Taken for Dead (Kate Maguire) (37 page)

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you seemed sincere enough, like. Maybe you
did
take Derek Hagerty’s story at face value. Which, of course, you were supposed to.’

‘Am I a prisoner here?’ asked Eoghan, and again his voice sounded flat and unfamiliar.

‘Of course not. But I’d prefer it if you stayed here until we got things sorted. You realize that you’ve complimicated the situation
enaaarmously
by taking off your blindfold. Not only for us, but mostly for yourself, like. Before, we could have dropped you off somewhere inconvenient and let you find your way home and that would have been an end to it.’

‘Why can’t you do that now?’

‘Oh, come on, Eoghan, use your brains. You’ve seen us now. You know who we are. You can identify us in a court of law.’

‘I don’t have the first idea who you are, and if the price of getting out of here is to forget I ever saw you or witnessed one of these two feens shooting a garda, then that’s a price I’m more than willing to pay. As for Denny, or Derek Hagerty, or whatever you want to call him, I didn’t see anything at all when we found him by the roadside that made me suspicious, and neither did he say anything that made me doubt that he wasn’t telling us the truth. Not while I was with him, anyway. I can’t vouch for what Meryl thought, or her husband.’

Staring out of the window with a freshly lit cigarette, Lorcan said, ‘I think you’re missing the point, Mr Carroll. It’s all very well your promising us now that you won’t rat us out to the law, but we don’t have any guarantee that you won’t change your mind as soon as you’re safely back in England. It would only take an e-mail to Anglesea Street, now wouldn’t it, or an anonymous phone call?’

‘What more can I give you than my word?’ said Eoghan.

Lorcan breathed smoke out of his nostrils. It had started to rain again and silver droplets were spotting the window. ‘You can give us your cooperation, that’s what you can give us.’

‘Cooperation to do what, exactly?’

‘Get yourself released, of course. You could call your bowl feen and tell him that you’ve been abducted but treated fair so far, but you’d need him to cough up a bit of money to get you free.’

‘That’s ridiculous. My father doesn’t have any money. He’s retired from the council on a pension.’

‘Oh, he can find the money all right. You won’t be asking for much, only fifty thousand euros, say. He can find that.’

‘Fifty thousand euros? How? The only way he could raise that kind of money would be to sell his house. The stress of it would kill him. He has a weak heart as it is.’

‘Oh, don’t you worry,’ said Lorcan. ‘The Garda will help him. Especially if you tell your father that Derek Hagerty admitted to you that he helped to arrange his own kidnap, so that he wouldn’t have to pay his creditors.’

‘But he didn’t. He said nothing to me at all except that he’d been beaten and all his front teeth were pulled out with pliers.’

‘Again, Mr Carroll, you’re missing the point. Derek Hagerty won’t talk, but the shades are convinced that he was a willing party to his own abduction. They believe that he knows full well who was supposed to have taken him. But – since
he
won’t talk – they’re desperate for witnesses. It’s highly likely that the Pearses found out the truth somehow, or they wouldn’t have notified the guards when they gave Derek Hagerty a lift into the city, so that they could pick him up and take him in for questioning. But, sadly, the Pearses are no longer in any fit state to testify.’

Eoghan was still shivering and he found it hard to make sense of anything that Lorcan was saying.

‘I’m supposed to ring my father and tell him that I know for sure that Derek Hagerty was faking it?’

‘That’s it, you have it. But you also have to tell him that you managed to persuade
us
that he told you nothing. That’s the reason we haven’t silenced you for good and all, like the Pearses. All we’re asking for is a small amount of recompense for the trouble you’ve caused us, and then we’ll let you go.’

Eoghan glanced towards Aengus and Ruari. They were sitting side by side in their matching jackets, both expressionless. With their flour-white faces and their carroty curls they looked more like two life-size marionettes than real people, and Eoghan found them more frightening than anybody he had ever encountered in his life.

‘Why should I do anything you want me to do?’ he challenged them. ‘You murdered my Meryl. Burned her alive! Christ, you sound like you’re proud of yourselves for killing her!’

Lorcan shrugged. ‘She should have listened to you, Mr Carroll. She should have left Hagerty where he was, or minded her own, at the very least.’

‘Are you those High Kings of Erin they’ve been talking about on the news?’ Eoghan demanded. ‘Is that who you are?’

‘Well, well, the light has shone through at last!’ said Aengus, with a sudden smile. ‘The very same. The great notorious High Kings of Erin! Not
all
of them, of course. There are more of us, like, all over the country. But all of us are sworn to do the same thing, and that’s to restore Ireland’s pride in herself and to punish those scobes who brought her so low.’

Eoghan didn’t know what to say to that. He couldn’t really understand what Aengus or Lorcan were talking about, or follow their logic, if there was any logic to it.

‘So … will you do it?’ asked Aengus. ‘You’ll agree to make the phone call and ask your father for the money?’

‘And what if I will not?’ said Eoghan.

Aengus looked at Ruari and then across at Lorcan.

Lorcan was about to light another cigarette. ‘Oh, you will, I think,’ he said, with the cigarette waggling between his lips.

Katie was due to meet with Derek Hagerty and his solicitor at two o’clock that afternoon to discuss the provisional withdrawal of the charge against him and how the Garda were planning to protect him and his family after he had left Anglesea Street.

However, she postponed the meeting for an hour because she had something more important to do. She drove to the hospital in Wilton to pay her respects to Detective Garda Goold and to give her condolences to her family.

The mortuary was silent and dimly lit. Rain was starting to patter against the clerestory windows and the mortuary attendant’s shoes made a scrunching sound on the highly polished vinyl floor. After the attendant had folded back the pale green sheet that covered Nessa Goold’s body, Katie stood for a long time staring in sadness at her lumpy, ruined face. The surgeons had attempted to suture back the flaps of flesh around her mouth, but Katie could see that even if she had survived she would have had to suffer months, or years, of reconstructive surgery.

She crossed herself and spoke the same words that her father had spoken over her mother’s open casket all those years ago, and over the casket of his second wife-to-be, Ailish, after she had died in a car crash less than six months ago.

‘
Solas geal na bhFlaithis ar a hanam
.’

‘May the joyful light of heaven shine on her soul,’ translated Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán, coming up behind her. ‘Poor creature. She deserves a Scott Medal for what she did.’

‘Stupid, stupid girl,’ said Katie. ‘What in the name of Jesus possessed her to try and stop some scumbag with a gun when she wasn’t armed herself? I’m so cross with her. But, no, you’re right. She does deserve a medal. How old was she?’

‘She’d be twenty-four next Friday. We were going to take her to the Long Island for cocktails and get her hammered.’

Katie stood beside the trolley for a long time without saying anything. This wasn’t Nessa Goold any longer, after all. This was just the body that had carried her through her short and tragic life. Nessa Goold herself was elsewhere, in the hands of God.

She and Kyna left the mortuary and went to the relatives’ room. There she found Nessa’s father and mother, as well as her grandmother and two of her brothers. They were all red-eyed and looking miserable, but the men stood up when Katie came into the room.

‘Do sit down,’ she said, and she sat down herself, beside the softly bubbling fish tank. ‘I just want to tell you that every officer at Anglesea Street has been shocked and saddened by Nessa’s passing. She had such a great future ahead of her in the Garda and I can’t imagine why fate was so cruel as to snatch her away from us so young.’

Nessa’s mother began to sob, with her handkerchief pressed against her mouth, and her father put his arm around her and held her close.

Katie said, ‘Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán said to me that Nessa’s courage deserved a Scott Medal. That’s the medal for bravery that is awarded once a year to gardaí who have knowingly risked their lives to protect others.

‘I want you to know that I’ll be writing to the interim commissioner to recommend that Nessa is chosen for the highest award, the gold medal. It’s the least I can do to honour her. She was a very courageous and selfless young woman, and even though we’re all feeling such pain at losing her, we should also be feeling tremendous pride.’

She shook hands with all of the family and embraced Nessa’s mother, and then she and Kyna left. Standing on the steps outside the hospital, buttoning up her raincoat, Katie said, ‘I swear to God that Nessa Goold is going to be the last of our officers murdered by the High Kings of Erin. I swear it.’

‘So, what’s the plan?’

Katie started to answer but her words were drowned out by a deafening burst of thunder right over the hospital roof. She waited for a moment, until its last echoes had crumbled away, and then she said, ‘I hate to admit it, Kyna, but Bryan Molloy is absolutely right. The High Kings of Erin have been making me play catch-up, right from the very beginning. I’m always two steps behind them. What I have to do is find a way to get ahead of them somehow – to try and anticipate what they’re thinking of doing next, so I can catch them at it.’

They started to hurry together towards Katie’s car. The rain wasn’t heavy, but it was cold and spiky, as if somebody were casually and vindictively throwing lengths of wire at them.

Once they had settled into their seats and slammed the doors, Kyna said, ‘What about Pat Whelan? Do you think he’s faked his kidnapping, too?’

‘We still don’t have definitive proof that Derek Hagerty faked
his
. But my instinct is, yes, this is the pattern. The High Kings of Erin approach a businessman who’s right on the edge of going bust and suggest he colludes in his own abduction. It’s very much like what Kevin McGeever tried to do – pretend that he’d been kidnapped to get his creditors off his back – only much more carefully worked out.’

They were driving along the South Ring now and there was another rumble of thunder right overhead. The rain began to drum on the roof of the car so loudly that they could hardly hear each other.

‘But what about Micky Crounan?’ shouted Kyna. ‘If he was colluding in his own abduction, how did he end up getting his head cut off? And even Derek Hagerty had all those teeth pulled out. You wouldn’t collude with that, would you? I know I wouldn’t. I go to jelly if the dentist tells me that I have to have a filling.’

‘I don’t know the answer to that yet,’ Katie told her. ‘But I’m beginning to wonder if these High Kings of Erin ever have any intention of letting their victims go free, whether the ransom’s been paid or not. Even if they were kidnapped willingly, their victims can still identify them, so the High Kings are always going to regard them as a liability. And look what extremes they’re prepared to go to, to silence any witnesses.’

‘They didn’t kill Derek Hagerty, though, did they?’ said Kyna.

‘Because Derek Hagerty escaped. Or
claims
he escaped.’

‘I know. But why did he need to escape at all if he was colluding in his own kidnap – unless, of course, he began to suspect that they weren’t going to let him go when the ransom was paid?’

‘I’m sure that his escape was a fake,’ said Katie. ‘His whole kidnap was a fake. The High Kings wanted Derek Hagerty discovered by some innocent passing motorist, so that his story sounded genuine. The trouble is, it didn’t go according to plan. I don’t think they bargained on somebody like Norman Pearse suspecting that it was all a put-up job.’

Katie slowed down for the Magic Roundabout, where the heavy rain had slowed the traffic even more than usual.

Kyna said, ‘But think about it. Why did they have to pretend that he’d escaped? They knew they were going to collect the ransom money anyway. What did they actually think they were going to gain by it?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Katie. ‘The only thing they did gain out of it was to make a show of us. We handed over a quarter of a million euros of public money when we didn’t have to – if only we’d been aware that Derek Hagerty was already free. On top of that, of course, there was the bomb and Garda McCracken losing her life, and that made us look a thousand times more incompetent, and almost criminally negligent.’

Kyna nodded. ‘Exactly. They made us look like bungling eejits. But maybe that was all they were trying to do – nothing more than that. Maybe that was the whole point of it, neither more nor less. And you have to admit they succeeded.’

‘Well, it could be you’re right,’ said Katie. ‘We’ve been getting a very bad press lately. God knows what they’re going to say when they find out that Pat Whelan’s been kidnapped. Not that they’re going to know about it – not just yet, anyway.’

‘Actually, ma’am, I hate to say this, but the media haven’t been giving us such a hard time, not the force in general. It’s been you, personally. Didn’t you see the
Examiner
this morning?’

‘No. It was on my desk but I didn’t have time to read it.’

‘Didn’t Tadhg McElvin tell you about it?’

‘No. I haven’t seen Tadhg since yesterday.’

‘Jesus, he should have done. There’s an editorial that says something like ‘Is A Woman Cop Tough Enough To Fight Cork’s New Crime Wave?’ Fergal Byrne wrote it. It’s all about you, and the High Kings of Erin running rings around you.’

‘Oh, come on. The press have been sniping at me with monotonous regularity ever since I was appointed,’ said Katie. ‘They don’t like me because I never give them all the juicy scandalous details they’re panting for and I don’t go out drinking with them.’