Cailin nodded understandingly. ‘I remember my da lost his job once, and the stress it put on him, it was unbelievable. While he was still in work, he was the sweetest fellow you could ever meet, but as soon as he was unemployed and he started running out of money, you couldn’t go near him, he was that moody. I’ve no proof of it, but I think he was stealing stuff, too, just to make ends meet.’
‘How about a refill?’ said Darragh, pointing to her empty glass.
‘No, let me get this,’ said Cailin. ‘It’s the least I can do to repay you. You gave my grandpa seven more months of life and you can’t put a price on that.’
They had another drink and carried on talking. Cailin left the subject of Brianna alone for a while, and concentrated on Darragh himself, and whether he was happy. He confessed that he was lonely at times, especially in the evenings, and that he was worried that he was growing too old to find a wife.
‘I’m only forty-seven, like, but every time I meet a girl I like the look of, she’s already wed, or living with somebody, and I don’t fancy them online dating services – that Kindling or whatever you call it. Christ knows what kind of a munter you’re going to end up with.’
He confessed, too, that he was often traumatized by the accidents that he and Brianna had to attend.
‘You always have to be totally calm and professional, because that’s your job and that’s what you’re trained to do and people like your grandpa are depending on you to save their lives. But when you see some toddler who’s been smashed into a pulp in a car seat, or some farmhand who’s got his arm all tangled up in a combine harvester, or a young woman who’s been floating around in Tivoli Harbour for a week – all green and blown up twice the size like a fecking dolphin. Well – it’s not easy to get pictures like that out of your mind. Here – sorry – I don’t mean to give you the gawks.’
‘No, not at all, Darragh,’ said Cailin. ‘How about Brianna? Does she cope with the accidents any better, or does she get upset the same as you?’
‘I reckon she’s tougher, to tell you the truth. A whole lot tougher. I think women generally are, do you know what I mean? Like they have to deal with the monthlies and having babies and all that kind of malarkey. Some of the things that would make men pass out – well, women just take them in their stride. It’s good that they do, because we’ve been having a fierce bad run of fatalities lately, me and Brianna – you know, quite a few of the people we’ve been picking up have been giving up the ghost before we could manage to get them to hospital. Many more than normal. I told her the other day that I’ve been feeling more like I’m driving a fecking funeral car than an ambulance.’
‘Really? How many deaths altogether?’
‘Seven since the beginning of December. And that’s just us. Me and Bree.’
‘Seven. Wow.’ Cailin didn’t tell Darragh that she already knew the statistics for fatal accidents in Cork for the past six months. They had been unusually high, but up until now she hadn’t been able to tell how many of those accident victims had died in ambulances on the way to the Mercy or CUH, or how that figure was broken down between individual rigs.
‘Sure like, they all died of natural causes,’ said Darragh. ‘But it’s like the lotto, I suppose. Some people’s numbers come up, week after week. Other people never get nothing.’
‘What does Brianna think about it? I mean, she was trying to save their lives, those seven people. She must feel desperate.’
‘She hasn’t been saying too much these past couple of months, to be honest with you. I think it’s like I said, and women are tougher. They can give birth to life, so maybe they’re more philumosophical about the end of life. One door opens and another door closes, like.’
‘Let me get you another,’ said Cailin.
‘Holy Saint Patrick, I’m going to be wrecked at this rate. But all right, then, sure, why not? It’d be rude to refuse a pretty young woman such as yourself.’
‘Now then, Darragh,’ smiled Cailin. ‘I have a boyfriend already. He’s going to be fierce jealous if he knows that I’ve been spending the afternoon drinking with a handsome paramedic.’
42
By ten forty-five that evening, Operation Labre was all set to go. Eight squad cars, three large vans and four unmarked SUVs had been lined up along Anglesea Street and now they all started up and drove off towards their prearranged pick-up points in the city centre. A strong wind had risen and the rain was blowing across the streets in curtains.
Katie sat in the front passenger seat of a silver Toyota Land Cruiser with Detective O’Donovan driving. Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick, Detective Sergeant Kyna Ni Nuallán and Detective Cullen sat in the back. Katie was wearing her black raincoat with the pointy hood, but underneath she had strapped on her ballistic vest. They all knew that this was going to be a highly unpredictable night.
‘I’m praying to the Lord that none of the rough sleepers gets hurt tonight,’ said Katie. ‘Otherwise we’re going to be all over the front pages in the morning and for all the wrong reasons. You know how quick the media can turn you from a hero into a villain.’
They drove along South Mall in a convoy with two squad cars in front of them and a large van bringing up the rear. Once they had picked up the rough sleepers, another van would follow to bag up and take away their belongings. Katie had been anxious to avoid any delay or dithering or arguing about their possessions on the street, or to give them the chance to go for any knives or other weapons they might have hidden among their bedding. Only two weeks ago they had arrested a rough sleeper and found a plastic bottle of battery acid folded into his blanket – ‘in case any scummer tries to hobble my hard-earned grade.’
Katie turned around and saw a second convoy turning up Oliver Plunkett Street, where three homeless men had been seen sleeping rough outside the post office. Her own convoy continued along Grand Parade and then turned into Paul Street. For the first hundred metres Paul Street was only wide enough for single-file traffic, but then it opened out into a red-brick plaza in front of the Tesco superstore. During the afternoon, a Garda patrol had noted at least five rough sleepers in the doorways around the plaza, both men and women. Not only could they find shelter here, but Tesco was open until ten p.m., which meant there was always a chance of being given extra change by late-night shoppers.
The two squad cars stopped a few metres short of the plaza, so that the rough sleepers wouldn’t be able to see them arrive. Detective O’Donovan steered Katie’s SUV into Saints Peter and Paul Place and parked in front of them. The large van drew up and blocked the road behind them. The instant the squad cars came to a standstill, their doors were flung open, and the van doors, too, and eleven uniformed officers scrambled out. They ran around the corner into the plaza and headed for the rough sleepers, who were huddled in the corner under blue plastic sheeting and makeshift tents. Katie jumped down from the SUV, tugged up the hood of her raincoat and followed them.
There were seven rough sleepers altogether – four men, a middle-aged woman and two young girls. The officers dragged the plastic sheeting off them, and hauled them to their feet in the rain. They looked bewildered rather than angry, and Katie could tell that three of the men and the middle-aged woman were drunk, and that the two young girls were almost certainly stoned.
Only one of the men seemed to be sober, although he kept lurching to one side and it took two gardaí to hold his arms to stop him from falling over.
‘What in the name of feck are you doing?’ he demanded. ‘I’ve done nothing at all wrong, for feck’s sake. I’m only trying to get myself a decent night’s sleep, for the love of Christ.’
The lurching man had straw-like shoulder-length hair like a scarecrow and he was wearing a filthy beige tracksuit with a wide wet stain between his legs. In spite of his dishevelled appearance and a rather large nose, Katie saw that he was actually quite good-looking and probably ten years younger than he seemed.
She went up to him and said, as gently as she could, ‘You’re
not in any trouble, sir, and you’re not under arrest. We’ve come to offer you shelter out of the rain, and a decent meal.’
The man blinked at her uncomprehendingly, as if he suspected that she could be some ghostly apparition – a sister of the Dullahan, perhaps, the headless horseman who rode around Ireland to round up the dying and the dead, whipping them into line with a human spine.
‘Shelter?’ he spat. ‘What kind of a shelter? Where? What? And what about our things? I have a hang sangridge and a napple there all ready for my breakfast, so I do.’
‘Don’t worry, we’ll collect all your belongings and fetch them along after you. If you want to know, we’re taking you to St Dunstan’s church hall in Mayfield. There’s beds waiting for you and a change of clothes and medicine too if you have need of it.’
The other three men and the middle-aged woman and the two young girls were already allowing themselves to be ushered around the corner by the uniformed gardaí and into the waiting van. Two of the gardaí were picking up their clothes and their bedding and stuffing them into large see-through polythene bags.
But the lurching man twisted himself away from the officers who were holding him upright, and shouted, ‘No! I’m not fecking going fecking nowhere! I can’t! I’ll be fecking cremated if I do! Leave me alone, would you? Leave me alone!’
Katie reached out and gripped his hand. He staggered back and collided with the wall behind him, but she took hold of his elbow as well to steady him, and to stop him from sliding down to the pavement.
‘Listen – you don’t have to be scared,’ she told him. ‘We won’t let anybody hurt you, I promise! That’s another reason we’ve come to take you to St Dunstan’s, to take you out of harm’s way.’
The lurching man stared at her. His chest was rising and falling and his wild hair was sparkling with raindrops. He licked his lips, and tried to speak, but he couldn’t.
‘I mean it,’ said Katie. ‘We know that you have to give up some of your money every day, and we know that you have to do it under threat of being beaten, or worse. But I swear to you on my life that we’re not going to let that happen to you. From now on, you’re going to be safe.’
She paused for a few moments, and then she said, ‘Tell me your name.’
The lurching man closed his eyes, and staggered again. Then, without opening his eyes, he yanked his hand free from Katie’s, reached into his sleeve and pulled out a long kitchen knife.
‘Watch out!’ shouted the garda who was standing close behind Katie’s left shoulder.
The lurching man slashed wildly at Katie’s face and the tip of the knife slit her left cheek, only about three centimetres below her eye. Katie ducked down to the right and snatched his wrist with both hands, bending it back so hard that his tendons crackled and at least two of his bones were dislocated. He let out a strange honking roar, more like a sea lion than a man, and dropped the knife with a clatter on to the ground.
‘You fecking witch!’ he screamed at her. ‘You’ve busted my fecking wrist, you fecking witch!’
‘Take him in, would you?’ said Katie to the two gardaí. They roughly seized his arms and hauled him out of his doorway, but Katie added, ‘Now, then – go easy on him, lads. Go easy. We came here to make his life better, not worse.’ Then, to the lurching man, ‘You still didn’t tell me your name, sir.’
‘Go feck yourself, you witch.’
‘Well, whatever. But we’ll see that your wrist gets treated. And we’ll also make sure that nobody else gets to hurt you.’
‘Why the feck should I be scared of some fecking Romanian when you’ve just busted my fecking wrist, you fecking witch!’
Kyna came back around the corner. She had been helping the middle-aged woman and the two young girls to climb up into the van, since the middle-aged woman was so wrecked she could hardly stand and the two young girls had kept stumbling and collapsing into helpless giggles every time they tried to mount the steps.
‘Katie, oh Jesus, you’re bleeding.’
Katie dabbed her cheek with her fingertips, and they came away slippery with blood. ‘No. It’s only a scratch. Don’t worry about it.’
Kyna took a folded handkerchief out of her jacket pocket and gently patted Katie’s cut. ‘It’s not too deep, thank God. But we should put some antiseptic on it. You don’t know what else that knife could have been used for.’
‘I’m more worried about what I’ve done to him. There I was saying that I didn’t want any rough sleepers hurt and the first thing I do is snap the stupid gowl’s wrist.’
‘He attacked you, Katie. And he called you a witch. I heard him.’
Katie couldn’t help giving her a wry smile. ‘That’s the second time today.’
‘Serious? Who else called you that?’
‘Never mind. Your man said something else much more important. He said, “Why should I be scared of some expletive-deleted Romanian?”’
‘Really? “Romanian”?’
Katie dabbed her face again and nodded. ‘So what does that tell us? He’s not Romanian himself but he could be one of Lupul’s ring of beggars. We’ve seen it before, haven’t we, ringmasters threatening the homeless if they don’t hand over a proportion of the money they’ve made begging. And maybe he’s still scared of Lupul because he doesn’t yet know that Lupul could have been burned to death. Or maybe he knows for sure that he isn’t dead.’
Kyna laid a hand on her shoulder and Katie could see in her eyes how much she wanted to hug her, and kiss her cut better. She was shivering slightly from the cold and the shock and she would have done anything to feel Kyna holding her close.
But, ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s hear how the other two squads have been getting along.’
*
All five squads in Operation Labre arrived within five minutes of each other at St Dunstan’s church hall. It was on Knight’s Hill on the Old Youghal Road, opposite Keohane’s Funeral Home and next to the Top petrol station. The rough sleepers that they had picked up from the city centre were all hurried inside, with umbrellas held over their heads to shield them from the relentlessly hammering rain.
Inside, a team of eleven Garda volunteers and the caretaker from St Dunstan’s church had done everything they could to make the hall warm and welcoming. They had turned up the central heating, and divided the main body of the hall into twenty cubicles with blue fence tarpaulins, the sort that were usually used to screen off building sites. In each cubicle they had laid down a single mattress on the floor with a pillow and blankets. On top of each pillow they had left a folded bath towel, as well as a washbag with soap and toothpaste and a toothbrush and a razor. They had set up a wooden box beside each mattress for the homeless sleepers to store their belongings, with a lamp on top of it, and a packet of Kimberley ginger biscuits.
On the raised stage at the far end of the hall they had erected a trestle table with chairs all around it, where the homeless would be served a hot meal. Katie could already smell mutton stew from the kitchen at the back of the hall.
She had stuck a plaster on to her cheek from the first-aid box in the leading squad car. Now she took off her raincoat so that she wouldn’t look so witch-like, and was standing by the doorway with Kyna to welcome the homeless as they straggled and shuffled into the hall. Most of them looked around as if they thought they were dreaming. The Garda volunteers guided each one of them individually to one of the cubicles that they had set up, and also showed them where the toilets were, and where they could wash.
A young woman came creeping up to Katie and Kyna, swaddled in a damp maroon blanket tied around with string. Her face was deathly white and she had smudges of dirt on her cheeks. Katie could see by the needle-marks in the veins on the backs of her hands that she was probably a heroin addict. She had tears clinging to her eyelashes and when she spoke she could barely manage more than a whisper.
‘Thanks a million million,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think a single soul cared for me any more. I couldn’t even work out
if I was asleep or awake most of the time. There didn’t seem to be no difference between them at all. I thought I might even be dead without knowing it.’
One of the Garda volunteers came up to them, a stolid woman with a russet-red bun and a motherly smile. She put her arm around the girl’s shoulders and led her gently to the cubicle where she could sleep.
Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick appeared through the main doorway behind the last of the homeless, an elderly man wearing a green overcoat that was far too large for him, and which dragged along the floor. The elderly man walked with a peculiar hop, which told Katie that he needed a hip replacement.
‘This is pure amazing,’ said Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick. ‘It’s almost enough to make me believe that I’m in the wrong job.’
Katie glanced at Kyna and raised her eyebrows, but said nothing. Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick usually seemed to be emotionless. His eyes were like two steel nail-heads and never gave anything away, but once or twice he had let out a comment that made Katie realize that – deep down – he was a man with some very turbulent feelings. He didn’t want any of his colleagues to know it, that was all.
‘I know what you mean, sir,’ said Kyna. ‘But I’d say it takes a very special kind of person to help these poor wretches long-term. You’d need to be a saint, wouldn’t you, and I know it’s not their fault, but you’d have to have a very poor sense of smell.’
Detectives O’Donovan and Cullen emerged from behind the tarpaulin screens.
‘That’s nineteen rough sleepers we have altogether,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘Three refused to come no matter what, and we’ve sent your man with the broken wrist to the Mercy.’
‘So now we simply let them settle down, feed their faces, and get themselves a good night’s sleep?’ said Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick.
‘That’s right,’ Katie told him. ‘Superintendent Pearse has assigned six officers to be on rotation all night, in case of any trouble, plus four volunteers. As you know, I’ve arranged for a doctor and a nurse to come around early tomorrow morning and give all the rough sleepers a quick check-up. If any of them have any critical medical problems they can be dealt with, within reason, and the doctor can prescribe methadone or buprenorphine to help any drug addicts. As I said before, we’ll be allowing the alcoholics among them a limited amount of drink, provided they don’t become abusive or violent. The whole point of Operation Labre is to win their confidence and get information out of them, not to rehabilitate them.’
Begging to Die Page 34
