Taken for Dead (Kate Maguire) (3 page)

‘Woofy?’ asked Inspector Fennessy.

‘Well, you know, whatever they call the family dog.’

She told him about the wedding cake. He listened, shaking his head. ‘Jesus. That’s nearly as bad as that woman in Curraheen who fried her old feller in lard and fed him to her cats.’

‘The technical boys are doing an ultrasound scan and maybe then we’ll be able to see who it is.’

‘How do you bake a head in a cake, for the love of God? And why would you?’

Katie closed the file in front of her and pushed her chair back. ‘The day we can answer questions like that, Liam – that’ll be the day that you and me are out of a job.’

***

She went home early that afternoon. This would have been her day off if she hadn’t had to appear in court. She had planned to go shopping at Hickey’s for new curtains and a new living-room carpet, but that would have to wait until the weekend now. She had almost finished redecorating her living room. All the Regency-style wallpaper that her late husband, Paul, had chosen had been stripped off and all the gilded furniture had gone. Maybe she would never be able to forget Paul’s selfishness, and his unfaithfulness, and his self-pity, and how their marriage had gradually disintegrated, especially after the death of little Seamus – but at least she wouldn’t have to live with his idea of luxury decor any more.

She lived on the west side of Cobh, overlooking the River Lee as it widened towards the harbour and the sea. The sun was still glittering on the water as she arrived home, but a chilly wind was rising and the trees along the roadside were dipping and thrashing as if they were irritated at being blown about.

When she turned her Focus into her driveway, she saw a man in a long grey raincoat standing in her porch. He turned around as soon as he heard her and raised his hand in greeting.

‘Perfect timing,’ he said, as she opened her car door.

She reached across to the passenger seat for her shopping bag, and then she said, ‘You haven’t come to sell me double-glazing, have you?’

He laughed and said, ‘Nothing like that. We’ve just moved in next door and I came to say hello, that’s all.’

‘Oh, okay then. Hello. Welcome to Carrig View. Let me just open the door and put down this shopping.’

‘Here,’ he said, and took the bag from her.

She unlocked the front door, switched off the alarm and beckoned him inside. As soon as she opened the kitchen door, her Irish setter, Barney, came bustling out to greet her, wagging his tail.

‘Well, now, there’s a fine fellow,’ the man said. ‘And what’s
your
name, boy?’

‘That’s Barney,’ said Katie. ‘Oh, just dump the shopping on the table, if you don’t mind. Thanks. That’s grand.’

The man held out his hand. ‘I’m David ó Catháin, but most people call me David Kane. I’m a vet, so from next week you’ll start to see a lot of people coming and going during the day with various animals. Dogs and cats mostly, and parrots, but I have had to treat the occasional alligator.’

‘Katie Maguire,’ said Katie.

She liked the look of David Kane. He reminded her a little of John, who had left her in the late summer to go back to live and work in America. He was tall, like John, and dark-curled, although his face was leaner, with a straight, sharp nose and a sharply squared jaw. He was thinner, too, but then John had built up his muscles working on his family farm, until Ireland’s collapsing economy had forced him to sell it.

David Kane’s voice was rich and confident and deep, but it was his eyes that appealed to her the most. Brown, and amused, as if he found it hard to take life seriously. Katie’s day-to-day life was grim enough, and monotonous enough, and she appreciated anybody who could bring some laughter into it.

‘The woman from the letting agency told me that you’re with the Garda,’ said David. ‘We won’t have to be worrying too much about security, then, with you next door.’

‘Well, she really shouldn’t have told you that, but yes.’

‘Like, you’re speeding around in a patrol car all day? That must be exciting.’

‘No, nothing like that. Sitting behind a desk mostly, sorting out mountains of paperwork.’

‘Oh. And what about your other half?’

‘The only other half I have at the moment is Barney.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. It’s just that the letting agent kept talking about “the couple next door”.’

‘I think I shall have to have a word with your letting agent and tell her to be a little more discreet.’

‘Truly, Katie, I apologize,’ said David. He took hold of her hand between both of his and gave her a look that would have melted chocolate, as Katie’s grandmother used to say.

‘Don’t think anything of it,’ said Katie. ‘You would have found out anyway. There’s not much happens here in Cobh without everybody knowing about it two minutes later. Sometimes I swear that they’re gossiping about things even before they’ve happened. But why don’t you and your wife come round tomorrow evening for a drink and we can get acquainted? I’d ask you tonight but I have a rake of work to catch up with. What’s your wife’s name?’

‘Sorcha. She’s not what you’d call the sociable sort, but I’ll ask her.’

‘Yes, please do. Around seven-thirty would be good.’

David suddenly seemed to realize that he was still holding Katie’s hand. He let go of it and grinned, as if to say,
what am I like, holding on to your hand for so long?

Katie showed him to the front door. As he turned to go, he said, ‘Would it be too intrusive of me to ask you what you actually do, in the Garda?’

‘Of course not. You’ll probably see on the nine o’clock news in any case. Detective Superintendent.’

David raised his thick, dark eyebrows. ‘Detective Superintendent? How about that, then? You’re the
capo di tutti capi
.’

‘Not quite. I still have a chief superintendent to answer to, and an assistant commissioner above him.’

‘All the same, I’m impressed.’

‘Good to meet you, David,’ said Katie. ‘And it’s very good to know that if Barney ever gets sick, God forbid, I now have a vet living right next door.’

David paused, looking at Katie as if he were about to say something, but instead he turned around and walked off down her driveway, lifting his right hand in farewell, like Peter Falk in
Columbo
. Katie stood in her porch watching him until he had disappeared behind the hedge.

What an unusual, interesting man, she thought, as she closed the front door behind her. There was something about him that made her feel off-balance, or maybe it was just that she was missing John. But what had he meant about his wife Sorcha being ‘not what you’d call the sociable sort’? That was strange.

She went back into the kitchen and started to unpack her shopping. Barney sat beside her as if he were guarding her, but more than likely he was simply waiting to be fed.
Just like
the males of every species
, she thought.
You think they’re protecting you, but all they have at heart is their own appetite
.

***

She dreamed that night that she and John were riding a tandem down Summerhill, on the north side of the city, at such a speed that she couldn’t pedal fast enough to keep up.

John was sitting behind her, so that she couldn’t see him, but she could hear him shouting at her over the wind that was blustering in her ears. She could tell that he was angry, really angry, but she couldn’t make out what he was so angry about. The trouble was, she didn’t dare to turn her head around because she might veer off the road.

She kept applying the brakes, and every time she did so the brake blocks gave a shrill, penetrating shriek, but they didn’t slow the tandem down at all.

‘John!’ she cried out. ‘John, please stop shouting! The brakes won’t work! The
brakes
won’t work!’

They jolted over the kerb and on to the pavement, heading directly for somebody’s front gate, but at that moment Katie opened her eyes. She sat up in bed, panting and hot, as if she really had been careering down Summerhill. Her bedroom was completely dark except for the small red light of her television and the clock on her bedside table, which read 2.25 a.m.

The shouting, however, was still going on, and so was the intermittent shrieking. But it wasn’t John shouting at her, and the shrieking wasn’t the sound of bicycle brakes. The noise was coming from the house next door – a man who was obviously furious about something, and a woman who was screaming back at him.

Katie sat listening for a few seconds. It was impossible to tell what either of them was saying, but then she heard a loud crash and a clatter like saucepans falling on to a tiled kitchen floor. She climbed out of bed, went across to her bedroom window and opened the curtains.

Even through the beech hedge that separated the two properties, she could see that her neighbours’ kitchen window was lit up. The man was shouting in short, sharp sentences now, almost like a fierce dog barking. The woman wailed
owww!
owww!
three or four times, and then she started to cry. Her crying sounded so despairing and so sorrowful that Katie was tempted to get dressed and go next door to make sure she was all right.

It sounded as if the man had hit her, and if he had, it was Katie’s duty as a peace police officer to ask her if she wanted to press charges against him.

She waited, undecided. The shouting had stopped now, and so had the shrieks, although she could still hear occasional sobs of misery.

After a long while, the sobbing stopped. Katie opened her window and listened intently. She could hear voices, much calmer now, but she still couldn’t distinguish what they were saying. It was a damp, chilly night; the sky was so overcast that she couldn’t even see the full moon. She gave a quick shiver and closed her window as quietly as she could. As she did so, the kitchen light next door was switched off.

She went through to her own kitchen, opened the fridge, and took a swig of fizzy Ballygowan water straight out of the bottle. She didn’t know if she had just overheard an incident of domestic violence or not. Of course, all couples argued, and most of the time their arguments sounded much worse than they really were, even if they were hitting each other. Two years ago she had organized a campaign in Cork against wife-beating, called Gallchnó Crann, or the Walnut Tree, after the old rhyme ‘a woman, a dog and a walnut tree, the more you beat them, the better they be’. But in so many cases the wives would refuse at the last moment to give evidence in court, even when they had suffered black eyes and split lips and broken ribs. They made the excuse that it had been their fault for provoking their husbands. ‘I nag him something terrible sometimes, I don’t blame him for lashing out at me.’

She climbed back into bed, although she didn’t switch off her pink bedside lamp. She lay there, with her eyes open, thinking about what she had just heard. She thought about John, too, and wondered what he was doing now. For him, in San Francisco, it would only be 6.41 yesterday evening, and the sun must still be shining. She wondered if he were thinking about her, or if he was sitting in a bar laughing with some other woman.

Then she thought about David Kane, and tried to work out what it was about him that had made such an impression on her. Maybe it was something of the quality that made Michael Gerrety so charismatic – a sense that he was dangerous.

***

The next morning, when she was standing in the kitchen eating a bowl of muesli, she heard a car door slam next door. She went through to the living room in time to see David Kane driving away in a silver Range Rover. He glanced at her house as he passed, but she was so far back from the window that she didn’t think he could see her.

She got dressed, putting on her thick white cable-knit sweater and the bottle-green tweed suit that she had bought when she and John had taken a weekend away in Kenmare. It was less than six months ago that they had gone there together, and yet it seemed so remote now, almost as if it had happened to somebody else, or in some film that she had once seen.

Before she went to work she walked around to the Kanes’ and rang the doorbell. They hadn’t yet put up curtains in the living-room window and she could see cardboard boxes still stacked in there. She waited and waited, but there was no reply, so she rang the bell again.

She was just about to walk away when a woman’s voice from inside the house said, ‘Who is it?’

‘It’s Katie, from number forty-seven next door. Katie Maguire. I only came to say hello.’

‘I’m not decent, I’m afraid.’

‘Well, I did invite your husband and you to come around for a drink this evening.’

‘I can’t, not this evening. I still have so much unpacking.’

‘How about tomorrow morning, then? I have the day off tomorrow, hopefully. Why don’t you come round for coffee? Sorcha – it’s Sorcha, isn’t it?’

There was a very long pause, and then the woman said, ‘I don’t know. I have so much unpacking to do, and I have to make the place look liveable in. David’s a bit of a stickler.’

Katie hesitated. She was very tempted to tell Sorcha that she had overheard her fight last night, but then she decided against it. If it became a regular occurrence, then maybe she would take some action, but it wasn’t her job to intrude on other people’s private lives. If she had arrested Paul every time he had shaken her or pushed her during an argument, he would have spent more time in prison than out of it.

‘All right,’ she called out. ‘But the invitation’s still open if you feel like coming around for a chat.’

‘I will so. Thanks a million.’

Katie walked back to her own driveway and climbed into her car. She had just started up the engine when her iPhone played ‘Banks of the Roses’. She took it out of her pocket and said, ‘DS Maguire.’

‘Hello? Hello? Oh! Good morning to you, ma’am! It’s Bill Phinner here from the Technical Bureau!’

‘Yes, Bill. I can hear you perfectly well. You don’t have to shout.’

‘Oh, sorry. I’m a little deaf myself and when I can’t hear other people too distinctly I think that they must be deaf, too. Anyway, it’s your wedding-cake man. Or your wedding-cake
head
, I should say – but it
is
a man, not a woman. We did the ultrasound scan and it’s his whole head all right, severed a bit rough-like between C3 and C4. Hard to tell exactly what with until we completely spoon him out of there.’