CHAPTER ONE
Galway, Ireland in November 2009
There was something sticky on his fingers and he’d never liked it when his fingers got sticky. His mother used to say that he must have been the only little boy who didn’t like sugary treats. He plunged them urgently into the beam of the cab’s headlamps. They were covered in some kind of reddish-brown muck. He’d stopped to have a smoke and had decided to make sure that the back of his cab was as clean as the new taxi regulations dictated it should be. Ben Miller, taxi-driver, was a stickler for rules. He would mostly go out of his way to obey even the most obscure of them, but when there were no clearly defined rules Miller could be more anarchic than anyone. He’d been like that since childhood, and in his wake he had left many bewildered friends and family members still vigorously scratching their heads.
‘Damn,’ he thought, ‘some eejit’s been eating that crap again. Can’t they read the signs?’ And there were more than enough of them.
He’d have to remember to remind fares not to eat in his cab! Or else he just shouldn’t allow them get into the car in the first place.
He looked around for something to wipe his fingers on. He had a hankie in his pocket, but it wasn’t for this kind of thing. And anyway he didn’t want to go poking around in his pockets and have his dirty fingers messing up his jeans. His mother, who seemed to have had advanced knowledge when it came to her eldest son’s quirks, used to call him a fuddy-duddy. He spotted a small puddle full of recently fallen leaves on the other side of the road, crossed over to it and, with distaste, dipped his fingers in. The water slowly turned a vague russet colour; when his fingers were clear of all residue of the mess Miller stood up and shook them dry.
It had begun to drizzle again. There was only one thing he hated more than being sticky and that was being wet.
‘Damn,’ he spat, and hurried back to his cab.
‘Come in zero-four! Come in zero-four!’ the radio summoned him and he grabbed the mouth-piece.
’Zero-four.
‘About fucking time! There’s a pick for you in Newcastle in ten going to the bus station so get your ass there pronto.’
‘Roger and over.’
He started the car up and, like a learner driver doing his test, executed a perfect three-point-turn. The drizzle had turned to rain so he got the wipers going and accelerated away. No more than twenty yards further on he was slamming on the brakes and skidding to a halt with the front wheels of the car braced against the kerb and mere inches from the outstretched hand of the woman lying prone across his path.
Miller didn’t do many things at speed and this was no exception, but having delayed long enough only to exhale deeply he got out of his cab and crouched down beside her. He winced when he saw that he was in a pool of what seemed to be her blood. He cursed the gods that were making him stick his hand into the gooey looking mess filling the spot on her neck where the pulse should be. There was none, or much of a neck either - more a gap between head and shoulders where it should have been.
He stood up and held his hands out in the rain. It took a few moments, but eventually it washed them clean and he shook them dry as best he could. Only then did he begin trying to take in the scene in front of him.
‘Christ,’ he thought, ‘I’ve read enough bloody detective novels to know what I should be doing now.’
He decided that step one should be to get an overall picture of what exactly lay in front of him. Then he should call the cops. The body was that of a young, blonde woman with distinctively Slavic facial features. She wasn’t dressed for the weather, in fact she was hardly dressed at all - just a saturated coat that now lay open revealing her nakedness. Taking a torch from the glove pocket he ran it quickly over her body before fumbling the coat closed. She was barefooted and her legs were splayed out at unnaturally contorted angles from her torso.
Her head had been almost entirely severed from the rest of her body and now seemed to be connected to it only by a few delicate shreds of skin. It was lying awkwardly at a forty-five degree angle to her left shoulder. Her blue eyes were wide open and her mouth appeared to have frozen mid-scream.
The rain had got heavier and was starting to drip from his jacket on to his jeans. ‘Not my night,’ he concluded. Anyway, as there was nothing more he could do for the girl now he could go back to his car and put that call into the Guards.
The radio was home to a hysterical dispatcher who was screaming blue murder in the direction of what he promised was a soon to be defiled zero-four. ‘Shut the fuck up!’ and he snapped the voice off. As a rule Miller didn’t use bad language, but when he was angry all rules went out the door; and the dispatcher had really angered him.
He reached under the driver’s seat and withdrew the mobile phone from where he’d secreted it when Gárda Superintendent Folan had first given it to him. There was only one number on it – Folan’s and it was picked up almost instantly.
‘I’ve found one,’ he announced into the silence at the other end.
‘You sure?’ Folan’s accent was anonymous metro with a smidgen of Connemara.
Miller saw in his mind’s eye the number 0832 woven intricately into the tiny seahorse tattoo he’d spotted on the girl’s upper left thigh.
‘I’m sure.’
‘Ok, hang on there until I can send someone over to get her the fuck out of there...and keep her out of harm’s way till then.’
There wasn’t really anywhere to hide her while he waited for the meat wagon to show up. No bushes or anything like that near the road. There was a bit of a ditch which looked to be filled with all kinds of unidentifiable muck. It would have to do. He bent down and manoeuvred the girl’s body into the gulley. A brief thought flashed through his mind: somebody somewhere might miss her eventually, though that was probably highly unlikely given the backgrounds of most of these girls. All they got out of life was bastards like him shoving their carcases into a ditch with his foot.
