Blood Sisters (40 page)

‘We think we might have some good news for you,’ said Enda. ‘
Better
news, anyway.’

‘All right, then. Let’s go up to my office.’

Once they had taken off their coats and sat down in Katie’s office, Katie said, ‘All right, listen. I’m sorry I had to break off our last meeting so abruptly. I have two major investigations under way right now and the situation with each of them is developing almost hourly. You’ll have heard about the bombing up at Spring Lane and two of our officers getting killed. That’s apart from everything else I have on my plate.’

‘We do appreciate that you’re a very busy woman, Detective Superintendent,’ said Partlan. The way he said ‘woman’ sounded to Katie as if he were comparing her to a harassed little housewife, but then again, she thought, perhaps she was being too sensitive.

‘Yes, thank you,’ she said, opening up the folder in front of her and starting to skim through it. ‘So what’s this “better news” you have for me?’

‘Since we last talked to you, we’ve been looking further into the complaints made against you by Bryan Molloy and Jilleen Quaid,’ said Partlan. ‘Whatever anybody says about us Garda Ombudsman investigators, nobody has ever accused us of not being thorough.’

Partlan and Enda smiled at each other and then Enda said, ‘We double-checked the ballistics tests that were carried out on the SIG Sauer pistol that was alleged to have been used to shoot Niall Duggan.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘There’s not much doubt that the bullet that killed him was fired from the same weapon. And it’s almost certain that it was Donie Quaid who fired the fatal shot. It was difficult to lift any latent fingerprints from the butt because of its criss-cross pattern, and, of course, you fired the weapon yourself, so the only clear fingerprint on the trigger was yours. But all the remaining bullets in the clip still had Donie Quaid’s prints on them. And apart from that, we’ve verified where the weapon originally came from. It was definitely the Garda station at Tipperary Town and, as you said, it was signed out by the late Inspector Colin McManus.’

Partlan held up a sheet of paper, although Katie didn’t look at it. ‘Donie Quaid’s letter confessing to the shooting was checked by our handwriting experts and that’s almost certainly genuine, too. He had a unique way of forming his
f
s, like fish swimming.’

‘Well, I’m glad you’ve confirmed what I knew already,’ said Katie, still pretending that she was reading.

‘There’s more than that, though. Jilleen Quaid’s complaint was that she had never seen the gun or the letter before she met you, but that you and Sergeant Gary Cannon intimidated her into saying that she had. That in itself would have been an act of gross misconduct on your behalf.’

‘It would have been if I had done it, but I didn’t.’

‘That’s the better news. We know you didn’t. We went up to the prison yesterday on Rathmore Road and interviewed Lorcan Devitt.’

‘Oh yes?’ said Katie, looking up. Now she was interested. She had arrested Lorcan Devitt for his part in the murder and extortion racket that had been run by Niall Duggan’s son and daughter, Aengus and Ruari. He had been one of the most feared members of the Duggan crime gang in Limerick, but ever since his conviction he had proved to be very obliging in providing information to the Garda – anything to reduce his seventeen-year sentence. Aengus and Ruari were dead now, so he had nothing to fear from them, and now that the Duggan gang had split up it was unlikely that any of the other one-time gang members would realize that he was grassing to the shades.

‘Lorcan told us that his nephew Phelim and some of Phelim’s classmates had been bullying Jilleen Quaid’s son Sean at school,’ said Enda. ‘In the end the bullying got so bad that Jilleen told Sean that Donie had shot Niall Duggan, just so that Sean could prove to Phelim and the rest of them that he came from a hard family, and that they’d better lay off him.’

‘Well, yes,’ said Katie. ‘Jilleen admitted to me herself that she’d done that. But now she’s obviously going to deny it, isn’t she? And her son will develop filial amnesia, more than likely.’

‘Ah, but Phelim Devitt hasn’t lost his memory, and neither have his pals at the Villiers Secondary School. We located them all, except one, and they all told us more or less the same story, that Sean came into school on the first day of summer term and boasted that his uncle had shot Niall Duggan and that his mother still had the gun in her possession. He told them that the gun had been given to Donie by Bryan Molloy and that was how Molloy had got rid of Niall Duggan and pretty much stamped out the worst of the crime feuds in Limerick, so they had better watch out.’

‘They won’t testify to this in court, will they, these lads?’ asked Katie.

‘They won’t have to,’ said Enda, and she looked pleased with herself now and much less weepy. ‘We went back to Jilleen Quaid and told her what the boys had all said. We warned her that if she lied under oath in court she could be prosecuted herself, and even imprisoned. Would you believe that she withdrew her complaint then and there? “Ohh,” she said, “I think I must have been a bit confused.” “Puggalized” was the actual word she used.’

‘“Puggalized” isn’t the word for it!’ said Katie. ‘But she’s withdrawn her complaint? Fantastic! But where does that leave Bryan Molloy? Have you told
him
about this yet?’

‘We’ll be talking to his lawyers as soon as we’ve finished discussing this with you. Under the circumstances I’d say that it won’t be easy for him to pursue his accusations of harassment against you. In fact, it’s quite possible that he’ll be facing criminal charges himself. It depends what the DPP thinks about it, although there may not be sufficient evidence and it might not be considered in the public interest.’

‘That’s up to her,’ said Katie. ‘But that
is
better news. I’m delighted.’

‘We thought you’d be pleased,’ Partlan put in. ‘And
we’re
pleased, too. We think this has gone a long way to clearing up some very dubious practices in the Garda, especially money and favours changing hands for the dropping of criminal charges.’

Katie said, ‘I have to admit that I did feel a certain amount of hostility towards you two the last time we met. Fair play to you, though, you seem to be doing a grand job altogether. Very thorough, like you say.’

‘We take the reputation of the Garda very seriously,’ said Enda. ‘Sometimes more seriously than many gardaí themselves ever do. It doesn’t always make us very popular, but you won’t find the word “popular” in our job description.’

‘No,’ said Katie. ‘I don’t think it’s in mine, either.’

* * *

Hardly had Enda and Partlan left her office than Tadhg Meaney, the ISPCA inspector, knocked at her door. He was carrying two polystyrene cups of Costa coffee.

‘Oh, you’re a life-saver,’ she told him.

‘I saw you going up with those two and that you didn’t have time to get yourself anything to drink. I guessed cappuccino. Is that right?’

‘That’s perfect,’ she said. ‘No wonder you’re so good at taking care of animals.’

‘Do you have five minutes?’ he asked her. ‘We’ve finished examining all of the horses now and we’ve come up with some fierce extraordinary findings.’

‘Of course. Sit down. Do you want a biscuit? I have some chocolate gingers somewhere in my drawer here. I don’t know why, but I’ve become addicted lately.’

As if I didn’t know perfectly well why
, she thought.

Tadhg laid a file on her desk and opened it up to show her at least forty shiny colour photographs of the twenty-three dead horses laid out at Dromsligo.

‘Just as we thought, they’re all thoroughbreds. I have a complete list here. We’ve estimated the approximate date of death of each of them, as well as what injuries were likely to have been caused by them being thrown off the cliff, and what injuries they might have sustained beforehand, and when.’

Katie looked carefully at the photographs, one by one. If their eyes hadn’t turned milky and their lips weren’t folded back in such a snarl, she could have believed that some of the horses were still alive.

Tadhg said, ‘The list also shows what chemicals remained in their systems, if any. Most of them exhibited some traces of chemicals, not all of them illegal, although it was hard to detect any pharmacological activity in those animals that were the most decomposed. We call this “no effect”.

‘All the same, we did find some evidence of acepromazine, which is usually used to slow a racehorse’s heart rate and can actually make it run more slowly, depending on how much you dose them up with. We also found Ritalin, which is a stimulant, and etorphine, which is another stimulant, highly controversial, and ractopamine, which is a muscle-builder usually used in pig farming to give you meatier bacon.

‘I’ll tell you, before I trained in veterinary medicine, I never realized just how many drugs we’re eating and drinking and riding around on every day. It’s amazing that humans and animals aren’t all permanently stoned out of their minds. You buy a ham sandwich for your lunch and it’s like you’re eating two slices of bread and half of Phelan’s Pharmacy.’

‘Did you manage to determine if they were dead when they went over the cliff or still alive?’

‘From our point of view, as veterinarians, we guessed that they were probably still alive. That was because of the high proportion of broken legs amongst them. They were probably driven to the edge, and jumped, and tried to land on their feet, but the impact, of course, would have shattered their bones.

‘Your technical experts agreed with us, because of the distance from the foot of the cliff that their bodies were lying. If they had been dead already and simply tipped over the edge, they would have landed much closer. The tide had dragged some of the bodies out and then washed them back in again, so they weren’t all positioned exactly where they first fell, but quite a few of them were impacted on the rocks and hadn’t shifted at all.’

‘Some people,’ said Katie, shaking her head. ‘They have no humanity at all, do they?’

‘This isn’t the worst case of cruelty to horses I’ve ever had to deal with, not by a long chalk,’ said Tadhg. ‘In terms of scale, though, it’s the biggest, and until we completed our final tests we thought it was the most pointless. Throwing the poor creatures off the cliff instead of taking them to a knackery would have saved the offender a fair amount of money, but that didn’t explain why they their owner wanted to be rid of them in the first place – owner, or owners plural, we’re not sure which – but the indications are that they all came from the same stables.’

‘But you have found out why they wanted to be rid of them?’ Katie asked him.

‘Let’s just say that we believe we have a good idea. When we were testing for drugs we took hair samples from each of them, like you do when you test humans for drug use, especially if you suspect that they’ve stopped taking them for a while to avoid detection.’

‘And?’

‘And all of the horses except for the foals showed indications of hair dye.’

‘Hair dye? You mean that their owners had been trying to disguise them or pass them off as other horses? Like, ringers? We thought they might have been, didn’t we, right from the beginning?’

‘Well, there are several reasons why horses have their hair dyed,’ said Tadhg. ‘The most innocuous is to cover up grey or white patches that might have appeared through sickness or age, so you can still show them off at dressage events. But of course horse thieves dye stolen horses to disguise them, and unscrupulous racehorse trainers dye horses to pass them off as other horses and fix the betting. Ringers, yes, in other words.’

‘And what makes you think they all came from the same stables?’ asked Katie.

‘There’s all kinds of indications. The majority of their racing plates all came from the same forge – Chinese, believe it or not.’ He frowned at his notebook and said, ‘The Qingdao Guanglongfa Precision Mould Forging Company in Beijing. They’re cheaper than most of the Irish plates but they’re very high quality.

‘On top of that, most of the animals still had undigested food in their stomachs, and apart from the foals all of them had been fed on Gain Racehorse Mix, which wasn’t really a surprise because that particular feed is used by dozens of Irish trainers. It’s the dye that convinced us, more than anything. Their hair had all been coloured with varying shades of the same brand of dye.’

‘Is there a special make of dye for horses?’

‘There’s no need. Horses’ hair is no different from human hair. The only difference between dyeing a horse’s hair and dyeing your own hair is the quantity you need. For a horse, of course, you need a bucketful. All the horses whose hair had been coloured had been dyed with Clairol.’

‘I think I need to get Detective Inspector O’Rourke in on this,’ said Katie. ‘Detective Dooley, too. If you can hold a minute.’

She rang Detective Inspector O’Rourke, but Detective Dooley wasn’t at his desk and when she contacted him on his iPhone he told her he was out in Mayfield, interviewing a witness, and that he wouldn’t be back at Anglesea Street for at least half an hour.

Detective Inspector O’Rourke came into her office wearing a pond-green sweater that was half a size too tight for him. Katie asked Tadhg to bring him up to date on his post-mortem examination of the horses from Nohaval Cove and then she said, ‘What do you think, Francis?’

‘It certainly sounds to me like there’s been some race-fixing going on,’ said Detective Inspector O’Rourke. ‘What with this exchange betting these days, there’s a fortune to be made in ringing if you can get away with it. You can bet on a horse to win, but equally you can bet on a horse to come last, and if you paint up some clapped-out no-hoper to look like the best runner in your stable, it’s ker-
ching
! you’ve made yourself a tidy little heap of euros.

‘From what you’ve told me, it looks like there’s one particular trainer who’s been doing it big-time but wanted to dispose of the evidence. Unfortunately he made the mistake of hiring Paddy Fearon to do it for him.’

‘Is it conceivable this same trainer might have planted the bomb in Paddy Fearon’s caravan?’ asked Katie. ‘If there really is so much money at stake and he’d found out we were going to bring Paddy Fearon in and question him...’