by Jane Ryan
I shuddered.
‘Map says it’s a mile up here.’ I pointed towards a stalky hedgerow same as any other bush for miles around.
A crackle burst from Liam’s radio and the car in front began to slow. ‘Pull in up here.’ It was Cig Murray.
Liam parked the car and we got out, all Garda jackets and caps. A woman from the Armed Support Unit flicked a red ponytail through the eye at the back of her cap.
The rain had eased, leaving the smell of drenched briarwood everywhere.
‘What’s the plan?’ Liam asked me.
A compacted dirt road led into the Farm.
We were standing in the thin light of the open car door.
‘Approach with caution,’ I said. ‘We have to assume –’
‘Have you been here before?’ Cig Murray cut right across me. He was the type of man who asked questions if the answers made him top dog.
I shook my head.
‘Charlie, no one knows Flannery like Bridge,’ said Liam.
Cig Murray eyeballed Liam in front of all the armed detectives and waited.
‘Eh . . . Cig,’ said Liam.
Cig Murray, not high in my estimation, nose-dived.
‘Right, you two, close the car door and let your eyes get used to the dark. Don’t want to explain to DCS Muldoon that one of you shot the other.’
Canned laughter in the background. We had been reduced tocity idiots. It didn’t bother me but I could see it rankled Liam.
‘Right – I’m at the rear with my lads –’ he pointed at two chinless detectives. ‘Dubs in the middle where we can keep an eye on them. Armed Support Unit in front.’
The car light went out and the dark sucked at me. I blinked rapidly, willing my pupils to widen to catch whatever light was available. My surroundings moved into shades of black. The ASU had their night-vision goggles on.
The ASU were in a single-file formation, making themselves a more difficult target, and about to take the lead, which was the correct procedure with the rest of us well behind. Then Cig Murray changed his mind and walked to helm, not about to give up being bandleader.
He turned and held a hand up for attention.
‘This is Kilmacow Farm,’ he said. ‘Used to belong to a family called Gillespie – last of them died couple of months ago and there’s no family local, so I’d expect it to be empty.’
I was impressed with his local knowledge and would have said as much, but he wasn’t for listening.
‘This road’s about quarter of a mile long – the homeplace is right at the back,’ he said. ‘Double time, lads!’
It was beyond ridiculous – no one jogged in this type of dark. We weren’t reserve cadets on manoeuvres.
But I was damned if I’d slow anyone down.
‘Hand!’ I called out to the nearest ASU detective and she stepped in towards me.
I put my hand in the strap on her vest, made for this purpose, and we broke into an easy trot. She was surefooted as a mountain goat and had night goggles.
Liam tagged my shoulder and kept step with us.
Cig Murray puffed, having set too fast a pace for himself. Others stumbled in the dark, either not knowing how or not wanting to attach themselves to an ASU officer.
‘Nearly there, lads!’ said Cig Murray.
He sounded giddy and it made me even more uneasy.
The Farm was squirreled away at the back of a wooded paddock as though the Gillespies had wanted to get as far back from their fellowman as possible. I could see its attraction for Flannery.
‘Here,’ said a voice. ‘Use a torch – weak beam.’
My escort took off her night-vision goggles and flashed a torch at an old five-bar galvanised-steel gate leading to the house. When this house had been a real home, someone had painted the frame blue with every second bar white. Now a thick creeper with hairy veins had claimed a third of the gate and looked in no hurry to stop.
Cig Murray held up his hand in a needless fist – we were right behind him.
Liam’s embarrassment hung in the air.
I said, ‘We should check –’
‘I have this, Garda Harney. Visual scan complete. No danger. Proceed.’ He was so full of himself he couldn’t see anything other than his hand waving us forward.
One of the ASU shouted at Cig Murray. ‘Cig, it could be –’
An explosive bang threw everyone back.
‘Charlie!’ Liam yelled.
The gate was booby-trapped. The creeper was smouldering and the metallic smell of electrical charge blanketed the air. Murray was thrown by the blast and had landed on his back, an upended beetle. The smell of burnt flesh and he was shrieking.
An ASU garda ran to him.
‘Murray’s in shock, but it could have been worse,’ said the garda. ‘You lads take him back down the road and in to St Luke’s – A&E will sort him out.’
Cig Murray had stopped screaming and someone shone a light at him. Tribal black burn-marks streaked his face. He blinked in slow motion, giving him a defenceless look, and I had a moment’s pity for him. He’d expected some junked-up yob, intimidated by armed officers, spraying bullets and missing his target.
‘This is a delaying tactic – we need to move – they might be still inside,’ I said to Liam and the garda at the front of the ASU column.
The ASU crept forward towards the house. It was in total blackness. I stayed behind them in line with protocol.
It happened quickly and it was too dark for me to see how they knocked in the door.
Three more ASU officers swarmed in ahead of me. Grunts, exertion, then a call.
‘Clear!’
Thundering feet came down the steep staircase.
‘Clear!’
I ran inside the front door and flicked on the nearest switch. A naked bulb gave out a feeble glow. The house was double-fronted and shallow, main ‘good’ rooms at the front. Everything was swallowed in decay, the interior stuffed with rot. A bed in the front room was unmade with a rusting safety razor on the sideboard. It smelled of damp plaster and loneliness.
‘Pity the poor so-and-so who was living here,’ said Liam.
We moved towards the kitchen, the ASU still leading. The kitchen couldn’t hold everyone. Of the two doors presented, one was internal so we took the sturdier door to the outside. Nothing but clotted gravel and a shed made of rusty sheet metal. No one was here. I twisted my neck to release the tension and pulled the night air in through my nose.
Liam was in the shed and stood in a slice of light from a naked bulb over an open chest freezer. One of the detectives around him was already on his radio calling it in and requesting the Technical Bureau.
‘Bridge!’ said Liam.
Experience told me there’d be another girl I’d failed in the freezer.
It was Lorraine Quigley. Saw the skinny elbows and remembered them sticking out of the short buttercup-yellow jumper that wore her. She was naked and packed away, an orchid bud starved of the light it needed to burst open, petals folded in on itself. Lorraine’s hair was piled on the top of her head in her trademark barrette clip. Her face was unrecognisable.
‘Lorraine, what did he do to you?’ I whispered.
Her frozen face, or what Seán Flannery had left of it. I had seen too many brutalised body parts to cry. Instead I internalised it, a pocket for a tear.
‘She was Flannery’s girlfriend, wasn’t she?’ said Liam. ‘You got her away from him and she was going to give evidence against him?’ His hand hovered near my shoulder as though wanting to comfort me.
I leaned against him for support.
‘I didn’t get her far enough away. I was going to get her and her baby to safety, give them witness protection. Christ, I had this idea she could stay in Birmingham, thought Flannery would never find her. It was possible – until she disappeared. Last time I heard from her she was making her way down to her cousin’s caravan in Wexford. How did I let this happen?’
‘Give yourself a break, Bridge – yo
u got the baby away.’
I gave a stiff bob of my head. Baby Marie was with Lorraine’s cousin.
‘If this was Flannery, we might get DNA,’ Liam said. ‘She was beaten. Even if the assailant wore gloves there’ll be sweat, blood, patterns, something. This took a lot of human contact.’
‘Look at her – she’s naked and I’d say doused in saline or something that will wash trace DNA off.’
I walked back to the house, the thoughts in my brain so much twisted cable running the same current. This was my fault. Different tune, same lyrics.
‘Garda Harney!’
It was one of the ASU.
‘Over here!’
He was shining an industrial torch on a looming box shape about as big as a family-sized bungalow jutting off the house. Had there been daylight we would have spotted it already, but the building belonged to the night, the outside painted coal-black.
The ASU guy came towards me. ‘It doesn’t seem to have an outside entrance.’
I ran back into the house – to the second door.
One of the other ASU officers was at the door checking for boobytraps. There were none apparent, no extra wires or suspicious connections, but everyone was on high alert after what happened to Cig Murray. The door jamb had been enlarged and one of the ASU tried the door handle. It wouldn’t budge. He had a kit with him and made tiny anti-clockwise movements with a pliers deep inside the lock until the door snapped open.
It opened outwards and inside was a clean room of white plastic and chrome. Precise and square with machines for pill-pressing and dehumidifiers. Others, large as washing machines, were a mystery. At the centre of the room was a bagging machine and checkweigher, all pharmaceutical-grade even to my untrained eye.
‘Get Liam O’Shea in here,’ I said.
Liam’s breath came in quick puffs from running. He turned wide-eyed to me.
‘Have you ever seen a dealer’s lab like this?’ he said. ‘It belongs in a hospital!’
‘He’s not a dealer, Liam. He’s a corporation.’
‘Can you imagine how much money he makes?’
‘He’ll need every penny to compensate the cartel for losing the shipment,’ I said.
Liam faced me. ‘You were right, Bridge – he was tipped off – but I don’t think he had much time, otherwise he would have burned this place to the ground.’
He pulled me out of the doorway so he could enter. His foot rose with a heavy forward motion, but at the same time a black gloved hand gripped his ankle.
‘Trip wire!’ yelled the ASU who was squatting by the door.
We both looked down at the single strand of fisherman’s wire across its base.
‘There’s a second inner door,’ said the ASU. ‘The door jamb was modified to make room for it – but look – it’s wide open. They were hoping we’d just barge in. Both of you move back slowly. We’ll need the bomb disposal unit.’
Liam and I went outside to the yard. The Tech Bureau were in situ but not moving out of their vans until the place was declared safe.
‘Who has bombs and clean rooms? Who is this guy, Bridge? Paddy Escobar?’
I snorted back a laugh. ‘Kind of.’
Chapter 6
The tartan blanket was stiff with black dirt, but filth never bothered Seán Flannery. It was one more type of disguise. He was sitting in the doorway of a ‘to let’ restaurant in Monkstown’s crescent, a once-busy grocer’s shop decades back. The cold October wind blew grit and the bitter tang of road tar into his face. The low winter sun had turned the roadworkers into a dayglo chain gang. Seán had watched their confused progression for two days, noting the local worthies were not pleased, holding their sharp noses a fraction higher as they walked by, too busy muttering about ‘slipshod builders’ and ‘corrupt councillors’ to drop a coin in Seán’s tatty paper cup.
It suited him. The village was sleepy and quiet from the diverted traffic. A fear had gnawed at him since the abandoned Fuentes shipment and something like injustice at the stones on the DOCB for stealing his drugs and some Garda buffoon on television talking about teamwork and striking a blow at the heart of organised crime. It rankled. And they’d trashed the Farm. Gardaí had respect for nothing, tearing down a man’s legacy. He rammed an ancient deerstalker hat further down his head, the fleece matted with grease from someone else’s hair. He’d filched it from a charity shop as he walked through Blackrock. The invisible hobo. Insulated from the cold in an ancient parka, he watched the men working from his vantage point, lost in the beat of the steel rollers moving over the black-glitter glue of bitumen. The roadworkers folded in more gravel and rolled again, as though working toffee, the rhythm of their travails a meditation.
It took Seán away, his eyes half-shut and a layer of white flocculent sleep all but descending on him. He put his hand into his boxers. Right under the jock cup was a concealed pocket. He touched the teeth of his house key, their jagged edges soothing him.
Lorraine came to him. Not the shredded woman in the warehouse, too destroyed to recoil from the punches, but Lorraine as she lay frozen, the ice fogging and reshaping her into a serene Madonna. It was a peaceful scene until Seán remembered the baby girl he’d orphaned. She punctured his self-awareness, leaving it as pocked as the road surface. He should have killed the child – instead he left her to a motherless fate. Proof, if it was needed, that he was formed from original sin. It made sense of his cruelty and inability to feel remorse . . . but he had felt remorse about Lorraine’s child. He struck his head, wanting to smack down the unassailable questions mid-air.
He shifted his thoughts away from that, to another girl walking around the backroom of his mind, so ripe at the age of nine. The soft downy skin on her arms and her dreams pulsing below the transparent skin of her eyelids. His desire was malevolent, dark as tar seeping into his pores, suffocating him.
He blamed original sin. The nuns in the Home said not even Jesus could wash away his sin. Despite that, Jesus would try to love him. Without end. A millstone of forgiveness around his neck to wander through life with. Seán hadn’t believed the nuns’ fantastic stories of women turned to salt and oracle boys whose dreams came true – but original sin was different. St Augustine, who Seán knew about from his time in the boys’ home named after him, declared that original sin was passed down through the generations when people had sexual intercourse and conceived a child. If the offspring was of an unwed mother, even baptism couldn’t wash away the sin. Seán was doused in it.
A Nissan van screeched to a halt.
Seán’s head whipped up while his legs thrashed out of the tangled rug. Four men from the road gang ran towards him. Another man tarring the road looked at the melee, the quick movements of the men drawing his eye. Seán’s fingers scratched the pavement, struggling for purchase. The roadworker looked away from his terror. Those other men were unstoppable. Big, ugly conscripts with anabolic bodies. Fear bit into Seán and numbed his feet, turning them towards one another in his unlaced boots – he jerked his knees upwards to release his feet from them. A hand reached him. Grabbed the parka. Seán shrugged it off and ran. Past an empty pub in his bare feet, heading for the boiling tar of the new road surface. Four hands hiked him up before he reached it. His legs chopped the air, his left arm brought back to an unnatural angle and close to snapping.
‘Youuuu!’ Seán called out to the roadworker who had caught his eye, but the man shrugged and continued breastfeeding his shovel. This was not his fight.
‘We have you now, Seán,’ said one of the attackers. ‘There’s a good man and don’t make a scene. Or I’ll break your arm.’
‘Do youse scum know who you’re dealing with?’
‘We do, Seán – but maybe you not – Big Man,’ said another, the air of pack leader about him, despite his pinched features. He had a cheerful, chilling tone of voice and a Slavic accent. He mangled his English into horror-show bites and was soaked in Eau de Psycho. Here for the impersonal violence.
Seán swallo
wed his pain and terror. His chances of surviving would collapse with a broken arm. Two of the men hog-tied him with plastic cable-ties and slung him into the back of the white van with a single yellow stripe, head first. The deerstalker took most of the impact, but there was a crunch and a warm line along his eyebrow.
The abduction had taken less than two minutes. It happened so fast a bystander wouldn’t have realised what they were looking at. The van looked commonplace yet official.
Fear and panic played on Seán so the van doors appeared to close in slow motion, peeling him back to the boy with his face pushed into ammonia-smelling black trousers.
Chapter 7
‘Well, Miss?’
‘Well!’
I beamed at Joe Clarke.
Joe was my sergeant when I’d first started in the Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau. He backed me to go to the UK when the Flannery arm-in-the-pig-carcass case gained national notoriety and the press were crawling around. He held me together when Kay died and lied to keep me out of prison after I’d falsified evidence. What had I given him in return? Made his name mud in the Bureau and a posting to a rural armpit. Yet, he still considered me one of his closest allies. I swallowed. I deserved no such regard from him, but I would be trampled underfoot for Joe if needed.
He was visiting me in my eyrie on the fifth floor of Harcourt Square. His uniform hung in pleated folds off a reduced body. His once dark hair was greying and needed a trim.
‘It’s good to see you, Joe.’
I was out from behind my desk and across into his bear hug, amazed my arms could reach behind his back.
‘What has you here?’ I asked. ‘Visiting old friends or couldn’t stay away?’
He gave a throaty chuckle. ‘I got a start in the Criminal Assets Bureau. I go back a bit with Muldoon and the boredom in Wexford was lancing me. It’s dead in the bed after summer, nothing but breaking and entering caravans or drunk patrol. You look surprised?’ His face was lit with a broad smile and he slapped my shoulder. ‘What has you up here? It’s a bit grim.’
