Dead Men Whistling Read online

  Kieran was almost certain now that he knew who the man was. He had to be a guard, or else it was highly unlikely that he would have known the name of the Garda’s regional Protected Disclosures Manager. Despite this, Kieran was afraid to challenge him by name, in case he immediately decided to silence him with his shotgun.

  ‘Well, if you won’t give us a tune voluntarily, like, we’ll have to see if we can get it out of you some other way,’ the man told him. ‘Patrick – why don’t you hold our friend here steady while Hoggy does the honours?’

  Patrick sat down on the bench on Kieran’s right side. He wrapped his left arm around Kieran’s shoulders and pulled him in tight. Kieran turned to look at him, but he was so close that he could hardly focus on him, and all he could see behind his balaclava was his bloodshot eyes and a grin with four front teeth missing.

  ‘All right?’ Patrick asked him, and winked. His breath was so foetid that Kieran had to turn his face away.

  It was then that he heard Hoggy start up the chainsaw, right behind him. It didn’t fire up the first time, so he had to tug the pull cord four or five times more. Once it was going, though, it sounded like a moped revving up, impatient for a traffic light to change.

  Kieran heaved himself sideways and tried to stand up, but Patrick clenched him even tighter and grabbed hold of his short curly hair.

  ‘Get off me, you bastard!’ Kieran screamed at him, over the noise of the chainsaw. He attempted to shake his head from side to side but Patrick had his fingers so firmly in his hair that his fingernails were digging into his scalp.

  The man with the shotgun stepped right up to him and made the sign of the cross, as if he were giving him benediction.

  ‘Shoot me!’ Kieran screamed. ‘If you’re going to fecking kill me then shoot me!’

  ‘I would, but it’s not even loaded,’ the man retorted, holding up the shotgun and shaking it. ‘And besides, I wouldn’t give you the compassion.’

  With that, he stood back and gave Hoggy the thumbs up.

  Kieran screamed again, but this time his scream was wordless, more of a shrill roar, and it didn’t stop until the teeth of the chainsaw bit into the back of his neck, ripping his denim shirt collar into tatters and then spraying a blizzard of blood and fragments of flesh all the way along the back of the bench. Next, the teeth bit into his vertebrae, and for a split second there was a sharp high-pitched chip! sound.

  With one last sideways sweep, Hoggy cut through Kieran’s larynx and then Patrick lifted off his head. Blood pumped out of Kieran’s severed neck, gushing over his shoulders and down the front of his shirt.

  ‘Look at the fecking state of me jacket!’ said Patrick. ‘I look like I’ve been working all day at Feoil O’Criostoir Teo!’

  ‘They wouldn’t employ you there, boy,’ said the man with the shotgun. ‘They want fellows who know how to kill cows and sheep, not feens.’

  Patrick held up Kieran’s dripping head so that it was staring directly at the man with the shotgun. Kieran’s eyes were open and his mouth was gaping but his expression was one of bewilderment rather than pain. Patrick turned it around so that he could look at it himself, and then said, ‘I’d say he looks kind of shook, myself. But he didn’t take it too bad, wouldn’t you say?’

  Hoggy, meanwhile, had switched off the chainsaw and was stowing it back into its carrying bag.

  ‘That was fierce easier than I thought it was going to be,’ he said, wiping his nose with the back of his hand again. ‘I don’t know why them Isis fellows didn’t use chainsaws instead of them knives. Much more efficienter, do you know what I mean, like?’

  ‘Yeah, sure, but the trouble with that is, your man here hardly felt nothing at all. For what he did, I think he should have suffered. Still, his loved ones won’t have all of him to bury, so they’ll be suffering for him. You didn’t forget the bag for his head?’

  Hoggy pulled a Tesco plastic bag out of his jacket pocket. Patrick dropped Kieran’s head into it and spun it around to tie up the top, as if he were serving potatoes in the greengrocer’s.

  ‘Right, let’s be out the gap before any grieving relatives get here,’ said the man with the shotgun. ‘Hoggy, the cuffs. We don’t want to be leaving any circumstantial, now do we?’

  Hoggy removed the handcuffs and stuffed them into his pocket. The man with the shotgun laid it down on the bench beside Kieran’s headless body and then carefully poked the low-D whistle into his windpipe, so that only about seventeen centimetres were sticking out.

  ‘There, head,’ he said. ‘Now you can sit and whistle to your heart’s content, and nobody’s going to be raging about it.’

  2

  ‘You’re going to love this one, ma’am,’ said Detective Markey, as he opened the door of Katie’s car for her.

  ‘You really think I needed to see it first hand?’ Katie asked him, zipping her dark green anorak and tugging up the black nylon fur collar. She had only just recovered from a bad cold and if Detective Markey hadn’t been so insistent she would have preferred to have stayed in her office in the warm.

  ‘Well, it’s fierce unusual, like, the whole scene, and of course he’s a bit of a celebrity, so I reckoned the media are going to be asking you a rake of questions about it. Like what the motive could have been and all that.’

  Three patrol cars and two vans from the Technical Bureau were parked in the steep driveway of the house in Woodhill Park in Tivoli, as well as an ambulance. The lower end of the road had been cordoned off from Lover’s Walk.

  The house itself was huge, white-painted, with a grey tiled roof and art deco windows. It stood in at least half an acre of shrubs and decorative flower beds, with a wide patio at the side that overlooked the River Lee far below. A red Bentley Continental GT was parked in front of the double garage, measled with raindrops.

  ‘Do you know how much one of them would set you back?’ said Detective Markey, as they walked around the Bentley to reach the front porch. ‘Quarter of a million yoyos, easy.’

  ‘Oh, is that all, Nick?’ said Katie. ‘In that case I’ll order two.’

  Detective Sergeant Kyna Ni Nuallán was standing outside the wide oak front door talking to Detective Patrick O’Donovan. Her short blonde hair was covered with a green knitted beanie and she was wearing a baggy purple raincoat and knee-length boots, which made her look more than ever like one of the aos sí, the fairy folk. Detective O’Donovan was unshaven and his hair was all messed up, as if he had been called here straight from his bed.

  Kyna turned around as Katie approached and gave her a wide-eyed look that conveyed everything intimate that she wanted to tell her without her having to say it out loud. They hadn’t seen each other for over two weeks because Kyna had been at Garda HQ in Dublin on an Evo-FIT training course. How are you? I missed you.

  In return, Katie closed her eyes for a moment to acknowledge that she had received and understood what Kyna was trying to convey.

  ‘So what’s the story?’ she asked. ‘I would have thought that Jimmy Ó Faoláin would be the last person that anybody would want to send off to higher service.’

  ‘I agree with you, ma’am,’ said Kyna. ‘He was minted and he was always throwing parties and he was everybody’s best friend. A legend.’

  ‘Maybe it’s connected to the GAA,’ suggested Detective O’Donovan. ‘He was chairman of the Rachmasach Rovers, wasn’t he – well, apart from being chairman of about a million other clubs and societies and charities and the Lord knows what.’

  ‘What about it?’ asked Katie.

  ‘Have you not heard? There’s been some rumours recently about the Rovers throwing games deliberate-like.’

  ‘Why would they want to do that? I thought they were hoping to be top of the league this year.’

  ‘I haven’t a baldy. Myself, I wouldn’t know one end of a hurley from the other.’

  At that moment, Bill Phinner, the chief technical expert, came out of the house, tugging back the hood of his white Tyvek suit. He looked even m
ore miserable than usual. Katie knew that he had not only given up smoking but given up vaping as well, which had done nothing to relieve his permanent state of pessimism. Bill Phinner believed that if they were given half a chance almost everybody in Cork was capable of committing a serious misdemeanour, and whenever they did it was his dreary duty to find the evidence to convict them.

  ‘How are you going on, Bill?’ said Katie.

  ‘You can come in now and take a sconce for yourself, ma’am,’ Bill told her. ‘So far the only evidence we’ve managed to retrieve is one ricocheted bullet. Apart from that we’ve found no circumstantial and no material evidence whatsoever, although we’ll obviously have the rest of the bullets to examine once the pathologist has dug them out for us. There’s no indication of forced entry. There’s no footprints on the floors, even though the morning’s been so wet. We’re testing for dabs but I’m not very hopeful. There’s no cartridge casings, neither, so the shooter must have picked them all up.’

  ‘No sign of a struggle?’

  Bill shook his head. ‘You’ll see why when you come in.’

  Kyna said, ‘We have Jimmy’s iPhone. It’s facial recognition so we won’t have any problem getting into it. We’ll also be taking his computers and his books and sending them up to the fraud squad.’

  ‘Them books are going to take some going through, I’ll tell you,’ put in Detective O’Donovan. ‘I reckon your man has twice as many books as the Vatican Library – except that his are all accounts, like, not the holy scriptures.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ said Katie. ‘From what little I know of Jimmy Ó Faoláin, it was grade first and God second.’

  ‘I met him once at a charity dinner in Dublin,’ said Kyna. ‘He had a silver tongue, I can tell you. If he hadn’t been a financier, he could have been a hypnotist. I almost fell for him myself.’

  Katie raised her eyebrows, but said nothing. Only she knew for certain that the possibility of Kyna ever falling for a man was beyond remote.

  ‘Who reported him dead?’ she asked.

  ‘His latest girlfriend,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘She’s a Ryanair stewardess, Viona Caffrey. Jimmy gave her a key because of the odd hours she gets in and he’s often away at some conference or other. She came here directly from the airport at approximately ten forty-five and that’s when she found him.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘Oh, still here. She’s in the conservatory with Garda Malone. She said she doesn’t want to leave here until he does.’

  ‘I’ll have a chat with her in a minute,’ said Katie. ‘Meanwhile, let’s take a lamp at our unfortunate friend.’

  She took two Tyvek shoe covers out of her anorak pocket and lifted up her feet to snap them on. She pulled on black forensic gloves, too, in case she needed to touch or handle anything. Then she followed Bill Phinner into the hallway.

  Inside, the house was lavishly decorated. The floor in the hallway was chequered with beige and white marble, and a sweeping staircase came down on the left-hand side, its newel post surmounted by a brass statuette of a bare-breasted nymph. A huge crystal chandelier was suspended from the ceiling, softly tinkling in the draught from the open door, and the walls were lined with original oil paintings by Walter Osborne and James Jebusa Shannon, or at least very passable copies of them.

  ‘You see that one,’ said Detective Markey, jerking his thumb towards a portrait of a woman feeding a cat with a bowl of milk. ‘I reckon that’s worth at least eighty-five thousand, that one.’

  ‘You should have been an auctioneer, Nicky,’ said Detective O’Donovan.

  ‘My old feller used to restore pictures at the Crawford Gallery,’ said Detective Markey. ‘Some of the paintings looked like the artist just gawked up his tripe and drisheen all over the canvas, that’s what he used to tell me, but it made no odds. They’d never have any bother finding some pretentious flute who’d pay them thousands for it.’

  They went through to the living room. Two French windows looked out over the patio, and the floor was highly polished parquet. The sofas and armchairs were all mock-rococo, and the side tables were crowded with antique lamps and porcelain figurines and gilded vases. The far end of the room was dominated by a large marble fireplace, and above the fireplace hung an enormous landscape painting of the Old Head of Kinsale, with fishing smacks and rolling cumulus clouds.

  Katie noticed that the grate was heaped with wood ash.

  ‘The fire’s not made up. Don’t tell me your man doesn’t have any hired help around the house.’

  ‘Oh, he does of course,’ said Kyna. ‘He has a Polish woman who comes in every day to make up the fire and change the bed and clean the windows and whatever, and another local woman who comes in to cook whenever he needs her, and a gardener, too, who’s also a bit of a handyman.’

  ‘So where were they this morning?’

  ‘The Polish woman had the morning off because she had to go to the dentist and the gardener only shows up twice a week.’

  ‘So it’s possible that whoever shot your man knew that the house was going to be empty, apart from him.’

  ‘It’s a fair bet, I’d say,’ said Detective O’Donovan.

  ‘See that Chinese vase with all them red bats on it?’ said Detective Markey. ‘You could get a couple of thousand for that, no problem.’

  Bill Phinner took them into the corridor on the opposite side of the living room, which led through to the kitchen. Halfway along this corridor there was an open door, and four technical experts in white Tyvek suits were clustered around it like a gathering of snowmen, scanning the floor with a green OPS laser and taking flash photographs and powdering the paintwork for latent fingerprints.

  ‘Hey there, fellers, give us a couple of moments, will you?’ asked Bill Phinner, and the technicians shuffled back along the corridor.

  Bill Phinner reached in for the door handle and closed the door. A few centimetres above the central rail there were five bullet holes in a tight diamond pattern, with another two higher up. Attached to the centre post was a driftwood plaque with a carved wooden heart hanging from it, engraved with the word Jacks.

  ‘Caught in his office, sending a fax to Poolbeg,’ said Detective O’Donovan.

  ‘He probably didn’t even know who killed him,’ said Kyna. ‘Not unless they shouted out before they shot him to make sure that he was in there.’

  ‘All right, let’s take a sconce,’ said Katie. She took out the Chanel-scented handkerchief she always carried in her pocket and held it up to her face, partly to mask the smell and partly because her nose had started to run.

  Bill Phinner opened the door wide. Jimmy Ó Faoláin was still sitting on the toilet, although he was leaning sideways against the wall. He was a dark-haired, rather Italian-looking man with sharply defined cheekbones and a strong but narrow chin. His eyes were open but they had already darkened to a reddish-brown with tache noire. He was wearing a silky maroon pyjama jacket with patterns of lilies on it, and his trousers were gathered around his ankles.

  One bullet had hit him five centimetres above his left eye, drilling a small, neat hole in his forehead, but it had exploded inside his skull so that the hair at the back of his head was sticking up in a wild coronet. Lumps of bloody brain tissue were splattered all the way up the white tiled wall behind him and were sticking to the pale blue blind. One large lump dropped off on to the floor even as Katie was watching it.

  Bill Phinner went into the toilet and pointed to a triangular chip in one of the tiles.

  ‘That was one of the two higher shots,’ he said. ‘The bullet ricocheted and like I say we’ve recovered it, so we should be able to identify the calibre pretty quick. If the seraphs are smiling on us we might be able to put a name to the type of weapon and even where it came from. And if the Lord God Himself is smiling on us it might have been used before, and we’ll have it on our database.’

  Delicately, as if he were opening the curtains of a toy theatre, he parted the front of J
immy Ó Faoláin’s pyjama jacket. Katie could see that the remaining five bullets had hit him in a cluster in the chest, around his heart. Runnels of blood had dried over the folds in his stomach and into his dark curly pubic hair.

  ‘He’s a grand healthy suntan, your man, doesn’t he?’ said Detective Markey. ‘Always hopping off for holliers in the Caribbean from what I hear. Me – I can’t even stretch to a long weekend in Santa Ponsa.’

  Detective O’Donovan said, ‘Pff! I’d rather be broke as a joke than minted and six feet under. Why do you think cemeteries don’t have shops?’

  Katie said, ‘Approximate time of death, Bill?’

  ‘Judging by his eyes and his body temperature, sometime around nine-thirty this morning, I’d say.’

  ‘We’re going house to house,’ said Kyna. ‘Not that there are many houses around here to go to, and there’s no CCTV either end of Lover’s Walk.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Katie. ‘Let me talk to Jimmy’s girlfriend and see if she knows why anybody might have wanted to see him dead.’

  *

  Viona Caffrey was sitting at one end of a white wickerwork sofa in the conservatory, clutching a damp handkerchief in her lap. Garda Malone stood close behind her, her arms folded, looking bored. Garda Malone was often put in charge of female suspects who might be a flight risk, because she had a soothing and sympathetic way of talking to them, but she was stocky and strong and a fast runner, too. Detective Ó Doibhilin called her ‘Mount Knocknaskagh with legs’, although not to her face.

  The conservatory had underfloor heating and it was filled with giant ceramic plant pots, so that every breath was fragrant with sweet bay and stephanotis and begonias. As she walked across the tiled floor, Katie couldn’t help thinking of the two dried-up violets on her own kitchen window sill.

  ‘Viona,’ she said. ‘I’m Detective Superintendent Maguire. How are you coming along there?’

  Viona looked up, her eyes red and swollen from crying. She was a handsome girl, with a long face and large violet eyes, although she had quite a prominent nose. Her ash-blonde hair was fastened in a French pleat, so that she looked like a typical hostess from an airline advertisement. She was still wearing her bright-blue Ryanair uniform, although she had taken off her rose-pink wrap overcoat and hung it over the back of the sofa, and Katie could see from the label that it was Sies Marjan. She had tried on one of those coats herself in Brown Thomas, but she hadn’t bought it. Apart from being too long for her, its price tag had been €2,420.