‘Ah stop, he’ll be okay,’ said Ger, flicking his cigarette butt into the road. ‘Gearoid can just bend his legs back and he’ll be fit as a butcher’s dog.’
‘It’s not his fecking legs I’m worried about. Gearoid wants them with their legs broke as you know full well. Saves him operating on their knees – taking out their nutellas or whatever you call them.’
‘Well, it’s not doing his health a heap of good lying out here in the wet,’ said Ger. ‘Let’s stow him away and skirt on before anybody sees us.’
He opened the rear door of the Opel. Between them, he and Milo lifted Kieran up and manoeuvred him on to the back seat. His legs were both dangling at such awkward angles that Milo had to twist one of them sharply to get him in through the car door; and when they laid him down they could hear the two sides of his broken pelvis grating against each other, like a broken earthenware basin. He was still alive, though. He was breathing in a high-pitched whistle, and he whimpered when they laid him on his side.
They had just climbed back into their seats when a Garda patrol car slowly drove past. They could see the gardaí looking at them, but the patrol car kept on going. Milo turned to Ger and said, ‘There you are. Remember that fortune cookie I had at Panda Mama last week? “You will have a narrow escape from bad luck.”’
Ger waited until the patrol car was out of sight and then pulled away from the kerb. ‘Yeah – but you remember what mine was? “You will meet the lover of your dreams.” That hasn’t happened yet, has it?’
Milo took out two more cigarettes. ‘Maybe if you stopped drowning yourself in that fecking Lynx aftershave and shaved off that scobe ’tache.’
‘Oh yeah? I’ve never seen the girls falling over you, boy. I’ve never even seen the sneaky butchers giving you the eye.’
Kieran, in the back, let out a quivering little scream of pain, and then fell silent.
20
Katie had only just sat down at her desk when Detective Scanlan knocked at her door. Pádraigin was wearing a plain long-sleeved dress in charcoal-grey wool and her hair was tied back with a grey satin ribbon, but Katie thought the severity of her appearance made her look unusually attractive, like a sexually repressed bunscoil teacher.
‘It took a while, ma’am, but I’ve found out at last who ordered that taxi that picked up Gerry Mulvaney.’
‘Good work. Who was it? Or did he order it himself?’
‘No, no, he didn’t. It was ordered on account, but the controller at Tuohy’s Taxis who took the call was off duty last night when I rang them. He’d left no note about that particular job, and nobody at the taxi office knew where he was – out on the lash, as usual, so they said – so I had to wait until he came in this morning. He told me the taxi was ordered by a woman called Grainne Buckley. It seems like she orders nine or ten taxis a week, sometimes more.’
‘Really? Where does she live?’
‘Tuohy’s always send her invoices care of McMahon’s solicitors in South Mall, and they pay them online. But almost every taxi she orders is either from or to St Giles’ Clinic – that’s on the Middle Glanmire Road in Montenotte, not too far past Lover’s Walk.’
‘St Giles’ Clinic? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them.’
‘They have a website but it doesn’t tell you very much. It says that they’re a private care and rehabilitation home for patients with severe disabilities, that’s about all. It doesn’t list any of the staff or describe exactly what they do.’
‘Have you checked them out? Are they registered with the HSE?’
‘It says they are, on their website. It also says that they’re registered with the UK Department of Health. I haven’t yet double-checked that, though.’
Katie prised the lid off her coffee and sat back.
‘Why would a private clinic in Montenotte send a taxi to pick up a scumbag of a dog thief from Riverstick?’
‘I have no idea,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘It’s like that Sherlock Holmes story, isn’t it, about the dog that didn’t bark in the night-time.’
‘Well, there was a reason why the dog in the story didn’t bark, wasn’t there?’ said Katie. ‘The dog in the story knew the villain, that’s why it didn’t bark. So – it might sound unlikely – but maybe the people at St Giles’ Clinic know Gerry Mulvaney.’
‘What’s the next step, then?’
‘God knows. This dognapping enquiry is taking up more and more time and we already have more on our plate than we can handle. Maybe you and Dooley could shoot up to Montenotte and see if you can find this Grainne Buckley. All you have to do is ask her why she provided a taxi for Gerry Mulvaney and see where it goes from there. It could be that she and him are nothing more than friends, or acquaintances. Maybe he has a relative who’s a patient up there. Who knows?’
‘All right, we’ll do that,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘And by the way, Conor Ó Máille will be here at eleven-thirty or thereabouts. The pet detective.’
‘Oh Jesus, yes. The pet detective. I just hope it was a good idea, calling him in.’
‘You never know. He could take over some of this dognapping enquiry, and give us a bit of a break.’
‘I’ll believe that when I meet him. He’ll probably have a magnifying-glass in one hand and a cat-basket in the other.’
Detective Scanlan said, ‘I’ll see if Dooley’s free now, any road. I should be back here before Conor Ó Máille turns up.’
‘Good. Make sure you are. It was your idea, after all, calling him in.’
When Detective Scanlan had gone, Katie asked Moirin to ring the Special Detective Unit in Dublin for her so that she could speak to Superintendent Matthew O’Malley. He answered immediately, and sounded very brisk and attentive. She could picture him: white-haired, bull-necked, strong-chinned, sitting to attention.
‘Kathleen, yes, how are you? Last time we met was at that annual superintendents’ conference in Naas, wasn’t it? What a hoolie that was and no mistake! What can I do for you today?’
‘I don’t need very much, Matthew, just a little information. It’s about that detective of yours who met Maureen Callahan.’
Superintendent O’Malley didn’t answer immediately, and she thought that he might not have heard her, so she added: ‘The one you told Jimmy O’Reilly about, so that he could tell me.’
‘Oh, yes – yes of course,’ said Superintendent O’Malley. For some reason he sounded more wary now, as if this was something that he didn’t want to talk about.
Katie said, ‘Anyway I met Maureen and she told me that her family are due to receive a very large shipment of contraband guns.’
‘Well, guns, that’s mainly the business they’re in, isn’t it, the Callahans? But it would be a real bonus to catch them at it, I must say.’
‘The shipment’s supposed to be arriving in Cork on Friday night, although she couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me exactly where. She said she’d text me as soon as she found out.’
‘I see.’
Katie hesitated for a moment. ‘I see?’ Was that all he had to say? If their positions had been reversed, her immediate response would have been ‘Why? What earthly reason would Maureen Callahan have for betraying her own family about a shipment of guns? Apart from the treachery of it, breaking the criminal code of silence, doesn’t she realise the appalling risk she’s taking with her own life?’
‘As soon as Maureen tells me that the weapons have been delivered, and where, I’ll obviously set up a raid,’ she said. ‘Before I consider mounting any kind of operation, though, I really would like to talk to this detective of yours, the one who met Maureen. I’d like to hear what his opinion is.’
‘His opinion of what?’
‘Well, his opinion of Maureen’s motive for giving us incriminating information about her own family, for starters.’
‘Did she tell you her motive?’
‘Yes. She said she was convinced that her family had murdered her boyfriend, Bradán O’Flynn, because they couldn’t tolerate a Ca
llahan doing a line with an O’Flynn.’
‘That sounds like a strong enough motive to me.’
Again, Katie thought, How incurious can he be? He was a senior detective, and yet he hadn’t asked what had led Maureen Callahan to believe that Bradán O’Flynn had been murdered. Neither had he asked if I had prior knowledge that he might have been killed, or was missing; or when this murder was supposed to have taken place, or how; or if there was a body. All the same, she didn’t challenge him. She had seen Superintendent O’Malley in arguments before, and she knew that it was easy to put his back up.
‘I’d still like your detective to know what Maureen told me about the arms shipment,’ she said. ‘He seems to have won the Callahan family’s confidence, so he’s bound to have some thoughts about it. I mean, he may think that for some unknown reason she’s just stringing me along.’
There was a very long silence, and then Superintendent O’Malley said, ‘I’m sorry, Kathleen. I can’t share his identity with you. As you well know, all SDU detectives operate deep under cover – they have to if we’re going to be effective. We can’t even tell quite senior officers who they are. Sometimes our investigations involve what you might call transgressions by the Gardaí as well as organised criminals – bribery and blackmail and so forth.’
‘Like wiping penalty points off driving licences, you mean?’
‘Well, yes, that kind of thing. And worse. So if I told you who our man was, his usefulness in Cork would be totally compromised, and that would mean months if not years of subterfuge going to waste.’
‘Oh, you don’t trust me, is that it?’ said Katie. ‘A member of one of Cork’s most wanted criminal families trusts me, but you don’t?’
‘Kathleen, you know that’s not the case. But I have to think of our man’s personal safety, too. If his cover was blown, you know as well as I do that he’d be floating in the Lee within the hour with a bullet in the back of his head.’
‘Does Assistant Commissioner O’Reilly know who he is?’
‘I can’t answer that, Kathleen. I’m sorry. It’s simply a question of security.’
‘I’m only asking you if Jimmy O’Reilly knows your man’s identity, that’s all.’
‘Why should that make any difference? But if you really must know, he doesn’t. Absolutely not.’
‘So you don’t even trust him?’
‘Jimmy O’Reilly and me go back a long way, Kathleen. I trust him implicitly. In this case, though, it was safer for all concerned if he didn’t know our operative’s name.’
‘Very well, Matthew,’ said Katie. ‘Let’s leave it at that, shall we?’
‘You’ll keep me informed about this arms operation? It could be quite a feather in your cap if you pull it off, couldn’t it? I’ll promise you this: if you do, I’ll buy you lunch at the Greenhouse.’
‘We’ll see,’ said Katie, although she thought, Jesus, how old-school Gardaí can you get? I’m surprised he doesn’t offer me honorary membership of the Masons.
‘Good luck to you Matthew,’ she told him, and put down the phone. Then she sat sipping her coffee for a few minutes, thinking, with that blank unblinking stare that her late husband Paul used to call her Sínead O’Connor face. He hadn’t dared to disturb her when she looked like that ‘in case you jump up and bite my fecking balls off, just because I’m a man’.
She had picked out at least one factual discrepancy in what Matthew O’Malley had told her. He had insisted that Jimmy O’Reilly didn’t know the identity of the SDU detective, while Jimmy O’Reilly had said that he did, even though he wasn’t allowed to tell her. Not only that, he had responded to all of her questions in the way that many criminal suspects did, strong on bluster but weak on detail, because they were making up their answers as they went along and they were challenging their questioner not to believe them. She could imagine that he had been fiddling with his pen while he spoke to her, and furrowing his eyebrows, and suddenly tilting back in his chair.
Her experience told her that he was lying about something, or at least not telling her the whole truth. But why? He had so much to gain if the Callahans were caught and convicted. It would shut down one of the biggest suppliers of illegal weapons into the country, both to criminals and dissident Republicans, and the SDU could take the credit for making the initial contact with Maureen Callahan.
*
She finished her coffee and then she decided it was time to go down to the holding cells to see if Keeno was in any state to be interviewed. When she arrived there, though, she found that there were three gardaí crowded in the corridor outside Keeno’s cell, and that his cell door was open.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked.
The gardaí shuffled aside so that she could enter Keeno’s cell. Keeno was lying flat on his back on his bunk while a middle-aged female paramedic was kneeling beside him, packing away a defibrillator. A male paramedic was standing in the corner holding up a stretcher. Keeno’s eyes were closed and his face was a strange dusty grey, as if somebody had emptied a pepperpot all over it.
‘What’s happened?’ asked Katie.
‘SCA,’ said the paramedic in the corner. ‘His heart’s beating normally again now but we’re going to take him to the Mercy for observation. You can thank your officers there for saving his life.’
The duty garda said, ‘It was real sudden, ma’am. He wasn’t too bad this morning although he was complaining about a pain in his chest. I fetched him some toast and a mug of tea and he was right in the middle of drinking his tea when he collapsed. I gave him CPR until Brogan could fetch the defibrillator.’
‘Well done the both of you,’ said Katie. She looked down at Keeno and said, ‘All right, you’d better take him away. At least one officer will have to go with him. Brogan – could you sort that out with Sergeant Kenny?’
Garda Brogan raised his hand in acknowledgement and went off. The paramedics lifted Keeno on to their stretcher and covered him with a blanket. He looked ghastly. If Katie hadn’t been able to see his chest rising and falling as he breathed, she would have sworn that he was dead.
‘He’s in desperate bad shape,’ said the female paramedic. ‘He has severe bruising to his chest, almost like somebody’s hit him with a sledgehammer. That could have been the cause of his arrhythmia. His blood pressure’s way up, too. One hundred and forty over ninety.’
‘He’s going to recover, though?’
‘I wouldn’t put money on it. The state he’s in, he could have another arrest at any time.’
Katie followed the paramedics to the front doors of the station and stood watching as they carried Keeno out and hurried him through the rain to the waiting ambulance. She realised that the consequences of this could be serious. If Keeno died, and it was established by the state pathologist that her kick to his chest was the cause of it, then it was almost certain that she would be suspended pending a full enquiry. It wouldn’t matter that she had kicked him while defending herself and her fellow officers. As Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin had warned her, there were plenty of civil rights groups who would immediately jump on what she had done as yet another example of ‘Garda brutality’.
She was still standing in the reception area when a taxi drew up outside the station. A tall man in a brown cap and a long brown coat climbed out, carrying a briefcase. He came briskly up the steps, pushed his way in through the doors, and walked across to the front desk.
Katie had been about to return to her office but she stayed where she was for a few moments because the man was extremely good-looking, almost film-star good-looking. After he had lifted off his cap to shake the rain off it, he ran his left hand through his wavy brown hair, which was as dark and shiny as polished mahogany, and Katie had immediately noticed that he was wearing no ring on it. His profile was strong and slightly Nordic, with a straight nose and a prominent jaw, and he had a dark neatly trimmed beard; but what caught Katie’s attention more than anything else was the way he was smiling. He seemed to be very rel
axed with the world, and very sure of himself, even in a Garda station. He was carrying a brown leather overnight case.
He went up to the desk and spoke to Sergeant Mulligan. Katie was too far away to hear what he was saying, but she saw Sergeant Mulligan shake his head. The man said something else, and then Sergeant Mulligan pointed towards Katie with his biro.
The man turned around, saw Katie, and smiled even more broadly. He came across the reception area and said, ‘Detective Superintendent Maguire, is it?’
There wasn’t only humour in his smile, there was humour in his eyes, too. They were the same polished-mahogany brown as his hair, and they shone, as if he had just thought of something that really amused him.
Katie nodded, closing her eyelids in a blink that was slightly longer than a normal reflexive blink, even though she knew why she was doing it. It was the long appreciative blink of a woman who likes what she sees, and can’t help communicating it.
‘That’s me, yes. Is there something I can help you with?’
The man kept on smiling. ‘I was supposed to be meeting Detective Scanlan, is it? But I’m a little early and I’ve just been told that she isn’t back yet.’
‘And you are?’
‘Oh, forgive me.’ The man put down his case, took out his wallet and handed Katie a business card. ‘Conor Ó Máille, Sixth Scents, Pet Detective.’
21
Kieran opened his eyes. He could see nothing but a pale green fog, and if it hadn’t been so warm he could have believed that he was floating out at sea somewhere. His whole body felt as if he were made of waterlogged sponge, and he was only just managing to keep his face above the surface. He thought that he was dipping up and down, and slowly turning round and round, and after a while the sensation began to make him feel sick.
He seemed to have been floating for over an hour when a face suddenly appeared in front of him. Perhaps he had nearly drowned and somebody had pulled him out of the water. Yet he still felt as if he were dipping up and down, even when the face came nearer, and stared at him intently.
Living Death Page 20