He hurried back into the kitchen, but only Mrs Kearney was sitting there, still nursing her cup of tea, looking just as shell-shocked as before. He put his head round the door of the living room – neat like the rest of the house, an old-fashioned three-piece suite, family photos on the sideboard, and empty. He heard Siobhan’s voice towards the front of the house and walked back through the hall to the door, catching her in the front garden just as she was finishing a call on her mobile.
‘Quick as you can, okay? I’m relying on you,’ she was saying, her mobile tucked awkwardly between shoulder and ear with her chin, Mrs Kearney’s phone in one hand, an open notebook in the other. She juggled the three to hang up and turned, looking surprised when she saw Mulcahy waiting in the doorway.
‘You weren’t supposed to hear that,’ she said, flashing her pale blue eyes at him, a smile on her lips.
‘Who was it?’
‘A guy I know through work. Bit of an under-the-radar merchant. Calls himself a private detective but he just sits in front of a bank of computers all day, spying on people. He’s going to run a GPS trace on that mobile number for me. If the phone is any kind of an up-to-date model, he reckons he can get it so long as it’s switched on.’
Mulcahy stared down at her, the line between legality and expediency being fudged before his eyes. His own privacy was something he guarded jealously, but he knew too well how the laws surrounding privacy often only got in the way of doing the job. ‘You don’t get that kind of spookery for cheap.’
Siobhan looked pleased by his lack of explicit disapproval. ‘He owes me the favour – I’ve put enough business his way over the years. And anyway, he won’t charge if it doesn’t work. If she’s not in the country, I mean. And if she is, we’ll know soon enough where, won’t we?’
She looked over his shoulder to check that Mrs Kearney was nowhere within hearing distance. ‘Do you seriously think someone’s after her?’
‘There’s no way of knowing for sure, but someone thought Conor Hayes was worth taking out, and as far as we know, he was a hell of a smaller link in the chain than she is. I hope you’re not in any danger yourself – after talking to Hayes, I mean.’
‘Just for talking to the guy?’ She gave him a sceptical glance. The thought that she could be in danger had never occurred to her. ‘I think you’re letting your imagination run away with you there, Inspector.’
‘Did you notice anybody else down by the pier, maybe watching, or waiting?’
‘Jesus, you’re as bad as the others, Mulcahy,’ she said, putting her hand on his forearm unconsciously, naturally. He might have thought it belonged there had it not been for the scar on the back of her hand. He tried not to look, but it made the breath stall in his chest from the burden of responsibility he felt for failing to prevent those injuries, for all she had suffered. His fault.
‘I’m only thinking of your safety,’ he said, conscious again of the weight of the weapon on his belt beneath his jacket.
‘I’ll be responsible for my own safety, thank you,’ she said sternly, and stepped away from him, a scowl where the smile had been seconds earlier.
‘Did Hayes even say anything interesting to you?’ Mulcahy said.
‘No. Like I said, the guy just looked totally scared out of his wits.’
‘And what did he say about Horgan? Anything?’
‘Nothing. I said I was surprised I didn’t see him at the funeral, and when he asked me who I was, he got into a right state. Broke into a sweat on the spot, told me not to come anywhere near the boat. He got even weirder when I went back and asked him if he’d seen Gemma Kearney at all recently. He didn’t even pretend not to know her. He just went apeshit. Started shouting at me to get away, that he’d have me done for trespass. I pointed out to him that I hadn’t set foot on his stupid boat and that the pier was public property. In the end I just decided to walk away. I was thinking about going to the hotel for a drink, waiting around—’ She broke off, chewed her lip for a second or two, then looked straight into his. ‘I don’t know. I just felt really knackered suddenly. It came over me, and all I wanted to do was get out of there.’
She grimaced unconsciously at the memory, her small white teeth clenched, the tendons in her neck standing proud, like she was deeply embarrassed by her lack of persistence.
‘I think it’s just as well you did.’
She shook her head ruefully. ‘Sure, but look what I missed. “Eyewitness to Murder” – that would have been some headline.’
Mulcahy was about to point out that the headline could have been far worse, but his mobile buzzed. It was Sweeney, and he turned away to take the call.
‘Unbelievable, boss,’ she said, her voice breathy with excitement. ‘You got it bang on, first time. I rang the guys in Cork and they picked Kearney up on the very first sweep. She came in through the Ringaskiddy ferry terminal on the overnight sailing from Swansea only yesterday morning. The ferry docked at eight twenty-five a.m. They say she would have been disembarked and on the road by nine at the latest.’
Mulcahy wasn’t sure whether to feel more relieved or worried by that information. Gemma Kearney, and more particularly her safety, was now very much his concern. ‘What was she driving, did they say?’
‘A Mercedes Vito van, apparently. With Dutch registration plates, weirdly. Do you have a pen? I’ll give you the number.’
‘No, but give it to me anyway.’ He memorised it as she said it, then told her to get back on to the Cork port authorities and get any other information they might have on whether she was travelling alone or not, and where she might have been coming from. He hung up and was about to tell Siobhan when her phone rang.
She held up a palm to him, looked at the screen and mouthed, ‘It’s him … Hi, Ray,’ she said, followed by a string of ‘Yeah’ and ‘No’ and ‘Hang on while I grab a pen’, accompanied by an awkward but clearly well-practised scramble in her bag. There was a final ‘Ah-ha’ and ‘Any idea where that is?’ while she scribbled something in her notebook and hung up, with thanks.
‘He could only pin it down to within a five-mile radius, because of the mountains.’
‘Mountains?’ Mulcahy frowned. ‘Where the hell is she?’
‘Not far. Dunmanway is the nearest town, Ray says. That’s as close as he can get to it. I saw it myself on the road signs on the way over here. It can’t be more than a few miles away.’
Dunmanway. The name was sparking connections in his mind. The trailer. That’s what it was. Aisling had said, last night, the trailer company with the red ‘H’ logo was based in Dunmanway.
‘What is it?’ Siobhan asked him, seeing he’d made some connection, but he held a hand up to her, took out his phone and dialled.
‘Liam, we’ve got a lead on her. Did you find anything?’
Ford said he’d found plenty, and that was the problem. Kearney’s main holding company, Prolutum, which seemed to be jointly owned by a sleeping partner, had extensive holdings in holiday properties all along the southwest coast.
‘And the partner would be Begley?’
‘Absolutely,’ Ford said. ‘Aidan found his name on a few documents relating to Prolutum. He’s got to be prime suspect for the sleeper. They were ploughing vast amounts of cash into property and construction for years. But that’s not all. We’re finding paperwork for all sorts of shite as well as the properties – art, antiques and so on – from auction houses and dealers all over the place. It looks like she was buying up half of feckin’ Europe.’
Converting cash into consumables, the classic money launderer’s ploy. But Mulcahy didn’t even want to stop and think about that. All he could think of was getting to Kearney. They could think about the extent of her criminality later.
‘Okay, look, we’ve just been told she’s definitely in the area, so you can refine your search. Aim for anything within a few miles of Dunmanway. That’s not tourist country, so it should stand out. For the moment just focus on that. I’m heading over that way now myself.
Ring me the second you find anything, and I mean anything.’
He hung up, turned, saw Siobhan staring at him, her blue eyes brimming with anticipation.
‘Are we going over there, then?’
‘I think it’s better if you stay here with Mrs Kearney,’ he said, shaking his head, though in truth he wasn’t even sure that was such a good idea. He’d have to make a call, get someone round from the local station, to be on the safe side.
Judging from the storm clouds in her expression, Siobhan wasn’t exactly keen on the idea either.
‘Better?’ Better for who?’ she snapped at him. ‘Piss off, Mulcahy, would you? No way are you leaving me out of this. Gemma Kearney is my story.’
She paused, disbelief getting the better of her. It was something Mulcahy was struggling with just as violently. How could she even begin to think he’d allow her to accompany him?
‘For Christ’s sake, Siobhan. This isn’t some stupid story. This is serious. There are people being murdered here. You know what happened to Conor Hayes last night and, for all we know, nearly happened to you. You can’t just tag along on something like this. It’s not some bloody game. It would be tantamount to reckless—’
He was about to say ‘endangerment’ but the palm of her small hand raised high in flat defiance in front of his face, the look of utter fury in her eyes, brought him to an abrupt halt.
‘Don’t you dare patronise me, Mulcahy,’ she hissed at him, ‘or belittle what I do. You wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for me. And you sure as fuck wouldn’t have found out by your own lights that Gemma Kearney was in Dunmanway. So just get used to the idea. I’m coming with you. Even if I have to follow you in my own car. Even if I have to crawl there on my hands and knees, I’m coming. This is my story, and I’m staying on it – to the death.’
27
Five minutes later they were in the Saab and on their way, at speed, holding back only to make sure Mrs Kearney was okay and to tell her not to answer the door to anyone until they returned. Mulcahy was driving, Siobhan reading the road map, assuring him it was pretty much a straight road from Drimoleague to Dunmanway. He pointed at the glove-box, told her there was a portable sat nav in there and to get it out, ready for a call from Liam Ford, which he prayed would come sooner rather than later. As he negotiated the twisting route into Drimoleague and out onto the Dunmanway road, he did his best to bring her up to speed, in the briefest terms he could, on what Ford had told him about Gemma Kearney’s ongoing business relationship with Begley.
‘Jesus, after what he did to her,’ Siobhan groaned. ‘Whatever was between them, it must’ve gone a lot deeper than business, on her part at least.’
She was probably right about that, Mulcahy thought, and he tried to imagine what could be going through Gemma Kearney’s head right now. Her lover, if he was that, dead. And a killer on her trail, dogging her every step. Why was she risking her life to come home? To see her mother, maybe? One last time before she disappeared completely? Given what he’d heard of her already, it seemed pretty damn unlikely.
As it happened, it didn’t take long for Ford’s call to come through. Crooking his mobile under his chin, Mulcahy repeated the address – Blaggard Farm, Gortnakilla Road, Dunmanway – to Siobhan, who punched the details into the sat nav and waited for it to make a GPS match. In the meantime Mulcahy asked Ford the question he really wanted answered: ‘So who owns the place now?’
Even above the rush of the car on the road Mulcahy could hear him working the keyboard, tapping the scroll bar impatiently rather than just holding it down. Then came a stream of muttered imprecation.
‘Well, she didn’t buy it through Horgan. Says here Blaggard Farm was seized by the Criminal Assets Bureau in 2003 from a company called Glanamh, as part of a long follow-up investigation into Klene Records. It seems Glanamh was also originally owned by one Declan J. Begley, esquire, gentleman fucking farmer.’
‘“Glanamh” means “clean” in Irish, doesn’t it?’ Mulcahy said.
‘Yeah, of course it does. Ah, Jesus, this is such a fuck-up.’
For a moment or two all Mulcahy heard on the line was Ford’s laboured breathing and the thumping of big fingers on the keyboard.
‘What’ve you got, Liam? Tell me.’
‘You won’t fucking believe this, boss. The CAB weren’t able to dispose of the farm until three years later, when the lawyers fighting its seizure suddenly withdrew their case. The property went to auction in May 2006, and listen to this – it was bought by some crowd called GemDec Associates. Gem, Dec – capital “G”, capital “D”. How the fuck could they have let that happen? The CAB let Begley buy back his own fucking land with dirty money.’
Mulcahy hung up and repeated the information to Siobhan, who laughed in bitter amusement. ‘Cheeky bastards. They must’ve had a hoot over that one.’
‘It cost them over a million euro,’ Mulcahy said, ‘so it must’ve meant a hell of a lot to them. What really kills me is the date they bought it. It means that Gemma Kearney and Declan Begley have been in business together for more than five years. Christ knows how much money they’ve laundered through her practice, and Horgans estate agents. It’s probably in the tens of millions.’
A grim, purposeful silence invaded the car now as Siobhan began jotting some notes in her reporter’s pad and Mulcahy put his foot down still harder and focused on the road ahead. Only a disembodied, mid-Atlantic, vaguely well-known female voice intruded on their thoughts: ‘In five miles, turn left.’
28
Their route took them through the centre of Dunman way, into the narrow, winding streets and prosperous market square, bustling with trade in the run-up to lunch time, and on up a steep hill that, once crested, deposited them in noticeably less lovely countryside. It was as if the green, rolling landscape they’d been driving through for miles had simply run out of lushness and instantly become more jagged, grey and barren. The road was narrower, bordered not by fence and farmland now but by forest, scrub and bog. Even the farms they did pass had an air of neglect to them, the fields smaller, the barns rustier, the hedgerows untended and unkempt.
‘Darkwood,’ Siobhan snorted, looking up from the map. ‘You’d think we were driving through Harry Potter country. There’s another place further on called Coolmountain.’
‘And where are we headed?’ asked Mulcahy, who had been focused on following the sat nav’s instructions.
‘I’m not sure. I can’t tell exactly where we are, but if I’m right, we’ve just passed through somewhere called Fernanes and we don’t have much further to go.’
They were three or four miles beyond Dunmanway now, yet the land felt a hundred times more remote. To the north, a range of high, bare hills loomed, the ‘mountains’ Siobhan’s call-tracer had mentioned, Mulcahy assumed, though he doubted it was easy to get a good signal anywhere around there. A minute later the voice told him to turn right onto a narrower road, a track really, graded but rarely used, a rib of shin-high grass running up the middle, which brushed noisily against the Saab’s underbelly as he slowed to a crawl. Then he saw it: a decrepit gateway punctuating the overgrown hedge on his left. It was bracketed by two short, low stone walls with pillars at the entry, one of which had partly collapsed. A rusting iron gate, long torn off its hinges, leant drunkenly into the undergrowth on one side. A paint-peeled sign attached to it with coarse strands of wire was only barely legible: ‘Blaggard Farm.’
‘Fucking hell,’ Siobhan said. ‘Did you say they paid a million euro for this?’
‘They must’ve wanted something here badly,’ Mulcahy grunted, and turned the car into the entrance, the decaying tarmac of the overgrown drive crunching beneath the tyres. They rounded a corner and the scene opened out into a flat clearing of bracken-filled paddocks, fields almost entirely reclaimed by nature and a ramshackle cluster of barns and assorted farm buildings fronted by a squat, dilapidated-looking bungalow fifty yards or so ahead. An air of bleakness and long abandonment hung like a dank mis
t over everything.
Mulcahy drove slowly up to the house. Although the track led round the back, to where he presumed there was a farmyard, he pulled up in front of what must once have been a small lawn bordered by flowerbeds long gone to seed, and now swamped in coarse grass and a maze of brambles.
‘You’d need a machete to get to that front door,’ Mulcahy said, but Siobhan was already encouraging him to drive on, pointing urgently through the windscreen towards the muddy corner leading to the yard.
‘I reckon somebody’s been here pretty recently,’ she said.
Now he saw what she’d seen: tyre tracks, and fresh-looking ones at that.
‘C’mon,’ she said. ‘Let’s go round the back and see if we can find her.’
Mulcahy took it slowly, turning the car cautiously into the yard, a ruinous arrangement of three large and variously crumbling barns, one completely open to the elements, and a few scattered, older stone outbuildings. The mud on the yard’s split concrete and cobble surface showed a curve of tyre marks sweeping in towards a wide parking bay surrounded on three sides by a low breeze-block wall and steps up to a brick path leading to the back of the bungalow. Tyre tracks but no tyres. No vehicle of any kind save for a spooky, grime-covered green and cream caravan, which had collapsed on its axle and was, seemingly, decomposing slowly into the concrete beneath it.
Mulcahy pulled up on the far side of the caravan, looked around and lowered his window. There was no sign or sound of life whatsoever, not even the scurry of a rat in the barns to break the silence.
‘Do you want to stay in the car while I check this out?’ he said, pulling the door handle and putting a foot out on the concrete before turning back to her. He’d intended it more as a question than an instruction, but, either way, he was met by a look of contempt from Siobhan.
Dublin Dead Page 27