No Memory Lost

  No Memory Lost

  Valerie Keogh

  Copyright © 2020 Valerie Keogh

  The right of Valerie Keogh to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in

  accordance to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 2020 by Bloodhound Books

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be

  reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in

  writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the

  terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living

  or dead, is purely coincidental.

  www.bloodhoundbooks.com

  * * *

  Print ISBN 978-1-913419-48-6

  Contents

  Also by Valerie Keogh

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Acknowledgements

  A note from the publisher

  Love crime, thriller and mystery books?

  You will also enjoy:

  Also by Valerie Keogh

  The Dublin Murder Mysteries

  No Simple Death

  No Obvious Cause

  No Past Forgiven

  The Three Women

  The Housewife

  Secrets Between Us

  Exit Five from Charing Cross

  The Hudson & Connolly series

  Deadly Sleep

  The Devil has Power

  Such Bitter Business

  Wicked Secret

  For my sister, Patricia Hudson.

  This is your reward for reading all those rough drafts.

  An Garda Síochána: the police service of the Republic of Ireland.

  * * *

  Garda, or gardaí in the plural.

  * * *

  Commonly referred to as the guards or the gardaí.

  * * *

  Direct translation: “the Guardian of the Peace.”

  1

  The high hedge around the abandoned house dulled the sound of traffic and shielded the group from the curious eyes of the crowd that had already started to gather. Soon they’d be joined by news cameras and journalists and the questions would start.

  But for now, Detective Garda Sergeant West stood quietly, unable to take his eyes from the battered brown suitcase that lay open among the weeds. He couldn’t see the contents from where he stood, but the case was small. If there was a body inside, it had to be smaller still. With a deep breath, he moved closer, taking careful steps through the undergrowth with his bootee-covered feet until he was close enough to see, breathing slowly in and out to calm the sudden painful grip he felt in his belly, moving closer still to be within touching distance. Squatting down, his eyes focused on the small, skeletonised body curled up inside.

  ‘Female,’ the man already squatting opposite said quietly.

  Detective Garda Andrews wasn’t a man given to taking uneducated guesses. West examined the small body more carefully. The child’s hair was long, but he wouldn’t have been able to say, with certainty, which sex it was. Then he saw it. A small hair slide almost lost in the tangle of unkempt hair. ‘That’s probably as much as we’re going to learn from her clothes,’ he said, eyeing the remnants of fabric that partially covered the small bones.

  He sat back on his haunches. Had the child died here, curled up and alone? Or was she killed and tossed away like garbage? Either way, it was grim. ‘She’s so small,’ he said. ‘How old d’y’think? Three or four?’

  Andrews, picturing his five-year-old son, Petey, shook his head. ‘Maybe not that old.’

  West stood and looked around. The front garden was long, the house barely visible behind overgrown shrubs and trees. It looked abandoned. ‘You know anything about this place?’

  Andrews pushed to his feet and stood beside him. ‘No, I don’t, maybe one of the uniforms will.’ Turning, he looked back toward the gate where a number of uniformed gardaí were unrolling crime-scene tape. ‘Garda Mackin,’ he called, raising his hand at the same time to beckon him over. ‘Do you know anything about this place?’ he asked when the garda hurried to his side.

  Garda Mackin was young but eager to impress. ‘The owner died a couple of years ago,’ he said promptly. ‘The new owner, a nephew I think, put it up for sale almost immediately, but then the housing market crashed and he withdrew it. I guess he’s waiting for the market to recover again. There was a problem with squatters about a year ago. It took a while to get them out and he boarded up the downstairs windows afterwards. I don’t know the exact date,’ he blushed and added hurriedly, ‘but I can get it for you.’

  Andrews shook his head. That kind of information would be easy to find once they were back in the station. ‘Anything else?’

  Mackin, wishing he had something exciting to add, shook his head regretfully. ‘No, we kept a close eye on it for a while, but there were no reports of anything suspicious.’ He waved a hand toward the street behind. ‘It’s a quiet road. The neighbours are quick to pick up a phone if anything fishy is going on.’

  Andrews dismissed him with a nod and turned to West. ‘So, it’s been pretty much left alone for the last year. I’ll get the dates when we get back.’

  West pointed toward the brambles and nettles that had invaded what had once been an orderly hedge. ‘They’re a good deterrent, Peter.’

  ‘And there’s usually a chain around the gate,’ Andrews told him. ‘The uniforms that answered the call used bolt cutters to get it off.’

  Raised voices alerted them to the arrival of Niall Kennedy, the pathologist. With a wave, he headed in their direction. He was wearing the biggest Wellington boots either man had ever seen, lifting his feet with exaggerated effort that made both men smile and shake their heads. Kennedy was a short man, not above five-five, and the boots, designed for a much taller person, made him look ridiculous.

  ‘We’ve a new supplies officer,’ he explained, stopping in front of them, ‘he must think we’re all giants. I’ll have to drop in on him and explain that it’s my personality that’s oversized, not my feet. But never mind that,’ he said, waving it away like an irritating fly. ‘Sorry, I’m late. The traffic was stop-go the whole blasted way. A most inconvenient time to find a dead body,’ he joked before his eyes looked past the two men and saw the victim. ‘Ah, God,’ he said, his face falling.

  West wanted to snap that God wasn’t very much in evidence at the scene, but he bit his tongue. They all had their own way of dealing with what they faced. If a prayer, to the god that West wasn’t sure he believed in anymore, helped the pathologist, who was he to cri
ticise?

  He stepped away from the immediate scene, Andrews following behind, and they waited silently.

  They weren’t waiting long. ‘There’s not much to tell you,’ Kennedy said, joining them, his face unusually grave. ‘There’s no obvious sign of injury, no broken bones.’ Pulling his gloves off, he rolled them up and shoved them into his pocket. ‘Based on ornamentation, it’s likely to be female, but that’s all I can say until I get everything back to the morgue.’

  ‘Any idea how long she’s been there?’ West asked.

  The pathologist shrugged. ‘At a very rough guess, I’d say several months. I’ll have a better idea after the post-mortem.’

  ‘Wouldn’t being closed up in the case have slowed decomposition down? Could we be looking at a longer time period?’ West asked.

  Kennedy shook his head. ‘It would have slowed the initial decomp, certainly, but once those insects got in, the interior of the case would have become wet and warm and the process would have been accelerated.’ He sighed heavily. ‘We’re really busy thanks to that car smash in Bray yesterday, but I’ll bump this poor scrap to the head of the queue. It’s not going to take very long.’

  And with that, he left, his gait less exaggerated but still enough to raise an automatic smile on everyone he passed.

  His departure was a nod to the garda technical team to move in. Normally, they were a noisy bunch, shouting directions, commenting on the scene, calling for various pieces of equipment. But this time, their silence was unsettling. Even these veterans of multiple crime scenes were silenced by the tiny body so carelessly abandoned.

  The boy who’d found the suitcase was standing quietly near the gate. Already unnaturally pale, his lower lip trembled and his eyes grew larger as the two six-foot tall men approached.

  With a hand on his arm, West drew Andrews to a halt. ‘Maybe you’d better have a word with the uniforms to see if they’ve organised a house-to-house yet. If the two of us get any closer to that boy, he’s going to pass out.’

  The boy looked relieved when Andrews moved away, but his lower lip still trembled.

  West gave the boy a reassuring smile. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  The boy gulped and looked at him from the corner of his eye. ‘Toby Ferguson.’

  ‘I know you’ve already told the other gardaí, Toby,’ he said, ‘but can you tell me what happened?’

  It was a simple story. The boy was walking to school with friends when one of them, for a prank, threw his backpack over the hedge into the garden. ‘They ran off and left me,’ he said. ‘I had to climb over the gate to get in. My bag was lying among the nettles.’ He held up his hands to show the distinct raised lesions he’d suffered as a result. ‘When I picked it up, it disturbed some of those bigger weeds. That’s when I saw the suitcase.’ He blinked and looked even younger. ‘I didn’t mean any harm; I just wanted to see what was inside.’ His gulp was louder this time. ‘When I saw what it was, I came away and rang the guards.’ The smile he tried was forced, shaky, and didn’t last long. ‘Then I rang my mum,’ he said. ‘She’s coming to take me home.’

  Before West could answer, a woman rushed through the gate, hair askew, forehead lined with worry. ‘Toby!’ The cry was part relief, part terror. She pulled the boy into her arms and held him tightly. Her eyes closed for a second and when they opened, they were fixed on West in indignation. ‘What the hell is going on here?’

  West explained briefly. ‘We’ll need Toby to sign a statement of what happened. I’ll send someone to your home, if that’s acceptable.’

  Mrs Ferguson kept her arms wrapped tightly around her son. ‘He said there was a body in the suitcase.’

  West nodded. It would be in the papers soon enough, there was no point in keeping it a secret at this stage. ‘It’s the skeleton of a small child.’

  ‘A child,’ she said in horror. But her look of horror quickly turned to puzzlement. ‘A child?’

  West knew what she was thinking. There’d been no reports of a missing child. If there had, they’d all know about it. A missing child stayed in the headlines until found, one way or another.

  There wasn’t an explanation to offer her, so he addressed himself to the boy. ‘You did the right thing, Toby. Thank you.’ He looked back at the mother. ‘You can leave now, Mrs Ferguson. We’ll be in touch.’ Turning, he saw a crowd had gathered outside the gate. ‘I’ll have someone walk you to your car,’ he said. ‘Where are you parked?’

  ‘On the roadway,’ she said, and with an attempt at humour, added, ‘I hope I didn’t get a ticket.’

  West gave a quick smile. Gallows humour. He was used to it.

  A raised hand brought Mackin running to his side. ‘Walk Mrs Ferguson and Toby to their car, please,’ he said, before looking around for Andrews. The garden was empty apart from the technicians working methodically. Already, to one side, a pile of sample containers was building up. Maybe they’d get lucky.

  He took a last look around at the sad resting place of the child and walked slowly toward the gate where he pulled the overshoes off and dumped them into the rubbish sack that one of the uniforms had set out.

  Andrews was busy instructing the uniformed gardaí. The house-to-house was unlikely to turn up anything useful, but you never could tell and anyway it was standard operational procedure. If they didn’t tick every damn box someone would complain. And West was determined not to give anybody cause.

  Ken Blundell’s face swam into his head as it had done repeatedly during the two months since his death. A death that was a direct result of a foolish decision West had made. He’d been lucky. His career could have ended, but Inspector Morrison had come through for him, telling the powers that be that the decision to send Denise Blundell on an anger management course rather than prosecute her for assault, had been his. Morrison had lied for him, in fact, and as a result, it had quickly blown over. It wasn’t something West was going to forget in a hurry. He also couldn’t forget, that if he’d followed the rule of the law and prosecuted Denise Blundell, her husband would still be alive.

  From now on, he was determined to be a model, law-abiding officer.

  He looked up and down the road. Beech Park Road. You couldn’t get a quieter suburban street but he wondered bleakly what other horrors were hidden away behind the closed doors. On that maudlin thought, he walked briskly to where Andrews was giving final orders to the enthusiastic gardaí that stood around him with all the eagerness of red setters desperately wanting to get off the leash.

  It brought a grin to West’s face. Andrews wouldn’t let them go until he was happy they all knew exactly what to do. He wasn’t a man who believed in improvisation.

  ‘Let’s get out of here before the reporters show up,’ West said as the last officer headed away.

  Andrews took a final look around and nodded. ‘Not much more we can do here.’

  They were in luck. As they climbed into their car, they saw a van with Raidió Teilifís Éireann blazoned along its side pull up. An eager news reporter climbed out followed by a camera-wielding companion. They’d be looking for someone to question. Without waiting, West put the car into reverse, and took off. ‘Phew!’ he said. ‘A respite, Peter.’

  ‘It’ll be brief,’ Andrews said. ‘Nothing gets the press baying for blood more than the death of a child. We’ll have reporters from RTE haunting us until we give them some answers.’

  West negotiated the heavy commuter traffic, switching from lane to lane. ‘I’ve been searching my memory,’ he said eventually, moving the gearstick into neutral as the traffic stalled. ‘We haven’t had an unsolved missing child case in Dublin, have we?’

  ‘There was one reported in Cork about a year ago,’ Andrews said. ‘A mother and a toddler went missing. The mother’s body was found in the River Lee a month later, but the child’s was never found. It’s assumed she drowned. There haven’t been any others that I’ve heard about.’

  West shot him a glance. He guessed any police officer with a
small child made a point of being aware of what went on. The traffic started moving. He changed into gear and minutes later pulled into his parking space outside Foxrock Garda station.

  The desk sergeant, Tom Blunt, looked up as they came through the door. ‘A bad one,’ he said simply before returning to his computer.

  Neither man commented. What was there to say?

  2

  In his office, West sat behind the desk and picked up the phone. The sooner Inspector Morrison knew, the better prepared he’d be when the phones started ringing, demanding information.

  He gave him the little they knew. ‘The body was obviously there for several months, Inspector,’ he said. ‘We’ve been promised autopsy results later today; until we have more to go on, we’re just following standard procedures.’

  Inspector Morrison grunted. ‘A child. I can already hear the press demanding answers. We’ve no outstanding missing person reports, I assume?’

  ‘None,’ West said. ‘It’s going to be a difficult one.’

  Morrison didn’t need to be told. ‘Keep me informed,’ he said and hung up.

  Putting the phone down, West looked up with a half-smile as Andrews came in with a mug of coffee in each hand. He took it without comment. ‘Morrison is up to date,’ he said, taking a sip.