Two Kinds of Blood Read online

  Joe looked sheepish. ‘Do you remember I had a contact in C3?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well, here’s what she got me.’

  I crowded in until our heads touched over the small desk, a communion of skulduggery.

  A nondescript black box, half the size of a standard android phone with a couple of stubby red and blue wires protruding. Another wire, black and thin, about one and a half metres long. The listening devices I’d researched on eBay were chrome, snazzy-looking and Hi-tech. This was more Harry’s Game.

  ‘This is it?’ I asked.

  ‘And you can take that tone out of your voice, Bridget Harney. This is a top-of-the-range listening device. You’ll give it to Sheila Devereux to plant.’

  ‘How does it work?’

  ‘It’s hardwired into the car’s own electronics so you can get a trickle charge from the car’s battery to keep it going. It has a SIM card and two options for listening – first you can dial the SIM card and it will activate the microphone and start listening, or you can have it voice-activated. If using the voice-activation mode, the bug will detect sound, send you a text and you dial in.’

  It was practical if somewhat clunky.

  ‘What’s the downside?’ I asked.

  ‘If there’s poor network coverage it won’t work and it doesn’t record anything, so you’ll need to listen in real time or you can use the TapeACall app. The app records calls and you can store the conversations in the Cloud.’

  ‘Get you, Joe, and the Cloud. This spook must be into you.’

  Joe shook himself and tried not to look pleased. ‘I wasn’t always behind a desk.’

  My stomach rumbled.

  ‘Hungry?’ Joe avoided looking at my bedhead.

  ‘I’m fine. How’s Sheila Devereux going to get it hardwired into the car?’

  ‘She won’t, unless she’s an auto-electrician and last time I looked she had no qualifications to speak of. She’ll have to ask Gavin if she can take the car – day out at the cinema for the great-grandkids or something – God knows Gavin’s given her enough of them – we can install it while they’re at the pictures.’

  It made sense and, though I was tempted to remind Joe of my car mechanic wisecrack, I bit my tongue – he was on a roll.

  ‘The main unit has to be installed somewhere behind the dashboard.’ He picked up the snake-length of thin black cable with a dot microphone at its end. ‘The mic should be hidden behind the roof lining material over the driver’s head. It’s the best position to get sound from.’

  ‘There’s a girl in the Tech Bureau could do it,’ I said. ‘She’s getting married soon and looking for nixers.’

  ‘Grand, use her so. This will put Sheila Devereux in a tight spot and that alone is worth it. Get yourself a burner phone. Untraceable. Don’t dial into it from any other phone.’

  ‘Does it have a serial number? Do C3 have any way of identifying the bug?’

  Joe shook his head. ‘No serial number and all the components are bought for cash in shops that supply the public – they make them up from scratch. This can’t be traced back to us. That’s the point.’

  Chapter 18

  She knew she enjoyed going to restaurants and staying in large, fancy hotels. She knew that better than she knew her own name. Elizabeth Harney. She underlined words in her mind based on people’s facial expressions, the words were important, anchors in her moth-eaten consciousness.

  The days had no meaning for Elizabeth in this place, with its endless miles of carpeted corridors she kept walking up and down, some kind of looping conveyor belt where she saw floating faces. It reminded her of being on the Tube in London going down the escalators and spotting someone coming up on the other side but recognising them too late. The stalled moment between catching someone’s eye and recognition was where she lived. The walking helped, but more of the world slipped into the electrical storm of her overloaded synapses. Dark and frightening with single shots of forked lightning to help her steer a path. Her last hope was to keep walking and the destination might reveal itself.

  ‘Your daughter’s in the day room – come on, Lizzie,’ a nurse told Elizabeth.

  She wanted to tell the nurse she had a son, not a daughter, and she hated being called ‘Lizzie’. She looked around for her favourite nurses. The sisters who called her Elizabeth and took her arm, walking beside her when the burden of searching for her son became unbearable.

  ‘Here she is!’ said the nurse with the affected jollity of a school matron.

  It hurt Elizabeth’s ears and she eased herself into a high-backed padded chair.

  It was The Girl. Tall, blonde and all angles, with such sad eyes. Elizabeth wanted to ask her what was wrong, but it was impolite to pry.

  ‘Hi, Mum,’ said The Girl and pressed a cheek, fresh as an ironed sheet and as sweet-smelling, into Elizabeth’s own parched skin. She didn’t have the heart to tell The Girl she wasn’t her mother. She had an indefinable quality Elizabeth liked, an innocence and an unashamed desire to be loved, despite being crimped by the ordeals of adulthood. The Girl sat down and took Elizabeth’s hands in her own. This, Elizabeth had decided, was where the confusion lay. For all the world The Girl’s hands looked the same as her own – younger of course, but there was a familiar symmetry in the joints and lengths of the fingers. The deep inward curve at the base of the thumb. Elizabeth got lost in the lines on her and The Girl’s skin.

  ‘Mum?’ said The Girl. ‘You look lovely today. I brought a jigsaw – we can do it later if you want? It’s the Bridge of Sighs. You and Dad visited on your honeymoon.’

  The Girl’s face changed when she said ‘Dad’, full of love, so Elizabeth knew it was an important word, but it couldn’t be her father, could it? Elizabeth’s father would never visit her, not after what happened.

  She struggled with The Girl’s speech, the patterns and intonations were too quick for her to hold on to, she couldn’t make anything stick in her mind, so responses were futile. Her eyes flitted onto the blue box with a picture on the front, and from the dark clouds of her mind came one word: Venice. She looked at the girl and smiled.

  The Girl lit up. ‘Shall we open it? Put out all the pieces?’

  Elizabeth nodded, buoyed by The Girl’s enthusiasm and an eagerness she didn’t understand, but let it take her anyway. The pieces were pink on one side and on the other were sky-blue or grey stone. She liked the shapes, the sharp corners and the busyness it brought when she had to put them together. It gave the anxiety lying coiled within her a task. She had one foot in this world and the other in a shadowy place filled with crying – it couldn’t have been Heaven because she had been taught as a child Jesus lived in Heaven and it was a glorious place. The other place might have been Limbo, where all the unbaptised dead children went. Buried outside graveyards in unconsecrated ground.

  ‘Mum? Are you OK? Nurse!’

  They crowded around her, making her more agitated.

  The Girl took her arm and walked her to a bedroom she recognised bits of, but it wasn’t one of her favourite hotels. The bed, for one thing, wasn’t right. This bed had bars on the side of it. And there was a smell of roast dinner.

  She sat without complaint on her chair in front of a dressing table that wasn’t hers. Her eyes flickered across the silver brush and matching hand mirror. A handsome dancer floated across her mind, the ballroom in the Gresham Hotel and a calf-length blue dress made of duchess satin, her hair twisted into a chignon by that brush. Had it been a birthday? The clove smell of the lily corsage Vincent had pinned to her dress. Elizabeth was lost. He was so tall. His wavy dark hair slicked back, his eyes when he invited her to dance. Elizabeth swayed with the motion of a remembered waltz and the pleasure of the brushstrokes on her hair. The Girl had a gentle hand.

  ‘That’s it, Mum. I love you.’

  And Elizabeth loved The Girl. She knew that, despite not knowing her or being unable to make sense of any of the fractured pictures in her mind. They lacked the
edges that fitted into one another.

  The Girl looked sad.

  ‘Are you sad, dear?’ said Elizabeth. Her voice sounded creaky.

  The Girl looked confused and put her head down to her mouth.

  ‘What’s that, Mum?’

  The Girl kissed the top of her head and murmured something she didn’t catch. So she tried again.

  ‘Are you all right, dear?’

  Something was happening with The Girl’s hearing. She rubbed Elizabeth’s shoulders and spoke as she would to a child.

  ‘It’s OK, Mum.’

  Elizabeth assumed something was wrong with The Girl and patted her on the hand. They stayed like that, The Girl brushing Elizabeth’s hair with slow, soft strokes.

  ‘I miss Kay, Mum.’

  The Girl’s voice was all but inaudible and Elizabeth didn’t understand the words, couldn’t put them in the right order, but she understood the tone. Loss. She was all too familiar with that sensation and reached up to The Girl’s face and brushed away a tear rolling down her cheek. Elizabeth looked at The Girl’s reflection in the mirror. Where had she seen her before? She was cross with herself for being of such little comfort to The Girl.

  ‘Oh!’ said The Girl. ‘I brought these letters from home for you. I can read them to you?’

  The Girl took a packet of yellowed letters from inside her jacket and placed them into her hands. She turned the packet of letters over, letting the brushed-velvet texture of the old paper take her someplace else.

  ‘Do you like them, Mum?’ said The Girl. Her voice was coming and going, a snowy television signal beamed from the past.

  These letters were important. Elizabeth had waited for them. They were an exit out of the rundown cottage and her mother’s cold anger.

  ‘Bridget!”

  The Girl turned.

  A nurse in the doorway had called her.

  ‘Bridget, there’s another visitor here.’

  That was The Girl’s name! Elizabeth tried to hang onto it. She looked around for a pen, to write the name down, but even as she searched she knew that her body wasn’t moving, or moved too slow to make a difference. She hurried and the letters dropped from her fingers but she paid them no heed. The shape of The Girl’s name was slipping off the surface of her too-smooth mind.

  ‘Mum? Mum! Stay where you are. I’ll get them.’

  ‘Elizabeth?’ said a lumpy man in the doorway.

  His voice brought something forward in her mind. The thought stayed in a display case like a taxidermist’s prop, scooped out and lifeless with only the outer skin left, the thought itself gone. Elizabeth’s mind was full of these garish husks.

  The lumpy man barked her name, the way a savage dog would, and The Girl swung around, anger written in large letters all over her face though she forced restraint on herself. Elizabeth saw it in a gesture she recognised, the way The Girl’s hands bunched into fists – she’d seen it before.

  ‘What are you doing here? Dad and I gave permission for quarterly visits and you have to be accompanied by us.’

  ‘Bridget, I wanted to see Elizabeth. She . . . we . . . I miss her.’

  The Girl looked ill and Elizabeth wanted to tell her that the lumpy man made her ill too. Elizabeth wanted Vincent, wanted to find the words to tell The Girl that the lumpy man came in when no one else was around, touching her, trying to get her to hold a pen and got mad when she couldn’t. She wanted to tell The Girl but couldn’t find the words. A sense of dread rose and crashed off the bird-like bones inside her chest.

  Elizabeth asked God to tell The Girl to stay.

  Richie Corrigan. The name appeared from the smoke of her mind.

  Chapter 19

  DCS Muldoon rapped on a table. An Assistant Commissioner was in the Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau’s squad room. The squad room was packed, detectives greeting one another with a hard handshake or a curt nod depending on the prevailing political winds. What shocked me was my attendance. Joe Clarke had dialled me up and told me to make my way to the fifth floor. The results of Lorraine Quigley’s post-mortem were back. I’d sprinted up the back stairs, high knees and high nerves at the grave tone of Joe’s voice. I hadn’t expected access to this meeting, and it was a bonus I was determined not to mess up.

  The AC stood to one side in full dress, face as stiff as his freshly pressed uniform. I could smell the chemical dry-clean of it over the sour musk of twenty people sardined into a room. Paul Doherty was in the Assistant Commissioner’s group, but I kept my face turned from him. Liam O’Shea caught my eye and motioned with a jut of his chin to join him and the other DOCB detectives. I walked over to the clump they stood in and was greeted by nods, a shuffle, and a few comments.

  ‘Howya, Bridge, stand in there.’

  ‘Move in to the left, Jimmy, would you?’

  They were quiet after a fashion, the presence of an Assistant Commissioner enough to quell even the most determined entertainer in the ranks.

  Muldoon’s secretary was in situ – she was his American Express card, he never left home without her.

  The Head of Communications, a rising superintendent who had a Master’s in political communications from Dublin City University, was inscrutable. She was professionally polite.

  DS Niall O'Connor’s eyes roamed over the crowd and picked out Liam.

  ‘O’Shea, you start with this.’

  It was a tall order in front of an AC, and craven. If O’Connor wanted the post-mortem reviewed, he should have done it himself. We received the report a short hour before the briefing. Standard protocol was to review with your sergeant or the cig on the case and work through it, for however long was needed. Not present it, with the expertise that implied. A sheen of sweat broke out on Liam’s bald head.

  ‘Don’t worry – any questions land them on me,’ I said. ‘O’Connor couldn’t dislike me any more than he already does.’

  Liam looked sceptical and moved off. He parted the town hall of detectives as he walked up to the desk where Muldoon and O’Connor were standing.

  ‘I’ll put it up on the whiteboard – you get yourself up to speed in the meantime,’ said O’Connor. He fiddled with the leads in an attempt to connect his laptop.

  Liam was being set up to fail and I blinked at him, hoping he could decipher my Morse code and stick with the post-mortem summary, but it was more difficult when an AC was to your back. I eyeballed Muldoon to no avail. His face was blank, awaiting instruction.

  Liam began. ‘The body is that of a twenty-six-year-old, underdeveloped, poorly nourished female. There is no peripheral oedema of the extremities. There is an area of congestion/erythema on the upper chest and anterior neck. There are multiple areas of haemorrhage –’

  ‘Jesus, move on, man! We’re not a First Year Med class,’ said O’Connor. He was enjoying himself.

  Liam raised his eyes to the group, shuffled his feet on a quicksand floor and swallowed. In the unnatural quiet it was a loud water drop.

  ‘Internal examination. Body cavities. The right and left pleural cavity contain 10ml of clear fluid with no adhesions. The pericardial sac is yellow –’

  ‘Go to the summary, Liam,’ said Joe. ‘I would say, Detective Superintendent O’Connor, no one from the squad has had more than an hour to examine this report and we should bring ourselves up to speed before including anyone else in the briefing.’

  I wanted to clap him on the back.

  ‘Since when, Clarke, are you in the DOCB?’ said DS O’Connor.

  You could have roasted marshmallows off Joe’s face. I’d never seen him lost for words and of course I should have said nothing, but when have I ever?

  ‘This was a joint effort between CAB and DOCB. It was a massive haul – as has been widely reported in the media. DCS Muldoon, I believe DS O’Connor was on the nine o’clock news last evening commenting about it.’

  If nothing else, I was going down swinging.

  ‘What is she doing in here?’ said DS O’Connor. He was bellowing.
/>   It was better than I’d dared hope. A look singed between the AC and DCS Muldoon.

  ‘That will do, O’Connor,’ said Muldoon. ‘Get on with it, O’Shea. The Assistant Commissioner doesn’t have all day.’

  It was late afternoon and the winter sun was low in the sky, glancing into the squad room and blinding Liam. I reached for the beaded cord of an ancient venetian blind – it whizzed down the frame of the window and smacked the base. O’Connor jumped and glared at me.

  ‘Lorraine Quigley was killed by blunt force trauma to the back of her head consistent with a wooden bat or plank,’ said Liam. ‘She sustained multiple injuries to her face and upper body consistent with punches or blows from an individual. After death Lorraine was washed in a saline-and-bleach solution so no trace evidence remains. She was frozen, which slowed down decomposition –’

  ‘So we have nothing,’ said O’Connor, his desire to be the big man in front of the AC outweighing his desire to hear the rest of the autopsy.

  ‘There were no toxins present at the time of her death,’ continued Liam and I admired his decision not to be cowed by O’Connor.

  ‘Detectives O’Shea and Harney, please move to the seizure,’ said the AC.

  The room quietened, Liam looked at me and I took my place beside him.

  ‘We received information that a seizure we were tracking via MAOC was already ripped off in Dublin and on its way to Kilkenny,’ Liam said. ‘We drove to Mullinavat and found an articulated lorry loaded with an international shipping container abandoned in a service station. On further investigation we found what we now know to be two and a half tonnes of pure cocaine and one hundred kilos of prescription drugs, benzodiazepines, Valium, Xanax.’

  ‘Here’s the list,’ said DS O’Connor, unwilling to be shelved. He brought up a slide with the seizure breakdown.

  The AC didn’t waste any time. ‘Detective Harney, I’ve read your brief and incident report on the seizure. Do you think Seán Flannery is supplying on an all-Island basis? Is there paramilitary involvement?’