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bloodstained T-shirt caught his eye again.
     
     
    In the outside corridor a seventeen-year-old drug-addicted mother wheeled her six-month-old baby down to the stairwell that led to street level. The baby had been born addicted to heroin courtesy of his mother's habit. They lived in an inner-city tenement called Hillcourt Mansions. This had the reputation as Dublin's toughest and most drug-infested hot spot. It was a three-storey flat-roofed 1950s design, twenty units on each level overlooking a central concrete courtyard, two stairwells to the ground at each end. Before heroin fully took over it was merely a petty-crime area, handbag snatching, mugging, drunken brawling. After the city's surge in hard drugs 'the mansions' had become a vicious, dangerous complex. Doctors refused to go into it and the police only in numbers and not for long. Hillcourt Mansions was hell on earth, an urban desolation of graffiti, used syringes and crack houses.
    Kelly had a single room along a narrow corridor in one of the shared flats and spent most of his time lying on a filthy mattress on the floor, spaced out in a multi-drug-induced stupor. He had no other possessions apart from the stolen CD player and discs. In one corner rested a tin waste bin quarter-full of dirty syringes and small clingfilm sachets that once contained heroin. A selection of knives, flick and fixed-bladed, wide and slim, were usually hidden under the mattress. More often than not they were bloodstained. The room was a pit, a flea-infested, urine-stinking dump. Micko Kelly couldn't care less.
     
     
     
    5
    3.30 pm
     
     
    'I'm sorry to disturb you, Mr Nolan, but I have something important to tell the girls.'
    Sister Concepta Downes stood at the front of classroom six of the Holy Rosary Convent in Blackrock. The school was four miles from Sandymount Park. Slightly behind her Detective Sergeant Tony Molloy watched and waited. Sister Concepta wore standard nun's uniform, navy veil across the middle of her hair allowing tufted grey fringe in front, long heavy grey skirt and white blouse, with grey cardigan. A wooden crucifix hung around her neck and she fingered it nervously. She was barely two inches above five feet and was dwarfed by the tall policeman.
    'This is a policeman, a Sergeant Molloy. He would like a word as well.' Her words were directed at the French teacher, Gerry Nolan, but loud enough for the class to hear. Nolan was a good-looking man in his early thirties, dressed in slacks and linen jacket with dark blue shirt open at the neck. He moved away from the blackboard and leaned against a radiator.
    'I'm afraid I have dreadful news,' the nun began, choosing her words carefully.
    Molloy inspected the faces behind the desks. There were twenty-two girls, aged around seventeen to eighteen years, all with the healthy complexions of good breeding and careful diet. There were a few black and oriental faces, probably from the embassies he decided. The girls were dressed in school uniform, grey skirts, white blouses, navy ties. Beneath the desks he spotted regulation navy blue tights and black, sensible shoes. There wasn't a pair of trainers anywhere. The overwhelming impression was wealth and privilege, the sort of girls ferried to school in BMWs, Volvos and Mercs, not old bangers like the '90-registered Toyota Corolla Molloy's wife used for their three children.
    'I'm afraid Jennifer Marks is no longer with us.' The words hung in the air and puzzled glances were exchanged around the classroom. 'She's dead.'
    There was a sharp intake of breath and the expressions changed suddenly to shock and disbelief. Gerry Nolan muttered a quiet 'Jesus Christ'.
    'I'm not going to say any more, I know this is a terrible shock for all of us,' continued the nun quickly, 'but Sergeant Molloy wants to know if any of you were with Jennifer, God rest her soul,' she crossed herself, 'yesterday after school.'
    As one all heads turned to a dark-haired girl sitting two desks from the back