Taken for Dead (Kate Maguire) (44 page)

‘It sounds like a miracle that anybody found him.’

‘It was a roller-blind sales rep. He was on his way to Munster Blinds in Killumney but as soon as he got off the main road he stopped to take a leak. He was right in the middle of relieving himself when he saw these fingers. I’ll bet that stopped him in mid-flow.’

Katie said, ‘What makes Sergeant Mahoney think that it’s Micky Crounan?’

‘He can’t be totally sure, but one of Crounan’s identifying features was the silver ring he always wore on his left-hand pinkie. His wife gave it to him when they first met twenty-seven years ago and he never took it off. The ring’s gone, but there’s an indentation on one of the fingers and black stains on the skin which would suggest that the deceased was wearing a silver ring before he was squashticated.’

‘That’s surely going to help us, though, isn’t it, the way they disposed of his body? You couldn’t do that single-handed, could you – flatten a man’s body with a roadroller and then cover it over with asphalt? You’d need a whole resurfacing crew. So there must have been more than a few accessories, as well as witnesses. Pity there’s no law of misprision any more.’

‘Well, I’ll go out there myself with Bill Phinner,’ said Inspector Fennessy. ‘I don’t know how they’re going to separate his remains from the asphalt, but I shouldn’t think it’s going to be easy.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ said Katie, picking up her satchel.

‘Oh, I’m not sure about that. I thought that if you were suspended – ’

‘I don’t give a fiddler’s, Liam. This is still my case even if I’m not officially working on it. I won’t comment. I won’t interfere. I just need to see the evidence for myself.’

‘I’ll let you see the photographs and all the forensics.’

‘It’s not enough, Liam. I have to get the feel of this first-hand. I think I’m beginning to understand what’s going on here, with these High Kings of Erin. Only piece by piece, like one of those thousand-piece jigsaws, you know, but every extra piece helps.’

‘I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to take you along with me in my car,’ said Inspector Fennessy. ‘Not without getting a bollocking from Molloy.’

‘All right. I have you. But I’m going out there anyway, even if I’ll be nothing more than a civilian nosy parker.’

‘I can’t stop you from doing that. I will say this, though – be very careful of these people. You could end up losing a whole lot more than just your job.’

Katie stared at him narrowly, holding her satchel close to her chest as if to protect herself. ‘What are you talking about, Liam? What are you not telling me?’

‘Nothing at all, ma’am, except you need to be double wide. You don’t play games with the kind of sham-feens who can burn people alive and cut off a fellow’s head and flatten the rest of him with a roadroller. And you don’t play games with the kind of sham-feens who can end your career as easy as look at you.’

Inspector Fennessy took off his glasses and cleaned the lenses on his pale lilac tie. Katie kept on staring at him while he did so. She felt strongly that he was trying to say something important to her, but that he was afraid to put it into simple English.

‘Look – I’ll have to be heading off,’ he said, putting his glasses back on again. ‘I may see you there, out at Lisheens. If I do, though, I think it’s best for both of us if we make out that we don’t.’

He paused, and then he said, ‘You’ve seen me through some difficult times, ma’am, and I don’t want you to think that I’m not grateful. When I was going through all of that trouble with Caitlin you weren’t soft on me, but you did appreciate why I was acting towards her the way I was. You were the only person who understood me, and that meant a lot, and still does.’

‘All right, Liam,’ said Katie. ‘I’ll see you after. Or not, rather.’

***

Before she drove out to Lisheens, Katie phoned her solicitor, Douglas Rooney. He was in court until lunchtime, defending a man charged with taking out his pit-bull terrier without a muzzle. She explained to his secretary why she needed to see him and made an appointment for later in the day.

A pale silvery sun began to shine as she drove westwards on the Cork Ring and the wet road in front of her was so dazzling that she had to put on her sunglasses. She turned off the N27 at Lisheens, but when she reached the small roundabout at the top of the slip road she found that there were cones across the road that led to Killumney, and a Road Closed sign.

She stopped and climbed out of her car so that she could move two of the cones to one side. Then she drove around the Road Closed sign and headed south. On either side there were only flat fields and hedges and stunted trees, without even a cow in sight. About a half-mile up ahead of her, though, she could see Garda patrol cars and several other cars and vans, including a green and white outside broadcast van from RTÉ, and a yellow JCB digger.

She parked her Focus as close behind the RTÉ van as she could, so that it was half-hidden from the gardaí and the TV crew and all the other people milling around in the centre of the road. Inspector Fennessy hadn’t yet arrived but she could see Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán talking to Sergeant Mahoney from the Ballincollig Garda station, as well as Detectives O’Donovan and Horgan. She turned up the collar of her raincoat and kept herself close beside the RTÉ sound technician, and nobody challenged her. She guessed that any gardaí who recognized her would not yet have heard that she had been suspended, and those who didn’t know who she was probably assumed she was with the TV crew. In any case, everybody’s attention was directed to the side of the road where the roller-blind rep had discovered the fingertips.

Katie couldn’t go up as close to the victim’s remains as she would have liked, so that she could examine them in detail, but she could see them reasonably well from where she was standing. The victim’s hand was palm upwards, with the fingertips slightly lifted, and she could clearly make out the silver-stained indentation on his pinkie. The Ballincollig gardaí had chipped and levered away the solidified asphalt from his knuckles down to his left collarbone. His fingertips had remained unscathed, but the skin of his arm had been charred black and crisp by the eighty-degree heat and most of it had flaked off. His muscles had been roasted to the colour of overdone beef and his bones were cracked and stained brown by the asphalt.

The left side of his ribcage was just visible. He had been so comprehensively crushed that his body was less than five centimetres thick. Katie could only think that Sergeant Mahoney’s assumption had been right and that he had been flattened by a roadroller. There were no humps or bumps on the finished road surface to indicate that a man was buried underneath it.

She looked around. This was an isolated spot, with no houses in sight, and although it connected the N27 with the trading estate at Killumney it was probably deserted in the evenings and for most of the day on Sundays. Three or four crows were perched on the telephone wires, their feathers fluttering, but there was no other sign of life.

She was turning to leave when Detective O’Donovan caught sight of her and quickly walked over.

‘Ma’am?’ he said. ‘You’re not going away, are you? I didn’t even see you arrive.’

‘That’s because I’m not really here,’ Katie told him. ‘If you think you’ve seen me, you haven’t.’

Detective O’Donovan said, ‘What? I’m sorry. I don’t follow you.’

‘It hasn’t been officially announced yet, Patrick, so don’t go spreading it about. O’Reilly has suspended me.’

‘
Suspended
you? Serious? What for, in the name of Jesus?’

‘All I can tell you at the moment is that there’s been a formal complaint lodged against me. I’m disputing it, of course, but in the meantime I’m at home on dog-walking duty. Or supposed to be.’

‘I can’t believe it. What about these kidnaps? Who’s going to be in charge?’

‘Talk to Inspector Fennessy. He should be here soon. He’s taking over for the time being, along with some inspector from Limerick.’

‘I can’t believe it,’ Detective O’Donovan repeated, shaking his head.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Katie. ‘I’ll have it all sorted before you know it. I’ll see you later so.’

She walked back to her car. Before she reached it, though, she saw an elderly man pedalling slowly and unsteadily towards her on a bicycle. He was wearing a tweed cap and a tweed jacket with frayed elbows and corduroy trousers. As he drew alongside her, he came to an abrupt stop and took off his cap and brushed back his straggly white hair. He had a bulbous nose and lips that were deepy furrowed from wearing false teeth, and his chin was covered with white prickly stubble. His breath reeked of stale alcohol and cigarettes.

‘Haven’t they dug that poor fellow out yet?’ he asked.

‘Not yet, no.’

‘They could use an ordinary pick and shovel. It’s only been a few days, so that tarmac will still be softish.’

‘You know what happened here?’

‘I do, of course. I only saw it with my own eyes. Well, I didn’t realize then that it was a fellow they was laying the road over. I thought they was fixing it, that’s all. But I thought it was queer that they was doing it so late, you know, when it was almost totally dark, like.’

‘When was this?’

‘Friday evening last week. I do a bit of gardening for a woman in The Brambles, up by Tanner Park. I was coming back late because she cooked packet and tripe for me special as a thank you, and we had a few scoops with it, too.’

‘So where do you live?’

‘Lisheen Fields. It’s only ten minutes on the bike.’

‘So you actually saw them laying the road here?’

‘That’s right.’

‘How many of them were there?’

‘Five, I’d say. Maybe six. I had to wheel my bike through the fecking field just to get past them and my boots got all muddy. I would have stopped to ask what they was doing but they was making so much of a racket with the paver that I couldn’t hear myself think and, besides, I have to confess to you that I was more than partially langered.’

Katie glanced back towards the gardaí and the TV crew still gathered around the side of the road.

‘You’ve told the guards what you saw?’ she asked.

The elderly man stared at her as if she had said something deeply offensive. ‘Now, why would I have done that?’

‘It could help them to find out who did this, that’s why.’

‘Guards? I wouldn’t piss on them if they was on fire. All the trouble I’ve had with the guards in my life. You’re not a guard, are you?’

‘Oh, come on, do I look like one?’

‘Of course not. Fine beoir like you. But any road, I recognized one of the lads who was laying down the black stuff and I wasn’t going to rat on him, was I? His dad’s an old chum of mine.’

‘You
know
one of them?’

‘For sure. Kenny Boyle, that’s Billy Boyle’s youngest. Kilshane Tarmac he works for. “We’re Streets Ahead!” That’s their motto. Grand, isn’t it? “We’re Streets Ahead!”’

He shook his head in amusement and kept on shaking it. Then he suddenly said, ‘You wouldn’t be having the time on you, would you? I promised the auld wan I’d be home by two. She’ll kill me stone dead if I’m not.’

‘Don’t worry, you won’t be late,’ Katie told him. ‘It was good to talk to you. Maybe we’ll bump into each other again. My name’s Katie. What’s yours?’

‘Fergal. Fergal O’Donnell. If you need your garden trimming any time, Katie, you just let me know. I’m in the phone book. Fergal O’Donnell, Hollyglen Cottage, Lisheen Fields. Weeding, lawn mowing, hedge trimming, you just say the word!’

‘Thanks a million, Fergal,’ said Katie. ‘I might take you up on that.’

Fergal O’Donnell climbed on to his bicycle and pedalled slowly past the crime scene and away down the road. Katie watched him weave erratically from side to side, wondering if she ought to walk back and tell Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán what he had just said to her.

However, she stayed where she was, almost feeling as if her feet were stuck to the road. She knew that it was her moral obligation to pass on the names of Kenny Boyle and Kilshane Tarmac. But for one thing, she was suspended and she was not supposed to be here at all.

More importantly, though, Fergal O’Donnell’s information might have given her a lead that she could follow all the way back to the High Kings of Erin – to identify them and to arrest them.

Under the law, Fergal O’Donnell had no duty to report to the Garda what he had witnessed; and since Katie was under suspension, she questioned whether she was duty-bound to report it, either. If she kept the information to herself, it could possibly give her a way to show that she wasn’t the dithering, hormonal woman that Acting Chief Inspector Molloy had been repeatedly trying to suggest she was.

She hadn’t felt so torn in her whole career, even when a vengeful Nigerian woman had threatened to shoot one of Michael Gerrety’s pimps and she had failed to pull the trigger of her own gun to stop her.

One by one, lazily, the crows lifted themselves off the telegraph wires and flapped away. For some reason that she couldn’t articulate, Katie took that as a sign. She unlocked her car, climbed in, and started the engine.

On the way back to the N27 she looked in her rear-view mirror and saw that the JCB had started to lift up the road surface. Then, as she reached the roundabout, she saw Inspector Fennessy driving up the slip road. She could still turn back and tell him what Fergal O’Donnell had said.

She drove all the way around the roundabout, in a complete 360-degree circle, but in the end she took the slip road down to join the main dual carriageway back to Cork.

As soon as she had returned home and taken off her raincoat Katie went through to the living room, sat down in front of the coffee table and opened up her laptop. While she waited for it to load, she tugged her gun out of its holster and laid it on the table beside the computer. She would go to Anglesea Street and hand it in when she went to meet her solicitor.

Barney stood in the hallway, wagging his tail very slowly and looking puzzled, because she usually took him out for a walk whenever she came back.

‘It’s all right, Barns,’ she said. ‘As soon as I’ve done this, I’ll take you to see grandpa.’