Begging to Die Read online

  BEGGING TO DIE

  Graham Masterton

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  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

  www.headofzeus.com

  About Begging to Die

  A young girl is found wandering the city alone. Who is she?

  Someone is killing beggars on the streets of Cork. But why?

  DCI Katie Maguire, Ireland’s most fearless detective, must find out. But while she fights for justice for the homeless, her fiance Conor has his own crusade: against illegal puppy farming. A hugely lucrative black market run by terrifying gangs, it is a huge scandal in Ireland.

  Soon their freedom, their marriage, and even their lives are in danger…

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  About Begging to Die

  Author’s note on Irish pronunciations

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  About Graham Masterton

  About the Katie Maguire Series

  About the Scarlet Widow Series

  Also by Graham Masterton

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  Author’s note on Irish pronunciations

  Caoilfhoinn = Key-lin

  Caoimhe = Kee-va

  Cathal = Ka-hal

  Sadhbh = Sive (as in ‘five’)

  Gaelic song ‘Mo Ghille Mear’ from Katie’s iPhone

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2q2pslNDCc

  For Professor Sabina Brennan

  of Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, Dublin,

  for her charm, her energy and her dedicated drive

  against dementia

  and for Caroline Delaney of the Irish Examiner

  for her sweetness, her wit and for answering every

  impossible question that I ask her.

  Ní thuigeann an sách an seang.

  (The well-fed have no understanding of the hungry.)

  Irish Proverb

  1

  Katie was walking past the iron gates of the Huguenot cemetery on Carey’s Lane when she heard a child crying. She stopped and listened, because she recognized that this wasn’t a cry of frustration, or hunger, or tiredness. This was a cry of loneliness, and desperation.

  She pushed open the gates and stepped inside. The cemetery was small, surrounded by high walls all the way round, and meticulously tended. Most of the gravestones lay flat, with stone chippings filling in the ground between them, and wooden tubs with bay trees were arranged at intervals around the walls.

  A tawny-haired girl was sitting on the edge of one of these tubs, sobbing. Katie guessed that she was about eight or nine years old. Her hair was braided in a single thick plait that hung over her left shoulder and she was wearing a grey plastic raincoat and yellow rushers. She was thin and pale and her face was dirty, so that her tears had left streaks down her cheeks, but she was pretty in an elfin way, with limpid brown eyes.

  Katie approached her along the flagstone path. ‘What’s the story, sweetheart?’ she asked, crouching down beside her. ‘Are you all on your own?’

  The girl’s mouth turned down and she let out a heart-wrenching wail.

  ‘Unde e mumia mea? Nu-mi găsesc mumia!’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand you,’ said Katie. ‘Do you know any English at all?’

  ‘Nu-mi găsesc mumia!’ the girl repeated, and more tears ran down her cheeks. Katie took her handkerchief out of her bag and gently dabbed them.

  ‘Your mama, is that it? You’ve lost your mama?’

  The girl nodded. ‘Nu știu unde este! Sa dus în colț și a dispărut!’

  ‘She disappeared?’

  The girl nodded again. Katie stood up straight and held out her hand.

  ‘Come on, sweetheart, we’ll find her for you. You don’t have to worry. I’m police. Do you understand that?’ She pointed to herself and said, ‘Police?’

  The girl stood up too, and quickly, and now she appeared to be panicking. She looked towards the cemetery gates as if she were thinking of running away. Katie snatched her left hand and held it tight and said, ‘It’s all right, sweetheart! You don’t have to be frightened! I’ll help you to find your mama, I promise you! You’re not in any trouble.’

  At the same time she thought, Jesus and Mary, I wish I knew what language she was speaking. It’s not zizzy enough for Polish and it doesn’t sound like Russian. Maybe Bulgarian or Czech.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked her. Again she pointed to herself and said, ‘I’m Kathleen. That’s my name. Most people call me Katie.’ Then she pointed to the girl and said, ‘What about you?’

  ‘Ana-Maria,’ the girl told her. Katie wiped her eyes once more. She was almost tempted to spit on her handkerchief and clean the girl’s dirty face, the way her mother used to do when she was little.

  ‘Ana-Maria, that’s a beautiful name. Well, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do, Ana-Maria. We’re going to walk to the place where I work and we’re going to find out what language you’re speaking and where you come from. Then I’m going to put out a call for your mama and see if we can find her for you. And while we’re waiting you can have a wash and a drink and something nice to eat. Okay?’

  Ana-Maria may not have understood a word of what Katie was saying, but Katie smiled and nodded and tried to look encouraging, and she mimed washing her face and drinking and eating, and Ana-Maria seemed to grasp the gist of it. She held Katie’s hand tighter, and the two of them left the cemetery and walked down Carey’s Lane to St Patrick’s Street.

  It was Tuesday, mid-morning, and the pavements of St Patrick’s Street were swarming with shoppers, as well as the usual buskers and living statues and chuggers, and the cars and buses were nose to tail. As they crossed over to Winthrop Street, Katie said, ‘Look out for your mama, Ana-Maria. If you see her, call out to her, won’t you?’

  Winthrop Street was pedestrianized, so they could walk down the middle in between the shops. Katie swung Ana-Maria’s hand a little and kept on turning her head to smile at her, trying to make her feel reassured.

  ‘You like McDonald’s?’ she asked her. Ana-Maria nodded, and Katie thought, At least there’s one language that every child in the world understands.

  They had almost re
ached The Long Valley Bar when, about fifty metres up ahead of them, Katie saw a tall man with tangled grey hair and a grey leather jacket striding across the end of the street. His shoulders were hunched as if he were in a hurry, but he glanced towards them and when he caught sight of them he stopped as abruptly as if he had walked into an invisible lamp post.

  As soon as Ana-Maria saw him, she let out a whimper and tugged hard at Katie’s hand.

  Katie said, ‘What’s the matter? Who is that?’ but Ana-Maria only tugged harder.

  The grey-jacketed man started to run towards them, with an extraordinary limping lope, and Katie immediately swung Ana-Maria behind her, to shield her. She raised her right hand ready to fend the man off, if she had to.

  The man’s face was grim, his eyes narrowed and his lips tightly puckered. He came galloping up to Katie without slowing down and even though she managed to strike his shoulder with a glancing karate chop, he was so big and so heavy and he had such momentum that she was sent sprawling on to her back on the pavement, hitting her head against one of the metal stools outside O’Flynn’s sausage shop.

  She lost her hold on Ana-Maria’s hand as she fell, and Ana-Maria immediately started to run away, back towards St Patrick’s Street, dodging in and out between the shoppers. The grey-jacketed man went loping after her, colliding with a young woman pushing a baby buggy, and forcefully shoving aside an elderly man who stopped to help her.

  Katie scrambled to her feet and sprinted after him. She caught up with him outside the Hallmark stationery shop and jumped up behind him like a racehorse taking a fence to give him a running kick in the small of his back. He stumbled forward and collided with the postcard display stand outside the shop door, scattering postcards across the pavement. He managed to keep his feet, though, and he swung his fist at Katie, snorting through his nostrils.

  Katie spun herself around and gave him the hardest roundhouse kick in the groin that she could manage. He shouted out, ‘Dah! Futui!’ and doubled up, falling backwards into the shop doorway and shattering the glass door with a splintering crack.

  ‘Stay down!’ Katie shouted at him, as he tried to get up. ‘I’m a garda officer! You’re under arrest! I said stay down!’

  ‘Dute dracu, scorpie!’ the grey-jacketed man snarled back at her. He started to climb to his feet, and when Katie approached him to push him back down, he reached out and grasped a long triangular piece of glass from the broken door, pointing it at her like a dagger.

  ‘You try to kick me again, bitch, I kill you to death,’ he warned her, in a thick, phlegm-clogged accent. He stood up, jabbing the piece of glass towards her again and again, even though it had cut him and there was blood dripping from the heel of his hand.

  Katie backed away, taking out her iPhone and prodding the number for emergency backup. The grey-jacketed man started to limp off towards St Patrick’s Street, waving the glass dagger from side to side to ward off anybody who might try to stop him. He backed his way into the side door of Brown Thomas, the department store, and then he was gone.

  Katie hurried to St Patrick’s Street, looking left and right to see if Ana-Maria was still in sight among the crowds. She jumped up and down, trying to see over the heads of the shoppers all around her, and she was still jumping when two gardaí in yellow high-viz jackets came running up to her, a man and a woman.

  ‘There’s some gurrier in a grey leather jacket tried to snatch this young girl,’ she explained. ‘He ducked into Brown Thomas and he might still be in there. He’s violent, though, and he’s carrying a piece of broken glass that he’s using as a knife.’

  At that moment, a squad car came around the corner from Merchants Quay with its blue light flashing.

  ‘Go inside there and see if you can find him,’ Katie told the two gardaí. ‘I’ll have these fellers watch the doors in case he tries to make a run for it.’

  The squad car parked next to the statue of Father Mathew and two more gardaí climbed out. Even as they did so, another squad car arrived from the direction of Grand Parade.

  Katie quickly briefed all the officers and then she called in to the station so that they could put out a citywide description of Ana-Maria. She had just finished doing that when Sergeant Nicholas Kearns turned up, along with two more gardaí. Sergeant Kearns had only recently been promoted but he had already proved himself to be level-headed in a crisis. He had a broad, sensible face with bushy blond eyebrows, and he walked with the confident gait of a man who spends an hour in the gym every morning.

  ‘So who’s this suspect we’re looking for, ma’am?’ he asked her.

  ‘Eastern European, by the sound of him,’ said Katie. ‘And violent. And armed with a shard of glass that could almost cut your head off. So be doggy wide, I warn you.’

  Katie left him in charge of searching for the grey-jacketed man while she herself went looking for Ana-Maria. She weaved her way through the crowds along St Patrick’s Street, peering into every shop and every side turning, but Ana-Maria could be hiding in any one of a hundred doorways or could have run streets away by now. By the time she had reached Finn’s Corner on Grand Parade, Katie had to admit to herself that Ana-Maria had disappeared, and that there was very little hope of finding her.

  She walked back to Brown Thomas, breathing hard. The officers who had been looking for the grey-jacketed man were gathered on the pavement outside the front door.

  ‘No luck?’ she asked Sergeant Kearns.

  He shook his head. ‘Ere a sign. We even searched the ladies’ jacks, but he could be anywhere at all, like, do you know what I mean? But I’ll put the word out, specially among the immigrants, like. Somebody must know who he is, and where he hangs out.’

  ‘It’s the little girl I’m worried about,’ said Katie. ‘I have no idea why he was after her, or why he frightened her so much, but I’m praying that he doesn’t find her before we do.’

  2

  When she had heard Ana-Maria crying, Katie had been on her way to Cari’s Closet to pick up an evening dress that was being altered for her. She wouldn’t need it until next month so she decided to collect it tomorrow instead, and she asked Sergeant Kearns to drive her back to the station at Anglesea Street.

  ‘It’s some handling, like, keeping tabs on all these immigrants,’ said Sergeant Kearns, as they drove along by the river. ‘I know we’re supposed to be politically correct, like, but it’s growing worse. There’s so many more of them flooding in and half of them illegals or asylum seekers – or making out that they’re asylum seekers anyway.’

  ‘I don’t know what language that little girl was speaking,’ said Katie. ‘It sounded central European but who knows?’

  ‘We hauled in a feller the other day and he could only understand Uzbek. Or claimed he could. It took us half the effing day before we could find an Uzbek interpreter, if you’ll excuse my French. At least I know now what the Uzbek for “pickpocket” is. O’g’ri. That’s something they don’t teach you at Templemore.’

  Before she went back up to her office, Katie called in to see Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick. He had been working lately on an operation to identify and keep immigrant suspects under surveillance. She found him sitting at his desk staring morosely at a long list of names on his laptop.

  ‘How’re you going on, Robert?’ she asked him, pulling a chair around and sitting down beside him.

  Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick shook his head. He was grey-haired even though he was only fifty-three, but built like a rugby forward, with a broken nose. He was unfailingly courteous to Katie, and respectful, but she was always disturbed by his cold, expressionless eyes. She found it impossible to tell what he was thinking, and sometimes when he appeared to be calm she was taken aback by the ferocity of what he came out with.

  ‘It’s like trying to find a needle in a halting site, tracking any one of these scummers,’ he complained. ‘There’s so many of them coming in separate, like, making out that they’re tourists, and then joining together and going on the rob for
a week or so. But before we can pick them up on the CCTV or put a name to them, they’re out the gap, back to whatever godforsaken countries they came from. They’re highly organized, though, no question about it.’

  ‘Well, we’ll just have to make sure that we’re even more organized than they are,’ said Katie. ‘But right now there’s one of them I’m trying to locate in particular.’

  She told Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick about finding Ana-Maria, and gave him a description of the grey-jacketed man. She even drew him a sketch, although she had never been very good at art. All the magic kingdoms that Katie had drawn when she was little had been populated by stick fairies and dragons that looked more like fire-breathing donkeys.

  ‘I’ll have Brogan go through all the CCTV mugshots we have on file and see if he can’t pick him out,’ said Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick. ‘Don’t you have any idea at all what language it was the little girl was speaking? That would be pure helpful in locating him, like. You know how all the different ethnic communities tend to stick together in locations that we know about. All the Somalis, for instance, down the lower end of Shandon Street and all the Romanians in Orchard Court in Blackpool and most of the Poles in their bedsits on the Lower Glanmire Road.’

  ‘I’ll try to remember some of the words she used,’ said Katie. ‘She definitely said “mammy” – although it sounded more like “moo-mia” – and I’m sure she also said “disappeared”, which sounded like French. You know, “disparu.”’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. My French only stretches as far as “derby ears, seevo play”.’

  ‘Oh. You mean, deux bières, s’il vous plait.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  Katie went up to her office. She had already eaten one half of the chicken sandwich that she had brought with her for lunch, and she opened her desk drawer and looked at the other half. Somehow, after rescuing Ana-Maria and then tussling with the grey-jacketed man, she had lost her appetite. She took out a pear, turned it this way and that, and then dropped it back in her lunchbox.