Buried

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Mother of God, that’s all we need.’

  ‘He deserved it. The same as Bobby Quilty. He just told me that Bobby Quilty was dead, blown up by a bomb or something like that. That’s why he came in to kill us. We weren’t useful any more. Surplus to requirements, that’s what he said.’

  ‘I know,’ said Katie. ‘I heard him telling you about Quilty. It’s true. I was there myself when the bomb went off.’

  ‘What? You were actually there?’

  ‘I nearly got blown up myself. There were six others killed, too. Listen, I’ll tell you all about it after. Are you certain he’s dead?’

  Kyna leaned over Ger’s face to make a final check that he wasn’t breathing. After a few seconds she said, ‘He’s gone, yes. I’ll bet you he’s in hell already.’ She stood up and then she said, ‘You’re here by yourself? Like, this isn’t official? There’s no other officers outside?’

  ‘This is a highly unofficial one-woman raid. And we need to get out of here fast, especially if those scummers are coming back from doing their messages in Newry.’

  Kyna looked around the living room. ‘We can’t leave the place like this. There’s enough fingerprints and blood and DNA to identify us ten times over. What’s going to happen when the cops come in and find Ger’s body like this, with my footprints on his face? Or are you going to file an official report and admit to everything?’

  ‘If I do that, I might as well hand in my resignation at the same time. This is not only unofficial, it’s probably illegal as well. Well, it is illegal. You’ve just killed a man.’

  ‘Self-defence. I wish I’d been there to kill Bobby Quilty, too.’

  Katie saw that there was an old Zibro paraffin heater standing in the corner, probably placed there to mollify the drafts that came through the north-east-facing window in the middle of winter. She went across to it, opened up the front panel, and saw from the dial on the tank that it was over half full.

  ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ said Kyna.

  ‘Why not? Bobby Quilty’s dead, so he won’t have anything to complain about.’

  ‘Holy Saint Joseph.’

  Katie lifted the fuel tank out of the paraffin heater and unscrewed the lid. The smell of the paraffin reminded her of her childhood, when her father had kept a paraffin heater on the upstairs landing to keep the bedrooms warm. She knew that what she was doing was madness, but her whole plan to rescue John and Kyna had been madness, right from the beginning, and it was better to see it through to its insane conclusion than to start trying to wrap it up by the book. She had seen too many operations falter and fail because officers had been unwilling to break the rules at a critical moment.

  She walked from one end of the living room to the other, sloshing paraffin on to the carpet and the curtains. When she reached the couch, she put down the paraffin tank and gently lifted the stained sheet from John’s feet. He whimpered and clutched at her arm, and she could see why. Both of his feet were ink-black and bubbling with pus, and the darkness had spread almost up to his knees.

  ‘Here – help me lift him up,’ she told Kyna.

  ‘I can’t,’ whispered John. ‘Just leave me here.’

  ‘You have to,’ said Katie. ‘We’re going to burn the place down.’

  ‘Well, let me burn with it. I can’t.’

  ‘John, we’re going to do it anyway.’

  Katie and Kyna put their arms around him, and between them they heaved him up to a standing position. He was panting and shuddering, and he kept closing his eyes tight shut because of the pain, but with Kyna supporting him he managed to stay upright.

  As quickly as she could, Katie splashed paraffin on to the couch and the bloodstained sheet. Then she knelt down and rummaged in the sagging pockets of Ger’s black jacket, her lips pursed tight with disgust, until she found his plastic cigarette-lighter. After that, she turned the tank upside down and emptied the last of the paraffin all over him. It wouldn’t burn his body sufficiently to hide who he was, but it might obliterate any evidence of who had killed him.

  ‘Right,’ she said, with her eyes watering from the paraffin fumes. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  They both wrapped John’s arms around their shoulders and half-carried, half-dragged him to the living-room door. Katie worked out in the gym whenever she could, but she was impressed with how strong Kyna was. She could almost have humped John out of the house by herself.

  When they had managed to heave John into the hallway, Katie went back into the living room. She flicked Ger’s lighter and set fire to the bottom of the curtains. Then she lit the hem of the bloodied sheet on the couch. When she lit the carpet, the flames scurried across the floor and set fire to the curtains at the other end. Finally, coughing from the fumes, she stood over Ger himself.

  Although he had been so criminal and vicious, Katie still felt deeply disturbed about burning his body like this. This wasn’t the way that people were supposed to end their lives – broken and alone and incinerated like so much rubbish. She also had an irrational feeling that, once he had burst into flames, he might jump up screaming.

  ‘Come on,’ Kyna urged her from the doorway. ‘We need to go now. Poor John’s going to drop at any minute.’

  Katie bent down and lit the cuff of Ger’s jacket. At once, he was enveloped in blue and green flames. His sparse grey hair shrivelled and the plastic frame of his sunglasses melted and dripped down the sides of his face, as if he were weeping black tears.

  The heat in the living room suddenly began to intensify and the hot air made the fire burn even more fiercely. Flames were leaping up the curtains like angry dogs to lick at the ceiling, while the polyester covering of the couch was ablaze and its foam filling was already pouring out dense brown billows of noxious smoke.

  Katie went back out into the hallway and lifted John’s left arm around her shoulders. He looked as if he were close to losing consciousness, because his head kept dropping forward, but together she and Kyna carried him along the hallway to the front door. They passed the room where Ger had been watching television and seen the news that Bobby Quilty had died. The television was still on, but now it was showing a weather forecast. Persistent rain across Northern Ireland for the rest of the day, and tomorrow.

  Kyna opened the front door and they carried John outside, his bare black feet trailing across the shingle.

  Blinking against the drizzle, Katie said, ‘My car’s just across the road there, off to the right.’

  She twisted her head around so that she could look behind her. Smoke was rising from the back of the house, thicker and thicker, and then she saw flames in the hallway.

  They were only a third of the way up the driveway, however, when a dark blue van appeared from the direction of Forkhill and turned into it.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Kyna. ‘The boys are back from Newry.’

  Katie stopped, breathing hard from the effort of carrying John. She had her right arm around his waist and she was gripping his left hand tightly, so without letting go of him she wasn’t able to pull out her gun. Kyna might have been able to keep him upright on her own, but she was panting, too. The only alternative would be to lie him down on the wet shingle driveway.

  The dark blue van stopped about thirty metres ahead of them. Katie could see three men staring at them through the windscreen, with the wipers squeaking monotonously as they cleared away the drizzle.

  Now the wipers stopped and three men climbed out. Two of them were the men who had held Kyna’s arms while Ger headbutted her – the man with the widow’s peak and the fair-haired spotty youth. The third was tall, with a chestnut-brown beard. Katie could see a fourth man in the back of the van, but he stayed where he was.

  ‘Hey! Where do you think you’re heading off to?’ shouted the thin man with the widow’s peak. ‘Look at it, Jesus, the whole fecking house is on fire! Where’s Ger?’

  Katie didn’t turn around again to look at the house, but she could smell the smoke now because the drizzly wind was bl
owing from the south-west, and she could hear crackling and popping and the chiming of breaking windows. The three men started to walk slowly towards them, but she could see that none of them was very confident. She could imagine why they were so uncertain. There was no sign of Ger to tell them what to do, and even though the house was on fire they didn’t know whether they ought to call the fire brigade. The fire brigade would call the police and that would mean they would be found out for keeping John and Kyna unlawfully imprisoned – not to mention any other illegal activities they might have been involved in, like tobacco-smuggling or drug-running or storing weapons for the Authentic IRA.

  Katie was about to tell Kyna to try and support John for a few seconds while she took out her gun. She had only managed to say, ‘Kyna, can you—’ when there was a shattering bang from behind her and she felt a shock wave pushing the three of them from behind, like a gust of strong wind. The next thing she knew they were being showered with fragments of brick and tile and sparkling glass.

  She looked around, and as she did so there was another explosion, even louder than the first, and half of the roof of the house appeared to jump into the air and then collapse completely into the floor below. A cloud of grey smoke rolled up into the rain, and then there was a third explosion, and a fourth, and then a sound like a hundred firecrackers. Part of the facade of the house fell forward, leaving a single chimney stack, and then that, too, teetered and fell sideways with a rattle of bricks.

  What was left of the house was still burning and even some of the trees around the garage were ablaze. A huge ivy-covered oak had been uprooted by the blast and fallen on top of Ger’s mustard-coloured Volvo, crushing the roof and shattering the windows.

  ‘God Almighty!’ shouted Kyna, because both of them were deafened now. ‘Bobby Quilty’s arms dump!’

  The three men who had been approaching them were already running back to their van. They climbed into it and slammed the doors, and then the van swerved backwards, skidded on the wet road, and sped off, heading north.

  There was a series of ten or eleven sharp bangs which Katie recognized as hand grenades. More debris flew up into the air and clattered on to the driveway all around them.

  ‘Let’s go!’ Katie shouted. ‘This time, I think God was on our side!’

  Forty-five

  Katie had only just returned home and given Barney a pat and a cuddle when Detective Inspector O’Rourke rang her.

  ‘How’s your family problem, ma’am?’ he asked her.

  ‘All sorted, thank you, Francis. I’ll be back at my desk at the crack of dawn tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s grand. I’ve been trying not to bother you, but one or two things have cropped up. You’ve heard about Bobby Quilty, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes. What a turn-up for the books that was. I’d say it was an act of God.’

  ‘Well, whatever, there must have been be a rake of people on both sides of the border who breathed a sigh of relief when they heard that he’d been topped.’

  ‘I certainly did,’ said Katie. ‘Any information yet on who did it?’

  ‘That’s a bit of a mystery at the moment. Of course, they’re still examining the house where it happened, but Detective Inspector Humphreys called me from Knock Road and said that it looked like Quilty had intended to murder the people who lived there, for some inexplicable reason. He had them all tied up and he was going to blow them up with a briefcase full of plastic explosive and nails.’

  ‘So, what went wrong? Or should I say right?’

  ‘They don’t know yet, not for sure. They can’t work out how the bomb was triggered, although it was probably set off by a signal from a mobile phone. I can give you all the details when you come in tomorrow.’

  ‘Do they know who these people were – the ones that Quilty wanted to kill?’

  ‘A family called the Crothers. They had very strong loyalist connections, apparently, but that’s hardly surprising. They lived in the Blackstaff ward, and that’s more Orange than a case of Tanora.’

  ‘Do they have any idea why he wanted to kill them?’

  ‘Not at the moment. But there was one quare thing. Quilty was shot, as well as blown up, although they don’t know yet who shot him. One of the seven people killed in the blast was an ex-PSNI police inspector, but he didn’t appear to be armed. We’ll obviously find out more when their technical experts have completed the forensics and they’ve finished collecting witness statements, but you know what they’re like in Belfast. Very tight-lipped.’

  ‘Thanks, Francis. I’m back home now, so you can ring me at any time.’

  She put her iPhone down on the coffee table, while Barney looked at her expectantly, wagging his tail. The hopeful expression in his eyes said: Walk, walk! Please say the word ‘walk’!

  She tugged at Barney’s ears, but before she could think about taking him for a walk she needed to know that John and Kyna were being treated, especially John. She rang CUH and spoke to a staff nurse in the Acute Medical Unit.

  ‘John Meagher’s extremely unwell, I’m sorry to tell you. His feet and his lower legs are badly infected. He’s also seriously dehydrated. Doctor O’Connell has instigated several tests and we should be receiving the results tomorrow afternoon. We’ll keep in touch with you, of course.’

  Next she rang Kyna. She was at CUH, too, being treated for a skin infection.

  ‘They’ve booked me in next week to have my nose reconstructed. Don’t worry. In two or three weeks I’ll be as beautiful as ever.’

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Katie asked her.

  ‘You mean how am I feeling about Ger? Very mixed. I loathed him and I wanted to pay him back for hurting me like that, and most of all for not allowing John to be treated. But I honestly didn’t mean to kill him. I would have preferred to see him sent to Portlaoise again. Then he would have suffered for the rest of his life and I wouldn’t be feeling so guilty.’

  ‘Anyway, take good care of yourself,’ said Katie. ‘Are you staying in the hospital or are they sending you home?’

  ‘I’m just waiting for some pills and then they’re going to discharge me.’

  ‘You could come and stay with me for a while. I could use the company.’

  There was a very long pause. Katie could hear hospital noises in the background, and a woman calling, ‘Nurse!’ Then Kyna said, ‘Thanks, Katie, but no... I think we’ve got each other into enough trouble already.’

  ‘Somehow I don’t really care any more.’

  ‘Well, you should. This city would be a much worse place to live in if it wasn’t for you.’

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow so,’ said Katie. ‘Maybe you can meet me for lunch. How about Elbow Lane?’

  ‘I don’t know. The more I see you the more I want to stay here in Cork and I’m not so sure that we’re very good for each other. Maybe in another life... if we were florists, or dress designers. Something girly and harmless. Besides, I don’t really want to go out looking like this.’

  ‘You look like you’ve walked into a door, that’s all.’

  ‘Every battered woman uses that excuse. No, Katie, let’s leave it for a while. I can’t thank you enough for what you did to rescue us – the risk you took. I think you’re amazing. But I need to meditate for a while, and get myself back together again, body and spirit.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Katie, a little sadly. ‘But call me when you’re ready, won’t you?’

  ‘I promise.’

  Katie switched off her iPhone and looked at Barney. He could sense that something was wrong because he cocked his head to one side and made that mewling noise in the back of his throat.

  ‘Come on, Barns,’ she told him, standing up. ‘Let’s go outside and get ourselves soaking wet.’

  *

  She was reading through the files that had been left on her desk when there was a complicated rapping at her office door. She looked up as Assistant Commissioner Jimmy O’Reilly came in.

  ‘Katie,’ he said. ‘Francis O’Rourke told
me that you’d been having some family problems.’

  ‘They’re all resolved now, thank you, sir.’

  Jimmy O’Reilly stood watching her for a moment, then he cleared his throat and said, ‘Fierce dramatic news about Bobby Quilty, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Not that much is going to change, I shouldn’t think. Somebody else will take over the cigarette-smuggling, no doubt, and all the other rackets the Big Feller was running.’

  ‘There’s a couple of likely contenders,’ said Katie. ‘Matty Fegan, for one. I’m keeping a close eye on him. Fatty Matty Fegan.’

  ‘It looks as if Bobby Quilty did us one favour, though,’ said Jimmy O’Reilly. ‘He caught the fellows who shot the Dohertys – even if he did set himself up as judge, jury and executioner, and execute himself in the process. I doubt if we would have found those Crothers in a million years.’

  ‘I just wonder why he went after them,’ said Katie.

  ‘Come here to me? He went after them because they’d murdered his relations. To Bobby Quilty, that was a personal challenge. He couldn’t let them go unpunished. Come on, Katie, you knew Bobby Quilty as well as any of us. To him, that would be unthinkable.’

  ‘But how did he know it was them?’

  ‘Because he had contacts everywhere in Belfast, didn’t he? He knew everyone – republican, loyalist, and everybody in between. The PSNI are doing a thorough test on the Crothers’ bodies, of course, and what remains of their house, but I was talking on the phone to Detective Chief Inspector MacReady about it yesterday afternoon and he was convinced that the Crothers shot the Dohertys. According to some of his informers, they were boasting about it in their local pub.’

  ‘What I actually meant was, how did Bobby Quilty find out that he was related to the Dohertys?’

  Jimmy O’Reilly frowned. ‘How should I know? Perhaps he’d always known. Perhaps he looked up his family tree. You can do it online these days, can’t you? Look Up Your Granny dot.com, or some such.’

  Katie was tapping her pen on her desk like a metronome. She knew what she was going to say next, but she also knew that she would have to phrase it very carefully.