Taken for Dead (Kate Maguire) (36 page)

‘Bryan, you’re being unfair,’ Katie retorted. ‘My team have been working all the hours that God sends them to break this case, but you know yourself that the evidence is less than minimal. We have the saw marks left on Micky Crounan’s vertebrae, we have the footprints left on Rocky Bay Beach, we have a fingerprint lifted from the Carrolls’ doorbell in Carrigaline, and two sightings of two bald gorillas in black suits, who nobody has yet come forward to identify. Plus some bits and pieces of bomb that may or may not have been put together by Clearie O’Hely.

‘I’m hopeful, though, that Derek Hagerty will break, sooner or later, especially now that he’s been charged.’ She checked her watch. ‘Talking of that, I have to be at the District Court in fifteen minutes.’

‘What for?’ asked Bryan Molloy. ‘How can you possibly pursue your case against Derek Hagerty when you have no witnesses left alive and no material evidence?’

‘Bryan, no messing,’ Katie snapped at him, ‘I’m beginning to wonder whose side you’re on.’

Bryan Molloy’s eyes bulged and he repeatedly jabbed his finger at her ‘I’ll tell you whose side I’m on! I’m on the side of efficiency and effectiveness in clearing up serious crime in this city! You know how I dealt with the gangs in Limerick? They thought they were hard, but I was harder than they were. I didn’t give them an inch, not a fecking inch, and I’m not going to give an inch to any of the gangs here in Cork, whatever they call themselves. But it takes good team management to be efficient and it takes good intelligence and first-class detective work to be effective, and you, girl, are seriously falling short.’

Katie said, ‘This is your idea of a truce, is it? This is your idea of us “rubbing along together”?’

‘Katie, you don’t have to call a truce with somebody who doesn’t have anything to offer you. And up until now, what have you come up with?’

‘You don’t know me at all, Bryan,’ said Katie. ‘You don’t know the way I work or what connections I have, and I can promise you that one day soon you’re going to regret talking to me like this.’

‘I’m shaking in my boots,’ grinned Bryan Molloy. ‘Meanwhile, if you or one of your team will be so kind, I’ll need some detailed background information on this Whelan kidnap so that I can talk to Jimmy O’Reilly again and see if he can authorize another two hundred and fifty thousand euros ransom money. I don’t know if he’ll be able to let us have that much, but if he can, we’d better not lose it this time.’

Katie was about to lash back at him that no crime ever got solved by sarcasm, but she bit her lip.
Wait until you get home
.

Instead, she said, ‘Detective O’Donovan’s taking down Mairead Whelan’s particulars right now. I’ll ask him to send them up to you.’

‘And what are you going to do about Derek Hagerty?’

‘I’ll drop the charge against him, for the time being anyway, although I still think I could make it stick. Believe me, there’s enough holes in his story to strain the poppies.’

‘Drop it,’ said Bryan Molloy. ‘We don’t want to look even more cack-handed than we do already. And you’ll have to turf him out, whether he wants to go or not. This is the Garda station, not the fecking Simon Shelter.’

‘We have a safe house in Macroom that should be free in a day or two. In the meantime, he could go back to his own home. It would give him the chance to sort out his affairs, cancel his newspapers or whatever and pack what he needs. But we’d have to give him round-the-clock protection.’

‘As long as it’s only a couple of days and no more than that. For the love of God, Katie, we can’t afford many more officers out on protection duty. We simply don’t have the manpower, and if you saw the overtime costs you’d pass out on the spot.’

‘I’ll see what I can arrange with Denis,’ Katie told him.

As she opened the office door to leave, Bryan Molloy said, ‘There doesn’t have to be this enmity between us, Katie. But you have to prove to me that you’re on top of these kidnappings. I can’t go on making excuses for you for very much longer.’

Katie pretended that she hadn’t heard that, and walked out into the corridor without closing the door behind her.

The door opened and Eoghan heard floorboards creaking, and people breathing, and the sound of their clothes rustling. He could smell perfume, too, heavy and musky, similar to the Jovan perfume that his wife, Patsy, sprayed on herself far too liberally whenever she went out in the evening.

He was blindfolded with what felt like a woollen scarf, knotted so tightly at the back of his head that it was bringing on one of his headaches. His wrists were bound behind his back with gaffer tape and his shoes had been taken away. He was lying on his right side, very awkwardly, on what felt like carpet that was worn down to the backing.

Wherever he was, it was chilly and smelled strongly of damp, like most old houses in Cork. He was trembling with the cold and also with the shock of being dragged away from his parents’ house and seeing that young detective shot, right in the face. On top of that, his bladder was so full that it was painful.

He heard shuffles and murmurs and then somebody came up and squatted down close to him, and sniffed. Then a thin, abrasive voice said, ‘So! You’re the fellow who found Derek Hagerty lying by the roadside, along with that Pearse woman.’

‘Do you think you could untie me here? I’m absolutely bursting for a slash.’

‘Oh, just piss in your kecks, I don’t mind. What I want to know is, what did you think when you picked up Derek Hagerty?’

‘Is that his name?’ said Eoghan. ‘To me and Meryl, he called himself Denny.’

‘Denny, Derek. Whatever he called himself, what did you think?’

‘What do you mean, what did I think? I thought we ought to call an ambulance or take him to the nearest Garda station, that’s what I thought. But he begged us not to, said he was scared for his life. He was totally shitting it, so Meryl said she’d take him back to her house, God rest her soul.’

‘You know that she’s dead?’ the thin voice asked him.

‘Of course. It’s been all over the news. It was horrible, her getting all burned up like that. She and I were going to be married once upon a time.’

‘Yes, I know about that. You have my sympathy, believe me.’

‘Was she killed because of this Denny fellow? This Hagerty, or whatever his name is? Am
I
here because of him? I was going to go to the cops about it, but my father told me that it would be safer for me to forget about it altogether and go back to England a couple of days early, just in case. I wish I had now.’

‘Do you know the names of the people who killed her?’

Eoghan had to squeeze his eyes tight shut and clench his thighs together for a moment to stop himself from urinating. Then he said, ‘No, of course I don’t. Even the cops don’t know. How could I?’

‘Did Derek Hagerty tell you who had kidnapped him? Did
he
mention any names?’

‘No, the people who took him, he said he’d never seen them before.’

‘Did you believe him?’

‘I didn’t have any reason not to.’

‘Ah, no. I have a strong suspicion, Eoghan, that you did
not
believe him.’

‘For Christ’s sake!’ Eoghan retorted. ‘Why should I have not believed him? I didn’t care one way or the other! He was all bloody and bruised and the smell off of him was rank. All I wanted to do was for us to get rid of him as soon as we could. To be honest with you, I didn’t even want to pick him up in the first place.’

‘But you had an inkling that he wasn’t telling you the truth, didn’t you?’

‘Like I say, it didn’t matter to me one way or the other. Not a hat of shite, believe me.’

‘All the same, you
did
think that he could have been lying about what happened to him, or exaggerating at the very least?’

‘No. Yes. I don’t know.’

‘If you didn’t suspect that he wasn’t telling you the truth, why did the Pearses call the guards?’

‘How should I know? Listen, I really need to go to the jacks and I don’t want to wet my pants, thank you very much.’

‘Okay, okay. I’ll do a deal with you. I’ll let you go and relieve yourself and then we’ll come to an arrangement, you and me.’

‘Arrangement?’

‘Go and water the horses first. I can’t stand talking to someone so twitchy. Malachi?’

Eoghan heard somebody else approaching and then his left arm was grasped tightly and he was hauled up on to his feet as easily as if he had been a young child. Because he was still completely blindfolded he had to stagger to correct his balance, but then his left arm was grasped again and he felt the tape around his wrists being sliced apart with a very sharp knife.

A hard hand gripped his right shoulder and, with stumbling steps, he was pushed straight along a corridor for about thirty or forty feet, then tugged to the left, and then stopped. He heard a door open and a growly voice said, ‘There you are. You can sit down to piss. Don’t want it spraying all over the shop.’

He unbuttoned his trousers and sat down. The toilet seat was wooden and rickety and the varnish was peeling, but he didn’t care about that. As he emptied his bladder, he thought,
My hands are free now, and there’s only this one fellow close enough to stop me. If I can surprise him, maybe there’s a good chance that I can get out of here
. He could hear the thin-voiced man talking and a young woman replying to him, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying, so they were obviously some distance away.

He knew it would be dangerous. If they had been prepared to shoot a detective garda who had tried to stop them, they would have no compunction at all about shooting him. In fact, he was almost one hundred per cent sure that was what they were going to do anyway. For some reason, the thin-voiced man seemed to be sure that he knew something incriminating about Derek Hagerty’s escape, even though he didn’t – or if he did, he wasn’t aware that he knew it. Whatever it was, though, it had been motive enough for them to murder Meryl and her husband, and horribly.

Behind his woollen blindfold, his eyes prickled with tears. Meryl. Oh God, Meryl. I loved you so much. Why did I take you on that stupid drive up to Fermoy? Did I really believe that you would go to bed with me? And Patsy. How is Patsy going to cope, if they kill me?

‘Aren’t you fecking finished yet?’ the growly voice demanded. ‘You’re putting the Shannon to shame in there.’

Eoghan stood up, pulled up his trousers and zipped up his fly. He groped around for a few seconds as if he were fruitlessly searching for something, and then backed out of the toilet and said, ‘Can’t find the handle to flush it.’

‘Jesus, out the way, would you,’ said the growly voice. Eoghan was roughly pushed aside, but as soon as that happened he reached up with both hands and wrenched the scarf down from his eyes. It had been knotted so tightly that it hurt his nose when he tugged it down, and he couldn’t get it over his chin.

He blinked in the sudden light. One of the bald-headed bouncer-types who had kidnapped him was stretching up to reach the cistern arm because the toilet chain was missing. Eoghan hunched his head down and shoulder-tackled him, as hard as he could, just like in rugby at school, and the bouncer-type hit the wall and dropped down between the wall and the lavatory bowl, so that for a few moments he was wedged in the corner.

‘What the
feck
do ye think ye’re playin’ at, ye feckin’ gowl!’ the bouncer-type screamed at him. He grabbed hold of the toilet seat to pull himself up, but its fastenings gave way and he fell back again, with the toilet seat landing in his lap.

Eoghan limped along the short distance to the end of the corridor until he reached the high-ceilinged hallway. He hesitated for a split second, looking for the best way to escape. All of the doors around the hallway were closed, and might be locked, and he didn’t want to risk running upstairs and trying to hide. He crossed over to the front door and hurriedly jiggled off the security chain. The two cast-iron bolts were both stiff, but he managed to force them back, the bottom one by kicking it with his stockinged foot, and then he pulled down the door handle and tugged. He tugged it again and again, but the door was double-locked and wouldn’t open.

‘So – thinking of taking a walk, were you, Eoghan?’ said that thin, scraping voice. ‘I thought you and me agreed that we had business to talk over.’

Eoghan turned around. The two bouncer-types with their black suits and shiny bald heads had positioned themselves on either side of the hallway, blocking the way to the stairs and the kitchen. Between them stood the carroty-curled brother and sister, Aengus and Ruari, both dressed in grey chalk-striped jackets, as well as Lorcan, the crimson-faced man, whose grey hair was even wilder and more straggly than ever, and who had a strange, distracted smile on his face, almost beatific, as if he were high.

Eoghan looked tensely from one to the other, slightly crouched down. He felt like a cornered animal.

‘Now why don’t you come back to the lounge, Eoghan?’ said Aengus. ‘You never gave me the chance to explain what I had in mind. Jesus! I can’t believe you rushing off like that without even saying “see ye”.’

‘What in God’s name can you and me possibly have to agree about?’ said Eoghan. His words sounded flat and expressionless, as if they were being repeated by a translator standing beside him.

‘Well, come here, sham, and I’ll tell you,’ said Aengus. Without saying anything else, he turned and walked back along the corridor, accompanied by Ruari and Lorcan, although the two bouncer-types waited in the hallway for Eoghan to follow them. He hesitated for a moment, but then he did. He knew that he had no alternative.

They went through to the large gloomy drawing room. Aengus and Ruari sat together on the ottoman while Lorcan went over and perched himself on one of the window seats. The two bouncer-types stood in the background, hands clasped together, silent and unmoving. Eoghan sat in one of the tub-like armchairs. Either the seat cushion was too flat or the sides were too high, but it made him feel diminished and small.

Aengus started to twist one of his carroty curls around his left index finger, around and around. ‘You know something, sham, I was almost coming around to believing you. That’s why I let you have a comfort break. I was coming around to trusting you, ninety-nine per cent at least.’