The Drowned
Authors: Graham Masterton
A Katie Maguire Short Story
About
The Drowned
The River Lee has always been a part of life – and death – in Cork. Now the bodies of five young men have been found by divers, locked in their car on the riverbed. A tragic accident? Or something more sinister?
As the volunteer divers begin the macabre task of extracting the bodies, DCI Katie Maguire investigates a crime where all is not as it seems...
About the Katie Maguire Series
About the Scarlet Widow Series
An Invitation from the Publisher
‘He’s not in his bed, mam,’ said Patrick, coming back into the kitchen.
‘Where is he, then?’ asked his mother. ‘He’s not in the toilet, is he?’
‘I looked in the toilet.’
Mary Buckley turned off the gas under her frying pan, which was crowded with curled-up rashers.
‘I declare you lads are going to be the living death of me one day,’ she told the three boys, who were already sitting at the kitchen table waiting for their breakfast, the two older ones with mugs of sweet tea and Patrick with a glass of milk.
‘I swear to God he’s not there, mam,’ said Patrick, but in spite of that Mary left the kitchen and stamped upstairs and they could hear her crossing the landing and going into Tadgh’s bedroom. They even heard her opening his press and then slamming it shut.
‘Oh yeah,’ said Kevin. ‘He’s really going to be hiding in his press, like, underneath his porn mags.’
‘I even looked under the bed,’ said Patrick.
‘He stayed out the night, that’s all,’ said Bryan. ‘I’ll bet you money he was poking that Aoife O’Grady.’
‘Aoife O’Grady?’ said Kevin. ‘That minger? Jesus, if I had two dicks I wouldn’t give her one.’
‘Aw come on,’ said Bryan. ‘She’s not too bad from the neck down, like.’
Mary came back into the kitchen. She was short and plump, with wiry red hair that was always criss-crossed with kirby grips. She was wearing a crimson boat-neck sweater, even though her husband, Neil, had died only five months ago of the lung cancer and her mother thought she ought to wear black for a year at least. Frankly, she was pleased that Neil had gone, with all of his coughing and moaning and spitting up blood, even if the boys were such a handful. Tadgh, the eldest at eighteen, was almost uncontrollable these days. The days were long gone when she could take the wooden spoon to him.
‘Well, if he thinks he’s going to get anything to eat when he comes back in, he’s got another think coming,’ she said, and scratched a match to light the gas again.
*
By seven o’clock that evening, however, there was still no sign of Tadgh, although he had usually finished shelf-stacking at Dunnes Stores in Ballyvolane by now and was back home for his tea. Mary was irritated that he hadn’t rung her to tell her that he was going to be late, but she wasn’t desperately worried. She assumed that he had gone straight from work to the alleyway at Barnavara Crescent where he and his friends hung out, drinking and smoking and buying flakka and breaking windows and making a general nuisance of themselves.
She took her purse out of her handbag and was about to go into the living room to give the boys money to buy themselves pie and chips at Looney’s when her doorbell rang. When she opened it, she found her neighbour Shelagh O’Reilly outside, in a headscarf and slippers, looking even more like Mrs Brown from
Mrs Brown’s Boys
than Brendan O’Carroll.
‘Oh, Mary. Sorry to bother you, like, but is my Aidan here by any chance? I was expecting him home two hours ago because his cousins are visiting from Waterford. He didn’t come home at all last night and I’m starting to think that something might have happened to him, do you know what I mean, like? Some of them lads he mixes with, they’re right scummers.’
‘He’s not here, no, Shelagh. But my Tadgh didn’t come home last night either, and he’s still not back even now.’
‘Have you tried ringing him on his moby? I tried ringing Aidan but the only answer I got was nothing at all, like.’
‘I would have, but he’s bought himself a new phone and he flat out refuses to tell me the number. He said I kept ringing him to tell him his tea was ready and it spoiled his street cred, whatever in the name of God that is.’
Shelagh looked along the road, as if she were making sure her Aidan wasn’t turning the corner on his way home. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll wait till dinner time and then I might go out looking for him.’
‘Why don’t you go round to Siorsa Mulvaney’s? The lads often go round to her place, don’t they, because she’s out at work all day?’
‘Well, I might just do that. I don’t know why exactly, but I have a fierce bad feeling about Aidan not coming home. I went to Psychic Betty only two weeks ago and she said that I had a bereavement on the way soon.’
‘Oh, stop,’ said Mary. ‘I’ll bet you anything you like they’re at Siorsa’s, all hung-over and hounding down a heap of takeaway chips.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Shelagh, again glancing worriedly down the road. ‘I think I’ll go round there and take a quick lamp just to reassure myself. Aidan’ll probably kill me for it, but I can’t shake off this feeling.’
The clouds were low and grey and a few spots of rain started to patter on the concrete path. Mary took down a small red umbrella that was hanging in the hall and handed it to Shelagh.
‘You’d best go home first and put on your rushers. It looks like it’s going to be raining rotten in a minute.’
*
But Siorsa Mulvaney’s small terraced house in Lotamore Lawn was dark and silent, and when Shelagh walked around to Ashford Heights to see if Aidan’s friend Darragh O’Connor knew where he was, she found that Darragh, too, had failed to return home last night. Unlike Shelagh, though, Brenda O’Connor was relieved rather than worried, because Darragh had been nothing but trouble lately, refusing to find himself a job and smoking skunk in his bedroom and playing loud rap music at all hours.
‘Would you try ringing him?’ asked Shelagh. ‘I’d just like to know that Aidan’s okay.’
Brenda invited her in to her cramped, gloomy living room, with its grimy beige leatherette couch and stained beige carpet. A huge overfed marmalade cat was lying on its back in front of the gas fire with its legs spread obscenely wide.
‘Would you care for a cup of tea in your hand?’ asked Brenda, lighting a cigarette and then lifting up the cushions on the couch to see if she could find her mobile phone. After a few minutes of searching she found it on the mantelpiece, standing up inside a souvenir mug from Austria with its handle broken off.
‘I don’t know why you’re fretting,’ she told Shelagh, blowing out smoke as she prodded out Darragh’s number. ‘Those boys are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. If you ask me, it’s other people they’re a menace to. I know your Aidan’s not such a bad lad, like, but Darragh’s driving us mental these days. We have the law parked outside so often the neighbours are beginning to think this is a fecking Garda station.’
She tried ringing Darragh three times, but all she could hear was a message from Meteor telling her that he was unable to take her call.
‘More than likely hasn’t paid his bill,’ she said after her third unsuccessful try.
Shelagh said, ‘I think I’ll go around to Margaret Martin’s. Maybe her boys know where Aidan is.’
‘Oh. The Terrible Twins? Well, you can try. You’re sure you don’t want a cup of tea?’
*
The Martins lived half a kilometre further down the Old Youghal Road and by now the wind had risen, so that Shelagh’s umbrella kept blowing inside out and she had to screw up her face against the rain.
Margaret herself was out getting the messages but Granny Martin was at home – a tiny, bent woman with a white bun and a black shawl and half-glasses, but a very sharp tongue.
‘No, Conor and Stevey didn’t come back last night and what a blessing that was. Those boys need their mouths washing out with Irish Spring.’
‘And they’ve not been home this morning?’
Granny Martin shook her head. ‘It wouldn’t bother me in the slightest if I never saw neither of them never again, I can tell you. I know they’re both their mother’s bars-of-gold and she won’t hear a word against them, but as far as I’m concerned they’re two wastes of space, twice over.’
*
Katie was buttoning up her black hooded raincoat, ready to go for lunch, when Detective Dooley knocked at her door.
‘Oh, Robert,’ she said. ‘How’s it going with Danny Phelan? Has he given you any more information on those stolen cars yet?’
‘Not yet, ma’am, but we’ll wheedle it out of him before too long, I can promise you that. If he had two brains, that fellow, he’d be twice as stupid. No – what I came up to tell you about, there’s five young men been reported missing from their homes in Mayfield. They’re all friends, all about the same age – seventeen, eighteen, and a pair of twins, both nineteen. Their families are all downstairs in one of the interview rooms and Ó Doibhilin and Scanlan are taking down their particulars now.’
‘
Five
of them? How long have they been missing?’
‘This is the second day now. The last they were heard of was about half-past ten on Tuesday evening when they were all going down to Havana Brown’s to see what girls they could pick up.’
‘Has anybody checked if they actually went to Havana Brown’s?’
‘The twins’ father went down there late last night and showed a photo of them to the bar staff. Like, it’s not easy to identify anybody in Havana Brown’s because it’s all flashing lights, and the music’s so loud it makes your eyes wobble. But because they were twins one of the girls behind the bar definitely recognized them. So
they
were there at least, the twins, even if the other three weren’t.’
‘All right,’ said Katie, looking at her watch. She was due in the circuit court at 3.15 p.m. and she wanted to have something to eat before then. Her breakfast had been nothing but an oat and honey bar which she had eaten while she was driving in from Cobh. ‘I’ll come down and make myself known to them. If it looks like it’s appropriate to put out a news bulletin, we still have time to make the
Six-One News
this evening and tomorrow morning’s
Examiner
.’
Together she and Detective Dooley went down to the interview room. Detectives Ó Doibhilin and Scanlan were facing the mothers of the missing teenagers across the table – Mary Buckley, Shelagh O’Reilly, Brenda O’Connor and Margaret Martin. The twins’ father, Jim Martin, was sitting against the right-hand wall with Donal O’Reilly, Aidan’s stepfather. Jim Martin was stocky and grey-haired. Donal O’Reilly was thin and ginger, although his hair was turning grey at the sides. Both men looked as if they were twitching for a smoke, biting their nails and jiggling their knees.
Detective Ó Doibhilin stood up and offered Katie his chair. He had brushed-up hair and looked almost too young to be a fully qualified detective. Detective Scanlan looked young, too, with her long brunette hair tied up with a scarf, but she always spoke crisply and with authority, as if she wasn’t prepared to tolerate any contradiction.
‘Everybody,’ she announced, ‘this is Detective Superintendent Maguire. She’ll be in overall charge of any search that we set up to find out what’s happened to your boys.’
Brenda peered at Katie and said, ‘Didn’t I see you on the telly a couple of nights back? You was talking about that riot over the water charges.’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Katie, sitting down. ‘That’s all quietened down now, thank God. People have a right to protest about what they pay for their water, but they don’t have a right to toss rockers and turn cars over.’