Page 15 of 56 Days
“You know, you should really put something on that bleeding heart of yours.” He opens thepassenger-sidedoor. “I think I might have seen afirst-aidbox in the back...”
Once they’re outside, the uniform hurries toward them.
They meet on the path.
“Detective Inspector Leah Riordan,” she says to him, “and Detective Sergeant Karl Connolly. What have we got here...?”
“Michael,” the young guard finishes. He pulls down his mask. “Garda Michael Creedon.”
“What’s going on here, Michael? In brief.”
Lee is encouraged by the fact that he flips open his notebook before answering.
“Well, we, ah, got here around half seven,” he says, scanning his notes. “Seventwenty-six. One of—”
“Seventwenty-six?” Karl asks. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I wrote it—”
“Not seventwenty-seven?”
The young guard’s cheeks start to color, and Lee digs Karl in the ribs before motioning for Michael to continue.
“Ah, yeah, so...” He clears his throat. “One of the residents was here waiting for us—Gillian Fannin. She lives in number four. She’s the one who called it in.”
“What did she call in,” Lee asks, “exactly?”
“A smell in the hall that she thought was coming from her neighbor’s apartment. Number one. Three doors away from hers but in the same corridor. She presumed it was just rotting food waste or something at first, but it was getting worse so... This morning she goes to knock on the door—but the door is open.”
“Open how?”
“She described it as pulled closed but not fully shut. The lock wasn’t engaged. She pushed it open a couple of inches—she was going to call out, see if anyone was home—but the smell was much worse then and she retreated, went back to her own apartment and made the call. Well, two calls—one to the station, one to 999 for an ambulance.”
“So she didn’t actually go inside?”
“She says she didn’t, no.”
“What was the door like when you first saw it?”
“As she’d described,” Michael says. “Like she found it. It doesn’t seem to lock unless you pull it shut.”
“Does she know who lives there?”
“She thinks it’s a young guy, in his twenties or thirties, but that’s it. She hasn’t seen him in a while, maybe a couple of weeks. I checked the letterboxes but they only have numbers on them. No names.”
“Good thinking,” Lee says, throwing the guy a bone. She can practically feel Karl roll his eyes at this beside her. “The paramedics—they went in?”
“One of them”—he looks down at his notes again—“Paul Philips, he went in briefly. Came back out, said this wasn’t anything they could help with and advised us to call the station and tell them what was going on. Said he hadn’t touched the body, that it was clearly in an advanced state of decomposition. And that if he had to make a guess, he’d say whatever happened in there happened a couple of weeks ago.”
“Did they leave?”
“I think they’re parked around the back, by the vehicle entrance. He said something about pronouncing death for you if you didn’t want to wait for the pathologist...?”
“Yeah, they’re able to do that now. But let’s wait and see. Didyougo in?”
“No, Declan did. Again, very briefly. The body is in the bathroom, the first door off the hall, so he didn’t have to go in very far. And from there he said he could see into the living room and the bigger bedroom. Seems to be empty apart from...” He clears his throat again. “He was only in there a few seconds.”
Still plenty of time to destroy critical evidence, but maybe the blast zone won’t be as big as Lee had feared.
