‘You walked, you say. You didn’t give her a lift?’
‘No, like I said, we walked.’
‘As far as the shopping centre. And then what happened?’
‘We split. She went off up Kilmacud way, and I went down Stillorgan Park.’
‘Just like that? You didn’t stop for another snog?’
‘Yeah, well…’
‘Even though she “really was just a kid”, as you put it?’ Cassidy remarked, snide and critical.
‘Well, you know, a bird in the hand and all…’
‘In the hand?’ Cassidy interrupted, all mock indignation. ‘So it went a bit further than a snog, then, did it?’
‘No, I just meant…’ Scully took a breath to calm himself, then seemed to think better of trying to explain what he meant.
‘No, it didn’t.’
‘You must’ve been pretty tempted, though, right? Not many people up there around the shopping centre at that hour. Pretty
easy to push things on a bit, get what you want, yeah?’
‘No. No way. I’m telling you, we had a snog and went our separate ways.’
‘Are you sure about that, Patrick?’ Cassidy pushed.
‘Sure of it? Of course I am. I mean… Look, hang on a second here. What’s this about? Are you saying she’s accusing me of something?’
‘Why would you say that, Patrick?’ Brogan interjected. ‘What is it you think she might be accusing you of?’
‘Ah, no. Come off it, now.’ There was a sense of panic in Scully’s voice. ‘This has to be some kind of a wind-up. What’s she
been saying?’
‘What is it
you
think she might be saying?’ Cassidy jumped in again aggressively, not letting anything go.
‘I told you, I haven’t got a clue, but whatever it is, it’s not true.’
‘That’s an interesting way of putting it, Patrick.’
‘What?’
Brogan was just beginning to think they might be getting somewhere, when the tension inside the room was shattered by a sharp
rap on the door.
‘What is it?’ she shouted, suppressing a curse and sharing a glare with Cassidy.
A young uniformed Garda popped his head tentatively round the door.
‘Inspector Brogan?’
‘Who the hell else would it be, ya gobshite?’ Cassidy muttered, but Brogan was already talking over him.
‘Yes, what is it? Quickly.’
‘Urgent message for you, outside.’
Cassidy suspended the interview and sat glowering at Scully like a guard dog sizing up an intruder. Outside, the young cop
handed Brogan a handset. Who the hell could this be?
‘Boss, it’s Donagh. Sorry to interrupt, but I thought you’d want to know this.’
‘Go on, then. What’ve you got?’
‘You won’t believe it, boss. We’ve got the fucker. There’s a small white Transit van in Scully’s garage with welding equipment
in the back. I did a quick check and, sure enough, it’s registered in his name.’
‘You beauty.’ In her mind, Brogan punched the air. ‘What’s it look like inside? Anything I can hit him with?’
‘Well, it looks clean enough. No blood or anything but then, as soon as I spotted the welding gear, I got the hell out. Thought
I’d better leave the rest to Technical, y’know, if it’s a crime scene an’ all.’
‘Good lad,’ Brogan said, and told him to tell Technical to impound the vehicle and get it straight over to the lab
on a flatbed. ‘Top priority, no excuses. Was there anything else?’
‘Actually, yes there was, boss. Maura bagged a stack of porno in his bedroom, and a fair old stash of cannabis and what looks
like ecstasy tablets. About twenty or thirty of them.’
Brogan felt her chest contracting, feeling certain that she’d got her man. With this lot, the rest should be just a formality.
‘Jesus, Donagh, you guys have outdone yourselves. Pints all round on me later, yeah? For now, though, I’m going back in to
nail this bastard.’
She hung up and handed the phone back to the uniform who was beaming at her for some reason. She ignored him, grabbed the
door handle and took a deep breath, half expecting Cassidy to have wound Scully up into a bate in her absence. But in the
interview room everything was exactly as it had been: Cassidy glowering, Scully making a poor job of looking unconcerned.
Soon wipe the smirk off that face, she thought as she sat down again, tipping Cassidy the wink as she told him to start up
the recorder again.
Siobhan knew better than to trawl the wards. It wasn’t her style, and she’d only draw attention to herself. It didn’t do to
get a reputation for that kind of thing. Of course, there was no point approaching the doctors or the admin staff directly.
She’d get nothing from them, not at this stage. Their jobs were far too cushy and well paid to risk losing for the sake of
a journalist’s curiosity. The nurses, on the other
hand, were always a good bet: overworked, underappreciated and, crucially, underpaid. Best of all, though, were the cleaners,
porters and ancillary staff, those poor eejits who did the worst jobs for the lowest wages, and were usually guaranteed to
lay their hands on any information you wanted, for a small fee.
She reckoned it must have been one of them who phoned her with the story in the first place, recalling the broad Dublin accent
cutting through the phone crackle. It might even be easy to track him down, as he’d be one of very few nowadays who was actually
Irish. Most of them were Bosnian, Afghan, Vietnamese – asylum seekers and illegal immigrants being the only ones desperate
enough to scrape shit, blood and vomit off floors in an economy that, until recently, had enjoyed full employment. Even most
of the good citizens now standing in dole queues for the first time in ten years would consider themselves above that sort
of thing.
She was standing near the hospital shop, considering the feasibility of tracking her informant down and surprising him, when
luck presented her with an easier option. A bell clanged and a pair of wide steel doors opened in the bank of lifts opposite.
Out shambled the tall, gaunt figure of Ivo Piric – a man who’d been very useful to her in the past. He was probably no more
than forty but, with his deep-set eyes, hollowed-out cheeks and skeletal frame, Piric looked to be in greater need of medical
attention than the oldster he was pushing ahead of him in a wheelchair. He’d always looked
like that, ever since he turned up in Dublin in the late 1990s as a Bosnian refugee from the war in the Balkans. A man so
haunted by the past it was etched on his face, having survived a massacre by hiding under the dead bodies of fellow villagers.
When she originally sold his story to the
Irish Independent
she’d had doubts about a lot of what he claimed. Although there was no doubting he’d witnessed a massacre, something about
him made her wonder which side of the atrocity he had actually been on. Even if she had been taken in by him, though, the
work Piric was stuck doing here had to be some kind of punishment. As he went past with the wheelchair, he recognised her
and smiled. She remembered how unsettling she’d always found that: like an animal baring its teeth, devoid of warmth.
‘Hi there, Ivo.’
He put a hand up and parked his charge in the entrance to a television room, where patients and visitors were being deafened
by some awful daytime magazine show. Piric loped over, his gaze already fixed on the small brown leather purse Siobhan was
pulling from her bag.
‘I need some information,’ she whispered, putting a hand on his forearm and drawing him towards the far wall. ‘And you’re
the very man to get it for me.’
It took Mulcahy a lot longer to work out how to copy in all the stations in the Dublin Metropolitan Region than it did to
write the email itself. He pressed send and his
request for information on violent sexual assaults with any religious overtones spun away into the electronic ether, accompanied
by a low whoosh from the speakers. He was thinking about trying Brogan again, when the phone rang. It was her.
‘Thought you’d want to let your embassy pal know we’ve got this lad in custody,’ she said, her voice humming with excitement.
‘Great,’ he said. ‘Give me some details and I’ll start packing my bags.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t do that just yet. We haven’t charged him.’
‘But he’s the one, right?’
‘He hasn’t put his hand up for it. But he’s admitted leaving the club with Jesica and we found a van in his garage with a
load of welding equipment in the back. Technical Bureau are swarming all over it now – should have something for us by morning.’
‘I take it he’s not a welder, then?’
‘Not exactly,’ Brogan laughed grimly. ‘He says he’s a postgraduate research student at UCD. Doing medieval history or something
like that.’
‘That’s interesting.’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘No, I meant the academic-welder thing. It’s not the most likely hobby for a historian.’
‘Absolutely, yeah,’ she said, her mind moving on elsewhere. ‘Anyway, for the moment I’m holding him on a
possession rap. We found a stash of hash and ecstasy in his bedroom.’
‘That’s useful. Much?’
‘Not so much hash, but there must have been twenty or thirty Es.’
Mulcahy knew what that meant. ‘That’s a lot for a cash-strapped student. You reckon that’s what he was doing up at the club
– dealing?’
‘That’s what I was thinking. He’s not so cash-strapped, either. His clothes are all designer labels, handmade shoes, that
kind of stuff.
So
not cheap student chic. I thought maybe you could check him out with your contacts in Drugs, whether they have any form or
intelligence on him.’
‘Yeah, of course,’ he said, pleased to be able to do something useful at last.
‘Quickly, like. It would be good to have it to take into the next interview.’
‘No problem. Give me the name and details, I’ll make a call and get straight back to you.’
She gave him everything she had on Scully and said she’d be waiting to hear from him.
‘Did you get my message about Geraghty?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘How come he went through to you?’
He was glad she couldn’t see his eyes rolling heavenwards; he’d almost forgotten her paranoid streak.
‘I had a few thoughts about his findings myself,’ he said, ignoring her question. ‘I’m not certain we’ve—’
‘Look, I’m sure they’re very interesting and all,’ Brogan
cut in, ‘but do you think you could keep them for this evening’s briefing? You can share them with everyone then. I really
need this drugs gen on Scully. Could you just do that, like right now?’
Stuff it, he thought. His own news could wait. ‘Okay, no problem, but before you go, have you said anything to Healy about
this guy yet?’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘I’m just wondering how much to say to the Spanish.’
‘It was Healy told me to call you,’ she said, her voice prickly. ‘I briefed him a few minutes ago. He said to let you – or
them rather – know we’ve got a suspect in custody. They don’t need to know any more than that for now.’
Things at the hospital had progressed even more swiftly than Siobhan had hoped. True to form, Ivo Piric was already aware
of some fuss having occurred, but he wasn’t very strong on facts, rambling on about men in uniform taking a patient away.
Intriguing, sure, but it sounded like something he’d dreamed up. For twenty euro, though, he was happy to find her someone
who knew exactly what had happened. Siobhan settled into the empty canteen with a plate of sad grey fish and limp yellow chips,
expecting a long wait. But barely four chips in, Piric was back. Which was how she’d ended up spending the past ten minutes
crammed into a glorified linen cupboard with Nurse Edith Sorenson, flanked by shelf upon shelf of starched white sheets and
pillow cases, her shorthand struggling to keep
pace with the torrent of indignation spilling from Nurse Sorenson’s lips. So far the nurse had confirmed, as obliquely as
she could, everything Siobhan’s informant had told her about this Spanish girl’s appalling injuries. But the stuff she was
going on about now – of Gardai interrogating the poor creature though she wasn’t fit for it, then a fist-fight breaking out
with some official, right at the girl’s bedside, and to top it all, what sounded like an invasion party from the Spanish embassy
stalking the corridors of St Vincent’s Hospital – it was pure dynamite.
‘And you’re sure this was the same fella who came to get her yesterday, with the troops, as you call them. The original one
from the Spanish embassy?’
‘I’m absolutely certain. He was only a scrap of a fella but very full of himself, I can tell you. Strutting around like a
little Franco, he was.’
Siobhan tutted sympathetically, noting the reference and deciding it put Nurse Sorenson in her mid-forties or so. ‘But you
didn’t get his name?’
‘He didn’t offer it – on either occasion. I might as well have not been there as far as he was concerned. He was a very rude
man.’
‘And there wouldn’t be any record of his name, in paperwork or anything, up at the nurse’s station? It would be a big help,
you know, so we could give him his comeuppance in the paper.’
Nurse Sorenson looked tempted by the suggestion but, as she’d already refused to let her have an unofficial peep at the
Spanish girl’s records, Siobhan wasn’t holding out much hope. Sure enough, the nurse shook her head ruefully.
‘No. In any case, it was Sister Philomena who dealt with all the paperwork.’
‘And you don’t think Sister Philomena…’ Siobhan said, writing the name down to her informant’s evident horror, ‘you don’t
think she’d be willing to cooperate?’
‘God no, she’d have my guts for garters if she knew I was talking to you. That’d be the end of me. I’m only telling you this
because—’
‘Okay, okay,’ Siobhan said, trying to calm her down. ‘You’ll have her in here yourself if you don’t pipe down. Look, you needn’t
worry. I won’t let on to anyone about our little chat if you don’t want me to. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you
telling me all this. It’s important that these people shouldn’t be allowed to think they can walk all over us, you know.’
Nurse Sorenson relaxed a little, evidently relieved that she’d chosen so trustworthy a member of the fourth estate to share
her story with.