Buried

by Graham Masterton

  When she turned into her driveway, however, she was surprised to see a heavily built man in a pale green linen suit standing in her porch, smoking a cigarette. She climbed out of her car and walked up the steps, and as she did so he took a last deep drag at his cigarette and then flicked it across her front lawn.

  ‘Well, this is unexpected,’ she told him, trying to sound calm and unimpressed.

  The man blew smoke out of the side of his mouth. He looked as if he had no neck and his globe of a head could roll off his shoulders at any moment. His hair was cropped very short at the sides, Kim Jong-un style, and his eyes were tiny pinpricks. Underneath his jacket he was wearing a pink and blue floral shirt, with the three top buttons undone so that his grey chest hairs curled out of the top of it like traveller’s joy.

  Katie reached the top step. She had her keys in her hand, but she made no attempt to open the front door.

  ‘What about you, DS Maguire?’ said the man, in a croaky voice.

  ‘Surviving, Mister Quilty,’ replied Katie. ‘And may I ask what you think you’re doing here at my house?’

  ‘Just came to pay you a sociable visit, that’s all,’ said Bobby Quilty. ‘If Maguire won’t come to the mountain, and all that.’

  ‘The only time I’ll ever come to see you is to haul you in,’ said Katie.

  ‘Ach, come on, you don’t have to give out like that. Live and let live, that’s what I always say.’

  ‘Tell that to Detective Barry’s parents. See if they agree with you.’

  Bobby Quilty grimaced and scratched the back of his neck. ‘I heard about that. Well, who couldn’t? But don’t you go accusing me of nothing. I didn’t have nothing at all to do with it.’

  ‘Sure you didn’t. And pigs have wings. But I think you need to be getting away, don’t you? I don’t know what you’re doing here, but you’re not at all welcome.’

  Bobby Quilty took out another cigarette and lit it, which made it obvious that he wasn’t thinking of leaving just yet. This was one of those times when Katie was glad to feel her Smith & Wesson Airweight revolver against her hip.

  ‘Well, DS Maguire, since it’s plain you’re not going to invite me inside for a wee drop, I’ll tell you here and now what I drove all the way out here to tell you. The thing of it is, I’m running a business that is much in the public demand, as you know fine rightly, and at the end of the day I’m doing nobody no harm at all. In fact, I’d say that I’m providing a brave good public service and they ought to be awarding me a medal rather than setting the polls on me.’

  Apart from feeling tired, Katie was growing impatient. ‘I’m not going to argue with you about the popularity of cheap cigarettes, Mister Quilty. But every country needs its taxes and the fact remains that importing and selling tobacco without paying the duty on it is against the law.’

  She said nothing about him using a large proportion of his profits to fund acts of terrorism. Working closely with G2, the Directorate of Intelligence in Naas, her team had already gathered a mass of incriminating evidence against the Authentic IRA, phone-taps and videos and witness statements, but she wasn’t ready yet to give Bobby Quilty even an inkling of how much she knew.

  All she said was, ‘What you’re doing is illegal and as soon as I’m ready I’ll arrest you and charge you, and believe me, you won’t see it coming, so you won’t have the chance to nip over the border.’

  Bobby Quilty blew out a long stream of smoke. ‘Aye, I know that’s what you get paid for, and it isn’t yourself that makes the laws. So there’s nothing personal in it, by any means at all. But I’m asking you to be reasonable, DS Maguire. You and me, I’m sure we can rub along together quite happy, without any need for getting up each other’s noses.’

  ‘Detective Barry was deliberately crushed to death, Mister Quilty. You may be surprised to hear it, but that got right up my nose.’

  ‘Ach, I’m sure that must have been an accident. And it needn’t have happened at all. Like, why was he bothering to chase after a jaunty like Denny Quinn?’

  Katie said, ‘Why exactly are you here, Mister Quilty? You know that I won’t stop coming after you, you and all your dealers, too.’

  ‘What – what if we made kind of a treaty between us?’ said Bobby Quilty. ‘You know, like the Good Friday Agreement, only the Quilty–Maguire Agreement.’ There was a thick whispery quality in the way he said it that made Katie’s wrists prickle. It was like, Let’s keep this to ourselves, shall we? It almost had the feeling of an indecent proposition.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Katie. ‘I’m not open to making any kind of treaties, especially with you.’

  ‘I know you’re a woman who doesn’t scare easy,’ Bobby Quilty told her. ‘I read in the paper about you and them nuns. It takes some hard neck to stand up to the church, I’ll tell you. Those priests, they scare me more than the O’Flynns ever did. So that’s why I knew I had to have a trump card when I came to talk to you.’

  Katie said nothing, but stayed where she was, watching Bobby Quilty smoke. Inside the house, Barney must have heard her and smelled her by now, because he was scratching and whining behind the front door. He probably couldn’t understand why she wasn’t coming in. She was tempted to call out to him, to reassure him, but she thought that could make her sound anxious and vulnerable and in front of Bobby Quilty she needed to appear utterly unyielding.

  ‘I’ll tell you what my trump card is,’ said Bobby Quilty. ‘It’s not actually a card at all, it’s a feller – a fine sham-feen by the name of John Meagher. A good friend of yours, as I understand it, or was once.’

  Katie actually shivered, as if somebody had poured ice-water down the back of her blouse. ‘John?’ she said.

  ‘That’s your man. The thing of it is, we have him. Kind of like a guest, you might say.’

  ‘You’ve abducted him, is that what you’re saying? You haven’t hurt him, have you?’

  ‘Ach no, catch yourself on, he’s in grand condition. But we have him, yes, and we have him in a location where you couldn’t find him in a month of Sundays. So this is where you and me, we’re already in agreement. You wouldn’t like to see nothing appalling happen to him, would you? And nor neither would I.’

  ‘Do you know how many years they’re going to give you in Rathmore Road for doing this?’ Katie retorted, although she was so angry and afraid that she couldn’t stop her voice from shaking. ‘Kidnap, and threatening to cause physical harm? Even if you don’t touch a hair on his head, you’ll get ten years minimum. If you hurt him, I’ll kill you myself.’

  ‘You don’t frighten me one iota, DS Maguire,’ Bobby Quilty told her. ‘Like I said to you, I’m only running a public service, and if you let me carry on with it without any more of your interference, your John will be laid and lifted. We’ll only keep him for a wee while, just to be sure that you’re cooperating. But if you start coming after my dealers again, or sticking trackers on to my trucks, I can’t guarantee that he’s going to stay in one piece, do you know what I mean?’

  ‘How do I know you really have him?’

  ‘I thought of that,’ said Bobby Quilty. He reached into the top pocket of his jacket and took out a silver bracelet. He held it out to her, but at first she made no move to take it.

  ‘Go on, you know what it is. The inscription inside will prove it for sure.’

  Katie reluctantly held out her hand and Bobby Quilty laid the bracelet in her palm. She didn’t need to look at it to know what it was: the silver Ardagh bracelet she had given to John when he came back from America to live with her. It was engraved with beastly faces copied from the Ardagh Chalice and inside it was inscribed with the words Grá agus dea-fhortún, K.

  ‘All right,’ said Katie. ‘But this doesn’t prove he’s alive and unharmed.’

  ‘Aye, dead on, but you’ll just have to take my word for it. Like, there’d be no point in my harming him if I wanted to make a deal with you, would there?’

  ‘I could arrest you here and now,’ said Katie.<
br />
  ‘Come on then, scoop me if you want to. But whatever you say I’ve said, I’d flat out deny it and this garden isn’t exactly black with witnesses, is it? There’s something else you need to think on, too. What time are we on? My associates know where I am, and if I don’t come back by eleven, your one-time fancy man will pay a very painful price for every minute that I’m late. Did you ever have a jag with a blind feller before?’

  Katie didn’t answer. Bobby Quilty was right – even if she arrested and charged him, she wouldn’t be able to prove in court that he had threatened her. Apart from that, she had no doubt at all that he would hurt John, and hurt him severely, if she didn’t agree to comply with his demands. Late last year a seventeen-year-old boy from Gurranabraher had given Detective Dooley a tip-off about one of Bobby Quilty’s cigarette consignments and two days later he had been found with his ribcage impaled on the railings outside the Holy Trinity Church on Father Mathew Quay, still alive, with the word ‘tout’ burned into the skin of his forehead.

  ‘Just go, Mr Quilty,’ said Katie. ‘If you think I’m going to stand here a moment longer and listen to you blowing, then you have another think coming.’

  ‘Don’t panic, I’m out the gap,’ Bobby Quilty told her. ‘One more thing I’ll say to you, though. If I get to hear that you’ve told anyone at all about this wee treaty of ours – even your da – then your John’s going to suffer, I swear to God.’

  ‘You leave my father out of this,’ Katie warned him.

  ‘No, DS Maguire, you leave your father out of this. And your fellow polls. This is just between you and me, you get it? And – oh, yes – I’ll be wanting to see Denny Quinn back on the street by midnight.’

  With that, he went up to Katie’s front door, lifted the flap of the letter box and puffed smoke into it.

  ‘There you are, Fido!’ he said. ‘Don’t let nobody say that I never gave you a suck off my fag! You make sure your mistress keeps her bake shut, okay? Wouldn’t want anything unpleasant to happen to your Uncle John, would we?’

  Barney growled, but Bobby Quilty let the flap drop and lifted his fingertips to his lips to blow Katie an extravagant kiss. ‘Grand to talk to you, DS Maguire. And grand to be able to come to such a mutually agreeable understanding. You’re a princess among women, no mistake about that!’

  He shuffled his way past her with a grin on his face, holding in his belly so that he didn’t bump her. Katie didn’t turn around as he went down the steps and crunched out of her shingle driveway, and didn’t move at all until she had heard him start up the engine of his pickup and drive away. Only then did she open the front door and go inside. Barney clearly sensed that something was wrong because he snuffled and whuffled and circled around her, his tail beating against the radiator.

  ‘It’s all right, boy, don’t stress yourself,’ said Katie, tugging at his ears to calm him down. She could smell Bobby Quilty’s cigarette smoke in the hallway and it made her feel sick. ‘It was only some scummer, not worth you getting all stooky about.’

  *

  She went into the living room and switched on the lights, although she didn’t switch on the TV as she normally did. She felt shaken right down to the core, and completely defenceless, which she had never experienced before. In the past two years she had dealt with several serious cases of kidnapping, where the perpetrators had threatened to maim or kill the people they had abducted, but she had always been able to handle them with professional detachment. Bobby Quilty, however, had taken John, and even though John had walked out on her, she still loved him, and the thought of him being blinded or mutilated or murdered made her tremble.

  She looked at the small square clock on top of the bookcase. It was only five past eight, although it felt as if she had been talking to Bobby Quilty for nearly half an hour. She stood in the middle of the living room, gripping John’s Ardagh bracelet tightly in her hand, sick with indecision. She knew exactly what procedure she had to follow. She should immediately contact Inspector O’Rourke and the rest of her team and send them out to discover when and where John had been abducted and where he was being held. But that would be critically risky. If Bobby Quilty caught wind that she had broken their ‘treaty’, she didn’t doubt for a moment that he would order John to be mutilated or murdered, just to prove how much of a hold he had over her and that he wasn’t a man to be messed with.

  She trusted her detectives implicitly but it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that Bobby Quilty had one or two officers at the station in his pocket. Even gardaí who had served for five years took home less than 30,000 euros a year and she knew that any number of them had serious debt problems.

  Barney stood looking up at her and made that creaking noise in the back of his throat. He needed to be fed and then taken for a walk. But how could she take him for a walk knowing that John was being held hostage and doing nothing to initiate his rescue?

  She went to the mirror that hung over the fireplace and stared at herself, as if her mirror image were another, calmer Katie, who could give her an answer. Her dark red hair was looking messy and chopped-about, and her eyes were puffy, as if she had just woken up.

  You have to handle this one very, very carefully, she told herself. You’re angry. You’re afraid. But don’t be rushed into taking some course of action you might regret. Bobby Quilty isn’t going to hurt John so long as he thinks you’re playing ball, because he knows that if anything happens to John, you’ll set the dogs on him.

  For the first time, she held up the Ardagh bracelet and examined it closely. It was slightly bent out of shape, as if it had been forcibly pulled from John’s wrist without opening the clasp. She wondered why he had still been wearing it. Did he still love her, in spite of having left her?

  She placed the bracelet carefully on the shelf over the fireplace, next to the silver-framed photograph of John which she should have taken down, but hadn’t. He standing next to a tractor at the Meagher family farm, stripped to the waist, one eye closed against the sunlight. He was tall, with dark curly hair and a crucifix of hair on his chest. She had always told him that he looked like a Greek god, but like a Greek god he had been jealous and controlling. In the end, that was why their relationship had broken down, because Katie refused to be controlled by any man, even a man she loved.

  In spite of that, the Katie that she could see in the mirror was already beginning to work out a way of saving him from Bobby Quilty. It wasn’t orthodox, and it was far from accepted procedure. It was probably illegal. But it could be the best way to protect John from coming to any harm and at the same time to bring down Bobby Quilty’s cigarette-smuggling empire.

  She sat down on the end of the leather couch and picked up the phone. It took the operator at Anglesea Street a few minutes to find Inspector O’Rourke for her, but eventually he picked up, sounding as if he had his mouth full.

  ‘Sorry, ma’am. I was just getting myself a sandwich.’

  ‘That’s okay. We all have to eat. How are things going?’

  ‘We’re making some progress with the bodies in Blarney. Just after you left, the Blarney Historical Society came back to us. There was definitely a family called Langtry lived in that house, up until February 1921. The father’s name was Stephen, so we should be able to trace him through public records.’

  ‘Grand. I think Dr Kelley should be coming down tomorrow afternoon, so maybe we’ll be able to make a positive ID within the next few days. I’d still like to keep this under wraps until we do. You haven’t had the media sniffing around, have you?’

  ‘Nothing. I reckon they’re too busy with this gay marriage vote and this water meter fracas.’

  ‘All right. Listen, the reason I’m ringing you is Denny Quinn. I want you to release him.’

  There was a moment’s silence and then Inspector O’Rourke said, ‘Release him? Did I hear that right? He’s up in the district court tomorrow afternoon. What if he does a runner?’

  ‘Just let him go. We’re dropping the charges.�
��

  ‘What? With all due respect, ma’am, he was flogging illegal fags and he cut Detective O’Connell’s cheek wide open. Not forgetting that Gerry Barry was killed when he was trying to arrest him.’

  ‘I know, Francis. But believe me, I have a very good reason for letting him go.’

  ‘Am I allowed to know what it is, this very good reason?’

  ‘Not yet, no. But I’ll tell you as soon as I can, and when I can tell you I think you’ll agree that it was the right thing to do.’

  Another silence, longer this time, and before Inspector O’Rourke could answer her Katie said, ‘Please don’t discuss this with anybody else. If anybody wants to know why we’re letting him go, all you have to say is “insufficient evidence”. I’ll be talking tomorrow to Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin, but it’s very important that we keep this as quiet as possible. Let’s just say it’s a matter of life and death.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Inspector O’Rourke, although he still sounded troubled. ‘I have you.’

  Nine

  A broken-down car transporter had caused a three-kilometre tailback on the N25 the following morning and it was raining hard so Katie had to keep her windscreen wipers flapping at full speed just to see the car in front of her. She didn’t arrive at the station until 8.35, by which time she was already feeling anxious and irritable.

  Detective ‘Horse’ Ó Doibhilin was waiting for her. He stood smiling expectantly while she took off her dripping-wet witch-goddess jacket, sat down at her desk and had a cursory look through all the folders and messages and letters that were piled up for her attention.

  Then, ‘Yes, Michael?’ she said, as if she had only just realized he was there.

  ‘The fellow from the Blarney Historical Society finally got in touch with me. Douglas Pike.’

  ‘I know, yes. Inspector O’Rourke rang me yesterday evening.’

  ‘He’s found copies of the old staff records from Mahony’s mill, going right back to nineteen-oh-something. All of their names, how much they got paid and where they all lived. He said that the Langtry family took up residence on Millstream Row in April 1916. They’d moved there from Dripsey. Stephen Langtry had been a machinist at the Dripsey woollen mills but for some reason he gave up his job there and moved to Blarney. Better money, more than likely, that was Douglas Pike’s guess. The Langtry family lived in Blarney until the second week of February 1921.’