Living Death

by Graham Masterton

  Gerry Mulvaney was staring at him in disbelief. His mouth was open and he wasn’t even dragging at his cigarette any more.

  ‘Then of course there’s blindness,’ said the doctor. ‘Blindness combined with paralysis, that’s a good one, especially if the patients can’t speak to tell you how helpless they feel. Then there’s deafness. On top of those, there’s a whole variety of amputations. No feet, no legs below the knee, no legs below the pelvis. No genitalia. No fingers, no forearms, no arms at all. You can choose from any combination you like.’

  Gerry Mulvaney kept on staring at him, and then he suddenly cracked into a grin and said, ‘Jesus! You’re right! You made your point there! I do get wheeled easy, don’t I? You almost had me pissing meself there! Holy Saint Joseph! What a gowl I am!’

  He was still shaking his head in amusement when the doctor said, ‘Gerry – that wasn’t what I was saying to you.’

  The doctor’s voice was calm and he was sitting back relaxed with his legs crossed, although Grainne had raised her eyebrows and even Dermot had stopped prodding starting prices into his iPhone and looked up, his beady eyes bright with interest.

  ‘You wasn’t?’ said Gerry Mulvaney. ‘Then sorry, you have me totally puggalised here.’

  ‘I was giving you a list of options,’ the doctor told him. ‘If you’re going to become a patient here, you’ll have to have a number of severe disabilities, and you can choose any combination you like. My only stipulation is that your combined disabilities must make it impossible for you to escape, or to communicate with anybody in the outside world in any way at all, either by speech or by writing.’

  Urine began to run from between Gerry Mulvaney’s thighs and drip down the front of the chesterfield on to the carpet. Grainne wrinkled up her nose in disgust and tutted, but the doctor said nothing.

  ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’ said Gerry Mulvaney, his throat tight with desperation.

  ‘I am serious, yes. But at least I’m giving you a choice, and that’s not a privilege that any of my patients are normally offered, believe me.’

  ‘Why don’t you just take me outside and put a bullet in my head? I’d rather you did that.’

  ‘I expect you would. But then you’d be dead, wouldn’t you, and you’d be no use to me at all. I’m running a clinic here, Gerry, not a funeral parlour. Dead, you’d be nothing but an inconvenience, because I’d have to find somewhere to bury you. Alive, you’ll be a lasting asset, because you’ll be able to pay me back day after day, month after month, possibly for years.’

  ‘If you think I’m going to choose to have any of those things done to me, you’re stone hatchet mad!’

  ‘Some of them will be done to you whether you like it or not. I just thought it would be friendlier to give you a say in which ones they are.’

  Gerry Mulvaney looked down at the carpet, breathing heavily. Then he reached across and crushed out his cigarette.

  ‘There’s no rush,’ said the doctor. ‘Have a good think about what would be best for you. Would you prefer to see, or to hear? Would you prefer to have hands, or feet? It’s entirely up to you.’

  At last Gerry Mulvaney stood up. The crotch of his green corduroy trousers was soaked. He stared at the door as if he were calculating his chances of getting there before he could be stopped. The doctor nodded almost imperceptibly at Dermot and Dermot put down his iPhone and stood up, too, his hands clasped together in the classic pose of bouncers everywhere.

  ‘When—?’ Gerry Mulvaney began, and his voice was little more than a whinny. ‘When were you thinking of doing this? Like, disabling me, like?’

  ‘The sooner the better,’ said the doctor. ‘Sometime over the weekend, probably. I don’t think there’s anything in the Holy Book which says you can’t amputate on the Sabbath.’

  Grainne suppressed a smile. She always enjoyed the doctor’s mordant sense of humour, mostly because she was the only one in the clinic who understood it. Milo and Ger never did, even though they were a mordant sense of humour in themselves.

  ‘Right,’ said Gerry Mulvaney. He cleared his throat and repeated, ‘Right.’

  It was then that he spun around and instead of making a dash for the door, he galloped towards the large sash window. He crossed his arms in front of his face and threw himself at the glass, just as Dermot caught up with him and launched himself on top of him. There was a splintering crack that sounded more like a lightning strike than a window breaking, and both of them ended up hanging over the window-frame, half-in and half-out of the room – Gerry Mulvaney face down and Dermot on top of him. Glittering fragments of glass were spread across the floor like a scene from Frozen.

  Dermot stood up and brushed the shattered fragments from his white surgical jacket. There was a two-centimetre cut on the top of his bald head but otherwise he was unhurt. The doctor helped him to lift up Gerry Mulvaney and sit him down on the floor. Gerry Mulvaney’s face was glistening scarlet with blood, like a Hindu demon. His eyelids were drooping but he had suffered a deep diagonal laceration across his lips, so that he was finding it difficult to speak.

  ‘Looks like this feen needs to see a doctor,’ said Dermot.

  24

  After lunch, Katie and Detective O’Donovan had to make an appearance in court. They were giving evidence against appeals that were being made against two convictions – one for drug dealing and one for indecent exposure.

  Katie was attending in person because both cases were more serious than they looked on the list. The drug dealer was a divisional drugs squad detective who had misreported the number of packets of heroin that had been confiscated during a raid on a house in Kerryhall Road. He had been caught trying to sell the drugs in order to pay off his mortgage arrears.

  The flasher was a former TD. He was a candidate for the Dáil who had lost his seat at the last election for Cork South Central – the so-called ‘constituency of death’ because its four seats had been so hard to win. He was already alcoholic but his dependency on drink had worsened after his defeat. He had exposed himself to a woman at the delicatessen counter of Tesco’s at the Paul Street shopping centre, asking her, ‘What do you think of this sausage, then?’

  In court, the flasher insisted that he had genuinely been drawing the woman’s attention to a Clonakilty white pudding on the display counter, and that he had failed to realise that at the same time he was experiencing a ‘clothing malfunction’. The bench listened to him patiently, and then Detective O’Donovan showed them new CCTV evidence from Tesco that proved he had flagrantly displayed himself – or, as the state solicitor’s counsel had put it, ‘actually waved it, like the national flag’.

  Both appeals were turned down, although the detective’s term of imprisonment was reduced from two years to eighteen months on compassionate grounds and the former TD was spared jail if he agreed to residential treatment for his alcohol addiction.

  Katie and Detective O’Donovan shared a large black umbrella as they left the courthouse. The rain was hammering down again so hard that it was dancing like fairies on the surface of Washington Street.

  ‘That poor TD,’ said Detective O’Donovan, as he opened the door of Katie’s car for her. ‘I didn’t honestly know whether to laugh or cry.’

  ‘It’s still an offence, and a fierce unpleasant one at that,’ said Katie. ‘I know that he was so drunk that he doesn’t even remember doing it. If he’d done it to me, though, he’d have remembered it all right. I’d have chopped it off as soon as look at it.’

  Detective O’Donovan gave her a sickly grin. ‘Remind me not to have a clothing malfunction when you’re around, ma’am.’

  She had just switched on her engine when her iPhone pinged. She had a text message from Dr Kelley the Acting Deputy State Pathologist, who was still working at the morgue at Cork University Hospital.

  Dr Kelley had completed her post mortem examination of the alleged dognapper who had been shot by Eoin Cassidy, and as soon as she had done that, the Technical Bureau had creat
ed an image of his face with computer software. His likeness had been shown every night for three nights on the RTÉ television news, and published in the Examiner and the Echo, but so far nobody had come forward to say that they recognised him. Because of that, Bill Phinner the chief technical officer was going to be sending down his forensic artist Eithne O’Neill to draw her own reconstruction of the dognapper’s face.

  Eithne had been away on compassionate leave, tending to her dying sister. According to Dr Kelley’s text, however, her sister had passed away and she desperately wanted to get back to work to take her mind off her grief.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Detective O’Donovan, as they drove back through the rain to Anglesea Street. ‘Some way of getting over your grief, wouldn’t you say, drawing pictures of some scummer with half of his head blown off?’

  ‘Eithne’s brilliant, though,’ said Katie. ‘She has this fantastic feeling for dead people’s personalities, as well as the way they must have looked. She draws them like she actually knew them. You can never match that with any software.’

  She reached the Garda station, and parked, and she was about to climb out of the car when her iPhone pinged again and Dr Kelley sent her another text.

  ‘Stall it for a moment,’ she told Detective O’Donovan, laying a hand on his arm. ‘Dr Kelley says that she’s just started her post mortem on a fellow called Martin Ó Brádaigh. He was the victim of a road traffic accident two days ago on the N25 near Grange. Run over by a truck.

  ‘She says her examination was held up until today because she had to deal urgently with two newborn babies from the maternity ward.’

  She paused for a few moments while she read more of Dr Kelley’s text.

  While she did, Detective O’Donovan said, ‘That’s right, Martin Ó Brádaigh. I know him myself. He’s the owner of Ó Brádaigh’s Used Motors on Watercourse Road – or was, rather. Sergeant Breen sent us a report from Dungarvan about that accident, Ó Brádaigh being a Corkman and all. Knocked flat by a Paddy’s Whiskey lorry, he was. For some reason he’d stopped his car in the middle of the road and was crawling around the carriageway on his hands and knees. The paramedics who picked him up said his body fair reeked of alcohol, what was left of him. He had a record for drunk driving. The demon drink, eh? Makes you show off your sausage and crawl out in front of traffic and all sorts.’

  Katie said, ‘There’s more to it than that. Dr Kelley says that some of his most serious injuries weren’t caused by being run down. He has deep gashes in his perineum which look as if they might have been inflicted by a knife or some other sharp instrument.’

  ‘The perineum?’ said Detective O’Donovan, frowning. ‘Isn’t that the bit down between your – Jesus? Ouch! The stinky bridge we used to call it at school, if you’ll pardon the language.’

  ‘Think about something else,’ Katie advised him. ‘Think about what kind of sandwich you want for your lunch.’

  ‘Holy Mary Mother of God. I don’t think that’ll help at all. It’ll probably put me off cherry tomatoes for the rest of my life.’

  As soon as she had returned to her office, Katie hung up her coat, made a finger-waggling coffee-drinking gesture to Moirin, and then phoned Dr Kelley’s number.

  Dr Kelley answered almost at once and said, ‘Detective Superintendent! Thanks a million for calling. You’ve read my text, then?’

  ‘I have, yes. Jesus. Your man was stabbed before he was hit by that truck? Stabbed between the legs?’

  ‘He was, and very deep. You wouldn’t believe the internal trauma. At first guess I’d say a sharp pointed knife, more like a kitchen-knife than a clasp-knife.’

  ‘Would that in itself have proved fatal, if he hadn’t received medical attention?’

  ‘He’d lost a fair amount of blood but no major arteries were severed. So, yes, he probably would have survived. The Waterford guards had him fetched in here so that I could carry out a routine post mortem, but mainly to test him for alcohol and drugs. The coroner will be asking why he was wandering around in the middle of a fast main road, after all.’

  ‘Was he drunk, or high?’

  ‘His blood alcohol level was 87 milligrammes, and there were traces of cocaine in his blood and his urine and his saliva. I took a full range of samples as soon as his body arrived – but, like I say, I had to postpone the full post mortem until now. They’ve had a nasty outbreak of respiratory syncytial virus infection in the maternity ward, with two fatalities, sad to say. It doesn’t appear to be the usual strain of virus at all, so they’re in something of a panic.’

  ‘I hate to ask you this,’ said Katie, ‘but why weren’t the stab wounds noticed as soon as your man was undressed?’

  ‘One of the garda who brought him in said that the truck which hit him was travelling at eighty kph. The truck wasn’t fully loaded but it still would have weighed at least nine thousand kilos. Internally, he was smashed to bits and his entire skin surface is covered in bruises and tears and abrasions. To give you some idea, imagine a man who’s been killed in a fight with a bear and then thrown off the top of a cliff on to a whole heap of jagged rocks.’

  ‘How long will it take you to complete your post mortem?’

  ‘It won’t be today of course. Mid-morning tomorrow, I’d say.’

  ‘Please call me, if you would. I think I need to come down and take a look. Depending on what you find out, this could be a murder enquiry, or manslaughter at the very least.’

  ‘I will, no bother at all.’

  Katie called Detective O’Donovan to bring him up to date on what Dr Kelley had told her. Then she rang Inspector O’Rourke and asked him if he had any news about Keeno.

  ‘The Mercy are keeping me informed, ma’am. They contacted me last about an hour ago. He’s still unconscious – no better but no worse. They’re keeping him on a respirator to aid his breathing.’

  ‘What about poor Garda O’Keefe?’

  ‘His jaw’s been reset but he can take only liquids at the moment. He’s in good spirits, though, according to his girlfriend. She says the only thing you mustn’t do is make him laugh.’

  She didn’t need to ring Sergeant Begley. He had called her this morning to say that he had seen his doctor, and he had been signed off work for three days at least.

  She went back to her computer screen. She ran through the latest monthly figures for drug seizures and quickly saw that in spite of her new strategy to stem the new flood of narcotics she seemed to be fighting a losing battle. In fact the figures were 6.5 per cent up on last month. What she found hard to understand was that Revenue had reported an ever-increasing success rate in detecting drugs smugglers through Ringaskiddy and Rosslare ferry ports, and both Cork and Shannon airports – Shannon in particular. If they were catching more and more mules, where were all these drugs coming from?

  She sat back. She was feeling tired now, and pre-menstrual, and although she was hungry her stomach felt bloated. She wondered when Maureen Callahan would call her to tell her when and where the arms shipment was going to be delivered, and what kind of a raid she would have to set up, and how quickly. She wondered if John would still be awake when she returned home, and what kind of a mood he would be in. His desperate optimism was becoming almost more than she could bear. It made her feel heartless, and uncharitable, and she didn’t believe that she was either.

  All she had to look forward to this evening was meeting Conor Ó Máille, and she was beginning to regret that she had offered to drive him back to his guest house. She didn’t feel attractive at all, and certainly not in the mood for being seductive.

  She went into the small bathroom at the side of her office. She was surprised to see that she didn’t look nearly as puffy and tired as she felt. After she had brushed her hair and applied some more lipstick she pouted at herself in the mirror, and turned her head coquettishly from side to side, and thought that she scored at least 75 per cent of her usual attractiveness.

  ‘You should always remember that you’re looking at men from t
he inside of your face,’ her grandmother had told her. ‘They’re looking at you from the outside, like, and they’ll see what they want to see.’

  She had never quite understood what that meant, but in a way she thought she did now.

  *

  Conor knocked on her office door dead on 5:30 pm, as if he had been waiting in the corridor outside and counting off the seconds on his watch.

  She was handing Moirin the last of the files that she had been reading and the letters that she had signed. She took a last sip of her coffee but it was cold.

  ‘Are you finished?’ he asked her, with a smile. ‘I can always wait for you, if you’re not ready.’ He was carrying a large bag from Saville menswear store on Oliver Plunkett Street, as well as his overnight case.

  ‘No, I’m ready,’ she said, putting on her raincoat. ‘What have you bought?’

  ‘A couple of shirts and a Tommy Hilfiger sweater.’ He lifted the sweater out of the bag to show her. It was a strong red colour, and she had always liked red, because it clashed with her dark red hair.

  They went downstairs in the lift, facing each other, smiling, but neither of them saying anything. Outside in the car park it was still raining hard, so Katie put up her umbrella. Conor took it from her and held it over their heads as they hurried over to her Focus, and then he opened the driver’s door for her.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ he asked her, when he had dropped his bags and the wet umbrella behind his seat.

  ‘Starved. But I have a leftover stew at home. I always make far too much.’

  ‘Well, I’m starved, too. I didn’t have any breakfast this morning. How about I buy you an early supper before you drive me up to Summerhill?’

  ‘All right,’ said Katie. ‘But let’s go halves on it. This will be a business dinner, not a date. What do you fancy to eat?’