Living Death (8 page)

Inspector O’Brien knocked at the front door and one of the gardaí opened it, almost at once. He must have been expecting them, even if the Cassidys weren’t.

‘All right, sir?’ said the garda. ‘Everything’s quiet.’ He jerked his head towards the kennels. ‘Well, except for the effing dogs, like, do you know what I mean?’

They went into the living-room. Eoin Cassidy was hunched on the end of the couch, watching
Today with Maura and Daithi
on the television. The second garda was sitting with his arms folded in a straight-backed wooden chair against the wall, looking infinitely bored. A crumpled copy of
The Sun
was lying on the floor at his feet, where he had obviously dropped it after finishing with the sports pages. He stood up when Katie and Inspector O’Brien came into the room, but Eoin remained where he was, staring unblinkingly at the television, and didn’t even turn his head.

‘Mr Cassidy?’ said Inspector O’Brien. ‘Mr Cassidy – this is Detective Superintendent Maguire from Cork City Divisional Headquarters.’

Eoin still didn’t look around, so Inspector O’Brien raised his voice. ‘DS Maguire has a special interest in your case, Mr Cassidy. She’s been investigating a gang of dognappers in the city division for quite some time now, and she believes your man may have been one of them.’

After a long pause, Eoin switched off the television’s sound with his remote, and turned around. His face was unshaven with a pale and greasy sheen like linseed putty, and his eyes were so puffy from lack of sleep that it looked as if he could barely see out of them. He was wearing a beige shawl-collared cardigan with nothing underneath but a stained white vest, green-striped pyjama trousers and odd socks, one brown and one blue.

‘Jesus and Mary and the Wain,’ he said, and he sounded exhausted. ‘If I’ve told you once what happened, Inspector O’Brien, I’ve told you ten times over. What more do you want me to say?’

‘I know that, Mr Cassidy. But DS Maguire hasn’t heard it. Not from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.’

Eoin took a deep breath. Without looking up at Katie, he recited what he must have told Inspector O’Brien at Bandon Garda Station.

‘Cleona woke me up to say that the dogs were going doolally. I took my shotgun and went outside to see what they were so het up about. There was a gang of maybe eight fellers taking our dogs out of their kennels and loading them into a van. I shouted at them to stop but they came for me, and I was afeard they were going to give me a beating, or worse. I fired the one shot up in the air, but they took no notice and kept on coming, so I fired again, and I hit the feller in the head. That’s all.’

‘All right, Mr Cassidy, thank you,’ said Katie. ‘I completely understand how traumatic this has been for you, so I don’t blame you for being reluctant to go over it yet again. Is your wife at home? Cleona?’

‘She didn’t have nothing to do with this at all. I made her stay upstairs.’

‘All the same, I’d like to have a word with her.’

‘What’s the point of that? All she heard was the dogs barking. She didn’t see nothing. Nothing at all.’

‘Where is she, Mr Cassidy?’ Katie asked him.

‘I don’t want her upset, not any more than she is already. She’s devastated.’

‘We’ll do everything we can not to distress her, I promise you.’

Eoin Cassidy hesitated for a moment, his lips moving around as if he were chewing on a lump of gristle and couldn’t decide whether to swallow it. Then he said, ‘Okay, then. I’ll fetch her down.’

‘We’d prefer to talk to her on her own, if that’s all right with you.’

‘All right. I’ll take her through to the kitchen. But like I say, she won’t be able to tell you nothing. She was here in the house the whole time.’

He stood up and left the living-room. When they had heard him going upstairs, Katie turned to the two gardaí who had been watching over him. ‘How’s he been? Has he talked to you at all about what happened?’

Both gardaí shook their heads. One of them said, ‘He hasn’t uttered a single word, like, except to tell us that we could make ourselves a cup of tea. I’d say the feller was in post-dramatic stress disorder, do you know what I mean?’

‘Traumatic,’ said Detective Scanlan.

‘You’re right,’ said the garda. ‘It must have been.’

‘Now I come to think of it, we
did
hear him say one thing,’ the second garda put in. ‘After we’d first come into the house, his missus come halfway down the stairs, wanting to know who we were. She was kind of whispering and screaming both at the same time, if you know what I mean, like she was panicking but she didn’t want us to hear. But any road your man pushes her back upstairs and says, “It’s all right, love, it’s only the guards – it’s not them other fellers come back.” So she goes back upstairs. But that’s all he said. He comes back in and sits right down and switches on the telly and doesn’t look at us and you wouldn’t even think we was even there, like.’

‘Are you quite sure that’s exactly what he said?’ Katie asked him. ‘“
It’s not them other
fellers come back”
?’

‘Well, words to that effect,’ said the garda.

Katie turned to the first garda. ‘And you heard him say that, too?’

The garda pulled a face and shrugged. ‘It was something like that, yes. Or, “It’s not them again” – something of that nature.’

‘But Mr Cassidy was clearly telling her that you were guards, so she had nothing to worry about, and that you weren’t somebody else – somebody that she was scared of?’

‘When you put it that way, yes, I would say that’s a pretty fair interprematation.’

Katie looked at Inspector O’Brien and said, ‘The hurley stick. That could explain it.’

She could tell that Inspector O’Brien was thinking along the same lines, because he raised one finger as if he were going to add to what she had just said. Before he could open his mouth, though, Eoin Cassidy appeared in the living-room doorway and said, ‘Cleona’s waiting on you in the kitchen, but for the love of God go easy on her, will you?’

‘I promise,’ said Katie. She beckoned to Detective Scanlan and the two of them went along the hallway to the kitchen.

Cleona was sitting at a Formica-topped table next to the right-hand wall. The kitchen was narrow and cramped and looked as if it had last been fitted out in the 1970s, when rustic pine was fashionable. A calendar from the Irish Kennel Club was pinned on the wall next to Cleona, and Katie noticed that yesterday’s date had been marked with nothing but a red felt-tip exclamation mark. There was a window over the sink but the blind was still raised and all Katie could see out of it was blackness, and their own reflections, as if three other women were having a ghostly conversation, out in the night.

‘Cleona?’ said Katie, with a smile. ‘My name’s Kathleen Maguire and I’m a detective superintendent from Cork city. This is Pádraigin Scanlan. She’s one of my team.’

Cleona looked even more devastated than Eoin. She was wrapped in a rose-pink velveteen dressing-gown with the collar turned up. She had applied natural matt foundation all over her face but it did little to cover the bruises on her cheeks and the left-hand side of her jaw, and both of her eyes were swollen. Her hair was like a nest of snakes, as though she had washed it but hadn’t bothered to brush it.

Katie sat down next to her and Detective Scanlan sat at the opposite end of the table.

‘We’re not here to give either you or Eoin a hard time,’ said Katie. ‘We’re only here to clear up what exactly happened.’

Cleona nodded but said nothing.

Katie said, ‘So what
did
happen, Cleona?’

Cleona sniffed and took a crumpled tissue out of her dressing-gown pocket so that she could wipe her nose. ‘The dogs woke me up. They were barking like you wouldn’t believe. Going mad they were. So Eoin went outside to see what was disturbing them. I heard a shot and that was all. Then Eoin came back in and said that a gang of dognappers had been stealing the dogs, and that he’d shot one of them, and killed him.’

‘You heard a shot? Just the one shot?’

Cleona nodded.

Katie leaned forward a little. As gently as she could, she said, ‘The problem is, Cleona, that there’s one or two details that don’t exactly fit. You heard only the one shot, but Eoin says he fired two. A warning shot first, and then the shot that killed the dognapper.’

‘Well, it could well have been two,’ said Cleona. ‘I couldn’t say for definite. It was all fierce confusing, like, and I was scared half to death. I get terrible nervous at night, right out here in the middle of nowhere at all, especially in the winter, you know.’

‘You have your husband to protect you, though,’ put in Detective Scanlan.

‘Oh, yes. And Eoin’s very security-conscious. He always makes sure the kennels are locked and the alarms are set.’

‘The alarms didn’t go off this time, though, did they?’ Katie asked her.

‘No. Eoin says that he must have forgot, just for once.’

‘That’s what he told the officers at Bandon. Do you think he did? Forget, I mean.’

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘Do you genuinely think he forgot or do you think the dognappers knew how to switch the alarms off?’

‘How could they?’ asked Cleona. She was blinking furiously now and she had to dab at her eyes with her tissue.

‘I don’t know. I was just wondering if you had any ideas.’

‘He said he forgot and of course I believe him. Why wouldn’t I?’

Detective Scanlan said, ‘It wasn’t Eoin who hit you, though, was it?’

Cleona pressed her left hand against her cheek. ‘Nobody hit me. I fell, that’s all. I tripped over a broomstick in the yard and I fell against the kitchen step.’

‘I used to have a boyfriend who hit me,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘I was always telling my friends that I’d fallen over. And what was the other excuse? Oh, I know. I’d stood up suddenly in the kitchen and banged my head on a cupboard door that I’d been stupid enough to leave open.’

‘Eoin has never laid a hand on me,’ Cleona insisted. ‘Not once in all our nine years of marriage.’

‘You’ve had your arguments, though?’

‘We have of course. Which couple doesn’t? But all Eoin does when he flips the lid is take some of the dogs out for a walk.’

‘One of the dognappers hit you, didn’t he?’ said Detective Scanlan. She said it so softly that Cleona could hardly hear her, but when she realised what Detective Scanlan had said, she slowly stiffened in her kitchen chair and pulled her dressing-gown tighter across her chest.

‘They came into the house, didn’t they, Cleona?’ said Katie.

‘I told you. I tripped over a broomstick in the yard and I fell against the kitchen step.’

‘You don’t have to make up a story about it, not for us,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘I’ve seen my own face in the mirror often enough with bruises exactly like yours, and unless you have a pure quare kitchen step with five fingers and a signet ring, it was some feller who hit you, and more than once.’

Cleona took a deep breath, and then another. Katie could see that she was trying desperately hard to compose herself, so that she could stick to her story that she had fallen over, and back up Eoin’s story that she had never set eyes on the dognappers.

But Detective Scanlan said, ‘Cleona, sweetheart, we’re not accusing you of doing anything wrong, neither you nor Eoin. But we can see that you’ve been badly hurt and how frightened you are. All we need is for you to tell us what really happened, so that we can clear this all up and find the men who did this to you and stole your dogs.’

Katie reached out and laid her hand on Cleona’s arm, and squeezed it. ‘You won’t get into any trouble, Cleona. I promise you. But we have to clear this up.’

Cleona burst into tears. She let out a high-pitched whinny, followed by a deep, lung-wrenching sob. Katie stood up and put her arm around her shoulders, and held her tight. It was over a minute before Cleona was able to stop shaking and wipe her eyes.

‘Why did they beat you, Cleona?’ asked Detective Scanlan.

‘There were two of them. They came into the house. One of them hit Eoin with his hurley stick and knocked him to the floor. The other one—’

She started sobbing again, so Katie and Detective Scanlan had to wait until she was able to continue. They exchanged looks, though, and they both had a strong suspicion what Cleona was going to say next.

‘The other one –
what
, sweetheart?’

‘The other one did it to me – had his way. I tried everything I could to stop him but he hit me and hit me and hit me, and there was nothing I could do.’

‘He raped you?’ said Katie.

Cleona nodded. ‘I tried to stop him, I swear to God I did. But he was too strong.’

‘Can you describe him?’ asked Detective Scanlan.

Cleona shook her head. ‘The both of them had scarves over their faces. They were rough types, though. They both smelled of cigarettes and drink. But the one who did it to me, the other one called him Keeno.’

‘Keeno? You’re sure?’

‘He called him that more than once. He told him to get off me because they were leaving. “Will you beat on, Keeno,” that’s what he said exactly, and that was when he got off me.’

Katie sat down again and took hold of both of Cleona’s hands. ‘Cleona, we’ll have to ask you some more questions, but before we do that it’s very important that we take you to the hospital for a check-up. You’ve washed yourself since this happened?’

Cleona nodded. ‘I have, yes. I couldn’t stand the smell of him on me. He didn’t – finish off, though, if you know what I mean.’

‘Even if he didn’t, and even if you’ve washed, there’s a possibility that there might be some trace left of his DNA. More than that, though, it’s vital that you’re checked for any sexually transmitted disease. You never know what this Keeno could have been carrying.’

‘Eoin told me to do that, too – go to the hospital.’

‘Really? So why didn’t you?’

‘I told him that if I went to the hospital the nurses would have to report what that Keeno had done to me. I mean, like, the way I’ve been beaten, I couldn’t just pretend that I’d had some one-night stand with some fellow and I was worried that he might have given me a dose of something. And if the nurses reported it, Eoin could be in desperate trouble for chasing after those men after they’d already left and shooting one of them out of revenge. After all, they were leaving. He could have just let them go.’