Authors: Graham Masterton
Eye for an Eye (6 page)
‘Quite apart from that, my client is an extremely God-fearing man and it would be totally against his faith to inflict harm of any kind on a member of the clergy.’
‘Very well,’ said Katie, checking her watch. ‘Let’s call an end to this interview for now. But I have to advise you that I’ll be asking your client further questions tomorrow morning.’
Bryan Doody stood up and tucked his notes into his briefcase. ‘You can question him as much as you like, Detective Superintendent, but you’ll only get the same answer. He played a prank on Mrs O’Donnell, but as far as I know there has never been a law in Ireland against playing pranks. If there were, every member of the Dáil would have been locked up years ago.’
He smiled and held out his hand, but Katie didn’t take it.
‘I’m in court tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘If you need to contact me, here’s my card. As I say, you can question my client until you’re black in the face, for all the good it will do you. He can’t admit to something that he didn’t do, and in any event you’ll have to release him by lunchtime, unless your chief superintendent makes an application to the district court to hold him for longer.’
*
That night, before she went to bed, Katie stood for a long time in front of the full-length mirror in her wardrobe. It had been two weeks since she had been to the hairdresser and her dark red hair looked as if she had been standing in a hurricane, but she had dropped a dress size since Easter and even though she was pale she thought she looked much better than she felt.
It was the endless legal wrangling that made her feel so tired. Bryan Doody suspected as strongly as she did that Dermot Breen had killed Father Fiachra, and they were both aware that Redmond Keane had probably put him up to his satanic ‘prank’. But there had been no eye-witnesses and none of the forensic evidence was conclusive. Clodagh had seen Redmond talking to a man in a hood, but even if Clodagh hadn’t been killed her evidence would have carried very little weight in court.
Katie stared at her reflection. If only she and her reflection could be twins, and one Katie could go on a few days’ holiday to Gran Canaria while the other Katie stayed here in Cork, questioning Dermot Breen until he broke down and admitted what he had done – not that she believed for one moment that he
would
admit it. He was physically gigantic and mentally impervious and she could tell that he had never been afraid of anyone in his life.
But then she thought: maybe one twin could ask him what had really happened in Mary O’Donnell’s garden. Not a twin of herself, but Father Fiachra’s twin, Deaglán. If Father Fiachra had lived until he was eighty-three, there was a remote chance that his brother had, too, even if he had led the life of a gangster.
She picked up her phone and rang Detective Aileen Brody, who was on night duty.
‘Aileen? It’s DS Maguire. See if you can find me a fellow called Deaglán Caomhánach, He has a whole rake of criminal convictions so it shouldn’t be too hard to find him, if he’s still living and breathing. The family came from Fair Hill, originally. That’s right, Caomhánach. Call me back if you have any luck, or even if you don’t.’
*
He was sitting by the window in the residents’ lounge with a tartan blanket over his knees, white-haired, his cheeks deeply lined, staring at the small brick-paved courtyard outside, where pigeons were pecking at some slices of soda bread.
Katie walked over and stood close beside him, but he continued to stare at the pigeons, making small sipping noises with his false teeth and occasionally clearing his throat.
‘Deaglán?’ said Katie, after a while.
‘Who wants to know?’ asked Deaglán, still without looking up at her.
‘My name’s Kathleen – Kathleen Maguire. I’m a detective superintendent from the Garda station at Anglesea Street.’
‘Are you now? Are you shades still going to be bothering me when I’m lying in my casket?’
‘I’m not after you, Deaglán,’ said Katie. ‘I’ve come about your brother, Fiachra,’
‘My saintly brother Fiachra, God rest his soul,’ said Deaglán. ‘Don’t worry, Detective Superintendent, the matron told me yesterday what had happened to him. Of all the people in the world who didn’t deserve to die a horrible violent death like that, it was Fiachra.’
‘We have a suspect in custody,’ said Katie. ‘We’re ninety-nine per cent sure that he murdered your brother, but he’s denying it of course and our evidence isn’t exactly what you’d call watertight.’
Deaglán turned his head around and looked at Katie for the first time, and he looked so much like his brother that it was unnerving. Of course she had never seen Father Fiachra alive, but she doubted that his eyes would have been so cold and so penetrating. Deaglán had the appearance of a man who didn’t care how much he hurt people, so long as he got what he wanted.
He sipped at his false teeth again and then he said, ‘Why don’t you bring your man around here and leave me alone with him for half an hour? I’ll make sure that justice is done.’
‘I think I have a better idea,’ said Katie. ‘One that wouldn’t entail me having to arrest you afterwards for manslaughter.’
Deaglán suddenly grinned, and then just as suddenly stopped grinning. ‘Go on, then,’ he said. ‘What’s your better idea, Kathleen?’
*
When Katie and Detective O’Donovan entered the interview room, Dermot was drumming his enormous fingers on the table top and he didn’t stop drumming when Katie sat down opposite him and switched on the digital recorder.
‘I’m going to give you the opportunity to admit to what you did, Dermot,’ she told him. ‘If you confess to killing Father Fiachra, and show that you’re genuinely sorry for what you did, I can almost guarantee that your sentence will be very much lighter.’
‘I never saw no priest,’ said Dermot in a flat, expressionless voice. ‘I never saw no priest and I never hit him with no rocker.’
‘You do realize that God will convict you in the court of Heaven, don’t you, for what you’ve done – especially if you lie about it?’
Dermot flinched, as if he had been bitten on the cheek by a gnat, but all he said was, ‘I never saw no priest. I never hurt him.’
It was then that Katie nodded to Detective O’Donovan, who stood up and went to the door of the interview room. Dermot didn’t look at him, but continued to stare at the table in front of him, where his large hands lay.
Detective O’Donovan opened the door and said quietly, ‘Come in, Father Fiachra. He’s here.’
Deaglán Caomhánach walked in, dressed in a black suit with a white priest’s collar. He had shaved, and his white hair had been cut and combed in a wave so that he exactly resembled his dead twin brother.
‘It was you!’ he said in a croaky voice. He pointed at Dermot, his arm stiff, his eyes cold and accusing. ‘Don’t you try to deny it! It was you!’
Dermot’s mouth slowly dropped open. He stared at Deaglán and then he stared at Katie and then he stared back at Deaglán again. He was speechless with shock.
Deaglán walked towards the table, still pointing. Dermot let out an extraordinary noise that was halfway between a cough and a screech, and tumbled off his chair on to his knees. He clasped both of his hands together like a penitent. ‘I was scared, father! I was scared! I only hit you because I was scared!’
‘Scared?’ said Deaglán. ‘How could a beast of a yoke like you be scared of an auld fella like me?’
‘Because you knew me, father, that’s why! Because you spoke out my name! You recognized me from church even though I was all dressed up like the Devil! Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have grassed me out to the shades! You would have done, wouldn’t you, and how many colours of shite would I have been in then?’
‘And that was your justification for beating my head in with a rock?’ Deaglán demanded. Katie had to admit to herself that he was playing his part with almost theatrical relish. He was clearly enjoying every moment of Dermot’s near-hysteria.
‘I didn’t do it from choicer, father! My boss would have killed me! Same reason I had to throw that Clodagh into the plating tank! He said that nobody had to know what game we’d been playing, trying to scare that old woman!’
‘And you’ll swear that you murdered me?’ Deaglán persisted. ‘You’ll swear it in on the Holy Bible, in front of a judge? If you don’t, boy, I’m going to drag you to Hell with me, right here and now!’
‘I will, I will, I promise you, father. Please forgive me.’
Katie said, ‘You’ll swear that you murdered young Clodagh, too? And that Redmond Keane put you up to it?’
Dermot was sweating now and shaking as if he had a fever. He nodded so frantically that spit flew from his lips and said, ‘I’ll swear it! I’ll swear it! Please don’t take me to Hell, father! Please!’
Deaglán didn’t answer immediately but continued to point at him and stare at him hard. Then he said, ‘If you don’t keep your promise, I shall come back for you. Don’t think that I won’t.’
With that, he turned around and walked out of the door, and Detective O’Donovan closed it behind him. Dermot remained on his knees, wringing his hands together, with tears sliding down his face.
Katie stood up and said, ‘Take care of this miserable wretch for me, would you, Patrick? I have an appointment at White’s Cross to keep.’
*
Redmond Keane was on the phone when Katie entered his office with two uniformed gardaí. As soon as he saw her, he said, ‘I’ll ring you later so,’ and hung up.
‘Good morning, Redmond,’ said Katie. ‘I think you can guess why I’m here.’
‘Not to invite me out on a date, I imagine,’ Redmond smiled. He went over to the coat stand and took down his trench coat. When he had shrugged it on, one of the gardaí came up to him and put handcuffs on him.
‘What’s the charge, Katie?’ he asked her.
‘Conspiracy to murder under Section 4 of the Offences Against the Person Act,’ said Katie. ‘Otherwise known as “dancing with the devil”.’
~
We hope you enjoyed this book!
For an exclusive preview of
White Bones
, the first full-length novel in the Katie Maguire series, read on or click the image.
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summer 2016
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Read on for a preview of
One wet, windswept November morning, a field on Meagher’s farm gives up the dismembered bones of eleven women...
Their skeletons bear the marks of a meticulous butcher. The bodies date back to 1915. All were likely skinned alive.
But then a young woman goes missing, and her remains, the bones carefully stripped and arranged in an arcane pattern, are discovered on the same farm.
With the crimes of the past echoing in the present, D.S. Katie Maguire must solve a decades-old murder steeped in ancient legend... before this terrifying killer strikes again.
Can’t wait? Buy
White Bones
here now
!
John had never seen so many hooded crows circling around the farm as he did that wet November morning. His father always used to say that whenever you saw more than seven hooded crows gathered together, they had come to gloat over a human tragedy.
It was tragedy weather, too. Curtains of rain had been trailing across the Nagle Mountains since well before dawn, and the north-west field was so heavy that it had taken him more than three hours to plow it. He was turning the tractor around by the top corner, close to the copse called Iollan’s Wood, when he saw Gabriel frantically waving from the gate.
John waved back. Jesus, what did the idiot want now? If you gave Gabriel a job to do, you might just as well do it yourself, because he was always asking what to do next, and was it screws or nails you wanted, and what sort of wood were you after having this made from? John kept on steadily plowing, with big lumps of sticky mud pattering off the wheels, but Gabriel came struggling up the field toward him, still waving, with crows irritably flapping all around him. He was obviously shouting, too, although John couldn’t hear him.
As Gabriel came puffing up to him in his raggedy old brown tweeds and gumboots, John switched off the tractor’s engine and took off his ear-protectors.
“What’s wrong now, Gabe? Did you forget which end of
the shovel you’re supposed to be digging with?”
“There’s bones, John!
Bones
! So many fecking bones you can’t even count them!”
John wiped the rain off his face with the back of his hand. “Bones? Where? What kind of bones?”
“Under the floor, John!
People’s
bones! Come and see for yourself! The whole place looks like a fecking graveyard!”
John climbed down from the tractor and ankle-deep into the mud. Close up, Gabriel smelled strongly of stale beer, but John was quite aware that he drank while he worked, even though he went to considerable pains to conceal his cans of Murphy’s under a heap of sacking at the back of the barn.
“We was digging the foundations close to the house when the boy says there’s something in the ground here, and he digs away with his fingers and out comes this human skull with its eyes full of dirt. Then we were after digging some more and there was four more skulls and bones like you never seen the like of, leg-bones and arm-bones and finger-bones and rib-bones.”
John strode long-legged down toward the gate. He was tall and dark, with thick black hair and almost Spanish good looks. He had only been back in Ireland for just over a year, and he was still finding it difficult to cope with running a farm. One sunny May morning he had been just about to close the door of his apartment on Jones Street in San Francisco when the telephone had rung, and it had been his mother, telling him that his father had suffered a massive stroke. And then, two days later, that his father was dead.
He hadn’t intended to come back to Ireland, let alone take over the farm. But his mother had simply assumed that he would, him being the eldest boy, and all his uncles and aunts and cousins had greeted him as if he were head of the Meagher family now. He had flown back to San Francisco to sell his
dot.com alternative medicine business and say goodbye to his friends, and here he was, walking through the gate of Meagher’s Farm in a steady drizzle, with a beery-breathed Gabriel
following
close behind him.
“I’d say it was a mass murder,” Gabriel panted.
“Well, we’ll see.”
The farmhouse was a wide green-painted building with a gray slate roof, with six or seven leafless elms standing at its south-eastern side like an embarrassed crowd of naked bathers. A sharply-sloping driveway led down to the road to Ballyhooly, to the north, and Cork City, eleven miles to the south. John crossed the muddy tarmac courtyard and went around to the north side of the house, where Gabriel and a boy called Finbar had already knocked down a rotten old feed store and were now excavating the foundations for a modernized boiler-house.
They had cleared an area twelve feet by twenty. The earth was black and raw and had the sour, distinctive smell of peat. Finbar was standing on the far side of the excavation, mournfully holding a shovel. He was a thin, pasty-faced lad with a
closely-cropped
head, protruding ears, and a soggy gray jumper.
On the ground in front of him, like a scene from Pol Pot’s Cambodia, lay four human skulls. Nearer to the damp,
cement-rendered
wall of the farmhouse, there was a hole which was crowded with muddy human bones.
John hunkered down and stared at the skulls as if he were expecting them to explain themselves.
“God Almighty. These must have been here for a pretty long time. There isn’t a scrap of flesh left on any of them.”
“An unmarked grave, I’d say,” put in Gabriel. “A bunch of fellows who got on the wrong side of the IRA.”
“Scared the shite out of me,” said Finbar, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “I was digging away and all of a sudden there was
this skull grinning up at me like my old uncle Billy.”
John picked up a long iron spike and prodded amongst the bones. He saw a jawbone, and part of a ribcage, and another skull. That made at least five bodies. There was only one thing to do, and that was to call the Garda.
“You don’t think your dad knew about this?” asked Gabriel, as John walked back to the house.
“What do you mean? Of course he didn’t know.”
“Well, he was a great republican, your dad.”
John stopped and stared at him. “What are you trying to say?”
“I’m not trying to say nothing, but if certain people wanted a place to hide certain remains that they didn’t want nobody to find, your dad might have possibly obliged them, if you see what I mean.”
“Oh, come on, Gabriel. My dad wouldn’t have allowed bodies to be buried on his property.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure, John. There was certain stuff buried here once, under the cowshed, for a while.”
“You mean guns?”
“I’m just saying that it might be better for all concerned if we forgot what we found here. They’re dead and buried already, these fellows, why disturb them? Your dad’s dead and buried, too, you don’t want people raking over his reputation now, do you?”
John said, “Gabe, these are human beings, for Christ’s sake. If we just cover them up, there are going to be five families who will never know where their sons or their husbands went. Can you imagine anything worse than that?”
“Well, I suppose you’re right. But it still strikes me as stirring up trouble when there’s no particular call to.”
John went into the house. It was gloomy inside, and it always
smelled of damp at this time of year. He took off his boots and washed his hands in the small cloakroom at the side of the hall. Then he went into the large quarry-tiled kitchen where his mother was baking. She seemed so small these days, with her white hair and her stooped back and her eyes as pale as milk. She was sieving out flour for tea brack.
“Did you finish the plowing, John?” she asked him.
“Not quite. I have to use the telephone.”
He hesitated. She looked up and frowned at him. “Is everything all right?”
“Of course, mam. I have to make a phone call, that’s all.”
“You were going to ask me something.” Oh, she was cute, his mother.
“Ask you something? No. Don’t worry about it.” If his father really had allowed the IRA to bury bodies on his land, he very much doubted that he would have confided in his mother. What you don’t know can’t knock on your door in the middle of the night.
He went into the living-room with its tapestry-covered furniture and its big red-brick fireplace, where three huge logs were crackling and Lucifer the black Labrador was stretched out on the rug with his legs indecently wide apart. He picked up the old-fashioned black telephone and dialed 112.
“Hallo? I want the Garda. I need to speak to somebody in charge. Yes. Well, this is John Meagher up at Meagher’s Farm in Knocknadeenly. We’ve dug up some bodies.”
