She went back into the hallway and took down the list. It was then that she saw the jagged splintering in the door panel, and even though she had no idea what might have caused it she knew at once that the Dohertys must be in some kind of trouble. Maybe they had argued and their argument had turned into a fight. She knew from what Órla had told her over tea and biscuits that the Dohertys’ marriage hadn’t always been the smoothest. Maybe she had left and taken the children with her and Kevin had simply gone off to work.
But why had neither of them taken their cars?
Celia went next door and knocked at Mrs Doody’s. It took a long time for Mrs Doody to answer and for a while Celia was worried that she might have disappeared, too. At length, however, she opened the door, cradling a black-and-white miniature schnauzer in her arms. The instant it saw Celia, the schnauzer started barking.
‘Corky, will you whisht awhile!’ Mrs Doody snapped at him. She had her hair pinned up in a tight grey bun and was wearing a splashy summer dress with huge yellow chrysanthemums all over it. She had an oddly tiny head and a pinched, shrivelled-up face, with black-rimmed spectacles that looked enormous by comparison.
‘Sorry to be bothering you, Mrs Doody,’ said Celia. ‘But have you seen any sign of Kevin and Órla today by any chance?’
Mrs Doody thought about it and then shook her head. ‘No, girl, not today. Órla I haven’t seen since yesterday morning. She came around to borrow some brown sugar for her barmbrack. Yesterday afternoon I saw Kevin out the window bringing the kids home, but that was all. They were very quiet last night, I have to tell you, and I haven’t heard a squeak from them today. Usually I can hear their telly, like, and the kids running up and down the stairs.’
‘They’re not at home this morning, but look, their cars are still there. And the house... I don’t know, come and see it for yourself. There’s something desperate quare gone on there, I’m sure of it.’
‘Let me find my slippers and I’ll be with you.’
She disappeared for a few moments and then returned, still carrying her miniature schnauzer, which barked at Celia when it saw her again.
‘Whisht, Corky, will you? Oh, they tell you when you buy them that they’re affectionate, these little fellows, and they are, but they don’t tell you that they’ve more bark than Gougane Barra forest.’
The two of them went next door to the Dohertys’ house. Both Mrs Doody and Corky started to sniff suspiciously as soon as they stepped into the hallway. Corky barked once and then started to make an extraordinary squeaking noise in the back of his throat. He wriggled and twisted in Mrs Doody’s arms so that she had to drop him on to the floor. He trotted without hesitation into the living room.
‘Well, you’re right, this is desperate quare,’ said Mrs Doody. ‘I can’t think what that smell puts me in mind of, but it’s not the way this house usually smells, and that’s for sure. Órla’s always squirting that flowery room spray around.’
Celia showed her the splintered door panel. She lifted her huge glasses a little so that she could focus better and then she said, ‘Now, then. A bullet’s done that, no mistake about it.’
‘A bullet? Serious?’
‘My uncle used to run Hickey’s Bar in Bandon and in the back room there was panelling which the Brits had shot at during the war. The marks you could see on the wall there were the identical spit of these, I’ll tell you.’
‘Mother of God,’ said Celia. ‘I know that Kevin and Órla have their fights all right, but I can’t see them shooting each other. You didn’t hear a gun going off, did you?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ said Mrs Doody. ‘By the looks of it, though, by the smell of it, I’d say that nothing good’s happened here.’ She reached up to touch the splintered front door, and then she turned around and snapped out, ‘Corky! For the love of all that’s holy, will you hold your whisht!’
Corky had started barking again, a high-pitched monotonous yapping, and they could hear him scratching at the floor, too.
‘What’s that little pesht up to now? Corky!’
They went into the living room and saw that Corky had managed to scrabble the red patterned rug to one side and was clawing furiously at the floorboards. Mrs Doody picked him up and tried to stop him barking by holding his jaws together, but he struggled and kicked and jumped down out of her arms again.
Celia went down on one knee and ran the palm of her hand over the floorboards. ‘Look here,’ she said. ‘There’s marks here like somebody’s pulled the floor up – see, there’s holes where the nails were taken out and they’ve been knocked back in different places.’
There was nothing that either of them could do to stop Corky from barking and scratching, and every now and then he pressed his snout against the cracks in between the floorboards and gave a deep, quivering sniff.
‘There’s something under there,’ said Mrs Doody. ‘He can smell it, like. He’s not exactly a bloodhound, but he can always tell when I fetch home tripe in my shopping bag.’
‘Oh, God,’ said Celia. ‘You don’t think—? Did you see that programme they had on the telly a couple of days back, about that family in Blarney that was found buried under the floorboards? Father and mother and children, too. And dogs.’
‘I saw that, yes. There was a piece about it in the Echo, too. But that occurred back in the 1920s. Jesus, that was before even I was born!’
‘I know. But where are the Dohertys?’
‘Like you say, they could have had an argument,’ said Mrs Doody, although she sounded more than a little apprehensive. ‘What’s under here, though – it’s more likely to be a pigeon that’s got itself stuck, don’t you think? Or a cat maybe, or a rat.’
Celia hesitated, but then she crouched forward and sniffed at the floorboards herself. Immediately she sat up straight, cupping her hand over her face.
‘I can smell something all right. Something sweet, like. Sweet but bad, do you know what I mean? Like when you buy a chicken and it’s off.’
‘Do you have Órla’s mobile phone number?’ Mrs Doody asked her. ‘Why don’t you try ringing her? Maybe she and Kevin had a fight, but it’s the first day of the holliers, isn’t it? Maybe she’s just taken the kids out shopping for some summer clothes.’
Celia went out to the hallway to find her purse and came back with her mobile phone. She pressed Órla’s number and waited.
After a short while they heard a ringtone. It was muffled, but there was no question where it was coming from – underneath the floorboards. Even Corky stopped barking and listened.
‘Call the guards,’ said Mrs Doody. Then she stepped back so that she was no longer standing in the centre of the living room, where the rug had been, and crossed herself.
Thirty-three
When she opened her eyes again and reached across the bed, Alan had gone.
She lay there for a while, looking towards the window. The wind that had been blowing most of the night had died down now and it appeared to be quite bright outside, even though it wasn’t sunny. She couldn’t hear rain, anyway, and that was a blessing.
She thought about Alan. She wasn’t sorry that she had invited him into her bed, especially since he had given her all the emotional comfort she had needed, and at the same time had been so restrained. They weren’t yet lovers – maybe they never would be, but they were as close now as two acquaintances could be.
She lifted her head from the pillow to check the time. It was nearly ten past eight – later than she had slept in for months – and she felt all the better for it. She wasn’t due in to Anglesea Street until lunchtime, when she was supposed to be having a meeting with Assistant Commissioner O’Reilly and Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin about their future strategy for dealing with Bobby Quilty and other cigarette-smugglers.
She hadn’t yet thought how she was going to explain to them why her investigations into the killings of Detective Barry and Darragh Murphy were making such slow progress. She would probably tell them that after the fiasco of
Operation Trident she was insisting that every piece of evidence against Bobby Quilty was triple-checked – fingerprints, DNA matches, witness reports, phone-taps, everything.
She closed her eyes again for a few seconds, but then she heard the bedroom door click and she opened them again. Alan came in, still wearing John’s black silk dressing gown. He was carrying two mugs, one with a picture of Pope John Paul on it, the other with the badge of An Garda Siochána.
‘Ah grand, you’re awake!’ He smiled. ‘I made us some coffee. I guessed that you like yours black, no sugar.’
‘You don’t know me that well, then,’ said Katie, sitting up. ‘One level spoonful of demerara. You’ll find it in the brown glass jar next to the microwave.’
‘Your wish is my command, o Detective Superintendent. You outrank me, after all.’
He set down one mug on the bedside table and went back to the kitchen. He returned, stirring her coffee, and sat down on the side of the bed.
‘You’ve given yourself the pope mug,’ said Katie.
‘You don’t have one with the archbishop of Armagh on it, that’s why. But I don’t think God will strike me down for drinking out of a Catholic vessel. Careful, it’s very hot still.’
‘I wasn’t going to drink it straightaway,’ Katie told him. ‘I didn’t want to have coffee breath when you kissed me.’
Alan looked at her very steadily. This was the moment when he could have said no, this will get far too complicated. But Katie was telling him that she needed him, for the time being at least, or somebody like him. Somebody she could come home to at the end of each increasingly disastrous day. Somebody who would understand what stress she was suffering and support her, and hold her close in the middle of the night.
He leaned forward and kissed her. Then he kissed her again and she kissed him back. She shifted herself further across the bed to make more room for him and turned down the duvet cover. Then she crossed her arms and pulled off her white short-sleeved nightdress. She was large-breasted for a small woman and her breasts swung a little when she lifted it over her head.
Alan stood up and unfastened the tie-belt, letting his dressing gown slide to the floor. He was broad-shouldered and muscular for a man in his early fifties, although his stomach was slightly rounded. The hair on his chest was as grey as the hair on his head and formed a V-shaped pattern, like grey cirrus clouds. His pubic hair was grey, too, and wiry.
He eased himself into the bed next to her. His penis was already stiff and his testicles were wrinkled tight. Katie took hold of the shaft and pressed the ball of her sharp-nailed thumb up against the opening. He was very big, and very hard, and she squeezed him tighter and tighter until his purple glans turned a dark plum colour.
He cleared his throat. ‘Have you condoms?’ he asked her.
‘I’m on the pill,’ she told him.
‘Better to be safe, you know. Don’t want to be sending another one to school.’
Katie had been taking the pill ever since she had accidentally become pregnant to her former neighbour, who had sworn on his life that he had had a vasectomy. She hadn’t thought she was likely to have another sexual encounter quite so soon, but she was terrified that she might have another unplanned pregnancy, and she would never consider an abortion. Her mother had died after giving birth to the last of her sisters. She had been warned that there were complications and she should terminate the pregnancy early, but she had refused. Only God gives life, and only God can take it away.
Alan kissed her again, on her lips, and then her neck, and took hold of her breast and caressed it, tugging gently at her nipple and rolling it between his fingers until it stiffened. She felt his glans becoming slippery, so she learned back on the pillow and opened her thighs. With a faint, moist click, like the quietest of kisses, the lips of her smooth waxed vulva opened up to reveal how wet she was.
‘Oh, Katie, you’re such a beautiful, beautiful woman,’ Alan breathed. He ran his fingers lightly down her side, all the way to her hip, which made her shiver. Then he slid his finger between her lips and stroked her clitoris so gently that she could barely feel it.
She kept her grip on his penis and guided it between her legs. He was arousing her with his finger-play and it was almost making her delirious, but she wanted him inside her, as deep as he could go.
He entered her and she let out a moan of pleasure that was almost a laugh. He felt enormous, as if he were far too big for her, and she opened her legs as wide as she could so that he could bury himself inside her, right up to that grey wiry hair, and his testicles bobbed against her. The tip of his glans touched the neck of her womb and she jumped, and laughed again.
He felt so different from John. Most of the time John had been sensual and slow, almost dreamy, although he had sometimes been forceful, when he was drunk or he hadn’t made love to her for several weeks. Alan was strong and blunt and deliberate and heavy, pushing himself into her again and again, harder and harder each time, as if he were trying to drive her into the mattress. His skin had the smooth dry texture of unpolished marble, so that Katie almost felt as if she were being penetrated by a life-size statue of a man. He made her feel physically helpless, but at work she was always in charge and in a way she found it exciting to be dominated like this.
He was panting now, as if he had been running a half-marathon. Without warning he levered his penis out of her and ejaculated all over her stomach. She was close to reaching a climax herself and she smeared his warm semen around and around, and over her breasts, so that her nipples were stiff and slippery.
Alan lifted himself off her and lay close beside her, quickly and lightly flicking her clitoris with his finger. It was as hard now as a little bird’s beak. She felt that tight, dark, shrinking sensation between her legs, tighter and tighter. Then she was shaking and jerking and gasping and she could see stars.
They lay side by side for over twenty minutes, while Katie felt him drying on her stomach. She looked at him closely and he smiled back at her, but she realized that she was searching for some telltale clue in his expression – like a detective rather than a lover. At the moment he had climaxed all over her she had found it erotic, but now she wondered why he had done it. Surely a man’s strongest sexual urge was to climax as deeply as he could inside the woman he was making love to – especially since this was their very first time.
Had he wanted to degrade her in some way, maybe without fully realizing it himself? She was a serving detective superintendent, after all, while he was an ex-detective inspector who had been forced to resign under a cloud of suspicion. As he had said, ‘You outrank me.’
Or maybe there was another reason. Maybe he hadn’t believed her when she had assured him that she was on the pill. She was only in her late thirties, after all, still young enough to have a baby, and when they were talking the previous evening she had described how she had lost little Seamus and how much she still missed him.
‘Your coffee’s probably gone cold by now,’ Alan told her.
‘Ah well, you can make me some fresh, can’t you? And what about that Ulster egg-in-a-cup? I need to take a shower.’
‘Katie,’ said Alan.
She touched his lips with the tip of her finger. ‘You don’t have to say anything, Alan. Let’s just wait and see where this goes. Three things there are that can never come back, and that was a fourth.’
*
Katie showered and dressed in her light grey suit. By the time she had blown her hair dry and put on her make-up, Alan had showered and dressed, too, in a tattersall country shirt and dark brown chinos.
Katie sat at the kitchen table with her laptop while Alan brewed some fresh coffee and boiled four eggs for their breakfast.
He had shelled the eggs and was mashing them up with butter, salt, pepper and breadcrumbs when Katie’s iPhone rang. It was Detective Sergeant Begley.
‘What’s the craic, Sean?’
‘You’re not going to believe this, ma’am, but it’s Blarney all over ag
ain.’
‘Blarney? What do you mean?’
‘There’s a family of four’s been discovered murdered in a house on Military Road. The father, the mother, and two kids, a boy and a girl. Shot dead, by the look of it, all four of them, and nailed down underneath the floorboards.’
‘Holy Mother of God. How long do you think they’ve been there?’
‘Oh, these aren’t historic bodies, like. The technical experts have only just taken up the floor and they haven’t touched them yet. They’re all wrapped up in plastic sheeting. The woman who lives next door saw them yesterday afternoon at about three o’clock, so they must have been killed sometime after that.’
‘All right, Sean. I’ll be with you directly.’
‘The reason I said it’s Blarney all over again, ma’am, there’s a note with them.’
‘Do you have it there with you? Read it to me.’
‘It says, “This is to show you that we never forget our own. It was the IRA killed the Langtrys and these are the blood relations of those murderers. The score is settled now at long last. Quis separabit?”’
‘UDA,’ said Katie. ‘I can’t believe it, after all these years. That’s all it says?’
‘That’s all. And it’s been printed on a computer and there’s no signature or nothing.’
‘Quis separabit? That’s signature enough, isn’t it?’
Quis separabit? – Who Will Separate Us? – that was the motto of the Ulster Defence Association, the Protestant paramilitaries that had fought against the Provisional IRA during the Troubles. They were known to have killed at least 260 people, but they were supposed to have ceased their armed campaign in November 2007. It was common knowledge, though, that some of them still harboured grudges – not only against the Provisional IRA but against others in their own organization.
Alan was standing by the table with a mug of mashed-up eggs in each hand. ‘Don’t tell me – you have to go.’
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