Dead Girls Dancing

by Graham Masterton

  They all looked back at her shiftily, but none of them spoke. She could hardly imagine anything worse than being sexually assaulted by those ugly, unkempt, unshaven men, every one of them reeking of stale alcohol and cigarettes and body odour.

  Kyna met her in her office when she came back. Katie hadn’t asked her to accompany her because the men would have recognized her as Roisin the bar-girl and she didn’t want their lawyers pleading entrapment.

  It was past two o’clock and the dog-napper had still not called back about Barney. Katie tried to put him out of her mind, but she couldn’t help glancing at the clock on her desk every few minutes.

  Kyna said, ‘I went round to Liam’s flat with O’Mara this morning and searched it. There was nothing there of any interest except for a few porn mags. Nothing to connect him with Davy Dorgan. He was scared stiff of Dorgan, but I still don’t think he would have knowingly gone on a suicide mission.’

  ‘I agree with you,’ said Katie. ‘They might be mental, the Authentic IRA, but they’re not ISIS.’

  There was a long silence between them and then Kyna said, ‘My mind’s all jumbled up at the moment, ma’am. I’ll stay here at Anglesea Street until this investigation’s over, but then I think I’ll probably be applying for a transfer to Dublin, like I was going to before.’

  ‘Give yourself some time,’ Katie told her. ‘Like you say, we’re all in a state of shock right now, so you don’t want to be making any major decisions, not yet. I promise you I won’t be putting any pressure on you myself, Kyna. You know how fond I am of you, don’t you, but I’ll never stop needing a man in my life, so the decision as to whether you go or stay has to be yours.’

  Kyna’s mouth puckered and she bent forward in her chair and clenched her fists and tears started to drip on to the folder she was holding.

  ‘I love you, Katie,’ she said miserably. ‘I love you so much.’

  Katie got up to hand her a tissue when her phone rang. She picked it up with her heart beating hard. ‘DS Maguire.’

  ‘It’s me,’ whispered a young girl’s voice.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘It’s me, Cissy.’

  ‘Cissy! Where are you? Are you safe?’

  There was such a long pause that Katie was afraid that she had rung off. At last, though, Cissy said, ‘I’m with my brother.’

  ‘You mean Davy?’

  ‘Yes, Davy.’

  ‘But where are you?’

  ‘Pana.’

  ‘You’re in Patrick’s Street? Where in Patrick’s Street?’

  ‘I don’t know the number but it’s upstairs.’

  Katie covered the phone with her hand and said to Kyna, ‘It’s Cissy Dorgan. She’s calling me on the mobile phone I gave her. She says she’s with Davy somewhere on Patrick’s Street.’

  ‘I’ll tell MacCostagáin and DI Mulliken,’ said Kyna. She wiped her eyes, dropped her folder on Katie’s desk, and hurried out.

  ‘And call for an RSU unit, too!’ Katie called after her. Then, ‘Cissy, are you still there, sweetheart?’

  ‘I am, yes.’

  ‘Cissy, can you see out of the window at all?’

  ‘I’ll have to be careful. Davy’s asleep.’

  ‘Davy’s actually there with you now?’

  ‘Yes. So I mustn’t wake him up. I kept this phone in my bag so he doesn’t know I have it.’

  ‘All right then, sweetheart, be very quiet, but try and tell me what you can see when you look out of the window.’

  There was another long pause and some soft scuffling noises and then Cissy said, ‘A shop called Mr Big Man.’

  Katie knew exactly where that was – at the west end of St Patrick’s Street just before it turned south into Grand Parade. As far as she could visualize it, the building on the opposite side of the street was next to Waterstone’s bookshop, but empty and up for rental.

  ‘Can you work out which floor you’re on?’ she asked Cissy.

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t tell.’

  ‘Look at the shop on the other side of the street. Can you see which floor you’re on the same level as?’

  ‘There’s Mr Big Man and then there’s another floor and then there’s another the same as the one I’m on.’

  ‘The second floor, then. Well done, Cissy. Good girl yourself. Listen – we’ll be coming round to get you in just a few minutes. Whatever you do, don’t say a word to Davy. Which room is he in? The front of the building or the back?’

  ‘He’s in the back,’ Cissy whispered. ‘He’s sleeping on his mattress, with—’

  ‘With who, Cissy?’ Katie asked her, but Cissy didn’t reply. ‘Cissy, can you hear me? With who?’

  There was only silence from the other end. Cissy’s phone had been switched off, either by Cissy or by somebody else. Katie didn’t dare to ring her back in case Davy was still asleep and the sound of her phone warbling woke him up.

  She unlocked her desk drawer, took out her revolver, and pushed it into her holster. Then she lifted her raincoat off its peg and hurried breathlessly downstairs. Detective Inspector Mulliken was already waiting for her, along with Kyna and Detectives O’Donovan and Ó Doibhilin and Scanlan.

  ‘I’ve alerted Superintendent Pearse,’ said Detective Inspector Mulliken. ‘There was already a foot patrol on Patrick’s Street and he has them watching out for Dorgan.’

  ‘Tell him he’s on the second floor of the building that’s to let, right opposite Mr Big Man. They’ll need to keep an eye on the back of that building, too. I think there’s an alleyway that comes out on to Paul Street.’

  ‘We’ll have three patrol cars backing us up, plus the RSU when they get here,’ said Detective Inspector Mulliken as they went down in the lift to the car park.

  ‘I don’t know for sure if Dorgan is armed,’ said Katie. ‘On his past record, though, I’m not going to take any chances.’

  ‘If it was him that set off that bomb,’ said Detective Inspector Mulliken, ‘you’d have thought he would have got himself as far away from Cork as possible, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Hiding in plain sight,’ said Katie. ‘I’ve seen it plenty of times before. The last place they think we’d think of looking is under our noses. Do you remember that car thief – what was his name, Hegarty – that fellow who rented a flat right next door to the Market Tavern across the road and used to walk past our front door every morning on his way to work? It was nearly six months before a sergeant bumped into him one day and recognized him.’

  *

  It was still raining hard when they reached St Patrick’s Street and Katie had the pointed hood of her waterproof jacket turned up. She had kept her iPhone in her hand but she hadn’t heard from Cissy again. She prayed that Davy hadn’t discovered the phone she had given her. She might be his younger sister, but if he was capable of blowing up one of his own gang, who could guess what he might do to her if he thought she had been betraying him?

  They parked around the corner in Grand Parade where Dorgan wouldn’t be able to see them from his upstairs window. Two patrol cars parked out of sight in St Peter’s and Paul’s Place and a third parked right at the back of the block on Paul Street, in case Dorgan tried to escape that way.

  Just as Katie and Detective Inspector Mulliken were approaching the front of the building she was told by Sergeant Croly that the Regional Support Unit had arrived and they, too, had parked in St Peter’s and Paul’s Place, with six armed gardaí. They came around the corner by the Bank of Ireland in their black uniforms and protective vests and helmets, two of them carrying sub-machine guns.

  Before they forced open the front door, Katie put up her hand and said, ‘C’m’ere – there’s a young girl of nine years old in there, probably in the front room on the second floor. Take great care that she isn’t hurt or distressed. The suspect, Davy Dorgan, may be in one of the back rooms. The last I was told about him he was asleep, possibly with somebody else, but of course he may be awake by now and I expect us breaking in will wake him anyway.�
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  The ground floor of the building had been a dress shop, so the upper two-thirds of the front door was glass. One of the RSU gardaí used a hand-held windscreen-cutter to remove it completely, which made no more than a purring sound. He lifted the panel right out and all he had to do then was reach inside and open the lock.

  The armed gardaí ran quickly and quietly up the stairs to the second floor. It was there that Katie had told them to shout ‘Armed gardaí!’ because she didn’t want Davy Dorgan to start shooting and then claim afterwards that he had thought the RSU were criminals who were breaking in to rob him.

  She drew her own revolver and followed Detectives O’Donovan and Ó Doibhilin upstairs, with Kyna and Detective Scanlan close behind.

  Each flight of stairs was narrow and dark and smelled of damp and old linoleum. When she reached the second floor, panting, Katie found that two RSU gardaí had already entered the front room overlooking the street and were standing protectively over Cissy.

  Cissy was sitting on a stained velvet cushion, dressed in a thick red overcoat with buttons like white chocolate drops, and Aran socks. Her face was filthy. Her hair had been chopped short and she was wearing a grubby white wool hat. She was tightly clutching the doll that she had christened Bindy.

  As soon as she saw Katie she scrambled to her feet and ran over to her and hugged her.

  ‘There, Cissy, I told you we’d come to get you, now didn’t I?’ said Katie. ‘There now, shush, you don’t have to cry! What a clever brave girl you were to ring me!’

  She heard shouting from the back room and it was the unmistakeable Larne accent of Davy Dorgan.

  ‘It was you, you frigger! It was you! Well, who else could it have been? I wouldn’t trust you near a scaby dog, you!’

  Katie crouched down and said to Cissy, ‘I just have to see what’s going on with Davy. Can you stay here with these two guards? They’ll take care good care of you, I promise.’

  Cissy clung on to her coat but Katie gently prised her hand free and said, ‘I won’t be long, sweetheart. But I have to make sure that everything’s being done according to the rules. It’s a bit like being a schoolteacher.’

  Cissy reluctantly backed away and one of the RSU officers laid his black-gloved hand gently on her shoulder. At that moment, though, Kyna came up the stairs and into the room.

  Katie said, ‘Ah! Here, Cissy, this is my friend Kyna. She’ll look after you. Kyna – this is Cissy, and this is Bindy.’

  Kyna was about to say something to Cissy when they heard Davy Dorgan shouting, ‘You know what’s going to happen to me now because of you? I’m going to be stuck in the fecking slammer for the rest of my life! How much did they pay you, you shitehawk? Come on, how much did they pay you? Don’t tell me they didn’t! Otherwise how the feck did they know I was here?’

  ‘It was never me!’ screeched another man’s voice. ‘I swear to God, Davy, it was never me!’

  ‘Lay your guns down on the floor, both of you!’ demanded one of the gardaí. ‘Lay your guns down and put your hands on top of your heads and back away to the wall!’

  Katie left the front room and made her way cautiously along the landing. Three gardaí were standing in the doorway of the back room with their sub-machine guns raised. Because they were so tall and their protective black suits were so bulky Katie found it difficult at first to see what was happening inside the room, but then one of the gardaí went down on one knee and adopted a firing position. It was then that Davy Dorgan came into view, with his hair sticking up wildly, wearing nothing but a brown check shirt. He was holding an automatic pistol in each hand, pointing them stiffly at somebody else inside the room. She couldn’t see who it was, but she could see a disembodied hand pointing another automatic pistol at almost point-blank range at Davy Dorgan.

  ‘Fecking Mexican stand-off,’ said one of the gardaí next to her. ‘We have the two of them covered, but they have each other covered, too, for feck’s sake!’

  ‘I said, lay the guns down on the floor!’ repeated the garda. ‘Neither of you have any way of getting out of here, so you might as well stop behaving like a couple of eejits and come along with us quiet-like.’

  For a long time nobody spoke and the only sound was the rustling of the gardaí’s nylon jackets against the walls and the sprinkling of rain against the windows. Katie heard a creaking behind her and turned around to see Kyna leading Cissy out of the front room and down the staircase, treading very softly. She blew Cissy a kiss.

  ‘See you after,’ she mouthed silently.

  Suddenly, there were two deafening shots, which made her jump, one followed almost instantaneously by the other. Katie saw the top of Davy Dorgan’s head flap open like the lid of a tea caddy and blood spray up to the ceiling. At the same time the gardaí opened fire with a short, rattling burst from their sub-machine guns. Katie heard two dull thumps, one after the other.

  The back room was full of acrid grey smoke now and the gardaí were pushing their way in through the doorway, so she couldn’t immediately see what had happened. She waited a moment on the landing until one of the gardaí beckoned her and said, ‘All safe now, ma’am.’

  She holstered her revolver and followed him into the back room, with Detectives O’Donovan and Ó Doibhilin close behind her. Detective Ó Doibhilin said, ‘Holy shit, ma’am. Sorry – I mean, Christ on a camel.’

  Lying sprawled on the floor, glassy-eyed, was Davy Dorgan. Lying with his head on Davy Dorgan’s left shin, bony and pale-skinned and wearing nothing but a pair of white Calvin Klein underpants, was a young man with a wispy blond moustache and a wispy blond beard. There was a bullet hole in the right-hand side of his stomach, and another in his chest which must have hit him in the heart. Both men were smothered in blood.

  ‘Tadhg Brennan,’ said Katie. ‘Nicholas O’Grady’s husband. What in the name of God is he doing here?’

  She was still staring down at his body when one of the RSU gardaí came in and said, ‘Come and take a lamp at this, ma’am. I think this answers a whole rake of questions.’

  She followed him into another back room that led off the landing. Its window was boarded up and it reeked of gun-oil and petrol and some other chemical smell. Along the wall behind the door there were stacks of amber-coloured C4 demolition packs, possibly a hundred of them. Along the opposite wall, on a long trestle table, at least thirty or forty AK47 assault rifles were arranged in lines, as well as a shoal of silvery automatic pistols with both eight-round and extended magazines.

  It was what was lying at an angle right in the middle of the floor that caught Katie’s attention the most, though. It was a large, six-engined drone, painted black, so that it looked like a massive spider.

  ‘It’s a DJI5900,’ said the garda, smug that he knew exactly what it was. ‘One of my cousins has the smaller version. He uses it to take photographs of people’s houses from the air. This fellow, though – this can fly non-stop for nearly twenty minutes at a time and it can carry up to three kilos.’

  ‘So what are you suggesting?’ said Katie – but even as she was asking him she realized the implications of what she was looking at.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ she said. ‘I have you! Supposing you wanted to deliver three kilos of explosive to somebody in a building that had sniffer dogs and security guards posted at all of the doors—’

  Detective O’Donovan had come in to the room now and was listening to what Katie was saying. ‘That’s it – rooftop to rooftop,’ he added. ‘Let’s say from the top floor of Tesco’s car park to the roof of the Opera House – after the Opera House has been searched top to bottom, and after everybody in the building has been screened. It would only be a few seconds’ flight.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ said Katie, looking back towards the room where the two bodies were lying, with gun-smoke still eddying out of the doorway. ‘But Dorgan’s dead now. We may never know for sure.’

  Detective O’Donovan shrugged and said, ‘In this life, ma’am, c’mon – whe
n do we ever know anything for sure?’

  40

  It was a week before the child psychologist at Tusla said that Katie could come and talk to Cissy – Katie, and only Katie. Cissy was still settling in with her new foster family in Douglas and she was not yet ready to meet any more strangers.

  The Austin family lived in a neat four-bedroom detached house on Riverside, a quiet cul-de-sac overlooking the southern bank of the River Lee. Mr and Mrs Austin were both in their early forties and had two teenage girls of their own. Mr Austin was a rewards manager for Munster Insurance and spoke almost endlessly in a bland expressionless monotone. Mrs Austin sat close to him and nodded enthusiastically at everything he said, although she hardly said a word herself.

  It was a bright grey morning, even if it was chilly, so Katie and Cissy went across the road to sit by the river and watch the ducks. A woman was walking a red Irish setter along the pathway and Katie felt a sharp pang for Barney. The dog-napper had never rung her back, even though he had promised he would, and she had to assume that she had lost Barney for ever. She could only hope that he had been taken for breeding – he was a pure pedigree after all. She prayed that they hadn’t used him for bait for a dog-fight.

  ‘Davy’s funeral is on Wednesday,’ she said. ‘Cemetery Lodge, in Togher.’

  Cissy was busy tying ribbons in Bindy’s hair. ‘I’m not going,’ she said.

  ‘Well, of course, you don’t have to.’

  ‘After what he did, I don’t even want to say his name ever again. Or see it, or read it. Not even on a gravestone.’

  Katie reached into her pocket and took out a paper bag of Oatfield Rosey Apples. She offered one to Cissy and Cissy took one, popping it into her mouth and clicking it around her teeth as she talked.

  ‘You know that I’m going to have to ask you some questions, don’t you, Cissy? The same questions I wanted to ask you before, except that you were too frightened of Davy to tell me.’

  ‘Davy’s not here any more. Davy’s in hell.’

  ‘You really think so?’

  ‘After he killed all those dancers, of course he is. He’s roasting and toasting.’