Taken for Dead (Kate Maguire) (24 page)

‘And the purpose of that is –
what
, like?’ asked Inspector Fennessy. ‘Surely they realize that if they keep on sticking up two fingers to us, we’re going to put twice as much effort into finding out who they are and hunting them down.’

‘I’m not at all certain why they’re doing it, Liam. Although – well – there’s a couple of possibilities that I can think of. Maybe they want to give themselves such a frightening reputation that when they kidnap somebody their relatives will stump up the ransom money without any argument and without ever telling us about it. Then again, they could genuinely be political, like they claim to be – or maybe they’re nothing more than attention-seekers. You remember the Brogans when they robbed all those building society branches wearing hockey masks so nobody would know it was them, and we told the media that we suspected the Quirke family – which we did, of course.’

Inspector Fennessy nodded and smiled. ‘That’s right, Kevin Brogan rang up the “PJ Coogan Show” raging that it was him and his brothers that had done it, but we hadn’t given them the credit. What a gobdaw.’

Just then, Katie saw two more cars approaching on the narrow, hedge-lined road that led to Rocky Bay Beach – a bronze Opel Insignia with a dented driver’s door and a cream Fiat Punto. There were no spaces left in the car park, so they drove halfway down the rough concrete slope that led to the beach and stopped at an angle, one close behind the other. Out of the first car climbed Dan Keane from the
Examiner
, with his photographer, and out of the second car emerged Branna MacSuibhne from the
Echo.

Katie could see yet another car coming into view around a bend in the road, followed by a large white van with a bottle-green stripe around it and a satellite dish on the roof.

‘Cross of
Christ
!’ she snapped. ‘Who tipped off the media?’

‘Not me, ma’am,’ said Inspector Fennessy, shading his eyes to watch the vehicles coming nearer. ‘I can swear that to you on my estranged wife’s share of my house.’

‘I told Tadhg
specifically
that I didn’t want them down here until the technical boys were finished and the site was cleared.’

‘I’ll go over and have a word,’ Inspector Fennessy told her. Blue and white crime-scene tape was stretched across the path that led down to the sand, and three uniformed gardaí had already intercepted the reporters to stop them from coming any closer. Dan Keane, however, caught sight of Katie and gave her a cheery salute.

‘Go on, Liam,’ said Katie. ‘I don’t want them seeing the bodies. I don’t even want them knowing how they died. It’s vital that we keep this very low-key, especially if the High Kings of Erin murdered them like this for the sake of publicity. We need to deny them the oxygen.’

Inspector Fennessy walked across to talk to Dan Keane and Branna MacSuibhne, who had now been joined by Fionnuala Sweeney from RTÉ, with her cameraman and sound engineer. Fionnuala was wearing a short ginger coat to match her gingery hair, and she waved, too. Katie looked the other way and pretended that she hadn’t seen her.

She was furious – so furious that her fists were clenched inside her coat pockets and she was breathing hard, as if she had just stopped running. The High Kings of Erin had now killed three people who appeared to be totally innocent, as well as a Garda officer, and at the same time they were taunting her and playing her for a fool. With this case – as Acting Chief Superintendent Bryan Molloy had so patronizingly told the media – she always seemed to be swimming against the tide.

It even occurred to her that the High Kings of Erin might have deliberately committed these murders here on the seashore as a sly reference to Bryan’s remark.
Pull yourself together,
girl
, she told herself,
don’t let the bastards grind you down
. But in spite of that, she still couldn’t work out what the High Kings’ game was, or who they could possibly be. She found it hard to believe that they were really old-fashioned Irish patriots, righteously determined to punish those chancers who had ruined the country’s economy. Maybe they did have some connection to the Real IRA,
Óglaigh na hÉireann
, who had frequently shot or beaten up drug-dealers in Cork for ‘unrepublican behaviour’, although she still thought that the killings were far too fantastical for them.

More likely, they were a professional crime gang who had concocted a far-fetched political excuse for what was nothing more than out-and-out extortion.

She was still standing there, looking out to sea, when Bill Phinner came up to her, walking so silently on the sand that she didn’t hear him, and she jumped when he said, ‘DS Maguire?’

‘Bill! Yes, what is it?’

‘We have the victims all laid out now, if you want to come and take a look.’

‘What? Yes, of course, Bill. Thanks.’

She followed him back to the nearest tent. She was only halfway there when Dan Keane shouted out, ‘DS Maguire! DS Maguire! Any chance of a quick word, ma’am?’

She pretended she hadn’t heard him and kept on walking, but as she reached the tent and Bill Phinner was holding the flap open for her, he shouted, ‘Is it true that this is Mr and Mrs Pearse, who found Derek Hagerty?’

She hesitated for a moment. She was sorely tempted to stalk over to the crime-scene tape and demand to know who the
hell
had told him that?

Bill Phinner obviously saw from her expression what she was thinking, because he said, ‘You’re grand, ma’am. Just come inside and see the victims. There’ll be plenty of time for the media later.’

Katie glanced across at Dan Keane, who was holding out both hands appealingly, but then she nodded and ducked her head down as she entered the tent.

The lights inside were brilliant, like a television set, which made the spectacle of the two half-incinerated bodies even more unreal. They had both been dug out of the sand and laid side by side on stretchers. The tent was crowded with five technical assistants in rustling Tyvek suits and masks, and two armed gardaí. There was an eye-watering smell of vinyl and petrol and burned flesh, which reminded Katie of Paul’s first and only barbecue – abandoned, thankfully, because of the rain.

She took out the large men’s handkerchief that she always kept in one of her pockets, soaked in perfume.

The victims both had their arms crooked up like two toy monkey drummers, the classic posture of burns victims. Both had been burned down to chest level – the man more severely than the woman. His eyeballs were shrivelled in their sockets and where his nose had been there were only two deep triangular cavities. In fact, there was scarcely any flesh left on his head at all, although he still had some large flakes of blackened skin on the right-hand side of his skull, with hair sprouting out of them, and part of his right earlobe remained intact, resembling a thick crispy curve of bacon rind.

The man’s collarbones were exposed and blackened, but below his breastbone, where he had been buried in the sand, his body was intact. He was wearing what was left of a green cable-knit sweater with some moth holes in it, a pair of worn brown corduroy trousers, and green rubber boots.

The woman had more hair than the man, but it had been charred into clumps, like the bristles of a burned sweeping brush. There was more flesh left on her face, too, pinkish-orange and glistening with intracellular fluid. Her neck and shoulders were a mass of yellow blisters, blister upon blister, although some of them were starting to wrinkle and collapse and weep.

She was wearing a pale grey cardigan with a pink cotton blouse underneath it, and a pair of black Levi jeans. Inspector Fennessy had probably been close when he guessed her age at mid- to late thirties; the jeans were tighter than an older woman would have worn, but they weren’t jeggings.

On her feet she was wearing flat grey canvas deck shoes.

‘The pain, I’ll tell you, it must have been monstrous,’ said Bill Phinner, in his dry, expressionless voice.

Katie didn’t answer him. She had accompanied Bill Phinner to more crime scenes now than she could count, and the two of them had stood together and witnessed much more horrifying sights than these two burns victims – men who had been deliberately pushed into combine harvesters, a woman whose husband had pinned her against the garage wall with their car’s bumper and left her for days on end to die. Yet this was the first time she had heard him utter a single word of empathy for any of the deceased.

‘Did you find anything else in their pockets apart from that bar receipt?’ she asked him.

‘The female had a pink plastic hair slide in her cardigan pocket and a tissue in her jeans. We’ll analyse them both for DNA, but that’s just routine. The male had an unused cotton handkerchief and seventy-eight cents in change.’

‘I’m surprised that he had a bar receipt in these trousers. They look like his gardening clothes.’

‘Well, who knows?’ Inspector Fennessy put in. ‘Sometimes I’ll be getting dressed in the morning and I’ll see something that I took out of my trouser pocket the night before and pick it up. Keys, change, receipts. Maybe he meant to take it downstairs and put it in his desk, but forgot.’

‘We found three cigarette ends buried in the sand around them,’ said Bill Phinner. ‘Something else, too, which may or may not be relevant.’

He beckoned to one of his assistants and she passed over a clear plastic evidence bag which he handed to Katie. Holding it up, Katie could see that it contained a tarnished silver medallion, oval in shape, with an embossed picture of a saint on one side and the words
Pray for Us
stamped into the reverse.

‘Who’s this?’ she said. ‘I can’t quite make out the lettering.’

‘Saint Nicholas. Not
only
known as Santa Claus, but the patron saint of prostitutes, among many other disreputable professions, such as thieves and pawnbrokers. Let’s put it this way, he takes care of the dregs of society, so long as they promise to try and mend their ways.’

‘Where was this found?’ asked Katie.

‘Underneath the right foot of the female victim. She may have been wearing it herself and the chain broke while she was trying to resist being buried, or else it belonged to one of the perpetrators. On the other hand, it’s just as likely that it was lost on the beach by a swimmer or a holidaymaker weeks or months or even years ago. We’ll do our best, but you can buy these things in their thousands in any religious store in Ireland, or online – www.religiousartefacts.com. We’ll try the Veritas shop in Carey’s Lane, see if they recognize it, but I can’t say that I’m hopeful.’

‘All right,’ said Katie. She knelt down carefully between the two bodies and examined them both closely, keeping her scented handkerchief pressed over her nose and mouth. The woman’s lips were curled up like the Joker’s. It was only the effect of the searing heat, which had tightened her facial muscles, but she looked as if she were grinning in glee at the clownish tragedy of her own appearance. The man, on the other hand, could have been a thousand-year-old mummy excavated from an ancient tomb.

Little did they know when they put on these clothes this morning that they would end the day looking like this, and that it was the last time that they would ever get dressed. Katie always thought the same about traffic accident victims, sitting dead in their cars with their clean shirts on, and their teeth freshly brushed, and their stomachs still full of breakfast.

‘‘You’ll be calling Dr Reidy, then?’ asked Bill Phinner, as Katie stood up straight again.

‘Yes. He won’t be very happy. One of his assistants has flown off to South America for some international pathology conference and the other’s on paternity leave. And I think there’s a golf tournament at Ballybunion he was very keen to go to.’

‘Oh well, he’ll have to make do with Fota. They have a couple of singles tournaments coming up next week. He can watch golf by day and post-mortify by night. I’ll text you as soon as these two have been delivered to the morgue.’

Katie pushed her way out of the tent and stood outside for a moment, breathing in the salty sea air. The tide had come in a long way since she had first arrived and Bill Phinner and his team would probably have less than twenty minutes to remove the bodies. After that, the holes in the sand in which they had been buried would fill up with seawater, and all the footprints around them would be washed away, and there would no trace left of the way in which the Pearses had met their deaths.

As she was walking to the car park, Detective Horgan came towards her in a bright blue anorak. His nose was red with cold and his GAA tie was crooked.

‘Visa just got back to us, ma’am.’

‘Oh, yes. Good. And was it him?’

‘It was him all right. Norman Anthony Pearse, Ard na Fálta, Boreenmanna Road, Ballinlough.’

‘Well, unless somebody stuffed that receipt into his pocket when he wasn’t looking, I think that proves it. You’d best go tell Inspector Fennessy. I’m going back to the station and then I’m calling it a day and going home.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ He started to go, but then he stopped and looked at the blue vinyl tents and shook his head. ‘What a way to end your life, burned alive like that. Makes you realize what all of them martyrs went through, them and that Bridget Cleary.’

Katie turned her head and looked at him quizzically, but his expression seemed perfectly serious. She never quite knew with Detective Horgan if he was taking the mickey or not. Bridget Cleary was said to have been the last-ever witch burned to death in Ireland, albeit by her husband, Michael, who set fire to her nightgown and then splashed lamp oil all over her, convinced that she was a fairy.

‘Yes,’ she said, and then continued walking to the car park, where the press and TV reporters were patiently waiting for her, swinging their arms and clapping their hands together to keep warm. She ducked under the crime-scene tape and went up to them.

‘It
is
them, isn’t it?’ asked Dan Keane, taking his cigarette out of his mouth and flicking it away. ‘Norman and Meryl Pearse?’

‘I’ll consider answering that question for you if first of all you answer one of mine. I want to know who tipped you off that we were dealing with an incident down here?’