Hurt (DS Lucy Black) (17 page)

‘We think he was grooming teenagers online. Someone online who had created a range of sock puppet accounts groomed Karen Hughes, the girl found dead on the railway tracks. That same person arranged to meet another girl last night at eight o’ clock. Carlin turned up at the meeting, then did a runner when he spotted us.’

Fagan listened, threading the pen in her hand from between one finger to the next as she did so. ‘How many accounts?’

‘We don’t know for sure. Certainly more than a dozen.’

‘Are you sure it was Peter Carlin who arranged all this?’

‘It looks that way. We think he was working with Gene Kay.’

‘The fire in Gobnascale? I heard that this morning, too.’

‘They unearthed a collection of images in his house. Including some of both Karen and the girl Carlin had arranged to meet.’

‘That might make more sense,’ Fagan commented. ‘Carlin had paedophiliac proclivities, certainly. But Peter Carlin couldn’t have arranged a dozen fake identities, let alone have been able to manipulate a child through a process of grooming. Carlin had a fairly extreme dependent personality disorder.’

‘A personality disorder? Would that not predispose him to something like this?’

Fagan shook her head. ‘Carlin was intellectually limited, to put it mildly. More importantly, though, he displayed almost all the defining features of dependency: extreme passivity, tolerating abusive relationships in order to feel wanted; not trusting his own judgement on anything. He was pathologically indecisive, unless someone told him what to do. He’d come in here some days with two pairs of socks and ask me which I thought he should wear for the day. He’d never be able to start something off his own bat. He’d need to be told what to do, to the letter.’

‘And he’d follow the direction because ...?’

‘Because he had a need to be accepted. If Carlin was involved in what you’re saying – and I’ve no reason to doubt you – then someone was telling him what to do. Someone powerful in his eyes, someone whom he trusted and whose approbation he needed. If anything, Peter Carlin would have been just another puppet.’

‘Could it have been Gene Kay?’

‘Maybe. I spoke with him a few times to do a psychiatric evaluation after his release from prison a few years back. He wasn’t the most charismatic or trusting. He didn’t strike me as the type to work with others. They’d make an unlikely pairing. That said, stranger things have happened.’

‘So it’s possible that Kay controlled Carlin?’

‘It’s possible,’ Fagan conceded. ‘Anything is possible. But I’d be fairly certain that the idea of Carlin grooming someone is a non-starter. Though if he did deliberately drive his car off the road, it would have been because someone told him to. There was no one in the car with him?’

Lucy shook her head.

‘He wasn’t on the phone with anyone? Perhaps he’d tried to contact someone if he was being pursued. He’d have needed someone to tell him to run.’

‘And if they told him to drive his car into a lake?’

‘If he admired them enough – was controlled enough by them – he’d do it.’

‘Jesus,’ Lucy said, standing. ‘I almost feel sorry for him now. Almost,’ she added.

Fagan smiled lightly. ‘I was sorry to hear about Karen Hughes. I worked with her over the self-harming before she was transferred to the children’s team. She was a lovely girl,’ Fagan added, standing to see her out.

Lucy nodded, not trusting herself to speak. ‘She was,’ she managed finally.

After leaving the block, she phoned through to the Incident Room to speak with Burns. She wondered if she should mention her doubts about whether Carlin going off the road was an accident. If he’d been on the phone, it would have been recovered when the car was pulled out of the lough. Unless he had been told to toss it out the window. It might explain why he’d had the driver’s window down when he hit the water, despite the cold of the night. If that was the case, it would never be found.

‘The team are out,’ the officer who answered the call told her. ‘They’ve gone to the Carlin house. Forensics have found a body. A young girl.’

‘Is it Sarah Finn?’ Lucy asked quickly, hoping that it would not be and yet aware that, even if it wasn’t, it would still be someone’s daughter. Another lost girl.

Lucy saw again, unbidden, in her mind, the image of Sarah Finn she had seen earlier, the girl’s gaze not meeting that of the camera, her eyes downcast; a child already broken.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied.

The Foreglen, along which Carlin’s house was situated, was one of the main routes out of the city, heading first to Dungiven, then on over the Glenshane Pass and down towards Belfast. It was the same route along which Sarah Finn’s phone had been found.

Carlin’s house was a two-storey block affair, the yellowed paint weathered, blistering and crumbling off the walls. To the rear were a number of dilapidated farm buildings, dominated over by a rusted barn, the roof jousts visible through the wide gaps worn through the corrugated metal front sections. A wooden door slanted off its hinges, exposing the insides.

Lucy parked up behind a marked car whose lights still soundlessly flashed. Its driver was on the phone and waved a single gloved hand salute out at her as she passed.

Lucy looked around for someone from CID. Despite her best efforts, the whole way from Derry, she’d been unable to contact anyone who might be able to tell her for certain that the dead body that had been found was Sarah Finn. There was a uniformed officer standing at the main door of the house while Forensics officers moved in and out wordlessly. Despite the activity, Lucy was struck by how quiet the scene was. Those who passed did so without speech, their heads lowered, as if in show of respect to the one dead. It was always so when the crime involved children.

‘Is the Chief Super about?’ she asked the uniform, flashing her warrant card.

‘He’s at the scene.’

‘Is it inside?’ Lucy asked, nodding past the man towards the hallway of the house beyond.

The uniform shook his head. ‘There’s a pond up at the top of the next field across. They found a pit there where he’d been dumping stuff for years. She was in there.’

‘Is it Sarah Finn?’

The uniform shook his head. ‘I’ve no idea, Sergeant; I’ve not been up.’

Lucy thanked him, then cut round the side of the house in the direction the man had suggested. To the rear of the house, standing on bricks, was the wheelless chassis of a car, the frame exposed and, like the barn, brown with rust. Lucy glanced over her shoulder, observing the back of the house. She could barely make out any movement in the rooms, the film of dirt on the windows being so thick.

The uniform had told her that the site was in the second field across. The first through which she trudged was water-logged, her boots sinking into the ground, the beer brown water pooling around her feet with each step she took. Eventually, she worked out to walk the circumference, the earth being a little firmer near the hedge bordering the field. The sky above was clear, the sun low, the shadows of the trees stretching across the grass towards her.

She glanced around, attempting to gauge the distance to Carlin’s nearest neighbour, but there were none immediately visible.

She reached the top of the first field and, cutting across to the left through a gap in the hedging, saw in the distance a crime scene tape already tied between two trees. Beyond it, a team of people in forensic suits were moving about. Using the edge of the field again, she was halfway across when she met Tara coming in the opposite direction.

‘Is it Sarah Finn?’ Lucy asked as she drew near.

‘I don’t know,’ Tara said. ‘I don’t think so. Apparently it looks like it’s been there for some time. Years, like.’ Without stopping, Tara trudged past. ‘I’ve to get food in,’ she offered.

Lucy felt immediate relief at the news, then felt instantly guilty at having done so. That the dead girl was not Sarah Finn did not mean that there was not still a dead girl.

When she reached the crime tape, she saw Burns and Mickey standing to one side, watching the Forensics team working. She understood now Tara’s shortness; Mickey seemed to be constantly at Burns’s side, while Tara herself was being dispatched on minor tasks. Lucy reflected that at least with Fleming she had never felt under-appreciated.

Lucy flashed her card again at the officer standing at the scene tape and ducked under. ‘You’ll need one of these,’ the officer said, handing her a face mask.

‘You’re back,’ Burns said, unnecessarily, from behind his own mask as she approached him.

‘It’s not Sarah Finn?’ Lucy answered.

‘Seems not,’ he said. ‘This one is old. Could have been in there ten years, they think. They’ve found all kinds of stuff. The place was full of asbestos. You’ll need your mask.’

Lucy quickly pulled it on, pulling the straps taut against her scalp.

The pit, beyond where they stood, was about twenty feet wide, though she could not from this angle tell its depth. A few of the CSIs, dressed in industrial protection gear, were already removing the asbestos, sealed in plastic, shifting it to one side to allow the officers access to what lay beneath.

‘They found a black dog in the house,’ Burns said. ‘We’re checking the hairs against those found on Karen.’

Lucy nodded.

‘They’ve found all kinds of stuff in the house,’ Burns continued. ‘Traces of fluids all over the place.’

‘Blood?’

‘And the rest,’ Burns added. ‘It looks like Carlin was doing all kinds of things to all kinds of people in there. An orgy site, one of the SOCOs said.’

‘I spoke with Noleen Fagan,’ Lucy said. ‘Carlin’s psychiatrist in the Mental Health team. She reckons it’s unlikely he would be our groomer.’

‘How had he not come to our attention before?’ Mickey asked. ‘Surely he should have been flagged up.’

‘He had dependent personality disorder,’ Lucy said. ‘It doesn’t mean he’s likely to be a criminal. In fact, Fagan reckoned he probably wouldn’t have been capable of grooming anyone.’

‘Is she sure?’ Burns asked. ‘The evidence is pretty compelling at this stage.’

‘He needed to be told what to do, by people whose approval he sought. He may even have been told to drive off the road the other night.’

‘What?’ Burns asked, exasperated.

‘He looked like he swerved off the road deliberately,’ Lucy said. ‘Fagan suggested he might have been instructed to do so by someone. Maybe someone he was speaking to on the phone.’

Mickey scoffed. ‘Or maybe he was on his phone and lost control. Nothing complicated about it.’

Lucy ignored him, addressing Burns. ‘Fagan reckons he’d be more a puppet than a manipulator.’

‘More puppets,’ Burns said. ‘This bloody case is built on puppets.’

Lucy shrugged and relayed the rest of what Fagan had said.

‘Then he must have been in cahoots with Kay. He does the arranging, Carlin does the dirty work. Then they used this place as their spot for carrying out the abuse,’ Mickey said.

‘I thought that too. However, Fagan reckoned Kay wouldn’t have been the type to work with others.’

Burns considered the comment, though Lucy could already sense without conviction.

‘We’ll wait to see what Forensics pull from the two houses. If we can connect one with the other, we’re sorted.’

One of the suited men approached them, a camera held in his hand.

‘This is what we’ve got, sir,’ he said, handing Burns the camera. ‘It’s the best I can get for you at the moment, until we get all the asbestos moved. She’s down near the bottom.’

Burns held one hand over the viewing screen at the back of the camera as he flicked through the images the man had taken. Mickey craned his head to see too. Lucy waited until he was done, then asked to see the images. Since she had started in the PPU, over a year earlier, four children in the area under the age of eighteen had gone missing who had never been found. That was low; she knew that there had been twenty-two missing across the North in a previous year alone. If this child had been in the ground for ten years, based on those figures, it could be any one of forty or fifty children in the Foyle district area who had been reported missing within that time period. That was assuming that the child had been reported missing in the Foyle district to start with.

Burns scanned through the images for a few moments, then handed the camera to Lucy. ‘See if anything stands out.’

The body was small, clearly a child, though the legs carried a good length. ‘What height is she?’

‘We think about five foot,’ the SOCO said. ‘She’s measuring four foot ten, so allowing for some curvature and that.’

She wore a T-shirt, yellowed and grubby with dirt, but originally white, Lucy guessed. She wore baggy jeans. Her hair seemed blonde. Her face, though wizened, was not decayed as Lucy had expected.

‘He buried her in quicklime, we think,’ the man said. ‘It helped preserve her.’

Lucy nodded. Contrary to popular belief, quicklime didn’t accelerate decomposition. Indeed, it was quite the reverse. She could understand why Carlin might have used it. If the farm on which he lived had been functioning at one stage, he’d have had to cover any of the animals that had died and been buried to kill the smell of the bodies.

‘I can follow up on the clothes,’ Lucy said. ‘See if it matches any Missing Persons investigations.’

‘And the shoe,’ the SOCO said. ‘I’ve a close-up of it further on.’

Lucy scrolled through the images. One of the last was indeed close up on the girl’s shoe. She wore a chunky black shoe, whose sole was almost three inches thick. At the strap, Lucy could make out an off-white skull and crossbones motif.

‘Just the one shoe?’

‘So far,’ the man replied.

‘I’ll run both through the older cases.’

‘Do that,’ Burns said. ‘What about the Finn girl? Any luck tracing the stepfather?’

‘He’s not ...’ Lucy began, then decided better of it. ‘The last address we had for him was sold a while back. He didn’t leave a forwarding address, but I’m going to try the estate agent who handled the sale to see if we can track him down through them.’

‘What about the phone we found yesterday? Have ICS found anything on it?’