Page 26 of Her Last Walk Home

‘Things have been hectic. I suppose I saw him this morning. I’ve been off site a lot today. Had a meeting with the boss. Christ on a bike, this is going to damage potential sales even more.’

His concern for his colleague had been quickly replaced with thoughts of his job, she noted. He pulled his shoulders back and made to stand. She stepped back to allow him out of the car.

‘I’ll need John’s contact details. Next of kin. That sort of thing.’

‘In the office. Everything’s there.’ He pointed to the cabin situated halfway down the unfinished site, behind a chain-link fence.

‘Garda Lei will accompany you. You’ll have to come to the station to make a full statement.’

‘I’ll do anything to help. Poor fecker.’

Lottie watched as Lei walked off with Patrick. The site manager, his shoulders hunched, seemed to have aged a decade in the few minutes she’d been speaking to him.

She turned to find Boyd.

‘Our dead man has a name. John Morgan. He was the foreman on the site.’

‘Well, that was kind of obvious.’

‘That he was the foreman?’

‘That he worked here. His clothes and all.’

‘Did you ever consider becoming a detective, Boyd?’

‘No need to be sarcastic. I was only saying…’

‘Forget it. Ask your fan club in there to get the forensic report to me asap. We have to move on this before the trail goes cold.’

‘You mean Grainne? Lottie, why are you resorting to conversing in clichés?’

‘Boyd?’

‘What?’

‘I mean this in the nicest way possible, but could you ever feck off?’

24

Jane Dore sat in the cold, sterile surroundings of her cutting room in the Dead House. The body of Laura Nolan lay on a steel table. It had arrived while she’d been at the Pine Grove house, and she’d got to work as soon as she returned.

She made her way around Laura’s naked body once again. Her clothes had been inspected, bagged and tagged. Samples had been taken to be sent to the lab, but even under a microscope she hadn’t found any trace of semen on the clothing or underwear. Perhaps when she opened the body it would tell her a different story. Still, the fact that the young woman had been fully clothed pointed to little or no sexual assault.

She examined the body head to toe. Besides the three stab wounds, there was bruising on her neck. Studying the discoloration, Jane was sure that partial strangulation had come first, followed by the knife wounds. She could see that the young woman had applied fake tan recently, and her nails were gel. She swabbed beneath each, taking the samples to inspect under a microscope before they too were transported to the forensics lab. Under the right index fingernail, she found what looked like a tiny deposit of clay. There was also a trace on the girl’s neck.Had it come from the ground where she was found? Once it was analysed, its source should be clearer.

She scraped and swabbed, then inspected the stab wounds and found they had been administered without hesitation. The killer had struck each site cleanly once. In and out. Had the neck wound been to hide the strangulation? Perhaps, and it was likely the arm wound happened as Laura tried to defend herself following the strangulation attempt. This wound was to the back of the girl’s lower right arm. Definitely a defensive action, Jane concluded. The chest wound was the final one. She’d have expected some hesitancy here, but the knife appeared to have struck cleanly through the clothing. She noticed fibres in the wound, and to the naked eye they matched what Laura had been wearing.

Turning, she looked at photos of the site where the young woman had been found. Little blood.

‘Where did he attack you, sweetheart?’ she murmured. She was certain that Laura had already been dead or dying when she was left in the grounds of the cinema complex at Connell retail park.

Lottie had hardly had time to catch her breath on the drive to the Tullamore mortuary. Now she watched as Jane detailed Laura Nolan’s post-mortem, grateful to the pathologist for pushing the girl up the list.

‘He tried to strangle her,’ the pathologist said. ‘She may have lashed out in defence, and he stabbed her lower arm. The stab to her neck was perhaps to hide evidence of the attempted strangulation. There would have been a lot of blood, and it would have sprayed the killer. The final stab was to her chest.Upwards thrust through her clothing. He was either smaller than her if standing, or they both might have been seated.’

‘Could she have been in a car?’

‘It’s possible. What makes you say that?’

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