The Torso in the Canal Read Online Free PDF Page A

Clarke’s Bridge, near Ballybough, just minutes away from the flat. In the dead of night, the two sisters carried the bags to the canal bank. Linda carried the light bits while Charlotte carried the heavier ones.
    During the course of the trial, Linda’s statement was produced as evidence. It indicated that her mother accompanied Charlotte and her when they went to move the bags, saying: ‘Charlotte took the heavy bits, we walked down to the canal, me ma walked with us.’
    As they made their way down the bank and under the bridge, they operated under the cover of darkness. When they stumbled down the bank, they opened a bag and threw a body part into the water.
    They made the journey several times, all the time watching for passers-by or unwanted strangers. They could just about see what they were doing, it was so dark. After they had dumped the final body part; there was some panic about whether a scar on Noor’s arm would identify him. Suddenly the sisters were gripped by fear, but by this stage, it was too late.
    The torso, femurs, legs and arms had all sunk in the water. There was nothing more they could do, even if they wanted to.
     
    *****
     
    When they returned to the flat, they found the bathroom and bedroom covered in blood and tiny pieces of flesh. The violent manner in which Noor had died had left tell tale marks everywhere. His blood had soaked into carpets, linoleum and the wooden skirting boards around the flat. The scene was one of horror, with all the tell tale signs of death there to see.
    Linda would afterwards confirm to gardaí that the carpet close to the bunk bed was heavily soiled with blood: ‘There was more blood there than anywhere else.’
    The towels they used to mop up the blood had also left crimson stains on the floor.
    The sisters next set about washing these stains away using buckets, mops and clothes. The clean up lasted well into the night. Charlotte recalled that they stayed up all night.
    ‘We were just cleaning up for hours. We had everything in the flat cleaned up then we went up to the Watergate Park and buried the head,’ she later said.
    As her statement indicates, the next stage of the cover up involved the disposal of Noor’s head. It was crucial that it would never be found. Others would not have been so brazen to attempt it, but the decision to dispose of the head at another location was made while they were still partly drunk and high on drugs. This explains their bizarre decision to place the head in a bag, take it through the city centre, then carry it on a public bus, and to a place where it could be disposed of safely. In many ways, the audacity of this would help ensure its success.
    They stayed up all night long cleaning away all traces of blood before they left Richmond Cottages the next morning. The time was now 11am. They were suffering from a mixture of shock, exhaustion and guilt; they were also hungry.
    But they knew that to conceal their act, they had to dispose of the head as quickly as possible.
    Having placed the head in a bag the night before, they now took it with them as they walked into a supermarket on Summerhill Parade to buy salad rolls, which they ate on the street. They were actually filmed in the store by an internal CCTV camera.
    When they finished eating, they made their way into the city centre and caught a bus to The Square Shopping Centre in Tallaght. They paid the correct fares and didn’t draw any unwanted attention to themselves.
    With Noor’s head still safely in the bag, they walked around the shopping centre, looking in the windows of clothes shops. They were now nursing headaches, but their minds and senses were also in turmoil.
    Linda began to have flashbacks; she could not stop thinking about Noor, the look on his face when he died, and how he’d called out her mother’s name after Charlotte had slashed his throat.
    Inside, she felt she was trapped in a living nightmare. She possessed a magnified view of the death she could