‘Fine. I’m fine. I’ve just got off the phone with Nils Shapiro.’
‘Oh, your pharmacy friend in LA.’
‘That’s right. He still wants me on board. He’s very keen.’
‘I see,’ said Katie. ‘Maybe we can talk about it tomorrow, when I get back.’
‘I don’t know that there’s too much to talk about.’
‘Well, you know me, I can always find something to talk about. My mother was always asking when I was ever going to shut my mouth and eat my dinner.’
‘How did she expect you to eat your dinner with your mouth shut?’
‘I’m not in the mood for jokes, John.’
‘No, sorry.’
‘Talking of dinner, have you had any?’ she asked him.
‘You’re not my mother, Katie.’
‘No, I’m not. In fact I’m not anything at all to you, am I?’
‘Katie—’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. It’s been a long day. I’ll see you tomorrow so. Goodnight.’
‘Katie—’ he said, but she switched off her phone. Maybe it was rude, and unkind, but she was beginning to feel that when he said he didn’t love Ireland any more, what he really meant was that he didn’t love her. Well, he did, but not enough to give up his life in America. She supposed she couldn’t blame him. He wanted sun instead of rain, blue skies instead of grey. He wanted boundless opportunity, instead of ‘Ah well, we’ve suffered many times before in the past and we’ve learned to put a brave face on it, like.’
She climbed into bed. The sheets smelled of laundry instead of her. She closed her eyes and almost instantly fell asleep.
‘Smoked,’ Dr O’Brien said.
‘Smoked?’ she said, looking at the eight hands laid out in a line on the stainless steel table in front of her. ‘You mean, like bacon?’
‘That’s correct. Or kippers. They haven’t been done in a proper smoker, though. I’d say a normal domestic oven. But it’s desiccated them enough to preserve them for a while – these three pairs, anyway. This fourth pair haven’t been smoked at all. Well – you can tell by the shape they’re in.’
‘But they all fit the wrists of our four victims?’
‘No question at all,’ said Dr O’Brien. ‘Every one of them, a perfect match, like a jigsaw. Or Lego maybe. Would you like me to show you?’
‘No, thanks, Ailbe,’ said Katie. ‘I’ll take your word for it.’
It was almost noon. The sun was shining in through the clerestory windows of the pathology laboratory, so that it looked almost like the interior of a church. All of the congregation here, though, were lying on trolleys under green sheets and had already gone to the place for which they had been praying all of their lives.
Dr O’Brien picked up Mawakiya’s left hand and turned it over. ‘Apart from the left hand of victim number three – the one you call Bula, is it? – the left hands of all the other victims were amputated very raggedly, almost certainly using a hacksaw. I thought before from the condition of their wrists that they had cut off their own left hands, but now I am almost certain of it. With Bula it’s impossible to say, of course, because his left hand was detached with a circular saw.’
‘Well, we know for sure what the motive was for cutting their hands off,’ said Katie. ‘Revenge, as you said, Ailbe, right from the very beginning. And they were sent to Michael Gerrety either as a threat or as trophies to show him what she had done to the people who worked for him, or both.’
‘I think in this case, both,’ said Dr O’Brien. ‘Not that it falls within my mandate to have an opinion. But it was common in many parts of West Africa for hands to be amputated as a punishment. In the colonial days they did it to prove to their white bosses that the punishment had been duly carried out. Well, it would have saved them from dragging in the whole body, wouldn’t it? In the Congo, they also used it as proof that expensive ammunition hadn’t been wasted. Even brutality has to stick to a budget.’
Katie would normally have taken the South Ring Road back to Anglesea Street, but she had to go into the city centre to do some shopping at the Paul Street Tesco. She needed dog food for Barney and washing-up liquid and cheese and fresh bread. She also felt like doing something totally normal, like pushing a shopping trolley around to the sound of piped music, so that she wouldn’t have to think about John and severed hands and Obioma and Michael Gerrety.
She turned into Washington Street, past the courthouse. As she was passing the building that housed Michael Gerrety’s brothel, she saw the front door open and a woman step out. To her astonishment, she realized that it was Obioma. Her black, Medusa-like hair was untied, but she was still wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans and boots, and that black leather waistcoat. She looked up and down the street, as if to make sure that nobody was watching her, and then she started to walk towards Grand Parade.
Katie stepped on her brakes and the van behind her blew its horn at her. It pulled up beside her and the passenger yelled out, ‘Learn to drive, you stupid cow! You almost had us up your arse there!’
Katie took no notice. Obioma was crossing Grand Parade and heading towards Patrick Street, and walking very quickly. The traffic lights were red, but Katie drove through them, turned left, and pulled her car up on to the pavement outside Finn’s Corner sportswear shop. She climbed out and started to run across the road, although she had to stop when a car came around the corner and almost hit her.
‘Are you after dying, you daft bitch?’ the driver shouted at her.
She didn’t say anything but dodged around the back of his car and reached the pavement on the opposite side of the road. However, Obioma must have heard the driver’s brakes screeching and him shouting at her, because she turned around. The instant she saw that Katie was coming after her, she started to run.
Katie started running, too. Patrick Street was crowded with lunchtime shoppers and she had to jink and sidestep to avoid bumping into them.
Obioma collided with several pedestrians and Katie heard them calling out after her in protest, but then she left the pavement and started to run in the road. Katie followed her and almost knocked a cyclist off his bike.
The two of them ran along the middle of Patrick Street, with shoppers turning round to stare at them. Obioma was about fifty metres ahead of Katie, and even though she was wearing high-heeled boots she was running very fast. Katie felt as if she ought to shout, ‘Stop her!’ but she knew from her experience as a young garda that people never reacted quickly enough, and that Obioma would be two streets away before they realized what she wanted them to do. Besides, she was too short of breath.
Obioma ran into French Church Street, a long narrow pedestrian alleyway that would lead her to Paul Street. Again, she was colliding with people as she ran, and she knocked one woman’s shopping all across the pavement, but that didn’t slow her down. In fact, she seemed to Katie to be running even faster. Katie herself was fit, and exercised regularly, but by now she was panting hard and she was very conscious of her holster slapping against her thigh. Her vision was jiggling like a hand-held camera and the shopfronts and cafes all along the street were becoming a blur.
She reached Paul Street and looked left and right to see where Obioma had gone. There was no sign of her anywhere, although Katie guessed she had probably turned right because that part of the street was more crowded. She started to jog towards Academy Street, trying to glimpse Obioma’s snake-like hair bobbing up and down ahead of her.
As she jogged, she took out her iPhone so that she could call for back-up. Obioma was in the city centre, on foot, and patrol cars could encircle the area within a few minutes. She slowed down to a walk to switch it on, but as she did so Obioma stepped out of the darkened doorway of a men’s hairdresser’s called The Crop Shop and hit her. It was a stunning chop with the edge of her hand which struck Katie on the cheekbone and sent her stumbling backwards across the pavement.
Obioma stalked after her and hit her again, with the left hand this
time, striking her left ear. Katie pitched over on to her shoulder and dropped her iPhone. Obioma immediately stamped on it, twice, and crushed it.
Katie’s head was singing and her vision was even more jumbled than when she had been running, but she managed to reach for her gun and tug it out of its holster.
Obioma stood over her. A crowd of shoppers had already started to gather around them, and Katie could hear one young man calling out, ‘Catfight! Come and see this, boy! Catfight!’
Katie propped herself up on her left elbow and pointed her revolver at Obioma. ‘You’re under arrest,’ she told her. She could feel her right eye closing up already.
‘Or what?’ said Obioma, looking down at her. ‘You will shoot me, in front of all of these people, with the risk of hitting one of them as well? I don’t think so, detective superintendent. Besides, I don’t think you’re the shooting kind.’
Now that Katie had produced her gun, the shoppers who had crowded around closest to them started to shuffle backwards. ‘I’m a Garda detective,’ Katie announced, without taking her eyes off Obioma. ‘Will somebody please dial 112 and somebody go looking for a guard. And, please, all of you, clear out of here now, as quick as you can.’
Several of the onlookers took out their phones and started prodding, while the rest of them began to disperse, but far too slowly, as if they were reluctant to miss out on any of the action.
‘Will you push on!’ she snapped at them. ‘I’m making an arrest here!’
Obioma, however, was giving Katie that haughty, heavy-lidded look. ‘I have a mission to fulfil,’ she said. ‘You know what I am sworn to do, and I will do it. There is only one way that you can stop me.’
With that, she turned around and started to walk away. The crowd parted to let her through, pushing at each other in their effort to keep clear of her in case Katie started shooting.
She turned the corner into Academy Street and was gone. Katie stood with her gun in her hand, pointing at nothing. Then she lowered it and slid it back into its holster. Obioma was wrong. She was the shooting kind. She had shot a killer before, and fatally wounded him, but that had been in a moment of high stress, when her own life had been in danger. She was not going to shoot a woman in the street in broad daylight in front of at least a hundred bystanders, especially since that woman had presented no obvious threat apart from hitting her, and especially since she would have had to shoot her in the back. That would have been summary execution.
More than that, she was keenly aware that Obioma wasn’t afraid of her. When she pointed her gun at most suspects that she arrested they would put up their hands and give up immediately, but Obioma didn’t care if she shot her or not. Her fearlessness made her invulnerable.
She heard sirens. A patrol car appeared at the Academy Street end of the street, and then another two at the opposite end, in Saint Peter and Paul Place, even though that was a pedestrian precinct. She heard running feet and saw yellow high-visibility jackets making their way towards her through the crowd.
Her head was throbbing and she felt that the pavement was ebbing and flowing underneath her feet. An elderly priest came up to her and put his arm around her. She could smell the mints on his breath.
‘You look very pale, my dear. Take some deep breaths, that’s it. Look, there’s a bench over here. Come and sit down. That’s a fierce terrible bruise on your cheek there and no mistake.’
She sat down, and the priest sat down next to her. Two gardaí came up to her, and at least one of them recognized who she was.
‘Who did this to you, ma’am? Do you know where she might have gone now?’
‘Yes, officer,’ said Katie. ‘I know who did it. I know where she’s going, too. But God alone knows how we can stop her.’
Forty-one
Detective O’Donovan came into her office and said, ‘You’re going to love this, ma’am. But then again, you’re probably not.’
‘Has she been caught yet?’
‘Not a sniff of her anywhere, I’m afraid. We’ve had thirty-five guards and the dog unit out searching for her. They were even looking in the ladies’ toilets in Dunne’s. That caused a bit of screaming, so I’m told.’
‘Well, she managed to outwit us before, didn’t she, Patrick, in Washington Street? Never even left the building after she shot Mister Dessie. No wonder we didn’t see her coming out of the front door, she never did, and she must have been staying in that empty flat ever since. We did search that flat, didn’t we?’
Detective O’Donovan nodded. ‘We did of course, yeah. But it was probably just a quick look in and all she would have had to do is hide herself in a wardrobe or under the bed or somewhere like that.’
Katie gently touched her right cheek with her fingertips. Her eye was swollen and tender and she knew that by tomorrow morning she would have a huge black eye. She had taken two Nurofen, so at least her headache had subsided. ‘So what’s this thing that I’m going to love but probably not?’
‘We’ve just brought in your two favourite gardaí, Ronan Kelly and Billy Daly. They’re downstairs in the interview room.’
‘Brought them in? What do you mean, you’ve brought them in?’
‘They were arrested at Ringaskiddy about an hour ago, trying to board the Swansea ferry with a load of drugs on them. I don’t know exactly how much, but there was heroin and racemic methamphetamine and so many pills you could have opened a maracas factory.’
‘Holy Mother of God, what did they think they were doing?’
‘They were emigrating. They knew you were going to report them for corruption, so they decided to make themselves scarce. They would have got away with it, too, except that one of the sniffer dogs was being taken off duty and started barking at them as they walked past.’
Katie stood up. ‘Right, I’ll go down and talk to them. I can’t believe those two. They walked through the stupid wood and got hit by every branch.’
Detective O’Donovan raised his hand and said, ‘Wait, ma’am. There’s something more.’
‘Don’t tell me. What?’
‘After they were stopped at Ringaskiddy, Daly’s car was found in the ferry terminal car park. Apparently he was just going to leave it there. It was only an old Honda Civic and he isn’t married or nothing so it’s not as if he has a wife or a partner who would have needed it.’
‘So?’
‘So a Honda Civic stopped across the street from Nolan’s yard at Dennehy’s Cross at the same time as the Nissan X-Trail was stolen – the one that rammed your car.’
‘Really? Why didn’t Ryan report that as soon as he saw it?’
‘Because it only stopped for a couple of minutes, and you can see that the driver is making a call on his mobile. Then it drove off.’
‘Don’t tell me it was Garda Daly’s car?’
‘I’m sorry to say that it was. It didn’t look like he was doing anything in particular, but he could well have been keeping a lookout while Kelly cut the wire and then he was checking on his mobile that he’d managed to break into the X-Trail and get it started.’
Katie didn’t know what to say. If Garda Kelly and Garda Daly had stolen the X-Trail, they had done it with the deliberate intention of using it to run her off the road and kill her. More than likely it had been them who had been following her when she left her house to go to Kent station and had come up so close behind her as she joined the main road to Cork.
They had been stupid enough to ram her car while it was going up a hill, with no certainty at all that the crash would be fatal. If she had been driving, instead of Ailish, she would probably have survived it. It was only Ailish’s bad heart that had killed her.
Katie took a deep, deep breath.
‘Are you okay, ma’am?’ asked Detective O’Donovan.
‘What do you think? Let’s go down and have a word with those two, shall we?’
Ronan Kelly and Billy Daly were sitting at the table in the interview room, both looking frowsy-haired, unshaven and dejected. A bur
ly uniformed garda was standing by the door with his hands behind his back, staring at the ceiling. He knew them both well, of course, but he was under instructions not to say a word to them.
When Katie and Detective O’Donovan entered the room, neither of them looked up. Katie said to the garda on the door, ‘If you could wait outside, please.’ She didn’t want everybody in the station to hear the details of this interview before she had even had a chance to discuss it with Acting Chief Superintendent Molloy and decide what charges they were going to bring.
Katie and Detective O’Donovan sat down opposite the two gardaí. Ronan Kelly glanced up and saw Katie’s bruised eye and Katie thought she caught him giving the ghost of a smile.
‘Patrick, would you?’ she said, and nodded towards the recording machine. Detective O’Donovan switched it on and Katie said, ‘Interview with Garda Ronan Kelly and Garda William Daly.’ She checked the clock on the wall and added the time and the date.
‘Now, we’re going to switch that off and talk informally,’ she said.
‘Ma’am?’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘I just switched it on.’
‘Well, switch it off again, please, and go right back to the beginning.’
When Detective O’Donovan had done that, Katie propped her elbows on the table and laced her fingers together like a judge about to pass sentence.
‘You two clowns tried to kill me,’ she said.
Billy Daly said, ‘That wasn’t us! Swear on the Bible!’
‘Will you shut your trap, Billy!’ said Ronan Kelly. ‘Saying it wasn’t us is just as bad as saying it was.’
‘Jesus, you two are thick,’ said Katie. ‘How you managed to qualify as gardaí I can’t understand for the life of me. I’m surprised you know which end of a baton to take hold of. You’re not only thick, you’re greedy and immoral and a disgrace to your uniforms. And to think the both of you had the Garda badge tattooed on you.’
She paused, and then she said, ‘There’s no point in you trying to deny what you did. You knew I was going to report you for taking bribes from Michael Gerrety. So you thought you could save your miserable skins by getting rid of me.
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