Inferno (CSI Reilly Steel #2) (4 page)

Gary was back with the phone almost as fast as was humanly possible.

The three returned to the septic tank and, slipping on her mask, Reilly once again took position over the opening. Launching the iSPI app, she aimed the phone low in the tank well below the rim, moving it slowly around in a 360 degree angle, and hoping to goodness she didn’t drop it into the malodorous soup.

‘Did you get everything?’Gary asked, when a few minutes later she stood up, hoping that she’d done all she needed to construct a usable map based on Jet’s standard protocol.

‘I think so. I also took some photo footage from the inside looking out. For a scene like this, where a victim has been confined in a tank or perhaps a well,’ Reilly continued, automatically slipping into instructive mode, ‘it’s always a good idea to have an image from inside, so we can try and imagine what our victim was looking at, what he might have been thinking before he died. It could well be part of the motivation for the murder.’

‘I’d imagine he was thinking that he really wished he had a ladder.’

‘Gary!’ Lucy poked him in the side.

‘What? Wouldn’t you?’

Reilly shook her head.  ‘OK, guys, show’s over. Now it’s back to good old-fashioned crime scene work.’ She pointed to two young uniformed policemen standing by the gate. ‘Those two were first on the scene. Gary, why don’t you get their shoeprints for elimination purposes.’

He nodded and went to do as he was bid.

‘Why does he get the cute uniforms?’ Lucy complained.

‘You think? I’d have thought this would be the last place you’d want to look for a date.’

The younger girl shrugged. ‘Needs must. I’d try my chances with hunky Detective Delaney if I thought I had a chance,’ she added, and despite herself, Reilly felt a little irritated.

‘I’m sure your dad would just love to see you stepping out with a cop,’ she said, referring to Jack Gorman, a fellow GFU investigator who also happened to be Lucy’s father  something Reilly had only discovered after taking up work at the unit. To her horror, she’d been unashamedly vocal to her protégée about Gorman’s old-fashioned, chauvinist attitude, completely unaware that the two were related.

Lucy winked. ‘Like I’ve said before, what Dad doesn’t know won’t hurt him.’

Reilly been lucky that Lucy and her father weren’t especially close, and that Reilly’s complaints hadn’t affected the younger girl’s impression of her – in fact, it was obvious that father and daughter had a complicated relationship and, if anything, Lucy shared Reilly’s opinion of the senior Gorman.

‘Well, now I need you to deal with Mrs Coffey and the plumber. Check their shoes for elimination purposes. They’ll both be shaken, and you have the gentler touch.’

Reilly watched as Lucy, too, went off to carry out her orders. The team were good kids – heck, Gary was only five years younger than she – but they seemed so young. Too young to be dealing with something as gruesome as this.

So what made her any different?  How come she was able to deal with these things with such ease? Was it because she’d had no choice but to grow up fast, after her mother abandoned the family when Reilly was barely into her teens? She’d had to step in and help her dad raise her little sister, try to become a kind of mother figure to Jess.

And look how that had worked out.

Reilly swallowed hard. The root of her equanimity around violent death was something she often wondered about.  Her only explanation was that once she was in the middle of an investigation, she’d taught herself over the years to let the more horrific circumstances go over her head. It was the only way she could remain unmoved. Or if not completely unmoved, then unscathed.

And Lord knew she’d had lots of practice.

Often, the messier the murder, the more focused and determined she in turn seemed to become, the more driven to read the clues, decode the science, and reveal the murderer. This case would certainly provide her with plenty of grist for the mill.

She remembered Chris’s words earlier.
A forensic nightmare...

Heaven help them.

‘I
hate this.’

The detectives stood outside the front door, waiting for Mrs Coffey to answer.

Chris looked at his partner ‘Hate what?’

‘You know, interviewing the wife.’ Kennedy hitched up his trousers and looked up at Chris, who was easily a foot taller. ‘For feck’s sake, her husband’s just been stuffed in a septic tank – and here we come asking questions and making her feel like a suspect.’

‘You’re long enough in the tooth to know it’s not like that,’ Chris protested.

Kennedy gave him a look of incredulity. ‘Yeah, and how would you feel if two flatfoots came knocking at your—’

He never finished his question. The door slowly opened, revealing a shaken- looking woman. In her mid-fifties, Sandra Coffey was trim and tidy in a navy trouser suit, her styled hair lightly colored to hide any encroaching gray.

Her face was an ash-colored, her eyes red-rimmed. She looked dazed, as though, like Alice in Wonderland, she had stepped into a strange world where nothing made sense, and everything was turned upside down. She stared blankly at the detectives, clearly unaware of who they were or what they wanted.

‘Mrs Coffey?’ Chris smiled, immediately employing his natural propensity for putting people at ease. ‘So sorry to bother you – I’m Detective Delaney, and this is Detective Kennedy.’

Her face maintained its blank expression, and she said nothing, just looked back and forth between the two of them as though their presence made no sense; was just another strange event in a bizarre and surreal day.

Chris continued, ‘We’re so sorry for your loss and know this is an exceptionally difficult time for you, but we wondered if we might ask you a few questions. Just to help us all try and understand what might have happened to your husband.’

Finally Sandra Coffey’s face registered comprehension. Visibly composing herself, she took a deep breath and tried to force a polite smile through the grief and shock etched deeply into her face. ‘Of course. Please come in.’

She held the door open for the detectives and they stepped inside. As the door closed behind the three of them, there was a moment of awkward silence as Mrs Coffey stared at their feet. Chris looked down and saw that their shoes were muddy from the garden.

‘Should we ...?’

She nodded. ‘I’m sorry, but the housekeeper was here just yesterday ...’  She pointed to a place by the door where two pairs of Wellington boots stood neatly side by side. His and hers, a sight seen in thousands of houses up and down the country – except now there was no ‘him’ anymore. Then her gaze rested upon the boots for a moment, as though she was starting to understand that this reality was her future, and would be repeated again and again, over and over in the coming days. She suddenly caught herself and looked up, as if finally realizing how insignificant a muddy carpet was, considering ... Her eyes welled up. ‘Forgive me, of course it doesn’t matter.’

‘No, the last thing you need is to have to clean up after us,’ Chris said gently, already using one foot against the heel of the other to slide his shoes off.  Kennedy’s were sturdier, black brogues tightly laced. He huffed and puffed as he bent over to untie them and struggled for a moment before straightening up, red-faced.

‘Why don’t we sit in the drawing room?’  She led the way down the hall and the detectives padded along behind her.

Chris took in the details of the house.  There was money here all right. The place was decorated in a restrained way, but all the furnishings were solid, antique pieces – no Ikea flatpack here – and the artworks were originals: oil paintings of rural scenes. Tradition ruled.  He wondered how her supposedly ‘down with the people’ journalist husband had felt in a house that represented many of the values he purported to hate.

Mrs Coffey led them into the drawing room and pointed to a floral couch. ‘Please, take a seat.’

Chris lowered himself into the sofa, Kennedy beside him. The cool light of late afternoon flowed through the tall wood-framed windows, and half-lit the room.

Mrs Coffey stood over them, her hands working, rubbing each other over and over as though trying to remove an invisible stain. ‘Can I get you some tea?  I could certainly do with a cup.’  She framed it in such a way that refusal was not an option.

Chris again offered his most comforting smile. ‘That would be great thanks – we’d both love one.’

Her face registered relief, and she turned and hurried from the room, her footsteps tap-tapping on the wooden floor as she disappeared down the hallway.

Chris watched her as she left. ‘She seems composed, but she’s having to work really hard to hold it together.’

Kennedy nodded, his eyes taking everything in too. ‘I think we surprised her just for a second, but she pulled it together really fast.’ He ran his gaze over the piano, a cluster of family photos arranged on top. ‘Have you ever seen a more ... I don’t know ... old-fashioned house?’

Chris smiled as his partner struggled to find the right word to describe the décor, but he knew what Kennedy meant. Someone from the 1950s would feel completely at home here. Apart from the digital radio standing unobtrusively on a small side table, there was nothing that would have been out of place in a post-civil war house – the comfortable floral-print couch and chairs, the real fireplace with a grate, the piano, a wall of book shelves, and a couple of antique side tables. 

‘No point looking
her
up on Facebook,’ Kennedy commented, right before Sandra Coffey reappeared with a small tray, three elegant china teacups and a plate of biscuits.

She set the tray on the side table by the couch, took her own tea and stood gazing out the window. ‘Help yourselves – there’s milk and sugar.’

Kennedy passed a cup to Chris, then spooned three mounds of sugar into his own cup, and grabbed a chocolate digestive as if he’d never see one again in his lifetime. He dipped his biscuit into the tea, and maneuvered it into his mouth in one bite, then slurped his tea.

Chris had just picked up his teacup when out of nowhere, his hands began to tremble.

Dammit ....

He’d been aware of a slight tingling in his fingers earlier in the car on the way here, but hadn’t thought too much about it, just putting it down to the cold weather.

Suddenly he felt nauseous. He sincerely hoped it wasn’t a recurrence of his former mysterious affliction.  Even having some idea of what it might be would make it less frightening ...

‘Once again, we’re sorry to bother you so soon,’ Kennedy was saying, ‘but the quicker we begin our investigation, the greater the chance of finding your husband's killer.’ 

‘What do you need to know?’ The window at which Mrs Coffey stood looked out onto the fields beyond the garden and orchard at the back of the house.  She answered without turning round, her gaze seemingly captured by the wide sweep of a newly ploughed field, the soil lying in rich, deep lines, churned and opened, marching off up a gentle slope towards the gray horizon. 

Kennedy slurped again at his tea, and looked at Chris, as if urging him to continue the questioning.

Chris and Kennedy had been partnered together in the Serious Crime unit shortly after the death of Chris’s father almost four years ago. At that time, Kennedy had automatically taken over much of the heavy lifting in the workplace, no questions asked, and Chris was forever grateful.  As a result, they had very quickly become good mates as well as partners and by now the two had worked out a well-worn, almost instinctive interrogation routine. Chris laid the groundwork, asked all the right questions and set the witness at ease, while Kennedy listened carefully, allowed the information to wash over him and waited for anything that sounded unusual or out of place.

Trying to concentrate and refocus on the task at hand, Chris set his teacup down and surreptitiously opened a small notebook so as not to break the thus-far cosy façade, all the while trying his utmost to conceal his shaking hands. ‘When did you last see your husband?’

Mrs Coffey lifted her cup, and sipped from it again, before finally turning round. He could see the tension in her shoulders. ‘The weekend. He was going to a conference down south somewhere earlier this week – Limerick, I think.’  She paused. ‘His secretary should have the details. Or assistant, as they like to be called these days. He has an office here at the house, and works mostly from home rather than at the
Herald
building.’

Chris and Kennedy exchanged glances, both noticing how there was a brief change in her voice when she mentioned the secretary. Gripping the pen tightly so as to steady his hand, Chris scribbled a quick note. ‘And had you spoken to him since then?’

Sandra Coffey shook her head. ‘That’s not unusual, though. When Tony’s away he works unsociable hours.  As you can imagine, part of his game as a journalist is to hang around in bars to get what he calls “the low down” on a situation. We often don’t talk when he’s away – after twenty years of marriage the need to speak to one another every day seems to fade.’  A look of sadness flitted across her face. ‘We usually just catch up when he gets home – often find we have more to say that way.’  She paused for a moment, as if again suddenly remembering her new-found situation. Her voice caught. ‘Or I should say, we did ...’

Chris glanced at Kennedy, who gave a barely perceptible shrug.

‘Did your husband have any enemies, Mrs Coffey?’ Kennedy asked, but something in his tone seemed to catch her attention, and she turned to look at him directly.

‘I can see why you would think that, of course.’ She suddenly shivered, as though a cold draft had hit her, and her voice broke a little. ‘It must have been such a horrible way to die.’

They said nothing, just let her continue.

‘For someone to do that to him ...’  For a brief moment it seemed as though she was going to let her emotions show, then just as quickly the shutters came down again and she strengthened her resolve. ‘I’m sure my husband had lots of enemies, Detective. He was an investigative journalist, after all. He wrote hundreds – if not thousands – of highly opinionated pieces over the years. People tended to either love him or hate him.’