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‘I’ll come and see you later, when you’re settled in the hospital’ she said, and gave the girl a smile. The girl only stared back and dragged the blanket up so far that only her eyes were showing.

As Katie stepped down from the back of the ambulance, however, the girl did say something, though her voice was so muffled that Katie could hardly hear her. There was noise from outside, too, a police siren suddenly yipping and dozens of people talking.

‘Say that again, sweetheart, would you?’ Katie asked her.

The girl lowered the blanket a little, took two or three breaths, then whispered, ‘
Rama Mala’ika!
’

‘I’m sorry, girl, I don’t understand you. What does that mean? That’s not your name, is it?
Rama Mal-ah-eeka
?’

She waited, but the girl didn’t repeat it. Katie looked at the paramedic and shrugged.

‘Okay if we take her off now?’ said the paramedic.

‘Of course, yes. Thanks a million.’

It was starting to rain again, so Katie hurried across to the deli and went inside. Detective Horgan was waiting for her and Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán had arrived. They were both standing inside the shop, talking to the technician whose back Katie had seen in the upstairs window.

Kyna ó Nuallán had joined Katie’s team only a month ago, from Dublin, to replace Detective Sergeant Jimmy O’Rourke who had been shot and killed while on duty. She was a thin, tall, sharp-faced young woman with a prominent chin, a geometric blonde bob and almost colourless eyes. Detective O’Donovan had said he would have quite fancied her if she didn’t always make him feel that he had said something gauche, even before he’d said it.

That was one of the reasons that Katie had selected her, though, apart from the fact that she was a woman. She had a way of listening to witnesses – nodding, not interrupting, but with one finely plucked eyebrow constantly raised as if she didn’t believe a single word they were saying. She made them work harder and harder to convince her that they were telling her the truth, and that was a very rare talent. Horgan had already dubbed her Sergeant O’Polygraph.

‘I got here as fast as I could, ma’am,’ she told Katie. ‘I’m almost done with Councillor Parry. You should have my full report on that by Friday, once I’ve talked to the Cremin brothers. I’m still trying to trace where the payment for that Donnybrook development went to, but I’ll find it.’

Katie turned to the technician. He was fortyish, grey-haired, and she had never seen him look anything but weary – as if he went home every night and tried to watch television with his spaghetti supper on his lap but couldn’t see anything in his mind’s eye but glistening intestines, and couldn’t taste anything but Vicks VapoRub.

‘Well then,’ she said, ‘we’d better take a look at this unfortunate feller. How long do you think he’s been dead?’

The technician handed her a surgical mask and passed another to Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán. He raised a jar of Vicks, but Katie shook her head and took an aerosol of Lancôme Miracle out of her bag. She sprayed the inside of the mask and then knotted it around her neck. Although most technicians and coroners used Vicks, it opened the nasal passages as well as masking the smell of putrefaction, and she found it made it linger in her lungs for longer. She didn’t want to be lying on her pillow tonight still breathing in the stench of death.

‘Judging by your
Calliphora vomitoria
, I’d say that three and a half days was about right,’ said the technician. ‘The weather hasn’t been too warm but it’s been long enough for them to lay their eggs and for their larvae to hatch out and the first batch to grow to maturity. They’ve plenty to feed on, after all. Flesh and faeces, their favourites.’

They climbed the stairs, the technician leading the way and Katie following close behind him.

‘I’ve been in touch with Lisney’s,’ said Detective Horgan, as they reached the first-floor landing. ‘This whole property’s been empty for about a month. The downstairs was rented by the Hungarian Deli people and Clancy’s after tracing them now to see if they went back to Hungary or not. The two upstairs flats were both rented by some company called Merrow Holdings, based in Limerick.’

‘Any idea who’s behind them?’ asked Katie. The perfume inside her surgical mask was so strong she had to sneeze, twice. It made her nose run but she knew better than to take it off, so she sniffed.

‘Merrow Holdings? Not yet. But Lisney’s said they’d get back to me before the close of business.’

The technician led them into the bedsit. It was lit so brightly with tungsten lamps that it looked like the set for a morning television show. The technician’s young assistant was down on his hands and knees with a Labino Nova torch light with a blue filter on it, searching for bloodstains or any stray fibres that might have been caught under the skirting board. He sat up on his haunches as they came into the room. He had such raging red acne on his forehead that Katie had always thought he looked as if he had been shot in the face with a pellet gun, but compared to the body on the sofa-bed his face was simply speckled.

Katie stood beside the sofa-bed and stared at the body for a long time. He was very dark, with a slightly dusty look about his skin, so she guessed he was probably Somali or Nigerian, since they made up most of Cork’s African immigrant population. She could see that he had been shot twice in the face at point-blank range with a shotgun – possibly a double-barrelled shotgun – once in the right cheek and the second time in the left eye. Above his chin, with its precisely trimmed goatee beard, there was nothing but the concave red labyrinth of his sinuses. The technicians had cleared the mature bluebottles from the room, but there were still a few random maggots crawling around inside the victim’s face, like cave explorers.

The man was very thin, though his stomach was hugely swollen with gas from his decomposing bowels. His bony right shoulder was covered by a tattoo of a black widow spider in its web, and his long flaccid penis was tattooed to resemble the head of rattlesnake, with scales and eyes, and even a forked tongue licking out of the side of it. The snake continued up through his woolly black pubic hair until it wound itself around his waist and its rattle finished up on his breastbone.

A single brown star was tattooed on each of his knees.

Katie leaned forward and stared at his face more closely. ‘His lip’s very
pink
,’ she commented. The technician came up behind her to take a closer look at it.

‘It is, yeah, I’d say it’s been tattooed that colour. It’s a bit of fashion, apparently, among the young Nigerians. They think it makes them more attractive to girls.’

‘What, bright pink lips?’

‘Oh yeah. A friend of mine works for Tattoo Zoo on South Main Street. He was telling me about them the other day, those Nigerians. They have a fad for having their mickeys decorated, too, like this feller.’

‘What about his hands?’ asked Katie, looking at the stumps at the ends of his arms. The bones that protruded from his left hand had been roughly and erratically sawn through at a right angle, while the bones of the right hand had been cut very cleanly, at a slant.

‘His hands? Well, they’ve both gone missing,’ said the technician. ‘A couple of the guards went searching through the whole house top to bottom but they couldn’t find a trace of them. It looks like your man must have taken them away with him for a keepsake.’

‘It was a woman, according to the witness.’

The technician looked back down at the grisly hollow of the dead man’s face. ‘A
woman
? Jesus. She must have taken some rabbie, and no mistake. I’ll tell you what’s interesting, though. Whoever did it, they shot this feller while he was lying down, right here.
In situ
.’

‘Both shots?’

The technician nodded. ‘The both of them. Straight through his head and into the sofa cushions.’

‘But she used a shotgun … and even if it was a sawn-off shotgun …’

‘That’s right, ma’am. She would have had to be standing on the bed with her feet either side of him, pointing the gun down at his face. Especially since she was a woman, and probably not so tall as a man.’

‘So, any sign of footprints?’

‘That’s what’s interesting – no. No indentations in the cushions, no dirt smudges on the sheets from somebody’s shoes, nothing.’

Katie slowly raised both hands as if she were holding up a crucifix beside the altar in church. ‘Maybe she simply stood where I’m standing now and held up the shotgun vertical with the muzzle downwards and the stock up in the air. Then she could have pushed the trigger up with her thumb.’

‘It’s possible. They have a fair recoil in them, though, those shotguns. Your average twelve-bore can kick back at you with anything up to twenty foot-pounds – even more, depending on your load. That’s like being punched by a middleweight boxer.’

Katie looked around the bedsit. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Any other forensics you want to show me?’

‘There’s over a thousand blood spatters, ma’am, as well as flesh fragments and bone fragments and brain tissue. There’s also urine and excrement and stray hairs that probably came off the young girl who was hiding in here. Until we move the body off the bed we won’t know the full extent of it for sure, but all of the exposed areas of the sheet and the blanket that we’ve been able to examine so far have numerous semen samples on them.’

‘Numerous? How numerous?’

‘Too many to give you even a guesstimated figure yet, but I’d say they run into hundreds.’

‘It doesn’t take a genius to work out what’s been happening in here, then,’ said Katie. She went across to the window and looked down into the street, where even more crowds had gathered. ‘God, don’t these people have anything better to do? Don’t they know that
Elev8
starts in a minute?’ She was talking about the children’s programme on RTÉ2.

She turned around. ‘How about the door?’ she asked the technician.

‘Well, look at it, the lock’s not up to much, Hickey’s cheapest, but it wasn’t forced and the key’s still in it.’

‘Okay, that might help,’ said Katie. ‘But it’s no good trying to recreate a scenario simply from what we have here. We have no way of telling if the perpetrator came into the room and surprised the victim and the girl together, or if the perpetrator brought them both here from some other location, or if the girl and the perpetrator were here first and the victim burst in on them.

‘According to those two fellers who found her, the girl knew the victim, or at least she knew what his name was, but we don’t know if she knew who the perpetrator was. That’s our number one priority. The sooner we can find out the victim’s identity, the sooner we’ll have some idea of why he was killed and who might have killed him.’

Sergeant ó Nuallán was jotting in her notebook. ‘I’ll go to the Tattoo Zoo and ask them for a list of African clients who might have had their lips tattooed lately, and if any of those had their genitals tattooed, too. That’ll be a start.’

‘There’s a few more tattoo places you can try if you don’t have any luck there,’ said Detective Horgan. ‘Body and Soul on Rahilly Street and Magic’s on Robert Street. Oh, and there’s Dark Arts on Maylor Street … I know
they
do a lot of Nigerians.’

‘“Nigerians” may be
spelled
with a “g”, Horgan,’ Katie retorted, ‘but you
pronounce
it soft, like a “j”.’

‘Oh, sorry, ma’am,’ said Detective Horgan, feigning surprise. ‘Don’t want to be accused of inadvertent racism. Or even advertent racism, whatever that is.’

‘Shut up, Horgan. And start knocking on doors, both sides of the street. We want to know if anybody was seen coming in or out of this building, and when – and if anybody heard anything unusual, whether it sounded like two gunshots or not. Also, if they heard any arguments or shouting or screaming.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

The technician sucked in his breath behind his surgical mask and said, ‘We’ll be here for three more hours, at least, probably more. I’ll let you know as soon as we’ve had the victim wheeled off to the path lab.’

‘Thanks,’ said Katie. ‘I’d better get on to the state pathologist. Oh God, if it’s Reidy, he’s really going to hate this one. If there’s one thing that gets up his nose, it’s a blindingly obvious cause of death.’

When she came back out on to the street, Dan Keane from the
Examiner
was waiting for her, as well as the woman reporter in the silvery anorak with the furry collar. Dan had his usual cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth, which waggled when he talked, and his face looked even more prune-coloured than ever.

‘What’s the form, Dan?’ she asked him. ‘Didn’t I hear you were retiring?’

‘Can’t afford to, superintendent. Not with the price of Powers these days.’

‘You could always give it up.’

‘Oh yeah, and I could give up breathing, too.’

‘Aren’t you going to introduce me?’

‘Sure, yes, sorry. This is the lovely Branna, superintendent. She’s just joined the
Echo
, although I can’t imagine she has half an idea what she’s let herself in for. Detective Superintendent Maguire, meet Branna MacSuibhne. Branna, girl – meet the highly respected and extremely scary Detective Superintendent Maguire.’

Branna held out her hand but Katie was busy untangling her surgical mask and didn’t take it. ‘Whatever you do,’ she said, nodding at Dan, ‘take everything this man tells you with a bucket-load of salt.’

Branna MacSuibhne was much younger than she had seemed at first sight. Perhaps it was the bouffant ash-blonde hair which had been sprayed rigidly into place on either side of her face like two water-buffalo horns, or the thick black mascara on her eyelashes. She had a plump, heart-shaped face and was actually quite pretty, though her chin was a little weak, and Katie would have guessed she wasn’t much older than nineteen.

‘Do we know who’s gone to higher service yet?’ asked Dan, nodding towards the upstairs room. Branna tugged a new notebook out of her anorak pocket and stood close beside him with her freshly sharpened pencil poised.

Fionnuala Sweeney came over to join them, with her gingery curls and her trademark green windcheater. Her unshaven cameraman hovered behind her shoulder, repeatedly coughing. Fionnuala held out her RTÉ microphone and smiled sweetly.