She paused, and looked at theTV camera, and added, ‘I’m not infallible. None of us are. But I would rather be guilty of making an error of judgement than guilty of causing the death of an innocent person by failing to respond to what seemed like genuine information.’
‘I spoke to Mr Quilty before I came here,’ said Roisin Magorian. ‘If you’ll forgive me for quoting him more or less verbatim, he says that the Cork Garda have a certain part of their anatomy hanging out of the window while their grannie throws snowballs at it.’
‘Mr Quilty is entitled to express his opinion in whatever language he chooses, provided it isn’t obscene or slanderous.’
‘However, he says that he isn’t a vindictive man and that he’s satisfied that his future relations with the Garda are going to be cordial. Warm, even. Would you agree with that?’
‘An Garda Siochána will treat Mr Quilty in the same way that we treat every other citizen of Cork, no matter who they are.’
‘No special treatment, then, in case he sues you for wrongful arrest?’
‘No comment,’ said Katie. ‘In fact, that’s a question that doesn’t deserve an answer.’
‘There’s no need to get stooky about it, Detective Superintendent,’ said Roisin Magorian. ‘I was only asking. You can’t deny that the Garda have given preferential treatment to certain people in the past, naming no names.’
‘Can I ask what progress you’re making with the murder of Darragh Murphy?’ put in Branna MacSuibhne.
‘Nothing dramatic so far,’ said Inspector O’Rourke. ‘Several Parklands residents saw a yellowy Volvo estate waiting at the end of the alley that runs behind the houses in Darragh Murphy’s street. It was there for at least twenty minutes with its motor running, which is one of the reasons it caught their attention. One witness said she saw a skinny feen in a grey hoodie walking out of the alley and climbing into the Volvo and then it immediately drove off.’
He looked down at his notes and then he said, ‘She told our officer, “Your man was walking very quick, like he thought the Devil was close behind him but didn’t want to turn around to look, and once he’d jumped into it, the car took off with its tyres screaming like all the bats of hell.”’
‘Could this have been the same Volvo estate you were looking for after the murder of Detective Barry?’ asked Branna.
‘I won’t deny that’s a possibility,’ said Inspector O’Rourke. ‘However, none of the witnesses at Parklands made a note of the vehicle’s index marks. We still have a name and address for the owner of the Volvo that may have been involved in the incident in which Detective Barry was fatally injured, but we haven’t yet been able to trace him. Charles Daly, of Rathpeacon. The address was real enough, but there’s nobody living there who matches the name in which the vehicle was registered. We’re still making inquiries of course.’
‘You wanted to talk to Darragh Murphy in regard to the death of Detective Barry,’ said Muireann Bourke. ‘Now that he’s dead, does that mean that the case is closed? Or do you have other suspects?’
‘The case is still very much open,’ said Katie. ‘As yet we have no conclusive proof that Darragh Murphy was responsible for fatally injuring Detective Barry, or that other parties weren’t involved. That’s all I have to say for now.’
After the media conference had ended, Katie was about to go back to the canteen when Roisin Magorian caught up with her.
‘What’s the story, Roisin? Anything more I can help you with?’
Roisin reached into her bulging green leather tote bag and took out a springbound notebook. ‘This is nothing to do with Operation Trident, Detective Superintendent. This is another story I’ve been working on altogether.’
‘Go on.’
Roisin Magorian had a pair of half-glasses hanging around her neck and she perched them on to the end of her nose. ‘I have a friend who has a friend who’s an accountant for the Diamond Club casino. He told me in confidence that some very influential people in Cork have desperate gambling debts, some of them running into six figures.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me one bit,’ said Katie. ‘You remember that case we had only last year, don’t you – that manager at AIB? He’d lost a fortune at the roulette table – a fortune! – and so he lent himself nearly a quarter of a million euros from his customers’ accounts so that he could save himself from having his legs broken. Well, when I say “lent”, he was never going to be able to pay it all back.’
‘This is much more serious, in its way,’ said Roisin Magorian. ‘There are several politicians who have run up enormous gambling debts and they’ve borrowed money to keep their creditors off their backs. At least three county councillors and a TD, too. Not just politicians, either. A senior manager in Revenue and a buyer of pharmaceuticals for the HSE. And – a senior officer in the Cork Garda. Which is why I’m asking you about it.’
‘Do you know who it is?’ asked Katie.
‘No. Your man from the Diamond Club wouldn’t name any names because it would be more than his job’s worth. In fact, he said it might be even more risky than that. Most of the money has been lent by sources with powerful vested interests, like developers looking for planning permission, or drug companies that want their product bought by the health service at an inflated price. Or, in some cases, by criminals – criminals who wouldn’t be too happy if it got out who they’d been lending money to.’
‘Do you have any evidence for this at all, apart from what this fellow from the Diamond Club told you?’
‘Some. But I’m gathering more day by day. I just wanted to ask you if you had any inkling that it was true, and if you know that at least one of your senior officers is up to his ears in gambling debt.’
‘You’re taking a chance, aren’t you? It might be a “she”, not a “he”. It might be me, for all you know.’
‘No, I may not know his name yet, but it’s a “he”.’
Katie could see that Inspector O’Rourke was waiting to talk to her. ‘I’m sorry, Roisin,’ she said. ‘You know more about this than I do. Even if I do find out, I’m not at all sure that I’ll be telling you.’
‘Well, we’ll see,’ said Roisin Magorian. ‘You might be inclined to, in return for some information from me. I may not know who your gambling Garda officer is, but I’m pretty sure who it was that lent him the money.’
Katie waited for her to continue, but Roisin Magorian did nothing more than tuck her notebook back into her tote bag. ‘Good luck to you, DS Maguire,’ she told her, and turned to go.
Katie was tempted to call her back, but she knew that she wouldn’t tell her any more. She went to join Inspector O’Rourke and make her way back to the canteen where Alan was waiting for her.
‘How do you reckon that went?’ asked Inspector O’Rourke.
‘Not quite as bad as I’d expected. But let’s wait until we see the Six One News and tomorrow morning’s papers.’
*
Alan looked up from the copy of the Echo he had been reading and said, ‘How did it go?’
‘As well as could be expected,’ said Katie, pulling out a chair and sitting opposite him. ‘In other words, somewhere between desperate and disastrous.’
‘Have you had any word from upstairs yet?’
‘Nothing so far, but I’m sure I will. Jimmy O’Reilly isn’t going to let me get away with making a hames of an expensive operation like that. It’s all budget with him. That man, I’ll tell you. He wouldn’t spend Christmas.’
She wondered why she was talking to Alan like this. After all, she hardly knew him. She hadn’t even checked if he really had been a detective inspector with the PSNI. But she felt exhausted with worry and badly in need of an ally. Apart from that, he was the only other person who knew where John and Kyna were, and what danger they were in, and everything he had said had rung true so far.
‘You look tired, if you don’t mind my saying so,’ Alan told her.
Katie scruffed her hand through her hair. ‘I’m fair beat out,
if you must know.’
‘Then why don’t we leave this till tomorrow? If you don’t want me seen around here too often, we could always meet for breakfast.’
‘No, I won’t be able to sleep until we’ve talked through how we’re going to handle this. I probably won’t be able to sleep anyway. I keep getting this picture in my head of John lying on a couch and Kyna feeding him, the way you described it. I mean, like, Mother of God, John was a very fit man.’
‘We have to take it careful, Katie. If we try to rush this, it’s going to end up like your Operation Trident, only worse. We have to nail Bobby Quilty before we do anything else, and nail him securely.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you get copies of all the intelligence we have on him,’ said Katie. She was becoming aware that other gardaí in the canteen had noticed her talking to Alan and were obviously wondering who he was and why they were having what must have looked like such an intimate conversation. Katie’s personal life was even more riveting to her fellow officers at Anglesea Street than their four-times-a-week dose of Fair City.
‘How did you get here?’ she asked Alan. ‘Did you drive?’
‘Came on the train,’ he told her. ‘I didn’t fancy driving for four and a half hours in weather like this, and besides there’s five kilometres of resurfacing works on the E201 at Two-Mile Borris.’
Katie couldn’t help thinking to herself: Even if he never was a detective inspector, he certainly sounds like one.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Instead of going to Jury’s, why don’t you come back to Cobh with me? I’ve a spare room and it’ll cost you nothing. I have to take my dog for his walk and get myself something to eat. That’s if you don’t mind reheated lasagne. It’s home-made, not Tesco’s best.’
‘Katie, I didn’t come here to impose on you. I can see that you have quite enough on your plate already, so you have.’
‘No, it wouldn’t be an imposition. I’d be glad of the company right now, to be honest with you. There’s not a lot of consolation in talking to yourself, like.’
*
They drove to Katie’s house on Carrig View in Cobh and it rained harder and harder all the way there. When they climbed out of her car and hurried to the front porch, Katie noticed the living-room curtain in the Tierney’s house next door twitching back and Jenny Tierney peering out to see who it was. Oh, there’d be some chinwagging now all right. C’mere till I tell you, that Detective Maguire brought a feller home with her last night and he didn’t leave until the morning so.
Barney greeted Alan with his usual suspicious snuffling, but when he realized that Katie was quite comfortable with him he relaxed and went into the kitchen to make some loud lapping noises in his water bowl.
‘Sorry about the sniffing,’ said Katie.
‘Oh, don’t worry. They say that dogs can sniff if a man has prostate cancer, so I’m relieved that he’s given me the all-clear.’
‘Would you care for a drop of coffee?’ asked Katie, walking into the living room. Her table lamps were on timers but it had grown so dark so early that she switched them on herself.
‘No, no thanks. I’ve been drinking coffee all day. If I have any more caffeine I’ll be gibbering like a baboon.’
‘A beer, then?’
‘All right, twist my arm. It’s a little early for me, but the sun’s gone down. It’s not visible, any road.’
Katie switched on the television. The Six One News would be on in five minutes and she wanted to hear Fionnuala Sweeney’s report on Operation Trident. She went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of Murphy’s and a glass for Alan, then she poured herself a vodka and topped it up with lemonade.
‘So tell me about yourself,’ she said, sitting down on the couch next to him and tucking her feet up.
Alan shrugged. ‘There’s not much to tell. If I’d followed my heart maybe there would have been. I always wanted to be a musician and have my own folk band, The Cuchulains I was going to call them, do you know? But my older brother went off to England to work in insurance, and my younger brother got himself a managerial job with Green Isle Foods, and my sister married this Belgian fellow she met on holiday, a bit of a looper but pleasant enough, and went off to live in Belgian land.’
‘What happened to The Cuchulains?’
‘Oh, they never came to nothing, sadly. The problem was that our da was a chief inspector in the RUC. There’ve been Hartes in the Northern Ireland police service since my great-grandfather was a county inspector for the Royal Irish Constabulary in 1912, and my da was dead set on the family name being carried down through the generations.’
Katie shook her head and smiled. ‘You don’t have to tell me. You were the only one left and you didn’t want to let him down. That was exactly what happened to me. Seven Maguire sisters and the only one to join the Garda was muggins.’
‘Still, Katie, fair play to you, you’ve done yourself proud. And your father proud, too. My da’s dead and buried now, but he was mortified when I had to leave the service. Mortified!’
‘Are you married?’ Katie asked him, nodding towards the gold ring on his wedding finger.
‘Separated. Coming up for eight years now. Somehow we never got around to divorcing, and somehow I never got around to taking off this ring. I suppose if nothing else it’s a great contraceptive.’
They watched the Six One News. A major fire had gutted a whiskey distillery in Midleton, with seven workers injured and three still missing. There had also been a critical vote in the Dáil on further cuts to the health service, so the report on Operation Trident had been dropped altogether.
‘There you are, Katie,’ said Alan. ‘There is a God.’
Katie finished her drink and stood up. ‘I’m not so sure about that. I still have to take Barney for his evening patrol and it’s flogging outside.’
‘Hey, I’ll come with you, so I will. There’s no point in just the one of us getting skited.’
As soon as Barney heard her take his lead down from the hook in the hall he came running out of the kitchen.
‘Look at him,’ said Katie. ‘He thinks I’m going to take him all the way down to Whitepoint Drive to see his girlfriend, Oona. Sorry, Barns, not on a night like this. We’re going as far as the ferry and back again, and that’s it, and if you don’t do your business by then you’ll just have to bottle it up till the morning.’
Alan laughed, and Katie turned to him, and suddenly realized for the first time in days that she had something to smile about, no matter how briefly.
Thirty
‘Oh, Jesus!’ John cried out. He sounded desperate, as if he had been trying to keep silent for the past half-hour but couldn’t contain his agony any longer. ‘Oh Jesus – oh holy Jesus, my feet!’
Kyna opened her eyes. The clock outside in the hallway had only just struck half past seven and the overhead light was still on, but she had been awkwardly curled up in her armchair trying to sleep. She was exhausted, and there was nothing else to do in this large, dull, brown-wallpapered room – no television, no radio, no books, not even a newspaper, and the only picture on the walls was an autumn landscape of County Fermanagh that was almost as brown as the wallpaper.
When John started moaning, however, Kyna lifted herself out of her armchair and went across to the couch to kneel down beside him. She said, ‘Ssh, I’m here, John,’ and gently laid her hand on his forehead. He felt chilled and sweaty, and he was trembling uncontrollably from head to foot.
‘They’ll have to call a doctor for you,’ she told him. ‘You can’t go on like this. You’ll get blood poisoning, if you haven’t already. Let me look at your feet.’
John shook his head. ‘No, no, please don’t touch them. Please. It’s like they’re on fire. It’s like they’re on fire and my legs are starting to burn, too.’
‘John, you have to let me take a look. I might be able to clean them up for you. If you leave them wrapped up like that they’re only going to get worse. You could die from septica
emia.’
John was wearing only the dirty blue shirt and boxer shorts that he had been wearing when he had first been snatched on his way to the Hayfield Manor. His legs were bare, but both of his feet were swaddled in thick white towels – the left towel very much larger than the right, more like a bath towel, so it looked disproportionately huge. Both towels, though, were stained with brown and yellow blotches, and they smelled strongly of dried blood and pus.
Even before she started to unwind them, Kyna was disturbed to see that John’s calves were swollen and red, almost up to his knees.
‘I’ll be as gentle as I can,’ she said. John nodded, gripping the edge of the cushion with one hand and pushing the knuckle joint of his other hand into his mouth and biting it.
She lifted up his left leg and carefully began to unwind the towel. John sucked in his breath and bit harder on his hand. Although she hated to hurt him, she knew she couldn’t let his feet continue to fester like this.
With every layer she unwound, the brown and yellow stains became wider and wetter and the smell became stronger. She retched, although she tried to suppress it because she didn’t want to John to become any more distressed than he was already. All she had eaten since this morning was a ham and tomato sandwich that Ger had bought at a petrol station on the way here, so she had nothing to bring up except saliva.
When she finally dragged off the last corner of the bath towel, she could see how badly John’s feet had become infected. His whole foot was swollen and purple and his toes were black. The hole that Chisel had drilled through his foot was now clogged with glistening greenish-beige pus.
She stared at it helplessly. She couldn’t bandage up his foot again, not with the same sodden towel, but she had nothing to clean it with. She always had make-up wipes in her bag, but Ger had taken that away from her, and in any case they wouldn’t have been enough to clean out John’s suppurating wounds. All she had now was the clothes in which she had first met Bobby Quilty, which Margot had washed for her: her pink TROUBLE T-shirt, sports bra and skinny black jeans. Ger had even taken her shoes.
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