Too Close to Breathe Page 3

“So, we’re in the bowels of one of the gloomiest and soggiest Octobers in five years, Costello here may not be himself, and now we have a suspicious death.”

  I’ve moved on. I’m searching through drawers. I can’t help feeling somewhat confused when I find it. His passport.

  “I really thought this would be gone.”

  I sift through the stiff pages. No stamps. It’s never been out of Europe. I’m surprised to see that he is of Italian heritage. Born in Naples. Dark-haired, strong-faced, but with soft round brown eyes. He is handsome. Even in the grainy passport photo he looks powerful. How would a man like this cope with unemployment? How much he would have sickened inside at relying on his wife for money, for security.

  It’s late. After midnight. The streetlights are orange orbs on the other side of the dew-lit window. Time is creeping by, eating through the seconds since Eleanor was found. Each minute takes the case further away from a quick resolution. Each minute means degradation of evidence, time layering dust over witnesses’ memories.

  Peter Costello’s not coming home. I can feel it. The house is expecting no one. It has been opened up, scraped clean, relieved of the secrets it holds. It’s no longer a home to this couple. For one it’s a grave; the other, a net.

  The laptop is on the desk. It commands attention. It’s taunting me.

  “Have they tried to get in?”

  Baz shakes his head. “Keith says no. We’ll send it back. Have Steve look at it.”

  “The password is right here.” I only need to glance at the wall and he sees it. Tacked to a calendar, which is still open on the month of May, is one of those mini Post-its. Written on it is the artist’s name: Chagall.

  Baz takes a glove from his pocket and lifts the laptop carefully from the desk.

  I follow him out of the office, back down the hallway, and out the front door. The sea breeze lifts the hair from my forehead, rushes up my nose. The raw saltiness of it stings the gritty tiredness in my eyes. Baz passes the laptop to one of the investigators, and I see them nod under his instruction. It’s packed carefully in a box and driven off into the night.

  I take out my torch, look over the front door. There is nothing to suggest someone tampered with the lock to gain entry into the house. Either the killer had a key or had gotten in elsewhere, or Eleanor knew them and invited them inside. I cast the light over the house; the windows are tight against the late-autumn weather. In the distance there are fireworks cracking across the black night, early Halloween celebrations.

  I step down from the porch, away from the bustle of the investigation. I check the eaves of the house, follow the guttering round the side and finally into the back garden. In the limited light, it appears that the garden wasn’t used much. A simple lawn stretches into overgrown straggling bushes. I bring the torch round, to the edges of the house. A bucket beneath the gutter, a drain thick with leaves. I push the leaves away with my foot; then, placing the end of the torch in my mouth, I crouch down and lift the grate. The round eye of a terra-cotta drain looks back at me, nothing hidden, nothing lost inside.

  “Anything?” Baz makes me jump.

  The torch falls from my mouth down into the drain. “Christ.”

  “Sorry,” he says.

  I fish the light out and stand up. “No. I’m hoping CCTV will show something. I can’t see there being many cameras about here.” I look out into the street.

  He’s shaking his head. “Helen came back on the cameras already. There’s nothing in this area, the closest is an ATM on Quinsborough Road. Best we can do is put an appeal out on social media for commuters passing the main road there.” He points out beyond the cul-de-sac to a road that runs parallel to the coast.

  “We’re in a black hole,” I say.

  “Tell me about it.”

  By the time we leave, the Bray coastline is filling with dawn birdsong even though the sky remains black as deepest night. The temperature has dropped, and our breaths cloud up before our faces. I carry a box of Eleanor Costello’s stuff to my car, open the door, and slide it onto the floor in front of the passenger seat. Baz leans up against the boot.

  “You sure you don’t want me to help out looking through that?” He makes a pass over the stack of bills, junk mail, and papers that I’ve rescued from different areas in the house.

  “Hell no, this eye-drying monotony is all mine.” I walk round to the driver’s side. “I need to get back to the office. Call me with anything new.”

  “Will do, Chief,” he says.

  I’m already pulling off, foot too heavy, too fast on the gas. I wheel-spin away, and in seconds, the house and Baz are swallowed up by the October darkness.

  Beside me on the passenger seat is my new hobby, a recommendation from my doc—the shrink who finally cleared me to return to work. Return to normality. Or normality as I know it. You’ve suffered a great trauma, she whined. You should take time to let your mind heal. My hands tighten on the steering wheel. Panic rises in me. Exhausting, unrelenting waves of panic. Panic that wrings the air from my throat.

  Changing down a gear, I lower the window, let the sea air strike blood into my cheeks, tunnel icy passages through my hair. The scent of death clings to the inside of my nose. My mouth fills with saliva. I gag, stop the car just short of the promenade on Strand Street. It takes a couple of minutes to settle my stomach; to let the sweat rise, cool, then dry on my forehead.

  My eyes settle on the passenger seat. A bonsai tree. The barometer of my mental well-being. Another method of absorption. Something about controlling an entity’s growth seems appealing. Blowing air slowly out through my lips, I pull away from Bray and back toward the office.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE CASE ROOM is a hum of phone chatter, fax machines, and tension. Anyone who thinks the not-sleeping, not-eating, and subsisting-on-caffeine detective is a fictional cliché has never suffered the fever of a murder investigation. Especially one in the first twenty-four hours after a victim is found. There is not one face that isn’t pinched in concentration. The need, the urgency to scrape together this case, trembles in the warmth of the room.

  When I step onto the floor, Helen, like a dog out of the traps, is at my side.

  “Chief, we’ve got something on the cameras. I think you should see it.”

  I walk to her station.

  “As I told Baz, there’s no CCTV around her house,” she says. “But I did get some from the university she worked at, UCD. They’ve a digital system over the gate that runs 24-7. The night porter was happy to courier us the most recent recording. It arrived only half an hour ago, but . . . we’ve got the victim leaving work.”

  She flicks the screen over on her computer to a clear image of Eleanor Costello midstride, about to exit the university grounds. The date on the top-right corner of the image displays “Wednesday, 19 October 2011.” I lean in. Her clothing is the same. She’s laughing, her hand at her ear holding back waxen blond hair. The white collar of her shirt peeks out beneath a pale pink scarf. Her coat—black and to her knees—is blown back behind her by some perpetual breeze.

  There is a man with her. His smile matches his companion’s. He’s youthful, but there’s something in the way he holds himself that displays a quiet confidence.

  “We don’t know who the man is yet,” Helen adds, pointing her pen at the screen.

  I move to the nearest computer. Open up another window and search for the university’s website. From there I open the staff profiles. A list of their lecturers, professors, and student representatives. Scrolling through the biomedical school, I stop at a man’s face, check the screen for likeness, then take a screenshot.

  “Lorcan Murphy. PhD student under Eleanor’s supervision and teaching assistant in microbiology.” I get up, offer the chair to Helen. “Good work. I’ll need a background check, criminal records—that kind of thing—and anything else you can scratch together in the
next few hours. I suspect he’ll be taking over Eleanor’s lectures, so I’ll pay him a visit this morning.”

  “Yes, Chief.”

  I move to the top of the room, to the whiteboard, and as if I’d signaled to the entire staff, the team stop what they’re doing and turn their chairs to face me.

  The question is always the same.

  “How are we doing?” I ask.

  One by one the answers come in, the dividing and conquering of knowledge, the sharing of information, the setting of new goals.

  Between them, my team relay Eleanor’s movements up until her death. She worked yesterday until approximately four p.m. She had one lecture on the division of mast cells. According to three different witnesses, there was nothing unusual about her delivery.

  She finished the lecture at one, then worked in the lab until three p.m. Her lab work consisted of preparing twenty petri dishes with agar solution for her students’ classes, followed by work on a paper she was writing for the Dublin Biochemist’s Partner, a science journal. Lastly, due to the CCTV footage and the identification of her teaching assistant, Lorcan Murphy, we believe she might have caught up with him to review his postdoctoral thesis.

  Then the room falls silent. Eventually, a voice speaks up from the back, Paul Brady, a round-faced officer whose shirt is consistently too tight.

  “The trail goes a bit cold after that, I’m afraid,” he says. “We know she sometimes or usually took the number 145 into the city center and then got the train out to Bray, but we’ve checked all the footage around the stations and on the train and we can’t locate her.”

  “It’s possible Mr. Murphy may have driven her home,” I suggest. “Helen, can you see if he drives? Then follow up on more CCTV footage.”

  “Yes, Chief.”

  “How about Cell Site? Phones? Anything on Peter Costello, his movements, his phone?”

  “There were a couple of phone bills seized at the house last night but no phone. The bill is in the victim’s name. We’ve contacted the phone company; they’re both on the same contract, one phone assigned to Eleanor and the other to her husband. Cell Site picked up Eleanor’s phone on a mast in Bray just before six on the evening of her murder.”

  “So, assuming that she’s with her phone, she went straight home after leaving the university.” I add that to the board. “It’s crucial we find Eleanor Costello’s phone. It may have been disposed of near the crime scene. Check street rubbish bins, the coastline. Extend the search. Also, if someone could put an appeal out on social media for Peter Costello to come forward for questioning. We’ll see what Lorcan Murphy has to add to the picture.”

  I search the team for Steve, who begins speaking before I find him.

  “The laptop rolled out some deets that could be relevant. Empty of almost anything telling, apart from the start of what seems like a terrible novel, an ancient game called Crusader Knights, and, interestingly, the Tor bundle.”

  “Any closer to deciding which of the Costellos used the computer most?”

  “Initial fingerprint analysis shows both sets of prints. Last log-in was early yesterday afternoon, when the user accessed the Dark Web via Tor.”

  I address the room. “Tor is a package used to enter secure networks that are mostly untraceable. In urban language, people use it to access the Dark Web.”

  Helen speaks up. “So the last user must have been the husband, yes? Eleanor was working then, right?”

  Steve shrugs. “Nothing to say she hadn’t taken it with her. In the footage of her leaving work, she’s carrying a large enough bag. Also, the laptop is one of those where the VDU can be removed and used as a tablet. Very portable.”

  My fingers want to snap through the pen in my hand. “Is there anything else you can take from it?”

  Steve shakes his head. “I’ll keep trying, but the Dark Web usually spells a dead end.”

  “Right, in the meantime: Peter Costello. Find him. Find Eleanor’s phone. She was still in her work clothes when she was found the morning after her death. Who was there? Who put that rope around her neck?”

  I step away from the whiteboard, and the team return to their posts, eager, focused, and hungry for a lead, a suspect, a name. I print out the smiling images of Eleanor and her colleague, then stick them up on the case board. I take a moment to study their expressions. They look happy, as if their laughter was the kind born of a shared secret.

  * * *

  —

  GRAFTON STREET IS the worse for wear after a raucous Thursday night. A few revelers stumble down the echoing streets. Drunken laughter and the occasional shout drift up into the dark morning. I’ve come back to change my clothes but can’t help lingering in the quiet of the flat.

  Up four floors, I enjoy the bustle of the city but at a pleasant hum that feels like a distant, comforting friend. The lamp is still lit from when I was called in this morning. The sofa cushions are smashed up against the corners. I massage my neck muscles, remembering that I’d woken on the couch again.

  I make a large mug of coffee and crack open the window. Lighting a cigarette, I check myself and realize I’ve eaten sod all in the past twenty-four hours. I check the cupboards, find a porridge pot, add water, and set it rotating in the microwave.

  On the coffee table is the box I removed from Eleanor Costello’s house and copies of whatever the team have gathered so far, a sizable stack of faxes and paper. Sitting cross-legged in front of the table, I push the box aside. Under the table, sandwiched between last month’s New Scientist and this month’s Hello! mag, is a creamy manila file. The file is a copy; the original sits, waiting for closure, in my office.

  Tracy Ward’s case was pinned down within a month. It should be open-and-shut, when the trial comes around. One advantage of nearly being killed along with her is that it gave us enough to hold the suspect in custody until we could gather the case together.

  A previous victim of Ward’s killer had stepped forward. Rachel Cummins, a redheaded, fragile survivor who was clearly broken. She testified that he’d attempted to kill her and had almost succeeded. I remember Clancy asking me to visit her. It was barely a month after the attack; the wounds on my neck and on my head were newly joined. Clancy had advised: “You’ve both shared an experience, it might help her talk.”

  And I asked her to look at the face of her attacker once more. I remember the shake in my hand as I rested it over hers when she selected his face from a line-up of e-fits.

  I know little about the killer, apart from his psych profile. Of that, I remember every miserable, wobbling line. I lift the cover of the file, and tingling starts up in my fingers. The coffee trembles in my hand. It’s too soon. I slide the file back between the magazines.

  Inside Eleanor’s box there are maybe ten unopened letters, the sort with shiny envelopes that give themselves away as junk from banks, garages, and opticians. Still, it provides the whitewash for the foundation of her life.

  There is one from a car manufacturer inviting Eleanor to the launch of their new sports model. I check the background information that the team have provided. Eleanor sold an A3 hatchback four years ago. No car since.

  The microwave pings, makes me jump; my knee cracks against the table, and coffee threatens to pitch over my case notes. I catch the mug just in time and move it to the floor.

  I eat the stodgy meal by the window, admiring the narrow branches on my new bonsai tree and gazing out over the darkness that still swamps the early morning. There is a tremulous silence from the city. The type of silence that’s filled with possibility and makes you question whether you have invented all of humanity and its stinking crap. Somewhere in the blackness spread out beyond my window, someone knows about Eleanor Costello’s death.

  Finishing the porridge, I chuck the container in the bin, then reclaim my seat in front of the coffee table. I take a pad of sticky notes and a pen and prepare
to immerse myself in all the details we’ve accumulated about Eleanor Costello.

  Occupation: microbiologist, part-time lecturer, occasional freelancer for pharmaceutical companies. Hobbies: unknown, although I scribble “amateur artist” on a sticky note and tack it onto the page. Her old family home address is cited as Eshgrove Estate. I grimace. The estate is a thin-walled concrete forest in the north of Dublin, marshaled by gangs of drug pushers and petty criminals.

  I picture Eleanor Costello’s smooth white skin, her blond hair styled to perfection. Talk about a phoenix rising from the ashes. Her dismal history goes on. She left home at sixteen. Stayed with an aunt, now deceased, in Kilcullen. The date her aunt died would have correlated with the year Eleanor graduated in biosciences from Trinity College Dublin with distinction.

  She moved permanently back to Dublin, this time to Templeogue in 1997, and there were numerous work posts around the city, none lasting more than six months, until finally she took up teaching and contract work at University College Dublin almost seven years ago, shortly after meeting Peter Costello.

  I lean back against the sofa. There are other surprising elements to Eleanor’s past. She was done for shoplifting at thirteen, a harsh sentence that resulted in a couple of weeks at juvie. A single letter from a social worker to her doctor about the possibility of abuse at home. At the age of twenty she was arrested for assaulting a fellow student. My eyebrows pinch together: An assault? The charges were later dropped.

  My breath tickles the paper; the corners of the notes bat about gently under my chin. Each line of her file draws me close. What can one really know about a person by looking at their dead body? Only so much. I know this. But before I could stop myself, I had built Eleanor Costello in my mind.

  I light another cigarette, take a long drink of coffee. The nutty flavor melts over the back of my tongue. Looking at her history, it’s a fair assumption that, for all of Eleanor Costello’s outward fragility, she’s a scrapper, a “dust yourself off and get going again” kind of person.