The Drowned

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Well, we all have some connection to a missing person, that’s what motivates us, like,’ said Fergus. ‘I lost my own daughter not long ago.’

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.’

  Fergus nodded towards the people carrier. ‘Do you reckon these are the five missing lads I’ve been seeing on the telly?’

  ‘Strictly between us, Fergus, they probably are. But please don’t say anything until it’s been officially confirmed.’

  ‘No, no, of course not. From what somebody told me, those five had been up to all kinds of shenanigans. Them and some other young students from the university.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Some feller I met in the pub, that’s all. You know what Cork’s like. Everybody knows what you’ve done before you’ve even thought about doing it yourself.’

  ‘These young students from the university... your man in the pub didn’t mention any names, did he?’

  Fergus frowned, and then he said, ‘Ruarí, that was one of them.’

  ‘Really? Ruarí?’ said Katie. ‘Well, that might help us.’

  ‘There must be half a dozen Ruarís at the uni,’ Detective Dooley put in.

  ‘Yes,’ said Katie. ‘It’s a Ruarí Barrett we’re interested in.’

  Fergus shook his head. ‘No, sorry, your man didn’t tell me any of their surnames.’ But then he nodded towards the people carrier again and said, ‘A terrible way for young fellers to die, like, drowned in the river. It’s not a peaceful way to go, either, trying to hold your breath like that and all the time your brain’s begging for oxygen.’

  ‘At least this will give their families closure,’ said Katie. ‘But on that cheerful note, I have to go. Thanks again for everything you’ve done, Fergus. But please remember this is all confidential.’

  ‘My lips are as tight as a duck’s behind, ma’am, you can count on it.’

  *

  At about eleven o’clock the next morning, when Katie was prising open the lid of her second cup of coffee, Detectives Dooley and Scanlan came into her office, along with Bill Phinner. Bill was carrying a large black vinyl folder.

  ‘I could have sent these up to your PC, ma’am,’ he told her. ‘But it’s worth looking at them enlarged.’

  They sat down on the couches by the window and Bill opened the folder on the coffee table. It contained twenty or thirty photographs of the five drowned boys, as well as schematics of their positions in the people carrier.

  ‘We’ve identified all the boys from the ID that three of them were carrying in their wallets and the photographs their relatives provided, and it’s those five all right,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘I’ll be contacting their next of kin later this morning, so that they can go down to the mortuary to make a formal identification.’

  Katie said, ‘The driver’s window was open, but even he didn’t manage to get out.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Bill. ‘And all the doors and the rest of the windows were locked, even though the switch was only centimetres away from the driver’s hand and he could have opened them easy. The water pressure was such that they may not have been able to open the doors, but at least they could have had a chance of escaping if they had been able to open the windows. We checked the electrics on the vehicle and they were still functioning.’

  ‘Who was the driver?’

  ‘Darragh O’Connor,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘But apart from his impressive record of non-headline offences, the interesting thing about Darragh O’Connor is that he doesn’t hold a current driving licence, and never has.’

  Katie studied the photographs of Darragh O’Connor, which had been taken from several different angles.

  ‘He’s leaning to the right, with his shoulder against the door. But his left leg isn’t even in the driver’s side footwell. And why isn’t one of the other lads sitting next to him in the front passenger seat? The four of them are all squashed up together in the back. That doesn’t make sense. Not unless—’

  Bill Phinner looked up at her expectantly. ‘Are you thinking what I’ve been thinking?’ he asked her.

  ‘You mean, that Darragh O’Connor wasn’t driving?’ said Katie. ‘Somebody else was driving and Darragh was originally sitting in the front passenger seat? Somebody who dragged him into the driver’s seat once the vehicle had gone into the water and he had already drowned?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ said Bill. ‘But if Darragh had drowned, and all the rest of the lads had drowned, too, why didn’t this theoretical driver drown along with them?’

  Detective Dooley shrugged. ‘He could have escaped through the open window, like, swum to the surface and then dived back down again to pull Darragh behind the wheel. Or maybe we’re misjudging him. Maybe he went down again to try and save Darragh’s life but didn’t have the strength to pull him right out.’

  ‘No, that doesn’t make any sense,’ said Katie. ‘If he’d been intent on saving anybody’s life, he wouldn’t have locked all the windows, would he? Not only that, he would have raised the alarm as soon as he surfaced again. But we’ve checked the logs and there were no emergency calls relating to this incident at all.’

  She paused again, looking through the pictures for anything that might indicate what had happened as the five boys drowned.

  ‘Were they all carrying their mobile phones?’

  ‘They were, yes, but of course the water had got into them. We’re drying them out now and we should have them working again in a while.’

  ‘Do we know where the vehicle came from?’ she asked. ‘I presume you checked the VIN number.’

  ‘We did, of course. It was last registered to a used car dealership, O’Hagan’s Autos in Limerick. Their records say that it was bought in January by a Patrick McNeill, who paid them six hundred euros cash. However, it was never registered under Patrick McNeill’s name, and never underwent an NCT, and never insured.’

  ‘Did you find anything inside the vehicle that might identify this Patrick McNeill? In the glovebox, or the door pockets?’

  ‘In the glovebox we found a Phillips screwdriver, half a roll of very old extra-strong mints, a map of Limerick, three used nine-volt batteries and a lotto ticket from 2013. There was nothing in the door pockets. On the floor under the seats we found a small folding umbrella and a child’s runner, size two, and a small white plastic lid of some kind.’

  ‘A small white plastic lid of what kind?’

  ‘I have no idea, to be honest with you. Look – here’s a picture of all the items that we recovered. That’s the lid there.’

  Katie looked at the photograph. She recognized the white plastic lid at once for what it was. Her late husband, Paul, had taken her on holiday to Tenerife and she had spent three days scuba diving.

  ‘Unless I’m wildly mistaken, Bill, this is a valve cover from one of those small spare air tanks that scuba divers sometimes have clipped to their belts in case of emergency. Have you checked it for fingerprints?’

  ‘Not yet, but we will.’

  ‘If that is a scuba tank valve cover, then it could be that our driver is a diver and that’s how he managed to stay underwater for so long, while all of those lads drowned. It could also mean that this accident was no accident at all, not even a mad drunken prank that went wrong. It could mean that it was carefully planned by somebody who wanted to see those lads dead.’

  Detective Dooley said, ‘The driver picked them up from Barnavara Crescent and presumably brought them all down to the city. Most likely they all went to Havana Brown’s. It would make sense that they arranged for the same driver to pick them up and take them home. If it was the same driver, that was when he was planning to drown the lot of them.’

  ‘None of the city’s taxi companies had a call to pick them up that night,’ said Detective Scanlan. ‘I’ll check with their families if they know what taxi company they usually used. If they don’t know, maybe we’ll find it on their mobile phones once they’ve dried out.’

  ‘All right,’ said Kat
ie. ‘But meanwhile we’re looking for a diver with a grudge. Maybe we should talk to the search and recovery team again. And maybe Lieutenant Breen. Between them, they must know just about every diver in Cork.’

  *

  Ruarí Barrett pushed his way out of the glass doors of the Boole Library at University College, turning his collar up against the rain.

  A middle-aged man in a blue windcheater was standing close to the entrance, with his hands in his pockets, but he didn’t seem to mind the rain at all. It was only what Katie’s father would have graded as number two on the scale of Cork rain – ‘wetting’. Worse than ‘soft’, but not as bad as ‘rotten’.

  Ruarí started to hurry towards the main quadrangle, keeping his tablet and his books shielded under his waterproof jacket. He was late for an appointment with his tutor, but he had needed to bone up on the design and analysis of self-excited jets.

  He didn’t notice that the man had given him a thirty-metre start but was now following him, walking just as fast as he was. Faster, in fact, because he caught up with him as he reached the corner of the stark modern building. Students could be seen sitting inside, most of them bent over their laptops.

  ‘Ruarí,’ the man said, not loudly, because he was close up behind him now. ‘Ruarí Barrett.’

  Ruarí stopped and turned around.

  ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing to bother you,’ the man replied. ‘Just like you weren’t bothered when you took my daughter Caoimhe.’

  ‘What?’ frowned Ruarí. ‘Who’s Caoimhe?’

  ‘You took her, you and your scumbag pals. That’s who.’

  ‘Listen, sham, I don’t know what the feck you’re talking about, but I’m in a desperate hurry right now and I don’t have the time to play riddle-me-ree.’

  ‘This is no riddle, boy. You and your scumbag pals picked up my daughter Caoimhe from Rearden’s and you did things to her that a father should never have to hear about.’

  Ruarí started to walk away, but the man caught up with him again and this time he snatched hold of his sleeve.

  ‘Will you ever fecking let go of me?’ Ruarí snapped at him, shaking his arm. ‘I have no idea at all what the feck you’re rabbiting on about!’

  ‘Don’t try to make a fool out of me, boy,’ the man retorted. ‘His name was Ruarí and he had white eyelashes like a pig, that’s what she wrote. You’ve just answered to the name of Ruarí and all you have to do is look at your reflection in that window to recognize yourself by that description.’

  ‘I’m saying nothing to you, you pox,’ said Ruarí, and yanked his arm free.

  ‘You think I’m going to let you go as easy as that, after what you and your gang did to my Caoimhe?’

  Ruarí stopped again and turned around, and this time he shouted so loudly that the students inside the library could hear him and looked up from their computers.

  ‘Do you want to know the truth, old man? Your daughter was a slut! She loved everything we did to her, and she was crying out for more! She wanted us to shit in her mouth and now I know where she got it from, because your mouth is full of nothing but shit! Now feck off and leave me alone!’

  The man looked away for a moment, across the quadrangle, as if he was thinking about something that had happened to him a long time ago and had just remembered. Then he turned back and dashed all of the books and the tablet out of Ruarí’s hands. They dropped on to the wet concrete pavement and a dozen sheets of notepaper fell out and were blown away into the rain.

  ‘What in the name of Christ—?’ Ruarí screamed. ‘That’s all of my study, you stupid bastard! I’ve just spent hours on that!’

  He bent down to pick up his books, but as he did so the man reached out and pincer-gripped the back of his neck. He jerked up straight again, furiously reaching behind him to wrench the man’s hand away. He didn’t see the hammerhead dive knife that the man pulled out of his pocket and plunged without any hesitation into his stomach, just below his sternum, almost up to the hilt.

  Ruarí let out a high-pitched heeeee! as the shock of being stabbed expelled all the air from his lungs. He started to pitch forward, but the man kept his grip on the back of his neck. Slowly, and with obvious effort, he dragged the knife downwards, cutting through Ruarí’s pale green sweater, as well as his shirt, and his skin, and his abdominal muscles, all the way down to his braided leather belt.

  Ruarí stared at the man in disbelief and reached out to grasp his shoulder for support. The man didn’t push him away, but drew out the knife and dropped it on top of Ruarí’s books. Ruarí tried to take a step forward, but when he did his stomach opened up like the mouth of a giant fish and his intestines tumbled out, glistening and bloody and beige, and swung in coils almost as far down as the pavement.

  He lost his grip on the man’s shoulder and fell sideways, hitting his head hard against the concrete. He lay there gasping and feebly trying with one hand to push his intestines back into his body.

  The man made no attempt to escape. He stood beside Ruarí with his arms folded as students came running to help, and then stood well away, horrified by what they saw, and realizing that there was nothing they could do. He was still standing there five minutes later when an ambulance drove up, with its siren warbling, and then two Garda patrol cars. By then, Ruarí’s eyes had glazed over and it was obvious that he was dead.

  Two gardaí came up to him. He raised both hands and said, ‘You can handcuff me if you want to. I did it. I stabbed him. A judge will decide if he deserved it. God has already made up His mind.’

  *

  Before Katie went down to interview Fergus O’Farrell, Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán knocked at the door of her office.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Katie asked her.

  ‘We’re making progress,’ said Kyna. ‘Fergus wouldn’t tell us himself, but we’ve found out how he picked those boys up. He lives at Árd Na Gréine, only three doors away from the Buckleys, so he’d seen which taxi company they usually used. It was Leeside Cabs and one of their drivers is a good friend of his, so when they rang and ordered a taxi this driver rang him and he went to collect them instead. The driver had no idea that Fergus intended to do them any harm. All he thought he was going to do was give them down the banks for causing such a disturbance around Barnavara Crescent, that’s all.’

  ‘He certainly did give them down the banks,’ said Katie. ‘Like, literally.’

  Kyna hesitated for a moment, and then she said, much more quietly, ‘We’ve finished searching his house, too.’

  ‘I should have known it was him,’ said Katie. ‘I think I guessed it had to be him. But he seemed like such a good man.’

  ‘I think he is a good man,’ said Kyna. ‘Sometimes good men get pushed into doing bad things, don’t they, because it seems like that’s the only way they’re going to get justice?’

  ‘That wasn’t justice. That was revenge. And I should have seen it coming and prevented it.’

  Kyna came up and handed her a folded sheet of paper. ‘Read this,’ she said. ‘It was pinned to the noticeboard in Fergus’s kitchen, so he clearly intended us to find it. Maybe it’ll stop you from being so hard on yourself.’

  The note was written by hand, in very small rounded writing, the kind of script that was taught at school.

  It said:

  Darling Pa, please don’t be angry with me. I know what I am going to do will break your heart but I am finding it impossible to go on. I keep trying to think of a way out but there isn’t one. I can’t go back to what I was and I can’t go forward because of what has been done to me. I am not Caoimhe any longer. I am just some dirty used doll that can only be thrown away. How can I give myself to a loving husband now? How can I walk down the aisle wearing a snow-white dress when I am no longer a virgin? Worse than losing my virginity once, I have lost it again and again, so many times that I can’t even count myself, and in ways that I can’t even tell you about because I am so ashamed.

  It ha
ppened that night when I was supposed to go to Rearden’s with Sean and Megan and Bryan. At the last minute they couldn’t make it because Sean and Megan’s grandma got sick and they had to go to Watergrasshill to see her. I didn’t tell you because I had never been to Rearden’s before and I wanted to go so much, even if it was on my own.

  I started off having a good time because I met these five boys I know. You know two of them, yourself, Tadgh Buckley and Aidan O’Reilly. The other ones were Darragh O’Connor and Conor and Stevey Martin. We had some drinks and a dance and three other boys joined us. They were students from UCC, they said, and I thought they were fun too. One of them was called Ruarí and he seemed to be the boss of them. I didn’t like him so much because he had really white eyelashes like a pig and he was fierce full of himself, but I am sorry to tell you Pa that I had drunk a few Jägerbombs and I wasn’t thinking straight at all.

  When Rearden’s was about to close Ruarí said that there was a party at some student’s digs at Abbeyville. I should have gone home then Pa but they said we would all have a fantastic time.

  They took me to Abbeyville but there was no party when we got there, only me and all of these boys. They said the party was going to start in a minute and they gave me more to drink and then they took me into the bedroom. I am not going to tell you what happened next because you will cry like I am crying now when I am writing you this.

  I beg beg beg you not to tell anybody why I have decided that this is my only way out. I have suffered enough shame already without the whole world knowing why.

  I love you so much dearest Pa and I know that when I am gone you will have nobody. But Ma and me we will both be looking down on you from Heaven and making sure that you are okay I promise you. XXXXX forever your Caoimhe.

  Katie put down the note and looked up at Kyna.

  ‘She hanged herself,’ said Kyna. ‘Fergus said nothing about this letter at the inquest. He told the coroner that she had never really got over her mother dying of cancer.’

  *

  Fergus was waiting patiently in the interview room when Katie walked in. He looked as calm and unperturbed as a man waiting for a doctor’s appointment, instead of an interview on a charge of murder. He may have been bad-tempered before, but now he seemed to be completely at peace with himself.