Buried

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Here,’ said Alan, passing Katie the Brown Thomas shopping bags which were resting against the chair beside him. ‘You’d better have your real identity back.’

  Thirty-eight

  On her way home that evening Katie stopped off at her father’s house in Monkstown to see how he was recovering from his recent bunion operation. As she arrived outside she was surprised to see her sister Moirin’s green Hyundai blocking the driveway, so that she had to park in the street.

  When she rang the bell, it was her younger sister Siobhán who answered. Siobhán was taller than Katie, and plumper, with masses of curly red hair. This evening she was wearing a pink short-sleeved blouse and jeans, and her hair was tied back, and Katie hadn’t seen her look so pretty in a long time.

  ‘Katie!’ she squealed and gave her a hug and wouldn’t let go. After a while Katie had to gasp for breath and say, ‘I love you, too, Siobhán, really I do, but you’re spifflicating me here and I’d like to get inside and see Da.’

  ‘I have a kitten now,’ said Siobhán, taking hold of Katie’s hand as they walked through the hallway into the living room. ‘The Finnegans next door had five kittens – well, six, but one of them died. They gave me one for free.’

  Katie could tell that her father’s cleaner, Bláithín, had been today because the house smelled of lavender furniture polish and there was a vase of fresh orange-tipped gladioli on the windowsill. Her father was sitting in the kitchen while her sister Moirin was noisily washing saucepans in the sink.

  ‘Don’t get up, Da,’ Katie told her father. She was pleased to see that there was a tinge of colour in his cheeks and he had filled out a little since the last time she had seen him. He was even showing the first signs of a small pot-belly underneath his pale grey cardigan. She put that down to Bláithín feeding him. Bláithín cooked for the Roaring Donkey pub, not far from Katie’s, and she brought him back any unsold meat pies or bread-and-butter puddings.

  ‘How’s your bunion?’ she asked him, and he heaved up his right leg to show her his hugely bandaged foot.

  ‘I don’t have a bunion any more, thanks to Dr Murphy. I’ll be able to wear slippers of the same size as soon I’m all healed up. Lately, I’ve always had to buy two pairs, so that I could walk around with an eight on one foot and a ten on the other.’

  ‘Did I tell you that I’ve got a kltten?’ said Siobhán.

  ‘Yes, darling, you did,’ said Katie. ‘What’s the kitten’s name?’

  ‘Zebby the Giraffe.’

  ‘That’s a pure strange name for a kitten. What colour is it?’

  ‘It’s a she. She has grey and black and white stripes, and a pink nose. And a pink bottom hole, too.’

  ‘Siobhán,’ Moirin admonished her.

  Siobhán had turned thirty now but while she was staying with Katie she had been attacked and hit violently on the head with a hammer by her lover’s jealous wife. She had suffered irreversible brain damage and now had a mental age of six or seven. Moirin and her husband, Kevin, had been taking care of her ever since.

  ‘Hi, Moirin, what’s the story?’ said Katie.

  Moirin dried up the last copper saucepan and hung it up, so that all the other copper saucepans jingled and clanked against each other. She took off her apron and said, ‘You’ve missed supper, Kathleen. It was chicken pot roast.’

  ‘I didn’t come for supper, Moirin. I just came by to see how Da was.’

  ‘That’s just as well, then. There wouldn’t have been enough for all of us.’

  ‘Where’s Kevin?’ asked Katie. ‘Has he got over that terrible rash yet? What was causing it, red peppers?’

  ‘He’s better for now, but don’t you worry, he’ll be allergic to something else soon. Gluten, or ivy, or beef hand pies. Kevin’s never happy unless he’s itching and scratching. He’s in Waterford at the moment, at some estate agents’ conference. Three days of peace. Well, apart from Siobhán.’

  ‘I know a joke,’ said Siobhán.

  ‘That’s good,’ said Katie. ‘Why don’t you tell us?’

  ‘Mother of God,’ said Moirin. ‘It’s enough to make me wish I still smoked.’

  ‘Go on, Siobhán,’ Katie smiled at her. ‘Tell us your joke.’

  Siobhán stood up like a child standing up to give a recital at school. ‘There was this old feller and he was standing by a puddle outside a pub. He had a stick with a bit of string tied to the end of it and he was jiggling the stick up and down, like this.’

  ‘All right,’ said Katie. ‘Then what?’

  ‘Another man said, “What are you doing?” and he said, “Fishing.” So your man felt sorry for him and took him into the pub and bought him a drink. And when they were having the drink your man said, “How many have you caught today?” And the old feller said, “You’re number eight.”’

  Katie laughed and said, ‘That’s a good joke, Siobhán. Who told you that?’

  ‘A man I met in the Garden of Time. Moirin takes me there a lot. There’s fountains.’

  Moirin pursed her lips in disapproval. ‘Between you and me, I think he was after a whole lot more than making her laugh. Nothing more tempting than somebody with the body of a woman and the mind of a child.’

  ‘It didn’t make me laugh,’ said Siobhán. ‘I don’t understand it.’

  ‘Then why in the name of God do you keep repeating it to everybody you meet?’ Moirin snapped at her.

  ‘Because it makes them laugh.’

  Now that Moirin had finished clearing up they went into the living room. Katie poured a whiskey for her father and a vodka and Coke for herself and sat down on the couch next to him. Moirin busied herself with her crochet – a baby’s bobble-hat that she was making for a friend – while Siobhán sat on the floor and played with two dolls from Frozen, Elsa and Anna, making them talk to each other in squeaky voices.

  Katie’s father took hold of her hand and said, ‘What’s wrong, darling? You didn’t drop by just to ask about my bunion, now, did you?’

  ‘You make me sound as if I don’t care about you.’

  ‘I know you care about me, Katie. You’re the first person here when I need anything. But something’s bothering you, isn’t it? Something serious.’

  Katie leaned towards him a little and very quietly told him all about John and Kyna and how Bobby Quilty was holding them in his house in South Armagh – and how she was planning to rescue them.

  ‘What frightens me is, that everything depends on this one snatch of conversation that I overheard outside Jimmy O’Reilly’s door and what I saw reflected in his bookcase. They might not have been hugging each other at all – maybe they were close together but from my angle it looked like they were.’

  ‘But Jimmy went to see Quilty after, didn’t he, and came back with a bagful of money?’

  ‘I don’t know for sure that it was money.’

  ‘Well, I doubt if it was drisheen. Come on, Katie, darling, sometimes you have to trust your own instincts and in this case I think your instincts are sound.’

  ‘Dear God, I hope so. It could all so easily go wrong and I dread to think what Quilty would do to John and Kyna if it does. The bags I made of Operation Trident doesn’t fill me with a whole lot of confidence.’

  ‘You know full well yourself that Operation Trident would have gone like clockwork if somebody hadn’t tipped off Quilty beforehand. It was decisive, it was bold. You put it all together in only a few hours. It was good police work, Katie, don’t you have any doubt about it.’

  ‘Thanks for the compliment, Da, but police work gets judged on results and in this case the result was total disaster. I really don’t know if I ought to be taking even more of a risk by trying to lift Bobby Quilty and whoever murdered the Dohertys and expose Jimmy O’Reilly, all at the same time. I’m worried that it’s going to turn out to be Operation Trident the Sequel.’

  Katie’s father glanced across at Moirin, who still appeared to be concentrating on her crochet, although she had her head slightly inclined tow
ards them, as if she were trying to catch what they were saying. Siobhán was singing ‘Let It Go’ in a penetrating off-key falsetto, so it was clearly hard for Moirin to hear them. Katie knew that her father trusted Moirin, like he trusted all of his seven daughters, but she would only have to say a careless word within earshot of the wrong person and Katie’s plan could be seriously jeopardized.

  ‘You’re right about Jimmy O’Reilly,’ he said, not even looking at her, and speaking with his lips nearly closed, like a ventriloquist. ‘He was only a sergeant, of course, when I knew him, but there were always rumours about him. You never saw him with a girl, and he was a scouter in his spare time. Sorry to be offensive, but some of the fellows in the station used to call him “Jimmy O’Piley”.’

  ‘Just because he was a scouter, that didn’t mean that he was gay – or if he was, that he was sexually active,’ said Katie. ‘Scouting Ireland have the strictest child protection policy you could imagine. Like, all scouters have to be screened by the Garda Central Vetting Unit, don’t they? They’re not even allowed to put on a pair of shorts until they can produce two references.’

  ‘Jimmy O’Reilly slipped through the net somehow,’ Katie’s father told her, still in that ventriloquist’s mutter. ‘There was an incident at the Fota summer camp one year. I’m not sure exactly what he was accused of, but he was forced to give up scouting and he was posted to Limerick. The whole thing was hushed up because he was a garda sergeant, but it was common knowledge around the station.’

  ‘He was married, though, wasn’t he?’ asked Katie.

  ‘Yes, to a woman who worked in the Dooradoyle library. Beibhinn, her name was. She was a fair few years older than Jimmy and I think she’d given up hope of ever getting wed. I remember one of the girls saying that she would rather have taken holy orders than marry the most miserable gay in Ireland.’

  Katie said, ‘So we’re fairly sure that Jimmy O’Reilly is gay. But that still doesn’t prove that I’m right about him feeding information to Bobby Quilty.’

  Katie’s father turned to her and looked her steadily in the eye. ‘Katie, if you’re wrong, you’re wrong, and you’ll soon find out if Bobby Quilty doesn’t go after whoever it was who murdred the Doherty family. In which case you’ll have to come up with a plan B. My only advice to you is to play this very, very close to your chest. This PSNI fellow who’s helping you out, what’s his name?’

  ‘Alan – ex-Detective Inspector Alan Harte.’

  ‘Are you sure you can trust him? From what you’ve said, it seems like he’s pursuing some vendetta of his own against Quilty. If that’s all that matters to him, maybe he won’t be so worried about John and DS Ni Nuallán. So if I was you, I’d be doggy wide with him. After all, if he was slung out of the police service, for whatever reason—’

  He paused for a moment and then he said, ‘You like him, don’t you?’

  Katie flapped her hand at him. ‘Who’d have a former garda inspector for a father? Mother of God, Da, you can read me like a Book of Evidence. Yes, I like him. But, yes, you’re right, I’m not completely sure of him.’

  ‘I have some old RUC contacts who might know him, or who might be able to find out more.’

  ‘I don’t know, Da. If he thinks that I’ve been checking up on him behind his back—’

  ‘Let it go!’ sang Siobhán, higher and higher, almost screaming. ‘I am one with the wind and the sky! You’ll never see me cry!’

  Moirin said, ‘I don’t suppose you can take care of her for a day or two, can you, Katie? This song’s breaking my melt!’

  ‘I’d love to,’ said Katie. ‘Let me wrap up this investigation I’m working on right now and then I’ll give you a ring. Maybe I’ll take her down to Kerry and stay at Parknasilla. Sometimes you get seals coming right up on to the shore for a sunbathe, close by the hotel. You’d like that, Siobhán, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Let it go!’ sang Siobhán, oblivious, holding up Elsa and Anna so that they danced in the air. ‘The cold never bothered me anyway!’

  Thirty-nine

  ‘I’m starved!’ said Chisel. He was lying on his back on the couch with a copy of the Racing Post spread over his middle and his big toes sticking out of the holes in his sock, with toenails that needed cutting. ‘I could eat the decorations off of a hearse, I tell you!’

  ‘Does that mean you want me to cook you something?’ asked Sorcia from the armchair in front of the television. She was sitting with her feet up on a vinyl-covered pouffe, her yellow towelling dressing gown gaping open. An unlit cigarette waggled between her lips as she spoke.

  ‘Of course not,’ Chisel retorted. ‘It means I want you to dance round the room in the nip whistling “The Broad Black Brimmer” out of your ganny. What do you think?’

  ‘I couldn’t do that any road, not while I’m in me flowers. Apart from that, I don’t feel like cooking and we don’t have anything in to cook unless you count a tin of tuna and a beetroot that looks like my grandmother’s arse.’

  ‘Jesus, you’re fecking lazy, you are, Sorsh. If there was work in the bed, you’d sleep on the floor. You can ring for a takeaway, can’t you? What’s the time? The Golden Wok’ll still be open.’

  ‘It’s either that or Murphy’s chipper.’

  ‘Nah, I don’t fancy fish. Jesus, I’ve been smelling you all day.’

  Sorcia switched the television to mute and reached down to the floor for her mobile phone. ‘I’ll say this for you, Chiz. You’re the most fecking romantic man I ever met in the whole of my life.’

  ‘I’ll have the chow mein and the chicken spring rolls and them chilli spare ribs. And don’t go forgetting the eggy rice like you did the last time.’

  Sorcia rang the Golden Wok while Chisel went into the kitchenette and took two more cans of Murphy’s out of the fridge. He popped the tops on both and handed one to Sorcia before he lay down on the couch again and lit himself another cigarette.

  ‘What’s this shite you’re watching?’ he asked her.

  ‘I don’t know. Some fillum about some feller whose brother’s a bit on the slow side, like.’

  ‘Why don’t you turn the sound back on?’

  ‘Because I don’t understand what the feck they’re talking about, that’s why.’

  ‘That’s because you’ve a wee want yourself, Sorsh.’

  ‘Oh go away and eff yourself.’

  ‘That’s more than you ever do for me, you dirty clart.’

  Sorcia was just about to snap back at him when they heard the front door downstairs being opened. Opened – pause – and then closed.

  ‘Who’s that?’ said Chisel, sitting up.

  ‘How should I know?’ asked Sorcia. ‘You didn’t leave the door unlocked, did you?’

  ‘I never go out the front, do I? I always go out the back.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean you didn’t leave it unlocked. I know you. You’d forget your scunders if they wasn’t stuck to your arse.’

  Now they heard heavy footsteps drumming up the stairs – at least two people, maybe three. Chisel stood up and said, ‘Christ, I hope it’s not the guards again. I left my gun on top of the toilet.’

  ‘Typical,’ said Sorcia, sitting up straight and wrapping her dressing gown around herself more tightly.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Chisel called out in a strangled voice. ‘This is like private property, like! You’re trespassing!’

  The living-room door opened and Bobby Quilty came in. Unusually for him, he was wearing a wide-shouldered black suit, and a white shirt with one tail untucked, and a mottled red tie. He reeked of David Beckham aftershave.

  ‘I know it’s private property, Chisel,’ he said, with a grin. ‘That’s because it’s my private property. You can’t trespass on your own private property, now, can you?’

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Bobby! What about you, big man? I wasn’t expecting to see you the day.’

  Bobby Quilty nodded at Sorcia and said, ‘All right, Sorsh? Gave you a quare gunk, did I?’

  Sorcia p
ulled her dressing gown even tighter across her breasts. ‘You could have given a body a moment’s notice, Bobby. I’d have dressed up for you.’

  ‘Don’t bother yourself, doll. You’d scare rats out of a stone ditch no matter what you wore.’

  Normally, Sorcia would have lashed back at him, but she clearly sensed that this unexpected visit wasn’t simply social because she carefully placed her can of Murphy’s on the floor and stood up, smoking in quick, nervous puffs and blowing the smoke out sideways.

  Chisel was trying to see who Bobby Quilty had brought with him. The two men were waiting on the landing, both shaven-headed, one wearing a black T-shirt with a demonic face on it, the other in a loose-fitting denim shirt that looked two sizes too big for him. Neither of them came into the living room and neither of them spoke. Although it was dark out on the landing, and their faces were in shadow, Chisel was sure that he had never seen either of them before.

  ‘Who’s that you’ve fetched along with you, Bobby?’ he asked, tilting his head to one side, trying to see them more clearly behind Bobby Quilty’s bulk.

  ‘Business associates,’ said Bobby Quilty. ‘That’s because you and me, Chiz, we have a little business to be sorting out.’

  ‘What sort of business would that be, then? I thought we were all squared up, you and me.’

  Bobby Quilty stepped forward and rested one hand on Chisel’s bony shoulder. Chisel glanced down at it uneasily, as if a fat predatory bird had just perched there.

  ‘I asked you to do something, didn’t I, when we took away that John Meagher fellow? I asked you to clean up the place, didn’t I, so that the polls couldn’t tell that we’d been keeping him here?’

  ‘We did, Bobby. We scrubbed the whole place thorough, I swear to God. We scrubbed the whole place thorough, didn’t we, Sorsh?’

  Sorcia puffed at her cigarette and nodded. She was beginning to look seriously frightened now.