Living Death (45 page)

Katie opened her desk drawer and took out the note that James Elvin had written for Jimmy O’Reilly. Then she pulled a pair of forensic gloves out of her jacket pocket, snapped them on, and picked up the briefcase. Detective Scanlan looked at her, puzzled.

‘What?’ she said. ‘Have I said something?’

‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ Katie told her, with the grimmest of smiles. ‘Or maybe not. It depends.’

Detective Scanlan went back to the squad room to fetch her coat, while Katie walked down the corridor to Assistant Commissioner O’Reilly’s office. The door was closed so she rapped on it, hard. At first there was no answer, so she rapped again.

‘Who is it?’ Jimmy O’Reilly called out, impatiently. ‘I’m up the walls right now.’

Katie opened the door and went in. Jimmy O’Reilly was standing behind his desk, holding his phone to his ear. He was wearing a dishevelled light grey suit, and he had loosened his black Freemasons tie.

‘Hold on a moment, David,’ he said. ‘I have a visitor.’ Then to Katie, he said, ‘What is it you want, Katie? I have my solicitor on the phone here.’

Katie held up the briefcase. Jimmy O’Reilly stared at it, and then he said, ‘David? Listen, David, something’s come up. I’ll ring you back in just a while.’

He put down the phone. ‘What do you expect me to say?’ he asked Katie.

‘I’m sure you’ll say nothing,’ said Katie. ‘Nothing to incriminate yourself, anyway.’

‘So what are you holding up that briefcase for?’

‘You know why, sir.’

‘I never saw that briefcase before in my life.’

‘So you filled it with twenty thousand euros with your eyes closed, did you?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. My God, you’d do anything to stir up trouble for me, wouldn’t you?’

‘If anybody’s an expert on stirring up trouble, I’d say that it’s you. Well, maybe you’re not. Paying off Maureen Callahan to fool me into thinking that there was an arms shipment, that wasn’t too expert, was it? And trying to fix it so that I organised a raid on a children’s birthday party? Forget about my reputation. What if a child had been hurt, or even killed?’

‘I still have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘I’ve had this briefcase and the banknotes inside it checked by Bill Phinner’s technical experts for DNA. It matches your DNA, sir, I’m sorry to say. Do you remember sneezing while you were wrapping up that money?’

Katie and Jimmy O’Reilly stared at each other for almost a quarter of a minute without saying anything. They both knew what Jimmy O’Reilly had tried to set up, and that he had failed, and they both knew that there was no point in him trying to deny it.

‘I’ll, ah – I’ll, ah – be having that briefcase back now, if you don’t mind, Katie,’ said Jimmy O’Reilly, holding out his hand.

‘No, sir. This is evidence.’

‘It’s my briefcase, for Christ’s sake, and the money inside it is also mine. It cost me dear, raising that money, I can tell you, in more ways than one. I can’t afford to lose it.’

‘I’m fully aware of that, sir,’ said Katie. She took James Elvin’s note out of her inside pocket and put it down on his desk. He frowned at it, and said, ‘What’s that?’ but then he saw his name
Jimmy
scrawled on it, in blue ballpen. He looked up at Katie and his face was stricken.

Katie said, ‘Look, listen, I’ll leave you in peace to read what it says. Then maybe you and I can have a talk later about what steps we’re going to take next. I’ll be here for the next half-hour, then I’m leaving for the rest of the day.’

Jimmy O’Reilly didn’t answer her, and made no move to pick up James Elvin’s note. Katie left his office and walked back to her own, half-expecting him to come running after her down the corridor to snatch the briefcase out of her hand. She even looked over her shoulder, but although his office door remained half-open, he didn’t appear.

She sat at her desk and waited for twenty minutes, although she was more than ready to leave. She thought that she should at least give Jimmy O’Reilly the time for what she had said to him to sink in – that, and James Elvin’s note that he was leaving him.

She stood up, opened her black patent shoulder-bag and took out her hairbrush and her make-up. She was pouting at herself in her mirror to apply some fresh lipstick when Jimmy O’Reilly suddenly materialised in her office doorway like a beamed-up character out of
Star Trek.

He walked up to her until he was almost close enough to take the lipstick out of her hand. His default expression was miserable, but she had never seen him look like this before. He had a strange unfocused look in his eyes as if he were drunk, but he didn’t smell of drink, only faintly of stale cigarettes and body odour.

He lifted his left hand and thoughtfully stroked his chin, his eyes half-closed, while he kept his right hand behind his back.

‘Do you know what they say?’ he whispered. He was so quiet that she could hardly hear him. ‘They say that every man has a Nemesis, and that Nemesis punishes every man who happens to be blessed with good fortune.’

‘Listen, sir – ‘Katie began. She wanted to tell him that he had given her no choice, but he lifted his finger to his lips and said, ‘
Shhh!
You
listen.’

He came even closer, and Katie couldn’t back away because her leg was already pressed against her desk.

‘You, Katie Maguire, you’re my Nemesis,’ he continued. ‘I had one of the most respected positions in the Garda. I had a young man who adored me. Then
you
came into my life, and now I have nothing at all.’

‘Sir – I’m sure we can come to some kind of a compromise about what you tried to set up with Maureen Callahan,’ said Katie. ‘If you never try to do anything like that again, there’s no reason why we can’t put it behind us. Everybody makes rash decisions at times, and you were very angry with me. I understand that.’

‘But you’ll always have that threat hanging over me, won’t you? You’re not only my Nemesis, you’re my sword of Damocles! I’m supposed to be your superior officer, but how can I act like your superior officer when I know that you could ruin me at a moment’s notice – because I said something that upset you, or because you disagreed with one of my orders, or for no other reason except you were having your monthly?’

‘Sir—’

‘Ever since I first met you, Katie, I disliked you. I disliked your cleverness, and your self-satisfaction, and the fact that they promoted you only because you’re a woman. And that’s what I dislike about you most of all – you’re a woman.’

Katie was about to say something else to calm him down when he produced a nickel-plated Sig-Sauer automatic from behind his back. Katie recognised it immediately: it had been presented to him for twenty-five years’ service. He lifted it up so that it was pointing toward the ceiling, and ostentatiously cocked it.

Three alternatives flashed into Katie’s mind. She could try to twist the gun out of his hand, although he might be able to angle it towards her while they were struggling and pull the trigger. Either that, or she could drop sideways to the floor, pulling out her own gun while she did so, and shoot him, if he didn’t shoot her first. Then again, she could kick him, as hard as she had kicked Keeno, but because he was standing so close it would be difficult for her to swing her leg for enough momentum.

‘I hope... I hope from the bottom of my heart that you never forget this,’ said Jimmy O’Reilly.

Before Katie could grab his wrist he opened his mouth wide, stuck the muzzle of the gun between his white false teeth and fired. There was an ear-splitting bang and the back of his head burst open, spraying blood and brains across the plain beige carpet in a wide fan shape. There was even a fine haze of blood on the opposite wall, beside the couches, over Katie’s framed certificates.

For a split-second, Jimmy O’Reilly was staring at Katie with the saddest, most desperate look in his eyes that she had ever seen, and then he toppled over backwards with his arms flapping like a man falling off a cliff. He hit the carpet with a thud and lay still.

Inspector O’Rourke was the first one to come running into Katie’s office. He must have just come in from outside, because his windcheater was sparkling with raindrops.

Katie was still standing beside her desk, with her hand pressed over her mouth in shock.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Inspector O’Rourke. Katie could tell that he was making an instant assessment of what might have happened. He saw that Katie wasn’t armed and that the nickel-plated Sig-Sauer was lying on the floor where Jimmy O’Reilly had dropped it.

‘Don’t tell me he’s topped himself, right in front of you.’

Katie nodded, and then she turned and walked stiff-legged to her toilet. She went inside and brought up three heaving splashes of coffee and chewed-up oats into her washbasin.

She lifted her head and stared at herself in the mirror. She was surprised by how calm and unruffled she looked, although her lipstick was smudged.

She went back into her office. Inspector O’Rourke had been joined by Detective Sergeant Begley and Detective Markey and four uniformed gardaí. They were all standing around the doorway looking stunned.

Inspector O’Rourke was prodding at his mobile phone. He looked up and said, ‘Are you right, ma’am?’

‘I’m okay,’ said Katie. ‘You’d best call Bill Phinner up here to take some pictures, and an ambulance, and Dr Cullinane.’ Dr Cullinane was the Cork City Coroner, and she would require formal proof of Jimmy O’Reilly’s identity, and evidence of his cause of death.

‘I’ve called Bill already,’ said Inspector O’Rourke. ‘He’s coming up here himself, along with a couple of his technical experts. I’m just ringing for a white van now. Dr Cullinane won’t be in her office today but I’ll leave her a message so.’

It was then that Katie’s own phone played “Tá Mo Chleamhnas a Dhéanamh”. She answered it immediately and it was Conor.

‘I’ve managed to book us a table at the Hayfield, although it took some persuasion. When will you be finished?’

‘I won’t be, Conor, not today. I’m sorry. We’ve had a bit of a tragedy here, to be honest with you.’

‘A tragedy? What do you mean? What kind of a tragedy?’

‘There’s only one kind of tragedy, isn’t there? The kind that never should have happened, but did.’

Ger backed the ambulance up to the porch of St Giles’ Clinic and Milo opened the doors. It was raining so hard now that it was almost laughable, and water was clattering down the side of the porch from a broken gutter.

Gearoid looked at his watch and said, ‘Where in God’s name has Lorcan got to? He said that he’d be here by two-thirty at the latest.’

‘He probably went down to Bandon to see that woman of his,’ said Grainne. She was dressed already in her paramedic’s uniform, and she was smoking a last cigarette before she climbed into the ambulance.

‘No, no. He’s finished with that one,’ said Gearoid. ‘He only used her so that he could work out how to break into her kennels. Well, to be fair, that wasn’t the only reason. It seems like she wasn’t getting much from her husband, and she was a bit of a tornado in bed.’

‘I know he’s your brother but he worries me sometimes,’ said Grainne. ‘He lets his heart rule his head, do you know what I mean, and he lets his mickey rule both of them.’

Just as she said that, the black Opel turned into the driveway with its headlights on and parked beside the ambulance. Lorcan climbed out and hurried towards them through the rain.

‘I’m not going to ask you where you’ve been,’ said Gearoid.

‘That’s a mercy. I’ve been down to Riverstick, as a matter of fact, to feed Gerry’s dogs. They were starving, most of them. I think I can sell one or two of them, but the rest I’ll have to take up to Bartley, to use as bait.’

‘I hope he’ll pay you for them.’

‘Sure I won’t be asking him for money. All he has to do is give me a few tips on which are the gamer dogs, and then I’ll be going to Egypt for my holliers, first class.’

‘Egypt? You don’t want to be going there. It’s full of terrorists.’

‘You think I’m scared of terrorists?’

Siobhán was wheeled out of the front door and then Dermot and Milo lifted her into the back of the ambulance. Dermot went back inside and came out a few moments later pushing Fearghal on a trolley. Milo helped him to lift him into the ambulance, too. Fearghal was staring upwards all of the time, as if he expected to see angels descending from the clouds, and he was making an extraordinary whirring sound in the back of his throat.

‘You know what that feller reminds me of?’ said Lorcan. ‘A fecking grasshopper I once ran over with my lawnmower, and chopped its legs off. It made that noise exactly.’

Grainne climbed into the back of the ambulance and Milo closed the doors.

Gearoid said to Lorcan, ‘Chill your gills this trip, and I mean it. Wardy’s had a new delivery in from Rotterdam and he says it’s huge. You may have to go over to Essex again the middle of the week, but we should have the second ambulance up and running by then. It only needs a new alternator, and Sonny says he can fit that in tomorrow.’

‘Tuesday I’ll be going up to Tipp, to Bartley’s place,’ Lorcan told him. ‘There’s some kennel owner from Carrigahorig who says he has a Neapolitan mastiff for sale, for fighting.’

‘Jesus,’ said Gearoid. ‘They’re enormous, those Neapolitan mastiffs, when they’re fully grown.’

‘That’s why I’m interested. You could fecking rake it in with a monster of a dog like that, in betting stakes.’

Gearoid patted Lorcan on the shoulders and then he said, ‘Any road, it’s time for you to go. I don’t think this weather’s going to be improving, and I heard there’s new roadworks past Kilmacthomas.’

Milo came up to them and said, ‘Are we out the gap, then? This rain’s going to get worse before it gets better.’

Lorcan went back to his car. Before Grainne climbed into the back of the ambulance, she flicked her cigarette butt away, blew out smoke, and said to Gearoid, ‘I don’t know. I read my Tarot cards last night and I have a fierce quare feeling about this trip.’

Gearoid shook his head in amusement. ‘Grainne, if I had believed in everything that fortune-tellers told me, I never would have done anything with my life, ever. I would have stayed in bed and lived on take-aways, too scared to go out.’