Red Light (22 page)

They crossed the Parnell Bridge and a warm south-west wind made Katie’s hair blow across her face. Twenty or thirty gulls were screeching and flapping over something tattered and brown that was floating slowly down the river. Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán paused for a moment and shaded her eyes so that she could see what it was.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, catching up with Katie. ‘It’s only a dead dog.’

Bula said, ‘You can’t make me do it. You don’t have the neck.’

The woman shrugged, as if he could think whatever he liked and it would make no difference to her. ‘That is what Mânios Dumitrescu said at first. But I changed his mind. Soon he was sawing at his wrist like it was the middle of winter and he was freezing and he had to have wood for the fire.’

‘You won’t change
my
mind
,
you witch.’

‘You do not believe that I will really shoot you between your legs?’

Bula let out a dismissive
pfff!
and shook his head. He was slurring his words now and hiccupping, and every now and then he would jolt with pain, but his eyes kept darting towards the workshop door. He was working out a plan to knock this woman over, snatch her gun from her, and then hop over to the door on one leg, using the backs of dining chairs and sofas to support himself, like a series of crutches. A mahogany table leg was resting against the opposite end of the couch he was sitting on, and he reckoned that if he could lunge over and seize that and then swing it around and smack her hard enough on the side of the head, he might be able to concuss her. He might even be able to kill her. At school, he had once smashed a classmate on the head with half a brick and he had seen his brains squirt out. He even remembered the boy’s name, Abayomi. The boy had survived, but he had never been the same again. He had never been able to stop dribbling.

‘So … are you going to do it?’ asked the woman. ‘You can stay where you are if your leg hurts too much. I can move the saw over to you, so that you can easily reach it.’

‘You really think I’m that fecking stupid, to cut my own hand off?’

‘As I said, Bula, the choice is yours. But you cannot escape your punishment.’

Bula thought:
I’ll take five deep breaths, and then I’ll go for the table leg. Grab the thin end of it and swing it around, so that I hit her with the thick end – whakkk! She’s moved in much closer now, I should be able to catch her on the cheek, or the eyebrow. Maybe I can even knock her eye out
.

Three, four
, hold it, then
five
.

Bula rolled himself sideways and snatched the table leg. He lifted it up, but as he did so the thicker end of it got caught under the arm of a nearby chair. He managed to jostle it free, but the woman had smartly stepped back and when he reared up from the couch and flailed at her, he missed. His damaged leg gave way and he dropped heavily on to the floor.

He lay on his side, breathing harshly, but still gripping the table leg. The woman stood over him and said, ‘Let go of it.’

‘I swear I’m going to kill you,’ Bula panted, although he was staring at the floor. ‘I swear to God I’m going to beat the fecking shite out of you.’

‘I
said
, let go of it,’ she repeated.

Grunting with pain from his mangled knee, Bula attempted to use the table leg to lever himself up. Without hesitation the woman lifted her high-heeled boot and stepped on his wrist. With an audible crunch of tendons his fingers opened up, so that she was able to kick the table leg across the floor with her other foot and out of his reach. He tried to seize her ankle with his free hand, and shook it, and then punched it, but he was too weakened with shock to force her foot off his wrist.

‘You are a fool, Bula,’ she said. ‘You are cruel and you are stupid and you do not even know how to atone for what you have done. You thought you were such a big man when you abused Nwaha, and all those other girls you treated no better than animals. I know all about you. But look at you now. You are not even man enough to choose your punishment, even though you know you deserve it.’

‘You are so dead,’ murmured Bula, with saliva sliding out of the side of his mouth. ‘I promise you. You are so fecking dead.’

The woman bent forward, and with her boot still firmly planted on his wrist she pressed the muzzle of her small grey gun against the palm of his hand and fired.

He screamed like a girl. The flesh was blasted from his hand in a fan-shaped spray of scarlet and the bones of his middle two fingers were shattered into sharp white splinters. The woman lifted her boot off his wrist and stepped away from him, and he lay there staring wildly at his devastated hand.

The woman thoughtfully licked her lips. Her eyes remained hooded and she showed no emotion at all. She glanced towards the workshop door as if she was reassuring herself that no passers-by in Mutton Lane had heard the shot. Then she reloaded her pistol and tucked it into her waistcoat pocket.

‘It seems that you have made your choice,’ she told Bula. ‘That hand will have to come off. So, in a way, you are lucky. Better to lose your hand than your
azzakari
.’

She forced her hands under the hot, sweat-soaked armpits of his yellow Hawaiian shirt and pulled him up. Although he was so bulky, she was very strong, and he didn’t try to resist her. Once she had managed to manoeuvre his left buttock back on to the bloodstained couch, he even straightened his right leg to make it easier for her to shift him into a sitting position.

Sitting there, he now looked more like a giant toad than a human being, in spite of his Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts. His face was grey, but it was so shiny with perspiration that it was almost silver. His eyes were bulging and his mouth was dragged downwards, and he spoke in croaks that the woman could barely understand. His eyes kept rolling upwards, and his head dropped and then jerked back up again, but he didn’t lose consciousness. The pain in his knee and his hand was too overwhelming.

The woman went over to the corner of the workshop and dragged over the table saw, positioning it right in front of Bula and flopping his arms up on to it. There was a long extension lead attached to it, which she plugged into the socket in the wall. She took off the plastic blade guard and then tested it with three quick bursts, so that the circular blade spun around with a soft, high-pitched screech. While she was doing this, Bula sat numbly on the couch, staring down at his smashed right hand and occasionally twitching.

‘There, Bula!’ said the woman. ‘Can you hear me?’

Bula looked up at her and nodded.

‘Do you understand what you are going to do now? You are going to cut off your hand.’

Bula nodded again.

‘I will turn on the saw for you, and then all you have to do is hold your right arm good and tight with your left hand, and push your wrist forward into the blade. Do it slow or your bones may catch in the teeth of the saw, so that your arm jumps back at you and hits you in the face.’

‘This hand’s wrecked whatever happens, right?’ said Bula, in a dull matter-of-fact voice.

‘Yes,’ said the woman. ‘Even if you went to the hospital, no doctor could save it. Look at it. There is hardly anything left to save.’

‘If I cut it off, will it stop hurting so much? It has to.’

‘You will have to try it and see.’

‘You’re a fecking witch, do you know that? You’re like something out of a fecking nightmare.’

‘You can call me what you like.’

‘But you’re not going to shoot me in the mebs?’

‘I promise.’

‘You swear on the Bible?’

‘I swear.’

‘How did I get myself into this?’ Bula asked her.

‘You mistreated Nwaha. The gods could not forgive you for what you did to her. Neither could I. I am
Rama Mala’ika
.’

‘You’re an angel? The angel of what? You’re no fecking angel. I told you. You’re a
mayya
. You’re a witch.’

‘I have nothing more to say to you, Bula. It is time for your punishment.’

She reached down and switched on the table saw and the thin whine of its electric motor drowned out what Bula said to her next. He may have been cursing her or he may have been praying. When his lips had stopped moving he sat there staring at the keenly shining blade for almost ten seconds, his tongue going around and around inside his toad-like mouth as if he were chasing the last fragments of his burger.

Then, with great deliberation, he laid his right forearm flat on the metal surface of the table, with his elbow pressed against the side-fence to guide it. He gripped his forearm with his left hand, as she had told him, and slowly edged it towards the blade. His shattered hand hardly looked like a hand at all, but like a pigeon that had been crushed by a car.

The woman took three or four paces back, and for the first time since she had captured Bula and brought him into this workshop, her head tilted back a little and her eyes widened and her lips parted. She was holding her breath, but Bula didn’t see that. He was concentrating on inching his wrist towards the circular blade, which was singing a high metallic song at more than 3,000 rpm.

There was a sound like lumpy vegetables being blitzed in a food processor. Bula’s hand flew off the table and bounced on to the floor, while Bula himself tipped sideways on the couch, waving the stump of his right hand into the air, with blood spraying out of it.

The woman quickly went over to the table saw and switched it off. All she could hear now was the shuffling of pedestrians’ feet along Mutton Lane, and the muted strains of fiddle music from the Mutton Lane Inn, and Bula’s self-pitying keening.

‘Look what you’ve done to me!’ he whined. ‘Just look what you’ve fecking done to me!’ He was covered in blood. Even his face was speckled with blood. He was holding up his right arm and it looked like a blood fountain.

‘No, Bula-Bulan Yaro,’ she said, although her voice was tighter now, as if watching him cut off his hand had excited her. ‘Look what you have done to yourself.’

Katie had only just returned to her office when both Detectives Horgan and Ryan came knocking at her door.

‘Who’s first?’ she asked, dropping the Gerrety files on to her desk. ‘Ryan, you couldn’t fetch me a Diet Coke, could you? I’m parched. Get yourself a coffee while you’re at it, or whatever you want.’

‘No problem at all,’ said Detective Ryan.

Detective Horgan said, ‘That feller up on the Ballyhooly Road, we’ve narrowed his identity down to three possibles, and I reckon I know which one of them he is. Or
was
, before he had his face blown off.’

‘Okay. Have you heard from Dr O’Brien yet?’

‘He rang about twenty minutes ago and said he was dropping by to see you later, before five if he could make it. He’s completed his autopsy on the black feller, apart from some DNA test results. They’re going to take a few days longer. But he’s made a start on the other white feller, too. He’s confident that he can tell us
what
the two victims are – their nationality, like – even if he can’t tell us
who
they are.’

‘But the white one, you think
you
can?’

‘I checked up on his tattoos. The skulls inside the stars, they’re Romanian prison tattoos. They mean something like, “Mess with me, you gobshite, and the stars foretell your sudden extinction.” At the moment there’s only three Romanian pimps in Cork unaccounted for. I’ve heard that Cornel Petrescu is probably in Limerick, touting some of his girls around the clubs. That leaves only Radu Vasilescu and Mânios Dumitrescu. Unless there’s some other Romanian pimp that we don’t know about, which I think is unlikely.’

‘You can’t locate either Vasilescu or Dumitrescu?’

‘Not in their usual haunts, no. Vasilescu’s almost always in The Ovens and Dumitrescu spends most of his afternoons in The Idle Hour. The barman in The Ovens thinks that Vasilescu may have gone back to Romania, although he couldn’t swear to it. I called around at Dumitrescu’s house in Grawn, but there was nobody home. His neighbours said they hadn’t seen any member of the family for at least twenty-four hours. And very thankful they were, I might add. The woman next door said she was allergic to the lot of them, especially Mânios.’

Katie very nearly said, ‘
Please, God, let it be Dumitrescu
,’ but she held her tongue. If it was Dumitrescu, then little Corina would stand much more of a chance of staying with her new foster parents and Katie herself would be saved the trouble of arresting and charging one of the nastiest and most sadistic people-traffickers in Cork.

Detective Ryan came back with a bottle of Diet Coke and a can of Red Bull for himself. ‘I need the caffeine,’ he explained, popping the top. ‘That’s fourteen and three-quarter hours of CCTV footage I’ve sat through, and Jesus, that would be enough to send a tightrope-walker to sleep.’

‘But you have a result, by the look of it?’ Katie asked him, nodding at the plastic folder he had laid on her desk.

‘Oh yes, absolutely. You wanted to see which way the purple suit feller went after he left Amber’s, and if a black girl was following him.’

He opened his folder and took out more than a dozen large photographs, which he fanned out in front of her.

‘These first five images, I printed them out from the camera on Mercer Street. See – there’s the purple suit feller turning up Winthrop Street, which is the way he would have gone if he had been heading for Lower Shandon Street. And look, after he’s passed the doorway of The Long Valley, this young black woman steps out and she starts to follow him, only about five metres behind. She’s all dressed in black with a black scarf tied around her head, just like the butcher boy described her.

Katie picked up the printouts and examined them closely. The woman was wearing a black T-shirt, a black sleeveless waistcoat, black jeans and knee-high black leather boots. A few stray curls stuck out of the top of her scarf, like the tangled roots of some exotic plant. Katie would have guessed her height at five foot five inches. She was very slim, too, no more than 125 pounds.

Detective Ryan laid out the next seven pictures. ‘These were taken from the camera on top of A-Wear on Patrick Street, opposite Debenham’s. They’re the clearest ones and they show the young woman’s face. They also confirm that she
is
actually following the purple suit man, not just randomly walking behind him – see – because he crosses the road here and she crosses right behind him. When he reaches the opposite side he hesitates for a moment, searching in his pockets, like maybe he’s making sure he hasn’t forgotten his wallet, or his keys, or something like that. She stops a few metres away from him and waits for him to carry on.’