Close behind Katie, Detective Scanlan said, ‘Holy St Joseph.’
Darragh Murphy was sitting upright in a large armchair covered with orange stretch nylon. He was wearing light grey trousers with a partially dried damp stain in the crotch, and a grubby yellow polo shirt. On the floor beside his chair there were three cans of Murphy’s. A fourth can had dropped between his grey-stockinged feet and spilled dark beer across the carpet. He had obviously been drinking from it when he was shot.
In the centre of the room stood a three-legged plywood coffee table in the shape of an artist’s palette. An untidy copy of yesterday’s Racing Post lay on top of it, as well as a glass pub ashtray that was heaped with crushed-out cigarette butts, and a fifth can of Murphy’s, also with its ring-pull open.
‘Looks like he treated his murderer to a swallow before he died,’ said Katie.
‘It does, too,’ said Inspector O’Rourke. ‘Some people have no gratitude at all, do they?’
Katie could see that Detective Scanlan was trying not to look at Darragh Murphy’s body directly, but that she couldn’t stop herself from glancing at it every few seconds, as if she needed to keep checking that what she was looking at was real, not a prop created by the special effects department for some grisly horror film.
Darragh Murphy had been shot directly from behind into the nape of his neck. Katie guessed that his assailant had been kneeling behind his armchair when he fired, although she could only guess what reason he had given for doing so, if he had given any at all. Maybe he had pretended that he had dropped something on the floor and was kneeling down to pick it up. Darragh Murphy must have known his assailant, or at least not felt threatened by him, or he wouldn’t have given him a can of stout. Then again, his assailant could have helped himself after he had killed him, as a small reward, or to steady his nerves.
‘Padragain, take a close sconce at this entrance wound,’ Katie told her. ‘You can see by the width of the abrasion collar that the bullet entered just beneath the base of his skull at a slight upward angle. You can also see that the collar has gunpowder stipple marks around it, and that there’s this sooty starburst effect directly under the skin. That tells us that it was fired at very close range, even if the muzzle wasn’t actually touching him. The starburst was caused by the smoke and the explosive gases dissecting between the skin and the skull.’
‘Yes, I have you,’ said Detective Scanlan, nodding much more emphatically than she really needed to. She would have seen dozens of photographs of various gunshot wounds during her forensic training, but photographs could never convey the glistening, bloody reality, or the flat, pervasive reek of gunpowder residue. Without a hint of a smile, Bill Phinner had said that it always smelled as if the victim had let off a breezer when they were shot.
Apart from the entrance wound, the back of Darragh Murphy’s skull was intact. The rest of his head, though, looked as if a hand grenade had exploded inside it. His eyeless mask of a face was sloping steeply forward, and his jaw had dropped down so that his stubbled chin was resting on the collar of his polo shirt. The sides of his head had been blown wide apart, like the two flaps of a cardboard box, with an ear still attached to each of them. Between them, his brain had been roughly mashed into glutinous beige lumps, and his sinuses and connective tissues had been torn into tangled scarlet strings.
‘Typical of high-velocity bullets,’ Katie told Detective Scanlan. ‘They don’t leave much of an entrance wound but they fragment inside the skull so that they leave multiple and very destructive exit wounds. The technical experts will be able to see all the bits and pieces when they X-ray his head. A “lead snowstorm” is what they usually call it.’
‘You’d wonder what was inside that brain, wouldn’t you?’ said Inspector O’Rourke. ‘Think of all of the incriminating information he’d have stored up in there. Still, too late to retrieve it now.’
Detective Scanlan pressed her hand over her mouth and made a retching sound and Katie said, ‘Go on, Padragain, Get yourself outside. I’ll join you in a second when I’ve talked to Bill Phinner.’
Bill had come out of the kitchen and was waiting for her in the hallway. He gave her a pinched, resigned smile as Detective Scanlan made her way quickly to the front door, retching again before she got there.
‘Well, and the top of the morning to you, DS Maguire.’
‘What’s the story, Bill? Sorry to drag you out so early.’
‘Oh, no bother at all. I could see the whole station was buzzing last night, what with all of those off-duty fellows coming in and the armed response lads getting themselves tooled up. I reckoned I’d be needed sometime during the night, so I made sure I turned in early. I slept like a child. Didn’t even wake up when the missus came to bed and she usually bounces up and down like she’s riding in the 3.15 at Mallow.’
‘There’s some glaringly obvious things for you to analyse,’ said Katie. ‘The beer can on the coffee table there, and the cigarette butts. But – I don’t know. I have a feeling that none of this fits together.’
‘In what way in particular?’
Katie turned towards the kitchen. ‘Garda O’Leahy, isn’t it?’ she asked one of the plain-clothes officers.
‘That’s right, ma’am.’
‘What time did you see Darragh Murphy driving home, did you say? It was after eleven, wasn’t it?’
‘Eleven-seventeen, though it was eleven-twenty before he managed to get in through the door. He was so wrecked he could barely stand up.’
‘So you couldn’t have missed seeing him coming home?’
‘He crashed into them garage doors and it was like thunder, I’ll tell you. Half the street was twitching their curtains to see if a bomb had gone off. You’d have been deaf as a doorpost not to hear that.’
‘And you’re sure it was him?’
‘Well, it was his car all right, and he was wearing that fawny-coloured windcheater that’s hanging up there by the door, and that cap. We were watching the house from the other side of the road, like, and the street lighting’s not that grand, but there was no lights on in the house before he came home, so who else could it have been?’
‘What’s on your mind, ma’am?’ asked Inspector O’Rourke. He nodded towards the body in the armchair and said, ‘You’re not thinking that this isn’t Darragh Murphy at all? And maybe he’s had his head blown off so that we couldn’t tell if he was or he wasn’t?’
Katie shook her head. ‘No, Francis. I don’t have any doubt that it’s Darragh Murphy. I’m pretty sure, too, that it was Bobby Quilty who arranged to have him taken out. Murphy was the only person who could testify that Quilty incited him to kill Detective Barry, and he was also a loudmouth. If you’re suggesting that Quilty had someone else killed in his place and whisked off the real Darragh Murphy away to somewhere safe, that’s not Quilty’s style at all. What incentive would he have, like, when at any time in the future Murphy could decide to incriminate him? Besides that, Bobby Quilty may sound as if he needs to take his boots off to count to eleven, but he’s very far from stupid. He’ll be well aware that we’ll test Murphy’s DNA and it’ll only take us a matter of hours to confirm if it is him or not.’
‘Well, I agree with all of that,’ said Inspector O’Rourke. ‘I was just wondering why you think there’s something askew here.’
Katie said, ‘Just look at this scenario. According to our surveillance team, Darragh Murphy came home so langered that he couldn’t even fit his key into the front door. What would you do if you came home as drunk as that? I doubt you’d hang up your jacket and your cap neatly by the front door, then go and fetch yourself a six-pack of Murphy’s out of the fridge and sit down to watch a couple of hours of late-night telly.’
Inspector O’Rourke said, ‘You’re right. It’s been a brave few years since I came home in that condition. Herself wouldn’t allow it. But, yes. He’d have been more likely to drop his coat on the floor, stagger into the bedroom and crash out fully dressed on to the bed. That’s if
he didn’t take a detour to the toilet first for a gawk. That’s what I always did.’
‘It’s far too early yet to start jumping to conclusions,’ said Katie. ‘I think, though, that one of the possibilities we ought to consider is that Darragh Murphy was shot much earlier in the afternoon. Whoever killed him could then have driven off in his car. Somebody returned in the car several hours later. Maybe it was the killer himself, maybe not. If Murphy was already dead, it wouldn’t have mattered. But he made as much of a show of it as possible so that if anybody was watching the house he would be guaranteed to attract their attention and lead them into believing it was Murphy coming home. He could have left immediately through the kitchen and of course at that time we didn’t have any officers deployed round the back of the house.’
Bill Phinner said, ‘Tyrone! Would you test that kitchen door for me? With your gloves on, please. Tell me if it’s locked or not.’
Tyrone tried the door handle and the kitchen door opened. ‘Not locked, sir.’
‘In that case, can everybody make sure that they don’t go trampling out into the garden, even if you feel like a smoke. We’ll need to be checking the garden for recent footprints.’
Katie said, ‘It might be worth calling the dog team out. They could at least confirm if the last person who was sitting in Darragh Murphy’s car went out through the back door and which direction they went in. They won’t be able to tell us much more than that because your man would probably have been picked up and driven away. If that was the case, though, there must been another vehicle waiting for them somewhere nearby, and if so, one or more of our local residents might have spotted it. There’s not much that you can get away with in Parklands without half the estate goggling at you.’
‘Fair play to you, ma’am,’ said Inspector O’Rourke. ‘But once he was home, maybe Murphy sobered up a bit. Like, you know, maybe he did sit down with a few cans to watch some telly. Maybe the offender was already in the house waiting for him, or came in through the back door after he had settled down. Maybe he picked the lock, or Murphy had simply forgotten to lock it. After all, there’s nothing in here that’s worth anybody stroking.’
Katie turned to Bill Phinner. ‘If you can give me an accurate time of death, Bill, that would help us no end.’
Bill Phinner looked at Darragh Murphy’s burst-open head. The halogen light that had been set up behind his chair shone through the holes where his eyes had been so that it cast a shadowy, ghost-like face on to the carpet.
‘We’ll be taking his liver temperature now and checking the degree of rigor. Of course we’ll be testing his blood-alcohol level, which will give us a much clearer idea if he really was drunk when he came home – if it was him, as you say. His temperature will probably give us the best estimate. It’s warmish in here so that may give the impression he hasn’t been dead as long as he really has been, if you know what I mean.’
Katie checked her watch. ‘In that case, I’ll leave you to it,’ she said. ‘I want to go and check on the house where John Meagher was supposed to have been held.’
Bill Phinner beckoned to his technical team and now they all came rustling into the living room, carrying their shiny metal cases of instruments and test tubes and chemicals. They started work right away, taking flash photographs of Darragh Murphy’s body from every angle, as well as the living room itself. They carefully packed up the fourth beer can from the coffee table, as well as the brimful ashtray and the Racing Post, and sealed them in polythene boxes.
Katie watched them for a while and then walked to the front door. Detective Scanlan was waiting for her, her face drained of colour so that the two spots of blusher on her cheeks looked like a clown’s make-up. She was clutching her lavender-coloured waterproof jacket tightly up to her neck
‘How are you feeling, Padragain?’ Katie asked her.
‘A touch better, thanks,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘I’m sorry about that. It won’t happen again.’
‘Oh, don’t promise that. I’ve seen much worse than that, and so will you.’
Bill Phinner had been following closely behind Katie and as she stepped out into the rain he said, ‘You’re right about the timing, ma’am, in my opinion. Whenever Murphy was shot, it wasn’t when we’re supposed to think that it was. That scene of crime in there, I was pure suspicious about it the moment I walked in. It looks staged, if you understand what I’m talking about.’
Katie stood in the rain with Detective Scanlan beside her. She could tell that Bill Phinner had something more to say to her, but something he was reluctant to tell her.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘There can’t be any question about it, can there? Bobby Quilty knew everything about this operation hours before we’d even finished setting it up.’
Inspector O’Rourke had joined them now. ‘Of course he did,’ he said, and he sounded angrier than Katie had ever heard him before. ‘He’s only done it again, Quilty, hasn’t he? He’s put us into a position where we don’t have the evidence to prosecute him and we can’t say too much to the media, either, without making ourselves look like an incompetent bunch of culchies, or corrupt, or both, or laying ourselves wide open to a libel action.’
Katie said, ‘You and I need to talk about this later, Francis. Meanwhile I urgently need to find out what’s happened to John Meagher and Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán.’
‘Don’t lose heart, ma’am, that’s all I can say,’ said Inspector O’Rourke.
Katie looked down the street and she could see Dan Keane from the Examiner waiting for her in his long IRA-style trench coat, smoking, as well as Branna MacSuibhne from the Echo and Muireann Bourke from Newstalk.
‘I want all of our lips sealed tight on this,’ she said. ‘If it’s someone in the station who’s been tipping off Quilty, they’ll have guessed that we suspect them, but I don’t want us to say openly that we have any suspicions of leaked information at all. I would rather say that I personally made a bags of Operation Trident because I didn’t double-check the intelligence I was given, something like that. Let’s give our mole the confidence to leak more information to Quilty – except that the next time he does it, let’s make sure it entraps him. Or her, whoever it is.’
‘You know something,’ said Inspector O’Rourke. ‘The mole could just as easy be me. Then what?’
‘Then I’ll find you out somehow, Francis, I swear it. And by God, you’ll suffer for it, believe me.’
Twenty-three
She received two messages on her way to Leitrim Street, even though it was only a ten-minute drive back down towards the city centre.
A dog team had been dispatched to Parklands to see if the killer had left Darragh Murphy’s bungalow by the kitchen door, and if he had, which direction he had taken after that. Seconds later, Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin called her to say that he had just received his morning paper.
‘It’s all over the front page, Katie, about the Langtry family.’
‘Well, that doesn’t surprise me. It’s a very unusual story.’
‘Yes, but it has all of this cat’s malogian about Langtry’s wife having an affair with a British army officer so that she could wheedle information out of him. They’ve quoted that Professor Pendle and he says that it’s highly likely that it was the Brits who executed them by way of punishment. Nobody’s happy about this, Katie, believe me. I’ve had Jimmy O’Reilly on to me already.’
‘Pendle, Jesus,’ said Katie. Sean Pendle was an emeritus professor of Irish history at Cork University and he was notorious for his extreme republican opinions and the way in which he would distort historical facts to suit his agenda. He had published a controversial book, Fenian Glory, which many bookstores in Northern Ireland had refused to carry. He was also a relentless publicity seeker, and Katie didn’t doubt that by this evening he would be on the television news to give his own explanation of how and why the Langtrys had been shot and buried under the floorboards.
‘I’ll talk to you about it when I get back to t
he station,’ Katie told him. ‘Meanwhile, sir, just to make your morning even brighter, Operation Trident has turned out to be an utter disaster, beginning to end.’
As briefly as she could, she updated him on the arrest of Bobby Quilty, the murder of Darragh Murphy and the disappearances of Kyna and John. Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin said nothing while she spoke, but she could almost feel his gradually deepening glumness.
‘All right, Katie,’ he said, when she had finished. ‘It looks like we’re in for one of those days that we’d rather forget.’
She arrived at the junction of Leitrim Street and Pine Street, where gardaí were already taking down the tapes that had cordoned off Pine Street and were waving traffic through. Detective Sergeant Begley was standing outside the terracotta-painted house where John was supposed to have been held, talking to a sergeant from the Regional Support Unit from Limerick.
‘Good morning to you, ma’am,’ said Detective Sergeant Begley. ‘This is Sergeant Norden from Henry Street.’
‘Yes, we’ve met before,’ said Katie. ‘You’re the one they call “Buzz”, aren’t you? I really appreciate your backup on this operation, sergeant. Not that any of it has worked out the way we planned.’
‘Well, you know what they say about the best-laid plans, ma’am,’ said Sergeant Norden. He was a big man and his protective vest bulked him out even more. That was why his colleagues had given him the nickname Buzz, after Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story. His head was shaved shiny blue and his eyes bulged and he breathed very laboriously as if he had just finished weightlifting.
‘Do you want to talk to the squatters?’ asked Detective Sergeant Begley. ‘They’re upstairs, smoking their heads off and asking us every two minutes when we’re going to eff off and give them some peace.’
‘There’s absolutely no sign that John was being held here?’ asked Katie.
‘Like I told you, ma’am, there are no beds here except the mouldy old mattress those two scummers use to sleep on. There’s three bedrooms altogether. One of them’s filled up with old junk so you can hardly open the door. The other one must have been a kid’s bedroom at one time, but there’s no bed in it now, although there’s impressions on the carpet where a bed must have been.’
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