Whatsisname with his tongue cut out. I’d forgotten what a field day the papers had with that one. I think it gave some of the reporters an actual hard-on.’
Both those guys were from the same gang, a nasty bunch of northside boys run by a raving psycho called Cueball Lanigan. Both of them were Breslin and McCann’s cases.
‘Sounds like it did the business for our vic, too,’ I say. If Aislinn got mixed up with Cueball’s boys, she got off lightly. ‘Anything else on the laptop?’
More energetic bubble-wrap rustles from Sophie. ‘She read a lot of fan fiction. The sappy kind, not the sexy kind; my guy was sort of disappointed about that. He said he stopped reading after one where Juliet wakes up early, and she and Romeo live happily ever after.’
‘Cute,’ I say. ‘Any dating sites?’
‘Nah.’
‘Message boards?’