Living Death

by Graham Masterton

  ‘We still haven’t identified the victim?’

  ‘Not so far. His body’s been sent off to CUH, and the technical experts are taking DNA and blood samples. We won’t be able to circulate pictures to the media, though, because he doesn’t have what you might describe as a face.’

  Katie sat down at her desk. On the top of the stack of papers in front of her was a confidential security report on the Cork Islamic community, which numbered about five thousand, and in particular the school that was being set up in the new Muslim cultural centre at Turners Cross. She lifted the cover and read the first page and then let the cover drop back. As if her life wasn’t under enough pressure already.

  ‘All right, Robert, thanks. I’ll ring Inspector O’Brien and see what the latest is. There isn’t too much we can do, though, until we put a name to this dead dognapper. I can’t afford to send you all out hunting for missing dogs, as you very well know. I simply don’t have the manpower available, or the budget.’

  Once Detective Dooley had left, she shuffled through all of the paperwork on her desk to see if there was anything that required her urgent attention. At the same time she listened to the voicemail messages on her phone and checked her texts and her emails. She had taken only one morning off and already she felt that she was being buried under a blizzard of paperwork.

  The most pressing message had been sent by Inspector Noonan. Somebody had deliberately started a fire at the new €5 million housing estate built at St Anthony’s Park to rehouse the Travellers who had previously lived on the halting site at Knocknaheeny. The Travellers had moved to their smart new houses only under protest, partly because they had wanted financial compensation but mostly because they hadn’t been allowed to take their horses with them. Several of them had threatened to vandalise the estate, and now it looked as if one of them might have carried out his threat. At least the city fire brigade had quickly contained the blaze and nobody had been injured.

  Katie knew that it would take more than detective work to solve this problem. If it turned out that a Traveller had started the fire, she would have to meet with the Traveller Visibility Group to see if something could be done to settle the Romas’ outstanding grievances. Then again, it could have been set by a disgruntled local resident who objected to so many Travellers moving in nearby.

  Her phone rang. It was Inspector O’Brien, calling from Bandon.

  ‘Oh, Terry,’ she said. ‘Thanks a million for ringing. You saved me from ringing you, as a matter of fact. What’s the story on this shooting?’

  ‘We’re more than slightly puggalised, to tell you the truth,’ said Inspector O’Brien.

  ‘Why’s that? From the sound of it, it was pretty straightforward.’

  ‘On the face of it, yes. A gang of dognappers breaks into a boarding kennels in the early hours of the morning and starts making off with the dogs, so the owner comes out and takes a potshot at them.’

  ‘So what’s the mystery?’

  ‘On closer consideration there’s a couple of things that don’t exactly fit, like, do you know what I mean? The victim wasn’t armed but there was a hurley lying on the ground next to him, as if he’d dropped it when he was shot. The technical experts used a scanner right then and there for fingerprints and the victim had definitely been holding the hurley himself prior to having his brains blown out. However there were scores more prints all over it – handle and bas both – and these all matched the kennel owner, Eoin Cassidy.’

  ‘So the hurley was probably his? Eoin Cassidy’s?’

  Inspector O’Brien said, ‘That’s right, and when we questioned him back at Weir Street he admitted it was. First of all he tried to make out that he’d been carrying the hurley along with his shotgun, and that the victim had snatched it from him, but we pointed out to him how unlikely this was. It would have been fierce awkward for him to be carrying a shotgun in one hand and a hurley in the other. Not only that – even if he really was carrying the both of them, why did he allow the victim to get close enough to snatch the hurley, when he was also holding a shotgun? And how did the victim manage to get so far away with it before he shot him, and how come the victim was facing him when he fired?’

  ‘What did he say to all of that?’ asked Katie.

  ‘He retracted his first explanation, and said that he was under such stress that he was confused, and that maybe he hadn’t been carrying the hurley after all. When we asked him again how the victim had managed to lay his hands on it, he said he plain couldn’t remember.’

  ‘How about you, Terry?’ asked Katie. ‘Do you have any theories?’

  ‘I don’t have a bull’s notion, ma’am, to be honest with you,’ said Inspector O’Brien. ‘But Sergeant Doherty talked to Cassidy’s wife, and he came away with the very strong impression that Cassidy wasn’t telling us the truth. Not the whole truth, any road.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘She was totally in pieces, that’s what he said.’

  ‘Come on, that’s understandable, surely. Her husband had just killed a man, and all of their valuable dogs had been stolen. I think I’d be more than a little upset, too, if I was her.’

  ‘I don’t know – Doherty reckoned there was more to it than that. She was crying and shaking so much that she could hardly get a word out, and her face was bruised, too, although she kept trying to hide it from him with her hands. He didn’t want to push her any further, like, because she was so distressed, and he didn’t want to be accused of harassment. But I’d say she needs talking to again, preferably by a woman officer.’

  ‘I see,’ said Katie. She sat back in her chair, thinking hard. Then she said, ‘Did anybody else get a sconce at these dognappers? I mean, apart from the Cassidys?’

  ‘Nobody,’ said Inspector O’Brien. ‘Well, that was hardly surprising at four o’clock in the morning, right out there in back of leap. We’ve checked all the CCTV cameras on the main roads between Kinsale and Clon, but there’s no trace of a white van or a Range Rover, which is what Eoin Cassidy said they were driving, so they must have come and gone by some back route. That’s always assuming he wasn’t lying to us.’

  Katie said: ‘All right, Terry. Detective Dooley’s put out feelers about the dogs around the city. You know, to pet-shops and breeders and vets. I have to say that dognapping doesn’t rank very high on my list of priorities, just at the moment. If there wasn’t such a strong chance that it could help us to identify our victim I’d put the dogs under “file and forget”. But I think you’re right. It sounds like there’s more to this than meets the eye. For all we know, there may have been something personal between him and this Eoin Cassidy, and this dognapping story is just a blind.’

  A new message text popped up on her computer screen from Inspector Noonan. She paused to read it, and then she said, ‘Listen, Terry, I’ll tell you what, I’ll come down to Ballinroe East myself and talk to Cassidy’s wife.’

  ‘You mean yourself in person, like?’

  ‘Yes, me in person. Apart from anything else, I’d like to take a sconce at where this shooting took place. What’s the time now? I can be down there with you by half-past four.’

  ‘Are you sure about that, ma’am?’

  ‘You said yourself she needed a woman to talk to her. I’ll bring Detective Scanlan with me, too. She has a very sympathetic way with her, and it’ll be good experience for her.’

  ‘All right, then, that’s grand,’ said Inspector O’Brien. ‘I’ll meet you outside the kennels there in – what? – forty-five minutes, give or take. Maybe an hour.’

  Katie put down the phone. She didn’t really have to go down to Sceolan Boarding Kennels herself. She could have sent Detective Scanlan down on her own to interview Mrs Cassidy, or detailed Detective O’Mara to ride shotgun with her if there was any risk of Eoin Cassidy giving them trouble. But after what Inspector O’Brien had told her, she sensed that there was something unusual about this case which might be worth looking into, and she seriously didn’t feel like spe
nding the rest of the afternoon ploughing through her ‘in’ tray. She could make a start on that first thing tomorrow morning.

  There was another reason she was tempted to drive down to Ballinroe East. Even though she didn’t like to admit it to herself she wasn’t in any great hurry to get back home to John. In fact the very thought of it filled her with a feeling that was close to dread. He had suffered so much, and the rest of his life was going to be one horrendous struggle, both physical and mental. How could she tell him to his face that she didn’t love him any more, and that he was going to be nothing but a burden to her?

  She shrugged on her raincoat again and went along the corridor to Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin’s office. She knocked at his door and he called out, ‘Come along in!’ although when she went inside he was talking on the phone.

  She sat opposite him while he finished his conversation. He seemed bothered about something, and he kept turning a pencil end over end and tapping it on to his desk. He always looked as if he were chewing a wasp, even when he was pleased, but now he was obviously angry, too.

  ‘No, I’m not at all happy about the way you’ve been dragging this out! Sergeant Lynch handled that situation perfectly correctly, and you need to inform him officially that he wasn’t guilty of any wrongdoing! The next thing I know, he’s going to be doing a Michael Galvin on us, and committing suicide because he thinks that his career’s over and he’s going to end up in prison!’

  He paused to listen and then he snapped, ‘No! Absolutely not! Sort it out and then get back to me directly and let me know that you’ve sorted it out! Today! Yes, today!’

  He banged down the phone and looked across his desk at Katie with his nostrils flaring.

  ‘Who was that? The Ombudsman?’ she asked him.

  He nodded, still so angry that he was finding it difficult to speak. ‘They’ve already established that Sergeant Lynch committed no misdemeanour whatsoever. As you know, he wrote in his report that he’d seen Mrs Shelley standing on the pavement when he passed her by on the way to that hit-and-run on Grand Parade, but the CCTV showed her standing in the road.

  ‘He only glimpsed her out of the corner of his eye, for God’s sake, and she was less than three feet away from where he said she was. And it certainly wasn’t his fault that a taxi ran her over. I can’t imagine why the GSOC thought that was even worth investigating!’

  ‘And they haven’t yet told Lynch that he’s in the clear?’

  ‘No. But I shall do myself, right now. Holy Saint Joseph and all the carpenters – as if we don’t have enough accusations to put up with, without nitpicking inquiries like this!’

  He paused to compose himself, and then he said, ‘I thought you were taking the day off, Katie. Weren’t you supposed to be meeting that poor fellow of yours, the one who lost his legs?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I was, and I did. John came home this morning. I was going to stay home with him for the rest of the day myself but Begley called me about this shooting down at Ballinroe East.’

  ‘Oh, the dognapper.’

  ‘Well, we’re not one hundred per cent sure that he was a dognapper yet. The kennel owner claims he was – the fellow who shot him. But we won’t know for sure until we have a positive ID. I’m going down to Ballinroe myself to have a word with the kennel owner, and also the kennel owner’s wife.’

  ‘What about your legless fellow?’

  ‘He has a nurse who’s going to be taking care of him whenever I’m away.’

  Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin pressed his hand over his mouth and looked at her narrowly. Then he said, ‘Katie – you’re sure you haven’t taken too much on yourself? You’re already up the walls here at the station, especially with all of these new budget cuts. Fair play, your fellow has a nurse. But I remember my sister looking after my old Da when he went doolally. She had a carer to help her out but Mother of God, it almost killed her.’

  ‘John’s not demented, sir. He’s just disabled. It’ll get much easier once they fit him with his prosthetic legs and he can start to walk again.’

  ‘And how long will that take?’

  ‘I don’t know. Six months, maybe a year.’

  Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin stood up and came around his desk. He stood very close to her, saying nothing for a few seconds.

  ‘I’d better make tracks,’ said Katie. ‘I’ve arranged to meet Inspector O’Brien at the kennels, and it’s getting dark already.’

  ‘I, ah – well, take care of yourself, won’t you?’ said Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin. ‘If you start to feel that the pressure’s too much for you, come and talk to me. It’s what I’m here for. You’ve been pushing yourself to the limit lately, I’ve seen that, especially with all these drugs flooding into the city. I don’t want you falling apart. Remember what happened to Liam Fennessy.’

  Katie said nothing. Inspector Fennessy’s personal life had fallen apart, and then he had started taking cocaine, and accepting bribes, and in the end he had shot himself.

  ‘No, sir, nothing like that is going to happen to me. To be honest with you, I don’t have the time to fall apart.’

  6

  Once they had passed Cork airport, the rain began to ease off and the pillowy grey clouds opened up, so that the pale lemon-coloured light of day could shine through. The hedgerows glittered and the road surface up ahead of them was dazzling.

  ‘How’s it going with the drugs programme?’ asked Katie. ‘Did you manage to have that meeting with the HSE at last?’

  ‘This morning,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘Moira Kennedy from HSE and two women from Cuan Mhuire and a fellow from Matt Talbot Services and Jim Geoghegan from Merchants Quay, too. I haven’t had the time to write it up for you yet.’

  ‘Not a bother. I wouldn’t have had the time to read it, even if you had. What was the general gist of what they had to tell you? They must all be feeling the effects of this drug tsunami too.’

  Detective Scanlan said, ‘You’re not joking. Cork’s awash with heroin, that was how Jim Geoghegan described it. By his estimate, there’s at least five hundred hard-core heroin addicts in the city centre alone, and he wouldn’t be surprised if it’s half of that again on top of it. The trouble is, he can only count the number of addicts who come to Merchants Quay to use their free needle exchange.’

  ‘It’s getting mental,’ said Katie. ‘Think of how many peddlers we’ve lifted in the past two months – not only how many numerically but how much stuff we’ve found on each one of them. And look at those petty crime statistics we’ve just had in. They’re up seven-and-a-half per cent since the last quarter, and almost all of them are drug-related in one way or another.’

  Katie had been aware since the end of the summer that more hard drugs were being peddled in the city than ever before. Not only more drugs, but much purer drugs too, so that new users were becoming dependent much more rapidly. Her narcotics squad had reported that heroin was even being sold in broad daylight, in mid-afternoon, in some of the shopping malls. One dealer had been caught right outside Champions Sports in the Savoy Centre, offering free sample packets of heroin to young lads going in to buy runners.

  ‘Moira Kennedy from the HSE said that the hospitals are dealing with at least half-a-dozen near-fatal overdoses every week,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘Last year twelve people altogether died of heroin overdoses in Cork city alone, and if things carry on like this, she reckons that this year it will probably be more than twenty.’

  ‘But she hasn’t picked up any hint at all where it’s coming from, all this heroin? Nor Jim Geoghegan, neither, nor Cuan Mhuire? Because, let’s face it, we’re still totally in the dark, too. The street dealers are mostly the same old scummers as always, but the quantity they’re selling now, and the quality of it. There’s no question at all that there’s somebody new in the business, and they’re incredibly well organised. But who is it?’

  ‘I talked to Declan Murphy from the Real IRA yesterday morning,’ said Detective Scanlan. �
�Even he doesn’t know who it is, or makes out he doesn’t, anyhow, and if anybody should know, it’s him. But I’m working on a couple of new contacts at the moment. I think one of them has a half an idea who’s behind it, but he’s too jibber to tell me.’

  ‘Well, keep on nagging him,’ Katie told her.

  ‘I will. Besides, I think he fancies me something rotten, so I might get lucky.’

  Katie gave her a quick sideways smile. Detective Scanlan was just twenty-four – tall and thin as a model, with a wave of shoulder-length brunette hair. She was very unusual-looking: she had a long pointed nose, but her huge violet eyes and her pouting pink lips gave her an almost magical appearance, as if she were an aes sidh, a fairy who had decided to join the mortal police force.

  Over the past few weeks, Katie had become increasingly pleased by the progress she was making. Pádraigin Scanlan was one of a team of four young detectives whom Katie had selected to give special guidance and encouragement. ‘Katie’s Kids’, Detective O’Donovan called them, although he didn’t mean it entirely as a compliment. But what these four lacked in street experience they more than made up for in other ways. They were attractive and bright and computer-literate and all of them looked young for their age, which meant that they could mingle with college and university students and infiltrate Cork’s thriving club scene. Detective O’Donovan was approaching forty. He was putting on weight and his hair was starting to turn grey. As canny and as hardened as he was, he would have found it impossible to pass himself off as a raver at Rearden’s or Cyprus Avenue.

  ‘You have eaten something today?’ Katie asked Detective Scanlan. ‘I don’t want you fainting on me in mid-interview.’

  ‘Oh, I’m grand altogether,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘I had a cheese and bacon burger at Coqbull for lunch, with the chorizo fries. I’m full as an egg.’