Page 41 of The Trap by Catherine
“They didn’t find anything. Some scuff marks on the fence. There’s no side access there, so he’d have had to go through the neighbor’s garden to get to her.”
“All right,” Denise said. “Probably just some teenager on a dare. I’ll give her a call later. Hey, is the sale still on?”
“Fuck off.”
She laughed to herself and then ended the call.
“Everything OK?” Angela asked, even though she’d heard the entire conversation. It seemed like the polite thing to do to pretend she hadn’t.
“Someone was in Lucy O’Sullivan’s back garden last night, apparently. A man dressed all in black. Any time there’s news in this case, the looney tunes come out to play.”
“What’s a DFS? I don’t think I’ve heard of that rank before...?”
Denise frowned. “What?”
“You called that guy DFS Dineen.”
“It’s not a rank,” she said, laughing. “It’s a furniture shop. The place that sells sofas? The one with the interminable sale?”
Angela was following this about as well as theJurassic Parkreference.
“It’s his nickname,” Denise explained. “Because he has zero per cent interest.In the job. Get it?”
“Oh. Yeah, that’s... That’s funny.”
“Come on, then,” Denise said, standing up. “I need to go see Mr. Roland Kearns, and Don says that I can take you with me.”
* * *
Denise took them off the M50 at an exit promising a place Angela had never heard of. The slip road didn’t just take them off the motorway, but all the way back to 2008, the year the Celtic Tiger choked and died, to what was surely supposed to have been just the first phase of an entirely new community, full of hopes and dreams and overstretched mortgage-payers, but which, in the economic carnage that followed, never made it past that.
Enormous apartment blocks, apparently inspired by the Soviet era, towered behind rows of tiny, boxy houses, glued together in never-ending rows without so much as a grassy verge between their driveways, on a bleak, desolate landscape of burnt grass, weeds, and bare soil. To get to them, you had to pass a U-shaped retail park that, at first glance, looked completely empty but, on second, at least had an Aldi. A huge flag-like sign lied that the other units represented aprime retail opportunity!as it flapped in the wind, its end ripped and fraying.
“It’s pretty bleak, isn’t it?” Denise said, glancing at her. “There’s a place up the country where they house post-release sex offenders in an effort to rehabilitate them, and it looks just like this.”
“Lovely,” Angela said and Denise laughed.
They were driving deep into the development, to the apartment blocks at the rear. On the right, they passed an upturned washing machine that someone had just left on a corner.
“Actually, I used to work with a guy who lived here. A detective. Well,formerdetective now. Ever hear of the Canal Killer case?”
Angela nodded. “Yeah, of course.”
You could count Ireland’s confirmed serial killers on one hand, even if you’d been in some traumatic vegetable-chopping accident, and the Canal Killer was one of them. He’d targeted students at St John’s College on the south side of the city, knocking them unconscious before leaving them to drown in the muddy waters of the Grand Canal.
“He was on it,” Denise said. “Helped solve it, basically. Remember the ex-girlfriend? Alison Smith? Well, they’re married now.”
Angela raised her eyebrows. “Really?”
“Hence former detective. And, luckily for him, former resident of this shithole.” She cut the engine. “I think they live abroad.”
Denise had parked outside the block furthest from the entrance. She got out of the car and walked to its main door, and Angela followed her. There was a high-tech-looking intercom system with a digital display and lots of buttons, but someone had taped a handwritten note over it:Broken.
When Denise pushed a hand against the door, it swung open easily.
“It’s been broken for weeks,” she said. “We’ll just go upstairs and knock.”
They got into the lift, which smelled of spilt milk and had a streak of something wet and brown in the corner.
