‘Why didn’t they report it to the Garda anyway?’ said Katie.
‘Like I say, they didn’t think it was anything of any great importance. Just a Land Rover that had caught fire for some reason and two fellows who were helpless to put it out. They only brought the pictures in to us because they were running low on holiday money and thought we might pay them a few euros for them. And so we did, because one or two of them are pure spectacular. In one of them, there’s a great ball of fire going up in the air which must have been the Land Rover’s petrol tank exploding.’
‘Why didn’t you bring them in to us?’
‘I did. I am. I couldn’t have done it any sooner. Here they are now, on my phone. I’ll share them with you right away.’
‘I must say you certainly picked your moment.’
‘DS Maguire, I swear to you on the tomb of St Francis de Sales that I haven’t even had the time myself to study them in any detail at all. I can tell you, though, that you can see at least one of the two fellows’ faces quite distinctly – so if you knew him, like, you’d be able to tell who he was.’
Katie opened the laptop in front of her and said, ‘Go on, then. You have me on your list of contacts, don’t you?’
There was a rustle of excitement in the conference room. Fionnuala Sweeney stood up and said, ‘You’ll be releasing those pictures to all of us, I hope?’
‘Not yet, Fionnuala,’ Katie told her. ‘We need to examine them ourselves first and see if we can identify either or both of the two men in them.’
Katie’s laptop pinged and an email from Dan Keane appeared with a Dropbox link to seven photographs. They all showed a Land Rover burning in a narrow country track, with dense black smoke billowing out of it and two men standing some distance away, half hidden by the long grass verge. The second to last picture was the most dramatic, with orange flames rolling up into the sky and one of the men turning his face away from the blast so that he could be clearly seen by the camera.
‘Thank you, Dan,’ said Katie. ‘We’ll take a look at these immediately and let you know as soon as we’re ready to issue a statement. Meanwhile, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t publish them yet.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ said Dan Keane. ‘We paid for them, after all. Two hundred and fifty euros. Cash.’
‘We appreciate that,’ put in Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin. ‘However, they amount to material evidence in an ongoing Garda inquiry. If you publish them prematurely and the men in the pictures are alerted to the possibility that we’re looking for them and flee our jurisdiction, that could amount to obstruction.’
‘I think I’ll have to talk to our lawyers about that,’ said Dan Keane. ‘In the meantime, though, can you now verify that this is the Land Rover that killed Detective Barry? Like, the number plates in those pictures do match, don’t they?’
‘You swore that you hadn’t had the time to study them,’ said Katie.
‘I didn’t, no. But I couldn’t help myself from giving the number plates a quick lamp. They’re BXZ plates, from Armagh.’
‘Very well,’ said Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin, speaking to all of the assembled journalists. ‘You can quote me as confirming that we’ve located an abandoned Land Rover that appears to be the same vehicle that killed Detective Barry. Further than that, I have no more comments to make at this time.’
Katie said, ‘The main purpose of this briefing was to inform you that the bodies found in Blarney have been positively identified as Stephen Langtry and his family. If we manage to come up with any information about who might have killed them and what the motive might have been, we will of course let you know. Thank you for coming.’
Dan Keane said, ‘Bobby Quilty, he’s from Armagh, isn’t he? And Detective Barry was trying to arrest one of his dealers when he was killed.’
Katie closed her laptop and stood up. ‘If we could convict people on evidence like that, Dan, three quarters of the population of Cork would be in prison.’
‘So they would, DS Maguire, and that would be fierce unjust. But think how peaceful it would be, shopping in Paul Street Tesco on a Saturday afternoon.’
Nineteen
When Kyna came downstairs she found Bobby Quilty sitting on a white simulated-leather sofa in the living room, his legs crossed, one flip-flop hanging loose, jabbing at his iPhone. She stood in the doorway waiting for him to acknowledge her. After all, he was supposed to have humiliated her and shown her in the most degrading way possible that he was the boss.
Her hair was still slicked back wet from the shower and she was wearing a faded pair of Margot’s jeans that she had rolled up around her ankles because they were much too long for her, and a loose white sleeveless top, without a bra. Without showing even a flicker of surprise at what Bobby Quilty had done to her, Margot had taken away Kyna’s own clothes to wash them.
Bobby Quilty didn’t look at her, not directly, but beckoned her to come in and pointed with his iPhone towards the armchair next to him. She sat down and waited until he had finished texting, not saying a word. She had been involved in at least half a dozen undercover investigations before, and the secret was not to act like the person whose identity she had assumed but to be them. It was never easy. Once, when she was gathering evidence against a Dublin brothel-keeper, she had developed such a crush on her that she had been sorely tempted to warn her that she was about to be arrested and give her time to get away.
‘’Bout you, then?’ said Bobby Quilty with a sniff.
Kyna pulled a non-committal face and said nothing.
‘Well, wait till I tell you,’ Bobby Quilty continued. ‘We’ve a new shipment of fags just arrived last night and a whole heap of orders from our regular customers. Ger will take you to the lock-up to pick them up and then he’ll drive you round so that you can deliver them and collect the cash for them.’
‘You don’t only sell your fags on the street, then?’ asked Kyna.
Bobby Quilty shook out a cigarette and lit it and blew out smoke. ‘Ach, no, not at all. Most of our trade comes from shops and bars and office workers. The reason I sell them out on the street is mostly to pick up new business. You know, people who never realized that they could buy two hundred fags for a quarter of the price. Once they know where we’ll be flogging them, and when, they always come back for more. Well, wouldn’t you? Ten euros for a packet of fags, it’s fecking inhuman!’
‘You don’t trust me to go out selling on my own, though? What, in case I run away with your fags and don’t come back?’
‘Oh, I think I can trust you. I took a squint at your phone, girl, just to make sure. No, I just want Ger to take you around so that he can show you the ropes, like, and you can meet the regular customers face to face. They’ll all take to you, believe me. You’re very easy on the eye. You’ll be good for business, so you will.’
‘Can I have my phone back now?’
‘Ach, sure.’ Bobby Quilty reached around to the table behind the sofa and then threw Kyna’s phone across to her. ‘I called a couple of your pals from the massage parlour and they were highly complimentary about you, to say the least. One feller said that he only had to hear your name and it got him all chubbed up.’
Ger appeared in the doorway, with Benny close behind him. He took off his hat to wipe his sweaty forehead and when he came into the room Kyna could smell his body odour. It reminded her of a long-dead cat she had once discovered in the kitchen cupboard of an old woman’s house she had been searching in Dolphin’s Barn.
‘’Bout you, then?’ asked Bobby Quilty. ‘Was the park any use?’
Ger reached into his inside pocket and handed Bobby Quilty a thick bundle of crumpled euro notes. ‘We sold thirty-seven boxes altogether. We could have sold more, but the shades was beginning to take too much of an interest.’
‘Didn’t I tell you not to worry about the polls? We’re insured, you know that. I have them totally sorted, so I have. They might sniff around, but they won’t scoop you.’
> ‘Well, you might say that, Bobby, but you’ve never spent two years in the slammer. The shades still give me the fecking palpitations.’
Bobby Quilty was counting out the money that Ger had given him, licking his thumb every now and then.
‘Nine hundred and thirty euros,’ said Ger. ‘One fellow didn’t have change but he said not to bother.’
‘All right, that’s magic,’ said Bobby Quilty, once he had finished counting and fastidiously turning all the notes around the same way. ‘Now you can load up again and take Sidhe here to do the drop-offs round Blackpool and Shandon – oh, and that newsagent on MacCurtain Street. And on the way back, stop off and see Chisel, would you, and check that our friend hasn’t managed to unscrew himself?’
Ger said to Kyna, ‘Come on, then, girl. Let’s get you to work. You might have a tasty arse but we can’t have you sitting on it all day.’
*
They drove down to Blackpool. Benny sat in the back with his earphones in and Kyna could hear the faint tish-tish-tish of his rap music. Ger said almost nothing except to swear at every cyclist who wavered in front of him and any driver who was slow starting off when the traffic lights went to green. His sweat smelled so strongly now that Kyna put down her window and kept her head turned away from him.
They turned through an archway between the run-down shops and houses along Dublin Street and into a row of tatty lock-up garages. Ger said to Kyna, ‘You go stand on the corner, Sidhe, and keep sketch, while me and Benny load up the car. If you see any shades coming, don’t shout out or nothing, just walk back over here flapping your hand like you’ve let off a breezer.’
Kyna shrugged and did as she was told. While she stood under the archway, ostensibly watching out for gardaí, Ger unlocked one of the garages, lifting its door with a harsh metallic squeal like a pig being slaughtered. Even from where she was standing, thirty metres away, Kyna could see that it was stacked right up to its asbestos roof with cartons of cigarettes – the distinctive red-and-white packs of Lucky Strike, West and Marlboro, as well as Goal and NZ Gold and Jin Ling and other brands she didn’t recognize.
While Ger and Benny filled up black plastic refuse sacks with cigarettes, Kyna surreptitiously slipped out her iPhone and texted Katie with her thumb. She told her that Bobby Quilty had sent her out on a delivery run, but that he had also asked them to check up on ‘our friend’, whoever that was, to make sure that he hadn’t ‘managed to unscrew himself’, whatever that meant.
She had only just finished texting when a Garda patrol car came slowly towards her along Dublin Street. She backed into the archway in case the officers recognized her or stopped to ask her why she was loitering there.
The patrol car passed by, though, without even slowing down, and a few seconds later Ger gave her a whistle as if he were calling a dog.
Before they started on their rounds, Ger consulted a torn-off sheet of notepaper with a list of all of their customers pencilled on it. ‘Right we are, then. First stop, Ali’s Corner Store on Thomas Davis Street, then it’s O’Grady’s, the bookies and The Scissor Shop, the barber’s.’
When they reached Thomas Davis Street, Ger pointed to the corner shop and Kyna climbed out of the car. Benny climbed out, too, opened the boot and handed her two bulging black bags. From the driving seat, Ger whistled to her again, and beckoned to her, and said, ‘Smile when you give Ali the fags, okay, and make him think that he could take you into the back of the shop and give you one.’
‘Wha’? But he’s a Paki, isn’t he?’
‘That’s not the fecking point, Sidhe. The point is that this is a cut-throat business, the cigarette trade, and we want him to go on buying from us rather than the Duggans or the O’Flynns. So, you know, give him the eye and wiggle your arse when you take his money. You wouldn’t have the time to flah him, any road. We have a dozen more drop-offs yet.’
Kyna kept her mouth closed. She took the bags from Benny and pushed her way between the string bags of onions and sponge mops that cluttered the entrance to the grocery store. Inside, it smelled strongly of fenugreek, and the aisles were so crowded with giant boxes of detergent and tins of okra and cut-price washing-up brushes and racks full of Tayto crisps that she had a struggle to reach the counter.
A bearded Asian in a yellow baseball cap was standing behind the counter, intent on mending a mobile phone.
‘Are you Ali?’ she asked him. ‘Here you are then, boy. Here’s the fags you ordered from the Big Feller.’
Ali put down his miniature screwdriver and grinned at her, with his two front incisors missing. ‘How about you, then?’ he said, in a strong Norrie accent. ‘First time the Big Feller’s sent a good-looking beour like you to deliver his fags.’
‘Well, he only wants to make you happy, Ali, do you know what I mean, like?’
‘I don’t know if the Big Feller could make me happy, but I think you could. What’s your name, girl?’
‘Sidhe. S-i-d-h-e like in “fairy”, like – not “she” like “her over there who looks like a bit of a goer”. And that’ll be five hundred yo-yos, please.’
‘Sure, but how do I know they’re all here, all the fags I ordered? Maybe you can stay for a while and help me to count them, Sidhe, just to make sure. What would happen if I was one box short? Where would I find another box?’
Kyna gave him an exaggerated pout. ‘Oh, you’re such a bad man, Ali. But not today. I’m up the walls, like, with all my deliveries. One day maybe, when I’m not so pushed.’
‘I will look forward to it, my darling.’
Ali opened up his till and counted out five hundred euros. He didn’t give them to her, though, until he had come out from behind the counter, put his arm around her waist and escorted her to the door. Even then he held the money just out of reach, until he had kissed her on the lips. The peak of his baseball cap bumped against her forehead.
‘Christ on a bicycle!’ Benny piped up as she climbed back into the car. ‘You only shifted him!’
Ger couldn’t help grinning behind his huge dark glasses. ‘I’ll tell you, there’s no way he’s going to be ordering his fags from Micky Duggan after that! What was it like?’
Kyna was tempted to spit and wipe her mouth but Ali was still watching from the doorway of his shop and giving her a little finger-wave.
‘Suppose a badger sat by mistake in a bowl of curry,’ she said. ‘Then, after the curry was all stiff and dried up, suppose you kissed that badger’s arse. That was what it was like.’
Ger laughed – a thin, cracked laugh – and Kyna knew then that she had won his confidence.
*
For the next three and a half hours they drove around Blackpool and Shandon and Gurranabraher, delivering black bags full of cigarette cartons to shops and pubs and offices and private houses. Kyna even took a bag to the manager of an old peoples’ home in Sunday’s Well, and round to the back door of a dental clinic on Commons Road in Farranree.
At every stop she was greeted with smiles of appreciation and thumbs-up gestures and two of her customers asked her out on a date – a spotty young estate agent with protruding ears and a white-bearded pub landlord who was old enough to be her grandfather. The cash was always handed over with no hesitation at all and by the time she delivered the last three sacks to the Golden Shamrock Bar in Blackpool she estimated that she had taken well over eleven thousand euros.
At last Ger parked outside a terracotta-painted house at the junction of Leitrim Street and Pine Street, opposite O’Keefe’s pub. The house had once been a shop but now its large display windows had grimy, fly-spotted blinds drawn down over them.
‘What are we stopping here for?’ asked Kyna. ‘We don’t have any more fags left, do we?’
‘You just mind your own beeswax girl and wait here for me,’ said Ger. He climbed out of the car, but instead of going to the front door of the house he walked around to a side gate, opened it, and disappeared inside.
‘What’s here, then, Benny?’ Kyna asked, but Benny
had put in his earphones and couldn’t hear her. After they had waited for a few minutes, though, he suddenly took them out and said, ‘I’m fecking parched, me. I’ve a mouth on me like Gandhi’s flip-flop. I’m going to get myself a Coke.’
‘Fetch me one while you’re at it,’ said Kyna.
Benny got out of the car and walked two doors down to Brannagan’s Bar. Kyna waited a little while, but when he didn’t immediately reappear, she got out, too. She looked up at the terracotta-coloured house, but she couldn’t see anybody looking back down at her from the upstairs windows, so she went to the side gate, opened it, and quickly went inside. She found herself in a cramped back yard with wheelie bins and a bicycle in it, as well as a stack of broken window frames filled with shattered glass, and a rabbit hutch that looked as if it had been smashed in half and then crudely repaired with a square of hardboard and a length of frayed electrical flex. The rabbit was sitting on a bed of its own buttons and it stared at Kyna bulgy-eyed, as if it were vainly hoping that she had come to set it free.
The back door of the house had been left ajar and Kyna could see a kitchen sink with dirty plates in it and some chipped cupboard doors. She could hear voices, too: a woman complaining loudly and persistently about something and two slurred male voices, one of which she recognized as Ger.
She went up to the door and pushed it open a little more. The voices sounded as if they were coming from somewhere upstairs, so she carefully stepped inside and went through the kitchen into the hallway beyond. The house was in a desperate state of disrepair. The walls were so damp that the floral paper had been bleached of all its colour, and the pale chocolate stair carpet was threadbare and spotted black with mould. Kyna went to the bottom of the staircase and looked up to the first-floor landing. The voices sounded as if they were coming from a room immediately on the left-hand side, and although the door was almost closed, cigarette smoke was curling around it, so she could be fairly sure that Ger was in there with whoever he was talking to – possibly the person whom Bobby Quilty had referred to as ‘Chisel’.
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