Buried

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Well, he must have money, then,’ said Katie. ‘I don’t mind a loser so long as he’s a rich loser.’

  ‘Yeah, but the second reason he wouldn’t suit you is because he’s gay as Bogley.’

  ‘You’re codding me, aren’t you? Him? He doesn’t look it.’

  ‘Oh, take my word for it,’ said Tache. ‘He’s a corned-beef inspector, him, no question about it. Comes in here with some twinks some nights and they can’t keep their hands off of each other. I’ve even caught him shifting some feller in the jacks.’

  ‘What a waste.’

  ‘You’re not the first girl who’s said that and you probably won’t be the last. I’m surprised Mr Kerrigan tolerates him sometimes, especially after he’s had a few drinks, like, and starts acting like a right batty boy. I don’t know what he does for a living but he has friends in high places, I’d say, and that’s why Mr Kerrigan never complains to him, not ever.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Katie. ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways.’

  ‘How’s your drink?’ Tache asked her. ‘Like a top-up, would you?’

  ‘No, you’re all right,’ Katie told him, although a second drink probably wouldn’t have affected her. Apart from the tonic being flat, she could tell that the vodka was watered down.

  ‘Now that auld feller right opposite your man, he’s minted,’ Tache was saying, although Katie was watching James Elvin so intently that she was hardly listening to him. The roulette ball had clattered again and the dealer had called the winning number, and again he was gnawing at his knuckles.

  ‘...not only that, he’s always on a winning streak. Talk about rubbing fat into a fat pig’s arse. I asked him once why he comes here every night, because he doesn’t need the money. He said he tries to stay away from the club but his feet always bring him here. Like he has club feet. Do you get it? Like he has—’

  ‘Sorry?’ said Katie.

  Tache was about to start telling her again when a door opened next to the roulette table and cigarette smoke billowed out. Two men appeared, both of them smoking, but they put their cigarettes into their mouths to shake hands.

  One of the men was tall and skinny, with a high shock of wavy red hair that was turning white at the sides. He was wearing a cream suit with wide padded shoulders which must have been at least fifteen years old. She assumed that this was Fintan Kerrigan, who owned the Diamond Club – or managed it, anyway. The other man, in his familiar pale green linen jacket, was Bobby Quilty.

  Katie stayed on her barstool, but lowered her pink-lensed sunglasses.

  ‘How about some peanuts?’ Tache suggested. ‘I have the dry-roasted or the chilli-flavoured.’

  ‘No, you’re all right,’ she told him. She could see Bobby Quilty having a last few words with Fintan Kerrigan. When they had finished Bobby Quilty raised one hand in salute and walked away, past the roulette table. He stopped, though, when he reached James Elvin. He said something, and James Elvin said something back, and Katie wished desperately that she could lip-read.

  Before he walked on, though, Bobby Quilty put his arm around James Elvin’s shoulders and gave him a squeeze, like a proud father with his bar-of-gold, or a GAA football manager with his favourite player.

  He crossed over to the bar and said loudly, ‘What about you, Tache? How’s your belly off for wrinkles?’

  ‘Oh, I’m grand altogether, thanks, Big Feller,’ said Tache. ‘Do you fancy a scoop before you go?’

  Bobby Quilty was standing next to Katie now, so close that she could smell him. Cigarette smoke was still curling out of his nostrils as if he were a dragon.

  ‘Well, now, here’s an improvement on your usual floozies,’ he said, grinning at her, and more smoke leaked out from between his teeth.

  Katie said nothing, but Tache said, ‘Bobby, this is Nessa. She’s bored of The Bank so she’s dropped in here to give us a try-out. It’s dead right now of course, but I told her we’re always buzzing later on.’

  ‘Fierce pity I can’t stay,’ said Bobby Quilty, angling his head to one side and making no attempt to hide the fact that he was trying to look up Katie’s dress. ‘Otherwise I’d say you’re pulled.’

  Still Katie didn’t speak. Bobby Quilty continued to stare at her as if he was beginning to suspect that he might have met her before, but couldn’t put his finger on where exactly, or when.

  ‘Cat got your tongue, Nessa?’ he asked her. ‘It’s not every day I pay a woman a compliment like that.’

  Katie felt her chest tighten. She had her gun in her purse, along with her make-up bag, but she still felt threatened. It was Bobby Quilty’s sheer physical grossness that was so intimidating, as well as his obvious belief that he could say and do whatever he liked to anybody. She was reminded of what she had read in school about the Roman emperor Caligula, who had told his dinner guests that he could have any of them killed at a moment’s notice for no reason except that he felt like it.

  ‘So, what do you want me to say?’ she replied, exaggerating the Mayfield whine that she had adopted when she first started talking to Tache.

  He narrowed his eyes. ‘Are you sure we don’t know each other?’ he asked her.

  ‘I think I’d remember you, boy,’ said Katie. ‘You’re not exactly Mister Missable, are you?’

  Long pause, then, ‘Take off them shades,’ said Bobby Quilty.

  ‘Oh, I will, yeah.’

  ‘Take them off. Let’s take a look at you proper-like.’

  He reached out as if he were going to take them off himself, but Katie was quicker. She seized his wrist and gripped it very tight, digging the ball of her thumb deep into his tendons.

  There was a moment of high tension between them. Bobby Quilty tried to force his hand nearer to her face but she wouldn’t let him. He didn’t speak, but she could almost hear him thinking: How come this floozy’s so quick to react, and so fecking strong?

  He half lifted his left hand and for a split second Katie was afraid that he was going to try to slap her. Just then, however, the bead curtain rattled and a grey-haired man in a brown jacket came through.

  ‘Boss?’ he said. ‘I have the car outside, but I’m blocking up the street and the guards have just told me to move it.’

  ‘All right, coming,’ said Bobby Quilty. He stopped pushing and Katie released her grip on his wrist. He continued to stare at her, though, as if he could penetrate her sunglasses with X-ray vision to see what she looked like without them.

  ‘I’m sure I fecking know you,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe you do and maybe you don’t,’ said Katie.

  Bobby Quilty stared at her a moment longer and then went stamping off, crashing his way through the bead curtain to follow his driver downstairs.

  ‘Good luck to you so, Big Feller!’ called Tache. Then he turned to Katie and said, ‘What in the name of Jesus was all that about? I hope you don’t have that effect on all the fellers who come in here!’

  It was then that Fintan Kerrigan came over to the bar and said, ‘You’re the young lady who’s looking for a job, right?’

  Tache looked baffled, but Katie slipped off her barstool and said, ‘Thanks for the drink, Tache, and for all the gossip,’ and followed Fintan Kerrigan into his office.

  Thirty-seven

  Her interview for the job of blackjack dealer lasted less than five minutes, as she had known it would, because whatever Fintan Kerrigan was going to offer her as a salary, she was going to tell him it wasn’t enough.

  ‘You’ll have all your tips, too, though,’ said Fintan Kerrigan, lighting up another cigarette and leaning back in his black leather chair. ‘Good-looking girl like you, Nessa, you should make at least double what I’ll be paying you. On a good night, a whole heap more.’

  ‘Supposing it’s a real quiet night, like tonight? Then what?’

  ‘It’s early yet. The place will be black later on.’

  ‘That’s what Tache said. But I don’t know. And you say that I’ll have to wear purple? I’ve never been
keen on purple.’

  ‘All my girls wear purple, It’s the Diamond Club colour.’

  ‘I’ll have to think about it,’ said Katie. ‘Purple, you know. It doesn’t suit me at all. Reminds me of funerals, like, do you know what I mean?’

  Fintan Kerrigan sat back with the smoke fiddling upwards from his cigarette. After a while he said, ‘You don’t really want this job, do you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s that Denny from The Bank, isn’it? He sent you here to find out how much I’m paying my dealers these days.’

  ‘No, he didn’t.’

  ‘Oh yes he fecking did. What kind of a gom do you think I am? Go on, away with you. And I’ll have ten euros off of you for the drink.’

  Katie stood up, opened her purse, and tossed two five-euro notes on to his desk. ‘Desperate the price of water these days, isn’t it?’ she said.

  *

  She met Alan afterwards in the bar of Jury’s hotel. She thought that he was looking jaded, but she didn’t feel tired at all. Maybe it was the stimulating effect of the dress she was wearing, and her new stilettos, and her swept-forward blonde wig. In the past three hours she had received more compliments and appreciative looks than she had in the past three months. Maybe blondes really did have more fun, especially if they wore very short red dresses.

  ‘I’m not at all surprised that Bobby Quilty didn’t recognize you,’ Alan told her, pouring a Satz into his glass. ‘I can hardly recognize you myself, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I’m fierce glad that he didn’t,’ said Katie. ‘That could have wrecked everything. I might be adding two and two together and making five and a half, but I think I have more than enough evidence now that either James Elvin or Jimmy O’Reilly himself has been tipping off Bobby Quilty. It could be the both of them.’

  ‘It looks that way, I agree with you,’ said Alan. ‘But even if they have, what do you plan to do about it? If you blow the whistle on them now, they’ll just deny it. And don’t tell me that Quilty has been lending O’Reilly cash that you can trace. If you hadn’t seen and overheard O’Reilly and Elvin the way you did, you never would have guessed what was going on, would you? And like you said yourself, it’s still possible that you might have misinterpreted what they were talking about and what they looked like they were doing.’

  ‘I know,’ said Katie. ‘But I’m sure I didn’t, and I‘m sure that I can prove it. Jimmy O’Reilly’s days are numbered, you mark my words. Not only that, I think I can nail Bobby Quilty at the same time.’

  ‘So what do you have in mind?’ Alan asked her. ‘I know how worried you are about John and Kyna, but you’re not rushing things here, are you? If you’re going to pull in Bobby Quilty, your evidence has to be watertight, one hundred and ninety per cent, or else his lawyers will make mincemeat out of you – and I’m speaking from bitter experience.’

  ‘You told me yourself that Bobby Quilty knows almost everybody in the North. I assume that includes almost all of the IRA and all of the the loyalist paramilitaries, too.’

  ‘Of course he does. As you rightly know yourself, he was a Provo until they laid down their guns – or laid them down officially, anyway. Then he got himself involved with the Real IRA but he fell out with them about who was in charge of what, particularly the finances. That’s when he suddenly discovered that he could carry on the cause but make a heap of money for himself while he was doing it. Hence the Authentic IRA.’

  Alan took a sip of his lager and then he said, ‘Believe me, Katie, I wouldn’t say he knows almost all of the paramilitaries. He knows every single man jack of them, full stop. Not only the men who carry the guns but the sons and the daughters of the men who carry the guns, and the grannies and grandpas of the men who carry the guns, and the names of their goldfish. On both sides, too – republican and Orange and all shades in between. If by any remote chance he doesn’t personally know somebody, then one of his minions will.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been counting on,’ said Katie. ‘If he knows that many loyalists, he’ll probably know who it was who shot the Doherty family.’

  ‘Oh, for sure, he’s bound to. The killers boasted about who they were on the end of their note, didn’t they, with that Quis separabit?, even if they didn’t actually put their names to it. Take it from me, they’ll be boasting about it even louder on the Falls Road or Sandy Row, or wherever it is they come from. Quilty will soon get to hear who did it, if he doesn’t know already. Not that he would ever tell you, or the PSNI. Not that he would give a damn, either.’

  ‘What if I fixed it so that he did give a damn?’

  ‘Sorry? I don’t follow you. How could you make a heartless shitehawk like Bobby Quilty care about anything at all that doesn’t affect him in the slightest?’

  Katie said, ‘You’re right, you couldn’t. Not normally, anyway. But supposing the Dohertys’ murders did affect him – and I mean personally? Supposing the Dohertys were actually related to him, cousins of his, only two or three generations removed? What’s the Big Feller going to look like if he allows some loyalist gang to shoot four of his close relations in cold blood and get away with it unpunished?’

  ‘No question about it,’ said Alan. ‘He’d track them down and blow their brains out. The slight snag is, they weren’t related to him, were they?’ He paused, and then he said, ‘They weren’t, were they?’

  ‘It won’t make any difference if they were or they weren’t,’ said Katie. ‘Not so long as Bobby Quilty believes that they were.’

  ‘And how are you going to make him believe that? You can’t tell the media that they were, can you? Apart from that, the Doherty family could easily check with the General Register Office and prove that you were telling a porky. That wouldn’t do your reputation a whole lot of good, would it?’

  ‘Just remember that most of Ireland’s public records were destroyed when they burned the Four Courts in 1922, so it wouldn’t be all that difficult to be a little creative when it came to the Doherty family tree. Besides, I’m not thinking of telling the media. I’m thinking of telling Assistant Commissioner Jimmy O’Reilly. Nobody else. Just him.’

  ‘Jesus. And I thought my Alison was devious,’ said Alan. ‘But what if O’Reilly isn’t your tout?’

  ‘Then I’ll just have to make sure that Quilty finds out some other way.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘He’ll go after the killers himself if he behaves true to type, which is what I’m counting on. He’ll make sure that he gives them one of his pontificating lectures before he has them executed. He doesn’t only want to be the big cheese, he wants the whole of Ireland to know that he’s the big cheese.’

  ‘Am I understanding you right here, Katie? You’re going to feed false information to Bobby Quilty in the expectation that he’s going to lead you to the shooters who murdered the Dohertys?’

  ‘You have it exactly. You should have been a cop, do you know that?’

  Alan ignored Katie’s light-hearted sarcasm. He was open-mouthed with disbelief. ‘He’ll kill them. He’ll kill them and you’ll be responsible. You won’t just be destroying your career, Katie. You could end up in the slammer.’

  ‘I’m not going to let him kill them. We’re not going to let him kill them, you and me. We can track him and stop him before it’s too late. If we do that, we’ll know who shot the Dohertys, and have them arrested, and also have Quilty arrested for aiding and abetting attempted murder.’

  ‘For the love of God,’ said Alan. ‘What if Jimmy O’Reilly or James Elvin aren’t your touts at all? What if they are but they smell a rat and they don’t tell Quilty that he’s related to the Dohertys? What if they don’t tell him anyway? What if they tell him but he doesn’t give a shite?’

  ‘In that case, I’ll just have to carry on my investigation into the Dohertys’ murder in the usual humdrum way. But it’s going to be well-nigh impossible to find out who did it, especially if they came from the North. I’ll need the full cooperation of the
PSNI, if they’ll give it to me, but I don’t think they’ll be too devastated that some Catholics got shot in Cork. And I still won’t be able to touch Bobby Quilty.’

  ‘There are so many “what-ifs”, Katie, that’s what worries me,’ said Alan. ‘What if Quilty doesn’t go after the Dohertys’ killers in person? What if he simply gets in touch with one of his minions in Belfast and tells them do the dirty deed for him? What if the Dohertys’ killers are shot and buried under the floorboards like the Langtrys and the Dohertys and nobody finds them for another ninety years?’

  ‘Alan, I have to do something. I can’t just plod on with nothing but forensic evidence and witness reports and hope that I might get lucky. I’ve already got lucky, overhearing Jimmy O’Reilly and James Elvin together. Like, what were the odds against that? I have to try and take advantage of it, even if it doesn’t work out. If anything happens to John and Kyna and I didn’t at least try—’

  Alan reached across the table and laid his hand on her arm. ‘All right, Katie. I’m with you. I think it’s a mad idea altogether – totally insane – and it could be very dangerous. I’m prepared to give it a go with you, though, just to watch your back for you if nothing else, and see you stay safe. So, when do you plan on telling O’Reilly that the Quiltys and the Dohertys are related?’

  ‘I’m going to the mortuary tomorrow morning to talk to Dr Kelley – she’s the pathologist. I’ll tell him when I go back to the station after that. He’s in Limerick anyway for a garda’s funeral until two o’clock at least.’

  ‘I must say I’m beginning to regret staying here tonight and not coming home with you,’ said Alan. She thought he looked dejected as well as tired, and older than when she had first seen him standing in the reception area at Anglesea Street in his sparkling wet raincoat.

  She could almost hear her grandmother Aileen, who always used to say, ‘It’s life, that’s what it is. It grinds you down like a millstone, life – day after day, week after week, year after year – until one day you’re ground down to dust. Then the wind blows you away, piff! and that’s you gone for good!’