Living Death

by Graham Masterton

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘He took Phil home and then went home himself. He didn’t see where Siobhán went – whether she walked or got a taxi or what – and so far nobody else saw her, either, although we have a few more witnesses yet to track down.’

  ‘She lives in Knocka, doesn’t she?’ asked Katie.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Most likely then she would have hailed a taxi or called for one, especially if she was langered.’

  ‘Of course. But we’ve contacted all of the cab companies and none of them have a record of a fare at that specific time of the morning from Oliver Plunkett Street to Killiney Heights.’

  ‘Maybe a taxi driver picked her up but didn’t take her home. We’ve had that happen before, as you know yourself. Did she use any particular taxi app? A lot of girls do these days.’

  ‘That’s a thought. I’ll have Ó Doibhilin ask her boyfriend – her ex-boyfriend, anyway. And if he doesn’t know, I’ll tell him to ask her family.’

  At that moment Katie’s iPhone pinged. Detective Scanlan had texted her to say that Eoin Cassidy was waiting by the front desk.

  ‘Eoin Cassidy’s here,’ she told Sergeant Begley. ‘Now we’ll find out for sure where these dogs came from. That’s unless he makes out they’re his when they’re not.’

  Sergeant Begley grunted with amusement. ‘Do you know what my wife always says? They should stop calling us An Garda Siochána and call us Daoine Nach Bhfuil A Chreideann Aon Duine – the people who don’t believe anybody.’

  They went downstairs and met Eoin Cassidy in the reception area by the front desk. He was accompanied by a beefy crimson-faced uniformed garda from Bandon. By contrast, Eoin looked tired and wan and he hadn’t shaved this morning. Even his brown tweed jacket looked tired, and his trousers drooped.

  ‘You’ve found Lili then?’ he said, as Katie came up to him. ‘And one of the German Shepherds – it’ll either be Gus or Bandit. I’m hoping it’s Gus. I mean, I won’t be upset if it’s Bandit, of course not. But Gus is only three and Bandit’s seven.’

  ‘We don’t know if it’s either of them yet, Eoin,’ said Katie. ‘A handler from the Dog Support Unit has them out in the car park, if you’d like to come and take a look.’

  Eoin followed Katie and Sergeant Begley out of the back door. It was cold out there, but there was no wind, and the sun was shining behind a thin haze of cirrus, and at least it wasn’t raining. A white dog support van was parked by the entrance, and a handler was waiting with the German Shepherd and the Vizsla from Riverstick.

  As soon as he saw them, Eoin hurried over and knelt on the ground between them and put an arm around each of them. When he looked up Katie, his eyes were shining and it was clear that he was close to tears.

  ‘Oh, it’s them all right,’ he said. ‘It’s Lili and Gus. No question about it. See, Gus has this saddleback pattern, and this black mask over his face. I’ve brought photos with me if you want to make comparisons. And Lili, she has this scar on her left hind leg. Oh, this is fantastic! I don’t know how to thank you. Their owners are going to be over the moon.’

  Katie said, ‘I’m pleased for you, Eoin. We’ll take a look at your photos, if we may, and we’ll be keeping the two dogs here for two or three days for forensic tests. We’ll want to check what they’ve been eating, and if they’ve been given any drugs, or picked up any infections. We’ll also be looking for dust or any other residue caught in their coats. That could give us a clue to where they’ve been.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Eoin. ‘I can wait. I’m just so happy out. Now you’ve found these two it gives me much more hope that we can find the rest of them.’

  ‘Come up to my office,’ said Katie. ‘There’s more I have to talk to you about.’

  She turned to his beefy escort and said, ‘We’ll be a while. Why don’t you go to the canteen and treat yourself to a cup of tea? They have home-made barmbrack, too, if you’re hungry.’

  On their way upstairs, Katie stopped by the squad room and called for Detectives Dooley and Scanlan to come with them. When they reached her office, they all sat down on the oatmeal-coloured couches underneath the window. Eoin appeared to be nervous now, and kept rolling and unrolling his thin brown tie around his fingers.

  ‘You need to know that we have the man known as Keeno in custody,’ said Katie. ‘You know – Keeno? The man who entered your home on the night when all of your dogs were stolen and raped Cleona.’

  Eoin gave a little quiver, as if a goose had walked over his grave, but said nothing, and kept on rolling his tie.

  ‘He’s here now, Eoin, downstairs,’ Katie told him. ‘We need you to come and take a look at him, to see if you recognise him.’

  ‘I’ve told you over and over what happened that night,’ said Eoin. ‘I don’t have to repeat it, do I?’

  ‘Eoin – it’s no use trying to pretend that those two men didn’t come into your house and that the one called Keeno didn’t sexually assault Cleona. If you won’t admit to what really happened, I may have to consider charging you with obstructing our enquiry. I’ve already arranged to meet with the Director of Public Prosecutions to discuss a charge of manslaughter against you. There’s enough evidence to suggest that you weren’t acting in self-defence at all and that you shot that intruder in cold blood, whoever he was. The court may take it into account that he invaded your home and was party to stealing your property, but that doesn’t mean that they’ll let you off completely.’

  ‘Before I say anything else to you, I want to talk to my solicitor,’ said Eoin.

  ‘Eoin – listen to me, I’m bending so far over backwards to help you here that my head’s almost touching the floor. If you can identify Keeno, we can put a lot of pressure on him to tell us who stole your dogs, and once we know who stole them, we should be able to recover them for you – all of them, with any luck.’

  ‘I appreciate your finding Gus and Lili for me, detective superintendent. I’m pure grateful, I can tell you that. But I want to talk to my solicitor.’

  ‘Time’s running out, Eoin, even if it hasn’t run out already. If we hadn’t located them, Gus and Lili would have been sold off by now and you never would have got them back. The rest of the dogs are probably being sold off even as we speak. We can find them for you if you help us to track down the gang who took them, but if you won’t, then there’s very little we can do. I don’t have the manpower or the financial resources to go looking for twenty-four missing dogs. I’m sorry, but there it is.’

  ‘Maybe there’s another way,’ said Eoin.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Like, maybe you could look at this the other way around.’

  ‘“The other way around”. What do you mean?’

  ‘Maybe you could use a pet detective. I mean, if a pet detective could trace where the rest of the dogs have been taken, then you’d be able to discover who stole them.’

  ‘There’s only one pet detective in the country that I know of,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘His name’s Robert Kenny and he’s based in Dublin. In fact I think he’s the only pet detective in Europe. He calls his agency “Happy Tails”.’

  ‘Yes... I’ve heard about him,’ said Katie. ‘He’s helped the Dublin Garda a couple of times to track down stolen dogs. He’s very successful, too, so far as I understand it.’

  ‘Actually, there’s another pet detective now, in Limerick,’ said Eoin. ‘He used to be a member of the Limerick and District Canine Club. I met him at their last annual championship dog show. Conor Ó Máille.’

  ‘What qualifications does he have, or is he just an amateur?’

  ‘Oh, no. He took a proper course in pet detection in Fresno, in California, and he’s a certified MART.’

  ‘MART? What’s a MART when it’s at home?’

  ‘Missing Animals Response Technician. Sixth Scents, that’s the name of his business – “Scents” like in smells. He’s been doing all right, too, so he tells me.’

  ‘�
��Missing Animals Response Technician”,’ said Detective Dooley, shaking his head. ‘Holy Saint Joseph.’

  But Detective Scanlan said, ‘I don’t know, Robert, maybe we shouldn’t mock. I think it might be quite a good idea, bringing in somebody who’s an expert in finding lost animals. And like Eoin says, it’s looking at this whole enquiry the other way around. The gang who stole those dogs are going to be keeping sketch for us, aren’t they? Not some lone dog detective. This could totally take them by surprise.’

  Katie turned back to Eoin. ‘Eoin, I’m asking you one last time if you’ll agree to come downstairs now and see if you can identify the suspect we have in custody. If you do, you can save us a heap of time and unnecessary effort, and taxpayers’ money, too.’

  Eoin said, ‘No. I’m sorry. Not until I’ve had the chance to talk to my solicitor. It’s Kevin Cushley, in Bandon.’

  Katie took a deep breath. She was tempted to say something cutting to him, but she held her tongue. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I’ll ask my secretary to phone him for you.’ She went to speak to Moirin, and then she beckoned Eoin to come into Moirin’s office, so that he could talk to his solicitor in private.

  While he was gone, Katie said to Detectives Dooley and Scanlan, ‘Well? What’s your opinion?’

  ‘I still think it’s worth calling in this pet detective,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘Supposing he can actually find these dogs, that would be fantastic. If he can’t – well, whatever he charges, it can’t be much, and at least nobody will be able to say that we were too stick-in-the-mud to try something different.’

  Katie looked at her watch. She was due to meet Maureen Callahan in less than forty minutes. She could faintly hear Eoin in Moirin’s office saying, ‘No,’ and ‘No,’ and ‘No, well that’s what I told them.’

  After a conversation lasting over ten minutes, he came back in.

  ‘So, what did Mr Cushley have to say?’ asked Katie. ‘Are you coming downstairs to identify Keeno or not?’

  ‘No. I can’t identify him because I never saw him.’

  ‘You’re still insisting that he didn’t come into the house and assault you and your wife?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Even though Cleona says that he did?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So why do you think she said that?’

  ‘I have no idea. You’ll have to ask her.’

  ‘I have, and she said that’s exactly what happened.’

  Eoin pulled a face, as if to say ‘Maybe she did, but there’s nothing that I can do about it.’

  Katie said, ‘All right, Eoin. You can go now. But don’t forget that you’re still on station bail. Robert – could you find the officer who escorted Mr Cassidy, please, and see them out?’

  When Detective Dooley had taken Eoin away, Detective Scanlan said, ‘Now what?’

  ‘I have to go out for an hour or so,’ said Katie, looking at her watch again. ‘When I come back we can have a chat with our friend Keeno, although Sergeant Begley doesn’t think we’ll get anything out of him but bad language and neither do I.’

  She paused for a second, thinking, and then she said, ‘While I’m gone, Pádraigin, why don’t you look up this pet detective? What was his name? Maybe he could help us. You never know, like, do you?’

  17

  As she drove to Blackrock, Katie was held up by pothole-repairing works at the junction with Beaumont Drive, and that made her five minutes late for her meeting with Maureen Callahan. She hoped that Maureen hadn’t thought that she wasn’t going to turn up, and already left, but when she turned into the car park she saw that there were only three cars there, and through the tinted windows of a red Audi parked at the very far end she could see the distinctive gleam of Maureen’s brassy blonde bob.

  She parked her own Focus as far away from the Audi as she could. She was wearing her dark blue duffel-coat and before she got out of the car she tugged up the hood so that even if anybody were watching from a distance they would have difficulty in telling who she was. She walked up to Maureen’s car but she went straight past it without stopping and without looking at Maureen. As she made her way to the footpath that ran beside the river, however, she heard a car door slam and knew that Maureen was following her.

  She kept walking. The River Lee was wide here, a glittering grey, with a view on the opposite bank of Tivoli industrial estate with all its Lego-coloured shipping containers and the estuary of the Glashaboy River. Maureen had obviously chosen to meet her here because the footpath was screened from the road by thick bushes, and only somebody in a passing boat could have seen them talking together.

  After she had walked about a hundred metres, and smiled at an elderly woman who was walking an equally elderly brown poodle, Katie stopped, and turned around, so that Maureen could catch up with her. Not far behind Maureen stood the limestone towers of Blackrock Castle, which looked like a castle out of a fairy story. These days, it was an observatory and a restaurant, and Katie and John had eaten there quite often, but it had originally been built in the reign of Elizabeth I to defend Cork harbour against marauding pirates. Quite appropriate to meet here, thought Katie, considering how the Callahan family made their money, smuggling arms.

  Maureen had pulled on a black woolly slouch hat to cover her distinctive blonde hair, and she was wearing a long black overcoat and black high-heeled boots. She was tall, taller than Katie, and easily the prettiest of the Callahan sisters, with an oval face and chocolate-brown eyes and naturally pouting lips, although she had an angry three-pronged scar on the left side of her forehead, as if she had been struck with red-hot fire tongs. As she came close to her, Katie could smell Joy, which had always been one of her own favourite perfumes.

  ‘How’s the form, Maureen?’ Katie greeted her.

  ‘How do you think? I wish to God that I wasn’t meeting you like this, if you want to know the truth, but I’m not going to let them get away with it, do you know what I mean?’

  She paused, and then she said, ‘You’ve no microphone?’

  Katie unbuttoned her coat and held it wide. ‘You can frisk me if you like.’

  She turned her pockets inside-out, too. ‘And see, look, I’ve left my phone behind in the car, so I won’t be able to record you with that, either.’

  ‘Okay, then, I’ll trust you. You saved my brother after all.’

  They started walking together. Maureen was very twitchy, and kept turning around to make sure that nobody was following them. After a while, Katie said, ‘Are you one hundred per cent sure that your sisters had Branán murdered? They haven’t just locked him up in a garage somewhere, or chased him out of Cork and told him never to come back?’

  ‘Oh no, they’ve done for him all right. Threatening people, that’s not their style. If you cross my sisters, that’s it, you might as well call for a priest right away, because they’ll have you as soon as look at you. No second chances. My Da says if somebody miders you, don’t threaten them, because you’ll only make an enemy out of them, and one day they could catch you unawares, like, and do for you when you least expect it. So it makes sense to do for them first. After that, you don’t have to be looking over your shoulder every five minutes.’

  ‘But if you’re not prepared to give evidence against them, how are you going to make sure that they get punished for killing Branán?’

  ‘Because I can get them locked up in jail, that’s how. Why do you think I wanted to talk to you?’

  ‘Go on, then. How can you get them locked up in jail?’

  Maureen glanced around again, and then said, ‘They’re having a huge shipment of guns and explosives delivered. Like, huge. Biggest this year, I’d say. Sometime on Friday night most likely.’

  ‘Where’s it coming from, this shipment?’ asked Katie.

  ‘The Czech Republic, through Boulogne, that’s the usual route. But it’s here in the country already.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I’m not too sure. Wherever they landed it. It could have b
een Kinsale or Kilmacsimon Quay up the Bandon River, or further along the coast maybe. It would have depended on the tides, like, and whether they thought that anybody had got wind of it. Maybe even Tralee.’

  ‘Do you know what’s in it?’

  ‘Assault rifles, the Czech ones, they’re like AK-47s. And Skorpion machine pistols, you can get four thousand euros each for those. And Semtex.’

  ‘So this is all arriving here in Cork on Friday night? Where, exactly?’

  Maureen pressed her hand over her mouth and looked out across the river. For a long time she said nothing at all, but then she turned back to Katie and said, ‘Even with what they did to Branán, this isn’t easy. I mean, it’s betrayal, like, isn’t it, and that goes against the grain.’

  ‘Maureen, those guns are going to be used to commit crimes, and probably to kill people. The explosives, too. I know that your motive for telling me about them is revenge, rather than saving lives, but think about it. You’ll not only be making sure that your sisters get the justice they deserve, you’ll be doing something in the public interest, for a change.’

  ‘Well, I suppose you’re right,’ said Maureen. She thought for a moment, and then she said, ‘No, you are right, and I’ll tell you what I’ll do. As soon as the shipment’s delivered, I’ll ring you to let you know where it is.’

  ‘Can’t you tell me now?’

  ‘I can’t, no. I wish I could, but there’s a score of different places where they store stuff and I don’t know where they’re going to put this shipment yet. My sisters have been fierce cagey with me lately, do you know what I mean? Like I say, though, the moment I know that it’s all been unloaded, and where, I’ll ring you. If you can just give me your number?’

  Katie told Maureen her number and Maureen put it into her iPhone.

  ‘Right then,’ said Katie. ‘I’ll be waiting to hear from you.’

  There was much more that Katie could have said to her. She could have said that even though she was acting as a Garda informant, she might still face historical charges for her own involvement in the arms-trafficking racket. After all, she had been working for the family business ever since she had left school, and over the years the Callahans had handled millions of euros’ worth of Semtex, as well as assault rifles, handguns, and even rocket launchers. Indirectly, the Callahans could be blamed for countless deaths and robberies, both south and north of the border. If a politician or a gangster had been shot in Dublin, you could almost be sure that they had been killed by a gun supplied by the Callahans.