Deadly Intent (6 page)

Nessa heard a footstep in the hall. She forced herself to look at Dominic's face instead of the knife. Willpower was her only defence. Even if Fergus was outside the door, she could not rely on him to save her.

‘I'm the
amadán
that said we should come on holidays here, same place we came when I was a child. My mother was from Beara, did I tell you that?' Dominic shifted his weight and fell back on the arm of the sofa, his lower lip quivering again. ‘But even here I couldn't get away from my old enemies. Failure and despair – they're the boys that lie in wait for me wherever I go, so now it's time for me to face up to them for once and all.'

He opened out his palm and placed the tip of the blade on his skin. Nessa watched as a bright red drop of blood spread from its centre. When Dominic turned his eyes to her again, they were filled with loathing.

R
edmond had a day off work but the last thing he wanted was to hang around at home. He could not stand solitary idleness, as he had long ago realised. So he had just spent an hour in the hotel gym close to the garda station, and was wondering whether to continue his workout in the station's own fine facility, or to pass an hour in the hotel pool. But either way, he would have nothing to do by lunchtime.

He was tempted to sidle in to his desk in the station, as he often did in his spare time. The snag was that his colleagues had begun to joke about it. On Thursday evening, he had been lingering late at his desk when the call about Maureen Scurlock came in – and next morning, he overheard sniggering voices while he was closeted in one of the station toilets. ‘The country would be rid of the scourge of crime,' said one, ‘if we were all as diligent as Garda Redmond Joyce!' ‘No doubt about it,' said the other, ‘and the buckos in government would be over the moon, with all the fuckin' overtime money they'd save!'

Redmond drained the last of his takeaway coffee, bought in the shop next door to the station. The cashier had asked him whether he was on his way to Castletownbere port, where a big crowd was expected at a protest that afternoon. News bulletins had reported that the owners of the Russian ship were bankrupt and would not pay their employees. The controversy was hotting up, with calls for action and negotiation, while the men on board relied on food donated by local people.

Redmond told himself he had a great excuse to go into work, as Inspector O'Kelleher might well need extra gardai for the protest. It would make a change from the usual duties: complaints about pub licences, late-night fights between local youths, and the repeated full-colour, close-up horror of road accidents. All of them reminders, to Redmond's mind, of the country's collective addiction to alcohol.

He kept his back to the station while he made up his mind. It was a sunny morning and he had a fine view of the Beara peninsula's vigorous spine of mountains on the far side of Bantry Bay, but a day's rambling on his own was definitely not on his agenda. He reminded himself that he had genuine work to do, making phone calls about the Derryowen incident two days earlier. Fergus Malden had booked a taxi for two o'clock on Thursday, to drive his father home to Tipperary; but Fergus also said that Oscar had contacted him at the last minute to cancel the booking. Redmond was trying to track down the taxi driver, having failed so far to make contact with Oscar Malden himself.

He had googled the businessman on the internet and found plenty of photographs, showing a man with clear, even features and a wide smile. His light-coloured hair was turning grey, but it was that attractive silvery grey that wealthy people always achieved. According to one Sunday newspaper, he was ranked at number sixty-eight on Ireland's rich list, and was lauded by politicians and pundits alike for his entrepreneurial spirit. He had made his money on security installations such as electronic gates for apartment blocks, and then countered recessionary losses by expanding his business interests in Russia and the Middle East. He was also highly regarded as a patron of contemporary art and music, and known for persuasive public commentary on cultural issues. Hardly the type to do a runner after assaulting a helpless woman on a remote laneway, as most gardai in the station agreed.

Redmond crumpled his takeaway cup in a bin, and crossed the edge of Bantry's attractive main square to the police station. He squared his shoulders as he pushed open the door. Just inside, Trevor O'Kelleher was in conversation with the district superintendent.

‘I've ten lads down in Castletown already,' said the inspector to his superior, ‘and I've others getting ready to join them. This caper could go on until nightfall.'

The young garda managed to catch O'Kelleher's eye. He reckoned he was in with a chance.

‘Redmond, good man yourself,' said O'Kelleher. ‘I've been looking around for someone to follow up a call that just came in.'

The inspector stepped away from the superintendent and spoke rapidly to Redmond. ‘It's a bit of a nuisance, to be honest. Something about a dead animal on a roadside over in Beara, getting in the way of motorists. We'll have to find out who dumped it and follow up on the legalities. I believe it's somewhere near Adrigole, but you'll get all the details over at reception.'

Redmond got caught in traffic in Glengarriff, a popular tourist town twelve miles west of Bantry and a gateway to the Beara peninsula, which stretched another thirty miles out into the Atlantic. A few coach buses had stopped to disgorge their passengers to the craft shops, and Redmond cursed as he waited. He would have been better off at home than searching for a dead sheep in the mountains. He was damned sure that Dublin-based gardai did not spend their time on such pursuits.

He smoothed down his hair and grimaced at his reflection in the rear-view mirror. He had always resented his baby-face looks, with the soft skin of a child – they made it so much harder for him to be taken seriously, he felt. Indeed, most people assumed that he had joined the gardai after leaving school or college, and had no idea he was already into his thirties, having worked in computing for several dreary years. His worry now was that he had made a mistake moving to Bantry, instead of applying for a city posting.

During his garda training, what he had loved most was the period of three months he spent in a suburban station in Dublin. Much of his time was taken up with routine jobs, but he also got a glimpse of a different and enormously exciting world: officers on tenterhooks as they played a deadly game of hide-and-seek with local drug gangs who were forever on the ready to execute anyone looking sideways at them, and garda camaraderie intensified in the glare of fear and danger. Redmond had often fantasised about that world since then, and how it would cater to his own addiction to a drug freely and legally available – adrenaline, the wonderful buzz brought on by constant stress and pressure.

But he knew that his innate caution meant he was not a natural candidate for such a life, and feared that jumping in at the deep end would expose his pathetic limitations. Meanwhile, Bantry station had advantages over most small-town postings. As a district headquarters staffed by about thirty officers, its brief went well beyond the humdrum. And the southwest coast of Ireland, notched as it was by innumerable remote inlets, was on the front line in the long war on illegal drugs. Boats laden with toxic packages made forays to shore, all part of a multibillion trade controlled from South America, Spain and Amsterdam. Sooner or later, Redmond would get the kind of investigative experience that would bolster his chances of getting his dream job in the future.

He told himself that he should make the most of his time in Bantry. The golf clubs he carried in the boot of the car were not going to get used, he realised that by now. But as he neared Adrigole village, he noticed a signpost to a sailing centre. He could call in on his way back – enrolling for a new activity had to be better than living in fear of his free time, and being superfit could earn him extra points with those who noticed such things.

His mobile phone beeped with a new text message and he stopped by the seashore to read it. It was from Sergeant Fitzmaurice, about a disturbance involving Dominic Scurlock at Cnoc Meala the night before. Redmond smiled as he texted back that he would be in Castletownbere in an hour or so. Once he had sorted out the roadside carcass, he could meet the sergeant and see the quayside protest as a bonus.

His satnav directed him to turn right towards the famous Healy Pass road that crossed the craggy middle of the peninsula. Houses and trees petered out a short distance inland. The sun went in, and soon he was surrounded by stony mountains and gathering clouds. His spirits sagged at the bleakness of the place – a nightmare vision of emptiness, he thought. His car seemed tiny and insignificant, like a beetle scuttling across the floor of a cave.

He could imagine the mountain valley as a location for a horror film, devoid of humans and over run by monsters tearing up the landscape, wrenching bare purple-grey stones out of the depths of the earth and hurling them all over the hills.

‘Be careful! We were afraid to go down.'

Three or four people stood at an old stone bridge over a wide stream, their cars parked nearby. The road continued up to the mountain pass high above them.

As he approached, Redmond realised that the dead animal was not at the side of the road. It was lying on rough grass by the stream, wrapped in a black plastic bag. The air was filled with the squawking of gulls, but several other birds were tearing at the bag itself. Redmond knew little about nature but thought they could be rooks or hooded crows. They pulled at the plastic with their powerful beaks, all the while beating their wings to keep the gulls away from their booty.

‘We'll have to phone the police.' One of the watching group pulled out his mobile as he said it. ‘I don't believe that's a dead sheep or a dog down there.'

Redmond understood instantly. The awful contents of the bag were being revealed as the birds tore it to ribbons.

He called out to the other people that he was a garda, as he ran to his car and pulled out the golf clubs from the boot. After handing them around, he jumped over a low wall by the roadside and down the steep slope to the bank of the stream. He waved his own club at the birds to scare them off.

He had no idea whether the birds would attack him. But they had to be driven away and the scene secured. Another man was trying urgently to get through to the Garda station. Whoever had made the original call had not understood or explained the situation.

The birds backed off gradually. One of them scraped Redmond's head with its claws but he ignored the pain. He was fighting off the nausea that assailed him as soon as he looked properly at the heap on the ground.

One leg was splayed sideways. A shoe was falling off at the ankle and the skin was exposed above a piece of ragged sock. The birds had torn into the flesh, pulling away at the trouser leg to get at their prey. In another half an hour they would have destroyed the body.

Redmond finally allowed his eyes to focus on the most awful sight of all. A bloodied hand was turned up to the sky, as if begging for mercy.

T
he place was dark. A basement, maybe, or an underground den. Windowless and dark, apart from a faint light far above Nessa's head. There were steps spiralling up towards the light.

She was surprised she could make out her own hand in the darkness. She opened her palm and saw a drop of blood at its centre. The blood was a bright red colour.

She felt a knot in her stomach, a tight knot of fear. The staircase was steep and her feet were tired, so very tired. She tried to trudge up the steps but she was afraid every minute of slipping down into the blackness.

She suddenly realised that she was not alone. It was the smell she recognised, that sickly smell of stale alcohol and sweaty skin. She could not see Dominic but she knew he was there.

Then she heard a laugh. Jack Talbot was chuckling over a newspaper article he thrust out in front of her.

It was his laugh that made Nessa realise she was dreaming. She was trapped in a nightmare, down in the depths of her own mind. The laugh began to change and now she heard Dominic's self-pitying tones. His face followed her into the cold light of awakening.

She lay rigidly still, hoping the tight lump in her stomach would ease. She wished she could turn to her husband's comforting touch, but a chilly emptiness had taken his place.

The room was dark but Nessa remembered that several hours of daylight had already passed. She had been up earlier to serve breakfast to the guests, to deal with their bills as they checked out, to nod at their concerned farewells. It seemed to her now that someone else had been acting her part all morning. She had slept so little during the night that arranging eggs on plates had been a trial of endurance. Just as well that her son Ronan was still at his friend's house, or she would have had to put on a false smile for him too.

She was glad too that she had drifted off when she finally made it back to bed. An hour of dozing uneasily allowed her to escape Dominic's lingering smell for a time, before he caught up with her in her dreams. She had stood in the shower for a long time earlier but felt she could not wash him off her. Her skin prickled under the duvet as his image loomed over her again, eyes bulging and belly pushing against her as he got ready to rape her.

She turned her face into her pillow as if that would get rid of him. She could not make sense of what had happened. Her friends would have described her as tough, determined, indeed bolshie at times, and she had always assumed that she could rely on those traits to get her out of trouble, even while she valued her softer side in her own mind. She should have been able to throw Dominic out of the house instead of standing there under his malign spell, immobilized and weak, at his mercy as he twirled the glinting knife in front of her.