The Moor (DCI Ryan Mysteries, #11)(45)

“Leonie and Marco are nice,” she said. “Leonie gives me chocolate, sometimes, and Marco showed me how to do a backward flip on the grass.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, they’re both acrobats, except Leonie’s pregnant now, so she can’t do her normal show at the moment. She still helps to set up and she trained the girl who’s replacing her, until she’s had the baby.”

“Have they been with the circus a long time?”

“Yeah, for years. They used to know my mum, before she died,” Samantha said, and realised it was becoming easier to admit that her mother was dead. “My dad doesn’t let me keep any pictures of her in the caravan, and he got really mad when I found some old ones of him and my mum in a box.”

He’d thrown them away, in a fit of anger, and she’d cried long into the night.

“But Leonie and Marco had some of her from before she had me, and one from the wedding to my dad.”

“Where are they now?”

Samantha hesitated, then jumped off the sofa. A moment later, MacKenzie heard her small feet stomping up the stairs and back down again.

“I brought them with me,” she said. “I gave one to Ryan to borrow, in case he needed it, but I kept the rest.”

MacKenzie couldn’t have said why she felt so nervous accepting the old prints, but it might have had something to do with the fact she had been entrusted with the safe-keeping of this woman’s daughter. If Esme O’Neill was looking down and watching the pair of them, she hoped she would approve of what she saw.

“Your mum was very lovely,” she said, holding the photographs in careful hands.

And so young, MacKenzie thought.

She saw a slim woman with gleaming red hair and a wide smile, dressed in skinny blue jeans and a casual shirt, tied at her waist. She was captured standing in a crowd of people roughly her own age, and MacKenzie pointed to the first one.

“Who’s this?”

“Oh, that’s Psychic Sabina,” the girl replied, without enthusiasm. “She fancies my dad.”

MacKenzie blinked at the candour, then remembered that children saw everything, whether you wanted them to, or not.

“Marco and Leonie are the ones standing on either side of my mum,” Samantha said. “My dad’s next to Leonie, and then that’s Ginger, who used to work for the circus, but he got a new job working for a call centre, apparently. The one on the end is my uncle, Duke.”

It was a motley crew, MacKenzie thought, and the O’Neill brothers appeared to be like chalk and cheese. Where Charlie was standing confidently, chest puffed out and tattoos on show, his brother stood awkwardly at the end of the line. Taller, ganglier, and pale as pasteurised milk, as he looked not at the camera, but at someone else in the group.

Maybe even at Esme.





CHAPTER 24


Ryan and Phillips spent over an hour with Charlie O’Neill, recording his version of the events of Friday, 3rd June 2011. Having discharged him from the station, they stood in the small viewing room overlooking Interview Room A, where his brother, Duke, had been waiting for some time. He was talking to their family solicitor, George Kingley, who was now providing his counsel to the younger O’Neill.

“What d’you make of Charlie’s statement?” Phillips asked, keeping his voice low.

The rooms were supposed to be soundproof, but discretion was a habit that was hard to break.

“I think his statement is very difficult to disprove without evidence,” Ryan said. “Unless an eyewitness comes forward and tells us they saw somebody enter and leave the caravan dragging Esme’s body behind them, we’ll have to piece the timeline together like a jigsaw.”

His eyes never moved from Duke’s face, which displayed the signs of severe stress.

“This O’Neill brother seems disproportionately worried, for someone who’s been asked to come in and make a routine statement about his sister-in-law,” he added.

Phillips agreed.

“He’s the nervy type, that’s for sure. Wonder if he’s like that all the time, or whether it’s only around the fuzz.”

“We’ll find out, in a minute,” Ryan said, and stuck his hands inside his pockets. “Charlie says he left the caravan around seven in the morning on the day Esme disappeared, and that everything was fine when he left. He confirms she was wearing blue jeans and a pink t-shirt, just as Samantha said, and that Esme was feeding the baby her breakfast the last time he saw her.”

He paused, thinking of what might have happened in between.

“Charlie says it was his brother who ran to him to tell him Esme was missing, after people had been complaining about the baby crying for a long time,” he said. “He seems to think this was sometime during the early afternoon. He went into the caravan to find some of her things missing and a note waiting for him.”

“Let’s see if their stories match,” Phillips said, nodding towards the man on the other side of the toughened glass wall. “Although, God knows, they’ve had plenty time to come up with a cover story, if they needed one.”

Ryan’s jaw hardened.

“Esme’s murderer—or murderers—did their best to destroy all traces of her. After all this time, they probably hoped she’d never be found. But she was. We have the evidence, we have the manpower, and we have the skills to crack this, Frank. We just need time.”