Living Death

by Graham Masterton

‘Of course. Holy Mother of God, Lorcan, I’d soon cut them off if they didn’t. It’s the delay, that’s all, while the cash gets laundered. I have no intention of being caught out by the Criminal Assets Bureau – not like that Patrick Duggan, with all those empty beer kegs full of euros buried under his farmyard. It’s not only that, though – we need to expand the business much faster if we’re going to dominate the market, and that means converting at least three more ambulances, and doing it soon. We’re going to need more patients, too.’

  The grey-haired man crushed out his cigarette and blew out a last stream of smoke. ‘There’s a breeding kennels in Mullingar that has twenty or thirty pedigree Akitas that we could go after. They’re fetching very decent prices in the UK just at the moment, Akitas, and we can sell them for fighting, too. The Pakis in Manchester will always pay well over the odds for Akitas.’

  ‘What about those fighting dogs? What’s happening with them?’

  ‘Bartley took them up to Ballyknock. He’s handed them over to some friend of McManus to train them. We could be looking at a hundred grand out of them if we’re lucky.’

  The doctor said, ‘I have no belief in luck, Lorcan, you know that. There’s no such thing. There’s only winning or losing, and the only difference between winning and losing is forward planning. Like the father used to say, the road to ruin is signposted with spontaneity.’

  The grey-haired man said nothing to that. They both knew that the doctor had acted spontaneously just once in his career, and that had been the finish of him.

  ‘I’ll get this dealt with,’ said the doctor, picking up the holdall. ‘Are you still okay for Sunday? It’ll be Siobhán again, and Fearghal. Fiontán’s not too fit at the moment.’

  ‘That’s the whole fecking point, isn’t it?’ grinned the grey-haired man. ‘None of them are supposed to be fit. The unfitter, the better, that’s what I thought.’

  27

  Katie was home by a quarter to seven and quietly let herself in. The nursery door was closed but the kitchen door was open and Barney came snuffling out to greet her. Bridie was up already, and boiling the kettle to make a pot of tea.

  ‘Thank you so much for staying over, Bridie,’ smiled Katie. ‘You don’t know what a blessing that was.’

  ‘Oh, it was no bother at all,’ Bridie told her. ‘In fact it was fantastic to get a quiet night’s sleep for a change. My neighbours upstairs have a new wain and it’s forever bawling its head off and of course they’re forever getting up and down to feed it, or change it , or walk up and down trying to get it back to sleep. It’s like having the army upstairs, I tell you.’

  ‘John still sleeping?’

  ‘He was complaining about the phantom pain again after I gave him his supper so I gave him some of the codeine linctus and he’s been in dreamland ever since. I hate to say it but you look fair done yourself. What kind of an emergency was it?’

  ‘Bit of a scrap,’ said Katie. ‘All sorted now, though. I’ll just go and take a shower and change.’

  ‘A cup of tea will crown you, and how about something to eat? I’m famous for my French toast if you could fancy that.’

  Katie smiled and nodded. She was suddenly beginning to feel very tired.

  *

  John still hadn’t woken up by the time she had to leave, so she sat down in the living-room to write him a note. Barney came and stood protectively beside her, with his tongue hanging out.

  ‘Dearest John, sorry that Cork’s criminal fraternity keep calling me away! Bridie told me that you were suffering pain again, I hope I’m not making it worse for you. I’ll be back home this evening at about—’

  She heard the nursery door open, and her pen froze, because Bridie was still clattering about in the kitchen, so she couldn’t have opened it. Then she heard a soft stomping sound, followed by a pause, and then another, and another. Gradually, awkwardly, the sounds came towards the living-room door.

  Katie put down her pad and turned around. The door was open but there was nobody there. She waited, and listened, and Barney listened too, and made that mewling noise in the back of his throat – the noise he made when he suspected that the postman was outside, or that there was a rabbit in the garden.

  It was then that John appeared, and quickly made a grab for the sides of the doorframe to support himself. He was wearing a blue pyjama jacket and rolled-up pyjama trousers, and his stumps were covered in thick white surgical socks. His hair was tousled and his face was very pale. He was gritting his teeth in an effort to grin.

  ‘John!’ said Katie. ‘For the love of Jesus!’ She stood up immediately and went across to help him.

  He raised one hand and said, ‘I’m okay! I’m fine! Look at me, I can walk!’

  ‘Are you sure you’re okay? Come and sit down.’

  ‘I’m grand. I really am. My therapist said I should try to walk as soon as possible. I started yesterday and I was hoping to show you last night when you came home.’

  ‘I’m sorry. We had a crisis at the station and I had to stay there all night. Are you sure I can’t give you a hand?’

  John said, ‘No, no – I can manage. It’s a question of balance, that’s all.’

  He hesitated for a moment, and then he released his grip on the doorframe and made a jerky, hurried rush towards the couch. Katie held out her hands in case he stumbled and fell, but he reached the couch and stood there, panting and not grinning any more, but plainly triumphant.

  ‘There! And you wait until my legs are ready! You won’t be able to tell that’s it not the old me!’

  Katie said, ‘That’s pure fantastic, John! Well done.’

  She couldn’t tell him how unnerving it was to see him standing up. Apart from the fact that the trauma of losing his legs had turned his hair grey and etched deep lines into his cheeks, he was now six inches shorter than she was, instead of six inches taller. She felt as if she were dreaming, and talking to some extraordinary dwarf.

  She picked up the piece of paper on which she had been writing and tore it in half. ‘I was just leaving you a note to tell you that I should be back this evening. I can’t say what time because I have to go to Tipperary. I’ll be off now. Do you need a hand getting back to bed, or are you going to stay here?’

  ‘I’ll stay here for a while. Give us a kiss before you go.’

  Katie bent forward and kissed him. His lips were very dry and his breath smelled faintly of garlic. He reached up and laid his hand on her shoulder and tried to kiss her more deeply, but she pulled away and said, ‘Really, John, I have to go. I’m late already.’

  As she turned to leave, he took two unbalanced steps towards her, reaching out for the flap of her jacket, but Barney nudged him with his nose as if he were warning him not to touch her.

  ‘’Bye, Bridie!’ Katie called out. ‘I’ll see you after! Probably about eight!’

  Bridie came to the kitchen door, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘You don’t have to hurry, Katie! If you can’t manage to come back at all, it won’t bother me! I can have another good night’s sleep!’

  *

  She stopped at Anglesea Street to see if she had any messages or letters that needed her attention, and to tell Moirin that she would be driving up to Tipperary.

  Detective Ó Doibhilin met her in the corridor as she was leaving. He was eating a hand pie which he kept behind his back while he talked to her.

  ‘Nothing to report of any note, ma’am,’ he told her, wiping the crumbs from his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘She went to the Douglas Village shopping centre yesterday evening and parked in the multi-storey for two hours, but that’s all. The rest of the time she’s been at home.’

  ‘Well, who knows? We may see her heading somewhere interesting tomorrow,’ said Katie. ‘Good man, keep your eye on her.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that, ma’am. She won’t be going anywhere unless I know about it. Where are you heading on to now – the Wilton Hilton?’

  Katie drove to the University Hospital. She
didn’t mind that it was still raining because the rain seemed different today – fresh rain, washing away the past. Dr Kelley was already in the mortuary, sitting in front of her computer; and Eithne O’Neill was there, too, standing beside the body of the dead dognapper, with a small sketchbook. Eithne was a slim, pretty girl, but this morning her hair was tied back severely and she was wearing no make-up and there were dark smudges under her eyes as if she hadn’t been sleeping.

  Katie raised a hand in salute to Dr Kelley but went across to talk to Eithne first. She tried not to look at the dognapper with the top half of his face blown off and his dark red sinus cavities exposed, but it was horribly fascinating and she found it very hard not to. She couldn’t help thinking: The inside of my head looks like this, too.

  ‘I heard about your sister, Eithne,’ she said. ‘I’m so sad for you. I really am.’

  Eithne gave her a fleeting smile. ‘Thanks for that, ma’am. At least it was quick. She only found out two months ago that she had the liver cancer. The first time she went to the doctor he told her she was pregnant. She was so happy, until she found out what it really was.’

  ‘That’s tragic. I’m surprised you want to come back to doing this. So soon, anyway.’

  ‘I’ve seen enough dead people to know that life doesn’t last for ever. And you never know when it’s going to be your turn. Like this fellow here. I’ll bet he wouldn’t have bothered to eat any supper that evening if somebody had told him that he was going to have his head blown off before he had the chance to eat tomorrow’s breakfast.’

  Katie looked at Eithne’s preliminary sketches. She had already created an image of a man with a triangular face, with a prominent nose and a weak, receding chin.

  ‘The ZBrush image didn’t show his forehead wide enough, in my opinion,’ said Eithne. ‘I reassembled all of the pieces of his skull that we’d been able to salvage from the crime scene, and I’d definitely say that he had a dome-shaped forehead. I should have a finished image by later today, or maybe tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m not too sure I like the way he’s staring at me,’ said Katie.

  ‘That’s because people with this kind of physiognomy tend to keep their chins down and look up at you, rather than straight and level, and that gives them the appearance of being disapproving or suspicious. It can also make them appear to be shy, even if they’re not shy at all. That’s one thing I’ve learned about facial reconstruction. Don’t think about the way a deceased person looked to the outside world, think about the way they thought they looked.’

  Dr Kelley came across. She was a small, tubby woman with heavy-rimmed glasses and bushy eyebrows. Katie had always thought that with a pair of tweezers and a little blusher she could have made herself quite attractive, in a Russian doll-like way.

  ‘I’ve been watching this young lady at work and she’s amazing,’ said Dr Kelley. ‘But why don’t you come over and take a look at our stabbing victim?’

  Katie gave Eithne a brief, consoling hug, and then said, ‘What was your sister’s name?’

  ‘Aoife. But our mother called her Féileacán, because she was always running around flapping her arms like a little butterfly.’

  ‘Féileacán, that’s pretty. I’ll say a prayer for her tonight, I promise.’

  She followed Dr Kelley to the other side of the mortuary, where Martin Ó Brádaigh’s body was lying on a stainless-steel autopsy table – naked, with only a folded green sheet over him to cover his genitals. His chest and his forearms were tattooed with snakes and demons and naked girls, although he was covered in so many bruises and contusions that some of the images had been scraped off or blotted out. His head was still violently angled to one side, as if he were straining to see himself reflected in the table underneath him.

  ‘Almost all of his injuries are consistent with him having been hit by a speeding truck,’ said Dr Kelley. ‘There’s even a diagonal dent across his forehead which exactly matches the driver’s side windscreen wiper.’

  ‘Was there any chance at all that he could have survived?’

  Dr Kelley shook her head. ‘Not a hope. His internal injuries are so catastrophic that it’s going to take me ten minutes at least in the coroner’s court just to read them all out. Nobody could have been hit by a vehicle of that mass at that speed and not been instantly killed. The total momentum was approximately one hundred and ninety-eight thousand metres per second.’

  ‘But the stab wound?’

  ‘Like I say, it must have been inflicted before he was knocked down. It was fresh, though. From his condition I would estimate that he was stabbed no more than thirty minutes or so before the truck hit him.’

  She lifted the sheet that was covering Martin Ó Brádaigh’s midriff. His penis and his scrotum had been lifted up and stuck to his stomach with surgical tape so that his perineum was exposed. Between his testicles and his anus there was a ragged, star-shaped laceration, although Katie could see by the wider slices at the side of the star where the knife must have first been pushed into him.

  ‘Mother of God, that must have been agony,’ she said. ‘And whoever did that, they must have wanted to cause him the maximum pain possible.’

  ‘I’ve taken an X-ray and a CT scan,’ said Dr Kelley. ‘What I’m going to do now is feed the scan into a 3-D printer so that I can give you a plastic replica of the knife that was used to stab him. Every knife-blade has its tiny imperfections so if you can find the original knife you’ll be able to compare it and prove that it was the actual weapon involved.’

  ‘That’s a start anyway,’ said Katie, although she didn’t like to say that her chances of finding the original knife were almost nil. What she really needed were eye-witnesses to the stabbing. If it happened out in the open, right in the middle of the N25, in daylight, somebody must have seen it, surely? One witness had come forward to say that he had actually seen the Paddy’s Whiskey truck hitting Martin Ó Brádaigh when he was crawling across the road, and two more witnesses had seen his body shortly afterwards, when the truck driver was calling for an ambulance. But he had stopped his Subaru right in the middle of the eastbound carriageway, and that was presumably when he was attacked. She found it hard to believe that not a single passing driver could remember his car obstructing the road, or have seen any other vehicles parked nearby. His attacker must have had some means of getting there and getting away afterwards, unless he had run off over the fields, which didn’t seem likely.

  Katie thanked Dr Kelley and said goodbye to Eithne and then she drove back to Anglesea Street. As soon as she got back into her office she called Mathew McElvey in the press office to come up and see her. He was in the canteen but he came up immediately, carrying a half-finished cup of coffee.

  ‘Mathew, I want you to put out a witness appeal for this fellow Martin Ó Brádaigh who was run down on the N25 just past Grange.’

  She explained how Ó Brádaigh had stopped his car in the middle of the road, leaving his door open, and that it was likely that he had been assaulted shortly after.

  ‘To anybody driving past, it may not have been apparent that he was being attacked, which may be the reason why nobody’s come forward.’

  ‘Where exactly did this happen? And when?’

  ‘One of the sergeants at Dungarvan has all the details,’ said Katie. ‘I have his name here, yes – ask for a Sergeant Breen. He should be able to email you a picture of the car, too, and that might jog somebody’s memory.’

  ‘When do you want this to go out?’ asked Mathew.

  ‘I’m leaving for Tipp in about an hour and a half, and I’ll be gone for most of the afternoon, so if you can have it ready for me to see before then. Ideally, I’d like it go out in time for the Six-One News this evening, and tomorrow morning’s Examiner.’

  ‘Oh, right. And if any of the media want to talk to you about it?’

  ‘Put them through to Inspector O’Rourke. I’ll brief him all about it before I go.’

  After Mathew McElvey had gone, Katie sat at he
r desk for a few moments, looking at the letters and folders that Moirin had left for her. She thought about Conor and she couldn’t help smiling to herself. She had never wondered before what it might be like to resign from An Garda Siochána and live like an ordinary wife. Even when she was married to Paul it had never entered her mind, and she had certainly never considered it with John. But now, with Conor?

  She even wondered what it might be like to have another child. Or children even. A little boy and a little girl. Nothing would bring her little Seamus back, even if she wept all day and all night for the rest of her life. But she was still young enough to have more.

  Moirin came in, with half an egg-and-tomato sandwich on a plate.

  ‘Do you fancy this, ma’am? I’m as full as a goose. I think the eyes overestimated the stomach, like, do you know what I mean?’

  ‘No, thanks, Moirin,’ said Katie. She was too churned up inside to feel hungry, too excited. ‘Detective O’Donovan will probably do it justice, though. He’d eat the Lamb of God that one, and come back for the ewe.’

  28

  She hardly recognised Conor when he arrived at the station just after 12:00. He was wearing a black baseball cap and a puffy bronze windcheater and black jeans, and dirty runners. His eyes were hidden behind RayBans.

  ‘State of you la,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘Oh come on, this is my dog fighter’s disguise. I couldn’t blend in with the likes of Guzz Eye McManus if I was too sartorial.’

  ‘How about me? Do you think I’m too dressed up?’ asked Katie. She had put on her black raincoat with the pointed hood, the one that John said made her look like a witch, and shiny black leather boots.

  ‘No, you’re perfect. You look like my girlfriend would look, if you were my girlfriend, but that’s how I’ll have to introduce you.’

  She reached up and took off his sunglasses. The desk sergeant noticed her doing it, and stared at her intently for a moment before going back to the report he was filling in. She looked directly into Conor’s eyes and said, ‘Fair play. I don’t mind being your girlfriend.’