Living Death (7 page)

‘Yes, sir, I was, and I did. John came home this morning. I was going to stay home with him for the rest of the day myself but Begley called me about this shooting down at Ballinroe East.’

‘Oh, the dognapper.’

‘Well, we’re not one hundred per cent sure that he
was
a dognapper yet. The kennel owner claims he was – the fellow who shot him. But we won’t know for sure until we have a positive ID. I’m going down to Ballinroe myself to have a word with the kennel owner, and also the kennel owner’s wife.’

‘What about your legless fellow?’

‘He has a nurse who’s going to be taking care of him whenever I’m away.’

Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin pressed his hand over his mouth and looked at her narrowly. Then he said, ‘Katie – you’re sure you haven’t taken too much on yourself? You’re already up the walls here at the station, especially with all of these new budget cuts. Fair play, your fellow has a nurse. But I remember my sister looking after my old Da when he went doolally. She had a carer to help her out but Mother of God, it almost killed her.’

‘John’s not demented, sir. He’s just disabled. It’ll get much easier once they fit him with his prosthetic legs and he can start to walk again.’

‘And how long will that take?’

‘I don’t know. Six months, maybe a year.’

Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin stood up and came around his desk. He stood very close to her, saying nothing for a few seconds.

‘I’d better make tracks,’ said Katie. ‘I’ve arranged to meet Inspector O’Brien at the kennels, and it’s getting dark already.’

‘I, ah – well, take care of yourself, won’t you?’ said Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin. ‘If you start to feel that the pressure’s too much for you, come and talk to me. It’s what I’m here for. You’ve been pushing yourself to the limit lately, I’ve seen that, especially with all these drugs flooding into the city. I don’t want you falling apart. Remember what happened to Liam Fennessy.’

Katie said nothing. Inspector Fennessy’s personal life had fallen apart, and then he had started taking cocaine, and accepting bribes, and in the end he had shot himself.

‘No, sir, nothing like that is going to happen to me. To be honest with you, I don’t have the time to fall apart.’

Once they had passed Cork airport, the rain began to ease off and the pillowy grey clouds opened up, so that the pale lemon-coloured light of day could shine through. The hedgerows glittered and the road surface up ahead of them was dazzling.

‘How’s it going with the drugs programme?’ asked Katie. ‘Did you manage to have that meeting with the HSE at last?’

‘This morning,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘Moira Kennedy from HSE and two women from Cuan Mhuire and a fellow from Matt Talbot Services and Jim Geoghegan from Merchants Quay, too. I haven’t had the time to write it up for you yet.’

‘Not a bother. I wouldn’t have had the time to read it, even if you had. What was the general gist of what they had to tell you? They must all be feeling the effects of this drug tsunami too.’

Detective Scanlan said, ‘You’re not joking. Cork’s awash with heroin, that was how Jim Geoghegan described it. By his estimate, there’s at least five hundred hard-core heroin addicts in the city centre alone, and he wouldn’t be surprised if it’s half of that again on top of it. The trouble is, he can only count the number of addicts who come to Merchants Quay to use their free needle exchange.’

‘It’s getting mental,’ said Katie. ‘Think of how many peddlers we’ve lifted in the past two months – not only how many numerically but how much stuff we’ve found on each one of them. And look at those petty crime statistics we’ve just had in. They’re up seven-and-a-half per cent since the last quarter, and almost all of them are drug-related in one way or another.’

Katie had been aware since the end of the summer that more hard drugs were being peddled in the city than ever before. Not only
more
drugs, but much purer drugs too, so that new users were becoming dependent much more rapidly. Her narcotics squad had reported that heroin was even being sold in broad daylight, in mid-afternoon, in some of the shopping malls. One dealer had been caught right outside Champions Sports in the Savoy Centre, offering free sample packets of heroin to young lads going in to buy runners.

‘Moira Kennedy from the HSE said that the hospitals are dealing with at least half-a-dozen near-fatal overdoses every week,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘Last year twelve people altogether died of heroin overdoses in Cork city alone, and if things carry on like this, she reckons that this year it will probably be more than twenty.’

‘But she hasn’t picked up any hint at all where it’s coming from, all this heroin? Nor Jim Geoghegan, neither, nor Cuan Mhuire? Because, let’s face it,
we’re
still totally in the dark, too. The street dealers are mostly the same old scummers as always, but the quantity they’re selling now, and the quality of it. There’s no question at all that there’s somebody new in the business, and they’re incredibly well organised. But who is it?’

‘I talked to Declan Murphy from the Real IRA yesterday morning,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘Even
he
doesn’t know who it is, or makes out he doesn’t, anyhow, and if anybody should know, it’s him. But I’m working on a couple of new contacts at the moment. I think one of them has a half an idea who’s behind it, but he’s too jibber to tell me.’

‘Well, keep on nagging him,’ Katie told her.

‘I will. Besides, I think he fancies me something rotten, so I might get lucky.’

Katie gave her a quick sideways smile. Detective Scanlan was just twenty-four – tall and thin as a model, with a wave of shoulder-length brunette hair. She was very unusual-looking: she had a long pointed nose, but her huge violet eyes and her pouting pink lips gave her an almost magical appearance, as if she were an
aes sidh
, a fairy who had decided to join the mortal police force.

Over the past few weeks, Katie had become increasingly pleased by the progress she was making. Pádraigin Scanlan was one of a team of four young detectives whom Katie had selected to give special guidance and encouragement. ‘Katie’s Kids’, Detective O’Donovan called them, although he didn’t mean it entirely as a compliment. But what these four lacked in street experience they more than made up for in other ways. They were attractive and bright and computer-literate and all of them looked young for their age, which meant that they could mingle with college and university students and infiltrate Cork’s thriving club scene. Detective O’Donovan was approaching forty. He was putting on weight and his hair was starting to turn grey. As canny and as hardened as he was, he would have found it impossible to pass himself off as a raver at Rearden’s or Cyprus Avenue.

‘You
have
eaten something today?’ Katie asked Detective Scanlan. ‘I don’t want you fainting on me in mid-interview.’

‘Oh, I’m grand altogether,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘I had a cheese and bacon burger at Coqbull for lunch, with the chorizo fries. I’m full as an egg.’

‘Holy Mary, I don’t know where you put it all,’ Katie told her. ‘You must have extra-efficient metabolism.’

She looked again at Detective Scanlan in her skin-tight jeans with the belt done up to the very last hole and wondered if she had been as thin at that age. Probably, although she had been much more bosomy. When they had first got together, her late husband Paul had almost been able to close both of his hands around her waist.

‘You should eat more,’ Paul used to say to her. ‘Don’t want you snapping in half, like, do we?’

*

It was dark by the time they reached the harbour town of Kinsale, but the restaurants and bars were all lit up and the pavements were crowded.

‘Jesus, I could do with a drink,’ said Katie, as they passed the scarlet-painted front of Max’s Wine Bar, on Main Street.

‘Serious?’ said Detective Scanlan.

‘Not really. I don’t want to keep Inspector O’Brien waiting. But maybe we’ll stop for one on the way back.’

Once they had driven through the busy town centre, the darkness closed in again, and they were on their own. They crossed the long concrete bridge that spanned the last wide bend in the River Bandon. Apart from the roadway ahead of them, flatly illuminated by their headlamps, all they could see now was the black glittering water of the estuary, and a sprinkling of lights from the houses that were perched high on the hills all around them.

In this landscape – although she had Detective Scanlan with her – Katie suddenly felt a pang of loneliness. When she had first told her father that she was thinking of joining An Garda Siochána, he had taken hold of her hands and said to her, ‘Think on this, Katie. From the moment you become a guard, no matter how many friends you have, no matter who loves you, people will always be wary of you. You’ll have made yourself an outsider, for the rest of your life.’

They turned down the R604 and arrived at last at the entrance to Sceolan Boarding Kennels. Inspector O’Brien was already sitting in his black Mondeo by the side of the road, along with a uniformed sergeant. Katie flashed her lights and they climbed out to meet her.

‘What’s the story, Terry?’ said Katie. ‘I hope we haven’t kept you waiting too long.’

‘No bother at all, ma’am,’ said Inspector O’Brien. ‘Gave us a chance to have a much-needed hang sandwidge.’

Inspector O’Brien was a stubby little bull of a man with very blue eyes and thinning, combed-over hair. Katie thought that if he put on a long striped apron he would look just like a butcher from the English Market.

‘This is Detective Scanlan,’ Katie told him. ‘I brought her along because she has a way of persuading women to confess to things that they wouldn’t even tell their best friend.’

‘Sounds exactly like my moth,’ said Inspector O’Brien. ‘She knows everybody’s business before they find it out themselves. This here is Sergeant Doherty. It was Sergeant Doherty who talked to Mrs Cassidy this morning, but like I told you, she was very unforthcoming, and pure distressed, so he considered it wiser to terminate the interview and question her later, when she’d had some time to calm down and reflect, like.’

‘Very sensible, sergeant,’ said Katie. ‘I gather she has some bruising on her face, too.’

‘She does, yes, desperate,’ said Sergeant Doherty. He was tall and stockily built, with a large bony head, and curled-up ears. In his yellow high-viz jacket he looked even more padded than he actually was, as if he wouldn’t be able to run more than a hundred metres before being puffed out. ‘I never got around to asking her how she came by them, all them bruises – whether she was the victim of domestic violence or whether she’d had some kind of an accident in inverted commas. You know – tripped and banged her face on the washing-machine like most of these battered wives do. She gave me the feeling that even if I did ask her, she wouldn’t tell me.’

‘Well, I think you did the right thing by cutting the interview short,’ said Katie. ‘She only would have retreated into her shell even more if you’d kept on pressing her. You didn’t warn the Cassidys that we were going to pay them a visit now, did you, inspector?’

Inspector O’Brien shook his head. ‘No, but I’ve advised Eoin Cassidy that even if he doesn’t get formally charged for shooting your man, we’ll be requiring his co-operation for quite some time to come. We still need to ask him a rake of questions, and the technical experts haven’t yet finished taking prints and fibres from all of the kennels. There’s any amount of wire fencing where somebody’s sweater or jacket could have got snagged.’

‘What about identikit pictures?’

‘Those, too. I’ve told him that we’ll be using his description of the victim to prepare some 3-D facial approximations – you know, with the ZBrush software, like. I know they’re more generic than your hand-drawn re-creations, but that’s all we can stretch to, at the moment. Bill Phinner has a forensic artist on his team, doesn’t he? But he told me that she’s not available right now.’

‘You mean Eithne O’Neill,’ said Katie. ‘Yes, she’s very good. In fact she’s brilliant. But she’s off on compassionate leave at the moment. Her sister’s dying of cancer, sad to say.’

‘Oh. I didn’t know that. I’m sorry to hear it. And there was me grumbling to Bill because I can’t afford a freelance artist. Not on my budget.’

‘Well, let’s just see how this all plays out,’ said Katie. ‘Let’s go and take a look at the scene of the shooting, shall we, and then Detective Scanlan and I can have a few words with Mrs Cassidy.’

‘Her name’s Cleona, by the way,’ put in Sergeant Doherty. ‘And go easy on her when you ask her about the dogs. You’d think she’d lost her children, the way she’s talking.’

They returned to their cars and drove up the sloping driveway towards the two rows of kennels. Every individual bay had a light on, even the empty ones; and the two main wall lamps were shining too, so that the tarmac courtyard in between the two rows of kennels was starkly illuminated, like a deserted film set. A blue vinyl forensic tent was pitched right in the middle of it, surrounded by blue-and-white garda tape, and a Garda patrol car was parked beside the house.

After they had climbed out of their cars, Inspector O’Brien came across to Katie and said, ‘I did recommend to the Cassidys that they move away for a while, in case any of the gang decided to come back and retaliate. But they insisted that they couldn’t leave the dogs that were left behind. There’s still thirteen of them all told, and they wouldn’t hear of the CSPCA taking them in, even temporary-like.

‘That’s why I’ve posted two armed officers here twenty-four hours a day – at least until we’ve put a name to our victim, and we know exactly who we’re looking for.’

‘Have they given you a full list of the dogs that were taken?’

Sergeant Doherty held up a folded sheet of paper. ‘Twenty-six of them altogether. Mostly they went for the big dogs. Two German Shepherds, three bull terriers, a Vizsla, two boxers, one mastiff... but there’s a Samoyed here and that’s worth nearly eight-and-a-half thousand euros, according to Eoin Cassidy.’

They walked towards the house. In one of the kennels, a Labrador was mournfully and repetitively barking, while a wire-haired fox terrier was jumping up and down and yapping in excited bursts.