Living Death (22 page)

‘Two men forcibly entered Mr and Mrs Cassidy’s house,’ she said. ‘One struck Mr Cassidy with his own hurley and knocked him out. The other raped Mrs Cassidy.’

‘No comment,’ Keeno repeated.

‘While she was being assaulted, Mrs Cassidy heard the other man call her rapist by name. He called him “Keeno”. That’s not a very common name, is it, Keeno? What do you have to say about that?’

‘I never told you my name.’

‘No, you’re quite correct, you didn’t. But Gerry Mulvaney called you Keeno. We have your conversation recorded. And the two dogs that you tried to sell him, the German Shepherd and the Vizsla, both of those have been identified by Eoin Cassidy as having been stolen from Sceolan Kennels. It’s all adding up, isn’t it, Keeno? I mean, a logical person would assume that the Keeno who raped Mrs Cassidy and the Keeno who tried to sell Gerry Mulvaney those dogs, they were one and the same man. And that same logical person would assume that Keeno was you.’

This time, Keeno said nothing, but slowly lowered his arms and sat up straight. Garda O’Keefe sat up straighter, too. In fact he placed both of his hands on his thighs and leaned slightly forward, as if he were ready to jump up at any moment.

Katie lifted up the first page of the sheaf of papers that she had in front of her, to give Keeno the impression that she was reading a report from the Technical Bureau.

‘Supposing that the DNA from the hair sample which we took from you earlier – supposing that matched any DNA that we might have taken from Mrs Cassidy after her rape? No matter who you are or what you call yourself – Keeno or Notso or Mr No Comment – supposing I charge you not only with handling stolen property, but with robbery, and with rape. Do you have any idea how long you’d be spending in jail?’

Keeno was too worked up to be listening closely, because he didn’t hear the conditional words that Katie had used deliberately – like ‘might’ and ‘supposing’ and ‘would’.

Instead, he panicked, and thumped his fists on the table, and let out a roar that was almost a scream. He reared up from his chair, knocking it on to the floor behind him. Katie and Sergeant Begley and Detective Dooley started to stand up, too, but he seized the edge of the table and tipped it up, so that all three of them stumbled backward over their chairs.

He started to head for the door, but Garda O’Keefe seized him before he was halfway there, and pinned his arms behind his back. Keeno had obviously been held like this before, however, because he jerked his head back, so that Garda O’Keefe had to jerk back, too, to avoid being hit in the face, and then he dropped to the floor, as abruptly as if his spine had snapped, so that Garda O’Keefe lost his grip on his arms.

He rolled over twice across the carpet, and as Garda O’Keefe bent down to grab him, he arched his back and kicked him in the chin. Garda O’Keefe’s jawbone cracked as loudly as a pistol-shot, and he staggered back, one hand held over his mouth.

‘You stay down!’ Sergeant Begley shouted at Keeno. ‘Stay down there on the floor, you scummer!’

But Keeno scrambled to his feet and headed for the door again, and when Sergeant Begley and Detective Dooley went for him, he pushed both of them so hard that they collided with each other. Detective Dooley tried to seize his arm, but Keeno punched him in the left ear, and then punched him again on his cheekbone.

Sergeant Begley forced him up against the wall next to the door. They struggled for a moment, grunting. Sergeant Begley was red in the face, his teeth gritted, while Keeno’s eyes were bulging, his head straining forward, his mouth wide open, like a zombie trying to take a bite out of Sergeant Begley’s neck.

Katie had lifted the table back on to its feet. She reached over and pressed the alarm button and then she hurried across to Garda O’Keefe, who was sitting on the floor now, holding his jaw.

‘I’ve called for back-up,’ she told him. ‘They’ll be here in a flash, don’t worry.’

He nodded to indicate that he had heard her, but she could see behind his hand that Keeno had kicked his jaw sideways, and dislocated it completely. A long string of blood and dribble was hanging from his fingers.

She turned back to Sergeant Begley and Keeno, who were still wrestling with each other by the door. Detective Dooley was trying to join in, but he still looked stunned, and couldn’t seem to keep his balance. Keeno was like a bull gone berserk, fuming with rage and fear and almost unstoppable, but at the same time he really knew how to fight. Without any warning at all, he head-butted Sergeant Begley. There was an audible clonk of skulls, and Sergeant Begley took an unsteady step backwards, and then another, half-concussed. Before he could recover, Keeno punched him hard in the belly. Then he turned to Detective Dooley and punched him again, too, a left-handed blow that hit his right cheekbone.

To Katie, all of this struggling seemed to be happening in slow-motion, and although she could hear the alarm beeping, she wondered why it was taking so long for anybody to come and help them. As Sergeant Begley and Detective Dooley stood stunned, Keeno was reaching out for the door-handle, and even though Katie knew that he had no hope of escaping from the station, she called out, ‘
Stop there!
Don’t you move a muscle!
I said
,
stop!
’

She thought that her words sounded slurred, and long-drawn-out, and when she started to head towards Keeno, she felt as if the air in the room had become so dense that she could only bound her way across the floor like an astronaut on the moon.

Keeno turned towards her. He had the same blank expression on his face as before.
I don’t give a shite if you’re a woman, I’m going to hit you all the same. That’s your place in life, to do what you’re told, and if you don’t do what you’re told, don’t be surprised if you’re hit.

Katie saw him raising his arm. His hand was open, so it looked as if he intended to slap her, rather than punch her. She saw Detective Dooley reaching out, trying to catch his sleeve. She heard Sergeant Begley shout something, although she was concentrating too intently to hear what it was. It just sounded like ‘
Mmmmwerrrrrrrr!
’

She spun around on the ball of her right foot and kicked Keeno in the chest with her left toecap. Even when she was sparring at her kick-boxing class she had never kicked anybody as hard as she did then.

Keeno crashed back against the door, and then slid down until he was sitting on the floor. His head was tilted to one side and his eyes had rolled up into his head so that only the whites were showing. The palms of both of his hands were upturned and open as if he were making an appeal to heaven.

‘Holy Mary Mother of God,’ said Sergeant Begley.

Katie recovered her balance, and as she did so, the world seemed to speed up again. She could hear the alarm frantically beeping, and now a garda’s face appeared in the window in the door. He was rattling the door handle from the other side and trying to push the door open.

‘Okay, hold on!’ Katie called out. Between them, Sergeant Begley and Detective Dooley dragged Keeno away from the door and laid him on the floor. Immediately, the door burst open and three uniformed garda pushed their way in.

‘What’s the story here?’ one of them asked. ‘Anybody hurt?’

‘We had a bit of a scrap with our suspect here,’ said Sergeant Begley. ‘One of you needs to take O’Keefe to the Mercy. His jaw’s been busticated.’

‘You look like you’ve had a fair bashing yourself, sergeant,’ said the garda, pointing to his forehead.

‘Oh, I’ll survive so. I’ve one devil of a headache, but it’s nothing that a couple of Nurofen won’t see to.’

Katie was standing over Keeno. His eyes were closed now and he was still unconscious.

‘What about your man?’ asked the garda.

‘DS Maguire gave him a kicking, that’s all. He’ll probably come round in a minute.’

Another gingery-haired garda knelt down on the floor beside Keeno and bent over to hear if he was still breathing. Then he pressed his fingertips against his carotid artery to check his pulse.

‘Yes, he’s still with us. But Jesus, you must have given some kick there, ma’am.’ He looked up at Katie, impressed.

‘Tell me about it,’ said Sergeant Begley, ruefully rubbing his stomach where Keeno had punched him. ‘Three hefty men in the room, like, and one of them only a boxing champion, and it takes a woman to bring your man down.’

One of the gardaí led Garda O’Keefe away, so that he could drive him to the Mercy Urgent Care Centre in Gurranbraher; and Katie told Detective Dooley to go to the first-aid room downstairs to have ice packs applied to his bruise. The two remaining gardaí fetched a stretcher, and heaved Keeno up on to it. Keeno’s eyes remained closed, although the lids were fluttering as if he were having a fit.

When they had lifted him up, Katie shook his shoulder and said, ‘Keeno? Keeno? Can you hear me, Keeno?
Keeno!
’

He didn’t respond. Katie shook him again, harder, but still he didn’t open his eyes. Maybe he really was concussed, but Katie guessed that he might be feigning unconsciousness because he was humiliated at having been knocked out by a woman, or else he didn’t want to answer the charges against him, or both.

‘Take him to a holding cell, would you,’ said Katie. ‘You’d better call Doctor Fitzpatrick, too, to give him a once-over. If he hasn’t woken up, make sure you lie him on his side. I don’t want him swallowing his tongue or choking on his own vomit. He’s probably faking, but I don’t want to take the risk, like.’

The two gardaí stretchered Keeno out of the interview room. After they had gone, Katie turned to Sergeant Begley and said, ‘As for you, Sean, I’m sending
you
home. Put a cold compress on your forehead, put your feet up, and have yourself a good hot cup of tea. I’ll see you tomorrow so.’

‘What about Mulvaney?’

‘I’ll be having a word with him now, although I doubt that he’ll tell us much more than he’s told us already. Even if he does know who these dognappers are, I think he’s far too frightened to give us their names.’

‘So what’s the plan?’

‘I’ll probably let him go for now. I don’t want to bring him up in front of the court until we have much more evidence against the whole gang. If we prosecute him, they’ll only go to ground, and then we’ll never find out the whole extent of what they’re up to.’

Katie was halfway back to her office when Detective Scanlan came hurrying up the corridor after her.

‘Ah, Pádraigin,’ she said. ‘I was going to be calling for you shortly. We have to go through the formalities with Gerry Mulvaney and Dooley’s indisposed, to say the least.’

‘I know. Jesus. He came into the squad room and showed me his bruises. How about yourself? You weren’t hurt at all?’

‘Not a scratch, thank God. Was there something you wanted?’

‘Yes…I managed to contact that pet detective. Conor Ó Máille. He’s in Kenmare today, looking for somebody’s lost greyhound, but he should be able to come up to Cork and see us tomorrow. He’ll give me a call when he gets here.’

‘All right,’ said Katie. ‘I’ve been trying to imagine what a pet detective looks like. Curly brown hair like a poodle, I’ll bet, and a wet nose, and a habit of sniffing all the time. Give me a minute now, would you, and we’ll go and see if we can get anything sensible out of Gerry Mulvaney if anything, as if.’

She was right, of course. Gerry Mulvaney insisted that he didn’t have a clue if Keeno was a member of a dognapping gang, and even if he was, what their names were, or where they came from. So far as he was concerned, Keeno had acquired the dogs legitimately, and his only possible misdemeanour was that he always insisted on being paid in cash, and didn’t supply any paperwork.

After twenty minutes of fruitless questioning, during which most of Gerry Mulvaney’s responses were shrugs, and scowls, and ‘how the feck should I knows’, Katie told him he could go. She released him on station bail, without surety, but she set a bail bond of €1,000 for him to appear in front of the District Court in three weeks’ time. She was hoping that by then she would have been able to identify the dognappers, and that she might be able to pressure him to turn state’s evidence against them, in return for dropping any charges for handling stolen property.

She accompanied him downstairs to the front desk.

‘Are you sure there’s nothing more you want to tell me?’ she asked him, as he crossed the reception area.

‘I can give you my old granny’s recipe for drisheen,’ he told her, zipping up his jacket.

‘Thanks, but I think I’ll pass on that if it’s all the same to you,’ said Katie. ‘Good luck to you so. I’ll see you in three weeks’ time, if not before.’

Gerry Mulvaney didn’t answer, but pushed his way out of the door. Katie watched him go, and as he went down the front steps of the station, a maroon Honda minicab sped up to the kerb, into one of the spaces reserved for Garda vehicles, as if it had been waiting for him to appear. He hurried over to it, opened one of the rear doors and climbed in. The minicab immediately pulled away.

Katie couldn’t see the taxi’s licence plate from where she was standing, so she went upstairs to the CCTV viewing room, where two gardaí were sitting in front of the multiple screens that covered almost all of the city centre. She said to the young female garda, ‘A Honda taxi just pulled up in front of the station and then shot off again. It was only a couple of minutes ago. Check its number for me, would you?’

‘Of course, ma’am. Hold on a second.’

While Katie stood behind her, she played back the recording from the camera on the opposite side of Anglesea Street. Katie saw the taxi speed backwards into the parking space outside the front of the station, and then freeze. She thought the driver looked Asian, and she could just make out the name
Tuohy’s Taxis
on the side. The garda jotted down its licence plate number on her notepad, tore it off, and gave it to her.

Katie headed back to her office. On her way there, Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin called her from his open office door.

‘
Katie!
’ he blurted out, and his mouth sounded full.