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‘I do not want your thanks,’ she said, using an offcut of raspberry-coloured velvet as a hand towel. ‘Soon you will be cursing me for saving your life. Soon you will be praying for me to kill you and put you out of your misery. Soon you will be wishing that it was you who had drowned in the river.’

‘I still need an ambulance. If a doctor doesn’t stitch this leg up soon, I’m going to lose it.’

‘First, you have to be punished for what you did to Nwaha, and all of the other girls you have hurt so much.’

‘Oh yeah, and losing my fecking leg isn’t punishment enough?’

The woman looked away for a moment, absent-mindedly fingering the bones and the shells and the claws that made up her necklace. Then she turned back to Bula and said, ‘You talk about punishment? Nwaha died, and what had she done to deserve that? Not only that, she was not given the burial ceremony that she should have been, according to our beliefs. She was not dressed in cotton robes, and none of the traditional songs were sung. I do not know if she is lying with her head towards the west, as it should be for a woman. All I can say is that she was at least buried in black earth, and not red, and that is only because
all
of the earth in this country is black, like the hearts of the people who live here. She was not given a second burial, either, which means her spirit will come back to haunt us.’

‘I told you before,’ croaked Bula. ‘
I
didn’t push her in the river. None of us did. She jumped in, of her own accord.’ He took two or three more wheezing breaths and then he said, ‘You don’t have any fags on you, do you?’

‘Fags? Oh, you mean cigarettes. No. Smoking is so bad for your health.’

‘Would you believe it, I’m not particularly worried about dying of lung cancer right now. Come on, I’m gasping. I think there’s a nobber in my pocket if you can get it out for me.’

The woman ignored him. ‘Now is the time for you to choose your punishment. I am giving you that much, which is more than you ever gave to Nwaha.’

‘Well, thanks for nothing.’

‘I can shoot you between your legs, like I said I would do before.’

‘Hey,
what
? You said that you wouldn’t do that if I told you that I knew Nwaha.’

‘No, I did not say that. I said that I
would
, if you did not admit to me that you knew her. I never said that I would
not
, even if you did admit it.’

Bula said, ‘You can’t do that to me. Look what you’ve done to my leg already. I’m going to be a cripple now, for the rest of my life. Now you’re going to make me into a gelding, too. What kind of a fecking sadist are you?’

‘I told you what I am. Judge, and jury, and executioner, too. Do you think I like doing this? I hate being in the same country as you, and those vermin you work for, let alone being close enough to smell you. But, like I said, you can pick your punishment.’

‘Nobody would have their balls shot off for choicer, would they?’ said Bula. ‘So what else is there?’ He winced, and squeezed his eyes tight shut for a moment, and then he said, ‘God almighty, my leg hurts. Can’t you just call me an ambulance? I’m dying of the pain here.’

‘Are you right-handed or left-handed?’

‘What difference does that make? Left-handed, if you must know.’

‘Then instead of me shooting you between the legs, you can choose to cut off your right hand.’

‘
What
?’

‘It is your choice, Bula. Which would you rather lose, your manhood or your hand?’

Bula sat on the couch for a long time, breathing deeply and slowly in his effort to control the pain in his knee. The woman stood watching him, and he knew that she was serious and that she wasn’t going to let him go until she had punished him, one way or another. He had seen too many gang members being punished in Port Harcourt to think that she wanted only to frighten him. He had seen ears cut off, noses cut off, even a woman’s lips cut off, so that they had fallen into her lap like the red rubber ring from a pickle jar.

‘So, what is it to be?’ the woman asked him, at last. ‘You are lucky that I brought you here. In fact, that is the whole reason I brought you here, so that your punishment could be quick and easy for you.’

‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about,’ said Bula.

The woman used her pistol to point towards the corner of the workshop, to the blue table saw. It had a circular steel blade, with fine alternating teeth for cutting oak and mahogany and other hardwoods.

‘Mânios was not so lucky. Mânios had to cut off his hand with an ordinary hacksaw. He did not cry out too much, but I know that it was not easy for him. For
you
, though – all you have to do is lay your arm across the table, press the switch, and
zzzztttt
!’

Bula twisted his head around and stared at the table saw. Then he turned back to the woman and said, ‘Is there anything in the world that I can do to show you that I’m sorry about Nwaha? That if I had my time back, I’d jump in the river after her, and save her?’

‘No,’ said the woman. ‘Nwaha is gone, and “sorry” cannot bring her back. And if it had not been for you, she would not have thrown herself in the river in the first place.’

‘I could pay you,’ said Bula. ‘I could manage at least two thousand euros. Maybe even two and a half, if I sold this bracelet.’

The woman smiled faintly and shook her head. ‘You are paying me already, Bula. This is your payment. I do not want your money.’

‘Then I hope you go to hell, you witch. I hope you go to hell and get screwed by three devils for ever and ever, amen.’

Katie was sorting through the papers she needed for the meeting with Michael Gerrety and his lawyers when Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán knocked at her door.

‘Kyna, come in. I thought for a moment there I would have to go without you.’

Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán was wearing a loosely woven white cotton sweater and a short grey skirt. Katie thought she was dressed a little informally for a confrontation with one of Cork’s leading solicitors. She herself was wearing a blue and white striped shirt and a navy-blue knee-length skirt. But then she thought, Kyna’s smart enough, and she’s young enough, and there’s nothing like a short skirt to distract a lawyer’s attention from the subject in hand.

‘Sorry if I’m late, ma’am,’ said Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán. ‘Detective Ryan’s just this minute come up with something.’

With the help of the Crime Prevention Unit, Detectives Ryan and Dooley had been sitting through hours of city-centre CCTV for the past two days, concentrating on the time frame in which the African man had probably been murdered on Lower Shandon Street.

‘There’s this African feller in a purple suit, crossing Oliver Plunkett Street. And can you guess where he’s going into? Amber’s … Michael Gerrety’s sex shop.’

Katie snapped her briefcase shut. ‘Is it up on screen now?’

‘Come and see for yourself. There’s no guarantee that it’s him because you can’t see his face clearly, and even if you could we don’t have much of a face to compare it with. But there can’t be too many Africans in Cork with purple suits.’

‘You didn’t have any luck with the tattoo parlours?’

‘Not so far, though there’s one place on Cook Street I’m going to go back to. Their head tattoo artist wasn’t there when I called, and his assistant was decidedly shifty, as if he knew something but wasn’t prepared to tell me.’

Katie looked around her office to make sure that she had everything she needed for her meeting, then she followed Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán along the echoing corridor and down the stairs to the main CCTV control room. Detective Ryan and a young female garda were sitting in high-backed chairs in front of the bank of thirty-six screens that were fed from cameras located all over the city. Crime prevention officer Sergeant Tony Brennan was there, too, in his shirtsleeves, noisily slurping milky coffee and frowning at what appeared to be the beginnings of a drunken brawl outside An Spailpín Fánach on South Main Street.

On every one of the smaller screens, traffic was silently crawling to and fro, and pedestrians were thronging the pavements. On one of the larger screens, however, the image was frozen.

‘Here he is, ma’am,’ said Detective Ryan, rising from his seat so that Katie could sit down and take a closer look.

Conor Ryan was one of the youngest detectives at Anglesea Street, but he had already made himself a reputation for doggedness. When older and more experienced detectives had abandoned a lead because it seemed to show no promise at all, he would go over it again and again until he had found the evidence he was looking for, or until he was convinced there really
was
no evidence. He was chubby, with short brown hair that stuck up at the back, and flaming red cheeks, and his jackets always looked too tight for him. He could easily have been mistaken for a trainee bank teller or the assistant manager of a stationery shop, but Katie preferred to have detectives on her team who didn’t look like detectives.

‘Full marks for persistence, Ryan,’ she said, leaning forward and peering at the monitor. It showed an angled view of Oliver Plunkett Street looking westwards from the Post Office towards Robert Morgan Street. Amber’s sex shop was on the corner, with an orange awning. An African man in a purple suit had stepped off the high raised kerb opposite and was waiting for a taxi to pass before he crossed. He was wearing a grey fedora hat which, from that angle, partially covered his face.

Katie looked at the time at the foot of the picture: 11.17.14 a.m.

She squinted at the screen even more closely. ‘It could just be shadow, but I’d say that your man has a goatee beard, like Mawakiya. But that still isn’t one hundred per cent proof that it’s the same feller, purple suit or not.’

‘Of course, we’ll be blowing it up and enhancing it, like,’ Detective Ryan told her. ‘I just thought you’d want to see the whole sequence first.’

‘Yes. Go on.’

He ran the recording in reverse until the African man had jumped backwards on to the kerb and then walked jerkily back as far as Cook Street, where he disappeared. Then he played it forwards, so that the African man reappeared, waited at the kerb again and then crossed Oliver Plunkett Street. He didn’t hesitate for a moment outside Amber’s but walked straight in.

‘I’d say that he knows Amber’s more than reasonably well,’ said Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán. ‘If you watch them, almost all of Amber’s customers hesitate outside the shop for a while before they pluck up the nerve to go in, and even then they look up and down the street to make sure they can’t see anybody who knows them. But this feller – no, he walks right in with no hesitation at all.’

Katie said, ‘Eleven seventeen. Our man on the street would have probably called it a day by then, wouldn’t he?’

‘That’s right. Most of the girls bring their takings in early, around nine, and it’s soon after that when Michael Gerrety shows up, if he shows up at all. Sometimes he sends that gowl Dessie O’Leary, and O’Leary stays longer as a rule, but even he’s usually out of there by ten or ten-thirty.’

‘I’m pretty certain that’s when they tot up their ill-gotten gains,’ said Katie. ‘I’ll bet they keep them in their safe on the premises, too. Don’t tell me that Michael Gerrety would risk leaving the building unaccompanied with that amount of cash on him. I very much doubt that we’re the only ones lamping him, and if one of his rival pimps robbed him, like Johnny-G or that Ambly-bambly one that only Patrick can pronounce – well, he could hardly come to
us
to report it, could he?’

‘What time exactly did purple suit
leave
Amber’s?’ asked Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán.

Detective Ryan ran the recording forwards until the black man in the purple suit reappeared from under the awning. The time was 11.41.32 a.m. He turned right and crossed back over the street, heading east towards Winthrop Street, which was a pedestrian precinct leading through to Patrick Street.

‘The butcher boy in Denis Nolan’s said he saw the black man in the purple suit around midday, didn’t he?’ said Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán. ‘So the timing would fit, wouldn’t it? It shouldn’t have taken him more than ten minutes to walk from Winthrop Street to Lower Shandon Street, would it, if he went there directly?’

‘If that,’ said Katie. ‘But what about the black girl in the headscarf who looked like Rihanna? There’s no sign that she was following him from here, is there?’

‘I’ve seen no sign of her so far,’ said Detective Ryan. ‘But there’s a camera on Mercer Street opposite the GPO and that feeds through to one of the monitors next door, so I haven’t had time yet to look at the recordings from that. I’m hoping it’ll show us which direction your man went in next – whether he turned up Winthrop Street or carried on straight along Oliver Plunkett Street. But you never know. They might show us more than that.’

Katie said, ‘We’re pushed for time right now. But I’d appreciate it if you can run through those Mercer Street recordings as soon as possible – even if they only tell us which way he went. It could make all the difference. Like, if he carried straight on, then where was he going? If he didn’t have enough time to get to Lower Shandon Street by midday, then are we looking at a different man, though I can’t think how we could be.’

Detective Ryan made the image of the black man in the purple suit run forwards, and then backwards, and then forwards again. ‘Like you say, ma’am, it’s highly unlikely, but if there
were
two different African men walking around the city on the same morning, both wearing purple suits, then I’ll make sure that I find out who they were, if it kills me.’

They were ten minutes late for their appointment on South Mall at the offices of Moody & McCarthy Solicitors. A receptionist showed them through to the oak-panelled conference room, where Michael Gerrety was already sitting with his lawyer, James Moody, smoking a cigar so that their air was pungent and bluish-grey.

Michael Gerrety and James Moody both stood up when Katie and Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán were shown in. Michael Gerrety was wearing an immaculate cream suit with a white rosebud pinned to his lapel, and as usual he looked extremely pleased with himself. James Moody was a large man with a stoop and sloping shoulders. He had dyed black hair slicked back from his craggy forehead and eyes that looked like two malevolent trolls hiding in the caves under his eyebrows. His lips were crimson and blubbery and he had a tendency to spit when he talked, but Katie had encountered him many times before and she knew him for a very wily and uncompromising lawyer, apart from being one of the most expensive in Cork.