Dead Girls Dancing

by Graham Masterton

‘I never saw any of them before, but there was five of them I’d say, maybe six. They came in and they was in there for maybe a half an hour or more and then they all left. Two cars they came in, a silvery one and a blacky one.’

  ‘Would you reck them again if you saw them?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’m fierce terrible when it comes to the names but I have a great memory for the faces all right.’

  ‘But you think Maggie Dennehy could still be at home but she’s just not answering?’ asked Garda Leary.

  ‘She hasn’t gone and if she hasn’t gone she’s still there,’ the elderly woman told her.

  As they walked back around to the Dennehy house Detective Ó Doibihiln said, ‘That old wan should have been a detective, do you know what I mean? She has the real gileage for it.’

  They went back up to the green front door and Detective Ó Doibhilin pressed the doorbell again. There was still no answer, so he took out the leatherette wallet he carried in his inside coat pocket and opened it up. Inside was a selection of pin lock jigglers – skeleton keys for cylinder locks. He peered at the door to identify the type of lock and then prodded at it with one jiggler after another until it suddenly clicked open.

  ‘You’re some genius,’ said Garda Leary.

  ‘My father worked for the Lock Doctor, that’s all. I was brought up unlocking locks that I shouldn’t have been, like the drawer in my brother’s desk with his girlie mags in it.’

  Detective Ó Doibhilin opened the door wide and called out, ‘Mrs Dennehy? Mrs Dennehy? It’s the police here, Mrs Dennehy! We just need to have a word with you, that’s all!’

  When there was still no answer he stepped into the hallway and Garda Leary followed him.

  ‘Mrs Dennehy?’

  He stopped, and sniffed, and then he said, ‘Oh, no. Please don’t tell me. Can you smell what I smell?’

  They went into the living room. The curtains were drawn, so the room was gloomy, but there was sufficient light for them to be able to see Maggie Dennehy lying on the couch.

  ‘Just open the curtains a little way,’ said Detective Ó Doibhilin. ‘Put on your gloves.’

  Garda Leary snapped on a pair of black latex gloves and then went over to pull back the curtains. The brown smells of human faeces and early decomposition were not yet overwhelming, but they pervaded the whole room and Detective Ó Doibhilin couldn’t help taking them in with every breath. After he had put on his forensic gloves, he tugged out his handkerchief and pressed it over his nose and his mouth.

  He approached Maggie Dennehy and stared down at her. Then, very cautiously, he tried to lift up one of the hands that was crossed saint-like over her breasts. It was totally stiff. She was still in full rigor, so he guessed that she had died less than twenty-four hours ago. One eyelid was fully closed and the other creepily half-open, but both her eyeballs had now sunk deep into her head, and her face was a pale lavender colour. Her hands were lavender, too, and her fingernails were white. All of the blood had drained out of them and would now be pooled in the lowest extremities of her body.

  Her neck was puffy, but he could clearly see that there was a deep purplish groove around her throat where the washing line had cut into it.

  ‘Right, girl, let’s get out of here,’ said Detective Ó Doibhilin, muffled behind his handkerchief. Garda Leary was keeping her mouth tight shut and did nothing but nod.

  Once outside again, they took two or three breaths of fresh air. Then Detective Ó Doibhilin called Detective Sergeant Begley.

  ‘What’s the story, Michael?’ Detective Sergeant Begley asked him, briskly. He sounded as if he were hurrying along one of the station’s corridors. ‘How’s it coming on with that Dennehy woman?’

  ‘She’s not being too cooperative, sir. In fact, we’ve found her deceased. Within the last day or so, I’d say, judging by the state of her.’

  ‘Christ on a bike. Serious? All right. I’ll give Superintendent Pearse the heads-up and I’ll send you some backup, whoever’s available, and the Technical Bureau, too. DS Maguire is up in Tipp this afternoon, chasing after those dog-fighters, but I’ll text her as well.’

  ‘Her nosy old neighbour told us there were five or six fellows around here yesterday, in two different vehicles,’ said Detective Ó Doibhilin. ‘She said they stayed here for thirty minutes maybe. Then Bernie Dennehy came home but he went out again after, and of course she hasn’t seen him since, although I didn’t tell her that he was dead, too.’

  ‘What was the cause of death there, Michael? Any ideas?’

  ‘I’d say strangulation of one sort or another. I suppose it could have been suicide, but she’s lying on the sofa in the sitting room so if she’d hung herself somebody would have had to cut her down and carry her there.’

  ‘Okay, Michael. I’ll come up there myself and take a look. Jesus. This gets more and more complimicated by the minute.’

  *

  Katie’s iPhone pinged as they were driving past Watergrasshill, less than twenty-five minutes away from the Cork City outskirts.

  ‘Mother of God,’ she told Detectives Markey and O’Mara. ‘It’s from Ó Doibhilin. He went to question Mrs Dennehy about Bernie Dennehy being shot and he’s found her dead. He says she looks like she’s been hanged or garrotted.’

  ‘Jesus. Does he know how long she’s been there?’ asked Detective O’Mara.

  ‘She’s still in rigor so it couldn’t have happened much later than yesterday afternoon sometime.’

  ‘What do you reckon, ma’am? Do you think maybe Dennehy killed her himself? They had this strange kind of arrangement, didn’t they, what with him selling her off to Niall Gleeson for sex? Maybe he’d just had enough of it and killed them both.’

  ‘But in that case, why did he go after Davy Dorgan?’ asked Detective Markey.

  ‘Well, we still don’t know what his motive was,’ said Katie. ‘That was the whole reason why Ó Doibhilin went to talk to Mrs Dennehy. We’ll be interviewing Dorgan about the shooting tomorrow morning in any case. Maybe Dennehy just flipped and wanted to take his revenge on everybody who’d ever thwarted him, like. It does happen. Remember that history teacher from the Pres last year – the one who stabbed his wife and his daughter and then came into school and tried to stab the boys in his class?’

  ‘Oh, I remember him all right. Meaney his name was. That was one way of teaching his pupils a lesson they’d never forget in a hurry. Almost cut the nose off of one of them.’

  Katie prodded out Detective Sergeant Begley’s number. As she did so Conor leaned close and said, ‘You’ll be tied up tonight, then?’

  ‘I will, yes, Conor. I’ll be staying at the station most likely. What’s the time? We’re supposed to be interviewing the fiancé of that girl Saoirse at eight... that poor girl who was shot and then burned in the attic.’

  ‘Fair play,’ said Conor. ‘But I’ll be back at Gabriel guest house if you need to get in touch.’

  In front of Detectives Markey and O’Mara he said this in a very flat, disinterested voice. He didn’t want them to realize that if she found enough time when she was finished at Anglesea Street, he was inviting her to come back to the guest house.

  ‘I’ll call you if I need to,’ she told him. At the same time, though, out of sight of her detectives, she grasped his hand.

  Detective Sergeant Begley answered her call. ‘We’re here now at Nash’s Boreen,’ he told her. ‘Inspector O’Rourke has come along with me just to make a general assessment and I have O’Brien and Buckley with me, too. Bill Phinner and his team turned up about ten minutes ago and they’re starting to take pictures.’

  ‘I’ll be calling the deputy state pathologist as soon as I get in,’ Katie told him. ‘As soon as the forensics are all completed at the scene I want Mrs Dennehy’s body taken to CUH for an urgent post-mortem. We need to know how she died, and the sooner the better.’

  Katie sat back, thinking, while the lights of Cork City gradually came closer. She wished in a way that she hadn’t tried to inter
vene in the dog-fighting that afternoon, especially since she had ended up shooting those two Staffordshire bull terriers. She felt so strongly about the cruelty that was inflicted on the fighting dogs, though, and about the misery that was caused to so many families because their dogs were stolen for fighting or breeding, or to extort a ransom out of them. What if that ever happened to Barney?

  ‘I’ll have to file a report about today,’ she told Conor. ‘What happened at the dog-fight, I mean.’

  ‘If I were you, I’d make it short and snappy and straight to the point,’ said Conor.

  ‘Snappy? That’s a good word to describe it.’

  ‘What I’m saying is, none of those knackers are going to make a complaint against you. What are they going to say? “We were holding a massive fifty-dog fight like, and this detective superintendent came in and messed it up for us”? I don’t think so.’

  31

  Shortly after she arrived at Anglesea Street and switched on the lights in her office Inspector O’Rourke returned from Nash’s Boreen.

  ‘The press are all up there,’ he said. ‘I gave them a simple statement to the effect that Mrs Dennehy had been found deceased and that we’re looking into the circumstances. They asked, of course, if it had any connection to Bernie Dennehy’s death and the shooting of Davy Dorgan, but all I told them was that our investigation was still in its preliminary stages.’

  Katie gave him a wry smile and shook her head. ‘Good man yourself, Francis. Thank God I’m not some poor Echo reporter trying to wheedle a story out of you.’

  ‘But, well... it very much looks as if Ó Doibhilin’s first guess was spot-on,’ Inspector O’Rourke told her. ‘There’s the cut-off remnants of a washing line dangling from the banisters. It’s tied with some fierce tight knots, like it’s had a heavy weight hanging from it, and the marks on Mrs Dennehy’s neck correspond with the pattern of the cord.’

  ‘So you think that she could have committed suicide?’

  ‘It looks that way. Unless she was hung by those five or six feens that her neighbour saw and Bernie cut her down when he came home. Maybe that would have given him the motive for going after Dorgan.’

  ‘Oh, stop,’ Katie told him. ‘I think we’ve done quite enough speculating. Dr Kelley’s still in Cork so I’ve left a message for her and I’m hoping she’ll be able to start her post-mortem early tomorrow. What we desperately need is some tangible evidence.’

  God must have had overheard her because at that very moment there was a rap at her door and Detective Inspector Mulliken came in, looking tired, with his Fota Golf Club tie askew, but holding up a torn-off sheet of notepaper as if he had won a few hundred euros on the lottery.

  ‘Not interrupting, am I, ma’am?’ he asked her. ‘I’ve just come off the phone with Simon Mitchell in Belfast. I told him about that tip-off that Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán picked up and he contacted the SRR immediately. He couldn’t admit it in so many words, because they no longer have an official presence in the province. In some mysterious way, though, he managed to come up with a whole rake of background information about Davy Dorgan.’

  ‘That’s a result, Tony,’ said Katie. ‘What did he tell you?’

  ‘Let’s see,’ said Detective Inspector Mulliken, reading from his notes. ‘Davy Dorgan is the second son of Bryan Dorgan, who was the second-in-command of the IRA in Larne during the Troubles. Bryan Dorgan’s other three sons all left Antrim and didn’t want anything to do with the dissident republican movement, but Davy was different. When he was growing up on the Seacourt estate he was constantly harassed and attacked by UDA thugs.

  ‘It seems like he was beaten up several times because of his homosexuality as much as his republican sympathies. When he was sixteen he was attacked by ten young men who cracked his skull with a flashlight and almost killed him. After that incident his behaviour became increasingly aggressive and disturbed, and he was arrested several times for attacking members of the Larne UDA. He was suspected to have stabbed and killed one of them at an eleventh-night bonfire, but it could never be proved.’

  ‘Well, all this psychotic behaviour seems to fit,’ said Katie. ‘Were you given any information about his younger sister?’

  ‘Yes... the Dorgans had a daughter Cecilia five years after their youngest son, Warren, was born. Mrs Dorgan fell pregnant one more time after that, at the age of forty-three, but both she and the baby died during a difficult childbirth at the Antrim Area Hospital.’

  Katie thought about Adeen telling her why her brother had ‘stampit’ on her doll, Bindy – Adeen, or Cissy rather, now that she knew her real name.

  ‘The Christmas after Mrs Dorgan’s death there was a devastating fire in Curwen’s Stores in Larne High Street,’ Detective Inspector Mulliken went on. ‘Seven people were trapped in the blaze and three of them died. The Curwens are a Protestant family so it was immediately suspected that the fire had been started by republicans. It was unusual, this fire, in that it was started more or less simultaneously in various departments of the store, and it was explosive.

  ‘The PSNI forensics team discovered that it had been started by TPA – triethylaluminium thickened with polyisobutylene and diluted with n-hexane so it didn’t burst into flame until the n-hexane evaporated. There – I managed to say all of that without spitting on you! But it was exactly the same compound that was used to set the Toirneach Damhsa dance studio alight. Exactly. Even down to the one per cent polyisobutylene.’

  ‘Did they find out who started that fire at Curwen’s?’ asked Katie.

  ‘They did, yes. The non-existent intelligence service who aren’t officially in the province had a squealer and this squealer pointed the finger at Bryan and Davy Dorgan and two other IRA shitehawks. The PSNI went to pick them up but they’d gone – Bryan and Davy and his young sister, too. Bryan went to the UK and died in Liverpool of lung cancer eighteen months ago, but they never knew what became of Davy and his sister – not until you found out that they were living under the name of Jepson.’

  Katie stood up and went to the window. It was dark outside now and raindrops were sparkling on the glass. She felt worn down – not only because of everything she had done today, but because of the constant warring she had to deal with between Catholics and Protestants, drug-dealers and pimps and people-smugglers and racketeers and frauds. Apart from that, there was all the internal politicking of An Garda Síochána she had to untangle. And Conor, too, expecting her to be passionate and attentive and give her every spare moment of her time.

  She felt like throwing up her hands and shouting Stop! Stop talking to me, stop expecting so much from me! Let me have just one day on my own, doing absolutely nothing at all but taking Barney for a walk on the beach, and then lying on my couch with a warm crochet blanket snuggled around me, sipping tea and eating barmbrack and listening to Claudie Mackula playing the flute and the bodhran and singing ‘Where Everything Ends and Everything Begins’, because that’s the way I feel at the moment!

  That’s the way I feel.

  She turned away from the window and asked, ‘Did they find out where Bryan Dorgan got it from, this TPA?’

  ‘It turns out that several plastics companies in Antrim use it for moulding, and a semiconductor company, too. The chemicals they used to burn down Curwen’s were stolen by one of Dorgan’s cronies from a firm in the Willowbank Business Park called Plastishape... and, here’s the cruncher, Plastishape discovered that since their last inventory, three weeks ago, a whole heap more TPA has gone missing. For some reason they never reported it. Embarrassed, most likely.’

  ‘I think we can guess where that ended up,’ said Katie. ‘Jesus – do they have no security at all, these Plasti-people? Anyway, what about Kyna’s tip-off about Davy Dorgan’s plan to shoot this British defence secretary? What intelligence did your friend find out about that?’

  ‘Well, that’s our most critical concern of all. Ian Bowthorpe’s attending a dinner in Dublin this evening, but he’ll be on his way here to Cork
tomorrow afternoon. The information you got from DS Ni Nuallán, that looks as if it could very well be sound. Three of the IRA men who used to associate with the Dorgans were seen to leave their homes at about 1500 hours this afternoon and drive south. Two of them have reputations as hit men and one has a long track record as a bomb-maker, which is why the non-existent security service have been keeping a fairly constant eye on them. Their car is being tracked, even though they don’t know it.’

  ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘Simon thought at first they might be heading for Dublin, but they’ve already gone past the Mad Cow and the last information he received was that they were parked outside Harte’s Bar and Grill in Kildare.’

  ‘Okay. I suppose even hit men have to eat. He’ll keep up us to date with their progress?’

  ‘Oh, sure, yes. Minute by minute. But the non-existent security service have already alerted the National Surveillance Unit and the NSU have had armed officers following these two ever since they crossed the border. They’re reluctant to stop them yet because they want to see if they’re heading for Cork, and if they are, who they’re going to be linking up with.’

  ‘Davy Dorgan, presumably. But the NSU are right not to stop them too soon. If we lift them now, we could allow Dorgan time to set up another attempt. Or, if he doesn’t, we may never be able to prove that it was him who planned it – that’s if it was.’

  ‘Of course. And we want to rope in as many of these Authentic IRA as we can. There’s a fair few faces up in Gurra that I’d like to be looking at through the bars of a cell.’

  Katie said, ‘That’s good work, Tony. Keep me posted. Right now I want to go downstairs and see how O’Donovan and Scanlan are getting on. They’re interviewing the fiancé of that girl who was shot in the Toirneach Damhsa attic. But it’s looking almost certain, wouldn’t you say, that Dorgan was behind it? The shooting, and the fire? All we have to do is find out who else was involved, if anybody, and then prove it.’

  Detective Inspector Mulliken folded up his sheet of notepaper. ‘I hope I’m not wrong, ma’am, but I’m beginning to get a sense that things are joining up like. It’s what I call my jigsaw feeling. Suddenly you see a piece of sky that fits, and then a piece of tree, and before you know it you have half a garden.’