Begging to Die

by Graham Masterton

  He didn’t answer that, and after a few moments he turned away and looked towards the window, as if he expected to see a hooded crow perched there, which would be an omen of ill luck, or an unusual cloud formation in the sky.

  *

  Katie walked along to the security control room, which was next to the main canteen on the hospital’s first floor. She would have done anything for a cup of coffee but she knew she didn’t have the time. She had called beforehand so that the acting Chief Security Officer, Donal Magill, was sitting in front of his CCTV screens waiting for her. He was a big, bald, cheery man with a large belly, a voluminous white shirt and a wheezing laugh, although this morning he was unusually sombre.

  ‘How’s the form, DS Maguire?’ he asked her, half-rising from his revolving chair and holding out his hand. ‘I’ve run through all the footage that you asked me to, like, and I believe I have the sequence you want to see.’

  ‘That’s brilliant, Donal, thanks. You’ve saved us a heap of work.’

  ‘Would you care for a cup of coffee in your hand?’

  ‘No, thanks, no. Let’s just take a sconce at the footage, shall we?’

  Donal Magill dragged a chair across for her, and they sat side by side as he ran through the CCTV footage from yesterday evening. Katie saw herself leaving Conor’s room and walking along the corridor towards the lifts, facing the camera. While she was waiting for the lift, the door of Saoirse Duffy’s room opened and the nurse appeared.

  ‘There – that’s who I want to see,’ said Katie, leaning forward in her chair. ‘Is there any way that you can bring the picture up any sharper?’

  ‘Sorry, no,’ Donal told her. ‘This is about the clearest I can get it. One of your technical experts might be able to enhance it, but the lighting along that corridor’s not too clever.’

  As the nurse walked towards the camera, she kept glancing from side to side, and twice she looked behind her as if she thought that somebody might be following her. Because of that, her face was constantly blurred, and from this video footage alone Katie could see that it would be almost impossible to confirm her identity beyond reasonable doubt. She was wearing the standard CUH uniform of a clinical nurse specialist – a pale purple top and dark navy trousers. She might have been a real CNS, but then she might have simply lifted the uniform from the clothing store.

  The nurse slowed, and stopped, and it looked fairly obvious that she had just caught sight of Katie standing in front of the lifts. Immediately she went hurrying off, back along the corridor, and out of sight.

  ‘Well, that tells me not much at all,’ said Katie, sitting back.

  ‘Do you want me to run it again?’

  ‘I don’t see the point. There’s nothing at all in that footage that I didn’t notice at the time. But come here to me, Donal – the hospital pharmacy keeps a record of all the drugs they use, don’t they?’

  ‘That’s right. They do too. And it’s meticulous – it’s almost OCD! If there was so much as a single ibuprofen that went missing, they’d know about it all right, and which member of staff took it. They have to. The pharmacy’s packed floor-to-ceiling with morphine and oxycodone and sufentanil and you name it. If a patient was to die of an accidental overdose, there’d be lawyers demanding to know where the drugs came from and who prescribed them for what, and there’d be heads rolling, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Dr Kelley’s fairly certain that Saoirse Duffy died of an overdose of fentanyl.’

  ‘She told me, yes. And of course they have fentanyl in the pharmacy. In fact, we had a bit of a panic last year when a whole box of fentanyl went missing but as it turned out it was only mislabelled. Still, it could have had serious consequences, do you know what I mean? You don’t want to be taking fentanyl instead of Zantac, I can tell you that.’

  ‘Would you go down to the pharmacy and check that all of their fentanyl has been accounted for – and in particular any fentanyl that was signed out within the past forty-eight hours to a CNS – or somebody who looked like a CNS, at least.’

  ‘Sure like, I can have Tadgh do that for me right now so.’

  ‘Thanks, Donal. I’ll still be around the hospital for the next forty minutes at least. I have to go down and see Dr Kelley in the morgue.’

  ‘Nothing like a few dead bodies to brighten up your day, DS Maguire, that’s what I always say!’

  Before she went to the mortuary, though, Katie looked in to see Detective Markey. He was sitting up in bed and even though his head was swathed in a white crêpe turban, he was smiling and bright-eyed.

  ‘It’s the constant headache, that’s all, ma’am,’ he told her. ‘I’ll tell you – it’s nearly as bad as when I was a kid and my mam was always giving me cheesers with the wooden spoon. But I can’t wait to get out of here and find the gowl who did this to me and do the same to him. Only I’ll do it to him with a sledgehammer, like. And several times over.’

  ‘We’ll lift him in the end,’ Katie reassured him. ‘Then you can go and visit him up at Rathmore Road and smile at him through the bars, and that’ll be better revenge than any sledgehammer.’

  *

  Dr Kelley was busy with the incinerated body that had been brought in from the fire at Alexandra Road. It was charred crusty black from head to foot, and it looked less like a human corpse than a blackened tree trunk found lying on the ground after a forest fire. It even smelled like burned wood.

  There were four other bodies in the mortuary, sleeping their last sleep under freshly pressed sheets: the couple who had thrown themselves out of the fourth-floor window of Lupul’s house, Vasile, and poor Saoirse Duffy, although Katie expected that Saoirse Duffy had been sutured back together again by now.

  Dr Kelley’s lab technician, Denis, was sitting in front of the screen of a gas chromatograph, testing hair samples for drugs. He smiled as Katie came in and gave her a scribbly little wave. So cheerful, with all these dead bodies lying around him.

  ‘How’s it going, Mary?’ said Katie. ‘Anything new to tell me?’

  ‘Not a lot. Both the man and the woman sustained multiple injuries. For the man, the main cause of death was a fractured spinal cord. The woman died from a massive brain haemorrhage. They were also both suffering from thirty per cent third-degree burns and from smoke inhalation. It would have been touch-and-go even if they hadn’t fallen out of that window. Or jumped, or whatever.’

  ‘Approximate ages?’

  ‘The man about thirty-five, I’d say. The young woman about twenty-seven.’

  ‘Anything further to suggest who they were?’

  ‘The man has tattoos on his forearms. I sent JPEGs of them to Bill Phinner. One of them is a shield with the heads of two red dogs in it, and the words Cânii roșii underneath, if I’ve pronounced that right. One of Bill’s technical experts knew what that was straight away: the badge of Dinamo București, one of Romania’s top football teams.’

  ‘Nothing like that on the girl?’

  ‘A butterfly tattoo. But she was wearing some bracelets and rings and I’ve also sent those over to Bill to see if he can source them. I must say they looked Eastern European, so maybe she’s Romanian as well.’

  ‘It fits, Mary. They were trapped in a house that we suspected was occupied by Romanian beggars.’

  Katie paused, and then she nodded at the charred figure lying on the autopsy table in front of them.

  ‘How are you coming along with this one?’

  ‘He’s male, I know that much. His internal organs are cooked but only medium-rare and not beyond testing. He was a heavy drinker and he also has a tumour about the size of a tomato on his left lung, although it could be benign. He wasn’t the healthiest of men, I can tell you that. But I’m running more tests on him and I should be able to tell you a lot more later today or maybe tomorrow.’

  ‘And the fellow who was found in the butcher’s fridge?’

  Dr Kelley led Katie across the room and folded back the sheet that was covering Vasile. He looked strangely peace
ful, like a young man who had been struggling to find some kind of contentment all his life, and had at last discovered it in death. One side of his mouth was even curled up in a smile.

  ‘The forensic technician who first examined him was spot on. Somebody drilled into the back of his head and reduced his brainstem to a smoothie, if you’ll forgive the analogy.’

  ‘But no other injuries?’

  ‘Bruising consistent with being manhandled and forcibly held down, but that’s all. On the whole he was in reasonably good shape, although he suffered from mild psoriasis.’

  ‘Well, we know his name and his nationality and where he was working, and they were showing a picture of him on the TV news yesterday evening and this morning, too – so hopefully we’ll be able to find out more.’

  ‘I forgot to mention… he has a tattoo, too,’ said Dr Kelley. She lifted Vasile’s left arm and showed her a heart with a dagger through it and the name Agrapina. ‘I looked it up, Agrapina. It’s a Romanian name meaning a girl who was born feet first.’

  ‘That’s funny,’ said Katie. ‘So was I. Born feet first, I mean. My grandma used to say that I came into the world in the same way that I’ll leave it. Mind you, she wasn’t exactly a laugh a minute, my grandma. My da used to say that if you were sad she’d make you lonesome.’

  ‘I’ll be running more toxicology tests this afternoon,’ Dr Kelley told her. ‘I’ll try to get you some results before the end of the day.’

  ‘Thanks a million,’ said Katie. She was beginning to feel stifled behind her surgical mask, so she laid her black latex-gloved hand on Dr Kelley’s shoulder to bid her goodbye.

  Once she was outside the hospital, she stood on the steps for a moment under the cold, anaemic clouds. She inhaled deeply, to cleanse the smell of the mortuary out of her lungs, and then she closed her eyes and said a quick but heartfelt prayer – this time, directly to God.

  Please, Lord, grant me a miracle. Please make Conor a whole man again. For his own sake, if not for mine.

  37

  Driving back to Anglesea Street, Katie was called by Bill Phinner. He sounded even more miserable than usual, and she guessed that he was trying to give up smoking again.

  ‘We’re still combing through the house on Alexandra Road, ma’am. There’s all manner of stuff in there and it’s going to take us days. There’s at least ten suitcases full of clothes, as well as handbags and shoes – and we’ve found five mobile phones that are still in working order – four of them subscribers to Telekom Romania and the other one to Orange Romania. They’ll be invaluable like when it comes to identifying who was living there and how long they’d been in this country and where they are now.’

  ‘No more human remains?’

  ‘No, ma’am, thank God. But—’

  ‘Well, that ties in with what we suspect. Lupul was using that house as a kind of a base for his beggars, sure, but he was sending them out on the streets all day and at night they had to sleep out rough, so they’d be taken for genuine homeless. That would account for all those mobile phones, don’t you think? He probably confiscated them before he sent them out begging. I mean, nobody’s going to be dropping money into a beggar’s cap, are they, if the beggar can afford a smartphone?’

  ‘Diarmuid and Siobhan are checking the SIM cards right now, ma’am. But what I was going to say was, we found a grey leather jacket. You mentioned that in the bulletin you put out for Lupul, did you not? A grey leather jacket.’

  ‘Yes, I did. Where did you find it?’

  ‘It was in the same room as that body we found – the one that was burned totally black. It was hanging up in an alcove so one sleeve was charred all flaky but that was all. There’s no name tag in it or nothing, and nothing in the pockets to tell us who it might have belonged to, except for some loose change and a packet of chewing gum. But it was grey.’

  ‘Where in the house did you find them – I mean both the body and the jacket?’

  ‘First floor, facing the back. It was one of the biggest bedrooms, and it had a desk in it as well as a bed, and a sofa under the window.’

  ‘So if Lupul had a room in that house to himself, that room would have been the most likely – him being the boss?’

  ‘We’ll be testing the jacket for DNA of course and see if it compares with samples from the body. We found a notebook in the room, too, one of those spring-bound jobs, which looks as if it could be a diary. It was burned to a cinder, but we should be able to prise the pages apart, like, and if we use the infrared reflected photography, we should be able to read what’s written on them.’

  ‘Okay, Bill. I’ll be back at the station in ten minutes tops. I’ll come down and take a look at that jacket then. If it’s Lupul’s, and that body is Lupul’s body, maybe half of our problem has been solved for us. All we’ll need to do now is find out who solved it.’

  *

  More news was waiting for her when she returned to her office. She had only just hung up her coat and asked Moirin for a cup of coffee when Detective O’Donovan came in. He looked refreshed and smiley and he was wearing a sleeveless purple tank top that she suspected his former girlfriend had bought for him because it was a size too tight.

  ‘How’s it going, ma’am? Guess what? One of our TV appeals has actually worked, for a change.’

  ‘You mean the appeal we put out for that Vasile fellow?’

  ‘That’s the one. We know that he worked behind the bar at The Parting Glass but what we didn’t know was that during the day he washed cars up on the Straight Road, by the Texaco petrol station. There’s this fellow walked in downstairs who says that he washed cars along with him, and he not only knows Vasile but he knows what happened to him.’

  Katie dropped the file that she had picked up to read and said, ‘Right. Let’s go and have a word. Moirin – I shouldn’t be long. Stall the coffee for a few minutes, could you?’

  She went down in the lift with Detective O’Donovan to the interview room, and as they walked along the corridor she quickly told him what she had learned in the mortuary from Dr Kelley, and how she had asked Donal Brogan to carry out an inventory of the opioids in the CUH pharmacy.

  Mihai was waiting in the interview room, with his black hair sticking up like a paintbrush that somebody had forgotten to clean. He was hunched forward in his blue fleece-lined jacket and his eyes were puffy. He smelled strongly of cigarette smoke.

  Katie sat down opposite him and smiled but he didn’t smile back. Detective O’Donovan sat on her left-hand side and switched on the voice recorder.

  ‘Well, thanks a million for coming in,’ said Katie. ‘Would you like a glass of water or anything? No? So can I start by asking your name?’

  ‘My name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mihai.’

  ‘Second name?’

  ‘No. Only Mihai.’

  ‘All right, Mihai. Where are you living now?’

  ‘Cork.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me where in Cork? Which street?’

  ‘Only Cork.’

  ‘Fair play to you, if you don’t want to tell me. I’m guessing you saw that picture of Vasile on the TV news?’

  ‘Yes. Last night.’

  ‘And you know Vasile?’

  ‘Yes. We work together at Handwash. Wash cars by hand.’ Here he lifted his right arm and circled it around as if he were washing a windscreen.

  ‘How long has Vasile been working there?’

  ‘Three month about. Yes, three month. I meet him in club one night and we start to talk and he tell me he want extra job for daytime.’

  ‘Okay. You know from the TV news that Vasile has been found dead.’

  Mihai nodded. ‘I tell him so many times, be dog wide. He know many bad people, Vasile. He meet bad people in his pub where he work, and he do things for them for money. What you call them? Favours. One week he make more than seven hundred euro, only for tell one bad man where other bad man hide stolen cars.’

  ‘When was the last time y
ou saw him?’

  ‘At Handwash, yesterday in the morning.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  Mihai looked behind him, and then he leaned forward across the table and said, in a whisper, ‘Two men come to Handwash. They take him.’

  ‘Two men came and took him?’ asked Katie. ‘In a car, or what?’

  Mihai nodded again. ‘Black Audi. Number plate start with “L”. Then maybe a nine, but that is all I see.’

  ‘Limerick plate,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘But probably a jammer anyway.’

  ‘Do you think Vasile went voluntarily? I mean, do you think he wanted to go with them?’

  Mihai shook his head. ‘He know them. And I know them, too. They work for Dragos. And with Dragos you don’t – you don’t – I can’t think of right word—’

  ‘You’re talking about Dragomir Iliescu? The one they call Lupul?’

  ‘That’s right. Lupul. And with Lupul you don’t – well, sorry, sorry to speak like this, but you don’t fuck with Lupul.’

  ‘I think we understand that,’ said Katie. ‘So these two men who took Vasile, they both work for Lupul. Do you know their names?’

  Again Mihai glanced over his shoulder, as if he were afraid that Lupul’s men would be standing close behind him. ‘Danut, is one. Marku, is the other one. Marku – they sometimes call him Dinti Ascutiti.’

  ‘Dinti Ascutiti? What does that mean?’

  ‘It mean something like “Sharp Teeth”. They say that one day he is angry with his girlfriend because she go with other man. So, he beat her and bite off her—’

  He held both hands in front of his chest and twiddled his fingers.

  ‘So – not exactly the sort of feen that a girl should think about dating on EliteSingles dot com,’ said Detective O’Donovan.

  ‘Do you have any idea why Vasile was taken away?’ asked Katie.

  ‘No. I don’t know. He never say much to me about this gangsters he know. But I know that Vasile get most of his money from Fat Man and so he is scare of Lupul. Pure scare.’