Katie was wearing a grade-three protective vest and carrying her Smith & Wesson revolver in a holster on her hip, but all the same she stayed well back in the road. The first few seconds of every forced entry were highly unpredictable. The night was warm, but she shivered. In her experience, the suspects were usually too surprised or drunk or high to retaliate, but occasionally all hell would let loose and there would be wild and indiscriminate gunfire. In only her second week as a detective one of her friends had been killed by a ricochet, and he had been sitting in his patrol car on the opposite side of the road.
‘Thirty seconds to go, ma’am. Twenty. Fifteen.’
Now the garda who had jammed the mobile phone signals switched on a software-defined radio to neutralize the burglar alarm. Katie was concerned that this might set off the alarm immediately, but she was relieved when there was total silence. Suddenly, however, an oil tanker on the River Lee below them let out a loud, mournful hoot, like a mother whale that had lost her young.
‘Holy Mary!’ said Detective Scanlan, close behind Katie. ‘That put my heart crossways!’
The two officers operating the Holmatro door-opener carried it quickly and stealthily into the porch and fitted its heavy-duty piston sideways across the door frame. Four armed officers from the Regional Support Unit were lined up next to them, ready to rush into the house as soon as the door fell open.
Detective O’Donovan raised his right hand and said, ‘Ten. Five. Zero. Okay – go!’
It took only three strokes of the door-opener’s pump handle before there was a sharp crack like a pistol shot and the door frame was forced apart. After that it took no more than a single kick for it to drop with a muffled thump into the hallway. At once the four armed officers jostled into the house, screaming, ‘Armed Garda! Armed Garda!’ Still screaming ‘Armed Garda!’ they reached the end of the hallway and began to mount the stairs.
Katie would have preferred them to stay completely silent as they entered the house, but there had recently been legal problems when gardaí had failed to identify themselves when they had raided brothels and crack dens in Cork, and she hadn’t wanted to give Bobby Quilty the slightest chance to wangle his way out of being convicted. Neither did she want to give him an excuse to shoot at officers if they burst into his bedroom without warning.
She walked over the fallen front door into the hallway, closely followed by Detectives O’Donovan and Scanlan. As she did so, she looked down at the bronze door knocker and saw that it bore the face of a snarling wolf. A knocker to keep out the Sluagh, the spirits of dead sinners, since the doorway faced to the west.
Detective O’Donovan immediately turned left into the living room, beckoning a young woman officer, Garda O’Leary, to follow him. Katie had assigned them both to find Kyna and get her clear of the house as quickly as possible. Detective O’Donovan’s mobile phone tracker was showing that ‘Sheelagh Danehy’ had left her phone downstairs somewhere at the back of the house.
Katie carried on to the end of the hallway. She could hear hoarse shouting coming from the first-floor landing, so she said to Detective Scanlan, ‘Come on,’ and started to climb the stairs. She was only halfway up, however, when Bobby Quilty appeared at the top, with armed gardaí on either side of him. He had already been handcuffed. He was wearing a sweaty pink T-shirt and a pair of droopy grey boxer shorts, and his bloated face was florid and patchy with rage.
‘Ach, it’s you, DS Maguire! I might have fecking known it! What in the name of feck is going on here? A man can’t get even snatch a decent night’s sleep in his own house without a bunch of polls busting his door down and pulling him out of the scratcher like a bag of dirty washing! You’d better have a fecking good reason for this, I can tell you now, a fecking amazing reason, because I’m calling my brief right here and now and he won’t be any more delighted than I am to be woken up at half past fecking four in the fecking morning!’
One of the armed gardaí said, ‘We’ve been through all rooms up here, ma’am. There’s nobody else here but him.’
‘Nobody? Not even Margot Beeney?’
‘No, ma’am. We’ve even checked the presses. He has the place to himself, like.’
Katie carried on climbing the stairs. When she reached the landing she stood in front of Bobby Quilty and stared up at him for a few seconds without saying anything. His huge belly rose and fell as he breathed, and he reeked of stale alcohol and Lynx Fever Body Spray, and some other oily smell that Katie couldn’t identify, but which put her in mind of tinned sardine oil. She also noticed for the first time that the wings of his bulbous nose were peppered with blackheads.
She took a deep breath and then she said, ‘Robert Boland Quilty, I am arresting you for incitement to murder Detective Gerald Barry. I am also arresting you for the false imprisonment of John Patrick Meagher. You are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, but anything you do say will be taken down in writing and may be given in evidence.’
Bobby frowned at Katie for a moment as if he hadn’t caught on, but then his face gradually cracked apart in a grin like a Hallowe’en turnip. ‘Is this some kind of a geg, doll?’
‘Do you want me to repeat myself? You’re under arrest. Now, get yourself dressed and we’ll take you into custody.’
‘You’re having a laugh, aren’t you? I told you before that I had nothing at all to do with thon detective getting himself run over. Just because you can’t think of anybody else to pin that on. And who in the name of God is John Patrick Meagher? I never heard of anybody of that name in my life. Your head’s full of wee sweetie mice, DS Maguire, so it is.’
‘Let’s talk it over at the station, shall we?’ said Katie.
‘I want to ring my brief first, so that he can meet us there. I’m not saying a word to you without my brief.’
‘You can do that once we’ve taken you in and formally charged you.’
Bobby Quilty said something back to her. It sounded caustic, but Katie didn’t hear it because it was blotted out by an urgent voice in her earphone. It was Inspector O’Rourke, calling her from Parklands.
‘DS Maguire? Hallo? We’ve just found Darragh Murphy.’
‘What do you mean “found”? Haven’t you lifted him?’
‘He’s dead, ma’am. He was sitting in front of his telly when somebody shot him in the back of the head.’
‘What? Serious?’
‘Oh, yes. Blew half his head off. I reckon they used a silencer because the surveillance team didn’t hear anything.’
‘Okay,’ Katie told him, trying not to show any reaction in front of Bobby Quilty. ‘We’ve just detained Mister Quilty here so I can be with you in twenty minutes or so. Have you contacted Bill Phinner?’
‘Detective Markey’s doing that now, ma’am. It’s a touch too early to go knocking on doors asking for witnesses, but we’ll be starting that as soon as it’s reasonable.’
‘Don’t disturb anything yet, and if the Technical Bureau turn up before I do, tell them not to disturb anything either – this is something I need to see for myself. Was there anybody else in the house?’
‘No, ma’am. Some women’s clothing in the bedroom. Underwear and such. A second toothbrush, too, in the bathroom, but that’s all. We’ll be searching the premises thoroughly of course, when you give us the say-so, but I thought you needed to know that Darragh Murphy’s out of the picture.’
‘Yes, thank you, Francis. Just give me a couple of minutes and I’ll get back to you so.’
‘Problems?’ asked Bobby Quilty, with that same hideous grin.
‘Nothing that concerns you,’ said Katie. Then, ‘Get yourself dressed, will you? These officers will go with you. Wouldn’t want you jumping out of the window or harming yourself so.’
‘None of them are gay, are they?’ said Bobby Quilty. ‘Wouldn’t like a gay garda to see me without my gunks!’
As the armed gardaí escorted him back to his bedroom, Detective O’Donovan came up the stairs with Garda O’Leary behi
nd him. He was holding up a sparkly pink iPhone in his latex-gloved hand. ‘We found this in the kitchen waste bin, ma’am. No SIM card in it.’
‘There’s no sign of “Sheelagh”?’ she asked, looking round to make sure that Bobby Quilty was back in his bedroom and out of earshot.
Detective O’Donovan shook his head. ‘Nowhere downstairs, no. We took a sconce out in the garden and the fellers in the back are searching through the woods. It might be kind of previous to say so, like, but I get the feeling that she isn’t here at all.’
Katie was beginning to feel a cold sinking sensation in her stomach. Her father had always said that when an operation started to go wrong it was like standing on the deck of the Lusitania – you know that it’s going down under your feet and there’s nothing you can do about it. She had planned for Operation Trident to be successfully completed in minutes, but already it seemed to be foundering. If Darragh Murphy was dead, she had lost the only witness who could testify that Bobby Quilty was guilty of incitement to murder. And where was Kyna? If she wasn’t here, why hadn’t she got in touch? And what about John?
She was about to contact Detective Sergeant Begley at Leitrim Street when he called her.
‘We’ve just this minute finished searching the building, ma’am. Top to bottom. Basement, attic, back yard, everywhere. Not a trace of your John.’
‘Nothing at all? How can that be? I was told that his feet were fastened to a bed. Bolted, in fact, though I’m not sure what that meant.’
‘No beds in the building at all, ma’am, except for some bogging old mattress that the two people who live here use to sleep on. Their names are Charles Rearden, unemployed, and Sorcia MacKenna, part-time hairdresser. Well, that’s what she calls herself, any road.’
‘And they know nothing about John?’
‘They both deny that there’s been anybody else in the building since they moved in there five months ago.’
‘Who’s their landlord?’
‘They’re squatting, so they say. They found the building empty so they decided to move in. It’s actually owned by a property company in Dublin called Watergrass Holdings.’
Katie could have asked him a hundred more questions, but this wasn’t the time for it.
‘I’ll get back to you in a couple of minutes,’ she said, and then she turned to Detective O’Donovan. ‘Send a car round to Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán’s flat, will you, just to make sure that she isn’t at home. I’ve rung her a few times without getting any answer, but you never know.’
Katie didn’t say so, but it was remotely possible that Kyna had become so stressed that she had decided to quit this assignment and go back to Dublin, and that she hadn’t had the courage to tell Katie that she couldn’t take the pressure any more. After all, she had not only had Bobby Quilty to contend with, she was still recuperating from a serious bullet wound and she was suffering from painful emotional problems.
Katie couldn’t believe that Kyna would do that, but even if she had, she could forgive her. What she needed to know more than anything else was that Kyna was safe.
‘Padragain, would you contact Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán’s parents and ask them if they’ve heard from her?’ she asked Detective Scanlan. ‘Try not to alarm them. Just say that we’ve lost contact with her – like, maybe her mobile battery’s dead or something, or maybe she’s staying overnight with a friend – but it’s important that we get in touch with her.’
Bobby Quilty reappeared, wearing the same creased green linen suit he had been wearing when he first told Katie that he had abducted John, as well as a lime-green shirt.
‘I’ll see you at the station, then sweetheart?’ He grinned at her, as the armed gardaí escorted him down the stairs. ‘I’ll be writing out my invoice for having my front door repaired.’
Katie didn’t answer. She was aching to ask him where Kyna was – but of course she wasn’t supposed to know about the existence of ‘Sheelagh Danehy’, and until she heard that Kyna was somewhere safe she couldn’t risk revealing her real identity. With Darragh Murphy dead it was likely that Bobby Quilty would have to be released from custody within a few hours.
Inspector O’Rourke called her again. He had cordoned off the street in Parklands outside Darragh Murphy’s bungalow and had put in a call to the coroner.
‘But still no trace of John?’
‘Nothing at all, ma’am. I’m sorry.’
Katie took a look around the house and then went back outside. It had started to rain now, a soft drifting rain that had soaked her hair even before she was halfway back to the car. Now that Bobby Quilty had been arrested, all the Garda vehicles had switched on their flashing blue lights. They made the rain sparkle, so that it looked to Katie as if the darkness was swarming with bright blue fireflies.
Twenty-two
At that time of the morning there was scarcely any traffic, so it took them only fifteen minutes to drive north-west across the city to Parklands. Katie left Detective O’Donovan behind at Bobby Quilty’s house to supervise an intensive search and, most importantly, to see if there was any evidence, apart from her mobile phone, that Kyna had been there, or where she might be now.
She took Detective Scanlan with her. She knew that Padragain had never attended a homicide scene before, even though she had seen dead bodies in the morgue, and mangled families in traffic accidents, and bloated teenagers hauled grey-faced and dripping from the River Lee. Homicide scenes, though, were something different altogether. They were a silent tableau of the very instant when, for some reason, a person’s life had been taken by somebody else. ‘Storybooks left open, halfway through,’ that’s what Katie’s father had always called them.
As they made their way through the wet, deserted streets, Detective Scanlan managed to get an answer from the Ó Nuallán number in Dublin.
‘Oh, hi there, I’m so sorry to ring you so early, but this is Detective Padragain Scanlan from the Cork Garda. Who am I talking to?’
She covered her phone with her hand and said to Katie, ‘Detective Ni Nuallán’s sister Bridget.’ Then, ‘No, no, it’s not bad news. Nothing like that. It’s just that we need some information about a case that your sister was working on and we haven’t been able to contact her. We were wondering if maybe she’d gone back home for a bit of a rest, like. No? Then have you heard from her at all? No? All right. I see. No bother at all. I’m very sorry to have woken you. Yes, I will, of course. Yes. Goodbye.’
Almost immediately Katie had a call from the gardaí that Detective O’Donovan had sent round to Kyna’s flat on Wellington Road.
‘She’s not there, ma’am, no. We talked to her flatmate and she said she hadn’t seen her in two days now. She had no idea where she was, no. She didn’t usually ask her, like, as a rule, because most of the time Detective Ni Nuallán wasn’t at liberty to tell her.’
‘Thanks,’ said Katie. She sat saying nothing for a while, biting her thumbnail. She was desperately worried now because Kyna’s disappearance and Darragh Murphy’s shooting led her to one inescapable conclusion: Bobby Quilty had been tipped off about Operation Trident.
Bobby Quilty’s nonchalance had made her suspect from the moment she had arrested him that he must have been forewarned – that, and the absence of anybody else in the house. She couldn’t believe that he didn’t habitually sleep with his mistress and keep at least one bodyguard on the premises to protect him in case of an invasion. He had too many enemies in Cork, and in the North, too – both criminal and political. The Ulster Volunteer Force had twice attempted to ambush his car when he was in Armagh, and his youngest nephew had been shot dead by Red Hand Defenders as he was stepping out of Loughgall Road Spar in Portadown.
By the time they arrived at Darragh Murphy’s bungalow the sky was beginning to grow lighter, although the street lamps hadn’t yet switched themselves off. The whole street had been cordoned off with blue-and-white tape and there were three Garda patrol cars parked there, as well two vans from the Technical Bureau
and an ambulance. In spite of it being so early, and raining, a crowd of about thirty or forty people had gathered on the corner and Katie recognized at least two cars belonging to local reporters parked further up the road.
Inspector O’Rourke was waiting for her in the shelter of the bungalow’s porch. He looked tired and bored, shifting from one foot to the other like a hotel commissionaire. The interior of the bungalow was already brightly lit with halogen lamps, although the three technical experts who had arrived to inspect the crime scene were all crowded into the kitchen in their bulky Tyvek suits, along with five gardaí, three in uniform and the other two in plain clothes, all of them waiting for Katie to take a look at Darragh Murphy’s body in the exact position where it had been found.
Inspector O’Rourke looked at Detective Scanlan and said, ‘Had your breakfast yet, detective? If not, good, because this isn’t pretty.’
Katie said, ‘Don’t worry, Padragain. You can step outside for a breath of fresh air whenever you want to.’
Inspector O’Rourke led them in single file along the hallway. The bungalow was cramped, with threadbare carpets and badly chipped paintwork, and Katie noticed that it had all the telltale signs of a house in which domestic abuse had regularly taken place. One of the living-room door panels was missing and there was a darker rectangle on the wallpaper in the hallway where a picture had once hung. On the windowsill at the end of the hallway stood a single porcelain dog which had probably been one of a matching pair. In spite of the damage, the bungalow was scrupulously clean, which told Katie that Neala had tried her very best to keep Darragh happy, right up until the very last beating.
The living room was papered with a pale green diamond pattern, with darker green velveteen curtains hanging at the windows, although one curtain was sagging where half of its nylon hooks had been pulled down. On a low cabinet in the far corner of the room stood a flat-screen 42-inch television, still switched on to the 5 a.m. Euronews, but with the volume muted.
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