They kissed again for a long time, until Katie could hardly breathe. What a way to die, she thought, with her eyes closed, and her mind completely in darkness, kissed to death. At last, gasping, she pulled away from him and said, ‘Barney.’
‘Barney?’
She went over to the kitchen door and closed it. ‘I don’t want him spying on us.’
‘He’s a dog.’
‘Exactly. Didn’t you ever hear of dogging?’
She unbuckled John’s tan leather belt and tugged down his zip. He was wearing grey David Beckham briefs which Katie had bought for him in Gentleman’s Quarters, and they clung closely to his erection. She went down on one knee to help him pull off his trousers, and then she rolled his briefs down, too, so that his penis rose up in front of her, so hard that it pulsed slightly with every beat of his heart. She took it into her mouth and sucked it, and rolled her tongue around it, and poked her tongue tip into it.
John stood upright, rigid, both hands covering his face, and when she cupped his testicles in her hand and gently prickled them with her fingernails, and then sucked his penis harder and deeper, he groaned like a man who has realized for the first time the dreadful truth – that happiness never lasts forever.
Katie stood up, her lips glistening. ‘Sit,’ she said.
‘Sit? You make me sound like Barney.’
She grinned and said, ‘Sit down, you gom. There – on that chair.’
Naked now, John did as he was told, and sat down on the plain wheelback kitchen chair, holding his erection in his hand like a newly crowned king with a purple sceptre. Katie unzipped her skirt, peeled off her tights and stepped out of her panties. Usually, she never wore panties when she wore tights, but it was close to the twenty-seventh of the month.
‘You know what you are, Katie Maguire?’ said John, as she came up to him and stood in front of him, with her hand resting on his right shoulder.
‘Pig-in-chief, that’s what you called me before.’
He smiled and gave the slightest shake of his head. The expression on his face was almost beatific. ‘You’re a dream, that’s what you are. You’re some incredible dream that I shouldn’t even be dreaming. Look at you.’
Katie kissed him, and then very carefully she climbed aboard him, opening her legs wide so that he could position his glans between the lips of her hairless vulva. When she was sure that he was positioned comfortably, she gradually lowered herself down, so that his penis slid deeper and deeper inside her. At last he was so deep that it looked as if she had black pubic curls, too.
She put her arms around him and rested her head against his shoulder and they stayed like that for over a minute, just feeling each other and smelling each other.
‘I don’t want this to end,’ John whispered, his breath hot and thunderous in her ear.
‘All things must end, my darling,’ she murmured.
‘Please God, not this.’
Katie didn’t say anything to that. Her life was all endings rather than beginnings, and here they were sitting on a kitchen chair while they were whirling around the Sun at 67,000 miles an hour, and it seemed so ridiculous and passionate and tragic all at the same time that she could have cried.
Slowly, she raised herself up, until John was right on the brink of slipping out of her. But then, very slowly, she sat down again, until she felt his hair between her thighs again. This time he slid so deeply inside her that his penis touched the neck of her womb, and she gave a snuffle and a nervous little jump. She continued to ride him up and down, up and down, keeping the same even rhythm, even though John was thrusting himself upwards now, his legs out straight, his thighs rigid and his buttocks clenched hard.
Katie could feel a climax gradually rising between her legs. The wooden chair seat was cutting into the sides of her knees, but she could hardly feel it. All she could feel was John inside her, and the pressure building inside her, building and building, as if her whole existence was about to implode.
John gasped, ‘Oh my God, Katie! Oh my dear God!’
She felt him shake, and then he jerked violently up and down as if he were having a seizure. She could feel his warmth and his wetness flooding inside her. She clung to his shoulders, her whole body locked with tension, her face contorted, her teeth gritted, her climax so close that she could have screamed.
Then her mobile phone buzzed on the tabletop. And it’s no, nay, never – no, nay never no more—
It was Inspector Liam Fennessy. He sounded very calm, but then he always sounded very calm. He had a coldness and a detachment about him that she had admired at first, almost envied, until she had discovered that he was coping with the stresses of his job by bullying his wife, Caitlin.
‘Sorry to disturb you, ma’am. We have another feller with his hands cut off and his face gone missing.’
‘Oh, God in heaven,’ said Katie. She was still breathless and she picked up a tea towel to pat the perspiration from her face and neck. John got up, went through to the bedroom and came back with her dark green dressing gown, which he wrapped around her shoulders, and then kissed her on the forehead.
Inspector Fennessy said, ‘A woman phoned Mayfield Garda station just before it closed and said that there was a body in a house on Ballyhooly Road, somewhere between Glen Avenue and Sunview Park East. Then she hung up.’
‘She didn’t give her name?’
‘No. But it didn’t take the lads long to find the right house. It was the only one where nobody was watching the telly. The door wasn’t locked, though, so they were able to go straight in. Sergeant ó Nuallán and Detectives O’Donovan and Horgan are on their way up there now, as well as the technical team.’
‘Do we have any idea who the victim is?’
‘Not so far. He’s a white male, early to mid-forties. He hasn’t yet been moved, of course, but he has two distinctive tattoos visible on his upper arms, and a fair few scars, but that’s all. He was naked, like the black feller, with both hands severed and missing, and what would appear to be a point-blank shotgun blast to the face. Or possibly blasts, plural. According to the lads who found him, there wasn’t too much left of his head, like.’
‘Give me the address and I’ll go up and take a look for myself.’
‘There’s no need to, ma’am. I’ll make sure you get a comprehensive report in the morning, videos and all. I can fend off the media, too, if they get any wind of it.’
‘Thanks, Liam, but I want to see this first-hand. I’m beginning to get the feeling that this might not be the last of these, if we don’t find our perpetrator pretty quickly.’
‘Okay, then. I’ll tell Sergeant ó Nuallán to be expecting you.’
She put down her mobile phone. John was buckling up his trousers with a rueful expression on his face. ‘You’re going out again? Another great supper down the toilet.’
‘You dare. I want to eat that when I come home.’
‘Katie, if that call was about what I guessed it was about, then you’re going out to take a look at another dead body, am I right?’
Katie fastened her bra at the front and twisted it around to the back. ‘Yes, you are. Liam says that his hands were cut off and then he was blasted in the face with a shotgun, just like that black feller in Lower Shandon Street – only this victim’s white. That tells us it probably wasn’t racist. So either it’s a copycat killer, or somebody carrying out a vendetta, or just some gas woman who gets her kicks out of chopping men’s hands off and then blowing their heads off.’
‘Whatever the motive, Katie, don’t tell me that you’ll come back here later tonight with an appetite for meatballs?’
She went up to him and fastened the last two buttons of his shirt. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I suppose you’re right. But don’t throw them away, whatever you do. They’ll probably taste even better tomorrow, when they’ve had a chance to mulch for a while.’
John kissed her. ‘Story of my life, isn’t it? You can’t have it today, John, but never mind. It’s going to be ten
times better tomorrow. And the word is “marinade”, not “mulch”. Mulching is what you do with compost.’
‘I know.’ said Katie. ‘It was supposed to be a joke, you being a farmer and all. Well, a former farmer. I’m sorry.’ She pressed her forehead against his chest and said it again. ‘I’m sorry.’
She wondered, if they stayed together, how many times she would have to say that. Perhaps she ought to have it tattooed on the palm of her hand.
Thirteen
Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán met her outside the house, wearing a faded denim jacket and jeans, and a rainbow-coloured silk scarf tied around her head.
‘Like the scarf,’ said Katie. ‘Very hippie.’
‘I need to wash my hair, that’s all.’ She was wearing no make-up and the purple circles under her eyes made her look as tired as Katie felt.
Between Glen Avenue and Sunview Park East, the 200-yard pavement was cluttered with patrol cars and vans and an ambulance, and so many blue and red and white lights were flashing that it looked like a fairground. Almost every front door along the road was open and the residents were standing on their steps in the warm evening air watching the gardaí and the technicians coming and going. Even small children were standing out in their pyjamas.
Katie could see Detective O’Donovan talking to people in the small crowd that was gathered behind the blue and white Garda: No Entry tape. She also recognized Dan Keane from the Examiner, wearing the saggy grey linen jacket he always wore in summer. Dan raised his cigarette to her in salute, but she only gave him the briefest of nods in return.
‘Who tipped off the media?’ she asked Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán. ‘Jesus, look, there’s Fionnuala Sweeney, from RTÉ. Tell your friends to watch out for you on the Morning Edition.’
‘It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if it was our perpetrator herself who tipped them off,’ said Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán. ‘If you ask me, she’s trying to make a point.’
‘Oh yes? And what point is that?’ asked Katie, as she stepped into the hallway and looked around.
Upstairs, on the landing, so many halogen lights were flashing that it looked as if they were holding an exorcism up there. A technician called down to them, ‘Could you wait there just a moment, please, ladies! I’m just untangling me cables.’
‘It’s the hands,’ said Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán, ‘Not only is she cutting them off, she’s taking them away with her, so that we don’t have any fingerprints. And because she’s shot the victims point-blank in the face it’s almost impossible to identify them from photofit pictures. You wait till you see your man upstairs. Apart from that, she’s made it a nightmare checking their dental records – that’s if they have any dental records in this country. Going by the state of that African man’s teeth, I’d say that he’d never been to a dentist in his life, in any country.’
‘So what’s the point she’s making? Always assuming that she is a she.’
‘I think it’s all about us. I think she’s making a show of us for not doing our job. Maybe she’s trying to tell us that we should have known a long time ago who these men were and what they were up to. So now she’s a kind of vigilante, trying to make us look as if we couldn’t beat nails into a bog with a saucepan. Since we can’t punish them, then she’s going to, and we still won’t know who they are.’
‘We don’t have any substantive proof yet that either of the two men were criminals,’ Katie reminded her. ‘We don’t know what they were.’
‘Oh, I’m fully aware of that, ma’am. I’m only theorizing. Our perpetrator probably killed them out of plain old revenge, more like. Maybe they conned her elderly mother out of her manage money, or maybe one of them made her pregnant and left her without any child support but she didn’t know which one. But who knows? I’d lay odds on both of them being bent. There aren’t too many respectable men who go around with boa constrictors tattooed on their mickeys – or if there are, I’ve never met them.’
Katie smiled tiredly and nodded. Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán was beginning to grow on her. More than anything else, she liked any detective who had the imagination to come up with a high-flown theory but the pragmatism to know that most criminals were too stupid to commit offences out of anything but greed or plain viciousness. Perhaps the cleverest thing that this perpetrator had done was to leave them so little forensic evidence that they had to theorize.
The technician beckoned that they could come up, and they climbed the stairs and entered the bedroom.
Because he was so recently dead, the man’s body had only just started to decompose, although his skin already looked mottled. All the same, the room reeked so strongly of stale urine and faeces that it was suffocating. It was that smell that Detective Horgan called Essence of Old Folks’ Home. Katie covered her nose and mouth with her hand. She had remembered her latex gloves, but she wished she had brought her Miracle perfume spray with her. The two technicians were wearing surgical masks and Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán took off her scarf and tied it around her face like a bandit.
The body was lying on the bed with his arms straight down, so that if his hands had still been there they would have been discreetly covering his genitals. A tourniquet had been fastened around his left wrist, with a pink toothbrush to tighten it, but his right wrist had bled out all over the quilt, and the bleeding had been so copious that the quilt was still shiny and wet. Although both stumps were clotted with dried blood, Katie noticed that the left wrist had been cut quite raggedly, with stray shreds of skin, while the right wrist had been cut as sharply and neatly as a log for the fire.
The man was white-skinned, with hairy arms and legs and a wild hairy tangle on his chest. From the way that his body hair was beginning to show signs of grey, Katie guessed his age at mid- to late forties. He had six or seven diagonal weals across his ribcage, like dried brown caterpillars, which indicated that he had been severely beaten at some time in his life, probably with a cane or a metal rod. He also had several silvery scars, some with suture marks, which indicated that he might have been stabbed.
On each of his bony shoulders was tattooed a triumphantly grinning blue skull, surrounded by a star.
His head had been even more spectacularly blown apart than that of the black man on Lower Shandon Street. There was no face, only a crimson cavern with two ears either side of it, at least twenty-five centimetres apart. A triangular flap of skull was still sticking up from the top of his head, but his brains had been sprayed across the quilt and pinkish lumps were still creeping slowly down the white wooden bedhead.
The senior technician leaned close to Katie and peered down into the remains of the man’s head. ‘Good evening to you, ma’am. This unfortunate individual was shot at least three times, I’d say, whereas we now know that the black feller was shot only twice.’
Katie raised an eyebrow but didn’t ask him how he was sure about that, because she knew that he was going to tell her.
‘This afternoon Dr O’Brien sent us over all the ammunition that he had recovered from his remains, so that we could count it and weigh it in conjunction with the ammunition that we dug out of the mattress. In total, six defence discs and twenty-one copper-plated BB pellets, which means we missed three, because there should have been twenty-four.’
‘Defence discs?’ said Katie. ‘That means those new Winchester shotgun shells.’
‘That’s right. The PDX1. And the beauty of the PDX1 is that you can use them in handguns like the Taurus Judge which can take .410 shotgun shells as well as ordinary .45 cartridges. They’re specifically intended for self-defence at very close range. The sort of gun that neurotic Americans like to keep in their bedside tables in case an intruder breaks in.’
‘So … if you can fire these shotgun shells from a handgun—’ said Katie.
‘You’ve got it, ma’am. It’s in my report already … the one I’ll be sending you by lunchtime tomorrow if I ever get finished here. It solves the question of how a woman could have shot your m
an in the face at point-blank range without standing on the bed to do it. It also solves the question of how your perpetrator could have entered the premises on Lower Shandon Street without being seen to carry a full-length or even a sawn-off shotgun.’
Katie turned to Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán and said, ‘Right. We need to check every firearms dealer in the country to see if they’ve sold any of these particular shotgun shells.’ She turned back to the senior technician and said, ‘They’re made by Winchester, aren’t they, but what did you say they were called?’
‘PDX1 Defender,’ the technician told her, poking around inside the victim’s face with a shiny pair of tweezers. ‘They’re very distinctive because they have a black hull, unlike most shotgun shells. And you see here, inside the victim’s sinus cavities? This grey plastic powder. It’s called Grex. They pack it into the shotgun shell to keep the blast pattern tighter.’
‘Okay, thanks,’ said Katie. ‘We also need to know if any of the dealers have sold a handgun that might be capable of firing these shells, although I’d be surprised if it was acquired legally. Oh – and get in touch with the shooting clubs, too, Lough Bo and Fermoy. You never know, their members are all mad about guns so one of them might have heard something. I’ll have a word myself with Eugene Ó Béara. If anybody knows which guns in Cork happen to be where, he does. Either that, or he knows somebody who knows somebody who does.’
Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán had made a note of all this on her iPhone. With her voice muffled behind her bandit mask, she said, ‘Fine. I’ll get on to it tomorrow as soon as they’re open.’
Katie stood very still for a while, her hand still pressed over her nose and mouth, looking around the bedroom inch by inch. She had already seen the dildoes lying on the bedside rug, and the clock, and the broken lamp. After a while she went slowly over to the dressing table and opened the drawers one after the other. Eyeliner, nail scissors, glittery nail varnish, elastic bands, hairgrips, Nurofen tablets, Durex condoms. Nothing to tell her who might have used this bedroom, even if they probably had used it for prostitution.
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