Buried

by Graham Masterton

  Katie said, ‘It’s okay, Alan. Stall it for a moment.’

  ‘It’s beyond me why you’ve showed up here today, Detective Superintendent Maguire,’ said Bobby Quilty. Still holding up his phone, he took a packet of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, placed one between his lips and then lit it, all left-handed. ‘I thought our arrangement was working very well on both sides.’

  ‘That was because I could never find anyone who was brave enough to give evidence against you,’ said Katie. ‘But now I believe I have.’

  ‘What, these three friggers here? They’re murderers, wee doll. They were the ones who shot the Doherty family. They shot the father and the mother and the poor wee children, too. I know that for a fact, because I know the scumbag who sold them their guns and not only that, they’ve been bragging about it all around Blackstaff. Who’s going to believe what they have to say, even if they have the guts to say it?’

  ‘Oh, you’d be surprised,’ Katie told him. ‘A court will believe them, if their story rings true. And I think they’ll have the guts to say it if it means a substantial reduction in their sentences for shooting the Dohertys.’

  There was another long, tense, uncomfortable silence. Then Bobby Quilty said, ‘Why don’t you call it a day, Detective Superintendent Maguire? Forget you ever came here, wee doll. That way, your two dear friends will stay safe and we can carry on like nothing ever happened.’

  ‘And if I do that, what will you do? Blow these people up? Them and their children?’

  ‘Retribution, that’s all it is. Justice. What they did to us, we’re going to do the same to them.’

  ‘The Langtrys and the Dohertys were shot and buried beneath the floorboards. They weren’t blown up.’

  Bobby Quilty blew out a long stream of smoke. ‘There was kind of a snag there. I wanted to do that, so I did, bury them under the floorboards. It would have been historically appropriate, do you know what I mean? But I was told when I got here that all the houses along this street have concrete floors, and we couldn’t have spent three days hammering away with pneumatic drills, now could we? – and then mixing up the concrete to pour over them.’

  The man with the orange hair suddenly spoke up. He had a thin, rusty voice, as if were making a complaint rather than a comment.

  ‘I’ll tell you this, too, Mrs Peeler. If you really want to make a point in this city, a bomb’s always the best way of doing it. A shooting, they’ll forget that after a few weeks. Shootings are ten a penny. But if you blow up half the street, they’ll remember that for a brave lot longer.’

  Katie ignored him and turned back to Bobby Quilty. ‘But what’s the point that you’re trying to make here, Bobby?’

  ‘I’m making the point that nobody murders members of my family and gets away with it, that’s all – no matter what their excuse is.’

  ‘The Dohertys were no relations of yours.’

  ‘They were, too. I have the family tree to prove it.’

  ‘And where did you get that from?’

  Bobby Quilty squinted against the smoke from his cigarette. ‘A reliable source. A very reliable source.’

  ‘Bobby – I invented that family tree myself, for the specific purpose of getting you here and identifying the men who shot the Dohertys for me.’

  ‘Away on!’ said Bobby Quilty. Then, ‘You’re not serious.’

  ‘I was never more serious in the whole of my life. Now lay the phone down carefully on the floor and step away from it. Robert Boland Quilty, I am arresting you under the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997, for making a threat to kill or cause serious harm to another person without lawful excuse. You are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, but anything you do say will be taken down in writing and may be given in evidence.’

  If the atmosphere in the living room had been tense before, it was now so charged that Katie almost expected the front windows to crack from the pressure. The orange-haired man uncrossed his legs and slowly stood up, as if his knees were as rusty as his voice. The three handcuffed men in the middle of the floor kept turning their heads around in bewilderment and panic, looking first at Katie and then at Bobby Quilty and then at the orange-haired man.

  Bobby Quilty said, ‘You disappoint me, Detective Superintendent Maguire. You fecking disappoint me. I thought you were a woman of your word, but all the time what were you doing? Deviously plotting, that’s what you were doing. But now you’re going to find out that I’m the kind of man who keeps his promises.’

  ‘I’m telling you this for the very last time, Bobby,’ said Katie. ‘Put down the phone.’

  Bobby Quilty changed the phone over to his left hand and defiantly raised it even higher, angling it so that Katie could see the screen. Then he held up his right index finger and said, ‘This is where you learn a lesson, Detective Superintendent Maguire. This is where you learn not to mess with Bobby Quilty. Execution by telephone. But you’ll never find out what happened to your friends or where their bodies might be buried, and you’ll never be able to prove a thing against me because I didn’t do it and I wasn’t there, and you’re a witness to that yourself.’

  Katie kept her revolver pointed at Bobby Quilty’s chest but she knew that she wasn’t going to shoot him. He was no immediate threat to her life, because he wasn’t armed, and it would be almost impossible for her to prove that he was a threat to John and Kyna’s lives, either. He was threatening these three members of the Crothers family, and their children, too, when they came home, and that was a serious offence in itself, but whether it justified shooting him and possibly killing him was another matter altogether.

  For the first time since she had thought of this plan for stopping Bobby Quilty, she hesitated. It could come down to a choice between saving John and Kyna and saving three alleged murderers. She had been prepared to risk her career setting up Bobby Quilty like this, but she wasn’t prepared to kill him and go to jail for it.

  She could walk out now and call the PSNI, but Bobby Quilty would only have to get the first hint of a police raid and he would almost certainly give the word for John and Kyna to be done for.

  ‘I tell you what, Bobby,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you a choice. I’ll walk out of here if you do, too, and take your briefcase with you. You’ve led me to the men who shot the Dohertys, as I was hoping you would, and now I can deal with them myself. They won’t go unpunished, I can promise you that.’

  Bobby Quilty drew deeply on his cigarette, and when he spoke, smoke came leaking out of his mouth and his brown-rimmed nostrils. ‘How do I know that you weren’t codding me when you said that the Dohertys were no relations of mine?’

  ‘You’ll just have take my word for it, that’s all.’

  ‘I had the information from a very reliable source, wee doll, and that very reliable source never mentioned you.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have done. He’s not an enthusiast when it comes to female police officers.’

  Bobby Quilty’s eyes narrowed when she said that, but he didn’t respond. For all he knew, she was only guessing that his ‘very reliable source’ was a garda officer and she was trying to trick him into saying who it was.

  ‘So what do you say?’ said Katie. ‘Deal or no deal?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ said Bobby Quilty. ‘I think you’re trying to pull a fast one here, Detective Superintendent Maguire. If I walk out of here and let these friggers live, then the word’s going to go around that any scummer can do for Bobby Quilty’s relations and he won’t have the balls to hit back. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? You want me to look windy. You’ll get all of the credit for solving the Doherty murders and I’ll end up looking like a sooner.’

  ‘Holy Mother of God, Bobby, how many times do I have to tell you? You’re not related to the Dohertys. I made it up.’

  ‘I don’t fecking believe you. I’ve seen the family tree for myself. There was a Quilty served with the IRA at Kilcullen and he married a Doherty.’

  �
�There wasn’t, and he didn’t. I invented it.’

  Bobby Quilty shook his head in disbelief and turned to the orange-haired man. ‘What’s your opinion, Sandy? I definitely think we’re being taken for eejits here, don’t you?’

  As soon as Bobby Quilty looked the other way, though, Alan seized Katie’s left arm and swung her violently round behind him, as if they were dance partners and some furious flamenco had just started up. He caught her completely by surprise and she hit her shoulder hard against the door frame, dropping her revolver, which bounced into the hallway. For a split second she thought: My God, he’s been fooling me – he’s on Bobby Quilty’s side.

  Dropping down on to her knees to pick up her revolver, however, she heard an ear-splitting bang, and then another, and another. She twisted round to witness what looked like a waxwork tableau in which time had stood still and nobody was moving. Through a gauzy curtain of gun-smoke, she saw Alan holding his automatic in both hands, pointing it directly at Bobby Quilty. She saw Bobby Quilty himself, his mouth open in surprise and his cigarette hanging from his lower lip. The sunset pattern on his shirt was so colourful that it was impossible to tell if he had been shot, but his shoulders were hunched forward and his arms were outspread like a man preparing to jump off a wall. He had dropped his mobile phone and it was bouncing across the floor.

  The man with the orange hair had hauled up the left side of his mustard-coloured tank top and was tugging a large pistol out of his belt. The shaven-headed man was reaching out towards Alan, his mouth distorted in a silent shout. In the middle of the room, the three handcuffed men had ducked down, hunching their shoulders and squeezing their eyes tight shut, since Alan had fired only a few inches over their heads.

  ‘Alan!’ Katie shouted, although she could hardly hear herself because the shots had half-deafened her. The orange-haired man had taken his pistol right out now and was cocking it and aiming it at Alan.

  Katie picked up her revolver and scrambled out into the hallway on her hands and knees. She heard another shot, a deeper boom! this time, then the sharper crack of Alan’s SIG Sauer. She stood up, went back to the open door and leaned cautiously sideways, holding her gun up high, so that she could see inside the room. The orange-haired man was sitting back in his chair with his arms and legs spreadeagled, and there was a blood on his tank top. The shaven-headed man with the white T-shirt had jumped on to Alan’s back and grabbed his right wrist and was trying to wrestle his gun away from him.

  ‘Get us the fuck out of here!’ Sam Crothers screamed, throwing himself from side to side in an attempt to free himself from his nylon handcuffs. Kenny MacClery was trying to bump himself across the room on his bottom. Stephen Crothers’s teeth were gritted in pain and concentration as he, too, tried to wrench his hands out of his cuffs.

  Katie was about to step into the room and point her gun directly at the shaven-headed man in the white T-shirt so that he would let Alan go, but then she saw Bobby Quilty. He had collapsed sideways into the fireplace and there was a wide triangular bloodstain on his jacket and blood running out of his nose. His eyes were bulging and his chest was heaving, but he was managing to inch his way out of the hearth and across the carpet, reaching out in front of him with his bloodied right hand.

  A second too late, Katie realized that he was trying to reach his mobile phone, which had fallen close to Sam Crothers’s bare foot. He jabbed at the phone with his index finger, missing it twice, but then he hauled himself a few inches nearer.

  ‘Alan!’ Katie screamed at him and tried to get into the room. But Alan and the shaven-headed man were struggling around and around, blocking the doorway, and as she tried to force her way past them they toppled against her, grunting and panting, and pushed her back into the hall.

  Even when she thought about it later, she didn’t remember hearing the explosion. But the whole house shook as if it had been hit by an earthquake and a blizzard of debris was blasted out of the living-room door – bricks, tiles, bits of furniture, curtains, as well as a shower of glittering nails and large pieces of human bodies. Alan and the shaven-headed man were both lifted up bodily and blown across the hallway into the kitchen where they landed with a double thump, splattering blood up the sides of the green kitchen cabinets.

  Katie was knocked over backwards, almost as far as the front door. She made a grab for the coat-stand to try and stop herself from falling over, but the coat-stand fell over, too, and she was buried for a moment in donkey jackets and children’s duffel coats. The explosion had split the wallpaper in the hallway and made all the pictures drop off, but it hadn’t been powerful enough to bring down the wall itself.

  As Katie struggled to her feet, a thick grey cloud of smoke and dust rolled out of the living room, so that she was almost blinded as well as deafened. She stood still for a moment, leaning with one hand against the wall to steady herself, then holstered her revolver and dragged her balaclava out of her pocket so that she could press it over her nose and mouth.

  Shaking with shock, she stepped carefully over the broken bricks and lumps of plaster until she reached the kitchen. She didn’t have to go inside to see that both Alan and the shaven-headed man were dead. They were lying face to face, both of them soaked in blood, and staring at each other with their eyes wide open, like two boxers challenging each other before a match.

  She didn’t want to look inside the living room but she knew she had to. Right inside the doorway a headless torso was lying against the wall. Its heart and deflated lungs were still inside it and lacerated strings of bloody beige intestine still connected it to the pelvis and legs, which were sitting in the middle of the room. She couldn’t see its head, but she could tell from the white underpants that it was Sam Crothers.

  The whole of the front of the living room had been blown out, so that she could see the street outside. Half the ceiling had collapsed and the front garden was heaped with bricks and broken window frames and jagged pieces of plasterboard. Lying on his back on the pavement, still sitting in his chair, was the orange-haired man. His face had been blasted off so that he looked as if he was wearing a piece of raw pig’s liver as a mask.

  Bobby Quilty’s pickup was parked right outside. Its windows were shattered and its doors dented and peppered with holes.

  Katie was feeling swimmy and there were tiny stars prickling in front of her eyes. The metallic stench of blood and faeces and exploded C4 made her retch. Stay steady, she told herself. This is your job and it was you who brought this about.

  Like Sam Crothers, Stephen Crothers and Kenny MacClery had been sitting with their backs to the briefcase and they taken the full force of the C4 and the nails that were packed inside it. Apart from their hips and legs, there was hardly anything left of either of them but plaited piles of intestines and a jumble of ribs and stringy rags of red flesh.

  Bobby Quilty’s body, in contrast, was almost unscathed. He had been lying on his side when he had detonated the bomb and the Crothers had shielded him from the worst of the blast and its devastating hail of nails. His eyes were closed and although his his chin was bearded with blood, and the front of his jacket was blood-soaked, too, he could have been contentedly sleeping.

  Katie looked down at him and thought: You always knew, didn’t you, that your life would end like this? And you were never going to die alone, were you? You had to have the satisfaction of taking some other scumbags with you – especially since you believed that I was lying to you, and that they had murdered your relatives.

  Now, however, Katie forced herself to switch into professional mode. She could hear people shouting in the street outside and a woman screaming. The police and the fire brigade would be here in a matter of minutes and she needed to be out of here and gone before anybody started asking who she was and what she was doing. She had been shaken to the core, but she had to think about John and Kyna. How long would it be before Bobby Quilty’s minions heard that he was dead and made their own decisions about what to do with them? Without Bobby Quilty holdin
g them as hostages to keep the Garda off his back they would be nothing but a useless liability.

  She bent down and lifted Bobby Quilty’s hand so that she could pick up his mobile phone. It was like a pig’s trotter and his fingers were sticky and still warm. She dropped the phone into her pocket and then she searched around for Alan’s SIG Sauer automatic. She couldn’t see it among the wreckage in the living room, so she had to go back into the kitchen. She didn’t want to look at Alan lying there dead, but she couldn’t stop herself. His expression had changed and he appeared to be sad now, rather than angry. She knew that it was only the primary flaccidity that occurs immediately after death, before rigor mortis begins to set in, but ever since their night together she had thought of Alan as being sad about something.

  She found his gun halfway underneath the gas cooker, with only the butt visible. Once she had retrieved it she de-cocked it and tucked it into her belt. She had been anxious not to leave without it because she had logged it out of the armoury at Anglesea Street and it could easily be traced through its code number.

  ‘Is there anybody in there?’ she heard a man shouting. ‘Hallo? Is there anybody in there?’

  She heard somebody else call out but she couldn’t hear what they said. They were probably warning the first person to stay well clear until the bomb squad had determined that there wasn’t a second device intended to catch first responders.

  Next to the kitchen there was a small utility room, with a washing machine and a clothes horse. There was also a door leading out to the back yard. As quickly and as quietly as she could, Katie let herself out and closed the door behind her. The yard was cluttered with an old enamel bathtub and a bicycle with no wheels and some broken fencing, and she had to climb over two worn-out car tyres, but there was a gate that gave access to the next street. When she opened it she was relieved to see that the street was deserted, so there wouldn’t be any witnesses to say they had seen a red-haired woman in black hurrying away from the house after the explosion.