Living Death (55 page)

Meanwhile, Dr Fitzgerald opened up one of his cases of surgical instruments and selected a number 12 blade, which was curved like a hook. He fitted it on to a scalpel handle and then he left the operating room without closing the door behind him, and walked swiftly along the corridor with his raincoat rustling.

John heard him coming up behind him but didn’t turn around. He was concentrating too hard on reaching the staircase, and his stumps were now giving him so much pain that he was biting his tongue.

Dr Fitzgerald came close up behind him and without saying a word he reached around in front of him and cut his throat. He sliced so deeply into his neck muscles that John’s head dropped backwards and almost fell off, and a huge spout of blood gushed out of his carotid artery and soaked his jacket, as well as splattering on to the parquet floor.

‘Holy Jesus!’ Grainne cried out.

Dr Fitzgerald gave John a kick in the small of his back so that he fell against the skirting-board. John shuddered violently and his right hand reached out as if he were trying to save himself from sliding into death, but then he lay still. Dr Fitzgerald tossed his scalpel on top of him.

‘God in Heaven, what did you do that for?’ said Grainne.

‘We’re found out, Grainne. He was phoning the guards when I caught him. They’re on their way now.’

Dermot had heard Grainne crying out, and he came stamping up the stairs to see what was going on. When he caught sight of John’s half-decapitated body he said, ‘Holy Saint Joseph.’

Dr Fitzgerald was behaving with ice-cold hysteria. He turned away from John’s body and then he turned back again, holding up his bloodstained right hand.

‘I’ll wash my hands,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to wash my hands and then we’ll get out of here as quick as we can.’

‘What about him?’ said Dermot, pointing at John’s body. ‘You can’t just leave him lying there, can you?’

‘We can dispose of him,’ said Dr Fitzgerald. ‘Where are Ger and Milo?’

‘You know where they are,’ Dermot told him. ‘You sent them out to see if they could pick up another patient, to replace Siobhán. They’re probably sitting in a layby on the Western Road, smoking their heads off and looking out for some student they can run over.’

‘Well, call them,’ said Dr Fitzgerald. ‘No – on the other hand, don’t call them. They’ll only complicate things. Is that ambulance repaired yet?’

‘I think so. I heard Sonny revving the engine outside, so I reckon he must have fixed it.’

‘Right. Okay. Dermot – you go and check that it’s up and running. Then we can take this fool away and get rid of him. Grainne, there’s a blue plastic sheet in the operating theatre, under the table at the side. Bring it out, will you, so that we can wrap him up? We don’t want any more blood on the floor than we have already. Once we’ve taken him outside, Dermot, if you can get out the bucket and the mop.’

Grainne said, ‘Gearoid, what about all the patients? If the guards are coming, they’re going to find all the patients, aren’t they?’

‘I’m not worried about the patients. They’re all alive, aren’t they, even if they’re not kicking. There’s no way that the guards can prove that we disabled them. We’re taking care of them, aren’t we? We’re giving them better care than they could ever expect anywhere else.’

‘
We
didn’t disable them, Gearoid,’ said Grainne. ‘
You
did.’

‘Don’t give me that, Grainne. You aided and abetted. Who handed me the spoon when I was taking out Gerry Mulvaney’s eyeballs?’

At that moment, the doorbell rang, and rang again, and again, and there was a loud hammering on the front door.

‘That’ll be the guards,’ said Dr Fitzgerald. He held up his bloody hand again. ‘I must wash my hands. Grainne – you go and answer the door. Stall them. Tell them that everything’s grand and deny that this fellow ever came here. No, don’t do that. The woman on the phone said surveillance officers. That probably means that they’ve been watching us, and so they will have seen him arrive here.’

The doorbell was now rung continuously, and the hammering was even louder.

‘Jesus wept,’ said Dermot. ‘Any second now they’ll be knocking it down with one of them battery rams.’

‘Go on, Grainne, go and open the door for them,’ said Dr Fitzgerald. ‘Tell them that he’s upstairs, right in the middle of a medical assessment, and that we’ll be bringing him down in just a few minutes. Then take them into the reception room and lock them in. That should give us enough time to get away.’

‘Gearoid, this is madness,’ said Grainne. ‘We’re never going to get away with this. Not in a million years.’

‘
Will you answer the door and do what I tell you!
’ Dr Fitzgerald screamed at her. ‘
If they can’t find his body they can’t prove anything!
’

Grainne shrugged, and looked at John lying up against the wall, with his head tilted away from his neck and his hair matted with blood. ‘If that’s what you want, Gearoid. But it wasn’t me who cut that feen’s throat, no matter what you say about aiding and abetting.’

She went downstairs. As she walked along the hallway she called out, ‘All right! All right! I’m coming for the love of God! Hold your whisht awhile will you!’

Dr Fitzgerald turned to Dermot and said, ‘Go out the kitchen way and see if the ambulance is ready. If it is, come back up and we’ll carry this fool outside.’

‘And where are you thinking of taking him?’ asked Dermot. ‘We can’t just turn up at St Finbarr’s Cemetery and politely ask them to bury him for us, can we?’

‘If you bury bodies they can be found, can’t they?’ said Dr Fitzgerald, still holding up his hand. ‘But if they’ve been eaten, they can never be found, can they?’

‘You’re joking, aren’t you? What are you going to do, cut him up and put him on the barbecue?’

‘Of course not. We’ll take him up to Ballyknock. Lorcan’s up there already. We can give him to Bartley Doran’s dogs as bait.’

‘Now I know you’re joking.’

‘Dermot, I was never more serious in my life. Now get down there, will you, and make sure the ambulance is ready.’

Katie was speeding back into the city on the South Link road when Detective Sergeant Begley called her.

‘One of the surveillance officers who was watching St Giles’ has just been in touch. He says that they were let into the clinic, but asked to wait for a few minutes, because your John was right in the middle of a medical assessment. Next thing they knew they looked out of the window and saw an ambulance shooting off. They were going to go after it but found that they’d been locked in.’

‘Oh, this gets better by the minute,’ said Katie. ‘I’m guessing that it was one of the clinic’s own ambulances – the white St Giles’ ones, with the picture of St Giles on it?’

‘That’s right. We haven’t clocked it yet but they can’t get far. They might as well have tried to get away in an ice-cream van.’

‘What about John? Is he still there?’

‘No sign of him, ma’am, but there’s a whole mess of blood in the first-floor corridor.’

‘Mother of God,’ said Katie, and felt a deep sickening sensation in her stomach. As soon as John had rung her and told her that he was inside St Giles’ Clinic, she had known that this would end badly.

‘There’s five patients there altogether, four male and one female,’ said Detective Sergeant Begley. ‘They’re all blind and all severely disabled. I’ve contacted the Mercy and they’ll be sending a couple of ambulances to pick them up. O’Donovan and Markey are on their way up to Montenotte now, along with eight uniforms. I’ve informed Bill Phinner, too, and he’s sending up a technical team.’

‘But there was nobody else there at the clinic? No nurses – no office staff?’

‘Nobody, ma’am. The two surveillance officers said they were let in by a very charming woman, which is why they didn’t suspect that they were being duped.’

‘And they allowed her to lock them in? I think we’ll have to send them back to Templemore for retraining.’

She reached Anglesea Street and turned into the station car park. She could have gone up to St Giles’ Clinic herself, but she trusted Detectives O’Donovan and Markey. Now that a large quantity of blood had been found, it was technically a crime scene, and they were quite capable of following procedure. Apart from that, if it was John’s blood, which it very well might be, she didn’t want to see it. She wasn’t squeamish, but she didn’t want her last abiding memory of the man she had once loved to be a lake of blood in some unfamiliar house.

As she walked across the station’s reception area, she saw to her surprise that Conor was sitting there. He dropped the newspaper that he had been reading and came across to her.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked him.

‘Waiting for you, believe it or not. I had to come into town anyway and I was wondering if you might be able to spare half an hour for coffee. Your assistant told me that you were at the hospital, but she said you shouldn’t be too long, so here I am.’

‘I’m sorry, Conor, I have a crisis on my hands just now,’ Katie told him. ‘John has done something very stupid and now I’m worried that he might have been hurt, or even killed, God forbid.’

Conor followed her to the lift, but when the door opened he said, ‘Listen, I don’t want to be in your way. Call me later if you can. I’ll go and see how Sergeant Browne’s getting along with my fighting dogs.’

‘No, come up for a moment, and I’ll tell you what’s happening. If something really bad has happened to John, I could use some moral support.’

They went up in the lift. Conor saw Katie biting at the side of her thumbnail and said, ‘He’s more than a friend, isn’t he? Or used to be. Am I right? And that’s why you’ve been looking after him.’

Katie gave him nothing but a brief smile to acknowledge that he was right. Then she walked along to her office and he followed her.

Before she did anything else, she rang Bridie, for the fifth time. All she heard was Bridie’s answering service, asking her to leave a message after the tone.

Conor sat down and said, ‘So what’s happened? How do you know that John’s been hurt?’

Katie was in the middle of telling him about the call that she had received from John while he was hiding at St Giles’ Clinic, when her phone rang.

‘Ma’am? DS Begley. We’ve located the ambulance. We thought it might have been heading for Ringaskiddy or Rosslare, to get on a ferry, or possibly due north to the border. But it’s been spotted by a Tipp patrol and it was driving through Cashel town centre. They must have gone all the way up by the back roads, Goatenbridge and Ballybacon, that way.’

‘Cashel? Are they following it now?’

‘At a fierce discreet distance, yes – waiting for our instructions on how to proceed.’

‘They’ve been seen in Cashel,’ Katie told Conor, covering the phone with her hand. Then, to Detective Sergeant Begley, ‘Which way are they heading now?’

There was a long pause, and then Detective Sergeant Begley said, ‘Palmer’s Hill. No – they’ve turned off now, to the right-hand side, down some unmarked track.’

Katie said to Conor, ‘They’re heading for Bartley Doran’s place. They must be. Why in the name of Jesus are they going there? Come on, I’m going up there now myself. Will you come with me? If there’s dogs involved I’d like to have you there.’

She called Superintendent Pearse and told him where she was going, and why, and asked for half-a-dozen uniformed gardaí and an armed response unit. She asked him also to contact Superintendent O’Neill at Tipperary Town to keep him up to date on what she was doing, and request some back-up, if he could spare it.

‘Don’t I get a gun?’ asked Conor, as they went back downstairs and hurried out in the car park.

‘If there’s any danger of shooting, I’ll lend you a ballistic vest.’

‘Oh, okay. But that’s not quite so exciting as having a gun.’

‘Believe me, Conor, there is nothing exciting about shooting somebody. It’s just about the most dreadful thing that I’ve ever had to do.’

*

They didn’t follow the winding route through the South Tipperary countryside that the St Giles’ Clinic ambulance must have taken. Instead, Katie drove at high speed up the M8, the same road that she and Conor had used when they went up to Ballyknock to visit Guzz Eye McManus.

In spite of the fine rain that was still falling, she drove at nearly 170 kph on the motorway, and it took them less than thirty minutes before she turned off for Palmer’s Hill. The Tipperary patrol car was parked beside the entrance to the narrow lane that led up to Bartley Doran’s property, with two gardaí sitting in it. Katie got out and went to talk to them, explaining that back-up was already on the way.

It was less than ten minutes before three more patrol cars arrived, two from Cork and one from Tipperary Town, as well as an Emergency Response Unit, in a Volvo SUV, carrying four armed officers dressed from head to foot in black.

Katie called all the gardaí to gather around her. The soft rain kept falling and sparkled on her dark red hair.

‘As far as we know, the ambulance that we’ve been pursuing has been used to smuggle drugs from the UK to Cork. We believe the man behind the operation is Dr Gearoid Fitzpatrick, a surgeon who was struck off the medical register but who started up his own clinic, presumably as a cover for his drug operation.

‘We suspect that he’s been deliberately mutilating people so that they can appear to be seriously disabled patients, and thereby avoiding a thorough search of his ambulances by customs officers. He knows now that we’ve discovered what he’s doing, which is why he’s made a run for it today. I can’t say that I’m sure why he’s come here. This is the home of a man who trains dogs for dog fighting. But Dr Fitzpatrick’s brother Lorcan is involved in dognapping and dog fighting, and so it’s possible that he’s here today, too.

‘We’re here to arrest Dr Fitzpatrick and any members of his clinical staff who may have come along with him. I’m not expecting any fierce resistance but these are serious criminals we’re dealing with here so be wide.’

She paused, and then she said, ‘There’s one thing. There may be a disabled man on board in a serious condition who has lost a lot of blood. I’ve organised an ambulance which will be here very soon, but if you find him please let me know as soon as you can. That’s all. Let’s go.’