Red Light (15 page)

‘So what’s the story?’ said John, giving his sauce a stir and then replacing the lid on the casserole.

‘Nothing special. Why?’

He came up to her and laid his hands on her shoulders. She loved that dark brown liquidity of his eyes and the coal-dust darkness of his six-o’clock shadow. A real dark Irishman, from romantic days, when there were fairies and kings.

‘I think I know you well enough by now,’ he smiled.

‘You know what my life’s like,’ she told him. ‘Somebody’s always doing something they shouldn’t, and I have to find out who they are and catch them. Day in, day out. There’s never a day when everybody in Cork decides just for twenty-four hours to stop drinking and robbing and fighting and vandalizing and selling drugs and prostituting themselves. Not one day, never! But that’s what I signed up for.’

‘Okay,’ said John, kissing her hairline, and then her forehead, and then the tip of her uptilted nose. ‘So do you know what I did today? Well, apart from housework.’

She put down her glass on the kitchen counter and then twisted open the top button of his white shirt. ‘Go on. What did you do today? If it was anything to do with the internet, I probably won’t understand a word of it.’

‘In simple terms, I’ve been designing a website that will enable doctors and pharmacists to see the test results of ErinChem’s newest products not just as charts and statistics, but visually. For instance, a speeded-up video of somebody’s skin rash clearing up.’

Katie undid his second button, and then his third, and slid her hand inside his shirt. ‘Yuck! I hope you’re not going to put me off my supper again.’

He kissed her long and deep, his tongue exploring her teeth and then tussling with hers. Then he kissed her again. When he stood back from her, his chest was rising and falling as if he had been running to meet her along the seashore. ‘I think I might turn off my meatballs for a while,’ he said. ‘This wasn’t part of the method that Nina the cleaner showed me.’

He went over to the hob and switched off the gas. When he came back to her, Katie was already unbuttoning her own blouse. She caught hold of him fiercely and kissed him again and again, pulling open his shirt and wrenching it off his shoulders. Although it had been months now since he had last worked on his late father’s farm, and he had put on at least ten pounds in weight, his chest was still muscular and his stomach was still taut. She grasped his penis through his trousers and she could feel that it was growing already. She squeezed it even harder and he said, ‘Ow!’ and flinched, but both of them laughed in mid-kiss.

John lifted off Katie’s blouse and then unfastened her bra. Her late husband Paul had always struggled with bras, for all that he was a womanizer, and had usually ended up blaspheming at whichever fecking eejit had invented them. But John put his left hand smoothly behind Katie’s back and her bra opened as if by magic, and her large rounded breasts fell free, with the subtlest of double bounces, and her rose-pink nipples already starting to crinkle.

They kissed again for a long time, until Katie could hardly breathe. What a way to die, she thought, with her eyes closed, and her mind completely in darkness, kissed to death. At last, gasping, she pulled away from him and said, ‘Barney.’

‘Barney?’

She went over to the kitchen door and closed it. ‘I don’t want him spying on us.’

‘He’s a dog.’

‘Exactly. Didn’t you ever hear of dogging?’

She unbuckled John’s tan leather belt and tugged down his zip. He was wearing grey David Beckham briefs which Katie had bought for him in Gentleman’s Quarters, and they clung closely to his erection. She went down on one knee to help him pull off his trousers, and then she rolled his briefs down, too, so that his penis rose up in front of her, so hard that it pulsed slightly with every beat of his heart. She took it into her mouth and sucked it, and rolled her tongue around it, and poked her tongue tip into it.

John stood upright, rigid, both hands covering his face, and when she cupped his testicles in her hand and gently prickled them with her fingernails, and then sucked his penis harder and deeper, he groaned like a man who has realized for the first time the dreadful truth – that happiness never lasts forever.

Katie stood up, her lips glistening. ‘Sit,’ she said.

‘Sit? You make me sound like Barney.’

She grinned and said, ‘Sit down, you gom. There – on that chair.’

Naked now, John did as he was told, and sat down on the plain wheelback kitchen chair, holding his erection in his hand like a newly crowned king with a purple sceptre. Katie unzipped her skirt, peeled off her tights and stepped out of her panties. Usually, she never wore panties when she wore tights, but it was close to the twenty-seventh of the month.

‘You know what you are, Katie Maguire?’ said John, as she came up to him and stood in front of him, with her hand resting on his right shoulder.

‘Pig-in-chief, that’s what you called me before.’

He smiled and gave the slightest shake of his head. The expression on his face was almost beatific. ‘You’re a dream, that’s what you are. You’re some incredible dream that I shouldn’t even be dreaming. Look at you.’

Katie kissed him, and then very carefully she climbed aboard him, opening her legs wide so that he could position his glans between the lips of her hairless vulva. When she was sure that he was positioned comfortably, she gradually lowered herself down, so that his penis slid deeper and deeper inside her. At last he was so deep that it looked as if she had black pubic curls, too.

She put her arms around him and rested her head against his shoulder and they stayed like that for over a minute, just feeling each other and smelling each other.

‘I don’t want this to end,’ John whispered, his breath hot and thunderous in her ear.

‘All things must end, my darling,’ she murmured.

‘Please God, not this.’

Katie didn’t say anything to that. Her life was all endings rather than beginnings, and here they were sitting on a kitchen chair while they were whirling around the Sun at 67,000 miles an hour, and it seemed so ridiculous and passionate and tragic all at the same time that she could have cried.

Slowly, she raised herself up, until John was right on the brink of slipping out of her. But then, very slowly, she sat down again, until she felt his hair between her thighs again. This time he slid so deeply inside her that his penis touched the neck of her womb, and she gave a snuffle and a nervous little jump. She continued to ride him up and down, up and down, keeping the same even rhythm, even though John was thrusting himself upwards now, his legs out straight, his thighs rigid and his buttocks clenched hard.

Katie could feel a climax gradually rising between her legs. The wooden chair seat was cutting into the sides of her knees, but she could hardly feel it. All she could feel was John inside her, and the pressure building inside her, building and building, as if her whole existence was about to implode.

John gasped, ‘Oh my God, Katie! Oh my dear God!’

She felt him shake, and then he jerked violently up and down as if he were having a seizure. She could feel his warmth and his wetness flooding inside her. She clung to his shoulders, her whole body locked with tension, her face contorted, her teeth gritted, her climax so close that she could have screamed.

Then her mobile phone buzzed on the tabletop.
And it’s no, nay, never –
no, nay never no more
—

It was Inspector Liam Fennessy. He sounded very calm, but then he always sounded very calm. He had a coldness and a detachment about him that she had admired at first, almost envied, until she had discovered that he was coping with the stresses of his job by bullying his wife, Caitlin.

‘Sorry to disturb you, ma’am. We have another feller with his hands cut off and his face gone missing.’

‘Oh, God in heaven,’ said Katie. She was still breathless and she picked up a tea towel to pat the perspiration from her face and neck. John got up, went through to the bedroom and came back with her dark green dressing gown, which he wrapped around her shoulders, and then kissed her on the forehead.

Inspector Fennessy said, ‘A woman phoned Mayfield Garda station just before it closed and said that there was a body in a house on Ballyhooly Road, somewhere between Glen Avenue and Sunview Park East. Then she hung up.’

‘She didn’t give her name?’

‘No. But it didn’t take the lads long to find the right house. It was the only one where nobody was watching the telly. The door wasn’t locked, though, so they were able to go straight in. Sergeant ó Nuallán and Detectives O’Donovan and Horgan are on their way up there now, as well as the technical team.’

‘Do we have any idea who the victim is?’

‘Not so far. He’s a white male, early to mid-forties. He hasn’t yet been moved, of course, but he has two distinctive tattoos visible on his upper arms, and a fair few scars, but that’s all. He was naked, like the black feller, with both hands severed and missing, and what would appear to be a point-blank shotgun blast to the face. Or possibly
blasts
, plural. According to the lads who found him, there wasn’t too much left of his head, like.’

‘Give me the address and I’ll go up and take a look for myself.’

‘There’s no need to, ma’am. I’ll make sure you get a comprehensive report in the morning, videos and all. I can fend off the media, too, if they get any wind of it.’

‘Thanks, Liam, but I want to see this first-hand. I’m beginning to get the feeling that this might not be the last of these, if we don’t find our perpetrator pretty quickly.’

‘Okay, then. I’ll tell Sergeant ó Nuallán to be expecting you.’

She put down her mobile phone. John was buckling up his trousers with a rueful expression on his face. ‘You’re going out again? Another great supper down the toilet.’

‘You dare. I want to eat that when I come home.’

‘Katie, if that call was about what I guessed it was about, then you’re going out to take a look at another dead body, am I right?’

Katie fastened her bra at the front and twisted it around to the back. ‘Yes, you are. Liam says that his hands were cut off and then he was blasted in the face with a shotgun, just like that black feller in Lower Shandon Street – only
this
victim’s white. That tells us it probably wasn’t racist. So either it’s a copycat killer, or somebody carrying out a vendetta, or just some gas woman who gets her kicks out of chopping men’s hands off and then blowing their heads off.’

‘Whatever the motive, Katie, don’t tell me that you’ll come back here later tonight with an appetite for meatballs?’

She went up to him and fastened the last two buttons of his shirt. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I suppose you’re right. But don’t throw them away, whatever you do. They’ll probably taste even better tomorrow, when they’ve had a chance to mulch for a while.’

John kissed her. ‘Story of my life, isn’t it? You can’t have it today, John, but never mind. It’s going to be ten times better tomorrow. And the word is “marinade”, not “mulch”. Mulching is what you do with compost.’

‘I know.’ said Katie. ‘It was supposed to be a joke, you being a farmer and all. Well, a former farmer. I’m sorry.’ She pressed her forehead against his chest and said it again. ‘I’m sorry.’

She wondered, if they stayed together, how many times she would have to say that. Perhaps she ought to have it tattooed on the palm of her hand.

Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán met her outside the house, wearing a faded denim jacket and jeans, and a rainbow-coloured silk scarf tied around her head.

‘Like the scarf,’ said Katie. ‘Very hippie.’

‘I need to wash my hair, that’s all.’ She was wearing no make-up and the purple circles under her eyes made her look as tired as Katie felt.

Between Glen Avenue and Sunview Park East, the 200-yard pavement was cluttered with patrol cars and vans and an ambulance, and so many blue and red and white lights were flashing that it looked like a fairground. Almost every front door along the road was open and the residents were standing on their steps in the warm evening air watching the gardaí and the technicians coming and going. Even small children were standing out in their pyjamas.

Katie could see Detective O’Donovan talking to people in the small crowd that was gathered behind the blue and white
Garda: No Entry
tape. She also recognized Dan Keane from the
Examiner
, wearing the saggy grey linen jacket he always wore in summer. Dan raised his cigarette to her in salute, but she only gave him the briefest of nods in return.

‘Who tipped off the media?’ she asked Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán. ‘Jesus, look, there’s Fionnuala Sweeney, from RTÉ. Tell your friends to watch out for you on the Morning Edition.’

‘It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if it was our perpetrator herself who tipped them off,’ said Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán. ‘If you ask me, she’s trying to make a point.’

‘Oh yes? And what point is that?’ asked Katie, as she stepped into the hallway and looked around.

Upstairs, on the landing, so many halogen lights were flashing that it looked as if they were holding an exorcism up there. A technician called down to them, ‘Could you wait there just a moment, please, ladies! I’m just untangling me cables.’

‘It’s the hands,’ said Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán, ‘Not only is she cutting them off, she’s taking them away with her, so that we don’t have any fingerprints. And because she’s shot the victims point-blank in the face it’s almost impossible to identify them from photofit pictures. You wait till you see your man upstairs. Apart from that, she’s made it a nightmare checking their dental records – that’s if they have any dental records in this country. Going by the state of that African man’s teeth, I’d say that he’d never been to a dentist in his life, in any country.’

‘So what’s the point she’s making? Always assuming that she
is
a she.’

‘I think it’s all about us. I think she’s making a show of us for not doing our job. Maybe she’s trying to tell us that we should have known a long time ago who these men were and what they were up to. So now she’s a kind of vigilante, trying to make us look as if we couldn’t beat nails into a bog with a saucepan. Since we can’t punish them, then she’s going to, and we
still
won’t know who they are.’