‘Ruhama saved me from the brothel, and it was a Nigerian sister from Cois Tine who finally convinced me that the juju curse could not harm me. In the end I told everything to the guards, everything. I didn’t catch fire. Father Dominic managed to contact my family through the Roman Catholic diocese in Oyo and none of them had been harmed because I had spoken out.’
‘What happened to your minders?’
‘Some of them were arrested and I think that one was ordered to be deported. Of course, they were not punished nearly enough for what they had done to me, but I try not think about that. The most important thing is that now I have my life and my freedom, and I believe in my true value as a person.’
Katie turned to Lolade and said, ‘You hear that, sweetheart? You’re going to have a very good life from now on. You have people around you who are going to help you now, and treat you with respect – not use you as if you’re worth nothing at all.’
Lolade nodded. ‘I feel happy now. I did not feel happy in a long time.’
‘I wanted to ask you about something you said to me in the ambulance. It sounded like ‘Rama Mal-ah-eeka’, if I remember it correctly. I didn’t know what it meant.’
Lolade glanced anxiously at Faith and gripped her hand tight. Whatever it meant, it obviously still disturbed her.
‘It means Angel of Revenge,’ said Faith. ‘The woman who killed Mawakiya, that is what she called herself. Lolade was not only frightened because this woman said she would shoot her like Mawakiya if she left the room, but because she was sure that she was a juju witch.’
Lolade made a quick side-to-side gesture two or three times across her chest. ‘She was wearing a juju necklace same like the witch who put the curse on me,’ she said. ‘I thought that even if she had gone away she could still kill me from a distance.’
Katie opened her briefcase and took out the CCTV blow-up that Detective Ryan had given her of the suspect following the purple-suited man along Patrick Street.
‘That is the woman,’ said Lolade, furiously nodding her head. ‘That is Rama Mala’ika.’
Katie showed her another picture, this time of both the suspect and the purple-suited man.
‘The man there – that is Mawakiya. He was wearing those clothes when he came to my room. He was coming for my money. He comes every day for my money. He told me also that two men were going to come in the evening. They want to have me at the same time, front and back, and I should be nice to them because they are his special friends.’
‘But then this woman appeared?’
‘Yes! She came in through the door bang! like thunder. And she point a gun at Mawakiya. And Mawakiya is very, very frightened! He gets down on his knees and says, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me! But she says I will kill you if you do not do as I say.’
Lolade was growing agitated now, and Faith stroked her hair and said, ‘Ssh, ssh, it is all over now. Nobody can hurt you any more.’
‘If it upsets you too much to talk about this now, Lolade, I can come back later,’ Katie told her.
‘I want to tell you,’ Lolade insisted. ‘I was very frightened of the woman, too, but she did not hurt me, and I hated Mawakiya. It was horrible, how she killed him, but I am happy that he is dead. I could sing a happy song that Mawakiya is dead.’
‘Did you see her cut off his hands?’
Lolade shook her head. ‘The woman said to me to sit down in the corner and to turn my back and to cover myself with my blanket. I did not see. I only hear. I hear the woman tell Mawakiya to take off all of his clothes. Then I hear her say that she would shoot him between his legs and turn him into a woman so that he would know what it was like to be treated like a slave.
‘I heard Mawakiya weep. I never hear a man weep like that before, only my grandfather when my grandmother died. I could not hear everything that the woman say to him next, but a long time pass, and then I hear him weep again, but this time it was different, and he say again and again “ah!-ah!-ah!”, like something hurt him very bad.
‘Next, another long time pass. I hear noises like “sheee-sheee-sheee”, but I do not know what is happening. I pull away my blanket and I turn around to see if the woman is still there. Mawakiya is lying on the bed and there is so much blood. I see then that he has no hands any more. The woman is standing over him with her gun. She is pointing it at Mawakiya’s face.’
‘She saw that you were looking at her, but that didn’t stop her?’
‘No. She was not afraid at all. She shot Mawakiya between his eyes. Her gun is very small but very loud bang! and his forehead disappear. She load her gun again and then she shoot him in his nose, and the rest of his face is disappear, too.
‘I feel sick to see what the woman has done to him. He has no face any more, only big red hole. She say something to me but I do not know what it is. I am deaf at first, because of the noise of her gun. She picks up my blanket and uses it to wrap up Mawakiya’s clothes, his suit, his dirty underpant, everything. I do not see what she has done with his hands, but when she goes, his hands are gone, too.’
‘But she warned you that if you tried to leave the room, she would kill you in the same way as Mawakiya?’
‘Yes,’ said Lolade. ‘And I thought that she could still do it, even if she was not there. I thought that she was a juju witch, because of her necklace, and because of the way she killed Mawakiya. He cannot go to heaven now because he has no hands to hold his spear and his shield, and he cannot wear warpaint because he has no face. He has to stay between this world and the next forever. They say it is like being drowned in a sack, you cannot breathe, but you never die.’
Katie said, ‘Tell me something about Mawakiya. What was his real name?’
‘I do not know. Everybody call him Mawakiya, because he was always singing, and always the same song. I once hear a woman friend of his call him Kola, but that is the only time. The first day when I come to Cork I meet only white men. They make me stay in this very cold bedroom for two days and all the time there is a big fat man watching me, even when I go to the toilet. His name is Bula-Bulan Yaro.’
‘That means “Fat Man”,’ put in Faith. ‘We know him. He’s an illegal who does all kinds of odd jobs for the traffickers.’
‘Bula, yes, we know him, too,’ said Katie. ‘He wallpapers brothels, drives the girls to the STD clinics, things like that. Not exactly criminal activities in themselves, but not very moral, either. Our Immigration Bureau have tried to deport him at least twice, as far as I know. I think his defence is that he’s fathered a child by some divorced woman in Farranree. There’s some human rights issue, anyway. He’s pretty low priority, but we’ll get him one day.’
Katie opened up her briefcase again and took out a manila envelope with more photographs in it. ‘I’m not going to tell you who the people in these pictures are, Lolade, but I want you to look at them carefully and tell me if you’ve ever met any of them, or seen them. If you have, I want you to tell me if you can remember any of their names, or what they might have called each other, or anything they might have said that sticks in your mind. It doesn’t matter if it didn’t make any sense to you when they said it.’
She took out six photographs and handed them to Lolade one by one. Lolade frowned at the first one, and then gave it back. ‘I have never seen these two men.’
‘That’s a relief. One of them is Chief Superintendent Dermot O’Driscoll and the other is Councillor Charles Clancy, the current lord mayor. That was just a test, I’m sorry.’
Lolade took much longer to study the second photograph. At last she tapped it emphatically with her fingernail. ‘This man came to see me when I was first brought to Cork. It was in a flat, with other girls. I don’t know his name, but before he came the girls kept saying that “Himself will be here in a minute”.’
‘Nobody actually called him by his name when he was there?’
‘I don’t think so. But I was very frightened and I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. I didn’t listen much to wha
t the girls were saying.’
‘Did he say anything that you can remember?’
‘He looked at me and smiled and said I was a cutie. I asked him what he want me to do and he is surprised that I speak good English. I told him that I had best teacher in my school, Mister Akindele. He said because I speak good English this would help me with my work, to be friendly with customers. Then he tell me to take off all of my clothes.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I say no. But he say it is important health check. He say I cannot work unless he is sure I am healthy, I don’t have skin problem, something like that. One of the women was there in the room with us and she said to me that it would be all right, she would stay there. So I took off my clothes, but to do that in front of a strange man I feel very – I don’t know the word. Like shame.’
‘Embarrassed, of course,’ said Katie. ‘But what did this man say then?’
‘He was very angry when he see me with no clothes on! He ask the woman how old I am. He said look at her, she is only a kid! He said, do you want me to get done? I don’t know what he means by “done”. He keeps saying, “I’ll get done, you stupid woman! I’ll get done!” I want to stop him being so angry so I tell him that I am already thirteen. But then he was even more angry. I do not know about the law in Ireland – I think he is angry because he believes that I am lying. I have a friend at home who was married when she was eleven, and her husband is forty-nine, so I thought it would make it all right. But he is still so angry. And I have no clothes on.’
The memory of it was making Lolade even more upset, rocking backwards and forwards in bed and hugging her knees tightly. Katie sat back and let her calm down.
‘Come on, sweetheart, how about a drink of water?’ she asked her. ‘Perhaps you’d like to take a break for half an hour. I can imagine how distressing this is.’
‘No, I will tell you! I have to tell you!’
‘All right. Ssh, don’t get upset. I understand. So what happened next, after Himself got so angry?’
‘He called on his phone and in only a short time Mawakiya comes to the flat. I do not like Mawakiya, he looks like a kind of a devil, with one eye all red and bad teeth, and he smells of perfume. Himself says to Mawakiya, “Take this girl away and teach her all the tricks. Bring her back in five years’ time.”’
‘So that’s how you ended up in that dump on Lower Shandon Street, being prostituted by Mawakiya?’
Lolade whispered, ‘Yes.’
Faith said, ‘We have no idea how Mawakiya kept himself out of sight for so long. Now that he’s dead, though, the girls he used to manage are coming to us and Ruhama and the social services and they’re desperate for help. They have absolutely no money, of course. Some of them have hardly any clothes, and without him they’re lost. And they’re all so young, fifteen, sixteen. It’s heartbreaking.’
‘You can understand why Himself wouldn’t take them on,’ said Katie. ‘He could have been charged with child-trafficking and defilement of a child under fifteen, both of which carry a possible life sentence. He might have been charged with reckless endangerment, too, and he could have been given an extra ten years for that.’
She passed Lolade another photograph. Lolade said, ‘Yes, that is the same man. I don’t know the woman.’
‘How about this man? Do you recognize him?’
Lolade looked at the fourth photograph and nodded. ‘I know him, yes. Six or seven times he came to have sex with me, but he never pay. I think he work for the man they call Himself. Three or four times I see him hit girls.’ She held up her fist and turned it slowly around. ‘One girl he pulled her hair like this, and twisted it, and twisted it, so that she scream and scream. Then he hit her head against the wall.’
Katie showed the photograph to Faith, and Faith crossed herself and said, ‘Dessie O’Leary. Mister Dessie, the girls all call him. There is no word that I can use to describe that man without having to say five Hail Marys and brush my teeth with carbolic soap.’
Next, Katie held up the photographs of the man that Lolade had only known as “Himself”.
‘Michael Gerrety,’ she said. ‘And here he is with his wife, Carole.’
‘Michael Gerrety!’ said Faith, her nose wrinkling in disgust. ‘Even more Hail Marys! Even more soap, too!’
‘Ah, yes. But Lolade has just told us that Gerrety passed her on to a third party, i.e. Mawakiya, for the express purpose of him pimping her – what other interpretation could you put on “Take this girl away and teach her all the tricks”? And Lolade is only thirteen. In other words, we now have a first-hand witness statement that Gerrety is guilty of trafficking and reckless endangerment, at the very least.
‘I can’t give you any specific details at the moment, Faith, but we’re seeking more evidence against him, and this can only help our case enormously.’
Katie replaced the photographs in the envelope. ‘Lolade, you’ve been pure amazing. I know how hard this has been for you, but believe me, things will only get better. I’ll come back to see you over the weekend so. I might have a few more questions to ask you, but the most important thing for you, girl, is to get yourself well.’
Before she went, she embraced Faith and said, ‘As for you, Faith, you’re a star. Thank you for what you’ve done for Lolade.’
‘A star?’ said Faith, and Katie could see the pain in her eyes. ‘I was a fallen star once. But you know, Katie – even a fallen star can rise up into the sky again, rise up, and shine. Maybe not as pure as before, but just as bright!’
Twenty-two
Katie went down to the pathology lab before she left the hospital. A young, ginger-haired pathologist was staring glumly at a shadowy scan of a bowel tumour, but Dr O’Brien had not yet arrived. Katie was relieved, in a way. Dr O’Brien would have insisted on showing her the two mutilated homicide victims, and how he had pieced together the skin from their faces, and her stomach didn’t really feel strong enough for gristle and connective tissue and the all-pervasive sweetness of decomposing flesh. She was having enough trouble keeping down the pineapple juice that she had drunk too quickly instead of breakfast. She left Dr O’Brien a note to call her.
Before she drove out of the hospital car park, she checked her text messages, of which she had fifteen altogether. Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll wanted to see her as soon as she arrived at Anglesea Street. Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán had found the body-art parlour where Mawakiya had been tattooed – but there were ‘complications’, which she didn’t specify but needed to discuss ‘asap!!’
Detective O’Donovan said that the CCTV picture of the young African woman that had appeared on the RTÉ News yesterday evening had attracted thirty-eight responses, one of which had been a proposal of marriage. However, none of the respondents had been able to say who she was, or where she came from, or where they might find her now.
The sketch artist, Maureen Quinn, had finished a preliminary likeness of Mawakiya’s reconstructed face. She had scanned it and sent it over for Katie to look at, but she wasn’t at all happy herself with what she’d done. ‘I’ve made him look like a troll! I shall have to have another try!’
Garda press officer Declan O’Donoghue said that he had received a request from Branna MacSuibhne from the Evening Echo for an ‘in-depth’ interview on the Garda’s war against sex slavery and vice – ‘which Detective Superintendent Maguire personally promised me’. Mother of God, thought Katie. Doesn’t she ever give it a rest?
From John, she had received a text that he had booked them an upstairs table for 7.30 p.m. at The Rising Tide brasserie in Glounthaune village. ‘Hopefully at long last we can eat a dinner together??’
Katie skimmed through the rest of her messages, just to see who had sent them, but most of them were routine updates from Garda headquarters in Phoenix Park, in Dublin – advising her, for instance, that they were making a new push to bring down road casualties on ‘Fatal Friday’, which was always Ireland’s worst day for traffic casualties. She
could look at these later, although she did pause to read an invitation for her to give an after-dinner speech on ‘Drugs and the Law’ at a medical convention in Kinsale. She had attended one of those conventions before, two years ago, and she couldn’t imagine anything worse than spending an evening with two hundred drunken doctors in dinner jackets, all of whom were convinced that their professional qualifications authorized them to grope every good-looking woman in the room.
She bought herself a latte and a cheese and tomato sandwich in the canteen. She hadn’t even reached her office, however, before Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll opened his door and said, ‘Katie! There you are! I was expecting you before!’
‘Oh, sorry, sir. I went to the hospital first to speak to Isabelle. Well, it turns out her real name’s Lolade. She’s started talking now, thanks to a very fine Nigerian lady from Cois Tine. And you’ll be delighted to know that she gave me some extremely damning evidence against Michael Gerrety and Desmond O’Leary.’
‘Well, good. Look, you can tell me all about that later. Bring your coffee in here, if you like. I have my replacement here I’d like you to meet. Temporary replacement, any road.’
Katie was about to say, ‘Give me a moment, Dermot,’ but he opened his office door wider and sitting at his desk was a short, bull-necked man in uniform, who immediately stood up and held out his hand.
Katie entered the office, awkwardly putting her briefcase down on the floor next to the bookcase, and her sandwich on the shelf next to a leather-bound copy of Offences Against the Person.
‘This is Superintendent Bryan Molloy from the Henry Street station in Limerick,’ said Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll. ‘He’ll be keeping his hand on the tiller while I’m away having my treatment.’
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