Begging to Die

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Sadly—’ she began, ‘sadly, a homeless individual by the name of Gearoid Ó Beargha was found deceased in a doorway on St Patrick’s Street early this morning. He was forty-six years old, and previously from Clonakilty. The cause of his death was not immediately apparent, but his remains have been taken to Cork University Hospital for a post mortem by the deputy state pathologist.’

  She gave the reporters the details of Gearoid’s background as a musician, and asked for anybody who had any information about his health or his personal circumstances to contact her at Anglesea Street.

  When she had finished, Brendan raised one hand for attention.

  ‘I would like to add one thing more, one personal comment. Now that I’ve been appointed chief superintendent here in Cork city, I’m intending to work closely with the council, the social services and the relevant charities to address the increasing problem of rough sleepers. We don’t want to lose any more Gearoid Ó Bearghas. Not one.

  ‘No matter how destitute they are, no matter how disturbed or addicted or down on their luck, all of the men and women sleeping outdoors on these freezing cold nights are our brothers and sisters, and we owe it to them to protect them.

  ‘Detective Superintendent Maguire has agreed to help me in this mission. She is an officer of exceptional ability and drive, not to mention charisma. I know that between us we can soon make a considerable difference to the streets of Cork – giving shelter to the homeless, sustenance to the hungry, and hope to the hopeless.’

  He turned to look at Katie, and Katie was sure that the cameras captured the provocative expression on his face. She saw Dan Keane raise an eyebrow, and Dan Keane never missed a trick. She gave a quick, humourless smile, shuffled her notes and stood up.

  Mother of divine Jesus, this man is after fetching me a heap of trouble on top of the heap of trouble I already have.

  9

  Brianna had only just poured out two cups of tea for herself and Darragh when the call came for them to attend an accident in Wellington Road, on the northside of the city.

  ‘I think they do this deliberate-like,’ she told Darragh, lifting her high-viz jacket off the back of the chair and shrugging it on. ‘They have a sixth sense, so the second I have a cup of the scaldy in my hand, they go and crash their cars or set fire to themselves or fall down a well.’

  ‘You’re nearly right,’ said Darragh, as they bustled out of the door. ‘A young woman’s fallen downstairs. She’s pregnant so they’re worried about the baby too.’

  They climbed into their ambulance and drove out past Smyths Toys and headed for the city. Traffic was sparse this afternoon so Darragh didn’t have to switch on the siren until they reached Merchants Quay and crossed the river by St Patrick’s Bridge.

  ‘I meant to tell you I saw that boyfriend of yours in town yesterday evening,’ said Darragh, as he turned up MacCurtain Street.

  ‘Braden? Oh, yeah? He didn’t mention it.’

  ‘We had only a brief natter, like. But he was saying that you two were buying yourselves a new car. One of them BMW X3s. Jesus, I wish. I’m still rattling around in that old Toyota.’

  ‘Oh, you shouldn’t believe everything that Braden tells you. He’s had his eye on one of them ever since one of his pals from the football club showed up in one. He’s been out of work since St Stephen’s Day and can you see me affording one on my wage?’

  They drove up York Hill and then turned right into Wellington Road, which led up to St Luke’s Cross. Halfway up the road they saw an elderly man standing on the pavement outside a maroon-painted house, waving at them. Darragh pulled into the kerb and he and Brianna climbed out of the ambulance.

  ‘She’s inside,’ the man gabbled. ‘I’m their neighbour, from down below them anyway. I heard this bumping, like, and she’s only fallen all the way down the stairs from the top to the bottom and she’s lying there now because we didn’t like to move her, do you know what I mean, in case we caused her more injury. The thing of it is, she’s expecting, and her husband’s terrified that she could lose it.’

  The front door was open, and so Brianna and Darragh went straight into the hallway. It was dark in there, and smelled of damp, and the wallpaper was peeling off. Directly in front of them was a precipitous staircase, carpeted with sisal, and at the bottom of the staircase, lying on her back with her arms outstretched and her legs wide apart, was a dark-haired young woman. She had obviously been on her way out when she had fallen because she was wearing a brown overcoat and Ugg boots, although one of her boots had fallen off. The sisal carpeting was slippery, even though it was rough, and the treads of the stairs were very narrow, so it wasn’t surprising that she had lost her footing.

  Kneeling on the floor beside her was a pale, curly headed man of about thirty years old, wearing a mustard-coloured sweater and grey tracksuit bottoms. He was gently stroking her forehead and calling her name, ‘Ailbe – Ailbe – Ailbe – can you hear me, Ailbe? Ailbe!’

  When he saw Brianna and Darragh enter the hallway, he stood up and held out his arms like a religious supplicant.

  ‘Thank God you’re here. She fell all the way down from the landing and she’s seven months’ pregnant. She’s breathing all right but she hasn’t opened her eyes and she hasn’t said a word.’

  ‘And her name’s Ailbe, yes? And yours is?’

  ‘Peter.’

  ‘Okay, Peter. If you can stand back now so that I can examine Ailbe and see what we can do for her. Darragh – we’re going to be needing a neck collar here.’

  Ailbe’s face was so white that she could have been a marble angel in some cemetery. She was breathing, although her breaths were quick and irregular, little sips of air, as if the angel were trying hard to conceal the fact that she wasn’t really marble, but alive. Brianna opened her resuscitation bag and took out her flashlight, and then she gently peeled back Ailbe’s right eyelid and shone the light into her pupil. The pupil was dilated and it didn’t constrict in response to the light, which was one indication that Ailbe was concussed. Brianna peeled back the left eyelid, and saw that the pupil was smaller, another symptom of concussion.

  ‘Is she going to be all right?’ asked Peter from the doorway, his hands clutched together.

  Brianna was taking Ailbe’s pulse, which was rapid but weak. ‘She’s knocked herself out, Peter, and they’ll have to do a CT scan when she gets to the hospital to make sure that she hasn’t bruised her brain. I haven’t yet given her a once-over to see if she’s broken any bones.’

  ‘And the baby? What about the wain? He’s a little boy.’

  Once Brianna had taken her pulse and her blood pressure, she unbuttoned Ailbe’s coat and then her thick pink home-knitted cardigan. Underneath her cardigan, Ailbe was wearing a dark brown corduroy maternity dress, and Brianna lifted up the hem and tugged down her tights so that she could check her white knickers. There was no trace of blood or fluid so it looked as if her amniotic sac hadn’t been ruptured.

  She laid her hand on Ailbe’s distended stomach and she could feel the baby stirring inside her. Once they had carried Ailbe into the ambulance, she could use a Doppler stethoscope to measure the baby’s heartbeat.

  ‘You’re all right,’ she told Peter. ‘I don’t believe the baby’s come to any harm.’

  ‘Oh Jesus Christ in Heaven, I hope not.’

  Quickly and carefully, Brianna felt Ailbe’s arms and legs and pelvis. She seemed to have no bones broken, but her neck was at an awkward angle. As she tumbled down the stairs she must have twisted around trying to save herself and the back of her head had hit the hallway floor so hard that her chin was now pressed against her chest. It was possible that she had sustained a similar kind of lesion as the boy and the girl in the overturned Fiesta, or even dislocated her vertebrae.

  Darragh appeared in the doorway with the trolley from the ambulance, with a cervical collar on top of it, which looked like the lower half of a knight’s helmet made of hard white plastic. He knelt down on the other side of the h
allway and gently raised Ailbe’s shoulders so that Brianna could fit the collar around her neck and fasten its Velcro straps.

  ‘She’s going to be all right, isn’t she?’ asked Peter. ‘She hasn’t broken her neck, has she? Nothing like that?’

  ‘Like I say, they’ll be giving her a scan when we get to the hospital,’ said Brianna. ‘She’s stable for the moment but I’ll be keeping an eye on her vital signs until we get there. The baby’s too.’

  ‘Should I come in the ambulance with her?’

  ‘Best not to. Health and safety and all that, like. You have a car, though, do you? You can follow us to Wilton but if we have to go through a red light you won’t be able to go through it after us, I’m afraid. We don’t want two casualties in one day.’

  Brianna and Darragh lifted Ailbe on to the trolley and wheeled her out to the ambulance. Peter ran up the road to where he had parked his battered blue Kia.

  Before he climbed into the driver’s seat, Darragh nodded towards Ailbe. ‘What’s the form?’ he asked Brianna. What he meant was, no matter what you told Peter, how seriously hurt is she really?

  ‘Touch and go, I’d say,’ said Brianna, as she unhooked the oxygen mask and fitted it over Ailbe’s nose and mouth. ‘I felt a soft lump on the back of her neck when I was fitting the collar and I’d guess she has a serious compression fracture. She could easy have damaged her spinal cord, and then who knows? She’ll be lucky to end up a quadriplegic.’

  Darragh looked down at Ailbe sadly and said, ‘Jesus, you wouldn’t wish that on anybody, would you? Poor girl. She’s the bulb off my cousin Sinead.’

  ‘Come on, Darragh, let’s get going. Every second counts.’

  Darragh started up the ambulance and they drove up to St Luke’s Cross with the siren whooping and scribbling, and then turned south down Summerhill. Through the tinted rear windows, Brianna could see Peter following close behind them.

  She took Ailbe’s pulse and blood pressure again. Although she was still unconscious, her pulse was much stronger and more regular, and her blood pressure had risen. Her eyelids fluttered and her lips moved as if she were trying to say something. Maybe she was calling for Peter to help her. Maybe she was simply asking ‘Where am I?’, like most concussion patients when they eventually opened their eyes.

  ‘Should have watched your step, shouldn’t you, girl, being pregnant and all?’ Brianna said, under her breath.

  ‘How’s it going back there?’ Darragh called out.

  ‘She’s stable. I’m just going to check the baby’s heartbeat.’

  They crossed over the Brian Boru Bridge, heading for the South Ring Road, the fastest route to the hospital. Depending on the traffic, Brianna reckoned that she had less than ten minutes before they reached the emergency room. She lifted up Ailbe’s dress to bare her stomach, and then she unzipped the case containing the Doppler stethoscope. It had a headset, like a normal stethoscope, but a hand-held battery-operated wand, which was pressed against the patient’s skin to detect a foetal heartbeat. Brianna smeared Ailbe’s stomach with gel, but she didn’t put on the headset. She laid the stethoscope to one side so that it would look as if she had been using it.

  Ailbe’s lips had started moving again, and her left eye was half open. The last thing that Brianna wanted was for Ailbe to regain consciousness and see her, or to start speaking out loud. That would make it too much like murder, rather than euthanasia, which is how she preferred to think of it. When she lay in bed at night, wide awake while Braden snored beside her, she liked to consider that what she had done during the day were Christian acts of mercy. Her patients had very little hope of recovery, and even if they did recover, most of them would be physically maimed or brain-damaged and their lives would be almost intolerable. How would Ailbe bring up her baby, if she were paralysed from the neck down? She wouldn’t even be able to hold it to her breast, to feed him.

  Once Ailbe was brain-dead, her baby might survive if the doctors could keep her heart beating artificially, but they would have to start doing this the moment after she died. There would be only one outcome of what Brianna was intending to do, and that was two funerals.

  They had reached the South Ring now, and Brianna had to hold on to the nearest grab handle to keep her balance while they tilted their way around the Magic Roundabout. As soon as the ambulance was steady, though, she ripped open the Velcro fasteners on the sides of Ailbe’s cervical collar, lifted her head and took the collar apart.

  Ailbe let out a high-pitched whistle through her nose, and then the faintest of moans, as if she were having a bad dream. Brianna held her head tightly in both hands, her fingers buried deep in her thick dark-brown hair, and wrenched it upwards, until she heard a crackling sound in her neck. Next she pushed Ailbe’s head to the left, as hard as she could, and then to the right. Finally, she twisted it around in each direction, as far as it would go, like Regan’s in The Exorcist, until she heard that same crackle from her fractured vertebrae.

  Brianna bent over Ailbe, and listened. She was no longer breathing, but Brianna checked her pulse again, just to make sure. No pulse at all. Her heart had stopped. Her stomach bulged and rippled, but that was her baby kicking, and if he was no longer receiving oxygenated blood, he too would die, within only a few minutes.

  They had nearly reached the hospital. Brianna fitted the cervical collar back on to Ailbe’s neck and tidied her hair. She checked her pulse one more time to make absolutely certain that she was dead. Her baby was still kicking, although his kicks were feebler, and less frequent, and by the time they turned into the hospital entrance and backed up to the emergency entrance, he seemed to have stopped kicking altogether.

  Darragh opened the back doors of the ambulance and said, ‘How is she?’

  Brianna burst into tears. ‘Oh God, Darragh. She’s gone. I did everything I could but she went out like a light. Let’s get her inside quick. Maybe we can save her baby but I doubt there’s much hope.’

  Two hospital orderlies came out and helped them to lift Ailbe out of the ambulance and wheel her inside. Brianna stood on the ambulance steps with her hand pressed over her mouth and her eyes blurry with tears. She felt genuinely sad for what she had done, but what would Ailbe’s life have been like if she hadn’t finished it for her? And her baby would never know how his life might have turned out, because he would never see daylight. At least they would both be remembered with inscriptions on a gravestone, and that was more than was granted to most of the people who died in this world, whose names and lives were forgotten for ever.

  Peter’s blue Kia drew up next to the ambulance with a slither of tyres and Peter scrambled out, leaving the driver’s door wide open. He ran over and said, ‘She’s okay, isn’t she? She hasn’t lost the baby or anything?’

  Darragh laid a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Come inside, boy. They’ll be giving her a full examination, the doctors, and they can tell you a whole lot more than we can.’

  Peter turned around and saw Brianna wiping the tears from her eyes with a crumpled tissue. He turned back to Darragh and said, ‘Why is she crying? What’s happened?’

  ‘Come on inside,’ said Darragh.

  ‘Why is she crying? Tell me! Why is she crying?’

  10

  They had found an address for Eamon Buckley the butcher on the PULSE computer, but when they knocked at the door on Mount Agnes Road they were told by a plump young woman jiggling a fat baby in her arms that he didn’t live there any longer and she had no idea at all where he had moved to.

  They went to his shop at the top end of Shandon Street and although it was closed and the blinds were drawn down over the windows, the Pakistani newsagent next door knew where he was living now. They didn’t tell him that they were detectives but he must have guessed because he called out, ‘What’s he done now?’

  Detectives Scanlan and Markey had already seen Eamon Buckley’s criminal record. He had been convicted and fined three times in the past five years for assault, and once for threate
ning to cause serious harm. That was when he had chased a customer halfway down Shandon Street brandishing a meat cleaver, although he hadn’t managed to catch him.

  His house was a large detached property on the corner of Farranferris Avenue and Kilnap Place, freshly painted a pale mushroom colour, with a white pillared porch added to the front to make it look even grander than its semi-detached neighbours. It was high up on the northside of the city in Farranree, with a distant view of the green hills to the south. A new red Mondeo was parked at an angle in the driveway.

  ‘Why am I nervous about this?’ asked Detective Scanlan, as she opened the wrought-iron front gate.

  ‘Oh come on, Padragain. He’s only a butcher with a record of violence and we’re only going to be asking him how some woman’s ring got mixed up in his mince.’

  ‘Nothing to worry about at all, then? Even when we ask him to open up his shop so that we can look for evidence that he’s been butchering human beings?’

  ‘You have it. I’ll bet you he’s as docile as your auntie’s pet poodle.’

  ‘My auntie doesn’t have a pet poodle. She has a marmalade cat that will scratch your eyes out as soon as look at you.’

  Detective Markey climbed the front steps and rang the doorbell. Inside the house they could hear chimes playing ‘My Wild Irish Rose’. At first there was no response, but then they heard a man’s voice shouting, ‘There’s somebody at the door, for feck’s sake! Is nobody going to see who it is?’

  A woman’s voice screamed something unintelligible in reply, and then there was the sound of somebody clumping angrily downstairs. Still the door didn’t open, and Detective Scanlan said, ‘Try ringing again.’

  ‘I don’t think I need to,’ said Detective Markey. ‘I think he knows that we’re out here, like. Maybe he’s just zipping his pants up.’