Living Death (23 page)

She stopped, and he put down the cheese sandwich that he was eating, stood up from his desk and came across to her, still chewing, and wiping his mouth with a tissue.

‘I hear you had a pure scrap with your dognapping suspect.’

‘You’re not joking. He went totally mental.’

‘I saw Sean Begley on his way home and he told me all about it – O’Keefe having his jaw dislocated, poor fellow, and Dooley being knocked about like that. Mother of God. And that was some fierce debt on Sean’s own forehead.’

‘I’ll be charging the suspect with assault,’ said Katie. ‘It’s all on CCTV of course, so we won’t be lacking in evidence.’

‘Sean said that it was you who stopped him. Fantastic – but remind me not to pick a fight with you myself.’ He reached out and momentarily squeezed her elbow, the way that friends do.

‘It was my dad told me to take up kick-boxing,’ said Katie. ‘He said he’d seen too many women beaten up – even by men who said that they loved them.’

‘I’ll be after asking you for a full report on how it all happened, though,’ said Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin. ‘Sorry about that, but the next thing we know we’ll have all of the civil rights groups jumping on top of us. “Police brutality”, “the Garda are nothing but trained thugs” – we’ll get all of that, you wait and see.’

‘Not a bother,’ Katie told him. ‘I’ll try and have a report on your desk by tomorrow afternoon at the latest.’

‘How’s it going any road, this dognapping inquiry? Did you get anything out of Gerry Mulvaney?’

‘Mulvaney? I might as well have been throwing biscuits at a bear. And the whole enquiry’s becoming more and more complicated. It’s taking up far too much of my time, to tell you the truth. We still haven’t been able to identify the man who was shot by Eoin Cassidy, and even if we
do
find out who he was, I can’t really see where that’s going to take us. Fair play, it might lead us to tracking down the rest of the gang, but you can hardly call it the crime of the century, can you, stealing twenty-six dogs, even pedigree dogs. Look at that fellow in Rathpeacon last year – he hobbled fourteen hundred prize-winning chickens – and what did he get? Three months suspended sentence and two hundred hours mopping the floors in some old people’s home.’

‘What about the charge against Eoin Cassidy?’

‘I can’t see that going anywhere, either. I’d wager money that he shot your man out of revenge because his wife had been raped, and he was raging – not because your man was threatening him directly. That’s what his wife says, anyway. But she won’t testify to that in court and so we don’t have any evidence one way or another. We’ll be lucky to get a conviction for manslaughter, what with all the mitigating circumstances.’

‘Oh well, we can’t win them all, can we? And between you and me your man probably deserved to have his head blown off.’

‘One thing –’ said Katie. ‘How’s the manpower situation looking in the next couple of days? Saturday in particular?’

‘Why’s that? Do you have some operation planned?’

‘I’m not sure yet. If it goes ahead, though, I’ll need twenty uniforms at least, and I’ll be calling in the Regional Support Unit too. But it’s all a bit up in the air at the moment. I’m still waiting to be given some further information.’

‘Well, Michael Pearse told me this morning that he’s pretty much up to full strength, in spite of this flu that’s been going around. I think there’s a rock concert at the Marquee on Saturday evening, Sleep Thieves or somebody, but that won’t be starting till seven at the earliest. Michael will give you the exact numbers he has available if you need them. Can you give me some idea of what you have in mind?’

‘Not yet, sir. Not really. I’ve been given what sounds like a good tip-off but so far I’m being very wide about it. I don’t want to jump the gun, like, and make a hames of it.’

‘
Jump the gun
,’ she thought
. That’s fitting, considering we’ll be raiding a huge shipment of illegal arms.

‘All right, then, I’ll let you get on,’ said Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin. ‘Wait, though – there was one thing I meant to tell you. That girl – the one who went missing on Hallowe’en – her mother has contacted Search and Recovery. So they’ll be scanning the river for her now.’

‘Oh, no. That’s not good news.’

Katie had called on Cork City Missing Persons Search and Recovery many times in the past – CCMPSR they called themselves. They were a group of twelve volunteers who regularly searched the River Lee with two inflatable boats, looking for the drowned bodies of people who had disappeared. Several of them were the relatives of drowning victims themselves. The River Lee gave the city of Cork its character, but Corkonians drowned in it with depressing frequency – half accidentally and half deliberately. From the latest annual report that Katie had seen, fourteen per cent of all the fatal drownings in Ireland had occurred in Cork, more than any other single location in the whole country.

‘I hope to God they don’t find her,’ she said. ‘I mean, I hope to God they don’t find her in the river.’

*

As she was buttoning up her coat to leave the office, Katie’s iPhone pinged. It was a text from Detective Sergeant Kyna Ni Nuallán.

Kyna was taking two weeks’ holiday in Gran Canaria before returning to duty. She had fully recovered from a bullet wound to her stomach, and from sustaining a broken nose, and she had sent Katie a selfie, tanned and smiling and holding up a bright orange cocktail beside the swimming pool of the Hotel Riosol.

I thought you might like to know that Ive changed my mind about leaving Cork and going back to Dublin
, she had texted.
Ive had time to rest and get my confidence back. After everything that’s happened I don’t feel afraid anymore.

There was a pause, and then she texted more.

It’s hard to work with you the way I feel about you but I know now that it would be unbearable if I never saw you again. If its all right with you and the powers that be I’ll report back to Anglesea Street Dec 1. Im sure we can find a way of making it work.

Another pause, and then a third text.

And being happy XXX.

Katie saw more in Kyna’s expression than simple pleasure. Her eyebrows were raised and her lower lip was protruding very slightly as if she were coaxing Katie to say
yes, Kyna, please stay in Cork
. It gave her a surge of mixed feelings. In a way, she had been relieved when Kyna had told her that she was going to ask for a transfer to Dublin. She had known that she would miss her badly, but she had considered that she had enough complications in her life.

Perhaps Kyna was right, though. Perhaps they could work together as friends and colleagues without allowing their attraction for each other to distract them. After all, Kyna had been one of the best young detectives on her team, and she would have been sorry to lose her, professionally as well as emotionally. She had a particular talent for asking questions that caught suspects off guard and got them to admit to their guilt without realising what they were doing.

Oh, Kyna,
she thought,
this is all I need
. She stood by the doorway of her office holding up her iPhone and staring at that elfin face, trying to make up her mind what to do. Should she reply to her text and say that she’d be delighted to welcome her back; or should she tell her that in the long run it would be far less painful for both of them if she transferred to Dublin?

Maybe the way she was thinking was skewed by her problems with John. She remembered what it was like to kiss Kyna, and John hadn’t kissed her like that since they had first become lovers. Kyna’s kisses had been tender and appreciative and almost magical, the sort of kiss that she would have expected from somebody who looked like one of the
Aes Sidh
, the fairy folk. The tip of her tongue had barely slipped between her lips. In the last few months of their relationship, John’s kisses had become increasingly few and far between and almost perfunctory. They had only been demanding when they were in bed and making love, and then they had often been too forceful, so that she had felt that she was being smothered.

Apart from that, she had craved his kisses then, whatever they were like, but now she didn’t.

Holy Saint Joseph and Mary,
she thought,
what am I going to do?
As difficult as she found it to make a decision, she strongly felt the need to have
somebody
holding her,
somebody
kissing her,
somebody
telling her how much they loved her and appreciated her, especially now that her workload was so demanding.

She decided to wait, and think about it some more. She could text Kyna after she had gone home and found out how John was progressing. At the moment, the inside of her brain felt like a kaleidoscope, full of shattered, brightly coloured fragments, and it was hard to think straight.

She was just about to walk out of the door when Kyna texted her again.

BTW this place is black with Cork folk! Ive bumped into 2 or 3 that I know already including Orlaith O Dalaigh you remember that pole dancer I lifted last year. She pretended not to reck me!

Katie couldn’t help smiling. It didn’t surprise her, though, that Kyna had found Gran Canaria crowded with local people having a winter break. It was one of the few package holiday destinations to which they could fly direct from Cork Airport without having to change planes.

She sent Kyna a smiling emoji and then she switched off her office lights.

*

On her way out, she knocked at the door of Assistant Commissioner O’Reilly’s office, to see if he had returned yet from his meeting with Commissioner Noirin O’Sullivan in Dublin. She wanted to tell him that she had met Maureen Callahan, and that Maureen had given her a tip-off about an impending arms shipment, as inconclusive as it was. However she had been reluctant to phone or text him about it. She couldn’t pin down exactly why it was, but she still felt something about the whole set-up didn’t quite fit. If she phoned or texted him about it, there would be a record of what she had said, and at the moment she wanted to avoid that. Besides, more than anything, she wanted to see him face-to-face when she told him. Jimmy O’Reilly might be devious and deceitful, but he always had difficulty in disguising his feelings. She had heard Detective Dooley say that when he was annoyed he had a face like a bulldog eating thistles through a barbed-wire fence.

She was just glad that she had taken at least one precaution to protect herself, if anything went wrong.

Jimmy O’Reilly’s office door was opened by one of his civilian assistants, a young man with a brushed-up blond quiff who looked like Tintin’s twin brother, even down to the sky-blue sweater with the rolled-up sleeves.

‘Ah, DS Maguire. It’s himself you were looking for, is it? He won’t be back tonight, sorry.’

‘He’ll be in tomorrow, though?’

‘I don’t think tomorrow, either. He has a two-day charity golf match at Fota. It’s in aid of the meningitis, I think, or the myeloma, I forget which. He’ll be off to Dublin directly that’s over so he won’t be back until Monday morning. He’ll be ringing in of course. Shall I tell him you wanted to see him?’

‘No thanks, you’re grand. I’ll call him myself.’

The last call she made before leaving the building was down to the holding cells to check up on Keeno.

The duty garda slid open the safety-glass window in the cell door so that Katie could peer inside. Keeno was lying on the bunk facing the door but his eyes were closed.

‘Doctor Fitzgerald came in to take a look at him?’

‘About an hour ago, yes. Your man came to when he was having his blood pressure taken. From the way he was talking it seemed to me like he had a reel in his head but the doctor said his blood pressure was slightly on the high side but otherwise he was grand.’

‘What did
he
say?’

The duty garda shook his head. ‘I asked him if he wanted anything to eat or drink, and if he wanted to make any phone calls, but he said no, he didn’t. Well, that’s not exactly what he said, but that was the gist of it.’

‘What
exactly
did he say?’

‘I don’t think there’s any necessity to repeat it, ma’am.’

‘Go on, tell me. I’m sure I’ve heard worse.’

The duty garda took a deep breath. ‘He said go and eff yourself you tramp’s abortion bastard.’

‘I see. And is that all?’

‘That’s all. Then he closed his eyes and fell asleep and he’s been asleep ever since, so far as I can tell.’

‘Okay, thanks. We’ll be interviewing him again in the morning. In the meantime, you’ll keep a close eye on him, won’t you?’

‘Oh, don’t you worry, ma’am. I’ll watch him like a hungry hawk.’

Katie took one more look at Keeno. He certainly looked as if he were asleep, and not pretending. His mouth was half-open and his lower lip was sagging, and she was sure that if he were awake he wouldn’t want to look so gormless.

*

John and Bridie were sitting in the living-room watching television and eating pizzas when she arrived home. Barney had been out in the back garden but when he heard her car he started barking at the kitchen door for somebody to let him in.

John was wearing a red sweater and pale yellow pyjama trousers. Up until now he had covered his legs with a blanket, or let his trouser-legs hang down so that it wasn’t so obvious that he had no lower limbs. This evening, though, he had rolled his trousers right up to his knees, so that his stumps were showing. His right leg was about two inches longer than his left.

His curly hair was washed and combed and he had shaved, and she could smell his aftershave. When she came in through the door he put aside his plate of pizza and smiled at her and said, ‘Katie! You’re home good and early for a change!’

‘We didn’t expect you back so soon,’ said Bridie, standing up. ‘Sorry we’ve started our tea without you. I can pop a pizza in the oven for you now, if you like?’

‘No thanks, Bridie,’ Katie told her. ‘I don’t have much of an appetite at the moment. So how did it go at the hospital this morning? I must say you’re looking very happy out.’