Begging to Die

by Graham Masterton

  Sergeant O’Farrell came over to Katie and opened the book, but before he showed her what was written in it he nodded towards Ana-Maria and said, ‘Cassady told me she doesn’t understand English. Is that right?’

  ‘That’s right. She speaks only Romanian.’

  ‘Well, then, here’s the entry for that gold ring. It was fetched in at seven forty-nine yesterday evening by Patrick Devlin of St Anne’s Terrace. He said his ma was making meatballs in the afternoon for her family’s supper and she found the ring in the mince.’

  ‘In the mince? Serious? Where did she buy it from, this mince?’

  ‘Buckley’s on Shandon Street. She always buys her meat there, so he said. She thought that one of the butcher’s assistants might have dropped it into the mincer accidental-like. She couldn’t take it back to the shop to complain because they would have been closed by then, and apparently they’re closed all day Wednesday. He was coming into town clubbing anyway so she told him to fetch the ring in here. She’s fierce superstitious and she thought it was bad luck or something with that creepy face on it and she didn’t want to have it in the house.’

  Sergeant O’Farrell thought for a moment, and then he shrugged. ‘Maybe she hoped that if the ring was handed in to us, we’d be giving the butcher down the banks when he came to claim it. You know, for contaminating his meat, like.’

  ‘But now we know that the ring didn’t belong to one of the butchers,’ said Katie. ‘So how did it get mixed up in the mince? I hope to God you’re not thinking what I’m thinking.’

  Sergeant O’Farrell glanced across at Ana-Maria again. ‘You’re sure she doesn’t understand us?’

  ‘We need to test that mince,’ said Katie. ‘I’ll send Markey and Scanlan up to St Anne’s Terrace to see if they can get a sample, even if Mrs Devlin’s already binned it. I’m presuming that she didn’t make meatballs out of it.’

  ‘No, she didn’t. But her son said she flushed it all down the toilet.’

  ‘Oh, perfect. In that case, they can find out where this Buckley lives and have him open his shop up for us. Bill Phinner can send a couple of technical experts up there to take traces from their mincer, and see what he might have stored in their fridge, heaven forbid.’

  Sergeant O’Farrell said, ‘You don’t really believe – well, you don’t really think—’

  ‘Let’s see what the test results tell us. But do you know something, Ryan – I have a fierce uneasy feeling about this. You know what it’s like when the sky turns a funny colour and you feel that a storm’s brewing up? That kind of a feeling.’

  7

  ‘Here he is, the poor little cub,’ said Conor.

  He lifted the grey plastic dog-carrier crate on to the table in Dr O’Sullivan’s treatment room and opened it up. Dr O’Sullivan reached inside and lifted Walter out, holding him up as if he were a newborn baby and staring intently into his squashed black face.

  ‘Well, I can tell you for starters, Con, he’s having desperate trouble with his respiration. And you’re right about his eyes. Classic example of proptosis. I hate to say it, but this unfortunate pup should never have been born at all.’

  ‘If you could give him a thorough once-over for me, Domnall, and let me know how much you’d be charging to set him to rights. Or as near to rights as you can manage. Then at least his owner will have a choice. She can leave him to suffer, or fix him – whatever that’s going to cost – or she can have you put him to sleep.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can so. Leave him with me.’

  ‘I’ll come back in a couple of hours if that’s okay. I’m going up to Ballynahina to see his breeders.’

  ‘Not the dreaded McQuaide sisters?’

  ‘The very ones.’

  ‘Well, watch yourself with Blánaid. She’s the pretty one but she’s sharp all right. You’d think she’d been sleeping in the kitchen drawer with all the knives. Caoilfhoinn’s not so bad but a bit on the slow side and she does whatever her sister tells her.’

  ‘Anything else I should know about them?’

  ‘They put up a pure respectable front but I have it on good authority that they’re churning out illegal puppies by the hundreds. Oh – and be wide when it comes to their so-called trainer. I don’t know what his name is but he’s a second cousin to the O’Flynns. Bit of a hard chaw.’

  ‘Okay. Thanks for the heads-up. I’ll see you later.’

  Walter turned his head around and looked at Conor as he walked away. In his seven years as a pet detective, Conor had handled scores of mistreated and miserable dogs, but there was something in the sad, hopeless way that Walter looked at him that touched him. Perhaps it was what Domnall had said about him, that he should never have been born at all.

  *

  Conor drove north from the city through the village of Dublin Hill and up the long straight ribbon of a country road that was Glenville Street. The morning was almost bright enough for sunglasses. He heard on his car radio that a rough sleeper had been discovered dead in a doorway on St Patrick’s Street. He also heard that a young woman’s body had been recovered from the River Lee, a suspected victim of the ‘Lee Pusher’, who was supposed to be haunting the river at night, pushing drunk or unsuspecting victims into the water.

  He saw a sign at the roadside with the name Foggy Fields on it, so he turned off and drove down a narrow boreen with nothing on either side but low hedges and fields that were speckled with distant cows. After driving two kilometres he came to a metal gateway, with a larger sign for Foggy Fields, and a painting of a shaggy labradoodle puppy with a pink ribbon tied round one of its ears. A steep asphalt forecourt led up to a large stone farmhouse with a slate roof, and behind the farmhouse Conor could see a row of five yellow-painted sheds.

  As he climbed out of his car, a woman appeared around the side of the farmhouse carrying a plastic bucket in one hand and a broom in the other. She was short and plump, with a round face under a purple headscarf, and she was wearing a shiny pink padded jacket that made her look even plumper.

  ‘How’re you going on there?’ she called out. ‘Is there something I can help you with?’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Conor. ‘I’m looking for a puppy for my daughter as a birthday present, and I’ve heard good things about Foggy Fields.’

  ‘Is it any special breed you’re after?’

  ‘She has her heart set on a pug.’

  ‘I’m sure we can help you there. Let me just put away this bucket and brush, and you can come inside and see what we have on offer.’

  She disappeared for a few moments around the other side of the farmhouse, and he heard a loud clattering. When she came back, she led him in through the front porch and into an office, where another woman was sitting on the edge of a cluttered desk, talking on the phone. This woman was no taller, but she was slim, with wavy blonde hair and a tip-tilted nose and bow-shaped scarlet lips. She was dressed in a loose cream boat neck sweater and tight black leather trousers, with high-heeled ankle boots. She smelled strongly of Estée Lauder Modern Muse.

  ‘It depends how many you’re after,’ she was saying. ‘We can send you fifteen at least in the next two weeks but you’ll have to wait till the end of the month if you want more than that. Sure I’d buy more bitches if you paid me more, Stevie, but you can’t have it both ways, like, do you know what I mean? You go up to three hundred for the cockapoos and then we can start to talk serious numbers. I don’t care what Sammy says. Tell Sammy that if he wants them any cheaper he’ll have to come up here and start siring them himself.’

  She put down the phone and turned to Conor with a smile. Her front teeth were smudged with lipstick.

  ‘This gentleman’s come looking for a pug pup,’ the plump woman told her.

  ‘Now!’ said the blonde. ‘If it’s a healthy happy puppy you’re looking for, you’ve come to the right place, I can assure you of that. I’m Blánaid McQuaide and this is my sister, Caoilfhoinn, if she hasn’t already introduced herself, which I doubt if she has.’
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br />   ‘Conor MacSuibhne,’ said Conor. ‘A pal of mine has one of your pugs and spoke very highly of you. My daughter fell in love with the little fellow when she saw it and she’s eleven years old next week so I thought I’d come up here and see if I can buy one for her, like.’

  ‘You’re in luck, then,’ said Blánaid. ‘We had a new litter of pugs just three weeks ago, and they’re all such darlings you’ll find it almost impossible to choose which one you want. Two of them have been snapped up already but there’s still four left.’

  ‘They’re only three weeks old?’ asked Conor. ‘Isn’t that too young to be taking them away from their mother?’

  ‘Oh, they soon adapt,’ said Blánaid. ‘I’m sure your daughter will be giving her puppy more love and attention than its mother could ever have given it.’

  ‘Fair play. You’re the expert. How much are you asking?’

  ‘For a pug, six hundred and fifty.’

  ‘Phew. I never realized. I thought maybe a couple of hundred.’

  ‘Six hundred and fifty – that’s at least a hundred euros less than any other breeder will be asking from you. Why don’t you take a look at them? Just imagine your daughter’s face when she wakes up in the morning on her birthday and there’s a dear little pug sitting on the end of her bed.’

  ‘I don’t know, like, at that price.’

  ‘Look, I’ll go down to five-seventy-five, but I can’t afford to go lower. It’s a fierce expensive business, breeding high-quality puppies and giving them the first-class care that we give them here at Foggy Fields. We make scarcely any profit at all and too often we make a loss. We only do it for the love of it, don’t we, Caoilfhoinn?’

  Caoilfhoinn had been biting her lip and staring out of the window. ‘What?’ she said. Then, ‘Oh, yes. Totally for the love of it, like.’

  ‘Fetch that new pug litter for us and bring them into the parlour, would you?’ Blánaid told her.

  She slipped off the edge of the desk and while Caoilfhoinn went to find the litter, she led Conor into a large room on the opposite side of the corridor. It was furnished with a reproduction antique sofa and two matching armchairs, and a peat fire was sullenly smouldering in the grate. The lime green walls were hung with paintings of Labradors and boxers and red setters, and with framed certificates from various Irish dog shows. In one corner stood an oak desk with a china statuette of a rough collie like Lassie and, next to it, a credit card terminal.

  ‘It’s insane how competitive it is these days, puppy-breeding,’ said Blánaid. ‘You may have seen some nasty comments about Foggy Fields on Facebook, but they’re all posted by rival breeders, do you know? We always take the best care of our breeding bitches… I mean, it would be madness not to, wouldn’t it? And we treat all of our puppies like the precious darlings they are.’

  ‘That’s reassuring,’ said Conor. ‘How many breeding bitches do you have here?’

  ‘Oh, a whole variety. You name them. Pugs, labradoodles, cockapoos, Lhasa apsos… all the most popular breeds. There’s bigger puppy farms in Cavan, I’ll admit that, but we’re easily the leading breeders in Cork.’

  Conor nodded. Blánaid hadn’t really answered his question, but he was posing as a simple, indulgent father who knew nothing at all about dogs. He didn’t want her to start suspecting that he was trying to find out what shortcuts she was taking to save money. She had already admitted that she had no compunction about taking a puppy that was only three weeks old away from its mother. To separate them before they were at least six weeks old was not only cruel but bad practice. Any younger and the puppy could suffer severe health and behavioural problems, because it had not yet been taught by its mother how to socialize and how to take care of itself.

  As Domnall had once said to him, ‘A three-year-old child can walk and talk and feed itself and go to the toilet, but it hasn’t yet learned what’s right and what’s wrong and how to live with other people. You wouldn’t dream of taking a three-year-old child away from its mother, so why would you do it to a three-week-old pup?’

  Conor went over to the fireplace and held out his hands over the peat. ‘It’s been desperate cold this month, hasn’t it? I can’t remember a January as bitter as this.’

  ‘Thank God my partner and me are going to the Maldives the week after next,’ said Bláinaid. ‘We’ll be needing umbrellas only to keep off the sun. Three weeks we’re going for. It’ll be divine.’

  Caoilfhoinn came in, lugging a big soft padded bag. She set it down on the sofa and opened it wide so that Conor could see the four pug puppies sniffing and wriggling inside it.

  ‘They’re pure gorgeous, aren’t they?’ said Bláinaid, reaching into the bag and lifting one of them out. ‘This one’s the feistiest. He’ll give your wee girl hours of fun, I can promise you. Here – hold him if you want to. Say “Hello there, sham – how would you like to come and live with me and my daughter?”’

  Conor took the little pug awkwardly, as if he had never held a puppy in his life. He stared into its glassy, bulbous eyes, and the pug stared back at him. He could see and hear at once that it was having trouble breathing. It had undersized nostrils, so that it was breathing through its mouth rather than its nose, which made it drool. It sounded, too, as if it had an elongated palate, which would restrict its airway.

  Even though it was so young, it already had crusts around its eyes, because it was suffering from the same problem as Walter, proptosis. It would only have to get involved in a rough-and-tumble with Conor’s imaginary daughter and its eyes would be in danger of popping right out of their sockets.

  ‘Well, he’s a cute enough little fellow, isn’t he?’ said Conor. ‘I’m sure Aoife will love him.’

  ‘Do you want to take him now?’ asked Bláinaid. ‘We can also provide you with a pet carrier, a luxury dog bed, and a month’s supply of Red Mills puppy food, all at bargain prices.’

  ‘Well, you’ve won me over,’ said Conor, handing the puppy back to her. ‘But five-seventy-five… I’ll have to make a transfer from my savings account. I could do that tomorrow morning, though, no problem at all, and come back and collect him. And, yes, I’ll be needing a bed, won’t I, and some food, I hadn’t thought about that. Maybe I can take a picture so that Aoife can see what this little fellow looks like.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Blánaid, and set the puppy down on the sofa. Conor noticed that it was shivering. This could indicate that it was cold, or anxious, or that it was suffering from respiratory distress or canine distemper or some other neonatal illness. It let out a little squeak which Conor knew to be ‘seagulling’, and which was a sign of fading puppy syndrome. Whatever was wrong with it, it would probably die within a week or two.

  He used his iPhone to take a series of photographs from several different angles, and also a video so that Domnall would be able to see how badly the puppy was quaking.

  ‘Aoife’s going to be over the moon when she sees these,’ he told Blánaid. ‘I’ll be back with you in the morning as soon as my money’s cleared.’

  ‘We’ll be looking forward to seeing you so. We’ll have everything ready, especially this little dote.’

  *

  Conor drove out through the gate and headed off along the boreen. As soon as he was out of sight of the Foggy Fields farmhouse, however, he pulled his Audi into the side of the road, with two wheels tilted up on the lumpy grass verge, and climbed out. There was a soft breeze blowing, almost like somebody breathing on his face, but the silence out here was overwhelming.

  He walked back as far as the high guelder rose hedge that surrounded the puppy farm. He jumped over the ditch at the side of the boreen and climbed up the tussocky hill beyond it, keeping his head down behind the hedge in case one of the McQuaide sisters happened to be looking his way.

  He reached the back of the farm, where the five yellow sheds stood. He peered over the hedge and listened, but he couldn’t see either Blánaid or Caoilfhoinn, and so he forced his way through a narrow gap in the hedge beside a
fence post. He scratched the back of his hand and pressed it against his lips to suck away the blood.

  As he was crossing towards the nearest shed, his iPhone warbled. It was Katie, wondering if he was still meeting her for lunch. Holy Saint Peter, he thought, if she knew where I am and what I’m doing here, she’d go wild.

  Before he texted her back, he climbed up the grit-coated steps to the shed door and opened it. As soon as he stepped inside, he was met by an extraordinary noise. This wasn’t the cacophony of yipping and yapping that he would have expected from newborn puppies. This was a high-pitched shrieking, more like a crowd of terrified children than dogs, and it was accompanied by the ringing of tiny claws against metallic mesh.

  It was gloomy inside the shed, because the skylights in the roof had been painted over with yellow paint, and the air was almost unbreathable. It was suffocatingly warm and it stank of urine and faeces.

  Conor saw that the left side of the shed was stacked with wire cages, three deep, and that each cage was crammed with puppies of different breeds – pugs and cockapoos and labradoodles and chihuahuas. They were all in turmoil as Conor walked along the length of the shed, jumping up and screaming and throwing themselves against the sides of their cages. The floors of each cage were covered with nothing more than a thick layer of ripped-up newspapers, soaked in urine, and even though each cage had a plastic water bowl, Conor could see that some of them had been tipped over and many were either empty or filled with urine.

  On the right-hand side of the shed there was a row of plywood crates, with lids placed loosely on top. He heard scratching and whining from inside the crates, so he lifted one of the lids and used his iPhone to light up its interior. Lying on a bed of shredded paper was a brown-and-white pointer bitch, staring up at him with mournful eyes, like a tragic Madonna in a medieval painting, except that her eyes were so crusted with yellow gunge that she could barely see. Four newborn puppies were suckling at her, while a fifth was lying in a corner of the crate, half-covered with torn-up paper, its eyes open but clearly weak and sick.