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Katie gently touched her right cheek with her fingertips. Her eye was swollen and tender and she knew that by tomorrow morning she would have a huge black eye. She had taken two Nurofen, so at least her headache had subsided. ‘So what’s this thing that I’m going to love but probably not?’

‘We’ve just brought in your two favourite gardaí, Ronan Kelly and Billy Daly. They’re downstairs in the interview room.’

‘Brought them in? What do you mean, you’ve brought them in?’

‘They were arrested at Ringaskiddy about an hour ago, trying to board the Swansea ferry with a load of drugs on them. I don’t know exactly how much, but there was heroin and racemic methamphetamine and so many pills you could have opened a maracas factory.’

‘Holy Mother of God, what did they think they were doing?’

‘They were emigrating. They knew you were going to report them for corruption, so they decided to make themselves scarce. They would have got away with it, too, except that one of the sniffer dogs was being taken off duty and started barking at them as they walked past.’

Katie stood up. ‘Right, I’ll go down and talk to them. I can’t believe those two. They walked through the stupid wood and got hit by every branch.’

Detective O’Donovan raised his hand and said, ‘Wait, ma’am. There’s something more.’

‘Don’t tell me. What?’

‘After they were stopped at Ringaskiddy, Daly’s car was found in the ferry terminal car park. Apparently he was just going to leave it there. It was only an old Honda Civic and he isn’t married or nothing so it’s not as if he has a wife or a partner who would have needed it.’

‘So?’

‘So a Honda Civic stopped across the street from Nolan’s yard at Dennehy’s Cross at the same time as the Nissan X-Trail was stolen – the one that rammed your car.’

‘Really? Why didn’t Ryan report that as soon as he saw it?’

‘Because it only stopped for a couple of minutes, and you can see that the driver is making a call on his mobile. Then it drove off.’

‘Don’t tell me it was Garda Daly’s car?’

‘I’m sorry to say that it was. It didn’t look like he was doing anything in particular, but he could well have been keeping a lookout while Kelly cut the wire and then he was checking on his mobile that he’d managed to break into the X-Trail and get it started.’

Katie didn’t know what to say. If Garda Kelly and Garda Daly had stolen the X-Trail, they had done it with the deliberate intention of using it to run her off the road and kill her. More than likely it had been them who had been following her when she left her house to go to Kent station and had come up so close behind her as she joined the main road to Cork.

They had been stupid enough to ram her car while it was going up a hill, with no certainty at all that the crash would be fatal. If she had been driving, instead of Ailish, she would probably have survived it. It was only Ailish’s bad heart that had killed her.

Katie took a deep, deep breath.

‘Are you okay, ma’am?’ asked Detective O’Donovan.

‘What do you think? Let’s go down and have a word with those two, shall we?’

Ronan Kelly and Billy Daly were sitting at the table in the interview room, both looking frowsy-haired, unshaven and dejected. A burly uniformed garda was standing by the door with his hands behind his back, staring at the ceiling. He knew them both well, of course, but he was under instructions not to say a word to them.

When Katie and Detective O’Donovan entered the room, neither of them looked up. Katie said to the garda on the door, ‘If you could wait outside, please.’ She didn’t want everybody in the station to hear the details of this interview before she had even had a chance to discuss it with Acting Chief Superintendent Molloy and decide what charges they were going to bring.

Katie and Detective O’Donovan sat down opposite the two gardaí. Ronan Kelly glanced up and saw Katie’s bruised eye and Katie thought she caught him giving the ghost of a smile.

‘Patrick, would you?’ she said, and nodded towards the recording machine. Detective O’Donovan switched it on and Katie said, ‘Interview with Garda Ronan Kelly and Garda William Daly.’ She checked the clock on the wall and added the time and the date.

‘Now, we’re going to switch that off and talk informally,’ she said.

‘Ma’am?’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘I just switched it on.’

‘Well, switch it off again, please, and go right back to the beginning.’

When Detective O’Donovan had done that, Katie propped her elbows on the table and laced her fingers together like a judge about to pass sentence.

‘You two clowns tried to kill me,’ she said.

Billy Daly said, ‘That wasn’t us! Swear on the Bible!’

‘Will you shut your trap, Billy!’ said Ronan Kelly. ‘Saying it wasn’t us is just as bad as saying it was.’

‘Jesus, you two are thick,’ said Katie. ‘How you managed to qualify as gardaí I can’t understand for the life of me. I’m surprised you know which end of a baton to take hold of. You’re not only thick, you’re greedy and immoral and a disgrace to your uniforms. And to think the both of you had the Garda badge tattooed on you.’

She paused, and then she said, ‘There’s no point in you trying to deny what you did. You knew I was going to report you for taking bribes from Michael Gerrety. So you thought you could save your miserable skins by getting rid of me.

‘Instead of that, you killed a perfectly innocent and happy woman. She was somebody’s mother and even more than that, she was soon to be somebody’s wife.’

‘That was hardly our fault,’ said Ronan Kelly out of his slit of a mouth. ‘How were we to know that you weren’t driving your own car? It’s not as though we’re fecking psychic.’

‘So you admit it?’

‘I’m not saying nothing. We might have done it and we might not. I thought you said this was just an informal discussion, anyway. Testing the water, like. Seeing where we stand.’

‘There’s no question where you two will be standing and that’s in the dock. What were you planning to do about Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán? She was the one who first told me that you were taking money to look the other way.’

‘What does it matter? We made a right hames of it, any road.’

‘We were going to do the same to her,’ put in Billy Daly. ‘The same only different, like.’

‘I fecking told you to shut your fecking trap,’ said Ronan Kelly.

‘We have CCTV evidence of you stealing the Nissan X-Trail from Nolan’s Construction,’ said Katie. ‘We have forensic evidence that it was the Nissan that collided with the rear of my car. That was done deliberately, so we’re not just talking manslaughter.’

She opened a folder in front of her. ‘Not only that, we have witness statements that confirm that you were paid substantial sums of money by the late Desmond O’Leary on behalf of Michael Gerrety in order not to interfere with any of his trafficking of girls under the age of legal consent or illegal immigrants. You were treated to sexual favours, too, free of charge. We also have evidence that you knew of his drugging and beating of unwilling sex workers.’

Both gardaí sat silent for a while, staring down at the table in front of them like two admonished schoolboys. In reality, Katie had no substantive evidence that the money that Mister Dessie had given them had come from Michael Gerrety, even though it was highly likely. There was nothing in the folder in front of her except for a report on stolen farm machinery in Maglin. However, they would be facing a charge of unlawful homicide and she reckoned they would do anything to mitigate the punishment they would receive for that.

Ronan Kelly frowned at Katie and he almost looked remorseful.
Briseann an dúchair tri shúile an chat
,
she thought.
A cat reveals its character in its eyes
. If he wasn’t remorseful, then he must be bitterly regretful for having been so self-indulgent, and such an easy mark for Michael Gerrety’s bribery. Sitting here in this interview room, about to be charged with serious crimes, what had he got out of it, after all? Some money, which had all been spent, and some drunken sex, which was all over and washed off. A tattoo, too, which would make him an obvious target in prison.

‘If I tell you a few things, give you some leads, like, would that make it any easier on us?’ he asked.

‘It depends on how useful they turned out to be, these leads.’

‘Well, I know you’ve been after Michael Gerrety. I know about Operation Rocker, like, and how Molloy was after calling it off, and how you weren’t exactly delighted.’

‘Word gets around, doesn’t it?’ said Katie.

‘Bryan Molloy and Michael Gerrety have known each other for years. I don’t think they’ve ever made a secret of it. Michael Gerrety started off his sex business in Limerick, remember, when Molloy was just a sergeant. He gave Molloy regular kickbacks to keep the law off his doorstep, and that’s how his businesses did so well.

‘He’s been paying him ever since. I don’t know how much, but a fair heap, I’d say. In return, Molloy uses his contacts in Dublin to put pressure on the politicians to change the law about sex workers. Gerrety thought that Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll was one almighty pain in the arse, and when Molloy was appointed to replace him he thought that all of his Christmases had come at once.’

‘Have you any proof at all that Michael Gerrety has been bribing Bryan Molloy?’ asked Katie. ‘Any evidence that would hold up in court?’

Ronan Kelly turned to Billy Daly. Billy Daly rasied one eyebrow and then he leaned over and whispered something in Ronan Kelly’s ear. Ronan Kelly listened, and nodded, and then he turned back to Katie and said, ‘It depends.’

‘It depends on what offences I charge you both with, is that what you mean?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Tell me what you’ve got and I’ll tell you what concessions I might make,’ said Katie.

At the back of her mind, she was seething with anger and hatred for these two men. They had killed Ailish, and they had intended to kill her, and they had destroyed her father’s happiness forever. Not only that, they had dragged the honour of An Garda Síochána through the dirt, and if it wasn’t for the Garda oath of attestation that she had taken she would have quit her job and gone to America with John.

In spite of that, her training and her experience kept the door to the back of her mind firmly closed. Showing how angry she was would only be counterproductive. She wanted Michael Gerrety, and the only way to get him was to keep calm – almost disinterested.

‘They took my phone off me,’ said Ronan Kelly. ‘They took my phone off me, but it’s all on there. Recorded, like.’

‘Okay …’ said Katie. ‘Patrick, would you be good enough to go and fetch Garda Kelly’s phone for him.’

Detective O’Donovan left the room and Katie was left with Ronan Kelly and Billy Daly.

‘You might have got away with it if you hadn’t had all those drugs on you,’ she told them.

‘We didn’t have any choice, did we? We hardly had any money between us, so we were going to sell the stuff to keep us going.’

‘Where did you get it?’

‘Off of one drugs bust and another, over the past year or so,’ said Ronan Kelly. ‘Like we would hand in about a half of what we seized and keep the rest. We sold a lot of it off, but we still had a fair bit left. Maybe ten or eleven thousand euros’ worth. This is totally off the record, mind, and if you ask me again on the record, I’ll deny it.’

‘Where were you going?’ Katie asked him.

‘Liverpool, to begin with. We’ve got a few friends there.’

‘And then what?’

‘I don’t know. If you want to know the truth, I think we’ve made a fecking pig’s dinner of everything. I’ve learned one thing: you don’t need much in the way of brains to commit any kind of crime, but you have to be a genius to get away with it.’

Detective O’Donovan came back with Ronan Kelly’s mobile phone in a clear plastic evidence bag. He handed it over and Ronan Kelly shook it out of the bag and set it down on the table. He touched the voice memo button and sat back with his arms folded.

They heard fiddle music playing faintly in the background, and a bodhrán drumming, and laughter, and glasses clinking. Then they heard Ronan Kelly saying, ‘We’ve sorted that (unclear) at Carroll’s Quay.’

Another man’s voice said, ‘Yeah, Billy told us. That’s grand. We appreciate it.’

‘I mean, what a fecking eejit,’ said Ronan Kelly. ‘You don’t go into a knocking shop with your wallet stuffed full of cash. What do you expect is going to happen? Anyway, we persuaded the feller to drop his complaint.’

‘What did you say to him?’ asked the other man. ‘You’d be forced to tell his missus, something like that?’

‘We tried that,’ Ronan Kelly replied. ‘Trouble was, he said he wasn’t married. So we told him the girl was underage and we’d have to charge him with defilement.’

The other man laughed. ‘Dowtcha boy! And you know what’s really, really funny about that?’

‘Go on, Dessie. What’s really, really funny about that?’

‘She is underage! She’s only fourteen!’

‘Oh, for feck’s sake, you (unclear).’

‘Anyway, Michael’s shown you his gratitude by giving you another hundred yoyos each.’

‘Tell him, any time. We’re only doing our job upholding the law.’

‘As long as it’s the law according to Michael Gerrety, he’ll be happy.’

Katie said, ‘Got him! You can turn that off now. I don’t need to hear any more.’

Ronan Kelly reached forward to switch off his phone, but Detective O’Donovan snatched it away first and dropped it back into the evidence bag.

‘I’d be interested to know why you recorded that particular conversation,’ said Katie.

‘Oh, I recorded plenty of others, just to be on the safe side. You’re never quite sure where you are with people like Gerrety. But this is the only one that’s out-and-out incriminating.’

‘We have plenty of interviews with Dessie O’Leary on record,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘We won’t have any trouble matching the voice.’

‘So what’s it worth?’ asked Ronan Kelly. ‘I mean, that’s pure gold, as evidence, you have to admit. It’s only second best to having a video of Michael Gerrety handing us the money in person.’

‘It’s highly incriminating, I agree,’ said Katie. She could feel her heart beating harder, but she was trying to stay dispassionate. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll forget about the drugs.’