Living Death

by Graham Masterton

  They both had only starters – Katie ordered the salmon gravadlax and Conor chose the Clonakilty black pudding with parsnip and apple purée. Although they said very little to each other, anybody watching them would have sensed the bond that was growing between them. The waitress treated them almost as if they were newly-weds.

  After lunch they walked back to Anglesea Street, but Katie stopped and kissed Conor halfway along Copley Street, before they came within sight of the Garda station.

  ‘I shouldn’t be too late tonight,’ she told him. ‘I’ll see you later so.’

  ‘I’m counting on it, Katie, believe me.’

  As soon as she returned to her office, Detective Scanlan came in to see her.

  ‘Glad you’re back, ma’am, we have a woman downstairs who says she recognises the picture that they published in the Examiner this morning, the fellow who had his head shot off at Sceolan Kennels. Sergeant Begley’s talking to her now.’

  ‘Begley can deal with her, can’t he?’

  ‘He could of course, but she’s very emotional about it and she has absolute proof that it’s him. She’s his mother.’

  ‘His mother? Serious?’

  ‘She reads the paper online every morning and there was her own son on the front page. She took a screenshot and compared it with her photo album.’

  ‘Getting very technological, the older generation,’ said Katie. ‘All right, let’s go down and see her.’

  She and Detective Scanlan went down together to one of the interview rooms. Detective Sergeant Begley was sitting with a white-haired woman in a dark brown overcoat with a rabbit-fur collar, clutching a large brown handbag on her knees. Katie guessed she must be in her mid-seventies, and that she must have been very pretty once, but she had one of those round babyish faces that rarely ages very well.

  Detective Sergeant Begley stood up and said, ‘This is Mrs Teagan O’Connor, ma’am. Mrs O’Connor – this is Detective Superintendent Maguire.’

  Mrs O’Connor looked up tearfully. On the table in front of her was her printed-out screenshot of Eithne’s likeness of the dead dognapper, as well as an old leather-bound photograph album.

  Katie sat down beside her and picked up the screenshot.

  ‘This is your son?’ she asked, gently.

  Mrs O’Connor nodded, and wiped her eyes, and sniffed. ‘Brendan. He’s the eldest of five. Look – see.’

  She slid the photograph album across the table and pointed to a large black-and-white photograph of five young men standing and sitting in a garden. In the middle of the group, and the tallest of all of them, was the man whose face Eithne had re-created from the fragments of his shattered head. The resemblance was so marked that there was no doubt in Katie’s mind that it was him.

  ‘So, Teagan, tell me about him,’ said Katie.

  ‘I was already saying to your sergeant here that Brendan was always trouble, mixing with a bad crowd ever since he was a teenager. If there was a knock at the door and it was a guard, it was always Brendan who’d been caught getting a langie off of a bus along Pana, or denting people’s cars playing long slogs down the end of Glandore Park.’

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Thirty-six next Good Friday.’

  ‘The night he was shot – did you know where he was, and what he was up to?’

  ‘I had no clue whatsoever at all. I hadn’t seen him at all for three weeks at least. He lives with his girlfriend Oona up in Onslow Gardens, with their three kids and all. She’s a right brasser that Oona and she and me never got on at all, which is why I don’t see so much of him.’

  ‘Did you have any notion at all that he was involved with a gang of dog thieves?’

  Mrs O’Connor took a tissue out of her handbag and loudly blew her nose. ‘I knew that he had some fierce rough pals who were all mixed up with dog-racing and all like that. He had a pit bull dog of his own which I couldn’t stick at all. Horrible beast, always pulling away at its leash like it couldn’t wait to jump up and take a bite out of your neck.’

  ‘Do you know who any of these rough pals were?’

  ‘Some of them, yes. Two or three of them he’d known ever since he was knee high to a high knee – old bunscoil pals like Kevin Brodie and Paddy Adams. But lately in the past few months there was one feen he was always talking about, do you know what I mean, and seemed pure impressed by. The last two times I went round to his house to see the grandchildren he was there, this fellow, acting like he owned the place. He had the grey hair and the grey suit and a sneery way of talking, like he was the only one who knew anything at all and the rest of the world was nothing but eejits. Brendan said he was a well-known dog-breeder.’

  ‘What was his name? Do you know?’

  ‘Lorcan, that was his Christian name. I never heard his surname.’

  ‘I see. Have you seen or heard anything from this Lorcan since Brendan was killed?’

  ‘Nothing. Not a word. Of course I didn’t know until this morning that anything had happened to Brendan, did I? It wasn’t unusual for me not to hear from him a month at a time, and Oona never rang me to ask where he was. Maybe she knew that he’d been killed, like, but if she did know, she never bothered to tell me about it.’

  ‘Did Brendan tell you anything else about Lorcan, apart from him being a dog-breeder? Did he tell you where he lived, for instance?’

  ‘No. Although there was one thing he did say about him. My older sister Vera was sick with the flu last July and it was taking her for ever to get over it. When I told Brendan about it he said that Lorcan’s brother was a famous doctor and runs his own clinic, and if she didn’t get better soon he could maybe arrange for her to visit him.’

  Katie looked at Detective Sergeant Begley and although he didn’t look back at her, she could tell by the way his eyes widened that he was thinking the same as she was. Brendan’s friend Lorcan was Lorcan Fitzgerald the dognapper, and not only that, the odds were high that Lorcan Fitzgerald’s brother was Dr Gearoid Fitzgerald, of St Giles’ Clinic.

  ‘Thank you, Teagan,’ she said. ‘I think that’s all I need to ask you for the time being, except for Oona’s address. We’ll be going to have a chat with her, of course. Is it okay if we make a copy of your photo album?’

  Mrs O’Connor nodded. ‘What about Brendan’s remains?’ she asked. ‘What’s going to happen about his funeral?’

  ‘His remains are still in the mortuary at the University Hospital, and I’m afraid they’ll have to stay there until the coroner has held a full inquest. After that – well, I suppose that’s something that you and Oona will have to arrange between you.’

  ‘Holy Saint Patrick. The very sight of her makes me craw sick. If it wasn’t for the grandchildren I’d be delighted never to clap eyes on her again, or to smell that Estée Lauder she sprays all over herself, a whole bottle at a time I shouldn’t wonder.’

  When Detective Scanlan had led Mrs O’Connor away, Katie and Sergeant Begley sat looking at the screenshot and the photo album and said nothing to each other for over a minute.

  ‘That forensic artist really has some talent, doesn’t he?’ said Detective Sergeant Begley at last, picking up the screenshot. ‘He’s caught this Brendan spot on – and when you consider that there was only half of his head left.’

  ‘That artist is a she, and her name’s Eithne O’Neill,’ said Katie. ‘She’s young, and, yes, she’s brilliant. But this is a turn-up for the books, isn’t it? Lorcan Fitzgerald and Dr Gearoid Fitzgerald being brothers. I mean, it must be him, mustn’t it? How many other Dr Fitzgeralds run their own clinics in Cork?’

  ‘I sometimes think that God sends us these complimications just for a laugh,’ said Detective Sergeant Begley. ‘Have you had any thoughts yet about how you’re going to deal with Dr Fitzgerald?’

  ‘I’m going over to CUH this afternoon to see the girl that we took from his ambulance, and then I’ll work out the best way of taking it from there. We have the clinic under surveillance of course and there’s no sign ye
t that he’s thinking of making a run for it – so maybe it wasn’t him who mutilated this girl, and all he’s been doing is taking care of her. But I don’t want to spook him, and I can’t afford another fiasco like Operation Trident.’

  ‘Operation Trident wasn’t your fault, ma’am. We all know that Bobby Quilty was tipped off.’

  ‘All the same, Sean, I’m taking this one cautious step at a time. If it was Dr Fitzgerald who operated on her, I want to make sure that he doesn’t see anywhere but the inside of a cell on Rathmore Road for the rest of his days.’

  *

  Katie and Detective Scanlan were met at CUH by Dr Donal Moran, a short, affable man with oversized spectacles and freckles. Katie thought that he looked more like a stand-up comedian than a cardiac specialist. He took them up to the room where Siobhán had been recovering, chatting all the way. A uniformed garda was sitting outside the door, reading a copy of Motoring Life. He jumped to his feet immediately when he saw Katie coming along the corridor.

  ‘All quiet?’ Katie asked him.

  ‘Yes, ma’am. A couple of chatty nurses, that’s all.’

  Dr Moran took Katie and Detective Scanlan in to Siobhán’s room. The calico blind was drawn halfway down so it was dim in there, and Siobhán was still on a cardiac monitor with a built-in defibrillator in case she showed any signs of a relapse. She lay propped up by two large pillows, ivory-faced, her hair clean and brushed, her eyes wide open. She was so still and her breathing was so silent that she could have been a waxwork.

  A young nurse was sitting in the corner by the window and she got up and brought over two chairs for Katie and Detective Scanlan so that they could sit on either side of Siobhán’s bed.

  ‘Siobhán,’ said Dr Moran, softly. ‘It’s Dr Moran again. I’ve brought somebody in to talk to you. It’s two Garda officers, Detective Superintendent Maguire and Detective Scanlan. Would you nod your head please if you understand me?’

  Siobhán nodded.

  Katie reached out and held Siobhán’s right hand, although it felt very cold and Siobhán didn’t respond to her touch at all.

  ‘Siobhán,’ she said. ‘I’m a detective superintendent, as Dr Moran told you, but I’d like you to think about me as Katie. My colleague here is Pádraigin. We’re here to find out what’s happened to you, and who hurt you like this. When we know for sure who it is, we’re going to arrest them and charge them and make sure that they’re sent to jail.’

  Siobhán blinked, but remained utterly still.

  ‘Was it Dr Gearoid Fitzgerald who blinded you and took away your voice?’

  Tears welled up in the corner of Siobhán’s eyes and she nodded.

  ‘Do you know why you were being taken to the UK?’

  Siobhán nodded again.

  ‘Was it for medical treatment? That’s what we were told by the nurse who was with you.’

  Siobhán shook her head.

  ‘So it wasn’t for medical treatment?’

  Siobhán shook her head even more strenuously this time.

  ‘Siobhán, sweetheart, do you think you can spell out for me why you were being taken to the UK? If I go through all of the letters of the alphabet, will you nod when I reach the right letter? I don’t mind how long it takes. All I care about is punishing Dr Fitzgerald.’

  Katie turned around to ask for a tissue to wipe Siobhán’s eyes but the nurse was already standing behind her to hand her one.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Katie asked her, when she had patted the tears from her cheeks. Siobhán nodded and so Katie began. ‘A – B – C – D—’

  At ‘D’, Siobhán nodded and stopped her, so she started again. When she reached ‘R’ she nodded again, and yet again when she got to ‘U’.

  ‘Is it drugs?’ said Katie.

  Siobhán nodded.

  ‘So it was nothing to do with treating you at all? They were smuggling drugs?’

  Siobhán nodded again.

  It took over two more hours, with Katie reciting the alphabet over and over, and Siobhán nodding whenever she came to the right letter, and Detective Scanlan writing down her evidence in her notebook. Eventually, Siobhán was growing too tired to continue, but she had told Katie everything that she had overheard about the drugs that Dr Fitzpatrick had been running, and the name of the man called ‘Wardy’. She also told her that there were other patients at St Giles’ Clinic who had been deliberately maimed.

  Dr Moran had been called away to deal with an emergency, but the young nurse sat in the corner of the room listening to Siobhán’s nodded testimony with mounting horror.

  At last Katie said, ‘Listen, Siobhán, we won’t press you any more today. But tomorrow we’ll have to come back with a camera crew so that we can make a video of what you’ve just told us. I’m sorry that we have to make you go through it all over again, but if we have a video we can show it to a judge and get a search warrant for the clinic and a warrant to arrest Dr Fitzgerald. Is it okay with you if we do that?’

  Siobhán nodded.

  *

  As they drove back to Anglesea Street, Detective Scanlan said, ‘Jesus – how could anybody have mutilated a beautiful young girl like that, just for the sake of drugs?’

  ‘You know the answer to that as well as I do, Pádraigin. They don’t have the slightest feeling for anybody else’s lives. If they did, they wouldn’t be peddling narcotics. But if Dr Fitzgerald has been bringing in drugs in his ambulances, I’m beginning to think that we might have solved the question of how Cork is being flooded with the stuff.’

  ‘But why does he have to blind people, and cripple them?’

  ‘Do you remember those Dutch smugglers a couple of years ago who got caught sneaking cocaine and heroin into the UK in a fleet of fake ambulances? The prosecution reckoned they’d brought in more than four hundred million pounds’ worth of drugs before they were caught. When the British crime agency stopped one of their ambulances, they found it was rammed to the roof with drugs, all hidden behind secret panels. There was about thirty-eight million pounds’ worth, in only one ambulance.’

  ‘Yes, I remember reading about that,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘But those Dutch fellows – they didn’t mutilate anyone, did they, as far as I know?’

  ‘No, they didn’t. Sure, they had fake patients in their ambulances, the same as Dr Fitzpatrick. But that was one of the ways the British crime agency caught them. Once the ambulances had reached their destination, their officers lamped the so-called patients strutting away, perfectly healthy, and counting out the money that they’d been paid for pretending that they were disabled.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘So what you’re thinking is – Dr Fitzgerald didn’t want to be caught out the same way? That’s why he’s made his patients genuinely disabled?’

  ‘Why else?’ said Katie. ‘Why else do you think he broke poor Siobhán’s legs? So she couldn’t run away. And why else do you think he blinded her? So she couldn’t see where she was or what was going on around her, or identify any faces. And why else did he cut her vocal cords? So she couldn’t speak and tell anybody who had hurt her. He made sure her hands were useless, too, so she couldn’t even write down anything to incriminate him. The one big mistake he made was to spare her hearing. If he had deafened her, punctured her eardrums or whatever, she wouldn’t have been able to communicate with us at all.’

  ‘What’s that saying? “A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse.” To tell you the truth, I never really understood what that meant.’

  ‘It means exactly what Siobhán was able to do for us today. When you already suspect that something’s going on, it takes only the slightest signal for you to be assured that it’s true. A nod, or a wink. In Siobhán’s case, a few nods did it.’

  ‘I feel for her,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘I really and truly feel for her. Myself, I think I’d rather be dead than be like her. It’s a living death, isn’t it?’

  *

  Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin called for Katie when
she arrived back at the station. She was intending to talk to him anyway, because she wanted to set up a full-scale raid on St Giles’ Clinic as soon as she had a warrant from a District Court judge. Her rank as detective superintendent gave her the authority to search premises without a warrant if she considered that there was sufficient evidence of a crime being committed, but there was so much at stake here that she wanted to make sure that she couldn’t be challenged in court for not following procedure. Apart from that, she was still haunted by the humiliating failure of Operation Trident.

  ‘Ah, Katie,’ said Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin, as soon as she came into his office. ‘I have to warn you that there’s going to be a full investigation into Jimmy O’Reilly’s suicide.’

  ‘Really?’ she said, sitting down. ‘I didn’t expect anything else.’

  ‘There was some suggestion from Dublin that you should be suspended until the whole matter is completely cleared up, but I told them that we have too much on our plates just now and I couldn’t spare you. The forensics clearly show that you never handled Jimmy’s firearm and that the angle of the shot was entirely consistent with a self-inflicted wound, so they agreed that you could stay on the job. But there will be a hearing, if only to satisfy the Phoenix Park bureaucracy.’

  ‘In a way, do you know, I wish that a hearing wasn’t necessary,’ said Katie. ‘Jimmy and I didn’t get along at all, and he could be a real aingiseoir at times, but I don’t want to see him humiliated, especially now that he’s passed.’

  ‘Well, you know what they say. Life is a vale of misery, or a word to that effect, and then you die.’

  ‘It is for poor Siobhán O’Donohue,’ said Katie. She told Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin how she had interviewed Siobhán, and how she planned to make a video recording of her responses. She also told him that the dead dognapper had been identified as Brendan O’Connor, and that his mother’s evidence had further strengthened the evidence that Lorcan Fitzgerald was responsible for the raid on Sceolan Kennels.

  When she told him that there was a strong possibility that Lorcan Fitzgerald and Dr Gearoid Fitzgerald were brothers, all he could say was, ‘Christ in Heaven. What a cat’s malack. I agree with you that we need to stick close to the book on this one. Drug dealers and doctors can always afford the most expensive lawyers, and in this case your suspect happens to be both.’