‘Katie! Great to see you! What’s the story? Haven’t seen you in donkeys’!’
‘How’s it going, Ry? Oh… I’m after visiting my fiancé. He’s been badly injured so he’s going to be in here for a while.’
‘Sorry to hear that. What happened?’
‘To cut a long story short, he got into a fight with another fellow but he came second. His nose and his cheekbone are broken, among other things.’
‘That’s desperate. But he couldn’t be anywhere better than here. You’re getting married again? You didn’t tell me that.’
‘I haven’t seen you since he proposed, that’s why. We need to have that lunch at Greenes you kept threatening to treat me to.’
‘I’m still saving up, Katie. I’m only a poor underpaid medical professional. But I’m glad you’re here. I was going to ring you anyway. We’ve had a young girl fetched in who was rescued from the river at Blackrock.’
‘I heard about that, yes. How is she?’
‘She’s been in and out of consciousness, do you know? But the reason I was going to ring you was that the last time she came to, the nurse who was with her said that she was mumbling about some fellow having knocked her into the water on purpose.’
‘Oh, Jesus. Not the Lee Pusher again.’
‘Well, of course there’s no way of telling for sure. She’s still semi-comatose. I’m fairly hopeful that she’s suffered no brain damage but we’ll be giving her an MRI in the morning just to make certain.’
‘Okay, grand. Let me know when she’s fully conscious again and I’ll send somebody over to have a chat with her. Do we know who she is?’
‘Saoirse Duffy her name is. Nineteen years old. One of her neighbours knew where she lived, so they were able to notify her parents. Her ma and her da have been here sitting at her bedside for most of the afternoon, but they’ve gone off now for a bite to eat. Do you want to see her? She’s only just along here.’
‘Go on, then. But let’s be quick. I was hoping to catch Dr Kelley before she finished for the day.’
They walked along the corridor together, with Dr O’Keefe occasionally breaking his stride with a little skip so that Katie could keep up with him. Although he was so large, Katie felt as if she were walking beside one of her little nephews. They reached a door at the end of the corridor and Dr O’Keefe opened it up.
Saoirse was lying with her eyes closed. She had an oxygen mask over her face and she was attached to an intravenous drip and a vital signs monitor. The monitor was connected to the nursing station in case there was any change in her temperature, pulse, breathing or blood pressure while she was unattended. But Saoirse wasn’t alone. Standing close to the left-hand side of her bed holding a pillow in both hands was Brianna, still wearing her fluorescent paramedic jacket. When Dr O’Keefe and Katie came in, she backed away from Saoirse’s bedside, stumbling over the plastic chair behind her so that she almost sat down.
‘Brianna? What are you doing in here?’ Dr O’Keefe demanded. ‘This young woman’s still in intensive care.’
‘Yes – well, yes, sure like, I know that,’ Brianna flustered. ‘But I was fierce worried about her. I just wanted to see how she was getting along, like.’
‘So what are you doing with that pillow?’
‘This pillow? Oh, this pillow! I thought she looked uncomfortable, and she seemed to be having trouble breathing, so I was going to prop her up a little more. You know, so that she could breathe more easy.’
‘Fair play, Brianna, but that’s not for you to decide. If you thought she looked uncomfortable, you should have called for a nurse.’
‘Yes, well, I suppose you’re right. Although I do have the training of course.’
Dr O’Keefe turned to Katie. ‘Brianna’s one of the paramedics who fetched Saoirse in from Blackrock,’ he explained.
‘I thought she’d passed over, to tell you the truth,’ put in Brianna. ‘But as it turned out, I saved her life. If it hadn’t been for me, like, she would never have made it. I didn’t realize that I’d saved her at the time, and I was mortified – mortified – thinking that I’d lost her, but when Dr O’Keefe here told me she was going to recover – well, you can imagine how I felt. I was like, hallelujah! I can only give thanks to the Lord in His infinite mercy.’
‘I see,’ said Katie. As she was gabbling away, Brianna was looking left and right, trying to see where she could put down the pillow, and Katie thought that she had rarely seen anybody look so rattled and so guilty. Whatever her reason for being here, it wasn’t to make Saoirse more comfortable, Katie was sure of that. She had interviewed enough thieves and frauds and murderers to recognize the way in which they subtly changed the subject so that they wouldn’t directly have to lie about the crime they had committed – or the crime they had in mind.
Brianna finally laid the pillow on the chair and pressed down on it hard, as if to make sure that it stayed there. ‘I’d best be making tracks,’ she said. ‘Keep me up to date with her progress, won’t you, doctor?’
‘Yes,’ said Dr O’Keefe. He may not have been quite as suspicious about Brianna’s behaviour as Katie, but he still sounded quite guarded. When Brianna had left the room, he looked at Katie and said, ‘What do you think that was all about?’
‘I don’t know. She may be totally well-meaning. But if I were you, I’d make sure that she doesn’t have access to this young woman again – at least, not without supervision.’
‘You’re not suggesting –?’
Katie looked over at Saoirse. Her face beneath the clear plastic oxygen mask was as white as the pillow that she was lying on, but she was breathing steadily, and possibly dreaming, from the way in which her eyes were darting from side to side, under her eyelids.
‘What? No, it’s not my job to suggest anything,’ said Katie, but she laid her hand against Dr O’Keefe’s shoulder as if to show him that they were more than incidental friends, they were guardians, too.
*
By the time Katie reached the morgue, Dr Kelley had gone home. The doors were locked and the lights were all turned off, so that the dead were left in darkness. As if they’re frightened of the dark, Katie thought. But when she returned to her car and checked her emails on her laptop, she saw that Dr Kelley had sent her a preliminary report on the cause of Matty Donoghue’s death.
The deceased had been suffering from several of the common diseases associated with homelessness and drug addiction: alcoholic polyneuropathy, crack lung and hepatitis C, as well as chronic eczema, rhinitis and athlete’s foot.
What killed him though was the 9.5255mm drill bit that penetrated the back of his head and shredded his medulla oblongata, his brainstem. This immediately stopped the functions of breathing, heart rate and blood pressure.
I might comment that if we had not carried out a full post mortem, the entry wound at the back of the deceased’s skull could easily have gone unnoticed or been mistaken simply for another of the many sanguineous crusts (scabs) on his arms, body and neck. Death in that case would have appeared to be attributable to sudden cardiac arrest, probably brought on by his inhalation of crack cocaine.
On another matter, I have completed my examination of Ailbe O’Malley. In spite of unusually severe bruising around her neck, there was no evidence that this was caused by manual pressure, or by strangulation with any kind of ligature, but only by torsion of her neck muscles as she fell downstairs. Her death was the direct result of dislocation of her cervical vertibrae.
Well, she thought, at least we don’t have to put poor Peter O’Malley through the third degree. As if he hasn’t suffered enough losing his wife and unborn boy.
Katie drove home steadily, playing ‘Báidin Fheilimí’ on her car CD to calm herself down. She tried to turn her mind to her search tomorrow morning of the McQuaide sisters’ puppy farm, and the killing of Matty Donoghue, and how she was going to have to press Andrei Costescu even harder to tell her where she could find Lupul. She thought briefly, too, about Brianna the paramed
ic, and what she had been doing in Saoirse Duffy’s hospital room – or what she might have been intending to do. She was an experienced paramedic and she had saved Saoirse’s life – surely she couldn’t have intended her any harm. It was disturbing, though, that she had appeared so shaken when Katie and Dr O’Keefe had walked in. Katie knew guilt when she saw it.
She tried to concentrate on all of these distractions, but again and again she could hear Conor saying, It’s over, Katie. It has to be over. I came to you as a man and I proposed to you as a man but now I’m no longer a man.
She didn’t cry. She was too tired to cry. But when she got home and closed the front door behind her, with Barney and Foltchain snuffling around her and wagging their tails, she simply stood still without taking off her coat and she felt like a statue of the Madonna, in some rainy shrine somewhere, in the darkness, motionless and sad and alone.
23
Bowser was still awake when the two gardaí came past his encampment in the back doorway of the Crane Lane Theatre. He was barricaded behind three of the empty beer kegs that lined the pavement and all that could be seen of him under the mound of blankets and plastic sheeting was his black-bearded face, with a maroon tea-cosy hat on.
It was past midnight, but when one of the guards shone a flashlight into the doorway, they could see that his eyes were open, shining orange with jaundice like two agates.
‘How’s yourself, Bowser?’
‘Still living and breathing,’ Bowser growled back. ‘No thanks to any fecking fecker excepting myself.’
‘Well, we’re just warning you to keep sketch for some scummers who are going around the city at the moment attacking the homeless like you. We believe they’re Romanians, or Eastern Europeans of some flavour anyway.’
‘I heard about it. Jimmy from the Simons told me. Don’t you worry about it, boy. I can look after meself. Didn’t I win the Elite heavyweight title three years in a row? I would’ve won the WBO heavyweight title, too, if I hadn’t broken me fecking ankle two days before the fight. You’re looking at a world champion here, boy. World fecking champion.’
‘Okay, Bowser. But be wide anyway. And don’t hesitate to call us if there’s any trouble. We have special patrols around the city at the moment, so we can be with you in minutes.’
‘Oh, call you, shall I? And how do you think I’m going to do that? Mowsie along to the nearest phone box, shall I? Or shall I send you a message by pigeon? There’s a rake of pigeons around but I don’t have pencil and paper.’
‘G’luck, Bowser,’ said the guard, and he and his companion carried on walking along Phoenix Street until they turned the corner into Smith Street and disappeared.
Bowser groped underneath his blankets until he found his bottle of Paddy’s whiskey. He unscrewed the cap and took a swig of it, which he swilled around his few remaining teeth before he swallowed it. He held it up to the street light and saw that he only had a couple more swigs left. He had intended to keep these until the morning to warm him up, but now that the guards had unsettled him he decided to finish them off now. Maybe John, the manager of O’Donovan’s off-licence, would take pity on him and lend him a borrow of another bottle until he had begged sufficient money to pay for it. John was a great boxing fan and never tired of hearing how Bowser had knocked out Declan Higgins at the National Stadium in Dublin in 2003 – or at least he said he was never tired of it.
Bowser finished off the bottle and screwed the cap back on. Now that it was empty he would keep it to piss in, in case the temperature dropped too low for him to heave off all his layers of blankets and shiver his way down to the shore twenty metres along the lane to strain the potatoes.
He began to nod off to sleep. As he did so, he gradually began to hear the roar of applause from the crowd at the National Stadium, swelling louder and louder, and his right arm jerked up as if the referee were holding it up, as he had that night when Bowser had floored Declan Higgins.
He could barely remember now how his life had fallen apart after that. The drinking, and the fights, and the arrogance. He could hardly remember Marie’s face, or what her voice had sounded like, but he could remember punching her, and how she had crouched on the kitchen floor with her hands clasped over her head to protect herself, weeping.
In the past three years he had been taken into five different shelters, including St Vincent’s House, Clanmornin House and Tir na nÓg, but he had been expelled from every one of them for drinking and violent behaviour. You’re looking at a world champion here, boy. World fecking champion. And don’t you forget it.
By two in the morning he had fallen into a deep, drunken sleep. At a quarter past two, three men came walking up Crane Lane, past the wall paintings on the back of the Crane Lane Theatre – a giant eye and two bewildered-looking cartoon birds. One of the men was tall and broad-shouldered, and wearing a grey leather jacket. The other two were shorter, dressed in black anoraks and black jeans, but they were just as stocky. They reached the doorway in which Bowser was sleeping behind the empty beer kegs and they stood there for a while, watching him. He might have been asleep but he was still sitting upright. Only his bearded face and his woollen hat were visible.
‘It looks like he’s sleeping,’ said the man in the grey leather jacket. ‘Let’s make sure that he stays sleeping for ever.’
He went to the corner of Crane Lane and Phoenix Street and stood there keeping watch for Garda patrols, while the two shorter men rolled the beer kegs out of the way as quietly as they could. After they had done that, they dragged aside the thick plastic builders’ sheeting that covered Bowser’s blankets and folded down the layers of stinking blankets as far as his waist.
‘Futu-i!’ said one of the men, flapping his hand in front of his nose. ‘Ce miros rău!’
‘Never mind about the smell, Danut!’ snapped the man in the grey leather jacket. ‘Kill him!’
One of the shorter men bent Bowser’s head forward and rolled up the back of his woollen hat, while the other man unbuckled the canvas bag that was slung around his shoulders and took out a cordless drill. He gave it three quick whizzes in the air to make sure that it was working.
‘Okay,’ said the man in the grey leather jacket. He took another quick look down Phoenix Street, and then gave Danut the thumbs up.
Bowser was snoring. Danut knelt down in the doorway on top of his folded blankets, feeling with his fingertips through his thick wiry hair for the guiding lump at the back of his head. Once he had located it, he said to his companion, ‘Marku… tilt head a bit more.’
Even when Bowser’s head was pushed forward even further, Danut still found it awkward to position the drill so that the spur would spin cleanly into his neck and leave the smallest entry wound possible. He had to bend his right wrist at a forty-five-degree angle and rest his elbow against the side of the doorway.
‘What’s taking you so long?’ hissed the man in the grey leather jacket.
Danut started drilling, and the drill bit’s cutting edges tore into the skin at the back of Bowser’s head. But the flutes became instantly entangled with his hair, and with a nasal whine the drill was brought to a stop.
Bowser let out a horrible roar, shaking his head violently from side to side and swinging his arms around as if they were clubs. Marku fell backwards on to the pavement, and Bowser’s empty whiskey bottle rolled noisily after him. Danut tried to stand up, but Bowser slammed him against the side of the doorway, so hard that his vertebrae crackled like fireworks. He managed to lift his drill and drilled into the side of Bowser’s face, so that the spur skidded across his left cheekbone, tearing a ragged red line, and then ripped into the flesh at the side of his nose. Blood sprayed across the blankets, but Bowser was impervious to pain, and he punched Danut hard on the jaw, and then he punched him again even harder on the side of the head.
The man in the grey leather jacket pulled a pistol out of his pocket and came over to the doorway shouting, ‘You! Stop! Hands up! Don’t move! You hear me, you nenorocitule
? Don’t move!’
Bowser punched Danut again, so that Danut dropped the drill. Bowser picked it up and slung it at the man in the grey leather jacket, hitting him on the knee. Then he struggled to his feet, kicking his blankets aside, and came lurching out of the doorway, with both of his fists lifted.
‘Ye want some, ye langer? Come on, then! C’mere to me! I claim ya!’
He staggered towards the man in the grey leather jacket, his fists milling, ducking his head as if he were coming after his opponent in the boxing ring. And – in the blue corner – Billy ‘Bowser’ Barrett, the Ballincollig Bruiser!
The man in the grey leather jacket took a step back, lifted his pistol higher and shot Bowser in the right eye. The bang was deafening and it echoed all the way down Phoenix Street. Bowser’s eye socket exploded and half of the back of his head flapped open, so that his tawny brains were spattered over his blankets.
He came to a dead stop, with his fists still uplifted, as if he couldn’t understand what had happened to him. While he was still swaying, the man in the grey leather jacket shot him again, just below his nose this time. His upper lip was split apart, so that he looked like a grisly parody of a giant rabbit. He waved his fists feebly, like paws, and then he pitched over sideways into the road, with his blood running from his head into the gutter.
The three men said nothing. Danut was so badly beaten, it was obvious that they couldn’t drag Bowser’s body away with them. He probably weighed close to 120 kilos. They heard a Garda siren, too, echoing along St Patrick’s Street, and they couldn’t be sure that somebody hadn’t heard the two shots and dialled 112.
Marku picked up the cordless drill, and the three of them hurried back down Crane Lane to South Mall, with Marku and the man in the grey leather jacket supporting Danut between them. Danut swore under his breath with every agonizing step. ‘La naiba, la naiba… Jesus… la naiba!’
Begging to Die Page 19