Dead Girls Dancing Read online

  Their lovemaking quickly grew more and more frantic. Katie had wanted to keep it slow and measured right until the very moment when they climaxed, but they couldn’t help themselves. Conor held the cheeks of her bottom in both hands, with the tip of one finger inserted into her anus, while she rode him and rode him and rode him. He was grunting and she was gasping and then her orgasm rose up between her legs like a huge dark force rising up from the depths of the ocean and she was shaken and shaken until she screamed like she had never screamed before.

  Then it was over, and apart from their syncopated panting there was no other sound except the rain.

  Katie rolled off him and they lay side by side on the bed, sweating and trying to get their breath back. She looked at the clock and it read 6:31.

  ‘Not even twenty minutes,’ she smiled. She could feel his warm semen sliding across her thigh. ‘My fault, I was too frustrated.’

  ‘We can always go for a repeat performance,’ said Conor, kissing her.

  ‘No. Sadly, I don’t have the time. I have to set up a meeting for the Toirneach Damhsa fire, as well as a hundred other things.’

  ‘Oh, well, that’s a fierce pity and no mistake,’ said Conor. ‘But I have to go back to Limerick today myself, like I told you. Clodagh and I have a meeting with our solicitors and there’s some business stuff I have to sort out. But I can probably come back tomorrow or the day after.’

  ‘Come and stay here with me,’ said Katie.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I still need you to work on this dog-fighting case, Conor, quite apart from needing you to make love to me. And it would save money if the Garda didn’t have to pay for your guest house.’

  ‘There,’ said Conor. ‘You’re logical as well as sexy. Those were two things that Clodagh wasn’t. And for some reason I could never please her. Probably because she came from Cavan.’

  ‘She’s happy now, though, isn’t she, with this fellow from Coilte?’

  ‘So she says. They manage most of Ireland’s forests, so I suppose he always has wood.’

  Katie slapped his arm. ‘Mother of God, your sense of humour. You’re worse than some of my detectives, you are. You’ll be the death of me, Conor Ó Máille.’

  *

  She made them a breakfast of scrambled eggs and grilled tomatoes and wholemeal toast. A little after seven-thirty, Jenny Tierney from next door rang the doorbell to take Barney out for his morning walk. She said, ‘Well, good morning,’ to Conor when she came into the kitchen in her dripping-wet plastic mac, although she continued to stare at him in a very disapproving way as Katie clipped on Barney’s lead.

  Conor raised his coffee mug to her and smiled and said, ‘Top of the morning to you, too. How’s it coming on?’

  After they had finished their breakfast, Katie drove Conor back into the city. She took him up Summerhill to the Gabriel guest house where he had been staying since he arrived in Cork to help Katie to track down dog-nappers. They sat in the car with the rain drumming on the roof, and squeezed hands, and kissed.

  ‘I’ll text you to tell you when I’m coming back,’ Conor told her.

  ‘Text me anyway. Ring me if you like.’

  ‘I think I might be falling in love with you, Kathleen Maguire.’

  ‘Don’t say things like that. The Devil may be listening. The luck I’ve had, do you know, I don’t want to risk another disaster. I’ll see you when you come back from Limerick so. Take good care of yourself and don’t allow the lovely Clodagh to rip you off.’

  ‘Oh, I’m after learning how to take care of meself now, girl,’ said Conor, in a strong Northside accent. ‘I’ve spent so much time in Cork, I’ve turned into a real cute hoor. Cute as the red-arsed bees.’

  Katie slapped his shoulder, and then she kissed him, and then it was time for her to go.

  She drove back down to the city centre feeling warm and content, and better about herself than she had in a long time. Conor made her feel so attractive, and she was so frustrated that she wouldn’t be seeing him again for another twenty-four hours at least. Why did wonderful nights like that always have to be over? Why did happiness fade so quickly but pain nag you for ever?

  As she drove over the Brian Boru Bridge, she passed a young mother with an umbrella pushing a buggy and she couldn’t help thinking of her own baby, Seamus, and what it had felt like to hold him in her arms and rock him to sleep. She could even remember the smell of him, milk and baby powder, and the feel of his tiny hand clasping her finger. He would be going to bunscoil now if he had lived, and be coming home to show her his crayon drawings. But he had died, like her first husband, Paul, had died, and her lover, John, and like last night there had been no way that she could stop another rainy day from breaking.

  When she had parked in Anglesea Street, she had to tug out a tissue and dab her eyes. She checked her make-up in the sun-visor mirror and applied a little more blushed nude lip liner. Mother of God, Katie, she thought, pressing her lips tightly together, you’re getting pure morbid in your old age.

  11

  She was still walking along the corridor to her office when her iPhone played. It was Dr Kelley calling from the morgue.

  ‘A very good morning to you, DS Maguire. I made an early start this morning on those two last victims they found in the attic. I still haven’t separated them yet, because they’re literally fused together and it’s going to take some very delicate work with the scalpel to cut them apart. I’ve X-rayed them, though, and you’ll never guess what.’

  ‘Surprise me, then,’ said Katie. She entered her office and finger-waved to Moirin, who was already sitting in her own small office, hunched in front of her computer. ‘What will I never guess what?’

  ‘They’ve been shot in the head, the both of them.’

  ‘They were shot?’

  ‘That’s right. The young woman has entry and exit wounds in the left and right sides of her skull, and the young man has an entry wound in his right temple and bullet fragments still inside his skull.’

  ‘Mother of God, I can scarce believe it. None of the other victims have bullet wounds, do they?’

  ‘No, only those two. I thought to myself that there was something unusual about them when their bodies were first brought in here. It would be very unlikely for fire victims to be clinging on to each other like that. Usually if you’re alight you’re totally concerned with trying to tear off your own burning clothing, and as your tendons tighten up your arms bunch up in that characteristic posture like you’re playing a little tin drum. I’d say it’s almost certain they were dead before the fire got to them.’

  ‘I’ll come over later this morning and take a look for myself,’ said Katie. ‘I assume that you’ve advised Bill Phinner.’

  ‘I have, of course. One of his ballistics experts is on his way here so that he can scan their skulls and extract the bullet fragments. They’re so badly burned the two of them that it isn’t going to be easy to estimate the exact range at which they were shot. As you know, we can usually tell if somebody’s been shot point-blank by the powder tattoo on the skin. At a rough guess, though, I’d say from the size of the entry wounds that they were likely shot from less than fifteen centimetres away, if not actually point-blank.’

  ‘That makes sense, sure,’ said Katie. ‘The space in the attic was very confined, and it’s almost certain that they were shot in the attic because of the way we found them. I can’t imagine that whoever shot them carried their bodies separately up the stairs and then arranged them so that they were holding each other.’

  ‘I’ll keep you informed, anyway,’ said Dr Kelley. ‘Ah, look – here’s the ballistics expert now. Jesus, they all seem so young these days, don’t they? Sometimes I feel like I’m working with a whole crowd of fierce clever children.’

  ‘I’ll talk to you later so,’ Katie told her. While she was talking Moirin had come in with a cappuccino for her, as well as a beige folder of letters and other paperwork, and Detective Dooley had appeared in
the doorway, waiting for her to finish.

  ‘Robert,’ she said, and beckoned him to come in. ‘How’s it going on?’

  He looked refreshed. His hair was brushed up vertically like a startled cartoon character, and he smelled of Lynx body spray. Katie noticed that his forehead was peppered with tiny red spots and hoped that she wasn’t overworking him or putting him under too much stress.

  ‘I’ve identified the girl from the attic,’ he told her. ‘It was Saoirse MacAuliffe, for sure. I took her bracelet to the Pandora shop and they had sales records of all the charms she’d bought. Not only that, she was wearing a pink Lipsy watch and her parents confirmed that they gave it to her for her last birthday, as well as the tackies that she was wearing. The tackies were mostly charred but there was some pink canvas left untouched and they still had the Wedge label inside. The Technical Bureau took DNA samples as well, just to make one hundred and ten per cent certain. We should have the results from those later today.’

  ‘She was engaged, wasn’t she?’ Katie asked him. ‘Did her parents know about any relationship she might have been having with this fellow from the dancing troupe – what was his name?’

  ‘Ronan Barrett. No. She’d told them recent-like that she and Ronan were friendly, and that he’d been helping her with some of the céili dance routines, but she didn’t say nothing about any kind of relationship.’

  ‘How about her fiancé? He’s an architect, isn’t he?’

  Detective Dooley took his notebook out of his jacket pocket and flipped it open. ‘That’s right. Douglas Cleary. He works for Leeside Architects, who submitted some designs for the Capitol Cinema development, although I don’t know if they were accepted. He’s been away in Manchester for the past two days for some architectural get-together, but he’s cut his trip short and he’ll be back here in Cork late this evening.’

  ‘So he’s been told that Saoirse’s dead?’

  ‘Her parents emailed him, but I cautioned them not to tell him that she was found in the attic with Ronan Barrett – and of course even they don’t yet know that she and Barrett were found hanging on to each other like that. We haven’t even told the media about that yet.’

  ‘Well, the plot thickens. Dr Kelley started her autopsy this morning and the first thing she found out was that Saoirse and Ronan had both been shot in the head.’

  ‘You’re codding me! Serious? So somebody murdered them and then set fire to the building.’

  ‘Well, let’s not jump to conclusions. I think it’s safe to assume that they were killed before the fire started, but we don’t know for certain who shot them. Maybe it was the arsonist – or arsonists plural. Maybe it was somebody else altogether. Until we hear from the technical experts we can’t even be certain if the fire was set deliberately or not.’

  ‘Oh, come on, ma’am, if that was an accident, I swear to God you can call me a two-headed tortoise.’

  Katie couldn’t help smiling. ‘Now you’ve almost made me wish that it was. But I agree with you, the chances of a fire as devastating as that being accidental are almost nil. Now – was there anything else? How’s the CCTV coming along?’

  ‘That was the other reason I came up to see you. I’ve finished looking through all of the CCTV recordings of the fire, as well as the fire brigade’s videos.’

  ‘Did you see anything suspicious?’

  ‘Hard to say for sure like. I’ve identified four fellers in the crowd in particular and two girls. All of them have a history of convictions or cautions for vandalism or antisocial behaviour of one kind or another. I’ve emailed you the complete list. When you’ve taken a sconce at it, maybe we can decide if it’s worth my while pulling them in for questioning. There’s one of them, though, who was right in the back of the crowd but he jangled a bell the second I realized who he was. Dara Coughlan, from Mayfield. I was involved in hauling him in about three years ago, when I was stationed up there.’

  ‘What’s the story about him?’ asked Katie. At the same time she switched on her desktop computer and found the list of six names that Detective Dooley had drawn up for her, just to see if she recognized any of them herself.

  ‘Serial arsonist, ma’am, that Dara Coughlan. Total header. He hangs around with that crowd of druggie young gurriers up at Barnavara Crescent. He torched five cars and the excuse he gave in court was that they belonged to fathers who wouldn’t allow their daughters to go out on a jag with him. He was only sixteen at the time so they put him on the rehab programme, but that had no effect on him at all like. You might as well have tried to teach table manners to an epileptic monkey. It was only about six or seven months later that he tried to burn down the butcher’s shop on the corner of Iona Park, and he said he did it for the same reason. He was sniffing around one of the butcher’s daughters and the butcher told him to take a running jump or he’d chop off something important and mince it up for a hamburger patty. So Dara poured petrol through his letter box.’

  ‘So what happened to him then?’

  ‘We hauled him in again and the court sent him off to Trinity House School until he reached seventeen. By the time they let him out I was doing my detective garda training at Templemore, so I never saw him again. Not until I recognized him in that CCTV footage, anyway. He’s watching that fire with some slapper and grinning like the epileptic monkey got the nuts.’

  ‘Well, if you have a gut feeling about him, you should bring him in for an interview,’ said Katie. ‘And think about it – if his motive for arson in the past was always revenge because he’d been told to keep away from somebody’s daughter, it would be worth your checking if he’d been making a play for any of the girls who danced for Toirneach Damhsa. Maybe somebody from the dance troupe had warned him off and he took exception. Mind you... it doesn’t look as if that fire was set off by anything as straightforward as petrol.’

  She looked down the list of names on her computer screen. She recognized one of them – Johnny Dunne, a Pavee musician who had been arrested the year before for throwing a flat-screen TV set out of a fourth-floor window of Jurys Inn and seriously injuring a woman who was walking along Anderson’s Quay underneath. From what she had heard, though, he had sobered up and got himself a contract with Heresy Records in Dublin.

  ‘None of the others are serial arsonists like Dara,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘All the same, they’ve all been had up for serious vandalism, like these two girls. They were caught trying to hobble sweaters from Olivia’s Boutique in Oliver Plunkett Street and a given a warning by the owner. They came back a couple of nights later and smashed the front window and threw cans of paint and wood varnish around and set fire to some of the clothes. They caused about thirty-five thousand euros’ worth of damage.’

  ‘Well, all six have previous and all six were present at the scene of the Toirneach Damhsa fire, so interview them all. I doubt if any of them were responsible, since we’re dealing with a shooting here, as well as arson, but I’d like to be sure. As you know yourself, some offenders’ antisocial behaviour escalates as they grow older, especially if they have untreated psychiatric problems.’

  Detective Dooley said, ‘Those two being shot like... that really puts a pure different aspect on this case now, don’t you think? It must have been more than just pointless vandalism, or some other dancers trying to mess up Toirneach Damhsa’s chances at the feis next week.’

  ‘It’s impossible to say yet, Robert, and after what Danny Coffey said about his partner Steven Joyce, and the way he threatened him, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of somebody from another dance troupe being responsible. I have to admit that up until now I never knew myself how desperate the competition was between all those rival dancers. Feis? Jesus, it’s more like Isis.’

  ‘What about Joyce like? Are we pulling him in for an interview?’

  ‘When we have more evidence, yes, we probably will, but not before. I don’t want to start making accusations against him based solely on what Danny Coffey told me. We know where Joyce lives, on
Connaught Avenue, and what with the feis coming up next week he’s not likely to be going anywhere – not without it looking fierce suspicious.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘I’ll make a start with Dara Coughlan. Little psycho. I almost wish it was him who did it. I’d love to see him banged up for the rest of his manky life.’

  *

  Katie rang Inspector Carroll at Tipperary Town and told him about the fifty-dog fight that Guzz Eye McManus was planning to celebrate his fiftieth birthday.

  ‘Where did you pick that up from?’ asked Inspector Carroll, and then coughed, as if she had caught him in the middle of eating a sandwich. ‘We’ve been hearing rumours, but you know how tight-lipped the Travellers are, especially that shower up at Ballyknock. They wouldn’t tell you where your toes were if they were standing on them.’

  ‘I have it on very good authority, Kenny, I promise you,’ Katie told him. ‘As soon as I hear more details, I’ll let you know so. But if McManus really is planning a fifty-dog fight, we’ll need to set up a major operation, depending on the location. Who knows how many officers and vehicles we’ll have to deploy. We’ll also be needing some help from the ISPCA. There’s going to be a whole rake of fighting dogs that need taking care of, and putting down probably, after we’ve lifted their owners. I’ll be having a word in a minute with Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin. We should start working out a joint contingency plan as soon as possible.’

  ‘That’s grand, Katie. I’ll talk to Sergeant Kehoe. I’m guessing that Michael Pearse is the man he should be liaising with at your end.’