The Irish Scissor Sisters (8 page)

It was approaching 7 p.m., and when Charlotte had finished she sat next to Linda and got her breath back. There wasn’t much earth covering the top of Farah’s head but it wasn’t visible to anybody who wasn’t looking for it and the three women were satisfied that the job was done.

There was still the question of the murder weapons to be disposed of. The Mulhalls got off the bench and started walking away when Kathleen turned around and headed back towards the large lake. She took the Stanley knife and hammer from her bag and threw them into the water individually, using the end of her jumper to cover her hand so she wouldn’t leave fingerprints. They landed about eight feet into the lake and splashed, before sinking to the bottom. They were satisfied that they would never be found because nobody was likely to have any cause to dredge the water. Even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to link them to anything because they had cleaned the weapons for fingerprints back at the flat.

After the knife and hammer were disposed of, Charlotte said, ‘That’s grand now,’ and that they could go home.

Linda was furious. She didn’t want to hear that everything was grand. They’d killed a man and had just buried his head in a field where kids went to play. There was nothing grand about that and she said this to her sister. Charlotte just shrugged her shoulders.

They walked out of the park and crossed the road in the direction of the Square. They had agreed to stay in Ballybough again that night to clean up some more but Linda announced that she was going home. She was depressed and wasn’t able to face it. She walked home to Jobstown, taking the camera bag with her. She said she’d make sure that it was taken care of. Kathleen and Charlotte hugged Linda before she walked away. Charlotte shouted after her, reminding her not to say a word to anybody about what had happened over the previous twenty-four hours.

Linda walked slowly home and when she arrived back at Kilclare Gardens she said hello to the children. They were excited to see their mam but she only wanted to go to bed.

John Mulhall walked into the living room and stared at his daughter before turning around and leaving without saying a word.

Linda went upstairs and had a long shower trying to wash Farah off her but no matter how much soap she used, she couldn’t get the dead man off her mind. She went straight to bed and put the camera bag on the floor beside her.

She slept for three or four hours and awoke with a start. She remembered the bag and went downstairs and got some coal and logs and started the fire. She lay on the couch and cried, waiting for the flames to get hot enough. After about half an hour she took the camera bag and put it into the fire. She sobbed as the flames engulfed the bag and soon reduced it to ash. She took another bottle of vodka from the press and poured herself a large drink and didn’t even use a mixer. Her hands were shaking and she needed something to calm her nerves. She got through nearly half the bottle and lay down looking at the fire. ‘I’m sorry; I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

The next thing she remembered was one of her children calling her. Linda looked around and realised she was at home and for a split second thought that she was dreaming about Farah. She looked in the fireplace and saw the ashes from the bag and knew that it was not a dream but very much a living nightmare. She took a plastic bag from the kitchen and got what was left of the camera bag and brought it to the back garden. She lifted the lid of the green wheelie bin, with the No. 31 painted on the side, and left the bag for the bin men. The thirty-year-old went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror.

She saw Farah. His sad eyes stared at her and he shook his head.

She screamed and splashed her face with water.

She glanced at the mirror again but he was still there. Linda wouldn’t be able to get the Somalian out of her mind for a long time.

After saying goodbye to Linda, Kathleen and Charlotte walked back to the Square to get a cup of coffee. Charlie was starting to worry about her older sister. She could see that Linda’s conscience was already starting to bother her. She’d always been a sensitive soul and would struggle to keep such a horrible secret. She told her mam that they’d have to keep the pressure on Linda over the next few days and weeks to make sure she didn’t crack and go to the guards.

They got the 77 bus back into town and walked the rest of the way to Ballybough. Charlotte started drinking vodka, while Kathleen got some cloths and a cooking pot and started scrubbing the bathroom again. Charlotte thought that it looked fine but her mother was like a woman possessed and just kept cleaning and cleaning throughout the night.

She told Charlotte about her life with Farah and said she would have been dead within the year if Linda and Charlie hadn’t killed him. That wasn’t much consolation to Charlotte – she knew she was the one who would take the bulk of the blame if the guards came calling. The twenty-two-year-old sat on the settee and stared blankly at the TV. She felt dead inside and had no energy left.

Kathleen woke up early on 22 March as there was still a lot of cleaning to do. She used a cloth and bleach to scrub the bedside locker and wardrobe. Then she got under the bunk bed, which could be cleaned now that the blood was dry.

Charlotte wasn’t in the mood for sticking around and got a bag of stuff and left without saying where she was going.

Kathleen went back to her frenzied spring clean but the bottle of bleach was empty so she popped out to the Gala supermarket, wearing a white hoody underneath a blue denim jacket. At 10.16 a.m. she bought credit for her mobile phone, a bottle of milk and a bottle of orange. She then made her way to the household products aisle and picked up a bottle of liquid cleaner and a large bottle of domestic bleach. She got back into the queue, and then left it again, putting the cleaner back on the shelf. She paid for her Domestos and left the shop.

The following day, at 11.25 a.m., she left the post office at Summerhill Parade after collecting her Social Welfare and went back into the Gala store next door. She headed straight to the household products and picked up some more black plastic bags and a large bottle of air freshener. She was trying to get rid of the smell of death that would not leave her small flat. She left the shop three minutes later.

All three women were trying to come to terms with what had taken place. Linda started to instantly feel guilty, while Charlotte was a far harder person and had no problem going back to the murder scene to stay there that night. Kathleen had played no active part in the murder and subsequent dismemberment but she had lost her long-term partner and cleaning seemed to be her way of dealing with this.

, three days after the murder, Charlotte went to the ATM at the Bank of Ireland on O’Connell Street. It was 7.32 p.m. when she withdrew €60. Exactly one week later, Kathleen did the same thing. At 1.35 p.m. she took out €150, in three €50 notes, from the same machine. There is nothing unusual about this except that Charlotte and Kathleen were withdrawing the cash from the account of Farah Swaleh Noor – the man who had been murdered and dismembered three days earlier.

Noor’s account was based at Allied Irish Bank in South Mall, Co. Cork. He was issued with an ATM card, which hadn’t been used since August 2004. A replacement card was sent to him in November 2004. Kathleen Mulhall would later claim that she had looked after Farah’s card because he wasn’t great at managing cash. In later investigations it emerged that she withdrew money from the account on four dates in March. She couldn’t tell gardaí where she took the money out, how much she withdrew or what she had used it for. The final time that Farah’s ATM card was used was on 30 March 2005. This was ten days after its owner was murdered and the same day that his body was fished out of the Royal Canal.

There was a lot of activity in the account during March 2005. In the ten days before Farah died the card had been used to withdraw money at Bank of Ireland O’Connell Street six different times. He was paid twice in March from Adecco Recruitment, €219.16 and €157.42 respectively. Farah had registered with Adecco Recruitment in Tallaght a few months before he died and was working temporarily in Schmitt ECS in Leixlip. He had failed to show up at work on 18 March because he was on an extended St Patrick’s Day drinking session and Deeanne Slade, who works at Adecco, had tried to contact him without success. On 21 March, Patricia Cleary Greene who works as a recruitment consultant with Adecco had tried to ring Noor but couldn’t get through to his phone. She did get hold of Kathleen who had told her that Noor was away minding a sick baby and that she didn’t know when he would be back. The Adecco staff were concerned that Farah had not come back to work and Patricia Cleary Greene eventually contacted Kathleen again, who told her that Noor ‘had moved to Kilkenny with a young one’. Patricia remembered that Noor always referred to his partner as ‘the boss’.

After Kathleen and Charlotte helped themselves to Farah’s money there was only €16.87 left in the account. Despite Kathleen’s later claims that she was ‘minding’ his money, detectives have little doubt that the two Mulhall women were effectively ‘cleaning out’ the bank account of the man Charlotte and Linda had murdered. The mother and daughter spent a lot of time together in the immediate aftermath of the murder and Charlotte spent most of the next couple of weeks living in 17 Richmond Cottages. Kathleen became obsessed with cleaning and wasn’t satisfied that they had done a good enough job at removing all traces of her boyfriend’s violent death. She kept going back over the bedroom and bathroom in the hours and days after Farah died. She also took all the bloody towels, and washed them, with Linda and Charlotte’s clothes, and put them in black bags out in the yard. She had left these, along with the bag of carpet and wallpaper and Farah’s clothes, out for the bin men. When they collected the bags the evidence was destroyed forever.

While Kathleen and Charlotte were sorting out Farah’s financial affairs, Linda was a nervous wreck, on the brink of a breakdown. Farah Swaleh Noor had begun appearing in her dreams each night and she was afraid to close her eyes because of what she might see. She spent most of her days drinking vodka and she neglected her kids, leaving her father to look after them. Something kept telling Linda to go back to Tymon Park and all she could think about was the head sticking out of the ground. The dreams were driving her mental. On 30 March, she eventually picked up the phone and told Kathleen that she had to go back down and dig up the head. She asked her mam to go with her. Her mother wanted nothing to do with it and wouldn’t agree to go.

That evening Linda got on a bus to Ballybough to try to convince Kathleen to change her mind.