Hurt (DS Lucy Black) (22 page)

She tapped on the door twice and, stepping back, regarded the front of the house. Despite her first impressions, she could see curtains hanging down the sides of the window of the small room to the left. She thought she saw something shift quickly from her sight and, moving across, she leaned against the window, using her glove to smear away the dust and allow her a view inside. She tensed as she now saw a small fire burning in the hearth. She stepped back and, glancing up, realized she had missed the thin skeins of smoke drifting against the cloud grey sky above the chimney of the house.

She heard a click and the front door opened. She shifted quickly back to come face to face with Seamus Doherty. He stared at her, clearly waiting for her to speak.

‘Mr Doherty?’

‘Yes?’

‘My name is Detective Sergeant Lucy Black. I’m with the Public Protection Unit. Can I come in?’

She motioned as if to step into the house, but Doherty held his ground, moving more fully into the doorway to block the entrance.

‘Why? Is something wrong?’

‘I’m looking for Sarah Finn, the daughter of your partner. I’d like to search your property. Please let me in.’

Doherty licked dryly at his lip, glancing past Lucy, clearly trying to gauge whether she was on her own. His eyes flitted across her face, his thoughts racing.

Lucy moved her hand towards her pocket, feeling for the weight of the gun she had placed there. Doherty saw the motion and, in an instant, had slammed the door on her.

‘Shit,’ Lucy snapped, pulling her gun free of her coat pocket and, raising her boot, kicking at the door. Its state belied its sturdiness, for though it rattled in its frame, it did not move.

Lucy stepped back, allowing herself more room, and kicked a second time, harder. She heard the crack as the wood around the catch splintered. A third kick and the door swung open. She moved into the room quickly, her back against the wall, her gun held in front of her.

‘Mr Doherty. My colleagues are on their way. Please surrender yourself.’ She moved into the room proper, scanning for hiding places. A bookcase against one wall, a heavy unit in the centre of the floor, on which sat two cereal bowls. A threadbare sofa pulled forward to meet it.

‘Sarah?’ Lucy shouted. ‘Sarah Finn?’

To the rear of the house, she heard a crash, as if a piece of furniture had been knocked over. Lucy moved quickly, still scanning the room, trying to keep her back to the areas she knew to be clear of potential hiding spots.

The room she was in opened out into the kitchen, where a chair lay on the floor. To her right was a hallway opening onto three further rooms. She moved up the darkened corridor, swinging quickly into the first room to the left. A bedroom, the bed unmade, a tangle of clothes on the floor. Jeans, a jumper, men’s boots. A paperback book steepled on the bedside unit. The bed was old, cast iron, high legged enough to offer Lucy an unrestricted view through to the far wall.

Satisfied, she turned to the second room, just a little further up the hallway, on the opposite side. A bathroom. Untidy. The toilet seat down.

The last room was to her right again. Lucy pushed open the door with her foot, then moved quickly in. A second bedroom, bigger than the first, the lower half of the walls panelled in dark wood. The bed was made here. A bag sat on a chair in the corner. On the bed, its head resting against the pillow, sat a tattered child’s toy, a white rabbit with one ear hanging loose over the eye, the stuffing showing at the stitching.

‘Sarah?’ Lucy shouted. ‘I’m with the police. Don’t be afraid.’

Lucy was turning to leave the room when she noticed a smaller door seemingly cut into the wood panelling in the corner opposite where the chair sat. She moved across and banged it with her foot. Gripping the small handle, she twisted it and pulled the door open. Beyond lay a set of wooden steps leading downwards, beneath the house.

‘Sarah?’ Lucy shouted.

She went down the steps towards the darkened room below. As she moved beneath the upper floor level, she realised that there was some natural light leaking into the cellar from a small window high up on the back walls.

Lucy moved down, surveying the area beneath as the objects scattered about began to take form in the gloom. She realized that at one end of the space, under the window, stood a heavy wooden table. Above it, hanging from small hooks in the wall, hung a set of meat cleavers.

Gasping, Lucy moved quickly across. The knives were clean, one or two badged with spots of rust.

‘Jesus,’ she muttered.

Suddenly she heard a movement behind her and turned. At first she thought Doherty was running at her, but as she raised her gun to shoot, she saw him grab at the handrail of the steps as if to pull himself up the steps again, as if to escape from where he had been hiding in the cellar.

‘Stop,’ Lucy shouted. ‘I
will
shoot you.’

Doherty paused, his foot on the bottom step, then slowly raised his hands.

‘On the floor,’ Lucy shouted. ‘Now! Face down.’

‘You’ve got it wrong,’ Doherty began.

‘Shut up,’ Lucy snapped, pushing him onto the floor, kneeling on his back as she pulled two plastic cable ties from her coat pocket and tightened them around Doherty’s wrists.

Just then, something in the periphery of her vision moved and she saw a figure rush down the steps towards her. Sarah Finn.

She stood to embrace the girl she had rescued. Instead, Finn lashed out at her with her fists, battering at Lucy as she struggled to contain the child.

‘Leave him alone,’ the girl screamed. ‘Don’t hurt him.’

A response team soon arrived from Dungiven station after Lucy had phoned through for support. They had brought with them a local doctor who examined Sarah Finn in the large bedroom in which she had been sleeping. The girl had wept uncontrollably as Doherty had been led away to be taken into Dungiven where he would be held for questioning. Sinead Finn had been called and was being brought to her daughter by Chief Superintendent Burns himself. A forensics team was on the way from Derry as was a social worker, after Lucy had called Robbie. Sarah would not be allowed back with her mother until she had been assessed by Social Services.

Lucy, meanwhile, sat in front of the fire, warming herself. The girl’s reaction was not unusual, she reasoned. Often, vulnerable children became attached to those who had exploited them, believing the abuse they had suffered to be a form of love. But Lucy found the use of the two bedrooms unusual. They clearly had been sleeping in different rooms. Doherty had told her she had got it wrong. Only when the doctor had finished, would Lucy be able to ask the girl herself directly.

* * *

The interview room into which they were led in Dungiven was old-fashioned, the ceilings high, the pipework of the heating system running along the base of the walls, the pipes painted the same puce shade as the walls. They could hear water gurgling through the pipes while they spoke, as the heating system shuddered into life.

Sarah Finn sat in the seat opposite Lucy. Ideally, Lucy would have preferred there to be no desk between them lest it create an adversarial atmosphere that she did not want.

Finn looked a little different from the school picture that Lucy had been using in the search for the girl. The brown hair of the image was actually sandy in reality. Perhaps as a result of the past few days, the puppy fat she had carried in the image had gone from her face, even if the top she wore seemed swollen a little around the softness of her stomach.

Robbie sat down, but not before pulling his chair around so that he was positioned midway between Lucy and the girl. Sarah wiped at the tears that had gathered around her eyes as she waited for Lucy to begin. She’d met her mother, Sinead, half an hour previous; their conversation had been little more than muffled cries from the girl and promises from the mother that she’d never let her go again.

Sinead Finn had protested when she was told that she could not be present when her daughter would be interviewed. Lucy explained to her that the girl was more likely to tell them the full truth without the mother’s presence distracting her. Especially when her statement might implicate Finn’s own partner.

The man himself, having been already taken to another interview room in the station, had not said a word following his protestation to Lucy that she had got it wrong.

‘It’s good to finally meet you, Sarah,’ Lucy began. ‘I’m DS Lucy Black. I work for the Public Protection Unit. I deal with cases involving vulnerable people and especially young people.’

Finn swallowed nervously and nodded, though Lucy had not asked a question.

‘This is Robbie. He’s a social worker who will be sitting in on the interview. Obviously, you can tell us anything at all that you want. Nothing you can tell us will shock us or make us think any less of you. I can’t promise that what you tell us will be confidential; we might need to use some of the things you say, if we decide to prosecute someone because of your abduction.’

The girl muttered something, her head lowered, her fingers playing with a strip of laminate peeling off the edge of the table.

‘Sorry?’ Lucy said. ‘We didn’t catch that, Sarah. You need to speak as clearly as you can, because this is being recorded so that we can be sure we don’t miss anything you tell us.’

The girl looked up through the loose strands of her fringe. ‘I weren’t abducted. I went with Seamus.’

Lucy nodded. ‘Maybe you’d tell us in your own words what happened over the past few days? Yeah?’

‘I knew Seamus was going away for a bit and decided to go with him.’

‘Why?’

The girl paused. She picked off the laminate strip, then muttered an apology and tried to reapply it to the table’s edge.

‘I wanted to get away. I thought Seamus was going to Manchester. That’s what he’d told Mum. But he weren’t. I didn’t know until I heard the van stop. I thought we were at the boat. When I got out, we were in the middle of the countryside. I’d nowhere else to go.’

‘Did Mr Doherty know you were in his van?’

She shook her head. ‘I took some money from the post office and packed my bag. I thought if I got to the boat, I’d hide out and get a lift somewhere else.’

‘Why?’ Lucy asked.

‘I wanted to get away.’

‘Did this have anything to do with “Simon Harris”, Sarah?’ Lucy asked.

The girl glanced up quickly, tears swelling in her eyes. Just as quickly she looked down at her lap again, sniffing. A tear dripped onto the floor from her bowed head. ‘I don’t know who that is.’

‘We found your phone, Sarah,’ Lucy said. ‘We know who “Harris” was.’

If Sarah realized the significance of the past tense she didn’t show it. Meanwhile, Lucy realized an incongruity in her story.

‘You said you didn’t get out of the van until Mr Doherty stopped at the house on the Glenshane?’

Finn nodded.

‘But we found your phone in a lay-by along the Glenshane Road.’

The girl nodded again. ‘Seamus took it off me the next day and dumped it somewhere. He didn’t tell me where.’

‘Why?

‘The messages.’

‘“Harris”’s messages?’

Finn nodded again, the tears coming more freely now.

‘Did you not want to get any more messages from him?’

Finn shook her head, sniffing loudly. She raised her head, her hair sticking to the dampness of her cheeks.

‘I told Seamus that he’d given me the phone in the first place. He’d “Find a Friend” set up on it.’

‘What?’

‘It’s a thing where you can see on a map on your phone where all your friends are. It meant he knew where I was if he wanted to find me. I told Seamus. We switched it off, but I didn’t think it was enough. So he took the phone away.’

‘You don’t have to be afraid of “Simon Harris”, Sarah,’ Lucy said. ‘He’s dead.’

The girl momentarily brightened, then at once, her expression seemed to darken and she began twisting one hand around the other. ‘That wasn’t his real name,’ she said.

‘We know,’ Lucy said. ‘He’d loads of names he used on Facebook. We know he targeted other girls, too.’

The girl straightened a little. ‘You’re sure he’s dead?’

Lucy nodded. ‘I watched him drown myself.’ She managed a smile, which was reciprocated by Sarah Finn. ‘So you don’t need to be afraid any more,’ Lucy said. ‘You can tell us everything.’

‘Can I get a drink?’ Finn said. ‘And can you let Seamus out, too? He’s been looking after me.’

Lucy glanced quickly at Robbie who raised his eyebrows sceptically.

‘We’ll certainly manage a drink,’ Lucy said. ‘Let’s see what you have to say first before we worry about the other thing, eh?’

‘It started out OK,’ Finn said, sipping from the can of Diet Coke she’d been brought from the Mace across the street from the station.

‘We’d meet in town sometimes. I knew the first time I met him that he was older than he’d said in his profile. He said he preferred the company of teenagers ’cause we always told the truth. We weren’t phonies, he said.’

She glanced up at Lucy, then quickly to Robbie. ‘I tried to stay away from him, but he seemed harmless. He’d talk about music and that. But he had some really cool bands I’d never heard of. He’d let me listen to some. And we always met in the town where there was people about, so it was never weird or anything.’

She paused, sipping again at the Coke. A little dribbled as she lowered the can and she lifted her hand and wiped at her mouth with the back of her wrist.

‘There was this one band I’d never even heard of. A singer. Jessica Hoop. He let me hear some of her songs. He said he thought I’d like it.’

She paused again, staring down at her hands. ‘I bet if you asked my mum what music I liked,
she
wouldn’t be able to tell you,’ she snapped. ‘She’d not have a notion. She’d not care.’

‘But he did,’ Lucy said softly. The girl needed to justify what had happened as a result of her trusting ‘Harris’. She needed to know that Lucy understood. And she did.

She nodded. ‘He told me he’d put it on a disc for me. Then, when we met the next time, he gave me a phone with a whole load of stuff on it. I didn’t want to take it, but he said it was an old one he didn’t need any more; he’d got a new one on contract and was just going to dump it anyway, he said. He’d put all this music on it for me. I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t grateful. He’d gone to all that effort.’