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It was Acting Chief Superintendent Molloy. He sounded more like a barking bull terrier than a man.

‘I’ve just this minute had a call from Michael Gerrety. He’s had a package delivered and he says he feels
threatened
and
disgusted
and what are we going to do to protect him? He says he’s going to make an official complaint about the way in which we’ve been handling these latest homicides because they represent a direct threat to his organization and to him personally and neither he nor anybody who works for him has been found guilty of any legal transgression whatsoever.’

‘No, they haven’t,’ Katie retorted. ‘And they probably never will be, either, now you’ve put a stop to Operation Rocker.’

‘I don’t need that kind of back-chat, Katie, thanks very much.’

‘So what’s
in
this package that has threatened and disgusted the saintly Mr Gerrety so much? Don’t tell me it’s a picture of Mary Magdalene. I know how offended Mr Gerrety is by prostitutes.’

‘Don’t try to be funny with me, either. It’s hands.’

‘What did you say?
Hands
?’

‘I would guess without seeing them that they’re the hands that were amputated from your four homicide victims.’

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God,’ said Katie. ‘You told him not to touch them, didn’t you?’

‘I didn’t see the need. I don’t think he’s going to touch them with a bargepole.’

‘All right, then. I’ll personally go over to The Elysian and collect them. Maybe you could kindly call Mr Gerrety for me and tell him I’m coming. I assume you have his number to hand?’

‘That’s not another of your jokes, is it?’

‘No, it’s not. None of this is funny, Bryan, and Michael Gerrety is the unfunniest thing that has happened to Cork since I was on traffic.’

She took Detective O’Donovan with her. She would have taken Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán because she knew a lot more about the finer details of all four homicide cases than he did. After what had happened between them this morning, though, she thought that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to give themselves some breathing space. Apart from that, for all of his bluster about respect for sex workers, Michael Gerrety was deeply contemptuous of women and she wanted to have a man by her side when she spoke to him.

The Elysian Tower was only a block away, so they walked there, under umbrellas that were clattering with rain. The two uniformed gardaí outside the building saluted Katie as she approached.

‘A package was delivered to Michael Gerrety about half an hour ago,’ said Katie. ‘Who brought it?’

‘Only a messenger from DHL,’ said one of the gardaí. ‘We signed for it and took it up to him.’

‘Didn’t it look at all suspicious?’

‘All it said on the box was “meat, perishable”, and the name of some beef farm in Kerry. We thought it was probably them steaks you send away for.’

‘You’re supposed to be protecting this man,’ said Katie.

‘Yeah, from some black woman. Nobody said nothing about boxes of beef.’

Katie closed her umbrella and shook it and the garda opened the wide glass doors for her. As they went up in the lift to Michael Gerrety’s apartment, Katie said, ‘“Nobody said nothing about boxes of beef.” Jesus. I sometimes wonder what they’re teaching them at Templemore these days. It didn’t occur to him that box might have contained a bomb, as well as steak?’

Detective O’Donovan shook his head, ‘Don’t be too hard on him, ma’am. He was only following his orders. If he’d been told to look out for a box of beef, he’d have been on it like that,’ he said, snapping his fingers.

‘Yes, well, personally, I almost wish that it
had
contained a bomb. That would have killed at least three birds with one stone.’

They reached Michael Gerrety’s floor and rang the bell at the door of his apartment. It played the opening bars of ‘If I Were a Rich Man’. Michael Gerrety’s wife, Carole, opened it, unsmiling. She was a short, chubby woman, and she was wearing a wraparound dress in shiny purple silk which didn’t seem to fit her anywhere. Her face was Canary Islands orange, with emerald-green eye make-up and scarlet lips. She smelled strongly of J
ō
van Musk.

‘You’d better come in,’ she said, making no effort to hide her hostility. ‘Himself is taking a call at the moment.’

As they entered the apartment, Katie could see Michael Gerrety in what appeared to be his study, pacing up and down as he spoke on his mobile phone.

‘No, feck that,’ he was saying, waving his free hand around. ‘No, absolutely not. Well, you can stick it up your grannie’s arse as far as I’m concerned.’

Katie looked around. She had seen these apartments advertised in magazines and on the internet, but she had never been inside one. The outside walls were all glass, floor to ceiling, with a wide balcony outside overlooking the city. She could see the River Lee and all its bridges, from the Eamon de Valera Bridge to the Passover, and the spires of Saint Finbarr’s Cathedral and the Holy Trinity Church, and the bell tower of St Anne’s in Shandon, which had given her the inspiration for Isabelle’s nickname.

Beyond that, she could see the green hills surrounding the city, as far as the airport to the south, with heavy grey rain clouds trailing across them like dirty petticoats.

All of the furniture in Michael Gerrety’s apartment was leather and chrome and glass, and the floor was highly polished oak. On the wall behind the dining table there was a large semi-abstract painting of a purple nude, with crimson nipples.

Michael Gerrety at last came out of his study. Today he was wearing a jazzy open-necked shirt and chinos, and was holding a half-smoked but unlit cigar. ‘Superintendent Maguire! The Boss Lady herself! I’m pleased to see that Bryan takes this so serious.’

He held out his hand, but Katie ignored it. ‘This is Detective O’Donovan,’ she said. ‘He’s been one of the leading investigators in all of these homicides.’

‘Well, I won’t try to shake
your
hand, detective, since the Boss Lady doesn’t seem to regard this as a social call.’

‘Do you want to show me the box?’ Katie asked him.

‘Oh, it’s
beyond
disgusting,’ put in Carole Gerrety. ‘Me
gorge
rose when I saw what was in it.’

‘Here, it’s in the kitchen,’ said Michael Gerrety, and led them through. The kitchen was pale lemon-yellow and gleaming and full of all the latest equipment. In the centre stood an island counter, topped with polished marble. On top of the counter lay a white cardboard box, only a little larger than a shirt box. The brown tape that had sealed it had been roughly cut open, and its lid was still half an inch open.

Katie and Detective O’Donovan approached the counter and looked at the box from all sides.

‘You’ve opened it, obviously,’ said Katie. ‘Apart from that, though, you haven’t touched its contents?’

‘Are you messing with me? Not at all. When you see for yourself what’s inside, you won’t want to be touching it, either. It’s savagery, that’s what it is. Savagery! And not only that, it’s an out-and-out threat. It’s like saying to me, this is what’s going to happen to you if you don’t watch yourself, or even if you do.’

Katie sniffed, and said to Detective O’Donovan, ‘Can you smell smoke?’

‘Oh, I can’t stay in here, it’s turning my stomach,’ said Carole Gerrety. ‘Why don’t you just take the horrible thing away and let’s be rid of it.’

Detective O’Donovan sniffed, too, and then he leaned closer to the box and said, ‘You’re right, that’s definitely smoke.’

‘I don’t smell anything at all,’ said Michael Gerrety.

‘That’s because you smoke cigars,’ said Katie. ‘But this isn’t cigar smoke.’

‘Smells more like a barbecue to me,’ said Detective O’Donovan.

Katie looked at the label on the box. All of the usual DHL labels and barcodes were stuck to the top of it, but there was also a label with a picture of a green pasture on it, and two grazing black cows. The lettering said Phelan’s Finest Dexter Beef and gave an address and an email in County Kerry.

Katie took a pair of latex gloves out of her pocket and pulled them on. Then, using her ballpen, she lifted the lid of the box and folded it back. The inside was lined with bubble wrap, and when she opened the bubble wrap she found eight human hands. They had been neatly tied together in pairs with thin black satin ribbon, palm to palm, as if they were praying.

There were two white pairs and two black pairs, one very dark but the other paler. The white pairs and the darker of the black pairs looked shrivelled, while the paler black pair was bloated and blotched.

All four of the left hands had rings on their fingers, some gold, some silver, three with semi-precious stones – a garnet, an onyx, and a yellow heliodor. The black right hand and the bloated right hand were also wearing rings. The ring on the black right hand was plaited gold, although it was only cheap because the gold had started to wear off, while the ring on the bloated right hand was a silver skull with red glass eyes.

Michael Gerrety came a little closer and pointed at the skull ring. ‘That’s Desmond O’Leary’s. The ring, any road. I couldn’t tell you for certain if the hand is his.’

‘Do you recognize any of the others?’

‘How do I know? They’re
hands
, that’s all. If you had your feet chopped off, I’ll bet that even your husband wouldn’t reck that they were yours.’

Katie didn’t tell him that Paul was long dead and buried: she didn’t want to give him the pleasure. ‘This one has a quincunx tattooed on it,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you’ve never seen that before?’

‘A
what
does it have?’

‘A quincunx. Four outer dots arranged in a square with a fifth dot in the middle. It’s a prison tattoo mainly, because it represents a person trapped inside four walls. And it’s mostly seen on Romanians.’

‘Well, I can’t lie to you and say that I don’t know any Romanians, but I never saw that tattoo before.’

Katie folded back the bubble wrap and closed the box. ‘We’ll be taking these away then and examining them more closely. I’m not one hundred per cent sure who sent these or what the sender was trying to imply by sending them to you, but for the time being we’re continuing to keep guards outside and we do recommend that you take your personal security very seriously.’

‘What do you mean you’re not one hundred per cent sure? It’s that Nigerian woman, isn’t it? That’s what Bryan said. He said that she’d even admitted it to you and told you why she was doing it.’

‘Did
you
know her sister?’ asked Katie. Detective O’Donovan was carefully sliding the cardboard box into his forensic evidence bag, but when she said that, he stopped and looked up, waiting to hear how Michael Gerrety was going to answer her.

‘What kind of a question is that? How could I know her sister if I don’t even know
her
?’

‘It’s because of her sister that she’s after you. That’s what she says. Her sister was called Nwaha and she drowned herself because she was so ashamed of what you and your minions had turned her into.’

Michael Gerrety pretended to think for a while and then he said, ‘No. Sorry, superintendent. Can’t help you, I’m afraid. What did you say her name was again?’

‘Don’t bother,’ said Katie. ‘Come on, Patrick, let’s get this evidence over to Dr O’Brien. It won’t take him long to work out who these hands belong to. He’s got the bodies that go with them.’

Michael Gerrety showed them to the door. As he opened it up, he said, quite casually, ‘Bryan Molloy said that you were seriously considering dropping those thirty-nine charges against me.’

‘Oh, did he now?’

‘He said that it was a waste of public money and the court’s time to pursue them any further – what with all of your evidence being nothing much more than hearsay and malicious gossip.’

‘He told you that, did he?’

‘Well, we were discussing it, like, at the golf club. We both agreed that it was better to be realistic about sex work.’

‘Realistic? Is that what you call it? So if some poor Nigerian girl is trafficked away from her parents and forced to have sex with countless numbers of dirty old men, so that in the end she’s so mortified by what she’s become that she throws herself into the Lee, that’s “realistic”, is it?’

Michael Gerrety smiled at her and Katie knew why. He was smiling because he was sure that he would never have to appear in court on any of the charges that had been filed against him. He was smiling because she hated him but he had beaten her, whether the hands fitted the bodies or not.

‘Thanks for coming, superintendent,’ he told her. ‘And thanks also for the warning. I’ll keep my eyes open for any vengeful young Nigerian women. Bye bye, then. Good luck.’

Katie and Detective O’Donovan walked back to the station. It had stopped raining for now but more clouds were rolling in from the south-west, as dark as slate, and it would soon start pouring again. ‘You’ll have those sent to Dr O’Brien asap, won’t you?’

‘Of course. Are you going up to have a word with Molloy?’

‘No, no, I’m not,’ said Katie. ‘I’d only lose my temper and there isn’t any point. Gerrety’s right, really. We don’t have enough evidence to be certain that he’ll be convicted, and even if he is, he’ll only get a fine, which he can afford, and have some of his assets confiscated by the CAB. Without the evidence we would have got from Operation Rocker, we’re stymied.’

‘So what do you plan to do? You’re not going to give up on him, are you? That wouldn’t be like you, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

‘It wouldn’t, would it? No, I’m not giving up on Michael Gerrety, ever. Right now, though, we have to catch this Angel of Revenge or Avenging Angel or whatever she calls herself, so let’s just concentrate on that.’

She had intended to stay with her father that night, but she didn’t finish work until 9.45 p.m., and when she rang him to tell him that she would be late, he said not to worry about him. He was still very shocked and distressed, but Ailish’s daughter had been around to see him and in any case he would rather be alone for the moment. And, yes, he had eaten something. Ailish’s daughter had brought him a chicken pie.