Still no sign of Lucille.
I went back to my perch and watched her place for a while, gave it a couple of hours then tried the cottage phone. No answer. Fuck it. I went in.
A metal spatula to unlock the latch on the transom of the sash window and I was standing in her living room. Nothing. She wasn’t in any of the other rooms either. The bed hadn’t been slept in.
A mobile rang on my way back out, through the hall. A small vase had been knocked off its table. Flowers had fallen out of it, and the carpet was wet. An accident? Lucille had opened the door and bumped into it? Who knows? The mobile lay next to it. I checked the incoming number on the display, let it ring out then rang the number back.
Chilly Winters answered. ‘Winters.’
Winters had rung her.
Me and him aren’t talking, so I hung up. I was glad I hadn’t answered it – he knew my voice. And he’d obviously done his homework and knew about Lucille. He was bound to anyway. If I could work out that she’d made the call to the Top Towers, so could he.
The mobile rang again. I pressed the button this time, but didn’t say a thing. ‘Lucille? Lucille, I know you’ve just rung me. This is Detective Sergeant Winters. Lucille, it’s vital you contact us about last night. Your life may be in danger. Lucille?’
If that didn’t tell me she hadn’t been to see him, nothing would.
I checked her car. Gemma’s handbag was under a coat on the back seat. In the boot was a suitcase containing Lucille’s clothes. Milk, coffee, cereal and things were in a box. Who the hell moves into a holiday home and leaves their gear and stuff outside?
I went back to my car and waited.
Know the problem with weighing up every possibility in sight but ignoring the unlikely ones? The unlikely ones don’t add up. They only add up when some unknown factor arrives and you say to yourself: ah, so that’s what happened; that explains it. Well, an unknown factor was arriving. How he’d found out about Clonkeelin, I couldn’t even begin to guess since only me and Lucille knew about it. But there he was. Unless, like me, he had a twin, Picasso was getting out of a Transit and going into Lucille’s driveway.
OK, I could speculate as to what I now thought was going on here, but I’d be wasting your time. I didn’t know. What I did know was that Picasso went straight for Lucille’s car and he was searching it in a way that told me that whatever it was he thought he was after, that’s where it was. Every inch of it. And the only way he could’ve known that the laptop – he had to be after that – was in it was by being told. And the only one who knew it was in there was Lucille.
He’d grabbed her.
The question was: would he lead me to her? Or to put it another way: was there anything left of her that was worth being led to?
I’d already been back through the laptop of course. Twenty-six different clients were recorded on it. I’d figured maybe Picasso had been one of them. Most of their names and addresses were listed. Ted Lyle had checked out some of their financial details and had listed them on the hard disk, together with personal stuff, wives’ names, kids and grandkids, in some cases. I’d thought Picasso might have first got to know Gemma by picking her up at an earlier date and going up to her room as just an ordinary punter. By the way he’d gone straight to her room the night he killed her, he had to have known exactly where to find her. How did he know that? Anyway, like everything else, it hadn’t given me the answers I’d been looking for. So I tailed him.
To be honest, even if he hadn’t grabbed Lucille, he was bound to try. The news on the radio’d said that a young woman had rung reception and had called Gemma by name. Lucille was her flatmate. He’d have worked it out that she might have been the caller and gone after her. So I’d expected to catch up with him one way or the other, even if it meant waiting until Gemma’s body’d been released for burial. He’d think Lucille would go to the funeral. He’d snatch her there. Bound to. She was the only one who could ID him, if I was reading this right.
I’ll tell you something else about him – when I saw him first on that laptop, a feeling of déjà vu hit me. I was sure I knew the bastard from somewhere. An older version of someone I’d met years ago. Couldn’t place him though.
Oddly enough, when that funeral did eventually take place – a small cortège it was, Gemma not having any family, just a bunch of mates and a couple of newspaper and TV people – I saw one woman there who got into a car with a Longford plate. Angela Reading maybe. Winters might’ve found that letter of mine and phoned Angela to tell her that the daughter she’d written to was being buried. Wonder what her response was. Denied all knowledge of course. Crying her eyes out she was. Everybody’s got a story to tell.
For now I stuck with Picasso’s.
I followed him to a detached house in an avenue out the Cork road – what you might call leafy middle-class suburbia. And a bit with it if some of the cars were anything to go by. No car in Picasso’s
