Living Death

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Okay,’ she said, pulling herself free of him. ‘Sorry – it’s been a long day. Tell me what Doctor Kahani had to say.’

  ‘It’s not just what he said, it’s what he did, that’s why I’m feeling so cheerful. He said my stumps have healed up brilliantly – not that he calls them “stumps”, they’re “residual limbs”, so far as he’s concerned.’

  ‘That’s wonderful. Did he say when can you have prosthetic legs fitted?’

  ‘Why do you think I’m smiling? I’ll be able to have my first ones within three or four weeks. My stumps have healed so well that he called the prosthetist in, and a very attractive prosthetist she is, too, Niamh McKenna. She made plaster casts of both of my stumps and she’ll be sending them off tomorrow to have the sockets made.

  ‘Doctor Kahani said that I can look forward to walking around just like I used to, and being as tall as I used to be. My therapist Aileen said it’s like a bereavement when you first lose your legs, but once you have your prosthetic limbs fitted, that really helps you to come to terms with it. You know what I feel like, sweetheart? I feel like I’m going to be a man again.’

  He didn’t say ‘– the same man that you first fell in love with’, but the implication was there.

  Bridie had let Barney in, and he came up to her and snuffled around her legs. He seemed to be uncertain of John, now that his stumps were exposed.

  Katie said, ‘That’s fantastic, John. That really is.’ But maybe I shouldn’t seem too excited about it, otherwise he’ll think that I want us to carry on like we were before.

  She turned to Bridie and said, ‘Finish your pizza, Bridie, and take your time. You don’t have to hound it. I’ll just go and get changed.’

  She patted Barney and went towards the door. John said, ‘Katie?’

  She stopped. ‘What is it?’

  ‘You are pleased, aren’t you, that I’ll be walking again? You don’t want me to stay like this, do you?’

  ‘Of course I don’t want you stay like that. Why would I? I’m really truly delighted for you, John. I’m a little tired, that’s all.’

  ‘What I mean is, I know you like being in charge. And if I stayed like this, you’d always be in charge, wouldn’t you?’

  Katie opened her mouth to say something but then closed it again. She knew that he was getting at her for rejecting him last night. She must have made him feel small and impotent, and this was his way of telling her how much he had resented it.

  She thought of what Kyna had texted her. Im sure we can find a way of making it work. And being happy XXX.

  *

  Her phone rang. John had gone to bed over an hour ago, and Katie was sitting in her dressing-gown on the couch watching Bridget and Eamon. Usually it made her laugh but tonight for some reason it left her unmoved. Perhaps the chain-smoking Bridget frying her husband’s breakfast with two hundred grams of lard was too close to reality to be funny.

  She picked up the phone and it was Detective Ó Doibhilin, ringing her from outside Charlie’s Bar on Union Quay. In the background she could hear drunken shouting and the sound of a siren.

  ‘Apologies for ringing you so late, ma’am, but I’ve been around the city all evening asking after Bradán O’Flynn. All his usual haunts, the Oval, the Vicarstown, El Fenix. Nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him for at least two weeks. Mind you, that was only the people who would speak to me. A fair few of them know who I am and wouldn’t say a word, especially the umpa lumpas in Charlie’s.’

  ‘Thanks a million, Michael,’ said Katie. ‘The reason I wanted you to check was that I’ve been told that somebody had done for him.’

  ‘Serious? Nobody I talked to this evening said anything about that. Jesus. Any idea who it was?’

  ‘I’ve been given some names but I’m not at all sure yet that my source is reliable. I’m expecting to be told more tomorrow. Once I have the whole picture I’ll be giving you a full update one way or the other. To be totally honest with you, I’m hesitant to launch a full enquiry and then find out that I’ve been led right up the garden path. I can’t afford it financially, and after that fiasco with Bobby Quilty, when he was tipped off in advance that we were going to raid him, I can’t afford it career-wise, either. Once bitten, twice wide.’

  ‘Oh, yes. The ill-fated Operation Trident.’

  ‘More like Operation Complete And Utter Laughing Stock. Three properties raided simultaneously, wasn’t it, and all we found were three dead bodies and no way of proving that it was Bobby Quilty who had them shot. Did I ever tell you that I was sent a stiff note from the commissioner herself about that? “You have to remember that the promotion of female Garda officers to the highest ranks has to be constantly justified by the highest standards of performance.”’

  ‘Yes, you did mention that, ma’am, in your debriefing. Twice.’

  ‘Did I? Oh, sorry to repeat myself. It only goes to show how thwarted I felt about it, and I don’t want to risk the same thing happening again.’

  ‘Well, that’s understandable, I’d say,’ said Detective Ó Doibhilin. ‘Any road, all I can tell you tonight is that there’s no sign at all of Bradán O’Flynn in the city centre and I didn’t come across anybody who had seen him for at least a fortnight, either dead or walking around.’

  ‘All right then, Michael. Goodnight, and thanks again.’

  Katie switched off the television, shut Barney in the kitchen with a bowl of fresh water and then went to bed. Her bedroom was warm enough for her to sleep naked, which she usually did, but ever since John had been staying here she had been wearing her ankle-length brushed-cotton nightgowns.

  As she lay there in the darkness, her eyes still open, staring at the ceiling, she heard a tinkling sound and thought with a sinking feeling that John was ringing his bell for her. Then she realised that a stiff breeze was beginning to blow from the south-west, and that it was only the Tierneys’ wind-chimes, next door. She was relieved, but also annoyed, because the wind-chimes always disturbed her sleep. Since the wind was up, it would probably start raining, sometime in the early hours, and that would probably wake her up, too.

  So Bradán O’Flynn hadn’t been seen around recently. That wasn’t watertight proof of Maureen Callahan’s story, although it went some way to supporting it. She really needed to discuss what Maureen had told her face-to-face with Assistant Commissioner O’Reilly. If necessary, she could always drive out to Fota Island tomorrow and meet him on the golf course. Before she went to those lengths, however, she decided that she would call Detective Superintendent O’Malley at the SDU headquarters in Harcourt Street, in Dublin, and see if she could arrange to speak to the detective who had first made contact with Maureen. She was interested to know exactly what she had told him, and how sincere he had judged her to be.

  Apart from that, she had one more course of action to follow up, although it was still too early to tell where that might lead her, if it led her anywhere at all.

  She fell asleep, although she dreamed that she was wandering through a dark, rank-smelling forest and that she was being followed by a shadowy hunchbacked figure with wild curly hair and stumps for legs, ringing a bell like a leper.

  19

  Kieran had been standing outside County Hall with his thumb sticking out for only five minutes before a black Opel pulled into the side of the road and waited for him, with its hazard lights flashing. He ran towards it through the driving rain, his khaki windcheater rustling and his knapsack jostling on his back.

  When the driver lowered the passenger-side window, Kieran saw that there were two middle-aged men in the car, both wearing formal black overcoats, like undertakers. The man in the passenger seat said, ‘Where you heading for, boy?’

  Kieran found the look of him quite intimidating. He had short grey scrubbing-brush hair and roughly pitted cheeks that looked as if they had been sandblasted. Kieran himself was plump and pale with blond eyelashes which led to all his fellow students at the University of Cork calling him Porky.

  �
��Like eh, Killarney,’ he said. ‘But anywhere along the way will be grand.’

  The man coughed and said, ‘We’re going only as far as Macroom. But if that’ll suit you.’

  Kieran was hesitant, but it was raining so hard now that it would be self-flagellating to turn them down. ‘Macroom would be fantastic, thanks.’

  ‘Hop in, then.’

  Kieran wrestled his knapsack off his back, opened the rear door and tossed it inside. Then he climbed in after it. As soon as he had closed the door, the driver pulled away from the kerb, so fast that Kieran was tilted over sideways.

  ‘Put your seatbelt on, boy,’ said the man in the passenger-seat, turning around. The driver didn’t look round but Kieran could see that he was taller, and had a floppy black fringe, which he intermittently swept back with his left hand as he drove.

  He was driving very fast, too – so fast that he had set his windscreen wipers to full speed, so that they were flapping wildly from side to side. Carrigohane Road led due westwards from County Hall and ran dead straight for over three-and-a-half kilometres. As they were nearing the Blarney intersection, where the road began to curve southwards, Kieran saw that his speedometer was quivering close to 80 mph.

  ‘Always in a rush, Ger,’ said the man with the scrubbing-brush hair, as if he could sense Kieran’s alarm. ‘I reckon it was his Ma. Whenever she sent him off for the messages, she’d tell him to be back before he got there, and he took it literal-like.’

  ‘You leave my Ma out of this, Milo,’ said Ger.

  He kept up his speed around the long tree-lined bend through Carrigohane, even though the limit was only 50, but he began to slow down when he reached the roundabout with Model Farm Road. This was a narrow semi-rural road which meandered between fields and nurseries and factories and private bungalows, all the way back into Cork City. Instead of staying on the main road, Ger turned left, and started to drive down it.

  ‘Hey, hey! Hey! This isn’t the right way!’ said Kieran. ‘If we go this way, we’ll end up exactly where I started from.’

  ‘Ger knows a short cut, don’t you, Ger?’ said Milo, reaching into his inside coat pocket and taking out a packet of Don Corleone cigarettes.

  ‘I don’t understand. How can this be a short cut, when we’re practically going in the opposite direction?’

  ‘Saves us going through Ballincollig,’ said Ger. ‘Traffic’s always desperate slow through Ballincollig.’

  ‘Yes, but we don’t have to go through Ballincollig. We could have gone straight down to join the N40, and then whack, all the way through to Macroom.’

  ‘Oh, we’ll end up on the N40 all right, don’t you worry about that,’ said Milo. ‘Just sit back and relax and enjoy the ride.’

  He tucked two cigarettes between his lips, lit them, and then passed one of them to Ger.

  Kieran said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise that you smoked. I can’t stay here in the car with you if you smoke. I have asthma.’

  Milo turned around again, blowing a long stream of smoke out of the side of his mouth. ‘Asthma? That’s ideal, boy, ideal! The sicker you are, the better we like you.’

  ‘Listen, I really need to get out,’ said Kieran. ‘Could you stop the car, please, so that I can get out.’

  ‘That’s pure ungrateful of you, wouldn’t you say?’ said Milo, with smoke leaking out of his nostrils with every word. ‘We offer you a free complimentary ride all the way to Macroom, for no charge at all, and what would that have cost you on the bus? And now you’re throwing our generosity right back in our faces! What’s the problem with young people these days? When I was your age, boy, I had to walk everywhere, whether it was flogging down with rain or not!’

  Kieran coughed, and held his hand to his throat. ‘It’s the smoke. I’m asthmatic, and my inhaler’s run out.’

  ‘Why don’t you open the window?’ said Ger, over his shoulder.

  ‘That won’t help,’ Kieran protested. ‘The smoke will blow straight in my face then, and the rain, too. Please – just stop. I can easy hitch another lift from somebody else.’

  ‘Me and my friend here – supposing we don’t want you to be hitching a lift from somebody else?’ said Milo, looking at Ger now, and not at Kieran, and smiling.

  ‘Will you please just stop! I can hardly breathe back here!’

  Ger turned to Milo and said, ‘He does sound awful wheezy, like.’

  ‘Stop and let me out!’

  Kieran shifted himself across the back seat, took hold of Ger’s head-rest with both hands, and began to shake it violently, harder and harder.

  ‘Stop and let me out! Stop and let me out!’ His voice had risen to a high-pitched, whispery scream.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ shouted Milo, and twisted around in his seat so that he could grip Kieran’s wrists and tug him away. But Ger had already had enough: he stamped on the brakes and the car slithered to a stop.

  They sat there for a moment, all staring at each other, panting. The car was filled up with cigarette smoke and even Milo had to cough.

  ‘Jesus fecking Christ,’ said Milo.

  Kieran said, hoarsely, ‘Thanks for the lift – not.’ He was trying to sound brave but he grabbed his knapsack and opened the car door and scrambled out as quickly as he could, slamming the door after him.

  He stood in the teeming rain watching the Opel’s red brake lights flare up for a second, and then its orange indicator lights flashing. It pulled away from the kerb and carried on along Model Farm Road – although now it was creeping along very slowly.

  Kieran looked around. His heart was beating hard and he wasn’t sure what he should do. He had told Milo and Ger that he could ‘easy’ get a lift from somebody else, but as far as he could see in both directions there was nobody. There was a gateway about two hundred metres further back along the road, but it led only to a derelict house with boarded-up windows. Beyond that he could see a sign for Nangles Garden Centre, and then a row of single-storey houses, but no cars, no tractors, nobody walking along the pavements. Even if a car did come by and stop for him, it was highly unlikely that they would be able to give him the long-distance lift he needed to take him on his way to Killarney. He guessed that he would have a better chance if he walked all the way back to the roundabout on the main road.

  He hitched his knapsack on to his shoulders, zipped the collar of his windcheater right up to his chin, and started to trudge west. The rain was blowing directly into his face and he kept coughing. He cursed himself for not bothering to refill his inhaler. His parents had plenty of spares but he had assumed that he would be home in Killarney before he needed it.

  He turned around, just to make sure that the black Opel had gone, but he was disturbed to see that it had travelled no more than a hundred metres down the road. He walked on a little further but then he turned around a second time and realised that it had actually stopped. Its rear red lights were shining so it must still be in gear and Ger was keeping his foot on the brake pedal. What were they waiting for? Why didn’t they just drive off?

  He started to walk faster, and then he broke into a jog. The road ahead of him was still deserted, although he could see a small car reversing out of the driveway of the furthest bungalow. He hoped that it would turn and head towards him, but once it had reversed it headed off in the opposite direction.

  He looked around yet again. The black Opel still hadn’t driven away. Maybe he was panicking for no reason at all. Maybe they had just stopped to make a phone call. All the same, he kept walking and intermittently jogging as fast as he could, his chest whining and his knapsack slapping thwack, thwack, thwack against his back.

  He had only managed to cover about a hundred metres when he heard a whinnying sound. He kept jogging, but when he quickly turned his head, he saw that the Opel was reversing towards him with its two nearside wheels on the pavement, and fast.

  He gulped in air, and then he started to run. It would be suicidal to try and cross the road, and he couldn’t push his way through the
bramble-hedge on his right-hand side, because he could see that there was a barbed-wire fence running through it. His only chance was to reach the derelict house, and escape through the metal gate.

  He ran as hard as he could manage, his legs and his arms pumping, every breath squealing in his windpipe. He didn’t dare to turn around, although the Opel sounded as if it were almost on top of him.

  He reached the gate, and pushed it, and it clanged, but it wouldn’t open. He saw almost at once that it was padlocked, with a chain. He grasped the top rail, preparing to heave himself over, turning towards the Opel at the same time to see how close it was, but it was then that it caught up with him. It hit him at an angle, at nearly 15 mph, so that his back was crushed against the concrete pillar on the left-hand side of the gate, and both of his knees were bent the wrong way underneath its rear bumper, with a complicated crackle like kindling catching fire.

  The Opel drove forward a few metres, and then stopped. Kieran remained where he was, his eyes staring with shock, his jaw hanging open. There was no visible blood. His knapsack had cushioned his spine against the sharp edge of the concrete pillar, but after his legs had disappeared under the car, the rear bumper had split his pelvis in half.

  Milo and Ger opened their doors and climbed out. Milo looked around but Model Farm Road was still deserted, and the rain was still dredging down, as heavy as ever. As they walked up to him, Kieran fell sideways, with his head in a puddle. The rain pattered on the hood of his windcheater and dripped off the end of his nose.

  Milo squatted down close to him, still sucking on the end of his cigarette, and said, ‘Hey! You still with us, boy? Can’t have you dying on us now, there’s not a priest in sight!’

  Kieran let out a groan that ended in a squeak, and a bubble of blood appeared between his lips, and then burst.

  Milo stood up. ‘You’re a right fecking Footy McLoughlin sometimes, Ger, I tell you. You only had to knock the poor bastard off his feet. You didn’t have to knacker him completely! I just hope he’s still living and breathing by the time we get him back to Saint Giles, or Gearoid’s going to do ninety.’