I Saw You (8 page)

‘Yes.’ Margaret nodded. ‘I used to think it was all nurture, and nature didn’t matter, but I’m not so sure any longer. Anyway, it’s good that you’re
like him. It must make it easier for your mother. To feel she still has a part of him in you.’

‘Well, as long as she doesn’t want me to do law. I’m not going to get the points in the Leaving Cert for that. I’ll be lucky if I get in to arts. But I don’t care.
And she’s so miserable since my sister died that she won’t care either.’

She opened the book again and flicked through the pages. Margaret watched her. Listened to her voice as she read the poem aloud again. Joined in as she walked along the path towards the main
road:

She went through the high gates, then walked away towards the canal. She would pick up a taxi and be back in the house by the sea in no time. She was tired. She would sleep when she got home.
And perhaps this time it would be a sleep without dreams.

‘Why are you so sure it was suicide? Why not an accident?’ McLoughlin perched on the edge of a high stool at the lab bench that served as Johnny Harris’s
desk, lunch counter and lectern.

Harris picked a black olive from a plastic container. He popped it into his mouth and sucked hard, rolled it around, then spat the stone into his cupped hand. ‘Mmm. These are good. Where
did you get them?’ He helped himself to another.

‘Middle Eastern shop at the end of South Richmond Street. The guys behind the counter are an unfriendly lot, but they have lovely stuff. They keep those olives loose. And lots of others
too. Big, small, green, black, stuffed, unstuffed. But they also have tins of the small green ones that are really good and incredibly cheap. Here,’ he thrust a hand into the plastic bag that
nestled at his feet, ‘have one.’

He put the tin on top of Harris’s newspaper, obscuring the half-finished Sudoku puzzle towards which Harris’s gaze kept straying. Harris picked up the tin and scrutinized it, then
put it down again. ‘Got anything else of interest in that bag?’ His cheeks bulged with olives.

‘A bunch of coriander, a lump of feta, some hummus.’ McLoughlin dumped them out. ‘A large packet of ground cumin, some paprika – oh, and these are nice.’

‘Let’s see?’ Harris was positively drooling. ‘What are they?’

‘Pickled green peppers. Very hot, but dee-licious.’

Harris pushed his glasses up on top of his head and looked speculatively at McLoughlin. ‘This is all great. And I’m sure we could carry on a long and fascinating conversation about
the nature of Middle Eastern food and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, but tell me, Michael, what do you really want?’

His friend didn’t look good, McLoughlin thought. There were dark circles under his eyes and his skin, which usually had the ruddy health of a sailor, was grey and wan. ‘And
what’s up with you? Too many late nights? Is that a healthy social life or are you sleepless for some other reason?’ McLoughlin rummaged in the bag again and pulled out a large round of
flatbread. He broke off a piece. ‘Like some?’

Harris nodded, and for a moment McLoughlin thought tears were making his eyes shine so brightly.

‘There’s a knife in the drawer.’ He reached over and pulled it out.

McLoughlin split the bread in half and filled it with hummus. He handed it to Johnny. ‘So, Chicko’s gone, has he?’

McLoughlin had never been able to understand Johnny Harris. He was a straight guy in so many ways. Great sailor and tennis-player. A churchgoer to boot. But such terrible taste in men. Chicko,
small, dark and handsome, had been the last.

‘Chicko? You want to know about the lovely Chicko? He said I was doing his head in. Whatever that means. So I’m on my own again. Footloose and fancy-free.’ Harris managed a
weak smile. Then he cleared away the remains of the food and wiped the counter-top with his handkerchief. He got up and opened one of the huge filing cabinets that lined the walls and tugged out
Marina Spencer’s records. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘let’s have a look at these.’

They were the photographs taken post-mortem, arranged in chronological order. The first showed Marina’s body lying twisted on the rocks of the rapids. Her hair streamed out behind her
head, pulled free by the flow of water. She was wearing a long dress with an exotic print. Her feet were bare. There were close-ups of her face, her hands, her torso. Her cheekbones and chin were
bruised, but the rest of her body seemed untouched.

‘Now, these are the ones that were taken here.’ Johnny spread them out.

McLoughlin had seen such photographs tens, possibly hundreds of times before. They didn’t shock him in the way they used to. Now he could break the image into its constituent parts. He
knew what to notice. And what to ignore. He knew that it was important not to see the person as a person. ‘What did you look for?’

‘The usual. Signs of violence. Strangulation. Haemorrhage. Abrasions. Bruising etcetera. She has bruises on her face and, see here, on her ribcage, knees and thighs. But they’re
consistent with being carried down on to the rocks by the force of the water.’

‘And nothing else, no sign that she was restrained, tied up in any way?’

‘No, absolutely nothing. See here, these close-ups of her wrists and ankles? Not a scratch.’

‘And she definitely drowned?’

‘Absolutely. Here, I have the content of her lungs. See? Lake water. And we both know that if she’d been dead when she went under she wouldn’t have breathed so there would have
been no water.’

‘And what about her blood? What did that show?’

‘OK. Alcohol, three hundred and sixty mls, traces of cocaine. Oh, and LSD. Lysergic acid diethylamide, the king or queen of the hallucinogens. A synthetic alkaloid related to ergot. She
was out of it.’

‘“Out of it”? Is that a technical term?’ McLoughlin raised his eyebrows.

Harris smiled grimly. ‘Very smart. LSD interferes with the natural action of serotonin in the brain. Induces severe hallucinations, what could be called temporary insanity, similar to
schizophrenia. Given the combination of drugs she’d ingested, she would also have had bouts of nausea, followed by intermittent unconsciousness, leading to depressed breathing and eventually,
possibly, death. So she was definitely out of it.’

‘But not so out of it that she wouldn’t have been able to get herself into the boat? If she was that bad I can’t see how she could have rowed out into the lake. She must have
gone quite a distance because otherwise she would have drifted into the shore close to the house. Where was the boat kept?’

‘There’s a photo somewhere. It was usually tied up at the jetty close to the house. But I doubt she would have been able to row from the house nearly the length of the lake. It must
have been somewhere else that night.’

McLoughlin picked up a magnifying-glass and studied the pictures of Marina’s head and face. ‘And where did the dinghy end up?’

‘Umm, let me see . . . Here.’ Harris rummaged through the pile. ‘Yeah, here. It got stuck at the top of the rapids, jammed up against the rocks. So they were both caught in the
same current.’

‘But would she really have been able to manage in the boat? I would have thought she’d have passed out, and the boat would have drifted back into the shore, or even if it had ended
up stuck on the rapids, she would have been found under a seat or something. From the amount of alcohol in her system it seems to me, the humble layman, that she might have died anyway from alcohol
poisoning, but she wouldn’t have drowned. What do you reckon?’

‘Well, I reckon that what you say makes sense except for one thing. Have a look at the photo of the dinghy again. See there – what’s that?’ Harris took the
magnifying-glass from him and angled it over the shiny black-and-white print. ‘What is it?’

‘Yeah, a bottle of Smirnoff. So what you’re saying is that she got into the boat, rowed herself out, was probably drinking at the same time, and chucked herself over the
side?’

‘Well, that’s consistent with the blood analysis. The fact that her blood alcohol concentration was so high suggests that she died very soon after drinking it.’

‘And what about the others at the party that night?’

‘I’m not the person to ask, Michael. You’d better go and talk to Brian Dooley. I’m sure you’ll have no problem getting his files.’

‘But why suicide, Johnny? I can see accidental, all right.’

‘You’ve read the note, haven’t you? I’ve read it. I’ve read lots of those notes in my time. It rings true.’

‘Not to her mother, it doesn’t. And I wasn’t convinced either.’

‘Well,’ Harris began to gather up the photographs, ‘it’s the coroner’s call, not yours or mine. From the physical evidence, she got into that boat on her own, she
rowed herself out as far as she could, she got herself into the water and she drowned.’

‘OK, you’re the expert. I’m sure if there was force involved you’d have found signs of it. So . . .’ His voice trailed off.

‘Anyway,’ Harris rocked back on his stool, ‘what are you doing getting involved in all this? I thought you were on your way to Brittany or somewhere.’

‘I’m waiting to hear the details. Paul Brady is to call me about it. In the meantime I thought I’d keep myself busy. Old habits die hard, you know.’ He slid off the stool
and picked up the plastic bag. ‘Here,’ he held out the bag, ‘I’ll leave you some of the goodies. Half of everything. The hummus, the olives and the bread. You take them. You
look like you could do with feeding up. You’re as skinny as hell, Harris, my boy. Take, eat and enjoy.’

The two men walked outside into the sunshine. McLough-lin’s car was parked beside Harris’s Range Rover, which looked as if it could do with a long session at the
car wash. It was mud-spattered from top to bottom. Harris pulled out his gold pocket watch and flipped open the lid. ‘Christ, look at the time. I was due at the morgue, like, half an hour
ago.’ He opened the rear door of the Range Rover and threw the plastic bag inside, next to his sailing gear.

‘Anything interesting?’

‘Not sure. Did you hear about the woman who was found dead in bed last night?’ Harris fumbled with his keys.

‘Yeah, it was Rathmines or somewhere, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s right. Heart of suburbia. I had a quick look at her
in situ
. Hard to tell. Could be one of your suicides. Or could be what I’ve taken to calling
“husband-assisted death”.’

McLoughlin laughed and put his key into the lock. ‘Lot of it about, these days You’d think with the legalization of divorce that guys would take the more conventional route to
freedom.’

‘Too bloody expensive and too slow.’ Harris climbed into the Range Rover. He pressed a button and the window slid down. ‘What is it about you straight blokes? Heterosexual
relationships have got so dangerous. Don’t know what the world’s coming to.’

McLoughlin followed Harris out of the car park. He drove behind him as far as Stove Street and eventually saw him swing into his designated parking spot outside the city morgue. He was lucky. It
was always a hassle going into the morgue – never anywhere to park. Especially during the week. It was easier on a Sunday. And Sunday was always a big day for bodies. It had been a Sunday, he
remembered, the day he and Finney had gone to bring Margaret Mitchell to the morgue to identify her daughter’s body. It had been a hot day like this. There hadn’t been much traffic on
the road into town. He remembered that Finney had been driving. He was driving fast, too fast. McLoughlin wanted to slow him down, give the woman in the back seat more time to prepare herself for
what lay ahead. But there was no putting off the horror of the moment when he would pull back the sheet and reveal the child’s face to the mother. He had waited for Margaret to respond. He
asked the question he had to ask.

‘Can you identify her? Can you tell us who this is?’

And Margaret had bowed her head, and said, without taking her eyes off Mary’s face for an instant, ‘This is the body of my daughter, Mary Mitchell.’

Then she had turned on him and Finney and screamed at them to get out and leave her alone with her child.

The lights turned green. He sat and stared at them until behind him the horns began to blow.

‘All right, all fucking right!’ McLoughlin shouted, as he inched forward. Ahead was the Matt Talbot bridge over the Liffey, and beyond it, the cranes on the skyline swung like
old-fashioned weighing scales high above the new apartment developments. Marina Spencer had been working there, he thought, up to the time she died. He had seen the articles about her that her
mother had cut from magazines and newspapers and put in the album.

He swung across the bridge and on to the quays, then turned right. A hoarding advertised the name of the development: Urban Living. He slowed to a crawl, then followed a line of trucks on to the
building site. The tall central block of apartments was completed, but the other smaller buildings were still clothed in scaffolding. He bumped over the rough pot-holed ground and parked by the
Portakabin that acted as a site office. Outside, the noise was deafening. Pneumatic drills, concrete-mixers and the general cacophony of modern building methods. McLoughlin ducked into the office.
A young woman was seated behind a desk covered with piles of paper. She looked up at him and smiled. ‘You want?’ Her accent was east European.

‘Perhaps you can help me. I’m wondering where Marina Spencer’s office was?’

‘Why you ask? Marina is gone. She is dead, you know.’

‘I know.’ McLoughlin leaned his two fists on the desk. ‘I know that. I’m a policeman, investigating her death. I wanted to take a look at her office.’

‘A policeman, a Garda Síochána.’ Her pronunciation was impeccable. ‘The police they have been here already, few weeks back.’

‘That’s right.’ McLoughlin felt in his jacket pocket for his wallet. ‘I’m doing follow-up work. Tying up loose ends, you understand.’ He held out his ID
card.

Her eyes flicked across it, then back to his face. ‘OK, you go to the apartments. You see sign for Inner Vision design company. They are on tenth floor. You go there, you find Becky Heron.
She Marina’s assistant. You ask her.’