Page 14 of The Trap by Catherine
“He’s taken up oil painting. To deal with the stress.”
“Good choice.”
“I thought so too,” Denise said. “Because he’ll still be able to do it—”
“—in prison,” they said in unison.
“You’re still doing his FLO-ing?” Don frowned. “Surely you could’ve passed it on to some other poor sod by now?”
“I am for now. I like to finish what I start, and the powers-that-be were only too happy to leave me there.” Denise paused. “I’m still doing it for the O’Sullivans too. I was there first thing, talking to the sister and the boyfriend—who’s still living with the sister, by the way.”
Don raised his eyebrows. “Are they...?”
“Couldn’t tell.” Denise looked at Angela. “Anyway, why the summons? What’s happened?”
The sudden attention caught Angela off-guard. She’d been silently watching their exchange, eyes going from Don to Denise like she was following the ball in a tennis match, beginning to believe that they’d both completely forgotten she was there.
She straightened up, cleared her throat, pushed her cup of coffee away.
“Tell her,” Don prompted.
And so Angela did—about Rosemary Double-Barrelled, the charity-shop discovery, the bag, and its contents.
“I called the charity’s head office,” Angela said. “They confirmed that she works there. And there’s lots of stuff online about her, with pictures. Local golf club, that sort of thing. She seems legit.”
“Where are these items now?” Denise asked.
“Locked in my desk drawer,” Don answered. “For the time being.”
Angela knew enough to know that they were never going to whisk her bloody discovery off to the lab with a label screamingRush; Kerry Long’s disappearance was well over three years stale and low-risk, and so didn’t warrant the cost of the tests. Unlike TV detectives, real ones had budgets. You couldn’t order a battery of expensive forensics tests for every lost button you found in the street.
Or bloody bra you found in a handbag.
But for some reason he hadn’t yet shared with Angela, Don had been eager to tell Detective Denise Pope about what they’d found.
“I took pictures,” Angela said.
She pulled out her phone and swiped to bring them up. She’d taken them at the same table they were sitting at now, before Don had locked the items away. There was one of each item and the bag itself, and a number of close-ups of the bra. Angela had put a ten-euro note from her pocket next to them for scale, swapping it out for a two-euro coin in the close-ups, and made sure to get the tag on the bra (Primark, 36A).
And she was feeling very smug about having done all those things.
She slid the device across the table to Denise, who picked it up and started studying the pictures.
“The bag is in excellent condition,” Angela said. “It looks like it’s been barely used, let alone been outdoors for any length of time, so I think we can assume this wasn’t an item someone found left in the street or thrown in a ditch. And is it even Kerry Long’s? Its condition and the Q-Park ticket suggests to me”—atsuggests to me, something crossed Denise’s face and Angela immediately regretted deploying that level of GardaSpeak—“that the bag might not even be hers, that her things just ended up in it somehow. There was cash in the wallet, so this clearly wasn’t about getting rid of items after a theft. And Rosemary said they don’t track donations.”
Denise slid the phone back across the table.
“She’s on your list,” Don said to her. “Isn’t she?”
“What list?” Her eyes flashed him a warning before she turned back to Angela. “You’re not a guard, are you?”
Unexpectedly, the words stung like a jagged knife-edge drawn against her skin. Angela swallowed hard, readying herself to respond, but Don got in there first with—
“She will be once she passes the PCT.”
—and then Angela could only hope that he’d leave it at that, because that could mean that she hadn’t taken it yet, but of course he felt the need to clarify that—
“She failed it the first time.”
