Her assistant, Moirin, came in, with her dyed-black hair tied back with a yellow band, so that she looked more like Disney’s Snow White than ever, if Snow White had aged ten years and put on six kilos.
‘Superintendent Pearse asked if you could drop in to see him as soon as you’re back,’ she said. ‘He’ll be in Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin’s old office.’
‘Thanks, Moirin. You couldn’t be fetching me an espresso before I go to see him? I’m in dire need of caffeine.’
‘I will of course. Oh – and there’s something on your desk there, in that envelope. It was handed in as lost property but Sergeant O’Farrell thought you might want to take a sconce at it. He couldn’t find it in the inventory but he thought it might be one of the rings that was robbed from the Public Museum last month. He said you’d never believe where it turned up.’
Katie picked up the clear plastic envelope that had been left beside her desk lamp with a slip of paper inside it stating GOLD RING and its PEMS reference number. She opened it and shook out a braided gold ring into the palm of her hand. Although it was quite heavy, it was quite small, so it was probably a woman’s ring, or a ring that a man would wear on his little finger. It was embossed with a tiny face, which looked like a woman with her eyes closed. The ring was well-worn: it was finely scratched and there was a deep cleft in one side of the woman’s forehead.
‘It is unusual, isn’t it?’ said Katie, holding it up and examining it closely. ‘I wouldn’t say it’s worth much, though. I doubt if it’s real gold even. I’ll have to ask Diana Breen to take a look at it. She knows her onions when it comes to antique jewellery, if you know what I mean.’
‘It reminds me of a ring my grandma used to wear,’ said Moirin. ‘It had the face of Saint Samthann on it, and she used to kiss it regular.’
‘Oh, yes? And who was Saint Samthann?’
‘She was the abbess at Clonbroney. The story goes that when a monk waded across the river to have his way with one of the virgins in her abbey, a giant eel bit his nether parts and wrapped itself around his waist and wouldn’t let go of him until he had presented himself to Saint Samthann and begged her forgiveness.
‘My grandma told me that when she was younger some scummer tried to rape her but she prayed to Saint Samthann and next door’s dog came bursting in and took a bite out of his backside. I don’t know how true that was but it made for a good story.’
‘Did Sergeant O’Farrell tell you where the ring was found?’
‘No, but he said he’d talk to you later so.’
‘Okay, thanks, Moirin,’ said Katie, and put the ring down on her desk. Her iPhone pinged and she saw that she had a text from Conor, her husband-to-be. He was following up a tip-off about a stolen Weimaraner in Mallow and would be home late. Katie typed back: No worries. I’m making fishcakes. But then she wondered if she had bought enough breadcrumbs.
*
The nameplate had been removed from the door to Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin’s office, leaving only four screw holes, and the door itself was half open. When Katie walked in she found Superintendent Pearse sitting on the edge of the desk with his arms folded. Another officer was standing in front of the window, with his back to her. He was wearing a pale blue shirt with the epaulettes of a chief superintendent – three red-and-gold pips over a red-and-gold bar.
He was tall, about the same height as Conor, with short black hair that was greying at the sides. He was saying something about recruitment, and how he wanted to see the number of sergeants up above forty again.
‘And I don’t only want to see our numbers improved, do you know? I want to see our public relations improved, too. It’s no good at all closing our eyes and sticking our fingers in our ears. We’ve lost the respect of the man and the woman in the street and we’re going to have to work hard to win it back.’
Katie stopped where she was. She was sure that she recognized his voice. Deep, with meaningful pauses, as if the pauses were just as important as the words, and with a slight but distinctive Sligo slur.
‘Ah, Katie, how’s it going on?’ asked Superintendent Pearse, hopping off the desk. ‘I gather you’ve been having some fun and games.’
‘Nothing too serious,’ Katie told him. ‘Just some Eastern European feen cutting up rough.’
The officer facing the window turned around, and, yes, it was him, Brendan O’Kane. He was older, of course, than when she had known him at the Garda College at Templemore, but he still had that aquiline look about him – those sharp features and those mischievous eyes, as if he were always thinking what trouble he could stir up, if only for the hell of it.
He was rarely a troublemaker, though, except when he wanted to have his own way. He had been promoted more quickly than any of Katie’s other contemporaries, and the last she had heard about him he had been the superintendent in charge of the Operational Support Unit, overlooking the Garda’s helicopters, dog teams, boats and divers and mounted patrols.
For three-and-a-half months, during Katie’s second summer at Templemore, she and Brendan had been lovers. She had been strongly attracted by his aura of risk and unreliability, but sure enough he had proved to be unreliable, and one afternoon she had come back early from her martial arts class to catch him in bed with her room-mate, Éama.
He came towards her now with one eyebrow slightly raised as if he were expecting her to make some vitriolic comment about what had happened between them all that time ago.
‘DS Maguire,’ he said, in that rich melted-chocolate voice. ‘I’ve been hearing some remarkable reports about you.’
‘I’ve not been idle, no, sir,’ said Katie. ‘Can I assume that you’ll be taking over here in place of Denis MacCostagáin?’
‘Poor Denis, yes. Well, reckless Denis, more like. I’m starting from today. This assignment came as much of a surprise to me as it obviously is to you. I’ll miss the boats and the dogs and the helicopters. The helicopters most of all, because they could get me around so quick. But what you have here in Cork city is a challenge all right, and I must say that I’m looking forward to rolling up my sleeves and getting my hands dirty.’
‘Oh, you’ll do that for sure. But I think you can safely say that the force itself is pretty much spotless now. Given a little time, I think you’ll be winning that respect from the public that you’re after.’
‘Well, all credit to yourself from what I hear,’ said Brendan O’Kane. ‘I was talking to one of the inspectors from the NBCI’s anti-corruption unit only a couple of days ago about everything you’d done to clean things up in Cork. Arresting Denis MacCostagáin – that was the icing on the cake.’
He gave her a slanted smile, and added, ‘He told me to watch my step around you, DS Maguire.’
Holy Mother of God, thought Katie. He’s giving me that exact same expression that he gave me when he looked over his shoulder and saw me standing in the bedroom doorway while he was naked as a goat on top of Éama. That expression that says – fair play, you’ve caught me misbehaving myself, but what are you going to do about it?
‘I’ll be convening a general meeting early tomorrow morning so that I can introduce myself to everybody here at Anglesea Street,’ Brendan O’Kane told her. ‘Maybe you’re free this evening, though, DS Maguire. We could discuss long-term strategy over dinner.’
‘Not this evening, sir. Sorry. I have to go home and make fishcakes for my fiancé.’
Brendan O’Kane gave her a resigned shrug. He knew exactly what she was telling him: that he would have to earn her trust all over again.
Superintendent Pearse caught the tension between them, but smacked his hands together and said, ‘Fishcakes! It’s donkey’s since I’ve had fishcakes! You have my mouth watering now so you do! I’ll have to have a word with herself so!’
3
‘Third fecking time this month,’ said Darragh, as he weaved their ambulance through the traffic jam that had built up alongside the Blackpool shopping centre. ‘I reckon there’s a Satan
ic curse on this junction.’
‘And always on a Tuesday,’ Brianna remarked. ‘My grandmother always said that Tuesdays were bad luck because Michael Collins was shot on a Tuesday.’
On the third day of January an elderly couple had been killed as they crossed over Commons Road, the main road north to Mallow, and only nine days ago a fourteen-year-old boy had been knocked off his bicycle and fractured his skull. This morning a yellow Ford Fiesta had come speeding out of Popham’s Road through a red light and collided with an Expressway bus heading south.
The red-and-silver bus remained at an angle in the middle of the junction, its wing mirrors sticking out like the antennae of a giant wounded wasp. The Ford Fiesta had catapulted over the steel barrier on the corner of Commons Road and was now resting on its roof in the shopping centre car park. Darragh and Brianna had been told that the driver and his passenger were still trapped inside.
‘Holy shite,’ said Darragh, steering the ambulance through the crowd who were milling around in the road, an assortment of shoppers and Expressway passengers who were waiting for another bus to come and collect them. It looked as if the passengers would have a long wait because Commons Road was blocked for at least a kilometre in both directions.
‘Watch out for that eejit with the head,’ said Brianna. ‘You don’t want to be causing any more casualties than we have already.’
Two gardaí in high-viz jackets beckoned them towards the entrance to the car park. As they turned into it, they heard sirens and Brianna saw the flashing blue lights of two fire engines making their way down towards them from Ballyvolane. She felt a sense of relief, because there was nothing worse than having to tend to road accident victims who were so smashed into their vehicles that it was impossible to give them first aid.
They parked, and Brianna lifted up her resuscitation bag, climbed out, and crossed over to the wreck. The Fiesta’s roof had been crushed so low that the driver and his passenger were not only hanging upside down from their seat belts but were hunched up, with their heads bent forward. Even though their airbags had inflated, Brianna suspected that they could both have sustained severe neck injuries.
Three more gardaí were gathered around the Fiesta. They had managed to wrench open the passenger door a few centimetres, although not far enough to lift out the young woman who was trapped inside. Her eyes were closed, and there was dark blood sliding out of the sides of her mouth. Brianna thought that she couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old. Her short hair was dyed shocking pink and she was wearing a denim mini-skirt and a denim jacket.
Brianna knelt down beside the car, rolled up her sleeve and managed to squeeze her right arm through the gap in the door to feel the young woman’s pulse. It was twenty-eight beats per minute, which was dangerously slow, and indicated that she could have suffered internal injuries and be in cardiogenic shock. Her eyelids fluttered and she bubbled blood between her lips and whispered something, but then she closed her eyes again and her pulse rate dropped even further.
Darragh, meanwhile, was crouching down on the opposite side of the car. The driver’s door was wedged tight but a garda had smashed the window with his baton and Darragh was checking the driver’s heart rate and trying to assess what injuries he might have suffered. The steering wheel had been rammed into his chest and he was letting out little mouse-like squeaks when he breathed.
Brianna guessed that he was only three or four years older than the girl in the passenger seat. His hair was shaved up at the sides and a snake was tattooed around his neck. His left arm must have been torn in half by the impact of the crash, because the two long bones from his forearm had burst through the elbow of his green JD Sports tracksuit and were protruding from it.
The two fire engines drew up alongside the ambulance with their lights flashing. Six firefighters jumped out and hurried over to the crushed Fiesta. A few seconds later a red Ford Ranger Rapid Response Vehicle pulled up behind them and out climbed Assistant Chief Fire Officer Stephen O’Grady. He was Cork Fire Brigade’s specialist in major disasters – big-bellied, jowly, with fiery red cheeks and a bristly little moustache.
The leading firefighter leaned over to assess the state of the wreck, and how they might extricate the driver and his passenger who were tangled up inside it. He was very tall, and black-haired, and doleful-looking, and Brianna could almost picture him carrying a scythe in one hand and an hourglass in the other.
‘We’ll be needing the spreaders, Michael!’ he called out. ‘And the cutters – and two rams!’
‘Are these two the only casualties?’ asked Assistant Chief Fire Officer O’Grady, as he joined them. ‘How about the bus passengers?’
‘The bus driver’s a bit shocked, like,’ said one of the gardaí. ‘His passengers all had a fair jolt, too, but there’s nothing worse than a couple of bruised knees, and a lump on the head. Most of them are pure vexed because they’re late for wherever they’re supposed to be heading to. There’s Christian sympathy for you.’
‘Well, it’s a blessing I suppose, that nobody else has been injured,’ said Assistant Chief Fire Officer O’Grady, although Brianna thought that he sounded slightly disappointed.
‘It’s critical we extricate both of these two as quick as we can,’ said Darragh, brusquely. ‘Even if their vertebrae aren’t fractured, they’ll be suffering from acute compression of the neck and that could lead to permanent cord lesion.’
‘The rear oyster is going to be the best way,’ said the leading firefighter. ‘We’ll take the doors off first. Then we’ll cut through the back and lift up the floor with a couple of rams.’
The firefighters brought over two Holmatro spreaders. With chugging hydraulic pumps and loud creaking noises that set Brianna’s teeth on edge, they forced off both the Fiesta’s doors. Then they passed a canvas strap from one side of the car to the other, underneath the patients’ thighs, tightening it up with a ratchet so that their weight would be taken off their necks.
Brianna was watching them, biting her thumbnail. They were both unconscious, and blood was still dripping from the girl’s lips.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘You have to get a groove on. This is the golden twenty minutes.’
The firefighters cracked out the Fiesta’s rear window, and then used cutters like huge black lobster claws to crunch through its two roof pillars. After that they set up two hydraulic rams inside it, just in front of the back seats. They started up the pump and with an agonized metallic groaning, the rams gradually lifted up the floor, so that the back of the car opened like an oyster shell. As soon as it was gaping wide, the firefighters slid two long boards along the roof, one under the driver and one under the girl. Then they reclined both front seats as far as they would go, unfastened the ratchet strap, and sliced through the seat belts.
As gently as they could, Darragh and Brianna and two of the firefighters lowered the driver and the girl so that they were lying face down on the long boards. Now they could slide them out of the car and carry them across to the ambulance.
Inside the ambulance, Brianna fitted a Kendrick Extrication Device on to the girl, fastening the straps around her torso and waist and behind her head. This was a kind of jacket to keep her anatomically immobile and lessen the chance of any further injury. At the same time, Darragh strapped another KED on to the young man. Once they had done that, they gently rolled both patients off the long boards and on to their backs on the ambulance’s trolleys.
‘Right,’ said Darragh, making his way forward to the driver’s seat. ‘Let’s hit the bricks.’
With their blue lights flashing and their siren whooping, they sped out of the car park, turning sharp left at the junction and heading back towards the city.
Bracing herself against the swaying of the ambulance, Brianna fitted oxygen masks and pulse oximeters on to both the girl and the young man. There was a time when she would have put them on an intravenous atropine drip before they set off, but the current thinking was that more victims were saved by
getting them to hospital as fast as possible and not wasting time by treating them at the scene of the accident.
She checked the girl’s pulse again. It was slightly stronger now, up to forty-eight, and blood was no longer running from the sides of her mouth. Depending on the compression damage to her neck, and whatever internal injuries she may have suffered, there was a reasonable chance that she would survive.
She had to hold on tight to the side of the trolley as Darragh crossed over the Christy Ring Bridge and took a sharp right along Lavitt’s Quay, beside the river. Once she had steadied herself, she went across to the young driver. Underneath the oxygen mask his face was the colour of congealing porridge and his breath was coming in tiny snatched gasps. She laid her hand flat on his chest and she could feel the distinctive scrunching of a crushed ribcage.
She staggered slightly as Darragh swerved around some parked cars, and then she checked the young man’s pulse. It was thirty-two, and irregular. The oxygen was helping to keep his heart going, but because of his chest injuries she couldn’t give him manual CPR, and she wasn’t sure if a pacemaker would only make his injuries worse. In her experience, it was ten to one that he wasn’t going to make it.
‘How are they doing?’ Darragh shouted, over the blaring of the siren.
‘The girl’s not so bad, but it looks like the feller’s touch and go.’
‘Sure listen, only five more minutes and we’ll be there,’ Darragh told her. ‘Tell him to hold on, will you? We’ve the worst survival record out of the whole fecking stack.’
‘The state he’s in, like, I don’t think he’ll pay me any mind,’ Brianna shouted back. At the same time, quite calmly and deliberately, she reached over and turned off the young man’s oxygen supply.
‘Will you move out the fecking way, you gowl!’ Darragh screamed at a rental-van driver who had decided to stop and reverse right in front of them. ‘Holy Jesus, they must be deaf and blind and half a bubble off true, some of these eejits!’
Begging to Die Page 2
