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  He turned to Bula and said, ‘You can take this one over to Washington Street. I think Mairead’s ready for her now. Any road, Michael will be wanting to take a sconce at her later.’

  Zakiyyah’s shakes were gradually subsiding, though her thigh muscles continued to twitch now and again. She felt a warmth rising up inside her, and a calmness. In fact she felt almost light-headed.

  ‘I must have my suitcase,’ she said.

  Mister Dessie ignored her. He stood up and zipped the hypodermic syringe back in its case and returned it to his inside pocket. Then he said to Bula, ‘As soon as you’ve dropped this one at Mairead’s, I want you to go over to Carroll’s Quay and see what the feck that Lindsey has been up to.’

  ‘What’s the story there, like?’

  ‘I don’t know for sure, but there was some kind of a shimozzle with one of her customers last night and he called for the guards. That’s the last thing we need, being haunted by the shades. As if we don’t pay the bastards too much as it is. They’ll all be taking themselves off on holliers in the Canaries before we know it, at our expense, with their blue lights flashing!’

  ‘I must have my suitcase,’ Zakiyyah repeated. ‘It has all my clothes – everything!’

  Mister Dessie turned to her and said, ‘Will you ever shut the feck up? I know you come from Africa, like, but you don’t have to pester me like a fecking parrot.’

  ‘But I need my clothes! And I am not going to work for you as bagar!’

  Mister Dessie paused for a moment, looking at Bula as if to say what am I going to do with this girl she’s giving me a pain where I didn’t even know I had a window.

  Then he walked across to the bed and clamped his hand around the back of Zakiyyah’s neck, hauling her on to her feet. She yelped out in pain but he gripped her even tighter and shook her head until the beads in her cornrows rattled. Without saying a word, he pulled up her turquoise satin slip and forced his right hand between her legs. She tried to clench her thighs together and bend herself forward, but he wrenched her neck up even further so that she actually felt her tendons crackle.

  Breathing furious onion fumes into her face, he hooked two fingers up inside her, and then pressed his thumb against her clitoris, as hard as he could. He kept up the pressure relentlessly for nearly ten seconds, all the time staring at her with those bulging eyes and breathing noisily through his nostrils.

  Zakiyyah could do nothing but stare back at him, her mouth wide open in pain. Bula meanwhile wasn’t even taking any notice of her, but prodding on his mobile phone again, as if he was used to seeing Mister Dessie treat girls like this and thought nothing of it.

  After a while, Mister Dessie abruptly released her neck and took his fingers out of her. Still without saying anything, he went over to the kitchenette and washed his hands with Fairy Liquid. He came out again, shaking droplets of water all across the room. Zakiyyah could only stand where she was, her head bowed, one hand slowly massaging the back of her neck. He had hurt her between her legs, too, but she didn’t want to touch herself there, not in front of him.

  Mister Dessie went to the door. As he opened it, though, he stopped and said, ‘Hey!’

  Zakiyyah didn’t respond. She hadn’t wanted to cry, but now she couldn’t help herself. The tears slid down her cheeks and dripped off her chin.

  ‘Hey, are you hearing me, girl?’ Mister Dessie demanded. ‘Because let that be a fecking lesson to you! Don’t you ever try to take the piss out of me, girl, because that’s what you’ll get, or worse.’

  Still Zakiyyah didn’t answer. Instead, she turned away and shuffled over to the bed. She eased herself painfully down on to its worn-out springs and curled herself up like a child.

  Six

  It was nearly 10.30 p.m. when Detective O’Donovan knocked at Katie’s office door again. He looked scruffy and tired. The shoulders of his khaki trench coat were still sparkling with raindrops and his tie was crooked. Katie was in the middle of shuffling all of her papers straight, in preparation for going home.

  ‘What’s the story?’ she asked him. ‘You look all flah’d out.’

  He sat down heavily in the armchair on the other side of Katie’s desk, took out a crumpled Kleenex and loudly blew his nose. ‘I hope I’m not getting one of them summer colds, that’s all. I was interviewing that feller who’d been cutting and shutting them motors down at Victoria Cross yesterday and he was sneezing all over me like he was trying to blow me out of the door.’

  ‘So, any luck with Maka-wiya?’

  ‘Mawa-kiy-a, ma’am, and it’s the feller’s nickname, not his actual real name. The cook in the African restaurant knows him – well, at least by sight. He goes in there at least once a week to eat, on account of they cook this special Nigerian dish he likes, pepper soup with hot chilli and fatty lamb and big slices of tripe.’

  ‘Please, Patrick! My stomach hasn’t recovered from smelling your man’s decomposing body today, let alone finding out what disgusting food he used to eat.’

  ‘Oh, sorry, ma’am,’ said Detective O’ Donovan. He tugged his notebook out of his coat pocket, licked his thumb, and flipped it open. ‘From what the cook was telling me, like, he’s a real cute hoor, this Mawakiya. He’s got his sticky black fingers into almost everything you can think of. Drugs – especially the party stuff like Es and ket and miaow-miaow and GHB. Stolen copper wiring. Stolen mobile phones. But his main line of business is pimping. He has contacts in Sierra Leone and Benin and Nigeria and he brings a steady stream of girls over. The cook said he always has two or three sexy young girls with him whenever he comes in to eat, and it’s never the same girls twice. And very young. He reckoned that some of them couldn’t have been older than fourteen or fifteen.’

  ‘But we only know his nickname?’

  ‘Mawakiya, that’s right. It means the Singer, according to the cook, on account of the feller never stops singing. Well, he’s stopped singing now, of course, for permanent.’

  ‘What language are we talking about? And don’t just say “African”.’

  ‘Hausa, that’s what the cook told me. He speaks it himself. But they speak Hausa all over the shop in West Africa, not just one particular country.’

  Katie tapped her pencil against her teeth and frowned. ‘I don’t understand how he’s never shown up on our radar before. A black feller in a purple suit pushing drugs and getting himself involved in low-level larceny and pimping underage girls from Africa. You’d think our alarm bells would have rung the moment he first stepped out on the street.’

  ‘Maybe they did,’ said Detective O’Donovan.’ There’s at least three black pimps that we know of, aren’t there? With his head missing, he could be easily be one of them and how would we know? Maybe he didn’t wear a purple suit all the time. I’ve got a yellow leather jacket myself, like, and I hardly ever wear it.’

  ‘Thank God for small mercies.’

  ‘Well, yeah, the missus is not too keen on it, either. Every time I put it on she calls me Hell’s Canary.’

  Katie said, ‘At least we’re sure of a name now, even if it is only a nickname. That means I can put out an appeal through the media tomorrow morning, asking for anybody to come forward if “Mawakiya” rings a bell, or if they ever saw a black feller walking around the city in a purple suit, or if they remember seeing anybody answering that description at the restaurant or anywhere else around Lower Shandon Street.

  ‘We can also ask if anybody noticed that black girl in black – the one the butcher boy saw. The one who looked like Rihanna. If she really does look like that, somebody must reck her.’

  She scribbled a note to herself and then said, ‘I’ll go to the hospital first thing and try talking to the girl again. You and Horgan and Dooley see if you can find those three black pimps, if only to eliminate them. There’s that Johnny-G, isn’t there? And the one who calls himself The Spider. Terence Somebody.’

  ‘Terence Chokwu. The other one is Ambibola Okonkwo, although don’t ask me how in the name of
Jesus I can ever remember that.’

  ‘If you can’t find them, or you can’t find all of them, you can start asking around the brothels and massage parlours. In fact, you can do that anyway.’

  ‘Do you know how many brassers we’ve got on our books as of yesterday?’ said Detective O’Donovan.’ Seventy-six in the city centre alone. That’s going to take us forever. Besides,’ he said, taking out his tissue again and wiping his nose, ‘I can’t see any of them telling us much. There’s usually only one reason they open their mouths and it’s not to grass on anybody.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Patrick,’ Katie cajoled him. ‘I know how persuasive you can be, especially with the ladies.’

  ‘What about the autopsy?’ O’Donovan asked.

  ‘A pathologist is coming down tomorrow afternoon. Not Dr Reidy, I’m sorry to say – or on the other hand, perhaps I’m not.’ She peered at the notepad on her desk and said, ‘Dr O’Brien. Never met him before. He doesn’t like to fly, so they told me, so he’s coming on the train. He can start by doing some DNA tests. Since our victim has no hands he has no fingers, and since he has no fingers we have no fingerprints. The technical boys didn’t find any at the scene, did they? Only the girl’s.

  ‘Meanwhile, I’ll have Kyna talk to INIS and the UK Immigration Service, too. And the Nigerian embassy of course.’

  Detective O’Donovan dry-washed his face with his hands. ‘Okay then, unless there’s anything else you want me to do I’m going to shave a bullock.’

  ‘No, you go. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  Before he went, though, O’Donovan stopped and said, ‘You do realize something about this woman who allegedly blew this feller’s head off?’

  ‘What?’ said Katie. She was already skimming through a report about farm machinery that had been stolen from Coolyduff and Templehill. O’Donovan didn’t answer immediately, and so after a while she looked up.

  ‘What?’ she repeated.

  ‘Well, I’d say that she’s done us a considerable favour, ridding the city of a scumbag like that. Wouldn’t you?’

  By the time she turned into the driveway in front of her single-storey house in Cobh it had stopped raining. The clouds had cleared away and the moon was reflected like a broken plate in the half-mile stretch of water that separated Cobh from Monkstown on the opposite shore. A soft breeze was blowing and it was unusually warm, almost as if somebody were breathing on her face.

  She paused in the porch for a moment with her front-door key held up to the lock. The breeze had made her think of little Seamus breathing against her face, and it had given her one of those terrible and unexpected pangs of grief. She knew there was no point in grieving. She could cry for the rest of her life and it would never bring him back again. She just hoped that he could see her now, wherever he was, in some baby’s heaven, and that he knew how desperately she missed him.

  She was still standing there when the door opened and John appeared, accompanied by a billow of acrid smoke, as if he were a demon making an entrance in a pantomime.

  ‘Ah, Katie! I thought I heard your car.’

  ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, what’s going on?’ said Katie, flapping her hand at the smoke. ‘You haven’t set fire to the place, have you?’

  ‘Oh, that, no, everything’s fine. I just let the potatoes boil dry, that’s all. I’ve opened all the windows in the kitchen. Come on in.’

  Barney, her Irish red setter, came trotting out of the living room to greet her. ‘Don’t jump up, Barney,’ she told him. ‘I’m a little too tired for jumping up.’

  ‘Hard day, huh?’ John asked her. He kissed her and then helped her out of her red waterproof jacket.

  ‘Yes, well, I’d rather talk about your day than mine.’

  ‘Hey, come take a load off, and I’ll pour you a drink. I bought champagne, to celebrate.’

  ‘I’ll just have a vodka to start with, if that’s okay. Jesus, how many potatoes did you burn?’

  ‘Oh, I think I managed to rescue most of them. I forgot all about them, that was the trouble. You know me, I can only think about one thing at a time and most of the time that’s you.’

  ‘Get away out of here, you spoofer,’ she smiled, but she put her arms around his waist and lifted up her face for them to kiss. She had grown to love him so much. He was tall, with dark curly hair, though he had been to the barber’s to have it cut shorter and neater for his interview with ErinChem. His eyes were brown but in some lights they could look agate or even garnet-coloured. Although she thought he was Greek-god handsome, Katie was always taken by the way he never seemed to take himself too seriously, and was never arrogant. At the same time, she had seen for herself how determined he was. He had come within an inch of persuading her to resign from An Garda Síochána and accompany him to San Francisco.

  She kissed him again and again. He looked so attractive in his crisp white shirt and he still smelled of the 1881 aftershave he had worn for his interview, although he smelled of burned potatoes, too.

  ‘Hey, are you hungry?’ he asked her, as she kept on kissing him.

  ‘I’m in love. And I’m so happy you’ve got that job.’

  ‘Well, me too. If it all works out well, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t do fifty times better than I would have done in the States. That CEO thinks a whole lot of you, doesn’t he, that Aidan Tierney? He was praising you up to the sky.’

  ‘I did him a favour once,’ said Katie, and then immediately wished that she hadn’t. She gave John one more kiss and went over to the drinks table and poured herself a double measure of Smirnoff Black Label. She took a large swallow, and coughed, and for a moment she couldn’t breathe.

  John stopped in the doorway. ‘Hey, are you okay? Not going to choke to death on me, are you, before I can serve you my celebratory supper?’

  Katie shook her head, lifting her glass to show him that she was all right, just trying to get her breath back.

  Then – ‘What favour?’ he asked her.

  ‘Oh, it was nothing much. His daughter got into some trouble and I had a word in the right ear, that’s all.’

  ‘What kind of trouble?’

  ‘She was caught shoplifting, that’s all. Nothing too serious. I think her boyfriend egged her on. A right piece of work he was.’

  ‘So Aidan Tierney owed you?’

  ‘You could say that. Stop looking so grim!’

  ‘I’m not looking grim. I just wanted to get this straight. Aidan Tierney agreed to interview me because he owed you a favour. It wasn’t just because you happened to know each other socially and you suggested that I might be the best person for the job?’

  ‘But you are the best person for the job – you know that. Whatever favour Aidan might owe me, he wouldn’t have taken you on if he hadn’t thought you were going to be brilliant at it!’

  John said, ‘I’d better go see how my pie’s doing. I don’t want to cremate that, too.’

  He went into the kitchen, but Katie followed him. The windows were all wide open and most of the acrid smell had eddied away now. She could see that one of her best stainless-steel saucepans was perched on the window sill, filled with cold water, its interior stained with dark brown circles.

  ‘John,’ she said, ‘hundreds of people in this city owe me favours of one sort or another, from councillors down to shoplifters. Part of being a good detective is knowing when to turn a blind eye, and when it’s more important to keep somebody obligated to you than it is to bang them up for some minor misdemeanour.’

  ‘Okay, I get it,’ said John. He opened the oven door and peered in at the lumpy-looking pie that was sitting on the middle shelf, dripping some of its filling on to the baking sheet beneath it. He checked his watch and said, ‘Ninety minutes … I guess it’s ready now. How about we sit down and eat?’

  ‘You made that yourself?’

  ‘Don’t sound so amazed. I have been known to cook more than baked beans on toast. You’re always saying how much you miss the ham and leek pie they
used to serve in Henchy’s, so I made you one.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  She saw now that John had laid the kitchen table with knives and forks and napkins, and two champagne glasses, as well as a new red candle in a floral holder.

  ‘You didn’t have to do all of this,’ she said. ‘I’m happy that you’re staying, that’s all.’

  He put on a pair of gingham oven gloves and lifted his pie out of the oven. ‘There, look at that, a culinary work of art! I’ll just put the cabbage on to boil. Where do you keep your matches?’

  Katie went to the living room and took the cigarette lighter out of her bag. As she lit the candle, John said, ‘For the sake of argument, supposing you hadn’t been able to fix me up with a job. Would you have come with me to San Francisco?’

  She shook her head. ‘John darling, I have fixed you up with a job. Or rather, you’ve fixed yourself up with a job. If ErinChem hadn’t wanted you, they wouldn’t have hired you. And it’s not some potty little pretend job, either.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right. I should stop sounding as if I’m not grateful. I am grateful. I love you, Katie, you know that, and that’s the beginning and the end of it.’

  He lifted out the two dinner plates that had been warming in the oven and cut them each a large slice of pie. Then he strained the cabbage and the potatoes that he had managed to salvage and carefully arranged them next to each slice. Katie sat down while he went to the fridge and took out a bottle of Lanson champagne. Once he had eased out the cork, he filled their glasses and raised his own in a toast.

  ‘Here’s to us, Katie. I love you. And thank you for making it possible for us to stay together. I mean it.’

  Katie clinked glasses with him and took a sip.

  ‘Tuck in, now, sweetheart,’ John told her. ‘Believe me, once you’ve tasted this, you will never hanker for one of Henchy’s pies ever again.’

  Katie picked up her fork. The pie smelled strongly of ham and leeks and celery, but somehow its pungency brought back the overwhelming smell of that rotting headless body in Lower Shandon Street, and the smell of the girl who had stayed with it all that time. When Katie put a little of the pie in her mouth and started to chew it, it was sweet and lumpy, and she began to think of maggots.