Begging to Die

by Graham Masterton

  ‘You shouldn’t be here, in this place,’ the man told her, still speaking in Romanian. ‘This doorway here, Dragos doesn’t own it. He has to learn that.’

  ‘I don’t have any other place to go,’ said Loredana. ‘I’m so sick. Do you have any ice? I only need a little and you can have all my money. Please.’

  ‘Dragos needs to understand that he’s pushed his luck too far. I’m sorry that you have to pay for Dragos thinking that he could be king of the castle. Well, I’m not too sorry. Anybody stupid enough to join Dragos’ gang deserves everything they get. Do you know what we call you lot? Banda de Nebuni – the Band of Fools.’

  His face rose upwards, just like a balloon, and disappeared. She thought she could hear him talking, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying. She was wracked from head to toe by a shudder so intense she felt that her spine was rattling and all the bones in her body had been dislocated.

  She heard him say, ‘Bine, there’s nobody coming, do it now!’

  She looked up to try and see who he was talking to but as she raised her head, freezing cold petrol was splashed into her face, stinging her eyes and temporarily blinding her. She gave a thin, choking squeal and raised her hands to cover her eyes, but then even more petrol was emptied all over her, soaking the scarf that was wrapped around her head, as well as her baby blanket and her duvet and the sleeves of her coat.

  She coughed and coughed and spat out petrol and then she groped out sideways for the door frame, so that she could lever herself up on to her feet. She was too weak, though, and her right knee gave way, and she pitched over on to the pavement, jarring her shoulder.

  Virgin Mary, help me. Virgin Mary lift me up in your arms and carry me away from here, to somewhere warm and silent and safe.

  She started to drag herself across the pavement, blinking furiously to clear her eyes, even though that made them sting even more. But she had crawled less than two metres when a lighted match was dropped on to her back. With a soft whoomph, she exploded into flame.

  For a split second, she could see the flames that were burning her face, flickering blue and yellow in front of her. Then she was overwhelmed by the most terrible agony she had ever experienced. She had burned her hand on an iron once, but this was the same searing sensation all over her body, and she could hear her ears crackling and feel the skin on her face shrivelling up, like crumpled cellophane.

  Somehow in her blindness and her pain she managed to push both hands against the pavement and force herself up so that she was kneeling. Then she flailed out with her right hand and gripped the drainpipe that ran down the wall beside her – pulling herself, blazing, on to her feet. She tried to scream for somebody to help her but when she took a breath she sucked in flames, which scorched her tongue and seared the back of her throat.

  Jerkily, stiff-legged, she started to walk towards St Patrick’s Street, although she no longer knew where she was going, and she was both blind and deaf. With each step, though, the pain was gradually easing and she was beginning to feel numb, which not only gave her relief, but hope, as if she might be saved after all. She didn’t realize that her nerve endings had been burned away, and that she would never be able to feel anything, ever again.

  Passers-by and taxi-drivers stared in horror as she came staggering out of Cook Street and crossed the pavement, a black stick-figure inside a tall rippling column of fire. She reached the kerb and then she toppled face-first into the road, only five metres in front of a bus. The bus stopped and the driver jumped down with a fire extinguisher. He sprayed her from side to side with foam as she lay in the gutter, with only a few flames dancing from her burning hair, like a living crown.

  A small crowd gathered around her and the two gardaí who had talked to her earlier came running across the road from Opera Lane. The woman garda knelt down beside her but if Loredana hadn’t still been wearing the charred remnants of her yellow scarf around her neck she wouldn’t have recognized immediately who she was. Smoke was still rising from her body and blowing in the chilly wind across St Patrick’s Street.

  A big-bellied priest came hurrying up, his white hair flapping. With a deep grunt he eased himself down on to one knee beside the woman garda and made the sign of the cross over Loredana’s blackened forehead.

  ‘Through this holy unction may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou hast committed,’ he intoned. He was so shocked that was all he could manage to say. He took off his thick-framed spectacles and pressed his hand over his mouth with his hand as if he were going to vomit, and he couldn’t even bring himself to choke out a last ‘Amen’.

  39

  Katie heard her oven ping to tell her that it was heated up enough to put in her individual chicken-and-mushroom pie, but as she walked through to the kitchen her phone rang.

  She turned around and went back into the living room, almost tripping over Barney and Foltchain who had been following her into the kitchen in the hope that she might be giving them a few dog treats each.

  It was Detective Sergeant Begley on the phone.

  ‘You’ll be seeing this on the TV news in half an hour, ma’am. A rough sleeper’s been burned to death on Pana. A young woman, and it looks like somebody’s doused her in petrol and set her alight.’

  ‘Mother of God. When did this happen?’

  ‘Less than half an hour ago. And here’s the thing: she was sleeping in the same doorway where that Matty Donoghue fellow got himself killed, and where his girlfriend disappeared from.’

  ‘Do we know who she is?’

  ‘Not so far. She had no identimication on her at all. But two officers on foot patrol stopped and talked to her only about an hour before she was burned. They guessed that she was Eastern European by her accent. They offered to help her to find a hostel for the night because she wasn’t looking too clever, but she told them no, she was waiting on a friend. The officers reckoned that she was actually waiting on her dealer.’

  ‘Where’s her body now?’

  ‘Still on Pana. Covered up and cordoned off, of course. There’s three technical experts here already, taking pictures and all, and Bill Phinner’s called in that burns specialist from the Mercy, what’s his name, Michael Cosgrove, isn’t it?’

  ‘Have you seen the girl’s body yourself?’

  ‘I have, yes. The last time I saw someone as badly cremated as that was when that Circle K tanker crashed on the Magic Roundabout, you remember, the week before Christmas. But it was definitely petrol that she was burned with, you can smell it, like.’

  ‘Any witnesses?’

  ‘Not to her being set alight, no. But at least twenty or thirty people saw her coming out of Cook Street, all on fire. Two witnesses took video of it, on their phones.’

  ‘What about her possessions?’

  ‘She didn’t have much. A spare pair of jeans and some underwear and a packet of cheese-and-onion Taytos and a couple of cans of Red Bull. Oh, and a glass crack pipe. They’ve all been photographed and bagged up and ready to go back to the lab. There was a coffee cup, too, with about seven euros in cash in it, so it’s fairly certain she was begging, like.’

  Katie sat down on the couch and turned off the sound on her television. Barney and Foltchain came up close to her and stood staring at her as if they wanted to know if they could be of any help.

  ‘Did you see the back of her neck, Sean?’ she asked. ‘Is there any indication that her killers might have been trying to drill into her brain before they set her on fire?’

  ‘No, I could see no sign of that,’ said Detective Sergeant Begley. ‘I asked Declan the forensic fellow who was giving her the once-over to take a sconce for me, but he said her head’s burned far too bad to tell for sure. Her skin’s flaking off and her hair’s all burned to a crisp and he didn’t want to mess up any evidence by poking around too much, do you know what I mean? We’ll have to wait for the autopsy so.’

  ‘Fair play,’ said Katie. ‘But even if somebody did try to kill her with a drill, they
obviously didn’t succeed – otherwise they wouldn’t have needed to pour petrol all over her and set her alight, would they? On top of that, we still haven’t identified that man who was burned at Alexandra Road. Bill Phinner says that they found a grey leather jacket hanging up in the room with him, so it’s pure possible that it could have been Lupul. And if Lupul’s dead, who’s going around killing rough sleepers? Or maybe nobody is. Maybe this was just a one-off. A jealous boyfriend or a drug-dealer she owed money to.’

  ‘That’s a possibility, ma’am, sure. But your plan to haul in all the rough sleepers – I’d say that’s looking more and more like something we need to do asap – if only to save any more of these poor streals from being massacrated.’

  ‘It’s almost all set up, Sean. Listen – give me a ring if anything new comes up. Don’t worry if it’s late. Otherwise I’ll catch you tomorrow afternoon when you get back in.’

  Katie put down the phone. After hearing about Loredana being burned to death, she suddenly didn’t feel at all hungry any more, even though she knew she ought to eat something. She found the events of the past few days deeply unsettling – mostly because there was no way of telling for certain if they were connected in any way or not. Vasile Deac, the informant, had been drilled in the brainstem just like Gearoid Ó Beargha and Matty Donoghue, and he had been carried dead from Lupul’s house on Alexandra Road, so the logical conclusion was that Lupul or one of his henchmen had murdered them all. But who had burned down Lupul’s house? And was it Lupul whose burned body they had found in the first-floor bedroom? And who had poured petrol over that homeless girl in Cook Street tonight?

  Katie knew that she could easily persuade herself that the murders and the fire were all interlocking pieces in the same puzzle, but she was always reluctant to jump to conclusions before she had irrefutable evidence. She had so many other unresolved questions nagging at her, too. For instance – who had given Saoirse Duffy her fatal dose of fentanyl, and why? And how was she going to present her case to the circuit court against Eamon Buckley and his assistant? And what relationship did Eamon Buckley have with Lupul, if any, apart from removing Vasile’s body and shutting it up in his fridge? How had Ana-Maria’s mother’s ring turned up in Eamon Buckley’s mince, and her necklace in the street where Bowser had been shot?

  She knew she was doing everything she reasonably could to find out the answers to all these conundrums, but they were making her feel tense and frustrated and worst of all, impatient.

  She went over to her drinks table and poured herself a large Smirnoff. Then she went into the kitchen, opened the fridge and helped herself to three lumps of ice. She looked at the individual chicken-and-mushroom pie and decided that she had better bake it, although it made her feel even lonelier than she usually did. There was every chance that Conor would be back home tomorrow, and even if he was bringing even more problems with him, at least he would be somebody to talk to in the evening, and somebody to hold her in the middle of the night when the turmoil in her head made it so difficult for her to sleep.

  She just hoped he wouldn’t start nagging her about the McQuaide sisters and their puppy farm again. It was difficult to know what action she would be able to take against them just yet, especially since they had promised that they would clean up Foggy Fields and abide by ISPCA guidelines. She had been thinking of sending Detective O’Crean up to Ballynahina to see if he could track down the sham-feen who had assaulted Conor, but so far she hadn’t been able to spare him for long enough to sit around The Fir Tree pub at Watergrasshill all day eavesdropping on local gossip.

  She managed to eat half her pie while watching After the Headlines – Charlie Bird. Then she showered and went to bed. She fell asleep almost immediately, but she was woken up after twenty minutes by a nightmare about her lover John. He was outside her bedroom window, banging on it and shouting for her to help him, although she could barely hear him. Then he suddenly dropped out of sight.

  She sat up, clutching her duvet tightly. The house was silent, except for Barney snoring in the kitchen.

  ‘John,’ she said, as if there were some way that saying his name could bring him back again.

  40

  By the middle of the morning, Katie had finalized her arrangements for gathering up all the rough sleepers in the city centre. Uniformed gardaí had been patrolling around the streets all morning, discreetly noting down the locations of as many beggars and homeless as they could find. With that information, Superintendent Pearse and Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick had drawn up a schematic, which they could use to pick up at least twenty-three of them in rapid succession.

  Katie went down to the squad room to give a briefing to the thirty-five uniformed officers who would carry out the operation. She had named it Operation Labre, after Saint Benedict Joseph Labre, the patron saint of homeless people. She was accompanied by Superintendent Pearse, Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick, Kyna and Detective O’Donovan. Chief Superintendent O’Kane joined them, too, but sat at the back to listen and didn’t contribute, although he didn’t once take his eyes off Katie, and smiled at her and raised an eyebrow whenever she looked in his direction.

  ‘I can’t emphasize enough that it’s vital that you treat these rough sleepers with care and respect,’ she said. ‘We’re trying to persuade them to co-operate with us, but most of them are drug addicts or alcoholics or mentally disturbed and almost all of them are guilty of petty theft or antisocial behaviour, so it’s quite natural that they don’t regard the Garda as their bosom pals.’

  Sergeant O’Farrell put up his hand. ‘I can’t really see any of them wanting to be hauled in, ma’am. What if they flat-out refuse to come with us?’

  ‘I’m not so sure that they will refuse, Ryan. You know how cold it is outside and the forecast says it’s going to be lashing later on. You’ll be telling them that we’re offering them a clean bed for as long as they need it, and hot showers, and that they’ll be fed three meals a day and given free medical treatment – and that will include controlled amounts of drugs. We’re not expecting any addicts among them to go cold turkey. You’ll also be telling them that we’re going to protect them from any gowl who’s been controlling them or taking money from them. Later, of course – once they’re settled and rested and their bellies are full – we’ll be asking them to tell us who their ringmasters are, if they have them, and most importantly where we can track them down.’

  ‘But what if they’re not persuaded? What if they tell us to go up the yard and that’s an end to it?’

  ‘In that case you’ll have to use force, so long as you’re careful not to hurt them or injure them in any way. As you well know, it isn’t against the law to sleep rough, although plenty of politicians have been calling for it to be made illegal. But we can legitimately lift rough sleepers off the streets on suspicion of trespass – for instance, if they’re camping on private property such as bank doorways or the waterways under the city’s bridges. We have the same authority if we want to question them about drug-dealing or antisocial behaviour, such as aggressive begging or defaecating in public places.

  ‘I’m hoping, though, that on a bitter wet night like tonight, most of them will be tempted by a warm bed at St Dunstan’s hall and a decent hot meal – as well as physical protection from their ringmasters.’

  ‘What about their possessions, or any dogs they might have with them?’ asked Inspector O’Rourke.

  ‘I’ve arranged for three follow-up vans that will collect and seal and label their bedding and their belongings. There are only two dogs that we know of, and they’ll be picked up by a handler from the dog unit.’

  ‘How long are we going to be able to hold them?’

  ‘Technically, we’re not holding them, we’re simply giving them some humane relief from sleeping outside in the middle of winter. They’ll be free to leave whenever they want to, just like anybody else we fetch in for questioning. But we’re not going to tell them that, unless they ask, and I’m confident that they’l
l come to trust us enough to give us the information we’re looking for.’

  ‘Supposing they do, and because of that information we haul in their ringmaster or ringmasters plural, and successfully prosecute them. What do we do with them then?’

  ‘Any non-natives we’ll be after deporting back to their countries of origin. As far as Irish natives are concerned, that’s up to the council. But even if they have to go back on to the streets, they’ll be far safer than they were before, and they won’t be having to hand over the money they make from begging to some gangster, on pain of being beaten up.’

  Sergeant Rooney put up his hand. ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, ma’am, there’s a whole lot of people going to say that this is one hell of a trick to play on some poor vulnerable down-and-outs. A bed and a hot meal as the price for ratting on their bosses.’

  ‘I fully appreciate that, sergeant,’ said Katie. ‘I expect His Holiness the Bishop and some of the homeless charity workers are going to be raging. But we’ve seen at least five murders now in the past few days, as well as two women gone missing, presumed dead. I know that Cork city to our discredit has the highest homicide rate in the country but it’s only January and we’ve only one more murder to go to reach our five-year average of eight. All these murders appear to be related to begging rings, and even if we are playing a trick, it’s a trick that could save more rough sleepers from being drilled to death or shot or set on fire.’