The Ruin 4 (Pages 179 - 229)

 SPOILERS!!!

Cormac realises that his position at the station is not easy. Danny, who went to Dublin to check on her sister's, thought to go and talk to Hannah Collins, Tom Collins's sister, who is in prison for drug traffiking. Hannah was willing to talk, and she told Danny that twenty years ago she provided Maude Blake with heroin, which was what killed her mother. Danny's superior, Melanie Hacket, went to the super, Brian Murphy, who tells Cormac that he expected more from him and is disappointed. Melanie thinks that Maude murdered her mother. And later that day she arrests Maude when she is with Aisling.

Cormac goes to talk to the woman who supposedly looked after Hilaria Blake, Dominica Keane. The nurse who visits her advises Cormac to be on guard as the woman is not trustworthy and a psychopath. Dominica tells Cormac that Hilaria was a good woman and it was not decent to take her children away from her. When Corman mentions the broken bones and the burnt marks that Jack had, the woman keeps saying that Jack was just a clumsy boy. When she says that she and others came to Hilaria's for prayer, Cormac wants to know who else was there, and Dominica mentions a German teacher, Simon Schmidt.

There is another cold case that Cormac is looking into, that of Maura Hughes, a fifteen-year-old girl who went missing in the 1980s. Her teacher was questioned when a friend of hers saw her in his car, but the man, Timothy Lanigan, said that he had only given her a lift. The charges were dropped, and Maura was never found, and the teacher moved to America. Cormac asks his friend Matt, who works for Interpol, to find out about the man, and some days later he tells him that Lanigan was a teacher in America and got married, and there was another disappearance in the school where he was a teacher and football coach. This time the girl was found dead and raped, and Lanigan was brought to be questioned, but again he was exonerated and the girl's boyfriend accused and sent to prison, but he was released when further evidence showed he was not the culprit. Lanigan divorced his wife and returned to Ireland, and now he runs a pub. Now Cormac plans to pay him a visit and see if he can get DNA from the man.