Blood Sisters (10 page)

‘How far gone is she?’

‘I don’t know exactly. Well, I think I do. Two months at least. It was that time we went to Dingle and stayed at the Skellig. It did nothing but piss with rain the whole time so we stayed in our hotel room and, you know. There was nothing worth watching on TV.’

‘Is she going to get rid of it?’

Detective Horgan shook his head. ‘I suggested it, like, and said that I’d pay for her to go to England if she had to. But she won’t hear of having an abortion. She’s told her ma already, and the whole family’s dead religious, do you know what I mean?’

‘So what are you going to do? Marry her?’

Detective Horgan’s face was a picture of misery. ‘I
like
her, like. She’s great for a laugh and she likes to go clubbing and all that. She used to, anyway. Now she’s being all serious and careful and she won’t touch drink. But
marry
her – Jesus, I couldn’t imagine spending more than a couple of days with her – not consecutive, like – let alone my whole fecking life.’

‘Does she
think
that you’re going to marry her?’

Detective Horgan nodded. ‘We were walking through French Church Street the other day, and she stopped outside that bridal shop and stared in the window. She didn’t say nothing, but she couldn’t stop smiling and squeezing my hand, do you know what I mean, like?’

‘If you don’t want to marry her, you’d better tell her. The sooner the better.’

‘Jesus, she’s going to lose the head with me if I do that!’

‘I’m sorry, Horgan,’ said Katie, ‘you don’t have a choice. You can tell her that you’ll look after the baby financially once it’s born, and take an interest in it. But don’t think about marrying her if you don’t really love her. It wouldn’t be fair to either of you, or the wain.’

Detective Horgan puffed out his cheeks in resignation. ‘You’re right, ma’am, I know it. My ma and da got married because of me and they
hated
each other. Like, intensely. My ma always used to say that God gave us the light of love but the Devil gave us children to snuff it out.’

Katie unconsciously laid a hand on her own stomach and thought of what John was going to say when she told him that she was pregnant.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s take a look at these horses. I made sure I didn’t eat anything this morning before I came out here and I’m starved.’

Detective Horgan started up the Toyota again and drove them up the narrow hedge-lined road to Dromsligo.

* * *

They parked outside the Victor Dowling Equine Rescue Centre, a sandy-coloured building covered with ivy, with white-painted stables all around it. As Katie climbed out of the car, Tadhg Meaney came out to meet her, wearing a tweed cap and a noisy brown oilskin raincoat.

‘Good timing, superintendent,’ he said. ‘I’m just on my way to the tractor shed myself.’

‘How’s progress?’ she asked him. ‘And for goodness’ sake call me Katie, or Kathleen if you want to be formal.’

They walked together across the yard and then around to the back of the stables where there was a huge dilapidated wooden building, more like a barn than a shed, with a sagging Killaloe slate roof. Katie could smell the horses before she saw them. They were giving off a ripe, cloying stench that she could actually taste on her tongue. She always thought that decomposing humans smelled
green
. This smell was darker – greenish-mahogany. She took out the perfume-soaked handkerchief that she always carried in her coat pocket and held it up to her nose. Tadhg Meaney saw what she was doing and gave her a wry smile.

‘Don’t blame you,’ he said. ‘I always dab some Vicks up my nose, myself, and suck a Fisherman’s Friend.’

The large double doors at the front of the shed were wide open. Tarpaulins had been spread out all over the concrete floor and on top of them lay the bodies of the twenty-three horses and foals, in three rows, with the most badly decomposed nearest the front. Some of them were little more than skeletons draped with hairy skin, like horses out of a nightmare, their eye sockets empty because the seagulls had pecked out their eyes. Towards the back of the shed they were mostly intact, except that their stomachs had ballooned out enormously.

‘Holy Mary,’ said Detective Horgan, flapping his hand in front of his face. ‘That’s some peggy dell of benjy coming off of this lot.’

The shed was brightly lit by portable halogen lamps on tripods, so that it looked like a film set. Two ISPCA vets in white protective suits and face masks were crouched down beside one of the horses in the second row. One of them was taking blood samples with a large hypodermic syringe, while the other was slowly waving a Detect-a-Chip scanner from side to side between its shoulder blades.

‘With any luck, we’ll have them all checked out by the end of the day,’ said Tadhg. ‘There are three four-year-olds, seven three-year-olds, nine two-year-olds, and four foals. None of the foals has been microchipped.’ He paused, and then he said, ‘I just thank God that the salt water helped to preserve them and that the weather’s been as cold as it has. Otherwise, you couldn’t have seen past the tip of your nose for the flies.’

Katie took the handkerchief away from her face and tried not to breathe in too deeply. ‘You said that the microchips of the first three horses you tested didn’t tally with any numbers registered at Weatherbys.’

‘That’s right. And like I said, that’s the whole mystery of it. We’ve scanned another nine horses since those three, and they’re all the same, microchipped but unregistered. They all have standard ISO transponders and out of the fifteen numbers on each of them the first eight numbers are correct, starting with 372 which is the country code for Ireland. But their personal identification numbers have never been officially recorded. The problem is that we don’t have the poor creatures’ passports to see if the numbers match, or if they’ve been tampered with at all. That’s if they ever
did
have passports.’

‘Sounds like one of your good old racing scams to me,’ said Detective Horgan.

‘It does, yes,’ said Katie. ‘But the usual reason for forging a passport is to get a sick horse accepted by a slaughterhouse, isn’t it? You can get six or seven hundred euros these days for a horse that’s fit for human consumption. But these are racehorses. You couldn’t get enough meat off the whole lot of them to make a pound of sausages. In fact, you’d have to pay a knackery to dispose of them.’

‘I’m thinking that they could well have been ringers,’ said Tadhg. ‘It’s been much harder for racehorse trainers to substitute one horse for another since microchips became compulsory. But there are still ways and means of forging passports and changing microchips, as you well know. The whole racing business is even more chaotic than ever these days, Katie, to say the least. Not to mention corrupt. And don’t get me started on the cruelty.’

‘How long is it going to take you to analyse the blood samples?’ asked Katie.

‘We’ll be testing for just about everything, although mainly for bute, but I should have some early results for you tomorrow or the day after.’

Katie pressed her handkerchief against her face again but the Chloé perfume did little to mask the overwhelming smell of dead horse, and in a way the strong floral scent made it even more sickening. Her stomach made a gurgling noise and she hoped that Tadhg hadn’t heard it.

‘Thanks, Tadhg,’ she told him. ‘I’ll wait to hear from you so.’

Tadhg stared at the horses and said nothing. He looked so defeated and sorrowful that Katie wished she could think of something to say to console him, even if it was only, ‘Tadhg... this wasn’t your fault.’

She turned away and left him standing there, and it was only when she and Detective Horgan were about to round the corner by the stables that he called out, ‘Thanks for coming by, Katie! I’ll be in touch as soon as I can!’

* * *

‘So, what do you think?’ Katie asked Detective Horgan as they drove back down the narrow country road to rejoin the N20.

‘Well, it stinks all right, and not only of dead horses. Like we said, it must be some kind of a racing scam. But what I can’t understand is, if you’re cute enough to pull off a racket involving twenty-three thoroughbred horses, why throw them off a cliff where somebody’s bound to stumble across them sooner or later? Why not cremate them, or bury them in a bog, or fill them full of rocks and take them out to sea where nobody’s going to find them?’

‘Maybe they thought the tide would carry them away.’

‘That’s possible, but tides turn, don’t they? And even if the tide had taken them out, it might well have washed them back in again. Whoever threw them off that cliff either did it for some fiendishly clever reason, or else they’re incredibly thick.’

Katie couldn’t help shaking her head and smiling. ‘This is Cork, Horgan. I think the chances of it being done for some fiendishly clever reason are pretty remote. I’d go for thick.’

They reached the N20. The only other vehicle in sight was a silver Mercedes parked in a lay-by about thirty metres to the north, on the left-hand side of the road but facing towards them. Detective Horgan was about to pull out when the Mercedes swerved out of the lay-by and came speeding in their direction.

Katie instinctively grabbed his arm and said, ‘Back up!’

‘What?’

‘
Back up
!’

Detective Horgan tugged the gear lever into reverse, but as he did so there was an ear-splitting crack! and his head jerked backwards. The Toyota slewed to the left and thumped into the high grass verge behind them. Katie’s head banged hard against the headrest but she immediately ducked down sideways so that she was hidden from view.

A few seconds passed. The Toyota’s engine had stopped and there was silence.

‘Horgan?’ said Katie, with her head still resting against his thigh. ‘Hoggy, are you all right?’

She felt a warm, wet drop on her ear and quickly sat up. The silver Mercedes had gone and the main road was deserted. There was a circular hole in the windscreen about two centimetres in diameter and when she looked at Detective Horgan she saw that his head was slumped forward on his chest and that blood was dripping from his forehead. The back of his head was a tangle of hair and blood, with a large lump of pinkish-grey brain matter drooping down on to his shirt collar.

She touched her earlobe with her fingertips and they came away red. She took out her handkerchief and wiped them, and then wiped her ear, and then she reached over for the car’s radio microphone to call Detective Inspector O’Rourke.

‘Francis?’ she heard herself saying. ‘Yes, this is Detective Superintendent Maguire. We’ve been shot at and Detective Horgan is down. Yes. I’m at the junction of the N20 with the Dromsligo road, about a kilometre north of Mallow. Can you ask Superintendent McCarthy to send some local back-up, and can you get up here yourself, as soon as you can. Bring O’Donovan with you. I need a technical team, too, and a white van.’

She climbed out of the car and stood beside it with the cold wind ruffling her hair. ‘The shot came from a silver Mercedes saloon,’ she said. ‘Put out a bulletin to stop every car of that description within a thirty-five mile radius of Mallow. Be warned that the occupants could be armed and dangerous.’

‘Consider it done,’ said Detective Inspector O’Rourke. ‘You’re not hurt yourself, are you?’

‘No, no. Not at all. They might have been trying to hit me, but they took out poor Horgan instead.’

She lowered the microphone and then stood and waited, using the half-open car door to shield herself from the wind. She couldn’t stop herself from shaking, partly with cold and partly with shock, but she didn’t want to get back into the passenger seat. She couldn’t even bring herself to look at Detective Horgan, sitting behind the wheel with his head bowed, although she could see his blood-spotted hand resting in his lap. Her gorge rose and it was as much as she could do to stop herself from retching. She could still taste those dead horses, and Chloé perfume, and there was a strong smell of slurry on the wind, too, from the fields around her.

It took the first patrol car only seven minutes to reach her, followed less than a minute later by another. Their blue lights were flashing, but the road was empty of traffic so they weren’t sounding their sirens. Four gardaí climbed out and approached her cautiously.

‘Jesus,’ said one of them, bending down to peer into the Toyota’s offside window. He crossed himself and added, ‘Right between the eyes.’

A young female garda said, ‘
You
didn’t get hit, ma’am?’

‘No, thank God,’ said Katie. ‘I was haunted they just took the one shot.’

‘Do you have any idea who they were?’ asked another garda.

‘No idea at all. And I can’t think how they knew who
we
were, or how they knew that we were here in Dromsligo.’

‘Couldn’t have been mistaken identity, I suppose?’ the garda suggested. ‘We’ve had some trouble between a couple of the less-desirable families in the area lately.’

‘It’s possible, but I don’t think it’s very likely. We don’t exactly fit the profile, do we?’

‘How about we drive you back to Cork, ma’am?’ asked another garda. ‘That must have been a fierce shock, like, seeing your man shot right next to you.’

‘That’s appreciated, but I’ll stay for a while,’ said Katie. ‘Detective Inspector O’Rourke is on his way here from Anglesea Street and I want to talk to the technical team, too, when they arrive.’

‘Why don’t you come and sit in our car then, ma’am?’ said the female garda. She was plump, with china-blue eyes. ‘You’re looking fair foundered there and at least it’ll keep you warm.’

Katie was about to decline that offer, too. Detective Horgan had been shot dead, but she was almost sure that the shooter had been aiming for her, and she didn’t want to walk away and leave him sitting there. God, he had celebrated his twenty-seventh birthday only two weeks ago. But she was trembling now, and she was beginning to feel as if the Tarmac was tilting underneath her feet, so she smiled and nodded and said, ‘Yes, thanks, I think I will.’

‘I have some hot tea in the car, too, if you’d like some,’ said the garda as she led her over to the patrol car.