Living Death
Authors: Graham Masterton
About
Living Death
DS Katie Maguire is at a loss. Last year, she and her team destroyed the biggest drug trafficker in Cork. So how is the city’s drug trade at an all-time high? Meanwhile, a spate of violent attacks which leave victims severely disabled has brought confidence in the Garda to an all-time low.
As Katie investigates, she realises that the two cases might be connected. Someone is using brain-damaged victims to smuggle drugs into the country. And the only way to find out more is to go in undercover…
For Katharine Walmsley
with love
‘Gach madadh air á mhadadh choimheach’
Irish saying: Every dog attacks the stranger dog
About the Katie Maguire series
About the Scarlet Widow series
An Invitation from the Publisher
As soon as she came teetering out of the doorway of the Eclipse Club in her short black dress and her spiky black ankle boots, her eyes circled with scarlet make-up and her hair dyed luminous green, they knew that she was exactly what they were looking for.
It was 2:25 in the morning. She was very drunk; and it appeared as if she might be on her own. She fumbled in her orange hessian bag, which had the wickedly grinning face of a pumpkin stitched on to it, and eventually managed to find her mobile phone.
The two of them were leaning against their shiny black Opel on the opposite side of Oliver Plunkett Street, smoking. They didn’t cross the road immediately. They watched her frowning at her phone, jabbing at it with her glittery green fingernails, and then silently swearing because she was finding it hard to focus on the app she wanted. All the time she was doing this, she was staggering to keep her balance and repeatedly slinging her bag back over her shoulder because it kept slipping off.
Milo looked at Garret and raised one eyebrow. Both men were dressed in tight black overcoats, with white shirts and ties. Milo was short and blocky, with grey hair shaved to a carpet-like fuzz and acne-scarred cheeks. Garret was taller, with a waving black fringe like a raven’s broken wing, and sunken cheeks, and the kind of thin black moustache on his upper lip that Corkonians call a ‘thirsty eyebrow’.
‘What you thinking, Gar?’ asked Milo.
Garret flicked his cigarette butt across the street. ‘Stall it for a minute, do you know what I mean? Just in case she’s a scrap with her boyfriend and he’ll be coming out begging her forgiveness.’
Six or seven more young people came tumbling out of the Eclipse, all laughing and swearing and pushing each other. One of the boys had painted his face dead-white like a vampire, with lipstick drops of blood dripping from the sides of his mouth. Another had a Ghostface mask from the
Scream
horror films perched on top of his head. Two ginger-haired sisters were dressed as witches in gauzy green dresses and a thin dark-haired girl was wearing a tattered white cloak like a
bean-si.
One of the young men called out, ‘Where we heading on to now, sham? It’s too fecking early to call it a night and I’m gasping for another gatt.’
‘Don’t know, boy,’ replied one of his friends. ‘Wish I hadn’t ate that fecking curry, I tell you. I’m just about ready to barfus maximus.’
‘Well, don’t you be boking over me. These are brand-new, these jeggings.’
Milo and Garret waited, but nobody came out of the club looking for the girl in the black dress. She continued to prod at her phone and after a minute or two it appeared that she had managed to send a text. She dropped her phone back into her bag and stood in the doorway of J. Casey’s furniture store next door, holding on to the black metal gates to keep herself steady, and she was obviously waiting for somebody.
Milo glanced to the left to make sure there were no cars coming and then crossed the street with his hands in his pockets. He went up to the girl and said, ‘All right there, love?’
‘I’m grand altogether,’ she replied, without looking at him.
‘Okay. I got a lamp off you there and I was wondering if you needed a lift home, like.’
‘No, you’re all right. I just called Hailo.’
Milo raised one eyebrow. ‘Okay, love. Grand. Just making sure you’re okay. Looks like you’ve had yourself a wicked awesome party the night.’
‘Not really.’ The girl continued to cling tightly to the railings and although she still didn’t look at Milo he could see that her scarlet eye-shadow was streaked, as if she had been crying.
‘Do you live far, like?’ he asked her.
‘Knocka. But it’s all right. My taxi’s going to be here in a couple of minutes.’
‘Ah, okay. Fair play. But I’m just about to go home to Gurra myself, so I could easy give you a lift. It’d be free of charge, like, and we can go right now, so you wouldn’t have to wait.’
The girl looked at him at last, and her eyes were sparkling with tears. Although her make-up was a mess, he could see that she was really quite pretty, with wide-apart brown eyes and a tip-tilted nose and full, pouty lips. He kept his hands deep in his coat pockets and he gave her a shrug and a reassuring smile, as if it didn’t really matter to him one way or another if she accepted his offer, and that he was only being friendly.
She lurched slightly, and gripped the railings with both hands to steady herself. She said, ‘No, I don’t know,’ and Milo had the feeling that she was going to turn him down. At that moment, however, two more young people came out of the Eclipse – a tall, broad-shouldered boy in a red-and-green striped sweater and a brown trilby hat like Freddie from
Nightmare on Elm Street
, arm-in-arm with a curly-haired blonde. The blonde was dressed in a scarlet Spandex suit with huge red feathery wings attached to her back, and she had two red horns sticking out of her hair – an angel from Hell.
The boy in the Freddie costume caught sight of the girl in the black dress in J. Casey’s doorway and immediately turned his back, pulling the red-dressed angel even closer to him and ostentatiously kissing her.
When she saw that, the girl let out a mewling sound in the back of her throat, like an abandoned kitten. The boy kissed the angel again, surreptitiously looking sideways at the girl to make sure that she was watching. It was then that the girl turned to Milo and said, ‘All right, yes. If you can give me a lift home, that would be grand. Killiney Heights, do you know it?’
‘Of course, yes. Come on, then. Give me your hand. Don’t want you falling over in the road, do we, and making a holy show of yourself?’
He helped her over to the Opel, and opened the rear door for her. When she had managed to topple into her seat, he walked around the car and climbed in the other side, so that he was sitting close to her. Garret was already in the driver’s seat, his dark eyes floating surrealistically in the rear-view mirror.
‘My name’s Milo and this is my friend Gar,’ said Milo. ‘What’s your name, love?’
The girl was still silently sobbing. She had raised her left hand to the side of her face like a horse-blinker, so that she wouldn’t be able to see Freddie and the evil angel kissing each other.
‘Siobhán,’ she said, miserably.
‘So what’s upsetting you, Siobhán? Is it that feller in the stripy jumper – your one meeting that beour with the wings?’
‘He’s my boyfriend,’ said Siobhán. ‘Well, he
was
my boyfriend. And that’s supposed to be my best friend Clodagh.’
Garret turned around in his seat and said, in his hoarse voice, ‘How about I go over and give him a good hard dawk for you?’
Siobhán shook her head. ‘No. That’ll only make things worse. Just take me home, please. Killiney Heights – the blue house, right at the end, by the playing fields.’
‘No bother at all,’ said Garret. He started the engine and steered the Opel away from the kerb. As he reached the end of Oliver Plunkett Street and was about to turn left into Grand Parade, he glanced in his mirror and saw the taxi that Siobhán had ordered on her Hailo app arriving outside the Eclipse. He smiled to himself but said nothing.
‘That feen’s some pedro,’ said Milo. ‘Look at you, girl – you’re twice as good-looking as that so-called friend of yours. But if you can’t trust him, like, he’s not worth the full of your arse of boiled snow, believe me.’
Siobhán didn’t answer but rummaged in her bag for a crumpled tissue, so that she could wipe her eyes and blow her nose.
They crossed Patrick’s Bridge, over the River Lee. A crowd of young kids were gathered under one of the streetlamps, smoking and larking about and passing a large bottle of cider around.
After they had reached the other side of the river, however, instead of turning left along the embankment towards Knocknaheeny, Garret drove straight ahead up the steep slope of Bridge Street, and then turned right into MacCurtain Street, so that they were heading east, instead of west.
Siobhán said, ‘Where are we going? Knocka’s back that way.’
‘Short cut,’ said Garret.
Siobhán seemed to be satisfied with that explanation for a moment, but when Garret turned up Summerhill towards St Luke’s Cross, she sat forward in her seat and said, in a drunken slur, ‘This is
totally
the wrong direction, like.’
‘I told you – short cut,’ Garret repeated.
‘Don’t worry about it, girl, Gar knows what he’s doing,’ said Milo. ‘This’ll save him going all the way round St Mary’s Hospital.’
Siobhán sat back for a moment, but when Garret indicated that he was turning right into the Middle Glanmire Road, she sat up again and said, ‘
No!
This isn’t the way at all! You have to go back! Where are you taking me?’
Milo laid his hand on her arm and said, ‘It’s all right, Siobhán, don’t get yourself all steamed up. Everything’s going to be fine. Gar has to pick up a couple of things from Mayfield before he drives you home, isn’t that right, Gar?’
‘That’s right,’ said Garret. ‘I forgot them, that’s all. I’d forget me own arse if it wasn’t screwed on.’
‘Take me back,’ said Siobhán, twisting her arm away. ‘I don’t care what you forgot, I’m not going with you. Take me back.’
‘Can’t do that, I’m afraid,’ Milo told her. ‘This is one of them journeys that you have to go to the end of, once you’ve started. Bit like life, do you know what I mean, like?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Well, think about it. Once you’ve been given birth to, you might take a sconce at the world and decide you don’t particularly like the look of it, but you can’t go squodging your way back into your mamma’s gee, can you?’