Taken for Dead (Kate Maguire) (16 page)

‘If the Pearses admit it, though, we’ll bring them straight in,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán.

‘Of course, if only for their own safety. If these High Kings of Erin are anything like as murderous as they claim to be, the Pearses will be needing us to give them round-the-clock security, too. We may even have to hide them away for a while. Derek Hagerty called them saints, but they don’t want to be joining the rest of the saints for a while yet.’

***

Acting Chief Superintendent Molloy was gathering his papers together to go to the media conference when Katie knocked at his open office door.

‘Well?’ he said, without looking up. ‘Did you get anything more out of Hagerty?’

‘Not much, but I think we may have identified the people who picked him up and drove him into the city. A travel agency manager called Norman Pearse and his wife. They live in Ballinlough.’

‘You’ve sent some of your people out to interview them?’

‘Of course. Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán and Detective Horgan. We should be hearing from them very soon, with any luck.’

‘That’s good. At least I can tell the media that we’re making some positive progress.’

‘Wait, that’s not the end of it by any means,’ said Katie. ‘I’ve just been called by a man representing the group that calls itself the High Kings of Erin – the same group who said they kidnapped Micky Crounan.’

Now, Bryan Molloy slowly lowered his clipboard and raised his head to stare at Katie with those bulging blue pit-bull eyes.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘He claimed that the High Kings of Erin were responsible for the bomb at Merchants Quay, and also for the kidnapping of Derek Hagerty, and for killing Micky Crounan, too.’

‘Did you trace the call?’

Katie shook her head. ‘We couldn’t, no. He was using a stealth phone and he wasn’t talking for long enough. But I’m ninety-nine per cent convinced that it wasn’t a hoax. For instance, he knew that Shelagh Hagerty had contacted us, although I can’t think how. Our security has been ultra-tight. The media don’t even know that Derek Hagerty was kidnapped yet, do they, let alone that he managed to escape? Or claims he did, anyhow.’

‘Well, they’re about to find out,’ said Bryan Molloy, picking up his clipboard again and glancing at the clock on his office wall. ‘We’re going to need all the help we can get on this one. You may have had a call from the High Kings of Erin but I’ve had a call from Jimmy O’Reilly about the money.’

‘I don’t suppose he’s exactly delighted with us.’

‘Delighted? You’re messing, aren’t you? He’ll be back from Dublin tomorrow, and if I had any choice in the matter, I think I’d rather go head to head with these High Kings of Erin or whatever they call themselves than Jimmy O’Reilly when he’s throwing a sevener.’

‘So what are you going to say to the media about all of this?’

‘There’s not much else I can say except to tell them the truth. I think you’ll agree that we’ve made a bags of this and we’re just going to have to admit it.’

‘I’m not at all sure that we have made a bags of it, not yet. It’s a bit early for us to be saying that we misread the situation at Merchants Quay. We may find out later it wasn’t our fault at all. Sure, I think you can tell the media that Derek Hagerty appears to have been kidnapped but is now a free man, but I don’t think you should give them much more than that. Come on, Bryan. We’re not at all sure yet that his story rings true.’

Bryan Molloy took his uniform jacket off the hanger on the back of the door and shrugged himself into it. ‘The media are going to want more details than that, Katie. Otherwise they’re going to be thinking that we’re hiding something.’

‘Of course we’re hiding something. We have to, for the time being. Listen, we don’t yet know for certain that it was Mrs Pearse and her friend who picked Hagerty up, or that it was Mr Pearse who called us. And we can’t yet be sure if there really is a gang of kidnappers called the High Kings of Erin, or whether somebody’s just stringing us along. It’s happened enough times before, God knows, people claiming credit for crimes they had nothing to do with. Even murders.’

‘We’ll be late,’ said Bryan Molloy. With that, he stepped out into the corridor, leaving Katie to close the door behind her.

***

The conference room where the media were assembled was crowded with at least twenty reporters, as well as cameramen and sound technicians. It smelled of new carpet tiles and stale cigarette smoke and Lynx aftershave. As Katie sat down at the desk between Bryan Molloy and the Garda press officer, Tadhg McElvin, the TV lights were switched on and she had to shield her eyes with her hand.

After a fusillade of coughing and shuffling everybody settled down and Bryan Molloy said, ‘We’ve called you all here this afternoon to give you some background into the cause of the bombing at Merchants Quay, and to bring you up to speed on our investigations.’

‘Has anybody claimed responsibility?’ asked Dan Keane from the
Examiner
. As usual, his hair was sticking up as if he had just got out of bed, and he had a cigarette tucked behind his right ear.

‘I’ll be taking questions later,’ said Bryan Molloy. ‘But the answer to your question is yes.’

‘So was it political?’ put in Fionnuala Sweeney, the pretty gingery-haired presenter from RTÉ. ‘Or was there another motive behind it?’

‘It was partly political and partly criminal. And we do have a fair idea why they did it.’

Katie leaned towards him and murmured, ‘
Bryan
, we don’t know their motives, not for certain. Let’s just stick to the basic facts, for the love of God.’

‘You don’t
have
any basic facts, do you?’ Bryan Molloy muttered back, leaning his head close to her without turning to look at her. ‘That’s the whole fecking trouble. But this lot have to leave here this evening thinking that I’m well on top of it.’

‘Oh, I thought you were going to admit that we’d messed it up.’

‘
I
didn’t mess it up, Katie. Not me. There was only one person in charge of organizing that farrago at Merchants Quay and that was you.’

Dan Keane raised his hand and asked, ‘Excuse me, Chief Superintendent, I hate to interrupt, but is there some kind of an internal disagreement going on here?’

‘Not at all,’ said Bryan Molloy, picking up his clipboard and giving the assembled media his toothiest smile. ‘Detective Superintendent Maguire here is simply filling me in on one or two operational details.’

‘My apologies,’ Dan Keane told him. ‘Whatever happened at Merchants Quay, though – whoever set that bomb off – I gather that you’re not very happy with the way the operation was handled?’

Bryan Molloy’s neck reddened to the colour of tomato soup. ‘I don’t know what in the world gave you that idea, Dan. In retrospect, I believe we could have handled the situation with more professionalism than we actually did, and with considerably more foresight, but even our most experienced officers can’t be expected to be psychic. We’re all human, after all, like most of you here, and we all have our failings.’

When he said that, Katie felt like standing up and walking out. If she did that, however, she knew that she would only be making herself look temperamental, and incompetent, and even more culpable for Garda McCracken’s death than she really was. It would also give Bryan Molloy the floor and allow him to carry on saying whatever he felt like, unchallenged.

Bryan Molloy looked directly into the TV cameras and furrowed his brow so that he looked almost comically serious. ‘The responsibility for the bombing at Merchants Quay has been claimed by a group who call themselves the High Kings of Erin. On Tuesday last week they abducted Mr Derek Hagerty, the owner of Hagerty’s Autos at Looney’s Cross. They called his wife, Mrs Shelagh Hagerty, and demanded a quarter of a million euros for his safe release. She was warned not to notify anybody, especially the Garda.’

Now the conference room erupted into waving hands and shouted questions. ‘Was the ransom paid, or not?’ ‘Have they let Derek Hagerty go yet?’ ‘Was he injured at all?’ ‘Why did they set a bomb off?’ ‘Why do they call themselves the High Kings of Erin?’ ‘Do you have any idea at all of their identity, sir, and what they’re after?’

Katie sat with her fingertips pressed to her temples as if she were suffering from a headache, but she didn’t speak. The very last thing she had wanted Bryan Molloy to tell the media was the name of the High Kings of Erin. Apart from the fact that she didn’t yet know if they really were responsible, it was a highly emotional name from Ireland’s medieval history, before the English claimed kingship, and it would give a gang of murderers and extortionists a nationalistic glamour that they didn’t deserve.

Bryan Molloy waited until the hubbub had died down, then he said, ‘I can confirm to you that the ransom has been paid in full. Mrs Hegarty herself was unable to raise the amount of money they were demanding, so she was assisted by the state. Detective Superintendent Maguire conceived a plan whereby the kidnappers would be tracked electronically once they had collected the cash and arrested once she was certain that Derek Hagerty had been released unharmed.’

‘So what went wrong?’ asked Fionnuala Sweeney. ‘A bomb went off and a young female garda was killed. How could that have happened?’ She was literally licking her lips as she waited for an answer, and Katie could imagine the rest of the reporters all salivating, too, as if the room were crowded with hungry dogs. There was nothing like a botched Garda operation to make front-page news, especially since it had led to a fatality.

In the simplest words she could find, Katie explained how she had planned to track the kidnappers until she was sure that Derek Hagerty was either safe or dead, whichever it was, and then arrest them.

Dan Keane said, ‘It sounds to me as if this gang
knew
that you were tracking them, like. So how exactly did they find out that Mrs Hagerty had been in touch with you, and that you’d be waiting for them?’

‘Right now, I simply don’t know,’ Katie replied. ‘We kept a very tight lid on this whole ransom payment right from the start, and even those officers directly involved on the ground knew only what they needed to know and nothing more. Only four of my detectives were aware that the kidnap victim was Derek Hagerty, and that was because they had to check on his background and any business problems he might have had.’

Now Bryan Molloy interrupted her. ‘Unfortunately, and very regrettably, it turned out that there was no reason for the ransom to be handed over at all. Earlier in the day, Derek Hagerty had managed to escape from his abductors and he was discovered alive and reasonably well, lying by the roadside near Ballynoe. This was more than forty-five minutes before we gave the High Kings of Erin two hundred and fifty thousand euros in non-consecutive, non-traceable banknotes.’

‘We weren’t aware that he had escaped, of course,’ said Katie. ‘If we had been, the story would have been very different.’

‘So he didn’t call you and tell you that he had escaped?’ asked Branna MacSuibhne, from the
Echo
. Katie noticed that young Branna had lost some weight and twisted her hair up into a ponytail, instead of her usual Jackie Kennedy bob.

‘No, Branna, he didn’t. He was frightened of what his abductors might do to him and his family.’

‘So how did
you
find out that he had escaped?’

‘We had a tip-off from the people who found him,’ put in Bryan Molloy. ‘We believe that they were a married couple from Ballinlough, but we have yet to confirm that, as I’m sure Detective Superintendent Maguire will tell you. She still has a fair amount of catching up to do, wouldn’t you agree, Detective Superintendent? But she’s swimming as hard as she can against the tide.’

The media conference went on for another twenty minutes. Fionnuala Sweeney repeatedly asked if the bombing at Merchants Quay could have been averted by better Garda intelligence, or by setting up the handover at another location where nobody was likely to be injured or killed.

Katie emphatically shook her head. ‘As police officers, Fionnuala, we demand a great deal from ourselves, more than most people ever realize. But we’re not psychic, as Chief Superintendent Molloy has already admitted to you, and we don’t have X-ray vision or super-hearing, and none of us can fly.’

She refused to speculate on the identity of the High Kings of Erin, or to give the media any more details about where Derek Hagerty was now and who had tipped them off about his escape. She was glad she hadn’t. While Bryan Molloy was winding up with a speech about how he was going to improve Garda response times, and how he was going to bring in software updates for the PULSE and AFIS computer systems in Cork – almost as if he were going to do it single-handed – her iPhone rang.

It was Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. She sounded as if she were standing by a main road, with cars swishing past.

‘We’ve just finished talking to the Pearses. They’re adamant, both of them, that it wasn’t them who picked up Hagerty and took him in. We separated them and talked to them individually, but both of them were insistent that they had never even heard of Derek Hagerty.’

‘So what was Norman Pearse doing driving into Western Road and then back out again?’

‘He says he was picking up a stationery order from Snap Printing down at Crawford House, some letterheads and some compliments slips.’

‘Have you checked that with Snap?’

‘They’re closed now, but I can track down the manager at home.’

‘All right, then. I’ll see you after. We’ve almost wrapped up this media conference. More than a little shattering, if you get my meaning.’

Just as she dropped her iPhone back into the pocket of her jacket, Katie heard Bryan Molloy announcing that the High Kings of Erin had also claimed responsibility for abducting and beheading Micky Crounan.

She could only sit and listen with her head bowed as he answered the media’s questions about Micky Crounan’s abduction and murder. Bryan Molloy told them that he was sure now that they were looking for a ruthless gang who were pursuing a political agenda, restoring the glory of Ireland’s native kingship, while at the same time enriching themselves with ransom money.