Lupul got out of the car and climbed up the rubbish heap until he was standing over Ştefan. In his right hand he was holding a cordless drill. He nodded to the two burly men and they knelt down on either side of Ştefan, pressing his shoulders and his upper arms hard against the cushions.
Lupul looked around with his hand shielding his eyes to make sure there was nobody else in sight, and then he knelt down, too, and prodded the cutting edge of the twist drill into the back of Ştefan’s neck. Ştefan stopped sobbing and tensed himself. He stayed utterly still, and made no attempt to break free. He had killed men himself and he knew that victims suffered much less if they allowed their killers to get on with it, without a struggle.
‘Give the Devil my best wishes,’ whispered Lupul, leaning close to his ear.
With that, he drilled into Ştefan’s head, pressing straight down at first and then tilting the drill left and right. Ştefan jerked up and down as the drill bit churned his brainstem into a paste, and then lay still. Once he was sure that Ştefan was dead, Lupul carefully eased the drill bit out of his neck and brushed his prickly white hair over the hole to cover it.
They rolled Ştefan over on to his back. His one good eye was still open and his tongue was lolling out of the side of his mouth, so that it looked as if he were pulling a comical face.
‘Aleks,’ said Lupul, and one of the men handed him a razor blade, the type they usually used for cutting cocaine. Lupul sliced deep into Ştefan’s right wrist, and then his left. Then he carefully pinched the razor blade between Ştefan’s right finger and thumb, to impress his fingerprints on it, before letting it tinkle down into the rubbish. Blood welled up in each of the cuts, but because Ştefan’s heart had stopped beating it did nothing more than slowly ooze out.
‘Okay,’ said Lupul. ‘Now we have only one more rat to deal with. Then we can say plimba ursu to everybody. Police too.’
He went clambering back down the rubbish heap, with his two minders following him. He opened the car door, but before he climbed in, he turned around and lifted his fist in the direction of Ştefan’s body, with his thumb squeezed between his index finger and his middle finger, a gesture that meant, ‘Screw you, Ştefan. Have a good time in hell.’
49
‘State of you la,’ said Diarmuid Moloney, blowing smoke out of his nostrils.
‘Fell off my motorbike,’ said Conor. ‘Bust my nose and my cheekbone, but it could have been worse.’
‘Didn’t even know ye owned a motorbike.’
‘Old Yamaha. Used to belong to my uncle. I only take it out now and again.’
‘Just as fecking well, I’d say.’
They were standing in the porch of Moloney’s farm, a run-down collection of buildings and barns on the eastern side of Ballyhooly. Off to the south-west, through the dredging rain, they could see the low green mountains on the opposite side of the Blackwater river. A few black-and-white cows were arranged around the fields like checkmate in a numbingly slow game of chess.
Diarmuid was broad-shouldered but short, with a bulbous nose and wildly sprouting eyebrows. He was wearing a tightly belted raincoat and a broad-brimmed trilby that gave him the appearance of an IRA gunman of 1922.
‘How’s Ruari?’ asked Conor.
‘Ruari? Didn’t you hear, like? Ruari passed.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. When?’
Diarmuid sucked at his cigarette. ‘Well, if he’d lived till next Thursday he would have been dead for a month.’
‘I’m sorry. I would have come to his wake if I’d known.’
As they were talking, the Moloneys’ German shepherd came trotting over.
‘Hey, how’s it going, Aengus?’ said Conor, and tugged at his ears and stroked him. In response, Aengus shook himself violently and sprayed both Conor and Diarmuid with rainwater.
‘I think Aengus’ll always remember how ye found him after those knackers took him and brought him back home,’ said Diarmuid. ‘I’ll never forget it for sure, myself. Ye’re a fecking genius and no mistake.’
‘In a way, that’s the reason I’ve called in to see you today, Diarmuid. I need a bit of a favour in return.’
‘Ye have only to name it, Conor. What’s ours is yours. Except for the cows, like.’
‘I’m looking for Semtex. And a detonator.’
Diarmuid looked at Conor narrowly. Before he answered, he took a long hard suck on his cigarette and then tossed it aside across the farmyard.
‘Semtex, is it?’
‘I have some old outbuildings I need to demolish, and that seemed like the quickest and the cheapest way of doing it.’
‘Ye couldn’t employ a couple of fellers and a digger?’
‘It’s a little more complicated than that.’
‘Complimicated, is it? How much more complimicated?’
‘All right, I’ll be square with you, Diarmuid. There’s a puppy farm not too far from here where they’re sorely mistreating their breeding bitches and their litters. Foggy Fields, run by Blánaid and Caoilfhoinn McQuaide.’
‘I know them all right. That Blánaid, she’s some sour misery, that one. Ye say how’s it going on to her and she sticks up her nose like you’ve blown off a breezer.’
Conor said, ‘I’ve done everything I can to have them closed down, but so far I’ve got nowhere. I reckon a well-placed explosion would be a quick way to persuade them to shut up shop. Not hurting any dogs, of course, but blowing up a shed maybe or knocking down a wall. Kind of a warning, do you know?’
Diarmuid thought long and hard. Then he said, ‘I don’t need to tell ye that nobody’s ever to know where ye came by it, the Semtex.’
‘Diarmuid, I think that goes without saying. On Ruari’s grave, nobody will ever find out. But if you’d ever seen for yourself the sheer outright cruelty those dogs have to suffer, you’d be round to Foggy Fields yourself with a whole barrowload of bombs.’
‘Okay, then. Come back tomorrow morning and I’ll have it ready for you. A pound of it, with an electric detonator. I must be mad as a box of frogs letting you have it, but a favour’s a favour.’
Conor shook his hand, and then clapped him on the back. ‘You won’t forget this, Diarmuid, I promise you.’
*
Katie drove to CUH after lunch to visit Detectives Murrish and Markey. Detective Scanlan had been allowed home that morning after a final scan, but she would be taking at least four weeks off to recuperate fully. Detective Murrish’s eye socket was healing well, and she was impatiently waiting for her prosthetic eye to be fitted, although she admitted to Katie that she was still having nightmares about being blinded.
‘Do you know what I hate most of all?’ she said. She was sitting in a chair by the window, looking out at the rain sifting across the next-door rooftop. ‘I keep hearing that crunch when the knife went into my eye. Crunch! And it makes me shudder something awful.’
Katie took hold of her hand. ‘It was a desperate thing to happen to you, Bedelia. But you’re strong. You’ll get over it.’
Detective Murrish smiled. ‘At least I can still see. That’s what I’m thankful for, more than anything else. See those raindrops, falling in those puddles? What if I’d never been able to see them again, ever?’
Katie went along the corridor to see Detective Markey. He was still wearing his white turban, but his last scan had shown that the swelling on his brain had almost completely subsided and that he, too, would be allowed to go home, possibly as early as tomorrow.
She updated him on her interview with Eamon Buckley and Thomas Barry. She had to tell him, though, that she had still heard no word from the gardaí in Skibbereen about the identity of the two men who had attacked him and Detective Scanlan.
‘Well, if they can’t find them, I’ll go down there and find them myself,’ he said. ‘With any luck they’ll resist arrest so I have an excuse to take the baton to them. Hard, like, on top of the head. And at least twice.’
‘Policing isn’t about revenge, Nick,’ said Ka
tie.
‘I know that, ma’am. But I can’t say that I wouldn’t enjoy it.’
Katie was walking back to her car when her iPhone played ‘Mo Ghille Mear’. She climbed behind the wheel and said, ‘Yes… sorry about the delay. I was halfway across the car park and it’s rotten out.’
It was Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick and he sounded even grimmer than usual. ‘It’s Ştefan Făt-Frumor. He’s been found dead on top of that rubbish tip off Spring Lane.’
‘Serious? When?’
‘Only about half an hour ago. Some Pavee kids were playing on the tip and they found him.’
‘Any indication how he died?’
‘The kids called for an ambulance and the paramedics who examined him say that it looks like suicide, because his wrists were cut. Bill Phinner’s already sent a team up there anyway so we should know for certain pretty soon. But I can’t believe that Făt-Frumor would take his own life. If he’d ever had the choice between being stung by a wazzer and seeing his mother boiled in oil, I know which one he’d have gone for.’
‘How was he identified?’
‘He had a final demand from Bord Gáis in his back pants pocket.’
‘That was a bit of a comedown for a king of crime. No suicide note?’
‘Not unless he left one at his house. O’Donovan’s gone there now.’
‘I totally agree with you that it’s highly unlikely that he killed himself. So who do you think might have done it? From what I’ve heard about him, he rubbed along pretty well with all the other gangs in Cork. Patrick found out that he was planning to expand his drug-running business to Dublin, though, wasn’t he? Maybe one of the Dublin gangs decided to come down here and squash him before he even had the chance to get started.’
‘I’ve heard nothing from the CSB that might suggest that.’ Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick was referring to the Crime and Security Branch based in Phoenix Park, who constantly monitored the activity of terrorists and serious criminals.
‘Listen, Robert – can you tell Bill that as soon as his technicians have completed their examination of the scene at Spring Lane, I want Ştefan Făt-Frumor’s body sent down to Dr Kelley at CUH as a matter of priority for an immediate post mortem. I’m going to call her myself to make sure she’s free to do it, or that she can arrange for another pathologist to carry it out in her place. I’m having no more gang killings here in Cork. I don’t want this turning into all-out warfare like Kinahan-Hutch.’
She made her way back to Anglesea Street. She knew there was no point in trying to guess who might have killed Ştefan Făt-Frumor. As she drove through the city with its silver-grey river and its high surrounding hills and the spires of St Finbarr’s and St Anne’s rising through the rain, she had the deadening feeling that this investigation was being played out according to a script that had already been written but which she herself had never seen, and that no matter what she did, it would have a tragic and unexpected but unavoidable ending.
*
Almost as soon as she returned to her office, Chief Superintendent O’Kane came in, briskly rubbing his hands.
‘Impromptu media conference downstairs in five minutes, Katie,’ he told her.
‘Impromptu media conference about what?’
‘Ştefan Făt-Frumor, of course. The news has got out already. One of the Pavee lads who found him had the wit to ring RTÉ and the Echo so that they would pay him for an interview.’
‘Mother of God, sir, we don’t even know yet how he died, or what his movements were before he was found.’
‘Then we can say so. But we need to be upbeat, and show the media that we’re winning the battle against organized crime. We’ve hauled in all of Lupul’s beggars, after all, and Lupul’s either deceased or disappeared, and now we’ve put an end to Făt-Frumor’s begging ring, too.’
‘Excuse me, sir, but it wasn’t us who put an end to Făt-Frumor. Person or persons unknown did it. That’s unless he committed suicide, which isn’t very likely. And we didn’t even know that he was running a begging ring until a couple of days ago, much to my personal embarrassment.’
‘We don’t have to say that, Katie. In any case, it’s all water under the bridge now, isn’t it? It’s pure important that we come over as positive, active, tough on any kind of crime, and always protecting the Cork community from harm.’
Katie hung up her raincoat. She didn’t know how to answer that. She knew how badly the Garda needed to repair their relationship with the ordinary people of Cork, but at the same time she didn’t believe in obfuscating or telling half-truths. They had failed to realize that Ştefan Făt-Frumor had been extorting money from the city’s beggars, and she felt that they should admit it, even now that he was dead. In fact, it was quite possible that his extorting money from beggars had led to him being murdered, and if so, that might lead them to track down his killer, or killers. Maybe a disgruntled beggar had done it. Maybe a whole gang of disgruntled beggars had done it.
‘I can only give the media the barest facts, sir,’ Katie told him.
‘Don’t worry. You can leave the inspirational talk to me. That’s why I was appointed, after all. To make An Garda Síochána acceptable again. Not just acceptable. Trusted. Liked. Even – dare I say it – loved. And, Katie—’
And I know that you’re going to say it again. ‘When we’re alone together, you don’t have to call me “sir”.’ But what we had between us, Brendan, all those years ago, that too is all water under the bridge.
Brendan was about to finish what he was saying when Moirin came in and said, ‘Sorry to interrupt, ma’am. A woman called Breda Behan’s on the phone. She wants to know if you’d be interested in giving a talk at the next Thursday evening meeting of the Cork Feminist Collective.’
‘Katie?’ said Brendan, raising an eyebrow. ‘That sounds right up your street.’
*
The media conference was over in less than twenty minutes. Katie announced simply that Ştefan Făt-Frumor had been found dead at Spring Lane and that their investigation into his death was ongoing. She declined to take questions, saying that there was nothing more she could add. She was so abrupt that Brendan found it impossible to launch into his intended speech about how effectively the Garda were cleaning up the streets of the city and rooting out drug-dealers and people traffickers, and how they were gradually winning over the hearts and minds of the people of Cork.
Instead, he could only stand up and say to the assembled reporters and camera operators, ‘Thank you. Watch this space.’
Afterwards, he caught up with Katie in the corridor.
‘That didn’t go down too well, did it, Katie?’
‘We told them all we know, sir. There’s no point in speculating. If you speculate, you usually end up looking like a total gom when the truth eventually comes out. I’m sure you know that as well as I do.’
‘Katie, I need you one hundred per cent on side. It’s vital that I have your support when it comes to our public image. Back in there, all you did was give out to those reporters like a – I don’t know, like a—’
‘Like a detective superintendent, reporting a suspicious death?’
Brendan was about to answer back, but instead he said nothing and lifted both hands as if to say, Okay, girl, have it your way for now.
*
At half past five, the rain eased off, and Katie drove up to St Dunstan’s church hall again, with Detective Inspector Fitzgerald and Kyna and Detective O’Donovan. She wanted to tell the rough sleepers that Ştefan Făt-Frumor had been found dead before they saw it on the Six One News – especially those that had been part of his begging ring.
They were having an early supper – most of them sitting at the table on the stage, but some of them sitting on the floor watching TV. This evening it was boiled bacon and cabbage and potatoes, with parsley sauce, and as she walked into the hall the smell of it reminded Katie that she hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast.
‘Could you mute the telly,
please?’ she called out, and when the hall was silent she climbed halfway up the steps that led to the stage and said, ‘I’ve some news for you… something that I know some of you will be very glad to hear.’
‘The Pope’s said he’s sorry!’ one of the men shouted.
‘Well, he has, as a matter of fact,’ said Katie. ‘But the news is that somebody’s passed… somebody who had a whole lot more influence on your lives lately than His Holiness. Ştefan Făt-Frumor. The one you call the Fat Fellow.’
A ragged cheer went up from the beggars sitting at the table, and some of them banged their knives and forks. As Katie stepped down from the stage, a freckle-faced young girl with wildly fraying ginger hair came limping up to her. Her shoulders were shaking and she was crying uncontrollably. Katie had talked to her the last time she was here: she was a cocaine addict and if she had spent all the money that she had made from begging on crack, then Ştefan Făt-Frumor’s thugs would beat her. Only a month ago they had knocked out all her front teeth.
She held out her skinny arms and Katie hugged her. Underneath her floppy cotton sweater Katie could feel her shoulder blades sticking out, and her ribs.
‘Bless you,’ she wept. ‘Bless you, bless you, bless you. You’re a saint.’
But a black-bearded man at the table shouted out, ‘Okay, the Fat Fellow’s dead, and he was a bastard all right. But who’s going to watch out for us now? At least the Fat Fellow stopped us from getting robbed or beaten or pissed on, like.’
Begging to Die Page 40
