Chapter 89
McKeown had asked the tech team to get their finger out and prioritise a thorough analysis of everything on the electronic equipment seized from the Healy and Clarke houses.
It was taking them too long and he didn’t hold out much hope of anything nefarious being found, other than the video he’d already discovered on Freya’s iPad.
All the same, it was a box that had to be ticked.
When Techie Gary walked grim-faced towards him, McKeown knew he was wrong.
‘You found something?’
‘You could say that.’
‘What?’
‘It’s bad. God, it’s fucking awful. I eventually got to restore deleted files from Cameron Healy’s laptop. I’ve compiled a report. Also, Freya Healy’s iPad was hacked.’
‘Could Cameron’s laptop have been too?’
‘Still working on that. What the hell went on in that house?’
‘Am I about to find out?’
‘Yep,’ Gary said. ‘I’ll have to send everything to the National Child Protection Unit. But the inspector and super will want the heads-up. I’ve emailed everything to you, but here’s a sample.’
He left the papers on McKeown’s desk and walked out, his shoulders slumped as if he had the defeat of the human race written across them.
These were images that someone thought they had permanently deleted from Cameron’s laptop, and as McKeown skimmed through them, he felt sick.
Lottie’s head was swirling after they left Dermot Macken. All they had was hearsay, and even at that she felt it was couched in riddles and lies. Nothing tangible with which to arrest him. She had to walk away. But a gut feeling told her he was still keeping something from her.
The one thing she had to do was to return to Alice Quigley’s house.
Whether the woman was there or not, the place needed to be searched.
Lottie had seen a PlayStation in its box through the window of one of the rooms. No indication that it was Freya’s gift.
Still, it was a red flag. She had the search warrant ready to be executed.
‘I can’t believe we were totally wrong-footed in all of this,’ she said.
‘We need to cross-reference both cases,’ Boyd said. ‘Alice and Sadie, and maybe even Caroline, are connected to the historical case.’
‘We’ve wasted almost a week. If Sadie isn’t the killer, then I fear something dreadful will happen to her and Lily and we’ll be too late to stop it. That’s if they’re not already dead.’
‘I can’t believe Alice could be involved.’
‘I agree. Why would she murder her own family? She presented as a grieving grandmother, drowning her sorrows by tending her garden. We have no evidence to say she’s a killer. But who knows why anyone does anything in this day and age? Playing devil’s advocate, one motive might be greed.’
‘Where did that come from? You saw the state of Alice’s house. She cares more for her bloody flowers, and the Healys only gave the impression of wealth.’
‘Everything was cheap except for Cam’s flashy Range Rover,’ Lottie said. ‘You saw the video of someone watching Freya from a tree. Perhaps images were being taken and sold – that’s greed. Liam Scanlan is involved in some aspect of these crimes. He could hold the key to the finances.’
‘Leaving Alice aside, he is the most likely candidate for the murders.’
‘Yes,’ she admitted, ‘but it’s all conjecture, and there’s no mention of him in the Tormey file.’
‘So what do we do now?’
‘I don’t know.’ She eyed Alice’s door. ‘Break it down and make a big mess?’
Boyd put out his hand and knocked. No one came to answer.
Lottie nodded at Garda Lei, who was struggling up the wet path with the big red key. A battering ram.
Once he had a hole smashed in the door, Lottie put her hand in and unlatched it. Though she had already been inside Alice’s house, she was met with a feeling of unfamiliarity. She welcomed it, because she didn’t want to encourage any false hopes or misconceptions.
The house felt cold. Not lived in. That theory was negated by the accumulation of so many possessions and paraphernalia. In other words, stuff.
‘Is Alice a hoarder, or plain untidy?’ Boyd’s face was a veil of horror as he appraised the random junk stacked in the rooms.
‘Or is she using all this to mask what she really wants to hide? I don’t know. Anyhow. Gloves.’ Lottie pulled her own on and walked into the room in which she’d seen the PlayStation.
Boyd ran his gloved finger along the top of the box. ‘Poor Freya.’
‘Might not be hers.’ Then she came across a gift bag with a dozen or so birthday cards. Behind it was a stack of presents, some with the brightly coloured wrapping paper around them intact. No longer in any doubt as to who they belonged to, she said, ‘This is too sad to contemplate.’
‘What?’
‘That a grandmother was somehow involved in the murder of her grandchild. Of her own family.’
Boyd nodded. ‘She is definitely not who she portrayed herself to be. Otherwise why wouldn’t she have told us she had Freya’s presents here?’
‘And spouting all that trash about Caroline having an affair.’
‘Maybe that was true. Remember those texts? Alice was the one who told us about seeing something on Caroline’s phone, and it led us to Thomas Clarke. Was that to keep our focus away from Alice herself?’
‘Maybe,’ Lottie said. ‘Or to direct us towards Sadie and her family. We have to keep an open mind. She might just have taken the presents to store them.’
‘Do you believe that?’
‘I believe nothing until we get to the bottom of it all.’
They moved on to what they supposed was Alice’s bedroom. More junk littered every surface.
‘Do you give any weight to what Macken said about the grooming and abuse?’ Boyd asked.
‘He’s lied to us already, and I don’t have the evidence to make any sort of call on his claims. But what he said could tie back to the old case rather than the current ones.’
‘Jane found no evidence that Freya was sexually abused.’
‘It might have been at the grooming stage. But I can’t get my head around Sadie. Maybe when she met Caroline two years ago it was the first time they’d seen each other since their time in Oak House, or since the Tormey murders. We can ask Sadie when we find her. If she’s alive.’
‘Maybe she’s the ringleader and has taken Alice.’ Boyd wasn’t giving up on the speculation.
While they waited for SOCOs to arrive, Lottie discovered enough bottles of sleeping pills in the bedside cabinet to kill an elephant. ‘These will need to be sent to the lab.’
‘Jane should review Freya Healy’s autopsy,’ Boyd said.
‘For what?’
‘Signs of sexual abuse.’
‘She didn’t find anything like that.’
‘Perhaps, but all the same…’
Lottie sighed heavily. ‘Sometimes you have to dig deep to find the signs of trauma.’
Her phone rang. McKeown. She answered the call and listened.
Boyd watched as she hung up. ‘You okay? You look like you’re about to be sick.’
‘Jesus, Boyd, it’s bad. So bad.’