The Forgotten Ones 5 (Chapters 43 – 55)

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SPOILERS!!!

What I had already suspected turned out to be right. The body who was cremated belonged to Terry Haynes, Tom Fleming’s friend and sponsor. Tom checks the names of the patients that had a skull metal plate and pins in their legs, and the name of Terry is there. So it is safe to assume that he was the man who was cremated instead of Carlisle.

What Lucy and Tom have discovered so far is that there are a couple of men, father and son, who hire homeless and foreign workers for a song, and they also steal the cabling from closed-off public buildings. Lucy assumes that Haynes was approached by Kamil about what was going on, so Haynes impersonated a man wanting job, and when he was discovered, he was murdered, and then Kamil was killed as well.

The people in the soup kitchen where Kamil and Haynes were last seen talking to this red-haired man alert Lucy and Tom that the blue van is back. The two cops go there, and when a young man notices Lucy and who she is, he takes off, and Lucy goes after him. Yet, she is unable to catch him, but they have the van, and the registration number shows that it belongs to someone called Rory Nash. Lucy talks to the wife, who tells her that her husband Rory is working somewhere, and the younger man she chased after was their son Padraig. When Rory Nash eventually goes to the station and talks to Lucy, he has an explanation for everything. The reason why his son must have fled from Lucy is because he is in disability benefits, and he must have thought that she would report him. The police don’t really have anything for the man, so Rory Nash walks out.

That night Lucy gets a home call. It is Dermot, the neighbour, who tells her that Fiona has left her partner, John Boyd, the guy from the city council. When Lucy gets to the house, she notices that Fiona’s lip is split, and the woman asks her that John hit her when she asked him to use her debit card. So she packed some clothes and left. While they talk, there are thumps coming from the front door. Dermot answers, and it is John, who wants to talk to Fiona. When John sees Lucy, he naturally recognises her and calls her a cop before Fiona. When Lucy has to admit that he is right, Fiona is angry for Lucy’s lies and tells Lucy to go. Poor Lucy. Her motivations are always genuine, and in this case she just wanted to help, but her half-truths have put her in a very difficult situation with two women that she started considering friends: Tara, her colleague, and Fiona. At least, Lucy and Tara have talked, and Tara has reluctantly accept her justifications, but she is still aloof around her. I wonder if Fiona will understand why Lucy has done what she has done.

When Lucy leaves her neighbours’ house, she doesn’t want John Boyd to know that she lives nearby, so she takes her car and drives away. As she drives around the area where Aaron Moore lives, she sees the car of the officers staking out the house. Lucy greets them, and then she thinks she has seen a torch beam inside the house. So she calls Burns with the new information, and the man calls the brother to let his officers to have a look. Inside the house everything is almost the same, but Lucy is curious to know about the rubble that she saw the last time. Seamus Moore, the brother, mentions that there is an outhouse, and when Lucy checks it, she notices that the toilet is gone, and there is a hole inside which there is a ladder. Without thinking about it twice, Lucy climbs down the ladder, and she sees some kind of room where there is a sleeping bag, some posters on the wall, and a range. From this area there are two underground corridors, and she and the other officer decide to split and check each one. In the end Lucy catches up with Aaron Moore, who is stopped at the end of the corridor by the stoned wall, and as he can’t continue, he faces Lucy with a knife in his hand.

I am curious to know the truth about this case. It is clear that the Nashes are in the thick of it, but why kill Haynes, Kamil, and Duffy? Was their irregular business that important that they had to kill these men?

Apart from this, Lucy is concerned by Grace, the young prostitute who alerted her about the place where Kamil was killed. The previous night Lucy invited her to sleep in her house as it was pouring with rain. The girl had a shiner, and she explained that a client had assaulted her. The girl had photographed the registration number of the car of the client, and Lucy finds out that it belongs to someone called Bernadette Thompson. The following day she calls the woman, and tells her about her husband using the car to have dealings with a young prostitute. The problem is that later in the day Lucy has a missed call from Grace, but whenever Lucy phones her, the call goes to voice mail. I have a bad feeling about this, and maybe something happened to Grace because Lucy alerted the man’s wife about what she knew. This sounds very much like what happened to Mary Quigg. I just hope the result isn’t the same and Grace is all right.

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