Taken for Dead (Kate Maguire) (54 page)

‘He’s not there, sir,’ Katie said, quietly, as Assistant Commissioner O’Reilly started to punch out Molloy’s extension number. ‘He’s not there and neither is Inspector Fennessy.’

Assistant Commissioner O’Reilly slammed the receiver down. ‘Then where are they?’ he demanded.

‘Your guess is as good as mine, sir.’

‘Jesus, this
is
a fecking catastrophe! Find them! Find the both of them! You’re detectives, for Christ’s sake! Find them! And not a word of this to anybody! If this gets out the whole fecking roof is going to fall in!’

Katie called both of their mobile phones again and again, but there was no reply from either of them. Eventually she went downstairs with Detective O’Donovan to the CCTV control room and asked the Crime Prevention Officer to check when Acting Chief Superintendent Bryan Molloy and Inspector Fennessy might have driven out of the station car park, and where they went.

Acting Chief Superintendent Molloy had driven into the station car park in his black Mercedes S-Class at 8.07 a.m., but left only twelve minutes later. He had driven along Merchants Quay and then crossed the River Lee by the Christy Ring Bridge to take the N20 due northwards.

‘I’d say he’s on his way back to Limerick,’ said Detective O’Donovan. He checked the clock and said, ‘Well, he’ll have got there by now, easy, especially in that motor.’

Inspector Fennessy had left the station car park in his metallic green Mondeo only a few minutes later. He had driven northwards, too, but on the N9 towards Fermoy.

‘Are you going to put out a bulletin on them?’ asked Detective O’Donovan.

Katie shook her head. ‘If we do that, Jimmy O’Reilly’s right, the roof will fall in. We need to be really, really careful. They’re not dangerous to the public, either of them, and we have to think about the reputation of the force as a whole. I’ll contact DS Brown at Henry Street. He’ll know who Molloy’s friends are, and where he’s likely to go if he thinks he’s in any kind of trouble. As for Liam Fennessy … I don’t know. It might be worth waiting to see if and when and where he turns up. He must have been under an awful lot of pressure of some kind to get involved in this.’

Katie went back to her office and switched on her desktop computer. There was a message on her phone from the press office, asking her to call back as soon as she could about the Duggans, and the shooting at her house of David Kane.

She went into her small private toilet and stared at herself in the mirror over the washbasin. She looked almost as waxy-white as one of the Duggan twins, and there were dark circles under her eyes. She had showered this morning and washed her hair but it still looked like a crow’s nest, and although she had put on her maroon suit which usually made her feel quite smart, it seemed too tight across the bust today, and her breasts felt sensitive.

All the same, Katie, she said to herself, you’ve done it. You’ve beaten the High Kings of Erin. They’re finished, both the original High Kings of Erin and the new High Kings of Erin, the Duggan gang and Bryan Molloy.

There was so much to clear up. She had to find Bryan Molloy and Liam Fennessy, wherever they were. She also had to track down Pat Whelan and Eoghan Carroll, and find out how they had managed to escape, and if they would have to face charges of assault for the injuries they had inflicted on Lorcan Devitt’s two cousins. Under EU law, even criminals had rights.

She fixed her make-up and then she went back to her desk to call James Brown in Limerick and the press office downstairs. She hadn’t even had the chance to pick up her phone, though, when Detective Dooley knocked at her door.

‘Robert,’ she said. ‘Come on in. How’s it going with Roisin Begley?’

‘Well, see for yourself,’ grinned Detective Dooley. He opened the door wider and led a pretty young girl into the office. Her dark brown hair was long and straight and shiny, and she was wearing a very short pink dress, with Detective Dooley’s tan leather jacket hung over her shoulders. Her emerald green eye make-up and her bright pink lipstick gave her the appearance of a little plastic doll.

‘Roisin herself,’ said Detective Dooley, proudly, and smiled at the girl and squeezed her hand. ‘I answered her advertisement and went around to see her and she told me the whole story. She thought that working for Michael Gerrety was going to be sexy and glamorous and exciting – didn’t you, Roisin, that’s what Gerrety promised you? She thought she was going to meet all these hunky rich fellers and make loads of money so that she could drive down Pana in her own sports car and stick up two fingers to all of her old schoolfriends, and her dad and mum, too!’

Katie stood up and held out her hands to her. ‘So what happened, Roisin? It didn’t turn out at all like that, did it?’

Roisin Begley suddenly pressed her fists up to her face and burst into tears. She tottered on her high red heels into Katie’s arms and Katie held her tight while she sobbed and shook and let out a howl that sounded like all of the pain and disappointment and degradation she had suffered turned into a single long plainsong.

‘Come on, sit down, Roisin, and tell me all about it,’ said Katie. She led her over to the grey leather couch beside the window and put her arm around her.

‘It was terrible,’ Roisin wept. ‘It made me sick to my stomach. First of all I met these two fellows in Starr’s and I thought they were funny and smart and they always had so much money. They took me to parties and discos and we had such a great time.’

She started howling again, so that she could hardly breathe. Katie turned to Detective Dooley and said, ‘Bring her a glass of water, would you, Robert? There’s a glass in the toilet there.’

‘After three or four times they said I would make a fabulous masseuse, you know. All I had to do was give these guys a massage and I would make so much money. They took me to see Michael Gerrety right at the top of the Elysian and Michael Gerrety said I was gorgeous. He gave me champagne and we went to bed together and it was just like a dream.’

‘Wait a minute. Michael Gerrety took you to bed, and he had sex with you?’

Roisin sniffed and wiped her eyes with her fingers, until her green eye make-up was all smeary. ‘He was such a great lover. I thought that every man I gave a massage to was going to be the same.’

‘Did he know how old you were?’ asked Katie.

‘I told him seventeen because the boys I met at Starr’s said you had to be seventeen to be a masseuse.’

‘But you weren’t seventeen?’

‘No. Sixteen. I’m not seventeen till November the nineteenth/’

Katie handed her a glass of water, and then she asked her, ‘What did Michael Gerrety do after that?’

‘He took me to this house in Knocka and showed me this room and said he was going to set up a website for me and all these men would come around and all I had to do was give them a massage.’

‘That was all? Just a massage?’

‘Well, all I had to do was rub their mickeys. I don’t know how to do that proper Thai massage. But Michael Gerrety said that if they asked for anything more I could give it to them, you know, and I could ask for lots more money.’

More tears ran down her cheeks, although this time she didn’t howl, and she gradually managed to choke out what had been done to her.

‘They weren’t these hunky, handsome guys that I thought they were going to be. They were old and they were stinky and I hated them. They wanted me to do everything with them, like suck them and let them pee on me and they always wanted to do it up my bottom. I started to think that I wasn’t pretty enough to get the really handsome men and I wasn’t worth anything. They treated me like a toilet, those men. I used to get the gawks all day from what they made me do. I had the taste of gip in my mouth from morning till night.

She looked up at Detective Dooley and let out a moan, but this time it was a moan of relief. ‘Then
he
came in this morning. Robert. And I thought he was gentle and lovely. And then he said what would I do for him, and I said anything, you name it. And then he said, that’s it, I’m a garda and I’m taking you out of here. I can’t believe it!’

Katie hugged her and let her cry it all out. She looked up at Detective Dooley and mouthed the words, ‘Well done you.’ Then she looked out of her window at the Elysian building, where Michael Gerrety lived. She knew that there was plenty of difficult work ahead of her, and tedious hours to be spent in court, but she also knew that sometime in the future she would remember this day as one of the best days in her whole career.

As Katie was about to leave her office that evening, her phone rang. She was inclined to leave it, but it went on ringing so she walked back to her desk and picked it up,

‘Katie? It’s Michael – Michael Dempsey, your tame historian.’

‘Michael, how are you?’

‘Well, I’m grand altogether, but embarrassed that I never really got back to you about the High Kings of Erin. I’ve seen on the news that you caught them, so you have my congratulations.’

‘Did you find out anything more about them?’

‘Nothing that would have helped you very much, except that they were
totally
ruthless and they murdered anybody who challenged them or stood in their way. It made no difference if it was their father or their first cousin or their closest friend – they did it with no compunction at all. They made the Islamic State look like amateurs.

‘Fair play, though, they did have a habit of taking hostages. There was Niall of the Nine Hostages who controlled almost all of Ireland by abducting important people from other provinces and keeping them prisoner. He used to demand enormous ransoms for their release – either grain or gold or cattle.

‘Then there was Finn Mac Cumhaill. He was one of Erin’s greatest warriors, and another prolific hostage-taker. He did it mostly for the ransom, but if nobody was prepared to pay for his hostages he would think up all kinds of inventive ways to kill them, such as cutting open their stomachs and filling them with rotten apples, and then letting his pigs get at them. He reckoned that if their death was gruesome enough, people would be more inclined to stump up ransoms in the future.’

‘That sounds horribly similar to our High Kings of Erin,’ said Katie. ‘Listen – maybe we should meet. This might give the prosecuting counsel some interesting background.’

‘I’d like that. But perhaps it would be wiser not to do it over lunch. Some of the things the High Kings of Erin did would turn your stomach. Enough to put you off drusheen for ever.’

Michael Dempsey hesitated for so long that Katie thought that he might have put the phone down. Just as she was about to say ‘
Michael
?’, though, he said, ‘I saw on the TV news what happened to you – you know, that neighbour of yours acting like a human shield.’

‘Yes, well,’ said Katie. She couldn’t help conjuring up a picture of David Kane standing in her porch, smiling with supreme self-confidence and holding up his bottle of Bollinger.

‘The thing of it is, there’s an interesting little story about Finn Mac Cumhaill,’ said Michael Dempsey. It just struck me as kind of
resonant
, if you know what I mean.’

‘Resonant?’ said Katie. ‘I’m not at all sure that I do. You mean that it rings a bell, like?’

‘It can’t be historically true, of course, but when Finn’s wife Uime was pregnant with twin boys, a jealous rival of hers turned her into a she-dog. She was turned back into a human before she went into labour, but her twins were both born as hounds. It wasn’t her fault, but Finn never forgave her, and constantly beat her and whipped her as a punishment. Even if they were dogs, though, he was devoted to his sons. He gave them the same care and respect as if they had been human, and that’s why why Irish veterinarians regard him as something of a patron saint.’

‘Sounds like your typical High King,’ said Katie, even though the very word ‘veterinarian’ had given her a chilly creeping feeling down her back. ‘Sounds like your typical man, in fact.’

‘Ah, but there’s a coda to it,’ said Michael Dempsey. ‘Whatever grievance Finn had against Uime, he saved her life. The jealous rival sent warriors to kill her, but he stepped in front of her and the arrow that had been intended to pierce her heart pierced his instead.’

‘I don’t really know why you told me that, Michael,’ said Katie.

‘I’m sorry, Katie. It wasn’t my intention to upset you. I just thought it was a perfect example of how Irish history repeats itself, over and over. We learn from history that we do not learn from history.’

‘Oh, the High Kings of Erin have taught me something all right,’ Katie told him.

‘Oh, yes? And what’s that?’

‘The more that somebody tells you that they can offer you, Michael, the less you’re likely to get out of them. Maguire’s Law of Unfulfilled Expectations.’

***

Three weeks passed. It grew dark at four o’clock in the afternoon and the rain was colder. There was still no trace of Acting Chief Superintendent Molloy nor Inspector Fennessy, although the Anglesea Street press office had managed to keep their unexplained disappearance out of the media.

Katie’s days were taken up with prosecuting Lorcan Devitt for homicide, kidnap, extortion, assault and at least eight other crimes, including drug-dealing and car theft and threatening behaviour. Pat Whelan and Eoghan Carroll had not yet reappeared – neither had Pat’s wife or Eoghan’s parents – but Katie guessed that they were waiting in hiding until they were sure that Lorcan Devitt was convicted and locked up. If he was found guilty of kidnap, then there was hardly any possibility that they would be charged with assault against Malachi and Ezra.

She had also arrested and charged Michael Gerrety for sex with an underage girl and reckless endangerment, and she was waiting for that case to make its slow and convoluted way to court.

Although her investigations were making good progress, she had been feeling so bloated and tired that she was relieved when it seemed that she was starting her period at last. The spotting, however, lasted only two days, and her breasts were even more swollen.

On the last day of the month, she went into Boot’s in Patrick Street and bought herself a pregnancy test kit.
I can’t be pregnant,
she thought,
it’s impossible. David swore to me that he’d had a vasectomy and he’s the only man I’ve slept with since John left.