Begging to Die

by Graham Masterton

  The three ducks eventually grew tired of being harassed, and they flopped one after another into the river and swam away. Bran reached the water’s edge, but stayed on the grass, stock-still, watching them. He had been named after one of the two brave hunting dogs of the mythological Irish hero Fionn mac Cumhaill, but he lacked the nerve to jump into the chilly grey water of the Lee to go after them.

  ‘You are the thickest dog ever,’ said Saoirse, bending over to clip his lead back on to his collar. ‘What do you think you were going to do with those ducks, even if you caught them?’

  She was concentrating so much on fastening his lead that she wasn’t aware of the tall, thin man in the loose grey tracksuit who was jogging in her direction. He crossed over the road on to the grass and as he did so he started to run faster, until he was almost sprinting. She looked up just as he collided with her, knocking her off balance and into the river. She was still holding Bran’s lead, and when she rolled over in the water, splashing and gasping, she yanked Bran into the water, too. Bran yelped and went under, but almost immediately came up again, paddling furiously to keep himself afloat.

  Saoirse tried to shout out for help, but when she opened her mouth she swallowed filthy cold water, and all she could do was splutter. She had never learned to swim, and even though she was thrashing her arms and legs wildly, she went under again.

  She kicked and struggled, and managed to break the surface, desperately gasping for air. She tried to reach the concrete bank, which was less than two metres away, but her duffel coat was sodden now, and weighing her down, and even though she tried to make swimming motions with her arms, she made no progress at all, and went under for a third time.

  The tall, thin man in the grey tracksuit had run off by now, turning the corner into the narrow entrance to Church Avenue, and disappearing.

  *

  Brianna had just tugged open the packet of cheese-and-onion Taytos that she had packed in her lunchbox when the call came that a woman had been pulled out of the river at Blackrock.

  ‘I think the Lord’s telling me to go on a diet,’ she said to Darragh, as she climbed into the ambulance next to him.

  ‘I think the Lord’s telling me to move to a city where there isn’t a river,’ said Darragh. ‘This is the fifth floater since St Stephen’s Day and it isn’t even February yet.’

  They sped around the Magic Roundabout and headed north on the South Link Road, with their blue lights flashing. Traffic was mercifully light, and they reached The Marina in less than ten minutes. There was a small crowd of five or six people gathered beside the river, and as Brianna climbed down from the ambulance she could see a young woman in a red duffel coat lying on her back on the grass, and a middle-aged man kneeling beside her.

  ‘Thank God,’ the man said, as Brianna knelt down beside him. ‘I’ve been giving her the kiss of life, like, and she’s coughed up about three pints of water. She’s breathing but she hasn’t opened her eyes yet.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Darragh. ‘Does anybody here know who she is?’

  ‘I’ve seen her before, walking her dog along here,’ said a woman. She was holding Bran in her arms, wrapped up in a tartan car blanket. ‘I think she lives in the village, right opposite The Leaping Salmon.’

  ‘My neighbour Michael was putting out the rubbish and he saw her waving,’ put in another woman. ‘He ran straight over and jumped in and pulled her out. He’s back inside now, getting himself dry. That’s the third time he’s gone in now to rescue somebody out of the river. They should give him a medal for it, do you know?’

  Saoirse’s lips were pale turquoise and her cheeks were reddened from the cold but she was still breathing. Brianna checked her pulse and then she and Darragh lifted her on to a stretcher and carried her into the ambulance. Once inside, they raised her up into a sitting position to drag off her soaking-wet duffel coat and her green Aran sweater, and Brianna wrapped a crackly foil survival blanket around her.

  Darragh folded up the steps and closed the doors. As he was walking around to the front of the ambulance, a Garda squad car came around the corner, followed closely by another. One of the gardaí came over to him, a big beefy fellow, hitching up his belt.

  ‘How is he?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s a she, and with a modicum of luck and God’s eternal mercy she’ll survive,’ said Darragh.

  ‘Trying to drown herself, was she?’

  ‘I have no idea. The dog was in the water, too, so maybe she went in after it. It’s unbelievable, the number of people who jump into the river to save their pets. The pets usually manage to get out by themselves while their owners go under.’

  ‘You’re not joking. Christmas Day we had some auld wan who went into the water by the Shaky Bridge, trying to rescue his sheltie bitch when it went for a swim. He went straight down to the bottom while the sheltie paddled over to the other side. It could swim better than Michelle Smith, that bitch, I’m telling you.’

  Darragh climbed up behind the wheel of the ambulance and started to drive off to the University Hospital. In the back, Brianna had fitted an oxygen mask over Saoirse’s nose and mouth and was keeping a watchful eye on her pulse. Her heart rate was fast and erratic and Brianna thought it was quite possible that after her immersion in the freezing cold river she might easily be at risk of a cardiac arrest. That was what it would look like, anyway, if her heart were suddenly to stop beating.

  Brianna thought for a moment, biting her lip. They had reached Victoria Road already so she knew she had only six or seven minutes at the most. But as they turned on to the South Link, she made up her mind. The girl lived in Blackrock, so it was likely that her parents would be reasonably well off, and could pay for a decent funeral.

  ‘How’s she coming along?’ Darragh shouted.

  ‘Not too good,’ Brianna called back. ‘Her pulse is ectopic and her temperature’s down to twenty-eight point three.’

  Quickly, she lifted off Saoirse’s oxygen mask. Then she picked up a folded white towel from the shelf beside her, folding it once more to make it thicker. She pressed it over Saoirse’s face and held it there, all the time watching the oximeter attached to Saoirse’s finger to check her pulse and her oxygen levels.

  Darragh was speeding along at almost 120, with the siren blaring. Usually they were held up by the traffic at the Magic Roundabout, but today the road was completely clear.

  ‘Come on,’ Brianna whispered to Saoirse, keeping the towel pressed down hard. ‘The Good Lord Jesus is expecting you, girl. Don’t keep him waiting.’

  Suddenly, however, Saoirse kicked her legs underneath the shiny foil blanket, and jerked her head violently left and right. She reached up with both hands and tore the towel away from her face, and when Brianna tried to press it down again, she seized her wrists and stared up at her, her eyes bulging and bloodshot, whining for breath.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she said, in a thin, piercing scream, almost like a whistle.

  Brianna said, ‘Drying your face, girl. You’ve just been fished out of the river, like, don’t you know that? You’re all soaking wet.’

  She tried to press the towel down once more, but Saoirse forced her wrists upwards. ‘Stop it! I can’t breathe when you do that! Stop it!’

  ‘Don’t talk such nonsense, girl. I’m a paramedic. I’ve only saved your life, like. Now let me dry you.’

  Brianna tried again to cover Saoirse’s face with the towel. She pressed down as hard as she could, but Saoirse kept her grip on her wrists and strained against her, gasping with effort. There was a moment when the two of them were deadlocked, Brianna looking down at Saoirse with grim determination, and Saoirse looking up at Brianna in bewilderment and fear. Their breathing sounded like two lovers, close to a mutual climax.

  They had reached the Sarsfield Roundabout now, and the hospital was only two or three minutes away. Brianna was beginning to panic now, and she grunted and leaned forward with all of her weight, no longer making any pretence that she was doing anythi
ng to Saoirse but trying to suffocate her.

  Saoirse made one last desperate attempt to push her away, but she was still in shock and the effort was too much for her. She let out a strangely wistful ‘ohhh’, and passed out. Her head fell back and her eyelids flickered and her hands dropped on to the blanket, and as the ambulance swerved around the roundabout, her body was jostled limply from side to side.

  Brianna folded up the towel again and kept it pressed down hard over Saoirse’s face. She held it there right up until the last few seconds when Darragh was backing them up to the hospital’s emergency entrance. The oximeter had dropped off Saoirse’s finger on to the floor while she and Brianna were struggling together, so Brianna couldn’t tell from that if her heart had stopped beating. As Darragh was opening up the doors, however, she felt Saoirse’s carotid artery with her fingertips and she detected no pulse.

  Thank you, Saint Agatha. The patron saint of nurses has blessed me once again. And this girl is blessed, too. In return for helping me to find prosperity here on Earth, she’ll surely find peace and joy and eternal happiness in Heaven.

  Two porters lifted the trolley out of the back of the ambulance and wheeled it in through the hospital doors. Brianna and Darragh followed them, until they met the duty doctor coming towards them, Dr Ryan O’Keefe, prodding at his mobile phone. He was a big, ebullient man, more like a rugby forward than a doctor, with curly blond hair and reddened cheeks, and a way of stamping along when he walked so that his white coat flapped.

  ‘One for the mortuary, I’m afraid, doctor,’ said Brianna.

  ‘Third fatality today,’ said Dr O’Keefe, still prodding at his phone. ‘We had two little kids run over by a bus on the Lower Glanmire Road, on their way to school. Only five and six years old. What’s the story with this one?’

  ‘She was pulled out of the river by Marina Park. She’d inhaled a fair amount of water, like, and she was hypothermic, but I’m not so sure if you can put her death down to drowning. I took her pulse and I reckon she could have experienced an autonomic conflict when she first fell in, do you know? Anyway, she suffered a fatal cardiac arrest on the way here from Blackrock.’

  Dr O’Keefe dropped his phone back in his overall pocket and watched Saoirse’s trolley being pushed away along the corridor. ‘Okay, I’ll take a look at her and pronounce life extinct. You could be right, though. More people die of heart seizures when they fall into the river than they do of actual drowning – especially now in the winter, when the water’s so cold. But of course there’s no way of telling post mortem.’

  Darragh looked at his watch. ‘We’ve time for a cup of tea, I’d say. I’m as dry as Gandhi’s flip-flop. Do you want to go up to the Coffee, doc?’

  ‘I’ll catch you later so,’ said Dr O’Keefe, and went stamping off along the corridor with an occasional skip, as if he were trying to catch up with some invisible friend who was walking faster than him.

  *

  ‘I’m thinking of going to Las Vegas for my holliers,’ said Darragh, as they sat in the hospital café.

  ‘Serious?’ Brianna didn’t look up. She was tapping away at her mobile phone, sending a text to Niall Dabney.

  ‘Yeah, serious. Somewhere hot, and dry and deserty, anyway, where people don’t keep on fecking drowning.’

  ‘Darragh,’ she said, ‘I think you’re forgetting that they have swimming pools in Las Vegas – hundreds of them. I’ll bet you that even more people drown there than they do here in Cork. Too many margaritas, and then a midnight skinny-dip, and glug. The only difference is that the water’s warm, so that when they find you floating around in the deep end in the morning, you’re already half-poached.’

  ‘You’ve a sick mind, you have, Brianna.’

  ‘I’m a realist, that’s all. There’s a headstone waiting for all of us. It doesn’t really make much difference how and when we go.’

  She sipped her tea and waited for Niall to text her back. Once the dead girl had been identified, she would call round at her parents’ house to offer her condolences and describe her last moments, which relatives always wanted to hear if they hadn’t been present when their loved ones passed away. Sometimes she would invent last words that they had spoken, such as ‘Tell my mother I love her’ or ‘I’m coming, Saint Peter! I’m coming!’ Then she would leave one of Niall’s cards and recommend him for his ‘sensitive, respectful, personal services… not like one of those big undertakers who churn out their funerals like the black pudding factory down at Clon’.

  Darragh finished his third shortcake finger and smacked his hands together. ‘Right…’ he said, with his mouth full. ‘We’d better make tracks.’

  They were buttoning up their jackets when Dr O’Keefe came in to the café.

  ‘I’m glad I caught up with you,’ he told them. ‘This’ll brighten up your day. That girl you fetched in – she’s going to recover.’

  Brianna stared at him. ‘What do you mean, she’s going to recover? She stopped breathing, and she had no pulse.’

  ‘Her pulse was weak all right, and her breathing was so shallow that it was almost undetectable. Almost like hypopnoea. But once we put her on oxygen and she began to warm up, her pulse rate improved and she started to breathe normally.’

  ‘Well, that is good news,’ said Darragh. ‘Lately I’ve been feeling that I’ve been driving a fecking hearse, like, more than an ambulance.’

  ‘Is she conscious?’ asked Brianna. Her iPhone pinged and she guessed that it was Niall, but she didn’t take it out of her pocket and look at it.

  ‘No, no, she’s not conscious yet,’ said Dr O’Keefe. ‘She might have suffered some brain impairment if she was under the water for any length of time, but until she recovers consciousness it’s too early to say for sure. As soon as I’m happy with her vital signs, I’ll be sending her across for an MRI.’

  ‘You truly think that she’s going to survive?’

  ‘Like I say, she could have sustained some brain damage because of oxygen deprivation. But I’m confident that physically she’s going to pull through all right.’

  Brianna suddenly felt as if she were going to faint. She saw tiny white sparks floating in front of her eyes and she had to pull out her chair again and sit down.

  ‘Are you all right there, girl?’ Darragh asked her, laying his hand on her shoulder.

  ‘I’m grand, thanks. It’s just – well, it’s come as a fierce shock, like, finding out that she hasn’t passed away. I was so sure that I’d lost her.’

  ‘Not at all, Brianna,’ smiled Dr O’Keefe. ‘It seems like you saved her life. I’m sure that when she’s recovered enough, Brianna, she’ll be wanting to thank you.’

  Brianna nodded, but said nothing. Her heart was beating hard and she was finding it difficult to breathe, almost as if she, too, had a folded towel pressed against her face.

  20

  Katie was finishing off her report on Deepwater Quay when Detective Inspector Jimmy Joyce rang her from Dublin.

  ‘How are you going on there, Kathleen? Listen – I’ve managed to have a word with my old friend Alexandru Salavastru. He’s the Comisar-șef of the general directorate for criminal investigation in Bucharest.’

  ‘Does he know this Lupul fellow?’

  ‘Oh, yes. His name is actually Dragomir Iliescu. It seems like he’s a long history of convictions, going way back to when he was a teenager… most of them for begging with menaces. He tried to set up a begging ring in Bucharest but he got chased out by a fellow called Bruce Lee.’

  ‘Bruce Lee? Serious?’

  ‘That’s right. He’s the king of the beggars in the capital there and that’s his nickname. That’s why Lupul upped sticks and went to Târgoviște. Alexandru wasn’t aware that he was here in Ireland, but he said that it didn’t totally surprise him. Things were getting a bit too hot for him in Romania, both from the cops and from rival gangs, too.’

  ‘Did you tell your friend he’s a possible murder suspect?’

  ‘I did of cours
e. And he said that didn’t surprise him, either. The gang wars among the homeless are a serious problem in Romania. As you know, there’s hundreds of them living in tunnels underground in Bucharest, and I mean like hundreds of them.’

  ‘And what do the police do when they find one of them dead?’

  ‘Unless there’s obvious signs of serious assault, they don’t bother to carry out a post mortem. Most of the homeless can’t be identified or traced so they simply send them off for burial as quickly as they can. As you can imagine, their mortality rate is shocking. Every single one of those homeless men and women under the streets is suffering from HIV, and most of them have TB, too. Ninety-nine per cent of them are drug addicts of one kind or another. The ones who can’t afford heroin or crack are addicted to Aurolac, which is a metal-based paint. They empty it into black plastic bags and sniff.’

  ‘So if somebody had drilled into their brainstem with a cordless drill, it’s unlikely that the police would notice?’

  ‘Alexandru had to admit that they probably wouldn’t. He’s not saying that the Poliţia Română are anything but scrupulous, but the sheer scale of the homeless problem in Romania makes ours seem like nothing at all by comparison. If you had to be lifting ten or twenty dead bodies every day out of the sewers in Cork, I don’t suppose you’d be checking for doonchie little drill holes in the backs of their heads, either.’

  ‘Thanks a million, Jimmy,’ said Katie. ‘You’ve been pure helpful. I needed to know if this Lupul believed that he could get away with killing rough sleepers without us realizing what their cause of death was. If it is him that’s been doing it, like – but now I’m almost a hundred per cent sure that it is.’

  ‘Are you any closer to finding your man?’

  ‘Not yet. But I have a whole team out looking for him. We’ll get him in the end.’