Living Death (44 page)

Dermot pushed Gerry up to Siobhán’s chair. Siobhán was wearing a thick black polo-neck sweater and a baggy pair of jeans, and socks, but no shoes. Her head was lowered as if she were asleep, but as Gerry was pushed nearer she raised it, with a jerk, as if she could see him.

‘This is Siobhán,’ said Gearoid. ‘She can hear you, but she’s blind, and she can’t say hello – or anything else, come to that. But she’s done one run for us already, and we’re very happy with her. She’s pretty, don’t you think? And when the customs officers see a pretty girl like Siobhán, stricken by blindness and such total disability, they’re all the more inclined to wave the ambulance through without turfing her out of it so that they can search it.’

Siobhán made a gargling sound in her throat, but it was impossible to tell if she were trying to speak, or if she were doing nothing more than swallowing an excess of saliva.

Next, Gerry was pushed up to face Fiontán.

‘For feck’s sake take me out of here,’ said Gerry. ‘I don’t need to see any more, Gearoid. This is doing nothing at all but putting the fear of God into me. Jesus, Gearoid, I can’t face you turning me into one of these people. I’d rather you killed me. I mean it. Why don’t you just fecking kill me?’

‘Because dead people can’t pay back what they owe, Gerry, and dead people are no use to me at all. I could fit out a hearse, I suppose, to carry drugs in, but how many times do you think I could ship your dead body to England and back before Revenue started sniffing at it and growing more than a mite suspicious?’

Fiontán’s head was tilted back, and he was dribbling and twitching with nervous spasms. The brunette woman kept turning her head from side to side, and she was clearly aware that there was somebody else in the room, although she could neither see them nor hear them. The young man with the cleft in his head sat utterly still, his blind blue eyes staring at nothing, but endlessly grinding his teeth.

‘This is Breda, and this is Val,’ said Gearoid. ‘You’ll be making the journey with one or other of them from time to time, so it’s good for you to have an idea of what they look like.’

Gerry closed his eyes. He obviously knew that it was useless for him to repeat ‘kill me’, so he said nothing. Gearoid had already lamed him. If he blinded him and deafened him and made it impossible for him to speak, that would be just like being dead, except that he would still be alive.

‘Right,’ said Gearoid. ‘I think it’s time to make a start on you, Gerry. Will you take him through to the operating room, Dermot, and strap him on the table? I’ll be with you in a minute. I have to ring my mother. She hasn’t been feeling too bright lately.’

‘
Gearoid
,’ said Gerry, but that was all.

Dermot pushed him back along the corridor and into the room that Gearoid used as an operating theatre. Gerry had stopped crying now, and he was starting to feel numb, as if none of this was really happening. The numbness was partly caused by the morphine that he had been given to suppress the pain in his leg, and partly by his brain defending him against the horror of what was going to be done to him.

Grainne helped Dermot to heave Gerry out of the wheelchair and on to the operating table. Dermot fastened a wide black canvas strap around his thighs, and tightly buckled it up, and then he forced his arms down by his sides and buckled a second canvas strap across his midriff.

‘Not hurting you at all, the straps?’ Dermot asked him.

‘Get away to feck with you, Dermot,’ Gerry retorted. ‘As if you give a shite.’

They waited for Gearoid to join them. Gerry lay helplessly bound to the table, staring up at the ceiling, while Dermot jabbed at his mobile phone and Grainne hummed ‘Red Is The Rose’. For a moment, Gerry thought that she was humming it only to mock him, because he had sung it to his girlfriend Aoife when he had proposed to her, more years ago than he could count. Aoife had died of ovarian cancer when she was only thirty-seven, and Gerry had never remarried. After Aoife had gone, his only companions had been his dogs, and most of those he had never much cared for.

Oh, Aoife, if you could see me now, that boy who sang to you.

Gearoid came into the room. He didn’t speak as he took down his green surgical gown from the hook by the door and pushed his arms into it. Grainne tied it up for him at the back. Then he put on his surgeon’s cap, and his mask, although he didn’t pull his mask up over his face. He leaned over Gerry and smiled and said, ‘You won’t be needing the anaesthetic for this, Gerry. This is a very simple procedure and in spite of what you might think, it doesn’t hurt too much. So I’m told, anyway, not having experienced it for myself.’

He beckoned Dermot to come around to the top end of the operating table. ‘Grab a hold of Gerry’s ears for me, Dermot, and hold his head still. This won’t take long but we don’t want him shaking his head around like a wet retriever.’

He opened Gerry’s right eye wide with his index finger and his thumb, and then he turned to Grainne and said, ‘Pass me the speculum, will you?’

She handed him a wire speculum, and he inserted it under Gerry’s eyelid to prevent him blinking. Gerry grunted and tried to twist his head to one side but Dermot was gripping his ears far too tight.

‘Spoon,’ said Gearoid, and Grainne gave him a long-handled surgical spoon, with a very small bowl at the end of it.

Gearoid said to Gerry, ‘This is what we call enucleation, Gerry. As I said, it’s probably one of the most painless ways of blinding you. I’ve tried all kinds of different methods, like caustic liquids and penetrating the eyeball with a pointed instrument, but I think you’ll agree with me that this is the least traumatic.’

He inserted the spoon into Gerry’s eye socket, wiggling it slightly so that it cupped the back of the eyeball. Gerry gasped, and panted. He would have screamed, but he didn’t have enough air in his lungs.

Very slowly, and with a soft sucking sound, Gearoid scooped Gerry’s glistening eyeball out of its socket. It stared at him without expression on the end of his spoon, still fastened to the thin pink optic nerve.

‘Scissors,’ he said, and Grainne passed him a pair of scissors with small curved blades. He snipped the optic nerve, which shrivelled back into Gerry’s empty eye socket like a worm with its head cut off.

Gearoid carefully removed the speculum and Gerry’s eyelid drooped shut, although blood slid out from under it, diluted by his tears.

‘There... that wasn’t so bad, was it, Gerry?’ said Gearoid. He held up Gerry’s right eye in front of his left one, so that he could see it. Still panting with shock, Gerry stared at it in disbelief.

‘What did Humphrey Bogart say at the end of
Casablanca
?’ said Gearoid. “Here’s looking at you, kid.”’

Gerry exhaled loudly through his nose, and then his left eye closed, too. Grainne prodded him, and when she got no response, she said, ‘Look, he’s passed out. Did you
have
to do that, like – show him his eye? Hasn’t he suffered enough trauma already, for the love of God, what with his leg.’

Gearoid pulled down his face mask. ‘Come on, Grainne. What’s the point of punishing someone if they don’t see how they’re being punished? He could have ruined everything. He could have cost us millions. We could have ended up doing ten years in jail because of him.’

Dermot was growing impatient for a smoke. ‘He’s wiped,’ he said. ‘How much longer do I have to keep holding on to his ears for?’

Gearoid looked down at Gerry. His cheeks were still rough and scarlet but the rest of his face was chalky white, so that he looked like a comatose clown. Gearoid thought for a few seconds and then said, ‘Kidney bowl,’ to Grainne. She held the bowl out for him and he dropped Gerry’s eye into it. The eye stared at the bottom of the bowl as if it didn’t understand what it was doing there.

‘All right,’ said Gearoid. ‘Let’s extract the other eye while we’re at it. There’ll be too much for us to do this afternoon getting the ambulance ready.’

He pulled up his mask again, held out his hand, palm upwards, and said, ‘Spoon.’

Katie had intended to arrive at the station early that morning, but she overslept and didn’t arrive until 10:15, yawning and carrying a cup of strong black coffee. Her only breakfast had been two oat-and-honey bars which she had eaten in the car.

John had called out for her three or four times during the night. First he had complained that he was suffering excruciating phantom pain in his legs. Then his throat had been burning with a raging thirst and he had drunk all of his water. Next his bedcover had slipped off on to the floor and he was shivering with cold, but his legs had been hurting too much for him to get out of bed and pick it up. After that he had been woken up by a nightmare that Katie had been badly injured at work and he had wanted to make sure that it wasn’t true.

As she drove into the city, in a downpour that was almost blinding, she had received a message from the chief technical officer Bill Phinner to call him as soon as she could. Once she had reached her office, she took off her hooded raincoat and shook it, fluffed up her hair, and then rang him.

He came up carrying the brown leather briefcase. She couldn’t tell from his expression what his test results might have been, because he always looked miserable, as if he couldn’t understand why God had put him on this earth to perform such a grisly job.

‘How’s it going on, Bill?’ Katie asked him.

Bill set the briefcase down on her desk and clicked it open. The bundles of money were still inside, covered in bubble-wrap.

‘Like er, we found traces of saliva and phlegm on the interior lining of the briefcase and also on some of the banknotes, which would indicate that whoever was handling them sneezed while they were doing it. We also found two grey human hairs.’

‘So who are we looking for? Somebody old, with a cold?’

‘As per your instructions, we compared the saliva with a swab taken from Assistant Commissioner O’Reilly’s telephone handset, and we also took a sample from a toothbrush in his toilet. The hairs we compared with hairs that we found on the back of his chair and also on the carpet under his desk.’

‘And?’

‘There’s no doubt about it at all. If Jimmy O’Reilly didn’t fill that briefcase with money himself, then he was unquestionably present while somebody else was doing it. And sneezed.’

Katie sat down. She felt as if all her suspicions had been vindicated, but she also felt deflated and more than a little apprehensive. She wished in a way that Bill had said that there was no evidence that Jimmy O’Reilly had packed that money for Maureen Callahan, because now she was faced with having to confront him, and the dilemma of whether or not she should report him to the GSOC.

She thought it was sad, too, that Jimmy O’Reilly hated her so much, and found her so threatening. She hadn’t told anyone about his relationship with James Elvin, but he obviously found it intolerable that she knew about it. His plan to discredit her had been absurd and ill thought-out, but if she hadn’t taken the precaution of tracking Maureen Callahan’s car, and if Kyna hadn’t almost miraculously produced that photograph of Branán O’Flynn in Las Palmas, he still could have damaged her career so drastically that she would have had to resign.

‘What’s the story behind this, ma’am?’ asked Bill. ‘I asked Ó Doibhilin but he said to ask you.’

‘Let’s just say that it’s very complex,’ said Katie. ‘Apart from that, I don’t know what the consequences are going to be. We took the hair and saliva samples from Jimmy O’Reilly’s office without his knowledge or consent. However they’re both non-intrusive samples and I’m sufficiently senior to have authorised it and I have every reason to believe that an offence has been committed.’

‘Really? What nature of offence, exactly?’

‘I’m going to be discussing this with Jimmy O’Reilly face-to-face, Bill, and we’ll see where we go from there. Meanwhile if you can keep this whole thing to yourself.’

‘Well, that won’t be difficult since I have no idea what “this whole thing” actually is. But I assume that if I looked into a crystal ball I might see a violent collision between “shite” and “fan” in the very near future.’

‘You have it, Bill. Thank you. I’ll keep you up to date.’

*

Half an hour later, Conor rang her and asked her if she still had the afternoon free.

‘So far as I know. I have some paperwork to catch up with, but after that, yes.’

‘Maybe we could have lunch together. Where’s good on a Sunday?’

‘Perrott’s Garden Bistro at the Hayfield Manor if you can get us in. They’re usually very busy, but their Sunday lunch is fantastic.’

‘I’ll see what I can do. Is it okay if I mention your name? And your rank?’

‘Don’t you dare. If they’re all booked up we’ll go for a Thai.’

It took her only another hour to go through all of her files and all her reports. She checked with Detective Dooley on Keeno’s condition at the Mercy, but he told her that there was still no change.

‘No better, but no worse. Who knows? He might stay like that for ever. Stuck between heaven and hell, like, and welcomed by neither.’

She also checked to see if any members of the public had responded to their new appeal for witnesses to the stabbing of Martin Ó Brádaigh, but none had.

She had almost finished going through her budget figures when Detective Scanlan knocked at her door.

‘Pádraigin,’ said Katie, putting down her pen. ‘I didn’t think you were working today.’

‘It was the best day to catch that priest you wanted me to talk to, Father Brennan. He was fierce evasive, and he wouldn’t talk at all about what happened when he visited the Knocknaheeny Youth Project. I went very easy on him, though, and I’ve arranged to talk to him again. I think I’ll get more out of him next time, when he’s not so defensive. I didn’t want to scare him into wiping his laptop, either.’

‘So have you finished for today?’

‘I have, yes. But I was surprised to see Assistant Commissioner O’Reilly just now. I thought I heard you say that he was in Dublin this weekend.’

‘He’s here? Now?’

‘I saw him go into his office. I said good morning but he didn’t even look at me. I’d say he’s real thwarted about something.’