Red Light (44 page)

She stayed overnight at Anglesea Street. The room was sparsely furnished and there was only a single bed, but there was a kettle and some teabags and some sachets of instant coffee and hot chocolate. She undressed and put on the plain white nightgown that she kept at the office, and then made herself a mug of chocolate.

She knew that she shouldn’t allow herself to get stressed about Michael Gerrety, but after sitting on the bed for a few minutes sipping her chocolate she stood up and parted the curtains and looked out. There, in the rain, stood The Elysian Tower, its windows lit up in a chequerboard pattern because so many of its apartments were still unoccupied. At the very top, though, she could see the lights of Michael Gerrety’s apartment.

In a way, she believed that dropping the charges against Gerrety was the right course of action for now. If they made a bags of this prosecution, it would be much more difficult to get him back into court at a later date even if they managed to gather some much more convincing evidence against him.

What was nagging her, though, was how it was ever going to be possible for them to get hold of that evidence, now that Acting Chief Superintendent Molloy had cancelled Operation Rocker. It also seemed as if Molloy had become buddies with Gerrety at the golf club.

She closed the curtains and drained the last of her chocolate. When she had brushed her teeth, she rang John. She had already texted him and told him that she would be staying in the city.

‘How are you?’ she asked him.

‘Fine. I’m fine. I’ve just got off the phone with Nils Shapiro.’

‘Oh, your pharmacy friend in LA.’

‘That’s right. He still wants me on board. He’s very keen.’

‘I see,’ said Katie. ‘Maybe we can talk about it tomorrow, when I get back.’

‘I don’t know that there’s too much to talk about.’

‘Well, you know me, I can always find something to talk about. My mother was always asking when I was ever going to shut my mouth and eat my dinner.’

‘How did she expect you to eat your dinner with your mouth shut?’

‘I’m not in the mood for jokes, John.’

‘No, sorry.’

‘Talking of dinner, have you had any?’ she asked him.

‘You’re not my mother, Katie.’

‘No, I’m not. In fact I’m not anything at all to you, am I?’

‘Katie—’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. It’s been a long day. I’ll see you tomorrow so. Goodnight.’

‘Katie—’ he said, but she switched off her phone. Maybe it was rude, and unkind, but she was beginning to feel that when he said he didn’t love Ireland any more, what he really meant was that he didn’t love her. Well, he did, but not enough to give up his life in America. She supposed she couldn’t blame him. He wanted sun instead of rain, blue skies instead of grey. He wanted boundless opportunity, instead of ‘Ah well, we’ve suffered many times before in the past and we’ve learned to put a brave face on it, like.’

She climbed into bed. The sheets smelled of laundry instead of her. She closed her eyes and almost instantly fell asleep.

‘Smoked,’ Dr O’Brien said.

‘
Smoked
?’ she said, looking at the eight hands laid out in a line on the stainless steel table in front of her. ‘You mean, like bacon?’

‘That’s correct. Or kippers. They haven’t been done in a proper smoker, though. I’d say a normal domestic oven. But it’s desiccated them enough to preserve them for a while – these three pairs, anyway. This fourth pair haven’t been smoked at all. Well – you can tell by the shape they’re in.’

‘But they all fit the wrists of our four victims?’

‘No question at all,’ said Dr O’Brien. ‘Every one of them, a perfect match, like a jigsaw. Or Lego maybe. Would you like me to show you?’

‘No, thanks, Ailbe,’ said Katie. ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

It was almost noon. The sun was shining in through the clerestory windows of the pathology laboratory, so that it looked almost like the interior of a church. All of the congregation here, though, were lying on trolleys under green sheets and had already gone to the place for which they had been praying all of their lives.

Dr O’Brien picked up Mawakiya’s left hand and turned it over. ‘Apart from the left hand of victim number three – the one you call Bula, is it? – the left hands of all the other victims were amputated very raggedly, almost certainly using a hacksaw. I thought before from the condition of their wrists that they had cut off their own left hands, but now I am almost certain of it. With Bula it’s impossible to say, of course, because his left hand was detached with a circular saw.’

‘Well, we know for sure what the motive was for cutting their hands off,’ said Katie. ‘Revenge, as you said, Ailbe, right from the very beginning. And they were sent to Michael Gerrety either as a threat or as trophies to show him what she had done to the people who worked for him, or both.’

‘I think in this case, both,’ said Dr O’Brien. ‘Not that it falls within my mandate to have an opinion. But it was common in many parts of West Africa for hands to be amputated as a punishment. In the colonial days they did it to prove to their white bosses that the punishment had been duly carried out. Well, it would have saved them from dragging in the whole body, wouldn’t it? In the Congo, they also used it as proof that expensive ammunition hadn’t been wasted. Even brutality has to stick to a budget.’

Katie would normally have taken the South Ring Road back to Anglesea Street, but she had to go into the city centre to do some shopping at the Paul Street Tesco. She needed dog food for Barney and washing-up liquid and cheese and fresh bread. She also felt like doing something totally normal, like pushing a shopping trolley around to the sound of piped music, so that she wouldn’t have to think about John and severed hands and Obioma and Michael Gerrety.

She turned into Washington Street, past the courthouse. As she was passing the building that housed Michael Gerrety’s brothel, she saw the front door open and a woman step out. To her astonishment, she realized that it was Obioma. Her black, Medusa-like hair was untied, but she was still wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans and boots, and that black leather waistcoat. She looked up and down the street, as if to make sure that nobody was watching her, and then she started to walk towards Grand Parade.

Katie stepped on her brakes and the van behind her blew its horn at her. It pulled up beside her and the passenger yelled out, ‘Learn to drive, you stupid cow! You almost had us up your arse there!’

Katie took no notice. Obioma was crossing Grand Parade and heading towards Patrick Street, and walking very quickly. The traffic lights were red, but Katie drove through them, turned left, and pulled her car up on to the pavement outside Finn’s Corner sportswear shop. She climbed out and started to run across the road, although she had to stop when a car came around the corner and almost hit her.

‘Are you after dying, you daft bitch?’ the driver shouted at her.

She didn’t say anything but dodged around the back of his car and reached the pavement on the opposite side of the road. However, Obioma must have heard the driver’s brakes screeching and him shouting at her, because she turned around. The instant she saw that Katie was coming after her, she started to run.

Katie started running, too. Patrick Street was crowded with lunchtime shoppers and she had to jink and sidestep to avoid bumping into them.

Obioma collided with several pedestrians and Katie heard them calling out after her in protest, but then she left the pavement and started to run in the road. Katie followed her and almost knocked a cyclist off his bike.

The two of them ran along the middle of Patrick Street, with shoppers turning round to stare at them. Obioma was about fifty metres ahead of Katie, and even though she was wearing high-heeled boots she was running very fast. Katie felt as if she ought to shout, ‘
Stop her
!’ but she knew from her experience as a young garda that people never reacted quickly enough, and that Obioma would be two streets away before they realized what she wanted them to do. Besides, she was too short of breath.

Obioma ran into French Church Street, a long narrow pedestrian alleyway that would lead her to Paul Street. Again, she was colliding with people as she ran, and she knocked one woman’s shopping all across the pavement, but that didn’t slow her down. In fact, she seemed to Katie to be running even faster. Katie herself was fit, and exercised regularly, but by now she was panting hard and she was very conscious of her holster slapping against her thigh. Her vision was jiggling like a hand-held camera and the shopfronts and cafes all along the street were becoming a blur.

She reached Paul Street and looked left and right to see where Obioma had gone. There was no sign of her anywhere, although Katie guessed she had probably turned right because that part of the street was more crowded. She started to jog towards Academy Street, trying to glimpse Obioma’s snake-like hair bobbing up and down ahead of her.

As she jogged, she took out her iPhone so that she could call for back-up. Obioma was in the city centre, on foot, and patrol cars could encircle the area within a few minutes. She slowed down to a walk to switch it on, but as she did so Obioma stepped out of the darkened doorway of a men’s hairdresser’s called The Crop Shop and hit her. It was a stunning chop with the edge of her hand which struck Katie on the cheekbone and sent her stumbling backwards across the pavement.

Obioma stalked after her and hit her again, with the left hand this time, striking her left ear. Katie pitched over on to her shoulder and dropped her iPhone. Obioma immediately stamped on it, twice, and crushed it.

Katie’s head was singing and her vision was even more jumbled than when she had been running, but she managed to reach for her gun and tug it out of its holster.

Obioma stood over her. A crowd of shoppers had already started to gather around them, and Katie could hear one young man calling out, ‘Catfight! Come and see this, boy! Catfight!’

Katie propped herself up on her left elbow and pointed her revolver at Obioma. ‘You’re under arrest,’ she told her. She could feel her right eye closing up already.

‘Or what?’ said Obioma, looking down at her. ‘You will shoot me, in front of all of these people, with the risk of hitting one of them as well? I don’t think so, detective superintendent. Besides, I don’t think you’re the shooting kind.’

Now that Katie had produced her gun, the shoppers who had crowded around closest to them started to shuffle backwards. ‘I’m a Garda detective,’ Katie announced, without taking her eyes off Obioma. ‘Will somebody please dial 112 and somebody go looking for a guard. And, please, all of you, clear out of here now, as quick as you can.’

Several of the onlookers took out their phones and started prodding, while the rest of them began to disperse, but far too slowly, as if they were reluctant to miss out on any of the action.

‘Will you push on!’ she snapped at them. ‘I’m making an arrest here!’

Obioma, however, was giving Katie that haughty, heavy-lidded look. ‘I have a mission to fulfil,’ she said. ‘You know what I am sworn to do, and I will do it. There is only one way that you can stop me.’

With that, she turned around and started to walk away. The crowd parted to let her through, pushing at each other in their effort to keep clear of her in case Katie started shooting.

She turned the corner into Academy Street and was gone. Katie stood with her gun in her hand, pointing at nothing. Then she lowered it and slid it back into its holster. Obioma was wrong. She
was
the shooting kind. She had shot a killer before, and fatally wounded him, but that had been in a moment of high stress, when her own life had been in danger. She was not going to shoot a woman in the street in broad daylight in front of at least a hundred bystanders, especially since that woman had presented no obvious threat apart from hitting her, and especially since she would have had to shoot her in the back. That would have been summary execution.

More than that, she was keenly aware that Obioma wasn’t afraid of her. When she pointed her gun at most suspects that she arrested they would put up their hands and give up immediately, but Obioma didn’t care if she shot her or not. Her fearlessness made her invulnerable.

She heard sirens. A patrol car appeared at the Academy Street end of the street, and then another two at the opposite end, in Saint Peter and Paul Place, even though that was a pedestrian precinct. She heard running feet and saw yellow high-visibility jackets making their way towards her through the crowd.

Her head was throbbing and she felt that the pavement was ebbing and flowing underneath her feet. An elderly priest came up to her and put his arm around her. She could smell the mints on his breath.

‘You look very pale, my dear. Take some deep breaths, that’s it. Look, there’s a bench over here. Come and sit down. That’s a fierce terrible bruise on your cheek there and no mistake.’

She sat down, and the priest sat down next to her. Two gardaí came up to her, and at least one of them recognized who she was.

‘Who did this to you, ma’am? Do you know where she might have gone now?’

‘Yes, officer,’ said Katie. ‘I know who did it. I know where she’s going, too. But God alone knows how we can stop her.’

Detective O’Donovan came into her office and said, ‘You’re going to love this, ma’am. But then again, you’re probably not.’

‘Has she been caught yet?’

‘Not a sniff of her anywhere, I’m afraid. We’ve had thirty-five guards and the dog unit out searching for her. They were even looking in the ladies’ toilets in Dunne’s. That caused a bit of screaming, so I’m told.’

‘Well, she managed to outwit us before, didn’t she, Patrick, in Washington Street? Never even left the building after she shot Mister Dessie. No wonder we didn’t see her coming out of the front door, she never did, and she must have been staying in that empty flat ever since. We did search that flat, didn’t we?’

Detective O’Donovan nodded. ‘We did of course, yeah. But it was probably just a quick look in and all she would have had to do is hide herself in a wardrobe or under the bed or somewhere like that.’