Dead Girls Dancing

by Graham Masterton

  The nurse had those heavy curved eyebrows that always put Katie in mind of crows circling above a field, on the lookout for rabbits. She also had a mole on her chin.

  ‘Oh yes, the roses,’ she said. ‘The housekeeping services manager took them away. I imagine she’s found somewhere to put them. The chapel, probably. That’s on the first floor, next to the staff dining room, if you want to go and see them.’

  ‘There was a card with them. Did she take that, too?’

  ‘No, she didn’t,’ said the nurse. ‘I still have it here.’

  She reached down to the wastepaper bin beside her desk, but Katie immediately said, ‘No! – please don’t touch it!’

  She pulled a pair of black forensic gloves out of the pocket of her jacket and tugged them on, finger by finger. Then she took out a small plastic evidence bag. While the nurse watched her in bewilderment, she carefully lifted the card out of the bin and held it up. There was a picture of a sad-looking puppy lying in bed with a bandaged head, and the message Get Well Soon, Pet!

  Inside, in a back-sloping script, whoever had sent Adeen the flowers had written, CU Soon C. D. But Zippo. Remember T.

  Katie studied the card carefully, turning it over to see if there were any marks on the back. Its surface was shiny but she knew that Bill Phinner had recently started using a new liquid developed in Australia that could show up fingerprints that had been left on a non-porous surface.

  The message was deliberately obscure, but it gave her one or two hints: that Adeen’s real name probably began with a C, and that whoever had sent her the card had a name that might begin with a D. ‘But Zippo’ – what did that mean? Zippo was a brand of cigarette lighter, so maybe it was some kind of reference to how the fire had started. And who was T, who had to be remembered?

  ‘All right, grand, thank you, nurse,’ said Katie, and sealed the card into her evidence bag. ‘It might be necessary for a technical expert to come here and take a copy of your fingerprints in case there’s any confusion about who might have been handling this card, but you won’t mind that, will you?’

  ‘If I’d known I shouldn’t touch it, I swear to God, I wouldn’t have gone nowhere near it,’ said the nurse, her eyebrows rising higher than ever.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Katie. ‘Even if we do find your fingerprints on it, I don’t think you’re in any danger of getting yourself lifted for tampering with evidence. Now, I’d better go and find those roses.’

  Once she had retrieved the flowers from the chapel, Katie went into the hospital’s security control room on the other side of the staff canteen. The duty security officer was sitting in front of his six CCTV screens, cupping a mug of tea in both hands as if it were the holy grail. Katie had met him before: he was a short bulldog of a man with cropped grey hair and was almost military in his efficiency.

  ‘How’s it going on, Jerry?’ she asked him. ‘I hope it’s no bother, but I need to see the video from the second-floor lifts, from about an hour and a half ago.’

  ‘No bother at all, DS Maguire,’ he told her, and put down his tea to run the footage back. Nurses and doctors and porters all rushed backwards in and out of the lifts, and at last Adeen’s visitor appeared, holding up his bunch of roses.

  ‘Freeze it right there, please,’ Katie told him.

  She leaned forward and peered intently at the screen. The garda on duty outside Adeen’s door had been right: he was tall, and wearing a dark brown suit, but his face was almost completely obscured by his bucket hat, pulled down low over his forehead, and his heavy-rimmed glasses.

  ‘If you could take a screenshot of that and send it to me at Anglesea Street,’ said Katie.

  Jerry the security officer peered closely at the image, too.

  ‘He might as well have a shopping bag over his head, like them Rubber Bandits,’ he said. ‘I doubt if his own ma would reck him, do you?’

  *

  As she drove back to Anglesea Street, Katie stopped outside Jackie Lennox’s chipper on the Bandon Road, but after visiting Adeen she had lost her appetite for a full fish and chip lunch. All the same, she went in and bought a large takeaway portion of chips for Denis MacCostagáin, and before she put them in the boot of her car she ate two or three of them, blowing on them to cool them down.

  On the way back to the station her iPhone pinged several times, so as soon as she returned to her office she put down the bunch of pink roses that she had taken from the hospital, and the box of chips, and checked to see who had texted her. The first message had been sent by Bill Phinner, asking her to drop in to the Technical Bureau laboratory as soon as she could. The next had come from Kyna saying that she was all ready to go undercover to the Templegate Tavern in Gurranabraher. She had attached a selfie showing her posing in front of her bedroom mirror in a denim jacket clustered with brooches and buttons and a very short red dress and red wedge sandals. Her blonde hair was gelled and brushed up vertically and her lips were painted scarlet to match her dress.

  ‘Gurra brasser!’ she had written. Katie couldn’t help smiling. No matter what Kyna wore, Katie thought she always looked sexy. She had such a fashion model’s figure: small high breasts and lovely long legs, and she always walked with such a confident loping stride, as if she were showing off the new season’s creations at a fashion show.

  Moirin came in and said, ‘You had a phone call from Corinne Daley at Tusla, ma’am. She’s left her number. She says they’ve found a really nice couple who can take in that girl from the fire at Toirneach Damhsa, when she’s ready.’

  ‘Well, that’s a relief. Sure look – can you do me favour and take these roses down to the Technical Bureau, as well as this card? I need the card and the cellophane wrapper around the roses checked for fingerprints, and maybe it’s worth checking the roses themselves for any traces of DNA, in case somebody’s pricked their finger on the thorns. I have to go and see Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin before these chips go cold.

  ‘Here, help yourself—’ she said, opening the white polystyrene box. She offered a chip to Moirin and took two more herself. ‘We don’t want him getting as fat as a fool, now, do we? Have another.’

  When she entered Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin’s office, carrying the box of chips, she found that Frank Magorian was already there, sitting on the couch under the window. He stood up as soon as Katie came in, holding out his hand and smiling. Katie put the chips down on Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin’s desk, pushing aside a report on drug abuse to make room for it.

  ‘Fresh from Lennox’s, sir,’ she told him. ‘You should eat them while they’re hot.’

  Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin gave her an uneasy look, as if to tell her that he wasn’t going to start stuffing his face with chips while he was discussing law enforcement strategy with the new Assistant Commissioner. Katie was beginning to feel hungry again and she wished now that she’d eaten them all.

  Assistant Commissioner Frank Magorian came up close and shook her hand. Although he was tall, at least six foot three inches, Katie had always thought that his head was disproportionately large for his body, like a statue of himself. She had known him when he was a superintendent at the Garda College, but this morning she had checked his recent career details online. He was fifty-two now, but to be fair, she thought he looked younger. He was handsome in a George Clooney-ish way that she personally found a little too smooth, with black, slicked-back hair that was greying at the edges, and a long face with a long straight nose and a heavy jaw. His eyes were deep-set, but they were bright and intelligent, and she knew that he had a formidable list of degrees in both criminology and business management, including the executive leadership programme for chiefs of police worldwide that was run by the FBI.

  If there was anybody qualified to be a possible successor to Nóirín O’Sullivan as Garda Commissioner, it was Frank Magorian.

  ‘How’s it going, DS Maguire?’ he asked her. ‘It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Please, sir. You can ca
ll me Katie. And it’s ten years next seventeenth of October, which also happens to be the feast day of St John the Dwarf.’

  ‘St John the Dwarf? What was he known for?’

  ‘Obedience, sir. He was told to water a piece of wood every day, and he did it for three years without complaint, even though the water was twelve miles away. After three years, it grew into a tree, and that tree’s still standing today. I always tell that story to my new detectives, in case they ever wonder why I’m making them do the same boring thing over and over.’

  ‘Well, Katie, you never cease to surprise me,’ Frank Magorian told her, shaking his head. ‘I’ll tell you something for nothing, Denis. This young woman was the star of Templemore when she was training there. Top marks in everything, and you could never catch her out. When it came to debates on points of law, they used to say, “Look out, everybody, Maguire’s on fire!”’

  Katie felt herself blushing. Mother of God, fancy him remembering that.

  ‘Here, come and sit down,’ Frank Magorian invited her. ‘I’ve just been asking Denis about this fire at the dance studio, and how that’s coming along.’

  All three of them sat by the window. The rain was still pattering on the glass and the pale grey shadows of raindrops trickled down their faces as they talked.

  ‘I’m arranging a conference at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon, sir,’ said Katie. ‘We’ve put names to all of the sixteen victims who died in the studio. Some of their bodies were very badly charred, but they were identified by dental X-rays and personal possessions and sometimes by areas of their bodies that were shielded from the flames by other bodies. Dr Kelley hasn’t officially finalized the cause of death of each and every one of them, but they all have severe laryngeal oedema, so I think it’s fairly safe to assume that they all died from inhalation of superheated air.

  ‘The two bodies we found in the attic were also charred beyond facial recognition, but of course those two had been shot in the head. Dr Kelley has told me that their lungs were not as seriously damaged as the other victims, so in their case I think we can assume that they had already stopped breathing before they were burned.’

  Frank Magorian nodded, and then he said, ‘The thing of it is, Katie, this case is still making headline news every day. There was a comment in the Times this morning which asked how eighteen people could have been killed in such a spectacular way, in daylight, right in the middle of the city, and yet the police still don’t seem to have the first clue who might have done it. Like – do we have a clue who might have done it?’

  He didn’t sound censorious, but Katie could understand that the media would question him very intensively about the Toirneach Damhsa fire tomorrow, and he would need to be up to speed on all of the latest developments.

  ‘We have a number of leads we’re following up,’ she told him. ‘It’s fierce competitive, step-dancing, and as you may know there’s a major feis scheduled in Cork for next week, so we’ve had to consider the possibility that somebody from a rival troupe might be responsible. On the other hand, we’re still trying to work out why two of the dancers were shot before the fire was started, and what that little girl was doing in the attic.’

  Katie explained that she had just come back from seeing Adeen but had not yet been able to find out who she was. She also told him that Danny Coffey had accused his former partner, Steven Joyce, of being the arsonist, but that she was waiting for more forensic evidence before she interviewed him.

  ‘I did pick up another undertone, though, when I was questioning Danny Coffey. He gave me the distinct impression that there might have been something going on between him and the Toirneach Damhsa dance instructor, Nicholas O’Grady.’

  ‘In what way? A homosexual relationship, you mean?’

  ‘I’m not sure. It could have been that he was simply shocked and upset, do you know what I mean, but he did seem unusually weepy. We know for sure that Nicholas O’Grady was gay. He was married to a young musician called Tadhg Brennan, so if there was anything going on between him and Danny Coffey it was—’

  She paused and turned to Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin. ‘I don’t know, what do you call it when a married gay has a gay affair outside his marriage? Do you call that adultery?’

  ‘You can call it whatever you like, Katie,’ said Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin. ‘The same laws apply as they do between men and women. If you want to be divorced, as you well know, you have to be separated for four out of the five preceding years, and there has to be no hope at all of reconciliation, whoever you’ve been messing around with – man or woman or donkey.’

  ‘Well, keep me up to date with any developments, Katie,’ said Frank Magorian, checking his watch. ‘Denis and I are having a bit of a natter about budgets and Garda station closures, and then I have to whizz back to Dublin. The Commissioner’s making her public announcement about my appointment first thing tomorrow morning and I’ll be doing a few TV and radio interviews of course. But hopefully I can be back here in time for your conference.’

  Katie stood up and smiled. ‘It’s grand to see you again, sir. Let’s hope this is something of a new era for the Southern Region.’

  ‘I’ll drop in to say goodbye before I leave,’ said Frank.

  Katie was tempted to take the box of chips from Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin’s desk but decided against it. They were probably stone cold by now, anyway.

  14

  When she went down to the Technical Bureau laboratory Katie found Bill Phinner leaning out of the open window of his cluttered little office, vaping out into the rain.

  ‘I hate to say it, Bill, but almost every time I see you these days you seem to be puffing away.’

  Bill Phinner took a last drag on his e-cig, blew out the vapour, and then closed the window. Katie could smell vanilla.

  ‘It’s the stress, ma’am. I freely admit it. What with this fire, and the Niall Gleeson shooting, and all that groundwater up at Watergrasshill being contaminated, we’re pure overwhelmed at the moment. I have two technicians off sick and one on his holliers. I think people forget that inside of our Tyvek suits we’re real human beings, and some of the stuff we have to deal with would make you craw sick.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Bill,’ said Katie. ‘This fire has put a whole lot of pressure on all of us. We have more suspects than we know what to do with but we seem to be going nowhere at all – not even round in circles. It’s any real motive that’s missing.’

  ‘Maybe there wasn’t a motive. Most arsonists burn down buildings just for the thrill of it.’

  ‘I’ve considered that, of course. But since two of the victims were shot it doesn’t seem likely that it was only done for kicks. It could have been that somebody had a personal grudge against a member of Toirneach Damhsa, or maybe it was somebody who didn’t want them to score well at next week’s feis.’

  ‘On the other hand, maybe it was nothing to do with dancing at all,’ said Bill Phinner.

  ‘Well, you could be right. Maybe Danny Coffey’s been having financial troubles and he burned the studio down himself to collect the insurance. I mean, compo, that’s probably the third most profitable industry in Cork, after drugs and prostitution.’

  Katie kept a straight face but Bill Phinner couldn’t help grinning. ‘I’ll tell you something, ma’am, you always brighten my day, you do. Look – come on through to the lab and I can show you what we’ve found out about the way the fire was started.’

  Katie followed him through to the laboratory. Eithne O’Neill was sitting in front of a computer, creating 3-D images of some of the worst-burnt victims from the fire. She was rebuilding their faces to confirm their identity, and also to give their relatives a post-mortem picture of them that wasn’t a black charred skull with its teeth snarling at them.

  Partlan Murphy was there, too, grey-haired and lean and round-shouldered, like a stork. He was a fingerprint expert and one of Bill Phinner’s longest-serving technicians. Lying on the bench beside him were the ce
llophane-wrapped pink roses that Katie had brought back from the hospital, ready for him to process, and he was peering through a binocular microscope at the back of the get-well card.

  ‘How’s it going on, Part?’ Bill Phinner asked him, laying a hand on his shoulder.

  Taking his eyes away from the microscope, Partlan Murphy said, ‘Better than I expected, sir. In fact, amazing. I’ve applied the MOF liquid and at least seven clear fingerprints are showing up.’

  ‘That’s the new Australian technique I mentioned to you the other day,’ Bill Phinner told Katie. ‘There’s metallic crystals in the liquid which bind to the residue left behind in a fingerprint – you know, like fatty acids, peptides, proteins and salts. The crystals create an ultra-thin coating that’s an exact replica of the fingerprint, and that makes a glowing image which we can photograph, in any colour we choose.’

  ‘Well, that’s mint,’ said Katie. ‘If only it was just as easy finding whose fingers they match.’

  ‘I hate to say it, ma’am, but that’s your problem, I’m afraid.’

  They reached the end of the laboratory where an angular young man in a long white lab coat was consulting graphs on his computer screen. He had very short red hair and bright red ears. He swivelled around his chair when he caught sight of Katie and Bill Phinner approaching, and took off his heavy-rimmed glasses.

  ‘This is Detective Sergeant Bryan Noone from the Ballistics Section in Dublin,’ said Bill Phinner. ‘I asked him to come down yesterday morning so that he could take a sconce at the floor and wall and ceiling samples that we took from the dance studio.’

  He picked up a charred section of parquet flooring that was lying on the bench, tagged and numbered, and showed Katie how its varnish had been bubbled and striated by the heat.

  ‘You see this? Didn’t I tell you that the fire was probably started by some kind of pyrophoric chemical? DS Noone here is the undisputed expert on pyrotechnics in Ireland, if not the entire civilized world, so I thought it would be a good idea if he came down to give us his invaluable opinion. DS Noone, this is Detective Superintendent Maguire.’