Dead Girls Dancing

by Graham Masterton

  DEAD GIRLS DANCING

  Graham Masterton

  Start Reading

  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

  www.headofzeus.com

  About Dead Girls Dancing

  In the middle of Cork, in the middle of the day, a fire crackles in a local dance studio. Thirteen women, all promising stars of Irish folk, die in the blaze. Their young lives cut short by a tragic accident.

  But where others see tragedy, DCI Katie Maguire sees murder. This is not the first fire to sweep through Cork. And in one previous case, the victims were dead before the fire was started.

  As Katie Maguire investigates the strange, obsessive world of competitive Irish folk dancing, she must face her most chilling killer yet…

  For Dan and Caroline,

  Samuel and Lucy,

  with love

  Ná lasadh tine go bhfuil tú féin nach féidir a mhúchadh

  (Do not light a fire that you cannot put out yourself)

  Irish proverb

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  About Dead Girls Dancing

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  About Graham Masterton

  About the Katie Maguire Series

  About the Scarlet Widow Series

  From the Editor of this Book

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  1

  They had just started dancing to ‘Blackthorn Stick’ when Catriona stumbled and stopped. She tugged at Brendan’s sleeve so that he stopped dancing too. Little Aoife, who was right behind them, almost collided with him.

  ‘What’s wrong, girl?’ Brendan shouted at her. He had to shout because the pipe and fiddle music was playing so loudly and the fourteen other dancers were rattling their hard shoes on the studio’s parquet floor in 6/8 time, which echoed and re-echoed.

  ‘Can you smell something burning?’ Catriona shouted back.

  Brendan and Aoife sniffed two or three times, but then Brendan said, ‘Nah, Cat, it’s car fumes, that’s all it is.’

  ‘Car fumes? It doesn’t smell like car fumes to me.’

  ‘Sure like, that’s what it is! It’s that Noonan fellow from the funeral director’s next door! He’s always leaving that old hearse of his running in case it gives up the ghost before he can drive it to the cemetery! I was almost fecking choked, coming in this morning!’

  ‘Brendan? Catriona? Are you having a problem over there?’ called their dance coach, Nicholas. He was standing next to the CD player on the opposite side of the room, one hand perched on his hip, holding up his mobile phone with the other. He was bald, Nicholas, with a neat white goatee beard and single diamond earring.

  ‘No, there’s no bother, Nicholas, we’re grand altogether!’ Brendan called back. He tapped his feet two or three times to catch up with the jig and carried on noisily dancing, and Aoife joined him. After a few steps, though, Aoife stopped again and wrinkled up her nose.

  ‘I think you’re right, do you know,’ she shouted, leaning close to Catriona’s ear. ‘There’s a funny smell for sure and it doesn’t smell like Noonan’s hearse to me! I can’t see car fumes wafting all the way up the stairs like, either, can you?’

  Catriona took in a deep breath, and then another, and then nodded. ‘It’s getting stronger, too, isn’t it? I don’t know. It’s like that bang you get off of Murphy’s Brewery, but a bit more burnt-like.’

  She was going to wave to Nicholas, but then she saw that he was down on one knee, busy helping Sinéad to fix a loose buckle on her shoe. He looked as if he were proposing to her – not that he would be, since he was married to his partner Tadhg already. She told Aoife, ‘I’ll just go and take a sconce like.’

  She walked briskly across the studio to the door that led to the stairs, her hard shoes clacking on the floor. She was a tall, skinny girl, pale-faced and freckly, with a mass of curly red hair that she tied up with a ribbon on top of her head, so that she never usually needed a bun wig for dancing. This morning she was wearing a plain emerald-green dance dress and no make-up, but this was only a practice session, after all.

  As she approached the door, Nicholas stood up and switched off the CD player. The jig abruptly stopped and so did the castanet clatter of fibreglass toes and heels.

  ‘Your shuffles are way out of synch!’ Nicholas protested. ‘Jesus, you sound like rabbits on a tin roof! That’s because some of you aren’t swinging your back legs nearly as high as I showed you for the double click. Come on, you know who you are! So – let’s start over!’

  Now that the studio was quiet, Catriona could hear a strange breathing noise from the other side of the door, with a rustling undertone, like wind blowing dry autumn leaves down a tunnel.

  ‘Cat? Where are you going, girl?’ called Nicholas. ‘Not giving up on us, are you?’

  ‘There’s kind of a smoky smell, Nick,’ she told him. ‘I was going to see where it was coming from.’

  Nicholas sniffed, but then he said, ‘No. I can’t smell nothing myself. Mind you, I’m still bunged up with a bit of a cold like.’

  ‘I told you,’ said Brendan. ‘It’s Noonan, warming up his hearse. I reckon he wants to spifflicate us all, so he gets more customers.’

  Catriona took hold of the doorknob, but instantly plucked her hand away and said, ‘Holy Saint Joseph!’ because it was hot – hot as a just-boiled kettle.

  ‘When you’re quite ready, Catriona!’ said Nicholas.

  Catriona tugged down the long right sleeve of her dance dress so that it covered her hand. She turned the doorknob and pulled the door open wide, but the instant she did so she was buffeted from behind her by a blustering gust of wind, as if an impatient ghost were trying to hurry past her into the stairwell. It made her dress flap and her curls fly up, and it made an uncanny whistling sound, partly doleful and partly triumphant.

  Catriona saw that the stairwell was hazy with light grey smoke, but as the air was sucked into it from the studio it exploded with a deafening boofff! into a rolling orange inferno. Fire roared in through the door and rushed across the ceiling and Catriona screamed as she was swallowed by flames. All the other dancers screamed and shouted, too, as they were blasted by a scorching gale. Some of them dropped to their knees, others covered their faces with their hands and staggered blindly into each other.

  Within seconds, everything flammable in the studio was ablaze and the temperature was climbing so high that the dancers felt as if they were breathing in nothing but suffocating heat. The green nylon curtains were being frizzled up by lascivious orange flames, the padded chairs along the si
des of the dance floor were smouldering and pouring out smoke, and even the polish on the parquet was starting to crackle. The wall mirror at the end of the room creaked loudly and then suddenly split diagonally from side to side.

  Catriona was on fire from head to foot. She was beating at her face and her chest with jerky, drumstick movements and hopping around and around in a terrible parody of a treble jig. Her red curls had all shrivelled away, except for a few on the crown of her head where her hair was thickest, which were burning like birthday-cake candles. Her freckly white face was already charred into a black demon mask, with deep scarlet fissures across her forehead and around her eyes. Most of her dress had burned into flakes and even her black heavy shoes were on fire.

  By now the air in the studio was not only blistering hot but it was quickly filling up with thick, choking smoke. The dancers were milling around in a panic, their shoes clattering on the floor.

  ‘Stay together!’ shrieked Nicholas. ‘Hold hands everybody! Stay together!’

  Even though he was coughing and whining for breath, Brendan tugged off the pale blue cotton sweater that was tied around his waist and held it up in front of him, trying to get close enough to Catriona to wrap it around her and smother the flames. Before he could reach her, though, she pitched sideways on to the floor, knocking her head with a hollow clonk. She rolled on to her back and lay there with her clothes smoking and her legs shuddering and her arms crossed in front of her as if she were praying.

  Brendan knelt down beside her and tentatively held out his hand towards her, but he could tell from her bloodshot eyes that she couldn’t see him and she was too close to death for him to be able to save her. He crossed himself, and coughed, and then stood up. Shielding his face with his sweater, he blundered his way through the smoke and the flying sparks to join the others.

  ‘Up to the attic, everybody!’ Nicholas was screaming, his voice hoarse from inhaling smoke. ‘We can’t get out down the stairs, so we’ll have to go up to the attic! Patrick! Help Niamh up, will you? Ciara, this way, love. Come on everybody, quick! And stay together!’

  He was flapping his arms and ushering everybody to the far end of the studio where a small door led up to the attic. Brendan had been up there only once, helping Nicholas to store some old boxes of dance costumes, but he knew it had a dormer window that overlooked the corner of Shandon Street so they would be able to open it and shout for help.

  Brendan glanced back at Catriona. By now he could hardly see her through the smoke, but she was still lying on her back, motionless, and she was surrounded by a circle of flames as if she were lying on a funeral pyre.

  Young Duncan with the spiky black hair was right beside him, almost bent double and coughing up long strings of phlegm. Brendan caught hold of the back of Duncan’s belt in one hand and his shirt sleeve in the other and dragged him jerking and tripping towards the end of the room. The rest of the dancers were crowded together now, jostling each other in panic as Nicholas fumbled with his keyring, trying to find the key that would unlock the attic door. There were some muffled moans, and sobs, but none of the dancers was screaming or crying out. The smoke was too acrid for them to breathe in and most of them had their hands pressed over their faces, as if they were going to speak no evil.

  As Nicholas found the right key, the flames in the studio suddenly sank lower, like a pack of mutinous dogs that had been ordered to lie down. The crackling of burning varnish was reduced to a few sporadic pops. There was a breathless tension in the room, interrupted only by the clicking of Nicholas turning the key in the lock.

  Holy Blessed Mary, thought Brendan. The fire seemed to have burned itself out and they were going to be saved. With his lungs almost bursting from holding his breath, he lugged Duncan towards the attic door just as Nicholas swung it wide open.

  With a gleeful whistle, air rushed down from the attic upstairs and the studio instantly exploded with even more ferocity than before, so that the whole room was filled to the ceiling with roaring flames. Brendan felt a blast of heat on the back of his neck and then his hair caught alight, although he didn’t realize it. For a few seconds, Nicholas and his dancers were all swallowed up by a turmoil of orange fire. When they reappeared, they were all blazing from head to foot, screaming and flapping their arms.

  They danced a hideous mockery of the ‘Blackthorn Stick’ with burned flakes of hair and clothing flying around them and their hard shoes clattering on the parquet like a death-rattle. It was like a feis held in hell.

  One after another, they staggered and collided and dropped to the floor, and lay there burning. The fire appeared to feed on them, but it also seemed to grow hungrier with each dancer it consumed. With a soft roaring sound it passed over them and began to climb the attic stairs, setting the sisal stair carpet alight step by step, as if it could smell somebody else up there and was greedily searching for them.

  2

  Katie was running through her quarterly budget figures with Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin when she heard the sirens from the fire station next door.

  She thought nothing of it at first and they went on discussing how she could adjust her detectives’ rosters in order to save money. She needed to recruit more detectives, too, because Detective Sergeant Lynch and Detective Ó Broin were due to retire in the spring, and she didn’t yet have any newly graduated detective gardaí to replace them.

  ‘There’s no getting around it, Katie, the ministry’s whittled us clean down to the bone,’ said Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin. He dragged out a handkerchief and loudly blew his nose. ‘All the same, though, we’ll have to work out some way of saving the shekels, even if we have to sell all our cars and drive around in steerinahs.’ He was referring to children’s home-made steering-carts.

  ‘I don’t mind that.’ Katie smiled. ‘My first boyfriend used to pull me around in his steerinah and I loved it. I was four and he was six. Dalaigh, his name was, and he always smelled of toffee. Or maybe it was wee, and I was just being romantic.’

  Now they heard another siren, and another, and Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin raised a bushy grey eyebrow at her. ‘Sounds like trouble, that.’

  He reached across to pick up his phone. but as he did so Katie’s mobile played ‘Fear a’ Bháta’. She took it out of the inside pocket of her jacket and answered it. It was Detective Sergeant Begley calling her.

  ‘I expect you’ve heard the fire engines going out, ma’am. There’s a major fire at the Toirneach Damhsa dance studio, ma’am. That’s down at the bottom of Shandon Street, by Farren’s Quay, right next to Jer Noonan’s funeral home. The station officer just called me and said that there’s people trapped.’

  ‘Did he tell you how many?’

  ‘He didn’t know exactly, but it seems like there was a full dance rehearsal going on, so I’d guess there must have been eight at least. They’ve sent out six appliances already and Assistant Chief Fire Officer Whalen has gone out there, too.’

  ‘Superintendent Pearse is on to it?’

  ‘He is of course. He’s sent Inspector Cafferty along there to supervise. The ambulance service has been called out, too, as well as the Red Cross, in case they need any extra white vans.’

  Katie covered her iPhone with her hand and said to Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin, ‘There’s a fire at the bottom of Shandon Street. A dance studio, with people trapped. Maybe as many as eight.’ Then she took her hand away and spoke to Detective Sergeant Begley again.

  ‘Did the station officer tell you who raised the alarm?’ she asked him.

  ‘Just some passer-by, so he said. They saw flames inside of the windows and smoke pouring out of the roof. Actually, there were seventeen 112 calls altogether, almost simultaneous like. All of their numbers have been recorded, if we need to check them later.’

  ‘All right, Sean, thank you. Are you going over there yourself?’

  ‘I am, sure. I’ll be taking O’Donovan and Markey along with me.’

  ‘Keep me up to date, th
en, okay?’

  Katie closed her accounts book and stood up. ‘I’d best be getting out there, too. The media will be there in force, for sure, and if the fire brigade are sending out their major incident officer, it would be a good idea if I showed my face as well.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin. ‘If there’s one thing that gives me the heebie-jeebies, it’s the idea of being trapped in a burning building. That was the way my Uncle Phelim died. Well, he wasn’t trapped, he was conked out, but the result was the same.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ asked Katie, as she gathered up her purse and her pen and her notebook.

  ‘He was wrecked as usual. He fell into bed, lit a cigarette and dropped off to sleep. He was a big fellow all right, but my aunt said that when they found him he looked like a little charcoal monkey.’

  ‘I’ll see you after so,’ said Katie. She walked quickly along to her office and lifted down her crackly yellow high-viz jacket from the coat-stand. The day looked grey and breezy outside, but it wasn’t raining yet. Six or seven hooded crows were clustered on the roof of the building opposite, their feathers ruffled by the wind. Katie wasn’t superstitious, but she didn’t like it when they gathered like that – it always seemed to precede some disaster.

  On her way out she stopped at the door of the squad room and called over to Detective Dooley.

  ‘Robert! I’m going across to that fire at Shandon Street! Come with me, will you?’

  He reached for his high-viz jacket, but Katie said, ‘Don’t worry about that. I don’t want you looking conspicuous like.’

  Detective Dooley was the youngest male detective on her team, with brushed-up hair and jeggings and the fresh-faced look of a college student, although he had just celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday. One of the reasons she wanted him along was because he was good at mingling with crowds of all ages, especially with younger people. When it came to serious fires, the firefighters dealt with the flames, while Katie’s detectives concentrated their attention on the people who were watching them. Over three-quarters of arsonists hung around the buildings they had torched because it excited them to see them burn.