Eye for an Eye (4 page)

‘That’s beside the point, Patrick. The point is, what’s a factory manager doing conspiring to frighten the wits out of some poor old woman and then aiding and abetting the murder of a priest who’s come to give her a little reassurance?’

‘Search me,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘Maybe he thinks she’s a witch and she’s been putting a hex on his factory for making too much noise. You remember that so-called witch in Montenotte – the one who tried to cast a spell on the oil tankers whenever they docked into the Shell depot on the river because their pumping kept her awake all night?’

‘I do, yes. The difference is that Shell didn’t try to scare that old woman to death, or bash her head in with a rock. Anyway... I think another visit to Toolmate is called for. Think about it: the only access to Mary O’Donnell’s back garden fence is through the factory grounds, and if Satan had come from outside the factory, surely Redmond Keane must have seen him through his office window?’

‘So you reckon that Satan came from
inside
the factory?’

‘Yes, I do, and if Redmond Keane won’t voluntarily allow us to search the premises to see if his outfit’s hidden there anywhere, I’ll apply for a warrant.’

*

‘I rang her back for you,’ said Desmond Keane, as Clodagh came into the office. ‘I told her you’d only gone to the toilet and you wouldn’t be long.’

Clodagh glanced over at her iPhone which she had left on her desk.

‘Who was it?’ she said, although she felt like saying, ‘You’ve no business, answering my private calls!’ She would have done, if he hadn’t been her boss, and if she hadn’t been so frightened of him.

‘Well, who were you expecting?’ asked Redmond, getting up from his desk and walking across the office until he was close enough to touch her. Or slap her.

‘I don’t know,’ said Clodagh. She was flustered now and she clutched her large white handbag defensively in front of her. She tried to get past Redmond so that she could sit down, but he took a step sideways and blocked her. ‘I wasn’t expecting anybody.’

‘Are you sure of that, Clodagh? Not even Detective Superintendent Kathleen Maguire?’

Clodagh blushed and again she tried to get past him, but this time he took hold of the cuff of her white Aran sweater and twisted it.

‘Let me go, please,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Oh, don’t you, now? Well, that’s very strange altogether because she left you a message. Would you like to hear it, this message?’

Redmond picked up her phone and held it up in front of her. Clodagh made a snatch for it, but he held it tantalizingly out of her reach.

‘Look, if I put it on the speakerphone, then we’ll both be able to hear it, won’t we?’

There was nothing that Clodagh could do. Redmond switched on her phone and they heard Katie’s voice saying, ‘
Clodagh? I just wanted to thank you for your help and advise you that we’ll be acting on it immediately. When you see me, though, say nothing at all to suggest that you might have spoken to me. I’ll call you later so
.’

‘Well, your mystery caller didn’t give her name, so I rang her back,’ said Redmond. As it happened, she was engaged on another call, but her answerphone told me who she was and invited me to leave a message. Which I did.’

He released his grip on her sleeve and handed her back her iPhone. Clodagh stood there miserably, glancing towards the door every now and then, as if all she wanted to do was escape.

‘So you spoke to Detective Superintendent Maguire, did you? And what exactly did you speak about that she’s going to be acting on immediately?’

‘It was nothing,’ said Clodagh. ‘It was about my brother Ciaran. He’s thinking of joining the Garda.’

‘Oh, your brother Ciaran is thinking of joining the Garda, is he? But if that’s all you were talking about, why did Detective Superintendent Maguire tell you to say nothing to suggest that you’d spoken to her? I would have thought your brother becoming a guard would be something to be proud of – something to tell all your friends about, not keep to yourself.’

Clodagh shrugged, at a loss for words. Redmond stood close to her for a while, looking her up and down with that cast in his eyes, which always unnerved her even when he wasn’t angry, which he was now.

‘You
saw
me, didn’t you?’ he said. ‘You saw me outside with that fellow in the hood. I thought I saw you looking, but I wasn’t sure.’

Clodagh sat down at her desk, still clutching her handbag. ‘I don’t know what you mean, Mr Keane. I didn’t see anything. I was chasing after the postie, that’s all.’

‘Oh, is that right? Well, let me tell you this, Clodagh, that fellow I was talking to had nothing to do with what happened to that priest next door. He’s just a fellow who does a bit of electrical work for us now and again. He’s cheap, right, but he isn’t licensed, so I can’t have the guards knowing about him. Do you understand me?’

Clodagh nodded.

‘Right, then,’ said Redmond. ‘You’d better get on with your work. That letter has to go out to the county council this morning and I still need you to find those nitrate solution prices for me from McGean’s.’

‘Yes, Mr Keane. I’ll get right on to it so.’

*

While Clodagh sat at her keyboard, typing, Redmond stood staring out of the window. It was raining outside, not heavily, but the wind was blowing ghosts of spray across the car park.

After ten minutes or so, his mobile phone rang. He picked it up and put it to his ear, but whoever was calling him, he said nothing at all, not even ‘Hello.’ He put it down, went over to his desk and took a manila envelope out of his drawer. He approached Clodagh and held it up in front of her.

‘Could you take this to Dermot in the plating shop? It’s a bit of a bonus I promised him.’

‘I will of course,’ said Clodagh. She was just relieved that he seemed to have forgiven her for contacting Detective Superintendent Maguire. It took the pressure off her, for the moment at least.

She picked up her folding umbrella and left Redmond’s office. As she crossed the yard she could hear the monotonous banging of the press that stamped wrenches out of red-hot metal billets. The workshop where they were polished and chromium-plated was right at the back of the factory site, close to Mary O’Donnell’s garden fence.

When she entered the plating shop she found that Dermot was standing alone by the tank where the wrenches were lowered into chromium chloride solution, his arms folded, as if he were waiting for her. He was well over six feet tall and everything about him seemed larger than a normal human being. His head was enormous, with a bulbous nose and massive chin, and his hands were like two shovels. He was wearing the largest size of Toolmate overall, but it was still too tight for him and two of the buttons had broken off. His tangled grey hair and deep-set eyes gave him the look of an ogre from a children’s picture book

‘Mr Keane said to give you this,’ she said, holding out the envelope.

Dermot took it, but didn’t take his eyes off her. She was turning to go when he said, ‘Did you ever wonder what a person would look like, you know, if they was chromium-plated?’

‘What?’ said Clodagh. She didn’t understand what he was saying.

Dermot tossed the envelope on to the workbench beside him and came right up to her. He nodded towards the huge, waist-high plating tank and said, ‘Did you ever wonder what a person would look like, if they was to take a swim in that? If they’d come out all bright and shiny?’

‘No, of course not. Of course they wouldn’t, they’d drown. And that’s poison, like, isn’t it? That’s what Mr Keane told me. You shouldn’t get even the tiniest splash on your skin, that’s what he said, and he said there was one woman who worked here who died from swallowing some by mistake.’

‘Oh, you don’t want to believe everything Mr Keane tells you,’ said Dermot. He opened his mouth to bare his oddly tiny teeth, but it was more of a grimace than a grin.

Clodagh turned away, but as she did so, Dermot seized her by the shoulders.

‘
Leave go
!’ she screamed. ‘
Leave go of me, will you
!’

Without a word, though, Dermot pushed her towards the plating tank, so that her shoes made a clanking sound against its metal sides. She let out another scream, high-pitched and piercing, and tried to twist herself free. But Dermot was overwhelmingly strong. He grabbed the back collar of her sweater and thrust his other hand deep between her legs and heaved her over the rail into the chromium solution. There was a wallowing splash and for a split second she disappeared beneath the surface.

When she burst out of the solution, she was frantically spitting, but then she closed her mouth tight to stop herself swallowing any more of it. She had to shut her eyes, too, because it stung so much. Waving her arms blindly in front of her, she groped for the side of the tank. Dermot, however, was methodically pulling on a pair of heavy-duty black rubber gloves, and when she managed to seize the rail he levered her fingers away from it and gave a hefty push against her forehead with the heel of his hand.

Clodagh’s wedge-heeled shoes slipped on the bottom of the tank. She fell backwards, with one last gargling sound, and disappeared under the surface again. Dermot stood and watched her for a while, and when she slowly began to float in a circle, her white face staring upwards through the ripples, he took off his gloves.

He picked up his mobile phone, jabbed at it, sniffed, and then said, ‘We’ve had a bit of an accident, like, in the plating shop. Yeah. That’s right. Don’t know what the feck she thought she was doing, stupid cow.’

*

Katie said, ‘You understand, don’t you, what this looks like?’

‘Oh, well, yes, I can see why you might be suspicious,’ said Redmond. ‘It was nothing but an accident, though, as far as I can tell. I can’t even begin to imagine what she was doing in the plating shop. And how she managed to fall into the tank, only God knows.’

‘You’re obviously aware that she called me yesterday.’

‘Of course, yes. She went to the toilet and her phone rang and I answered it for her. I wouldn’t have done normally, but she told me when she came to work that she had some old school friend she was anxious to hear from, so I didn’t want her to miss her call.’

‘She told me that she saw you talking to some fellow wearing a black hood, very much like the fellow who was making out to Mrs O’Donnell that he was Satan.’

Redmond had been watching as the ambulance backed into the car park and the paramedics opened up its doors. It had stopped raining now and the car park was shining with a watery sunlight. He turned around with his mouth turned down dismissively and shook his head. ‘I can’t think why she should have said that. Maybe she was trying to cause me some bother. She’d asked me for a pay rise but I’d had to tell her that we couldn’t afford it.’

‘I thought Toolmate was doing really well,’ said Katie.

‘It is, yes. But that doesn’t mean I can give everybody an increase in wages. I have to plough money back into expansion. Toolmate is growing really fast and if we’re going to keep up with demand we need new storage facilities and new workshops.’

‘So you think that Clodagh was simply making that up – about you and the man in the hood?’

‘Well, of course, since it never happened.’

‘And you’re convinced that she fell into that tank of chromium solution by accident?’

‘I couldn’t say for sure, Katie. I wasn’t there at the time and neither was anybody else. Maybe she just leaned over too far and lost her balance. Maybe she decided to take her own life. She always seemed happy enough to me, but who knows what problems she might have had? Maybe she was pregnant. Maybe her boyfriend had left her. I simply couldn’t tell you.’

Katie stared at Redmond for a long time without saying anything. He was trying to look both bemused and sympathetic, but as the seconds went by she could tell that he was finding it harder and harder to keep it up. She had interviewed hundreds of liars in her career and she could sense his tension. He couldn’t keep even one of his eyes fixed on her – his gaze continually darted towards the window, as if he wanted to make sure that Clodagh really was dead and wasn’t going to sit up on the stretcher on which she was being carried to the ambulance and start denouncing him.

At last, Katie said, ‘All right, Redmond. But I’d like my officers to make a thorough search of the premises, if that’s all right with you.’

Redmond’s expression abruptly changed from bemused and sympathetic to prickly and defensive. ‘Why would you want to be doing that? We’ve nothing to hide here. All you’re going to find is shovels and spanners.’

‘It’s just a matter of procedure, Redmond, like I said before.’

‘That’s as may be, but Toolmate has its procedures as well. I’m only the manager here, not the owner, and I’m not at all sure what my CEO would have to say about a search.’

‘What reason could your CEO possibly have for saying no?’ Katie asked him.

‘I couldn’t tell you. She’s a woman, by the way, and not a very obliging woman at that. If I let you search the place without her say-so, she might very well sack me for overstepping my authority.’

Katie pointed towards the phone on his desk. ‘Why don’t you call her and ask her? I assume you know her number.’

‘Toolmate’s headquarters is in San Jose, California. She won’t be awake yet. And even when she is awake, she still might refuse. She’s very legalistic.’

‘In that case, it’ll be easier and quicker if I apply for a search warrant,’ said Katie. ‘Don’t go anywhere, and tell all of your workforce to remain on the premises. I’ll be back as soon as I’ve drummed up a district court judge.’

‘Do what you have to,’ said Redmond, lifting his hands in a show of resignation. ‘I can tell you now, though, that you won’t find anything. You’d be better off not wasting your time or taxpayers’ money.’

*

As Katie walked across the car park she saw that the ambulance was still there, with its doors open. The paramedics were talking to Bill Phinner and Detective O’Donovan and Eithne and another three gardaí, including Sergeant O’Malley. Detective O’Donovan had Clodagh’s blue coat over his arm and he was holding her handbag as well as a plastic shopping bag containing her personal possessions from her desk – a hairbrush and some eyeliner and her address book, even the ham sandwich and the bag of Taytos she had brought for her lunch.