Dead Girls Dancing Read online

‘To begin with, yes. I’ll talk to you after when I know a bit more.’

  Katie took her coffee along to Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin’s office. He was talking on the phone when she knocked at his door but he beckoned her in and gestured that she should sit down. He was in his shirt sleeves and braces as usual, and while he was talking he had been running his hand through his fine white hair, so that it was sticking up like a dandelion puff – a jinny-jo, Katie had always called them when she was young, and blown them into the wind.

  When he had finished on the phone, he perched himself on the corner of his desk and said, ‘Well! You’ll never guess who that was.’

  ‘That’s the second time today that somebody has told me that I’ll never guess something. I’ll bet you can’t guess what I couldn’t guess the first time.’

  ‘No, you’re right, I can’t.’ He normally looked like somebody’s miserable uncle, with his eyes slightly too near together, but this morning he seemed to be in a much more affable mood.

  ‘Those two young people found in the attic after the Toirneach Damhsa fire were not only incinerated, they were both shot in the head.’

  Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin blinked at her. ‘Holy Jesus. That complicates matters.’

  Katie told him that a ballistics expert had already gone to Cork University Hospital, and brought him up to date on all the other progress she had made, such as it was. ‘There’s still no obvious perpetrator, though. Not even a principal suspect, unless you believe Danny Coffey.’

  ‘All right,’ said Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin. ‘It’s early days yet. What about that Niall Gleeson shooting? How’s that going?’

  ‘Nowhere at the moment. Again, the ballistics expert will be looking at the bullet, but I’m not too confident that’s going to tell us anything much, especially if the NIRA shot him.’

  Katie paused, and then she said, ‘So who was that on the phone that I can’t guess?’

  ‘Commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan herself. She wanted to tell me that the government have appointed a new Assistant Commissioner for the Southern Region, to replace Jimmy O’Reilly, God rest his poor tortured soul.’

  ‘Well, amen to that,’ said Katie, even though Assistant Commissioner O’Reilly had done everything he could to undermine her. He had eventually shot himself after an abortive attempt to involve her in a fake arms deal, which would have ruined her reputation, on top of which he had been deserted by his faithless and sponging boyfriend. Katie couldn’t imagine that any new Assistant Commissioner could be worse.

  ‘So do I know him – or her?’ she asked.

  ‘You should do. Frank Magorian, the chief superintendent from the Garda College.’

  ‘Oh, I know Frank all right. He was in charge at Templemore when I was taking my senior investigative officer course. He was always very smooth, very unflappable. He’ll make a perfect Assistant Commissioner. If the roof fell down on top of his head, he would only say something like, “Oh! Not a bother, let’s be thankful it’s not raining.”’

  ‘He’s coming in later, Katie, so I’ll give you a call when he’s here so that you can reintroduce yourselves. Was that everything? You look like you have something more on your mind.’

  ‘Dogs, sir. It’s Guzz Eye McManus rearing his ugly head again.’

  She told him about the proposed dog-fight and as she did so his expression grew increasingly morose, like it usually was, and his shoulders sagged.

  ‘Come on, Katie. You know how much over budget we are. So some dogs are going to get killed. Cruel, of course, I’m not saying for a single second that it isn’t. Totally inhumane. But under the Control of Dogs Act we would have had to have them put down anyway, if they’re the specified breeds and we’d caught them out in public without a leash or a muzzle. I mean, holy Saint Joseph, can you imagine how much an operation like this is going to cost to set up?’

  ‘So what are you saying, sir? You’re saying that I should take no action? You know that a proportion at least of those fighting dogs have been stolen from their rightful owners, and that the dog-fighters are guilty of barbaric mistreatment of animals in the ways that they train them. There’s also the question of the profits made by dog-fight organizers like McManus. I’m sure the Criminal Assets Bureau would be fierce interested in what he rakes in.’

  Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin stood up, walked around his desk and opened up a folder of paperwork, as if to indicate that he had more important matters to concern him than dog-fighting. ‘All I’m saying is, you can keep your eye on McManus, of course. But this is much more a matter for the ISPCA than it is for us. They have their inspectors, don’t they, eight of them at least. They have a sizeable budget. It’s their whole mission, to protect dogs from being mistreated for the sake of sport. We can cooperate with them, for sure, and give them backup if they’re threatened, but we’re not made of money, Katie, and we have a duty to protect human beings before animals.’

  ‘I see. All right. Grand,’ said Katie, and stood up, too. ‘I’ll tell Inspector Carroll. I’m not sure how he’s going to take it. There’s so much other crime associated with dog-fighting, like theft and extortion, particularly up in Tipp. I think he was quite enthusiastic about hauling in McManus and some of his pals.’

  ‘Well, like I say, if you want to cooperate with Inspector Carroll up at Tipp and go to this dog-fight as an observer, that’s fine. If you can get plenty of video evidence, you can present it at Phoenix Park next time we have a major budgetary meeting and make your case for a full-scale anti-dog-fight operation.’

  Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin was about to say something when Katie’s iPhone played. It was Bill Phinner calling her from the Technical Bureau’s laboratory.

  ‘Bill? What’s the story?’

  ‘We’ve run tests on the fire victims’ skin and clothing, ma’am. Also on the residue left on the floor and the walls. We haven’t come to a final analysis yet, but I think we have a fair idea now of what was used to start the fire and how it was planned.’

  ‘When you say “planned”, you’re sure now that it was deliberate?’

  ‘Absolutely. No question at all. Whoever burned down that building knew exactly what they were up to. I’d also go so far as to say that they might have done something like this before, and Matthew Whalen has come to the same conclusion. He’s going to run through fire brigade records and see if he can find any incidents of arson where there’s a similar scenario and where the same pyrophoric agent might have been used.’

  ‘That’s grand, Bill. I’m looking forward to your report. How about Niall Gleeson? How’s that coming along?’

  ‘Some good news on that, I’m happy to tell you. The bullet went through his head and hit the door pillar of his car, so it was almost totally flattened. All the same, we’ve looked at it under the microscope and there’s still a doonchie bit of rifling on it, so we should be able to make a comparison if you can find the gun that fired it. It’s a 9 mm round. Even better than that, though, we were haunted and found the spent casing. It had rolled down the nearest shore into the drain. It’s solid brass, a full metal casing made by Magtech.

  ‘We’re also examining the bullet and the bullet fragments from the two fire victims. Those are 9 mm, too, but we found no casings in the attic.’

  ‘Just on the off chance, can you compare the bullets from Niall Gleeson with those bullets?’

  ‘You’re thinking the same perpetrator might have shot all three of them?’

  ‘I’m not thinking anything at the moment, Bill. But three people were shot in the head within a day of each other and less than two kilometres apart.’

  ‘Fair play to you, ma’am,’ said Bill Phinner. ‘But when you put it that way, it kind of makes the Northside sound like one of them old John Wayne films, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Mother of God, Bill. Wasn’t it always?’

  12

  She had only just carried her coffee back to her desk when Detective Inspector Mulliken rang h
er.

  ‘What’s the form, Tony?’

  ‘I have the husband here in the interview room. The fellow whose wife Niall Gleeson was pleasuring while he was at work. He’s a bus driver. He’s behaving fierce aggressive and I thought you might care to come down and assess him for yourself.’

  ‘Well... if you really think I need to.’

  ‘I’m thinking that a woman’s touch might calm him down a little, do you know what I mean?’ said Detective Inspector Mulliken, and Katie could hear that he was almost pleading. ‘I did try to catch DS Ni Nuallán before she went to get herself dolled up for the Templegate Tavern, but she was out the gap already, and Padragain Scanlan is out investigating that jewellery shop robbery in French Church Street.’

  ‘I’m not the only other woman officer in the station, Tony. What about Shelagh Brogan? She doesn’t suffer aggressive men gladly.’

  ‘Sure like, I know that, ma’am, but if I let Detective Brogan loose on this feller they’d probably end up the two of them having a bare-knuckle boxing match. You’ll see what I mean if you come down to talk to him.’

  Katie checked her watch. She had been hoping to drive down to Cork University Hospital to see how young Adeen was recovering, but she supposed she could spare ten minutes to help Inspector Mulliken with his belligerent interviewee. After all, there was a remote possibility that he had shot Niall Gleeson, and that it hadn’t been the New IRA or one of Cork’s cigarette-smuggling gangs that wanted to make sure that Bobby Quilty’s business was finished for good.

  She gulped down her cappuccino, although it was tepid now and the foam had turned to white scum. Then she went downstairs to the interview room. Even when she was only halfway along the corridor she could hear a man shouting, and a banging sound, too.

  When she opened the door and went inside she found Detective Inspector Mulliken standing with his arms folded, tight-lipped, while Detective Ó Doibhilin was sitting at the interview table next to him, with an expression on his face that was half nervousness and half amusement. A ginger-haired uniformed garda was sitting on the opposite side of the room, red-faced, but it looked more like sunburn from a recent week in Gran Canaria than bottled-up anger.

  Sitting opposite Detective Ó Doibhilin was a huge overweight man in a soiled grey tracksuit from JD Sports. He was bald, with enormous fleshy ears, and his face was so distorted with rage that his piggy little eyes had almost disappeared, and his rubbery red lips were wet with spit. He was shouting in a strong Northside accent and thumping the table with his fist to emphasize every word.

  ‘How the feck do you think I would have felt about him, if I’d known? I can’t tell you how long he and me was friends, but it was a brave number of years anyway. And now you say he was after riding my moth when I was at work! Are you taking the fecking piss like?’

  He stopped talking and thumping when Katie came into the room, and wiped his mouth and then his sweating forehead with his sleeve, and loudly sniffed.

  ‘Mr Dennehy, this is Detective Superintendent Maguire,’ said Detective Inspector Mulliken. ‘This is Mr Bernard Dennehy, ma’am.’

  ‘Bernie, for feck’s sake,’ the man retorted. ‘I’m not a fecking dog with a barrel of brandy round its fecking neck. And I don’t know why the feck you’ve pulled me in here, I’ve done nothing at all like, except now you’ve told me that my best mucker Niall was riding my Maggie behind my back. So what the feck are you saying like, hunh? That it was me who shot him? I didn’t even have an inkling what him and her was up to! And where was I going to get a fecking gun from, even if I did know?’

  Katie sat down opposite Bernie Dennehy and gave him a reassuring smile. He smelled strongly of cigarettes and body odour and something else sweetish which she couldn’t identify, although she guessed it was diabetic urine.

  ‘You’re not under arrest, Bernie, and we haven’t charged you with anything. You’re free to leave any time you like. It’s just that we need you to help us with our investigation into Niall Gleeson’s death, and I’m sure you’re just as keen to find out who killed him as we are, seeing that he was such an old friend of yours.’

  ‘I don’t know nothing at all,’ Bernie protested. ‘All I know is I went to work and when I come back like, Maggie’s bawling her fecking eyes out and telling me that Niall’s been found márbh. She never stopped bawling the rest of the fecking day.’

  ‘But you weren’t aware that Niall and Maggie were having an affair while you were off driving buses?’

  ‘I just fecking told you, didn’t I? So far as I was concerned, the only times those two ever met was when she came to the pub with me, and that was once in a fecking blue moon.’

  ‘So weren’t you surprised that she took his death so hard?’ Katie asked him.

  ‘What do you mean like?’

  ‘Well, if she’d only met him once or twice, when you took her to the pub, didn’t it strike you as strange that she should be so upset?’

  Bernie Dennehy stared at Katie hard and it was obvious that he was trying to work out what she was getting at. His eyes were glittery, but the whites were yellow, which indicated that he was suffering from jaundice.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘She’s always been some sheevra. She wore black for a week when our dog died like.’

  ‘So you’re telling me that you had no suspicion at all that Niall and Maggie were getting it on?’

  ‘Haven’t I just fecking said so? How many fecking times?’

  He looked at his watch and said, ‘I need to be starting my shift anyway. You said I wasn’t under arrest or nothing.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ said Katie. ‘Who do you work for?’

  ‘Bus Éireann, if that makes any odds.’

  ‘So what time does your shift start?’

  ‘Two-thirty. And I can’t be late or they’ll give me the fecking bullet.’

  ‘Well, okay, we won’t hold you up any longer, Bernie. What route are you driving today?’

  Bernie Dennehy gave Katie that hard stare again. She could read what he was thinking in his eyes: What’s this fecking woman asking me that for? What fecking difference does it make what route I’m driving?

  ‘The 245,’ he said, suspiciously.

  ‘The 245? That’s to Fermoy, isn’t it?’ said Katie.

  ‘You have it. Cork Bus Station to Duntaheen Junction.’

  Katie beckoned to Detective Ó Doibhilin to pass her his notepad and pen. With her hand cupped over the pad so that Bernie Dennehy couldn’t see what she was writing, she scribbled down Call the bus station. Check his story.

  Detective Ó Doibhilin took the notepad and left the interview room.

  ‘Where’s he off to?’ asked Bernie Dennehy.

  ‘Oh, just routine,’ said Katie.

  ‘So can I go now? And how am I supposed to get myself to work?’

  Katie was almost tempted to say ‘take a bus’, but she smiled and said, ‘We’ll arrange transport for you, Bernie, not a bother. There’s just a couple more questions I have to ask you. Like, when was the last time you and Niall got together?’

  Bernie thought for a moment, and then he said, ‘A couple of nights ago it was, at the pub.’

  ‘Which pub?’

  ‘Niall’s regular. The Templegate Tavern.’

  ‘Did Niall give you the impression that he was worried at all? Did he tell you that he was feeling threatened by anybody?’

  Bernie Dennehy shook his head so that his jowls wobbled. ‘He was complaining about some young gowl who was getting up his honk, but that’s all.’

  ‘Did this young gowl have a name?’

  ‘Can’t remember. Danny somebody. Danny or Dessy or Davy.’

  ‘But Niall didn’t give you any reason to think that somebody might be planning to do him harm?’

  ‘No, not at all. Not a word. So can I go now?’

  ‘Just one more thing, Bernie. Weren’t you ever wide to Niall’s feelings about Maggie? Didn’t you ever suspect that he was seeing her behind your back?’
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br />   ‘No, never. Nothing. And even if I’d found out about it – well, I might have emptied him, but no more than that. I wouldn’t have fecking shot him like, would I? So now can I go? I’ve been bulling for a piss ever since I got here.’

  ‘Okay, Bernie. If you can hold on just a little longer.’

  ‘What the feck for? I’ve nothing else to tell you. I didn’t shoot Niall and that’s an end to it.’

  ‘All right,’ said Katie. ‘But of course you would say that, wouldn’t you, even if you had shot him?’

  ‘Oh, come on, you’re having a fecking laugh, aren’t you?’

  The door opened and Detective Ó Doibhilin came back in. He glanced at Inspector Mulliken and raised his eyebrows and then he sat back down next to Katie and passed her the note that she had scribbled for him. On the back he had written, Bus Éireann let BD go a year ago. Wouldn’t say why.

  Katie looked up at Bernie Dennehy and said, ‘What if the 245 left at half-past two without you, Bernie?’

  ‘What are you talking about? I’m the fecking driver. It can’t leave without me.’

  ‘Sorry, Bernie, but you’re not the driver. You don’t even work for Bus Éireann any more. It’s my guess you’re not driving for anybody. I mean, without being personal, look at the state of you la. The benjy off you, Bernie, you can’t be driving a bus full of paying passengers smelling like that. Why don’t you tell me what’s happened? I’m not going to give you a hard time if you tell me the truth.’

  ‘Who the feck told you I was out of a job?’ said Bernie. He was trying to sound indignant, but Katie heard him swallowing the sudden weakness in the back of his throat.

  ‘Bus Éireann of course,’ she told him. ‘They said you haven’t been driving buses for them for a year. Come on, Bernie, you might as well take your oil. It doesn’t matter if you talk to me or not, I’m a detective and I’m going to find out all about you sooner or later.’

  Bernie Dennehy gripped the edge of the table with both black-fingernailed hands, his eyes closed tight. Whatever turmoil was going through his mind, Katie could feel the table actually shaking, as if an earthquake were imminent. A few seconds passed and then he let out a loud blubbery honking noise and opened his eyes, and tears started to stream down his cheeks.