‘Jesus, I thought we were done for there,’ she whispered, shocked by his sudden violence but shaking with excitement again now, not fear. ‘Is he all right?’
Mulcahy stared back at her, something blank and intransigent in his eyes, something she’d never seen in them before. ‘He’ll live. Come on, we’ve got to get him in there, into the cabin, while he’s out cold.’
He stood up, pushed his hand into Begley’s armpit and pulled him up, indicating to Siobhan that she should do the same. Between them they hauled Begley through the door of the cabin and into what appeared to be a luxuriously appointed living room, laid out like a studio apartment with a single bed to one side, a sitting area with table, chairs, armchairs and a flatscreen TV to the other, and what looked like a fully equipped kitchen and bathroom towards the back. There was only one real incongruity – a wide rectangular hole in the middle of the floor, its steel hatch lying open.
‘Jesus,’ Siobhan said. ‘You could hide out in here for weeks.’
Mulcahy didn’t really have time to take it in. Already Begley was beginning to come round, his eyes rolling under the lids, his breath coming in short, rasping gasps. Mulcahy looked into the hatch in the floor, saw a pit with a set of wooden stairs leading down to what looked like a steel door. Dragging Begley the rest of the way himself, he dumped him unceremoniously down the steps, crashing the hatch closed on top of him.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, holding a hand out to Siobhan.
31
They should have run out of the back of the barn, and away across the fields. But if only they could get to the car, Mulcahy thought, he’d be able to get Siobhan properly away. Even in the fraction of a second it took to hesitate, his ears became attuned to a new sound, that of an engine, another set of tyres crunching into the farmyard outside.
He stood stock still, his hand gripping Siobhan’s, returning her stare of puzzlement, of fresh anxiety. Who the hell could this be?
A second later they got their answer. A car door opening, a male voice shouting, a thick accent. ‘Hello there, now. Garda Siochana. Do you need some help there?’
An ecstasy of relief was breaking out on Siobhan’s face.
Had Ford heard him after all? But Mulcahy knew that couldn’t be right. There was no way an armed-response unit could have got out there so quickly, not from Skibbereen or Cork, which meant Ford must have phoned the local Garda station, got a patrol car to come out. Jesus, if they were uniforms, they wouldn’t even be armed.
He pulled Siobhan round to the side of the cabin. ‘Let me go see first. Can you stay here and make sure Begley doesn’t get out?’ he said, pulling Begley’s pistol from his pocket. ‘Do you know how to use one of these?’
As he handed the gun to her, she took it without a hint of the tentativeness with which most people handle a firearm. Her hands were shaking, but she knew what to do with them. ‘My dad was in the army for a while,’ she said. ‘He showed me how. It’s been a few years, but … ’ She turned the small Beretta over in her hand, checked the safety, pulled the slide back along the barrel and showed Mulcahy the chambered round before easing it back again. ‘Like riding a bicycle.’
He didn’t even stop to smile at her. Instead he turned and ran, holding his own weapon straight down by his side, thinking only of Gemma Kearney and that shotgun. Maybe she’d try to brazen it out, like she had with him. There was no way she could know Begley wasn’t still in charge inside … The first shot rang out before he was even halfway to the barn door, the unmistakeable crump of a shotgun blast. Mulcahy cursed, ducking down instinctively into a crouch, flattening himself against the metal door when he got to it.
Outside, in the middle of the yard, he could see a blue and white patrol car, its blues flashing silently on the roof, both the driver’s and passenger doors wide open. Hearing no more firing, he inched his face out of the door, could hardly believe what met his eyes: a tall stripling of a Garda, carrot-haired, freckle-faced, no more than twenty years old, reeling in silent, disbelieving agony across the yard, clutching a wound like a shark-bite ripped from the side of his uniform between ribs and hip.
Even as Mulcahy searched to see where the shot had come from, he heard another blast. He turned towards the sound, watched in horror as a second Garda staggered out from the far side of the patrol car, clutching a ragged, spurting wound to his leg, and collapsed to the ground, screaming. That’s when he saw Kearney emerging from behind the caravan, a baleful expression on her face, breeching the shotgun, reloading and raising it to fire again.
Half mesmerised by blood and horror, Mulcahy knew only that he had to stop her. He shouted out her name and ran into the yard holding his Sig in a straight-arm, two-hand grip in front of him, aiming squarely at her chest, focusing on the two white dots of the sights.
‘Don’t kill him, Gemma,’ he shouted, trying to make it sound authoritative. ‘You don’t have to. He’s no threat to you now. Put the shotgun down.’
She didn’t even seem to see the weapon in his hand, just swung round with a look of titanic fury, the barrel of the shotgun following her eyeline. Mulcahy dived to his right just as the flame blossomed from the barrel, and he was still falling when he heard the rattle and ding of the shot on the metal door behind him, followed instantly by a shredding pain all along the left side of his face. But it was nothing compared to the screaming agony that, a fraction of a second later, hurricaned through his entire body when he slammed, shoulder first, into the concrete breeze block lying where he landed. The shoulder socket he’d done so much damage to fourteen months before cracked like an egg. His gun spun out of his grip, a tidal wave of shock consuming every thought like a savage at a feast. For a moment there was nothing but pain, howling through him. By the time that horror had eased, and he remembered to open his lungs and eyes and ears again, another had joined it: a shotgun barrel poking into his chest and a deranged Gemma Kearney screaming at him to get up or she’d kill him right there on the ground.
‘Where the fuck is Declan? Where is he?’
Somehow, he found a way – with his good arm, his knees, his feet – to scramble into a slumped position against a rusting oil barrel. It was difficult to keep his eyes open through the pain, but even as another wave peaked, it seemed to bring a kind of numbness in its wake. Which was just as well, as Gemma Kearney wanted him up on his feet and was jabbing the barrel at his face now.
‘Where’s that reporter bitch?’ she was screaming at him. ‘Has she got him?’
Suddenly an image crystallised in his head: Siobhan wrapping her hand round the Beretta. Where was she?
He turned towards the barn, felt blood trickling down his face and inside his collar. He must’ve been caught by two or three pellets at least, though he felt nothing, just the atom-splitting pulse of pain in what used to be his shoulder.
‘If you don’t come out, I’ll take his head off,’ Gemma screamed through the barn door. But he knew she wouldn’t shoot him, not yet, when she began prodding him again with the gun barrel, forcing him to get to his feet.
He’d just about managed to stand up when they heard a pistol shot crack out hollowly from inside the barn. Kearney flinched. Mulcahy didn’t have the energy even for that, but they both held still as the report echoed hollowly down to a silence broken by the ragged moans of one of the wounded Gardai behind them. Then came the screams – a man’s screams – from inside the barn.
Begley had taken a hit.
Kearney stepped back and poked Mulcahy savagely in the kidneys with the shotgun. On the scale of pain it registered no more than a nudge.
‘We’re going in there,’ she said, ‘and you’re going ahead of me, now.’
Bracing his damaged arm with his right hand to limit the pain of movement, Mulcahy shuffled forward towards the wooden barn door. Inside, the first thing he saw was Begley lying in front of the cabin door, desperately trying to staunch the flow of blood coming from a wound in his upper left thigh.
‘The bitch shot me. She sho
t me,’ he shrieked at them, holding his hands round his thigh in a kind of manual tourniquet. Mulcahy saw the length of baling twine trailing from one wrist – he must have worked it loose and made his way out of the cabin, only to encounter Siobhan outside. But there was no sign of her anywhere now. Where the hell had she got to?
‘Get over here, would you,’ Begley roared at Gemma. ‘Can’t you see I’m bleeding out? Do something, for fuck’s sake. Help me.’
But Gemma didn’t drop her guard. Pushing Mulcahy forwards with the gun, ensuring she stayed well in his shadow, they ventured further into the barn.
‘Hang on, Declan. You’ll be okay,’ Gemma said levelly, almost chidingly. ‘Tell me where she is first. Did you see where she went?’
Begley, however, was succumbing to the effects of shock. All the blood from his leg seemed to have drained directly from his face, which was crumpling with emotion. He shook his head in answer to her. ‘I don’t know,’ he whimpered, and repeated the phrase over and over again.
Mulcahy, barely managing to focus himself, heard Gemma curse behind him. He could sense her grip on the situation, her taste for the fight, beginning to go. She was muttering to herself, unsure what to do. Then, making an abrupt decision, she stepped out from behind and turned to face him, the shotgun pointing at his gut.
‘Come out, Siobhan, or I’ll finish off this fucker,’ she shouted at the emptiness, at the piles of old tyres, the heaped coils of barbed wire, the empty diesel drums and fertiliser sacks, at the unresponsive silence.
‘Come on,’ she shouted again. ‘This is your last chance.’
Nothing.
Kearney shifted her trigger hand to get a better grip on the stock, raised the barrel towards Mulcahy’s chest, on her face a look like death. ‘Looks like she ran out on you,’ she said. ‘So you’re no use to me—’
A sharp report rang out from the far end of the barn to their right. Mulcahy swivelled round at the same time as Kearney, watching as she raised the gun to her shoulder to track a shadow scuttling past a pile of tyres. Gemma was in front of him now, her back turned to him, and through the fog of pain behind his eyes he recognised what would probably be the last chance he’d have to save his life. In a slow-motion blur he watched Kearney draw her shoulder back to fire, and, with all the energy he could summon, he lifted his right foot as high as he could and lashed out at the back of her knees with it.
It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t even accurate, but he was a big man with a big shoe size and the heel of his boot sank into her thigh with such force she went flying to the ground, the shotgun going off in her hands with a deafening roar. Without stopping to think, he hurled himself lengthwise after her, blanking out the certainty of still more excoriating pain by bellowing out as he fell on her, pinning her down.
‘Come on, Siobhan, come out. She can’t move. The shotgun’s empty.’
When he opened his eyes next, Siobhan was there above him, anger bright red on her cheeks, the Beretta digging into the side of Kearney’s face.
‘Let go of the shotgun,’ Siobhan hissed at her. ‘Let go of it or I’ll do you. I swear I’ll do you.’
‘Watch out for Begley,’ Mulcahy wheezed, trying to breathe through the pain. Siobhan looked down at him, an infinity of emotion charging across the space between their eyes.
‘I don’t think he’s going to be doing much of anything,’ she said quietly, lowering herself to the floor, keeping the gun trained on Kearney, her legs starting to shake uncontrollably.
Mulcahy did his best to turn his head to see what Siobhan was talking about, understanding what she meant at exactly the same moment as Gemma Kearney did. His ears were rent by Kearney’s howl of anguish. Declan Begley, or what remained of him, was lying slumped against the cabin wall, his chest caked in blood, the lower half of his face entirely missing. Kearney’s last blast had taken him out, permanently.
Epilogue
Mulcahy remembered nothing more of the events of that day. He had to rely on Siobhan’s account, related to him and the rest of Ireland across an eight-page spread in the Sunday Herald two days later. From his hospital bed he read how he and Siobhan had not had to restrain Gemma Kearney after her realisation that Declan Begley was dead. There had been no need: all she’d done was crawl across the floor to the bloodied corpse she’d made of her lover, and weep uncontrollably over him.
Mulcahy had no recollection whatever of insisting, despite his own injuries – thirteen shotgun pellets to his face and neck, a shattered collarbone and shoulder socket, torn ligaments – that he and Siobhan should make their way out of the barn to the yard to see what they could do for the two injured uniforms outside. Back-up was already on its way by then, with Murtagh and O’Grady leading the posse of six cars that raced up the track to Blaggard Farm fifteen minutes later and slewed to a halt just outside the yard, the silence seeming even heavier as they fanned out, weapons drawn, and one by one stopped to take in the bloody scene before them. Both of the uniforms survived, just about; the younger was still fighting for his life in the intensive-care unit at Cork University Hospital, where he had been helicoptered within half an hour of being discovered.
Mulcahy skipped over the stuff that made him out to be a hero. He knew that was just Siobhan being a hack. All he’d done was try to survive. He knew all too well that if Siobhan hadn’t held her nerve and outsmarted Gemma Kearney in those final crucial minutes in the barn, they’d both be dead by now and Kearney and Begley would already be out of the country with new identities and wholly untroubled consciences. Of more interest to him by far was a short follow-up report on the body found in Fuengirola, originally thought to be Begley’s. The piece echoed his own suspicions that Begley and Kearney had lured an assassin into a trap and turned the tables on him, planting Begley’s ID on his body before the couple embarked on their own clean-up spree. The report was largely speculative, but carried a strong sense that a well-informed insider, Murtagh maybe, or Ford, had guided it along. As for Cormac Horgan, there was talk of the police in Bristol reopening the investigation into his death but Mulcahy doubted whether, short of a confession from Gemma Kearney, anyone would ever get a definitive answer to what had happened up on the Clifton Suspension Bridge that night.
The pages that bemused Mulcahy most were the ones devoted to what was called, in a blaring headline, THE HIDE – WHAT THEY FOUND IN THE BLAGGARD FARM STASH. Beneath the cabin in the barn, in the cellar where he’d tried to confine Begley, a bizarre strongroom had been found, containing a huge assortment of Irish art works, antiques and other precious objects. The term ‘Aladdin’s cave’ featured heavily in the coverage. An offshoot of Begley and Kearney’s other money-laundering activities, its combined worth was in the millions, but there was no obvious rationale to the collection other than cash conversion: paintings by Le Brocquy, Middleton, Dillon and Swanzy stored side by side with Georgian silver sauce boats, antique clocks and mirrors, porcelain, gold, loose gems and jewellery of every kind. And ten bales of Colombian cocaine, weighing in at ten kilos each, the twine with which they were tied identifying them as probably the last of the Rotterdam consignment.
As ever, Mulcahy wasn’t so much shocked by the extent of Begley and Kearney’s criminality, as baffled by it. What could stealing that cocaine possibly have brought them that they didn’t have already? Greed that raw was something, he knew, he would never get his head around. He wasn’t sure he would want to either. If it weren’t for that gulf in understanding, or in empathy at least, there would be no point in him being in the job.
Mulcahy lay back motionless in the bed, the strapping on his shoulder and chest making any but the smallest movements difficult without assistance. He closed his eyes, saw a byline swimming in an ocean of newsprint, words and ink slowly melding and morphing into short black hair as soft as cashmere, slipping through his fingers like ripples on a beach. At the diamond-shaped pane of glass in the door, Siobhan Fallon’s face appeared, decided he was sleeping, and turned away.
Ackn
owledgements
More than ever, enormous thanks to my agent Broo Doherty; to David Shelley, Daniel Mallory, Thalia Proctor, Kirsteen Astor, Laura Collins and all at Little, Brown UK; and to Breda Purdue and Margaret Daly at Hachette Ireland. Many thanks also to Andy Hamilton of the Bristol Coroner’s Office; the ever-generous D.P. Lyle for his medical and forensics advice; to my fellow writers at Criminal Classes: Kathryn Skoyles, Richard Holt, Elena Forbes, Keith Mullins, Cass Bonner and Nicola Williams, and our wise friends Margaret Kinsman, Chris Sykes and Peter Guttridge; to Andrew Pettie and the team at the Telegraph; to the staff at the Garda Press Office and all the other members of the Garda Siochana who helped me in the writing of this book. As always, a lifetime’s gratitude to my mother, Jo; to Noelle, Carmel, Billy, Tony, Clare, Gill and Alison; and, most of all, to my gorgeous wife, Angela.
www.gerard-odonovan.com
Table of Contents
Preface
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Suicide estate agent a ‘financial casualty’
Monday: 20 September 2010
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Tuesday
Chapter 6
Dublin Dead Page 30