The Galway Homicides Box Set 2 Read online

  Lyons removed herself from the back of the horsebox and found Sally Fahy standing nearby.

  “Sally can you find out who’s in charge here? See if they can give us an office or somewhere we can set up an incident room. We could use the Garda station, but it would be better to be on site if possible,” Lyons said.

  “Sure. I’ll call you when I have something organised,” Fahy said, heading off towards the show office.

  Then Lyons went and found Eamon Flynn. She knew they had no time to lose in getting the investigation underway.

  “Eamon. Can you go and find the pony that was in the box? Sinéad will probably need to examine its hooves, and make sure they don’t clean it up, there may be hair or blood or other evidence caught in one of its shoes,” Lyons said.

  “And when you’ve done that, start setting up interviews with anyone who stayed overnight at the show ground. There are a number of camper vans lined up along the far side of the car park, and some of the bigger horse trailers also have quite luxurious living accommodation built into them. Get one of the uniforms to help you. This lot will want to be leaving soon, and we need to talk to them before they disappear. You should be able to get a list from the office,” Lyons said.

  “What about the girl?” Flynn asked.

  “She’ll probably turn up in an hour or two. We’ve enough to be doing for now,” she said.

  Lyons then walked back to Lady’s trailer where Sinéad was finishing up.

  “Sinéad, I need you and your crew to have a good look around for wherever this fella was set upon. The doc says he wasn’t killed in the horsebox, so we need to find where the initial attack took place. There could be some blood evidence where he was hit on the head. Give the place a good going over for us. Did you find anything in the horsebox?” she said.

  “A good few prints on the back door, around the hasps, as you’d expect. A couple of boot prints on the floor underneath the straw, oh and some horse poo!”

  “Lovely. Good for the roses though,” Lyons said, smirking. “Give me a call if you find anything,” she said, walking away towards the office.

  * * *

  The show office looked like organised chaos when Lyons arrived. It was a permanent structure with wooden steps up to a half-glazed green door, with the word “Office” painted in signwriting on cream coloured board over the entrance. Inside, there were three desks, each one piled high with papers and folders, leaving just a small space for the three girls occupying the office to work. There were wooden bookshelves all around three of the walls to waist height, leaving a shelf on top which was festooned with trophies of all shapes and sizes. The centrepiece was a large silver cup sitting on a black wooden base, and Lyons could just make out “Best in Show” engraved along the side of it.

  Above the shelving were numerous photographs, mostly black and white, of ponies with their proud owners, and some of these included behatted dignitaries with chains of office presenting cups or rosettes. Many of the photos had captions along the lines of “Moygashel – winner 1972” and so on.

  The fourth wall of the crowded office had another half-glazed door leading to a small office with “Show Manager” printed on white card and pinned to it with a brass drawing pin. Through the glass Lyons could see Sally Fahy trying to clear some space on the manager’s desk and arranging the room so that a briefing could be held.

  Lyons asked the girl sitting at the desk nearest the entrance, “Where can I find Mr Weldon?”

  “He’ll be back in a minute. He’s just gone down to see the Gillespies. God, this is awful,” she said.

  “Can you get him on the radio or send someone to fetch him. I need to talk to him urgently,” Lyons said.

  “Yes, OK. I’ll go myself. I won’t be long,” she said getting up and putting on a sleeveless padded green jacket.

  Weldon appeared back in the office a few minutes later.

  “Hello, Inspector, I hear you want to see me,” he said.

  Oliver Weldon was a man in his fifties who spoke with a refined Galway accent. He was a stocky man of about five feet nine in height with a generous mop of silver hair and a ruddy face. He was wearing the by now familiar green padded sleeveless jacket over a grey button-down Ralph Lauren shirt and somewhat worn dark green corduroy trousers that topped a pair of stout brown leather brogues.

  “Thank you, Mr Weldon. Yes, I just wanted to update you and your team with some news we have from the pathologist, Dr Dodd,” Lyons said.

  “The good doctor has confirmed that the dead man was not killed by the pony, in fact the animal never touched him. The man was dead before he entered the horsebox. He was killed elsewhere,” Lyons said. Weldon went to speak, but Lyons carried on before he got a chance to get going.

  “We now have a murder investigation underway, Mr Weldon, so we need to treat the whole area around the pony’s trailer as a crime scene, and we need to interview anyone who was here late last night, or overnight,” she said.

  “I see. Well, yes, of course. Would it be OK to let the Gillespies know that Lady is in the clear? Jenny is very upset.”

  “Yes, that’s not a problem, it could even help us,” Lyons said.

  Weldon despatched one of the girls to go to the stable where Lady was temporarily housed to break the good news. As she left, Lyons’ phone started to ring and she excused herself, going outside to take the call from Sinéad Loughran, the forensic team lead.

  “Yes Sinéad, what’s up?”

  “Hi Maureen. We’ve found a small patch of blood on the ground at the back of the stable block. And there are some scuff marks on the ground here too. I can’t say for sure if it’s the victim’s blood, but the chances are,” Sinéad said.

  “OK. Well you know what to do. I’ll come down in a few minutes, I just want to sort out a few things up at the office,” Lyons said.

  Lyons went back in to where Sally Fahy was re-arranging Weldon’s office. She had cleared enough space for five chairs, and had managed to procure a blackboard from somewhere that she had propped up against the wall behind Weldon’s desk.

  “That’s great Sally, well done,” Lyons said, and went on to tell the junior detective what had been discovered.

  “We’ll have a briefing in an hour here. Tell the rest of them for me, will you?”

  Just then a commotion broke out in the main office. Máiréad Gillespie had come back as soon as she heard that Lady had been cleared, and she was now calling for the Gardaí to find her daughter.

  Lyons nodded to Fahy, who took the hint and went out into the general office to deal with the distraught woman.

  “You must find Jenny. She has to know that Lady isn’t going to be put down,” Máiréad Gillespie said between sobs. “She’s very upset, and anything could have happened to her.”

  “It’s all right, Mrs Gillespie,” Fahy re-assured the woman, “We’ll find her. She won’t have gone far. I’ll get someone onto it at once. Now why don’t you go back to the stables? That’s where Jenny will go when she comes back.”

  When Mrs Gillespie had left the office somewhat reluctantly, Lyons spoke to Fahy again.

  “Sally, you’d better get on to Séan Mulholland. Ask him to take any spare uniformed officers he can find and start a search for the girl. Get him to comb out the town, you know, the coffee shops, pubs, and ask about. She can’t be far away, and if they find her, be sure to tell her the pony is safe. This is all we bloody need!”

  When things had quietened down a little, and she had set a number of investigative strands running, Lyons turned her attention to the dead man. She had retrieved his wallet and car keys from his pocket before the doctor had arranged for the body to be taken away, and, wearing vinyl gloves so as not to contaminate the evidence, she laid the contents of the wallet out on the desk in Weldon’s office.

  There were five plastic cards in the wallet. A UK driver’s license with a photo of the man taken a few years back by the look of it, an Irish passport card valid for a further four years, an AIB bank
card in his own name, and an HSBC debit card as well as a Barclaycard, all in date, and all correct as far as Lyons could see.

  Further exploration of the brown leather wallet revealed three hundred and fifty euro in cash, a number of receipts for petrol and food in Galway, an out-of-date membership card for an organisation called “The Association of Journalistic Photographers” and a recent receipt from a place called Ocean View Guesthouse, handwritten, and signed in a fluid hand by what looked like C Curley.

  Lyons put the items into a plastic evidence bag and sealed it tightly. Then she left the office and went to the back of the stable block where Sinéad Loughran was sifting around. Along the back wall of several concrete stables a number of large plastic bins with sliding lids were lined up. The bins were in different colours signifying the way in which garbage had to be sorted for disposal and recycling. Sinéad was working at the side of one of the bins, dusting the ground with a narrow paint brush. She still had her hooded white paper suit on, and her face was covered with a white face mask to prevent her inhaling any of the dust that was being thrown up.

  When Lyons appeared, Sinéad stood up and removed her mask and hood, allowing her blonde ponytail to fall loosely down her back.

  The two women knew each other well, and unless there was an audience, they tended to dispense with the usual formalities.

  “Hi Maureen,” the forensic girl said, “I think this may be where the victim was attacked. There’s a fairly small blood spill, and there are some hand smudges on the lid and side of the green bin where he may have reached out as he fell to the ground.”

  “Any sign of a weapon?” Lyons said.

  “Not yet, but when I’ve finished I’ll have one of the guys go through the bins,” Sinéad said.

  “Lucky him! How much longer will you be?”

  “No more than an hour. I’ll come and find you when we’re done,” Sinéad said.

  * * *

  Sergeant Séan Mulholland was quite enjoying the drama of the missing girl. It wasn’t often that something like this came along to punctuate the otherwise drab daily grind, and he felt that the girl wasn’t in any real danger in any case. But they needed to find her, if for no other reason than to put her mind at rest about her pony.

  He had commandeered two of the uniformed Gardaí that had been allocated to the show, and along with two more of his own uniformed officers, they had set out through Clifden to make enquiries. They had divided the town and its hinterland up into rectangles, and they went from premises to premises looking for Jenny Gillespie. They didn’t have a photograph of her, but they reckoned that a dark-haired fifteen-year-old girl with a Donegal accent wearing riding gear wouldn’t be too hard to spot.

  At the same time, two more of Mulholland’s men, Jim Dolan and Peadar Toner, set off in two separate cars to drive out along the roads leading from the town in case she had gone further afield. But despite all of their enquiries and searching, there was no sign of the girl by lunchtime when they all met up at Clifden’s Garda station to compare notes.

  Chapter Five

  Lyons got the team together just after lunch. They were all packed into Oliver Weldon’s office, seated rather uncomfortably on chairs that Sally had borrowed from the general office outside. There were just five names chalked up on the blackboard. At the top was David Ellis, the deceased. Beneath the victim’s name was Jenny Gillespie – missing, followed by the names of her mother and father. At the end of the list was the single word – Lady.

  “OK,” Lyons said, “what have we got. Sinéad?”

  Sinéad Loughran explained how the body had been found positioned to make it look as if the pony had kicked the victim to death. She went on to explain that this was not the case. She explained about the site they had found by the bins, and revealed that on going through them, right at the bottom of the blue bin, they had found a hypodermic syringe. At first she had thought that it could have been used for one of the animals, but Sinéad had consulted the on-site vet and she had confirmed that it was not of the kind used on horses. There was a small trace of clear liquid left in the syringe, but Sinéad had not had a chance to determine what it was.

  “But that doesn’t mean it has anything to do with Ellis’s death, surely?” said Eamon Flynn.

  “I agree. But it’s a bit odd. Anyone injecting themselves for diabetes, say, wouldn’t discard a syringe with the needle still attached like that,” Sinéad said.

  “Oh, and we found a stout piece of wood about a foot long discarded in one of the other bins. It may be what was used to bash Ellis over the head. I’ll have to get it back into the lab to be sure – see if there are any blood traces or hair on it. I’m sorry, but there won’t be any fingerprints on it,” she continued.

  “OK. Let’s move on. Eamon how have the interviews gone?” Lyons said.

  “We set up three separate streams and focused on the people who had stayed overnight here on the grounds. No one saw anything out of the ordinary. No one suspicious lurking around, and everyone we spoke to seemed to have someone else who could vouch for them. So, more or less a complete blank. Sorry, boss,” he said.

  “Great. Sally did any of the staff have anything useful to add?”

  “No, nothing I’m afraid. But I did sense that something wasn’t quite right as I was talking to them. Nothing you could put your finger on – just a feeling really – you know, the occasional furtive look between them, poor eye contact sometimes, that sort of thing,” the young detective said.

  “Hmm, OK, that’s interesting. We’ll follow up on that later. Well spotted, Sally. What about the security company that are supposed to guard the place after hours?” Lyons said.

  “Nothing there either, boss. It seems they only do a drive by every two hours or so, and there was nothing reported, so that’s a dead end too,” Flynn said.

  “Terrific! Right, well here are our tasks for the rest of the day. Eamon, can you locate this Ocean View place and see what you can find out? If he was staying there, drive out and go through his room, see what you can turn up. Sally, can you get on to John O’Connor. Give him the details of the license, passport and cards and see what he can dig up on our Mr Ellis? Sinéad, can you come with me? I want to see if we can find Ellis’s car, and then I have to call Superintendent Plunkett and put him in the picture,” Lyons said. “Let’s meet back at six for an update.”

  * * *

  Cathleen Curley had completed all of her household chores and had finished a late lunch with her husband when Eamon Flynn turned into the drive and parked in front of Ocean View.

  When he had introduced himself to the woman of the house, he confirmed that she had a Mr David Ellis staying.

  “Yes, Mr Ellis is a nice man, but very quiet you know. He doesn’t say much,” she said.

  “How many nights is he booked in for, Mrs Curley?” Flynn asked.

  “Well he should by rights have checked out today, but, well, he didn’t actually come back here at all last night. He might have met someone you know, that sometimes happens. And it’s no harm, his room isn’t booked for tonight what with the show being over. It’ll be quiet enough now till the Arts Festival next month,” Mrs Curley said.

  Flynn asked the woman to sit down and informed her that they had found the body of a man they believed to be David Ellis at the pony show grounds. She was, of course, distraught. So much so that Flynn insisted on making her a strong cup of sugary tea. He then asked if he could examine the room that Ellis had been staying in, and Cathleen readily agreed.

  Flynn found the room to be very neat and tidy. There was just one extra pair of trousers hanging in the wardrobe, a freshly pressed shirt, two pairs of socks and a clean pair of underpants in the drawers. A small black alarm clock ticked quietly on the night stand beside the bed where a half-finished tumbler of water also stood. A small black carry-on bag was placed on the only chair in the room. The small en suite shower room yielded the usual toiletries that accompany a single man travelling alone, and a plastic sup
ermarket bag with some used socks and undies lay in the corner of the room against the wall.

  Flynn explored the room carefully, looking underneath the clothes in the drawer, and examining the pockets of the trousers, but found nothing of interest. He was about to leave the room when he had an idea. Rather reluctantly, for he disliked disturbing the neat, well-made bed, he lifted the mattress. It was heavy, and to see underneath it properly he had to sit on the base of the double bed and perch the mattress on his shoulder whilst he felt around in the gap. But his efforts were well rewarded. There, tucked in snugly between the mattress and the base of the bed, he found a small, slim laptop computer.

  After he had donned blue plastic gloves, he repeated the acrobatics with the mattress and fished out the little computer which he recognised as a small Apple MacBook. When he had re-assembled the bed in a sort of fashion, he sat on the edge and phoned Lyons.

  “That’s great, well done, Eamon. Don’t touch it or turn it on. Take it in to John O’Connor and get him going on it first thing tomorrow.”

  * * *

  Using the car keys Lyons had retrieved from Ellis’s jacket pocket, Sinéad and Lyons moved amongst the remaining cars parked in the show ground with Lyons continually pressing the remote fob that would open car doors and probably flash the lights too. By the time they had circled the car park twice, none of the vehicles had responded.

  Lyons handed the keys to Sinéad.

  “Can you go out on the road and try these on the cars parked up and down the street outside? I want to call Dr Dodd to see if he’s got anything further,” Lyons said.

  Sinéad Loughran left the show grounds, making an odd sight in the street outside still dressed in her scene of crime suit, although she had at least removed her face mask.

  * * *

  “Ah, Inspector, I was wondering if you would call. I think I may have discovered what killed your Mr Ellis,” Dodd said.

  “Excellent, Doctor. Go on then, what was it?” Lyons said.