Begging to Die

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Roger,’ said the ERU officer, flatly. ‘Have we time for a quick stabber?’

  *

  Detective Sergeant Begley called Katie. She had been up in the top-floor communications room in Anglesea Street since nine p.m., following their progress on their dashcam. Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick was sitting next to her, hunched forward in his chair and looking tired, while Kyna was standing behind her with a mug of mint tea.

  ‘So – what’s the plan now, ma’am?’ asked Detective Sergeant Begley.

  ‘The driver – I couldn’t see him clearly at all,’ said Katie. ‘I’m wondering if it could have been Lupul.’

  ‘If he wasn’t charred to a cinder at Alexandra Road then it might have been. But, no, it was too dark to get a clear lamp at him. Male, wearing a shiny black jacket from what I could see. He had on a cap of some kind so I couldn’t say for sure if he was a baldy or not.’

  Katie turned to Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick. ‘There’s two things that we can do, Robert. We can go in and lift this Danut now, and take a guess on whoever’s in there with him. Either that, or we can keep the place under surveillance until tomorrow morning and see if any more of those gowls show up.’

  Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick sniffed and ran his hand through his prickly hair. ‘I’m trying to imagine what their next plan of action is going to be. They know for sure now that their begging ring has been busted, and so they’ll be wide that we’re keeping an eye out for them. My guess is that they’ll be after throwing in the towel and heading for Ringaskiddy or even above to the border. They might even head off tonight. Like, they’ve nothing to stay for, have they, not now?’

  ‘What – you think they’ll leave all their rough sleepers behind?’ asked Kyna. ‘Just abandon them, like?’

  ‘Of course they will. They don’t give a two-toned shite for those poor streals. All they’ll do is go back to Romania and press-gang some more. They don’t see them as human beings, like. They’re just ATMs as far as they’re concerned. You remember that begging ring in Dublin last year? They were making well over a grand a day, easy, but the beggars themselves were so fecking hungry they were raiding the bins outside of Bunsen’s for out-of-date buns.’

  ‘I’m more than inclined to agree with you,’ said Katie. ‘I believe they’ll probably bail, too, so let’s haul them in now. Sean – did you hear that?’

  ‘I did, ma’am. McKenzie and Nolan, they’re right behind us. O’Mahony and Kerr are ready in position now up the far end of the boreen. We’re all set to go.’

  *

  Detective Caffrey steered their Toyota into Sutton’s Buildings and crept up without lights until their front bumper was less than five metres behind the black Audi saloon, and then he parked at a forty-five-degree angle across the road. The first ERU team followed close behind them in their Volvo, while the second team rolled silently down from the top of the slope and blocked the Audi from escaping in that direction.

  Most of the cottage windows along the street were lit, and when Detective Sergeant Begley and Detective Caffrey climbed out of their car and quietly closed the doors, they could hear televisions and muffled music. A curtain was drawn back on the opposite side of the street from Danut’s cottage and a white-haired woman in a red cardigan peered out. Detective Sergeant Begley went across to her, pointed to the word Garda on the front of his jacket, and pressed his finger to his lips. The woman stared at him, blinking, and then she crossed herself as if Saint Patrick himself had come to her window, and let her curtain fall back again.

  The four ERU officers gathered around. Two of them were holding Heckler & Koch MP7 sub-machine guns while the other two were armed with Sig-Sauer automatics. Both Detective Sergeant Begley and Detective Caffrey were carrying automatics, too.

  ‘I know these cottages and there’s no way that anyone can get out the back,’ Detective Sergeant Begley told the four ERU officers. ‘On the other hand, that might make them a bit more desperate. One of the victims of this begging ring, a fellow called Bowser, he was shot in the head, as well as drilled, so we have to assume that they have at least one pistol.’

  Garda McKenzie said, ‘If there’s a chance at all that they’re armed, it’s best to go in hard and fast, like. We’ll ram the door open and if it looks like they’re going for any weapons we’ll toss in a flashbang.’

  ‘Any questions?’ asked Detective Sergeant Begley. ‘No? Then let’s do it.’

  They gathered around the front door of Danut’s cottage and Garda Nolan came forward carrying a red Enforcer battering-ram. The door had peeling yellow paint and it looked half-rotten so Detective Sergeant Begley didn’t think it would take more than a couple of hard blows to knock it open. But as Garda Nolan lifted the Enforcer, and was about to slam it into the lock, the door unexpectedly opened, and there was Danut. He had taken off his black anorak and was standing in the hallway in a T-shirt with a grinning skull on it with a daisy in its teeth, with the slogan ‘Dirty Shirt’. There was a crumpled cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth and his belly was hanging over his belt.

  Detective Sergeant Begley stepped forward. ‘Danut? We’re armed gardaí. Don’t give us any trouble now, sham, we’re taking you in. Who else is in the house with you?’

  Danut said nothing, but immediately slammed the door. The officers could hear him shouting to somebody inside. ‘Politie! Futu-i! Este poliția!’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Detective Sergeant Begley to Garda Nolan, almost wearily.

  Garda Nolan smashed the Enforcer into the door and the lock was splintered out of it with one blow. Garda O’Mahony was the biggest of the team, at least six feet four tall, and he kicked the door wide open with his boot and strode into the hallway like the Terminator, holding up his sub-machine gun.

  The living-room door was closed but he kicked that open, too, and stepped inside, crouching down a little with his sub-machine gun held up ready to fire. The other three ERU gardaí jostled in behind him, while Detective Sergeant Begley and Detective Caffrey brought up the rear, but both with their pistols drawn.

  The living room was cramped and furnished with a soiled beige sofa and two armchairs that looked as if they had been rescued from a skip. The pale green wallpaper was damp and stained and even the mirror over the fireplace was freckled with brown spots and misted over. A small, smouldering peat fire had filled the room with a haze of pungent smoke.

  Danut was standing behind the sofa, holding up an automatic. Sitting on the sofa in front of him with his hands up was Marku. He, too, was bald, but unshaven, with prune-coloured circles under his eyes. His right arm was wound around with grubby white crepe bandages, all the way from his elbow to his wrist, and he was wearing a blue rubber glove on his hand.

  ‘I come quiet,’ he said, slurrily. ‘Please no shoot.’

  ‘Taca-ti gura, tâmpit!’ Danut barked at him. Then, to the Garda officers, ‘I go now. Okay? You don’t stop me. Marku – dă-mi cheile mașinii.’

  Keeping one hand raised, Marku reached into his trouser pocket and wrestled out a set of car keys. He held them up and Danut snatched them, still keeping his automatic raised.

  Detective Sergeant Begley said, ‘Danut, you understand English, don’t you?’

  ‘And you – you understand English, also,’ Danut retorted. ‘So I say very clear, I go now. You try to stop me, I will shoot.’

  ‘Danut, sham, you’re not going nowhere. Take a sconce out the window if you want to, and you’ll see that your car is totally blocked off.’

  Danut hesitated, and then took a step back towards the window. He drew back the curtains and quickly glanced out into the street, keeping his automatic held high.

  ‘You move your cars,’ he demanded. ‘You move your cars and I go.’

  ‘You don’t stand a snowball’s,’ said Detective Sergeant Begley. ‘Can’t you see that it’s over? You’re outgunned and outmanoeuvred and even if we did let you walk out of here, how far do you think you’d get?’

  ‘I don’t und
erstand you. I go.’

  ‘Not a hope, Danut. Now, why don’t you drop that weapon down on the seat there and then come around here with your hands up high, like your friend here?’

  Danut looked desperately from side to side. He could see that Garda O’Mahony had his sub-machine gun aimed at his chest, and that his aim didn’t waver for a second.

  Suddenly, he reached over the back of the sofa and jammed the muzzle of his automatic against Marku’s right temple. Marku tried to duck his head away, but Danut kept pressing the gun against his forehead, just above his eye, and snapped, ‘Stai nemiscat!’

  ‘Hold fire, O’Mahony,’ said Detective Sergeant Begley, quickly laying a hand on his shoulder. But to Danut he said, ‘I’m warning you now, and this is the last time I’ll warn you. Drop the weapon. Drop it. It’s over.’

  ‘No, it is not over. We will go now, both. You will move your cars and we will go. If not, Marku will die, and you will be the murderer.’

  ‘Danut, can’t you get it through your head? There’s no way out.’

  There was a long moment of extreme tension. It was broken when Danut started to cough – a harsh, wheezing, clogged-up smoker’s cough. His automatic wavered as he coughed, and it was then that Marku twisted around on the sofa and tried to seize it.

  Marku was too fat, though, and too slow. With an ear-splitting bang, Danut shot him right between the eyes. The back of his bald head burst open like a broken jug and cream-coloured brains looped all over the arm of the sofa.

  ‘Drop it!’ screamed Garda O’Mahony. But before he could let off a shot himself, Danut stuck the muzzle of the automatic under his own chin and blew off his jaw and his upper lip and most of his nose. His eyes stared at the gardaí above the bloody cavity of his face, as if he were a child who doesn’t understand what’s happened to him, and then he collapsed sideways behind the sofa.

  Garda O’Mahony edged around the sofa, still pointing his sub-machine gun, just in case Danut had enough life left in him to squeeze off one final shot. He bent over for a moment, and when he stood up he was holding up Danut’s automatic, its grip all smothered in blood.

  ‘Straight to the hot place, this one. He’ll be dancing with the Devil already, I’d say. Jesus.’

  ‘Two men down, ma’am,’ said Detective Sergeant Begley, over his headset. ‘Danut and his pal, whoever he is. It’s not Lupul. Doesn’t fit the description.’

  ‘None of ours hurt?’

  ‘No. Danut did for his pal and then for himself.’

  ‘Damn. That’s exactly what I didn’t need. I was hoping he might tell us what happened to Lupul. Listen – if you and Caffrey can do a quick search, Sean. See if there’s anything that gives you a clue if Lupul’s alive or dead. Mobile phones. Notes, letters, bus or train or ferry tickets. Clothing. I’ll be sending the Technical Bureau up there right away, plus the coroner of course. Damn.’

  47

  Katie stayed at Anglesea Street that night, although she rang Conor before she went to bed.

  ‘How’re you going on, darling?’ she asked him. ‘Sorry I can’t be home tonight. If I told you that today was total madness, that would be the understatement of the year. You’ll see some of it on the news tomorrow morning. Two of those Romanians shot dead, up at the top of Richmond Hill.’

  ‘Shot dead? Not by you?’

  ‘No, of course not. I wasn’t even there. Not in person, anyway.’

  ‘Well, it’s your job, Katie. I know that.’

  ‘You sound kind of quiet. Is everything all right?’

  ‘No. Yes. I’m grand altogether.’

  ‘Did you take the children for a walk?’

  ‘The children? That’s the closest I’ll ever be to having children.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Con. I didn’t mean it like that. I’ve always called them the children.’

  ‘I did take them for a walk, yes. But it was lashing too hard, even for them. As soon as they’d done their business they wanted to be back by the fire.’

  ‘I wish I was there with them. And you.’

  ‘Well, sometimes terrible things happen to us and there’s nothing at all we can do about them. All we can do is hope that we’ve done right by everybody else.’

  ‘That sounds pure philosophical. What does that mean?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Something and nothing at all.’

  ‘Con – are you okay? I can come back home if you need me.’

  ‘No, you’re fine. You don’t want to be driving back to Cobh in weather like this. I’ll see you tomorrow so, with any luck. Goodnight, sweetheart. Sleep sound.’

  ‘You too, darling.’

  When Conor had hung up, Katie sat on the bed frowning at her iPhone, as if she expected him to ring back sounding all cheerful and saying, ‘Really! I was only codding you! I’m not miserable at all! Listen to that pop! That’s me whipping the top off a bottle of Satz!’

  But her iPhone stayed silent. After a while she lifted the blankets of her single bed and slid her bare feet down between the cold sheets. She lay on her pillow with her eyes open, listening to the rain rattling against the window, and then she reached over and switched off her lamp.

  *

  Brianna looked rough. Her hair was uncombed and her eyes were puffy and she had a cold sore on her upper lip. Her paramedic’s uniform had been taken away and she was wearing a plain grey woollen dress that was at least a size too large for her. When Katie and Kyna came into the interview room next morning, however, she raised her eyes towards them in a way that Katie thought looked almost hopeful. She had seen that look in a criminal’s eyes before – At last, somebody’s here to save me from myself.

  ‘Good morning, all,’ she said. ‘How’s it going on?’

  Brianna was represented by Partlan Devine, a solidly built fortyish solicitor from the same chambers as Frank Lyons, but with more experience of representing the suspects of unusual homicides. He had acted two years ago for the Ballincollig mother who had strangled every one of her five children when they reached their third birthday and hidden their bodies in her press.

  Partlan Devine had a brick-red face, a prickly ginger moustache, and an equally abrasive way of talking. The shoulders of his dark blue suit were lightly seasoned with dandruff. He was accompanied by his assistant, a pale but attractive girl called Naoimh with an abundance of shiny black hair and large mint-green eyes, and a legal pad balanced on her black-stockinged knee.

  Katie laid her job book on Brianna’s case on the desk in front of her but didn’t open it.

  Instead, she said, ‘Before we start to question Brianna about her attempt on the life of Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán in the ambulance yesterday, Mr Devine, there’s something else you have to know. Her flat on Noonan Road was searched yesterday evening by experts from the Technical Bureau, and that search has turned up some evidence that incriminates her in another ongoing investigation.’

  Brianna glanced nervously at Partlan Devine, but Partlan Devine kept his washed-out hazel eyes on Katie.

  ‘I see, Detective Superintendent Maguire. I assume that you’re going to be good enough as to inform me what this evidence might be, and to what allegation it relates?’

  Kyna passed Katie a clear plastic evidence bag and Katie held it up. ‘This is a phial that once contained fentanyl citrate – a large enough dose to be lethal if it was all to be injected into the average person. It was found in the wheelie bin at the rear of Brianna’s block of flats.’

  ‘Sure anybody at all could have tossed it in there. Some drug addict, for instance.’

  ‘No, not just anybody. It has a partial fingerprint on it, and that partial fingerprint matches Brianna’s. All opioids carried in NAS ambulances are scrupulously logged, so we know that this particular phial came from the drug store in Brianna’s ambulance.’

  ‘So she threw away an empty phial of fentanyl citrate? What does that prove? She’s an advanced paramedic.’

  ‘Yes, but it has more than Brianna’s fingerprint on it. Our forensi
c technicians found that its needle also bears traces of DNA – and it’s the DNA of a young girl called Saoirse Duffy. Saoirse was recovering from near-drowning at CUH when somebody came into her room and injected her with this fatal dose of fentanyl citrate.

  ‘It doesn’t seem like a coincidence to me that after she was rescued from the Lee, the ambulance that took Saoirse to hospital was crewed by Brianna and her partner Darragh Ó Dálaigh.’

  ‘And what does that prove?’ asked Partlan Devine.

  ‘We have CCTV footage of a woman dressed as a nurse leaving Saoirse’s room shortly before she was found to have passed away. I have to admit that the footage isn’t one hundred per cent clear, but it’s a reasonable assumption that this “nurse” was Brianna. Her ambulance was parked at CUH at the time. Their shift had just finished and her partner, Darragh, was having a late snack in the hospital canteen. She had told him that she wasn’t hungry but she wanted to go and talk to a friend of hers in the emergency room.’

  Partlan Devine pursed his lips in annoyance. Then he said, ‘I’ll need to have some time in private with my client before we respond to this new allegation. You haven’t yet formally charged her, I presume?’

  ‘Not yet, but we will be. She’s in custody already and I wanted to see her response first. Let us know when you’re ready.’

  Katie and Kyna both pushed back their chairs, but before they could stand up, Brianna said, ‘Don’t bother. Charge me. Read me my rights. Go on. I did it. I admit it. And all the others too.’

  ‘Brianna—’ said Partlan Devine, reaching out for her arm and gripping it tight. ‘Please don’t say any more. This is not the way to protect your best interests.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Brianna, shaking her head. Tears were sliding down her cheeks and her nose was running too. Kyna took out her handkerchief and passed it across to her. As she wiped her eyes and blew her nose, she looked up at Kyna as if to say, God Almighty, I tried to kill you, and here you are giving me your handkerchief.

  Katie said, ‘What do you mean by “all the others”, Brianna? Who exactly are you talking about?’