Taken for Dead (Kate Maguire) (30 page)

He tried once more to lift himself up, but both of his arms were being gripped tight and the girl called Ruari was holding both of his ankles, digging her sharp fingernails into his skin.

‘You should be thankful we’re not taking out your pearly whites, Pat,’ said the carroty-curled young man. ‘You should have heard your man roaring and screaming when we were doing that, even though we tanked him up with whiskey.’

Pat could do nothing but lie back, squeeze his eyes tight shut and clench his teeth. Malachi took hold of his left nipple between finger and thumb and stretched it upwards as far as he could, so that it formed a little tent of white skin. Then he opened the secateurs, positioning the curving blades just below the areola.

Saint Epipodius, let me not feel this.

His prayer, however, went unanswered. The secateurs cut through his skin and his flesh with the softest crunch, but the pain was fiercer than anything he had ever felt in his life, as if he had been branded on his chest with a red-hot iron. Malachi held up his bloody nipple in front of his face so that he could see it, but he closed his eyes tight and turned his head away. He could feel blood sliding down his side on to the table top, and the agony was unbearable.

‘There,’ he heard the carroty-curled young man saying. ‘That wasn’t so bad after all, now was it? Only one more to go!’

‘
No
!’ Pat begged him, shaking his head violently from side to side, his eyes still closed. ‘No, please, no! I’ll do anything you want! I promise you! I’ll ring my wife! I’ll tell her I’ve been kidnapped! But not again! Please!’

‘What do you think, Ruari?’ asked the carroty-haired young man. ‘Think we can trust him, or not?’

‘Not me, I wouldn’t,’ said Ruari. ‘Besides, if you leave him with a nipple, even if it’s only the one nipple, he could still pretend that he was a king now, couldn’t he?’

‘Well, you’re probably right, sis. What do you say, Lorcan?’

The crimson-faced man was standing by the window, looking out at the rain. He turned his head and said, ‘It’s tradition, isn’t it, and who are we to be messing with tradition?’

‘Please, no,’ said Pat. ‘Please, in the name of Jesus.’

He tried to struggle again, but he was already numb with shock and he found that he couldn’t make his arm or leg muscles do what he wanted them to do. All he could manage was to clench his fists tightly and arch his back.

Malachi pinched his right nipple and stretched that up, too. In spite of his shock, he couldn’t stop himself from lifting his head and watching as Malachi opened the secateurs. This time he didn’t appeal to Saint Epipodius. He knew that it was going to hurt regardless of his prayers. He thought that the best course of action would be to watch and try to persuade himself that he was observing another man having his nipple cut off, and not himself at all. Perhaps in that way he could distance himself from the pain.

But when Malachi squeezed the handles of the secateurs together, and the blades sliced through his skin, the pain was just as excruciating as it had been the first time. It seemed to take longer, too, almost as if Malachi were cutting his nipple off in slow motion. Even the soft crunching sound seemed to go on for nearly half a minute.

He saw blood spurting from his chest, but then Ruari let go of his ankles and came round unhurriedly with a grubby-looking green hand towel. She pressed it against his wound, and held it there for a while, looking down at him as she did so. He didn’t think he had ever seen a woman with such a white face and such finely plucked eyebrows. Her eyes were such a pale green colour that they looked more like stones than eyes, and they showed no more emotion than stones would have done.

‘There now, Pat,’ she said, ‘that’s all over. You’ve been put in your place now. No more playing at kings for you, boy.’

Close behind her, Malachi held up Pat’s right nipple so that he could see it, then the carroty-curled young man passed him a small polythene freezer bag. He dropped the nipple into it, along with the bloodied left nipple, and passed it back.

‘You see, you won’t be having to make a phone call now to prove that we have you,’ said the carroty-curled young man, flip-flapping the bag in front of Pat’s face. ‘We’ll be able to send these to her, with a warning not to show them to the guards under any circumstances, but of course she will. The guards will do a DNA test to prove that they’re your little titties, and then they’ll pay up to have you released. See? Perfect!’

Lorcan, the crimson-faced man, came away from the window and looked down at Pat’s chest, with its two circular wounds where his nipples used to be. The wound on his left side had begun to clot now, but the wound on the right was still bleeding. ‘You shouldn’t have changed your mind, Pat. We didn’t have to do this at all. But I suppose you’ll always have something to remember us by.’

Pat didn’t answer him. His eyelids were fluttering and he kept losing consciousness – light, then dark, then light again – and he kept missing fragments of conversation. It was like listening to a microphone with a faulty connection.

At last he croaked, ‘It doesn’t – doesn’t work.’

‘What doesn’t work, Pat?’ asked Lorcan. He had tucked a cigarette between his lips and he was snapping the top of a purple plastic lighter.

‘Prayer,’ said Pat. ‘It doesn’t fecking work.’

Katie met Michael Dempsey in the Roundy Bar on Castle Street in the city centre. It was still raining hard outside and it was dark inside, so they sat at a table under the window.

‘I need you to tell me about the High Kings of Erin,’ she told him, hanging her raincoat over the back of her chair.

‘The High Kings of Erin?’ asked Michael Dempsey. ‘How long do you have?’

He was tall, at least six foot three, but round-shouldered, with thick black curly hair that was beginning to show strands of grey. He looked like the professor of history that he was, wearing a maroon corduroy jacket with elbow patches, a yellow cravat and a thick green flannel shirt. His trousers were baggy at the knees and his brown deck shoes were worn down.

‘I know that there were dozens of Irish kings,’ said Katie. ‘But you must have seen on the news that we’re trying to track down a gang of kidnappers who call themselves the High Kings of Erin.’

‘You could hardly miss it. Those two people burned to death on the beach like that. And that fellow having his head cut off and baked into a wedding cake. Shocking.’

Katie said, ‘The trouble is, I’ve received two phone calls now from these High Kings of Erin, but I still can’t be sure if they’re the real kidnappers or if they’re hoaxing us. This always happens whenever we’re dealing with a major crime and it gets well publicized – some stupid gobdaw will ring up and claim they have vital information for us, or that they committed the crime themselves. Sometimes it’s some header who is totally convinced in his own mind that he really
did
do it, but usually it’s time-wasters – the sort of people who call the fire brigade just to see the engines come out.’

She paused while Michael Dempsey ordered coffee for them both and a raspberry pastry for himself. ‘You’re sure I can’t tempt you?’ he asked her.

Katie shook her head. ‘No thanks, I’m a cake-o-holic. Once I start eating them I can’t stop.’

‘Well, I shouldn’t either. But when you teach history you realize how short your life is, and is it worth depriving yourself? You can’t eat raspberry pastries when you’re lying six feet under the sod in St Joseph’s Cemetery.’

‘True enough,’ Katie smiled. ‘But what I wanted to ask you, Michael, is if you thought these murders were – I don’t know,
ritualistic
in any way. Did the real High Kings of Erin kill people like that? Or even the mythical High Kings?’

‘Would it make any difference?’

‘Of course. If the real High Kings of Erin ever killed people like that – burning them and baking their heads into cakes – that would make me pretty sure that these new High Kings of Erin really
are
responsible for doing it. They wouldn’t simply be trying to take the credit for a couple of random gang killings that were nothing to do with them.’

‘I understand,’ said Michael Dempsey solemnly. ‘However, I can’t truthfully tell you that I’ve ever read anything about the High Kings of Erin disposing of people in those particular ways. But, like you say, there were dozens of High Kings, more than fifty altogether, some of them mythical and some of them real, so I don’t know everything that was ever written about all of them. I can tell you, though, that they were a pretty ruthless lot, on the whole. They had to be. They sacrificed innocent children and they murdered their brothers and sisters, just to stay on the throne.’

He tore open a packet of brown sugar and poured it into his coffee, then another one, and then another. ‘You’ll have to give me a little time to do some research.’

‘I’d be very grateful, Michael,’ said Katie. ‘More than anything else, it might help me to understand their agenda. The two men they’ve abducted so far were both on the brink of bankruptcy. Why would they demand ransom money from people who patently didn’t have any? Why didn’t they kidnap rich people?’

She didn’t tell him that she was almost certain that Derek Hagerty had aided and abetted his own kidnapping, and that the Pearses may well have been murdered because they had suspected it, too, and might have been able to give evidence in court to prove it. Neither did she say that there had been another witness who could possibly prove that Derek Hagerty had been an accomplice in his own abduction – Meryl’s former fiancé, Eoghan.

Michael Dempsey said, ‘You – ah – you won’t be mentioning my own name in connection with this investigation, will you?’

‘Of course not. My lips are sealed.’

‘Well, you know that I’m more than happy to help you out. But after what happened to Gerry O’Brien …’

‘No,’ Katie assured him. ‘We won’t risk anything like that.’ He was referring to his late colleague from the history department of Cork University, Professor Gerard O’Brien, who had assisted Katie and her team to investigate a previous series of ritual homicides. The killer had found out that Professor O’Brien was getting close to the truth about the murders and had brutally silenced him.

Michael Dempsey sipped his coffee and then he said, ‘It’s queer, don’t you think, that this gang should be giving themselves a name like the High Kings of Erin? Quite intellectual for a Cork crime gang? About the most romantic gang name I’ve ever heard is the Bride Valley View Boys. Not that it’s at all romantic if you know Bride Valley View.’

‘That’s one of the main reasons I’ve come to you, Michael,’ said Katie. ‘I need to find out if their name can give me any clues as to who they really are and what it is they’re after. They may be political fanatics, or they could be using the name just for mockery, who knows? Or, like I say, it might not be them at all, and they might just be stringing me along. But they know much more about these kidnappings than they could have seen on the TV news or read in the papers, so I do have serious suspicions that they’re responsible.’

‘Well, Katie, the High Kings of Erin committed some terrible acts of butchery, either to survive or to get what they wanted. For instance there was Art Óenther, who was sent by his wicked stepmother Bé Chuma to fetch back to Ireland the daughter of Morgan, Delbcháem, so that he could marry her and inherit her father’s throne. Before he could take her away, though, he had to kill her brother, Ailli Dubdétach, and then her mother, Coincheen, the ‘dog-headed’. Coincheen had cut off the heads of all her daughter’s previous suitors and impaled them on a bronze fence. So Art Óenther cut off
her
head, and Morgan’s too, for good measure, and impaled
them
on the fence.’

‘Mother of God, they were a bloodthirsty lot all right.’

‘There are plenty of descriptions of people being burned alive, but on bonfires usually, not half buried in sand. And the only mention I can recall of people being cooked was in the reign of the High King Tigernmas, the son of Follach, which was a particularly bloody time. Tigernmas used to offer sacrifices to Crom Cruach, the fertility god. Apart from many other small children, they once included the twin babies of his own sister, Eithne. The poor little babes were boiled alive in a pottage, with herbs and grains.’

‘Jesus. I’ll bet Darina Allen doesn’t teach you how to cook
that
recipe at Ballymaloe.’

Michael Dempsey lifted up his raspberry pastry and said, ‘You’re absolutely sure you wouldn’t like a bite?’

‘If I was tempted before, I’m certainly not tempted now. Can you imagine it? “What’s for supper tonight, darling?” “Oh, just the usual, boiled twins.”’

Michael Dempsey chewed and swallowed his pastry, but as he did so he was watching Katie closely. ‘Something else is worrying you, isn’t it?’

‘What?’ she said, looking up at him. ‘No – nothing more than usual.’

‘I don’t know. You’ll forgive me for saying so, but you look kind of sad.’

Katie tried to manage a smile but it turned out to be more of a pout, like a small child just about to burst into tears.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Michael Dempsey. ‘It’s none of my business. I shouldn’t have stuck my snout in. Forget I ever said it.’

‘No, no, you’re a sensitive man, Michael. You’re a sensitive man and you’re right. The truth of it is that the man I thought was going to marry me – well, now he’s
not
going to be marrying me.’

‘He must have a screw loose, this fellow.’

‘No … it’s just that Fate with a capital F had different ideas. That can happen sometimes. He went off to America and I decided to stay here.’

‘Couldn’t you have gone with him?’

‘Ah,’ said Katie, fiddling with her coffee spoon. ‘That’s the sixty-four thousand yoyo question. But no, not really. I have a city of over half a million people to look after. I couldn’t just walk away and leave them, could I?’

Michael Dempsey continued to watch her for a while and then he said, ‘Do you know what I’ve learned, more than anything else, from all of my years of studying history? I’ve learned that life is filled with overwhelming sadness.’