Suddenly they heard a piercing chorus of agonized screams from the five yellow-painted sheds. In a slurring voice like a slowed-down record, Conor said, ‘It’s the puppies! They’re hurting them!’ and he started to run around the side of the farmhouse, with his hospital gown flapping.
Katie tried to run after him, but her stiletto-heeled boots had become wedged in a crack in the paving stones. She tried to unlace them but the knots were too complicated and she could only succeed in tying them even tighter. She was still struggling with them when she heard the McQuaide sisters shrieking with hysterical laughter, even louder than the puppies’ screaming. Conor reappeared. Both of his legs had been severed above his knees so that he was rocking his way slowly towards her on two bloody stumps, like a man wading through treacle. His nose had been hacked off, too, so that there was nothing more than a dark triangular cavity in the middle of his face. He stopped, reaching out his arms to her, but she couldn’t move.
‘Katie! Don’t leave me, Katie!’ he begged her. His voice was bubbly with blood. ‘Please don’t leave me!’
‘DS Maguire?’ said a voice, out of nowhere.
Startled, Katie opened her eyes. She stared at the wall for a moment and then she turned around. A young garda was standing beside her bed with a cup of tea in her hand.
‘It’s five-thirty, ma’am. DI Fitzpatrick said to tell you that he’s ready when you are.’
29
When they drove up to Montenotte it was still dark, and a soft rain had started to fall.
Sidney Park was a steep narrow road with a row of semi-detached houses stacked up the hill on the left-hand side, but nothing but railings on the other. The third house had ginger-coloured pebble-dashing and peeling white paint and its front garden was scruffy and untended, with a broken plastic chair in it. A van was parked in the road outside it but no cars were standing in its driveway. All the curtains in the upstairs windows were drawn tight.
Their convoy of two unmarked cars and four squad cars stopped opposite the front gate, blocking the road to all other traffic.
‘Looks like they’re still in their scratchers,’ said Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick, when he and Katie and Detective O’Donovan had climbed out of their car.
The fine drizzle was trailing across the road so Katie put up the pointed hood of her black raincoat. Conor always said it made her look like one of the Sidhe, the fairy-folk, because in Ireland the fairies were never tiny, but the same size as humans. Under her raincoat she was wearing a ballistic vest, so this morning she looked even bulkier than a human.
She looked around for Sergeant O’Farrell. ‘Ryan,’ she called to him. ‘Do we have the back covered yet?’
Sergeant O’Farrell came up with his walkie in his hand, followed by seven gardaí, all of them dressed in black. Three of them came from the Regional Support Unit and were armed with Heckler & Koch sub-machine guns.
‘The back’s covered all right. Just say the word, ma’am, and in we go.’
‘Right, then,’ said Katie. ‘Let’s do it.’
Sergeant O’Farrell and the rest of the gardaí hurried to the front door, their jackets rustling as they jogged across the garden. One of them knocked loudly, and pressed the doorbell too. Then they waited, tensely positioned on either side of the porch.
There was no answer from inside the house, so the garda knocked again. After thirty seconds there was still no response, so Katie said, ‘That’s it. Break it down.’
A garda went up to the front door with an Enforcer battering-ram. He slammed it into the lock stile three times, and with a loud splintering crack the door swung wide open. The gardaí from the RSU bustled into the house first, screaming, ‘Armed gardaí! Armed gardaí!’
Katie and Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick and Detective O’Donovan and the rest of the gardaí waited in the rain, which was soft as dandelion puffs. After two or three minutes, one of the armed officers appeared in the doorway and called out, ‘There’s nobody here, ma’am! The whole place is empty!’
‘You’re sure of that? You’ve checked the attic?’
‘We have of course. Not a soul.’
‘Fair play,’ said Katie, resignedly. What surprised her was that she wasn’t really surprised. As they had driven up from Anglesea Street she had felt almost certain that they wouldn’t find Lupul here. Even if they had, it would have been the beginning of a legalistic nightmare. They could have brought Lupul into Anglesea Street for questioning, but they wouldn’t have been able to arrest him without reasonable evidence. She might have accused him of assault for knocking her over in Winthrop Street, but little else. Being Romanian wasn’t a crime in itself, and the human rights lawyers would have been swarming around like bluebottles over a dead cat as soon as she charged him.
‘Shite,’ said Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick, under his breath.
‘Let’s take a sconce inside, shall we?’ said Katie, and they stepped in through the broken door and into the hallway.
The house was gloomy and cold and smelled of damp, like so many of the older houses in Montenotte. Outside it was gradually beginning to grow lighter, but Katie borrowed a flashlight from one of the gardaí. They didn’t switch on the house lights as a matter of normal procedure, in case the electrical system was booby-trapped or they compromised any incriminating DNA on the light switches. Not only that, flashlights illuminated rooms at different angles, so that they were able to see footprints and objects that might be invisible under overhead lights, such as hairs or crumbs of food or dropped contact lenses.
The living room looked as if it had recently been occupied. Facing a large flat-screen television was a grimy cream leatherette sofa with squashed purple cushions, which had clearly been sat on recently. A coffee table with a large Guinness ashtray on it was heaped with cigarette butts. The room smelled strongly of stale tobacco and another odd smell, which Katie couldn’t immediately identify, but which reminded her of toilet freshener blocks.
She tugged on her black forensic gloves and picked up a folded newspaper, which had been dropped on the floor next to the sofa. It was yesterday’s Echo.
‘Well – whoever was here, it looks like they hopped off at very short notice,’ she said. ‘Who does the house belong to?’
‘It’s a rental, managed by Cudahy’s,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘They told me the owner lives in Málaga these days, a retired fellow by the name of Bell. He used to be something to do with the building trade.’
‘Did they tell you who was renting it now?’
‘Nobody, according to them. The last tenant left six weeks ago after renting it since April last year. A couple with two young children.’
‘So whoever’s been staying here, they’ve been squatting?’
‘I’d say so, yes. But at least they won’t be able to deny it was them if we find them. They’ve left a rake of evidence.’
‘If we find them. They seem to be one step ahead of us, don’t they?’
They went through to the kitchen, which was cramped and dark with a chipped red-tiled floor. Katie looked out through the rain-beaded window and could see two gardaí standing outside by a dilapidated garden shed.
The kitchen sink was stacked with dirty plates and all the work surfaces were crowded with empty baked-bean tins and crumpled Brennans bread wrappers and empty Smirnoff bottles. On top of the gas cooker, a casserole dish was encrusted with burned mince and potato.
‘Counting the bean tins, I’d say they’d been here about a week,’ said Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick. ‘And judging by those vodka bottles, I’d say they weren’t Irish.’
They climbed the steep stairs to look at the bedrooms. In the main bedroom there was a double bed with no sheets but two duvets heaped on top of it, both of them grubby and covered in brown stains, as if somebody had suffered a nosebleed. The orange-and-green wallpaper was rippled with damp and at a skewed angle above the bed hung a reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper. There was a sour, underlying reek of body odour and a
gain that toilet freshener smell.
They went into the bathroom. A sodden maroon towel lay on the floor, and the bath itself had several rings of grey soap scum around it. The toilet was filthy, too, and the last person to urinate in it hadn’t flushed it.
‘Holy Saint Peter,’ said Detective Inspector Fitzgerald, wrinkling up his nose. ‘When I was a lad that was a wooden spoon offence, no excuses accepted.’
On the window sill there were two disposable razors, both used, and a black spray can of men’s deodorant with the name Erou on it. Katie picked up the can and sniffed it and now she understood where the toilet-freshener smell had come from.
At the back of the house were two other bedrooms with single beds, although only one of them appeared to have been slept in; its blue blanket was rumpled and there was a head-shaped dent in the pillow.
Katie said, ‘Lupul may well have been staying here, but this isn’t the house that Ana-Maria was talking about, where all of his beggars were being put up. She said there were twelve of them at least. I suppose they could have slept on the floor but it doesn’t look like it. Where’s all their clothes and all their possessions? Even beggars have rucksacks.’
She opened the cheap pine wardrobe but there was nothing inside except for a few wire coat-hangers. When she bent over and looked under the bed, though, she saw a single pale-pink trainer with white stripes on it. What attracted her attention was how small it was. She took out her iPhone and took three flash photographs of it, and then she reached underneath the bed and fished it out.
‘Adidas, size thirty-eight,’ she said, turning it over. ‘This would fit a woman or an older girl. And did you know that most Adidas shoes are made in Romania?’
‘Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?’ asked Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick.
‘Nothing. Except that I’m going to take this back to Bill Phinner and have him test it for DNA. And then I’m going to show it to Ana-Maria.’
‘Then you are thinking what I think you’re thinking.’
They went back downstairs. Sergeant O’Farrell said, ‘Well? The birds have flown, haven’t they? But why would they fly if they weren’t the birds that we were looking for?’
‘More to the point, who warned them that we were coming?’ said Katie. ‘What do you think, Robert? Maybe your man at The Parting Glass lost his nerve and decided that two hundred euros wasn’t worth getting himself killed for.’
Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick shook his head. ‘This is all still supposition, ma’am. If only we could find one solid piece of evidence that linked Lupul to Ana-Maria’s mother disappearing, and her ring turning up in that mince, and her necklace turning up where that Bowser fellow was shot. Not to mention those rough sleepers having the brains drilled out of them.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘I’m only saying that maybe none of these things are connected, do you know what I mean? At least, not in the way that we’ve been thinking they are.’
Katie looked around the hallway, and then back up the stairs. ‘You’re right, of course, Robert. But there’s no future in trying to put the pieces of a jigsaw together if you don’t have at least some idea in your mind of what it’s going to look like when it’s finished. Maybe we haven’t found Lupul himself here this morning, but I have the strongest feeling that he’s left that link here that you’re talking about, even if we’re not sure what it is.’
She turned to Sergeant O’Farrell. ‘You can cordon off the house now, Ryan, and I’ll ask Bill Phinner to send a technical team up and go through it top to bottom. We’ll be interviewing all the neighbours, too, when they’ve woken up – that’s if we haven’t woken them all up already.’
They left the house and returned to their car. It was still raining, but it was spitting now, rather than soft, and judging by the low grey clouds that were rolling in from the west it would soon be pelting.
‘I knew it would be a cat day today,’ said Detective O’Donovan, as he slammed the car door. ‘The forecast didn’t say so, but I could feel it in my bones.’
Katie didn’t answer because she was staring at her iPhone. Before she could fasten her seat belt, she had been sent a text by Superintendent Pearse.
‘Mother of God,’ she said, softly.
‘What’s the story?’
‘That young woman who was pushed into the river at Blackrock. They’ve found her dead in her bed.’
‘That’s sad. That is sad. Do they know what the cause was?’
‘Not yet. They were worried that she was suffering brain damage because she was under the water for so long.’
Detective O’Donovan drove further up Sidney Park so he could turn down the zigzag lanes that would take them back to Wellington Road, and then down Summerhill to the city. They passed the Gabriel House guesthouse, where Conor and she had first made love, and quite unexpectedly she found that she had a tocht in her throat, and she pressed her hand over her mouth to keep her emotions under control. She was far too busy to cry.
*
As soon as she had sat down in her office, Moirin came in with a cappuccino for her, and a sticky raspberry bun from Heaven’s Cakes in the English Market.
‘Holy Mary, Moirin, I’m trying to keep my weight down.’
‘Well, so am I, ma’am, but I bought two of them and if I hadn’t have given one of them to you, I would have been forced to eat it myself.’
‘Have you thought of buying only the one?’
‘Not really. That would make it look as if I had no friends.’
Chief Superintendent Brendan O’Kane tapped at her door. He was looking spruce and freshly showered in his crisp white shirt and Katie could smell that he had sprayed on a little too much Eau Sauvage. At least it wasn’t Erou, she thought.
‘So like, I understand that Lupul wasn’t at home.’
‘No, sir. That’s if it was him who was staying there. But as Sergeant O’Farrell rightly pointed out, why did they leave so quick if they weren’t the fellows we were looking for?’
‘True. So what’s the plan now?’
‘The house wasn’t nearly big enough to accommodate all of the beggars that Lupul brought over from Romania, so he must be renting or squatting another property somewhere else. What we need to do now is find that.’
‘Any clues?’
‘None so far. But we’re keeping a close watch on all the beggars and rough sleepers around the city, as far as we can anyway, and it will take only one of them to lead us back there.’
‘Okay, grand. Have you heard from Dr Kelley about our ex-boxer yet?’
‘Not yet. But his head was in a desperate mess so it will probably take her some time to piece it all back together again. You know how scrupulous she is. She’ll even be scraping the bits of brain off his blankets and weighing them, just to make sure there isn’t too little or too much.’
‘And I heard that girl passed away. The one who was rescued from the river.’
‘Yes. It could have been that she was starved of oxygen for so long that she didn’t have a chance of surviving. All the same, I’ll be after asking Dr Kelley to carry out a post mortem on her, too, just to be certain about the cause of death.’
‘It could only have been natural causes, though, couldn’t it? If you can call being pushed into the river a natural cause.’
‘I’m not sure. I have a funny feeling about it, that’s all.’
Brendan raised his eyebrows. ‘I remember you at Templemore, you and your funny feelings.’
Katie didn’t answer that. Instead, she said, ‘I went to see Padragain Scanlan yesterday evening. She was knocked about something desperate but it looks like she’s going to be okay. I’m still waiting to hear about Nicholas Markey. His skull was fractured and all the bones in his hands were shattered so I don’t know how long it’s going to take him to recover. If he doesn’t regain the full use of his hands – well, we’ll just have to wait and see and say a prayer to Saint Stanislaus Kostka.’
; Brendan frowned, so Katie added, ‘Saint Stanislaus Kostka – the patron saint of broken bones.’
‘I see. Okay. You must have been paying attention in catechism. Do you think it was that butcher who did it?’
‘Eamon Buckley? It’s highly likely, but so far we don’t have any proof. No witnesses, as usual.’
‘Tell me the old, old story. Thanks for the updates, anyway. Oh – and how’s your fiancé? Colin, is it?’
‘Conor. He’s had an operation on his cheekbone and his eye socket. He has to have another operation to straighten his nose, but he looks like he’s bearing up all right.’
Brendan nodded thoughtfully. Then, after a long pause, he said, ‘I’ve been thinking about that pug dog, Walter.’
Katie had started to look through the messages on her desk, but now she looked up and said, ‘Walter? What about him?’
‘Can his owners raise enough money to have him fixed?’
‘I don’t know for sure. I shouldn’t think so. They were talking about crowdfunding but I’ll be amazed if they can raise as much as three thousand.’
‘So they’ll probably have to have him put down?’
‘It’d be heartbreaking if they have to, wouldn’t it? He’s such a little dote. But, yes, I expect so. It’d be cruel to let him go on living in that condition. Every single breath is a struggle for him, like.’
‘Find out how much his owners have managed to raise so far,’ said Brendan. ‘However much or how little it is, I’ll pay for the rest of it.’
Katie stared at him. She didn’t know what to say. Brendan looked back at her, and gave a shrug, as if to say, Whatever you thought of me, I’m not like that at all. Maybe I cheated on you once, when I was years younger, but that’s not the kind of man I am now.
‘Serious?’ said Katie, at last.
‘Serious. I took a shine to the little fellow. And maybe we can persuade the media to run a story on him. We could use him as a warning to anybody else who’s thinking of buying a puppy. You know – tell them to check that it comes from a proper registered puppy breeder, and that it’s old enough to be taken away from its mother, and that it’s been given all its vaccinations and been wormed and whatever.’
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