Living Death (11 page)

‘No, no bother at all,’ Katie told her. She was about to say that he had slept like a baby, but then she thought of Seamus and she stopped herself. She looked across at the clock on the mantelpiece and said, ‘I have to go now, but I shouldn’t be back too late so.’

‘John has an appointment with Doctor Kashani tomorrow morning at eleven-thirty,’ Bridie reminded her. ‘That’s to see if he’s ready yet for the next stage of his prosthetics. I’ll take him there myself of course but you might want to meet us there.’

‘I’m up the walls with work at the moment, but I’ll try.’

‘It’s just in case you want to ask Doctor Kashani direct about John’s long-term treatment. You know – when he might expect to start walking again, and what medication he’s going to have to take, and for how long, and such, do you know what I mean?’

‘Like I say, Bridie, I’ll do my best.’

‘And of course there’s the psychological side to it. Some of the amputees I’ve taken care of, they’ve taken a brave few years to get used to losing their arms or their legs or whatever. And it’s quare, you know, the fitter they were before their ampumatation, the more depressed they are about it. They keep staring at the place where their leg or their arm was, as if they can force it to grow back again by willpower.’

‘I can understand that, yes, after talking to John,’ said Katie. ‘I don’t think he’s finding it at all easy to deal with.’

Bridie was struggling to reach behind her hips and fasten her apron. ‘He has
you
, at least. You know how much he’s relying on you, don’t you?’

Katie didn’t answer that but said, ‘Here,’ and tied up the strings for her. ‘Tell John I’ll try to get back home as early as I can.’

‘I will of course.’

*

It was raining as she drove into the city on the N25 – not torrentially, but fine silvery cloaks of drizzle that drifted across the city like a procession of ghosts, and softly rattled against the side windows of her car as if they were trying to attract her attention.
Don’t you remember us, Katie? We remember you.

She had received at least a dozen messages, and she listened to them as she drove. Detective O’Donovan needed to talk to her about a District Court case against a Romanian pimp which had collapsed for lack of credible witnesses, and Detective Ó Doibhilin had traced the origin of one of the porn fraud sites. Inspector O’Brien from Bandon said that he had a possible ID on the ‘feller’ with whom Cleona Cassidy had been having an affair, and Detective Dooley thought that he might have a lead on two of the most valuable dogs that had been stolen from Sceolan Boarding Kennels.

The last message surprised her most of all, though. It was delivered in the dry, emotionless tones of Assistant Commissioner Jimmy O’Reilly.

‘Katie, if you would be so good as to come by my office as soon as you get in, there’s a matter I have to discuss with you. Something pure confidential.’

Katie was so taken aback by this message that she played it again, twice. The relationship between her and Jimmy O’Reilly had always been unpleasantly abrasive, right from the very start. He was one of the old-school golf-playing stonecutters, and he had made no secret of his annoyance when Katie had been promoted over the heads of several senior male inspectors, even though she was equally experienced and – in some instances – much more qualified. Her appointment as detective superintendent had been part of An Garda Siochána’s drive to show that they gave just as much opportunity to women officers as they did to men, but Jimmy O’Reilly had seemed to consider her promotion a personal affront. As far as he was concerned, female gardaí were good only for making tea and comforting battered wives and seeing primary school children across the road.

What had finally brought him to the point where he would barely even speak to Katie was her discovery that he had been passing confidential Garda information to a Cork thug called Bobby Quilty, in return for substantial unsecured loans. He had been borrowing the money to give to one of his young personal assistants, James Elvin, to pay off his gambling debts. James Elvin was not only his personal assistant, but his lover.

So what was this ‘pure confidential’ matter that Jimmy O’Reilly wanted to discuss with her? Katie had found out that he had been tipping off Bobby Quilty about imminent Garda raids on his properties, but she had still failed to come up with enough incriminating evidence to take to the Commissioner and the Garda Ombudsman, and finish his career. That was why the last few months between them had been characterised by such a hostile deadlock.

After she had hung up her plum-coloured raincoat in her own office she put her head around the door and said good morning to Moirin, her new assistant. Moirin was small and chubby with a pale heart-shaped face and red heart-shaped lips and black bouffant hair, like Disney’s Snow White. If Katie hadn’t known that she was twenty-six years old and a single mother, she would have guessed that she had only just left secondary school.

‘Assistant Commissioner O’Reilly was asking after you, ma’am.’

‘Yes, Moirin, I picked up his message on my mobile. I’m heading along to see him now, once I get myself a coffee. But don’t be surprised if I come back with two black eyes.’

Moirin gave a hesitant little ‘
Stop!
’ but said nothing else. She had been working here at Anglesea Street for only five weeks and she wasn’t yet sure whom it was safe to talk about sarcastically, and whom she should treat with respect.

Katie went to the canteen for a take-away cappuccino and carried it along the corridor to Jimmy O’Reilly’s office, pinching the lid between finger and thumb because it was so hot. She knocked and he immediately barked out, ‘
Come!
’

He was standing by the window with his back to her, looking out at the rain. He was wearing his navy-blue full dress uniform, with his medals and his Sam Browne belt, and she remembered that he was attending a memorial service today for one of his predecessors, Martin Duggan.

‘I heard your message,’ she said.

He paused for a long moment and then he turned around. He was very thin, with a gaunt, cadaverous face, and a concave chest, and eyes that had as much expression as two stones picked up off the beach. His silvery hair was greased straight back from his forehead and half of his left earlobe was missing, although he had always refused to explain how and when he had lost it. Detective Dooley reckoned that a Rottweiler had mistaken him for a bone.

‘Ah, Katie,’ he said. ‘Sit down for a moment will you.’

Katie sat, placing her coffee cup down on his blotter. He stared at it, his nostrils widening with every breath, as if he were going to tell her to take it off immediately, but then he obviously decided that life was too short and that the relationship between them was strained enough already.

He sat down himself, and tilted himself back in his black leather chair, his hands steepled in front of him, his eyes narrowed towards the window, and not at her.

‘You and I are both adults, Katie,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to pretend that things between us are remotely what you might call amicable. However, we have a job to do and that job is more important than any ill-feeling that we might harbour towards each other.’

‘I’ve no personal ill-feeling towards you, sir,’ said Katie. ‘I’m perfectly well aware of what situation you found yourself in, and I fully understand why you did what you did.’

‘Oh, is that so?’

‘Yes. You know full well yourself that when you passed on information to Bobby Quilty, you placed me and three people that I cared about in danger of their lives, and I find that professionally unforgivable. I’ve said this to you before and I don’t mind saying it again: how do you think I can trust you now? How do you think I can take your word for anything?’

Jimmy O’Reilly sucked in his cheeks, and his nostrils flared even wider. Katie sensed that he was right on the brink of jumping up and barking at her, but he restrained himself, and continued breathing steadily, and carried on talking to her in that dry, expressionless monotone.

‘As I said, we have a job to do and the job comes first. Especially when it comes to protecting the public at large. I simply want to pass on to you some information which was sent to me late yesterday by the Special Detective Unit.’ He paused, and then he added, still without looking at her, ‘You can trust
them
, I imagine?’

‘The SDU? I would hope so.’

‘It’s highly classified, this intelligence, Katie, and before I share it with you, I have to warn you that you’re not to divulge even a whisper of it to anybody outside of this room. Not yet, anyway. Not until you’ve satisfied yourself – and
me
, of course – that it’s one hundred and ten per cent accurate. Not until you’re confident that you’re ready to act on it, and make arrests that will lead to certain convictions. You’ll understand why when I tell you where it came from.’

Katie said, ‘Why can’t the SDU act on it themselves?’

‘Because they’re still unable to verify what they’ve been told, not to the point where they can justify a search warrant. Whereas
you
, Katie – you’re just about the only person in Cork who could do that for them.’

‘Why me?’

‘The source of their information declines to talk to anybody else, that’s why. She says she can’t trust any other Garda officer but you, because you came up with the evidence that saved her brother from prosecution.’

‘I think I know who you’re talking about,’ said Katie. ‘Maureen Callahan. Is that right?’

‘That’s right. I don’t exactly know the full details of what you did for her brother, but apparently she was adamant that she was only going to share her information with you.’

‘Well... I’ve always had the feeling that Maureen’s not altogether happy being a member of the Callahan family,’ Katie told him. ‘Not an
active
member, anyway. But those three sisters of hers – they’re enough to scare the sheet off a ghost. I don’t think she ever dares to step out of line.’

Katie knew Maureen Callahan well, and couldn’t help herself from liking her, because she was pretty and funny with brassy blonde hair and very smart. The problem was that she was the youngest member of one of Cork’s most violent crime families. The Callahans were involved in protection rackets and heroin dealing in the city’s nightclubs, but most of their money came from gun-running. They had made a fortune smuggling in automatic weapons and pistols and even rocket launchers from eastern Europe and supplying them to the Authentic IRA and the drug gangs of south-west Dublin.

Like several other criminal gangs in southern Ireland, the Callahans had survived and prospered for so long because they were run by women. Instead of having lethal feuds with their rivals, the way their menfolk did, they gritted their teeth and co-operated with them, no matter how much they despised them. They paid their fathers and sons and brothers to stay in the pub all day and not to interfere with business.

‘So what’s the story between you and Maureen Callahan, then?’ asked Jimmy O’Reilly.

‘It was on Paddy’s Day last year. There was a fight in the street outside Cubin’s and Maureen’s brother Padraig was arrested for stabbing a member of the O’Flynn family. The O’Flynn fellow wasn’t killed, but he lost three fingers and a lot of blood. The next day two alleged eye-witnesses picked out Padraig, but they were so sure of themselves that I thought that there had to be something suspicious about them. No “ums” or “ahs” or “it might have been him, like, but then maybe it wasn’t”. That was in spite of the fact that it was pitch dark and everybody involved was either high or langers or both.

‘I had my team go through all of the CCTV footage in the city that night, and sure enough there was Padraig Callahan at the exact time of the stabbing, coming out of The Pav.’

Jimmy O’Reilly waited expectantly for Katie to continue, but she didn’t tell him what her suspicions had been: that the two eye-witnesses had been bribed by Acting Chief Superintendent Bryan Molloy to identify Padraig Callahan. During the course of his career, Molloy had earned himself a formidable track record for crushing criminal gangs, especially the warring families who used to dominate Limerick’s underworld, but he had frequently falsified evidence to make sure that he got the convictions that he wanted. He had retired now, but Katie knew that he still bore her a volcanic grudge, and that was why she never spoke about him, in case word got back to him, and he lodged a formal complaint with the Garda Ombudsman.

When he realised that Katie wasn’t going to add any more, Jimmy O’Reilly said, ‘Any road, Maureen Callahan approached an SDU detective over the weekend. He was plainclothes, of course, and she didn’t know who he was, but for some reason he told her that a friend of his was a guard. She told him that she had some major information about her family that we’d be interested in.’

‘Information about what?’

‘She wouldn’t tell him, but it’s a fair bet that it’s either about drugs or guns, and even though she’d had a fair few scoops the detective had the feeling that she wasn’t messing. Since she wouldn’t speak to him, he suggested that she give us a ring here at Anglesea Street, even if she did it anonymous-like. It was then that she mentioned your name, and told him that you were the only Garda officer she felt she could confide in. So – I’d say you need to meet up with her, and as soon as you can arrange it.’

‘How can I get in touch with her?’

‘Here, take this down,’ said Jimmy O’Reilly, opening up a folder on his desk. ‘This is her mobile.’ Katie took out her iPhone and prodded out the number that he read to her. ‘She’ll be free sometime after five, so she said, but not to try and get in touch before then because she’ll be home with her sisters, and of course she doesn’t want
them
to know that she’s talking to the guards. If you ring her or text her then you can arrange somewhere discreet to meet her.’

‘Can you give me
his
name, the SDU officer? I’d like to speak to him in person.’

‘Well, yes, of course I know who he is, but I’m not allowed to tell anybody else, Katie, even you. You know how secretive they are, the SDU. All of this information came direct from Detective Superintendent O’Malley at Harcourt Street.’