With a bitter smile Mulcahy realised that his earlier suspicions about Solomons must have been correct. Corbett had assumed that Mulcahy’s ‘impressive source’ was Solomons, too.
‘Yesterday, point blank with a shotgun, in much the same way as Ronson and Begley.’ Mulcahy left it a second or two before relieving the commander of his fears. ‘At his home, in Dublin.’
‘His home, you say?’ Corbett said.
‘Yes, Commander. My source was a part-time crook and property developer with links to Begley in Dublin and Spain. He was also an acquaintance of Trevor Ronson, though exactly how well he knew him I couldn’t say.’
‘I see. Yes. Okay.’ Corbett was doing a spectacularly poor job of disguising his relief. ‘And now you’re thinking these … these three murders could be related, is that it?’
Mulcahy thought he might as well push for all the information he could while he had the Englishman on the back foot. ‘Well, obviously, I have no evidence for that as yet, but I wouldn’t discount the possibility, either. When I was talking to Chief Inspector Ferrer, he led me to believe that you had a suspect in mind for Ronson’s killing. A Colombian national?’
‘Ah yes, Guttierez,’ Corbett said, keen to let the focus shift. ‘As you clearly already know, the possibility that a hit man may be involved is a theory we’re working on, though not the only one.’
‘And you’re giving serious credence to that idea?’ Mulcahy made no attempt to disguise his scepticism.
Corbett hesitated, as if trying to make up his mind. ‘It’s the theory that is most favoured by those on the ground here. By that I mean among the local criminal population on Merseyside, rather than ourselves necessarily. To be honest, it’s not a belief we’re seeking to discourage. It keeps the locals from each other’s throats if they can blame an external force. A deus ex machina, you know. Or a deus ex Colombia, if you see what I mean.’
‘Well, my Latin’s a bit rusty, but yes.’
‘Unfortunately, the question of credence, as you put it, is complicated by this Guttierez chap. He popped up on our radar just before Ronson was killed and, not to put too fine a point on it, disappeared. He’s known to be a heavyweight with the Cali Cartel and comes with a reputation fearsome enough to merit a warning from our Colombian colleagues that he was boarding a flight out of Bogota for Heathrow.’
‘You had him tracked?’
‘Yes, or rather my colleagues in security and immigration thought they did.’ Corbett coughed. ‘Rather embarrassingly, when I say he disappeared, I mean into thin air, quite literally. We know he boarded the plane at Bogota, but somehow he slipped through immigration this end without making a mark. Possibly by using a different passport. He must have disguised himself, somehow, before passing through immigration. How, we don’t know. Even our facial-recognition software failed to identify him – to be fair, there were a great many flights coming through at that time. We now fear he may have been waved through on an EU-issue passport and be travelling freely within the European Community on it.’
‘Christ, that’s a bit unfortunate all right.’ Even Mulcahy felt he was understating the case.
‘Yes, so I’m afraid we have no idea of his current whereabouts,’ Corbett said, exasperated. ‘Other than that the Colombians assure us he hasn’t gone home, which means we can’t rule him out for Ronson’s murder. Not with that background dispute over the cocaine and so many rumours about a hit man going about. Luis Guttierez, as we understand it, is one of the Cali Cartel’s most brutal enforcers. He’s also proving one of the most elusive, despite his nickname – “El Güero”, they call him over there.’
‘Are you serious?’ Mulcahy had to stop, take a breath, unsure from Corbett’s anglicised pronunciation whether he’d heard correctly or not. He’d only ever heard that term in the feminine form before: la güera. But there was no reason why it couldn’t be applied to a man, was there?
‘Did you say “El Güero”?’ Mulcahy asked, staggered. ‘The Blond?’
It was exactly how Brogan’s witness had described McTiernan’s killer.
‘I see your Spanish is better than your Latin,’ Corbett said. ‘But yes. You’d think it would make him stand out rather too much to be good at his job over there. Not so noticeable here in Europe, though.’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that,’ Mulcahy said, the pounding in his chest beginning to move up into his head.
In the couple of hours before Ali McCarthy could take a coffee break from her new job, Siobhan managed to fill in a few more pieces of the Gemma Kearney jigsaw. Out in suburban Douglas, she met up with Cathy Barrett, the young mother who had been so outraged at the thought of Kearney going to Cormac Horgan’s funeral – a russet-haired, emerald-eyed young mother whose life was now focused almost exclusively on her three-month-old infant daughter. As they sat in the kitchen of her large detached house, the baby gurgling happily in a stroller between them, Cathy told Siobhan that Kearney and Horgan had been together for four years and that Kearney had lived with – or sponged off, as Cathy put it – the comparatively wealthy Horgan for much of their time at university and while they were doing their professional examinations.
‘First sniff of a job of her own, though, and she was off,’ Cathy said. ‘She just dumped him, from nowhere. Poor Cormac was devastated. She never told him why, just told him to F-off, and when he tried to persuade her to come back, she got some thug to threaten him. Can you believe it? Told him to stay away or he’d get his legs broken. We were all horrified, but it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. We always knew she was scum. She couldn’t hide it for ever. I wanted Cormac to go to the Guards, but of course he refused. Why he felt any loyalty to her I’ll never know.’
All of which had been, partly at least, behind Horgan’s decision to leave Cork and go to work in Skibbereen. Cathy hadn’t seen so much of him since that time, especially not since she’d got married, but her incandescent hatred of Kearney hadn’t dimmed by so much as a single lumen over the years. Its precise cause never did come out, but seemed to be based on a towering snobbishness and an unshakeable belief that Kearney was the most selfish and manipulative woman in all Cork.
‘Closest I’ve ever met to living, breathing poison,’ Cathy confirmed, ‘and you can quote me on that.’
Siobhan fully intended to, just as soon as she had a story to quote her in. It was all good background, and maybe even went some way to account for the fact that, hard as she tried, she didn’t manage to turn up anyone else in Cork who knew Kearney well. A couple of people at the local Chamber of Commerce said they knew of her, sure, but to socialise, have a meal or do business with? Nothing. The most interesting suggestion they made was that Siobhan should try some of the estate agents around the city, as Kearney was known for brokering lucrative property deals on behalf of clients – and there weren’t many of those going these days.
By the time Siobhan headed back into the city centre, she felt she had lots of scraps of information but still no big picture. Happily that was something Ali McCarthy looked very likely to provide when she sashayed into Gloria Jean’s coffee shop on Patrick Street, overbrimming with indignation and attitude. No taller than Siobhan but with haystack blonde hair, denim cut-offs over leggings, and a short green tailored jacket over a logo-emblazoned T-shirt, she didn’t look like someone who’d ever be happy stuck away in a second-storey office licking envelopes.
‘The only reason I stayed was because the money was good,’ the girl said, once she got settled with her skinny latte. ‘She treated me like dirt. Treated everyone like dirt, actually. But she wasn’t there half the time. She was away a lot.’
Ali’s job, it seemed, was mostly just to sit by the phone and refuse business by telling any enquirers that the practice had no space on its client list at present.
‘That’s exactly how she told me to say it: “Miss Kearney has no space on her client list at present.” And then I had to ask them for their contact details and tell them we’d be in touch if a vacanc
y came up. But even she said that was only to stop them from calling us again.’
‘Did she seem that busy?’
‘Well, yeah, really busy. She was always working when she was around. I asked her why she kept spending money putting the ads in the local papers. She said it was “a matter of perception”.’
I’ll bet it was, Siobhan thought to herself.
‘She did a lot of business over the phone,’ Ali continued. ‘Most of it seemed to involve moving money around the place, all over the world, like. She always kept the door to her office shut. Locked it when she was away. But sometimes when I went in with a coffee or something, I’d see her computer screen and there were all these accounts in the Cayman Islands and the Virgin Islands and places I never even heard of. I often wondered if what she was doing was even legal.’ Ali paused and gave Siobhan a look so replete with insinuation it might as well have been a nudge in the ribs. ‘I used to put a lot of calls through to her from abroad, from Spain mostly. She used to buy and sell property for clients living out there, but there was this one bloke in particular she was always on the phone to. He was just as big a shit as she was … ’
Leaning back in the chair, as close to horizontal as he could go, Mulcahy opened his eyes wide, blinked rapidly at the white blur of ceiling, then closed them again and massaged the lids with the tips of his index finger and thumb, feeling the tension leach away down his spine. El Güero, for Christ’s sake. It sounded like something from a Tarantino film. Comical. But not inconceivable. And that was the problem. Now that Corbett had provided a direct link with the Cali Cartel, the hit-man theory became that bit more plausible. With the high-level contacts a South American drugs cartel could furnish, and pay for, it would be all too easy for a man like that to fly from city to city and get tooled up wherever he went. Ditching his weapons and moving on, possibly even changing passports wherever he went. In and out. Clean skin. No dirt. No shadow.
He was reminding himself again that he had yet to call Brogan back when a shadow moved across his eyelids. He sat up. Ford was in front of the desk, another sheaf of papers in his hand.
‘I spoke to one of the coroner’s officers over in Bristol, a very helpful guy,’ Ford said, brandishing the documents. ‘The post mortem on Horgan showed typical features of a fall from height, nothing incongruous, entirely consistent with other deaths of that type, although … ’ Ford paused and ran a finger down the top sheet. ‘Here it is: he didn’t fall straight in the water. Poor bastard hit some trees and rocks on the way down, “sustaining major head wounds, broken bones, contusions and large lacerations that could have masked any pre-existing injuries”. In other words, it’s impossible to determine what killed him apart from the fall, so they can’t rule anything out.’
Ford handed the paper over to Mulcahy before continuing, ‘He said it’s not uncommon for the coroner to reach an open verdict in this kind of case where they have no witnesses to the jump. Comes down to the “balance of probabilities”, he said. Given the location, the fact that Horgan’s business was in the crapper and no other compelling factors, he reckons they’ll decide it’s a reasonable assumption that he took his own life.’
‘Nothing conclusive either way, then.’ Mulcahy quickly read the document before handing it back. ‘The thing is, it turns out your hunch was good. According to SOCA, Begley never went to Liverpool – or not to Ronson’s funeral, anyway. They filmed the whole thing covertly and spent the last two weeks identifying everyone who turned up. Begley wasn’t one of them. And they’ve got good reason now to think this Cali hit man’s not as daft an idea as we thought it was.’
He updated Ford on what Corbett had said about the missing enforcer known as El Güero.
‘Christ on a bike,’ Ford exclaimed. ‘They’re fuckin’ serious, aren’t they?’
‘Looks like it,’ Mulcahy agreed.
‘Still, that’s no reason to think this Horgan thing’s dodgy, is it?’
‘No, but I think it’s worth having a closer look at him.’
Ford gurned a smug smile at him. ‘Actually, I got there before you, boss. I put him through PULSE while I was waiting for you to come off the phone, ran a detailed check.’
‘You’re a smartarse of the highest order, Liam.’ Mulcahy chuckled. ‘What did you get on him?’
‘Not a feckin’ thing. Cormac Patrick Horgan of my own fair county of Cork was as clean as a whistle. Not so much as an illegal download. A proper sparkler. Almost too good to be true, actually.’
‘Fuck that,’ Mulcahy said. ‘There’s got to be something more. Who do we know in Skibbereen?’
21
Half an hour talking to the local CID man, Detective Sergeant Pascal McCann, at Skibbereen Garda Station set Mulcahy some of the way straight at least. Cormac Horgan had been a popular and successful man around town. A newcomer, he’d moved the fifty miles southwest from Cork city to ‘Skib’ six or seven years previously, to take over the family firm from his ageing bachelor uncle. He settled in to the close-knit market town quickly, joining all the appropriate local clubs and commercial associations. A regular churchgoer, he fundraised enthusiastically and donated generously to a wide range of local charities. The only conventional thing he hadn’t done was marry. Most of all, though, he’d turned round the Horgans chain of estate agents in a matter of months after taking over, and just in time to make the most of the boom. At the same time he branched out into property investment services and, initially at least, did wonders for local property developers, farmers and smalltime investors while adding considerably to his own fortune in the process.
A paper fortune, as it transpired. In line with the crazed conventional wisdom of the Celtic Tiger, which refused to recognise even the possibility of a rainy day, however distant, it seemed he had salted virtually nothing away and instead ploughed everything he earned into onward investment. And he had convinced half the town to throw their nest eggs in with him, advising high-rollers and risk-averse alike to plough every spare penny into an evermore elaborate series of development ventures at home and abroad, which one day – he claimed – would pay out a bonanza beyond their wildest and most avaricious dreams. His speculating frenzy peaked at more or less the same time as the global money markets collapsed, Lehman Brothers went splat, and the Irish property bubble imploded. That he’d lost so many people’s life savings as well as his own was rumoured to have hit him hard, said the sergeant. Not that there was much sympathy among his fair-weather friends in Skibbereen.
‘I’m sure that’s why the family decided to bury him up in Douglas,’ DS McCann said, his accent thick with the melodious rhythms of West Cork. ‘There might have been a graveside riot down here. A lot of people felt he took the coward’s way out. All that stuff in the papers about him being universally missed? Not around here, I can tell you. Lost too many people a bloody fortune.’
There was such an air of vehemence in McCann’s voice, Mulcahy had to wonder if the CID man himself might have taken a not-so-crafty punt on one of Horgan’s property investment schemes.
‘Some people said he didn’t even care so much about the property businesses any more,’ McCann said, really getting into his stride. ‘He must’ve thought he’d set himself up for life. I was talking to a pal of his only the other day who said he’d confided as much in private to him, that the estate agencies were only shops, and he didn’t take their loss so much to heart. It was the other stuff that affected him. Losing everyone else’s money. And the other business, of course. He was mad about that. Couldn’t stay away from the water.’
It was as if McCann was engaged in a private reverie, not even bothering to supply details of what he was talking about. But Mulcahy’s curiosity was aroused by the reference to Horgan’s other interests.
‘I don’t follow,’ Mulcahy said. ‘What other business?’
‘Oh, himself and a pal had a nice auld sideline down in Glandore,’ McCann said. ‘They must’ve made a fortune out of it from the tourists in the summer. Boating and
sailing, dolphin-watching and fishing – anything to do with the water. Anytime you went into the estate agent’s looking for him, they’d tell you he was down there. Himself and Conor must’ve had at least five boats in the harbour. You couldn’t get on them when the sun came out, they were that popular. Doing tours, round the coast, out to Galley Head and back, down as far as Baltimore and Glengariff if the weather was right. And they did fishing, too. Big business, corporate stuff – you know, taking out these suits who’d never held a rod in their hands before, fishing for sharks and other big stuff. Pay a fortune for it, y’know, not realising they were the ones being reeled in.’
‘So what happened?’
‘That went, too. Overextended himself on the last couple of boats, apparently. Started out with just a couple of dinghies for the fishing, but these latest boats, Jaysus, they were like floating tour buses. Massive things. Must’ve cost an absolute fortune. The bank repossessed the lot. Them and all the other ones.’
‘Helpful as ever, then, the banks?’
‘Oh yeah, you’re not wrong there. By then the boats were about the only recoverable assets Cormac had left. The uniform lads down here helped the bailiffs secure them. A couple are still down in the harbour, chained up and sealed, ready to be picked up by the new owners, but the rest were taken away after the sale. That must’ve been tough on Cormac, seeing them auctioned off like that. It was only a few weeks afterwards, you know, that he killed himself.’
When he put the phone down, Mulcahy felt a germ of excitement ripping through his thoughts. DS McCann’s comments about boats and sea tours around Galley Head and Baltimore, in particular, were strobing like a lighthouse beam in his brain. He walked out into the outer office and over to the map pinned to the wall behind Ford’s desk. As always when he looked at a map of Ireland he recalled how, as a kid in school, he’d always thought its island shape looked like a fat old man sitting in a comfy chair, arms crossed and legs stretched out, staring west across the ocean to America. He looked down now at the southernmost tip of Cork and Kerry, to where the old man’s toes dipped into the blue vastness of the Atlantic. He was tracing a forefinger round the rugged coastline when Ford came back.
Dublin Dead Page 21