‘I can’t believe we fell into that. And we stopped in Skibbereen for something to eat, too, like a right pair of eejits. If I’d thought for one second that Buckley was going to turn around and follow us, I’d have told Nicholas to put his foot down and shoot us back to Cork as fast as humanly possible. If not faster.’
Katie reached out and squeezed her hand. ‘Don’t go blaming yourself, Padragain. It could have happened to anybody. I’m having Buckley kept under surveillance twenty-four/seven now. He was back to open his shop first thing this morning so it’s unlikely that he spent the night down in Skibbereen. As soon as he parked his car we attached a GPS tracker to it so we won’t be needing to tail him like that again.’
‘Well, maybe not,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘But as soon as I’m well enough, I’m going after him, don’t think that I won’t. And when I haul him in, I’m not only going to throw the book at him, I’m going to hit him over the head with it, as hard as I can.’
Katie shook her head in amusement. She spent another ten minutes talking to Detective Scanlan, mostly about her family and when her boyfriend was going to come and visit her, and then she went along the corridor to see Detective Murrish.
Detective Murrish was awake, propped up on two pillows, with a thick white bandage over her left eye socket, but she was still sedated and her speech was very slow and blurry, with long pauses in between her sentences. All the same, she managed to ask Katie how the hunt for Lupul was progressing, and when Andrei Costescu was likely to be appearing in front of the circuit court.
‘The consultant said that they can give me a nocular – an ocular prosthesis. A glass eye, in other words. He said that it’ll move around, the same as my good eye, and nobody will know the difference. So I’ll be able to come back to work, won’t I?’
‘You’re sure? You’ve had a pure traumatic experience, Bedelia. You can take as long as you like to get over it, and make up your mind if you really want to come back.’
‘What? You’re codding me, aren’t you? Of course I want to come back! Being a detective, that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, ever since I was a little girl. I used to hide my brother’s Lucky Leprechaun lollies and tell him that a thief had taken them, and then I’d take out my magnifying glass and look all around the house and make a big show of finding them.’
Katie couldn’t help smiling. ‘We’ll still have a place for you at Anglesea Street, don’t you worry. And you won’t only be on lolly-hiding duties.’
‘I mean, there’s no reason I can’t carry on being a detective, is there?’ said Detective Murrish. ‘Look at that Columbo. He had a glass eye, didn’t he, and his glass eye didn’t even move.’
*
Her last call was to Conor. His whole head was wrapped up in white crepe bandages now, except for his eyes and his mouth and two holes for his nostrils.
‘I know I look like the Invisible Man,’ he told her, in a dry-throated voice. ‘My nose is all blocked up and I can hardly see you, but believe it or not I’m feeling a whole better. I think it could be the morphine. It’s wonderful. I can understand now why people get addicted.’
‘Has Mr Sandhu been in to see you?’
‘Yes, and he’s very happy. He says I’m healing up down there much quicker than he expected.’
Katie was silent for a few moments, and then she said, ‘Like I told you, we went up to Ballynahina yesterday. Me and Kyna and two technicians. I came in to see you last night and tell you but you were dead to the world.’
‘Oh, yes? And?’
‘Nothing, I’m afraid. No forensic evidence that you’d been there, in any of the huts, nor of the fellow who attacked you. No blood, no hairs, no fibres. Nothing.’
‘Did you talk to the dreaded McQuaide sisters?’
‘Yes, we did – and Mother of God, they’re a right pair of gankies, those two, aren’t they? But they totally denied that you’d been up there to see them, and they also denied that they knew of any fellow who could have given you a beating, even if you had been there.’
Conor turned his head away, as if he didn’t want Katie to see how angry and disappointed he was.
‘Con?’ she said, laying her hand on his blanket. ‘Con – I haven’t given up. There’s bound to be somebody around Ballynahina who knows him, a fellow like that. And the desperate state of that puppy farm – we’re considering prosecution, probably in conjunction with the ISPCA.’
Conor turned back. ‘They’ll still deny that they had me beaten, won’t they? And if you can’t find any proof—’
‘Not necessarily. Not if we give them a loophole. We can promise them that we won’t be after applying for a court order to have them completely closed down – not if they admit to what happened to you, and not if they point the finger at the gowl who did it.’
‘But that’s the whole point, Katie! They need to be closed down! Those two sisters should be thrown in jail for the way they’ve been mistreating those poor breeding bitches, and those puppies! Christ Almighty, if they’d done anything like that to a human, they’d be looking at five to ten years in the women’s wing in Limerick!’
‘Con… you know yourself that closing down these puppy farms has almost no political support, and that most of the public simply don’t care. What’s wrong with breeding little puppies? They’re so sweet! And in any case, once they’ve stopped being so sweet, once they’ve peed on the carpet a few times or cost a couple of hundred euros in vets’ bills, it’s easy enough to abandon them in the middle of nowhere, or throw them out of your car window when you’re driving up the N8.’
Conor didn’t answer that. He reached across to his bedside table and poured himself a glass of water. Once he had drunk it, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, he said, ‘Tell me what else you’ve been up to.’
‘Con – I promise you I’m not going to let this rest.’
‘Forget it, Katie. It doesn’t matter any more. What’s been done to me, it can’t be undone, so what difference does it make if the fellow gets a few months behind bars? He’ll have TV to watch, and three square meals a day, and his wife or his girlfriend will be able to come and visit him, and he’ll be able to tell her what they can get up to together when he’s released. Which is something that I can’t say to you – not now, not next week, not next year, and never will be able to, ever, for the rest of my life.’
‘I think it would be a good idea if you talked to a counsellor, like Mr Sandhu suggested,’ said Katie. ‘I’ll have a word with him later.’
‘Maybe he knows a magician who can conjure me up a new pair of balls.’
‘It’s not funny, Con.’
‘It depends on your sense of humour. I’m sure the McQuaide sisters would think it hilarious, if they knew. I looked in the mirror this morning and I didn’t even recognize myself. Face all wrapped up in bandages and no beard. I thought: perhaps I’ve lucked out, and this isn’t me after all. Perhaps the real me is still back in your house in Carrig View, waiting for you to come home so I can make mad passionate love to you. And you don’t think that’s funny?’
Katie stood up. ‘I’ll come and see you again tomorrow, okay? I have to catch a couple of hours sleep now because we’re setting up an operation for four o’clock tomorrow morning and I’m beat out, to tell you the truth.’
She leaned across the bed to kiss him but again he turned his face away.
‘Don’t kiss me,’ he said. ‘If you kiss me, I’ll know that I’m me, and I don’t want to be me.’
Katie waited for a few moments, still leaning towards him, but he kept his face turned away. In the end she said, ‘Don’t give up, darling. Please. You’re still in shock, and you’re all drugged up. Things will work out, I promise you.’
‘You think so? Well, we’ll see, won’t we? Whatever it is you’re doing at four o’clock tomorrow morning, take care of yourself. With or without me, you’re precious.’
*
As she was crossing the car park, her iPhone pinged. It was Dr Kelle
y, who texted that she had phoned her a few minutes ago at Anglesea Street, only to be told she was at CUH visiting her three injured officers.
If UR still here I need to talk 2 U urgent.
She went back into the hospital and walked along to the mortuary. Before she went into the pathology laboratory, she hung up her coat and took a surgical gown down from the shelf to cover her trouser suit. She also tied on a surgical mask and pulled on a pair of blue plastic overshoes. The double doors squeaked mournfully when she pushed them open.
Inside the mortuary it was chilly, as usual, and as brightly lit as a film set, with that pervasive smell of chlorine, like a swimming bath. Dr Kelley was standing in front of her PC, her eyes looking tired and thoughtful.
‘Ah, there you are, Kathleen. I wanted to talk to you face-to-face because this is a difficult one.’
‘Difficult? In what way?’
‘Oh, not pathologically. The cause of death is patently obvious. But politically. I mean as far as CUH is concerned.’
She went over to the examination table and lifted the sheet from the body lying underneath. It was Saoirse Duffy, her face bloated and grey. The top of her skull had been sawn off and her brain removed for an MRI and other tests, and her chest and abdomen were still gaping open. Her liver and her stomach and her lungs would be bagged up and returned to her body cavity before she was handed over to the undertakers, but it was likely that her brain would be retained and her skull would be packed instead with wadding.
‘She suffered acute hypoxia when she was submerged in the river, there’s no question about that,’ said Dr Kelley. ‘Even if she had survived, there was every likelihood that her brain functions would have been severely impaired. The least she would have suffered would have been episodes of dizziness and chronic confusion.’
‘But?’ asked Katie, behind her mask.
‘But the damage to her brain wasn’t the primary cause of death. The primary cause of death was a massive overdose of fentanyl. From the tests on her brain that I’ve already carried out, I would say that she was injected with more than five milligrams. Three milligrams as you probably know is enough to kill an adult male.’
‘Have you told Dr O’Keefe?’
‘Not yet. I wanted to talk to you about it first. We’ll have to take a look at Saoirse’s medical records to see if there’s any indication that she was actually prescribed fentanyl or any other opioid – and if so, who prescribed it, and why. She was semi-comatose, of course, but she wouldn’t have been suffering any pain, so why fentanyl?’
Katie couldn’t help thinking of the nurse she had seen coming out of Saoirse’s room last night – the nurse who had suddenly turned around and hurried off in the opposite direction as soon as she had seen her. Perhaps she had been right to be suspicious about her, after all. She would check with Dr O’Keefe to see what arrangements he had made for Saoirse to be checked on by the nursing staff, and also the hospital’s security officers to see if they had any CCTV footage from the first-floor corridor.
She looked again at Saoirse. She had seen so many dead bodies, but she was always struck by how messy and repulsive even the most beautiful of humans are, once they’re taken to pieces. They were just bones and red meat and gristle, like bodice hanging in a butcher’s window, or the tripe and liver in his stainless-steel trays.
One evening, when they were watching a romantic scene on TV, Katie’s late husband, Paul, had said: ‘You see them two shifting? Doesn’t it ever occur to them that they have their lips around one end of a tube that goes all the way down to their lovebird’s large intestines?’ But that was what Paul had been like: always imagining the grotesque side of life. Katie had to see it for real.
She decided she would assign Detective Sergeant Sean Begley to this investigation, and as soon as possible. Herself, she badly needed some sleep if she was going to be fit for action at four o’clock in the morning.
33
Katie lay in the darkness in her room upstairs at Anglesea Street and tried to fall asleep, but she couldn’t stop thinking about Saoirse’s dissected body, and the way she had died. Since the poor girl had been injected with an overdose of fentanyl, which was a hundred times stronger than heroin, whoever had injected her had clearly had every intention of killing her.
But why? Was it the same person who had pushed her into the river? Did somebody hold a grudge against her? She was only a trainee beauty therapist, that was all, and so young. What could she have possibly done in her short and innocuous life to make anybody want to murder her? Maybe she’d jilted a boyfriend, but Katie could hardly imagine that even the bitterest of jilted boyfriends would take the risk of creeping into a hospital at night to give her a lethal injection.
She kept thinking, too, about that paramedic that she and Dr O’Keefe had caught in Saoirse’s room holding a pillow. She had appeared to be flustered, but it was hard to imagine that after resuscitating Saoirse from near-drowning she would have been out to do her any harm. And if she had, why? What possible motive could she have had?
Maybe it had been a clinical error, nothing more than that. Maybe the fentanyl injection had been intended for another patient, and their notes had been mixed up. Yet five milligrams of fentanyl would kill anybody, so even if Saoirse hadn’t been the intended victim, somebody had been intended to die.
She closed her eyes, but only for a few minutes, because she started thinking about Conor; and then Bedelia; and Nicholas; and Padragain. She felt as if her life was a dark tangled mess, with all the people she cared for tangled up in it, too, and that she would never be able to untangle it again.
*
It was twenty-five minutes past eleven when her iPhone played ‘Mo Ghille Mear’. She rolled over and picked it up almost at once and said, ‘Tony?’
‘Hope I didn’t wake you, ma’am,’ said Detective Inspector Mulliken.
‘Well, you did and you didn’t. I was only half-asleep. What’s the story?’
‘Caffrey’s just called me about Eamon Buckley.’
‘God in Heaven, this is late. Are him and O’Sullivan still keeping him under surveillance? Don’t tell me your man has shot off down to Skibbereen again.’
‘No. Caffrey says that after Buckley shut up his shop at five-thirty he drove straight home to Farranferris Avenue, and that seemed to be that. The curtains in his front room were open and they could see him watching TV. At half-past ten, though, just when him and O’Sullivan had agreed to call it a night, Buckley came out again, and got into his car, and drove off, and you’ll never guess where he is now.’
‘Tony, I’m not actually in the mood for guessing.’
‘Sorry, ma’am, but you’ll hardly believe it. He’s in Alexandra Road, in Montenotte. He’s stopped right outside that house where our coffin-maker said that all of Lupul’s beggars were staying.’
Katie sat up and switched on the bedside lamp. ‘Can Daley and Cailin see him too?’
‘They can, yes. They’re only a few metres away, on the opposite side of the road. Buckley got out of his car and went in through the front gate. That was only about five minutes ago.’
‘They haven’t seen Lupul though?’
‘No. They’ve observed only two people leave the house all afternoon, and they looked like rough sleepers. They were carrying rolled-up sleeping bags and rucksacks and one of them had a small dog with him. They were heading down to the city so.’
‘You know what this means, though, don’t you, Tony? It proves a link between Lupul and Buckley. There’s no way that Buckley can deny it now. That’s the best news I’ve had in days.’
‘So what do you want to do now?’
‘Keep an eye on the place, that’s all. We don’t yet have any evidence against Buckley, so we can’t lift him, but if he comes out again tell Caffrey to keep on following him. If Lupul shows up, then I might consider going in earlier, to catch them together. It’s possible of course that Lupul’s already inside but right now let’s leave it till four o’clock, like
we planned to. Is everything set up now?’
‘Chalk it down, ma’am. I’m still waiting to hear what time the immigration officers are going to show up, but they’ve promised to get back to me before twelve.’
Katie climbed out of bed. There was no point in her trying to sleep any longer. She pulled on her black sweater and her tights and her trousers, and then she went downstairs to the canteen for a cup of strong coffee. The canteen was almost empty except for three uniformed gardaí eating a midnight fry and laughing loudly and clattering their knives and forks.
Katie felt for the first time that the investigation into Lupul and his beggars was moving forward. From the moment that Ana-Maria had recognized her mother’s ring it had seemed highly likely that Lupul and Eamon Buckley were connected, even if it wasn’t in the gruesome way that she had first suspected. Even if the mince had been nothing but pork, and the ring had dropped into it by accident, how had it found its way into Buckley’s butcher’s shop in the first place? On top of that, the discovery of her mother’s necklace at the scene of Bowser’s shooting was circumstantial evidence at least that Lupul was responsible for the killing of Gearoid Ó Beargha and Matty Donoghue, and for the disappearance of both Ana-Maria’s mother and Máire O’Connor.
What Katie needed now was indisputable proof that Lupul was behind the murders and disappearances. She was hopeful that Bill Phinner’s forensic technicians would find some incriminating evidence in the house in Alexandra Road; and once she had enough to arrest him, she would order every Romanian beggar that her officers could find to be rounded up and brought in for questioning. If they knew that Lupul was safely locked up, she was confident that two or three of them would feel brave enough to speak out against him, and admit that they belonged to his illegal begging ring. According to Ana-Maria, her mother had detested Lupul, and maybe some of the other beggars felt the same about him.
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