Free That Gallagher Girl by Kate Thompson

– it was too late to call in on her. I’m in Coral Mansion. I can’t tell . . . there’s no electricity: I’ll have to wait until morning to do a recce. But I’ve a feeling you’ve had visitors. Squatters . . . yeah.’
    On the landing, Cat froze. Then she lightly retraced her steps back to the room in which she had set up camp and reached for the Swiss Army penknife that she always kept by her while she slept, cursing her stupidity when she realised she’d left it below in the kitchen. Grabbing her phone instead – her lifeline to Raoul – she moved out onto the balcony. A flight of steps took her down to the garden. Here, by the disused pool on the patio, she hunkered behind an overgrown shrub, and sucked in a couple of deep breaths.
    Stupid, stupid Cat! Why hadn’t she had her things packed and ready for a quick getaway, the way she usually did? Why had she left her laundry strung up on towel rails in the bathroom? She was normally so careful about being on the ball. Now here she was in a garden at midnight, half dressed and horribly vulnerable. And Cat hated feeling vulnerable! She wished she hadn’t left her Swiss Army knife in the kitchen. Her Swiss Army knife felt good in her hand: even if she had no intention of using it, it lent her an air of bravado she did not necessarily feel.
    Through the big picture window overlooking the patio, she saw that the trespasser had moved into the sitting room, and was starting to light candles. He must have found the supply she’d left in the kitchen. The kitchen and the room where she slept were the only rooms in the house in which Cat ever lit candles, since those windows could not be seen from the road. She’d learned to negotiate her way through the house in the dark, like a feral creature. The sitting room, however, was her daytime lair: she used it as a studio, and the paintings she’d made were taped to the walls.
    Cat watched as the figure moved around the room, planting candles on mantelpiece and window ledges. She was freezing now: the wind was up, and it had started to rain. Perhaps she could slip back to the bedroom, quickly help herself to some clothes and her sleeping bag and leg it out of there? But leg it where, exactly? To Raoul’s place in Galway? To the Crooked House? To that hellish gaff she’d spent a night in last week – the one with the junkyard out back, and the rats?
    She would feel at home in none of these places: there was nowhere in the world that was home for Cat. She felt a rush of helpless rage as she stood there in the chill night air, watching through a window as this . . . this interloper took possession of her space.
    But hey! There was something familiar about the inter-loper, now that she saw him by the light of half-a-dozen candles. The last time she’d seen him, hadn’t he been all bathed in the golden glimmer of candlelight? It had been at the wrap party of that film she’d worked on – The O’Hara Affair . He’d had a gig as a stunt double and, that night at the party, Cat had decided on the spur of the moment that she’d wanted to get to know him. His name was Finn, she remembered. They’d shared a dance or two, then a bottle of wine and a laugh and a drunken snog. Later, they’d swapped phone numbers . . . and had never seen each other again because the number Cat had given him was bogus. Cat was careful about letting anyone have her number.
    And yet, and yet . . . he was cool, Finn Byrne, wasn’t he? He’d be cool about the fact that she’d been squatting in his house – she knew he would. He was a scuba diver, and divers were laidback individuals. Maybe he’d even allow her to stay on until she got herself sorted with money and somewhere else to live? What the hell – she hadn’t much choice. She had no choice. She looked at the phone in her hand, then scrolled through the menu until she found