Taken for Dead (Kate Maguire) (40 page)

She finished her drink, but she didn’t pour herself another one. What was the point of getting drunk on her own? What she needed was somebody to talk to. Barney was scratching at the kitchen door, but there was no point in talking to him, and in any case he hadn’t been outside long enough.

She was still trying to decide if she wanted to make herself something to eat when her doorbell chimed. She stood up and went to the living-room door, but then she hesitated. She wasn’t expecting anybody from the station, or any of her friends, so there was only one person it could be.

The doorbell chimed again. She went up to the door and called out, ‘Who is it?’

‘Who do you think?’

‘What do you want? It’s late.’

‘I need to talk to you.’

‘Well, you can talk to me tomorrow. It’s late and I have nothing to say to you right now.’

‘I need to know what’s happened to Sorcha. I came home this evening and she’s not there. She’s gone. She’s even taken a suitcase and some of her clothes.’

Katie waited for a moment, and then she said, ‘She’s safe, David. That’s all I’m going to say to you tonight. She’s safe and she’s being well taken care of.’

‘So you know where she is?’

‘Yes, and I’ll tell you tomorrow.’

‘If you can tell me tomorrow, why can’t you tell me now?’

‘Because tomorrow she’ll have a protection order against you and you won’t be able to go near her, that’s why.’

‘What? What are you talking about, protection order?’

‘That’s all I’m going to say to you, David. Now, go back home and I’ll discuss it with you in the morning.’

There was a long silence from outside, but Katie hadn’t heard David leave and she was sure that he was still standing in the porch.

‘David – ’ she began.

‘Can’t we just talk about it?’ he begged her. ‘I know I’ve done wrong, Katie. I know I’ve treated Sorcha badly. But whatever she’s said to you, it’s not all my fault. Far from it.’

‘David, go home.’

‘I desperately need some help here, Katie. I don’t know how to deal with this situation at all. I don’t have anybody to discuss it with, because it always seems like I’m in the wrong. But if you had any idea what it’s like, living with Sorcha.’

Katie waited, but it was obvious that David was going to stay outside until she agreed to talk to him.

‘All right,’ she said, sliding back the safety chain and unlocking the door. ‘I’ll talk to you. But for five minutes only, and I’m still not telling you where Sorcha is.’

David was standing in the porch looking dishevelled. His dark curly hair was messed up and although he was wearing a brown tweed jacket, his crumpled shirt tails were hanging out. His eyes were puffy and as soon as he stepped into the hallway Katie could smell that he had been drinking. He lurched against the raincoats and then steadied himself by placing the flat of his hand against the opposite wall.

‘David, you’re langered,’ said Katie. ‘I hope you weren’t driving like that.’

‘Oh! I’m sorry! I forgot you were a detective superintendent and not the interfering slutbag who lives next door!’

‘I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,’ Katie told him. ‘Go home and get yourself sober and I’ll come round and see you in the morning.’

David stared at her. ‘Did I
ask
you to stick your nose into my marriage?’ he said. ‘You were all sympathetic to me when you were gagging for a shag, weren’t you? But now look at you? All high and mighty and judgemental! How dare you to think that you can come between me and my wife? What gives you the right, you supercilious bitch?’

Katie said, ‘Go home, David. I’m not telling you again.’

‘And if I don’t? Then what? You’ll arrest me? What for? Defending a husband’s right to tell his psychotic wife to behave herself?’

Katie grasped the sleeve of David’s jacket and tried to turn him towards the front door, which was still wide open. Immediately, David reached behind him and slammed it shut. His face was flushed and contorted, barely recognizable, as if he had suddenly been possessed by some demon. He pushed Katie back along the hallway with both hands, so that she staggered and lost her balance and her shoulder hit the frame of the living-room door.

‘You
think
– !’ David shouted at her. ‘You
think
that you can tell me how to treat my own wife! What gives you the right? What gives
you
the fecking right? You may be a detective, Detective Superintendent, but you’re still a slutbag, and I won’t be given lessons in how to behave by some slutbag! Do you hear me?’

Katie backed into the living room, glancing behind her to make sure that she didn’t stumble over the coffee table. Her heart was beating hard, but she had faced up to drunken and violent men plenty of times before. As a young garda, she had patrolled outside Waxy’s and Rearden’s and Buckley’s on a Saturday night, and David didn’t make her feel afraid.

‘So what happened?’ said David. ‘Sorcha came around to you whining, did she? She always does that, wherever we are. “Oh, he’s been beating me! Oh, he gave me such a slap!” Don’t you realize that’s the only way that any human man could possibly deal with her?’

‘David, get out of here, now, and go home,’ Katie warned him. ‘I don’t want to arrest you, but unless you leave I swear that I will.’

David advanced on her and shoved her again, and then again. She fell backwards on to the couch and he toppled heavily on top of her. He seized her right wrist and forced her arm straight upwards, while at the same time grabbing the hem of her skirt and twisting it right up almost to her waist.

‘So you think you can play dirty with me, do you?’ he hissed at her, right in her face, so that she could feel his spit prickling all over her cheeks and she was overwhelmed by the smell of whiskey. ‘You think you can flirt with me and jeopardize my professional reputation and mess up my marriage? You just wait until I report you to your superiors. Then we’ll see who can play dirty!’

His hand fumbled underneath her bottom until he found the elastic of her thong.

‘First of all, though,’ he panted, ‘how about some compensation for that bottle of Bolly you made me break? Yes? How about that? Only fair, don’t you think? And you know you like it, don’t you, even though you make out you don’t!’

Katie didn’t answer him. Instead, she tensed every muscle in her body and then heaved herself sideways so that David fell off her and on to the carpet.

‘Jesus!’ he said, reaching out for the edge of the coffee table to pull himself up. ‘What the hell did you do that for? I thought you wanted it!’

Katie sat up and then climbed over him. He snatched at her ankle, but she trod on his stomach so that he gasped and said, ‘
Shit
!’ and let her go.

‘Now, get out of here,’ she told him. ‘Get out of my house and don’t ever come back.’

David levered himself up between the couch and the coffee table and eventually managed to stand. He stood there, swaying, one eye closed because he couldn’t focus with both eyes. ‘You know what you are?’ he blurted. ‘You’re a fecking witch. I should have known that the day I first saw you. I’ll tell you something, witch, if anybody deserves a fecking belt, it’s you.’

He lurched towards her, raising his arm as if he intended to slap her. Instead of backing away, though, Katie took a step forward, lifted herself up on the balls of her feet and swung her right leg in a side roundhouse kick, so that her shin struck him hard in the ribs.

David doubled up and staggered to his left. As he did so, Katie punched him directly on the cheekbone with her elbow. He fell sideways on to the floor, staring at the carpet.

Almost a minute went past, with David still staring at the carpet and Katie standing over him. At last he managed to sit up, wincing. There was a crimson bruise on his right cheek and his right eye was already beginning to close.

‘
You’ve hurt me
,’ he whispered. His voice was tiny, like a miniature man shut up inside a matchbox. ‘
You’ve really, really hurt me. I think you’ve broken my ribs
.’

‘Do you want me to call for an ambulance?’ asked Katie.

David took a deep breath and shook his head. ‘There’s nothing they can do for broken ribs. Don’t worry. I’m a doctor. I have plenty of painkillers.’

‘Do you want a hand up?’

‘No, thank you. I don’t want anything more from you, ever. I wish I’d never set eyes on you.’

‘Well, the feeling is mutual, David, I can assure you. Now I’d very much appreciate it if you’d get up and leave. I’ll ask the people who are looking after Sorcha to ring you in the morning, but you’ll be hearing from the court, too.’

David managed to climb to his feet. He shuffled out of the living room into the hallway and Katie opened the front door for him. He paused for a few moments before he stepped outside, as if he wanted to say something to her, but either he was in too much pain or else he couldn’t think of anything venomous enough, or both.

Katie watched him as he crept back next door. She felt sick with contempt at his arroagance and his stupidity, and disgusted at her own weakness, too. How on earth could she have found him so attractive? Even in his drunken anger, hadn’t it occurred to him that since she was a Garda officer she would be highly trained in self-defence? Every Saturday morning she still went to Muay Thai kickboxing sessions.

She closed the front door and locked it. She went back into the living room and tidied the cushions on the couch. She looked around and felt very empty and lonely .
How did my life come to this?
she thought. But then she heard Barney whuffling and scratching at the kitchen door again, and she went through to let him in.

Pat Whelan heard voices and opened his eyes. Above him was the sharply sloping ceiling of an attic room and when he turned his head to one side he saw that he was lying on a single bed with a thin horsehair mattress covered by a scratchy pink wool blanket. The room was gloomy: the only light came from a dormer window, grimy-glassed and speckled with raindrops, through which he could see only dull, charcoal-grey clouds.

He heard footsteps mounting uncarpeted stairs, and voices growing louder. ‘Oh, but they will, I’m sure of it,’ a young woman was saying, right outside the door. ‘They know what will happen if they don’t. What they
don’t
know is that the very same thing will happen if they do.’

He made an effort to sit up, but when he did so his chest was gripped with such agonizing pain that he let out a child-like whimper and dropped back on to the blanket. He felt as if his ribcage had been mercilessly beaten with a metal bar and then his nipples branded with a red-hot iron. When he looked down he saw that a white gauze bandage had been wrapped several times around his chest, and that there were dark brown spots of dried blood where his nipples had been. Apart from the bandage, he was wearing only a pair of grubby grey tracksuit bottoms which he had never seen before in his life.

The door opened and the carroty-haired twins, Aengus and Ruari, came in, followed by Lorcan. Aengus was wearing a lime-green roll-neck sweater, while Ruari was dressed in a dark brown sweater and an orange tartan skirt. Lorcan was all dressed in black – black jacket, black shirt – but still crimson-faced, as if he had just returned from a wake where there had been plenty to drink.

‘Did I hear you bawling there, Patrick?’ asked Aengus, leaning over him. ‘I think we might have some ibuprofen downstairs if you’re still feeling any pain.’

‘What the hell did you do that to me for?’ Pat croaked at him. ‘That was just sadistic.’

‘Oh, come on,’ said Aengus. ‘If you’d been a shade more cooperative we wouldn’t have had to touch you at all. But we had to show you who was in charge here, like, and that’s the way the great High Kings always did it. There’s nobody going to be sucking
your
tits in future, and that’s for sure.’

‘You’re a total header. You’re all total headers.’

‘There’s no call to be offensive, Pat. The fact of it is we needed some proof that we have you and snipping your tits off was much less drastic than pulling out your teeth or cutting your mickey off. Anyway, you’ll be glad to hear that they were sent to your wife by express post which means that she’ll receive them this morning. Here – I’ve brought you this phone so that you can give her a ring and see if the guards have managed to drum up the ransom for her.’

‘I swear to God I wish I’d never got myself involved in this.’

‘You didn’t have a choice, Pat,’ put in Lorcan, lighting a cigarette. ‘Well, you
did
, when you started to borrow more money from the bank than you could afford to pay back. You need to tell your wife that, on the phone. Tell her that you’re surviving, just about. But tell her why we took you.’

‘I don’t see what difference a doonchie overdraft like mine could have made to the whole Irish economy,’ Pat protested.

‘On its own, you’re right, Pat, it was a drop in the ocean. But there were tens of thousands of other small businessmen who did the same as you, and even if tens of thousands of drops don’t quite make an ocean, they’re enough to sink the fecking ship. Did you ever hear somebody say “there’ll be the devil to pay”? Well, the devil is the sailor’s name for the gap between two planks in a ship’s hull, and to pay the devil meant to seal that gap with hot pitch. Except that when it came to the Irish economy, we had no hot pitch ready to seal it up with, because of people like you who never gave a thought for tomorrow.’

‘Here,’ said Aengus, and handed Pat an iPhone. ‘Give your missus a call. Tell her what your situation is and who has you and why you’re here, and most of all ask her if she’s managing to raise the money.’

‘I hate to do this to her. She’s sick enough as it is and I’ve let her down so many times lately this will break her melt.’

‘Pat, call her. Otherwise we might have to send her another piece of you, just to doubly prove that we have you, and you wouldn’t like us to do that, would you?’

Grimacing, Pat lifted himself up so that he was supporting himself on his left elbow. ‘If Mairead’s told the guards that I’ve been kidnapped they might trace this call, mightn’t they?’