Blood Sisters (37 page)

She nodded towards the painting on the sideboard, facing the wall. ‘You managed to do some more painting today, then?’

‘Just an hour or so, but it’s coming on. Maybe you can pose for me again after supper.’

‘I don’t know. I’m pretty much beat out.’

‘You don’t have to do anything. Just sit there looking gorgeous.’

‘We’ll see. I don’t
feel
gorgeous, believe me. I’ll probably feel better once I’ve had something to eat. When are you going to show it to me?’

‘Not yet,’ said John, closing his laptop. ‘Not until it looks so much like you that I can’t tell for certain which is which.’

‘As long as you don’t try to take it to bed, instead of me.’

Barney had been standing by the kitchen door, sniffing and slowly wagging his tail. Suddenly he let out a sharp bark, and then another, and scuffled his paws on the carpet.

‘What’s the matter, Barns?’ Katie asked him. She turned towards the living-room window, where she could see herself reflected in the darkness outside. ‘Is there somebody there? It’ll only be old Pauly from the shop, taking his dogs for a dander.’

She walked over to the window and took hold of the curtain cord. ‘I can’t see anybody out there, Barns. Maybe it’s next door’s cat.’

She tugged the cord and the curtains started to jerk across the window, but as they did so there was a splintering crack. The right-hand curtain billowed inwards as if it had been violently poked from behind with a walking stick, and then fell back again. A Celtic Weave plate on the sideboard was smashed apart and Katie could see a black hole in the wall right behind it.

‘
Get down
!’ she shouted at John, breathless, almost screaming.

John hesitated and she threw herself across the room, grabbed his red plaid shirt and pulled him down behind the couch. He rolled over and stared at her, wide-eyed.

‘What the hell is that? Is somebody shooting at us?’

‘Stay there,’ Katie told him. She lifted herself up on to her hands and knees and crawled over to the door. Once she was out in the hallway she stood up and reached around for the living room light switch, clicking it off. Then, when the living room was in darkness, she hurried along to the nursery and retrieved her revolver from the chest of drawers.

‘Katie? What do you want me to do?’ John called out.

‘Call 112. Tell them where we are and who I am, and tell them that we’re being shot at from somewhere outside the front of the house. Tell them to send the Regional Support Unit.’

‘The what? The Regional Support Unit? Okay, I’m doing it.’

Katie went back into the hallway, holding her revolver raised in both hands, with the hammer cocked. Keeping her back close to the wall, she went up to the front door, reached across and slid off the safety chain. Then, dodging quickly across to the other side of the hallway, she opened the door two or three inches and peered out into the night. The temperature was three or four degrees above freezing, but there was a cold wind blowing inshore from the harbour, which made her shiver.

She could hear John talking to the emergency services, and then he said, ‘Katie!
Katie
! You’re not going outside, are you?’

Katie said, ‘
Ssh
! I’m just trying to see if there’s anybody here!’

But there was nobody standing in the driveway in the front of the house and as far as she could tell there was nobody crouching behind their cars. The hedge on the right-hand side cast an inky triangular shadow, but she couldn’t see anybody hiding there, either.

She opened the door wider, although she still kept herself close to the frame with her revolver held up high in front of her. She was about to take a step outside when she heard the roar of a car engine starting up and the screech of a fan belt, and a silver Mercedes appeared from behind the next-door hedge and sped away northwards. It happened so fast that Katie couldn’t see its registration plate or what model of Mercedes it was. She couldn’t even be sure if it was a Mercedes at all and not an Audi. After a few moments she smelled scorched rubber in the wind and half-burned diesel.

John came to the door and laid his hand on her shoulder.

‘Was that them?’ he asked.

Katie waited for a moment and then she said, ‘I should think so. Nobody else round here drives like that. Holy Mary, I’m shaking like a leaf.’

‘Do you want to speak to the call-handler? She said they’re sending armed back-up right away. “Armed back-up” – Listen to me! I sound like a character in a crime film.’

‘Well, darling, you are,’ said Katie. Her heart was thumping so hard that she was sure that John could actually hear it. She waited a few moments longer and then she closed the door and slid on the safety chain. ‘It’s a miracle that neither of us got killed.’

She went through to the kitchen, which was dimly illuminated by the street light on the corner. Even though she was fairly sure that the shooter had driven off in that Mercedes and wouldn’t be coming back, she was going to keep the house in darkness until the RSU arrived. It was quite possible that whoever had taken a shot at her had arranged for a car to make a show of driving away but had left a second gunman behind so that he could pick her off as soon as she switched on the lights and appeared in one of the windows.

John took her in his arms and held her close and kissed her hair. ‘I hate to say this,’ he said. ‘I’m not a cop, but it does seem to me that somebody is seriously out to get you.’

‘I don’t think you have to be a cop to work that out,’ said Katie. ‘That car looked very much like the same one that Horgan was shot from over in Dromsligo.’

‘I thought you’d found that one, all burned out.’

‘We found a car that answered its description, all burned out, but there was nothing in it to prove that it was actually the same one.’

‘You need to move away from here for a while, sweetheart, at least until you find out who’s taking pot-shots at you. Can you do that? You have some safe houses, don’t you, for witness protection, that kind of thing?’

‘No, I’m not moving,’ said Katie. ‘If I allowed myself to be frightened out of my house every time some scumbag wanted to see me dead, I wouldn’t be living here at all. I’ll arrange to have a couple of officers parked outside for a few days. It’ll be more cost-effective than moving, and besides I’m thinking of
your
security, too.’

John kissed her again and stroked her back. ‘I love you, Detective Superintendent Maguire. If I lost you, I don’t know what the hell I’d do.’

* * *

It was over twenty-five minutes before two blue and yellow Volvo station wagons arrived outside, their blue lights flashing and GARDA ARMED SUPPORT UNIT scrolling across their roof racks.

John looked cautiously out of the living-room window and said, ‘The cavalry’s here. Didn’t exactly hurry, did they?’

‘That’s budget cuts for you,’ said Katie. Cobh Garda station was less than two kilometres away from Carrig View, but financial restrictions had recently forced its closure and now Cobh and Carrigtwohill were served from Midleton, eighteen kilometres away to the north-east.

Six armed gardaí in dark-blue uniforms and body armour scrambled out of the Volvos and immediately fanned out around Katie’s front garden. Katie opened the front door for them and two officers came inside – a sergeant with a battered face like a former boxer and a woman garda with choppy brown hair and heavy eyebrows. They were both weighted down with Glock pistols and ammunition pouches and tasers and handcuffs and two encrypted radios each, and they jingled and clanked as they walked.

‘What’s the story?’ said the sergeant. ‘Somebody’s taken a shot at you, is that it?’

‘About half an hour ago,’ Katie told them. She took them into the living room and showed them where the bullet had pierced the window and buried itself in the wall.

The sergeant crouched down, so that his eye-line matched the bullet’s trajectory and he could make a rough calculation of where the shooter had been standing when he fired. ‘Right next to your front gatepost, I’d say. Okay. We’ll make a thorough search of the area, of course, but what? You think he’s well away, do you?’

‘A car went speeding off like a bat out of hell as soon as I opened the front door,’ said Katie. ‘It was silvery-coloured, a Mercedes maybe, but it could have been an Audi or a BMW. It went that way, north, probably heading for the N25. I’ve alerted Traffic to look out for it, but I can’t say that I’m very optimistic.’

‘At least you weren’t hit, ma’am, and that’s a blessing,’ said the woman garda.

‘Yes, thank God,’ said the sergeant. ‘And there’s no further call for you to worry about your security, not tonight. We won’t be leaving until we’re totally satisfied that there’s no other potential offenders in the locality who might be a threat to you. Even so, I’ll be posting two armed officers outside until we can relieve them in the morning.’

Another RSU garda appeared in the porch, holding a Heckler & Koch sub-machine gun at a slant. ‘Technical Bureau’s here, ma’am. And three patrol cars. And a vanload of reservists.’

‘Jesus, when one of your own gets threatened you people really take it serious, don’t you?’ said John. Outside, on the pavement, floodlights were being erected and the front of Katie’s house was being cordoned off with crime-scene tapes.

The RSU sergeant looked at John and it was obvious from the twitch under his left eye that he found that remark deeply unamusing. ‘We take it serious when
anybody
gets threatened, sir. That’s our job.’

* * *

Five reservists spent over two hours on their hands and knees on the pavement searching for a spent cartridge case, although they couldn’t find one. Meanwhile, the technicians took photographs of the tyre tracks that had been left by the silver saloon and photographs of the bullet holes in Katie’s living-room window and curtain, and the hole in the wall opposite.

When Katie went back into the living room she found that Eithne was there, her blonde hair covered by a black woolly bobble-hat, measuring the room with a laser.

‘Don’t mind if I move this out of the way, ma’am?’ she said, pointing to the painting on the easel, which was still facing the wall.

Katie shrugged. ‘Yes, go ahead, if you have to.’

Eithne picked it up and turned it around. John had finished painting Katie’s face and hair, and now he had painted her breasts as well and part of her left arm. Eithne stared at it in embarrassment.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, ma’am,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realize—’

‘That’s all right,’ Katie told her. ‘My partner’s a very good artist, so how could I refuse?’

Denis McBride, the ballistics expert, had just walked into the living room and he caught sight of the painting, too. He blinked and took off his owlish glasses and furiously started to polish them with the end of his tie.

Katie took the easel from Eithne and set it down on the small occasional table in the corner, facing the wall again. Eithne said, ‘Fair play to you, ma’am, it’s beautiful. He’s really done you justice.’

‘Well, justice, that’s what we’re all here for, isn’t it?’ said Katie. To her surprise, she didn’t feel at all disconcerted about Eithne or Denis seeing the painting. In fact, in a strange way, she felt proud of herself. She remembered from carrying Seamus how different her attitude had been about her body – how womanly she had felt, but not at all shy about showing herself. Any man could find her arousing, but he couldn’t make her pregnant.

Denis opened up his metal box of tools and started to examine the bullet hole in the wall with a magnifying-glass. Katie went through to the kitchen. Fortunately, John had been in here when Eithne had turned the painting around, talking about hurling to two of the gardaí.

‘Anyone for coffee?’ she asked. ‘I think we can all forget about sleeping tonight.’

She made four mugs of instant coffee and a glass of warm milk for herself, and then she sat down at the kitchen table, although she didn’t join in the men’s conversation about Pa Cronin and the Bishopstown hurling team and how well they expected to score this season. Being shot at in her own home had badly disturbed her. She had been threatened so many times, ever since she was a young garda on traffic duty and crowd control at GAA matches. One drug-dealer had even screamed in open court that he would give her a blood eagle, which meant breaking her ribs at her spine and pulling her lungs out of her back. But this sniping felt very different and very much more personal, as if somebody was trying to kill her because of who she was, not simply because she represented the law.

After about twenty minutes, Denis came in, holding up a bullet in a pair of forensic tweezers.

‘Well?’ asked Katie.

‘Same type of bullet that was used to shoot Detective Horgan,’ he said. ‘7.62 × 54 millimetre R. Of course, I’ll have to take it back to the lab and compare the striations, and as you’re aware there’s anything up to a ten per cent error factor, but considering both bullets were fired in your direction, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they came from the same weapon.’

‘What did I say?’ put in John. ‘It really looks like somebody’s out to get you.’

‘Yes, it does,’ said Katie. Barney was standing close to her, looking as desperately worried as only Irish setters can do. She patted him on the head and said, ‘I’ll just have to make sure that I get them first.’

Sister Aibrean always woke early, before it was light. This morning she was woken even earlier than usual by the rumbling of a thunderstorm over Ballyburden to the south-west and the flashing of lightning behind her thin, rose-patterned curtains.

She switched on her bedside lamp and climbed out of bed. It was 6.16 a.m. As she did so, it started to hammer down with rain, almost ridiculously hard, drumming on the roof and bouncing off the window sill. She went over to the window and looked out and she could see that the gutters along Waterfall Road were already overflowing. She stood there for a while and lightning flickered again. For some reason she felt it was an omen that something terrible was going to happen to her today, although she couldn’t imagine what. All she was planning to do was help with the jumble sale at the Church of the Real Presence on Curraheen Road.