‘You’re sure about this? You might end up paying the whole three thousand, or near enough.’
‘They gave me a very generous bonus when I left the Operational Support Unit. What else am I going to spend it on? Since I lost Radha, I don’t have anybody to take on holiday, or buy surprises for. I might as well use the grade to do something worthwhile.’
‘That’s – well, that’s pure generous of you, sir.’
‘Brendan.’
‘I’ll give Walter’s owner a ring later and tell them. I’m sure she’ll be over the moon.’
Brendan came over and stood beside her, with his hand resting lightly on her desk next to her paperwork. She looked up at him, and then looked down at her desk, and then looked up at him again. They both knew what was going on between them.
Katie’s phone warbled. She reached across and picked it up and said, ‘DS Maguire.’
‘It’s Bill Phinner, ma’am. We’ve tested all the samples we brought back from the puppy farm. There’s no matches at all to Conor Ó’Máille’s DNA. No fingerprints, no blood, and no fibres either to match his coat.’
‘I see, Bill. That’s a disappointment, but thanks a million anyway. What time can you send a team up to Sidney Park?’
‘They’ll be leaving in about twenty minutes. I was just waiting for Deirdre Hagerty to come in. She’s especially good with hair. And that trainer you left with us – I should have an analysis for you by late this afternoon.’
‘Thanks, Bill.’
Katie put down the phone. Brendan was still standing close beside her.
‘Bad news?’ he asked her.
‘More like no news. There’s no trace at all at Foggy Fields that Conor was assaulted there. I knew it was a bit of a long shot, but the McQuaide sisters are totally denying that he was ever there, and without any forensics we have no way of proving that they’re lying. I’m thinking of sending Cairbre O’Crean up to Ballynahina to snoop around and see if he can find out who might have beaten him up, but that’s another long shot and I don’t have a bottomless budget.’
She looked up at him again. ‘You don’t have any more of that generous bonus to spare, do you, sir?’
30
Vasile beckoned the next car to come forward to be hosed down and washed. He felt tired and hungover. Because it was raining, only three cars had come in to Handwash so far this morning, and only one driver had given him a tip. Apart from that, his throat was sore and he was sure he had caught a cold. There had been one old man in The Parting Glass last night who had sneezed repeatedly in his direction and hadn’t once bothered to put his hand over his mouth.
He stood in front of the car and signalled it to stop. It was a black Audi saloon with dark tinted windows. Mihai came forward with the pressure hose but before he could start spraying, the Audi’s two rear doors opened up and two short, stocky men in black anoraks climbed out. Vasile recognized them – Danut and Marku. They had come into The Parting Glass two or three times for a drink and once Vasile had caught sight of Danut in McDonald’s on St Patrick’s Street with Lupul.
Danut came straight towards him, while Marku raised his hand to Mihai, signalling him not to start spraying. Vasile knew immediately that he was in trouble. He dropped the wet chamois leather that he was holding and started to run towards the Texaco petrol station, but he had managed only five paces before Marku came bustling around the front of the car and viciously snatched his right arm. Danut caught up with him from behind and gripped his shoulder.
Vasile tried to twist himself free but the two men were far too strong for him.
‘Get the fuck – off me, will you?’ he panted.
‘Shut your trap and get in car!’ Danut told him.
‘Mihai!’ shouted Vasile, but Mihai was already backing away. ‘Mihai, call the cops!’
Danut and Marku forced Vasile into the back of the car, with one of them wedged on either side of him. He kicked at the back of the seat in front of him but Danut smacked him hard around the side of the head.
‘Stay still, nenorocitule, or else I hit you again!’
The two men slammed the Audi’s doors and the car drove off at speed, its tyres slithering on the wet concrete forecourt. The driver slewed across the road to the right, towards the city centre, causing an oncoming truck to blast its horn at them.
‘What’s this all about?’ asked Vasile. ‘I’ve done nothing.’
A man was sitting in the front passenger seat with the collar of his jacket turned up. He turned around and stared at Vasile with such grey-eyed frigidity that Vasile shivered and couldn’t stop himself from letting out a little squirt of pee into his jeans. It was Lupul, unshaven, his grey eyebrows tangled, his grey hair sticking up as if he had just survived an electric shock.
‘Oh, you’ve done nothing, have you, you skinny piece of shit?’ he said, in Romanian. ‘How about giving my address to the law? Doesn’t that count?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t even know your address.’
‘So it was a coincidence, was it, that you were seen talking to two cops in street last night, and that my house was raided this morning?’
‘I never spoke to any cops. Somebody’s just stirring up trouble.’
Lupul took out his mobile phone and held it up so that Vasile could see it. Although the picture on the screen was quite dark, and the car made the phone jiggle, Vasile could see that it was a video of him on Cornmarket Street, talking to Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick and Detective O’Donovan. It also showed Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick taking out his wallet and it was clear that he was counting out money.
‘There – proof,’ said Lupul. ‘And don’t try to pretend that those two men are just friends of yours, paying you back some money that they owe you. We know them. They’re poliţai şpăgar. Dirty cops.’
‘I wasn’t talking to them about you. How could I tell them where you live when I don’t know where you live? They paid me because I gave them some information about two young guys at the pub selling drugs.’
‘Don’t bother to make up stories. I know you give tip-offs to that porc sălbatic Făt-Frumor. And I know you know where I live – even though I don’t know how you found out. Maybe some druggie told you. Maybe some pizza delivery boy. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I had to leave my house last night with about five minutes’ notice and I’m more than upset about it. I’m înfuriat.’
‘It wasn’t me. I didn’t tell them anything about you. Why would I?’
‘For the money, you miserable motherfucker. Why else?’
Lupul kept on staring at Vasile for several long seconds, unblinking, his mouth turned down with contempt. Then he turned his back and didn’t speak again.
They continued to drive through the rain with the windscreen wipers squeaking monotonously, crossing over St Patrick’s Bridge and then heading up the long steep hill to St Luke’s Cross. Vasile desperately tried to work out some excuse for having taken money from Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick that Lupul might be persuaded to believe, but he was too frightened now to be able to think coherently. He was even too frightened to beg Lupul not to hurt him, in case Lupul didn’t intend to, but beat him up just to show him that whatever he begged for, he was going to be given the opposite.
When they reached St Luke’s Cross they turned into Alexandra Road, a terrace of tall damp-looking houses, most of them painted grey or brown or beige, and half-hidden behind high cement-rendered walls and overgrown trees. They stopped about halfway up the road and all climbed out. Vasile was unsettled to see that their driver, despite having black close-cropped hair and broad shoulders, was a woman. She had piggy little Slavic eyes, a blob of a nose, and a large mole on the left side of her chin. When he looked at her, she looked back at him with total dispassion, as if he had no more humanity than a cardboard cutout with a picture of a young man printed on it.
Lupul unlocked the maroon-painted front gate of number thirteen and went inside. The woman driver w
ent after him and, with a polite gesture, Danut indicated that Vasile should follow.
‘I have a choice?’ asked Vasile, and Marku let out a sharp bark of laughter, like a mongrel.
The house was four storeys high, and probably dated from the 1890s, when there was a British military garrison in Montenotte. As they walked up the black-and-white mosaic path towards the porch, the front door was opened, and a young man appeared, in a pea-green sweater and jeans. Vasile noticed that he didn’t look particularly pleased to see Lupul, and when Lupul stepped inside the hallway, he pressed himself back against the wall to let him pass, breathing in and turning his face away, as if he were afraid of him.
Vasile looked at the young man as he entered the house, but the young man still kept his face turned away.
Inside, the house was dark and smelled of damp and burned sausages. Lupul went first to the high-ceilinged drawing room on the right of the hallway, and looked inside. Vasile was going to follow him but Danut held his sleeve so that he had to stay where he was, at the foot of the staircase. From there, only one end of the drawing room was visible, but Vasile could see two scruffy-looking bearded men standing with their arms folded and a young woman in a baggy blue tracksuit top sitting beside them, and he could hear the voices of several more. He guessed there must be at least ten people in the room altogether.
‘I am back now. Give me half-hour and we will get you all down to city and out on streets,’ Lupul told them.
He came back to Vasile. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s go upstairs, shall we, and you can tell me exactly what you said to those cops.’
‘I swear that I’m telling you the truth, Lupul. I didn’t say one word about you.’
‘What did you call me?’
‘I’m sorry. I thought that was your name.’
‘My name is Dragos. I should smack you across the face for that. But you know what? I’m not going to. And do you know why I’m not going to? It’s not because I’m Mr Nice Guy. It’s because I don’t want to leave my handprint on you, or any of my DNA.’
Vasile stared back at Lupul, and gradually the implication of what he had just said began to dawn on him. He let out a childlike whimper and dropped to the floor, scrambling on his hands and knees towards the front door, which was still open. Before he could reach it, though, the young man in the pea-green sweater slammed it shut. Vasile stood up and tried to snatch the doorknob, but both Danut and Marku took hold of him and threw him violently back against the stairs.
‘Now, are you going to climb upstairs by yourself or will we have to drag you up by your balls?’ asked Lupul.
Vasile leaned sideways, wincing. He felt a sharp pain in the right side of his back and he was sure that at least two of his ribs had been cracked. Lupul stood waiting for him as he turned himself over and slowly began to crawl upstairs, taking in squeaky snatches of agonized breath with every step.
Eventually he reached the landing, which had a threadbare carpet that smelled of damp and rotting string. He grasped the banisters to pull himself on to his feet, and once he was standing up, Danut and Marku shoved him roughly across to an open bedroom door. The knife-like pain in his side was unbearable, and he was terrified of what they were going to do to him. As he stumbled into the bedroom, he started to cry.
A half-broken blind was drawn down over the bedroom window, and there was a single bed with a filthy striped mattress on it, but no blankets. On the wall above the bed hung a curled-up calendar showing March 2002, and a faded picture of Jesus surrounded by children.
Lupul came in. ‘What are you blubbing for?’ he demanded. ‘Are you a baby? You think that I wouldn’t have been blubbing if those cops had hauled me in this morning? And it was all because of you, you little poponar! I could have been kicked out of Ireland and everything I’ve been working on so hard would have gone straight down the toilet!’
Vasile smeared the tears away from his cheeks with his fingers. ‘I swear I didn’t give those cops your address. I swear it in name of my mother.’
‘Futu-ți Cristoșii mă-tii!’ Lupul retorted, and waved to Danut and Marku to force Vasile on to the bed, face down. Vasile screamed in pain, but they ignored his screaming and Danut climbed on top of him, sitting astride his back.
In the corner of the bedroom stood a tall chest of drawers with flaking veneer, and on top of it rested a black cordless drill. Lupul picked it up and said, ‘Marku.’
Marku took the drill and handed it to Danut. Then he gripped Vasile firmly by the ears, squashing his face into the mattress so that he could barely breathe. Danut felt for the sweet spot at the back of Vasile’s skull, and then positioned the drill bit just below his thumb.
‘Go ahead,’ said Lupul. ‘The sooner we’re rid of him, the better. Little poponar.’
With a nasal whine, the drill bit bored into Vasile’s head. He jerked and jumped, but Marku was holding his head so tightly that he couldn’t move it, and Danut’s weight on his back made it impossible for him to roll off the mattress. He gave one final shudder as Danut wiggled the drill bit around and around, making sure that his brainstem was ripped into shreds, but after that he lay still.
Danut eased out the drill bit and climbed off him, and Marku released his grip on his ears.
‘So – what are we going to do with him now?’ asked Danut, looking around for something to wipe the drill bit.
‘Same as others, of course,’ said Lupul.
‘You’re sure he’ll take him?’
‘Why shouldn’t he? We pay him enough, don’t we?’
‘Yes. But the cops were searching his shop, weren’t they? Maybe he’ll want to give it a rest for a while.’
‘They didn’t find anything because there was nothing to find. That is the whole beauty of it. I’ll ring him anyway and he can come around here later and pick him up.’
‘Okay.’
Lupul looked down at Vasile’s body and crossed himself. ‘Rest in peace, little poponar,’ he said, and then he grinned. ‘That’ll teach you to rat on Dragos Iliescu.’
Danut and Marku were waiting for him out on the landing. He left the bedroom, closing and locking the door behind him and taking out the key.
‘Right,’ he said, ‘let’s take our poor unfortunate devils down to the city to start making us some money.’
31
Katie was eating a Marks & Spencer cheese salad at her desk when Dr Kelley emailed her the results of her post mortem on William ‘Bowser’ Barrett. As she read it, her chewing slowed down, and then stopped, and then she put down her plastic fork.
The cause of death was two gunshot wounds to the head. One of the bullets remained lodged inside the decedent’s skull, a 9mm Parabellum round. The entry wounds to the front of the head are identical, which indicates that both rounds were fired from the same weapon. The trauma to the back of the head was catastrophic, as would be expected. Apart from the damage resulting from the gunshot, however, I found a minor twisted contusion in the skin, which appears to have been made by a drill bit, in almost precisely the same spot as the penetrative wounds that I found in the necks of Gearoid Ó Beargha and Matthew Donoghue. It would appear that a start was made on drilling into William Barrett’s neck but for some reason this was not completed, leaving him with only a superficial wound.
Dr Kelley’s report was accompanied by several close-up photographs, as well as an MRI scan of Bowser’s skull, showing the bullet still buried inside his head. Katie hadn’t yet heard from Bill Phinner if his technicians had found the other bullet. Maybe it was stuck in the door at the back of the Crane Theatre, or maybe it had ricocheted off the wall and rolled down a nearby shore. But they would need only one bullet to identify the gun that had shot him – so long as they found the gun.
Detective Inspector Mulliken knocked at her door.
‘Sorry to interrupt your lunch, ma’am, but our nasty little coffin-maker’s lawyer has arrived. J.P. Foley, of all people.’
‘Oh God. Not J.P. Foley. Ireland’s answer to Atti
cus Finch. He likes to think he is, anyway.’
‘Kyna’s down there now. She’s dealt with all the paperwork. How do you want us to approach this?’
‘What I’d really like to be doing is shooting him in the kneecaps. But it’s Lupul we’re after, more than a miserable streal like him. So we need to win his confidence, like, do you know what I mean? Make him feel that if he co-operates with us, things may not turn out so bad for him.’
‘So long as Foley doesn’t advise him to say nothing at all.’
‘We’ll see. Even the great J.P. Foley knows that you can’t stab a garda in the eye in front of witnesses and expect a judge to let you off. But there’s one thing more, Tony. Don’t mention that we know that Gearoid Beargha and Matty Donoghue were both murdered. Whoever did it, Lupul or not, I still want them to believe they’ve got away with it.’
They went downstairs to the interview room. J.P. Foley was sitting next to Andrei Costescu, and he stood up when Katie and Detective Inspector Mulliken came in. He was tall, at least six feet three, with a long face but small wide-apart eyes that gave him the appearance of a haddock. His grey hair was combed into waves, and as usual he was wearing a dark blue three-piece suit with a freemason’s lapel pin.
‘Detective Superintendent Mag-waah,’ he said, in his rich Dublin baritone, holding out his hand. ‘When was the last time you and me crossed swords? The O’Flynn trial, wasn’t it? I still like to think of that encounter as a draw.’
‘Really?’ said Katie. ‘Well… Tomás O’Flynn was only sent down for manslaughter instead of for murder, so I suppose you can give yourself some credit for that.’
She ignored his outstretched hand and sat down at the table next to Kyna. She thought that Kyna was looking exceptionally smart and pretty today, with her blonde hair braided in a circle on top of her head and a hint of blusher on her cheeks. She smelled fresh, too, of some perfume with top notes of bergamot and neroli.
Begging to Die Page 24