Peter had a sudden headache, like a vice was tightening around his forehead and the back of his skull. He couldn’t be part of this. He wasn’t going to be responsible for another man’s death, whatever he might have done. He was a garda, not judge, jury and executioner in one lethal package.
Peter went out into the snow, opened the back door of the squad car, then went back in and lifted Cummins. He carried him outside, staggering under the weight, and laid him down in the back seat. He did what he could to put the body in the recovery position and fastened a seatbelt around him as best he could. Then he set off. Doctor Barrett lived on the outskirts of the village. He was Cummins’s best chance. There was no way an ambulance would be able to make it out in this weather.
The car slipped and slid its way down the drive. Peter cursed and tried to turn into the skid, maintained control of the car but only just. How had Jim managed to get it here? Visibility was still brutal. He drove on grimly, trying not to think about the body in the back seat and what it might mean. There were no other cars on the road, though he passed one abandoned in the ditch. Still, Peter turned on his flashing lights, just in case. He slowed the car to a crawl. If he came off the road it would be so much worse. Who could he call for help? How could he keep Cummins warm and alive here until the morning?
Peter kept driving, resisting the urge to look behind him and check on Cummins. And he made it to the house. Barrett’s house was a handsome two-storey with a cut-stone facade and a gravel drive. The driveway was buried under snow, but at least there was no hill to tackle. His headlights illuminated the doctor’s Nissan Patrol on the drive, a heavy coating of snow on the roof and bonnet. Peter parked the car, turned off the engine with a sense of profound relief and ran for the front door. He rang the doorbell once, twice, then a third time. It occurred to him that he didn’t know if Barrett was married or had children. He could be waking an entire household. The least of his worries right now. Barrett was slow coming, and Peter hammered on the door with his fist.
‘Doctor Barrett? It’s Peter Fisher. I need you to open the door.’
Through the glass panel to the side of the door Peter saw a shadow approaching from inside the house. Barrett opened the door and for a moment, just a fraction of a second, Peter saw a look of fear in Barrett’s eyes.
‘What’s the problem, Peter?’ Barrett said. ‘Is it Maggie?’
‘I need your help, doctor,’ Peter said. And he didn’t miss the fact that relief replaced the fear in Barrett’s expression. ‘I have a body . . . a person . . . he’s unconscious. He’s been beaten up.’
Barrett helped Peter carry Cummins into the house. They brought him into a downstairs bedroom where they put him on the bed. Barrett examined him, talking all the time.
‘The risk is skull fracture or hematoma. He needs a CT scan, but we’re not going to be able to get him to hospital tonight.’ He took a little torch out of his medical bag, lifted each of Cummins’s eyelids in turn, checked for pupil reaction. ‘How did this happen?’ Barrett asked, turning to Peter.
Peter opened his mouth to answer and couldn’t find the words. What could he say? What did he want to say?
Understanding crept into Barrett’s eyes and he turned back to the patient. ‘This is Séan Cummins, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Peter said.
Barrett sat back. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s no way to know without a CT scan, but my best guess is that he’ll come out of this. His eyes are reactive and I don’t see any leakage of brain fluid. It’s concerning that he’s still unconscious.’ He paused. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘I want you to . . . look after him,’ Peter said.
Barrett shrugged. ‘I can do that. I can keep him here overnight. Observe him. Tomorrow, depending on how he’s doing, I can call the helicopter out for him. If that’s what you want. If you’re sure.’
Peter felt like he was sinking into tar.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘What are the alternatives?’
Barrett spoke very slowly and deliberately. ‘Well. I can be discreet,’ he said. ‘You know. For a complicated situation like this. If that’s what you want.’
‘I want . . . I just want you to take care of him, all right?’
‘Of course,’ Barrett said.
Peter moved towards the door. ‘I’ll call in the morning. See how he’s doing.’
Barrett looked at his watch. ‘Morning is only a few hours away now,’ he said. ‘You’re welcome to stay if you want. There’s coffee.’
‘No, thank you,’ Peter said. ‘I’ll go. I’ll speak to you in the morning.’
He left, made for the squad car, and slowly made his way to the flat, a white-knuckle drive that had him swearing that it was the very last time he would drive in this weather. He made it inside, freezing, hungry and freaked out. He stripped off his outer jacket, fell onto the couch and slept.
Sunday 8 November 2015
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Cormac woke early on Sunday morning. He hadn’t slept particularly well, but then he never slept well the night before a big operation. He thought about calling Emma and decided against it. He wanted the whole thing behind him before he spoke to her again. He took a slow shower instead, thinking about the plan for the day ahead, hoping that Matt would be able to come through. He dressed and called Matt before he left the hotel room.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘We’re a go.’
‘Excellent.’ Cormac felt a welcome rush of adrenaline. Finally, things were moving in the right direction.
‘We’re very low on bodies,’ Matt said. ‘I’m going to be there as an observer only. Same goes for you, given you’re on suspension. But it’s a skeleton crew, so be prepared to jump in if it looks like you’re needed. That’s the unofficial word from Murray and Kennedy.’
‘If it goes down the way we want it to, we can tidy up the formalities in the wash afterwards anyway,’ Cormac said. Damnit. He wanted to be running this operation. To have the logistics and the team and the timing of the thing in his hands.
‘Exactly,’ Matt said. ‘Are you armed?’
‘No. I handed my gun in.’
‘Maybe it’s just as well,’ Matt said. He explained the details, the location and the timing. ‘I’ll see you there,’ he said, and he hung up.
Cormac dressed quickly, made his way downstairs, and went to the front desk to check out. He wasn’t the first there, was obliged to queue for a few minutes for his turn. When he reached the desk, the woman seated behind it gave him a professional smile.
‘No breakfast this morning, sir?’
‘Not today,’ he said. ‘I need to get back.’
She nodded, her eyes on her computer screen as she went through the motions. She took his card, swiped it and they waited.
‘Heading back to Galway this morning?’ she asked.
He nodded. She would have read his address on his check-in details. She handed him back his card and receipt.
‘Some of the roads are closed this morning. The weather, you know.’
‘Thanks.’ Cormac turned to leave.
‘I heard on the radio this morning that they’ve run out of grit,’ he heard the woman behind him in the queue say as he walked away. ‘And there’s more snow coming tonight. The whole country is going to come to an absolute standstill.’
By the time Cormac had retrieved his car from the underground garage and was navigating his way through Dublin traffic, he’d listened to five minutes of radio coverage and he was having second thoughts. The streets in Dublin were clear of snow and ice, but if the radio presenters weren’t exaggerating, the midlands and the entire west coast were close to shutting down, and likely to stay that way for the best part of a week. Shite. He needed to get to Tullamore. Cormac did a U-turn and pointed the car in the direction of Dublin airport. He phoned every car rental place he could think of on the way. There were plenty of cars available – the weather had resulted in lots of cancellations
apparently – but most of them were not much more suitable for snow and ice than his own ancient but beloved BMW 3 Series, with its rear-wheel drive and fat tyres. He was getting close to the bottom of the list when he got lucky.
‘We’ve got one Range Rover. Just got a cancellation for it. Expensive, but I’d grab it quickly if you want it.’
Cormac did want it. The rental cost for three days was enough to make him wince, but so be it. He pulled in to the side of the road for long enough to give the guy his credit card number, then drove on to the airport. He would leave his own car in long-term parking. If he was going to fly out to see Emma again next weekend, he could pick it up then.
Cormac got back on the road. With the detour to the airport and the car-rental paperwork, he had lost time, but he had hours yet until the raid kicked off. He pulled in to a roadside café, grabbed a table at the back and ordered some breakfast. He called Emma again, but it rang out. He left a message asking her to call him back. They really needed to talk. Ten minutes later, as he was starting on an omelette, his phone rang. It was Deirdre Russell.
‘We got it,’ she said.
‘Got what?’
‘The phone calls, all the phone calls. The information came back on the Loughnane warrant, but we got all this extra stuff with it. Whoever ran our warrant at the phone company, they must really like to use their initiative.’ Deirdre was excited, half laughing. ‘There was nothing useful on Loughnane’s phone. If it wasn’t for this additional data, the warrant would have been a dead end.’
‘And it isn’t?’
‘No. They ran a data filter. I didn’t even know it could be done. I had to get one of the tech guys to explain it to me. Basically, they map the location of the phone you’re interested in, and then they run some sort of filter through the system to try to identify any other phones that were consistently in the same locations at the same times. That way they can find out if someone was using a second phone. Did you know they could do that?’
‘I’d heard something about it,’ Cormac said.
‘Well anyway, they turned up a second phone. Loughnane must have had a burner. And now they’ve sent through all the calls and messages to and from that phone. But get this – it was used to call and message only one other number. We don’t know who owns that one yet, but I’d bet you anything that the mystery phone will turn out to be Kelly’s. On the day of the abduction Peter spoke to Loughnane at around two o’clock. At ten minutes past two there’s a call from Loughnane’s burner to the mystery number. That must have been the call to Kelly to tip him off that we were looking for him.’
‘That’s fantastic news, Deirdre. Great work.’
‘How lucky can we get, right? What are the chances? I didn’t request this data filter and you should have seen Moira’s face when it came through. She looked like she was chewing glass. But what could she do? She couldn’t exactly complain about it.’
‘No,’ Cormac said. He thought about Orna and smiled to himself.
Deirdre’s voice lost some of its ebullience. ‘She still doesn’t seem to be running with it, though. She says she’s going to talk to Murphy about it on Monday, before she takes it any further.’
‘Don’t worry about it, Deirdre. Hang in there. A few more days, all right?’
If everything went well he’d soon be in a position to run the case himself, and with this to work with he’d have Loughnane in a jail cell and Peter Fisher’s reputation restored by the end of the week.
Cormac gave himself two hours to drive what would usually be a sixty-minute trip to Tullamore, and he needed every minute of it. All he felt after the first twenty minutes was relief that he’d rented the Range Rover. The weather was terrible. It wasn’t like they hadn’t had the cold and the snow to deal with in Dublin, but at least the roads were well gritted, and the snowploughs were out every day. The motorway would have been gritted in the morning but the snow was still coming down and traffic had slowed to a crawl. Once he turned off the M6 and took the N52 towards Tullamore he found no traffic, but for good reason. The snow was six inches deep, and there were drifts piled up against the hedgerows.
He kept going. He told himself he still had time – he was due to meet Matt and the Internal Affairs team at the rendezvous point in fifteen minutes. But as Cormac slowed to a stop, trying to figure out which of the un-signposted country roads would get him to his destination, he got a text message from Matt. It’s kicking off. They’re going in. Get here if you can.
Shit. Cormac oriented himself, hit the accelerator and went into a skid. He recovered, took a couple more turns, drove a few minutes more and found the road that led to the incinerator. He took the turn. There were no houses here, just farmland, and a narrowing lane. There had been no gritting or snow clearance here, and the lane must have had a good eight inches of snow covering. There were tyre tracks – multiple vehicles had passed this way. Cormac turned the corner, and had to hit his brakes. The way ahead was blocked by two police cars, parked end to end and blocking a gated entry into a small industrial premises. There was nowhere to discreetly park this monster car, no way to approach other than in the open. Cormac thought about just staying in the car – he didn’t even have a garda vest he could pull on to keep himself from being shot by a jumpy member of Matt’s crew – but in the end couldn’t do it. He got out of the car.
It was eerily quiet. The police cars were empty, and there was no one to be seen in either direction. Cormac turned, looked for vantage points where someone could be watching. There was dense forest on the other side of the road but if someone was positioned in there Cormac couldn’t see them. He must be too late, Matt’s crew must be inside the incinerator complex.
Cormac reached the gate, noted the hazardous chemical warning signs either side of it, and kept going. Something about the scene wasn’t right. There were too many cars, too many police vehicles. There was a white unmarked van parked right by the facility – probably used to transport the drugs. Two unmarked cars were parked to the right of the van and four more took up every inch of the small car park beyond that, parked haphazardly as if the crew had driven in at speed, dumped them and run for the building. Six cars here, four at the gate, the van. As many as forty-two officers then, if every vehicle came in fully loaded. Too many. Way too many. Even at two officers per vehicle it still came out at twenty-two. Matt had made it clear that they would operate a skeleton crew only, a handful of hand-picked officers who could be trusted. Cormac found himself reaching for a gun that wasn’t there. He was about fifteen metres from the door of the building when it opened.
Matt came out first, his face grim. He saw Cormac almost immediately, locked eyes with him, shook his head. Other officers came out in Matt’s wake, first plainclothes like him, then uniforms. Matt came to Cormac, walking fast. He put an arm over his shoulder, turned him and guided him away from the building at speed, talking urgently all the while.
‘You need to go. Fast. Christ, Cormac, it’s bad enough but you don’t want him to see you here too.’
‘What is it? Matt, what’s going on?’
Matt kept up his forced march, and Cormac stayed with him. A glance over his shoulder saw a press of bodies still spilling out of the building. Lots of uniforms, no one he recognised. Three plainclothes officers were in step with Matt and Cormac, a few paces behind. The disappointment on their faces matched Matt’s. Cormac stopped abruptly, Matt tried to drag him onwards. Cormac held his ground.
‘Matt, what the fuck is going on? Did we get it wrong? Were the drugs here?’
Matt took a step back towards Cormac, lowered his voice to a hiss. ‘We didn’t get it wrong. We were just too bloody late.’
They heard a scuffle and muffled cursing behind them and both men turned in time to see Anthony Healy being led from the building in handcuffs. Healy was bleeding from a cut to his mouth. He was pale faced and wild eyed, like a panicked animal. He made a clumsy, flailing break for freedom as the uniforms moved him towards the squad car, but that
was dealt with swiftly. He was lifted and stuffed unceremoniously into the back seat, the door closed on him.
Cormac looked at Matt, waiting for the explanation, but Matt’s eyes hadn’t left the scene behind them. The last man left the building. It was Brian Murphy, impeccably dressed in a navy suit, stripping off a garda vest and handing it to a subordinate. He was talking to a chastened-looking Rebecca Murray and Aidan Kennedy and looked very much the man in charge.
‘We got here early,’ Matt said. ‘Set up back in the trees, with two guys on the radio ready to come in with the cars at the right time. Healy and Trevor Murphy arrived with the drugs, started unloading them. We were watching, recording. We would have gone in within another minute, but before we could, he got here.’ Matt nodded towards Brian Murphy. ‘He had a full team with him, even forensics to do the drug testing right here on the spot.’ Matt’s gaze switched to a woman in a white suit carrying a test kit to a marked car.
‘What are you telling me, Matt?’ But witnessing Brian Murphy marshal his troops with cool confidence, Cormac had the horrible feeling that he already knew.
‘Brian Murphy took Healy down before we could. They ripped half the packs open right there in the building. The test kits weren’t even needed. The arrogance of the fuckers. They’d stuffed the drug packs with newspaper, hadn’t even bothered to get a bit of flour for the weight of it.’
‘Where’s Trevor?’ Cormac asked.
Matt was shaking his head. ‘He’s still inside, getting his pats on the back. They’re claiming he was working undercover the whole time. Jesus, who knows? Maybe he was. Or maybe Brian Murphy realised that you were getting close and stepped in before you could get there. Either way, we are never going to know because after this he will be fucking untouchable.’
Brian Murphy had seen Cormac. He walked towards him with deliberation.
‘Detective Reilly,’ Murphy said.
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