The Irish Scissor Sisters (5 page)

Linda studied the severed midriff and noticed that Farah Noor was still wearing his underpants. She remembered the stories that Kathleen had recently told her about being raped by Farah.

She took her knife and pulled down Farah’s underpants. She grabbed the top of his penis and took it between the thumb and index finger of her left hand. Using her right hand, she sliced through the penis section, ignoring the testicles. It had shrunk with the cold mixture of water and congealed blood. She took the two-inch penis and tossed it into the shower with the other human remains.

‘There, you little fucking prick,’ she whispered. ‘Now you will never rape my ma again.’

The job of cutting Farah Swaleh Noor up took the Mulhall sisters over four hours. The blade on the bread knife was serrated and was not much use for the grim task of dismembering human remains, while the Stanley knife was essentially too small. But after hours of frantic work and intense effort all that remained of Farah Swaleh Noor was his torso and head. Linda and Charlotte were shattered after the night of murder and butchery. This was in marked contrast to Kathleen who had not taken part in either the murder or dismemberment – instead she was watching television.

Farah’s eyes were closed and he looked very pale. The mixture of blood and water had made his complexion lighter. His short black hair was covered in thick congealed blood.

‘What are we going to do with his head?’ she asked.

Linda thought for a moment. She realised that if they didn’t cut it off and the body was found, the police would easily find out that it was Farah Noor and would find them all. They’d be sent to prison for life and she’d never see her four kids again. There was nothing else to do.

‘We’ll have to cut it off,’ she declared.

Charlotte took a deep breath and began breathing heavily. Linda composed herself and got one of the white towels and placed it over Farah’s face so he wouldn’t be looking at her. She picked up the hammer and started raining blows against the battered neck, to try to detach it from the torso. Charlotte took over and pounded the head but it would not dislodge. Linda eventually picked up the bread knife and put her left hand around the dead man’s forehead. She put her knee on his torso to steady it and began sawing at the head. Charlotte helped and it took them about ten minutes with the blunt knife to sever his windpipe and get the blade through the back of his neck. The top of Farah’s spine stuck out of the back of his head. It was like a scene from a horror movie. His hair was so short and so sticky that Linda struggled to hold the head but she certainly didn’t want to put her hand inside the brain and skull, so she just let it drop and it made a thud on the floor.

With the dismemberment of the corpse now completed the girls went into the sitting room and collapsed on the settee, where Kathleen was resting on another chair. They had a couple of drinks to steady their shattered nerves. It was only when they sat down and were away from the bathroom that the enormity of what they had done hit them. They didn’t know what to do next. The bathroom of the flat resembled an abattoir and would obviously have to be cleaned. It was hard to know where to even begin.

Linda began to get emotional on the couch and sobbed. Charlotte put her arm around her but didn’t join in. Her attitude was what’s done is done. All they could do was make sure that the guards didn’t catch them. Farah was from Somalia and didn’t have any family in Ireland. His only real family was Kathleen and she and the girls would make up a story about Farah running away to be with an ex-girlfriend. He had been known as a ladies’ man when he was alive, so if the police checked they would think that the story wasn’t too far-fetched. They started thinking about who might notice that Farah wasn’t around. Kathleen couldn’t think of anybody off-hand. Most of his friends were in Cork and he wouldn’t be seeing them anyway now that he lived in Dublin. The Somalian community in Ireland was not that big and they tended to keep themselves to themselves. People wouldn’t necessarily think that Farah not being around was a big deal. Finally they agreed it could be done.

The next problem was what to do with all the body parts. Farah wasn’t a small man and they couldn’t just walk down to the canal and throw him in. They would need to pack him in black bags and transport him to the water. Charlotte thought that walking in the middle of town with black bags early in the morning would arouse suspicion. She suggested that they put the body in the sports bags Kathleen used for her frequent moves. By now it was around 11 p.m. and they agreed that they should clean the place up and pack up the body. The plan was to dump it first thing in the morning, before rush-hour traffic and while it was still dark. Charlotte had been drinking down by the canal before and knew Clarke’s Bridge at Ballybough. She decided that it would be as good a place as any. The water was deep and the body would sink to the bottom. You didn’t get too many people fishing there so it wasn’t too likely that some poor unfortunate would hook an arm when he was fishing for pike.

A lot of clothes and household towels had got covered in blood during the murder and subsequent dismemberment. They had changed colour from the mixture of blood and guts and it wasn’t as if you could just put them in the washing machine and use them again. They would have to be destroyed. The duvet on the bottom bunk was splattered with blood from Farah being repeatedly stabbed – that would have to go too. There were also Linda’s and Charlotte’s clothes to think about. They were drenched in blood and would have to be thrown out as well. Farah also had clothes in the wardrobe. If the guards were to believe that he had run off with some woman, then they’d have to get rid of all his clothes as well. Otherwise it would just make the guards suspicious and lead to them asking questions. There was a major problem though. It was only Tuesday night now and the bin men didn’t come until Friday. It would be far too risky to leave bloody clothes in the flat or in the back yard for three days. If the guards did somehow find out what had happened, the first thing they would find would be the bags left for dumping and they’d all be caught. None of the three Mulhall women knew how to drive or had a car. They’d have to contact somebody they could rely on, someone who definitely wouldn’t go to the police telling tales of murder. Who can you trust to keep such a secret though? Linda and Charlotte didn’t have many friends. Kathleen had left her old life behind when she upped and moved with Farah Noor. The three of them knew that there was only one answer.

There was only one person that would even contemplate covering up Farah’s murder. But it wouldn’t be fair to drag him into this. It was bad enough that they had got themselves in such a mess without inflicting it on him. But what other choice did they have? It was now 11.41 p.m. Kathleen took Linda’s mobile and dialled a number that she hadn’t rung in a long time.

‘Hiya, love,’ said the voice on the other end of the phone.

‘It’s not Linda, it’s me,’ said Kathleen.

‘What do you want?’ came the reply. He would recognize that deep voice anywhere and he didn’t want to hear it again for as long as he lived.

‘I’m with Linda and Charlotte in me flat. There’s a problem here. You need to come over.’

John Mulhall hung up the phone and cursed his ex-wife. She had been out of his life for three and a half years but she was still causing him trouble.

Little did he know that that one phone call would change his family’s life forever and that he would be dead nine months later because of it.

furious when Kathleen phoned to tell him about the little problem his two eldest girls were having in Richmond Cottages. He hung up the first time but phoned back a few minutes later because he loved his daughters and would always do anything he could to help them.

Kathleen wouldn’t tell him what was wrong at the flat or if Linda and Charlotte were OK, so he eventually agreed to drive over to Ballybough from Tallaght.

While they were waiting the first thing that Linda and Charlotte did was wash themselves. Spending over four hours dismembering a corpse is a messy business and the sisters were covered from head to toe in blood. All their clothes were filthy and caked through with layer after layer of dried, gooey blood. Their hands were also red and thick fragments had got caught under their false nails, while their hair looked like it had been treated with red shampoo. The only part of them that wasn’t that bloody was their faces. They were dotted with the odd speck of red but were not as bad as you would imagine. The natural thing for anybody to do when their face gets splashed with dirt is to use their clothes to clean it. This is exactly what the Mulhalls did. When blood spurted up at them while they were hacking the body, they had used the sleeves of their tops to wipe it away – neither girl would ever consider going out without wearing heavy make-up and even during their darkest hours they were not prepared to see their faces spoilt. During the rest breaks they both regularly cleaned themselves in the bathroom sink and dried their faces with toilet roll. They now wanted a good wash and went into the kitchen and filled the sink with water. Charlotte and Linda cleaned away the blood and skin pieces from their hair and skin. They didn’t have the option of having a shower at the moment but the sisters made the best of a bad situation. They decided that there was no point changing their clothes yet because they still had to go and clean the flat before dumping the body. It would only ruin a new set of clothes.

They then went to tackle the corpse in the bathroom, having taken a roll of plastic bags from the kitchen to deal with the body parts. There was blood everywhere. The walls had changed colour, with a mixture of dried blood and guts and the blood had gone as high as six feet up the wall from where Farah’s arteries were cut and had sprayed out of control. The floor was waterlogged with blood and you could see the impression the towels had left in the large pools as the sisters had made futile efforts to clean while cutting up the body. The toilet and sink hadn’t escaped the carnage and the inside of the toilet bowel was now dark red from the bits of bone and brain that had been flushed down it.

Charlotte took charge of packing up Farah’s body. She took the torso and midriff and placed them in two black bags and tied a knot on the top of each. She put them in the sports bags and left them in the hall beside the bedroom, ready to be transported to their watery resting places. She did the same with the two arms and packed them in black bags, along with the vest and pair of underwear and put them with the other limbs in the hall.