Lupul shrugged, and sucked at his cigarette. It was obvious that he hadn’t quite understood what she meant.
She leaned towards him again. ‘Did you kill Ana-Maria’s mother?’
Lupul looked at Ana-Maria, and winked at her.
‘I said—’ Katie began, but Lupul raised his hand and said, ‘I hear what you say. But you can prove nothing. Everything is gone. A bird fly past your window – how do you prove it?’
With that, he unscrewed the cap on the bottle of Paddy’s and took three large gulps. Then he licked his lips and burped and said, ‘You stay here tonight and you think, yes? Your police friends will know by morning you are gone. We give them time to worry. Tomorrow you can call and say, “I am safe, Ana-Maria is safe. Dragomir Iliescu is a good man and it is okay for him to have beggars on the streets.”’
Jesus, you’re some climpy, thought Katie. And a sadistic climpy, too. But she had come across plenty of criminals who were twice as stupid and even more violent, and so she said nothing. She knew that by now Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick and the rest of her team would be making every effort to find out where she and Ana-Maria had been taken, and that they had the expertise to rescue them once they had. If necessary, they could call in the Garda Negotiation Section, who had a remarkable record of ending hostage situations and barricades without bloodshed.
She realized that she would be wasting her breath if she argued with Lupul any longer. He sat on his bed playing with his mobile phone and sniffing and repeatedly swigging Paddy’s. Shortly after eleven o’clock, the blowsy woman came in and took Ana-Maria to the toilet. Afterwards Katie went to the toilet, too, but when she had struggled to take down her trousers and her thong with her hands tied, she had to sit with the door open while Gheorghe leaned against the wall opposite, watching her and grinning.
When she returned to the bedroom, Lupul said, ‘You lie down now. Sleep.’
Katie and Ana-Maria lay down back to back on the double bed, and Lupul directed Aleks to fasten the cords around their wrists to the bed frame.
‘Please – this is hurting my hand something fierce,’ Katie protested.
‘Who cares? Shut up your face. Sleep.’
By midnight, Lupul had finished the bottle of whiskey. He dropped his phone on the carpet and lay on his back, snoring.
Cathal Kilmartin looked in on them. He reeked of alcohol, too. He saw the phone on the floor and bent over with a grunt to pick it up. ‘Pleasant dreams, girls,’ he said. ‘Don’t let the fleas bite.’ Then he switched off the overhead light and closed the door, so that the only illumination came from the single orange bar of the electric fire.
‘Mătușă?’ whispered Ana-Maria.
‘What is it, sweetheart?’
‘O să ne omoare?’
‘I don’t know what that means, Ana-Maria, but don’t you worry. There are people coming to save us, I promise you.’
‘Lupul mi-a omorât mumia, nu-i așa?’
Katie guessed what that meant. Ana-Maria was asking if Lupul had murdered her mother.
‘Try to get some sleep,’ she said. ‘We can worry about that in the morning.’
She felt bruised and exhausted and disorientated, and as if she had wandered into a strange surreal world where nothing made any sense. She closed her eyes, even though she didn’t think she would be able to sleep. Aleks had tied her up at an awkward angle so that the heel of her hand was pressing hard against the metal bed frame.
She said a prayer for their rescue – silently, but shaping the words with her lips so that God would be able to see what she was saying.
53
Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick was still in the communications room at half-past eleven. Every Garda station in the southern and eastern regions had been alerted that Katie and Ana-Maria had been taken, and roadblocks had been set up on most of the major roads, but there was still no sign of them.
The Volvo in which they had first been abducted had been found at the Clayton Silver Springs Hotel, but the CCTV coverage didn’t extend to that end of the hotel’s car park, so the Garda had no idea what make of vehicle they might be travelling in now. It was likely that instead of leaving Silver Springs by the main road they had turned right up Lover’s Walk, which was steep and very narrow, and which had no CCTV coverage either, not until St Luke’s Cross. From Lover’s Walk, they could have turned off in almost any direction, up or down any number of winding side roads – east to Mayfield, north to Fermoy or west to Blackpool.
Detective O’Donovan came in, stretching and smearing his face with his hands after a two-hour nap. He had started his shift at seven o’clock that morning, and after he had nodded off over his desk Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick had told him to take a break.
‘Story?’ he asked, but Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick shook his head.
‘At least we know that it’s Lupul who’s taken them. So much for him being cremated in that fire. But that doesn’t help us much. We’ve no intelligence at all about where he might have taken himself off to, after Sutton’s Buildings. There was nothing on his dead pals’ phones except texts about picking up money and drugs, and Romanian porn. And there’s been no sightings of him anywhere around the city.’
‘What about the beggars? Have they been any use?’
‘You’re joking, aren’t you? I sent Cullen and Walsh up to St Dunstan’s church hall with that translator fellow so that they could ask all the Romanians yet again if they had any notion where Lupul might be hiding himself. If they do know, they’re not telling. Too scared, if you ask me, now that they’re sure he’s alive.’
‘I’m off to find myself a coffee,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘Can I fetch you one?’
At that moment, though, Bill Phinner walked in through the door. He was wearing a baggy green cardigan with what looked like a striped pyjama jacket underneath it, and he was holding up a blue plastic folder.
‘Bill,’ said Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick. ‘Thought you went home hours ago.’
‘I did. But I’d left this file on DS Maguire’s desk so that she could see it as soon as she got back in. I rang her half an hour ago to find out if she’d managed to take a sconce at it yet, and that’s when Sergeant O’Farrell told me that Lupul had abducted her, like.’
He set the file down on the desk in front of the CCTV monitors and opened it up. It contained at least fifteen 5 x 10cm photographs, all solid black, but with faint white handwriting on them.
‘These are pages from the notebook we found in Lupul’s burned-out house on Alexandra Road. They were pretty much charred to a cinder, but we were able to salvage a fair number of them, as you can see. We were lucky that all the writing’s been done in ballpoint pen, which always shows up a whole lot clearer than fountain pen or gel ink.’
‘So how did you get to read what was written on them?’
‘We photographed each page under infrared LED light. How much reflectivity your surface gives you, that depends on your incident angles. We tried various angles between fifteen and seventy-five degrees to see which gave us the best contrast between the writing and the paper background.’
‘I’m not sure I understood a word of that,’ said Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick. ‘So what does the writing actually say?’
Bill Phinner passed him the first sheet out of the file. ‘Some of it’s in Romanian, but that’s not a bother because it’s mostly figures. It’s Lupul’s accounts book. It has a complete list of all of his beggars by name, where they’re located in the city and how much each one of them has earned each day. You can see that the fellow who took over the pitch outside of the Savoy Centre almost doubled his takings from his previous location, which was on Marlboro Street.’
‘Okay… this could be useful background evidence if we ever catch him.’
‘Ah, yes, no, but that’s not the half of it. On this page he’s listed his expenses. And look at the very first one, right at the top. “Pentru E. Buckley, pentru Sorina Bălescu, 250 €.”’
/> ‘Sorina Bălescu – that’s Ana-Maria’s mother,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘Like, it doesn’t say so in so many words, but surely that’s proof that Lupul knew Buckley, and why would he pay him two hundred and fifty yoyos, except to get rid of her? What’s the odds he did fecking mince her, the lying scumbag?’
‘Look at the next entry,’ said Bill Phinner. ‘“Pentru E. Buckley, pentru femeia Cook St, 275 €.” That young woman who went missing from Cook Street, Máire O’Connor, he’s clearly paid Buckley to make sure that she disappeared without any trace, too.’
‘And we know for a fact that he was intending to dispose of Vasile Deac’s body,’ put in Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick. ‘There’s no other earthly reason he would have put it into his fridge.’
‘Sure like, but I think this is the critical entry,’ said Bill Phinner. ‘“Pentru C. Kilmartin, Skibbereen, 2,000 €.”’
‘Kilmartin – that’s the name of that feen who runs a piggery down in Skibb, isn’t it?’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘You know – the one at the end of the road where Nick and Padragain were following Buckley to, that night they got assaulted outside the West Cork Hotel.’
‘Well, I didn’t know that myself,’ said Bill Phinner. ‘But I thought, if you’re running a begging ring in Cork, why would you be paying that much grade to somebody in Skibbereen, unless maybe they were laundering it for you? Anyway, I looked up all the Kilmartins in the area and the only C. Kilmartin is Cathal Kilmartin who runs Kilmartin’s Pig Farm, at the end of Blackthorn Boreen.’
‘They sent officers from Skibbereen to interview this Kilmartin fellow, didn’t they?’ said Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick. ‘And they checked out his piggery, too. He was adamant that he didn’t know Buckley, wasn’t he, and they gave the piggery the once-over, but they couldn’t find anything suspicious.’
‘Think about it,’ said Bill Phinner. ‘Where can you dispose of a body so that no trace of it can ever be found, not even by forensics? Not in a bog, or the river. It’ll either be dug up one day, or it’ll float to the surface. You can burn it, but it still leaves ashes. But if you feed it to your animals, then it’s gone and lost forever. Come on, you’ve read stories about it, haven’t you, dead bodies being fed to the pigs, and then recycled, and recycled. If you ask me, that Lupul’s been reading the same stories.’
‘But if Sorina Bălescu was fed to Kilmartin’s pigs, how did her ring end up in Buckley’s mince?’
They all looked at each other, and they knew there was only one answer.
‘The sick feck,’ said Detective O’Donovan.
‘Sweeney Todd Syndrome, they call it,’ said Bill Phinner. ‘The perverse pleasure of making other people eat human flesh without them knowing it. A hundred to one he fetched some back from the piggery and sold it in his shop, along with the crubeens. Cannibalism by proxy. I’ll bet it turned him on.’
Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick lifted up his jacket from the back of his chair. ‘Whatever his motive was, Lupul did away with Ana-Maria’s mother, we can be sure of that. Now he’s taken Ana-Maria herself, and DS Maguire, so I think we have to face up to the strong possibility that he intends to do away with them, too, if he hasn’t already. Let’s start by getting ourselves down to Skibb, pronto. I’ll wake up Superintendent O’Shea down at Clon so that he can organize a squad asap and get them up to that boreen.’
‘What if they’re not there, at the piggery?’
‘Then at least we’ll know that they haven’t been fed to the pigs.’
‘But, Jesus. What if they have?’
‘Then I won’t be accountable for my actions, I can promise you that.’
*
Katie kept falling asleep, and then immediately waking up, and then falling back to sleep again. Her hand had become numb and despite the one-bar electric fire she was so cold that she kept dreaming she was dead, and that she was lying in one of the drawers of Dr Kelley’s morgue. Dr Kelley pulled out the drawer, stared at her, and then slid her back in again.
She dreamed about Conor, too. They were standing on the beach at Garrettstown again. It was a grey afternoon, and growing dark. Conor had his back to her and his coat collar turned up, and for some reason he refused to turn round.
She kept shouting ‘Con!’ over and over again, but the sea swallowed up her words, and when she tried to run after him, Barney kept jumping up and knocking against her and getting in her way.
She suddenly opened her eyes. For a split second, she couldn’t think where she was. She twisted her head around and saw that Ana-Maria was no longer lying next to her. That must have been the jumping up and knocking that she had felt. By the dim orange light of the electric fire, she saw that Ana-Maria had managed to wriggle her hands out of the washing-line knots that had been holding her, and that she was standing by the side of Lupul’s single bed.
She had picked up his cordless drill and she was holding it in both hands above his head. Lupul himself was oblivious, deep in a drunken sleep. His mouth was hanging open and he was snoring, rough and uneven. He sounded like a carpenter slowly sawing his way through a sheet of asbestos.
Katie had never seen an expression like Ana-Maria’s before, not on a child of nine. It was partly saintly, the pale face of a Madonna in a roadside shrine, but her eyes were wide and glassy, as if the Madonna had become possessed by a demon.
‘Ana-Maria,’ she said, softly. She didn’t want to wake Lupul. He was so drunk that God alone knew what he would do if he found that Ana-Maria had freed herself, and had picked up his drill.
Ana-Maria ignored her. All her attention was focused on Lupul. She lowered the drill until the triangular cutting edge of the bit was pointing right between his untidy eyebrows.
‘Ana-Maria – no!’ Katie cried out, but Ana-Maria squeezed the trigger and drilled straight into Lupul’s forehead. She pushed the drill down as hard as she could, right up to the chuck, so it screeched against his skull, and a bloody ribbon of skin flew up.
Lupul let out a roaring scream and tried to sit up, but Ana-Maria tugged the drill out from between his eyebrows and stuck it into the centre of his forehead, just below his tangled grey hairline. His brains were oozing out of the first hole that she had drilled, as shiny and beige as French mustard, streaked with blood. He was thrashing his arms and kicking his legs, but Ana-Maria pressed her knee against his shoulder to hold him down. She managed to drill right into his head a second time, until the drill bit jammed, and she had to let go, and he was left with the heavy drill and its battery swinging from his forehead.
Croaking with pain and shock, Lupul rolled off his bed and fell heavily on to the floor. He kept trying to pull the drill out of his head but his hands jerked and trembled and twitched and he couldn’t seem to get them to do what he wanted.
Ana-Maria stood back and watched him, her arms by her sides. She didn’t take her eyes off Lupul, but she remained totally expressionless, as if she had sprayed a wasp with insecticide, and was dispassionately watching it die.
The bedroom door slammed open. It was Cathal Kilmartin, in a stained white nightshirt. He was still drunk, and he had to grab the door handle to stop himself from falling over.
‘What the feck?’ he blurted. Then he tilted forward and saw Lupul lying on his side on the floor, feebly trying to tug the drill out of his head. ‘Jesus, what the feck?’
Aleks appeared behind him, and he looked equally drunk.
Katie said, ‘For the love of God, you two, don’t just stand there! Ring for an ambulance! This man’s going to die if you don’t!’
‘What’s he doing?’ blinked Cathal Kilmartin. ‘What’s that fecking drill doing, stuck in his fecking head? Dragos? Dragos! Are ye trying to kill yourself or something, ye fecking eejit?’
‘Ring 112!’ Katie snapped at him. ‘Call for an ambulance! Tell them it’s desperate!’
Aleks was swaying from side to side. ‘No fecking way. Ambulance come, police come too. I go. I’m out of here. Gheorghe! Gheorghe! Trezeşte-te! We g
o!’
He went stumbling off into the darkness. Cathal Kilmartin stayed where he was in the doorway, trying to understand what was happening. A few seconds later the blowsy woman looked over his shoulder, wrapping a pink satin dressing gown around herself.
‘Holy Mary Mother of God!’ she said, in a voice harsh from decades of cigarette smoking. ‘Cathal, out the road, you fat lump! Jesus, the shite you’re in now, boy!’
Katie said, ‘Untie me, would you? This man needs urgent first aid, and an ambulance.’
The woman knelt on the bed, so that the springs creaked. Leaning over, she tugged at the washing line tied around Katie’s wrists. She smelled of cigarette smoke and musky perfume, and her breasts swung heavily against Katie’s hip as she gradually unravelled all the knots.
‘What’s that fecking eejit doing with that drill stuck in his nut? The times I’ve told Cathal not to bother with these fecking Ramoonians.’
‘They’ve been good to us, girl, you can’t deny it,’ slurred Cathal Kilmartin. ‘Who else would have given us all that grade not to say nothing?’
‘Oh, shut your bake, Cah, you’re fecking moylo. As if you’re not always.’
At last Katie was able to climb off the bed. She said to the woman, ‘Ring 112, will you?’ and the woman puffed out her cheeks in exasperation.
‘I’m only doing this because these langers are so fecking langered,’ she said. ‘They’re worse than fecking kids, I tell you.’ She slapped off in her slippers to make the call, coughing as she went.
Katie knelt down next to Lupul. His eyes were half open and he was still breathing but he was utterly still now. She pressed two fingertips against his neck and felt his pulse. It was slow, but she decided that he didn’t need CPR. Carefully, she lifted up the heavy cordless drill and twisted the chuck, so that the drill bit was released. Its shaft was protruding about four centimetres out of his forehead but she didn’t try to pull it out in case she damaged his brain tissue even more.
Begging to Die Page 43
