Begging to Die

by Graham Masterton

  ‘You know very well the conditions of your sentence being suspended,’ she told him. ‘What did the judge say? You’re not to involve yourself in any more illegal activity against people you suspect to be mistreating dogs – no matter how justified you believe yourself to be. Leave it to the ISPCA, that’s what he told you.’

  ‘Well, I know, but—’

  ‘Con – think about it. This fellow who beat you up could well go to prison, but you know what he’s going to say in his defence. He found you trespassing on private property, and he’ll probably say that you were causing damage, or that he thought you were after stealing some of the dogs. That means that you’ll go to prison, too, no question about it, for violating the rules of your probation.’

  She squeezed his hand tight. She was very close to tears. ‘If you get yourself locked up, Con, how are we going to get married in the summer? I’m a Garda superintendent. I can’t have a wedding ceremony in the prison chapel up at Rathmore Road.’

  ‘Then for Christ’s sake don’t arrest him,’ said Conor. ‘I’ve admitted that it was my own stupid fault.’

  ‘But look what he’s done to you. When I first saw you just now, I hardly knew who you were.’

  At that moment Katie heard the curtain being drawn back, and a polite cough. She turned around to see a consultant coming in, sympathetically smiling. He was dark-skinned, neatly bearded, with rimless spectacles. He was carrying a folder with several X-ray photographs in it.

  ‘Bhavik Sandhu,’ he announced. ‘I am a consultant in urology. I will be taking care of Conor this afternoon.’

  ‘Detective Superintendent Kathleen Maguire,’ said Katie. The consultant’s eyebrows lifted and he gave her a quick, evasive smile, as if he didn’t quite know how to react to that.

  ‘I see. Are you investigating how Conor came to be so badly injured?’

  ‘Yes and no. He’s my fiancé, as it happens.’

  ‘I see. Your fiancé? Well, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but your fiancé is going to require urgent surgery.’

  He turned to Conor and said, ‘The triage nurse tells me that you were kicked between the legs, Conor, is that correct?’

  ‘That’s right. Three times at least, so far as I remember. I mean, Jesus. I didn’t know pain like that even existed. It went right off the register.’

  ‘It is hardly surprising that it hurt so much. Your X-ray has shown that your testicles are badly bruised and that you’re suffering from testicular torsion. Your spermatic cords have been twisted and this means that the blood supply to both of your testicles has been cut off.’

  ‘I know what it means, doctor,’ Conor told him. ‘How serious is it?’

  ‘Well, not to beat around the bushes, extremely serious, which is why we will have to take you into theatre straight away. Because of the length of time that has elapsed since you were injured, your testicles have already started to atrophy, and without a blood supply for so many hours there is a high risk that they could infarct. This means that they could die.’

  ‘I know what that means too, doctor. In that case, the sooner you operate, the better, don’t you think?’

  ‘I will have you prepped for surgery within the next few minutes, Conor. Once we have sorted out your testicles, one of our maxillofacial surgeons can address your other injuries. You have a fracture of your zygoma, your cheekbone, and also a multiple fracture of the floor of your orbit, your eye socket. It’s possible that we may need to insert a graft to rebuild your orbit – titanium, perhaps, or dissolvable plastic.’

  ‘What about my nose? I can feel it crunching inside and I can hardly breathe.’

  ‘We’ll have to wait for the swelling to go down first. Then you’ll need rhinoplasty to straighten it.’

  ‘Oh, Con,’ said Katie, and took hold of his hand again.

  ‘Serves me right, doesn’t it, charging around like Brian Boru? I should have remembered that Brian Boru got pure creamed out of it, the same as me.’

  They were still talking when a porter and two nurses appeared, one almost anorexically thin and the other chubby.

  ‘Conor Ó Máille?’ said the chubby nurse, cheerfully. ‘We’re ready to take you off to the theatre now, Conor.’

  Conor looked up at Katie. ‘I’m sorry, darling. For you, more than myself. I’ve made a right hames of everything, haven’t I?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, don’t fret yourself about it,’ said Katie, taking a tissue out of her coat pocket to wipe her eyes. ‘You were haunted not to be killed. I’ll be saying a prayer for you, Con, and I’ll be back later when you’re out of surgery.’

  Conor caught the sleeve of her coat. ‘Listen, just one more thing. Walter. I left him with Domnall at the Gilabbey. He’s going to need picking up and looking after.’

  ‘Okay, Con. No problem. I’ll take care of him.’

  She watched him being wheeled away. She felt as if the metaphorical storm that she had predicted had suddenly rolled in, and that the sky had blackened overhead.

  *

  She was sitting in the relatives’ waiting room half an hour later when her iPhone played ‘Mo Ghille Mear’. When she took it out, she saw that she had been sent a text by the deputy state pathologist, Dr Mary Kelley.

  Gearoid Ó Beargha did NOT die of natural causes. I’ll email you full post-mortem report shortly + photos CGI scans.

  Katie immediately stood up and left the waiting room and walked quickly to the hospital mortuary. When she pushed open the doors and went inside, she found Dr Kelley standing in front of her computer, busily typing with two fingers. Katie thought she had lost some weight since she had last seen her, and she looked less like a Russian matryoshka doll than she had before, although she still had a double chin.

  Along the left-hand wall of the mortuary, four trolleys were lined up. All of them clearly had cadavers on them but they were discreetly covered in green surgical sheets. In the centre of the room, Gearoid was lying naked on a stainless-steel autopsy table, face down. His skin was as white as candle wax, although he had two wings of dense dark hair across his shoulders. His arms and legs were hairy, too, and his buttocks were blotched by a mass of blue and yellow bruises. The downdraught ventilation system around the autopsy table was switched on, to minimize odours and to protect the pathologist from breathing in pathogens while she was working on him, but Katie could still detect the distinctive rotten-chicken smell of death.

  ‘Kathleen! That was amazingly fast,’ said Dr Kelley. She switched her computer to sleep and came over to Katie, holding out a green surgical mask.

  ‘I was here in the hospital already, as it happens,’ said Katie. ‘A friend of mine has had a bit of an accident.’

  ‘Not too drastic, I hope?’

  ‘They’re operating on him now. He should be fine by the time they’ve finished with him, God willing.’

  ‘I’ll tell you, Kathleen, if I didn’t work here, you wouldn’t get me near a hospital for love nor money. I wish I’d taken my old dad’s advice and trained to be a chemist. And my ma – she thought I ought to be a teacher in high babies. She said I had the sympathy for it. But, oh no. I was determined to cut people up, more fool me.’

  Katie tied on her mask and tugged it up over her nose, and then she crossed over to join Dr Kelley beside Gearoid’s naked body.

  ‘He has all the usual symptoms that you’d expect from a street sleeper,’ said Dr Kelley. ‘He has liver cirrhosis, hepatitis B, eczema and psoriasis. He also has skin infestations including scabies, foot trauma and dental caries, and a chronic lung infection. In any event I wouldn’t have given him a life expectancy of more than three or four years, the condition he’s in.’

  ‘But he didn’t die of natural causes?’

  The tangled curls on the back of Gearoid’s head had already been parted, but Dr Kelley leaned over and brushed a few stray hairs out of the way, so that Katie could clearly see a small red hole in his skull.

  She peered at it closely. ‘That’s not a bullet wound
,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t look like a stab wound, either.’

  ‘You’re right, it’s not. It’s a drill hole. He’s been drilled to death, with what I would guess is an ordinary cordless drill. You know – the sort you can buy in Hickeys or Clark’s or any do-it-yourself shop.’

  ‘Serious? You mean like one of those Black and Deckers?’ Katie lifted her hand up as if she were holding one.

  ‘Spot on. And whoever killed him, they knew exactly what they were doing, because there are no hesitation marks. I would guess that they felt for his occipital protuberance – you see this bump here at the back of his skull. Then they located the soft spot underneath it and drilled at an angle upwards, into his brainstem. I could tell from the CGI scan that they must have swished the drill around a bit just to make sure. His medulla oblongata has been drilled into mush, and that would have killed him instantly. Stopped his heart, stopped his breathing, stopped all sensory communication between his brain and his body.’

  Katie was silent for a moment. ‘What about forensic evidence?’

  ‘If you look here, you can see these two wide bruises on his back and this was probably where his assailant knelt on him while he was drilling into his head. There’s some bruising on his left wrist, too, although that might not be related. Bill Phinner has all his clothes and his shoes, of course, and the poor fellow’s few possessions. There was a little bundle of love letters from some woman called Ailbe.’

  ‘Has anybody from the Technical Bureau examined his body yet?’

  ‘One of Bill’s technicians is coming across here later to take some more pictures and some hair and skin samples, but to be honest with you I can’t see how they’re going to help us. You’d need to find the drill bit and see if it had any remnants of his brainstem on it. Of course, whoever killed him would only have to put the drill bit in a dishwasher and that would be that. There’s nothing like a Finish Powerball for getting rid of evidence. They ought to say that in their ads.’

  ‘All right, Mary,’ said Katie. ‘Thanks a million for that. I’d best be getting back to the waiting room. I don’t know how long my friend’s operation is going to take.’

  ‘I’ll be emailing the post mortem to the station for you in about twenty minutes, and I’ll send you a hard copy too. I hope your friend makes a full recovery, anyway.’

  ‘Thanks. Me too.’

  As she walked back along the hospital corridor, Katie thought – what if Conor doesn’t make a full recovery? What if the surgeons can’t save his testicles, and he turns out to be sterile? She admitted to herself then that ever since she had accepted his proposal of marriage, she had been turning over and over in the back of her mind the possibility of having a baby with Conor, although she hadn’t allowed herself to shape the thought into words.

  Any child she had with Conor could never replace her little Seamus, and she wouldn’t want that, anyway. But after she had come into his nursery that morning and found Seamus dead in his cot, she had always felt incomplete somehow because she had no children. Five out of her six sisters had families, and after all she was still young enough to be a mother. Hadn’t that Gwen Stefani become pregnant with her youngest child at the age of forty- three and Janet Jackson had been fifty when she had given birth. So why shouldn’t she? An Garda Síochána granted maternity leave, after all.

  She went outside the front entrance of the hospital and phoned Detective Inspector Mulliken. It was dark now, and it was starting to rain, so she stayed close to the wall under the shelter of the portico. When Detective Inspector Mulliken answered, she gave him all the details of Gearoid Ó Beargha’s post mortem.

  ‘Oh, that’s grand, that is,’ he said, with a sigh. ‘Now we’ll be having to stop and search suspects for cordless drills as well as firearms. What’s it going to be next? Food mixers?’

  ‘Wait, there’s more,’ she said, and she told him about the young Romanian coffin-maker who had taken over Gearoid’s begging site outside the Savoy Centre.

  ‘You think he might have had something to do with this Gearoid being murdered?’

  ‘We have no way of knowing, Tony, not yet – although yes, it’s a fair possibility. But listen, I want us to check the passports or the ID cards of every Romanian national we find on the streets. We’ll need to do it fierce discreet-like. Let’s check on all the other rough sleepers as well, so it doesn’t look like we’re picking on Romanians in particular. I’m convinced there’s an organized begging ring in the city at the moment, and I don’t want them to get wide and melt away before we can haul them all in.’

  ‘Okay, ma’am, I have you,’ said Detective Inspector Mulliken. ‘I’ll go down right now and talk to Superintendent Pearse. I’ll ask him if his foot patrols can make a start this evening. They could check up on a few of the homeless tonight, do you know, and then a few more tomorrow. That way, it’ll seem like it’s random.’

  ‘Maybe they can arrange for a member of the Simon Community to go around them – or somebody from the city council’s homeless emergency service. If they do that, it’ll look much more like they’re simply concerned about the rough sleepers’ welfare. It should help to identify any professional beggars, too. If they’re professional beggars they won’t want to move and risk losing their site, even if it means they get a bowl of soup and a warm bed for the night.’

  ‘That’s good thinking, ma’am. I’ll make sure it’s done.’

  Katie went back into the hospital and sat down in the waiting room. On the table lay a copy of an old VIP magazine with a picture of the Instagram star Tara O’Farrell on the cover, showing off her seven-month baby bump. Oh thank you, Lord, she thought. Why don’t you rub it in?

  An elderly woman on the opposite side of the waiting room gave her a smile, and said, ‘All right?’ But the reality was that Katie felt as if her mooring rope had come loose, and she was adrift.

  12

  ‘Oh Jesus, Matty, I’m dying,’ whispered Máire, huddling up closer to him. ‘I can’t feel my feet any more.’

  Matty lifted his head so that he could peer down to the bottom of their sleeping bag. ‘It’s that fecking bin liner, that’s what it is. It’s only gone and blown away, like. No wonder your feet are so cold.’

  The two of them were bundled up in the doorway of an empty shop on Cook Street, opposite the Vanilla Café. The temperature had dropped below freezing now, and the rain was dredging along the pavement like a funeral procession seen through a fog.

  They were both in their middle thirties, although Matty was prematurely drawn and grey, and Máire’s face was yellowish and bloated from cirrhosis. What now seemed like years and years ago, Máire had been a promising young dress designer and Matty had been studying at the School of Law at Cork University. They had bumped into each other at Gorby’s nightclub one Freakscene Wednesday, and they had been attracted to each other almost at once. After the nightclub had closed, some old school friends of Matty’s had invited them round to their flat in Togher for drinks, and in the early hours of that morning they had both first tried crack cocaine.

  Their sleeping bag was ripped at the bottom, which was why Matty had covered it with a black bin liner. Now the bin liner had been whipped away by the wind, and the sleeping bag was drenched, and so were the three pairs of thick woolly socks that Máire was wearing.

  She snuggled in closer. ‘I can’t feel my feet but the rest of me’s aching something terrible,’ she said, and then she started to cough. She coughed and coughed, bringing up sticky lumps of phlegm.

  At last she stopped coughing and wiped her mouth three or four times with her tartan scarf.

  ‘Do you think Scully’s still around?’ she asked Matty.

  ‘Even if he is, he won’t give us any. We’ve missed two tick Fridays and we’d have to settle up first.’

  ‘What about Bimbo?’

  ‘Not a hope in hell. He’s most likely in bed by now with that molly pal of his.’

  ‘How much grade do we have left?’

  ‘Thi
rty-six euros and eleven cents.’

  ‘Is that all? We shouldn’t have bought those fish and chips. I’m probably going to puke mine up anyway. But that’s enough for a screed of coke, isn’t it? There must be somebody who’ll sell us some. What about Billy Murphy?’

  ‘Billy Murphy? His stuff’s seventy per cent cattle wormer.’

  ‘I know. But it’s still thirty per cent pure.’

  Matty shivered. He felt drained and exhausted, as if the endless rain had diluted his blood and turned it to pale pink water. He had a nagging ache in his lower back and underneath his maroon woollen hood his scalp itched so much that he could have scratched it until it bled. He didn’t know if he could summon up the strength to go trudging around the deserted streets of Cork at this time of night, looking for somebody to sell him a rock of crack cocaine for €36.11. Even if he could find a dealer, a rock half the size of a thumbnail usually cost €50 or more.

  There was a West African nicknamed Zoomer who hung around the entrances to the Voodoo Rooms and Chambers, the gay club on Washington Street, but both of those would be closed by now, and in any case he hadn’t seen Zoomer in weeks. Maybe he had gone back to Nigeria or been lifted by an undercover drug officer or been stabbed by a rival dealer.

  Although Matty was so tired and so reluctant to struggle out of their sleeping bag, Máire had triggered the need in him and he knew he wouldn’t be able to settle down again until he had managed to find something to smoke or snort. In the crumpled plastic Dunnes’ bag in which they kept most of their belongings there was a crack pipe, which he had made out of a Tanora bottle topped with tinfoil and duct tape. He could already imagine himself sucking on it and feeling the high.

  Maybe The Hangout on Princes Street was still open, and maybe Billy Murphy was still there. Máire was right. Even if he only had snow, what did it matter if it was seventy per cent cattle wormer? As long as it wasn’t seventy per cent baby laxative, which had made Matty fill his trousers almost as soon as he had snorted it.