Her heart was beating so hard that it hurt because there was every chance that Ger would suddenly open the door and see her standing there. However, there was no point in her going back. Benny would probably have returned with their Cokes by now and he would see her emerging from the side gate and tell Ger anyway.
She had an excuse ready, to explain why she had followed Ger into the house, but that excuse would only work if she kept on going. She grasped the banister rail, hesitated for a few seconds, and then started to climb the stairs. They creaked loudly, but the woman continued to nag, and Ger continued talking back to her, so they obviously hadn’t heard her.
When she reached the landing, she tiptoed over to the right-hand side and opened the first door she came to. It was a bathroom, with curled-up green linoleum on the floor and a bath with dripping taps. The inside of the toilet was stained rusty brown, and its wooden seat had come off and was propped up against the wall beside it.
Kyna opened the next door, which she had to do carefully because the knob was loose and rattled as she turned it. This room smelled strongly as if somebody had been sleeping in it. The ill-fitting orange curtains were still drawn and there was a king-sized mattress on the floor with twisted sheets on it, and pillows that were still dented with the impressions of two heads. A single corduroy-covered armchair was heaped with clothes, men’s and women’s, including a large pair of stained white underpants.
Just as she closed the door of this room, she heard Ger say, ‘How’s our friend been keeping, then, Sorcia? Has he been giving you any bother?’
The woman said something Kyna couldn’t hear, but then she must have turned around because she heard her say, ‘—shouting out and moaning and groaning, so I give him five paracetamol and that shut him up. I don’t care. I don’t like to see nobody suffering like that. I remember when my mam was—’
Kyna paused, still on tiptoe, holding her breath. Ger and the woman must be very close to the door for her to be able to hear them so distinctly. The other man spoke, too, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying, only that he had a strong Southside accent.
She went to the door at the end of the landing. On the wall next to it was a faded framed print of Pope Paul VI, holding up two fingers in blessing. She tried the handle, only to find that the door was locked, although the key was still in it. She unlocked it and slowly pushed it open.
It was gloomy inside, like the bedroom, because the blind was drawn. The smell was even worse, though – rancid and sour, but with a sickening sweetness to it, too. Several bluebottles were flying around, while others tapped and buzzed at the window.
Kyna didn’t recognize John at first, although she had met him six or seven times and seen dozens of pictures of him and Katie when they were together. He was lying asleep on a single bed, completely naked. His face was startlingly white, and shiny with perspiration, so that he could almost have been a marble effigy of himself, except that his mouth was hanging open and he was snoring.
As she approached him, keeping her hand cupped over her nose and mouth, Kyna saw that both of his feet had been fastened to the wooden board at the end of the bed with metal bolts and that shiny green flies were clustered around the stigmata. He had soiled the mattress and the insides of his thighs were smeared with dark yellow faeces.
She laid her hand on his shoulder and gently shook him. ‘John?’ she whispered. ‘John, can you hear me?’
He stirred and groaned like a door creaking, but he didn’t open his eyes. Kyna shook him again, harder this time. ‘John? Wake up, John! John!’
He made a snuffling sound and then he opened his deep blue eyes and stared at her, unfocused.
‘John – we’re going to get you out of here. So try and be strong, okay? Katie hasn’t forgotten you – she loves you. Do you understand me?’
John frowned at her and said, ‘Kyna... is that you?’ Then he looked around the room and said, ‘Where am I?’
‘They’re keeping you locked up here, but we’ll soon get you out, I promise.’
She could hear Ger coughing, and the woman saying something to him, so she tiptoed out of the bedroom and locked the door. She was halfway back across the landing when the door at the top of the staircase suddenly opened and a skinny man in a black T-shirt appeared, with his belt tied tightly into a knot to stop his jeans from falling down. Right behind him came Ger, and a bosomy young woman in a headscarf. All three of them had been smoking so heavily that they came out in a cloud, like characters in a pantomime.
‘What in the name of God are you doing here, Sidhe?’ Ger demanded. ‘I told you to wait outside, didn’t I?’
‘I’m bursting for a piss,’ said Kyna. ‘I couldn’t hardly do it down the shore, could I?’
‘You could have gone over to the pub, for feck’s sake.’
‘Oh, give the girl a break, would you?’ said the bosomy young woman. ‘You’re so tight, you are, Ger, wouldn’t give a starving nun the skin off your skitter!’
‘Any more of that, Sorcia, and there’ll be less of it!’ Ger snapped at her. But then he said, ‘You didn’t go in there, Sidhe, did you?’
‘Where?’ asked Kyna.
‘In there,’ he said, pointing towards the room where John was locked up. ‘That door there.’
‘Why should I? I just need the toilet.’
Ger gave her a ghastly grin and the smoke from his last cigarette came leaking out from between his teeth. ‘That’s fierce strange, that is. I thought you was the toilet!’
The skinny man laughed, honking like a donkey, but Sorcia came over and opened the bathroom door. ‘There, love. It’s in there. You’ll have to forgive the boggin’ state of it. Chisel keeps promising to fix the seat but he keeps fixing himself first and then he’s too blootered to know one end of a screwdriver from the other.’
‘Holy Jesus, Sorcia, I could see you far enough!’ Chisel protested.
Kyna went into the bathroom and closed the door. She turned on the tap in the washbasin to make a splashing noise and then took out her phone and texted Katie to tell her the house number, and exactly where John’s bedroom was located, and also that his feet were bolted to the bed. She hadn’t seen anybody else in the house apart from Chisel and Sorcia, and she hadn’t seen any firearms, but that wasn’t to say they didn’t have any, or that there wasn’t another of Bobby Quilty’s gang keeping an eye on the house for him.
Ger knocked on the bathroom door and said, ‘Get your skates on, will you, we don’t have the whole fecking day!’
‘Coming!’ Kyna called out, and cranked the cistern handle.
‘Is that better?’ asked Ger as she emerged. In spite of his earlier irritation, she was sure that he really liked her now and that he would do almost anything for her if she asked. What she would really have liked him to do was lie down on the floor in front of her so that she could stamp very hard on his face.
Twenty
Katie was talking to Mathew McElvey in the press office when her iPhone pinged and she saw that Kyna was texting her.
Mathew was saying, ‘I agree with you absolutely, DS Maguire. We have to be very diplomatic in the way we handle this Langtry case. On the one hand, we don’t want the Garda to be seen to be stirring up old grievances, but on the other hand, like you said at the briefing, we don’t want to be seen to be squandering the taxpayers’ money trying to find a murderer who’s long dead and buried.
‘I still think, though, that there’s powerful public interest in knowing who it was that murdered the Langtrys, and why – especially if it turns out that Radha Langtry was having an affair with a British officer and it was the Brits who shot them. I had a call only this morning from that Stephen Wright fellow from the Daily Mail in London and he was very keen to know if—’
‘I’m sorry, Mathew,’ said Katie. ‘I’ll have to interrupt you there. I’ve an urgent case to deal with. I’ll get back to you after, if that’s okay.’
‘Okay, sure,’ said Mathew. ‘But I have my fingers crossed
about what they’re going to be saying on the Six One News, I can tell you.’
Katie hurried back up to her office and immediately put in calls to Detective Inspector O’Rourke and Detective Sergeant Begley, as well as Detectives O’Donovan, Dooley and Scanlan. Then she switched on her desktop computer, clicked on to a map of Cork City, and brought up a street view of the terracotta-coloured house where John was being held.
For the first time since Bobby Quilty had visited her at home and told her that he had abducted John, she felt that surge of adrenaline that came from being in control again, although she remained deeply anxious about John. J’s feet bolted to bed, Kyna had texted her. His feet, bolted to the bed? She couldn’t even begin to imagine what that must look like, or the pain he must be suffering. Maybe Kyna had just meant that his ankles were fastened with leg-cuffs. Pray that she had.
While she was waiting for Inspector O’Rourke and the other three detectives to reach her office she put in a call to Bill Phinner. Bill had already left, but Tyrone Daley answered. He hadn’t yet had time to enhance the pictures of the Land Rover at Boycestown and the two men watching it burn, but when Katie told him it had suddenly become urgent he promised to drop everything else and turn his attention to it.
When he arrived, Inspector O’Rourke was carrying a half-finished polystyrene cup of tea, and Detective O’Donovan had obviously been ready to go home because he was holding a large carrier bag from Saville menswear and an empty sandwich box.
Once all the detectives were gathered in her office Katie announced, ‘It’s Bobby Quilty.’ She stood up and swivelled her computer monitor around so that they could all see the screen. ‘Things have moved much faster than I thought they would.’
‘Like, what things?’ asked Inspector O’Rourke. ‘We’re supposed to be turning a blind eye to Bobby Quilty, aren’t we? And that diktat came direct from Our Lord and Master Jimmy O’Reilly himself.’
‘We were turning a blind eye, Francis, until about five minutes ago. But Jimmy O’Reilly’s reasons for turning a blind eye were very different from mine. He was trying to save money by not arresting any more of Quilty’s street-peddlers, because the courts have only been letting them off, or throwing their cases out altogether. I was trying to save someone from being mutilated, or even killed.’
‘Like, who exactly?’
‘You know him,’ said Katie. ‘His name is John Meagher. My ex, if you want to call him that.’
Very briefly – trying not to sound too emotional – she explained how Bobby Quilty had taken John hostage, threatening to blind him or murder him unless she agreed to back away and leave his cigarette-smuggling business unmolested, and stop trying to prove that he had played any part in Detective Barry’s death.
‘But I couldn’t just sit on my hands and let Quilty get away with it,’ said Katie, and she told them how she had asked Kyna to infiltrate Bobby Quilty’s gang in order to discover the exact location where John was being held.
‘I was pure reluctant to ask her, of course I was. But I couldn’t think of anybody else I could trust enough to do it – somebody Bobby Quilty wouldn’t recognize.’
Detective Sergeant Begley shook his head in admiration. ‘That’s one fierce brave girl, Kyna. Holy Mary, Mother of God, she’s still convalescing from having herself shot.’
None of them questioned what Katie had done, although she knew Detective Sergeant Begley well enough to read from his expression that he would have acted very differently. Regardless of the risk to his career, he would have arrested Bobby Quilty and subjected him to the kind of ‘interview’ that would have led to him giving away John’s location with no hesitation at all. Katie knew very little about his ‘interviews’ except that sometimes they involved a broom handle and a woodworking clamp.
‘There’s more, though,’ said Katie. ‘I’m fairly sure now that I know the identity of the driver who killed Detective Barry.’
‘What, somebody grassed?’ asked Detective O’Donovan.
‘Not exactly. But a woman was taken into the Walnut Tree shelter this morning, a battered wife, and she told me that her husband had boasted to her that it was him. Not only that, he told her that Bobby Quilty was with him at the time, in the passenger seat, and that Quilty had specifically incited him to do it. Her husband’s name is Darragh Murphy. Does that name ring a bell for any of you, by any chance? Darragh Murphy?’
‘Oh, it does for me, ma’am, for sure,’ said Detective Scanlan, raising her hand if she were in class. ‘I must have scooped him four or five times when I was working the clubs – mostly for selling coke, although most of the time it was seventy-five per cent baby laxative. His regular customers called him Diarrhoea Darragh. So far as I know he’s still living in Parklands.’
‘That’s right, Parklands,’ said Katie. ‘His wife told me about him because he’s been beating her so badly and she wanted to see him locked up. Her word alone won’t be enough for us to charge him with any realistic chance of conviction, but now we have the photographs the Dutch cyclists took of the two men torching the Land Rover. They’re very blurred, but Tyrone’s working on them now and with any luck we’ll be able to identify one of them as Darragh Murphy.’
‘What’s the plan, then, ma’am?’ asked Detective Dooley.
‘I’ll talk to Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin and Superintendent Pearse now that I’ve spoken to you. I’m thinking of setting up three simultaneous raids – very early tomorrow morning, if possible. One to pick up Bobby Quilty, one to pick up Darragh Murphy, and one to rescue John Meagher.’
‘Holy St Joseph. That’s going to take some organizing,’ said Inspector O’Rourke. He looked at his watch and said, ‘It’s almost five-thirty now. We’re going to be fierce pushed for time, even if Jimmy O’Reilly agrees to it, and you know him. He’s going to umm and ah about the logistics, and the cost of the overtime, and how sound our evidence is, and what’s the price of bodice in the English Market.’
Katie said, ‘I know. But we can’t drag our feet with this one. The longer we put it off, the greater the risk to Kyna and John. You’re right, yes, it won’t be at all easy to organize because the coordination has to be faultless, but I’m confident that we can do it. Like, when I say “simultaneous”, I mean each of the three raids will have to be synchronized right down to the second. I’ve no doubt at all that if Bobby Quilty picks up even a sniff of what we’re doing before we can lift him, he’ll have John killed to punish me for breaking our agreement, and Darragh Murphy, too, so that he can’t give evidence against him.’
‘You really think he’d risk doing that?’ asked Inspector O’Rourke.
‘You know Bobby Quilty better than I do, Francis. Whatever he’s involved in, think of the worst possible outcome you can and then double it. Before we enter any of the three premises I need to be sure first of all that Quilty’s at home. I also need to know that his landline’s cut and that his mobile phone’s jammed: (a) we have to him cornered, and (b) he has to be totally incommunicado.’
At that moment, Katie’s phone rang. It was Tyrone, telling her that he had sent eleven enhanced versions of the Dutch cyclists’ photos to her computer.
‘All the pictures had a lot of noise on them,’ he told her. ‘I tried a Laplacian filter on them and then unsharp masking. In the end, though, I got some really great edge with that new Fuji doodad that Bill just acquired for us – it’s amazing.’
‘Can you see the men’s faces clearly?’ asked Katie.
‘You can, yes. One of your subjects is seen only in profile, side-on, like, though I reckon you could easy make a positive ID from that, because he has very distinctive features. Like, his beezer’s long enough to take your dog for a walk on it. Your other subject is full-face when he turns away from the petrol tank explosion and now that I’ve sharpened it up it could almost be a mug-shot. A real sham-feen, I can tell you. The sort that doesn’t look as if he would take it kindly if you spilled his drink.’
Katie went over to her desk a
nd clicked up the photographs on her monitor screen. She could see the grassy farm track and the burning Land Rover with thick black smoke rolling out of it, and the two men watching it. The man who had turned to face the camera was wearing a black T-shirt with Cork Hurling in white lettering on it, which matched the T-shirt worn by the driver of the Land Rover seen on CCTV. Both men looked as if they were laughing. Tyrone had succeeded in removing most of the motion blur and graininess and made the pictures remarkably sharp – clear enough to be admissible as evidence in court.
Detective Scanlan came over and stood beside her. ‘OMG, that’s Darragh Murphy all right! Grown a bit of a scraggly beard since I last saw him, but that’s him in the flesh. And I can tell you who the fellow is with him, the one with the schonk. That’s Darragh’s best friend Murty – Murty Something, I can’t remember his surname. I’m not sure I ever knew it. But he would trail along everywhere behind Darragh, whining through that schonk of his – “where are we going now, Darragh?” “what are we going to do next, Darragh?” “give us a drizzle off your can there, Darragh” – and Darragh would smack him around the head, but he never seemed to mind.’
Katie said, ‘All we need now is just one member of the public who saw Darragh behind the wheel that day and that will give us all the evidence we need to charge him.’
‘You mean if we can find a member of the public who isn’t too terrified to stand up in a court and say so,’ said Inspector O’Rourke.
‘We can cross that bridge when we come to it,’ Katie told him – although, even as she said it, she wished that she hadn’t, considering where Detective Barry had been killed.
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