Hays got up from his desk and moved quickly out of his office. He saw Sally Fahy and John O’Connor in the open plan and summoned them to his room urgently.
Hays explained the situation to the two Gardaí.
“First thing we need is a location. John, will you call Flynn’s phone. McFadden didn’t mention anything about Eamon, so maybe he’s got away, although I suspect he would have been in touch if that were the case. Nevertheless, call it.”
“Sally, can you get onto the Gardaí in Cavan? Lyons and Flynn should be back in the Republic by now. See if there are any reports of anything odd going down around there. Tell them a female officer’s life is in danger. And then we’re driving out there, so get a couple of spare phones and some other essentials and be ready to roll in ten minutes.”
Hays realised that he had to maintain a professional approach in the situation but inside, his feelings were in turmoil. He had grown to love Maureen Lyons over the past couple of years, and he couldn’t bear to think of her being harmed by that little scum bag McFadden. He also knew that Maureen was a fighter. She wouldn’t just collapse in submission whatever was going on, and McFadden wasn’t all that clever, so he felt that she would probably be OK, but he was not at all certain. McFadden’s situation had gone from bad to worse, and he was getting to the point where he had little or nothing to lose, so he was almost certainly desperate. Desperate men don’t normally make good decisions.
When they were on the road, Fahy told Hays that there were no reports of anything strange in the Cavan area so far, but that the sergeant in Cavan had promised to let them know immediately if anything came in.
“Do you think she’ll be OK, boss?” Fahy asked the inspector.
“Inspector Lyons is extremely resourceful, Sally. She’s clearly in a bad spot just now, but I’d have every faith that she’ll be able to manage whatever comes along. Let’s hope so anyway,” he said, more in an effort to convince himself than anything else.
A moment later, Sally Fahy’s mobile rang, and she answered it on speaker phone.
“This is Sergeant Dillon from Cavan calling. We have reports of a car hijacking coming in from a few miles outside the town. A woman was stopped by a female Garda, and her car was taken off her by a young man leaving her at the roadside. We have a patrol car on its way, and there seems to be another car involved in some way. It’s not clear yet, but the squad car will be there within five minutes,” Dillon said.
“Sergeant, this is Senior Inspector Mick Hays from Galway. The female officer is Inspector Maureen Lyons, and she has been kidnapped by the man who hijacked the car. Can you circulate details of the vehicle that was taken? And as soon as your folks get to the scene, I want an immediate report. There may be another one of our officers involved.”
“Yes sir, of course. I’ll call you back as soon as we have anything,” Dillon replied.
“Good man. We’re on our way, and should be there within the hour,” Hays said, and hung up.
“Can’t you get a bit more speed out of this old heap Sally, we’re barely breaking the speed limit!”
“Right, sir, hold tight!”
Fahy brought the Hyundai up to 150kph, and with the blue lights and sirens made short work of the small amount of traffic that they encountered on the road.
“I’m going to call the Super. See if we can get the helicopter up. McFadden won’t have gone far with Maureen,” Hays said.
Superintendent Plunkett listened to Mick Hays as he outlined the situation.
“Christ, Mick, this thing goes from bad to worse. Just tell me what you want. And don’t hold back,” the superintendent said.
“Thanks, boss. I want a Garda helicopter up over the spot where the car was hijacked. They can liaise with Sergeant Dillon in Cavan, and if we can get the PSNI to put their bird up, so much the better. I want roadblocks on every road within ten kilometres of the hijack location, and I want two dog teams sent up there. Then, any derelict buildings in the area need to be searched. Oh, and can you get ten grand in used notes prepared in case we have to go through with the exchange?” Hays said.
“Consider it done Mick. Oh, and Mick – don’t worry, we’ll get her back. I haven’t lost an officer yet in thirty-two years on the job.”
“Thanks, boss.”
* * *
McFadden used the handcuffs that had previously been around his own wrists to secure Lyons to a sturdy piece of rusting farm machinery inside the abandoned barn. He stuffed some old cloth into her mouth to stop her screaming, and settled down on a hay bale to develop the next part of his plan.
He was sure that the Gardaí would happily pay out ten thousand euro to get one of their own back in one piece, and that would be enough to get him away to England where he could lie low for a few months and put all this behind him.
But he would need to be careful about how he secured the cash and made his escape. He couldn’t very well drive out of there in the stolen car – there would be roadblocks all over the place, and he would need a vehicle to make good his getaway. So, firstly, he needed another car: something that wouldn’t draw attention to itself in these parts, and if he could find one with Northern Ireland plates, all the better. He could see a farmyard about half a kilometre away from the old barn and decided to set out and have a look to see what he might find.
He was happy that Lyons was secured – with her hands cuffed to the old machine, and with her feet bound, she wasn’t going anywhere.
Taking Lyons’ phone with him, Lorcan set off on foot across the fields towards the farmyard.
* * *
As soon as McFadden had left, Lyons assessed her situation objectively. Clearly, she needed to get out of the cuffs and free herself if she was to escape, but it wasn’t going to be easy. She managed to eject the cloth from her mouth handily enough, but decided not to start shouting as, more than likely, all that it would achieve would be to bring McFadden back, and he wouldn’t be best pleased.
With feet bound, and hands out of commission, it wasn’t going to be a simple job to get free. There was however a good lot of old scrap and rusty iron lying about, and she calculated that if she could somehow use her bound feet to manoeuvre a bar of the rusty metal up towards her hands, she might be able to lever the cuffs away from their mountings.
She wriggled and squirmed and finally managed to find a loose piece of iron that she thought might be useful. She scrabbled about with her bound feet, slowly but surely edging the iron bar towards her hands. She pulled at the cuffs, straining to get a grip on the bar. Her wrists were hurting a lot, and red welts were forming where they were rubbing against the metal.
After more than half an hour, she finally had the bar in her hands, and inserted it in between the handcuffs and the piece of machinery that was anchoring them. Now she needed some serious leverage to break open the cuffs.
By contorting herself, and by bringing her knees up close to her face, she managed to get the iron bar under her left leg, and then using the weight of her entire body, she leant down on it. As she put pressure on the bar, the handcuff dug deep into her wrist, and for a moment she felt that the bone might break before the cuff. With one final heave, blotting out the pain as best she could, there was a satisfying snap, and the handcuff sprang open.
“Thank God for Yoga classes!!” she said to herself.
A few minutes later she had untethered her bound ankles and was able to use her free hand with the same iron bar to break off the second handcuff. She was free, although quite exhausted and sore from all the straining and heaving.
What to do now? She could, of course, head off. It would have to be on foot, as McFadden had taken the keys of the hijacked car with him. Lyons felt that this was not the best plan, after all, she was quite likely to bump into McFadden as she made her escape, and such an encounter was unlikely to end well for her.
No. She decided to re-arrange things to look like she was still captive, and she hid her trusty, and now proven, iron bar underneath her so that
she could use it as a weapon when McFadden returned.
* * *
Lorcan McFadden had no luck at the farmyard. There was a car, but it was an old Toyota, and while the keys were in it, it would obviously be missed as soon as he took it, so that was not an option. From the farmyard though, McFadden spotted another enterprise just a few hundred metres down the track. There was a modest bungalow with a huge steel shed that had a large concrete apron in front of it. There were a number of vehicles parked on the concrete in various stages of repair and decay. There didn’t seem to be anyone around, so McFadden approached the site with caution. If anyone challenged him, he could say he was looking for a mate that he thought worked around there.
In the yard, he spotted an old Mercedes G Wagon in black, and as luck would have it, a Northern Ireland registration. It looked to be in roadworthy condition, with air in the tyres, and only a light covering of dust and mould on the windows and bodywork. Making his way under the cover of the other vehicles, he worked himself round to the side of the G Wagon, and gently tried the driver’s door, which, as it turned out, was not locked. Inside the car, there was a pile of old rags, a few oil-stained newspapers, and a small collection of oil-covered engine parts. It was impossible to say if they belonged to this vehicle or not, so he needed to find out if the old Mercedes was driveable. Keeping a sharp eye out for anyone around, he pulled the plastic covering off the binnacle at the back of the steering wheel and found the ignition wires. Nervously, he pulled the wires free and touched the two starter wires together. There were sparks, which was good, as it confirmed that the car had a live battery. After a few sluggish heaves, the old motor coughed into life, and McFadden sat into the seat properly, and drove out of the yard. Looking in the rear-view mirror, he saw no one in pursuit.
He drove the old jeep at a fair pace till he was well out of sight of the house where it had been languishing, and then pulled off the road into a narrow, wooded lane. He took Lyons’ phone out of his pocket and called the number for Mick.
Hays answered almost immediately.
“Hays,” he barked into the phone.
“Hiya, Mick. Now here’s your instructions. At seven o’clock, I’m gonna text you a set of GPS co-ordinates. One hour later, exactly, you’re to drop a bag containing ten thousand euro from a helicopter, on the exact spot. You’ll be in the chopper. Then you and the chopper bugger off. When I have the money, I’ll call you to tell you where your inspector can be found. If anything goes wrong, you’ll never see her again.” Then he hung up.
When he had finished the call, McFadden drove the old black jeep away from the site of his earlier crash, till he came to a small village with a petrol station and a Centra shop. Looking carefully around for any sign of a Garda presence, he parked a little way from the filling station, and walked to it. In the shop he bought a couple of pre-packed sandwiches, two cans of Coke and a chocolate bar. He figured Lyons might be getting peckish, and he needed somewhere to hide up until later in any case.
He then drove back to the old barn where he had left Lyons and drove the G Wagon in beside the car they had used earlier.
Lyons appeared to be asleep, lying awkwardly up against the old rusting machinery where he had left her. She feigned waking up and turned to face him.
“C’mon sleeping beauty, I’ve brought you some grub,” McFadden called to her, nudging her shoulder.
“About time. I’m starving,” she replied.
McFadden opened one of the sandwiches and leaned in towards Lyons so that she could take it from him with one of her cuffed hands. She knew she would have to time her next move to perfection. Her judgement was good, and with one fluid movement of her arm, the iron bar she had hidden underneath her body flew at McFadden’s face. There was a sickening crack as two of his teeth smashed to pieces in his mouth, and the sharp end of the iron went on to gouge a deep furrow in the side of his face which immediately started to pump blood.
McFadden reeled backwards, his hand flying to his face, which was, as he realised half a second later, a mistake. Lyons still had a good grip on the iron bar, and as McFadden fell backwards with the entire front of his torso exposed, Lyons whipped around and with as much force as she could muster, drove the iron as hard as she could directly into his groin.
McFadden let out an almighty wail as he instinctively doubled up, but unfortunately for him, Lyons wasn’t finished yet. As he tumbled past her, howling in agony, she bashed him firmly on the back of the head, and rendered him unconscious.
“Fuck you, McFadden,” she said, “I don’t even like chicken and stuffing sandwiches!”
Lyons then spent the next ten minutes trussing up the broken form of Lorcan McFadden. She bound his hands and feet and tied a ligature round his neck which she fastened to another piece of old farm machinery so that if he came around he wouldn’t be able to move without choking himself.
She then went through his pockets and retrieved her phone.
“What is it this time?” Hays barked down the phone when it rang a few seconds later.
“That’s a nice way to speak to a fellow inspector, sir!” she said.
“Jesus, Maureen. Thank God. Are you OK? Where’s McFadden?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just having a sandwich and a can of Coke. McFadden’s a bit tied up just now, but you can probably talk to him later. Are you going to come and get us?”
“Of course we are. Send your location using the phone and Google Maps. I’ll be there as soon as we can get to you. Is McFadden secured?”
“Eh, yeah, you could say that. He’s lost a few teeth, and his manhood is a bit bruised to say the least, but I think he’ll live, for a day or two anyway.”
“Christ, Maureen. You had us all spooked there for a while. I was thinking the worst. Send the location. We’re on our way,” Hays said, unable to disguise the relief he felt.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later two white 4x4s with sirens wailing and lights flashing turned into the yard where the old barn was located. Hays hopped out and ran into the barn. He couldn’t believe the sight that met his eyes. There was Lyons, calm as you like, sitting on a hay bale, relaxed and smiling, and nearby, the wreck of Lorcan McFadden, with dried blood caked on his face, lips swollen, and a distant look in his eyes with his head lolling about against the ligature around his neck, barely conscious and muttering obscenities.
On the way back to Cavan in the Armed Response Unit vehicle, Lyons brought Hays fully up to date on the events of the day, from the time they collected McFadden in the North, to the time she had been found in the barn.
“He had demanded ten thousand euro for your release. He wanted it dropped by helicopter,” Hays said.
“Cheeky bugger, if I’d known that was all the value he put on me, I would have given him a few more goes of the iron bar,” Lyons said.
“Well you’re worth a hundred times that to me, Maureen,” Hays said.
“Probably not the way you would have done it, but it worked all the same,” she said.
“How’s Eamon by the way? He looked to be in pretty bad shape after the car crash,” Lyons said.
“He’s OK. They got to him pretty quickly when you two made off in the old lady’s car. He’s a bit concussed, and he has a broken wrist, but other than that, he’s fine. He’ll be as right as rain in a few days. He was very worried about you though. Blames himself for what happened,” Hays said.
“Na, there’s no point in that. He didn’t do anything wrong. Anyway, we have another pile of charges to lay at Mr McFadden’s door now as a result. He’ll be going away for a very, very long time indeed,” she said.
“Right. But don’t forget, we still have the Craigue kidnap to solve. McFadden was just a bit player, and Eddie Turner isn’t saying much. Not yet anyway. Maybe we could show him photos of the bruising to McFadden’s privates and tell him you are going to interview him – that might loosen his tongue.”
* * *
When Hays and Lyons eventually got back to their
house in Salthill, they were both exhausted. They sat closely together on the sofa in the lounge for half an hour to relax, and Hays cracked open a bottle of red wine. When Maureen had finished her first glass, she lay back, nestled up against her partner, and tears began to flow down her cheeks. Hays held her close.
“It’s OK love, it’s all over now. You did very well, you know. I can’t imagine what would have happened if McFadden had got his money. You managed to close out that possibility very nicely.”
“God, Mick, I’m sorry. But I was really scared. He had a wild look in his eyes, and by that time he had nothing to lose. Anything could have happened,” she said.
“But you see he made one fatal mistake, didn’t he? He didn’t take account of the ‘Lyons factor’. It’s not the first time you’ve brought one of these toe-rags down to earth with a bang all on your own, and it may not be the last if I know you,” Hays said.
“Oh don’t, Mick. I think I might go back to handing out parking tickets for a while. C’mon, let’s go to bed. We have another long day ahead tomorrow. I’m looking forward to bringing McFadden before a judge with a nice long rap sheet!”
Chapter Nineteen
When the two inspectors arrived at Mill Street Garda station the following day, Maureen Lyons was met with a round of applause from the rest of the team.
She was embarrassed and diverted attention from her own achievements by asking how Eamon Flynn was doing.
“They sent him home last night. His arm is in plaster, and he’s a bit battered and bruised, but he’s OK. He was asking for you, Inspector Lyons,” John O’Connor said.
“I’m fine, thanks. Now let’s get on. We have a lot to do today,” she said.
John O’Connor was assigned the task of accompanying McFadden to court. They were charging him initially with two counts of causing death by dangerous driving, and two counts of assaulting a police officer in the execution of their duty. As he had already proved to be a flight risk, the Gardaí were fairly sure he would be remanded in custody until such time as they could prepare the book of evidence. If the judge made any comment about the various injuries on the prisoner’s face, he was to tell the court that his injuries were sustained in the course of conducting the crimes, and during his arrest. They would leave the other charges such as vehicle theft and kidnap until later, but O’Connor was to make it clear to the court that there were further charges expected.
The Galway Homicides Box Set Page 37
