Dead Girls Dancing Page 16

  ‘Is it hurting at all?’ he asked, but Liam shook his head, still in shock. His cheeks had flushed when he had spoken to Kyna, but now his face was as chalky white as a clown.

  ‘Keep your hand up in the air,’ Patrick told him. ‘Murtagh – he’ll have to be having stitches for this. One of you needs to take him to the Mercy.’

  Billy said, ‘It’s all right, I’ll take him. This was going to be my last scoop anyway, until this evening.’

  He stood up, drained the last of his pint, and then helped Liam to stand up, too.

  Davy said, ‘You’ll be okay, wee lad. Only a flesh wound. Tell the doctors you were sawing off a table leg and your hand slipped.’

  Liam stared at him with a mixture of bewilderment and sheer hatred, but Billy steered him out of the pub door before he could say anything in reply. Patrick went back to the bar and returned with a wet dishrag to wipe the blood off the table. The atmosphere in the pub was so tense that when he had finished mopping up he switched the radio on to RedFM to break the silence. They were halfway through playing Kyna’s favourite song, ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, by Sinead O’Connor.

  My God, thought Kyna. How totally fitting is that, a song about pain.

  Murtagh and Davy sat together without speaking for nearly a minute. Then Davy called out, ‘I’ll have a MiWadi when you’re ready, Paddy. Blackcurrant this time, big lad.’

  ‘Well – I doubt that Liam will be giving you any more bother, Davy,’ said Murtagh, as Patrick brought over a bottle of MiWadi and a glass. From the look in his eyes, though, Kyna thought that he was thinking something quite different – like You shouldn’t have hurt him like that, you prickly hypersensitive bastard.

  ‘I warned him before and he took no notice,’ said Davy. Kyna couldn’t hear what he said next, but then he swallowed a mouthful of blackcurrant juice and added, ‘Sure like, you’re probably right. I’d say that he’s learned his lesson.’

  Another ten minutes went by. Kyna was about to ask Patrick how much longer she was going to have to wait for the landlord when the door opened and a short, fat, grey-haired man in a maroon tracksuit came in carrying a large cardboard box of Tayto cheese-and-onion crisps.

  ‘Here’s Roy now,’ said Patrick.

  Kyna could see Roy’s face scrunch up in distaste as soon as he caught sight of Davy. If a look could make a man drop down stony cold dead on the spot. But then her attention turned from Roy to the dark-haired girl who was following close behind him.

  She wasn’t often stunned, but this girl stunned her. She was wearing a long white boat-neck sweater and tight black jeans and black leather boots, and her wrists jingled with at least a dozen bracelets. She was carrying an acoustic guitar slung across her back, so that the diagonal strap divided her very large breasts. Her face was a perfect oval, with huge onyx-coloured eyes and sulkily pouting pink lips, and her hair was scraped back from her face and tied in a long shiny ponytail.

  ‘This is Sorcha,’ Roy told Patrick, hefting the box of Taytos on to the counter. ‘She’s our live singer for this evening. She lives in Ballyvolane, so I reckoned I’d kill two birds and give her a lift.’

  ‘Well, this is Roisin,’ said Patrick. ‘She’s looking for bar work so.’

  Roy looked Kyna up and down and said, ‘Have you worked behind a bar before, girl?’

  ‘The Fob and Gill in Mayfield for six months. It was Martin trained me up.’

  ‘The Rob and Kill? If you worked there for six months I reckon you could work anywhere at all. A good pal of mine had half of his nose bitten off in the Fob and Gill.’

  Kyna smiled, although she was only half-listening. She was finding it hard to take her eyes off Sorcha, and Sorcha was staring back at her – as if each of them had found someone they had been looking for all their lives but thought they would never actually meet.

  16

  It was almost 8.30 by the time Katie arrived back home at Carrig View. The rain had stopped and the sky had cleared so she could see two misty white moons, one suspended over the harbour, the other reflected in the harbour.

  She parked in her driveway, but when she opened the door of her Focus she could hear the distant sound of the carillon of bells from St Colman’s Cathedral, high on top of the hill in the centre of Cobh. She hesitated for a moment, listening. The bells pealed on and on, and she felt almost as if they were calling her.

  She expected that Barney had heard her car coming back and would be eagerly waiting for her behind the front door with his tail wagging. But Jenny Tierney would have fed him and taken him for a walk and it wouldn’t hurt him to wait for another half-hour. She had been planning to attend Mass on Saturday evening, but hearing the bells she felt the strongest urge to go to the cathedral now. She knew that it normally closed at six, but if they were practising the carillon there must be somebody there who could let her in.

  She backed out of the driveway and drove into the town, which was less than five minutes away. Cobh had rows of multicoloured shops and pubs, yellow and blue and pink, and the statue of a weeping angel in Casement Square to commemorate the sinking of the Lusitania. The carillon was ringing so loudly as she drove up the steep hill to Cathedral Place that she could hear it inside the car.

  She parked and climbed out and stood on the cathedral steps for a while, listening and looking up. The cathedral was built in Gothic style, with a spire that was ninety metres high, like a slender rocket ship fashioned out of limestone. Its foundations had been laid in 1868 but it had taken over half a century before it was completed and consecrated. Katie came here as often as she could. Her mother’s funeral service had been held here, and so had the funeral services for her baby, Seamus, and her husband, Paul.

  The main doors were closed and locked, but she found that the side door was open. Inside it was chilly and the lights were dimmed. The votive candles that had been lit to commemorate the dead were flickering in an alcove behind the pillars. As she walked between the pews towards the altar the bells boomed and reverberated and drowned out the clicking of her footsteps on the mosaic floor. There were forty-nine bells, in four octaves, and the largest weighed over three tons.

  She sat down in a pew close to the altar and crossed herself. She wanted so much to pray, but she felt that in the past few months she had almost completely lost touch with God. Dealing with drug gangs and pimps and murderers was partly to blame, because there was no chance of outwitting them unless she behaved as ruthlessly as they did. She had killed a dog-napper with a kick to the heart and she had shot a serial killer who had been murdering sex-traffickers. On top of that, she had driven Assistant Commissioner Jimmy O’Reilly to suicide, and she still felt guilty about it even though he had been doing everything he could to undermine her.

  It was the way she had treated John, though, that really made her feel that she forgotten God. John had needed her love and support so badly, but she had turned her back on him to start her relationship with Conor. John was dead now, so it was too late to ask for his forgiveness. But would God forgive her?

  Without her expecting it, her eyes filled with tears and she felt a tocht in her throat. Even if she had felt able to pray, she would have found it difficult to say the words out loud. She took out a tissue, wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Just as she was doing so, two clergy appeared from one of the side doors, their heads tilted towards each other so that they could hear themselves talking over the booming of the bells.

  One of them she recognized: the Reverend Peter O’Farley, who had officiated at Seamus’s funeral. He was a broad-faced, handsome man with a high wave of black hair turning grey at the sides. The other was thin and beaky-nosed, with a tangle of gingery hair and rimless spectacles.

  ‘Well, well! Kathleen!’ called out Father O’Farley as soon as he caught sight of her. ‘It’s been a while now, hasn’t it? How are you going on?’

  ‘Oh, I’m grand altogether, thanks!’ Katie told him, raising her voice so that he could hear her. ‘I have to start so early these days I h
ardly ever have the chance to come to Mass at ten in the morning! I hope I’m not trespassing!’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Kathleen, nobody trespasses in the house of God! It’s pure gratifying to see you here! This is Bryan Hannigan, by the way. He’s visiting us from St Malachy’s Church in Belfast. Kind of a cultural exchange, as it were. It’s a beautiful church, St Malachy’s, fantastic. Bryan – I want you to meet Detective Superintendent Kathleen Maguire – one of Cobh’s most outstanding citizens and the strong arm of the law in the city of Cork.’

  Father Hannigan came up and shook Katie’s hand. ‘Pleasure to meet you, Kathleen!’ he smiled. But then he looked at her more keenly and took off his spectacles.

  ‘I hope I’m not intruding,’ he said. He leaned closer so that he wouldn’t have to raise his voice so loudly over the bells, and she could smell Fisherman’s Friends on his breath. ‘But it looks to me like something’s upsetting you.’

  ‘I, ah—’ Katie began, but then tears filled her eyes again. Oh, Jesus, the very last thing I want now is sympathy.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Father Hannigan. ‘You can tell me to mind my own damned business if you like.’

  Katie had to press her hand over her mouth for a few seconds to stop herself from sobbing. All she could do was look at Father Hannigan and try to convey to him the hurt and guilt she was feeling through the expression of her eyes alone.

  Father O’Farley came up to her, too, and said, ‘Kathleen... Kathleen, what’s wrong? You’ve come here for a reason, haven’t you?’

  Katie nodded and wiped her eyes again. ‘I’ve lost Him. I’ve lost God. It was my fault. Now I don’t know how to pray to Him any more, or if He’ll listen even if I do.’

  The carillon of bells suddenly fell silent, leaving only a metallic resonance in the air, like the fading hum of a tuning fork. Father O’Farley laid his hand on Katie’s shoulder, and now he could speak to her much more quietly.

  ‘Kathleen – you may think that you’ve lost contact with God, but I promise you that God has never lost sight of you. He knows how difficult your life is, and how hard you have to struggle to keep the peace and protect those around you. You’re one of His most precious children.’

  Katie swallowed hard. ‘It’s not so much the job, Father, although that’s been desperate enough. I let somebody down very badly, somebody who needed me. I let them down because of my own selfish feelings, and I can’t get it out of my mind.’

  ‘Would you like to confess what you did? Would that help?’

  Katie thought for a moment and then said, ‘Yes.’ She hadn’t expected to find a priest here to take confession, but she realized that admitting her guilt in front of God was the main reason why she had come here.

  ‘Why don’t you make your confession to Stephen here?’ said Father O’Farley. ‘Sometimes it’s easier if you tell your troubles to somebody you don’t know so well.’

  Father Hannigan smiled at her and Katie said, ‘All right. I will. I don’t know how else I’m going to get over this. I’ll tell you, though, I can’t imagine what kind of a penance is going to make up for what I did.’

  ‘Kathleen, the very fact that you’ve come here at all is a sign that you’re already beginning to make amends,’ said Father O’Farley.

  ‘Where would you like to talk to me?’ Father Hannigan asked her. ‘In one of the confessionals? Or we can simply go into the Pietà chapel if you prefer. Or even right here.’

  ‘I think – I think here,’ said Katie, looking up at the high vaulted roof and the shining organ pipes and the great rose windows. ‘I feel like God’s here, even if I haven’t been able to talk to Him.’

  ‘Well, He’d hear you in here all right,’ said Father O’Farley. Then he said, ‘Listen... I’ve a couple of phone calls to make, so I’ll leave you two together. Call me when you’ve finished.’

  Katie sat down again and Father Hannigan sat in the pew right behind her so that she could speak to him without having to look at him directly. She crossed herself again and said, ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. My last confession was on St Stephen’s Day.’

  Father Hannigan spoke very precisely in his soft Belfast accent. ‘Jesus said, “Come to me, all you who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”’

  ‘What I’m feeling, Father, it’s more than a burden,’ said Katie. ‘It’s like a never-ending migraine. I just don’t know how I’m ever going to get over it.’

  Haltingly, she told him how John had been kidnapped by Bobby Quilty to deter her from investigating his cigarette-smuggling racket. She explained how Bobby Quilty had bolted John’s feet to a bed when he tried to escape, and how his lower legs had become septic and had to be amputated. Out of guilt and pity, she had agreed to look after him during his convalescence, but his physical condition was so wretched and he had become so emotionally demanding that she had made it clear to him that their relationship was over.

  He had tried to win back her love by going undercover and trying to find evidence against one of Cork’s biggest drug-dealers, but he had been caught out and murdered.

  Katie was making no effort now to wipe away the tears that were running down her cheeks and dripping from her chin. ‘I might as well have killed him myself,’ she said. ‘I could have shot him in his sleep. At least he would have died thinking that I still loved him.’

  Father Hannigan said, ‘Very often, Kathleen, it is harder to tell a painful truth than it is to hear it. There are times when a white lie is kinder... when somebody who is terminally ill says to me, “I’m not about to die, am I?”’

  ‘I could have been so much gentler on John, though. And I didn’t have to rub his nose in it by bringing Conor home with me.’

  ‘Kathleen, you are feeling genuine remorse and showing a strong desire to renew your closeness to God.’

  ‘That’s all I want, Father,’ Katie told him. ‘I just need you to tell me how I can.’

  Father Hannigan laid his hand on top of hers. ‘God is the father of mercies, and through the death and resurrection of His Son, He has reconciled the world to Himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins. Through the ministry of the Church, may God give you pardon and peace. And I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to give me a penance?’

  ‘Your penance is to light a candle in memory of John, and to say a prayer for his soul, in any words you choose, but which you sincerely mean. And I want you to express your gratitude to God, for He has never abandoned you, and He is patiently waiting for you to speak to Him again.’

  Katie wiped her eyes. Father Hannigan was right. However much she had hurt John, she would only have hurt him even more if she had deceived him, and nothing could bring him back now.

  ‘Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good,’ Father Hannigan coaxed her.

  Katie crossed herself and whispered, ‘For His mercy endures for ever.’

  She stood up and went over to the alcove where the votive candles were burning in their red glass jars. She took a fresh candle and Father Hannigan picked up the box of matches and handed it to her.

  ‘Careful,’ he cautioned her, as she struck a match and the wick flared up. ‘You don’t want to add a scald to your penance.’

  She turned to stare at him, with the match still alight. He took hold of her wrist and blew it out for her. Scald, that was what the Northern Irish called a burn, but scald was what Corkonians called a cup of tea. Adeen had spilled her tea and when she had said ‘my scald!’ that was what Katie had thought she was talking about, her cup of tea. But perhaps she had meant the burn on her back.

  It could be that Adeen came from Ulster and that was why nobody had been in touch to say that she was missing and no school had repo
rted that she hadn’t turned up for class.

  ‘What?’ said Father Hannigan, taking off his spectacles again. From the look in his pale green eyes Katie was sure that he could read her mind. She had come across priests who understood her spiritual needs, but never one so sensitive to what she was feeling.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I may be totally mistaken. But maybe you were the reason I came here, or maybe I was sent here to meet you by God.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

  ‘No, Father. I’m not sure that I do, either. But I’ll soon find out. And thank you for hearing my confession. You’ve taken away a lot of my pain so.’

  Father Hannigan smiled, although he was obviously still baffled by what she had said. ‘Now why don’t you say a prayer for your John, and you’ll feel better still.’

  17

  Detective Dooley and Detective O’Mara stopped outside the tall maroon-painted building on North Main Street and a patrol car with two uniformed gardaí in it drew up close behind them.

  It was 3.25 in the morning. Both detectives were tired. Detective Dooley’s hair, usually brushed up, was flat on one side where he had slept on it for half an hour on the vinyl-covered squad room couch, and Detective O’Mara, who was broad-shouldered and red-haired and usually red-faced, too, was looking as pallid as pastry.

  As they climbed out of the car they could hear a cat yowling somewhere and the muffled sound of a man and a woman arguing, but apart from that the street was quiet. The uniformed gardaí came up to join them, one of them swinging a red Enforcer battering-ram. The other followed him, yawning with his mouth wide open.

  ‘This is where Coughlan’s been dossing down lately with his bit of sly lack,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘He has another girlfriend up in Mayfield, but from what I hear her ma got fed up with him staying overnight and never flushing the toilet, and his own ma won’t have him in the house.’