Blood Sisters (33 page)

There were now twenty or thirty of them and Katie was growing increasingly worried that the situation was going to turn violent. She glanced across at Sergeant O’Farrell and he gave her a thumbs up to indicate that he shared her concern. He switched on his R/T and spoke to the riot officers waiting outside. ‘Grady? Everything’s still on the simmer at the moment, like, but there’s a few skangers here throwing shapes. So be ready to come in here quick if we need you.’

The garda with the crowbar climbed the steps of Paddy Fearon’s caravan and inserted the flat end of it into the side of the door. He tugged at it, but as he did so Katie was deafened by a massive bang. Paddy Fearon’s caravan burst apart in front of her eyes. Its windows were shattered in a blizzard of broken glass and its aluminium carcass was ripped into weird distorted shapes, like rags, and flags, and leaping horses.

Katie was thrown backwards by the force of the explosion, hitting her head and her right shoulder on the asphalt. Detectives Dooley and Brennan and all of the gardaí were knocked over, too. The two gardaí who had been trying to open the door were both killed instantly. Their mangled, legless torsos were blown almost fifteen metres into the crowd of Travellers, landing with a double thump and spraying blood in all directions. They were immediately followed by a clattering shower of saucepans, china ornaments, cutlery and bottles.

A ball of orange fire rolled up out the wreckage of the caravan, but it turned almost at once into a mushroom cloud of thick grey smoke. The sound of the explosion echoed and re-echoed and scores of hooded crows took off from the telegraph wires along the Ballyvolane Road, scrawking in panic.

Katie sat up, her ears ringing. Her hair was thick with dust and her duffel coat was sparkling with thousands of specks of broken glass. She had a cut on the heel of her hand where she had instinctively lifted it to protect her face. Her stomach muscles were rock-hard and she prayed to God that the foetus inside her hadn’t been harmed.

Pieces of debris were still dropping from the sky, fragments of wooden shelving and sheets of paper, and three tattered bed sheets were floating high up in the shining fog like ghosts. The first thing she saw was Paddy Fearon’s brindled pony, first collapsing on to its knees, then falling over on to its side. A large triangular shard of aluminium had sliced into the lower side of its neck severing its cranial vena cava and dark red blood was pouring out of it in a thick glossy stream.

Detective Brennan helped Katie to her feet. He said something to her, but she could hardly hear him and the voices of everybody around her sounded like children in a playground far away. She looked around. There was chaos, with people running everywhere. Apart from the two gardaí who had been killed, however, it didn’t look as if anybody else had been seriously injured, although she could see one woman with a deep diagonal cut on her cheek from flying glass and several of the young men were still sprawled out on the ground, shaking their heads as if they were half concussed.

Katie walked over to the two bloodied bodies lying on the ground. The water in the potholes around them was streaked with crimson. Both dead gardaí were wearing their shoulder numbers, but she couldn’t recognize either of them because their faces were so swollen and battered. Their thighs looked like dark-red joints of meat. She was so shocked she couldn’t believe that any of this was really happening, and when she turned around again she almost lost her balance.

Detective Brennan caught her arm to steady her and then immediately said, ‘Sorry, ma’am—’

‘No, no. God. Thank you. I nearly fell. Oh God, this is appalling.’ She crossed herself. ‘Those poor men.’

‘Here, come away, ma’am,’ said Detective Brennan. ‘There’s nothing at all we can do for them now. Well, we can pray for their immortal souls, but that’s about all, like.’

Sergeant O’Farrell was on his R/T, calling loudly for the army bomb squad from Collins Barracks, which was only a little more than five minutes away, and for ambulances, and for the Technical Bureau.

‘We need to evacuate the whole halting site immediately,’ said Katie.

‘What?’ said Detective Brennan, cupping his hand to his ear.

‘I said we need to clear everybody out of here! There could be more bombs in some of the other caravans for all we know! This could be some kind of racist attack!’

‘I’ll get it done, ma’am,’ said Detective Brennan

‘Tell Sergeant O’Farrell to call Bus Éireann. Ask them to send up half a dozen buses from the bus station as fast as they can, but only as far as the Ballyvolane Road. And have him call the Reverend McSweeney at Saint Joseph’s in Mayfield. Ask him if we could use the parish hall for a few hours to house all these people.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

Katie saw the injured pony trying to lift its head. ‘That pony!’ she said. ‘Can’t we do anything to save it?’

Detective Brennan turned his mouth down and shook his head. ‘Not a hope, ma’am. He’s a goner, that one.’

Katie looked around again. Some of the Travellers were still milling around, dazed, but all of the women had retreated back to their caravans and hustled their children inside. Already, though, seven or eight gardaí from the riot team were fanning out around the halting site, knocking on mobile home doors and trying to direct the Travellers towards the entrance. Through her temporary deafness, she could hear shouting and arguing and swearing.

Fionnuala Sweeney was circling the wreckage of Paddy Fearon’s caravan with her cameraman, giving a gabbled commentary. Katie guessed that she was probably reporting live now. She reached over and patted Detective Dooley on the shoulder and shouted, ‘Get her out of here, would you, Robert?’

Detective Dooley was clearly as deaf as she was, but he nodded. Katie waited while he went over to Fionnuala and spoke to her and her cameraman, then ushered both of them well away, past the toilet block. Then she walked over to the side of the caravan where the pony was lying. There was a stench of scorched metal and burned rubber in the air, although the last of the debris had settled now.

The pony rolled its eyes and looked up at her.
Jesus,
she thought,
what a miserable life you’ve led, and what a miserable way to end it. Let’s hope there’s a pony heaven, with fresh grass and blue skies and other ponies romping around
.

She unbuttoned her duffel coat and tugged her revolver out her hip holster. Then she went down on one knee and aimed at the pony’s forehead. She knew from her firearms training how to put down horses. She imagined an X drawn from each of the pony’s ears to its opposing eye and she positioned the muzzle where the X met in the middle, at a slight downward angle, so that the bullet would go through its brain and into its spine.

The pony let out a soft, regretful sigh, as if it understood what she was going to do but accepted it, and then she fired. She was still so deaf that the shot sounded muffled and flat. The pony’s legs puppet-jerked and then it lay still.

When she stood up, Sergeant O’Farrell touched her shoulder and said, ‘Come on, ma’am, we need to get you away from here. I don’t personally think that any anti-knacker fanatic is set on blowing this whole place up, but you never know. And if it’s the Provos, they have a nasty habit of setting a booby trap for the first responders.’

‘Of course,’ she said. She slid her revolver back into its holster and followed him around to the other side of the caravan, glancing back at the pony as she did so. It was still staring at her and she hoped that it forgave her.

* * *

It was more than three hours before the bomb squad had completed their examination of the wreckage of Paddy Fearon’s caravan. They had also thoroughly searched every other mobile home on the Spring Lane Halting Site for any further explosive devices. All of the residents meanwhile had been taken in buses to Saint Joseph’s parish hall where they had been given tea and sandwiches and seen by a doctor and a nurse.

Katie waited in the Mercedes command van, keeping in touch with Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin and Mathew McElvey in the press office. Gradually her hearing returned to normal, but the back of her head was still sore from her knocking it so hard on the ground.

She had just finished talking to Mathew when Detective Dooley climbed up into the van.

‘I think you’d better come and take a lamp at this, ma’am,’ he said. He caught sight of the sugared doughnut that one of the gardaí had brought her with a mug of tea, and said, ‘I wouldn’t eat that just yet, like, if I was you.’

They walked back through the halting site. Sergeant O’Farrell and three gardaí were standing amongst some of the junk with which Paddy Fearon had surrounded his caravan – a bedside table, a gas boiler, and the skeleton of a baby’s Tansad pushchair They were all staring down at the tussocky grass that had been flattened by the blast, but as Katie appeared they all looked up at her uneasily.

‘We’ll have to have him formally identified, of course,’ said Sergeant O’Farrell. ‘I’m fair confident, though, that it’s your man.’

Katie looked down. Behind the gas boiler, half hidden in the grass, his squinchy eyes narrowed as if he were playing hide-and-seek, was a man’s severed head. He had tousled grey hair, roughly pitted cheeks and a broken nose. His prominent Adam’s apple was still intact, but below that the unshaven skin of his neck was ripped into lacy red tatters and his trachea coiled out of it like the pink body sac of a squid.

Katie said, ‘It certainly
looks
like Paddy Fearon, doesn’t it? But who in the name of Jesus would want to blow
him
up? He hasn’t annoyed the Provos, has he?’

‘Oh, he had a fierce number of enemies, as far as I know,’ said Detective Brennan. ‘You’ll have to ask Inspector O’Rourke, he’s the expert when it comes to cultured individuals and all the feuds between them. I know that Fearon got himself on the wrong side of Tómas Ó Conaill a couple of years ago, and there’s a sham-feen you wouldn’t want to upset if you valued your mebs.’

Katie looked at the twisted remains of the caravan. Its entire upper half had been blown off, leaving the cooker and kitchen worktops exposed, as well as a jagged diagonal section of the plywood shelves on which Paddy had kept his ornaments.

‘So where’s the rest of him?’ she asked.

Detective Dooley beckoned her nearer so that she could see what was left of the caravan’s interior. The brown Dralon couch was still mostly intact, although one corner of it had been torn open and a fold of burned white sponge was bulging out of it, with a stray spring in the middle. The rest of Paddy Fearon was still sitting there, in his trackie bottoms, up to his midriff. His intestines were piled on to the gold satin cushion next to him, with three or four bloodstained strings of them trailing over to the torn metal edge of the caravan in the direction of his detached head.

‘No sign of his ribcage or his arms yet,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘They’ll be scattered about, though. We’ll find them. The bomb squad have found the detonator. It’s an ordinary commercial detonator, same as the Provos use. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the Provos did this, though. Not unless Fearon was up to something that upset their Republican sensibilities, like selling ketamine without giving them a share of the proceeds.’

‘Is this is a coincidence, though?’ Katie asked him. ‘Or was he deliberately killed this morning so that we couldn’t arrest him?’

‘Well, now, that’s the sixty-four million euro question. The media knew that we were coming here to lift him, so whoever planted this bomb in Fearon’s caravan, maybe
they
knew, too. But who knows how?’

‘I’ve already asked Fionnuala Sweeney and Dan Keane, but they’re not telling me. Thank you, supreme court. It makes you wonder what’s more important, doesn’t it, protecting the freedom of the press or catching the scumbags who break the law?’

She paused and looked again at the slippery beige heap of Paddy Fearon’s innards on the couch. ‘I really don’t mean that,’ she said, more to herself than anybody else. ‘I just get so frustrated at times.’

She walked back to the entrance of the halting site. The fog had all cleared now and the morning was sunny and sharp. Fionnula Sweeney and Dan Keane came up to her, as well as Jean Mulligan from the
Echo
, and she gave them a brief statement.

‘Two gardaí were killed instantly this morning when a bomb was detonated in a static caravan at the Spring Lane Halting Site in Ballyvolane. The owner of the caravan, Mr Paddy Fearon, was also fatally injured.’

‘Fatally injured?’ she heard Detective Brennan mutter, close behind her, to Detective Dooley. ‘Blown to fecking smithereens, more like.’

‘Mr Fearon was a prominent member of the Travelling community,’ Katie went on. ‘The police had come to Spring Lane to question him on a routine matter, but that is all I’m able to tell you at the moment. We will be contacting as many of Mr Fearon’s relatives as we can find, but it will take some time as we’ve been told that he had eighteen children.

‘The families of the two gardaí who lost their lives have yet to be informed and until then we won’t be releasing their names or any further details. Everybody at Anglesea Garda station is extremely shocked and distressed, and I know that feeling will be shared by members of the Garda throughout the country, as well as ordinary men and women.

‘After the explosion all the residents of the Spring Lane Halting Site were evacuated for their own safety. However, the site has been thoroughly searched by the army bomb disposal team and should soon be all clear for its residents to return.’

‘Just one question, Detective Superintendent Maguire!’ Jean Mulligan called out. ‘Do you know if Paddy Pearon had been threatened at all? Was there any prior warning about the bomb?’

‘That’s two questions, Jean, and the answer to both of them is no.’

‘You weren’t just going to
question
Paddy Fearon, though, were you?’ asked Fionnuala. ‘You came here to arrest him.’

‘I’m not prepared to discuss that yet, Fionnuala. This tragic incident has only just occurred and I’ll be holding a full media conference as soon as we have it in perspective. At the moment, to be honest with you, we’re all still in shock.’