‘This is your neck of the woods, Liam,’ Mulcahy said. ‘Turns out Horgan ran a boating business out of somewhere called Glandore. I can’t see it. Do you know it?’
‘Sure,’ said Ford, waving a finger vaguely at the map. ‘It’s out west there, on the coast, near Skibbereen.’
‘I know that,’ Mulcahy said tetchily. ‘But where exactly?’
Ford turned round, squinting at the map. ‘It’s tiny, barely a few houses and a harbour. Lovely spot, though. Just a couple of headlands round from—’
For Mulcahy, it was like a series of pilings sliding into place. One after the other they fell into line: the location, the boats, the desperation for money. He knew exactly what Ford was going to say microseconds before his own eyes took in the name Ford was stabbing his forefinger at on the map, their eyes meeting, a rush of disbelief and excitement on their faces.
‘Rosscarbery Bay,’ they both said, in unison.
22
‘Boss?’ It was Sweeney, head round the door, lean forearm hugging the jamb, a hank of dark hair spilling over her left eye, urgency in her expression. ‘There’s a guy here from Pearse Street, wanted to talk to Liam, but he’s gone out again. Can you have a word? Says it’s important, to do with Rosscarbery Bay.’
‘He’s here?’ Mulcahy said. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had just dropped into the office. ‘Send him in.’
The guy in question was Detective Inspector Kevin O’Neill, head of the B Division Drugs Unit working out of Pearse Street, one of the busiest city-centre stations. In its ambit was everything from Government Buildings and Grafton Street to the pubs and clubs of throbbing Temple Bar. Ford knew him well, having worked with him in the North Central hellhole that was Store Street Station when O’Neill was a sergeant. Mulcahy had only met him once or twice at socials, a short, dark, growling type with a brittle air and a fixed look of fury on his face. A Dubliner through and through, what he could have to say about Rosscarbery Bay was anybody’s guess.
‘Yeah, well, that’s just it, isn’t it,’ O’Neill said. ‘We picked this guy up during a raid on a squat over on Fenian Street, must be three, four weeks ago now, and he had twenty wraps of coke in his bag. He had no idea how it got there, naturally, so we processed him and he’s been over in Cloverhill on remand since. Then I get a call from one of the prison officers saying this guy is in trouble on the wing – some scrote tried to shank him – and he’s begging to see me, says he has some information to trade. So I was out there this morning, anyway, and he ups and outs with it – that he was one of the crew, on that boat, the Rosscarbery one, you know?’
‘The Atlantean? Are you serious?’
‘Yeah, that’s what he called it.’
Mulcahy was almost dazed by the suddenness of it. ‘Is there any reason to believe him? It was all over the news not so long ago. He could’ve got the name off the TV or the papers.’
‘Well, obviously, and yer man, stupid twat, says he won’t spill anything till he knows the deal. Then I remembered bumping into Liam at a match a couple of nights ago and he mentioned you guys were still circling on Rosscarbery and thinking now maybe the gear might’ve come over from Holland.’
‘And?’
‘And that’s just it, isn’t it? This guy – his name is Cuypers – he’s Dutch. The only thing he’d give us was that the boat came over from Holland … ’
*
Forty minutes later Mulcahy was out in the sprawling new-build wasteland of Dublin West, turning off the M50 and approaching the drab diamond-shaped cluster of buildings that was Cloverhill Prison. For all its claims to be a twenty-first-century specialist remand facility, the prison was very much Victorian in spirit, with an old-fashioned panopticon layout at its core, and even an old-style prisoner tunnel leading to the newly built courthouse next door. All Mulcahy could see as he walked from the car park was the five-metre-high curtain wall that enclosed the complex, its continuum broken only by the bunker-like reception building, bulging out in a curving architect’s fancy of red brick and glass. It did nothing to make the place look any less intimidating for visitors – quite the opposite, in fact, as the narrow, overhung windows set deep into the façade looked about as welcoming as machine-gun slots.
He showed his warrant card and was informed by a dourfaced screw that he was on the governor’s list. Although no one impeded his progress, it took another twenty minutes of searches, jostled key chains, clanging doors and endlessly long corridors before he was, at last, shown into a barewalled, windowless interview room. There, a tall, tanned, grizzled man in jeans, trainers and a pale blue sweatshirt was sitting at a table that was bolted to the floor. Mulcahy waited as the prison officer who’d accompanied him shut the door and took up position beside it, affecting a blank-eyed indifference to any words that might be uttered in his presence, short of threatening ones.
‘Willem Cuypers, right?’
The man nodded, stress manifest in a muscle spasm on his left cheek. Mulcahy could well believe the man was a yachtsman, the deep teak tan that weeks banged up inside had done nothing to pale, the thin green tattoos faded to near-nothingness by sun and salt on forearms that looked tough as bog oak. He’d met many like him on piers and slipways all over the world. Not a man to suit a prison. Not a man to be trapped indoors.
‘I’m Mulcahy. You have information about a case I’m working on?’
‘Yes. The big cocaine find at Rosscarbery Bay. I was there. I can tell you about it.’
The words sounded harsh, guttural in the man’s heavy Dutch accent, but his English was good. What impressed Mulcahy most was the certainty in his deep voice; he wasn’t surprised O’Neill had taken this man seriously.
‘So tell me about it.’
Cuypers fixed him with an icy stare. ‘Do I get what I want?’
‘What is it that you want?’
‘I told the other guy, O’Neill. I want to get out of here, now.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Mulcahy said, lacing it with a bit of anger. He pushed back his chair and stood up.
‘No, wait.’ The Dutchman’s glare softened. ‘I don’t mean release. I know you won’t do that. I want a transfer to another prison, today. After that, if I’m convicted, I want a reduction in my sentence and a guarantee I can serve it in the Netherlands.’
‘You’re very sure of yourself, aren’t you?’ Mulcahy said, staring down at him.
‘No, not of myself, but I am sure you will want what I know.’
Mulcahy sat down again, shook his head. ‘I might be able to swing a remand transfer, but it would probably be tomorrow at the earliest. And I’d need to check the accuracy of your information first. The other stuff, serving abroad, I have no control over. It’s a bureaucratic matter, decided by civil servants. All I could do would be to make a recommendation.’
‘And you would do that, yes?’
‘If what you say stands up, yes, sure. No skin off my nose.’
‘And you will have me moved quickly?’
‘Like I said, that depends on what you tell me. What are you so afraid of, anyway?’
Cuypers lifted the right-hand side of his sweatshirt, revealed a large, paperback-sized bandage pad taped to his stomach just above his waistband. There was a dark stain of dried blood spread across the centre where the wound had leaked through the thick cotton wad.
Mulcahy sucked his breath in through his teeth. ‘Okay. I heard he missed you.’
‘Sure, he missed my liver, my kidneys,’ Cuypers scoffed. ‘He missed killing me.’
‘Why would anyone want to do that?’
‘Who knows? Maybe I upset somebody in here, or maybe it is for what they are afraid I will tell you. But if they’re trying to kill me anyway, I might as well trade with you and have a chance, yes?’
‘Makes sense to me,’ Mulcahy nodded. ‘Tell me what you’ve got, and if it’s good, I’ll get you your transfer.’
What Cuypers had to tell Mulcahy wasn’t just good. It was dynamite. In under a
minute Mulcahy had no more doubts that it was the real thing, not least because it confirmed much of what they already suspected regarding the Atlantean.
‘We sailed out of Vlissingen – do you know it?’ Cuypers began. ‘The English, they call it Flushing.’
Mulcahy nodded slowly, afraid of giving away too much in his excitement. Vlissingen was the location of the boatyard they’d been told about.
‘It’s down south on Walcheren, near Middleburg, right out on the coast. Very quiet, but it has everything for boats, you know? They told me to get there at midnight, for leaving early in the morning.’
‘They? Who are “they”?’
Cuypers shook his head. He would only say he’d asked a friend how he might make some quick cash to sort out a debt that had been called in. The friend told him someone was looking for crew for a no-questions-asked sailing trip. He knew from the amount on offer – €2,000 for a three- or four-day voyage – that it had to be illicit. A fact confirmed when he turned up at the boatyard, deserted but for a pocket of hectic activity around a ten-metre Bermuda-rigged yacht, the Atlantean, onto which the skipper and another crewman were busy transferring large plastic-wrapped packets from a guy in the back of a silver Mercedes van parked alongside, and stowing them below decks.
‘What were they like, these packets?’
Cuypers shrugged. ‘White plastic, about ten kilos each one, with some thin, you know, rope tied round them.’
‘Twine.’
‘Yes, twine, that’s the word,’ Cuypers agreed.
‘You must have suspected what was in them,’ Mulcahy said.
‘I didn’t ask, if that’s what you mean.’ Cuypers shrugged. ‘Maybe I didn’t want to know. Most of it was already loaded when I got there. I only found out how much there was when I went below later to stow my bag. Sure, I was shocked by the amount. I realised I was dealing with some serious people, but I needed the money, and I couldn’t have backed out then even if I wanted to.’
Fair enough, he knew too much already by then. Again Mulcahy asked for names, but Cuypers claimed he didn’t know them. Not very likely, but Mulcahy let it go for now. He was the one holding all the cards. He could wait. The last thing he wanted was for the man to give him fake names just to get him off his back.
‘So what happened then?’
‘The other guy drove the van away, and we made ready to sail.’
‘He was the man in charge? He didn’t sail with you?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘The skipper was an English guy, but the guy with the van was the boss, for sure. He was Irish, I think. That kind of accent, anyway.’
‘Describe him.’
Cuypers shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I was below deck most of the time. I didn’t see him so much, and it was dark. So, one metre ninety, maybe, the same as me? I didn’t really see his face; he had on a baseball cap, and a leather jacket.’
‘Age?’
‘Thirty-something? Forty maybe. But that’s just a guess. One thing I do know is he didn’t know boats. He never came aboard, not once. Everything was hurry, hurry, hurry with him.’
‘Okay, we can go back to him later. Go on with the rest.’
Mulcahy sat back again, as Cuypers embarked on a seaman’s account of the three-day voyage, how the Atlantean handled poorly, how they discovered her engine was pretty much on its last legs as they motored out of port, but forgot about all that as soon as they reached open water and made sail, caught some great wind and weather and pushed the boat on as hard as they could as they skirted round Ostend and Calais and down into the busy English Channel. Mulcahy let Cuypers know that he was a keen sailor himself, which seemed to relax him a little, enough eventually for him to drop a name, the skipper’s name, Jenkins, which Mulcahy then used to press him for the other crewman’s name.
‘Go on, Willem. What’s it to you, for God’s sake? You’ve already gone most of the way down the road; you can’t stop now. You’ll have to tell us in the end.’
Cuypers tried to argue, but Mulcahy was obviously right. Eventually he caved in. The other guy’s name was Ryan, he said, but didn’t know whether that was a first name or surname. All he knew was he was Irish, from Dublin.
‘He didn’t say much. I didn’t have much to say to him, either, because I was pissed off. He was no sailor. I had to do most of the work, with the skipper. That’s not easy on a yacht that size, not when you’re going hard for three days non-stop.’
Cuypers continued until he got to the point on the third day when they dropped sail in a choppy sea a couple of miles off the southwest coast of Ireland, establishing their position by GPS and an earlier sighting of the Galley Head lighthouse. They started up the engine so they could maintain position, but it gave them trouble straight away and Jenkins, the skipper, began to get nervous.
‘We were sitting in the swell, the wind was getting up, and Jenkins was cursing because we were at the exact coordinates and there was nobody there to meet us. We’d made such good headway before, we had to trim back most of the day. Now, the sun was low in the sky and we were supposed to make the rendezvous at dusk. Where were they? I think Jenkins, he felt exposed, sitting there, holding position with the engine coughing and belching out oily black smoke like a big signal. And we were talking about what to do when we heard a shout from Ryan up forward. We looked and saw a white rib speeding out towards us, and Jenkins said get ready to transfer the cargo.’
‘You weren’t surprised by this?’ Mulcahy asked him. ‘You’re saying you knew the plan was to transfer it at sea?’
Again Cuypers gave a philosophical shrug. ‘Sure. Jenkins told me sometime on the first day. I think to reassure me. He said we’d be met, they’d take the cargo, and we’d sail the empty yacht on to Kinsale and moor her up there, nice and clean, and I could catch a flight back to the Netherlands from Cork.’
‘So what happened?’
‘Ryan was below deck passing the bales up to me when I heard Jenkins cursing. He was pointing at what looked like a patrol vessel coming up fast, really fast – you know, maybe as much as eighteen or twenty knots. I thought it had to be a coastguard cutter or something – then I saw the big gun up front and knew it was. I also knew there was no way we could outrun it.’
‘But the rib got to you first.’
Cuypers nodded. ‘When they came alongside, they didn’t even know there was a problem, but as soon as they tied on one of them spotted the patrol ship and he totally panicked. I mean, the cutter was still at least ten minutes off and Jenkins was screaming at them, really, saying we must take some of the cargo, but they wouldn’t listen. They threatened to go without us.’
‘There were two of them?’
‘Yes, two.’
‘Irish accents?’
‘I would say so, definitely. But don’t ask me who they were. The light was going by then, and they were wearing wet-weather gear, big mufflers and hoods. It was cold, you know? It was total panic. Jenkins was arguing with them, saying we’d all be tracked down and killed for abandoning the cargo, and them saying they’d rather take their chances than go to prison.’
Cuypers broke off and leant back in his chair, staring up at the ceiling, exhaling a sigh of the most heartfelt variety. ‘I was afraid, too, and pretty exhausted, man. After a minute of this shouting I just jumped across to the rib. I wasn’t going to be left behind. Then Ryan came after me, so Jenkins had no choice. He grabbed the GPS and jumped, too, and right in that moment the rib’s two big outboards kicked in and we shot – I don’t kid you, it was like being shot from the barrel of a gun – away towards the shore. It was terrifying. At that speed the waves were like brick walls and the rib was bucking off the top of them like a wild horse. It was all I could do to cling on for my life.’
‘Sounds like a hell of a powerful boat,’ Mulcahy said. ‘You reckon you could have got away with some of the cargo?’
‘Thinking back, for sure. We had at least ten minutes. We could have got fifteen, maybe twenty bales off. They would have
saved a lot of money. But like I said, it was panic. There was no way the patrol could have caught that rib. The other ones, they must have known that, but they killed everything with panic.’
‘Amateurs, you reckon?’
Cuypers gave Mulcahy a level stare. ‘I was an amateur,’ he said, prodding his own chest. ‘All I know is how to sail.’
‘It sounds to me like the one in charge of that rib knew what he was doing. Nobody could have kept you upright at that speed without knowing how to handle her properly.’
‘For sure, that’s true. And he knew the coast, too. It was getting real dark when they landed us in that cove. It wouldn’t have been an easy place to find, cliffs and rocks all round, tricky currents, too. They knew it well, I think.’
‘And they just marooned the three of you on this beach and took off by sea themselves again?’
‘Ja. We thought it would be where they had arranged to offload the drugs, and there would be somebody to meet us, you know? But there was nobody. After a while we realised it was just a cove; there wasn’t even a road down to the beach, only a kind of track, for animals, or swimmers maybe. We hung around for a bit, but it was so cold we decided we should try to make our own way. We couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces, it was so dark. All we did was fall over and get more lost.’
‘I don’t suppose you know which way the rib headed when they left you. East? West?’
‘Look,’ Cuypers said wearily, ‘I have no idea. My only thought then was for getting away. For me. I didn’t care about them. Just me. Like I said before, I can’t tell you anything at all about those guys.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Mulcahy said, holding out the flat of his palm and starting to tick things off on his fingers. ‘You’ve told me they were Irish, that they knew how to handle the rib pretty expertly and knew the waters, even in the dark and in a panic. And that they had somewhere to get back to themselves, and fairly quickly, so they could cover their tracks. I’d say that suggests they were locals, wouldn’t you?’
Dublin Dead Page 22