Living Death Read online

  Gerry Mulvaney’s chest rose and fell under his Tattersall waistcoat. At last he said, ‘You have to swear to God that you won’t let him find out that it was me that told you. Otherwise he’ll murder me just the same, either him or his gang.’

  ‘Just tell me the name, Gerry.’

  ‘He calls himself Keeno. That’s the only name he goes by. I’ve done business with him a fair few times before. He rings me and says that he has dogs for sale and he fetches them here and I sell them for him.’

  ‘Keeno?’ Katie repeated. She gave him no indication that she had heard that name before. ‘Can you describe him?’

  Gerry Mulvaney shrugged. ‘I don’t know, like. Mid-forties I’d say, maybe a little older, black hair. Kind of sleepy-eyed, like, and with a busted nose, too. Tell you who he puts me in mind of – that Sylvester Stallone fellow in the Rocky fillums.’

  ‘What kind of an accent does he have?’ asked Detective Scanlan.

  Gerry Mulvaney looked hesitant, but Katie kept her revolver pointed between the Vizsla’s eyes and nodded suggestively down at it as if she were quite prepared to pull the trigger at any moment.

  ‘West Cork, Kerry maybe. He speaks real quick, like, and kind of slurs what he says. But he never says much. Only “Here’s the dogs, like, and we’ll be waiting on the grade.”’

  ‘Do you have any idea who his gang are? Have you seen any more of them?’

  ‘No. He’s the only I’ve ever seen. Look – you’re not really going to shoot them dogs, are you?’

  ‘What kind of a vehicle does he drive?’

  ‘The last time, when he dropped these two off, just some van. Ford Transit, I’d say. Silver, no lettering on it. There must be hundreds of them.’

  ‘How do you pay him?’ asked Katie.

  ‘Cash. I ring him up to tell him I have it ready and then he comes to collect it.’

  ‘All right,’ said Katie. Usually, she would have been deeply suspicious about everything that he had told her, but he had given her the name ‘Keeno’. Even if he had been lying about everything else – even if his dog supplier looked more like John Goodman in reality than Sylvester Stallone, and even if he drove a red Fiat Ducato instead of a silver Ford Transit, Gerry Mulvaney had still made the connection that she was looking for.

  She tucked away her revolver, pulled down her sweater and patted the Vizsla on the head. The Vizsla wagged his tail and licked his lips as if he were expecting a treat.

  ‘I’ll tell you what we’re going to do, Gerry,’ she said. ‘We’re going to take these two dogs as evidence. We’re going to give you the money for them, cash, and you’re going to tell

  Keeno that you’ve sold them, and that you’ve been paid.’

  ‘Then – then what?’ said Gerry Mulvaney, and his left eye was twitching.

  ‘When Keeno comes to collect his money, we’ll be waiting to have a word with him. It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘But you can’t do that! Jesus Christ Almighty, the rest of the gang they’ll know it was me who ratted him out and they’ll fecking kill me!’

  ‘Your choice, Gerry. If you co-operate with us and help us to detain Keeno, the court should go easy on you. If necessary we can also give you protective custody and relocate you to a safe house. However, if you don’t co-operate, I’ll arrest you now and we’ll announce through the media that we’re looking for Keeno, so his gang will still know that it was you who gave us his name. If that’s what you decide, I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes, I can tell you that.’

  She looked around the building and said, ‘Either way, it’s the end for Gerry Mulvaney’s High Class Kennels.’

  Gerry Mulvaney took a dented cigarette case out of his inside pocket, opened it, and took out a half-smoked cigarette. He lit it with a pink plastic lighter and blew a long stream of smoke out of his nostrils.

  ‘Go on, then,’ he said, without looking at Katie. ‘Take the fecking dogs. I’m tired of running this fecking business any road. Just make sure that none of Keeno’s pals ever finds me, that’s all.’

  Katie turned to Detectives Dooley and Scanlan and said, ‘Can you contact the dog support unit and ask them to shoot down here asap, to pick up these two? And can you arrange with Bandon for Eoin Cassidy to be fetched up here to take a look at them, to see if they’re his? I’ll talk to Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin and arrange for the cash to be raised to pay this Keeno, and I’ll also ask Superintendent Pearse to set up surveillance.’

  ‘Do you know who I feel like?’ said Gerry Mulvaney, blowing out more smoke. ‘I feel like Michael Collins when he signed that fecking treaty with the Brits, that’s who I fecking feel like.’

  ‘What? That you’ve signed your own death warrant?’ said Katie. ‘Don’t worry, Gerry. We’ve a whole rake of witnesses under protection – you wouldn’t even believe how many – and no harm’s come to any of them yet.’

  Gerry Mulvaney shook his head and couldn’t stop shaking it. ‘You know what you are, Detective Superintendent What’s-Your-Face? You’re a fecking dearg-due, that’s what you are. A fecking blood-sucking witch. You never were going to shoot those dogs, were you, not in a million years? But you got inside my head. And now look at me. Totally fecking botched.’

  13

  Katie had been waiting at the Circuit Court for over half an hour when she heard an ambulance siren outside, and doors slamming, and the sound of running feet. A man’s voice shouted, ‘Here, this way, and make a bust will you!’ and a woman called out, ‘Where is she?’

  Katie was sitting in the office that the state solicitor used on court days. It was a small stuffy side room with a desk and a green leather couch and shelves crammed with books on case law and family law, as well as The Irish Constitution of 1937 and the Acts of the Oireachtas.

  She stood up and went over to the high window that overlooked Cross Street but although she could see the ambulance’s flashing lights reflected in the windows of the Washington Inn opposite, she couldn’t see the ambulance itself.

  She was about to go out and find out what was going on when Finola McFerren the state solicitor came in, looking flustered. She was holding her wig in her hand as if it were a dead rat that she had found in the corridor outside.

  ‘I’m so sorry, detective superintendent,’ she said. She was a tall woman, almost unnaturally thin, with black-framed glasses that were always perched halfway down her long curved nose. ‘Abidemi Nduka has failed to show up. I wasn’t so concerned about that. As you know yourself, her testimony wasn’t exactly going to be critical. But would you believe that Rosaleen Dunnihy has gone into labour?’

  ‘Stop! So that’s what the white van’s for?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. Her waters broke, right there in the witnesses’ waiting room. It was a blessing it didn’t happen while she was on the stand giving evidence.’

  ‘So what now?’

  ‘Judge O’Connell has postponed the hearing sine die, and he’s said that if it’s a boy he wants it named after him.’

  Katie wasn’t amused. She picked up her briefcase from the couch and said, ‘If she was that close to giving birth, like, why did you call her? I’ve just wasted nearly an hour and I’ve fierce more important matters to be taking care of.’

  ‘Well, as I’ve said, I’m sorry. I’ll get back to you about it as soon as it’s rescheduled, of course, but I shouldn’t imagine that will be for several months now.’

  ‘All right. Fair play to you. At least Michael Gerrety will be staying on Rathmore Road where he belongs.’

  Michael Gerrety was Cork’s wealthiest and most notorious pimp, and he had lodged an appeal against his sentence for conspiracy to drown a teenage prostitute. Katie had been obliged to attend the hearing because his appeal was based on the grounds that she had harboured a long-term personal grudge against him – mostly because of her repeated failure to convict him for living off immoral earnings. He also claimed that she had persuaded the principal witness against him to give false evidence. His appeal was
a farce, as far as Katie was concerned, and she knew that he had lodged it for the sole purpose of irritating her and wasting her time.

  On her way back to Anglesea Street, Detective Scanlan called her from Riverstick and told her that the Dog Support Unit had arrived and collected the German Shepherd and the Vizsla. Eoin Cassidy would be driven up from Bandon tomorrow morning at 10:00 to see if he could identify them.

  Detective Scanlan also told her that Superintendent Pearse had sent down two gardaí with the cash for ‘Keeno’ to collect, accompanied by four more armed officers from the Regional Support Unit.

  ‘It’s all set up now, ma’am. All we’re waiting on now is Keeno.’

  ‘Let’s hope he shows up sooner rather than later. And keep your eyes open for anybody who might be with him. Bring them in too, whatever they say.’

  It was nearly five by the time Katie returned to her desk. Moirin went to fetch her a cup of coffee and then quickly ran over the paperwork that she had sorted out for her. She leaned over Katie’s desk so that Katie could see into her cleavage. She smelled faintly of Rose’s Olde Irish Cough Drops.

  ‘There’s three invitations for you to meet different community groups. I’d say the most pressing of these is Irish Rural Link. They’re asking for an urgent meeting about Garda station closures. They say in their letter here that the burglary situation in some of the country areas is getting desperate. They reckon that south of the city there’s been almost a twofold increase in aggravated break-ins, although a lot of them don’t get reported because the victims don’t ever think they’ll get their property back, or else they’re afeared of reprisals.

  ‘It’s probably worth meeting with them because they have very good media connections, do you know what I mean, and if you didn’t agree to meet them they might crib to the Echo about it.’

  ‘I see,’ said Katie. ‘Let’s email them, then, and ask them to suggest a date.’

  Moirin jotted that down, and then she said, ‘Oh – and you and a partner of your choice have been invited to the Cork Simon Ball next year. I know it’s not until April but it’s always sold out months before. I’d like to go myself but my Barry’s not at all sociable and when he dances you’d think he’d been struck by lightning the way he hops about.’

  Katie gave her a tight smile. She couldn’t take John as ‘a partner of her choice’ because it was questionable if he would even be capable of walking by April, let alone waltzing. But the ball was in a good cause, helping Cork’s homeless, and it would be good public relations for her to show her face there.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Put me down for two tickets. And put an ad in the paper for a man who doesn’t dance like a duck.’

  It was a quarter past five already, and she was acutely aware that she would now be able to call Maureen Callahan. Apart from that, she had her strategy meeting with Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin and Superintendent Pearse in only fifteen minutes.

  ‘Let’s leave the rest of this until later,’ she said. ‘There’s a phone call I have to make and I’m running out of time as usual. But thanks, Moirin. You’ve taken a ton of pressure off me.’

  As soon as Moirin had left her office, Katie picked up her iPhone and called the number that Assistant Commissioner Jimmy O’Reilly had given her. It was answered almost at once, as if Maureen Callahan had been jiggling her phone in her hand, waiting impatiently for her to ring.

  ‘Maureen?’ she said.

  ‘Hallo, yes, this is Maureen. Is that who I think it is?’

  ‘It is, yes. Are you able to talk to me, Maureen?’

  ‘I can. I’m on my own at the moment. My sister’s gone out for the messages. She won’t be too long, though. She’s only gone up to Dunne’s at Ballyvolane.’

  ‘I’ve been told that you might have some information for me. Something that you don’t want to tell anybody else.’

  ‘Well, that’s right, that’s right. Sorry to be so skittery. I don’t know if I ought to be talking to you like this or not.’

  ‘Try and calm yourself down a little,’ said Katie. ‘Let me hear what you have to say, and then we can decide what to do about it, if anything. There’s no need for you to be frightened, let me promise you that. Nobody else is going to know that you spoke to me – and I mean nobody, and not only nobody, but never.’

  ‘It’s only because I trust you,’ said Maureen Callahan. ‘I mean I was going to tell that detective feller Dermot and I think I probably could have trusted him, like, but then I wasn’t totally sure, do you know what I mean? I thought I could trust my own sisters, like you would, wouldn’t you, your own sisters? But could I feck. After what they did I don’t think I’m ever going to trust nobody, never again. I mean, Jesus.’

  Maureen Callahan spoke in a high-pitched northside gabble, and she kept punctuating her speech with little puffing noises, so Katie guessed that she was smoking at the same time, and just as rapidly as she was speaking. Although she had said that she was nervous, Katie could tell from experience that she was working herself up to saying something that she was determined to get off her chest.

  ‘So why don’t you trust your sisters any more?’

  ‘Would you? Would you trust anybody who did what they did?’

  ‘I don’t know, Maureen. It depends what they did. One of my sisters borrowed my best angora sweater once without asking and burned a hole in it.’

  ‘You’re fecking joking, aren’t you? A hole in a fecking sweater, I wish! I’ll tell you what my sisters did. I was secretly doing a line with Branán O’Flynn, like. You know Branán?’

  ‘Of course. I know all the O’Flynns. I think I’ve arrested all of them, at one time or another.’

  ‘Well, me and Branán, we’d known each other ever since we was in bunscoil together and he was always flirting around with me even then, when we was kids. But of course we grew up and I was Callahan and he was O’Flynn and we couldn’t go on being friends because our families were always at each other’s throats. It was Kieran O’Flynn who shot my cousin Alan, not that nobody could ever prove it.’

  ‘Yes, I know about that,’ said Katie. ‘But, tell me – you and Branán O’Flynn started seeing each other, without anybody knowing?’

  ‘Nobody knew. Not his family, and nor mine neither. We were doing a line, like, for more than six months before anybody found out. I don’t know who it was who sneaked on us. It could have been one of the barmen at Jurys Hotel on the Western Road, because we used to go there to spend the night together, like. But somebody sneaked on us for sure.’

  ‘So what happened, Maureen?’ asked Katie. Maureen was gabbling and puffing even more furiously, and then she started sobbing, too, although her sobs were more like a seal honking.

  ‘One day two weeks ago I go to meet Branán at the Oval Bar – you know, on South Main Street. We used to go there for a scoop sometimes because we could sit right in the back and nobody would reck us. Branán’s not there, but I can’t believe my eyes because my Da’s there of all people and so is my older sister Bree. My Da! And Bree! Would you fecking believe it? They grab hold of me and they take me outside and they push me into the car, like. My Da’s having a rabbie about me doing a line with Branán but my sister Bree – Mother of God, I tell you, she goes off like a fecking Haitch-bomb. She’s allergic to those O’Flynns like I never saw nobody allergic to nobody.’

  Maureen puffed and honked and sniffed and honked again.

  ‘Go on,’ Katie coaxed her.

  ‘We’re driving back home and I go, “What about Branán? You know, “Did you see him, like, and warn him off, or what?” And Bree goes, “Don’t you bother yourself about Branán, Mo, because you’re never going to see Branán, never again, not so long as you live, and neither is anybody else, neither.” So I go, “What do you mean, like, you haven’t, like, hurt him or nothing?”

  ‘It’s then my Da turns around and goes, “No, pet, we didn’t hurt him. He didn’t feel a thing.”’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me they shot him
?’

  Maureen let out a long, keening wail, which ended in another sob.

  ‘They only fecking murdered him! They murdered my Branán! The love of my life he was! He and me, we was talking all the time about running away from Cork together and getting married. And they murdered him! My own flesh and blood! My own Da, my very own Da, and my own sister Bree! Can you believe it?’

  Katie let her sob and puff for a while, and then said, ‘Do you know what they did with his body?’

  ‘No. They won’t tell me. I’ve asked them again and again but they say it’s better if I never know. More than likely they probably buried him in a bog somewhere, like the O’Flynns was supposed to have done with my cousin Alan.’

  ‘If Branán’s disappeared, why haven’t the O’Flynns reported him missing?’

  ‘Oh, come on. The O’Flynns wouldn’t tell the guards if somebody broke into their toilet and stole their shit.’

  ‘Maureen – are you prepared to make a formal statement about this and testify in court?’

  ‘No, I am not,’ said Maureen. ‘No way.’ Then, ‘Stall it for a moment,’ and she loudly blew her nose.

  When she had finished, she said, ‘If you try to make out that I told you all of this, I’ll say I didn’t. I’ll say you must have been dreaming.’

  Katie waited for a moment, and then she said, ‘I don’t understand this, Maureen. If you’re not prepared to help me arrest your father and your sister for murdering Branán, then why did you want me to call you? Without your testimony, there’s nothing I can do. Your father will deny it and your sister will deny it and we have no idea of where Branán’s body might be or where he was killed or how, so we’ll have no forensic evidence, either. Don’t you want to see justice done?’

  ‘Oh, believe you me, DS Maguire, believe you me – I want justice done. I want more than justice done! They’ve ruined my life – I want to see them ruined, too, the whole Callahan family, not just my Da and Bree. I want to see them all locked up!’