‘If Mathew gets in to the station before I do, tell him that he can confirm to the media that an unidentified male has been found deceased on Cook Street. He can of course say that we’re investigating, and that we’d appreciate hearing from anybody who might have witnessed anything unusual around that area last night. But that’s all. He mustn’t say that your man was homeless, or sleeping rough, do you know what I mean? If they ask him if there might be any connection between his death and Gearoid’s, he should simply tell them that it’s far too early to be speculating.’
‘All right, ma’am. I have you. I’ll see you later so. Nothing serious at the hospital is it, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘What? No – I hope not, Sean. I sincerely hope not.’
*
Conor was sitting up in bed when she came into his room, attached to an intravenous drip. On the tray in front of him there was a plate of toast and raspberry jam and a cup of tea, and he was watching Ireland AM. His left eye was completely closed now and he still had a large plaster across his nose, but at least he was more recognizable than yesterday.
‘Katie!’ he said, picking up the TV remote and switching it off. ‘Now here’s a sight for sore eyes!’
Katie came up to his bedside and kissed him. ‘I brought you these. I think under the circumstances you’re allowed to break your diet.’
She handed him a cellophane packet of Wilde’s chocolate fudge slices, as well as a folded copy of this morning’s Examiner. Then she took off her bobbly dark green overcoat and hung it over the back of the chair, sitting down close to him.
‘My God, Katie,’ he said, holding up the packet of fudge. ‘You know my deepest darkest weaknesses already, and we haven’t even exchanged rings yet.’
‘So how are you feeling?’ she asked him. She was trying to smile and sound bright, but her throat felt tight and she was finding it more difficult than she had expected. ‘Has the consultant been in to see you?’
‘Not yet. I’ve had all my vital signs taken, and apparently I’m still alive. But I don’t know for sure if they’ve been able to repair all of the damage. I’m not too worried. One ball can do the work of two. You can walk with only one leg, can’t you, and you can still drive even if you have only the one eye.’
‘Do you have any pain?’
‘Kind of a dull throbbing ache down there, but they’ve got me on the oxycodone, so it’s tolerable. I can tell you, though, I won’t be riding a bicycle for a while. Not over cobbles, anyway.’
‘Oh, Con.’
‘You’ll not be taking out a summons against the fellow who did it, will you? I’d say I’ve been given punishment enough for being a reckless obsessive eejit without being locked up in jail for eighteen months.’
Katie shrugged, and tried to smile, but said nothing. Because Conor had broken the conditions of his bail by trespassing on the McQuaides’ property, she hadn’t yet made up her mind if she should charge their minder for beating him up so badly.
Conor paused, and sipped his tea, and then he said, ‘To tell you the truth, I’ve had the McQuaide sisters on my mind ever since I woke up this morning – how we can close them down.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘I reckon we’ll have to do an Al Capone on them… you know, get them for tax evasion or fraud or some other offence apart from puppy farming. Only two or three TDs have any serious interest in putting a stop to illegal dog-breeding. That’s because there’s scarce any public support for it and, more to the point, there’s no votes in it, either. Apart from that, the ISPCA don’t have enough funding to prosecute the McQuaides privately.’
‘Con – you need to forget about the McQuaide sisters for a while. Concentrate on getting yourself better. When you’re fully fit, we can talk about this some more.’
‘That’s all very well, sweetheart. But every minute that goes by, all over the country, hundreds of breeding bitches are suffering, all shut up in boxes without even seeing the daylight, and thousands of puppies are weak and sick and deformed and pining for their mothers, just so that monsters like the McQuaide sisters can have their fancy houses and their Mercedes and their holidays in the Maldives.’
‘Con—’ Katie began, but at that moment there was a tap at the door and Mr Sandhu appeared. He was accompanied by a nervous-looking junior doctor with fiery red hair and glasses, who looked the spit of Ed Sheeran.
‘Good morning, Detective Superintendent,’ smiled Mr Sandhu. ‘The nurse told me that you had arrived. I hope you managed to get some rest overnight. Good morning, Conor. How are you feeling this morning?’
‘Sore, and still battered about, but better, thank you.’
‘We have sorted you out down below, although it will take a little while before the sutures can be removed and the swelling will subside. Next, of course, we need to address your nose and your cheekbone and your eye socket, and I am hoping that we will be able to do that tomorrow or the day after at the latest. Mr O’Connell will be dealing with that surgery, and he will be coming to see you later today. He is our leading maxillofacial consultant.’
‘Well, I can’t wait to have my face fixed. I’ve been eating my breakfast here and I don’t know what’s been crunching louder, the toast or these smashed-up bones in my nose.’
‘I am sure Mr O’Connell will fix you up perfectly,’ Mr Sandhu reassured him. But then he looked across at Katie and said, ‘However, I think it is necessary now to make you aware of the full extent of the surgery that I have performed on you, and what its consequences might be.’
‘“Consequences”?’ said Conor, and he looked at Katie, too. ‘That sounds like what the judge said to me when he was passing sentence for burning down Guzz Eye’s mobile home.’
‘I will explain what it was necessary for me to do in surgical terms, because of the seriousness of your injuries,’ said Mr Sandhu. ‘Then I will let your good lady explain to you what the long-term effects will be, and leave you to discuss between yourselves how you are going to manage them.’
‘I’m not sure I like the sound of this,’ said Conor. He had been about to take another sip of tea, but now he carefully placed his cup back on its saucer.
‘The blood supply to both of your testes had been cut off for so long that they had suffered infarction, or necrosis. Tissue death, to put it simply.’
‘Both of them?’
‘I’m afraid so. Added to which the left testicle was severely ruptured, beyond any meaningful repair. I had no alternative but to carry out a radical inguinal orchiectomy.’
‘You had to remove both of my testicles?’
‘Yes, in essence.’
‘So I’m a eunuch?’
‘That is not a word we use in urological practice, Conor.’
‘It doesn’t matter what word you use, doctor. It’s still what I am. A eunuch. A castrato. The next thing I know they’ll be asking me to sing soprano in St Francis church choir.’
Mr Sandhu shook his head. ‘No, no, no. Contrary to popular myth, a fully grown man who loses his testes does not start speaking in a high voice. This happens only when a boy is castrated before puberty, before his vocal folds have lengthened and thickened and his voice has broken.’
Although he was listening to Mr Sandhu, Conor kept his eyes fixed on Katie. He looked so devastated that she could have burst into tears, but she didn’t want to distress him any more than he was distressed already, and she didn’t want to make him feel that they had no hope of an intimate relationship together. He wouldn’t be able to give her a child, but maybe he would still be able to make love to her.
‘What about – you know – what about virility?’ he asked.
‘It’s early days yet, Conor, and I am sure you understand that the effect of your surgery could be psychological as well as physical. But I know you have a supportive and understanding partner in Detective Superintendent Maguire, and there is plenty of help available to you, both in terms of counselling and also medication.’
‘Like, Viagra?�
��
‘That is one treatment, yes. There is also Cialis and Levitra, and they are doing experiments with stem-cell injections, too. But hopefully these will not prove to be necessary.’
There was a long silence in the room. Eventually, Mr Sandhu said, ‘Do you have any other questions at this time? Perhaps I should leave you two together to discuss your next steps.’
Conor said, ‘Yes. Thank you.’
Mr Sandhu hesitated for a few seconds, nodded to Katie, and then he and the junior doctor left the room, closing the door behind them.
Katie reached out and held Conor’s hand, and squeezed it. ‘You’ll get through this, Con, with God’s help.’
‘I’ll get through it, darling, with or without the Lord Almighty. But how about us?’
‘I’m not going to abandon you. I love you.’
‘You loved me as I was before I was a eunuch. But what about now?’
‘Don’t use that word. This has all been such a fierce shock. You have to give yourself time to recover. Mentally, like Mr Sandhu said, as well as physically.’
Conor tried to pull his hand away, but Katie held on to it tightly, and wouldn’t let him.
‘What do they say about men who don’t behave like men?’ said Conor. ‘You know, cowards and wimps and suchlike? “You don’t have the balls, boy”, that’s what they say. And now that’s me.’
‘Con—’
‘You’re the strongest, most passionate woman I’ve ever come across, ever. I knew I could never match you for determination, or confidence, or bravery. No – let me finish. I could never be your equal in those ways, ever. But I thought that I could make you feel loved, and looked after, and satisfied. I thought that I could give you a glow.’
He tried again to tug his hand away, but again Katie clung on to him, even though tears were streaming down her face, and she felt as if she had been punched so hard that she was breathless.
‘I can’t do that for you any more, Katie. I can’t give you anything that a man should be able to give you. The glow’s gone out for ever.’
14
When Brianna walked in, she found Niall Dabney bent forward at his desk, half-hidden behind a huge spray of plastic orchids, hounding down a sausage-and-egg McMuffin.
‘Mmmph,’ he said, with his mouth full. ‘Bit of a late breakfast.’
Brianna said nothing, but crossed over to his desk and sat down in one of the two worn-out purple-upholstered armchairs facing him. Niall took one more bite and then pushed the paper-wrapped McMuffin to one side. The whole reception room smelled of sausage and damp and dust.
‘Result,’ he said, smacking his hands together. ‘With your upside-down car fellow, anyway. It turns out that he was his parents’ bar of gold, and they want to give him a grand send-off, with the horse-drawn hearse and all the trimmings. Seven-and-a-half thousand, plus VAT.’
‘What about that Looney girl?’
‘Oh, that one who died of an overdose? Her father rang me, like, and asked me if I could organize a funeral in Skibbereen, where most of her family are from, but he couldn’t afford more than four and I couldn’t have done it for the money, do you know? Not a hope.’
‘Well, that’s a disappointment.’
‘Don’t be too disappointed, Bree. The upside-down car fellow’s parents have paid in full in advance and I have your cut for you.’
Niall leaned sideways and opened his bottom desk drawer. He produced a manila envelope and passed it over. Brianna opened it, licked her thumb, and counted out the notes inside.
‘This is only five hundred.’
‘I have my overheads, Bree. I can only give you ten per cent of the net, like.’
‘That’s not what we agreed.’
‘That’s all I can afford, for the love of God. Look at the state of this place, do you know? It hasn’t been redecorated since the millennium.’
Brianna didn’t have to look around the reception room to know how tatty it had become. Even though Dabney’s Funeral Home was only a small premises on Marlboro Street sandwiched in between Flynn’s Donuts and Bootz Shoe Shop, it had once been quietly opulent inside, with purple velvet curtains and a thick-pile purple carpet. Now, though, the curtains were faded and the carpet was moth-eaten. The marble memorial plaques in the window display were laced with cobwebs and the gilt lettering on the glass had peeled so that it read, abney’s Fun ral Hom .
Niall Dabney himself had been equally worn down by time and shortage of money. He was a short man, with a large head, but in early middle age he had been reasonably handsome, always immaculately dressed in black, with bouffant grey hair and a rich, solicitous voice. Niall Dabney’s had been the place to go if you wanted to give your loved one an unusual and distinctive funeral, with a choir maybe, or a guard of honour, or girls in long white dresses showering the casket with white rose petals as it was carried out of the church.
But then Niall’s wife, Aileen, had died of breast cancer, only forty-three years old. Although Niall was so experienced in dealing with the grief of others, he had found himself unable to cope with his own grief, except by drinking. A lavish funeral that he had arranged for the former TD for Cork South-East had turned into a shambles. The hearse had broken down on the Magic Roundabout so that it had to be towed into St Finbarr’s chapel by John O’Leary’s recovery truck, following which the coffin had been dropped halfway up the aisle and Niall had ended up screaming in a drunken rage at the priest and the TD’s widow.
From then on, Niall could only attract enough business to stay solvent by offering cut-rate funerals to Cork’s less affluent families. Years of alcohol and anxiety had taken their toll on him, and he looked ten years older than he really was, with thinning hair and a stained grey suit and hands that trembled uncontrollably. Even the areca palm in the corner of his reception room was shrivelled and brown, and had long ago lost its ability to purify the air.
‘I could have another for you,’ said Brianna. ‘A young woman seven months’ pregnant and the baby, too, which is kind of a bonus. The husband’s not wealthy, but the young woman’s parents live in Douglas and they’re comfortably off, I’d say. I’ve been around to see them to offer condolences, as usual, and of course I recommended you for the funeral arrangements.’
‘Good girl. Grand. A mother and baby funeral? I charged ten thousand for the last one of those I arranged, and that was ten years ago – at least ten years ago. I organized it so that we had three baby lambs around the grave when the little one was buried. There wasn’t a dry eye in the cemetery.’
Brianna said, ‘You can have baby alligators around the grave if you want to, Niall. This time I want my full ten per cent and no messing.’
Niall didn’t answer but picked up his McMuffin and then put it down again.
‘Do you know what I hate about this world?’ he said.
‘Let me guess. The commercial rates you have to pay on this dump of a funeral home. No? The price of Jameson’s whiskey. No? Not that either?’
‘No, Bree. What I hate about this world is that there are so many dead people in it. I hate death. I detest it. And yet every single one of us has to face it in the end.’
‘I can’t imagine why you hate it so much, Niall. You make your living out of it, after all.’
*
At the same time that Brianna was talking to Niall, Ailbe and her baby were being wheeled into the mortuary at CUH. The porter was accompanied by Mr Stephen O’Malley, the consultant obstetrician.
‘How’s it going, Mary?’ he asked. He was tall and stooped and bespectacled, with bushy eyebrows, and a permanent frown on his face as if he were always trying to remember something important, but never could.
Usually, when she was carrying out a post mortem, Dr Kelley liked to listen to classical music, but this morning the mortuary was silent except for the sprinkling of rain against the clerestory windows and the fitful buzzing of a fluorescent light that was nearing the end of its life.
‘Overworked, as usual,’ she sai
d, putting down her pen. ‘They will insist on having fatal accidents, these Corkonians. You could almost believe they do it on purpose.’
She had just finished her examination of an eighty-three-year-old cyclist who had wavered into the path of a petrol tanker as he was leaving The Three Horseshoes pub on the Old Youghal Road. She had found that his blood alcohol level was 102 mg per 100 ml, over twice the legal limit for drivers. His skull had been completely crushed under the lorry’s nearside front wheel so that his face was as flat as a pie dish, with his ears sticking out for handles.
Mr O’Malley took off his glasses, breathed on them, and polished them on his tie.
‘As you’ll see for yourself, Mary, I carried out a c-section. There was no detectable foetal pulse so I was fairly sure that we were going to be too late, and sadly we were, but it was worth a shot. The mother fell downstairs, apparently, and broke her neck.’
Dr Kelley lifted the sheet that was covering Ailbe and looked down at her for a long time. Her baby was lying on his side next to her, mother and baby boy who would never know each other.
‘Good-looking young woman,’ Dr Kelley said at last. ‘She wouldn’t have guessed for a moment when she woke up yesterday morning that she and her wain were going to end up here.’
Mr O’Malley nodded, abstractedly. ‘What did somebody once say? “The world in its violence and its serenity will roll on through the endless indifference of space, and it will take only one hundred of its circuits around the Sun to turn us, who loved each other, into dust.”’
‘Well, thank you for that, Stephen. I’ve just carried out a post mortem on an auld fellow with a squashed head, and I was sorely in need of cheering up.’
‘Oh, you’re welcome.’
Mr O’Malley waited for a while, as if he had something more to say, but then he simply cleared his throat, turned around and walked off. Once the door had swung shut behind him, Dr Kelley called for Denis, her anatomical pathology technician. Denis came out from the back room where he had been writing up the notes for the elderly cyclist. He was a serious young man, Denis, whippet-thin, so that his lab coat always seemed to be on the point of slipping off his shoulders. He had a pointed nose and a prominent Adam’s apple and hair that was brushed up vertically so that it looked as if he had stuck his fingers into an electric socket.
Begging to Die Page 11