Living Death (50 page)

‘You’ve hurt me, Eoin,’ said Cleona. ‘You’ve really, really hurt me.’

‘And you don’t think you deserve it? You slut! You fecking
slut
! You’re sitting there with another man’s wain inside of you, and you’re moaning that I’ve hurt you? Jesus Christ in Heaven, what do you think you’ve done to me?’

Cleona winced and closed her eyes, keeping her arms wrapped around her midriff. Eoin leaned over her and shouted in her ear, ‘Whose is it, Clee? Whose little bastard is it? How many other scumbags have you been poking? Jesus, what a deceitful whore you are! Whose is it?’

‘What difference does it make?’ whispered Cleona. ‘It’s a baby, it’s a new life, that’s all.’

‘What
difference
does it make? You’re fecking joking, aren’t you? What
difference
does it make? Don’t you remember the vow you made when we got married? “I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad?” Remember saying that, Clee? But you let some other scumbag poke you, and not only that, you’re expecting his baby! So whose baby is it? Come on, tell me who he is!’

Cleona gave him the smallest shake of her head. She was concentrating too much on the pain that she was feeling in her stomach, and suddenly she convulsed and brought up a handful of pale grey sick, half phlegm and half porridge.

‘Holy Mary Mother of God you fecking disgust me,’ said Eoin. ‘Are you going to tell me who the father is, or what? Or will I have to beat it out of you?’

Cleona wiped her hand on the cushion and started to sob. Eoin stood watching her for a moment with his mouth turned down in revulsion, and then he stalked stiff-legged out of the room, hitting his shoulder against the doorframe. He went out into the hallway and then Cleona heard him open the front door. A damp, chilly draught blew in from the yard outside, a draught that smelled of recent rain and dogs.

After a while she managed to stand up and shuffle to the kitchen. She bent over the sink, staring one-eyed at the plughole while her stomach tightened and she brought up more sick.

Please dear God let my baby be safe. Please calm Eoin down and make him understand how desperately I needed a man who made me feel young and attractive again. I know how much I’ve betrayed my marriage vow to him, dear God, but please make sure my baby hasn’t been hurt.

She was still leaning over the sink when she heard the front door slam so hard that the flower-vase on the windowsill beside it dropped on to the floor.

‘Clee?’ said Eoin, in a bloated voice. He was obviously looking into the living-room to see if she was there.

She didn’t answer, but eventually he came along the hallway and appeared in the kitchen door. She slowly stood up straight, with a cold sensation sliding down her spine, because he was carrying the long three-pronged pitchfork they used to spread out the straw.

‘Eoin?’ she said. ‘What’s that for?’

He took a drunken step forwards, as if the floor were sloping like the deck of a ship. He held up the pitchfork and said, ‘Persuasion, that’s what it’s for.’

‘Eoin, you’re really scaring me. Please take that thing away. Please.’

Eoin stared at her intently but his eyes seemed to be unfocused. ‘It’s only to persuade you to tell me who the father is. Tell me who the father is and I’ll take it away.’

‘I told you. What difference does it make who the father is? And anyway, I don’t see him any more.’

‘How long was it going on for? And when? All those times I had to go away for the night, I suppose? Those times I had to go to Kerry and Galway, and that dog show in Killarney. Was that when you were shagging him? I bet it was. And I bet you and him, you were laughing your heads off that I didn’t know. Did you suck his micky? Have I been kissing your lips and all the time they were the same lips that sucked another man’s micky? Jesus, I’ll never be able to wash away the taste of him, will I? You whore.’

‘Eoin, please take that away. I’m hurting bad enough as it is. I think I might have to call for the doctor.’

Eoin levelled the pitchfork at her and took two steps nearer. Cleona backed away until she had reached the kitchen wall and could back away no further.

‘Tell me his name,’ said Eoin. He made a jabbing gesture with the pitchfork and shouted, ‘
Tell me his fecking name, Cleona! Tell me his name!
’

‘
Lorcan!
’ Cleona screamed at him. ‘
It was Lorcan Fitzgerald!
’

Eoin seemed to be stunned. He opened and closed his mouth, and then he said, ‘Lorcan Fitzgerald? That grey-haired feen who kept coming around and asking if we had any dogs for sale?’

Cleona nodded, too tearful to speak.

Eoin started to inhale deeply, his chest swelling up more and more every time he drew in breath. His face was bright red with rage and alcohol and he looked as if he could actually explode and spatter the kitchen walls with his flesh and blood, like a suicide bomber.

Without a word, though, he rammed the three prongs of the pitchfork into Cleona’s stomach, with one of them piercing the back of her right hand. He stabbed her with such force that the points of the prongs were only stopped by the kitchen wall behind her.

Cleona gasped, but that was the only sound she made. Eoin pulled out the pitchfork, although he had jammed it into her stomach so hard that he had to tug it from side to side to get it completely free.

Cleona held out a hand for him to support her, but he backed away, and she dropped to her knees on the kitchen floor with blood flooding the front of her pale beige sweater.

‘My baby,’ she sobbed. ‘Oh, dear Christ. My baby.’

She fell forward and lay on the floor shivering. Again she stretched out one hand as if she wanted Eoin to take hold of it and help her, but again he backed away. After a few moments more, he walked out of the kitchen and threw the pitchfork down in the hallway. Then he went into the living-room and picked up the phone.

He dialled 112 and when the emergency operator answered, he said, ‘My name is Eoin Cassidy. My address is Sceolan Kennels, Ballinroe East.’

‘Yes, Eoin, thank you. But what’s your emergency?’

Eoin lifted his left hand and looked at his wedding-ring, turning it this way and that. Then he said, ‘I don’t know if you’d call it an emergency, exactly. But I’ve just killed another man’s child.’

Katie had a quick lunch with Conor upstairs at the Electric restaurant on South Mall Street. They sat by the window overlooking the river, with the spires of St Finbarr’s cathedral in the middle distance, and the sky filled with huge white cumulus clouds. She had wanted to come here because it was lively and busy and normal, although she still wasn’t very hungry.

Conor didn’t ask her how she was feeling, but then he didn’t have to. He had been to the Dog Unit’s kennels that morning to see the dogs that Sergeant Browne had rounded up for him, and he talked about them instead. He described them with such affection that he could have been talking about children that he was thinking of adopting.

‘Those bull terriers were so tough and aggressive and snarly, but as soon as you patted them and stroked them and gave him a Molly and Murphy dog biscuit they were the softest dogs you ever met.’

‘Well, you have a way with them, Conor. I’ve seen it for myself. It’s the same way you have with me, except I don’t think I fancy a dog biscuit.’

They both had only starters – Katie ordered the salmon gravadlax and Conor chose the Clonakilty black pudding with parsnip and apple purée. Although they said very little to each other, anybody watching them would have sensed the bond that was growing between them. The waitress treated them almost as if they were newly-weds.

After lunch they walked back to Anglesea Street, but Katie stopped and kissed Conor halfway along Copley Street, before they came within sight of the Garda station.

‘I shouldn’t be too late tonight,’ she told him. ‘I’ll see you later so.’

‘I’m counting on it, Katie, believe me.’

As soon as she returned to her office, Detective Scanlan came in to see her.

‘Glad you’re back, ma’am, we have a woman downstairs who says she recognises the picture that they published in the
Examiner
this morning, the fellow who had his head shot off at Sceolan Kennels. Sergeant Begley’s talking to her now.’

‘Begley can deal with her, can’t he?’

‘He could of course, but she’s very emotional about it and she has absolute proof that it’s him. She’s his mother.’

‘His mother? Serious?’

‘She reads the paper online every morning and there was her own son on the front page. She took a screenshot and compared it with her photo album.’

‘Getting very technological, the older generation,’ said Katie. ‘All right, let’s go down and see her.’

She and Detective Scanlan went down together to one of the interview rooms. Detective Sergeant Begley was sitting with a white-haired woman in a dark brown overcoat with a rabbit-fur collar, clutching a large brown handbag on her knees. Katie guessed she must be in her mid-seventies, and that she must have been very pretty once, but she had one of those round babyish faces that rarely ages very well.

Detective Sergeant Begley stood up and said, ‘This is Mrs Teagan O’Connor, ma’am. Mrs O’Connor – this is Detective Superintendent Maguire.’

Mrs O’Connor looked up tearfully. On the table in front of her was her printed-out screenshot of Eithne’s likeness of the dead dognapper, as well as an old leather-bound photograph album.

Katie sat down beside her and picked up the screenshot.

‘This is your son?’ she asked, gently.

Mrs O’Connor nodded, and wiped her eyes, and sniffed. ‘Brendan. He’s the eldest of five. Look – see.’

She slid the photograph album across the table and pointed to a large black-and-white photograph of five young men standing and sitting in a garden. In the middle of the group, and the tallest of all of them, was the man whose face Eithne had re-created from the fragments of his shattered head. The resemblance was so marked that there was no doubt in Katie’s mind that it was him.

‘So, Teagan, tell me about him,’ said Katie.

‘I was already saying to your sergeant here that Brendan was always trouble, mixing with a bad crowd ever since he was a teenager. If there was a knock at the door and it was a guard, it was always Brendan who’d been caught getting a langie off of a bus along Pana, or denting people’s cars playing long slogs down the end of Glandore Park.’

‘How old was he?’

‘Thirty-six next Good Friday.’

‘The night he was shot – did you know where he was, and what he was up to?’

‘I had no clue whatsoever at all. I hadn’t seen him at all for three weeks at least. He lives with his girlfriend Oona up in Onslow Gardens, with their three kids and all. She’s a right brasser that Oona and she and me never got on at all, which is why I don’t see so much of him.’

‘Did you have any notion at all that he was involved with a gang of dog thieves?’

Mrs O’Connor took a tissue out of her handbag and loudly blew her nose. ‘I knew that he had some fierce rough pals who were all mixed up with dog-racing and all like that. He had a pit bull dog of his own which I couldn’t stick at all. Horrible beast, always pulling away at its leash like it couldn’t wait to jump up and take a bite out of your neck.’

‘Do you know who any of these rough pals were?’

‘Some of them, yes. Two or three of them he’d known ever since he was knee high to a high knee – old bunscoil pals like Kevin Brodie and Paddy Adams. But lately in the past few months there was one feen he was always talking about, do you know what I mean, and seemed pure impressed by. The last two times I went round to his house to see the grandchildren he was there, this fellow, acting like he owned the place. He had the grey hair and the grey suit and a sneery way of talking, like he was the only one who knew anything at all and the rest of the world was nothing but eejits. Brendan said he was a well-known dog-breeder.’

‘What was his name? Do you know?’

‘Lorcan, that was his Christian name. I never heard his surname.’

‘I see. Have you seen or heard anything from this Lorcan since Brendan was killed?’

‘Nothing. Not a word. Of course I didn’t know until this morning that anything had happened to Brendan, did I? It wasn’t unusual for me not to hear from him a month at a time, and Oona never rang me to ask where he was. Maybe she knew that he’d been killed, like, but if she
did
know, she never bothered to tell me about it.’

‘Did Brendan tell you anything else about Lorcan, apart from him being a dog-breeder? Did he tell you where he lived, for instance?’

‘No. Although there was one thing he did say about him. My older sister Vera was sick with the flu last July and it was taking her for ever to get over it. When I told Brendan about it he said that Lorcan’s brother was a famous doctor and runs his own clinic, and if she didn’t get better soon he could maybe arrange for her to visit him.’

Katie looked at Detective Sergeant Begley and although he didn’t look back at her, she could tell by the way his eyes widened that he was thinking the same as she was. Brendan’s friend Lorcan was Lorcan Fitzgerald the dognapper, and not only that, the odds were high that Lorcan Fitzgerald’s brother was Dr Gearoid Fitzgerald, of St Giles’ Clinic.

‘Thank you, Teagan,’ she said. ‘I think that’s all I need to ask you for the time being, except for Oona’s address. We’ll be going to have a chat with her, of course. Is it okay if we make a copy of your photo album?’

Mrs O’Connor nodded. ‘What about Brendan’s remains?’ she asked. ‘What’s going to happen about his funeral?’

‘His remains are still in the mortuary at the University Hospital, and I’m afraid they’ll have to stay there until the coroner has held a full inquest. After that – well, I suppose that’s something that you and Oona will have to arrange between you.’

‘Holy Saint Patrick. The very sight of her makes me craw sick. If it wasn’t for the grandchildren I’d be delighted never to clap eyes on her again, or to smell that Estée Lauder she sprays all over herself, a whole bottle at a time I shouldn’t wonder.’