Detective O’Donovan looked up at the first floor of the cement-rendered building.
‘Holy Saint Joseph,’ he said. ‘They’re really going at it. Sounds like my brother’s boat-repair workshop down at Kinsale.’
They went through a stone archway and climbed up the concrete steps to the first floor. On the door that led to the Laethanta na Rince dance studio a handwritten sign had been pinned up, Quiet Rehearsal in Progress. The music was so loud now and the sound of dance shoes so thunderous that Detective O’Donovan had to shout for Katie to hear him.
‘That’s a barefaced lie! Jesus!’
They opened the door and went inside. Sixteen girls in short pink skirts and black tights were practising their céili dancing, leaping and clicking and stamping in a slow triple jig.
Their dance teacher and manager, Steven Joyce, was standing at the side of the studio, clapping his hands in time to the music. He was a small man, with gingery-brown hair that was cut in a high fade with a hard parting, shaved up the sides but long and swept back at the top. He had a neat gingery-brown beard and watery blue eyes, and he put Katie in mind of a self-portrait by Van Gogh, except that he was wearing a tight green cashmere sweater and skinny beige jeans.
She could now see why the hard-shoe dancing sounded so loud. The floor of the studio was covered with at least thirty wooden doors which had been unhinged and laid down side by side on top of the parquet. The dancers were leaping from door to door and then rattling their fibreglass-tipped shoes on the panels.
Steven Joyce caught sight of Katie and Detective O’Donovan and raised one hand to acknowledge their arrival. He crossed over to the sound system and switched off the jig, then he clapped his hands and called out, ‘Five minutes rest, girls! But then it’s the “Three Tunes” so, and I want to see perfect roly-polys! Not like the last time, when most of you looked like you were winding wool!’
He stepped over the doors and came up to Katie and said, ‘I was expecting you yesterday, to be honest with you, or even the day before.’
Close up, he was only three or four inches taller than Katie, and he smelled strongly of L’Eau Froide, which was a cool unisex fragrance.
‘We had a heap of background investigation to go through first, Mr Joyce,’ said Katie. ‘There’s no point in asking people questions unless you know what you’re supposed to be asking them about.’
‘Surelike, I can understand that. Have you spoken to Danny Coffey yet? I’m sure Danny’s been pure complimentary – not.’
‘What’s with the doors on the floor?’ asked Detective O’Donovan, deliberately changing the subject so that Katie wouldn’t have to answer either yes or no.
‘Oh the doors! The doors are what make Laethanta na Rince so unique, yet totally traditional. Your hard-shoe step-dancing doesn’t go back as far as some people think – only to the early eighteenth century. Most country cottages had only the rough dirt floors in those days, and they weren’t at all suitable for dancing because they were covered at best with reeds and the pigs would come in and out and do their business.’
‘That doesn’t sound too savoury,’ said Katie.
‘Well, the wives used to scatter mint leaves on the floor so that when they walked around they’d crush them with their feet and make the place smell a little better. But when it came to dancing they would unscrew their doors and lay them flat to make a stage. Sometimes they’d coat the door with butter to make it easier for them to dance on it wearing their hobnailed boots.’
‘I’ll have to remember that next time I go to Havana Browns,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘Take a tub of Kerrygold with me and smear it on the soles of my shoes.’
Steven Joyce was plainly very serious about his dancing and he ignored that comment.
‘It’s dancing on doors that originally gave the hard-shoe jigs their resonance and their rhythms,’ he continued, ‘and of course, as you probably know, those cottages were fierce cramped for space, especially if you’d invited a whole crowd of friends and neighbours to watch you dancing, so you couldn’t wave your arms around. Hence we dance with our arms held close down by our sides.’
‘And, what? When you compete in a feis, do you take these doors with you?’
‘We do, most of the time, and that’s what’s given us our great reputation. You have to leap and treble and stamp very precise when you’re dancing on a door, I can tell you. You could easy trip on a transom and twist your ankle.’
‘You and Danny Coffey used to be very close friends, I gather,’ said Katie.
‘We were, yes, when we first started Toirneach Damhsa.’
‘He says you wanted more than your fair share of the profits and that’s why the two of you parted company.’
‘Is that what he said? Well, I suppose that’s half of the truth. The way I saw it, I was doing all the creative work, all the choreography – me and Nicholas O’Grady between us, anyway – while Danny was doing a bit of driving and fetching the sandwiches and sitting on his arse.’
‘All right. So what’s the other half of the truth?’
Steven Joyce looked around to see if his dancers were listening to their conversation. They were standing and sitting around, chatting and drinking bottles of water, and didn’t appear to be interested in what he was saying, but all the same he said, ‘Let’s go out on to the balcony.’
He opened up a pair of French windows and they stepped outside. From here they could see over the wet slate rooftops to the city below them, and the three tall spires of St Fin Barre’s cathedral.
‘If you want to know the absolute truth, it was Nicholas who split us up, more than the money.’
‘Go on,’ said Katie. After her interview with Danny Coffey, she had a strong feeling that she knew already what he was going to say.
‘I’d known Nicholas for years. We were both taught to dance by Peggy McTeggart at the UCC School of Music and Theatre – may the Lord bless her memory, dear Pegs. I always thought that Nicholas and me would stay together for the rest of our lives.’
‘You were partners?’ asked Katie. ‘Sorry to ask such an obvious question, but I want to be clear about it.’
Steven Joyce nodded. ‘We didn’t live together because Nicholas always said that he needed space in his life, but I think you could say that we were as close as two human beings can be.’
He hesitated for a moment and looked away, his mouth working with emotion. ‘I always knew that he enjoyed flirting with other men. I tried not to think about it, although I warned him again and again about the dangers of HIV. He hurt me with all his flings, but I said to myself that he’s a free agent and who am I to control his life for him? But then Danny Coffey came into our lives, fresh after leaving Michael Flatley, and we formed Toirneach Damhsa together.’
‘And Nicholas had another of his flings, with Danny Coffey?’
‘I found out about it only by accident. I went back to the studio one evening to pick up some messages that I’d forgotten and caught them in the changing room. I could never understand it. I mean, you’ve seen Danny Coffey, haven’t you, for the love of God! He’s not exactly an Adonis, is he? More like a middle-aged salesman from Kelly’s Carpets. And he doesn’t have the sweetest temperament, either. Just about everything gives him ire.’
‘So what happened? You and Nicholas broke up and Nicholas stayed with Danny?’
‘It was more complicated than that. Like I say, it was partly to do with the money and partly to do with the bookings that Danny wanted to set up. I told him he wasn’t giving the dancers enough time to rest and train in between gigs, but he always had his eye on the profits rather than anything else.
‘But – yes – whatever it was that Nicholas found so attractive about Danny, he stayed with him, rather than me. Of course, he found young Tadhg Brennan after a few months and they moved in together and got married. I was invited to the wedding, but I didn’t go. I was still too sore about losing him to Danny.’
‘Sore enough to take your revenge on
the both of them?’ asked Katie.
‘Holy Jesus! I was still odd about it, but I never would have done anything like burn down that studio! I knew most of those poor young dancers. I trained them myself, right from when they were still at school, some of them.’
‘Where were you exactly, when the studio was set on fire?’ asked Detective O’Donovan.
‘I was in Mallow as a matter of fact, having lunch at Peppers at the White Deer with Shelagh Murtry from the Centre Stage dance and drama school. I wanted to see if they had any young dancers who might be interested in joining us. I have the receipt to prove it.’
‘You were there, yes,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘We’ve checked already. But of course you could have paid somebody to set the fire for you.’
‘Oh, get out of that garden! I have a temper all right, but only when my dancers are out of step! I’m not saying I don’t feel bitter about Danny and Nicholas – I am, or at least I used to be – but I’ve always been the kind of fellow who looks to the future. I picked myself up and started Laethanta na Rince, didn’t I, even though I didn’t have a pot to piss in nor a window to throw it out of?’
‘All the same, you have to admit you had motive enough,’ said Katie. ‘We’re still not clear if the arsonist realized that so many people would lose their lives. Did you know Ronan Barrett or Saoirse MacAuliffe?’
‘Who? No. Neither of those names means nothing at all.’
‘So you didn’t train them, either of them, and they never danced for you?’
‘No.’
‘All right – one last question for now – if you didn’t have anything to do with setting that fire, can you think of anybody who might have done?’
Steven Joyce stared at her. ‘You really want me to answer that?’
‘Yes, I do. That’s why I asked you.’
‘Well, if you want my honest truthful deep-down thoughts about it, I reckon it was Danny himself.’
‘Do you seriously mean that?’
‘I’ve heard rumours that Toirneach Damhsa haven’t been doing too well financially. Danny owes a rake of back tax to the Revenue Commissioners and he’s recently lost three of his best dancers – two of them because they left Cork to get married and one with a slipped disc. Like you say, he might not have meant to hurt anybody and it all went wrong. But the insurance would have set him straight, for sure.’
Katie said, ‘Fair play, Steven, we’ll look into it.’
She didn’t tell him that she had already detailed Detective Ó Doibhilin to check how much Danny Coffey could expect from his insurers for the loss of the dance studio and the lives of the dance troupe themselves.
‘You won’t be telling Danny that I accused of him of it, though, will you?’ said Steven Joyce, suddenly anxious. ‘He’ll fecking kill me to death if you do.’
*
When Katie returned with Detective O’Donovan to Anglesea Street she found Conor waiting for her in her office, talking to Moirin.
‘We need to be setting off soon,’ he told her. ‘The traffic’s bad on the M8 past Fermoy, so they say, because of the roadworks.’
‘Give me ten minutes,’ she told him. ‘Moirin – would you call Markey and O’Mara and make sure they’re all geared up and ready to leave for Tipp?’
She sorted quickly through the files that had been left on her desk and checked her emails and texts. She quickly answered a query from the clerk of the Circuit Criminal Court about the bill of indictment for a Somali drug-dealer named Ismail Tima Khatarta. As she was typing, Detective Scanlan came in, looking pleased with herself.
‘Result!’ she said.
Detective O’Donovan was about to leave, but Katie said, ‘Stall it a second, Patrick. You might want to hear this.’
‘I’ve managed to get through to Mrs McCabe at last,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘She works in the Cancer Research charity shop in Larne in the mornings, which is why I couldn’t get through to her earlier – but that’s where she first met Cissy Jepson. Cissy came in looking for a doll to buy, but she didn’t have enough money, even though the doll she wanted was only three pounds. Mrs McCabe promised to keep the doll aside for her until she had saved up.
‘Cissy started coming into the shop regularly and talking to her. It seemed like she had no friends at all and was very lonely. Mrs McCabe said she met her once walking along Main Street with a young man, and said hello to her, but Cissy didn’t answer and she got the impression that she didn’t want the young man to know that they knew each other. The next time she came into the shop, though, she explained that the young man was her older brother.’
‘You sent Mrs McCabe those pictures of Adeen and Davy Dorgan?’
‘I did of course, and she recognized them instantly. No hesitation whatsoever. Cissy Jepson is Adeen and the young man with her was Davy Dorgan, although it seems certain that he was calling himself Jepson, too. Mrs McCabe took Cissy home one day because it was lashing and she didn’t have her own umbrella and she saw a card by the doorbell with the name D. Jepson on it.’
‘Jepson,’ said Katie. ‘Now it makes sense. Or I think it does, anyway. I’m probably crediting Davy Dorgan with much more intelligence than he deserves. But Anne Jepson was the mother of Sir Roger Casement.’
‘You’ve lost me there,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘Why would Dorgan call himself after Sir Roger Casement’s mother?’
‘I expect he wanted an alias so that the PSNI and the SRR couldn’t track him down. But maybe he wanted an alias that summed up who he was. I mean, I’m really guessing here, and it doesn’t really matter one way or another now that we’re sure who he is, but Sir Roger Casement was a fervent nationalist, wasn’t he, and he tried to ship in German guns to fight the British and get Ireland united. That’s why they stripped him of his knighthood and hanged him.’
‘That’s an interesting theory all right,’ said Conor. ‘It sounds like one of those theories that either cracks a case wide open or leads you up a blind alley. I’ve come up with a few like that myself when I’ve been trying to find a lost dog. Usually I end up chasing my own tail, instead of the dog’s.’
‘Well, we’ll see,’ said Katie. ‘But what makes me suspect that it could be true is that Sir Roger Casement was found out to be gay, and so, as we know, is Davy Dorgan. It could be that Dorgan identifies with him and that’s why he chose the name Jepson.’
Detective O’Donovan frowned and said, ‘I don’t want to sound like I’m politically incorrect here or nothing, but you may have hit on something there, ma’am. Danny Coffey’s gay, and so are Steven Joyce and the late cremated Nicholas O’Grady. Don’t ask me what it all points to, because I couldn’t tell you, but it’s worth taking on board.’
‘I think we need to tie up some loose ends,’ said Katie. ‘See if you can locate Nicholas O’Grady’s husband – what was his name, Brennan? And that Saoirse’s fiancé. I know that both of them are very unlikely suspects, but I’m beginning to feel like this investigation is a wasps’ nest. I can hear some fierce buzzing inside of it all right, but we need to give it a few hard knocks to break it apart and let the wasps out.’
‘I’m allergic to wasps,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘One sting and I go into prophylactic shock.’
‘You may die but at least you won’t get pregnant,’ said Conor.
Katie couldn’t help smiling, but Detective O’Donovan had no idea what he meant and shook his head. ‘I’ll go after that Brennan character first, ma’am. I’ll text you as soon as I’ve set it up.’
‘Good man yourself,’ said Katie and turned to Conor. ‘Let’s go, shall we? I can’t wait to lift that monster McManus.’
28
They were delayed for over twenty minutes by resurfacing works on the M8 so that it was nearly a quarter to three by the time they arrived at the Dundrum House Hotel and Golf Club. Katie had arranged to rendezvous there with the ISPCA inspectors and the officers from Tipperary Town. She decided not to meet at the Garda station because there was a chan
ce they might have been seen by somebody passing the end of St Michael’s Road on their way to the dog-fight.
Katie stepped down from the marked Toyota Land Cruiser in which she and Conor and Detectives Markey and O’Mara had driven up from Cork, and Inspector Carroll came across the driveway to greet her.
He was a solidly built man, Inspector Carroll, shaven-headed under his uniform cap, and Katie could sense a kind of inner tension in him. He looked as if he could have been a useful amateur boxer when he was younger. His nose was bent to the left and had obviously been broken, and he had a glassy look in his eyes which made her think that he wore contact lenses.
He had brought seven uniformed gardaí with him in a marked van and a patrol car, as well as an unmarked black BMW. Katie introduced him to Conor and Detectives Markey and O’Mara, but after she had done that he stood close to her with his face turned away as if he were simply admiring the view and spoke quietly so that they couldn’t overhear what he was saying.
‘To be honest with you, ma’am, this is a pure farce, isn’t it? If this dog-fight turns out to be as big a show as we suspect it is, we shouldn’t have eleven officers here. We should have a hundred and eleven, and a helicopter to chase after any guttie who tries to do a legger over the fields. Not to mention a fleet of buses to take all of them into custody.’
‘Well, I agree,’ Katie shrugged. ‘But...’
Inspector Carroll looked around the hotel grounds. The hotel building itself was a fine three-storey eighteenth-century mansion, surrounded by a golf course and immaculately mown lawns. Thirty kilometres to the south rose the Galtee Mountains, although they looked pale green behind the afternoon mist, as if they were seen in a dream.
‘This place is massive,’ said Katie.
‘Oh, it’s fantastic,’ Inspector Carroll agreed. ‘I stayed here once and had a wonderful lunch in the restaurant. For all the good we’ll be able to do today, I’m almost tempted to say let’s forget about the dog-fight and play a leisurely round of golf instead, and then treat ourselves to dinner.’
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