An hour later, Moss came through to Erika’s office with Gerry O’Reilly’s criminal history.
‘You should see this,’ she said handing Erika a print out.
‘First brush with the law was aged 8 in 1980,’ said Erika looking up at Moss as she read,
‘Yeah, nice kid. He was part of a gang of six kids who assaulted an elderly lady and stole her purse, arrest and caution,’ said Moss.
‘Arrested again aged, ten, eleven, and twelve, for shoplifting, arson and stabbing another boy at school in the leg. Aged seventeen he was convicted of ABH, glassed a barmaid during a pub brawl and she lost an eye. He was sent St. Patrick’s Institution in Dublin for eighteen months… Then he seems to have turned his life around, joined the Irish Army in 1991. He was stationed in Kuwait following the Iran-Iraq war, for 2 years, then Eritrea for another year and then as part of a peacekeeping force in Bosnia…’
‘Then he gets into a fight with another officer, nearly kills him, and in 1997 he has a Dishonourable Discharge,’ said Moss. ‘He worked several security jobs over the years, and apart from a caution for marihuana he’s kept his nose clean and stayed off the radar. But he was around during summer 1990, he would have just been released from youth detention…’
‘Pull his passport records. Let’s hope he was in the country when Jessica went missing.’
‘Do we want to bring Laura Collins in for questioning?’
‘No. I want to first go and see her,’ said Erika.
65
Erika, Moss and Peterson arrived at 7 Avondale Road early afternoon, and the street was eerily quiet. There were no cars, and it was silent, save for the wind, which slowly pushed a whirling pile of leaves towards them.
They walked down the driveway to the house and saw Laura’s silver Range Rover parked at the bottom by the front door. The engine was still ticking under the hood and it was still warm when Erika laid her hand on it.
They exchanged a look and rang the doorbell. Laura answered, her hair on end and with a look of wild panic in her eyes.
‘Are you here with the paramedics? My mother, she’s not responding, she won’t wake up!’
They hurried inside and up the wide wooden staircase. The second floor was gloomy, and Laura led the through to the master bedroom at the end of a long carpeted corridor. They passed a guest room, and a room filled with toys and a small bed with a pink eiderdown, which Erika presumed had been Jessica’s room.
The master bedroom had fitted wardrobes along one wall, and a dressing table in the bay window that looked out over the garden. A door led off to an en suite bathroom. The double bed was empty, the covers bunched up messily.
‘She’s in here,’ said Laura. They went through to a small elegant bathroom where Marianne was propped up against the bath. She wore a long white nightgown and she was still, her arms flopped open, her face white.
‘Why is she in here? Did she collapse?’ asked Erika.
‘I was trying to get her to wake up… She wouldn’t wake up.’
‘What has she taken?’ asked Erika rushing over with Peterson. She helped him to gently lay Marianne on her back and Peterson opened her mouth to check her airways.
‘She’s not breathing,’ he said. He set to work quickly and began to give her CPR.
‘No, no this can’t be happening,’ cried Laura. ‘Mum! Wake up! Wake up!’
‘I need to know what she’s taken,’ said Erika.
‘She’s had those pills, the sleeping pills…’
‘Halcyon, yes?’
Moss went through to the bedroom and returned with a box of Halcyon. She opened it and pulled out two pills sheets, one was empty and the other had just a couple left.
Laura looked up at her and nodded. Peterson was still working on Marianne, alternating between fifteen chest compressions and two breaths.
‘How many has she taken?’
‘We’ve been giving her a couple every four hours.’
‘We?’
‘I mean, I…’
‘Come on,’ said Peterson. He was working on Marianne and she wasn’t moving.
‘Who has been prescribing these pills?’ asked Erika.
‘The doctor, a private doctor…’ Laura began to cry. ‘Mum, please, I didn’t mean any of it!’
Marianne seems to take in a ragged breath and splutter, colour flushed back into her cheeks and she began to cough.
‘It’s okay, you’re okay,’ said Peterson. Marianne rolled to one side and was sick. The doorbell went downstairs and Moss left the room. She returned a few minutes later with three paramedics carrying a stretcher.
They spent twenty minutes in the bathroom making Marianne stable.
‘She’s going to be okay,’ said one of the paramedics as they stretchered her out.
‘I should go with her,’ said Laura.
‘DI Moss will go, won’t you,’ said Erika. If Moss was disappointed she hid it well.
‘Yes, of course. I’ll go and keep you posted.’
‘We need to talk to you,’ said Erika.
‘I don’t know anything about the pills, I didn’t know they would be bad for her!’
‘No, we want to talk to you about Jessica’s father Gerry O’Reilly.’
66
Erika and Peterson sat with Laura in the living room of Avondale Road. It was still and silent. A clock ticked out in the hallway and the painting of the Virgin Mary seemed to tilt her head imploringly toward the tableaux below.
Erika had laid the copy of Jessica’s birth certificate out on the polished surface of the coffee table in front of Laura.
Laura had been silent for a moment, staring at it in fear and disbelief, and then she had started to retch.
‘Laura,’ said Erika grabbing her hand, ‘It’s okay, we’re here, and it’s going to be okay.’
‘No, it’s not!’ she cried, tears running down her cheeks. ‘It’s not.’
‘Start at the beginning,’ said Erika. Peterson handed her a tissue and she took it wiping her face. A calm seemed to descend on her and she began to talk,
‘I loved living in Ireland. We had a small house in a pretty village by the sea. We didn’t have much, Dad was working on various building sites and Mum was at home with me, but we were happy. I met Gerry when I was thirteen.’
‘Where did you meet him?’
‘At the local Catholic youth club, a little hut on the hill at the top of the beach. It may have ben filled with pictures of Our Lady, and they assumed that the kids would be playing Ping-Pong and cards, but the older kids would slope off to the beach, amongst the dunes. I was the unlucky girl who fell pregnant.’
‘What happened?’
‘God, it was so long ago, and Ireland in the early eighties was like England must have been in the sixties. My mother went crazy. I tried to hide it from her, but one night when I stood up in front if the television she saw my silhouette and that was my childhood over…’
‘Your mother was more religious than she is now?’
‘It’s like a fervour in Ireland, competitive Catholicism, like keeping up with the Jones’s only it’s not washing machines and house extensions that people are investing in. It’s the accumulation of deity’s, it’s time spent at mass. I was sent away to an aunt… she’s dead now, but you don’t need to check, you can see I had the baby. I had my Jessica…’ she broke down again and they waited to give her time to compose herself. ‘We moved to England a few months after I came back from my holiday with Aunt Mary. A new start. We came to London with very little, we all lived in a youth hostel near London bridge for two weeks. And we stuck to the story, my mother had given birth a few months previously. Not that anyone cared! You should have seen it. It was a dump, no one said grace before bed, they all took the lords name in vain, some of the women were shagging around. And you know what was fucked up? My parents were the happiest they’d ever been! They could have let me keep her. It could have been a fresh start for me too.’
‘When did you move here?’
‘A few years later. My dad got work on the construction of Canary Wharf, they were behind schedule and there was so much work to be done. He’d never earned so much money. We were living in a rented a house in East London. I remember the day so clear. He took me to work with him, and we left mum with Jessica, she was almost one. The construction work was all over the East London Docks, and they’d been drained. The mud was dry and you could climb down the ladder and walk around. Dad was in the pub with some mates in between work, and I got taking to this beautiful lad, he was a gypsy. He was searching amongst all the mud for any metal. I’d started smoking on the sly and I offered him a cigarette and we got talking. Nothing more. Then my dad started yelling at me to come back, he said he’d done a big deal to buy a piece of land. We left to go home to mum and he was so excited, was talking about building a big house for us all. When we got home, my mother had registered Jessica for nursery school, and a doctor and dentist. She’d told them all she was her mother, she’d made it official…’
Erika and Peterson watched patiently.
‘This is the land my father bought, and this is the house he built. It all happened so fast. Life changed and I struggled to keep up with it all. Then Mum had Toby, and I was doing my school leaving exams. I used to look at them with Jessica and Toby and I felt the odd one out. My mother thought I was a sinner, that I was a fallen woman. I went away to university and it made me realise that I was living with a religious nutter for a mother. When I came back after my first year in 1990, my mother had started Jessica and Toby studying for their first communion. She was my little girl and I didn’t want her to have to go through all that, having to go to confession as a child, learning all about original sin…’
‘Did you have much contact with Jessica’s father? Gerry O’Reilly?’ asked Peterson.
‘No. We did what was akin to a midnight flit from Ireland. We left without telling anyone. And this was before Facebook and mobile phones, and we were moving to a new country. We lost contact. Well, I did something I never should have done, and I wrote to Gerry, shortly after I left home for University. I thought he had the right to know…’
Erika’s phone rang and she saw it was DS John Mc Gorry.
‘Can we stop for just a minute, I need to take this,’ said Erika. She left Peterson with Laura and came out into the garden. The sun was just breaking through the clouds and there was a smell of rotting leaves and wood smoke in the cold air.
‘Boss, where are you?’ asked John.
‘I’m at 7 Avondale Road,’ said Erika.
‘We’ve had a setback, Boss. I’ve just been going through all the records we’ve got on Gerry O’Reilly. During August 1990 he wasn’t released from St Patrick’s Youth detention centre until August 30th 1990, three and a half weeks after Jessica went missing, and he didn’t leave Ireland to come to the UK until October of 1990. He couldn’t have abducted Jessica.’
‘What?’ asked Erika looking back at the house. The windows reflected back the grey sky.
‘But he’s been in the UK over the past few months…’
‘Been?’
‘He left three hours ago on a Eurostar train to Paris.
‘Shit. Oh, shit. Get in touch with Interpol. Erm, we need to bring him in.’
‘Okay Boss. How are things going with Laura?’
‘Slowly, we’re trying to get her to talk, but I don’t know how much she’s going to divulge.’
Erika hung up the phone and was about to go back inside, when it rang in her hand. It was Isaac Strong.
‘I’ve finally had the results come back on the soil samples we took from the plastic Jessica Collins was wrapped in,’ he said. ‘As well as being soil and silt samples consistent with what would be found at the quarry, there was another type of material which was found within the plastic. When I sent the soil away to the forensic geologist I also included the lower jawbone from Jessica’s remains, where the material was swabbed from between the teeth where is had become lodged.’
‘What’s the material?’ asked Erika becoming impatient.
‘It’s from a type of bivalve mollusc native to the area around the Gower Peninsula in Wales, also known as the Penclawdd cockle. Jessica was dropped into the quarry wrapped tightly in the plastic, it created a seal that only the water and microscopic organisms could get through…’
‘The quarry was searched in the weeks after Jessica went missing, so whoever put her in the water either kept her alive…’
‘Or killed her, disposed of the body and then transferred the body to the quarry.’
‘Laura was away with her boyfriend Oscar when Jessica disappeared,’ said Erika. ‘They went to the Gower Peninsula in Wales.’
67
AUGUST 7TH 1990
* * *
The air was warm, and a breeze floated off the sea shore towards Laura and Oscar Browne as they sat beside the fire. It was a cool night, and the sky was a vast canopy of stars above them. They were the only people for miles, sitting on the sand in the small, secluded bay in the Gower Peninsula near Swansea.
‘Do you want some more?’ asked Oscar holding up a bottle of wine. Laura leaned forward and let him top up her mug. She thought how beautiful he was, bathed in the fire light. He stood and stretched and went over to the pile of driftwood he had collected earlier in the day, with the help of Jessica.
When they’d arrived, Jessica had been confused but excited to see the caravan with its view of the bay twinkling in the sunlight. The Gower Peninsular was stunningly beautiful, and this little bay was heaven itself; rolling grass and heather with rocks peeping out, which led down to a vast sandy beach where the sun glittered on the sea in the distance and the wet sand was dotted with rock pools.
* * *
Laura had wanted everything to be perfect, so she sent Jessica and Oscar down to the beach so she could quickly made the Caravan home. She made up the small bed for Jessica at the front of the caravan, under the window where she could see the sea, and at night look up at the stars. She tucked her favourite teddy bear in under the covers. They’d rented the caravan was rented from an advert in the back of a guide book, and being a woman who loved her creature comforts, Laura was pleased to read that the caravan had its own electricity. When they’d arrived with ice cream, and frozen beef burgers they’d discovered that the electricity came from a noisy petrol powered generator, which had taken some of the romance from the air when it roared to life, but outside the caravan it was surprisingly muffled, and from down on the beach you couldn’t hear it
When Laura finished making the bed, she’d stood up and brushed her hair from her eyes and peered out of the window. Oscar and Jessica were down on the sand in bare feet, he had an armful of wood and she was poking around in a rock pool. She jumped back with a scream and a giggle, holding a stick, and on the end of it was a large crab… Her long blond hair was loose, and she still wore the party dress. A pang of guilt came over Laura. Clothes were going to be a problem for her, they’d probably have to go into Swansea tomorrow and get her something else to wear, but she was with her daughter for a whole weekend, and she got to be her mother, a role she had been denied and made to feel guilty for so many years.
* * *
When Jessica had returned from university, a month previously, the powerful maternal feeling she’d had for Jessica had returned. She longed to spend some time with her daughter during the summer, but Marianne had been harsh. She’d broached the subject one afternoon when everyone else was out, and it was just her and Marianne. She approached her mother in the laundry room at the back of the house and asked if she could take Jessica out the next day, into London.
‘No! Now you need to get over this,’ Marianne had snapped, pulling clean laundry from the tumble dryer. ‘She’s happy, if anyone is going to take her anywhere, it’s her mother, and in case you’ve forgotten I am her mother!’
‘You are not.’
‘I am! You’re what’s called a laissez faire mother,’ Marianne had
snarled. ‘You whine and moan about not seeing her, but you’re perfectly happy to take the freedom, going out on the town, spending time with boys… she’s only a few years younger than when you fell, but Jessica is not going to make the stupid mistakes you made. You were nothing better than a common whore, you were still a child! I don’t know what possessed you to open your legs to that boy. I hoped it was a mistake a one-off, but your behaviour over the years shows me there’s an evil in you.’
‘By that you mean that Jessica is a mistake! If I made a mistake then Jessica is that mistake!’
Marianne had turned with real fury in her eyes and slapped her hand around the face. Laura had reeled back and fallen over, hitting her head on the edge of the door to the laundry room. She lay there for a moment in shock and reached up to her head and her fingers. They had come away covered in blood. She looked back at her mother’s. She was unconcerned, and had gone back to unloading the tumble dryer. She was humming, actually humming as she removed the rest of the clothes. She was a heartless bitch.
It was then that Laura had made her plan to take Jessica when she went away camping with Oscar. She’d lied to Marianne that they were leaving on the 6th August, when they were planning to go a day later.
They hadn’t met Oscar. She had given up trying to seek their approval, and telling them about a black lad from a single parent home would have produced exactly the reaction she’d predicted. They would have stopped listening, in particular her mother. It wouldn’t have mattered that he studied hard, that he was studying to be a lawyer on a scholarship.
With this in mind, she hadn’t told Oscar the full story. He presumed her parents knew Jessica was going away with them. He hadn’t been hard to convince. He loved children.
* * *
Back on the beach, Oscar and Laura lay back on the soft dry sand. The fire crackled at their feet and the air was fresh with the smell of the sea and the far off sounds of the sea.