Free The Irish Scissor Sisters by Mick McCaffrey Page A

when there were none on show.
    Kathleen and Linda were soon positive that Noor was lying in the water, just a few feet from them, but they wanted to be absolutely certain. Linda turned to somebody in the crowd and asked them what the commotion was about. The man told her there was a body all cut up in the canal and the gardaí were pulling it out. She told him that was awful and looked at her mother. They had seen enough and rushed back to the flat to talk about what would happen next. The police had no idea that the remains were Farah Noor’s so they were confident enough that they wouldn’t be arrested any time soon.
    They turned on the 5.30 p.m. news on TV3 and watched live reports from the scene. They did the same thing on RTÉ at 6 p.m. and switched back over to TV3 at 6.30 p.m. Linda stayed in her mother’s that night and all they did was watch the news, trying to get more information about what the guards knew about Farah. Charlotte wasn’t in the flat as she was staying with friends elsewhere in the city that night. Linda rang Charlie’s mobile after watching the news reports and broke the news to her sister. Charlotte was shocked and cursed Farah Noor but she didn’t return to Richmond Cottages. She decided to stay in drinking with her friends, instead. Linda and Kathleen stayed in the flat staring at each other. Neither was in the mood for drinking – they were lost in their own thoughts, wondering about the consequences of what the two sisters had done that night.
    Linda went back to Tallaght the following morning and spent the next few days with the news on. She saw the murder case featured on RTÉ’s Crimecall and knew that if the guards were going on TV making public appeals for assistance, they were obviously treating the case very seriously. She realised that now, more than ever, she had to do something about Farah’s head.

    In the days after the murder, and even after the discovery of the body, Kathleen played out a charade with people, pretending that her boyfriend was still alive.
    Five days after the murder the landlord of 17 Richmond Cottages, John Tobin, had gone to collect his rent from Kathleen Mulhall. A plumber by trade, Tobin bought the large house in June 2004 and divided it into four flats. Kathleen, or Catherine, as she had introduced herself to the landlord, had viewed the flat with Farah Noor and moved in at the end of 2004, paying €190 a week in rent. She had given her former address as 158 Lower Glanmire Road in Cork and listed her previous landlord as a reference. Tobin had found that Kathleen and Noor kept to themselves and didn’t cause much trouble. There had only been one incident when, after a minor disagreement, they called the guards about a fellow tenant.
    As Kathleen was giving John Tobin the rent on 25 March, she told her landlord that Farah had run away to be with another woman, who’d had a child for him. She said that the girl only lived around the corner and that she’d only found out about it because Farah was meant to be working nights as a security guard in a shop in town. He’d told her he was spending all his time working but she’d discovered that he was actually seeing another woman and had spent hardly any time in work. She told her landlord that she had put Farah’s stuff into black bags and left them under the stairs. John Tobin did see two or three black bags in the house but in reality they probably contained bloody carpet, rather than clothes.
    John Tobin wasn’t the only person to whom she spun the cock-and-bull story about Noor leaving her for another woman. In one incident Kathleen bumped into Farah’s friend Ibrahim Mohamed in the city centre. She asked him if he had seen Noor and told him to tell her boyfriend that she was looking for him if Mohamed happened to see him.
    Farah’s cousin, Lulu Swaleh, had phoned her on 10 March to ask if a parcel of clothes sent from Kenya had arrived in Ireland yet. Even though Farah was still living with