Red Light (3 page)

Katie took hold of Corina’s hand and squeezed it, and smiled. ‘I’ll see you again, Corina, yes? Some nice people are going to take care of you. You’ll have your own bed to sleep in and you won’t have to do any more cooking or cleaning or changing babies’ nappies, and we’re not going to let Marcela or Mânios hit you any more. You’re safe now.’

She didn’t know if Corina understood everything that she was saying, but the little girl looked up at her and gave her a wide grin. It broke Katie’s heart to see that all her teeth were rotten right down into her gums.

While she was putting on her dark red waterproof jacket, Katie had a few quiet words with Mary ó Floinn in the corridor.

‘Fair play to you, Mary, you’ve shown some real neck, doing this,’ she told her. ‘Most people don’t dare cross the Dumitrescus. We’ve had Mânios Dumitrescu up in front of the court three times in the past four years on charges of assault and extortion and every time our witnesses have been threatened with being cut or beaten up and they’ve all conveniently decided to lose their memories.’

Mary ó Floinn said, ‘You don’t think we’re scared at Nasc? We’ve already had some very nasty phone calls from the Dumitrescus. Not openly threatening, as such. They’re vicious, but they’re not stupid. And of course this isn’t the usual kind of case for us. Mostly we’re trying to keep Roma families together, not split them apart. In the end, though, yes – I suppose it’s all going to depend on what you can coax little Corina to say to you and what witness statements you can get.’

She paused, and then she said, ‘By the way, superintendent, I wasn’t expecting you to come here in person. I very much appreciate it.’

Katie gave her a quick, tight smile. ‘I was going to send Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán – you’ve met her, haven’t you? But I wanted to come and see Corina for myself. I’m allergic to those Dumitrescus but I wanted to remind myself exactly why, and just how much. Mânios, he’s the devil incarnate, that fellow, that’s the only word for him, and that mother of his, what a witch!’

She looked back towards the interview room and saw Corina sitting alone on the couch, her head down, playing some game by wiggling her fingers. Detective O’Donovan had reported to her that when Corina was taken from the Dumitrescu house in Gurranabraher last Friday, the officers had found that she had no spare clothes, only the filthy T-shirt and shorts she was wearing at the time, no shoes apart from a pair of worn-out rubber dollies that were two sizes too small for her, and no toys. She wouldn’t have needed books, because she had never been sent to school and couldn’t read or write. She couldn’t even count up to ten in Romanian.

Katie made her way down the steep concrete steps of Ferry Lane to Pope’s Quay, overlooking the River Lee, where she had parked her metallic-blue Fiesta. The sun was shining, so that the pavements and the road surface were almost blinding. After she had climbed into the driver’s seat she pulled down the sun visor and looked at herself in the mirror. The weather had been unseasonably cold in the past few weeks and her lips were chapped. She thought she looked tired, and her short copper-coloured hair was a mess. Sometimes she wondered what John had ever seen in her, though he had always told her that she looked as if she were related to the elves, petite and green-eyed and ‘impossibly pretty’. ‘Don’t you mean “pretty impossible”?’ she had always retorted.

She applied some Lypsyl to her lips and tugged at her hair. She made up her mind not to go to Advantage again to have it cut, although it probably wasn’t her stylist’s fault that she had chopped it about so much. While the poor girl was trying to layer it and trim it straight Katie had been constantly talking on the phone, and when she talked on the phone she always got agitated or angry, and she never sat still.

No wonder her late mother had always called her ‘Fairy Fidget’.

Her phone rang now, playing the chorus of ‘The Wild Rover’
by The Dubliners.
And it’s no, nay, never –
no, nay never no more
—

She lifted it out of her jacket pocket and said, ‘Yes, Liam? What’s the story? Did you get to talk to Gerrety?’

It was Inspector Liam Fennessy. He was supposed to have been meeting Michael Gerrety and his lawyer this morning to discuss the thirty-nine charges that were being brought against Gerrety for operating the city’s most profitable online sex service, Cork Fantasy Girls. It was a convoluted case that had been dragging on for months.

‘Gerrety didn’t show,’ said Inspector Fennessy. ‘No big surprise, I’d say. His lawyer made some lame excuse about his mother being poorly. But that’s not the reason I’m ringing you. A feller’s been found dead in a flat over a shop in Lower Shandon Street. Horgan’s there already and ó Nuallán’s on her way. Horgan said your man’s been lying there for at least three days, but it could be anything up to a week. Both of his hands have been amputated and it looks like he’s been shot point-blank in the face with a twelve-bore.’

‘Jesus.’

‘That’s exactly what I said. He was a black feller, apparently. We have a name for him because there was a young girl in there with him, although it’s not a name I’d recognize. The girl claims she was an eye-witness to him being shot but she was too scared to come out of the room. Apparently the perp threatened her that if she did, she would blow
her
head off, too.’

‘Come here to me? ‘Did you say
she
?’

‘That’s right. The girl told the two fellers who found her that it was a woman who did it, for definite.’

‘Did she
know
the woman?’

‘They didn’t think so. They weren’t sure.’

‘Did she give them any idea what she looked like? Would she recognize her if she saw her again?’

‘No. They said she clammed up after telling them that. Didn’t say another word.’

‘What number Lower Shandon Street?’

‘I don’t think you’ll have any trouble in finding it, ma’am. We have three cars and a white van there and more on the way. The technical team should be there, too, at any minute. Horgan says that there’s a fierce crowd already.’

‘Okay, Liam. I’ll go there directly. How about you?’

‘I still have all of the statements on that Ringaskiddy drugs case to go through. It’s up in court in the morning. Michael Gerrety’s lawyer said that he might be available tomorrow afternoon, but I doubt I’ll be able to meet him then. I’ll have to make it Friday, if I can.’

‘In that case, don’t worry. I’ll go. It’s high time I had a less than friendly chat with Mr Gerrety.’

‘Cancery bastard. I know exactly why he vexes Dermot so much.’

‘Watch your temper, Liam. Just leave the file on my desk, and I’ll have Shelagh fix the appointment for me.’

‘Yes, ma’am. I’ll catch you later so.’

Katie started up her car, backed out of her parking space in front of the old Cork Button Co., and drove along the quay to Lower Shandon Street. Earlier this morning she had been wishing she had eaten something before she had left home. She usually found that if she missed breakfast she was beginning to flag by eleven o’clock and become irritable, particularly in the week before her period. After what Inspector Fennessy had told her, though, she was relieved that she hadn’t. There were few things she found more unpleasant than lukewarm coffee and half-digested Alpen spurting out of her nose.

Fennessy had been right – Lower Shandon Street was already crowded with three patrol cars, a yellow ambulance, a white Mercedes Vario van from the Technical Bureau, an outside broadcast van from RTÉ, two Garda motorcycles and at least seventy or eighty bystanders, many of them black and Asian, all standing on the pavement opposite the Hungarian Deli as if they were expecting a minor celebrity to show up.

A motorcycle garda waved Katie through and pointed to a space where she could park outside O’Donnelly’s Turf Accountancy, with two wheels tilted on to the kerb. Detective Horgan was standing outside the Hungarian Deli, talking to Dan Keane from the
Examiner
and a woman reporter in a silvery fur-collared anorak whom Katie didn’t recognize. He immediately came up and opened her door for her. Katie saw that he had a blue surgical mask tied around his neck.

‘Well, wow, you really hurled it here, ma’am. Didn’t break the speed limit, I hope?’

Katie ignored that remark. She was used to Detective Horgan’s terrible sense of humour. He was blue-eyed and fresh-faced, and his high quiff of wiry blond hair made him look like a member of a second-rate boy band. In spite of his puerile quips, though, he was developing into a very acute and persistent young detective, who was almost impossible to fob off with blustering excuses or hastily cobbled alibis.

‘So what’s the story?’ asked Katie, as they walked towards the shop.

Detective Horgan pointed to Ciaran O’Malley and his client, Mr Rooney, who were standing under the awning of the next-door premises looking fed-up and anxious to go. ‘The young feller works for Lisney’s and he was showing the old feller the shop to rent it out as a chipper. The way they tell it, they opened up the front door and the stink almost knocked their socks off.’

‘The body’s where?’

‘Upstairs, first floor.’ Horgan pointed to the window over the Hungarian Deli sign. When she looked up, Katie could see blue laser lights criss-crossing the ceiling, and then, momentarily, the back of one of the Garda technicians in his white Tyvek suit.

‘I’ll tell you for nothing, ma’am, it hums in there like St Mary’s church choir. You’d be advised to put a dab of the old Mentholatum under your nose.’

‘Inspector Fennessy mentioned a girl,’ said Katie.

‘Yeah, that’s right, they found her sitting on the floor next to the body, practically naked. She’s in the back of the ambulance now. I talked to one of the paramedics and she doesn’t appear to be suffering from any injuries, like, but she’s badly undernourished. She’s been living off tap water and Bolands Raspberry Creams for the past three days. They’ll be taking her off to the Wilton Hilton in a minute for a check-up.’

Katie said, ‘Okay, I’ll see her first. Have you interviewed those two fellers?’

‘I have, yeah, both of them. Not that they could tell me much. When they first found the body the girl said a couple of things in some language they didn’t understand. The old fellow said it sounded like African.’

‘African? What kind of African?’

‘Well, he wasn’t too sure about that. But the kind that black people speak.’

‘Off the top of my head, detective, I don’t know how many languages they speak in Africa, but it must be more than one. We speak about twenty different languages in Cork, for God’s sake. You’d think so, anyway, by the sound of it.’

Detective Horgan said, ‘He did catch the victim’s name, though, or what he thought was the victim’s name, because the girl repeated it two or three times. Mah-wah-
kee-
yah.’

‘Mah-wah-
kee
-yah? He was sure of that?’

Detective Horgan nodded and held up his iPhone. ‘I made him say it over, and I recorded it, and the young fellow agreed that was what it sounded like.’

‘All right,’ said Katie. ‘I think you can tell them they can go for now. They both look like they’ve had enough for one day. Have you tried to talk to the girl yourself?’

‘I did, but she wouldn’t say a word to me. Those two fellers said that the last thing they got out of her was her age. They asked her how old she was and she stuck up thirteen fingers. Well – I mean she stuck up her fingers thirteen times. Ten, and then three.’

This was one of those moments when Katie couldn’t be sure if Detective Horgan was joking or not, but she let it pass. She walked around to the back of the ambulance and knocked. After a moment the doors were opened and a young woman paramedic appeared, in her bright yellow and green uniform, with a pale angular face and dark hair shaved so short that she almost looked as if she were undergoing chemotherapy.

‘Detective Superintendent Maguire,’ said Katie, holding up her ID. ‘I’d like to have a few words with your patient, if I may, before you take her off to CUH. I presume that’s where she’ll be going?’

‘That’s right, yes,’ said the paramedic.

‘What condition is she in? I mean, generally speaking?’

‘We’ve checked her for heart rate and blood pressure and any obvious physical trauma. She’s dehydrated and she’s at least twenty-five pounds underweight for a girl of her height. Apart from that, she appears to have two fractured ribs, as well as multiple bruises and dozens of historic scars.’

Katie climbed up into the ambulance and sat down next to the girl lying on the trolley. The girl stared up at her, clutching the light blue cotton blanket that covered her, as if she were terrified to let go. Her hair was filthy and tangled and she had weeping red cold sores around her lips. She obviously hadn’t washed in a long time, because she smelled of stale body odour and urine.

‘Hallo, sweetheart,’ said Katie, giving her a smile. ‘How are you feeling?’

The girl said nothing, but pulled the blanket up further under her chin.

‘This fine lady is going to take you to the hospital,’ said Katie. ‘The nurses will give you a shower there, and wash your hair for you, and then they’ll give you something to eat and drink. Believe me, you’ll feel a hundred times better.’

‘She hasn’t spoken at all,’ said the paramedic. ‘She won’t even tell me her name.’

‘Well, that’s not unusual,’ said Katie. ‘Ever since she was taken away from wherever she’s come from, I doubt if a single person has done anything but lie to her and threaten her and thrash the daylights out of her if she wouldn’t do what she was told. Why should she think that you and me are going to treat her any different?’

She was tempted for a moment to ask the girl about ‘Mah-wah-
kee-
yah’, but she decided against it. Even if she could persuade her to say anything at all, it was obvious that she was deeply traumatized and in Katie’s experience witnesses in that state were almost always unreliable. She didn’t want to devote hours of valuable police time trying to distinguish between what had really happened and what might have been nothing more than a young girl’s nightmare.