The Murder of Mr Moonlight by Catherine Fegan

Author:Catherine Fegan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241988503
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

11. A gruesome discovery

It was 1.20 p.m. on a mild spring day and Sergeant Padraic Powell was kneeling down, peering into a small, dark opening in the ground. One of two cement slabs that had been covering the opening he was looking into was leaning against a small stand of hawthorn trees. The other, the one closest to the house, had been partially prised open, just wide enough to push in the suction pipe that was sticking out of it.

As visibility was poor, Sergeant Powell had to position himself low to the ground to get a good look. He crouched down and peered into the darkness below. He caught sight of something gardaí had been looking for since 2011. There, covered in a transparent, algae-like substance, was the partial outline of what could only be human remains.

It was 30 April 2013, and twenty-two months after the inexplicable disappearance of Bobby Ryan, the Lowry farm in the heart of the Golden Vale had just given up its darkest secret.

Earlier on, shortly after midday, the CCTV cameras outside Mary Lowry’s home had filmed Pat Quirke, behind the wheel of his silver jeep, pulling into the farmyard at Fawnagowan. He arrived with a shovel, which he used to prise open the run-off tank behind the milking parlour so that he could draw water from it to agitate the slurry in the nearby slatted shed. While he was drawing the water, he saw something in the tank. He rang his wife, Imelda, to come directly to meet him there.

At 12.53 p.m. Imelda pulled into the driveway and drove past Mary Lowry’s house and on up to the farmyard, where she parked her car. Pat told her of his find and asked her to take a look. She peered into the dank gloom of the tank and she saw it too. Unmistakeable. At that point Imelda, not her husband, rang a local garda to report the finding of human remains.

Garda Tom Neville, the same garda who had filled out the missing-person report on Bobby Ryan almost two years before, knew Imelda Quirke through the local underage hurling team. He had her number stored in his phone and when she rang him at 1.07 p.m. that day and told him about the gruesome discovery in the tank, he told her not to touch anything, that he would send a patrol car out to meet her at the farm.

Sergeant Powell, who at that time was the sergeant in charge of Tipperary town garda station, was on duty when Garda Neville phoned in with the news that a body had been discovered at Fawnagowan. He immediately made his way to the farm, accompanied by his colleague, Detective Garda David Buckley, who knew the way to Fawnagowan. When they arrived shortly after 1.15 p.m., they found Pat and Imelda sitting close together on a low wall, just past the cattle crush at the back of the farm. Pat appeared quiet and didn’t say much, other than speaking to tell the sergeant that he had found a body in the run-off tank.

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