Buried

by Graham Masterton

  Katie smiled at him. ‘I’ll tell you as soon as I can, Bryan. But it’s like you’ve come running into the room with another piece of the jigsaw that I’ve been missing. Only two or three more pieces to go and it’ll be finished.’

  ‘Okay, ma’am, if you say so.’

  *

  It was nearly 6 p.m. before Alan rang her.

  ‘I nearly missed him. I had to go to the jakes and when I came out he was just going out through the front door. But I’m after him now. He’s on foot all right. He stopped by the car park and I thought he was going to go in, but he was only chatting to somebody there. Now he’s on the move again.’

  ‘Thanks, Alan. Ring me as soon as he gets to wherever he’s going.’

  ‘No problem.’

  She closed the folder on the desk in front of her and stood up. It would be a good idea if she went to the canteen for a coffee and a sandwich because she had a feeling she would be working late tonight. She had nearly made it to the door when her phone warbled again.

  ‘DS Maguire? It’s Dr Kelley.’

  ‘Oh – Dr Kelley. How are you? How’s it going?’

  ‘Slow. We’ve removed the plastic sheeting from all four victims now. I just wanted to tell you that one of Kevin Doherty’s brothers has come in to identify them. It’s the whole Doherty family all right – Kevin and his wife Órla, née Cronin, and their two children Thomas and Sibeal. All four of them died from massive gunshot trauma to the head.’

  ‘Dear God in heaven,’ said Katie.

  ‘I have two technical experts working with me now. We won’t have any clear results for several days, I shouldn’t think, but they’re trying to recreate the crime scene from the angle of the bullet wounds and the blood spatter on their clothes. It looks as if they were very close to each other when they were shot and that they were probably kneeling. That’s all I can really tell you at the moment, except that they were all shot with .38 calibre hollow-cavity bullets.’

  ‘That fits in with the damage on the front door,’ said Katie.

  ‘Exactly. And as soon as the technicians can check the striations on the bullets, what’s left of them, we’ll know for sure how many weapons were involved.’

  ‘I’ll try to come by tomorrow morning and take a look for myself,’ Katie told her. ‘Meanwhile, thanks a million.’

  She went to the canteen and bought herself a latte and a chicken salad sandwich. She had taken only two bites before Alan rang her again.

  ‘Katie? You were dead on. The Diamond Club on Father Mathew Street, only two doors up from the Gospel Hall. I tried to follow him inside but there was a doorman who wouldn’t let me in unless I became a member. Well – when I say “doorman”, I mean muscle-bound Neanderthal in a dinner jacket. He was more than willing to sign me up on the spot, but I thought I’d better ring you first. Your wee man James might have seen us together at the station, so I didn’t want to go inside there and have him recognize me, in case it messed up whatever it is you’re up to.’

  ‘That’s fantastic, Alan, thank you. He probably wouldn’t know who you were, but it’s better to be safe. Listen – do you think you can just keep an eye on the place for me, maybe for half an hour or so, just to check if he leaves? I’m going to go in after him myself.’

  ‘You’re codding me, aren’t you? He’s going to know you the moment you walk in through the door.’

  ‘Trust me, he won’t.’

  ‘Okay, then, if you say so. There’s a bus shelter right opposite Father Mathew Street. I’ll sit there and read my paper and look as if I’m waiting for a bus.’

  ‘Alan,’ said Katie. She was conscious that she was treating him like one of her own team of detectives and she didn’t want him to feel that she was demeaning him. ‘Thanks a million for this. I mean it. It’s just that I can’t trust anybody else but you. Not at the moment.’

  ‘Katie, don’t bother yourself. Anything that helps us nail the Big Feller.’

  Katie called for a taxi and then finished her coffee in a series of gulps even though it was still too hot. She left the rest of her sandwich. She had intended to eat it only as a precaution in case she felt hungry later.

  Normally she would have asked a garda to drive her, but she didn’t want anybody in the station to know where she was going – not that it would have given them any indication of what her plans were. God or Fate had given her a precious lead in saving John and Kyna, and she wasn’t going to compromise it in any way.

  A red taxi from Sun Cabs was waiting for her outside as she left the station. She could have walked to St Patrick’s Street in less than the ten minutes it took drive there, but the early evening was still humid and she didn’t want to end up flustered and hot.

  The taxi dropped her off outside the Brown Thomas department store. Inside it was all bright lights and the smell of perfume. She went up the escalator to the first floor, to women’s designer fashions. A thin middle-aged sales assistant came gliding out to meet her with a beatific smile and her hands clasped together and said, ‘Madam? Is there anything in particular you’re looking for?’

  The sales assistant looked so saintly that Katie almost felt she could have said ‘redemption’. Instead, she frowned at the rails of designer dresses all around her and said, ‘Something that’s eye-catching, do you know what I mean? And sexy, and a little too young for me.’

  ‘Eye-catching?’ said the sales assistant. ‘I see. Did you have any preference as to style or colour?

  ‘Red, I think. Red would be perfect. And short. And maybe off-the-shoulder. Something that shouts out at you. Something that says “Look at me, I’m out for a bit of fun.”’

  The sales assistant blinked at her, but Katie said, ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s only for a laugh. We’re having a bit of a hen party, that’s all.’

  ‘I see. Well, why don’t you come and take a look at some of the Carven dresses? Some of them are very eye-catching. And, ah, fun.’

  It took Katie less than five minutes to choose a scarlet taffeta mini-dress. It was very short and swirly, and cut on a diagonal so that the left shoulder was bare.

  ‘It certainly shouts out, doesn’t it?’ said the sales assistant when Katie came out of the changing room and did a twirl in front of the mirror. ‘Not too young for you, though. In fact, I’d say it makes you look even younger.’

  The dress was priced at 390 euros, but Katie intended to bring it back for a refund the next day, when she had finished with it. Once she had paid the sales assistant, she went back down to the shoe department on the ground floor and bought herself a pair of red Kurt Geiger stilettos to match. They were tagged at 120 euros, but she thought she might keep them afterwards because they would go with her own red velvet dress. She could always put them down to expenses: ‘specialist footwear for undercover operation’.

  She checked her watch. She had taken twenty-five minutes already and she didn’t want to keep Alan waiting at that bus stop for too much longer. She bought a blonde urchin-style wig for 45 euros and then carried all of her bags into the ladies’ toilet, locked herself into a cubicle, and changed. In the next cubicle she could hear a woman quietly crying and normally she would have asked her what was wrong, but she had no time.

  She had entered the store a businesslike woman with dark red hair and a pale grey suit. By the time she emerged on to St Patrick’s Street, she was an exhibitionist blonde in a provocative scarlet dress who looked ready to party. She hadn’t yet changed her shoes, though. It would be quicker to walk to South Mall where Alan was waiting for her, rather than take a taxi, and she wasn’t going to try to teeter there on six-inch stilettos. On her way down Winthrop Street several young men turned round to look at her and she was given two or three appreciative whistles. One even called out, ‘Hey, darling! Fancy coming to the Voodoo Rooms with me, do you?’

  Oh, yes, she thought. I can imagine what your friends would say if you brought a detective superintendent into one of Cork’s ravingest night clubs.

  As she
turned into South Mall, Katie could see Alan sitting in the glass bus shelter He was holding up his folded copy of the Echo with a pen in his hand, as if he were trying to do the crossword, but she could see that he had his eye on Father Mathew Street across the road.

  She put on her gold-framed, pink-lensed sunglasses and sat down right next to him. He glanced at up at her, but then went back to his crossword.

  ‘What’s the craic, sweetheart?’ she asked him, in a throaty voice.

  He looked up and stared at her, and then he said, ‘Jesus! Katie! I thought I was being accosted there! I was just about to tell you that I couldn’t afford you!’

  He couldn’t stop staring at her, shaking his head. ‘Well, you’re a fine beour now, no question about it! If you hadn’t opened your mouth I could have sat here beside you for the rest of the evening and I wouldn’t have recognized you.’

  ‘That’s the point,’ said Katie. ‘I’m going to go into that Diamond Club now and see what I can pick up about young James Elvin. This must be the first undercover job I’ve done in seven years.’

  ‘So, what can I do?’

  ‘There’s nothing much more you can do, Alan, not until tomorrow. Then we’ll see how this all starts to come together. If it comes together. I have my fingers crossed that certain people will act to type, but as you know yourself, they don’t always do that.’

  ‘Oh, I know that fine rightly, I can tell you. I’ll go and book myself a room at Jury’s, then. Do you want me to take all those messages for you?’

  ‘You can still stay the night at home with me, Alan. We don’t have to – you know.’

  Alan shoved his newspaper into his jacket pocket and bent over to pick up Katie’s Brown Thomas shopping bags. ‘No, I think it’s better if I don’t. Not that I don’t think you’re stunning, not at all. You know I do. And not that I don’t want to. But sometimes I think two people can meet and be attracted to each other, strongly attracted, but they’re not right for each other. All they’ll ever do is end up hurting each other for no real reason at all.’

  Katie was taking off her flat work shoes. She dropped them into one of the shopping bags and said, ‘Is that what happened with you and your wife – what was her name?’

  ‘Alison, yes. More or less. We nearly tore each other to shreds. I wouldn’t want to go through anything like that again, Katie.’

  ‘Is that what you think? That we’d tear each other to shreds?’

  ‘No, not really. I’m just being wary, that’s all. Once bitten.’

  Katie said nothing. She hadn’t been expecting to have a long-term relationship with Alan, but she thought it might have turned out to be more than just a one-night stand. It was clear, though, that he was afraid of committing himself. Perhaps that accounted for his last-second withdrawal when they had made love.

  She had a suspicion, though, that there was more to it than that. Maybe he wouldn’t fully feel like a real man again until he had harpooned his Moby-Dick. Bobby Quilty had destroyed him and he needed to destroy Bobby Quilty in return, more than anything else.

  ‘I’ll ring you after, anyway,’ she told him. ‘Maybe I’ll drop into Jury’s, if it’s not too late, and we can have a drink in the bar.’

  They stood up and he kissed her. She touched his prickly cheek with her fingertips and looked into his eyes to see if she could read what he was really thinking, but they seemed clouded, like one of those grey misty days over the estuary when she could never be sure which was the land and which was the sea.

  *

  Katie crossed the road. Father Mathew Street was narrow and dark and damp-smelling, with high buildings on either side. The Diamond Club was a few doors short of halfway down it, with a purple neon diamond sign over the entrance, flickering intermittently. Inside the front door there was a small purple-carpeted foyer, with a reception desk and a potted palm, where the dinner-jacketed Neanderthal was waiting with his hands cupped over his genitals. He smelled strongly of Aramis aftershave.

  ‘Your boss in?’ Katie asked him.

  ‘Might be. Who wants to know?’

  ‘I’m looking for a job, like, that’s all.’

  ‘A job is it? What as?’

  ‘Blackjack dealer. I used to work at the Gold Rush on MacCurtain Street, but I don’t know, I was fair fried there after a while.’

  The doorman looked up and down the street and then said, ‘Okay,’ and picked up the phone on his desk. ‘Mister Kerrigan? I have a girl down here says she’s a blackjack dealer looking for a job. Yeah. No. Yeah. Well, put it like this, you wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating Taytos. Okay, then. Yeah.’

  He put down the phone and said, ‘You can go on up. Mister Kerrigan’s tied up with a bit of business at the moment, like, but he shouldn’t keep you longer than ten or fifteen minutes, so he says. He says that you can have a drink on the house while you’re waiting.’

  ‘What, and some Taytos to go with it?’

  ‘He didn’t say nothing about that. Just a drink.’

  Katie decided that it wasn’t worth trying to explain that she had only been joking. She climbed the narrow staircase at the back of the reception area. At the top there was a small landing and a doorway covered with a curtain of purple and green glass beads. She rattled her way through them and found herself in a long, low, purple-carpeted room with purple Tiffany lamps hanging from the ceiling. All down the right-hand side there were card tables with purple baize tops, and gilt-painted chairs, and in the centre there were two blackjack tables, with a roulette table at the very far end.

  On the left-hand side there was a bar with a short fat barman in a white dinner jacket standing behind it. He was throwing dry-roasted peanuts up in the air and trying to catch them in his mouth, ducking his head from side to side like a performing seal.

  It was early yet, so the club was almost empty. Four men were playing poker, while another six or seven were gathered around the roulette table, along with three bored-looking girls in low-cut purple dresses. The female dealer had piled-up black hair, Amy Winehouse style, and was wearing a tight purple satin blouse. Standing between two of the girls, his face in profile, was James Elvin. He had loosened his tie and his forehead was shiny with sweat. One or two of the other men looked around when Katie walked into the club, but James Elvin’s attention remained fixed on the roulette layout.

  The ball clattered to a stop and the dealer announced, ‘Red, twelve.’

  James Elvin said nothing, but raised his fist to his mouth and bit at his knuckles. One of the other men let out a little whoop.

  Kaie went up to the bar. As she did so, the barman missed the last peanut he had been trying to catch and it bounced across the bar.

  ‘Shite,’ he said, then, ‘Sorry about that, girl. How’s it going there?’ He had a cast in his eye so that it was difficult for Katie to tell if he was looking at her directly or not. On his upper lip he had a thin black moustache of the type that Katie’s husband, Paul, used to call a ‘thirsty eyebrow’. His elasticated purple bow tie was so greasy it was almost black.

  ‘What can I be getting for you?’

  ‘Vodka tonic, if you don’t mind, boy,’ said Katie, in a high Mayfield whine. She knew that, like several other casinos in Cork, the Diamond Club didn’t have a liquor licence, but the barman took a large bottle of Smirnoff from the neon-lit shelf behind him and poured out a large glass for her, topping it up with Tesco tonic water and a tired slice of lime.

  ‘This your first time?’ he asked her, as she climbed up on to a barstool, crossed her legs and tugged up the hem of her dress. ‘Haven’t seen you in here before, have I?’

  ‘I thought I’d try it out, like,’ she told him, perching her sunglasses on top of her wig. ‘I was fair bored out of my mind at The Bank and the Gold Rush, do you know what I mean? Same old faces every night.’

  ‘Well, you have your regulars here, of course,’ said the barman. ‘But there’s a lively crowd in later most nights, and at weekends.’

  Katie
looked around. ‘Yes, I like it. It has what-do-you-call-it, you know? Atmosphere.’

  ‘Just as well, right, or we couldn’t fecking breathe, could we?’ said the barman.

  God spare me, thought Katie, a comedian. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked him.

  ‘Bertie, that’s my real name. Bertie. But everybody calls me Tache. On account of my ’tache, like.’

  ‘Good to know you, Bertie. My name’s Nessa.’

  ‘Good to know you, too, Nessa. What do you do, then, Nessa, or are you a woman of leisure?’

  ‘I wish. I’m working at the Clarion at the moment. Receptionist, like. Well, I have to make ends meet, do you know what I mean? My husband and I split up about six months ago and he’s not exactly forthcoming with the maintenance.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that, Nessa,’ said Tache. ‘Suppose you’re looking to supplement your income, then, playing the tables?’

  ‘That – and looking for some rich and handsome feller to take care of me for the rest of my life.’

  Tache swivelled his eyes around the club and then shook his head. ‘Nobody of that description in yet, girl. You’ll have to wait for the late, late crowd. There’s a car dealer comes in around eleven most nights, Paddy McGuigan. You might take a fancy to him.’

  I doubt it, thought Katie. When I was a detective sergeant, I arrested Paddy McGuigan for cutting and shutting insurance write-offs.

  She nodded in the direction of the roulette table. ‘That fair-haired feen there, between them two girls. He’s a good-looking feller.’

  Tache let out a raspberry-blurt of amusement. Then he beckoned Katie to lean closer to the bar so that he could speak to her confidentially.

  ‘There’s two reasons why he wouldn’t suit you, pet. One is, he always loses, big-time. He comes in every night, but when he leaves he’s hundreds of yoyos down – thousands, sometimes. I’ll say this for him, though, he’s always back next day with all the grade he needs to settle up. I can’t tell you where he gets it from, but he doesn’t get it from playing roulette, I know that much.’