‘Three.’
‘Okay, then. Three it is. I’m going into town right now and I’ll bring the cash right back for you.’
Before they left the shed, Katie stopped by the bull mastiff’s cages. Both of them came right up to the wire and barked at her as if they were ripping the lining out of their throats.
‘What are the chains for?’ she shouted at Bartley, above the barking. ‘They must be desperate heavy for them.’
‘That’s the whole point, darling,’ said Bartley. ‘Carrying the weight of them chains, day and night, that builds up their neck and their upper body strength. I have some extra weights, too, which I hang on to their chains when I take them out for a run.’
They stepped outside. As he shut the door of the shed, Bartley said, ‘If you’re so interested, darling, why don’t ye come and take a gander at how I train the dogs up to gameness. I was all ready to do a little baiting when The Guzz rang me.’
Katie already knew that dogfight trainers used extreme cruelty to prepare their animals for a match, and she was aware of what baiting involved. She would have given anything to arrest Bartley Doran there and then, but she knew that it would be far too dangerous without back-up. Apart from that, she would need lengthy and careful surveillance of what he was doing, and independent evidence from witnesses. What was she going to tell the court? ‘I saw dogs with no food and nothing to drink and heavy chains round their necks’? The judge would want to know why she hadn’t simply reported Bartley to the ISPCA. Case dismissed.
Limping, Bartley led them back towards the large steel barn. As they came nearer, Katie could hear several dogs barking from inside there, too.
‘So what’s your line of business, darling?’ Bartley asked her. ‘Or are you a lady of leisure? Or pleasure?’
‘I’m a hair stylist,’ said Katie.
‘Oh, yeah? Where’s that, then?’
‘Gerrardines, on Liberty Square, in Thurles,’ Katie told him, without hesitation. She had done over half an hour’s homework for her role as ‘Sinéad’.
‘Oh! Hair stylist! Maybe I can persuade ye to pop down here now and again and give us a trim,’ said Bartley. ‘I have to keep me ginger curls in order, if ye know what I mean, wink, wink.’
Katie simply blinked at him as if she didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. He opened up one of the barn doors for them and they went inside.
The floor of the barn was thinly covered in sawdust. On the right-hand side a circle of wooden crates formed a makeshift dog-fighting ring, and three bored-looking young men were sitting on the crates, each of them holding a dog tightly on a leash – two bull mastiffs and a Staffordshire bull terrier. Katie thought the young men looked like members of an unsuccessful heavy metal band – all three of them were wearing black T-shirts and their arms were blue with tattoos right up to the elbows. They had silver studs through their cheeks and hair that was shaved at the sides but grown long on top and tied back with elastic bands.
The dogs were barking and snarling and trying to lunge at each other, and Katie could see that it was taking all of the young men’s strength to hold them back.
Another dog was tied up by itself to one of the crates – a chocolate-brown poodle. The poodle was in very poor condition – its coat obviously hadn’t been clipped in months and it had wood-shavings and twigs and dried leaves clinging to it. It wasn’t joining in the cacophony of barking – it was simply standing where it was tethered, shivering.
‘All right, lads?’ Bartley said to the three young men. ‘We’ll get started on the baiting directly so. I’m just giving these good people the guided tour.’
‘This bastard’s only shit on me runner,’ said one of the young men, in a slurred Kerry accent.
Bartley laughed. ‘Ha! I hope you gave him a fierce good kicking for it!’
‘He did that all right,’ another of the young men put in, with a cackle. ‘Right in the mebs. Never saw a dog jump so high in the whole of me life.’
On the left-hand side of the barn stood several large pieces of equipment that looked as if they had been stolen from a children’s playground. There was a tall metal pole with six arms jutting out from the top of it, like a helicopter propeller. From each of these arms a chain was dangling, with a collar on the end of it.
‘This is the jenny, or the catmill some folks call it,’ said Bartley, limping up to it. ‘We chain the dogs up, one dog to each beam, like, except for one beam, which has a bait animal chained up to it, like a cat or a pup or a rabbit maybe, or another dog that’s not been showing too much fighting spirit. Of course the dogs try to chase after the bait, and sometimes they go round and round for fecking hours. Once the exercise session’s over, we take off their collars and throw them the bait, as a reward, like. If we do that, though, that’s the only food we’ll give them all day, and that makes them fight each other all the more fiercer for it. A dog will always fight better if he’s hungry. And thirsty. And hurt.’
Next to the catmill there was another metal pole, with a powerful spring hanging down from the top of it. Attached to the spring was a ragged piece of brown-and-white cowhide, about the size of a hand-towel, which was torn and pitted with scores of teeth-marks.
‘This is the jump pole,’ Bartley explained. ‘The dogs jump up and bite the leather, and they hang there for as long as they can. It’s great for strengthening their jaw-muscles, and the back legs, too, because they keep on jumping up until they’ve got a good grip.’
‘But why do they want to do that?’ asked Katie.
‘Because they’re starving,’ said Conor. ‘You’ve heard of shipwrecked sailors eating their own shoes. This is the same.’
‘You see that birdcage, darling, down on the floor there?’ said Bartley. ‘Now and then we’ll shut up a cat in it, or a pup, or a chicken, and we’ll hang that from the spring instead of the leather. I tell you, once those dogs have got their delph into that cage they’ll hang there till hell freezes over. Like Redmond says, they’re starving.’
Next to the jump pole there were two professional-size treadmills that Katie could well imagine had been stolen from some gym. Both of them had chains and collars fastened to them and both of them reeked of dog urine.
‘Well, they speak for themselves, these do,’ said Bartley. ‘We can chain a dog up to one of these and make it run for hours. Great for its heart, like, and its stamina. If it collapses, we leave the treadmill running so it gets battered about, so it soon learns to stay on its feet, even when it’s flah’d out.’
‘Sounds like me at Gerrardine’s, after a long day,’ said Katie. ‘You wouldn’t believe how tiring it is, doing highlights, and having to listen to some auld wan rabbiting on about the cruise she took to Ma-jork-ah!’
Pretending to be Sinéad helped her to suppress her rage. The last time she had felt as angry as this was when she had arrested a 41-year-old father in Togher for sexually abusing his own three-year-old daughter.
‘We also give the dogs a rake of vitamins and drugs to condition them and stir them up to fight,’ said Bartley. ‘Testosterone, and weight-gain supplements, and steroids, as well as speed and cocaine. It works out expensive, for sure, but we make so much profit out of each fight that it’s nothing at all by comparison. That last fight at Clonlong, like, we netted over three hundred thousand.’
Conor said, ‘That’s fantastic,’ although Katie pretended that she hadn’t heard, or wasn’t interested even if she had. But she was beginning to see the raid on Sceolan Kennels in a new and very different light. Once the twenty-six stolen dogs had been sold, or ransomed, or trained for dogfights, the dognappers could easily clear three-quarters of a million euros out of it. That meant that it could have been far more profitable than an armed bank robbery or a major drugs deal.
‘What’s that, up against the wall there, that pole?’ asked Conor.
‘That?’ said Bartley. ‘That’s what we call a flirtpole. It’s hand-held, the flirtpole, for when we’re exercising only your sing
le dog. We fix a lure to the end of it like a piece of meat or a dead cat or something and then we drag the lure around us in a circle, and the dog goes chasing after it.’
He laid his hand on Katie’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. ‘I’ll tell ye this, darling, people say that dogs are intelligent, but if dogs had any fecking sense at all they’d come up to us when we’re dragging the flirtpole around and say, “Come here to me, feen, there’s no way I’m running around and around after that lump of meat like some kind of four-legged eejit. Take it off the end of that fecking pole and feed it to me right now or I’ll bite your fecking ankles.”’
‘If a dog said that to me, I’d be amazed,’ said Conor. ‘I haven’t yet met a dog that could even say “Give me a slice of Clonakilty black pudding, fried on both sides.”’
Katie was about to laugh, as Sinéad would have done, but Bartley turned to Conor and his tone was unmistakably aggressive. ‘Don’t ye try taking the piss out of me, Redmond, boy. I don’t think your beour here would want to see ye ending up as dog bait – would you, darling?’
‘Only codding you, Bartley,’ said Conor, giving Katie a quick, cautionary look. In spite of his smiling and his over-familiarity, there was nothing pleasant or forgiving about Bartley Doran, and now Katie had seen how quickly he could turn.
Bartley limped back to the dogfight arena. ‘Right, let’s get this show started, shall we? Dylan – you want to put the bait in the ring, boy?’
Katie moved close to Conor and said, under her breath, ‘Mother of God. I know what’s going to happen and I don’t really want to watch.’
Bartley turned around and beckoned them to come closer. ‘C’mere!’ he called them, over the ceaseless barking of the three fighting dogs. ‘Ye’ll like this, I promise ye!’
Dylan handed the leash of his bull mastiff to the young man sitting beside him. He walked around the ring to where the poodle was tethered, and untied it. Then he picked it up and threw it bodily into the middle of the ring, as carelessly as a baggage handler throwing a bag. It fell on to its side, rolled over, and then scrambled unsteadily back on to its feet, still shivering.
The three fighting dogs went berserk. Their barking rose to a harsh and frenzied yammer, more like pneumatic drills than dogs, and they strained at their leads so hard that the two young men who were holding them were pulled unwillingly on to their feet. Terrified, the poodle backed away to the opposite side of the ring, limping like Bartley, and Katie could see that one of its legs was sticking out at an awkward angle, and was probably fractured. When it reached the wooden crates it tried to jump up, but the crates were too high and it could manage only an awkward series of ineffectual little hops.
‘Oh Jesus Christ,’ said Katie. It was taking every ounce of her self-discipline not to take out her gun and stop this horror immediately.
Bartley raised his left arm in the air. He kept it raised for four or five seconds, for dramatic effect, and then he shouted ‘Let ’em go, lads!’ and brought it down as if he were starting a race.
The three young men unclipped the fighting dogs’ collars. The dogs instantly stopped barking and shot across the ring. The poodle made a last desperate effort to jump over the crates, but it couldn’t summon up enough strength, and the fighting dogs tore into it as if they hadn’t been fed for days. Katie guessed that Bartley had starved them on purpose, just for this.
One of the bull mastiffs bit into the side of the poodle’s neck, while the Staffie crunched into its spine. The other bull mastiff went for its belly, tearing away curls of brown hair and triangular flaps of skin. The poodle screamed like a badly injured child, and so the first bull mastiff clamped its jaws into its face, shaking its head violently from side to side. It ripped off the poodle’s nose and most of the flesh from its cheek, and dragged out its left eye on a string of optic nerve.
Bartley whacked his blackthorn stick on top of the crates in delight. ‘What do ye think of that, then? There’s a sight for sore eyes, wouldn’t you say? There’s a fecking sight for sore eyes!’
The three young men were whooping and laughing and whistling to the fighting dogs to encourage them. ‘Come on, Tyson, bite his fecking head off!’
Blood was spraying around the dogs as if they were being attacked by a swarm of angry red wasps. Their assault on the poodle was relentless, and Katie had to close her eyes. Even with her eyes closed, though, she could still hear snapping and wrenching noises, and the sound of the fighting dogs snarling and guzzling and growling as they ripped the poodle apart. But still, somehow, the poodle kept on screaming.
Conor put his arm around her shoulders and spoke quietly into her ear. ‘I know how much this disgusts you, Sinéad, but Bartley has his eye on you and you have to look like you’re enjoying it.’
Katie knew that he was right. She opened her eyes and looked across at Bartley and gave him a thumbs-up and grinned. Bartley had obviously been watching her, because his expression changed from suspicious to satisfied, and he lifted his stick in acknowledgement.
The poodle made one last effort to escape from its tormentors. Half-blind, with its sides hanging in shreds, it twisted itself free from them and managed to hump its way to the middle of the ring. Its belly had been torn open and it was dragging its glistening intestines through the sawdust. Again, Katie felt an almost irresistible urge to pull out her revolver, if only to shoot the poodle and save it any more agony.
Conor must have sensed her despair, because he squeezed her arm. She knew that he adored dogs, too, and that it was just as painful for him to witness this baiting as it was for her.
The poodle stood still, ruined, with its head bowed and one ear hanging loose. The three fighting dogs jumped on it again, and it dropped sideways on to the floor. All Katie could see after that was their wrestling blood-spattered bodies and their stumpy tails sticking up as if they were sexually excited.
Bartley let them ravage the poodle for a minute or two longer, but then he pushed aside one of the crates and limped into the ring. ‘That’s enough, now!’ he shouted at them. ‘Fecking get off out of it! Ye’ve had your fill of fun, ye greedy bastards!’
The fighting dogs took no notice of him, so he lifted his blackthorn stick and started to beat them on their backs, so hard that they were yowling in pain and backing away from him.
‘Come on, lads,’ Bartley said to the three young men. ‘Get their leads on and lock them back up in their cages.’
He turned to Katie and Conor and said, ‘They didn’t do bad at all, did they? Except they shouldn’t have let up like that and give the bait a chance to get away. When they’re in a real fight, that could be fecking fatal, I tell ye. Still – a couple more sessions like this and they’ll be up to gameness, I’d say.’
The three young men clipped the dogs’ leashes back on and dragged them away. After they had gone, Bartley took Katie and Conor back outside. As they left the barn, Katie looked back at the grisly remains of the poodle and wished that she were able to take a photograph of it. Even if she never managed to arrest Bartley for handling stolen animals and dog fighting, a least the ISPCA could try to prosecute him for cruelty.
Conor zipped up his windcheater and said, ‘Thanks for the show, Bartley. That was ten times better than anything that’s been on the telly.’
‘True that,’ said Katie. ‘Made my hair stand on end, I’ll tell you, and I’m a professional stylist.’ She couldn’t think of anything to say that was stupider than that.
‘Like, most people are far too fecking soft on their dogs,’ said Bartley, as he accompanied them back to their car. ‘The Lord specifically created dogs for the service of man, and that’s all there is to it. Why, even the Lord’s name is “dog” spelled backwards. Dogs are for sniffing out rats and racing and fighting and guiding blind feckers across the road. They’re not for eating you out of house and home and then dossing down on your couch and farting like the Uillean pipes.’
‘Well, we’re heading into Cashel now to fetch your grade for you,’
said Conor. ‘It won’t take us long. I’m pure pleased to have found a Great Dane as fine as that one. Who’d you get him from, by the way? I wouldn’t mind seeing if they have any more as good as that.’
Katie took out her iPhone and held it up in front of her face so that she could pretend to primp her hair, as if she wasn’t at all interested in how Bartley was going to answer that question. But having that one question answered was the only reason they had driven all the way up here to Ballyknock, and braved a face-to-face meeting with Guzz Eye McManus, and witnessed Bartley’s gruesome dog baiting. She was so tense waiting to hear what Bartley was going to say that she stopped tweaking her hair and held her breath.
‘Oh, sure, yeah,’ said Bartley. ‘Ye have only to ask him and he’ll find ye whatever breed you want. He doesn’t come cheap, mind, and he doesn’t expect ye to be asking him any nosey-parker questions about where he gets them from, the dogs.’
‘Maybe I know him already,’ said Conor.
‘Well, happen ye do, but he doesn’t advertise himself on the interweb or anything like that.’
‘So?’ said Conor.
‘So, like, what?’
‘So what’s his name?’
‘Oh. Didn’t I say? Lorcan Fitzgerald. That’s your man.’
‘So how can I contact him, this Lorcan Fitzgerald?’
‘Hold on,’ said Bartley, taking his mobile phone out of his pocket. ‘I have a number for him here. What you do is, you ring this number and tell him who you are and what you’re after, and if he likes the sound of you, he’ll ring you back.’
‘And if he doesn’t like the sound of you?’
‘Then he won’t ring you back. Simple as that.’
*
They drove back down the narrow claustrophobic lane to Palmer’s Hill and then into the town of Cashel. Neither of them spoke for a while, although Conor reached across and laid his hand on top of Katie’s hand, just for a moment. It was almost like a benediction.
They parked outside the large grey AIB Bank in Cashel’s Main Street, but before they climbed out of the car, Katie said, ‘Holy Mother of God, Conor. I’ve seen some vile things done to innocent animals in my life, but that.’
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