Katie wasn’t quite sure what she should do next. These two men could be perfectly innocent, and had simply stopped for a break, or maybe they were lost and had stopped to get their bearings. But she couldn’t see a satnav screen, or the light from a mobile phone, and if they were consulting a printed map, surely they would have had the interior light switched on.
She took her own phone out of her coat pocket and quickly prodded in the number from the SUV’s index marks. Almost instantly, the response came back from the National Vehicle and Driver File. The SUV was a Toyota RAV4, first registered in October 2016 to William John Sweeney of Áit Síochánta Farm in Ballyshoneen Cross, County Cork.
She checked with the PULSE computer, but there was no record of this vehicle having been stolen. Yet what would a farmer from Ballyshoneen Cross be doing here in Cobh, outside her house, at this time of night?
Her answer came almost at once. The Toyota’s engine was switched off, and the cigarette was flicked out of its window in a shower of sparks. Both its driver and its passenger doors were flung open and the two men swung themselves out. It was too dark for Katie to be able to make out what they looked like, even though there was a streetlight fifty metres further down the road. She could only see that they were both wearing shiny black Puffa jackets and both had shiny shaved heads.
The two men came striding in her direction, but they couldn’t have been aware that she had been watching them from her driveway gate, because as soon as they caught sight of her they came to a shuffling stop, and almost collided with each other, like two comedians.
‘Detective Magga-wire?’ said one of them, in a harsh Eastern European accent.
‘Who are you?’ Katie demanded. ‘Have you been following me here?’
‘You are Detective Magga-wire?’
‘Who wants to know?’
The men came closer. One of them was much taller than the other, but they both looked hard, with broad shoulders and faces as rough as concrete, and the shorter man’s head kept twitching to the left, as if he were about to have a fit at any moment and start hitting out.
‘We have come for girl,’ said the taller one. He sounded as if he were reciting something that he had been taught to say by somebody else. ‘You bring us out girl, okay?’
‘What girl? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘You know what girl. Don’t give us trouble.’
‘Or what?’ Katie demanded. ‘Come here, you two – if you’re not out the gap before I count to three I’ll be calling for backup and having you hauled in for threatening behaviour.’
‘No, we don’t go. We have come for girl.’
‘You listen to me, sham. I have no idea what you’re talking about and if you don’t leave now – like, immediately – I’ll also have you arrested for failing to comply with a direction from a member of An Garda Síochána. In case you don’t know, that’s a Class D fine of a thousand euros or six months in prison.’
‘You listen, vacă, we don’t go without girl,’ said the shorter man, in a thick phlegm-clogged voice. He took a step towards her, his left hand raised to grab her arm, but Katie took two quick steps backwards, her heels crunching on the shingle driveway. She thrust her hand into her open coat and tugged out her revolver, pointing it directly at the shorter man’s head.
‘Down on the ground, the both of you!’ she barked at them.
The two men stared at her in shock, and then at each other. The shorter one tentatively raised both hands, but both of them remained standing.
‘I said, down on the ground!’ Katie repeated. ‘Don’t you eejits understand English? Face down, flat, and stay there until my backup gets here!’
There was a long, tense pause. Katie pointed her revolver at the taller man and then back towards the shorter man. The breeze had risen, and the dry beech hedge was furiously rattling, like some kind of mystical warning. The taller man was staring at Katie with deep hostility but then he glanced behind him, as if he were measuring up the distance between him and the SUV. He hesitated for a few seconds, and then he snatched at the sleeve of the shorter man’s jacket and said, ‘Alerga! Nu ne va împușca! Alerga!’
They both turned around and ran back towards the Toyota. They yanked open the doors and scrambled into their seats, and the taller man started up the engine. With a loud slithering of tyres they swerved away from the kerb and sped off down Carrig View, with the passenger door still flapping open.
Jamming her revolver back into its holster, Katie ran back to the porch and slammed the front door so that the dogs couldn’t get out. Then she climbed into her car and reversed out of her driveway and on to the road. She pressed her foot down hard on the accelerator pedal and went speeding off after the Toyota. The two men had a start on her, but she knew all the roads in Cobh, every twist and turn and unexpected obstruction. She had also been trained up to CBD2 in high-speed driving when she was at the Garda College at Templemore.
Carrig View became the High Road that led straight into the centre of Cobh, and as she passed the Great Gas petrol station, Katie caught sight of the Toyota’s red rear lights up ahead of her. It was travelling fast, but not as fast as her. She took several deep breaths to steady herself, and whispered, ‘Do scíth a ligean,’ which her grandmother always used to say to her grandfather when he was overexcited or threw a rabie – relax. Her heart was thumping but she was confident that she had this situation under control. She could have fired at the two men as they ran away, but if she had wounded them or killed them the subsequent Garda inquest would have been a nightmare. You shot two unarmed men in the back, Detective Superintendent Maguire?
She supposed she could have shot at their tyres, but she knew that most tyres these days were either run-flat or self-sealing and so that probably would have been pointless.
As she passed Heidi’s café, where she occasionally went for breakfast, Katie was only about a hundred and fifty metres behind the Toyota. She had no way of telling if the two men realized that she was chasing after them, but when they reached the junction with Whitepoint Drive they took a sudden right-hand turn. She could only guess that they were trying to be evasive, in case she had sent out a call to the local Garda station to look out for them, and given a description of their Toyota. But she doubted that they would have turned down that way if they knew that Whitepoint Drive led only to the Lower Road, which turned sharply east to run parallel to the High Road, and eventually met up with it again at the Cobh Heritage Centre.
She also doubted that they knew that Cobh Garda Station was sited halfway along the Lower Road, and that Cobh Garda Station was open twenty-four hours.
Katie didn’t turn down Whitepoint Drive after them, but kept on speeding along the High Road. She switched on her r/t and had herself patched through to the communications room at Cobh.
‘DS Maguire, from Anglesea Street. Come here to me, this is urgent.’
‘What’s the story, ma’am?’
‘There’s a white Toyota RAV4 heading east on the Lower Road. It’ll be passing right by you in only a couple of minutes. I’m heading into town myself on the High Road and I’m hoping to cut it off at Westbourne Place. If you can send a car behind it, we’ll have it boxed in.’
‘We have a couple of cars parked right outside on the road, ma’am. Don’t you worry – we’ll be after it pronto.’
‘Listen – there’s two occupants in the Toyota, and they’re both Eastern European fellows. I don’t believe they’re armed but tell your officers to be dog wide anyway. They’re wanted for threatening behaviour, and maybe other offences, too.’
‘I have you, ma’am. Roger and out.’
Katie had to slow down for a moment before she could pass an elderly couple in a mustard-coloured Volvo estate. They were driving at such a crawl that she was tempted to blast her horn at them, but then again she calmed herself down by saying, ‘Do scíth a ligean.’ As soon as she was able to overtake them, she pressed her foot down again and it took her less than two mi
nutes then to reach the junction with Westbourne Place.
She did a sharp U-turn, which led to an approaching driver flashing his lights and giving her the finger, which she ignored, and then she sped down the slope towards the car park in front of the Cobh Heritage Centre and Deepwater Quay beside it. It was here that the Titanic had docked, and over the pointed rooftops of the red-brick museum she could see that a huge white cruise liner was tied up here this evening, festooned with lights.
As she neared the car park, she recognized the Toyota’s halogen headlights approaching from the direction of the Lower Road. It was travelling much more slowly than it had before, but a Garda squad car was only about a hundred metres behind it, and because of that the taller man was obviously taking care to keep to the speed limit. She could see that a second squad car was following, about three hundred metres further back.
Katie slewed her Focus sideways, stopped, reversed a little, and then applied her handbrake, so that she was completely obstructing the narrow road that led up towards the town centre. The Toyota slowed down even more when it reached the car park, and then it, too, came to a halt. Katie could imagine what the two men were saying to each other, as it must be dawning on them that they had two Garda squad cars close behind them and that their only escape route was blocked off.
She could also imagine what they were saying to each other as she left her car and began to walk towards them, and what they were saying probably included a stream of swear words in whatever language they spoke. Since they had been demanding ‘the girl’, it was more than likely that they were Romanian. Meanwhile, the first squad car had stopped so close behind them that it was almost touching their rear bumper, while the other squad car drew up alongside. The squad cars’ doors were thrown open and five uniformed gardaí climbed out.
‘DS Maguire!’ Katie shouted out to the gardaí, holding up her ID card in her left hand. ‘I’m armed!’
None of the officers had time to respond, though, because the Toyota’s engine suddenly revved. It shot forward, hitting the side of a Volkswagen saloon and denting its door. It then careened around the car park, colliding with three or four more cars before it screeched around the side of the heritage centre and headed towards the quay.
Katie started to run around the corner after it, and three of the gardaí joined her, including a sergeant, while the other two climbed back into their squad car.
‘They won’t get away!’ the sergeant panted. ‘Dermot and Michael, they’ll go back and cut them off at Whitepoint Drive!’
Although it was late and the temperature was almost down to zero, the quay was brightly lit and crowded. A row of five tour coaches had just returned from Cork city and they were parked up nose to tail beside the museum wall. Dozens of passengers were stepping down from them and filing across the quay. A square blue pontoon was tied up between the ship and the shore so that they could board the liner through a large door in its starboard side.
The Toyota headed straight towards the lines of passengers without slowing down, and Katie heard screams and deep soft thumps as at least four or five of them were knocked over.
‘For the love of God, look out!’ she cried, although she was breathless and she doubted that anybody could hear her over all the background noise. Because it was so cold, the coaches’ engines had been left running and the cruise liner’s generators were droning and the passengers were shouting in panic.
A dock worker ran forward in his high-viz jacket and threw a traffic cone at the Toyota, which bounced off its windscreen. The Toyota slewed to the right and hit the front of the first tour coach. The impact sent it spinning around in a circle and it skidded over to the edge of the quay, rocking on two wheels for one queasy second before it toppled off and landed on its side on top of the pontoon. The bang was deafening, followed by a loud slap of seawater. Almost instantly, its petrol tank exploded and it was engulfed in flames.
Two dock workers and a crewman from the liner attempted to approach it, but the flames were already too fierce and the heat was too intense for them to get close. Katie could even feel it from where she was standing on the quayside, and she raised her hand to shield her face.
‘We need ambulances – now! – and the fire service!’ she called out to the sergeant, although when she turned round she could see that he was already talking on his r/t. When she turned back, she saw that three crew members had appeared in the liner’s open doorway with fire extinguishers.
The crewmen started spraying the Toyota with thick white foam, although the flames seemed to swallow it up and leap even higher. After less than a minute, to her horror, Katie saw that the driver’s door was gradually starting to lift up, like a trapdoor from hell. Even more flames poured out of the SUV’s interior, and wrapped in these flames appeared the taller of the two men. His entire head was on fire, and the sleeves of his Puffa jacket were blazing, so that it looked as if he were wearing fiery epaulettes. The crewmen aimed criss-cross jets of foam at him, and he managed to push up the door a little higher. He reached out and gripped the rear door handle, trying to pull himself out, but then another billow of flames engulfed him. He dropped back inside the Toyota and the door slammed shut on top of him.
In the distance Katie could hear ambulance and fire engine sirens, so she left the quay and ran across the car park to move her car. She reversed it into the last remaining parking space, opposite the statue of Annie Moore, just as a fire engine with its blue lights flashing came down the slope. When she had done that, gasping for breath, she came back to see how many of the liner’s passengers had been injured, and if she could help.
As far as she could make out, only one passenger was clearly dead, a black man with grizzled grey hair in a camel-hair coat. His glasses were lying on the concrete in a widening stain of blood, their lenses cracked, and an elderly woman was kneeling beside him, sobbing. A young Chinese woman had been badly hurt, and one of the ship’s doctors was giving her a painkilling injection. Another white-haired woman looked as if she had been slapped across one side of her face with a bright red paintbrush, and she kept dabbing at her cheek in disbelief, while a big-bellied middle-aged man was lying on his back on the ground, rolling from side to side and groaning like a dying bull.
After the fire engine, three ambulances arrived, only seconds apart, and six paramedics came hurrying out of them, four men and two women, carrying their resuscitation bags. Katie could only stand back and watch, pushing her hands deep into her coat pockets because the wind that was blowing from the harbour was so bitter. The wind was pungent with smoke, too, and she hoped she couldn’t smell charred human flesh.
She crossed herself as the paramedics got to work and whispered a prayer to Saint Raphael, the patron saint of healing. There was no other way she could help. She didn’t want to ask herself if she had done the right thing by pursuing those two men. There was no question, though, that if she hadn’t pursued them they would still be alive, and none of these innocent passengers would have been killed or hurt.
Inside her mind, she couldn’t help hearing what her former Chief Superintendent, Denis MacCostagáin, used to say whenever any of his officers were accused of negligence or lack of foresight. ‘If only time went backwards instead of forwards. We’d never make any fatal mistakes, would we, because we’d be wide to what was coming. But without fatal mistakes our lives would be dreary as all hell, wouldn’t they?’
18
It was four thirty a.m. before Katie returned home, and she was exhausted and shaking with cold. She had stayed on the quay until the last of the injured passengers had been taken away for treatment, and a three-man technical team had turned up in their white Tyvek suits, yawning, to take pictures.
The firefighters had doused the last flames that flickered from the Toyota’s tyres, and about an hour later a bright orange mobile crane had arrived on the quay to lift its burned-out shell off the pontoon and load it on to the back of a flatbed truck. The bodies of the two men were still inside it, but remo
ving them without further damage was going to take the skill of a specialist pathologist, and that would be done at the Technical Bureau’s workshop where vehicles were taken after serious accidents.
She hung up her coat and went into the living room. The fire that she had lit hours ago had burned down to ashes and so she turned on the central heating. Barney and Foltchain opened their eyes and Barney stood up and shook himself to greet her, but Walter stayed fast asleep on the couch. He had left a small curly turd on the tiles in front of the fire and he had scratched at the hearthrug in his attempt to bury it.
‘It’s all right, dog people, you can stay in here for the rest of the night,’ she told them. ‘Don’t think you’re sleeping in here tomorrow, though. Tomorrow, it’s back to the kitchen.’
She undressed and showered to warm herself up and to wash away the smell of smoke. When she had pulled on her long brushed-cotton nightdress, she went to the washbasin to brush her teeth. She stared at herself in the mirror. Green eyes, Titian red hair, skin as pale as ivory. Her late lover, John, had teased her that she was like a selkie, one of the seal-women who lived under the sea but could shed their skins and come ashore to take on a beautiful human form and find a human husband. They made wonderful wives, but they were always secretly yearning to return to the sea.
John used to say that it wasn’t the sea that Katie couldn’t give up, but her life in the Garda. She couldn’t hear a news report about an armed robbery or a civil disturbance or a missing person without having to drop whatever she was doing and drive immediately back to Anglesea Street to take charge. She couldn’t even see a squad car speeding past with its blue light flashing without calling in to the station to find out where it was heading, and why.
Begging to Die Page 14
