Living Death

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Holy Mary, I don’t know where you put it all,’ Katie told her. ‘You must have extra-efficient metabolism.’

  She looked again at Detective Scanlan in her skin-tight jeans with the belt done up to the very last hole and wondered if she had been as thin at that age. Probably, although she had been much more bosomy. When they had first got together, her late husband Paul had almost been able to close both of his hands around her waist.

  ‘You should eat more,’ Paul used to say to her. ‘Don’t want you snapping in half, like, do we?’

  *

  It was dark by the time they reached the harbour town of Kinsale, but the restaurants and bars were all lit up and the pavements were crowded.

  ‘Jesus, I could do with a drink,’ said Katie, as they passed the scarlet-painted front of Max’s Wine Bar, on Main Street.

  ‘Serious?’ said Detective Scanlan.

  ‘Not really. I don’t want to keep Inspector O’Brien waiting. But maybe we’ll stop for one on the way back.’

  Once they had driven through the busy town centre, the darkness closed in again, and they were on their own. They crossed the long concrete bridge that spanned the last wide bend in the River Bandon. Apart from the roadway ahead of them, flatly illuminated by their headlamps, all they could see now was the black glittering water of the estuary, and a sprinkling of lights from the houses that were perched high on the hills all around them.

  In this landscape – although she had Detective Scanlan with her – Katie suddenly felt a pang of loneliness. When she had first told her father that she was thinking of joining An Garda Siochána, he had taken hold of her hands and said to her, ‘Think on this, Katie. From the moment you become a guard, no matter how many friends you have, no matter who loves you, people will always be wary of you. You’ll have made yourself an outsider, for the rest of your life.’

  They turned down the R604 and arrived at last at the entrance to Sceolan Boarding Kennels. Inspector O’Brien was already sitting in his black Mondeo by the side of the road, along with a uniformed sergeant. Katie flashed her lights and they climbed out to meet her.

  ‘What’s the story, Terry?’ said Katie. ‘I hope we haven’t kept you waiting too long.’

  ‘No bother at all, ma’am,’ said Inspector O’Brien. ‘Gave us a chance to have a much-needed hang sandwidge.’

  Inspector O’Brien was a stubby little bull of a man with very blue eyes and thinning, combed-over hair. Katie thought that if he put on a long striped apron he would look just like a butcher from the English Market.

  ‘This is Detective Scanlan,’ Katie told him. ‘I brought her along because she has a way of persuading women to confess to things that they wouldn’t even tell their best friend.’

  ‘Sounds exactly like my moth,’ said Inspector O’Brien. ‘She knows everybody’s business before they find it out themselves. This here is Sergeant Doherty. It was Sergeant Doherty who talked to Mrs Cassidy this morning, but like I told you, she was very unforthcoming, and pure distressed, so he considered it wiser to terminate the interview and question her later, when she’d had some time to calm down and reflect, like.’

  ‘Very sensible, sergeant,’ said Katie. ‘I gather she has some bruising on her face, too.’

  ‘She does, yes, desperate,’ said Sergeant Doherty. He was tall and stockily built, with a large bony head, and curled-up ears. In his yellow high-viz jacket he looked even more padded than he actually was, as if he wouldn’t be able to run more than a hundred metres before being puffed out. ‘I never got around to asking her how she came by them, all them bruises – whether she was the victim of domestic violence or whether she’d had some kind of an accident in inverted commas. You know – tripped and banged her face on the washing-machine like most of these battered wives do. She gave me the feeling that even if I did ask her, she wouldn’t tell me.’

  ‘Well, I think you did the right thing by cutting the interview short,’ said Katie. ‘She only would have retreated into her shell even more if you’d kept on pressing her. You didn’t warn the Cassidys that we were going to pay them a visit now, did you, inspector?’

  Inspector O’Brien shook his head. ‘No, but I’ve advised Eoin Cassidy that even if he doesn’t get formally charged for shooting your man, we’ll be requiring his co-operation for quite some time to come. We still need to ask him a rake of questions, and the technical experts haven’t yet finished taking prints and fibres from all of the kennels. There’s any amount of wire fencing where somebody’s sweater or jacket could have got snagged.’

  ‘What about identikit pictures?’

  ‘Those, too. I’ve told him that we’ll be using his description of the victim to prepare some 3-D facial approximations – you know, with the ZBrush software, like. I know they’re more generic than your hand-drawn re-creations, but that’s all we can stretch to, at the moment. Bill Phinner has a forensic artist on his team, doesn’t he? But he told me that she’s not available right now.’

  ‘You mean Eithne O’Neill,’ said Katie. ‘Yes, she’s very good. In fact she’s brilliant. But she’s off on compassionate leave at the moment. Her sister’s dying of cancer, sad to say.’

  ‘Oh. I didn’t know that. I’m sorry to hear it. And there was me grumbling to Bill because I can’t afford a freelance artist. Not on my budget.’

  ‘Well, let’s just see how this all plays out,’ said Katie. ‘Let’s go and take a look at the scene of the shooting, shall we, and then Detective Scanlan and I can have a few words with Mrs Cassidy.’

  ‘Her name’s Cleona, by the way,’ put in Sergeant Doherty. ‘And go easy on her when you ask her about the dogs. You’d think she’d lost her children, the way she’s talking.’

  They returned to their cars and drove up the sloping driveway towards the two rows of kennels. Every individual bay had a light on, even the empty ones; and the two main wall lamps were shining too, so that the tarmac courtyard in between the two rows of kennels was starkly illuminated, like a deserted film set. A blue vinyl forensic tent was pitched right in the middle of it, surrounded by blue-and-white garda tape, and a Garda patrol car was parked beside the house.

  After they had climbed out of their cars, Inspector O’Brien came across to Katie and said, ‘I did recommend to the Cassidys that they move away for a while, in case any of the gang decided to come back and retaliate. But they insisted that they couldn’t leave the dogs that were left behind. There’s still thirteen of them all told, and they wouldn’t hear of the CSPCA taking them in, even temporary-like.

  ‘That’s why I’ve posted two armed officers here twenty-four hours a day – at least until we’ve put a name to our victim, and we know exactly who we’re looking for.’

  ‘Have they given you a full list of the dogs that were taken?’

  Sergeant Doherty held up a folded sheet of paper. ‘Twenty-six of them altogether. Mostly they went for the big dogs. Two German Shepherds, three bull terriers, a Vizsla, two boxers, one mastiff... but there’s a Samoyed here and that’s worth nearly eight-and-a-half thousand euros, according to Eoin Cassidy.’

  They walked towards the house. In one of the kennels, a Labrador was mournfully and repetitively barking, while a wire-haired fox terrier was jumping up and down and yapping in excited bursts.

  Inspector O’Brien knocked at the front door and one of the gardaí opened it, almost at once. He must have been expecting them, even if the Cassidys weren’t.

  ‘All right, sir?’ said the garda. ‘Everything’s quiet.’ He jerked his head towards the kennels. ‘Well, except for the effing dogs, like, do you know what I mean?’

  They went into the living-room. Eoin Cassidy was hunched on the end of the couch, watching Today with Maura and Daithi on the television. The second garda was sitting with his arms folded in a straight-backed wooden chair against the wall, looking infinitely bored. A crumpled copy of The Sun was lying on the floor at his feet, where he had obviously dropped it after finishing with the sports pages. He stood up when
Katie and Inspector O’Brien came into the room, but Eoin remained where he was, staring unblinkingly at the television, and didn’t even turn his head.

  ‘Mr Cassidy?’ said Inspector O’Brien. ‘Mr Cassidy – this is Detective Superintendent Maguire from Cork City Divisional Headquarters.’

  Eoin still didn’t look around, so Inspector O’Brien raised his voice. ‘DS Maguire has a special interest in your case, Mr Cassidy. She’s been investigating a gang of dognappers in the city division for quite some time now, and she believes your man may have been one of them.’

  After a long pause, Eoin switched off the television’s sound with his remote, and turned around. His face was unshaven with a pale and greasy sheen like linseed putty, and his eyes were so puffy from lack of sleep that it looked as if he could barely see out of them. He was wearing a beige shawl-collared cardigan with nothing underneath but a stained white vest, green-striped pyjama trousers and odd socks, one brown and one blue.

  ‘Jesus and Mary and the Wain,’ he said, and he sounded exhausted. ‘If I’ve told you once what happened, Inspector O’Brien, I’ve told you ten times over. What more do you want me to say?’

  ‘I know that, Mr Cassidy. But DS Maguire hasn’t heard it. Not from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.’

  Eoin took a deep breath. Without looking up at Katie, he recited what he must have told Inspector O’Brien at Bandon Garda Station.

  ‘Cleona woke me up to say that the dogs were going doolally. I took my shotgun and went outside to see what they were so het up about. There was a gang of maybe eight fellers taking our dogs out of their kennels and loading them into a van. I shouted at them to stop but they came for me, and I was afeard they were going to give me a beating, or worse. I fired the one shot up in the air, but they took no notice and kept on coming, so I fired again, and I hit the feller in the head. That’s all.’

  ‘All right, Mr Cassidy, thank you,’ said Katie. ‘I completely understand how traumatic this has been for you, so I don’t blame you for being reluctant to go over it yet again. Is your wife at home? Cleona?’

  ‘She didn’t have nothing to do with this at all. I made her stay upstairs.’

  ‘All the same, I’d like to have a word with her.’

  ‘What’s the point of that? All she heard was the dogs barking. She didn’t see nothing. Nothing at all.’

  ‘Where is she, Mr Cassidy?’ Katie asked him.

  ‘I don’t want her upset, not any more than she is already. She’s devastated.’

  ‘We’ll do everything we can not to distress her, I promise you.’

  Eoin Cassidy hesitated for a moment, his lips moving around as if he were chewing on a lump of gristle and couldn’t decide whether to swallow it. Then he said, ‘Okay, then. I’ll fetch her down.’

  ‘We’d prefer to talk to her on her own, if that’s all right with you.’

  ‘All right. I’ll take her through to the kitchen. But like I say, she won’t be able to tell you nothing. She was here in the house the whole time.’

  He stood up and left the living-room. When they had heard him going upstairs, Katie turned to the two gardaí who had been watching over him. ‘How’s he been? Has he talked to you at all about what happened?’

  Both gardaí shook their heads. One of them said, ‘He hasn’t uttered a single word, like, except to tell us that we could make ourselves a cup of tea. I’d say the feller was in post-dramatic stress disorder, do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Traumatic,’ said Detective Scanlan.

  ‘You’re right,’ said the garda. ‘It must have been.’

  ‘Now I come to think of it, we did hear him say one thing,’ the second garda put in. ‘After we’d first come into the house, his missus come halfway down the stairs, wanting to know who we were. She was kind of whispering and screaming both at the same time, if you know what I mean, like she was panicking but she didn’t want us to hear. But any road your man pushes her back upstairs and says, “It’s all right, love, it’s only the guards – it’s not them other fellers come back.” So she goes back upstairs. But that’s all he said. He comes back in and sits right down and switches on the telly and doesn’t look at us and you wouldn’t even think we was even there, like.’

  ‘Are you quite sure that’s exactly what he said?’ Katie asked him. ‘“It’s not them other fellers come back”?’

  ‘Well, words to that effect,’ said the garda.

  Katie turned to the first garda. ‘And you heard him say that, too?’

  The garda pulled a face and shrugged. ‘It was something like that, yes. Or, “It’s not them again” – something of that nature.’

  ‘But Mr Cassidy was clearly telling her that you were guards, so she had nothing to worry about, and that you weren’t somebody else – somebody that she was scared of?’

  ‘When you put it that way, yes, I would say that’s a pretty fair interprematation.’

  Katie looked at Inspector O’Brien and said, ‘The hurley stick. That could explain it.’

  She could tell that Inspector O’Brien was thinking along the same lines, because he raised one finger as if he were going to add to what she had just said. Before he could open his mouth, though, Eoin Cassidy appeared in the living-room doorway and said, ‘Cleona’s waiting on you in the kitchen, but for the love of God go easy on her, will you?’

  ‘I promise,’ said Katie. She beckoned to Detective Scanlan and the two of them went along the hallway to the kitchen.

  Cleona was sitting at a Formica-topped table next to the right-hand wall. The kitchen was narrow and cramped and looked as if it had last been fitted out in the 1970s, when rustic pine was fashionable. A calendar from the Irish Kennel Club was pinned on the wall next to Cleona, and Katie noticed that yesterday’s date had been marked with nothing but a red felt-tip exclamation mark. There was a window over the sink but the blind was still raised and all Katie could see out of it was blackness, and their own reflections, as if three other women were having a ghostly conversation, out in the night.

  ‘Cleona?’ said Katie, with a smile. ‘My name’s Kathleen Maguire and I’m a detective superintendent from Cork city. This is Pádraigin Scanlan. She’s one of my team.’

  Cleona looked even more devastated than Eoin. She was wrapped in a rose-pink velveteen dressing-gown with the collar turned up. She had applied natural matt foundation all over her face but it did little to cover the bruises on her cheeks and the left-hand side of her jaw, and both of her eyes were swollen. Her hair was like a nest of snakes, as though she had washed it but hadn’t bothered to brush it.

  Katie sat down next to her and Detective Scanlan sat at the opposite end of the table.

  ‘We’re not here to give either you or Eoin a hard time,’ said Katie. ‘We’re only here to clear up what exactly happened.’

  Cleona nodded but said nothing.

  Katie said, ‘So what did happen, Cleona?’

  Cleona sniffed and took a crumpled tissue out of her dressing-gown pocket so that she could wipe her nose. ‘The dogs woke me up. They were barking like you wouldn’t believe. Going mad they were. So Eoin went outside to see what was disturbing them. I heard a shot and that was all. Then Eoin came back in and said that a gang of dognappers had been stealing the dogs, and that he’d shot one of them, and killed him.’

  ‘You heard a shot? Just the one shot?’

  Cleona nodded.

  Katie leaned forward a little. As gently as she could, she said, ‘The problem is, Cleona, that there’s one or two details that don’t exactly fit. You heard only the one shot, but Eoin says he fired two. A warning shot first, and then the shot that killed the dognapper.’

  ‘Well, it could well have been two,’ said Cleona. ‘I couldn’t say for definite. It was all fierce confusing, like, and I was scared half to death. I get terrible nervous at night, right out here in the middle of nowhere at all, especially in the winter, you know.’

  ‘You have your husband to protect you, though,’ put in Detective
Scanlan.

  ‘Oh, yes. And Eoin’s very security-conscious. He always makes sure the kennels are locked and the alarms are set.’

  ‘The alarms didn’t go off this time, though, did they?’ Katie asked her.

  ‘No. Eoin says that he must have forgot, just for once.’

  ‘That’s what he told the officers at Bandon. Do you think he did? Forget, I mean.’

  ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘Do you genuinely think he forgot or do you think the dognappers knew how to switch the alarms off?’

  ‘How could they?’ asked Cleona. She was blinking furiously now and she had to dab at her eyes with her tissue.

  ‘I don’t know. I was just wondering if you had any ideas.’

  ‘He said he forgot and of course I believe him. Why wouldn’t I?’

  Detective Scanlan said, ‘It wasn’t Eoin who hit you, though, was it?’

  Cleona pressed her left hand against her cheek. ‘Nobody hit me. I fell, that’s all. I tripped over a broomstick in the yard and I fell against the kitchen step.’

  ‘I used to have a boyfriend who hit me,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘I was always telling my friends that I’d fallen over. And what was the other excuse? Oh, I know. I’d stood up suddenly in the kitchen and banged my head on a cupboard door that I’d been stupid enough to leave open.’

  ‘Eoin has never laid a hand on me,’ Cleona insisted. ‘Not once in all our nine years of marriage.’

  ‘You’ve had your arguments, though?’

  ‘We have of course. Which couple doesn’t? But all Eoin does when he flips the lid is take some of the dogs out for a walk.’

  ‘One of the dognappers hit you, didn’t he?’ said Detective Scanlan. She said it so softly that Cleona could hardly hear her, but when she realised what Detective Scanlan had said, she slowly stiffened in her kitchen chair and pulled her dressing-gown tighter across her chest.

  ‘They came into the house, didn’t they, Cleona?’ said Katie.

  ‘I told you. I tripped over a broomstick in the yard and I fell against the kitchen step.’