Eye for an Eye (5 page)

‘Is it a go for a search, ma’am?’ asked Sergeant O’Malley.

Katie shook her head. ‘Keane’s trying to delay it. Says his dragon of a boss in California will give him the sack if he allows us to search the place without her clearing it first.’

‘So what?’ said Bill. ‘You’re a superintendent. You have the authority to instigate a search yourself.’

‘I do, yes, but only if I have reasonable grounds for thinking that we might turn up some incriminating evidence, and in this case I think I’d rather have a warrant. Apparently Toolmate’s boss is very litigious. There’s a dead young girl in there and I don’t want to mess this up because we haven’t played it exactly by the book.’

‘At a guess, I’d say she died almost instantly,’ said Bill. ‘That solution we fished her out of is a mixture of chromium chloride, glycolic acid and various citrates. One swallow of that and you’d probably die of cardiogenic shock.’

Katie climbed up into the ambulance. Clodagh was covered by a green sheet, but Katie folded it down so that she could see her face. Her eyes were closed and she looked as if she were a statue of herself on a medieval tomb – not metallic and shiny, but as if her skin had turned to polished granite.

Bill was close behind her. ‘I can’t see a young girl like that throwing herself into a tank full of chemicals, can you?’ he asked her.

‘I don’t know for sure,’ said Katie. ‘We find enough of them floating in the river, don’t we? And if they don’t leave a note, you can never tell for certain if they fell, or if they jumped, or if they were pushed.’

‘Well, I’m like you, ma’am, and I don’t happily make assumptions, but in my estimation the sides of the tank are too high for her to have fallen into it accidentally, and she would have had to climb up on something if she had deliberately thrown herself in.’

Katie gently covered Clodagh’s pale grey face again and crossed herself. She stepped down from the ambulance and said to the paramedics, ‘All right, then, you’re good to go. I’ll call Dr Reidy and have him send a pathologist down.’

She went over to Detective O’Donovan. ‘I’ll drum up a judge, Patrick, if you can go to the court and collect a search warrant.’

‘I will of course.’

Katie nodded at Clodagh’s possessions. ‘Have you looked in her bag?’

‘Not yet, no. I had a quick flick through her address book to see if she had her parents’ phone number written down, but that was all. I was going to go through all of her things when I got back to the station.’

Katie took a crumpled pair of black forensic gloves out of her coat pocket and tugged them on. Detective O’Donovan passed her the handbag and she opened it. Inside she found the usual clutter that she would have expected to find in a young woman’s handbag – a red plastic purse and make-up and keys and a roll of peppermints and shopping receipts and Always pads.

At the back of the handbag there was another zipped-up compartment and she opened that, too. Crammed tightly inside it was something made of black material, which she carefully pulled out. She gave the handbag back to Detective O’Donovan and unfolded the material to see what it was.

‘Holy Mother of God,’ said Detective O’Donovan, and Bill Phinner and Eithne and Sergeant O’Malley came across to look at it, too.

It was a hood, with two pointed peaks that had the appearance of horns. It was made out of thick black cotton which looked as if it had been hand-stitched. The left eye-hole was empty, with two or three loose threads hanging from it, but the right eye-hole had a red transparent oval of plastic sewn into it.

‘Will you look at that?’ said Bill. ‘That’s identical to the piece of red plastic we found in the garden. I’d say what you have there, ma’am, is Satan himself.’

Katie glanced towards the office building to make sure that Redmond Keane hadn’t seen her holding up the hood. Then she folded it up and pushed it back into Clodagh’s handbag.

‘What do you reckon, ma’am?’ said Detective O’Donovan.

‘For the time being I’m trying to keep an open mind,’ Katie told him. ‘All the same, I think we can discount the possibility that Clodagh herself was dressing up as Satan, even if she had the mask in her bag. Mary O’Donnell said that Satan was very tall, with a voice like gravel going round in a concrete mixer. Clodagh was about five foot three and sounded more like one of the Nolans.’

‘She wouldn’t have had the strength, either, to bash in Father Fiachra’s head with that rocker,’ Bill put in.

‘You’re right,’ said Katie. ‘I think she must have found that hood somewhere in the factory and hidden it in her handbag so that she could show it to me later. The tragic thing is that Satan got to her first.’

Bill said, ‘I’ll take the hood back to the lab directly and test it for hair and DNA. If the fellow was talking while he was wearing it, there’s bound to be saliva on it.’

‘That’s grand,’ said Katie. ‘And I think we can speed things up by taking DNA samples from all of Toolmate’s workforce right now. We won’t need a warrant for that. Eithne? Tyrone? Do you have what you need to screen everybody here? I think the workforce numbers just under forty altogether.’

‘We have millions of swabs in the van so,’ said Tyrone. ‘We could test half of Munster if you wanted us to.’

Katie snapped off her forensic gloves. ‘Very good. I’ll just go and have a word with Mr Keane and tell him what we’re intending to do. I don’t think he’s going to be best pleased about it, but you know what they say. If you’re going to dance with the devil, make sure you’re wearing your fireproof shoes.’

*

It was late in the afternoon before the technical team had finished taking DNA samples from all of the workers at Toolmate. One by one they had reluctantly shuffled into the staff canteen for Eithne and Tyrone to swab the insides of their cheeks, and then shuffled out again, scowling.

Redmond Keane had protested at first, but Katie had sharply told him that she was sufficiently high-ranking to authorize an
ad hoc
DNA screening and in the end he had shrugged and given in, pretending to be good-humoured about it. Technically, she could also have authorized a search of the premises without a district court warrant. As she had told Bill, however, she didn’t want her chances of successfully prosecuting Clodagh’s killer to be jeopardized by some last-minute legal hair-splitting.

Besides, she already had in her possession the single most important piece of evidence that she would have been looking for – Satan’s hood.

At 4.15 p.m., Detective O’Donovan came back to the Garda station at Anglesea Street with the search warrant from Judge Michael Flanagan.

‘Good – but I’m going to hold off the search until we have the DNA results,’ Katie told him. ‘That way we’ll know if one of those workers is a viable suspect or not and it’ll save us a whole lot of time and money.’

‘What if it’s none of them?’

‘Then we’ll have to think again, won’t we? But I’ll bet you money that Clodagh was right and that Redmond Keane is behind all of this, along with some other fellow in the factory – maybe more than one of them. Clodagh managed to find Satan’s hood, didn’t she? – although I wish I knew
where
she found it.’

‘I’ll tell you, though, it didn’t seem to me like Keane
knew
that she’d taken it,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘He would have searched her bag, like, wouldn’t he?’

‘I think you’re right,’ said Katie. ‘When I told Keane we were going to take DNA samples of everybody in the factory he wasn’t too happy about it, but he didn’t go mental. That makes me think that he didn’t realize the hood was already missing and that he was he confident he had plenty of time to dispose of it before I came back with a search warrant.’

‘How long before we get the results?’ asked Detective O’Donovan.

‘Another eight or nine hours, and that’s them going flat out. But I’ve ordered Keane’s home to be kept under surveillance tonight and we’ll be intercepting his phone calls and emails.’

‘It’s the motives that are clear as mud,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘Why did Satan bash the priest’s brains out – that’s always supposing it was Satan that did it. And why was Clodagh drowned in that tank like that, especially if they didn’t know that she’d found that hood?’

*

Katie spent the rest of the day going through her paperwork. She was prosecuting a fifteen-strong Romanian gang for cigarette-smuggling and she had to read through the Book of Evidence, which was almost as thick as the Old Testament but a great deal less exciting.

When she had finished that, she leafed quickly through a report from Detective Brennan on five arrests that had been made that afternoon during a violent public protest on Centre Park Road. Cork Petroleum had applied for planning permission to extend their storage facility on the south bank of the River Lee, which would mean that a terrace of
nineteenth-century houses would have to be demolished and half of a small public park paved over. She had already tossed the report aside when she remembered what Redmond Keane had said to her when she had asked him about Clodagh’s wages.

Toolmate is growing really fast, and if we’re going to keep up with demand we need new storage facilities and at least three new workshops.

That was all very well, thought Katie, but where could they possibly find the space to build them? The Toolmate factory was sited in a north-pointing triangle where the R614 to Rathcormac joined the road from Upper Glanmire. On the south side, which was the only direction in which they could expand their site, stood Mary O’Donnell’s bungalow.

She called Detective O’Donovan and asked him to check through all the applications made to Cork County Council’s planning department over the past twelve months, and what their decisions had been.

He came back in less than an hour. ‘An application was made on 26 March this year by Toolmate Ltd for outline planning permission. They wanted to demolish a single-storey dwelling called Killshallow adjacent to their premises and construct in its place three workshops and two storage sheds.’

‘And what was the outcome?’

‘Permission was granted, yes. But there’s an addendum attached to the council’s decision, noting that the owner of the single-storey dwelling would have to agree to sell voluntarily at the market price. The council were not prepared to make a compulsory purchase order on Toolmate’s behalf.’

‘So that’s what Satan was doing in Mary O’Donnell’s garden,’ said Katie. ‘She didn’t want to sell, and the county council wouldn’t force her to move out, so Redmond Keane summoned His Satanic Majesty to frighten her away.’

‘That still doesn’t explain why Satan had to kill Father Fiachra. That’s assuming that it
was
Satan who killed him – but then Bill found no evidence that anybody else had been in the garden that morning. The fellow was in disguise, after all, and what threat could an eighty-three-year-old retired priest have been to him?’

‘He’d lost one of his eyes. Maybe he lost the head, too.’

*

Shortly after ten the next morning, when Katie was peeling the lid off her macchiato, Eithne came into her office with the first results of the DNA tests.

Her sleeves were untidily rolled up and her blonde hair was sticking up even spikier than usual. She had shadowy circles under her eyes.

‘Don’t tell me you’ve been working on these all night,’ said Katie.

‘Don’t worry, ma’am,’ said Eithne. ‘Tyrone’s finishing off the rest and I’ve been given the rest of the day off to catch up with my sleep. But we thought you should see these right away because we’ve come up with a probable match.’

She laid a plastic folder on Katie’s desk and pointed to the long list of figures on the sheet of paper inside it. ‘We found three long grey hairs inside the hood and traces of saliva. When we made a DNA comparison, we found that we couldn’t exclude a forge operator named Dermot Breen.’

‘Which is lab-speak for being 99.9 per cent certain that it was him?’

‘That’s right, ma’am, and he’s the only person who’s been wearing that hood. Nobody else has been playing Satan, only him.’

‘Thank you, Eithne,’ smiled Katie. ‘Now you can go and get your head down on that pillow. You deserve it.’

*

It was nearly nine-thirty in the evening and Dermot was still denying that he had struck Father Fiachra with the rock.

Katie and Detective O’Donovan had been interviewing him now for almost five hours, but all he would say was, ‘I was wearing the hood, I admit it. I was there in the auld wan’s garden, I admit it.’

‘There’s no way at all that you can deny it, Dermot,’ said Katie. ‘Your hair and your spit were found inside the hood and your footprint and one of the eyes from your hood was found in Mary O’Donnell’s flower bed.’

‘I never saw no priest, though. I swear on the Bible. I never saw no priest and I never hit him with no rocker.’

‘If you didn’t see him it would have been hard for you to hit him, I’ll grant you that,’ Katie told him. ‘But the fact is, Dermot, there was nobody else in that garden that morning except for you and him, so who else could have attacked him?’

‘I never saw no priest, I swear on the Holy Bible. I never saw no priest and I never hit him with no rocker.’

Dermot’s solicitor Bryan Doody gave a long, exaggerated sigh. He was a short, portly man with a snub nose and a comb-over, and a navy pinstriped suit that was two sizes too tight for him, and he smelled strongly of stale cigars. All the same, he was a partner in one of the most expensive firms of lawyers on South Mall and Katie knew from experience that he wasn’t to be underestimated.

‘I don’t see the need for you to keep repeating the same question over and over again, Detective Superintendent,’ he told her. ‘My client has admitted that he was attempting to alarm Mrs O’Donnell, but only as joke. A bad joke, I’ll grant you, but Mrs O’Donnell’s refusal to sell her property to the Toolmate company had caused a great deal of ill feeling, since the future of so many local jobs depended on it. It wasn’t as if Toolmate weren’t offering her a price that was far above the market valuation.’

He dragged out a handkerchief and loudly blew his nose. Then he said, ‘You have circumstantial evidence that shows that my client was at some time in Mrs O’Donnell’s garden, I’m prepared to grant you that. But your evidence in no way establishes that he was there at the same time as Father Fiachra, and it certainly doesn’t prove that he attacked him.