Red Light

by Graham Masterton

  She took hold of the hem of her dress and lifted it up to her waist. Michael Gerrety looked at her for a long moment and then he said, ‘Good. That’s how the punters like it. I’ll be giving you a call, then, as soon as everything’s been arranged.’

  He paused, and then he said, ‘That’s grand. You can let it down now. Don’t want the missus to see you flashing your gash, now, do we?’

  ‘I’ll see you after, then.’

  ‘Well, not me myself. I don’t personally run this business on a day-to-day basis. But somebody will be in touch with you on my behalf and get you sorted.’

  He laid his hand on Branna’s shoulder and steered her towards the door. ‘I want to thank you for coming to see me. I wish all the girls who worked through my website were as wholesome as you are, and I mean it, you’re really wholesome. And you’re very pretty with it. I certainly wouldn’t kick you out of bed for eating crisps.’

  They hadn’t reached the door, however, before the doorbell played ‘If I Were a Rich Man’.

  Michael Gerrety called out to Carole, ‘Are you expecting anyone? Carole! Carole, will you get off that fecking phone for one minute! Are you expecting anyone?’

  Carole didn’t hear him, and the doorbell chimed again. ‘Jesus,’ said Michael Gerrety. ‘It’s probably the Chinky she ordered.’

  He opened the door. As soon as he did so, without any hesitation, Obioma stepped into the apartment and shut it behind her. She was all in black, as usual, except for a white scarf knotted around her hair. She was pointing her pocket shotgun directly at Michael Gerrety’s face.

  ‘How the feck did you get in here?’ Michael Gerrety demanded. ‘Carole! Call the guards! Carole!’

  Carole was still on the phone and still she didn’t hear him. Obioma said, ‘Get back, Mr Gerrety, and sit down on that couch there.’

  But Michael Gerrety seized Branna and pulled her in front of him, gripping both of her arms so tightly that she couldn’t twist herself free.

  ‘What are you going to do then?’ he said, ducking his head down behind Branna’s. ‘Blow this poor girl’s brains out? Carole! Will you get off that fecking phone, Carole. Can’t you see what’s going on here, you dozy mare! Carole!’

  Michael Gerrety backed towards the open door that gave out on to the balcony, pulling Branna after him.

  ‘Leave go of me!’ squealed Branna. ‘Leave go of me! Leave go of me!’

  But Michael Gerrety dragged her out on to the balcony and now Carole looked around and saw what was happening.

  ‘Call the guards!’ Michael Gerrety panted. Branna was throwing herself from side to side and bending herself around and kicking back at him, and he was having to use all of his strength to stop her from breaking away.

  Carole said, ‘Name of Jesus, what’s going on? Who’s this?’

  ‘I said call the fecking guards! She has a gun, for Christ’s sake!’

  Obioma stepped out on to the balcony, too. She pointed her pocket shotgun at Carole and said, ‘Drop the phone!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said drop your phone or I will kill you!’

  Carole opened her hand and her phone fell to the floor. ‘Now,’ said Obioma, ‘go to the end of the balcony and kneel down with your back turned and say nothing.’

  Carole did as she was told. Michael Gerrety was still wrestling with Branna, but he managed to say, ‘You’re not getting away with this, you bitch!’

  ‘You don’t think so?’ said Obioma. ‘Mawakiya did what I told him to do and cut off his own hand. So did Mânios Dumitrescu, and Bula, and Mister Dessie. I sent you the proof that they had done it, didn’t I? Did that scare you, Mr Gerrety? Did it make you fearful that I would come to you and make you do the same?’

  ‘Leave go of me!’ gasped Branna, and then she screamed out, ‘Help! Help! Somebody help me! Somebody help me!’

  ‘Nobody will hear you up here, my darling,’ said Obioma. ‘But I am not going to harm you. You have done nothing. It is this man, Michael Gerrety, that I want to punish. This is the man who took my sister Nwaha into slavery and made her a prostitute.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Michael Gerrety asked her. ‘Just tell me what you want and you can have it.’

  ‘They all said that. All four of those human slugs who worked for you. “Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, you can have anything! I will give you all the money I can lay my hands on! Just don’t hurt me!”’

  ‘Listen, I can give you a hundred times more than they could,’ said Michael Gerrety. Branna was jerking her head back now, in an attempt to hit him in the face, and he was having to dodge from side to side. ‘Will you keep still, you stupid bitch!’ he shouted at her. ‘Do you want to get me killed?’

  ‘Yes!’ she screamed back at him. ‘Yes, I do! I’m not a prostitute at all! I’m a reporter, for the Echo, and I’m going to see you damned for what you do!’

  ‘So you’re a fecking liar, as well as a slag?’

  Obioma said, ‘Let her go, Mr Gerrety. You cannot hold on to her forever. My sister killed herself because of what you did to her, and now is the time for you to be punished for it.’

  ‘If you think you can make me cut off my own hand, you’re badly mistaken. Nobody in the whole of my life ever made me do anything that I didn’t want to do, and you’re not going to be the first.’

  Obioma said, ‘There is a saying in Nigeria, Mr Gerrety. He who shits in the road on his way to the farm will meet flies on his way back. You can never escape the consequences of what you have done.’

  Carole suddenly started to cry. It was like the crying of a small, terrified child, rather than a middle-aged woman.

  Obioma said nothing, but waited for Michael Gerrety to answer her.

  Forty-three

  Katie arrived outside The Elysian with Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán and Detective O’Donovan.

  She went up to the two gardaí who were standing outside the front door and said, ‘What’s the story? No more suspicious packages, I hope.’

  ‘Only the usual residents in and out,’ said one of them. ‘Apart from that, one pizza delivery, one CD from Amazon, and a letting agent.’

  ‘A letting agent?’

  ‘She was after taking pictures of one of the apartments, that’s what she said. She was black, and I’ll tell you, she was some beour. But she didn’t fit the description of the suspect and I checked her ID. She was in and out of here in five minutes, if that.’

  ‘Which letting agency did she come from?’

  ‘Carbery’s, on Grand Parade.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’d say she left about twenty minutes ago.’

  ‘Describe her. What colour was her hair?’

  The garda looked uncomfortable. ‘It was, like, red, like yours. I mean, you couldn’t really miss it, a black woman with red hair. I mean, it must have been dyed, like, you know.’

  ‘Full marks for logic, officer,’ said Katie. Then she turned to Detective O’Donovan and said, ‘Sounds suspiciously like your African lasher who said that she didn’t give Obioma the keys to O’Farrell’s furniture workshop. What other ways can you get into this building, officer, apart from this one?’

  ‘There’s a door for the maintenance staff, but only the maintenance staff have a key for that, and then there’s a door from the basement garage, but that has a keyless combination lock and only the residents know the combination.’

  ‘But you could open the garage door from the inside, even if you didn’t know the combination?’

  ‘You could, yeah. I took a look in there meself this morning – just checking that nobody had wedged the door, like, or messed around with the lock so that it didn’t close proper.’

  Katie said, ‘Okay. As it happens, we’re here to bring Michael Gerrety into the station with us for questioning. Stay here for the moment, but if we need you upstairs we’ll call you.’

  As they waited for the lift, Detective O’Donovan turned to Katie and said, ‘What are you t
hinking, ma’am? Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?’

  ‘You mean, that your African lasher might have lied to you about the keys to O’Farrell’s workshop, and that she might have come here to let Obioma into the building? Well, we’ll soon find out, won’t we? If we find Michael Gerrety with no hands and half his face blown away, we’ll know that we’ve been outsmarted.’

  They went up to Michael Gerrety’s floor, walked along the corridor and approached the front door of his apartment. Katie raised her hand to indicate that they should be quiet and pressed her ear to the door.

  ‘I can faintly hear a woman crying.’

  ‘If you listened at half the doors in Ireland you could probably hear a woman crying,’ said Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the Gerretys having a row.’

  She pressed her ear to the door again, but now the crying had stopped. She heard a man’s voice, and he sounded angry, but then there was silence.

  ‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘Whatever’s going on in there, here goes nothing.’

  She pressed the doorbell and the chimes played ‘If I Were a Rich Man’.

  They waited, and waited, but nobody opened the door and there was still silence inside the Gerretys’ apartment.

  ‘Try the doorbell again?’ suggested Detective O’Donovan.

  ‘They’d have to be deaf or dead not to have heard that,’ said Katie. ‘Something’s happening in there and they’re deliberately not coming to the door. Kyna, there’s a caretaker’s office in the lobby, can you go down and get a master key? And bring one of those guards up with you. Tell the other guard to stay on the door in case I’m wrong and Obioma hasn’t managed to get inside.’

  Katie and Detective O’Donovan stood well away from the Gerretys’ door while Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán ran back along the corridor to the lift.

  ‘What’s the plan if she is in there?’ asked Detective O’Donovan.

  ‘I have no idea, Patrick. It isn’t easy to stop somebody who doesn’t care at all if they live or die.’

  They waited, and listened, and Katie heard a girl’s shrill voice calling out something that sounded like ‘Don’t – don’t do that!’, but after that there was silence again.

  Detective O’Donovan said, ‘Sounds like there’s somebody else in there, apart from the Gerretys. Let’s hope this isn’t going to be messy.’

  They heard the lift whining, and then Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán was back, with one of the gardaí from the Elysian Tower’s front door, his high-visibility jacket rustling as he jogged close behind her.

  ‘The master key,’ said Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán, holding it up. ‘The caretaker was very reluctant to let me have it at first, but then I threatened to arrest him for obstructing a police officer, and he was most cooperative after that.’

  As quietly as she could, she inserted the key into the door and turned it. Katie took her revolver out of its holster and stood to one side as Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán gingerly pushed the door open. To Katie’s relief, neither the bolts nor the safety chain were fastened, so there was no need to kick it.

  She put her finger to her lips and they entered the Gerretys’ apartment without saying a word. Normally, they would have stormed in like they had at Lower Glanmire Road, shouting out ‘Armed gardaí!’, but she had no idea of what they were going to find here, and Obioma was so different from the usual armed suspects they encountered that she wanted to proceed with the utmost caution.

  Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room it was almost dark, and the sky was the same prune colour as Katie’s bruised eye. Although the sun had gone down, the balcony outside was lit up and they could see Obioma out there, pointing her pocket shotgun. Only two metres in front of her stood a young blonde girl in a very short pink dress. She appeared to be struggling, but she was being forced to stay in front of Obioma by Michael Gerrety, who was holding her arms. Behind Michael Gerrety, at the very far end of the balcony, Carole Gerrety was kneeling on the floor with her back turned and her head bowed.

  ‘Let’s take this very, very easy,’ said Katie. Keeping her revolver raised, she crossed the living room towards the open balcony door. She was only halfway there before Obioma caught sight of her, although she kept her pocket shotgun pointed at the girl in the pink dress, and Michael Gerrety.

  ‘Obioma,’ said Katie, stepping out on to the balcony. ‘You need to put that weapon down, Obioma.’

  ‘I am here to finish my punishments,’ Obioma retorted, in a challenging tone. ‘This man deserves to die more than any of the others.’

  ‘Detective Superintendent Maguire!’ gasped the girl. Katie quickly glanced at her. She hadn’t recognized her without her water-buffalo hairstyle.

  ‘Branna! What in God’s name are you doing here?’

  ‘She’s a lying conniving bitch, that’s what she’s doing here!’ Michael Gerrety put in. ‘Now arrest this fecking black madwoman, would you? That’s your job, isn’t it? Keeping us citizens safe?’

  ‘Leave go of me!’ Branna shrilled at him. ‘Make him leave go of me!’

  ‘Oh, absolutely, and get myself shot dead? No thanks, girl! Come on, DS Maguire! Do your duty before somebody gets killed!’

  Branna jerked her head back again, and this time Michael Gerrety wasn’t expecting it and she hit him with a sharp crack on the bridge of his nose.

  ‘Jesus!’ he shouted, and two streams of bright red blood poured from his nostrils and dripped from his chin. By way of retaliation he gave Branna a violent shaking, but he didn’t let go of her arms.

  ‘Obioma!’ said Katie. ‘This is all over now. Branna’s an innocent girl and I don’t want her hurt.’

  ‘Innocent?’ raged Michael Gerrety. ‘She’s just broken my fecking honk!’

  ‘I am not going to put down this gun and I am not going to leave here until this man is dead,’ said Obioma. ‘I will take away his face and cut off his hands so that he cannot be accepted into heaven, and then my mission will be finished. My sister Nwaha will be able to sleep in peace.’

  ‘I’m not going to let you do that, Obioma,’ said Katie.

  ‘You will not stop me. You could not stop me before and you will not stop me now.’

  With that, she took a step nearer to Branna and Michael Gerrety, with her pocket shotgun aimed directly at Branna’s face. Then she took another step, until the muzzle was almost touching Branna’s forehead.

  ‘Are you going to be a man, Michael Gerrety, and let this young woman go?’ she said. ‘Are you going to take the punishment that you deserve?’

  ‘Oh, I will, yeah!’ said Michael Gerrety. His voice was panicky and bubbly with blood. ‘You’re mad, you are! You’re touched in the head! DS Maguire, aren’t you going to arrest this nutjob?’

  ‘If I have to kill one to kill the other, then so be it,’ said Obioma.

  Over five seconds passed during which nobody spoke and nobody moved. Off to the south, an airliner rumbled as it took off from Cork airport. Tears were running down Branna’s cheeks, while Michael Gerrety was keeping his head down behind her and his shoulders hunched.

  Close behind her, Katie heard Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán whisper, ‘My God. She’s going to do it, isn’t she?’

  Katie fired. Obioma spun around, thrown off balance by the impact of the .38 Special bullet, and also startled. Her arm swung around, and she tried to aim her pocket shotgun at Katie, but Katie fired again, and this time she staggered backwards and hit the balcony railing with a clang.

  Then, whether she did it deliberately or not, she rolled and toppled over the railing and disappeared. She didn’t cry out, she simply disappeared. Katie reached the edge of the balcony just in time to see her hit the pavement, seventeen storeys below.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán. She reached out and laid her hand on Katie’s arm, but Katie pushed it away. Her ears were ringing from the two gunshots and her wrist hurt from the recoil.

/>   Michael Gerrety released his grip on Branna’s arms and Branna sank to her knees on the floor and started sobbing – agonized, lung-wrenching sobs. Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán and Detective O’ Donovan helped her up on to her feet and took her into the living room. Carole Gerrety stood up and went to the railing and stared down into the street, both hands held up to her face in horror.

  Katie turned to Michael Gerrety. He was smearing the blood from under his nose with the back of his hand. ‘Don’t think it’s broken after all,’ he said. ‘Just a bad nosebleed. Bitch.’

  Katie returned her revolver to its holster. She was still partially deafened. ‘You did this,’ she heard herself say to him. ‘This is what happens when you treat human beings as if they were only put on this earth to make money for you.’

  Michael Gerrety put his arm around his wife’s waist and said, ‘I’ll ignore that remark, detective superintendent, considering you just saved my life. Are you all right, Carole? Jesus.’

  Katie took another look down to the street below. The garda from the front of the Elysian Tower was kneeling down next to Obioma and several bystanders had gathered, although they were keeping their distance.

  Detective O’Donovan came back out on to the balcony and said, ‘I’ve called for an ambulance and the technical boys.’ He nodded towards Michael Gerrety and said, ‘What about him?’

  ‘What does he mean, what about me?’ asked Michael Gerrety.

  ‘The reason I came here this evening was to take you in for questioning,’ said Katie.

  ‘Questioning? What about? Jesus, you never leave me alone, do you? You’re obsessed, you are.’

  ‘I need you to answer some questions about payments made by you to certain police officers in exchange for their turning a blind eye to some of your illegal activities.’

  ‘What? What illegal activities? I never did anything illegal in my life.’

  Katie said, ‘Under the circumstances, we’ll leave it until tomorrow. But I’d appreciate it if you’d make an appearance at Anglesea Street sometime in the morning. You can bring Mr Moody with you, if you wish.’

  ‘This is harassment! I almost got myself killed there and now you want me to answer questions about illegal activities which I’ve never even done! You’re fecking obsessed!’