Living Death

by Graham Masterton

  ‘How did you get on at St Giles’ Clinic?’ Katie asked them.

  ‘That’s an awful quare place,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘We rang the doorbell and it took about five minutes before we got an answer, and then the door was opened up by some short squat fellow who looked like Frankenstein’s assistant. We asked for Grainne Buckley and he made us wait in the hall for another ten minutes.’

  ‘It was spooky, that’s the only word for it,’ Detective Scanlan put in. ‘It was dead cold, like, and dark, and every now and then we could hear somebody upstairs making a weird kind of a howling noise. We couldn’t decide if it was a human or a dog. I felt like we were in a horror film.’

  ‘But you saw Grainne Buckley?’

  ‘Oh, she came down after we were almost ready to go up and find her, but she was pure tick,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘I asked her why she had ordered a taxi for Gerry Mulvaney but she came over so offended you’d think I’d asked her what size knickers she wore.

  ‘She swore on the Bible that she’d never heard of anyone called Gerry Mulvaney and since that was the case, why would she have ordered a taxi for him? She said she’d had the same trouble several times before, unauthorised people ordering taxis on the clinic’s account. I told her the controller at Tuohy’s had been sure that it was her who had rung him, but she totally denied it. It must have been somebody taking her name in vain, that’s what she said.’

  ‘What about the taxi driver?’

  ‘Well, of course, as soon as we left the clinic we went down to Tuohy’s to find him. As luck would have it, he’d just come in from a job.’

  Detective Dooley took out his notebook. ‘Uday Malaki, his name is. Iraqi. Been here in Cork for three-and-a-half years now. He said he picked up Gerry Mulvaney from Anglesea Street and took him to Kent Station.’

  ‘So Mulvaney was taking a train somewhere? But who ordered the taxi for him and why did they order it on St Giles’ Clinic account?’

  ‘That’s the six-million-euro question.’

  Katie went over to her desk and activated her computer. ‘So what do we know about St Giles’ Clinic, besides the fact that it takes care of seriously handicapped people and that it’s awful quare?’

  She found the clinic’s website. It was emblazoned with the picture of St Giles tending to a hart that had been wounded by hunters, with a line of italics underneath it saying We rehabilitate and care for those with severe disabilities. Apart from that, though, there was only the scant information that Detective Scanlan had told her about. The clinic’s address, its email and telephone numbers, and a line saying that it was registered with the HSE and the UK Department of Health. None of its directors or medical staff was named, and there was no mention of how many patients it cared for, or any details of what specific services it provided.

  Detective Dooley said, ‘I did notice that they had three ambulances around the back. Two of them were white, and carried that same picture of St Giles, and the lettering St Giles’ Clinic, Cork. The third one was an ordinary yellow NAS bus, but it was one of the older Mercedes models and one of its wheels was jacked up. It looked to me like it was being refitted.’

  ‘They have three ambulances?’ asked Katie. ‘Why would a small private clinic need three ambulances?’

  ‘I don’t know. There’s no law against it, is there? They could have, like, fifty ambulances if they wanted to.’

  Katie stared at the picture on the screen of St Giles, feeling both irritated and frustrated. Her previous chief superintendent, Dermot O’Driscoll, had always admired her ability to sniff out cat’s malogian. She strongly believed that there was more to Gerry Mulvaney’s connection to St Giles’ Clinic than a fraudulent call for a taxi. In her experience, anybody who swore anything on the Bible was almost always lying – as was anybody who swore that they were telling the truth on their mother’s grave. Invariably, those suspects’ mothers were still living and breathing and watching Fair City every night.

  The trouble was, what would be her justification for investigating the clinic any further? It would take time and money and what had they really done to lead her to suspect them of criminal activity? On top of that, the clinic might lodge a complaint of Garda harassment, which would lead to more paperwork and more time-wasting and more adverse comments in the media. She could see it now – Cork Garda Bully Home for Incurables.

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to leave it like that for the time being. But keep your eyes and your ears open for any mention of St Giles’ Clinic. I’ll ask some of my doctor friends about it, too – whether or not they know who runs it, and how it’s financed.’

  Detectives Dooley and Scanlan left, and Katie switched off the table-lamps and returned to her desk and the neatly sorted files that Moirin had left for her. She had only just started signing letters when Moirin came in with a cup of coffee for her.

  ‘I thought you might be needing a bit of a pick-me-up,’ she told her.

  ‘Oh, thanks, Moirin. You’re an angel. I’d give you a promotion if there was anything higher you could be promoted to.’

  She was about to ask Moirin what she had thought of Conor Ó Máille – strictly from a woman’s point of view – when a voice at her office door called out, ‘Hello?’

  She looked past Moirin and saw that it was Conor Ó Máille himself.

  ‘Conor,’ she said, relieved that she hadn’t yet opened her mouth. ‘Is everything fixed?’

  ‘Sorry to interrupt you,’ he said. ‘I have the room booked at the Gabriel House all right but your sergeant downstairs has no spare cars available from the car pool, not until tomorrow morning. But that’s not a bother. I wasn’t planning on driving up to Ballyknock until mid-morning tomorrow at the earliest. There wouldn’t be any of those dog-fighting fellows around, anyhow, not until the afternoon. They don’t dislike anything except work and getting out of bed before lunchtime.’

  ‘So what are you going to do now?’

  Conor looked at his watch. ‘Oh, I have plenty to keep me busy. I have to get some messages, and I also have clients to see here in Cork, as well as a couple of vets. One of them’s going to be showing me a new breed identification test. It’s a way of telling precisely from a dog’s DNA if it’s pure bred or if it’s a boxatian or a corgollie.’

  ‘Well, I’m finishing early,’ said Katie. ‘I have some things to sort out at home. So if you’re still around at five I could give you a lift up to Summerhill. It’s not much out of my way.’

  ‘You’re sure? You don’t have to. It’s only ten minutes and I could always walk it.’

  ‘No, it’s no trouble at all. If you come back here at five-thirty I’ll be ready to go.’

  Conor looked at her, and she looked back at him, and Moirin looked at both of them. There was no mistaking what had just been arranged. Conor said, ‘Okay, then, that’s very kind of you. I’ll see you after.’

  Moirin went back to her office. Katie didn’t ask her what she had been thinking of asking her. She didn’t need another woman’s opinion of Conor, not now. She was soon going to find out for herself.

  23

  ‘What did those gardaí want?’ asked the doctor, looking up from his computer screen.

  Grainne said, ‘They knew that Gerry had been picked up from Anglesea Street by a taxi on the clinic’s account.’

  ‘God in Heaven. How did they find that out? Don’t they ever mind their own business? What did you tell them?’

  ‘I told them I’d never heard of Gerry and I knew nothing at all about it and nobody of that name came here. I said that we’d had a fair number of hobblers recently charging their taxi fares to our account, so it must have been one of them.’

  ‘What if they question the driver?’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. It was Uday. He knows better than to tell the guards our business. He wouldn’t like his cheap supply cut off, like, would he? If they do ask him, he’ll probably tell them he took him off to the airport or somewhere like that. Somewhere they won
’t get suspicious if he doesn’t come back within a day or two.’

  ‘Or ever, in his case. Not as the Gerry Mulvaney of old, anyhow. He deserves this, that’s all I can say. I mean, how stupid can one man be? If he had two brains he’d be twice as stupid.’

  Grainne nodded towards the computer screen, which was displaying a three-dimensional image of a human pelvis. ‘What are you planning on doing to him, then?’

  ‘Oh – this isn’t for Gerry, this is our friend Kieran. I’ve just been working out what kind of a patient he’s going to be. His hips and his legs were badly crushed, but he was lucky that no arteries were ruptured and that there was minimal soft-tissue damage, considering. I’ll give him the usual laryngectomy and I think that the legs will have to come off, but I’m pretty sure that I can reconstruct his pelvis so that he’ll be able to function as at least two-thirds of a human being.

  ‘What I still can’t decide is whether to blind him or not. I know it’s safer for security’s sake, but it seems a pity that not even one of our patients can see what’s happening to them. It’s like inviting an audience to the theatre to watch a play and then keeping the curtains closed. This is clever stuff we’re doing here. It would be gratifying if some of our patients could appreciate it.’

  ‘Even if he couldn’t speak, though, he could blink,’ Grainne cautioned him. ‘Some quadriplegic patients communicate like that, don’t they? One blink for yes, two blinks for no.’

  ‘I don’t know how many blinks it would take to say, “I was run over in the street by two goms in black suits who took me to St Giles’ Clinic where my legs were amputated and I can identify the very doctor who did it.” No – I’m minded to leave him his sight but puncture his eardrums. If he’s stone deaf, he won’t be able to make much sense of what’s going on around him.’

  Grainne had been admiring herself in the mirror on the wall behind the doctor’s desk, primping her gingery hair with her fingertips. She thought she was looking quite attractive for forty-five, although she wasn’t sure about that lavender wool dress.

  ‘He’ll still be able to write and draw, though,’ she said. ‘That’s unless you sever his tendons, like the others.’

  The doctor turned to her, hawk-faced, with the thinnest of smiles. ‘It’s sometimes hard to believe that you were Nurse of the Year, Grainne, I’ll tell you. No – what I was thinking of doing was amputating both of his arms, too, just below the shoulders. That will leave him two stumps to balance himself with, and to turn himself over from time to time so that he doesn’t develop bedsores. But it won’t handicap him totally. It’s amazing what limbless people are capable of doing with their mouth alone. Look at that Prince Randian, the Human Torso, in Freaks. He could shave himself and he could even roll his own cigarettes, just using his lips.’

  ‘I never saw that film and I never wanted to see it. I don’t think I’m so much a connoisseur of the grotesque as you are.’

  ‘Now then, Grainne. I’m a doctor. All doctors have to be connoisseurs of the grotesque, as you put it. It’s our job.’

  ‘All right. So this Kieran’s going to be limbless and deaf. What about Gerry?’

  The doctor stood up. He was wearing a grey jacket of herringbone tweed which hung on him as if he had recently lost a lot of weight, or if he had bought it in the 1990s, when shoulders were wider. He looked tired, but satisfied, like a man who has been working too hard, but is beginning to reap the rewards for it. The rose gold Breitling Navitimer watch which he wore loosely on his right wrist had cost over €19,000.

  ‘Let’s go and see Gerry, shall we? Let’s ask him what his preference is.’

  He switched off his computer and he and Grainne walked along the corridor to the wide staircase that dominated the centre of the house. From some of the doors they passed they could hear groaning and sobbing, and the high-pitched flutelike sounds made by men and women who no longer had a larynx but were still desperate to speak.

  The doctor felt at last that this clinic was his kingdom, and that he had won back all of the power and the prestige that he had lost three years ago. His humiliation when he had been struck off the medical register had driven him close to suicide, and if it hadn’t been for his brother he might well have taken himself down to Tivoli Docks and found a cure for his mortification in the cold grey water of the River Lee. His medical knowledge had also helped to dissuade him. He knew as a doctor that there was nothing romantic about death by drowning: drowning is agonisingly painful, and personally he had very little tolerance for pain.

  He and Grainne crossed the gloomy hallway to the reception room where Gerry Mulvaney was waiting for him. The room was huge, with a very high ceiling. Above the red marble fireplace hung a vast mirror, like the mirror in Alice Through the Looking-Glass, which reflected the view through the window of dark green dripping laurel bushes.

  Gerry Mulvaney was sitting on one of two enormous leather chesterfields, which made him look as if he had shrunk to the size of a small child. He was leaning forward nervously and smoking, and darting forward every now and then to tap his cigarette into an ashtray which was on a side-table just out of his reach. On the other chesterfield sat Dermot, placidly tapping away at his iPhone, although it was obvious that he wasn’t there simply to keep Gerry company.

  ‘Gerry,’ said the doctor. ‘I thought you’d given up on the smoking. So bad for your lungs.’

  Gerry Mulvaney shrugged. ‘It’s me fecking nerves that bother me, more than me lungs.’

  The doctor sat down on the chesterfield close to him, while Grainne sat next to Dermot, her hands in her lap, with a prim smile on her face that Gerry Mulvaney found even more disturbing than the doctor’s concern about his health.

  ‘The bottom line is, Gerry, you’ve messed up good and proper,’ said the doctor. ‘Keeno’s still being held by the guards as far as we can find out, although I’m not too worried that he’s going to tell them anything. Keeno wouldn’t tell them if they were on fire.’

  ‘Well, I know that for sure,’ said Gerry, leaning forward to crush out his cigarette and then taking out a packet of Marlboro to light another one. ‘You can always trust Keeno to keep a confidence, like.’

  ‘Not like you, Gerry, I’m sorry to say. It’s some hole you’ve dropped us in here, boy. No mistake about that. You shopped Keeno to the guards and you put the whole operation at risk. It’s not just two dogs we’re talking about here, Gerry. If it was, well, I’d still be taking a very dim view of it, but we’re talking about so much more than that. We’re talking about millions of euros, Gerry. Millions.’

  ‘What was I supposed to do, like?’ asked Gerry. ‘There was that fecking Maguire woman, pointing her gun at the dogs’ heads and saying she was going to do for them right there and then if I didn’t go along with her. Keeno would have been raging if she’d shot them, you know that.’

  ‘And you believed her? Holy Saint Gabriel and all the Archangels, Gerry, you’re beyond stupid, you really are. Haven’t you read about her in the papers, that DS Maguire? She was the one who got Michael Gerrety put behind bars. Michael Gerrety, the biggest wheeler-dealer since Charlie Haughey, and that must have been about as easy as nailing a jelly to a tree, believe me.’

  ‘All right, fair play to you, she wheeled me. What can I do except say that I’m sorry?’

  The doctor leaned back a little. ‘There’s still a risk, Gerry, and that risk is you. If I let you go now, what are the chances that DS Maguire isn’t going to pay you another visit at Riverstick and threaten to shoot a few more of your pooches?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say a word, not now. You know that. I wouldn’t let her wheel me twice. Not with that trick, any road.’

  The doctor was concentrating on picking a stray speck of dust from his sharply creased black trousers. ‘I can’t risk it, Gerry,’ he said, almost sadly, without looking at him. ‘If I can’t trust you once, how can you expect me to trust you twice?’

  ‘Because you can, that’s why. Because I’ve learned me lesson.�
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  ‘It’s all very well you saying that, but how can I be sure that she’s not going to try some other scam on you, and you’ll be gabbling away to her fifteen to the dozen. You see, it’s not only the money that’s involved here, it’s our liberty. I have no intention of spending any time at all in jail because some clapped-out dog-hobbler couldn’t keep his mouth shut.’

  He paused, and then he said, ‘Besides which, you owe us the cost of two fine pedigree dogs.’

  Gerry Mulvaney didn’t answer, but continued to puff at his cigarette. He was sure that whatever was said next, it was going to be bad, but he couldn’t guess what it was. He shifted on the leather chesterfield like a man who feels a pressing need to go to the toilet.

  ‘St Giles’ Clinic is doing better every day,’ said the doctor. ‘The only problem is, we need more patients. It’s a clinic which takes care of people with severe disabilities, as you know, but it’s hard to find sufficient numbers of people with severe disabilities to make it profitable.’

  ‘Bit like my business,’ said Gerry, uneasily. ‘There’s never enough good-quality dogs, do you know what I mean, like? Not to make a decent living out of.’

  ‘What I thought was, Gerry, you could help us out, and at the same time compensate us for the two dogs you lost. And make amends for Keeno being lifted.’

  Gerry Mulvaney was really agitated now. ‘Oh, yeah. And how would I do that, like? I’m not exactly flathúl to say the least.’

  ‘It’s not money I want from you,’ the doctor told him. ‘I want you to volunteer to be a patient here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, “I want you to volunteer to be a patient here.”’

  ‘But how could I be a patient here? All your patients are total fuck-ups, aren’t they? There’s nothing wrong with me at all except a twinge of the gout now and again and sometimes I get the sore eye arses.’

  ‘You get the what? Oh, you mean “psoriasis”. But gout and psoriasis, they’re not disabilities. Not the kind you need to be suffering from, if you’re going to be a patient here. I’m talking about paralysis, a complete inability to walk or even to sit up unaided. I’m talking about dumbness – or “muteness” if I’m going to be less medically but more politically correct.’