Brendan nodded, looking around her office as if he thought he might have left something there by mistake. Then he looked back at Katie and said, ‘You’ll be extra careful, won’t you? This Lupul’s some homicidal maniac by the sound of it. I don’t want to lose you, too.’
The way he said ‘too’ suggested to Katie that he must be referring to his late wife, Radha. Did that mean that he felt as much affection for her? After all, during their brief affair at Templemore, before he had cheated on her, they had even talked about moving in together.
‘I will, sir,’ she told him. ‘I promise you.’
She was about to put on her coat when her phone rang. As she picked it up, Brendan saluted her and said, ‘I’ll catch you later so, when you’re back,’ and headed for the door.
She gave him a wave in return and then, ‘Robert,’ she said into the phone, ‘are we just about ready?’
‘You’re not going to believe this,’ said Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick. ‘Lupul’s house is on fire.’
‘Holy Mary, you’re codding, aren’t you?’
‘No, and it’s a serious fire too, from what Cullen says. He’s rung for the fire brigade already. He reckons there might be people trapped inside there.’
‘Let’s get ourselves up there, Robert, like now. And Patrick. I’ll meet you in the car park.’
Brendan had caught the urgency in Katie’s voice, and stopped by the door.
‘What’s the story?’
Katie was pulling her coat on over her covert ballistic vest. ‘Lupul’s house is on fire. Daley thinks there could be people in it who can’t get out.’
‘Jesus. This looks like being a night-and-a-half. I’ll stay here for now, Katie, but keep me posted.’
‘Yes, sir.’
She could see that he was itching to chide her again for calling him ‘sir’ instead of ‘Brendan’, but they both knew that this wasn’t the time for it.
*
The fire had already taken a fierce hold on the ground floor when Katie arrived at Alexandra Road. As she climbed out of her car she could see flames dancing behind the smoke-darkened windows of the first and second floors, too, as if demons were having a party.
When she breathed in she could smell burning nylon carpets, and there was an intermittent crackling in the air that sounded like a shooting gallery.
Three fire engines were already lined up in front of the house with their blue lights flashing, and hoses had been run in through the front garden gate. Katie saw that Assistant Chief Fire Officer Matthew Whelan was in attendance, standing beside his red fire-and-rescue SUV with his arms tightly folded and his lower lip stuck out like a big petulant baby, as if this fire had been started with the deliberate intention of disturbing his night’s sleep.
She was surprised and concerned to see some of the media here already – Caroline Dooley from the Examiner and Adam O’Hearne from RTÉ television news, accompanied by a cameraman in a woolly bobble hat – as well as Micky Murphy from Red FM.
Further up the hill, two squad cars had been parked across the junction of Alexandra Road and Military Hill to block it off, and Katie could see Sergeant O’Farrell and three uniformed gardaí talking to four or five elderly people and a woman with two small children. She guessed that they must have evacuated them from the houses on either side.
She crossed the road together with Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick and Detective O’Donovan. Detectives Walsh and Cullen were waiting for her beside their car, both looking cold and tired. Detective Walsh was only five feet three and looked far too young to be a fully qualified detective. Her hair was dark and close-cropped and she had thick curved eyebrows so that she always put Katie in mind of Sinéad O’Connor. Detective Cullen was tall and bony and red-haired with a long face and a mournful way of talking, as if he had accepted from his schooldays that life was always going to be unfair to him.
‘Any sign of how it started?’ asked Katie.
‘No, ma’am,’ said Detective Cullen sadly. ‘None at all. Not from where we sitting out here, anyway. Nobody’s come in or out of the house since Eamon Buckley and his pal – and that dead fellow, of course.’
‘We saw the smoke to begin with,’ said Detective Walsh. ‘We thought it was somebody’s wood stove burning at first but then it started drifting across the road, like, and it smelled really strong, so we went in through the gate there to check it out. We could see at once through the skylight over the door that there was flames inside the hallway, and that flames were climbing up the stairs, too. We knocked and we rang and we could hear somebody shouting – it sounded like a young woman. So Daley broke the front window with a brick to get in but as soon as he did that the whole front parlour went up like a bomb.’
‘I tried round the back, too, but it was no use,’ Detective Cullen put in. ‘The kitchen door was locked and anyway the fire was already raging in there. I burned my hand on the doorknob. I mean, talk about Dante’s Inferno.’
‘Have you heard that young woman again?’
‘No. And no sign of her, either, so maybe I was hearing things. Well, let’s hope I was, because if I wasn’t she might have been burned up, or choked by the smoke.’
Katie nodded towards the group of reporters. They had been joined now by Duncan Power from the Irish Times.
‘How did that lot find out about this fire so quick? I mean, Jesus, they were here before we were, and we’re supposed to be the first responders.’
‘I have no idea, ma’am. But that Caroline Dooley – she showed up not five minutes after the first fire engine.’
‘Okay, Cailin, thanks,’ said Katie. She patted her on the shoulder and then went over to talk to Matthew Whelan.
‘DS Maguire!’ he greeted her, with his deep, grating voice, which sounded like a dead body being dragged over wet gravel. ‘We’ll have to stop meeting like this. When was the last time? When that dance studio burned down, wasn’t it, on Farren’s Quay. Tragic. Beyond tragic. All those young lives lost like that. Your officer there told us that she heard a woman calling out from inside this house but my men haven’t seen anybody yet and I’m praying they don’t.’
Katie stepped in through the garden gate and Matthew Whelan followed her, although they stayed close to the wall and went no nearer to the house. All the windows in the ground floor had shattered now and Katie thought it was like looking into the furnace at a crematorium. The heat was so intense that she could feel it on her face from twenty metres away. Three firefighters in the front garden were jetting cascades of water into the living room and the first-floor bedroom, while two more were on ladders on top of the fire engines directing water cannon on to the upper floors, so that the cold night air was filled with glittering spray.
‘Mother of God, I don’t think I’ve ever in my life seen a house fire raging like this one,’ said Katie.
‘Arson, no doubt about it,’ said Matthew Whelan. ‘We’ll have to wait for the fire investigators to report, but there’s no question in my mind that this was set deliberate. The way this is going up, it’s my guess that accelerant was poured over every floor and down the stairs, too.’
35
Katie watched the firefighters at work for a few minutes, then she went back through the gate and across the road to where the little knot of reporters was gathered, stamping their feet and chafing their hands to keep warm. Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick came over to join her.
‘Would you be having any comment for us, DS Maguire?’ Caroline Dooley shouted out, pushing back the hood of her duffel coat.
‘Not yet, no,’ Katie told her. She had to raise her voice so that she could be heard over the roaring of the fire engines’ pumps. ‘You can see what’s happening for yourself, and I know no more than you do.’
‘Would you think there’s any chance at all that this house was torched on purpose? I mean, Jesus, look at it. It’s burning like a Roman candle.’
‘Like I say, I have no comment at the moment. I do have a question for you, though. Did
somebody tip you off about this fire? It seems to me that you showed up here awful quick, like.’
Caroline Dooley looked at Adam O’Hearne, and Adam O’Hearne shrugged, as if to say, You’d best tell her, she’s going to find out anyway.
‘I had a phone call. I don’t know who it was from. There was no number displayed and when I tried to ring back all I got was a continuous tone, like there wasn’t any such number. It was a man’s voice and all he said was that there was a fire at number thirteen Alexandra Road and I should go up and take a sconce at it, because there was a story behind it.’
‘I had the same,’ said Adam O’Hearne.
‘Did you ask him who he was?’
‘Of course, yes, but all he did was hang up.’
‘Did he give you any idea what the story was?’
‘Not to me, he didn’t,’ said Adam O’Hearne. ‘He said something to you, though, didn’t he, Caroline?’
‘He did, yes. He said, “Now there’ll be no more misunderstandings about who’s in charge.” I asked him in charge of what, like, but he just hung up, the same as he did to Adam.’
‘What did he sound like?’ asked Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick. ‘Young? Old? Did he have any kind of an accent?’
‘He wasn’t a Corkman, I can tell you that for sure. If he had any kind of an accent he was putting it on, like he was trying to disguise his voice, do you know. I’d say he was copying some inner-city Dublin skanger, if he was copying anybody.’
Katie and Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick were still talking to the reporters when they heard screaming. Katie turned around and saw to her horror that the fourth-floor bedroom window of the house had been pushed up, and that a man and a young woman were leaning out of it, both waving their arms and crying out desperately for help.
The bedroom behind them was filled with billowing orange flames, and Katie could see that they were both on fire – their hair and their clothes. She ran back across the road and in through the garden gate, with Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick close behind her, and the bobble-hatted cameraman so close behind both of them that he stumbled and almost dropped his camera.
The couple continued screaming as they tried to climb out of the bedroom. Two of the firefighters sprayed fine sheets of water up at them, and two more quickly hoisted a ladder and shifted it across to the side of the window. But the fire inside the room was still raging, so fiercely that Katie could hear it howling, like a hungry beast.
Before one of the firefighters was even halfway up the ladder, the man and the woman clung on to each other tightly and pitched themselves sideways over the window sill. They fell together on to the mosaic-tiled path in front of the house with a thick wet thump, and the woman’s forehead cracked against the rope-top edging tiles.
The firefighters gently eased the two of them apart. The man’s blue check shirt had been charred into rags and the back of the young woman’s dress had been completely burned away, exposing her scarlet-blistered back and her underwear. Both of their faces were scorched a dark maroon colour and their hair had been reduced to crispy black stubble.
The young woman was staring up unblinking as the fine drops of water fell from the sky and into her eyes. One of the firefighters felt her pulse, but after a few moments he shook his head. The man, meanwhile, let out a thin, wheezing sigh, as if he were resigned to his fate, and a ghost-like curl of smoke rose out of his mouth. Although he sighed, his neck was twisted at an acute angle and it was obvious that he was dead, too.
Two more firefighters came hurrying into the garden with a Samaritan defibrillator and two oxygen masks, but their colleagues raised both hands to show them that they were wasting their time.
Katie crossed herself. Almost as soon as she did so, the roof high above them collapsed with a rending crash and flames leaped into the darkness up to twenty metres high. Dense brown smoke rolled across the neighbouring rooftops, peppered with sparks.
‘Come along, DS Maguire,’ said Matthew Whelan, taking her arm. ‘You need to be well clear of here. The whole house could be coming down at this rate.’
The reporters were waiting for her as she walked back across the road.
‘Holy Saint Joseph,’ said Duncan Power. He looked utterly shaken. ‘We saw those two falling out the window. What’s their condition?’
‘I’m sorry to tell you that they didn’t survive,’ Katie told him. She had to take a deep breath before she was able to say any more. Of all the tragic events she had witnessed, the deaths of this man and this young woman for some reason had moved her much more deeply than most. Maybe it was the way they had embraced each other, even though they were on fire, and even though they must have known that tumbling out of that fourth-floor window would almost certainly kill them.
‘Do you know who they were?’ asked Caroline Dooley.
‘I’ve no idea at all. All I can tell you is that we believe this house was rented, but as yet we have no information as to who rented it or who might have been staying in it.’
‘That fellow who rang Caroline here and Adam, he rang me, too,’ said Duncan Power. ‘He said nothing about who was in charge, like he did to Caroline, but it sounded to me like he was out to show somebody else who’s boss. Like, “don’t be getting above yourself, sham, or I’ll burn down your house.”’
Katie said, ‘Let’s wait until the fire investigators have done their work. The pathologist, too. The phone calls you all received could suggest arson, sure like, but it could have been that your caller had seen that the house had caught alight by accident and was hoping to make something out of it. We just don’t know the circumstances yet, and for all we know there are even more bodies inside. I pray not.’
Detective O’Donovan came across the road. Behind him, the fire brigade were directing great arcs of water into the skeletal rafters of the roof and at last the leaping flames were beginning to flicker and die down, although the clouds of smoke were piling up much thicker. The night air was not only stunningly cold but hazy and eye-wateringly acrid, so that everybody was coughing. Katie saw an ambulance turning the corner from St Luke’s, coming to take the two bodies away to the morgue.
Detective O’Donovan beckoned her aside, out of earshot of the reporters.
‘Me and Daley, we’ve been taking a lamp around the back garden. And what do you think we found there? Three twenty-litre jerrycans. Three, all empty, but all smelling of petrol. There’s an empty fish pond back there full of nothing but bracken and they’d been slung in there.’
‘If those were what the arsonists used to set the house alight, that was pure careless of them, wouldn’t you think? We were bound to find them.’
‘Maybe they were careless because they simply don’t care.’
‘Sure like, you could be right. But three empty jerrycans does make it look almost certain that this was arson, and that narrows down our possible suspects. How many chancers do we know in Cork who would have enough nerve to teach a dangerous character like Lupul a lesson? I think we can count them on the fingers of half a hand.’
‘The O’Flynns, for a start,’ Detective O’Donovan suggested. ‘They’ve an abiding hatred of anybody who wasn’t born and bred in Cork. Well, like most Corkonians. But especially blow-ins who try to muscle in on their rackets. And our friend Ştefan Făt-Frumor of course, although he claims he’s moving up to Dublin and doesn’t give a monkey’s about Lupul – that’s if you can believe a word he says. And he’s mostly into drugs anyway.’
‘Or maybe the Garritys,’ said Katie. ‘That John and Dermot Garrity seem to think they’ve a monopoly on street crime these days, and they’re a right pair of shapers. And then of course there’s Foxy Collins, but this is not really his style.’
She coughed, and took out her handkerchief to dab at her eyes. The smoke was so dense now that the firemen were walking around in it like ghosts, and the reporters had all backed further up the road.
Sergeant O’Farrell came up to them.
‘Just to let you know, ma�
��am, the houses on both sides are all evacuated now. The residents have been taken in by the Ambassador Hotel, and given rooms, which was pure Christian of them.’
‘Good work, sergeant. Listen, I have to get back down to the station. I’ll leave DI Fitzpatrick in charge here. Come on, Patrick, let’s make tracks. There’s not much more that we can do here now. We’ll only choke to death. Where’s DI Fitzpatrick got himself to?’
As if she had summoned him from beyond the grave, Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick appeared out of the smoke. ‘Here, ma’am. Are you thinking of leaving?’
‘Apart from not wanting to suffocate, I need to work out a new strategy. And I mean urgent-like. This whole homeless situation – it’s got totally out of control.’
She went across to tell Detectives Cullen and Walsh that she was going back to Anglesea Street so that she could stand down the operation she had been planning to raid Lupul’s house. She also promised them she would send two more officers up to relieve them as soon as she could.
‘So long as they get here before we see anybody else cremated,’ said Detective Walsh. Her eyes were crowded with tears but Katie gave her the benefit of the doubt and put her weeping down to the smoke.
*
‘That immigration officer is going to be spitting tacks,’ said Detective O’Donovan, as they climbed back into their car. ‘The poor fellow’s been driving all the way from Waterford in the dead of night for no purpose whatsoever. He hasn’t even got here yet and now he has to drive all the way back again.’
‘Well, I hope he doesn’t throw too much of a rabie,’ Katie told him. ‘We’ll be needing a whole lot of support from the immigration service if we’re going to clear this mess up.’
‘So what’s the plan, ma’am?’
‘I’ll have to talk to Chief Superintendent O’Kane first, because this is going to be fierce political. Don’t get me wrong about the homeless situation. I don’t blame the homeless themselves. There can’t be anything worse than having to sleep in a doorway in the middle of winter when you’re addicted and flat broke and sick as a squirrel. But scummers like Lupul have been preying on them for far too long and I blame myself for not giving out about it sooner.’
Begging to Die Page 28
