‘I can’t possibly tell you that, I’m afraid,’ said Katie. ‘You’ll have to wait until you see it on the news.’
‘Oh, you can give me a hint, can’t you? Is it a murder? Or is it a robbery? Fraud, is it? Or drug-dealing, or sex-trafficking?’
Katie smiled and shook her head. ‘I have all of those to deal with, believe me, and more’
‘More? What else is there?’
‘You’d be amazed what people get up to.’
‘Come on, don’t keep me in suspense. I’m fascinated to know what you do all day. You can change the names to protect the innocent, if you like. That’s what they used to say on TV, isn’t it, at the beginning of those true-crime programmes?’
‘Slainte,’ said Katie, raising her glass. David raised his glass too, and looked her steadily in the eyes, saying nothing.
‘Is that one of your treatments?’ Katie asked him.
‘What? Sorry?’
‘Hypnosis. Is that one of the ways you cure your animals?
‘Oh, was I staring? I apologize. I was just thinking to myself that you don’t look very much like a detective superintendent. In fact, to be fair to you I wouldn’t have had you down for a Garda officer at all.’
‘No? What is a detective superintendent supposed to look like?’
‘A female detective superintendent, like you? Much more butch, I’d say. Maybe just the faintest hint of a moustache on the upper lip. And gruffer. And certainly not wearing high-heeled boots. You’re not like that at all. In fact, if I’d been introduced to you for the first time and I didn’t know what you did for a living, I’d have said – ’
‘What?’ said Katie.
‘I’d have said TV news presenter. Or maybe the editor of a fashion magazine. Something professional, but very feminine. Something that takes brains but needs some glamour as well.’
Katie was thinking, what a load of cat’s malogian. But at the same time, she couldn’t deny that David was charming and persuasive, and it felt good to be flattered so profusely after such an abrasive day, even if she didn’t believe a word of it. It had been emotionally draining, breaking the news to Mary Crounan that her husband had been killed, and her constant confrontations with Bryan Molloy had badly jolted her confidence in her own authority.
David had also been shrewd enough to say that he would have mistaken her for a woman who was not only attractive but clever, too. She appreciated that.
‘Here,’ he said, and got up from his chair to refill her glass.
‘There’s domestic violence, too,’ she said, in a level voice, while he was still standing over her.
‘Sorry? I don’t follow you.’
‘You asked me what more there could be, after murder and robbery and drug-running and sex crimes. I have to deal with more domestic violence than almost any other offence, especially on pay-day. I’ve even started up a group to help women who have been beaten or intimidated by their partners. It’s called the Walnut Tree.’
David sat down again. He refilled his own glass, and then he said, ‘Why do I have the feeling that you’re trying to tell me something?’
Katie raised an eyebrow. ‘Why do I have the feeling that you know exactly what I’m saying to you, but you can’t decide if you want to discuss it?’
‘You’ve seen Sorcha, is that it?’
‘No. I haven’t seen her. I went round to your house after you’d left this morning and knocked at the door but she wouldn’t open it for me. But why would you think that I had seen her? Was it because I happened to mention domestic violence?’
‘You’re a very interesting woman, Katie. I’ll give you that. The Walnut Tree, I get it. The woman, the dog, the walnut tree. Do you think that I’ve been beating Sorcha, is that it?’
‘All right. Talking of beating, I won’t beat around the bush. I heard you two in your kitchen last night. It sounded very much as if you were hitting her.’
‘I slapped her, yes.’
‘So you admit it?’
‘Yes. I slapped her a couple of times. It was the only way I could get her out of it.’
‘Get her out of what?’
‘Her hysteria. It’s impossible to know what to do with her when she’s throwing a fit like that.’
‘Can’t you just restrain her?’
David stood up again, crossed his arms and lifted up his sweater. His torso was lean and muscular, with a thin line of dark hair running down to his navel. However, his chest and his stomach were criss-crossed with scores of crimson scratch marks. He looked as if he had been wrestling with a wildcat.
‘She’s bipolar,’ he said, lowering his sweater and sitting down. ‘Sometimes she’s depressed and talks about committing suicide. Other times, she’s so hyperactive that she rushes about the house screaming and smashing things, and if I try to stop her she’ll attack me.’
‘Has her doctor given her anything? You can get drugs, can’t you, to stabilize people with manic depression?’
‘She was on Seroquel for a while to control her mood cycles, and when she was taking that she didn’t have so many highs and lows. The trouble was, it made her about as responsive as a zombie. I don’t know whether I’d prefer to have a wife who’s sobbing one minute and laughing like a lunatic the next, or one who sits staring at the TV for hours on end and hardly utters a word.’
Katie said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry. It was just that when I heard you two shouting at each other last night it sounded like a classic domestic.’
‘That’s all right. I married Sorcha, didn’t I, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health? That was the oath I took and I won’t go back on it.’
‘Well, if there’s anything I can do to help – ’
He sipped his Prosecco and shook his head. ‘I have to grin and bear it, that’s all. Sometimes fate deals you a really bad hand, but look at it from Sorcha’s point of view. Fate has been pretty good to her, hasn’t it, considering her condition, giving her me to look after her?’
Katie and David sat for almost half a minute looking at each other, saying nothing. Katie thought David was very attractive, and she was impressed by the way he had talked so openly about his wife, and about what had happened in their kitchen last night. He appeared to be relaxed, too, but she couldn’t help feeling that it was a studied relaxation. She had sensed a similar tension in some of the criminals she had interviewed. They had smiled, they had joked, they had told her whatever she wanted to know – but she had always felt that they were spring-loaded, that the smallest provocation would make them explode.
She still wasn’t one hundred per cent sure that David hadn’t been beating Sorcha, even if the claw-marks on his chest and stomach seemed to bear out his story. However, she didn’t question him about it any more. She was at home, after all, not in the interview room at Anglesea Street, and David was her new next-door neighbour, not a suspect.
They talked for another hour – mostly about life in Cobh, and which were the best pubs and restaurants, and about David’s work as a vet. They finished the Prosecco and Katie brought a bottle of Pinot Grigio out of the fridge.
Eventually David looked at his watch and said, ‘I have to go. I want to make sure that Sorcha’s okay – hasn’t drowned herself in the bath or tied a plastic bag over her head or anything stupid like that.’
Katie showed him to the front door. Before he left, he took hold of her hand and kissed her on both cheeks.
‘You’re a very unusual woman,’ he told her. ‘I’m really glad that I’ve met you. You see? It looks as if fate has dealt me at least one good card.’
‘There’s a word for that,’ said Katie. ‘My grannie would have called it plámás.’
She couldn’t tell from the expression on his face whether he knew it was Gaelic for ‘sweet-talk’, or not, because all he did was smile and walk off into the darkness and the fine chilly rain.
7
Katie had only just sat down at her desk the next morning and prised the lid off her
latte when Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán appeared in her doorway, accompanied by a middle-aged woman in a brown fake-fur coat that had seen better days.
‘Good morning, ma’am,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. ‘This is Mrs Shelagh Hagerty. I thought you’d want to see her directly.’
‘Oh yes?’
Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán came across the office holding up a jam jar. ‘She found this on her front doorstep this morning. Come on in, Shelagh. This is Detective Superintendent Maguire.’
‘How do you do?’ said Shelagh Hagerty. She looked pale and puffy-eyed and she was holding her handbag tightly, as if she were afraid somebody might snatch it away from her.
Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán set down the jam jar and Katie could see that it contained at least a dozen teeth, some of which were smeared with blood. She picked it up and examined it closely. They looked very much like human teeth.
‘You found this on your doorstep? At what time? Was there any note with it?’
‘About half past six. I was putting out the empty milk bottles because I’d forgotten to do it the night before. Well, the state I was in, like. There was no note with it but this fellow rang me almost as soon as I’d gone back inside.’
‘Who was he? Do you know?’
‘He’s never told me his name. But he said that if I didn’t have the money ready by midday Wednesday then he’d be sending me more of Derek piece by piece until there was nothing left of him at all.’
‘Sit down, Shelagh,’ said Katie. ‘We need to go over this right from the very beginning. Who’s Derek? Is he your husband?’
Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán dragged over a chair for Shelagh Hagerty and she perched herself right on the edge of it, her hands clasped together, holding her handbag. ‘That’s right. Derek Hagerty of Hagerty’s Autos on the Curraheen Road at Looney’s Cross. Two nights ago he didn’t come home and the same night I had a phone call. It was a man’s voice but it was kind of muffled, like. He said that if I didn’t raise two hundred and fifty thousand euros by Monday I would never see Derek alive again.’
She let out an extraordinary sob, as loud and as unexpected as the cry of a trumpeter swan, and her eyes filled up with tears. She tried to open her handbag to find a handkerchief, but Katie pulled a Kleenex out of the box on her desk and passed it over to her.
‘He said that if I contacted the Garda or the newspapers or the TV, and he found out about it, that would be the end of Derek immediately. But I don’t know how I’m going to raise two hundred and fifty thousand euros, even if I sell all my jewellery. We don’t have anything else much of value. We used to own a caravan but we had to sell that when business started going downhill.’
Katie picked up the jam jar again. ‘Do these look like your husband’s teeth?’
‘I don’t know for sure. But I think so. There’s one gold one in there and Derek has a gold one.’
‘Who’s your dentist?’
‘Dr Michael Lynch, in Patrick Street.’
Katie stood up and gave the jam jar to Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. ‘Kyna, take these to Bill Phinner in the technical lab, would you, please, and then ask Dooley to go round to Dr Lynch, fairly lively if he could, and ask for Derek Hagerty’s dental records. He can explain that Derek Hagerty’s missing and we urgently need to identify his teeth.’
‘Supposing Dr Lynch won’t release them? I mean, he’s going to plead patient confidentiality, isn’t he?’
‘Have him call the Dental Protection people and discuss it with them. They should tell him that it’s okay if they’re required by a police officer. If he still won’t let us have them, we’ll have to apply for a warrant, but I don’t want to waste time doing that if we can possibly help it.’
Once Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán had left her office, Katie sat next to Shelagh Hagerty and took hold of her hand. ‘You said that your business had been going badly, Shelagh. Does Derek owe anybody a lot of money?’
Shelagh Hagerty nodded. ‘The bank most of all, AIB, but I think he’s been borrowing money from his friends, too – right, left and centre. I told him almost a year ago that he should think about declaring himself bankrupt, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Hagerty’s Autos was started by his father and it’s been going since the 1960s. “It’s not a business,” he always says, “it’s a family tradition.”’
‘We’ll need to see the company accounts, and the order books, too,’ said Katie. ‘They might give us some clues. But do you know if any of his creditors has been threatening him at all?’
‘There’s Sean O’Grady, who’s one of his suppliers. He was all sweetness and light, Sean, when things were going well, but as soon as Derek was a month late with his payments he started to say he was going to take him to court. Worse than that, he spread it around that we were in the height of loberty, which wasn’t at all true, but of course it made Derek’s other suppliers very reluctant to give him any more credit.’
‘And the man who called you – I know his voice was muffled – but there wasn’t anything about it that you recognized?’
Shelagh Hagerty shook her head. ‘The only thing I’d say is, he wasn’t local, like. Tipp, I’d say, or Limerick maybe.’
‘Well, we can check all your recent phone records,’ said Katie. ‘If your man knows what he’s doing, though, he’s probably calling you from a pre-paid mobile or one of those stealth phones that changes its identification number with every call.’
‘Dear God, please find Derek and save him,’ said Shelagh Hagerty. ‘I know this fellow said that I shouldn’t come to you, but what else could I do?’
‘When did you last see Derek?’ asked Katie.
‘On Tuesday morning, around seven-thirty, when he left for work.’
‘Did he appear at all worried about anything? Did he say anything that struck you as unusual?’
‘All he said was, “I wouldn’t mind chops for my tea.” Oh – and he asked me to call Danny Rearden the plumber for him, because the upstairs toilet cistern’s been leaking. Then he kissed me, and went.’
‘Did he phone you at all during the day?’
‘No … I tried to phone him myself to tell him that Danny couldn’t come until Thursday, but his mobile was dead and when I called the workshop Fergal said that he’d gone to the bank.’
‘And what time was that?’
‘Three-thirty, four o’clock, something like that.’
‘So what’s happening at the workshop? Is it still open?’
‘Fergal’s running the business for now. He’s the chief mechanic and he mostly runs it anyway these days. I told him that Derek had gone to Macroom for a few days to take care of his elderly ma because his pa’s in hospital, may the Blessed Virgin forgive me for telling such a lie. His pa’s been dead these five years but his ma … well, she’s still tipping away like a small tractor.’
‘Did your man say when he was going to ring you next, or how to get in touch with him if you managed to raise the money?’
‘He said he would call me this evening, at six o’clock, to see how things were going.’
‘All right, Shelagh, I want you to ring Fergal and tell him that you’re sending an accountant to collect all of your books, because you’ve been asked to do an audit for the revenue commissioners. Actually it will be a plain-clothes detective, but we don’t want him to know that.’
‘You don’t think Fergal’s involved in this, do you?’
Katie shook her head. ‘I’m not suggesting that at all, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. When you’ve done that, I want you to go back home and carry on doing what you can to raise the money this man’s asking for. We don’t know what contacts he has and it’s important that you look as if you’re still trying to meet his demands. I’ll be after sending Detective Horgan or Detective Dooley round to your house a little later, and also one of our technicians to record his voice when he calls you this evening, to see if we can’t trace where he’s calling from. I’ll also be assigning two gardaí
to keep your street under surveillance, but nobody will know that they’re there.’
‘Oh God, you will find Derek, won’t you?’ Shelagh begged her. ‘I haven’t made a terrible mistake, have I, coming here? Supposing they followed me here without my knowing?’
Katie laid a hand on her shoulder and said, ‘Shelagh, you’ve been very brave coming here. It was the best thing you could have done. We’ll do everything possible to get Derek back for you, safe and well.’
All the same, she couldn’t help thinking about Micky Crounan and how his abductors had probably killed him even before his wife had begun to raise the ransom money. Derek Hagerty’s kidnappers had sent only some of his teeth, not his head, but that was no guarantee at all that he was still alive. They could have been wrenched out of his jaw after he was dead.
‘I bought the chops for his tea,’ said Shelagh, dismally. ‘I went to Coughlan’s specially.’
Katie stood beside her for a while, until she had dabbed her eyes and recovered her composure. Then she said, ‘It’s all right. I’m grand altogether. Let me phone Fergal.’
***
When Shelagh Hagerty had made her call and left for home in a taxi, Katie walked along to Acting Chief Superintendent Molloy’s office.
He was talking loudly on the phone, pacing up and down as he did so, and letting out bursts of his harsh, abrasive laughter. He beckoned Katie to come in and sit down, but she went over to the window and looked down at the rain-slicked car park. It was always interesting to see which officers spoke to each other in the car park, when they didn’t think they were being watched or overheard. Katie could tell by their body language when they were sharing confidences, or affection.
‘Well, okay, Ryan, you old langer, I’ll let you go,’ said Bryan Molloy. ‘I’ll see you on Saturday afternoon three o’clock at the Lee Valley Golf Club. I can’t tell you how much I’ve been looking forward to beating the dust off you again!’
He put down the phone, sniffed loudly, looked at his watch, and then said, ‘Well?’
‘There’s been another abduction,’ said Katie. ‘Derek Hagerty, the owner of Hagerty’s Autos. He went missing two days ago and his wife Shelagh has received two phone calls demanding a quarter of a million euros for his safe return.’
Taken for Dead (Kate Maguire) Page 5