Taken for Dead (Kate Maguire)

by Graham Masterton

  Pat Whelan was standing with his elbows on the counter, frowning at his laptop. He looked up when the carroty-curled young man flicked the cymbal and said, ‘All right there? Anything I can help you with?’

  The carroty-curled young man smiled and looked around the shop as if he were roughly calculating what all of this stock was worth.

  ‘I hear you’re thinking of closing down,’ he said, in his hoarse, thin voice.

  ‘End of the month,’ said Pat. ‘There’s twenty per cent off everything till then. What are you looking for?’

  ‘Nothing special,’ said the carroty-curled young man. ‘To be truthful with you, nothing at all. Whelan’s has been in business for ever, hasn’t it? A real Cork institution.’

  ‘My grandfather opened it in 1933,’ Pat told him. ‘Guess who bought his first guitar here?’

  ‘Rory Gallagher.’

  ‘That’s right. Kim Carroll, too. His first bowed mandolin, anyhow.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I’ve done a little research on you, like.’

  Pat stood up straighter, although he didn’t close his laptop. He was short and plumpish, with a mass of curly black hair that was beginning to turn grey, and which badly needed a cut. His face was podgy with a button of a nose and thick lips and broken veins in his cheeks. He was wearing a frayed green jacket, a crumpled-looking orange shirt, and speckled maroon bow tie. At a glance, in the back of a badly lit pub, he could have been mistaken for Dylan Thomas.

  ‘Research?’ he said. ‘What was that for? Just curiosity, like?’

  ‘You could say that,’ replied the carroty-curled young man, He ran his fingernails with a soft rattle along a Korg Arranger keyboard, and then turned round to face Pat, still smiling.

  ‘That keyboard comes with a free stand and amp, if you’re interested,’ said Pat.

  ‘Well, no, Pat, I’m not really interested in buying an instrument. What I’m really interested in is keeping you in business.’

  ‘What do you mean? I’m practically bankrupt. Why do you think I’m closing the shop down?’

  ‘I know that you’re stony broke, Pat, and I also know how much you’re in for. Three hundred and forty-two thousand yoyos, and then some. You’ll be sleeping with the tramps at St Vincent’s House before you know it.’

  ‘Listen, who are you?’ Pat demanded. ‘You’ve got a brass neck poking into my affairs like that.’

  ‘No need to get yourself agitated. I’m a friend. In fact, one of a number of friends, you might say. You know about Kevin McGeever?’

  ‘Of course I know about Kevin McGeever. He was the stupid eejit who pretended that he’d been kidnapped so that his creditors would get off his back. What an eejit.’

  The carroty-curled young man raised his gingery eyebrows in agreement. ‘You’re right, Pat. He was an eejit. An eejit of the first water. But, you know, his basic idea was sound. He thought that if he disappeared for a while, and then came back looking like he’d been badly mistreated, barefoot and clatty and his fingernails grown all long, none of his creditors would press for their money, on account of they wouldn’t want to be suspected of abducting him.’

  ‘What was sound about that?’ asked Pat. ‘He got himself arrested for wasting Garda time, didn’t he?’

  ‘Ah! But that’s because he didn’t plan things right. It’s no good pretending to be kidnapped if you don’t have any kidnappers. All that McGeever did was to disappear off to the west of Ireland somewhere and have his girlfriend report him as missing. There was no ransom demand from any third party, no threats made on his life. That didn’t ring true at all. On top of that, like, he didn’t anticipate that when he was found wandering by the roadside the people who found him would take him directly to the nearest Garda station. Thick, or what? Where else did he think they were going to take him?’

  ‘So what does any of this have to do with me?’ asked Pat.

  ‘It has everything to do with you, Pat,’ said the carroty-curled young man. ‘Right now, you are in the same unenviable position as Kevin McGeever. Granted, he was a millionaire property developer and you run a one-horse music shop, but you both owe more money than you can ever hope to pay back.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Pat, slowly closing his laptop. He had been looking through the online catalogue of the Sound Shop. Almost every price that they were offering undercut the lowest prices that he could afford to charge, and that was why his business was going under. Some days recently he had sold nothing but a harmonica or some sheet music or a single packet of guitar strings; other days, nothing at all.

  ‘Just supposing you left your shop tomorrow evening, Pat, and a couple of fellows jumped on you? Just supposing they blindfolded you and drove you off and locked you into a room somewhere? Just supposing they contacted your wife and your sons and demanded two hundred and fifty thousand yoyos for your safe return?’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. Where would my wife and my sons get half a million euros from? My wife’s not well and my sons are still at college.’

  ‘Now that’s where this little plan works so well, unlike Kevin McGeever’s. Your wife goes to the Garda and informs them that you’re being held hostage, although she tells them the kidnappers have warned her not to, on pain of something horrible happening to her. The Garda come up with the necessary money because they can hardly refuse if your wife has been threatened and your life is at stake.’

  ‘Then what?’ asked Pat. He had just noticed that the two bouncer-types standing outside the front door of his shop had turned away three young musicians who were regular customers. He kept on glancing at them nervously.

  ‘We arrange a swap, like. We get the money and you get returned to your nearest and dearest, living and breathing and in very reasonable shape, all things considered.’

  ‘“Very reasonable shape”? I’m not so sure I like the sound of that.’

  ‘Come on, Pat, you have to look as if you’ve been forcibly abducted, even if you haven’t. We may have to mess you up a bit and put on some make-up to look like bruises. But the deal is, we’ll give you ten per cent of the ransom money, after what you might call a cooling-off period, like, so that nobody gets too suspicious. Once you get that you’ll be able to afford the best dentist in Cork.’

  ‘What about the shades? They’re not just going to stand by and let you stroll off with half a million euros, are they?’

  ‘Don’t worry about the shades. They won’t bother us.’

  Pat thought for a moment, but then he said, ‘This still won’t settle my debts, though, will it? Like, what? Ten per cent of half a million is only fifty thousand.’

  ‘Don’t you worry about that, either. Kevin McGeever was right about one thing at least. Your creditors won’t come after you if they think they might be suspected of kidnapping you. And we can make sure that they are suspected.’

  Pat looked around his shop – at the tall, shiny conga drums and the music stands and the stacks of Skytec speakers and Marshall amps. Not that it was really his shop any more, and neither was any of its stock. It all belonged to the tax commissioners, and Allied Irish Bank, and his scores of impatient creditors. Three hundred and forty-two thousand euros didn’t sound like much unless you didn’t have it, or any chance of raising it, except by winning the lotto.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked the carroty-curled young man.

  ‘You don’t need to know that, Pat. In fact, the less you know the healthier it will be for you and your nearest and dearest.’

  Pat’s first instinct was to tell the carroty-curled young man to stick his offer where the sun doesn’t shine and to clear off out of his shop and never come back. Fair play, he was well up shit creek without a paddle, and his canoe may have sprung a leak, but he was still a decent man and he had never committed a single criminal act in his life, unless you counted hobbling a few Mars bars from the local sweet shop or boxing the fox when he was a kid.

  But then he thought of what it would be like to sleep soundly at night, and not to wake up at two in the
morning sweating and grinding his teeth and worrying about money. He thought of Mairead’s constant back pain, and how he could afford to have her privately treated if he had fifty thousand euros and no outstanding debts. Not only that, he could buy her a new coat, and new shoes, and maybe even take her away to Gran Canaria for a week on a package.

  He couldn’t remember the last time they had eaten at a proper restaurant. He could only just remember when they had last gone out to the pictures. They had gone to see Love, Actually but had to leave halfway through because of Mairead’s back pain. After that, he had never had enough grade to take her out again.

  ‘So … supposing I said yes, I’d do it …’

  The carroty-curled young man said nothing, but waited, smiling, for him to finish. Outside, the two bouncer-types were turning away yet another customer, a bleached-blonde violinist from the Cork Symphony Orchestra.

  ‘… supposing I said yes, what would I actually have to do, like?’

  ‘Nothing at all. We’d arrange a time and a place for you to be snatched. Then we’d drive you away and keep you hidden until your ransom was paid. Most likely you’d have to talk to your wife on the phone, pleading with her to raise the money. And we might have to pull out a couple of your teeth as proof that we really have you, but I’d hope very much that it wouldn’t come to that.’

  ‘What? Pull out my teeth? Jesus. I hate the dentist at the best of times.’

  ‘It has to be convincing, Pat. If the shades even get a sniff of a scam they won’t cough up, and after all, phone calls can easily be faked. That was the problem when they kidnapped that racehorse, Shergar. They could hardly put him on the phone, could they, and they couldn’t prove in any other way that they had him.’

  ‘How about my wife, Mairead … would she be in on it? I mean, would she be aware that it was nothing but a set-up? Like I say, she’s not too well. Spinal stenosis. I wouldn’t want her to suffer any stress.’

  The carroty-curled young man emphatically shook his head, so that the carrots bounced. ‘You’d have to keep her completely in the dark, Pat. Sounds cruel, I agree, but women are shite at telling lies.’

  ‘But if you warn her not tell the gardaí … what happens if she takes you serious, like, and doesn’t tell them? She won’t be able to raise the money then, will she?’

  ‘Oh, she’ll tell them, I guarantee it, because she won’t know where else to turn for help. But the gardaí mustn’t have any notion at all that it’s a fix.’

  Pat thought for a moment, and then he said, ‘Listen … can you give me some time to mull this over? When it comes down to it, we’re talking about extortion here, aren’t we?’

  ‘Extortion? No, not really,’ said the carroty-curled young man. He was drumming his fingers on the counter and it was clear that he was becoming impatient. ‘It’s more like the liberation of redundant public funds. The Department of Justice always budgets a certain amount of money every year for ransom demands and suchlike. It occurred to me and my friends that it would be a fierce pity if that money was never put to good use and just rolled over till next year like a lotto jackpot.’

  ‘All the same …’ said Pat, uncertainly.

  ‘Just tell me you’re in, Pat, and I’ll set the wheels in motion.’

  Pause. ‘What if I say thanks, but no thanks?’

  ‘You won’t.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Because you know as well as I do that there are far worse things that can happen to you than going bankrupt.’

  ‘Hey, steady. You’re not threatening me, are you?’

  The carroty-curled young man raised his eyebrows again as if to say, Holy Mary, Mother of God, you’re wide at last.

  ‘You know O’Connell’s shoe shop?’ he said.

  ‘O’Connell’s, of course. That was one of the worst fires in Cork for years. Frank O’Connell ended up with third-degree burns trying to save his stock. Lost all of his shoes and half of his face, too.’

  ‘Well, let me just say this. Frank O’Connell said thanks, but no thanks. It’s a no-brainer, Pat. Me and my friends are offering you an easy way out of all of your financial worries, but now that you know how our little scheme works, we can’t really take the risk of you sharing it with anybody else – like the shades, for instance.’

  Pat said nothing. He should have known the moment the carroty-curled young man stepped into the shop and those two bouncer-types took up their positions outside the door that this was going to be serious trouble. In 1991, Michael Crinnion, the hardest enforcer of the O’Flynn crime family, had walked into the shop in almost exactly the same way and for years he had been forced to pay protection money and allow his shop to be used as a dropping-off point for drug-trafficking. That extortion had only come to an end when Crinnion was shot dead in a phone box by rival gang members in April of 1995.

  Pat had sworn to himself then that he would never give in to criminals ever again.

  ‘Well?’ demanded the carroty-curled young man, after nearly half a minute of silence.

  ‘Well what? I wouldn’t do it for choicer, but it looks like I don’t have any alternative, do I?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘When would you do it? Like, snatch me, I mean?’

  ‘I’ll let you know early tomorrow. But it’ll be soon.’

  Pat stayed behind the counter as the carroty-curled young man left the shop and he and the two bouncer-types walked off in the direction of the General Post Office. One of the bouncer-types glanced back at him through the window and gave him a gap-toothed grin. Pat was shaking and sniffing as if he had the flu.

  He stepped out from behind the counter and stood in the middle of the shop, looking around him, still shaking and breathing noisily through his nostrils. Then he kicked over a drum kit, so that the bass drum boomed and the cymbals clashed. After that, he walked all the way down to the front door, kicking and pushing over keyboards and electric pianos. Finally, he took a Flying-V guitar down from the wall and smashed it against the bookcase where all the music books were stacked, again and again, until books and glass were scattered all over the floor and the guitar was shattered into pieces, its neck broken and strings dangling.

  He dropped the wrecked guitar and then slowly went down on his knees, his hands covering his face, and sobbed like a child at his own helplessness.

  22

  Katie stood on the sand at Rocky Bay Beach, her hands deep in the pockets of her red duffel coat, her hair blown across her forehead by the chilly breeze that was blowing in from the sea.

  The technical team had erected two bright blue vinyl tents over the incinerated bodies that they had found half buried in the sand. They had taken hundreds of photos and more than sixty plaster casts of footprints, and now they were carefully digging the bodies out. Every now and then there would be a flicker of flashlights inside the tents, and every now and then a technician would emerge from one of the tents carrying a large black bucket of sand. He would squat down and carefully sieve the sand with a fine-meshed riddle, in case the perpetrators had dropped anything incriminating. Even a cigarette end could prove damning.

  The car park was packed with four patrol cars, two Technical Bureau vans, an ambulance from Cork University Hospital, Katie’s own car, two Range Rovers and a Ford Transit dropside tipper in case they needed to take away a large quantity of sand for closer analysis. There were no media vehicles yet; Katie had told Tadhg McElvin not to notify them until she had visited the crime scene herself and assessed how she was going to present it to the press.

  Inspector Fennessy emerged from one of the tents and walked over. He was looking gaunt, as if he hadn’t been eating properly, and his circular spectacles were stuck together with a lump of yellowish Sellotape on the bridge of his hawk-like nose. The tails of his long grey herringbone overcoat flapped in the wind.

  He held up a small transparent envelope. Inside it was a receipt from a credit card terminal.

  ‘They found this in the male’s b
ack trouser pocket. It’s a Visa debit card receipt for drinks at the Silver Key Bar in Ballinlough, three evenings ago. I’ll have Horgan check out the card owner’s identity right away.’

  ‘Ballinlough? It’s more than likely that it is the Pearses then, isn’t it?’

  Inspector Fennessy nodded. ‘I’d say so. You can’t tell from their faces, of course, they’re almost burned down to the bone, but the rest of their bodies fit the description. A woman in her mid- to late thirties by the look of her and the way she’s dressed, and a man close to sixty, I’d say.’

  ‘What’s the story with the footprints? Do they tell us anything?’

  ‘It’s hard to say for sure because there’s so many of them and they’re all criss-crossed and going in every direction, but we have plenty of photographs of them, as well as plaster casts, and we’ll be able to sort them out once Bill Phinner can get them back to the lab. At a guess, I’d say there was at least three of them, apart from the victims, and possibly one more. All male, by the size of them, like, and the depth of their impressions, and all wearing rushers or some kind of waterproof boots, except for one.’

  Katie said, ‘I think they already tell us one thing at least – and it’s important.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? And what’s that, like?’

  ‘I think these High Kings of Erin are trying to show us that when it comes to the law they don’t give a fiddler’s. Apart from the fact that they actually rang me up and confessed that it was them who had taught the Pearses a lesson, and told me where we could find them, they plainly didn’t care that they were leaving enough evidence all over the crime scene to convict them ten times over. That’s if we can ever can find them.’

  ‘Well, I have to agree with you,’ said Inspector Fennessy. ‘And not only that – what a fecking horrendous way to kill people, for the love of God. Why did they have to make such a holy show of it? A bullet in the back of the head in their own front lounge would have done the job just as effective. They didn’t have to take them all the way to the seaside and set them alight. Like, what’s all that about?’