The Drowned

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Do you have any more information on where those five lads were last seen?’ asked John Brogan. ‘That would be pure helpful. People always think that bodies in the Lee float off with the tide, but we usually find them almost exactly where they first went in. There’s almost no current at all at the lower levels, like.’

  ‘If they did go into the river, they’ll still be on the bottom so,’ added Fergus. ‘The water’s too cold for them to have started fermenting yet. In warm water they come floating up in three or four days and they’re so full of gas you wouldn’t be able to sink them again for love nor money. But in these temperatures it could take weeks for them to inflate.’

  ‘The last time that any of them were seen was at Havana Brown’s, at about one o’clock in the morning on Wednesday,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘Even then, we only have firm identification that the twins were there, not the rest of them, although they probably were. After that, who knows where they went? I’m sorry. We don’t know how five young lads could have disappeared without anybody noticing them, but they have.’

  ‘Okay,’ said John. ‘We’ll just have to pootle up and down and see what we can see. I have to tell you, though, it could take weeks, or even longer. My own father’s body was found at Marina Point but it took three and a half months.’

  Detectives Dooley and Scanlan waited until John and Fergus and another volunteer had climbed into the inflatable boat. They started up the outboard motor and then they went puttering off down the river. Almost immediately four or five seagulls took off from the railings of the Eamon De Valera Bridge and began to follow them, hoping that they would bring some grey mullet to the surface.

  ‘You could join these fellers, instead of being a croupier,’ said Detective Scanlan as they watched them dwindle into the distance.

  ‘Are you codding me? Once they start searching, they go on searching until it gets dark, and they survive on sandwiches that people pass down to them from the river bank. Apart from that, they’re all volunteers, aren’t they, and they don’t get paid? They only do it because most of them know somebody who’s ended up drowned.’

  They walked out of the gates of Custom House Quay and back towards the station.

  Detective Scanlan said, ‘I hope they don’t find them.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I mean I hope they don’t find them in the river. I hope they’ve just done something stupid like drive down to Kerry and got drunk and gone fishing.’

  ‘You don’t honestly think that’s what they’ve done, do you?’

  ‘No,’ said Detective Scanlan. She had plum-coloured shadows under her eyes and she looked to Detective Dooley as if she needed a few days’ break. Maybe he could persuade her to share a few days’ break with him, down at Parknasilla resort hotel in Kerry.

  ‘No,’ she repeated, as they turned the corner into Eglinton Street. ‘If you really were a croupier, Robert, I’d bet you a hundred euros that they’ll find them dead.’

  *

  They heard nothing from the search and recovery unit until it grew dark. Then John Brogan called Detective Scanlan to tell her that they had scanned the north side of the Lee, close to the bank, as far as the mouth of the Glashaboy River. The only anomalies that had shown up on their screen had been a motorcycle with no front wheel and a Tesco trolley.

  Detective Scanlan came up to tell Katie, but all Katie could say was, ‘Well... they did say that it sometimes takes months.’

  Appeals for information about the missing boys were repeated on the Six-One and the Nine O’Clock News, as well as in the Evening Echo and on most of the local radio stations, including Cork 96FM and Red FM and Cork Campus Radio, which served the university. By the time Katie came into the station the following morning there had been a few more drunken hoax calls – ‘I seen the five of them jumping off the top of Shandon steeple, with parachutes’ – but not a single reliable sighting reported by anybody, from anywhere.

  It was early afternoon before Detective Dooley came up to her office, and he was looking serious.

  ‘Ma’am? I’ve just had a call from the search and recovery team. About an hour ago they located a vehicle underwater on the south side of the river, just off the Shandon Boat Club slipway. They sent down their diver to take a sconce and he’s reported that there’s bodies in it.’

  ‘Did he say how many bodies?’

  Detective Dooley said, ‘At least three that he could see. It’s fierce murky down there and he didn’t want to disturb anything.’

  ‘Right,’ said Katie, standing up and briskly shuffling her papers into order. ‘We’re going to need Navy divers asap, so if you can call Lieutenant Breen at Haulbowline and arrange for that. It sounds like we’re going to need some towing or lifting equipment, too, but I expect the divers will be able to tell us the best way to recover this vehicle out of the water. Did they tell you what kind of vehicle it was?’

  ‘An SUV or a people carrier, that’s what it looked like.’

  ‘I assume the search and recovery team are still on the scene?’

  ‘They are, yes. They’re just about to make another dive, with a camera this time, but they’re not optimistic that they’ll be able to see too much. That water, downstream from the city, that’s like my mam’s mushroom soup, only it’s probably a bit more drinkable.’

  *

  Katie went out to the Shandon Boat Club, along with Detective Sergeant Begley and Detectives Dooley and Scanlan. The roadway leading to the club was barred by a Garda patrol car and there were at least ten uniformed gardaí keeping sightseers at a distance. Even the media were being held at bay outside the gate.

  ‘Detective superintendent!’ called out Fionnuala Sweeney from RTÉ News. ‘I understand there’s a car been discovered underwater, with people in it! Can you confirm that at all?’

  ‘I have no idea what’s been located at the moment,’ Katie told her. ‘I’ll let you know as soon as I do.’

  ‘There’s a family gone missing from Kanturk. A father and a mother and three small children. The family dog, too. Do you think it could be them?’

  ‘Like I say, Fionnuala, I have no idea yet. We’ll have Navy divers here soon to make an assessment.’

  She walked to the slipway, where John Brogan and his volunteers were standing around. Their orange inflatable boat was tied up nearby.

  ‘What’s the story?’ she asked them.

  ‘We almost missed it,’ John Brogan told her. ‘It’s so close in to the bank there, and of course we had to veer out a few metres away in our RIB to avoid the slipway. There, look, you can see our marker.’

  Katie could see a yellow buoy floating in the water, less than three metres away from the concrete embankment but at least thirty metres away from where they were standing.

  ‘Which way is the vehicle pointing?’ she asked.

  ‘Forwards, like it was driven down the slipway. Or rolled down.’

  ‘I reckon it was driven,’ said Detective Sergeant Begley. ‘If it had rolled down, it would have stopped when it reached the bottom. It was probably being driven at a fair speed, too, to go that far before the engine conked out.’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking, too,’ said John Brogan. ‘But if that was the case, like, the driver must have been mouldy, or high, or some kind of a header. Otherwise, when he hit the water, he wouldn’t have kept his foot on the gas, would he?’

  It was only three o’clock but it was growing prematurely dark and a chilly breeze was blowing across the river. Katie took her red woollen gloves from her coat pocket and tugged them on, while Detective Sergeant Begley thrust his hands into the pockets of his coat and stamped his feet. After about ten minutes, though, Fergus O’Farrell suddenly emerged from the water in his black diving suit and face-mask, with an oxygen tank on his back. He came up the slipway, his wet yellow flippers slapping on the concrete, carrying an underwater camera with a light attached. As he approached them, he pushed back his face-mask and spat.

  ‘What have you got, Fergus?
’ asked John.

  ‘About ninety-five per cent of feck all, excuse my language. But there’s bodies in there, five of them so far as I can tell. I’ve taken a few pictures and I can send them to your tablet if you want to take a look.’

  ‘Yes, do that, and then I can show them to Detective Superintendent Maguire here. Sorry – I should have introduced you. Detective Superintendent Maguire, Fergus O’Farrell, our new diver. Fergus, this is Detective Superintendent Maguire.’

  Fergus turned to Katie and said, ‘I know. I’ve seen your picture in the papers enough times, haven’t I? Well known for cracking difficult crimes.’ He turned around and looked back at the river. ‘I don’t reckon you’ll have much of a problem working out what happened here, though.’

  ‘Why?’ said Katie. ‘What do you think happened?’

  ‘For some reason or other, these five eejits drove straight into the water. High on something or other, that’s my guess. Either they took the wrong turning or else they did it for a laugh. It’s amazing how many people drown because they’ve jumped into the river just for the fun of it.’

  ‘Some fun,’ said Katie. ‘Anyway, thank you.’

  Fergus only grunted in reply. He sent the pictures he had taken to John’s tablet and then went over to the Missing Persons van to take off his diving suit.

  ‘Don’t mind Fergus,’ said John. ‘He’s one of the best divers we’ve ever had, but he’s a bit humpy-like, do you know what I mean? I think he thinks that life should have been kinder to him – for instance, he should have won the lotto or married one of the Nolan sisters. Anyway, come over to my car and we can take a sconce at his pictures.’

  As they walked across to John’s car, another car drew up behind it and a young Naval Service officer in a long blue raincoat climbed out. Katie could see his naval cap on the dashboard of his car, but he didn’t put it on. She had met him several times before – mostly here, at the Port of Cork marina, when frogmen from the Naval Service Diving Section had been called in to help retrieve bodies.

  ‘Lieutenant Breen, how’s it going?’ she called out as he came walking smartly towards them.

  ‘You could have timed this better, DS Maguire,’ he called back. ‘I have a Navy veterans’ dinner this evening.’ Then, ‘Hello, John. What’s the story?’

  Katie thought that Lieutenant Breen was quite handsome in a clear-eyed, square-jawed, clean-cut, military way. He had been trained as an NSDS diver himself, and since only nine per cent of applicants were ever accepted for the diving section, that meant that he was not only good-looking but physically very fit. Katie, though, was more attracted to men who were a little more louche and had the smell of danger about them.

  John told him about the vehicle that they had found underwater at the bottom of the slipway. Then he took out his tablet and scrolled through it until he found the photographs that Fergus O’Farrell had just taken.

  Although the light on Fergus’s camera was intensely bright, the river water was so cloudy that the figures sitting in the submerged vehicle looked like ghosts in a fog. There was nobody sitting in the front passenger seat, but they could just make out the driver, leaning at an angle away from the camera. The other four figures were all sitting close together in the back seat and one of them had his face pressed against the window. He looked swollen and moon-like, his eyes wide and his mouth hanging open. He reminded Katie of an inflatable sex toy.

  ‘That looks like one of the missing lads,’ said Katie. ‘I’m not sure what his name is, but it’s almost certainly him. You saw the photographs, didn’t you, Sean? He was the one who was holding up a bottle of beer.’

  ‘We can extract the bodies and then winch the vehicle back up the slipway,’ said Lieutenant Breen.

  ‘It’s going to be dark soon,’ said Katie.

  ‘That really doesn’t make too much difference. We have portable arc lamps in our support van, and the water’s so filthy you can’t tell whether it’s day or night anyway. Now that I’ve seen the location, I can call in our recovery team and they can be here in less than an hour.’

  ‘One thing, though,’ said Katie. ‘I don’t want you to extricate the bodies before you winch the vehicle out. I don’t want your divers to touch them at all.’

  ‘Well, we generally remove the bodies first,’ said Lieutenant Breen. ‘It depends on the circumstances and it’s a matter of respect as much as anything else – especially if a vehicle’s turned upside down, which they often do if they hit the water at any speed. But if that’s the way you want us to do it—’

  ‘I want to see them exactly as they were when they went into the river,’ said Katie. ‘I also want our scene-of-crime technicians to examine them in situ. They always say that dead men don’t tell tales, but most of the time they tell us a whole lot more than living ones. They never tell us any lies, anyway.’

  *

  It was two hours before the Navy divers arrived, along with their large blue support van. Three forensic experts from the Technical Bureau turned up shortly afterwards, along with the chief technical officer, Bill Phinner. It was dark now and it had begun to rain.

  Katie went to talk to the reporters who were still waiting outside the port gates.

  ‘A vehicle has been located underwater with several deceased persons in it,’ she said. ‘All I can tell you at the moment is they are not the missing family from Kanturk.’

  ‘How many deceased persons altogether?’ asked Dan Keane from the Examiner.

  ‘I’ll be able to tell you that when the divers raise the vehicle out of the river. As you know yourself, the water in the Lee is not exactly what you’d call limpid.’

  Fionnuala Sweeney started to ask her a question but she was drowned out by the bellowing arrival of a bright green heavy-duty Doggett tractor.

  Katie said, ‘Sorry, Fionnuala. That’s my cue to go.’

  She went back to the quayside and rejoined Detective Sergeant Begley and Detectives Dooley and Scanlan. The divers had already attached a steel hawser to the vehicle and now two of them were dragging it up the slipway. The tractor’s driver reversed to the top of the slipway and they hooked the hawser to the back of it.

  With its engine roaring, the tractor crept slowly forward. The hawser tightened with a series of shuddering twangs and gradually the rear of the vehicle emerged from the water.

  ‘Dark blue people carrier,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘That fits the description of the taxi that picked them up from Barnavara Crescent.’

  ‘Yes, but if it is the taxi that picked them up at Barnavara Crescent, where’s the taxi driver? Don’t tell me a taxi firm would have allowed them to drive themselves home.’

  ‘Maybe it was a rental,’ Detective Sergeant Begley suggested. ‘Or maybe it wasn’t a taxi at all and they just borrowed it.’

  ‘Well, we can soon check on that, one way or another.’

  The people carrier was pulled right up to the top of the slipway, with grey water pouring out from underneath its doors. It was brightly illuminated by the arc lights that the NSDS had set up, so that it looked as if it were being filmed for a horror movie.

  The driver’s window was fully open and the driver was leaning towards it, as if he had been trying to escape. The other four boys were sitting tightly together in the back seat, although one of them was twisted sideways, with one knee over the boy next to him, which suggested that he might have been struggling to get himself free. The two boys sitting beside the doors were both still clutching the door handles.

  All five of them had bloated grey faces, with a bluish tinge around their mouths, as if they had been feasting on blueberries. They were in the early stages of putrescence, so their cheeks and necks were swollen and bulging out of their shirt collars.

  The technical experts circled around the people carrier in their noisy white Tyvek suits, taking videos and scores of flash photographs, so that the rain sparkled. Eventually Bill Phinner came up to Katie and said, ‘Okay to open her up now, ma’am?’

  ‘Ye
s, go ahead,’ said Katie. ‘But before you remove the bodies, make sure you plot their positions exactly. They were obviously struggling to get out, but why was the driver the only one to open his window? And when he had, why didn’t he manage to escape?’

  Two ambulances were being waved through the gates by the gardaí. Once the drowned boys had been removed from the people carrier they would be taken to the mortuary at Cork University Hospital for post-mortem examinations. The people carrier would be lifted onto a low-loader and driven to the Technical Bureau’s garage for a meticulous forensic study.

  Detective Dooley was holding up his iPhone. ‘I’ve just checked the index marks, ma’am. There’s no such vehicle registered with the RSA.’

  ‘So it’s probably not a real taxi,’ said Katie. ‘But we still need to know who picked them up in it from Barnavara Crescent, and if it is the same vehicle, why one of them was driving it instead of him? Presumably he drove them all down to Havana Brown’s that evening, and maybe he arranged to pick them up and take them home to Mayfield afterwards. If so, why wasn’t he in the car with them? And if they were driving themselves home, what were they doing here at the Shandon Boat Club? It’s not like it’s on their way and they accidentally took a wrong turn.’

  ‘That’s always presuming it’s the same car,’ said Detective Sergeant Begley.

  ‘If it wasn’t, whose was it, and how did they come to be driving it?’

  Detective Sergeant Begley looked at the five grey-faced boys lolling in the people carrier, their eyes still open, as if they were waiting to be driven off to Purgatory. ‘Like you say, ma’am, they’ll tell us, one way or another.’

  Fergus O’Farrell had taken off his wetsuit now and came up to them wearing a blue anorak and a black polo-neck sweater. Katie thought he looked much less miserable now that his face wasn’t so compressed.

  ‘Thank you for finding these lads, Fergus,’ she said. ‘I think the work that you and the rest of the team are doing is fantastic.’