Gallows Lane (Inspector Devlin Mystery 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

night. I phoned round this morning, but none of them knew where she was. Hadn’t seen her since the club. When I hadn’t heard from her by lunchtime, I knew there was something wrong.’ She exhaled her smoke in a single, steady stream.
    ‘We’ll need names, Miss Doherty.’ I said.
    Claire Finley worked in the same newspaper office as Karen Doherty, accepting phone-placed classified adverts. She sat now in the staff kitchen, smoking a cigarette and drinking a mug of tea. Williams sat with her arm around the girl. We recognized Claire’s face from the vest top Karen had been wearing. The girl should have been looking forward to her impending marriage; instead she was mourning the death of a friend. And blaming herself.
    ‘We shouldn’t have left. I knew that. But I wanted to get home,’ she said, looking at each of us, pleadingly, hoping that we would nod our understanding and offer her some comfort. ‘You see? I had to get up for work. I wanted to get home.’
    Claire explained to us that she and five of her friends, including Karen, had gone to Letterkenny for her hen night. They had shared a meal first in a local restaurant, then had gone clubbing in Club Manhattan. One by one, her friends had started to pair up with men. She had lost track of Karen, she said.
    When they met up afterwards, Karen and another girl, Julie, were missing. Julie had texted one of the others to say she had ‘scored’ and wouldn’t need a lift. No one had heard from Karen. They waited five minutes or so for her, then, presuming that she had achieved the same result as Julie, they went home. Karen’s sister Agnes had phoned that morning, looking for her. Claire hadn’t been too worried at that stage – maybe Karen was sleeping off a hangover somewhere. But by lunchtime she still hadn’t appeared, or phoned in sick, and had missed two deadlines for articles she had been writing. Claire had phoned around her friends. Only then did it become apparent that she hadn’t made it back to Strabane.
    ‘You didn’t see her with anyone?’ I asked, a little incredulously. ‘The entire night, you didn’t spot her once?’
    ‘No, I . . . I . . .’ Claire began, then spluttered into tears for the third time since our arrival. She looked at Williams, her head tilted slightly. ‘Please .. .’ she managed.
    ‘Maybe Claire and I could have a few minutes, Inspectors?’ Williams said, nodding towards the door of the kitchen.
    Hendry and I went outside and stood on the street, taking the opportunity for a smoke.
    ‘Well, what’s your reading of it?’ Hendry asked.
    ‘I’m not sure, Jim, to be honest. The pathologist’s report should be through this evening. There’s a lot of strange stuff with the scene. Locked doors, unused condoms.’
    ‘Anything we can do, Ben, just let us know.’
    ‘We’ll need someone to speak to the rest of the girls on the hen night. Could you take care of that over here?’
    ‘No problem. Keep us up to date on what’s happening your side, eh?’
    Williams joined us a few moments later.
    ‘Anything?’ I asked.
    ‘Girl stuff,’ she said. ‘Seems Claire met a man last night. One last fling before the ball and chain. Spent most of the disco in the back of his car; doesn’t want her fiancé to know, obviously. She has no idea what happened to Karen, but she feels guilty as hell about it.’
    When I got back to the station, Patterson and Colhoun were putting the finishing touches to a display for the media. All the weapons they had found had been bagged and tagged and were laid out like a banquet on top of two pasting tables clothed in white paper. Boxes of ammunition were piled on one side, the shotguns in the middle and the revolvers side by side at the front. On a separate desk, in pride of place, lay the bag of Es, some of them spilling on to the desk from the mouth of the bag.
    Costello had dressed for the occasion and I noticed he had brought a new black hawthorn walking stick which perhaps he felt