‘That smells fantastic,’ he said. It did. Emma liked to cook, when she had time.
‘It’s my standard special, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘You’ll be sick of it, but I wanted to make something nice, and my imagination deserted me.’
‘I wasn’t expecting you.’
‘Three late nights in a row is enough,’ she said. Cormac got a wine glass from the cupboard, poured himself a glass from the bottle open on the kitchen table, then returned to his seat and watched her work. She was turning a lamb rack in the pan, browning it. She had already put potatoes in the oven, had herbed breadcrumbs ready. He watched her press the crust to the rack, every movement neat and precise, before putting the lot in the oven.
‘Ta-daa!’ she said, turning to him, picking up her own wine glass from the counter. ‘Twenty minutes and we can eat.’ She sat opposite him, reached one socked foot under the kitchen table and rested it on his lap.
‘Work’s going well?’ he asked.
‘Getting there. Lab’s good to go. Interviews for the last two researcher positions start tomorrow. And I am taking the whole weekend off.’ She made a face. ‘I know I’ve been a bit useless lately. Total workaholic. But I promise things will settle down.’ She kept talking, suggesting possible plans for the weekend ahead. Go to Dublin Friday evening, see some friends. There was a rugby match, if he fancied it he should go while she got some shopping in and they could meet for an early, boozy dinner after. Or if he didn’t feel like the trip, maybe they’d just hang out in Galway? Do a bit more exploring.
Cormac was distracted, his mind wandering back to the Katherine Shelley interview as she spoke.
‘What about Danny?’ she asked. ‘Did you ask him for dinner? We could have them here, if you like. Or just meet in town.’
‘Not sure about that,’ he said. ‘I’ve asked him again, but he hasn’t said whether or not he can do it.’
‘Maybe Sarah doesn’t want to. She doesn’t know us. Maybe she’d rather just stay at home with her kids.’
‘Maybe,’ said Cormac. He wasn’t going to tell her that he suspected Danny was cheating. He didn’t want that image in her head, that cliché of the cheating cop using the job as an excuse every time he had to work nights.
Emma got up to check on the food, and the conversation died. Was she pissed off?
‘I can ask him again,’ he said.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. She started to put plates together, and he got up to help. He almost told her about Lorna McIntyre and the possibility that she was missing, but she’d already changed the subject and he didn’t want to bring the mood down on what might be their only night in together this week. When they sat down to eat they talked about incidentals. They finished the first bottle, and Cormac took a second from the wine rack without really thinking about it. When he had sat down and poured for them both, he turned the conversation to the Blake case and Emma listened, her grey eyes serious.
‘It was hard to listen to. Not that she didn’t have a point. Worse things happen today, where something gets missed, or a child slips through the cracks. And this was twenty years ago. It’s easy to forget how much has changed.’
‘But,’ Emma said.
Cormac grimaced. ‘I don’t know. It’s hard to listen to from someone who was part of it, you know? She was too quick with the excuses.’ They fell quiet for some time then, Cormac lost in his thoughts, Emma watching him. Eventually, she spoke.
‘You don’t usually talk about your cases,’ she said. There was empathy in her eyes, and sadness. ‘This one is different for you, isn’t it?’
‘Christ, Em,’ he said. He got up and poured a glass of water from the tap, drank and turned to her. ‘Sorry.’ He smiled at her. ‘Very dramatic.’ So much for his plan to keep the mood upbeat.
She hesitated, then shrugged. ‘I’d much rather know than not, if there’s something on your mind. We don’t have to talk about it. But it’s better for me if you can tell me enough so that I understand at least a bit of what’s going on with you, when things are difficult.’
If he told her a quarter of the shit he saw it would break her heart. She’d grown up in a house of privilege, and though she’d had her own trauma, it was different. One shocking, even horrific, incident did not undo a lifetime of love and care and plenty. Cormac reminded himself that he’d had more than his fair share of love and care himself, if not so much of the plenty.
‘It’s Jack,’ he said. ‘So many of the kids we see, even the ones who go into care – what they go through before we get to them. They never fully recover. Jack was one of the few kids to get out intact.’ He stopped talking. Didn’t want to finish the sentence.
‘But if he committed suicide, even years later, it means none of them are safe,’ she finished for him.
‘Yeah.’
She nodded, then changed the subject. It shocked him sometimes, how well she knew him. She could delve straight into him, right to the centre, then pull back and move on before he realised she was there. They talked for a little longer, then went to bed. Emma turned to him with a warmth and desire that easily matched his own, and for a short time, the Blake case and station politics were washed clear from his mind. She fell asleep quickly afterwards, lying on her side with her face turned away from him, her body utterly limp and relaxed. He ran a hand down her back, her warm velvet-soft skin, and she sighed in her sleep. His eyes traced the scar that ran along her jaw. She’d had to have surgery to reset it. A fainter, spider-like scar started at the very edge of her forehead, and ran back under her hairline.
Emma shifted in the bed beside him, then sighed again and seemed to settle back into a deeper sleep. Cormac lay down on his back, one hand behind his head, and stared up at the ceiling. He had to find a way to make Galway work. He would take these shitty cases and make them shine. He was dropping off to sleep when his phone buzzed. A message from Matt, with a link. No subject, no text. He clicked on the link, and it brought him to the website of the Independent. Seconds later, he was looking at Healy’s grinning face. In the photograph Healy was wearing a reflective garda vest and a hard hat, as he stood beside a front-loader that was pushing plastic-wrapped bags of something into the teeth of an incinerator. Cormac scrolled down to read the caption. Gardaí destroy more than €2 million worth of drugs. Scrolled down further to the article, which was dated 11 March 2012.
Detective Sergeant Anthony Healy watches as cannabis, crack cocaine and heroin, valued at more than 2 million euro, is incinerated. This enormous haul had been recovered from the North Dublin area by gardaí over the last six months. It was taken to a local incinerator by officers and destroyed today. ‘Seizing these drugs has meant that we have stopped them getting onto the streets of Dublin,’ said Detective Sergeant Anthony Healy. ‘Today is the culmination of months of work. We need the help of the public if we are to continue to have this level of success. I urge people to use the confidential tip line if they have any suspicions about drug activity.’
Cormac turned off the screen and put his phone down, then lay back on his pillow and stared again at the ceiling. Matt had sent that for a reason, and it wasn’t so that Cormac could admire Healy’s sterling work. This was confirmation. Healy was up to something, and whatever it was had something to do with that drug haul. It was equally clear that Matt wasn’t in a position to give him any more. Maybe there was an ongoing operation. No, if Cormac was going to do anything about Healy, he was going to have to do it alone.
Thursday 28 March 2013
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Cormac sat at his desk, typing up his meeting with Katherine Shelley and thinking about the text message he’d just received from Emma. She wanted to know if he was on for going to Dublin or not. He didn’t want to go, and wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was just that he didn’t want to head back and see friends until he had stuff sorted out in Galway. The Blake case was moving forward, but he was following the slimmest of threads, which might snap at any moment. Going to Dublin would mean leav
ing early on Friday, and he didn’t want to be out of the station right now. Something was going on with Healy, and whatever he was involved in had him under pressure.
There was a burst of laughter from the other side of the room. Healy was Mr Happy today, one joke after another. But his tension was evident in the set of his shoulders, and the glances he kept sending Danny’s way.
Danny was sitting at his desk, head bent over his work, ignoring the craic and the messing around him. He hadn’t been around at all for the last two days – Cormac had looked for him a couple of times, and when he hadn’t found him had assumed that he’d gone to Dublin after all, to track down Lorna’s elusive friend. The fact that he was back at his desk suggested that whatever he’d found in Dublin was good news. Cormac would drag him out for pints that evening, without Fisher, and check that all was okay, maybe push a bit more about Healy. In the meantime, he had work to do.
The meeting with Katherine Shelley hadn’t brought much new information, once he’d had a chance to sit down and analyse it, but in a backwards sort of a way that was helpful. She had given him a different take on Mrs Keane, now the helpful neighbour, according to Katherine Shelley. Why had she wanted the children to stay with a mother who abused them? If she was that close, that present, she must have known what was going on. Tom Collins had been very sure that Keane was the one supplying the alcohol. It should have been counterintuitive, that whole story – that a religious woman would have interfered with social workers trying to care for those children, that she would have plied an alcoholic with booze. Somehow it wasn’t. Somehow, it was utterly predictable. How much of his views about Catholic Ireland had been formed by the outpouring of stories of abuse over the past ten years, from the Magdalene Laundries to Brendan Smyth? Had he felt the same way – suspicious of all things religious – back in the nineties? He honestly couldn’t remember.
He was still mulling this over when his phone buzzed, and a voice he didn’t recognise told him that he was to report to Chief Inspector Murphy’s office as soon as possible. Cormac gathered the file and his notebook, and left the room, climbing the stairs to Murphy’s office. Murphy’s aide, a female officer, waved him directly in.
Murphy listened politely enough while Cormac walked him through his work so far. It was premature for a briefing; he’d only had the case a few days. A review meeting this early smacked of micromanagement. What happened to ‘preliminary report by Friday’? Murphy leaned back in his chair, allowing it to swivel slightly from side to side as he listened to Cormac. He had a pen in one hand, which he wiggled between two fingers, occasionally bringing it down on the desk and letting it play against the surface in a drumming motion that punctuated Cormac’s report. It was distracting, as was the tension on Murphy’s face. He waited until Cormac had gone through it all, right up to the social worker interview, Cormac’s planned next steps, and his view that the investigation was, so far, not showing any signs that it would yield a suspect, let alone an arrest.
When he finished speaking, Murphy paused for effect, then sighed. ‘That’s it?’
‘Yes sir,’ said Cormac. ‘There’s not much there. I suppose, after twenty years, it’s inevitable to some degree.’
But Murphy was shaking his head. ‘And Detective Hackett hasn’t spoken to you about the evidence her team’s been able to uncover?’
Cormac had nothing to say. Melanie Hackett? Danny’s boss? Danny reported to her when he wasn’t seconded to the drugs unit. She was young, she was ambitious, and as far as he knew, she had nothing whatsoever to do with his case.
‘I’ll admit to being disappointed, Detective. I’d heard good things about you. But perhaps I expected too much.’ Before Cormac had a chance to respond, Murphy pressed the intercom button. ‘Send them in,’ was all he said.
Cormac turned as the door opened, and watched as Danny and Melanie Hackett walked into the room. Murphy gestured for them to take the two remaining chairs, which necessitated an awkward shuffle over from Cormac, to allow Mel access to the chair in the middle. Mel gave him a nod, then ignored him, but Danny, who appeared for once both rested and reasonably well dressed – he was wearing slacks and a dark blue shirt with a navy Ralph Lauren pony on the left breast – looked at him and tried and failed to communicate a silent message. Cormac had no idea what was going on, but the signs weren’t good.
Murphy nodded to Mel Hackett. ‘Mel, perhaps you should fill Detective Reilly in on the assistance you can offer him with his case?’
When she spoke, Hackett addressed herself to Murphy. ‘As you know sir, McIntyre has been seconded to Operation Sparrow.’ She turned her attention to Cormac and spoke briefly. ‘You may be aware that the task force is focused on possible drug-running routes into Europe from landings on the west coast of Ireland. Early on in the operation it focused on gathering information from our local lower level informants, in an attempt to confirm information provided by MAOC.’ MAOC was the Lisbon-based Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre, staffed with law-enforcement personnel from European countries including Ireland. ‘Garda McIntyre was aware of some of the details of DS Reilly’s case. He knew that DS Reilly was searching for a source for heroin in Kilmore in 1993. McIntyre ran a search through PULSE, and came up with a name. A young woman from Kilmore was taken into custody in 1994. She was found in the company of a drug dealer in Castlebar, and was thought to be under age, so someone took her in, took her details. That was the first time she was picked up, but it wasn’t the last.’
‘And this woman’s in prison now?’ Murphy asked. ‘Looking for early release in exchange for information?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Murphy nodded, and gestured for Hackett to continue.
‘I encourage everyone who reports to me to use their initiative,’ Hackett said. ‘And that is exactly what Garda McIntyre did. He ran her name through our database and found that she had provided information to Operation Sparrow in the past, though that information hadn’t been useful. He decided that there was a chance she would have information that would be relevant to DS Reilly’s operation. As it was something of a long shot he thought he would interview the informant himself before bringing any possible information to DS Reilly. His hunch paid off far better than he expected.’
‘I was going to Dublin anyway,’ Danny said hurriedly. ‘Really, I didn’t expect anything to come of it, or I would have brought it straight to DS Reilly. But I . . .’
Hackett gave him a look that said ‘shut the fuck up’ as clearly as if she’d said the words aloud.
‘So you brought that information to me,’ Murphy said to Hackett. His tone was on the dry side of neutral, and she flushed slightly. ‘You didn’t think this information would be best provided directly to DS Reilly?’
‘I . . . DS Reilly wasn’t at his desk, sir, when the information came to me, and I thought it best that I provide it to you without delay.’
Cormac kept his expression bland, uninterested, but inside he was cursing himself. He’d underestimated the hostility towards him in the station, and he was about to pay for that mistake.
‘Well, he’s here now,’ Murphy said.
Hackett hesitated, then turned to Cormac. ‘The informant’s name is Hannah Collins. She grew up in Kilmore. Her younger brother was, as I understand it, very close to your suspect.’
‘You’re talking about Thomas Collins,’ said Cormac, his voice flat.
‘Hannah Collins was arrested last year. She’s an addict, her boyfriend’s a dealer. The boyfriend beat up another addict who owed him money. Hannah was involved. She was convicted of conspiracy to commit GBH, and sentenced to five years. She’s served just under a year. McIntyre, will you please report the substance of your interview with Hannah Collins?’
Danny cleared his throat. He didn’t look at Cormac. ‘Uh . . . I was aware from conversations with DS Reilly that he was investigating a suspicious death in Kilmore in the nineties. The victim died from a heroin overdose. As DS Hackett said, I found Hannah’s name
on PULSE, figured that if she was doing drugs in Kilmore in ’94, there was a reasonable chance that she might know where DS Reilly’s suspect could have bought heroin in 1993. I saw she was in prison, I ran her name through the Operation Sparrow database, and found she’d been an informant once before.’ Danny shrugged. He looked miserable. ‘I thought it would be worth visiting her while I was there, see if she had any idea who would have been supplying heroin locally back in the day.’ Danny shifted his weight awkwardly. ‘I would have spoken to DS Reilly first, but as DS Hackett said, I thought it was a bit of a long shot.’
‘A long shot worth taking, it seems,’ Murphy said.
‘Yes sir.’
Shit. There was nothing Cormac could do but sit back and watch it coming.
Danny continued. ‘Hannah’s given a statement. She says that Maude Blake came to her directly to ask her to procure heroin for her. Hannah introduced Maude to her boyfriend at the time, who sold heroin to Maude. Two days later, Hilaria Blake died of an overdose.’
Cormac finally escaped the office fifteen minutes later. It was agreed that Hannah Collins’s statement would be passed to him by Danny and Mel. He was to get full copies of Hilaria Blake’s medical records, assuming that they hadn’t been destroyed. And then he was to bring Maude in for questioning. He didn’t go far, just walked to the end of the corridor and waited at the corner. As he’d suspected, Danny got the boot shortly afterwards. Murphy wanted to speak with Melanie Hackett alone. Cormac gave Danny a jerk of the head, then turned and walked down the stairs and out of the station, not looking to see if Danny would follow. He turned left at the steps and walked into the carpark, waited.
‘Hannah Collins,’ Cormac said when Danny reached him. ‘Is this bullshit, Dan? Why is it this smells of bullshit to me?’
‘Christ, Cormac, I’m sorry.’
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