Can Anybody Help Me? (30 page)

Not when there was so much else to think about.

She made herself some tea and clutched the cup as she wandered around the house. A film of dust covered the fireplace, the hall table, the bed in the back room. She really should do some cleaning. But that probably didn't fall under the category of ‘taking it easy' and that was one element of the doctor's advice she was happy to follow. Still, it left her with a lot of time on her hands.

Her hand strayed towards the phone in her pocket, then she snatched it away again. She was getting too bloody addicted to that site. Ridiculous. She'd want to stop that now or she'd be a lunatic after a month on maternity leave; she'd turn into one of those loo-lahs who left nasty little notes on other people's threads about the correct temperature at which to heat a bottle, or something. Best to nip it in the bud right away.

She took another sip from her tea and continued to wander. There was a bit to be done before the baby arrived, alright. Okay, a lot. Every room came with its own checklist. Their bed needed changing. The bathroom needed to be cleaned. The
spare room … Christ. Matt may have gone on a cot mission but there was no way you'd fit so much as a bed for a Barbie in there at the moment. She should really get cracking. Picking a starting point was the hardest part though.

The car. She hadn't so much as opened the door since it had been driven back from Athlone. That was a nice, handy, contained job that she could get started on, and a bit of gentle vacuuming would hardly raise her blood pressure. With something approaching enthusiasm, she walked down the stairs, left her cooling tea on the hall table and walked out to the Peugeot that had been neatly parked in the tiny front drive.

Not so neatly emptied though. She beeped the alarm, opened the front door and then gagged when she realised that the fresh chicken sandwich her mother had made had been transformed into a homemade petri dish. She had forgotten the name of the young member who'd been asked to drive the car back for her, but he was clearly the nervous type, too afraid to touch anything without her say so. A cop without an ounce of cop on. They were the worst kind.

Holding her breath, she reached in and grabbed a handful of newspaper to help contain the soggy brown bag. Flicked her eyes across the front page. And found herself reading a startlingly familiar story.

‘Community in shock following tragic death of mother of three.'

It was the story her mother had been wittering on about. Claire frowned, and some of the details came back to her. Found dead in her car. Left three young boys behind her … Jesus, FarmersWife. Right part of the country too, it had to be her. Sandwich forgotten, she lifted the paper out and
smoothed it against the car bonnet. The details were just as the Farmer had described it – she found herself still thinking of him as The Farmer, even though now she knew he had a name. Jim Leahy. His wife had been Martha. There was nothing new in the article, nothing he hadn't said in his post. But there was a photograph.

She stared at it, trying to see something that wasn't there. It was just an ordinary family shot. A man, holding a small baby and a pregnant woman, standing to his left, hands fastened around the arms of a wriggling young boy while attempting to smile at the camera at the same time. It was slightly out of focus too, the type of picture you would probably delete if you were coming to the end of the memory on your camera. Probably now the most precious one the family owned.

There was nothing there to indicate …

Oh, stop it, Claire. You're becoming obsessed.

But even as she tried to smother the thought, she found herself tracing her fingers over the surface of the paper. So that was what she looked like. The Netmammy. Death of a Netmammy.

Why did that phrase sound familiar? Oh, Christ, yeah. That woman, the one who had phoned Flynn on the day Miriam Twohy's body had been discovered. She had mentioned Netmammy, she had been convinced she had known Miriam Twohy online, but then just as quickly phoned back to say she'd made a mistake. Claire hadn't thought anything of it, at the time. But that was where she had first heard the name.

She crumpled the paper up in her hand and lifted the rotting sandwich out with a grimace. She was going mad. Imagining crimes that weren't there. She'd have to join a gym
or something, give herself something practical to do. The doctors couldn't say anything about swimming, surely, that was one of those things they recommended. Wasn't it? Or was that yoga?

Regina Mulhaire was an inspector now. They'd kept in vague touch over the years, nodded hello at Christmas Day Mass and bumped into each other at funerals. Claire wouldn't have called her a friend exactly. But she knew she'd give her a hand if she needed it.

Which she didn't.

She went back inside, wrapped the sandwich in as many plastic bags as she could get her hands on and threw it in the bin. Contemplated changing the liner and then found herself with her phone in her hand. It took two tries to get through to the station, but when they finally answered they patched her straight through. Regina didn't ask why Claire wanted the information, which was good, because she didn't know what she would have told her.

Food. Food could fill an hour. But even a toasted cheese sandwich didn't seem appetising after the mouldy chicken incident, so she went into the hall and emptied the washing machine, which had been sandwiched into the tiny space under the stairs. That took all of five minutes. Emptying the dryer and putting away the clean clothes took ten. Her mother had told her she should wash all her baby clothes in advance, using non-bio powder. She probably would. When she got around to buying some.

There was nothing on the television. Seriously, how did unemployed people put in their day? They must be driven demented. Or fat. Probably both. She found the tea, tasted
it, made another cup and put it down again. Wandered into the hall and stared out of the front door, gauging the likelihood of rain. She should probably go for a walk later. If Matt agreed. Then again, he might cop on to the fact she wasn't as exhausted as she had let on earlier. Probably best to stay on the sofa.

The sofa. Her arse was moulded into the cushions at this stage. She shifted in one direction, and then another. Tried elevating her feet and then grimaced as heartburn struck. Threw a cushion across the room in frustration and winced as it narrowly missed the fresh flowers Matt had arranged only that morning. A gift from Collins Street. Hope you enjoy your rest. Jesus, she was going out of her mind.

In her enthusiasm, she almost swallowed the phone whole when it rang. And felt her heart beat rapidly when she heard what Regina Mulhaire had to say. Martha Leahy had killed herself by running a pipe from the exhaust of her car back in through the driver's window. It wasn't a popular method of suicide these days, as the newer cars tended to produce fewer emissions making it a much messier and less effective business. But this woman had been driving a fifteen-year-old jalopy, built in less carbon-efficient times. Chances were she had been fast asleep before the poison really took hold, because a mixture of alcohol and drugs had been found in her system. No surprise where she got them. Diphenhydramine. The stuff you got in any chemist's store.

Dear Jesus. Dear Jesus.

Claire knew that the abrupt end to the phone call had been rude, but politeness was the last thing on her mind. Her mind racing, she found herself tapping into the Netmammy app
almost as a reflex. The homepage opened in front of her but she bypassed it and went onto her private message page. There was only one. She hadn't paid any heed to it when she'd seen it the previous day. But now it seemed to scream at her.

Fear bubbled up inside her, alongside excitement. The excitement she always felt when a case was coming together, when information was at hand, or close to it. When links were being made, threads drawn. Her breath coming quickly, Claire raced to the spare room where she'd thrown her briefcase after she'd been sent home from hospital.

Inside was a photocopy of every note that had been taken during the Miriam Twohy murder investigation. She ran her eyes quickly across the post-mortem reports. Diphenhydramine. Readily available, but when mixed with alcohol positively guaranteed to induce a deep sleep. The same mixture. But there
had been something else. She rifled through the sheets, but couldn't find the final page she was looking for.

Because they hadn't bloody logged it. Well, she hadn't. She had taken Flynn's carefully written note and shoved it into her jacket pocket, intending to do something about it later. Then the call about Merview had come through and she'd forgotten all about it. Besides, hadn't the woman called back anyway, retracted the whole thing? She couldn't be blamed, could she, for ignoring it? For not realising the importance of the information? Because, she thought, ice forming in the pit of her stomach, she might just have fucked up royally.

A jacket pocket. Her navy one. The only one that still fitted.

The coat had been flung into the far corner of the wardrobe. She grabbed it, and felt her head spin as her hand closed on the crumpled paper. She withdrew it and read the notes, written Flynn's unmistakable handwriting. The details of the first phone call they'd received. A woman called Yvonne Grant had claimed she knew Miriam Twohy via the website Netmammy. Her screen name, Flynn had written in neat, rounded handwriting had been MyBabba.

Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck. One thing that had always bugged Claire about Miriam Twohy's killing was the idea that she had gone willingly to her death. That a woman who had no social life to speak of, whose idea of a good night out was watching
The X Factor
on the sofa with her mother, had gone out, met a stranger in a bar and gone home with him.

But what if he weren't a stranger? What if she believed them to be friends? What if the meeting had been arranged through a website, and she felt she could trust the person on the other side of the screen? Claire grabbed her phone, ran a quick search.
MyBabba was a Netmammy regular, she had logged thousands of posts, many of them sent late at night, presumably when her child had gone to bed and the lonely woman was reaching out to hundreds of others in similar situation.

What if one day one of them had said, look, we're meeting up. You know us well now. Why not join us?

And she had.

‘MyBabba is organising it.'

But it still didn't make sense. If Miriam Twohy was MyBabba, then why was she still posting? After all that was why Yvonne Grant had called back and withdrawn her initial complaint. MyBabba had reappeared.

Or had she. Just how hard would it be to assume someone else's identity on the site? Perched on the side of her bed, Claire went back into the homepage and logged off SofaBound. The welcome screen sat ready and waiting. She inputted MyBabba and then paused. All she needed was a password. But that could be anything. Three years previously, Collins Street had sent her on an in-service course on Cyber Crime. ‘An idiot's guide to the internet' was what it should have been called. But rather than a qualification in computer safety, she had left instead with the tutor's phone number. Given that the tutor was now her husband, father to be of her first child and cot installer extraordinaire, she had always figured she'd got a good deal. But right now she was kicking herself for not having listened to what Matt had to say, rather than checking out how broad his shoulders looked as he was saying it. It had been the first time she'd ever asked a man out for a drink and judging by the surprise on his face, quickly replaced by delight, it appeared to have been the first time a woman had ever asked him. And
neither of them had gone on a date with anyone else again. There was no point in phoning him for help with this though. He'd kill her if he thought she was doing anything more adventurous than making tea.

ABC123. Incorrect Password. Think Claire. She was only going to get into trouble if she kept trying blind. What if it was one of those ‘three tries and you're out' scenarios? Her mind raked through the small amount of information she'd managed to retain from Matt's lecture. ‘Think of the obvious', he'd told her. Pet names. Or children.

Hands shaking, Claire went back to the login screen. And inputted ‘Réaltín'.

Incorrect password. The killer, she was now convinced that someone claiming to be MyBabba was the killer, wasn't stupid. Claire knew she'd made a huge mistake by ignoring that first phone call. She couldn't afford to make another one.

The Netmammy offices were on the fourth floor. Of course they were. Glaring at the signpost, Claire rolled up the car window and reversed into a parking space.

The west Dublin industrial estate that housed the company's headquarters had been easy to find. The Companies Registration Office had given her the address, and her phone's GPS had got her there in a surprisingly short time. But no one had, as yet, invented an app that would haul her arse up four flights of stairs. Time to get going, so.

Repressing a grunt, she pushed open the heavy white PVC door. There was no open space or reception area, just a small square of grubby grey carpet and stairs. Looking with distaste at the sticky banister, she kept her hands by her side and began to heave herself upwards.

The first flight led to an equally dingy landing, and three more white doors, wooden this time. Only one had a sign outside, and Claire wondered who would be tempted to visit an outfit called ‘Tru Health' in a place like this, or indeed what Tru Health actually sold. Feeling truly unhealthy, she continued to climb.