Living Death (51 page)

When Detective Scanlan had led Mrs O’Connor away, Katie and Sergeant Begley sat looking at the screenshot and the photo album and said nothing to each other for over a minute.

‘That forensic artist really has some talent, doesn’t he?’ said Detective Sergeant Begley at last, picking up the screenshot. ‘He’s caught this Brendan spot on – and when you consider that there was only half of his head left.’

‘That artist is a she, and her name’s Eithne O’Neill,’ said Katie. ‘She’s young, and, yes, she’s brilliant. But this is a turn-up for the books, isn’t it? Lorcan Fitzgerald and Dr Gearoid Fitzgerald being brothers. I mean, it
must
be him, mustn’t it? How many other Dr Fitzgeralds run their own clinics in Cork?’

‘I sometimes think that God sends us these complimications just for a laugh,’ said Detective Sergeant Begley. ‘Have you had any thoughts yet about how you’re going to deal with Dr Fitzgerald?’

‘I’m going over to CUH this afternoon to see the girl that we took from his ambulance, and then I’ll work out the best way of taking it from there. We have the clinic under surveillance of course and there’s no sign yet that he’s thinking of making a run for it – so maybe it wasn’t him who mutilated this girl, and all he’s been doing is taking care of her. But I don’t want to spook him, and I can’t afford another fiasco like Operation Trident.’

‘Operation Trident wasn’t your fault, ma’am. We all know that Bobby Quilty was tipped off.’

‘All the same, Sean, I’m taking this one cautious step at a time. If it
wa
s Dr Fitzgerald who operated on her, I want to make sure that he doesn’t see anywhere but the inside of a cell on Rathmore Road for the rest of his days.’

*

Katie and Detective Scanlan were met at CUH by Dr Donal Moran, a short, affable man with oversized spectacles and freckles. Katie thought that he looked more like a stand-up comedian than a cardiac specialist. He took them up to the room where Siobhán had been recovering, chatting all the way. A uniformed garda was sitting outside the door, reading a copy of
Motoring Life
. He jumped to his feet immediately when he saw Katie coming along the corridor.

‘All quiet?’ Katie asked him.

‘Yes, ma’am. A couple of chatty nurses, that’s all.’

Dr Moran took Katie and Detective Scanlan in to Siobhán’s room. The calico blind was drawn halfway down so it was dim in there, and Siobhán was still on a cardiac monitor with a built-in defibrillator in case she showed any signs of a relapse. She lay propped up by two large pillows, ivory-faced, her hair clean and brushed, her eyes wide open. She was so still and her breathing was so silent that she could have been a waxwork.

A young nurse was sitting in the corner by the window and she got up and brought over two chairs for Katie and Detective Scanlan so that they could sit on either side of Siobhán’s bed.

‘Siobhán,’ said Dr Moran, softly. ‘It’s Dr Moran again. I’ve brought somebody in to talk to you. It’s two Garda officers, Detective Superintendent Maguire and Detective Scanlan. Would you nod your head please if you understand me?’

Siobhán nodded.

Katie reached out and held Siobhán’s right hand, although it felt very cold and Siobhán didn’t respond to her touch at all.

‘Siobhán,’ she said. ‘I’m a detective superintendent, as Dr Moran told you, but I’d like you to think about me as Katie. My colleague here is Pádraigin. We’re here to find out what’s happened to you, and who hurt you like this. When we know for sure who it is, we’re going to arrest them and charge them and make sure that they’re sent to jail.’

Siobhán blinked, but remained utterly still.

‘Was it Dr Gearoid Fitzgerald who blinded you and took away your voice?’

Tears welled up in the corner of Siobhán’s eyes and she nodded.

‘Do you know why you were being taken to the UK?’

Siobhán nodded again.

‘Was it for medical treatment? That’s what we were told by the nurse who was with you.’

Siobhán shook her head.

‘So it wasn’t for medical treatment?’

Siobhán shook her head even more strenuously this time.

‘Siobhán, sweetheart, do you think you can spell out for me why you were being taken to the UK? If I go through all of the letters of the alphabet, will you nod when I reach the right letter? I don’t mind how long it takes. All I care about is punishing Dr Fitzgerald.’

Katie turned around to ask for a tissue to wipe Siobhán’s eyes but the nurse was already standing behind her to hand her one.

‘Are you ready?’ Katie asked her, when she had patted the tears from her cheeks. Siobhán nodded and so Katie began. ‘A – B – C – D—’

At ‘D’, Siobhán nodded and stopped her, so she started again. When she reached ‘R’ she nodded again, and yet again when she got to ‘U’.

‘Is it drugs?’ said Katie.

Siobhán nodded.

‘So it was nothing to do with treating you at all? They were smuggling drugs?’

Siobhán nodded again.

It took over two more hours, with Katie reciting the alphabet over and over, and Siobhán nodding whenever she came to the right letter, and Detective Scanlan writing down her evidence in her notebook. Eventually, Siobhán was growing too tired to continue, but she had told Katie everything that she had overheard about the drugs that Dr Fitzpatrick had been running, and the name of the man called ‘Wardy’. She also told her that there were other patients at St Giles’ Clinic who had been deliberately maimed.

Dr Moran had been called away to deal with an emergency, but the young nurse sat in the corner of the room listening to Siobhán’s nodded testimony with mounting horror.

At last Katie said, ‘Listen, Siobhán, we won’t press you any more today. But tomorrow we’ll have to come back with a camera crew so that we can make a video of what you’ve just told us. I’m sorry that we have to make you go through it all over again, but if we have a video we can show it to a judge and get a search warrant for the clinic and a warrant to arrest Dr Fitzgerald. Is it okay with you if we do that?’

Siobhán nodded.

*

As they drove back to Anglesea Street, Detective Scanlan said, ‘Jesus – how could anybody have mutilated a beautiful young girl like that, just for the sake of drugs?’

‘You know the answer to that as well as I do, Pádraigin. They don’t have the slightest feeling for anybody else’s lives. If they did, they wouldn’t be peddling narcotics. But if Dr Fitzgerald has been bringing in drugs in his ambulances, I’m beginning to think that we might have solved the question of how Cork is being flooded with the stuff.’

‘But why does he have to blind people, and cripple them?’

‘Do you remember those Dutch smugglers a couple of years ago who got caught sneaking cocaine and heroin into the UK in a fleet of fake ambulances? The prosecution reckoned they’d brought in more than four hundred million pounds’ worth of drugs before they were caught. When the British crime agency stopped one of their ambulances, they found it was rammed to the roof with drugs, all hidden behind secret panels. There was about thirty-eight million pounds’ worth, in only one ambulance.’

‘Yes, I remember reading about that,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘But those Dutch fellows – they didn’t mutilate anyone, did they, as far as I know?’

‘No, they didn’t. Sure, they had fake patients in their ambulances, the same as Dr Fitzpatrick. But that was one of the ways the British crime agency caught them. Once the ambulances had reached their destination, their officers lamped the so-called patients strutting away, perfectly healthy, and counting out the money that they’d been paid for pretending that they were disabled.’

‘Oh, God,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘So what you’re thinking is – Dr Fitzgerald didn’t want to be caught out the same way? That’s why he’s made his patients genuinely disabled?’

‘Why else?’ said Katie. ‘Why else do you think he broke poor Siobhán’s legs? So she couldn’t run away. And why else do you think he blinded her? So she couldn’t see where she was or what was going on around her, or identify any faces. And why else did he cut her vocal cords? So she couldn’t speak and tell anybody who had hurt her. He made sure her hands were useless, too, so she couldn’t even write down anything to incriminate him. The one big mistake he made was to spare her hearing. If he had deafened her, punctured her eardrums or whatever, she wouldn’t have been able to communicate with us at all.’

‘What’s that saying? “A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse.” To tell you the truth, I never really understood what that meant.’

‘It means exactly what Siobhán was able to do for us today. When you already suspect that something’s going on, it takes only the slightest signal for you to be assured that it’s true. A nod, or a wink. In Siobhán’s case, a few nods did it.’

‘I feel for her,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘I really and truly feel for her. Myself, I think I’d rather be dead than be like her. It’s a living death, isn’t it?’

*

Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin called for Katie when she arrived back at the station. She was intending to talk to him anyway, because she wanted to set up a full-scale raid on St Giles’ Clinic as soon as she had a warrant from a District Court judge. Her rank as detective superintendent gave her the authority to search premises without a warrant if she considered that there was sufficient evidence of a crime being committed, but there was so much at stake here that she wanted to make sure that she couldn’t be challenged in court for not following procedure. Apart from that, she was still haunted by the humiliating failure of Operation Trident.

‘Ah, Katie,’ said Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin, as soon as she came into his office. ‘I have to warn you that there’s going to be a full investigation into Jimmy O’Reilly’s suicide.’

‘Really?’ she said, sitting down. ‘I didn’t expect anything else.’

‘There was some suggestion from Dublin that you should be suspended until the whole matter is completely cleared up, but I told them that we have too much on our plates just now and I couldn’t spare you. The forensics clearly show that you never handled Jimmy’s firearm and that the angle of the shot was entirely consistent with a self-inflicted wound, so they agreed that you could stay on the job. But there
will
be a hearing, if only to satisfy the Phoenix Park bureaucracy.’

‘In a way, do you know, I wish that a hearing wasn’t necessary,’ said Katie. ‘Jimmy and I didn’t get along at all, and he could be a real
aingiseoir
at times, but I don’t want to see him humiliated, especially now that he’s passed.’

‘Well, you know what they say. Life is a vale of misery, or a word to that effect, and then you die.’

‘It is for poor Siobhán O’Donohue,’ said Katie. She told Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin how she had interviewed Siobhán, and how she planned to make a video recording of her responses. She also told him that the dead dognapper had been identified as Brendan O’Connor, and that his mother’s evidence had further strengthened the evidence that Lorcan Fitzgerald was responsible for the raid on Sceolan Kennels.

When she told him that there was a strong possibility that Lorcan Fitzgerald and Dr Gearoid Fitzgerald were brothers, all he could say was, ‘Christ in Heaven. What a cat’s malack. I agree with you that we need to stick close to the book on this one. Drug dealers and doctors can always afford the most expensive lawyers, and in this case your suspect happens to be both.’

Katie said, ‘I have Scanlan checking the birth and electoral records to make absolutely certain, but I’m pretty sure that they are related. What I’m really interested to find out now is whether the dognapping and the drug dealing are in any way connected, or whether they’re running them as two separate rackets.’

‘All I can say, Katie, is good luck to you so. You can tell Michael Pearse that I’ve authorised a search of St Giles’ Clinic, as and when the warrant’s issued. I imagine you’ll be calling in the RSU, too, as a precaution. You have your arrest of Lorcan Fitzgerald pretty much sewn up, don’t you, with your fighting dogs and all? And you’ve liaised with Superintendent O’Neill in Tipperary Town?’

‘We’re all set to go on that,’ Katie assured him. ‘Wednesday at noon, at the horrible Bartley Doran’s place. I don’t think I’ve looked forward to lifting anybody so much for a long time.’

‘Now, then, Katie. Aren’t you always saying yourself that the name of the game is “objectivity”.’

‘Not when you’ve seen a poodle ripped to pieces for the fun of it.’

They were still talking when Detective Sergeant Begley knocked at the door.

‘Apologies for interrupting you, but I’ve had a call from Inspector O’Brien in Bandon. About twenty minutes ago they arrested Eoin Cassidy from Sceolan Kennels. They have him on charges of murder and attempted murder.’

‘What?’ said Katie. ‘For shooting the dognapper? Don’t tell me his wife’s changed her mind about giving evidence against him.’

‘No, not at all. It’s his wife he tried to murder,’ said Detective Sergeant Begley. ‘Apparently he found out she was pregnant by another man and so he stabbed her with a pitchfork and killed the baby. The wife herself is in a serious but stable condition at the Mercy.’

‘Mother of God,’ said Katie. ‘If only she’d agreed to give evidence about him when she had the chance.’

‘Oh, there’s more to it than that,’ said Detective Sergeant Begley. ‘Guess who the father was? She admitted it to him before he stabbed her. Lorcan Fitzgerald.’

‘The Grey Man,’ said Katie. ‘I’ll bet you a million euros that was why he was having an affair with her. He was probably checking up on what dogs they were keeping at the kennels, and what they were worth, and how to turn the alarms off, too. God, some men are such bastards, aren’t they?’

‘Don’t look at me,’ said Detective Sergeant Begley.

*

She rang Conor at 6:15 pm and told him that she was finished for the day. Maybe he could meet her at Henchy’s and they could have a drink before going back to his guest house.

‘That is far and away the best idea I’ve heard all day,’ he told her.

‘In that case I’ll ring Bridie and ask her if she can stop over the night to take care of John. I’ll get back to you in a minute.’