Mathew McElvey, the press officer, raised his hand too. ‘DS Maguire and I have already been discussing how we’re going to present this to the media. We’ll be emphasizing that Operation Labre is another initiative in Chief Superintendent O’Kane’s PR effort to win back public confidence in the Garda. A random act of kindness to the homeless. We won’t be mentioning that we’ll be questioning them to discover the location of their ringmasters.’
Superintendent Pearse stood up and said, ‘H-hour is twenty-two-thirty. You’ll be divided into five teams of seven with two squad cars, an SUV, and a van for each team. Sergeant O’Farrell has all the details on how you’ll be organized and which teams will pick up which rough sleepers from where. Any questions?’
The briefing ended, and most of the gardaí drifted out of the squad room to go and get themselves some lunch. Brendan came up to Katie as she was putting away her notes, and said, ‘If you can pull this off, you know, you could change the whole way that this country treats its homeless.’
‘Oh, you think so? I think most of our TDs are too hard-hearted for that.’
‘You’re one in a million, Katie, do you know that?’
‘I’m taking a serious risk, sir, because I don’t see any other way of putting a stop to these begging rings. I’m hoping it’s going to work, but on the other hand it could be the biggest public relations disaster that Anglesea Street has ever known.’
Brendan smiled at her. ‘We’ll see,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile, I have my bet on Kathleen Maguire to beat all runners.’
*
Early in the afternoon, along with Detectives Walsh and Cullen, Katie walked up to the newly refurbished criminal court buildings at the top end of Anglesea Street to present the book of evidence against Eamon Buckley and Thomas Barry. Since they were charged with an indictable offence, their hearing was deferred until the first sitting of the circuit court on 5 February, and they were both remanded in custody. Standing in the dock, Eamon Buckley shouted out, ‘It’s a fecking joke, this! A fecking charade!’ while Thomas Barry burst into tears. Both were promptly manhandled out of the courtroom and down to the cells.
On her way back to the station, Katie received a text from Conor. Mr Sandhu was allowing him to go home at two-thirty p.m., once Mr O’Connell, the maxillofacial surgeon, had taken another look at him. If the scumbags of Cork give you a couple of hours’ peace, he had texted, do you think you can pick me up?
I’ll be there XX, she texted back.
When she returned to her office, she found Detective Inspector Mulliken waiting for her.
‘What’s the story, Tony?’ she asked him. ‘Do you fancy a coffee? I’ve a terrible throat on me from talking all morning. Moirin!’
‘I’ll go for a cup of the scaldy if that’s all right,’ said Detective Inspector Mulliken. ‘And you’ll be pleased to hear that I have a result from the ambulance station. The Chief Ambulance Officer has just PDF’d me the pharmaceutical records from all his rigs over the past seven days.’
‘Was he grudging about it?’
‘Not at all. I told him that cock-and-bull story about fake drugs from Eastern Europe and he couldn’t have been more helpful. It seems like all the opioids that are carried in HSE ambulances are kept in a sealed box, which only the paramedics themselves can open. At the end of their shift they hand over the box to be kept in a security cage, because addicts sometimes try to prise the doors off ambulances to get at the drugs. If a paramedic team use any opioids while they’re out on a shout, they hand the box at the end of their shift to the hospital pharmacy, who supply them with a fresh one.’
‘And?’
‘Each box contains morphine, atevan, diazepam, dilaudid and fentanyl. In the past three days, only two paramedic teams used fentanyl – one for that traffic accident up at Blarney on Monday evening when that auld wan got knocked off his bike by a tractor and had half his leg torn off. The other team claim that they “accidentally dropped and broke” a fentanyl citrate phial while checking their supplies.’
‘I see. Do they have names, these clumsy paramedics?’
‘The driver’s name is Darragh Ó Dálaigh. His partner’s name is Brianna Cusack.’
‘Brianna… that was the name of the paramedic that Dr O’Keefe and I found in Saoirse Duffy’s room, holding up a pillow. She said she was only going to prop Saoirse up in bed, but if that was all she intended to do, she looked fierce guilty about it. If I’d seen her doing that in a play, on the stage, I’d have said that she definitely had it in mind to smother the poor girl.’
‘So what are you going to do? Fetch her in for questioning?’
Moirin brought in a cup of cappuccino for Katie and a mug of tea for Detective Inspector Mulliken, as well as a plate of shortbread biscuits. Katie stirred her coffee for a while, thinking, and then she said, ‘Of course, even if this Brianna was that nurse, and even if she did inject Saoirse Duffy with fentanyl, all she has to do is deny it. We have the CCTV footage, sure, but it’s far too unclear to make a positive ID. Before we fetch her in for questioning, we need to try to discover if she had any kind of a motive.’
‘So how do you suggest we go about finding that out? Always assuming that it was her.’
‘I think I’ll start by sending Cailin down to make friends with her partner. Those paramedic teams, they go through some desperate moments of stress together, don’t they, when they’re coping with a car crash or a fire or a stabbing or something like that? In between the stress, though, they have pure long stretches of boredom. Don’t tell me that while they’re waiting to be called out they don’t chat together and share a few personal details about themselves.’
‘Well, Cailin’s good at the chat, no doubt about that.’
‘Exactly. She looks so young and innocent, like. Hardly anybody ever guesses that she’s a detective, and she’s equally cute at wheedling information out of people as Kyna. She’d hadn’t been here long, do you remember, only a couple of months, but she coaxed that AIB bank manager into telling her that he’d been having an affair with his secretary and fiddling the bank’s receipts so that he could take her to Santa Ponsa.’
‘Right you are, then,’ said Detective Inspector Mulliken. ‘I’ll see if I can track down where he usually goes after the end of his shift, this Darragh. I know that some of the paramedics drink at The Hawthorn in Togher when they’re off duty because it’s not too far off.’
He finished his tea and stood up, but before he left he said, ‘The Moloneys – did you have the chance to look over that jobs book yet? Before we go any further with it, I’d like your opinion on what charges we should be bringing, and whether you think the evidence we have will stand up in court. It’s pure sensitive, the whole case, what with Billy Moloney being so close to Councillor McVeigh.’
‘Yes, I’m concerned myself about that particular connection,’ Katie told him. ‘It’s going to be kid gloves time, no mistake about that.’
Katie knew that the head of the Moloney family was a lifelong friend of Councillor John McVeigh, who was deputy chair of the Cork City Joint Policing Committee. Councillor McVeigh had never made a secret of his strong Republican views, which was one of the reasons he was so popular in Cork. His grandfather Tom McVeigh had been a member of the Anti-Treaty IRA when they had taken over Collins Barracks in Cork in 1922 and tried to hold out against the National Army. He had been shot dead during the fighting in the hills around Douglas.
Councillor McVeigh still gave fiercely Republican interviews, and frequently lauded his grandfather’s bravery. ‘Michael Collins betrayed Ireland, but not Tom McVeigh!’
‘We’ll just have to be careful that it doesn’t look like we’re persecuting IRA sympathizers simply for their politics,’ said Katie.
‘Well – you’ll see from the jobs book that so far the Moloneys insist that they knew nothing whatsoever about the guns that were found underneath their barn, and they totally deny any knowledge of explosives that might be stored away somewhere else on their farm.�
��
‘I’m going home this afternoon, Tony. I’ll take the book with me and read as much as I have time to. Once I’ve done that, though, I’ll have to talk it over with Chief Superintendent O’Kane. He’s on the council’s Policing Committee too, along with Councillor McVeigh, and the last thing he’ll want to be doing is putting the committee’s nose out of joint.’
She couldn’t help thinking that was an ironic thing to say, considering that she was going to the hospital now to pick up Conor.
41
Conor was waiting for Katie in the reception area at CUH, and when she came in he stood up at once and held out his arms, almost as if he couldn’t believe that she had kept her promise and actually turned up to collect him. Apart from the white plaster covering the bridge of his nose, he was already beginning to look like his normal self. His bruises were fading and his lips were no longer split and swollen and he was already growing chestnut-coloured prickles on his chin.
They held each other tight for a few moments, and Conor kissed her, first on the forehead and then on the lips.
‘I knew you’d come,’ he told her hoarsely. Ever since he had been beaten up he had been forced to breathe through his mouth.
‘Of course I’ve come. You didn’t think that I wouldn’t?’
‘It’s not every day you’re asked to give a lift to a eunuch.’
She took his arm and together they walked out of the hospital doors. The rain that had been forecast for this afternoon had just begun, pattering all around them like an audience that couldn’t quite decide whether to start clapping or not.
‘You’re not to use that word again,’ Katie told him, as she unlocked her car.
‘What, eunuch? Why not? It’s true. It’s what I am.’
‘You’re not. You’ve been badly injured, that’s all, and we’re going to do everything we can to make you better.’
‘There is no way to make me better. You heard what Mr Sandhu said.’
‘Then we’ll have to make the best of what we have. That’s what my da always used to say.’
‘And look what happened to your da. He ended up doing the riverdance.’
Katie steered out of the hospital car park and turned south towards the Bishopstown Road. ‘Don’t make fun, Con,’ she said. ‘My da was pure mortified by what he’d done. He couldn’t see any other way out of his guilt than drowning himself.’
‘I’m sorry, darling. It’s just that if I don’t make fun I’ll break down and cry.’
Katie reached across and laid her hand on his thigh for a moment. The rain was easing off a little as they reached the South Ring Road, and the windscreen wipers started to squeak.
‘Big boys are allowed to cry if they want to,’ she told him. ‘And who knows – a few tears might water that stubble of yours, and make your beard grow back a bit quicker.’
Conor shook his head. ‘Do you know what you are, Katie Maguire? You’re a witch! The best kind of witch, don’t get me wrong, but a witch all the same.’
*
They were able to spend three hours together at home before Katie had to go back to Anglesea Street to start off Operation Labre.
Barney and Foltchain were delighted to have Conor back, although Foltchain sniffed suspiciously at the gauze padding and the plaster on his nose. Conor lit the fire in the living room while Katie made cheese and tomato rolls for them, and then they sat on the couch, saying very little, but basking in the warmth of the fire and the contentment of being back together again.
‘You’ll have to forgive me if I do some reading,’ said Katie, when they had finished eating. ‘I have this investigation to catch up on. The Moloneys. They have a farm up near Ballyhooly and we found some guns under their barn.’
‘The Moloneys? You’re codding me, aren’t you? I know the Moloneys. Their German Shepherd went missing about a year- and-a-half ago and I found him for them. He’d been hit by a car and the car driver took him off to the vet because he didn’t know who he belonged to, and when he was well enough he’d taken him home. But you say they had guns? I mean, serious?’
‘Five automatic rifles and three shotguns. We were tipped off by one of their neighbours after he and the Moloneys had some bad-tempered dispute about boundary lines. The neighbour also hinted that they might have Semtex hidden on their farm somewhere.’
‘That’s unbelievable. They seemed like pleasant enough people to me. They paid me €150 for finding their dog for them, and they gave me a couple of cabbages, too.’
‘Well, if they do have explosives hidden anywhere, I should think they’ve been hidden for at least twenty years – probably since the Good Friday Agreement.’
‘Doesn’t Semtex have a shelf life?’
‘No. It doesn’t degrade any more than a car tyre would. Car tyres and Semtex are both made of roughly the same things – rubber, polymers, stuff like that, except Semtex has explosive instead of carbon. About three years ago we found nearly a quarter of a ton of explosives stored in an old cowshed in Rathcormac. That dated back more than sixty years, and it was all still live. Half the village would have been blown to kingdom come if that had gone off.’
Conor pulled a face but said nothing. Katie opened up Detective Inspector Mulliken’s jobs book and started reading it, and he sat beside her with his hand on her shoulder watching television. After about ten minutes, though, he turned around and peered out of the window.
‘Look – it’s only soft rain now, if it’s raining at all. Maybe I’ll take the dogs for a scove.’
‘You won’t be long, will you? I have to go back at six at the latest.’
‘No, no, I won’t be long. I need to get myself some fresh air, that’s all, after being cooped up in that hospital. I need to have a think, too.’
‘A think? What about?’
‘I don’t know. Everything. You, and me. My dog detective business. Everything.’
‘Con, I still love you. I’m not going to leave you dangling.’
Conor let out a sharp, sardonic laugh. ‘That’s a grand promise to make to a man with no balls!’
‘Con—’
He leaned forward and kissed her. ‘Don’t worry about me, darling. I’m bound to be kind of bitter from time to time. You know yourself what life can take away from you when you least expect it. Your looks, and then your friends, and then the ones you love. If life was a person, it’d be a thief.’
*
Darragh Ó Dálaigh wasn’t hard to track down. Detective Walsh found a clear picture of him on the NAS website, from the time last summer when he had been awarded an HSE certificate of excellence. Once she knew what he looked like, she went down to the Southside ambulance station, pretending she was delivering a parcel from Amazon that he had ordered. Another paramedic told her that he had finished his shift about an hour earlier, but that he almost always stopped for a scoop or two at Flannery’s Bar before he went home to his sister’s house by the Lough. If he wasn’t there, she might be able to find him in The Harp.
She came across him in Flannery’s, a shabby-looking pub on the Glasheen Road painted raspberry pink. He was sitting on a stool at the end of the bar with a half-finished pint of Murphy’s in front of him. The pub was gloomy and almost empty, but there was music playing and Darragh was snorting with laughter at something the barman had just told him.
Detective Walsh sat up at the bar about three stools away from him and asked for a Woody’s pink grapefruit.
‘You’re over eighteen are you, love?’ the barman asked her. She rolled up her eyes, took out her driving licence and held it up in front of his nose.
‘I’ll have a couple of chunks of ice in that, too, and two straws,’ she told him.
She took two or three sips of her drink before she turned to Darragh and said, ‘I reck you, don’t I?’
‘I dunno, girl. Do you? Where would that be from, then?’
‘You’re an ambulance driver, isn’t that right?’
‘I am.’
‘You came out
when my grandpa had a heart attack last year. You only saved his life, like. I never had the chance to thank you, you and your partner. You were brilliant. He’s passed now but he would have passed a lot sooner if it hadn’t been for you.’
‘Where was that, then?’
‘Outside the Spar shop at Ballyphehane. I don’t suppose you remember, the number of the times you must get called out. I bet you can’t tell one auld wan with a dicky heart from the next.’
‘No… I’m fair sure that I remember. Give me a minute so and it’ll come back to me.’
‘Come here – I have to buy you a drink, like. You more than deserve it. It’s a pity your partner isn’t here, too, she was amazing doing all that PRC.’
‘CPR.’
‘Yes, that too. Listen, what’s your name? Mine’s Cailin. Barman, do you want to pour this good fellow a pint of whatever he’s drinking?’
Detective Walsh bought Darragh a pint of Murphy’s and then they sat down together at one of the tables at the back of the bar. Darragh told her his name and how long he’d been working for the National Ambulance Service and how he’d been engaged once but his fiancée had broken it off the week before the wedding.
‘After that I never found anyone else I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, like.’
‘What about your partner?’
‘Brianna? Oh, she’s good-looking enough, and we get along all right. At least we did at first, but a few months ago she started to have personal problems. These days she spends a lot of time all wrapped up in a world of her own. When she does talk to me, she’s kind of sarcastic, which she never used to be.’
‘That’s a shame. What sort of problems does she have? Do you know?’
‘I don’t like to be too nosy, like, but I’m fair sure that it’s money. She has a boyfriend who’s a bit of a gambler and from what she’s told me I’ve put two and two together. It sounds like he’s got himself into the height of loberty.’
Begging to Die Page 33
