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The memory of it was making Lolade even more upset, rocking backwards and forwards in bed and hugging her knees tightly. Katie sat back and let her calm down.

‘Come on, sweetheart, how about a drink of water?’ she asked her. ‘Perhaps you’d like to take a break for half an hour. I can imagine how distressing this is.’

‘
No
, I will tell you! I
have
to tell you!’

‘All right. Ssh, don’t get upset. I understand. So what happened next, after Himself got so angry?’

‘He called on his phone and in only a short time Mawakiya comes to the flat. I do not like Mawakiya, he looks like a kind of a devil, with one eye all red and bad teeth, and he smells of perfume. Himself says to Mawakiya, “Take this girl away and teach her all the tricks. Bring her back in five years’ time.”’

‘So that’s how you ended up in that dump on Lower Shandon Street, being prostituted by Mawakiya?’

Lolade whispered, ‘Yes.’

Faith said, ‘We have no idea how Mawakiya kept himself out of sight for so long. Now that he’s dead, though, the girls he used to manage are coming to us and Ruhama and the social services and they’re desperate for help. They have absolutely no money, of course. Some of them have hardly any clothes, and without him they’re lost. And they’re all so young, fifteen, sixteen. It’s heartbreaking.’

‘You can understand why Himself wouldn’t take them on,’ said Katie. ‘He could have been charged with child-trafficking and defilement of a child under fifteen, both of which carry a possible life sentence. He might have been charged with reckless endangerment, too, and he could have been given an extra ten years for that.’

She passed Lolade another photograph. Lolade said, ‘Yes, that is the same man. I don’t know the woman.’

‘How about
this
man? Do you recognize him?’

Lolade looked at the fourth photograph and nodded. ‘I know him, yes. Six or seven times he came to have sex with me, but he never pay. I think he work for the man they call Himself. Three or four times I see him hit girls.’ She held up her fist and turned it slowly around. ‘One girl he pulled her hair like this, and twisted it, and twisted it, so that she scream and scream. Then he hit her head against the wall.’

Katie showed the photograph to Faith, and Faith crossed herself and said, ‘Dessie O’Leary.
Mister
Dessie, the girls all call him. There is no word that I can use to describe that man without having to say five Hail Marys and brush my teeth with carbolic soap.’

Next, Katie held up the photographs of the man that Lolade had only known as “Himself”.

‘Michael Gerrety,’ she said. ‘And here he is with his wife, Carole.’

‘Michael Gerrety!’ said Faith, her nose wrinkling in disgust. ‘Even more Hail Marys! Even more soap, too!’

‘Ah, yes. But Lolade has just told us that Gerrety passed her on to a third party, i.e. Mawakiya, for the express purpose of him pimping her – what other interpretation could you put on “Take this girl away and teach her all the tricks”? And Lolade is only thirteen. In other words, we now have a first-hand witness statement that Gerrety is guilty of trafficking and reckless endangerment, at the very least.

‘I can’t give you any specific details at the moment, Faith, but we’re seeking more evidence against him, and this can only help our case enormously.’

Katie replaced the photographs in the envelope. ‘Lolade, you’ve been pure amazing. I know how hard this has been for you, but believe me, things will only get better. I’ll come back to see you over the weekend so. I might have a few more questions to ask you, but the most important thing for you, girl, is to get yourself well.’

Before she went, she embraced Faith and said, ‘As for you, Faith, you’re a star. Thank you for what you’ve done for Lolade.’

‘A star?’ said Faith, and Katie could see the pain in her eyes. ‘I was a
fallen
star once. But you know, Katie – even a fallen star can rise up into the sky again, rise up, and shine. Maybe not as pure as before, but just as bright!’

Katie went down to the pathology lab before she left the hospital. A young, ginger-haired pathologist was staring glumly at a shadowy scan of a bowel tumour, but Dr O’Brien had not yet arrived. Katie was relieved, in a way. Dr O’Brien would have insisted on showing her the two mutilated homicide victims, and how he had pieced together the skin from their faces, and her stomach didn’t really feel strong enough for gristle and connective tissue and the all-pervasive sweetness of decomposing flesh. She was having enough trouble keeping down the pineapple juice that she had drunk too quickly instead of breakfast. She left Dr O’Brien a note to call her.

Before she drove out of the hospital car park, she checked her text messages, of which she had fifteen altogether. Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll wanted to see her as soon as she arrived at Anglesea Street. Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán had found the body-art parlour where Mawakiya had been tattooed – but there were ‘complications’, which she didn’t specify but needed to discuss ‘asap!!’

Detective O’Donovan said that the CCTV picture of the young African woman that had appeared on the RTÉ News yesterday evening had attracted thirty-eight responses, one of which had been a proposal of marriage. However, none of the respondents had been able to say who she was, or where she came from, or where they might find her now.

The sketch artist, Maureen Quinn, had finished a preliminary likeness of Mawakiya’s reconstructed face. She had scanned it and sent it over for Katie to look at, but she wasn’t at all happy herself with what she’d done. ‘I’ve made him look like a troll! I shall have to have another try!’

Garda press officer Declan O’Donoghue said that he had received a request from Branna MacSuibhne from the
Evening Echo
for an ‘in-depth’ interview on the Garda’s war against sex slavery and vice – ‘which Detective Superintendent Maguire personally promised me’.
Mother of God
, thought Katie.
Doesn’t she ever give it a rest?

From John, she had received a text that he had booked them an upstairs table for 7.30 p.m. at The Rising Tide brasserie in Glounthaune village. ‘Hopefully at long last we can eat a dinner together??’

Katie skimmed through the rest of her messages, just to see who had sent them, but most of them were routine updates from Garda headquarters in Phoenix Park, in Dublin – advising her, for instance, that they were making a new push to bring down road casualties on ‘Fatal Friday’, which was always Ireland’s worst day for traffic casualties. She could look at these later, although she did pause to read an invitation for her to give an after-dinner speech on ‘Drugs and the Law’ at a medical convention in Kinsale. She had attended one of those conventions before, two years ago, and she couldn’t imagine anything worse than spending an evening with two hundred drunken doctors in dinner jackets, all of whom were convinced that their professional qualifications authorized them to grope every good-looking woman in the room.

She bought herself a latte and a cheese and tomato sandwich in the canteen. She hadn’t even reached her office, however, before Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll opened his door and said, ‘Katie! There you are! I was expecting you before!’

‘Oh, sorry, sir. I went to the hospital first to speak to Isabelle. Well, it turns out her real name’s Lolade. She’s started talking now, thanks to a very fine Nigerian lady from Cois Tine. And you’ll be delighted to know that she gave me some extremely damning evidence against Michael Gerrety and Desmond O’Leary.’

‘Well, good. Look, you can tell me all about that later. Bring your coffee in here, if you like. I have my replacement here I’d like you to meet.
Temporary
replacement, any road.’

Katie was about to say, ‘Give me a moment, Dermot,’ but he opened his office door wider and sitting at his desk was a short, bull-necked man in uniform, who immediately stood up and held out his hand.

Katie entered the office, awkwardly putting her briefcase down on the floor next to the bookcase, and her sandwich on the shelf next to a leather-bound copy of
Offences Against the Person
.

‘This is Superintendent Bryan Molloy from the Henry Street station in Limerick,’ said Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll. ‘He’ll be keeping his hand on the tiller while I’m away having my treatment.’

Katie shook Superintendent Molloy’s hand, and nodded, and said, ‘Yes. We’ve met before, briefly. It was at that seminar in Tip on dealing with Travellers.’

‘Well, that’s right,’ said Superintendent Molloy. ‘I seem to remember DS Maguire here proposing some kind of a softly-softly approach to the Knackers. Winning their confidence, learning their cant, making sure their children go to school and stay there for more than five minutes.’

‘I don’t usually refer to them as Knackers,’ said Katie. ‘I think there’s enough alienation between the Travelling community and the rest of us without that. I don’t think ‘softly-softly’ is how I treat them, though. If any Traveller breaks the law, they get jumped on just as hard as anybody else.’

Superintendent Molloy let out a noise like a party balloon just before its neck is tied up. ‘I love hearing female officers getting all disciplinarian! Fifty Shades of Blue!’

Katie remembered Superintendent Molloy very well. He had not only opposed all her suggestions for improving relations with the Travellers, he had stood in the bar all evening, loudly denigrating the appointment of women as senior Garda officers, well within earshot of Katie and her team.

She could remember almost everything he had said. ‘Every Garda station needs somebody to make the tea and keep the place spick and span and blow the noses of the beaten wives who come in cribbing about their drunken husbands. That’s what women are
for
! What are we going to do if they all get promoted upstairs? Make our own fecking tea, is it?’

Katie was rarely judgemental about looks. Michael Gerrety might be handsome, but he was far from pleasant. Superintendent Molloy, on the other hand, had all the appearance of a bully and he was one. His prickly hair was cut very short, grey at the sides and black at the top. His blue eyes protruded, even when he wasn’t in a temper, and he had a way of staring at people in a belligerent way when they were talking to him, as if he couldn’t wait for them to finish so that he could disagree with them.

He had a snub nose, with black hairs growing out of his nostrils, and a pugnacious mouth. His ears were large and unusually crimson, and Katie couldn’t keep her eyes off them when he was talking to her. She kept meaning to google ‘very red ears’ to see if they were a sign of high blood pressure.

Superintendent Molloy said, ‘Dermot has been giving me the background to these two homicides you’re investigating, the ones with their hands missing and their heads blown to smithereens. How’s that progressing?’

‘Oh, it’s all coming together,’ said Katie. ‘We have a possible suspect, although we haven’t yet identified her. I think we’re coming close to a motive, too.’

‘And what would that be, do you imagine? The suspect is African, isn’t she?’

‘Yes, and I think that could explain the way the victims have been mutilated, but I don’t think it has much bearing on
why
they were killed. As far as we can establish, the African victim was a local pimp and all-round low life nicknamed Mawakiya, while the white victim was probably a Romanian pimp called Mânios Dumitrescu.’

Superintendent Molloy raised his eyebrows. ‘Ah … so you think that this African woman might be a brasser, taking out her revenge on two pimps who had cheated her? It does happen. We had a case exactly like that in Limerick last summer. Three of the local hookers decided they were sick of paying so much of their hard-earned wages to their minder. They trapped his head in the door of some old fridge that was standing in his own front yard, and then drove a car into it. Didn’t quite decapitate him, but nearly.’

‘I have no evidence that our suspect is or ever has been a hooker,’ said Katie.

‘Oh come on, what else? African, and going after pimps like that? It’s the logical conclusion.’

‘It’s an assumption and I don’t make assumptions. It’s assumptions that get cases thrown out of court. Look at those charges that were brought against those brothel-keepers last year in County Louth. The Gardaí failed to identify themselves when they entered the premises because they “assumed” that the brothel-keepers would know they were the law. The judge agreed that by failing to identify themselves they had nullified their entry warrant. Case dismissed.’

‘Dah – that was nothing but a legal technicality!’ said Superintendent Molloy, flapping one hand dismissively. ‘What we’re talking about in
this
case is a motive so obvious that you’d have to be lying in your scratcher with your head under the covers to miss it. All you have to do is find out which girls were working for those two scumbags – and
that
shouldn’t exactly tax your pretty head too much. Just check their websites, if they have them, and their ads in the local papers, and you’re halfway there.’

‘We’re doing that already, of course,’ Katie told him. ‘With Mawakiya it’s a little more difficult, because he’s been keeping himself under the radar.’

‘Meaning what, exactly?’

‘Meaning that a few people in the city have been aware that he’s around, but for some reason he’s never come to
our
attention before. There’s a chef who works in one of the African restaurants on Lower Shandon Street, he saw him quite often, and apparently he always had a number of very young girls with him. A couple of minor drug-dealers knew him, too, as well as some juvenile offenders who were caught stealing tyres from Smiley’s. But that was about his level. Petty pimping and petty drug-pushing and petty thieving, that’s all. It seems extreme, to say the least, that one of his girls would go to the lengths of forcing him to cut off his own hand, then amputating his other hand, then blasting him in the face with two shotgun shells.’

She paused, but before Superintendent Molloy could interrupt her, she said, ‘That’s another thing. She shot them with quite a new type of Winchester shotgun shell, fired from what was probably a fairly newish type of handgun. A personal protection weapon, rather than some long-barrelled shotgun like you’d be taking out to shoot clay pigeons with. We have to ask ourselves where she acquired it – or how she even knew such weapons existed.’