The Priest by Gerard O'Donovan

Author:Gerard O'Donovan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective
ISBN: 9780748116935
Publisher: Sphere
Published: 2010-11-10T23:00:00+00:00

The next few hours went by in a tumult of briefings, job allocations and technical meetings. The strategy agreed on was to put a small specialist team in place to lead the manhunt for Scully using the Garda Network – a battery of electronic tools for monitoring the use of mobile and landline phones, cash cards, email, internet service providers and any other electronic signatures and imprints a suspect might leave – plus four detectives following up on Scully’s known associates, relatives, ex-girlfriends and so on. In the meantime, the majority of the new bodies on board were to be thrown at the second incident, in a co-ordinated drive to collate as much information on victim, perpetrator and crime as was achievable in a condensed space of time.

As a result, by early afternoon the information on the second assault began to trickle through. The most important piece of the jigsaw provided an ID for the girl and, as a result, a location of sorts for the actual attack. A door-to-door inquiry in Pearse Avenue, Fairview, turned up a Mrs Fidelma Plunkett who was beginning to wonder why her daughter hadn’t yet returned from a night out at a club up the road with friends. Alarm bells rang, a description of clothing matched the victim’s, and a car was sent round. By mid-afternoon a team of detectives had gleaned enough information from shell-shocked relatives and friends, about the victim’s background and movements, to give the key facts: nineteen-year-old Catriona Plunkett was a pretty dental secretary who’d gone out for a Friday night bop at the Kay Club up in Killester with her pals, drank a bit too much, felt a little tired and decided to leave early. The bouncer, pulled out of his bed, confirmed that he’d seen her leaving the club alone at around 12.45 a.m. Both these facts were subsequently confirmed by the club’s exterior CCTV. At which point the trail went ice cold, until Catriona turned up half dead a couple of miles away in Fairview Park at 5.25 a.m.

Another team of four Gardai, led by Maura McHugh, had already been dispatched to seize and view the footage from all CCTV and traffic cameras covering the many roads and approaches that converged on Marino Parade and Fairview Park. But that was a mammoth task which could take days. One small fact that did bloom into significance out of the many flooding back was that yes, Catriona did have a cross and chain, a lovely gold one bought for her from Fields on Henry Street for her eighteenth birthday. Catriona loved it so much, her mother claimed, that she never took it off, not even to have a bath. Mulcahy knew it hadn’t been on her when she was found and a double check with the hospital and Technical confirmed that it wasn’t among the items dumped with her in Fairview Park either. He led a brainstorming session for case officers on the significance of crosses, chains, burning, branding and the rising level of violence – with some useful ideas emerging.

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