Red Light Read online

  Detective O’Donovan came stumping up the stairs, out of breath.

  ‘I’ve talked to all the neighbours along this row,’ he said, flipping open his notebook. ‘The house is rented, but none of them knows the name of the owner. They’ve suspected for about six months now that it was being used as a knocking shop because there were so many strange men coming and going at all hours of the day and night.

  ‘The woman next door, Mrs Cooney, she complained one night because of all the screaming going on when her kids were trying to get to sleep. The next morning some feller came around and told her that if she ever complained again he’d pour petrol all over her and put a match to her.’

  ‘Name of Jesus, why didn’t she report him?’

  ‘You want her exact words? “I believed that your man would actually burn me alive if he found out that I’d shopped him, while the guards wouldn’t get off their arses until I was nothing but ashes.”’

  ‘There’s public confidence for you. Could she describe him, this feller?’

  ‘She thinks he was foreign, because he spoke funny.’

  ‘Oh well, that’s helpful. The people round here think you’re foreign if you come from Midleton. What did he look like, did she say?’

  ‘She said he was one skinny malink. In fact, she said he was so thin that the one eye would have done him. But he still made her afraid of her life.’

  Katie nodded towards the body lying on the bed. ‘He’s skinny enough, wouldn’t you say? It could have been him.’

  ‘Well, yes. It could have been. But I don’t think there’s a lot of point in asking Mrs Cooney to take a look at him.’

  ‘All right,’ said Katie. ‘I don’t think there’s much more I can do here tonight. I’ll look forward to your report in the morning, Bill, and hopefully we’ll have the coroner’s report on our black friend, too.’

  As she left the house, Dan Keane came up to her, closely followed by Fionnuala Sweeney and her cameraman.

  ‘So, what’s the form, detective superintendent?’ asked Dan Keane. ‘We hear another pimp has had his head blown off.’

  ‘I don’t know who told you that, Dan,’ said Katie. ‘An unidentified male has been found deceased at this address, but so far the cause of death has not been officially established. There is no evidence so far to connect this death with the suspected homicide earlier this week of an unidentified male at an address in Lower Shandon Street.’

  ‘Oh, there’s a pity,’ said Dan Keane. ‘I had my headline all ready for tomorrow’s paper, “The Headless Whores’ Man”!’

  ‘So far we have no proof that either victim was connected in any way with prostitution or the sex trade. Sorry. But I’d like to know who gave you that idea.’

  ‘I’m sure you would, detective superintendent. As usual, however, my sources must remain confidential.’

  Fionnuala Sweeney held out her microphone and said, ‘Is there any truth in the suggestion that both victims had their hands cut off, too?’

  Katie gave her a tight smile and said, ‘I can’t say anything more at this stage. I’m still waiting for the coroner’s report. Once we’ve fully established the cause of death and the extent of any injuries, we’ll let you know of course. It’s likely that I’ll be holding a media conference late tomorrow afternoon at Anglesea Street.’

  Fionnuala Sweeney held up a small piece of notepaper and frowned at it. ‘Do you happen to know what “Rah-ma-malah-eekah” means?’ she asked.

  ‘Where did you hear that?’ said Katie, shielding her eyes from the cameraman’s lights.

  ‘I can’t reveal my source, I’m afraid. That was told to me in confidence.’

  ‘Well, that’s helpful. Do you know what it means?’

  ‘No. We tried it out on Google Translate, in every possible language they do, but we came up with nothing at all.’

  ‘In that case, there’s nothing more that I’m prepared to say to you at this stage,’ Katie told her. ‘The press office will get in touch with you tomorrow.’

  ‘Are you sure you’ve never heard that before?’ Fionnuala Sweeney persisted, but Dan Keane laid a hand on her shoulder and said, ‘Don’t waste your breath, girl. If Detective Superintendent Katie Maguire doesn’t want to give you an answer, Saint Peter will be asking you what good you’ve ever done, before she’ll give you one.’

  Katie and Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán walked together to Katie’s car.

  ‘I think you’re right, and it was the perpetrator who tipped off the press,’ said Katie. ‘That girl they found with the body on Lower Shandon Street, the one I call Isabelle, she said that exact same thing to me before they took her off to hospital.’

  ‘She didn’t give you any idea what it meant?’

  ‘No, she didn’t, and it was the last thing she said to me. But I met with Father Dominic at Cois Tine this afternoon and he’s sending two African women to talk to her tomorrow, one Nigerian and one Somali. Most of the African immigrants in Cork come from one or other of those two countries, so there’s a fair chance that at least one of them can persuade her to open up.’

  Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán was tying her scarf around her head again. ‘I don’t know if you picked up my message yet, but Horgan got no joy from immigration. There’s no trace at all of the girl entering the country, wherever she’s originally from.’

  ‘Why doesn’t that surprise me one bit?’ said Katie. ‘Listen, I’ll see you in the morning so. We have a meeting with Michael Gerrety and his lawyers in the afternoon. Perhaps he might tell us who she is.’

  ‘Patrick O’Donovan was telling me all about Michael Gerrety,’ said Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán. ‘From what I gather, I’m sure he’ll tell you, yeah.’

  Fourteen

  ‘So this is your little nest, girl,’ said Mairead, opening the last door at the end of the corridor. Zakiyyah peered inside. The buildings on the opposite side of Washington Street faced almost due south, so the room was filled with reflected sunlight from their upstairs windows. It was so narrow, however, that the king-size bed was pushed up against the wall on one side and there was space for only one bedside table, with one pink-frilled table lamp, although there was a reading light clipped to the opposite side of the headboard.

  The window was covered with a plastic venetian blind, with alternate lavender and white slats, and the bed was covered in creased purple velveteen, with heaps of cushions in various shades of purple and violet. The corner of the room behind the door was curtained off, presumably to give Zakiyyah somewhere to hang her clothes – not that she had any, now that her suitcase had been taken away from her.

  On one wall hung a large poster of a salacious young witch, naked except for a pointed hat and a cloak, her eyes closed in ecstasy as she pushed the handle of her broomstick up inside her. Her black cat was watching her and licking its lips.

  On the facing wall there was a framed photograph of Blarney Castle, faded by years of sunlight until it was almost colourless.

  ‘What do you think, then?’ said Mairead. ‘Home from home. Better than some mud hut in Africa, I’ll bet.’

  Mairead was a short, bosomy woman with long lank silver-blonde hair that draped over her shoulders. She had a heart-shaped face and a turned-up nose and she could have been pretty in a plump, waitressy way, except that her cheeks were blotched and puffy and underneath the thick pink gloss her lips were cracked. Her eyes were cornflower-blue, but Zakiyyah saw some indefinable lack of focus in them, as if she had long forgotten who she was and what she was doing here.

  She was wrapped in a gold satin gown and was wearing high-heeled gold slippers, but underneath Zakiyyah could see that she was wearing only a black lacy corselet, with some of the lace ripped around the side of one cup.

  Mister Dessie was standing in the corridor close behind them, smoking and talking to a girl in the room next door. ‘I’ll be off now, Mairead,’ he said, after a while. ‘Himself will be dropping by later, he said, after his round of golf. He said not to let anyone to
uch her until he’s taken a sconce at her and the doctor’s been.’

  ‘Oh, I will, yeah,’ said Mairead. ‘Listen, would you nip across the road for me and get me a packet of Johnny Blue before you go? I’ve been gasping.’

  ‘Go and get them yourself, you idle slag. What do you think I am?’

  ‘You’re all fecking heart, that’s what you are, Dessie. That’s the last time you get a gobble.’

  ‘After the last time, I’d rather stick it down a mincer.’

  Mister Dessie went off, and Mairead put her arm around Zakiyyah’s shoulders and said, ‘Don’t take any notice of that gobdaw. He’s all mouth and no trousers.’

  ‘He frightens me,’ said Zakiyyah. ‘He will not let me have my suitcase and he hurt me.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, girl. I won’t let him hurt you again. Well, so long as you behave yourself, and do what you’re told, like.’

  ‘I was supposed to dance in a club. I do not understand any of this.’

  Mairead looked towards the window, at the buildings opposite, and her eyes seemed even more unfocused, as if she had X-ray vision and could see right through them, to the hills beyond. ‘No, love, I don’t think any of us do. I keep asking myself how I got myself into this, and to be honest, I don’t really remember. I know that I was stone-broke. Dessie lent me some money, and then he lent me some more money, and before I knew it I owed him seven hundred euros and I didn’t have any way to pay him back except for this.’

  ‘I share a bed only once with a man,’ Zakiyyah told her. ‘That was my boss in Lagos, and I did not want to do it, but he said that I would lose my job.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll get used to it. It’s not half as bad as some of these Holy Joes try to paint it. Fair play, some of the punters we get are totally crustified, or else they’re langered and they stink of the drink, but in that case they usually can’t get it up any road. Either that or they’ll ask you to do something pervy. But you don’t have to do anything you really don’t want to, especially if it’s unhygienic. Mister Dessie will usually back you up if a punter’s giving you grief. But if a punter asks me to do something that’s pure disgusting, what I usually tell him is it’ll cost him double.

  She laughed, although her laugh sounded completely flat, like a broken bell, with no humour in it at all. ‘Most of the time, though, they cough up, and then I wish I’d charged them three times as much.’

  Zakiyyah said, ‘What if I do not like the man at all?’

  ‘Then you open your legs and close your eyes and think of what you feel like for your dinner tonight.’

  ‘I cannot say no, I do not want you?’

  ‘No, girl. You’re here to pay back what you owe. If you turn down a punter, or upset him at all, then you’re liable to get yourself a beating, believe me.’

  ‘I am so frightened,’ said Zakiyyah. She had to sit down on the bed because she was trembling so much and she felt as if she were going to be sick. She retched twice, while Mairead stood beside her, watching her patiently.

  ‘Let me tell you how it works,’ said Mairead. ‘What happens is, the punter sees your picture on Michael’s website. He phones up the number, like, and we send him to the courthouse there across the street. That’s so that we can see him standing on the steps, just to check out that it isn’t the shades or a fecking one-legged leper or something. If he looks okay we phone him back and we tell him how to get up here.’

  ‘Then what?’ asked Zakiyyah. She had never felt such dread in her life, and she found it even more terrifying because of the matter-of-fact way in which Mairead was describing what she was expected to do.

  ‘There’s four girls here most of the time. I’ll introduce you to the others in a minute. If your punter hasn’t already taken his pick from the pictures on the website, he’ll make his choice after we let him in. He’ll tell us what he wants, like, and we tell him how much it’s going to cost him. It’s a hundred euros for a hand-job, or a hundred and seventy for oral, or two hundred for full sex, with another fifty for anal. Then of course it’s extra for anything like bondage or lesbian or special requirements.’

  Zakiyyah closed her eyes. She wished that somehow she could be magically transported back to her home village – that when she opened them again she would see her mother stirring Akamu custard and her father raking the yard and her sister laughing in the sunshine. If that was impossible, she would rather not open her eyes, ever again, and never see that purple bedspread, or those cushions, or those orange brick buildings opposite with their dazzling windows. She would rather be dead.

  But she opened them again, and she was still alive, and Mairead was still talking to her. ‘Renting this room will cost you two hundred euros a week, and your advertisement on the interweb will cost two hundred and fifty. On top of that, Michael takes sixty per cent of everything you make, which goes towards paying him back. I’ll help you to work that out.

  ‘House rules: none, really, except that you must always use a condom. Michael’s very particular about that, even for oral. It doesn’t matter how much the punter offers you to do it without. It’s all part of Michael’s Green Light campaign, so that he can prove to the world that he keeps his girls healthy and safe, that’s what he says. You have to buy your own condoms, though, and your own baby-wipes.

  ‘You’ll be starting in the morning as soon as the first punter rings, and finish whenever the last one wants his end away. That usually means you’ll service ten or maybe twelve punters a day, sometimes more. You’ll be extra busy when Cork’s playing at home, I can tell you. Sometimes you won’t even have time to wash your mouth out.’

  Zakiyyah managed unsteadily to stand up. ‘I would like a drink of water, please.’

  ‘Oh, of course, girl! I’ll bet you haven’t had a drink all day, have you? And did that Bula give you anything to eat? I’ll bet that he didn’t, the gowl. Jesus, he’s as thick as two short planks tied together. Come into the kitchen and I’ll knock you up a hang sangwich.’

  Zakiyyah followed Mairead into the tiny kitchenette, where a moulting green budgerigar was perched in a cage on the window sill. Mairead poured her a glass of red lemonade and made her a sandwich with white bread and Spam. As she sat at the glass-topped table, two other girls came in, a small flat-faced Thai girl with very long black hair who was wearing nothing but a thong and a quarter-cup bra, so that her prune-like nipples were exposed, and a tall, thin blonde in a stained pink dressing gown. The blonde’s hair was braided in a tight coronet and she looked as if she might have been Czech or Ukrainian.

  ‘This is Lotus Blossom and this is Elvira,’ said Mairead. ‘Girls, this is Zakky.’

  Lotus Blossom came up and kissed Zakiyyah on both cheeks and said, ‘Welcome. You call me Lawan, that is my real name, not work name.’

  ‘Zakiyyah,’ said Zakiyyah.

  Elvira smiled and gave her a little finger-wave, but Lotus Blossom said, ‘Elvira does not speak good English yet. She has been here only one month now. For me it was very hard to understand Irish people when I first come here, even though I speak good English already. Sometimes I still don’t know what they say. Everything they say is “like” and good is “how bad” and even old man is “boy”.’

  She pressed her sparkly-polished fingertips to her lips and tittered. Elvira smiled, too, in a dreamy, drugged-looking way, although it was obvious that she didn’t know why.

  Zakiyyah drank her red lemonade and tried to eat her sandwich, although she found it difficult to swallow. The phone rang and Mairead picked it up and said, ‘Oh. Sure. You’ll be there in five minutes, will you? Well, give us a ring when you get there, darling, and I’ll tell you where to go next. That’s all right.’

  ‘Who was that?’ asked Lotus Blossom.

  ‘Not for you, girl. It’s some culchie who’s just come up on business from Kenmare and he fancies Elvira. Do you know what he said, the stupid cake? “I’ve only seen her picture online and I’m desperately in love with her already.” Jesus.’

  ‘So
long as it’s not that old man who sells fish in the English Market,’ said Lotus Blossom. ‘Every time he always wants me. “Oh, Lotus Blossom you’re so sweet like your name!” But he stinks of kipper! He says he washes but he always stinks of kipper!’

  She tittered again, although there was no real humour in her laugh at all, just like Mairead’s. Zakiyyah felt that they were laughing only because crying wasn’t going to change anything. She pushed her plate away and said, ‘I am sorry. I cannot eat any more. My stomach is not good.’

  ‘Oh, don’t you worry about that, girl,’ said Mairead. She picked up one of the sandwiches herself and took a bite. ‘You’ll soon get used to the delights of Irish cuisine. And most of the time we get takeouts from one of the local Chinkies.

  ‘Here …’ she said, with her mouth full. ‘I’ll show you the rest of the place.’

  Zakiyyah finished her drink and got up to follow her. As she did so, Lotus Blossom laid her hand on her arm and said, ‘Don’t you worry, Zakky. It’s not so bad. Better than working in a shop, or a restaurant. Most of the men are very nice to you. You only get a few bad ones, and that’s because they’re drunk.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’ asked Zakiyyah.

  Lotus Blossom shook her head. ‘I don’t remember! Maybe two years. I will still be here when I am old and all of my teeth fall out! Men like that! Blow-job with no teeth! Not so worried you will bite it off!’

  ‘You have not paid them back yet, in two years, the money you owe them?’

  ‘I don’t remember. They always say I still owe them more. Besides, what else am I going to do? They have my passport, all my papers.’

  Mairead took Zakiyyah into the living room. The sunshine showed up the dust on the purple velvet curtains and the worn-out black carpet. Three black leather couches were arranged around the walls facing a 42-inch flat-screen TV, and in between the couches there stood a black-painted coffee table with dog-eared copies of pornographic magazines like Private and Color Climax arranged in a fan shape – like Irish Country and Woman’s Way in a dentist’s waiting room.