‘I strongly believe that Bobby Quilty is holding Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán and John Meagher imprisoned in his house in South Armagh.’
‘Oh, yes, and what evidence do you have for this strong belief?’
‘I was told by an ex-detective inspector of the PSNI.’
‘Ex-detective inspector?’
‘He resigned after he was suspected of drug-dealing, but he claims that Bobby Quilty framed him.’
‘And where did he get his information from?’
‘A former Provo who works in a local pub. While he was still in the service, the ex-detective inspector let this fellow off several charges of handling explosives. In exchange for that, the fellow keeps a sneaky eye on Bobby Quilty for him so that one day he can get his revenge.’
‘And that’s your evidence?’
She knew what this would look like, especially to Acting Commissioner Jimmy O’Reilly, and to several of the more misogynistic senior officers at Anglesea Street. They would think that she felt so humiliated by the fiasco of Operation Trident that she had worked herself up into a hormonal tantrum and now she was trying to bring down Bobby Quilty in any way she could, no matter how flimsy her evidence might be. ‘Policing by PMT,’ Jimmy O’Reilly had once called it when she had lost her temper with a particularly sarcastic Cork pimp.
But supposing she was given the go-ahead to set up a raid? What if it turned out the same as Operation Trident? What if Bobby Quilty was again tipped off in advance and when they broke into his house there was no sign that Kyna and John had ever been there? For Katie, that could well lead to serious disciplinary proceedings – probation, suspension, or even demotion. Jimmy O’Reilly wouldn’t take kindly to the Garda being made to look like fumbling culchies, especially in front of the PSNI.
She was desperately worried about Kyna and John, but she had to be rational. If she failed to rescue them at the first attempt and was taken off the case, or suspended, or worse, then she would have very little hope of rescuing them at all.
‘I know what’s running through your mind, Katie,’ said Alan. ‘I talked to my old pal at Lisnasharragh before I phoned you and he was of the same opinion. With a cute hoor like Quilty you can’t just go barging in with all guns blazing without knowing in advance how it’s all going to work out. My informant saw the fellow on the stretcher and the girl with the blonde hair, but let’s be serious, we don’t know for sure if they’re the two people we’re looking for, and even if they are the two people we’re looking for, how do we know they’re still there now, or if they’re likely to be still there if we burst in looking for them?’
‘So what are you suggesting? Further surveillance?’
‘You have it exactly. I’ll go down there myself and have a scout around. I’ll see what pictures I can get and if there’s any forensic evidence there to be picked up. And – well, you know, it’s surprising what you can hear when you keep your ears open.’
‘You mean you’re going to hack their mobile phones and tap their landlines?’
‘Away on with you, Katie! As if I’d do any such thing!’
‘Of course not – not as a civilian, and not without a warrant. Who knows what you might overhear?’
‘Katie, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can,’ said Alan. ‘I would have trod careful in any case, but now I know that these two mean so much to you personally yourself, I’ll tread extremely light indeed, I promise you. A couple of years ago one of our sergeants got on the wrong side of Bobby Quilty and his Authentic IRA and you don’t want to know what they did to him, except that it involved his own baton tightly wrapped in razor wire.’
‘You’re right, I don’t want to hear what they did to him,’ said Katie. ‘It’s bad enough trying not to think what they might be doing to Kyna and John.’
Twenty-six
‘I’m sorry that I never thought to bring a priest along with us,’ said the tall man. ‘Very remiss of me, not to think that you Taigs wouldn’t be expecting the last rites and all.’
‘Let me cover him up at least,’ said Kevin. He hauled himself to his feet, gripping the banisters with one bloodied hand to help himself up. His teeth were chattering as if he were freezing cold.
The tall man went over to the coat rack and lifted down Kevin’s own long grey raincoat. Kevin took it and gently draped it over Tom’s body. From the living room, he could hear both Órla and Sibeal weeping. Their sobs were so anguished that they barely sounded human – more like lonely seals crying on an ice floe after their cubs had been culled.
‘Please,’ said Kevin. ‘You can do anything you like to me, but please don’t hurt my wife and my baby girl. I’m begging you. If you have any human mercy at all, please don’t hurt them.’
The tall man looked away, as if he were thinking about something else altogether – like, did I remember to book my car in for its NCT?
Kevin waited, swaying slightly with shock. After a few moments the tall man seemed to have collected his thoughts because he said, ‘All right, then, let’s get you in here all together. Come on now, big lad.’
‘I beg you,’ said Kevin. His throat was so dry that he could hardly speak.
‘What? Like Stephen Langtry begged for Radha, more than likely, and his kids, too? Come on, come in here and let’s get this over and done with.’
The short man pressed his hand against Kevin’s shoulder and pushed him into the living room. Órla and Sibeal were standing next to the fireplace, clutching each other, their eyes swollen and their faces dripping with tears. The younger man had propped his AK-47 up against the window while he rolled up the large red Ashanti-patterned rug in the middle of the floor. Once he had done that, he left the room and Kevin heard him open the front door. He came back shortly afterwards, carrying a large roll of translucent polythene sheeting almost two metres long.
‘You can’t do this,’ said Kevin. ‘This is just barbaric.’
‘Ach, there’s been a surfeit of barbarity in Ireland down the years,’ said the tall man, without looking at him. ‘But there’s a way to end it, so there is, and that’s to punish every act of barbarity with an act of equal barbarity. I know fine rightly that you’re innocent yourself, Kevin, and so are you wife and your bairn, but the Langtrys were just as innocent and somebody has to be punished for their murder, and if not you, then who?’
The young man had unrolled the wrinkled polythene sheeting and spread it all across the polished oak floorboards. Kevin had sanded and polished those floorboards himself, soon after they had first moved in.
Kevin knew that he wasn’t dreaming, although everything that was happening felt utterly unreal. It was more like being very drunk than dreaming. It felt like those times when he had been quite aware that he was drunk, and hadn’t wanted to be drunk, but hadn’t been able to speak properly or walk without stumbling down the stairs.
Now that the sheeting had been unrolled across the floor, the tall man touched Kevin very lightly on the back of his head and said, ‘Kneel, will you, Kevin.’
Kevin knelt down, his arms by his sides. He couldn’t stop himself from crying now even though he wanted to be brave in front of Órla and Sibeal. He didn’t want to look at them. He didn’t want to witness the distress in their faces, but he couldn’t help it. These might be the last few seconds in which he would ever see them.
The short man came up and stood right behind him. He was expecting to be shot in the head at any moment and wondered what it was going to feel like. Did you feel anything at all? Or could you feel your brain exploding, the way Tom’s had exploded? Were you aware of everything that you had ever thought or learned or experienced bursting apart like a supernova? How much would it hurt?
He was still waiting for the shot when the tall man went across to the fireplace, took Órla’s arm and led her over to the middle of the room, next to Kevin. Órla tried to twist her arm away from him, but he was gripping her sleeve too tightly.
‘Kneel,’ he told her. When she hesitated, he repeated in the
same unemphatic monotone, ‘Kneel.’
Órla knelt. She was close enough for Kevin to be able to reach out and touch her, but when he lifted his hand towards her the tall man pursed his lips and shook his head.
‘Mummy!’ sobbed Sibeal.
‘Don’t you worry, wee girl,’ said the tall man. He went over and put his arm around her shoulders and gently steered her over to stand next to Órla.
‘Now, you kneel, too, darling, just like you do in church when you’re saying your prayers to the Holy Mother. “Hail Mary, full of grace, why do you make that self-satisfied face?”’
Sibeal knelt, awkwardly, but at the same time Kevin started to get to his feet again.
‘You lay one finger on her! You touch one hair of her head and I’ll find you in hell! I’ll find you in hell, you bastard, and I’ll make sure that you suffer for all eternity!’
The short man grasped both of Kevin’s shoulders and forced him back down into a kneeling position, jarring his left kneecap painfully against the floor. The tall man said, ‘I may very well end up in hell, Kevin, but you won’t be able to find me. You – you’ll be in paradise with your family, big lad, strolling happily from cloud to cloud and you’ll have forgotten all about me. Or even if you haven’t, you’ll have forgiven me. That’s what you Taigs do, isn’t it? Forgive?’
‘Don’t you dare hurt her!’ Kevin warned him.
‘Ach, she won’t feel a thing,’ said the tall man. With that, he lifted his automatic, cocked it, and pointed it directly between Sibeal’s eyes.
Kevin didn’t have time to speak before he pulled the trigger and shot Sibeal in the centre of her forehead. Blood sprayed over the glass of the china cabinet directly behind her and up the wall, spattering a small framed picture of St Felicity. Sibeal pitched backwards on to the floor, but still kneeling, as if her knees were hinged. Her blue eyes were still open and, like St Felicity, she was staring up at the ceiling, except that there was a powder-black entry wound between her eyebrows. A large triangular segment had been blown from the back of her skull so that her brains were now tangled with her hair.
Órla screamed and tried to stand up. The short man made a grab for her and as she turned herself around to fight him off the tall man shot her in the right eye, at point-blank range. The fragmentation bullet didn’t penetrate all the way through her skull, but her head was violently distorted off to the left so that her face now sloped in a surrealistic parody of herself. She dropped sideways on to the floor close to Kevin’s knees and blood ran out of her eye socket and across the bridge of her freckled nose. She was wearing the thin silver bracelet that Kevin had given her on her thirtieth birthday, because that was all he had been able to afford.
Kevin closed his eyes tight. He thought, Kill me, go on, you’re going to do it anyway, and there’s nothing left for me to live for now, but he didn’t speak.
The tall man was standing very close in front of him. Kevin couldn’t smell him with all that gunpowder stench in the air, but he could sense that he was there.
‘Strange thing, revenge, isn’t it?’ the tall man asked him. ‘The sweetest morsel in the mouth that was ever cooked in hell. That’s what Sir Walter Scott called it.’
Kevin still said nothing. He could hear the rain sprinkling against the windows and in the distance he could faintly hear the rumbling of a plane taking off from Cork airport. So this is how my life ends, he thought. This is where my destiny was always leading me.
He pictured the first time he had seen Órla, standing behind the counter at Ryan’s, the baker’s, with the sun making her look so pale and ethereal, like the ghost of a beautiful girl, rather than a real girl.
‘Are you getting?’ she had asked him.
He opened his eyes. The tall man was staring at him with an expression that he had never seen on anybody’s face before, ever. It was closer to helplessness than anything else, as if he had no choice but to do this because Irish history wouldn’t have it any other way.
‘I am now,’ he said – but of course the tall man didn’t understand that this was in reply to the very first question that Órla had put to him and had nothing to do with the bloody tragedy in this living room.
The tall man slowly circled around him, his shoes making a rustling sound on the polythene sheeting. He stood behind him for what seemed to Kevin like an hour, but was less than a minute. Then he raised his automatic until the silencer was only a centimetre away from the back of Kevin’s head.
‘This is for Radha,’ he said. He fired, and Kevin’s face blew open from the inside out.
*
The tall man and the short man wrapped up each of the four bodies tightly in polythene sheeting, sealing them with silver gaffer tape. While they were doing that, the younger man used a crowbar to prise up six floorboards in the middle of the living-room floor.
Between them, they lowered the bodies into the spaces between the joists and then they carefully nailed the floorboards back down. They replaced the rug and positioned two of the armchairs on top of it.
This took them nearly two hours and then they had to spend a further twenty minutes to clean up Tom’s blood from the hallway. Fragments of the bullet that had gone through his head had scarred the upper right-hand door panel, but the younger man had the idea of covering these up by pinning over it a list of reminders that Órla had written to herself and stuck to her fridge.
‘Let’s put it this way, you’re not going to walk in here and immediately think, “Ah, she’s stuck her to-do list on the front door to hide some bullet holes”, now are you?’
They took a last look around. The Doherty house was silent, as silent as the Langtrys’ house must have been when their murderers had finished nailing down their bodies and cleaning up the blood. Then they closed the front door behind them, climbed into their van and drove off.
It was still raining, even more heavily now, and the rain drifted across the city as if God were trailing shrouds across the streets.
Twenty-seven
It was past 2.30 p.m. before Katie arrived back at Anglesea Street. A lorryload of live pigs had broken down in Jack’s Hole and the traffic had tailed back all the way to the Euro Business Park. Apart from that, it was raining so hard now that she had to set her windscreen wipers to flap at full speed, and visibility was down to less than thirty metres.
As she came out of the lift she almost collided with Detective Ó Doibhilin.
‘Oh, there you are, ma’am,’ he greeted her. ‘I was just coming back from your office because you weren’t there, but here you are now yourself.’
‘What’s the story, Michael?’ Katie asked him. She walked briskly down the corridor to her office and Detective Ó Doibhilin came trotting after her. He was waving a green plastic folder as he did so.
‘I heard back from a fellow called Bracewaite, who’s like an unofficial historian for the Manchester Regiment. All of their regimental records are kept in the Tameside Local Studies and Archive Centre in Ashton-under-Lyne in Manchester.’
‘Did he know who this “Gerald” might have been?’
‘He’s one hundred per cent sure of it. Lieutenant Gerald Seabrook, whose family came from a place near Manchester called Hale Barns. He’d seen service in France during the First World War and in 1919 they posted him to Ballincollig.’
Katie took off her waterproof jacket and hung it up. ‘What we really need to know is, is there any record of his having had a relationship with Radha Langtry?’
She sat down and Detective Ó Doibhilin popped open the plastic folder and handed it to her. ‘There’s no specific record of that, like, but there’s a copy of a letter that was sent just before Christmas in 1920 from the regiment’s headquarters in Manchester to Lieutenant Seabrook’s commanding officer here in Ireland. I’d say that there’s at least an implication in it that Lieutenant Seabrook was doing a line with Radha Langtry.’
Katie took out the typewritten letter and quickly read it. It had been sent by Major D. R. Kettering from L
adysmith Barracks, Ashton-under-Lyne, to Lieutenant Colonel F. H. Dorling, commander of the 1st Battalion of the Manchester Regiment in Ballincollig. It was dated 17 December 1920.
Sir,
I have received an appeal from Mrs J. Seabrook, the wife of Lt. G. K. Seabrook, urgently requesting information about his wellbeing and whereabouts. It appears that she has had no word from him whatsoever for more than three months, neither has she received the usual monthly payment from him to meet her household expenses and the care of their two young children.
She is particularly distressed since Christmas is almost upon us.
I would be grateful if you could have this matter raised with Lt. Seabrook and inform me of the position regarding his contact with his wife and financial contributions to his family.
‘Is this all?’ asked Katie, holding up the letter. ‘Did this Major Kettering get a reply?’
‘I’m afraid that’s all, ma’am – all that’s in the archive, any road. There’s no further word about why Lieutenant Seabrook hadn’t been in touch with his missus. But there is a record of what happened to him.’
‘Oh, yes? And what was that?’
‘He went missing in March 1921. They thought at the time that he’d deserted, because four private soldiers failed to show up for duty at the same time. Here they are – Privates Pincher, Mason, Caen and Roughley. A whole rake of British soldiers went AWOL, according to this Bracewaite fellow, because they’d just come back from fighting the Germans in France and suddenly they found themselves up against the IRA. The stress and the totally different circumstances they were fighting under was too much for some of them. That was in the days before post-traumatic stress disorder was thought of, you know. They’d only just invented shell-shock.’
‘But he hadn’t deserted, this Lieutenant Seabrook?’
‘No, ma’am, he hadn’t at all, and neither had any of those four privates. If they had, like, we wouldn’t be able to check up on it. There’s a file called “arrests and illegal absences” in the regimental archives, but it’s sealed for a hundred years and nobody’s allowed to take a sconce at it until 2040 at the earliest. No, in 1923 the Brits and the IRA were doing some further political bargaining, like, and as a concession to the Brits the IRA told them that Lieutenant Seabrook and the four privates had been abducted and shot and their bodies buried underneath a hedge in Muskerry.’
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