Authors: Graham Masterton
‘Sergeant Browne’s not going to be pleased,’ said Katie. ‘These cars are like his children.’
They reached a rusty five-bar metal gate with a padlock and chain on it, and Conor stopped. ‘Let’s hope we don’t have to leave in a hurry,’ he said. ‘I don’t relish driving all the way back to the main road in reverse.’
On the other side of the gate there was a muddy concrete yard, and a large green-painted house that looked as if it had been extended again and again, with each extension uglier and more out of proportion than the last. Behind the house there was a large steel barn, also painted green, although the paint was flaking; and a row of three wooden sheds.
Katie was about to climb out of the car when her iPhone pinged. She had a message from Detective Dooley. She had asked him to keep her up to date on Keeno’s condition in the Mercy.
KEENO NO CHANGE
he had texted. Katie closed her eyes for a moment and said a silent prayer to St John of God the patron saint of heart sufferers to keep Keeno alive. She despised the man, but if he died it would cause her more grief than he was worth.
As they left the car and approached the gate, a cheerful-looking man in a tweed cap and a khaki anorak came limping briskly across the yard towards them, lifting a blackthorn stick in greeting. He called out, ‘Hold on there folks and I’ll unlock it for ye!’
As he came nearer, Katie saw that he had tangled sandy eyebrows and pale green eyes, almost colourless. His nose was squashed and puglike, so that Katie could see up his nostrils, and his cheeks were scarlet and laced with broken veins, as if he spent most of his life standing in a field in a cold north-westerly wind – either that, or drinking a bottle of whiskey every night.
Katie noticed that his anorak was bulked out on the left-hand side, and its collar gaped to the left, and she guessed that he could be wearing a shoulder-holster underneath it.
‘It’s Redmond, isn’t it?’ he said, as he reached the gate, although he didn’t hold out his hand. ‘The Guzz rang me and told me that ye was heading down here. Ye was after that Akita, weren’t you, the last time ye was here. When was that?’
‘April,’ said Conor.
‘April, was it? Jesus, the way time flies. Well, I’m fierce sorry that I couldn’t let ye borrow him for breeding, but it was far too close to the fights, like. It’s the Great Dane you’re after this time, isn’t it, that’s what The Guzz told me. I think we might be able to come to some mutually profitable arrangement with that feller. Look – bring your motor into the yard and then I’ll take ye to see him.’
He unlocked the gate, dragging off the chain, while Conor went back to the car.
‘And what’s
your
name, darling?’ he asked Katie.
‘Sinéad,’ said Katie, and gave him a silly simpering smile, trying to look as if she didn’t have a brain in her head.
‘I’m Bartley,’ said Bartley. ‘Bartley Doran. I’ll expect Redmond’s told ye all about me.’
‘Only that you’re the best dogfight trainer in the whole of Ireland.’
‘Ireland? The whole fecking world, darling. The whole entire planet.’
Conor brought the Mercedes into the yard and swung it around so that it was facing back towards the gate. Katie was glad he had done that. When you were dealing with men like Bartley Doran, you never knew when you might have to leave at very short notice.
Bartley led them around the side of the house to the row of wooden sheds. He opened the door of the first shed and beckoned them inside. Instantly, they were met with a barrage of ferocious barking, and the clanging of dogs throwing themselves up against the sides of their cages.
‘Holy Mother of God,’ said Katie, but Bartley continued to beckon them in.
‘There’s nothing to be afraid of, girl. They can’t get at ye.’
The shed was divided into six wire cages, much like the cages where Gerry Mulvaney had kept his dogs, except that the dogs in these cages had no bowls of food or water. The smell of urine and faeces was overwhelming, and when Katie stepped inside it brought tears to her eyes and made her retch.
‘Sorry about the hong,’ said Bartley.
Only three of the dogs were jumping up against the sides of their cages. Two bull mastiffs had heavy steel chains wrapped around their necks instead of collars, and they were too weighed down to jump, although they were barking so hysterically that they sounded as if they were screaming.
The Great Dane was down at the end of the shed, and he was barking, too, but it sounded to Katie as if he were frightened and hungry rather than aggressive. He was full-grown, at least 85 centimetres in height, with a glossy black coat.
Conor went right up to his cage and said, ‘Here, boy, here boy. I’m not going to hurt you,’ but the Great Dane backed away as far as he could and continued to bark.
‘How long would ye be wanting him for?’ asked Bartley.
‘About a week I’d say. The Great Dane bitch I have at the kennels has just gone into heat. When would you need him back?’
‘Ye can take him for two weeks if you like. It depends what we’re talking about moneywise.’
Katie couldn’t stop herself from retching again, behind her hand. She was so glad that she had said no to Moirin’s club sandwich this morning.
‘Two grand,’ said Conor.
‘Three,’ said Bartley.
‘How about two-and-a-half?’
‘Three.’
‘Okay, then. Three it is. I’m going into town right now and I’ll bring the cash right back for you.’
Before they left the shed, Katie stopped by the bull mastiff’s cages. Both of them came right up to the wire and barked at her as if they were ripping the lining out of their throats.
‘What are the chains for?’ she shouted at Bartley, above the barking. ‘They must be desperate heavy for them.’
‘That’s the whole point, darling,’ said Bartley. ‘Carrying the weight of them chains, day and night, that builds up their neck and their upper body strength. I have some extra weights, too, which I hang on to their chains when I take them out for a run.’
They stepped outside. As he shut the door of the shed, Bartley said, ‘If you’re so interested, darling, why don’t ye come and take a gander at how I train the dogs up to gameness. I was all ready to do a little baiting when The Guzz rang me.’
Katie already knew that dogfight trainers used extreme cruelty to prepare their animals for a match, and she was aware of what baiting involved. She would have given anything to arrest Bartley Doran there and then, but she knew that it would be far too dangerous without back-up. Apart from that, she would need lengthy and careful surveillance of what he was doing, and independent evidence from witnesses. What was she going to tell the court? ‘I saw dogs with no food and nothing to drink and heavy chains round their necks’? The judge would want to know why she hadn’t simply reported Bartley to the ISPCA. Case dismissed.
Limping, Bartley led them back towards the large steel barn. As they came nearer, Katie could hear several dogs barking from inside there, too.
‘So what’s your line of business, darling?’ Bartley asked her. ‘Or are you a lady of leisure? Or pleasure?’
‘I’m a hair stylist,’ said Katie.
‘Oh, yeah? Where’s that, then?’
‘Gerrardines, on Liberty Square, in Thurles,’ Katie told him, without hesitation. She had done over half an hour’s homework for her role as ‘Sinéad’.
‘Oh! Hair stylist! Maybe I can persuade ye to pop down here now and again and give us a trim,’ said Bartley. ‘I have to keep me ginger curls in order, if ye know what I mean, wink, wink.’
Katie simply blinked at him as if she didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. He opened up one of the barn doors for them and they went inside.
The floor of the barn was thinly covered in sawdust. On the right-hand side a circle of wooden crates formed a makeshift dog-fighting ring, and three bored-looking young men were sitting on the crates, each of them holding a dog tightly on a leash – two bull mastiffs and a Staffordshire bull terrier. Katie thought the young men looked like members of an unsuccessful heavy metal band – all three of them were wearing black T-shirts and their arms were blue with tattoos right up to the elbows. They had silver studs through their cheeks and hair that was shaved at the sides but grown long on top and tied back with elastic bands.
The dogs were barking and snarling and trying to lunge at each other, and Katie could see that it was taking all of the young men’s strength to hold them back.
Another dog was tied up by itself to one of the crates – a chocolate-brown poodle. The poodle was in very poor condition – its coat obviously hadn’t been clipped in months and it had wood-shavings and twigs and dried leaves clinging to it. It wasn’t joining in the cacophony of barking – it was simply standing where it was tethered, shivering.
‘All right, lads?’ Bartley said to the three young men. ‘We’ll get started on the baiting directly so. I’m just giving these good people the guided tour.’
‘This bastard’s only shit on me runner,’ said one of the young men, in a slurred Kerry accent.
Bartley laughed. ‘Ha! I hope you gave him a fierce good kicking for it!’
‘He did that all right,’ another of the young men put in, with a cackle. ‘Right in the mebs. Never saw a dog jump so high in the whole of me life.’
On the left-hand side of the barn stood several large pieces of equipment that looked as if they had been stolen from a children’s playground. There was a tall metal pole with six arms jutting out from the top of it, like a helicopter propeller. From each of these arms a chain was dangling, with a collar on the end of it.
‘This is the jenny, or the catmill some folks call it,’ said Bartley, limping up to it. ‘We chain the dogs up, one dog to each beam, like, except for one beam, which has a bait animal chained up to it, like a cat or a pup or a rabbit maybe, or another dog that’s not been showing too much fighting spirit. Of course the dogs try to chase after the bait, and sometimes they go round and round for fecking hours. Once the exercise session’s over, we take off their collars and throw them the bait, as a reward, like. If we do that, though, that’s the only food we’ll give them all day, and that makes them fight each other all the more fiercer for it. A dog will always fight better if he’s hungry. And thirsty. And hurt.’
Next to the catmill there was another metal pole, with a powerful spring hanging down from the top of it. Attached to the spring was a ragged piece of brown-and-white cowhide, about the size of a hand-towel, which was torn and pitted with scores of teeth-marks.
‘This is the jump pole,’ Bartley explained. ‘The dogs jump up and bite the leather, and they hang there for as long as they can. It’s great for strengthening their jaw-muscles, and the back legs, too, because they keep on jumping up until they’ve got a good grip.’
‘But why do they want to do that?’ asked Katie.
‘Because they’re starving,’ said Conor. ‘You’ve heard of shipwrecked sailors eating their own shoes. This is the same.’
‘You see that birdcage, darling, down on the floor there?’ said Bartley. ‘Now and then we’ll shut up a cat in it, or a pup, or a chicken, and we’ll hang that from the spring instead of the leather. I tell you, once those dogs have got their delph into that cage they’ll hang there till hell freezes over. Like Redmond says, they’re starving.’
Next to the jump pole there were two professional-size treadmills that Katie could well imagine had been stolen from some gym. Both of them had chains and collars fastened to them and both of them reeked of dog urine.
‘Well, they speak for themselves, these do,’ said Bartley. ‘We can chain a dog up to one of these and make it run for hours. Great for its heart, like, and its stamina. If it collapses, we leave the treadmill running so it gets battered about, so it soon learns to stay on its feet, even when it’s flah’d out.’
‘Sounds like me at Gerrardine’s, after a long day,’ said Katie. ‘You wouldn’t believe how tiring it is, doing highlights, and having to listen to some auld wan rabbiting on about the cruise she took to Ma-
jork
-ah!’
Pretending to be Sinéad helped her to suppress her rage. The last time she had felt as angry as this was when she had arrested a 41-year-old father in Togher for sexually abusing his own three-year-old daughter.
‘We also give the dogs a rake of vitamins and drugs to condition them and stir them up to fight,’ said Bartley. ‘Testosterone, and weight-gain supplements, and steroids, as well as speed and cocaine. It works out expensive, for sure, but we make so much profit out of each fight that it’s nothing at all by comparison. That last fight at Clonlong, like, we netted over three hundred thousand.’
Conor said, ‘That’s fantastic,’ although Katie pretended that she hadn’t heard, or wasn’t interested even if she had. But she was beginning to see the raid on Sceolan Kennels in a new and very different light. Once the twenty-six stolen dogs had been sold, or ransomed, or trained for dogfights, the dognappers could easily clear three-quarters of a million euros out of it. That meant that it could have been far more profitable than an armed bank robbery or a major drugs deal.
‘What’s that, up against the wall there, that pole?’ asked Conor.
‘That?’ said Bartley. ‘That’s what we call a flirtpole. It’s hand-held, the flirtpole, for when we’re exercising only your single dog. We fix a lure to the end of it like a piece of meat or a dead cat or something and then we drag the lure around us in a circle, and the dog goes chasing after it.’
He laid his hand on Katie’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. ‘I’ll tell ye this, darling, people say that dogs are intelligent, but if dogs had any fecking sense at all they’d come up to us when we’re dragging the flirtpole around and say, “Come here to me, feen, there’s no way I’m running around and around after that lump of meat like some kind of four-legged eejit. Take it off the end of that fecking pole and feed it to me right now or I’ll bite your fecking ankles.”’
‘If a dog said that to me, I’d be amazed,’ said Conor. ‘I haven’t yet met a dog that could even say “Give me a slice of Clonakilty black pudding, fried on both sides.”’
Katie was about to laugh, as Sinéad would have done, but Bartley turned to Conor and his tone was unmistakably aggressive. ‘Don’t ye try taking the piss out of me, Redmond, boy. I don’t think your beour here would want to see ye ending up as dog bait – would you, darling?’