Eye for an Eye
Author: Graham Masterton
Date: 2015-07-02 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Crime; Fiction; Short Stories; Mystery; Ireland
Description: Meet DS Katie Maguire. With her bright green eyes and short red hair, she looks like an Irish pixie. But she is no soft touch. In this exclusive short story, Ireland's most fearless detective hunts down a priest-killer in county Cork.
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Rights: All Rights Reserved

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About Eye for an Eye

About Graham Masterton

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About the Katie Maguire Series

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‘Sorry to disturb you, ma’am,’ said Sergeant O’Malley, knocking at Katie’s open office door. ‘There’s been a priest found dead in somebody’s back garden, up at White’s Cross.’

Katie looked up from the report she had been reading on drug-smuggling through Ringaskiddy, using disabled children as mules. She hadn’t slept well last night and she was suffering from a dull, persistent headache that even Nurofen hadn’t been able to cure.

‘A priest?’ she asked.

‘Retired priest anyway. I’ve reported it to Detective Inspector O’Rourke and he said to come up and tell you, too.’

‘What did he die of, this priest? Natural causes?’

‘Well, the rock that was used to bash his head in, that was natural.’

‘I see,’ said Katie, closing the folder in front of her. ‘What was he doing in somebody’s back garden?’

Sergeant O’Malley approached her desk and handed her an iPad. On the screen was a picture of a white-haired priest in a black cassock, lying on his side in a bed of flowering purple hydrangeas. His eyes were open and he looked as if he were staring at the camera with an expression of mild curiosity. However, the right side of his head had been deeply dented in, and his hair on that side was stuck together with congealed blood.

‘He had his wallet on him. His name’s Father Fiachra Caomhánach, from Watergrasshill, eighty-three years old. We contacted the diocese to get some background on him and we’re trying to trace any relatives now. But take a sconce at the next picture. There, see? Those were found lying in the bushes beside him.’

Katie slid to the next picture and saw a wooden crucifix with a silver figure of Christ nailed on to it, at least thirty centimetres in length, as well as a white glass bottle bearing an embossed medallion of a guardian angel.

Sergeant O’Malley said, ‘The diocesan secretary told us that Father Caomhánach retired in 2005. They said he was often in the news when he first took holy orders because the Caomhánach family used to be one of Cork’s worst crime gangs, back in the sixties, and his twin brother Deaglán spent years in prison. Not only that, Father Caomhánach was one of only four priests in the whole country who was trained by the Vatican to carry out exorcisms, and even though he was retired he was still qualified to do so, if he was called upon, like.’

‘And you think that was what he was doing when he was killed?’ asked Katie. ‘Performing an exorcism?’

‘He had all the gear with him, didn’t he? The cross, and the holy water. I’m assuming it’s holy water in that bottle, any road. He had a book, too. It’s all in Latin, but it has the word Daemonum in the title, so I reckon it was something to do with driving out demons.’

‘I don’t know. In this day and age? An exorcism?’

‘It’s possible, I’d say. I saw a programme about it on Channel Four the other evening. They said that there’s been a growing demand for them in Ireland recently – the exorcisms, like, you know.’

‘Well... Pope Benedict was a great believer in casting out evil spirits, wasn’t he?’ said Katie.

‘That’s right. And Pope Francis healed some poor fellow with the abdabs, or whatever it was that was wrong with him, right in front of a crowd of people in St Peter’s Square. That was supposed to have been an exorcism.’

‘Yes,’ said Katie. She sat thinking for a moment, and then she said, ‘Whose garden was he found in?’

‘Some auld wan. Hold on.’ Sergeant O’Malley took back his iPad and tapped on the keys. ‘Mrs Mary O’Donnell, seventy-seven years old, widowed. She lives alone in a bungalow on the R674, next to the Toolmate factory.’

‘Yes, I know where you are,’ said Katie. ‘And what did Mrs O’Donnell have to say for herself? Did she actually witness Father Caomhánach being killed? And who called us? Was it her?’

‘It was her all right, but all she told the operator was that somebody had suffered a bit of an accident in her garden, and when we arrived there she wouldn’t speak to us or tell us what had happened. She said she couldn’t because she was mortally afraid of the enemy, whoever “the enemy” is.’

‘“The enemy”?’ said Katie. ‘Well – it might not be relevant, but ‘the enemy’ is what Pope Benedict called the Devil,’ She stood up, and said, ‘Do the media know about this yet?’

‘Not yet. After I’d seen you I was going down to the press office to tell Mathew McElvey, but I’ll hold off on that if you want to tell him yourself.’

‘I imagine you’ve alerted Bill Phinner.’

‘Of course. He’s sending a technical team out there now, if they haven’t left already.’

‘Mother of God, I hate any case that involves the church,’ said Katie, irritably. ‘All you ever get is sealed lips and doors slammed in your face. They never lie to you, but they never tell you the whole truth, either. Then there’s their lawyers. Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll used to say that dealing with the diocesan legal advisers was worse than trying to untangle your Christmas tree lights.’

‘Tell me about it,’ said Sergeant O’Malley. ‘One of the first cases I ever worked on was that abuse case at Saint Vincent’s. I couldn’t get a straight word out of any of them, do you know what I mean? Like, “I don’t understand what you’re accusing me of, and even if I did, I didn’t do it, and even if I did do it, I don’t recall doing it, and if anybody else recalls me doing it, they’re grievously mistaken.”’

Katie went to the window and looked out. The clouds were low and grey and it was drizzling. ‘I’d best go up to White’s Cross myself. Are you going back there? I can see this taking some handling.’

*

Katie and Detective O’Donovan drove northwards from Cork City up to White’s Cross, following Sergeant O’Malley’s patrol car. As they did so, the sky grew even darker, and by the time they had parked outside Mary O’Donnell’s bungalow it was lashing with rain. Katie was wearing her long purple raincoat with a purple bucket rain hat to match. Detective O’Donovan’s grey quilted jacket made him look even bulkier than he actually was, and he had put on some weight lately. Too many Bigfoot sausages from the chipper on his way home from the station.

The bungalow was painted pale green, with damp patches on it, and it was set back from the main road behind a yew hedge that was badly in need of trimming. The asphalt driveway was already crowded with two Garda patrol cars, a van from the Technical Bureau, and three other unmarked cars. Sergeant O’Malley was waiting in the porch, and Katie and Detective O’Donovan followed him in through the open front door and into the narrow hallway.

Inside the gloomy little living room, Katie could see Mary O’Donnell sitting on a chintz sofa with a young female garda sitting beside her, talking to her. She was a tiny woman, with long greasy grey hair that was clipped back with a brown plastic click-clack. She had a beak of a nose and enormous glasses, and she was very round-shouldered. She was holding a cup of tea in both hands, with the spoon still in it, and it didn’t look as if she were actually drinking it but simply holding it to keep her wrinkled hands warm.

The young female garda looked up, but Katie pointed towards the back of the bungalow to indicate that she was going to take a look at the dead priest before she came and talked to Mary O’Donnell. An overfed ginger tom was lying by the fireplace, where a peat fire was smouldering, and he, too, looked up, as if he deeply resented all of this toing and froing in his domain, and the fact that he had no power to tell everybody to get out and leave him and his mistress alone.

Katie went through the kitchen and stepped out into the back garden, which was just as untidy and neglected as the front. The technical experts had already erected a blue vinyl tent over the flower bed where Father Fiachra was lying and the rain was rattling on it loudly. Eithne O’Neill and Tyrone Byrne were crouching next to the body, both wearing noisy white Tyvek suits. The chief technical officer, Bill Phinner, was standing beside them, looking as depressed as ever, as if he couldn’t understand what he was doing here, underneath this tent, on a wet Thursday afternoon, with a dead priest lying at his feet.

Eithne leaned forward to take close-up photographs of Father Fiachra’s smashed-in head, and as Katie and Detective O’Donovan crossed the lawn to join Bill in the tent her LED flashlight made the garden flicker like a film premiere.

Detective O’Donovan peered at Father Fiachra. His eyes were still open, although they were beginning to turn misty. He had bushy white eyebrows and a large nose with a cleft in the end, and deeply lined cheeks. His mouth was slightly open, revealing his mottled brown teeth.

‘Jesus. Somebody really smashed the shite out of him,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘Is that the rock he was clattered with?’

‘That’s the one,’ said Bill, nodding towards a jagged limestone block that was lying on the wet grass nearby. It was almost as big as Father Fiachra’s head, and although the technical experts had covered it over with a transparent evidence bag, which was speckled with raindrops, Katie could see the dark red bloodstains on one edge of it.

‘He was struck at least three times,’ Bill told her. ‘The first blow when he was standing up and the next two when he was lying face-down on the ground. I’d say his assailant was standing behind him and slightly to his right when he first hit him. The rock weighs approximately five kilos, which is twice the weight of your average house-brick, so it’s likely that the first blow would have been enough to crack his skull open and kill him.’

‘Maybe his assailant was just making sure he was dead,’ said Katie. ‘Or he could have been angry, or vengeful, or drunk, and that’s why he hit him more than he needed to. I say “he” because that’s one hell of a rocker for a woman to be lifting. What about the rocker itself? Do you think you’ll be able to get much off it?’

Bill shook his head. ‘Doubtful. It’s a fierce rough lump of limestone, so there’s not much hope of lifting fingerprints off it, and if his assailant was wearing gloves there won’t be any chance of DNA, either. All the same, if his gloves were wool, or cotton, we might find some trace of fabric on it. It’s always worth a try. You remember that fellow from Togher, the one who strangled his landlady? A single fleck of wool from his sock got caught on a splintery floorboard and that was enough to convict him. That was my finest hour when he was sent down.’

‘Any other evidence?’ asked Katie. ‘Any footprints?’

‘There’s a couple of partials over there – you see, where the fence is broke? We’ll be taking casts, but they’re not too distinct. All the same, they could be an indication that the offender gained entry to the garden through that gap.’

‘So if she was inside the house at the time, it’s possible that Mrs Woman might not have seen him?’ said Detective O’Donovan.

‘She might and she mightn’t. I gather she’s refusing to speak about it. Sergeant O’Malley said she had the fear of God in her.’

‘More like the fear of the Devil,’ said Katie. ‘That’s if the crucifix and the holy water are anything to go by.’

‘Up until now we haven’t found any hoof prints,’ said Bill. ‘I think it’s more likely we’re looking for a mortal, unless Satan’s taken to wearing gullies.’

Katie went across to the gap in the fence, which was right at the back of the garden, on the left-hand side, and partially concealed by a sprawling laurel bush. On the other side of the fence, she could see the back of a single-storey concrete building, one of the workshops of the Toolmate factory next door. The factory covered about two thirds of an acre, with an office block and several more workshops and a car park.

Katie had met their managing director once, about nine months ago, at a fund-raising dinner for the AADI, which trained guide dogs for autistic children. Very handsome and personable, she remembered, although she couldn’t immediately think of his name.

‘What do you think?’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘Did the offender know that Father Fiachra was going to be holding an exorcism in the garden? And if he did know, like, how did he know? And why was Father Fiachra holding an exorcism anyway?’

‘Well, we’re still not one hundred per cent sure that he was,’ said Katie. ‘For all we know, he was simply blessing the garden. Maybe Mary O’Donnell’s late husband is buried here somewhere and he was saying a prayer over his grave. There’s only one person who can answer that for us.’

*

Katie and Detective O’Donovan went back inside the house. Katie took off her hat and her raincoat and hung them up in the hallway, and then she went into the living room.

‘Give us a few minutes, please,’ said Katie to the young female garda. The garda touched Mary O’Donnell’s hand sympathetically and then stood up and left the room. As she walked out of the door, Detective O’Donovan couldn’t help turning his head to admire the impressive size of her hips, and Katie gave him a sharp look as if to say, Concentrate... and don’t be sexist.

She sat down on the sofa next to Mary O’Donnell while Detective O’Donovan remained standing by the window. The living-room walls were crowded with prints of Jesus and Mary and the Last Supper and various saints, as well as a font of holy water decorated with a figurine of Our Lady of Grace and pink plaster roses. The ginger tom narrowed his green eyes and stared at Katie with hostility.

‘Mary?’ said Katie. ‘My name’s Detective Superintendent Kathleen Maguire. I understand that you’ve been through a very distressing experience, but I have to ask you a few questions to find out what happened to Father Fiachra.’

Mary furrowed her lips so tightly so that she looked almost like a headhunter’s trophy from the Amazon.

‘Just tell me why you don’t want to talk about it,’ Katie persisted. ‘Sergeant O’Malley said you told him that you were frightened of the enemy. What enemy did you mean, Mary? I can’t believe that you have any enemies.’

Mary turned her head and stared at her through her huge magnifying spectacles. ‘Would you want to be dragged down to Hell?’ she retorted, in a low, hoarse whisper.

‘Of course not. But who’s going to drag you down to Hell? You’re a good woman, aren’t you? You go to Mass, don’t you? Don’t tell me you don’t go to confession, and say your prayers.’

‘I could pray all day. I could stay awake and pray all night. That will never take the stain away. He knows what I’ve done, somehow, and he’s going to make me suffer for it.’

Katie glanced over at Detective O’Donovan, but all he could do was shrug. She could sense, though, that Mary desperately wanted to tell her how Father Fiachra had been murdered, and why. The problem was that she was terrified, and that to her this ‘enemy’ was real – as real as the pimps who threatened the working girls she questioned, or the Provos who warned off Cork’s amateur drug-dealers.

‘What is it you’ve done, Mary? What sin could you have possibly committed that Jesus wouldn’t have forgiven you for it?’

Mary said, ‘I’ve never spoken about it. I’ve never confessed it. That’s why I’ll never be forgiven. And how could I confess it now, like, after all these years? It would seem that I wasn’t contrite at all and I was just making sure that I wasn’t dragged down to Hell when I die.’

‘Mary, there is no sin that Jesus won’t forgive, no matter how long ago you committed it,’ said Katie. ‘He won’t condemn you, no matter what you did. He’ll just be happy that you decided to come to Him at long last and ask for His mercy.’

‘You’re not a priest, though,’ said Mary.

‘No, I’m not, but I hear more confessions than any priest ever will,’ Katie told her. ‘I may not have the authority to forgive, but I can understand, and for somebody to understand what you’ve done wrong, and why you did it – that’s much more cleansing to the soul than forgiveness.’

Mary was silent for a few moments, sucking at her teeth and thinking. Then she said, ‘Do you mind if your man leaves us, while I tell you?’

Katie turned around to Detective O’Donovan. ‘Patrick, would you go and see if Bill Phinner’s finished yet?’

Detective O’Donovan gave her the thumbs up and left the living room. Once she was sure he was gone, Mary leaned forward and took hold of Katie’s arm, gripping it so tight that Katie could feel her fingernails digging into her through her sweater. She smelled of stale lavender and dried urine.

‘My late husband Tadhg had a drink problem. He was on the meat counter at Dunnes Stores and he lost his job because he was always langered and they couldn’t trust him with the knives or the bacon-slicer no more, not unless they wanted fingers in with the rashers.’

‘Go on,’ said Katie. Behind those magnifying spectacles she could see that Mary’s eyes were looking inwards now, focused on the past.

‘We were so skint that I could barely put food on the table and of course we had three children in them days. They were used to eating bacon and tripe, but after Tadhg lost his job they had to make do with bread and dripping.’

She paused, and then she said, ‘It was little Kieran’s fourth birthday and I didn’t even have enough grade in my purse to bake him a cake, let alone buy him a present. I went to a friend to see if I could borrow some money off her. She was out, but her husband was in. Barry, his name was. He had fair curly hair, but wiry, you know, like a goat’s hair? I told him why I was there and he said that he’d give me twenty punts and that I’d never have to pay him back, so long as he could take me upstairs to bed.

‘I was a pretty young thing in them days. You wouldn’t believe it to look at me now, but all the men used to give me the eye.’

‘So you went to bed with Barry?’ said Katie, gently but firmly lifting Mary’s arm off her sleeve.

Mary nodded. It was plain from the expression on her face that after all these years she was still mortified by what she had done.

‘I bought Kieran a plastic train set and I baked him a cake, but I couldn’t bring myself to eat even a morsel of that cake, and every time I saw him playing with that train set I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about Barry and his wiry fair hair.’

‘Didn’t your husband ever ask you where you got the money from?’

‘I told Tadhg I’d borrowed it from my friend Fiona, and to be honest with you, I think he was too drunk to care.’

‘So that’s why you imagine that you’re going to be dragged to Hell?’ Katie asked her.

‘It’s nothing to do with my imagination, Detective Superintendent. It’s real and it’s true. I betrayed my husband’s trust and broke my marriage vows and committed adultery, all for the sake of twenty punts. The Devil knows where I live now and he’s going to be taking my soul down to burn in the fire.’

Katie looked at her narrowly. ‘What do you mean, Mary – the Devil knows where you live? I’m not sure that I understand you.’

‘He’s been appearing in my garden. Satan himself. He’s been appearing for weeks now, so I daren’t even go out to hang up my washing. Why do you think I called Father Fiachra? I was desperate.’

‘Serious? You’ve been seeing Satan in your garden?’

Mary nodded again, and crossed herself, and then crossed herself a second time.

‘Okay...’ said Katie. ‘So what does he look like? Does he have horns, and a tail?’

‘No, no, no. None of that. He’s dressed head to toe in black, with a hood, and even his face is black, with eyes that shine red, like two hot coals.’

‘How do you know it’s Satan?’

‘Because he told me. He has a voice like gravel, do you know what I mean? – gravel going around and around in a concrete mixer. “I am Satan, Mary!” That’s what he told me. “I am Satan, the Lord of Darkness ,and I’m coming for you!”’

‘He doesn’t say why he’s coming for you? He doesn’t mention what you did with Barry?’

‘He doesn’t have to,’ said Mary. ‘I know that’s why. That’s the only sin I’ve never confessed, and I’ve never done penance for, so what else could it be?’

‘Is that all he says to you?’ Katie asked her. ‘“I’m coming for you”? Nothing else?’

‘He says I’d be wise to sell up and move away, where he won’t be able to find me.’

‘But he’s the Devil. Surely he could still find you, no matter where you went?’

‘Well, I’m not at all sure about that. I know that we’re never out of the sight of God, but I don’t know if Satan’s the same – omnivorous, or whatever you call it.’

‘Omniscient,’ Katie corrected her.

‘That’s right. That, too.’

Katie said, ‘Did you see Satan today?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘What time did Father Fiachra get here?’

‘About nine. That’s usually the time that Satan pays his visits. He hadn’t appeared so we had a cup of tea and then Father Fiachra went out into the garden to sprinkle the holy water on the grass so that Satan wouldn’t be able to step on it.’

‘Do you think Father Fiachra believed you?’ asked Katie.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you think Father Fiachra believed that Satan had actually appeared in your back garden and threatened you?’

Mary looked nonplussed. ‘And why wouldn’t he?’

‘Because he might have been wondering the same thing that I’m wondering... if it wasn’t Satan at all, but someone dressed up as Satan. Someone who’s been deliberately trying to scare you for one reason or another.’

‘Well, now, I hadn’t thought of that,’ said Mary. ‘But why would they?’

‘You tell me. Is there anyone in White’s Cross who doesn’t like you? Have you argued with anybody?’

‘Who would I argue with? I spend most of my time on my own and the only neighbour I have is the factory next door. All the fellows from there seem cheerful enough.’

‘But this morning, when Father Fiachra was killed, you weren’t looking out of the window?’

‘No, I was in here, stoking the fire.’

‘And you hadn’t seen Satan earlier on, before Father Fiachra arrived?’

‘No.’

‘Did you hear anything? Banging? Shouting? Did Father Fiachra cry out at all?’

‘I’m a little on the deaf side these days. He might have done, but I wouldn’t have heard him. I only realized what had happened when I went into the kitchen to put on the kettle, and there he was, lying in the flower bed, with all his head – ugh! I don’t even want to think about it!’

She crossed herself again. Katie stood up and said, ‘Thank you, Mary, for being so honest with me and telling me so much. It could prove very useful.’

‘You won’t be telling anybody else? Not about me and Barry, I mean. Barry’s passed away now, and so has Fiona with the breast cancer, but all of their kids are still alive, except for Martin who had the epilepsy. And there’s a whole lot of people who know me.’

‘No, Mary,’ said Katie. ‘I won’t breathe a word to anybody. But if I were you, next time you go to church, go to confession and tell the priest all about you and Barry. Tell him you took so long to confess what you’d done because you were so ashamed, but now you’re asking for God’s forgiveness. Then at least Satan won’t have any excuse to come calling again.’

Mary held out her hand and Katie took it and gave her a reassuring squeeze.

‘You’re an angel, you know?’ said Mary. ‘If ever there was one of God’s messengers walking this earth, it’s you.’

*

‘Is that what she called you?’ said Detective Inspector O’Rourke. ‘Well, quite right, too, ma’am. You deserve it. You are an angel, whatever Jimmy O’Reilly says about you.’

Detective Inspector O’Rourke was a stocky, round-faced man of forty-five, with chestnut hair that was shaved up the sides of his head like an Irish cousin of Kim Jong-Un, and protruding ears. Katie liked him a lot, though, because he was always straightforward and blunt, and he had never shown her any of the sexual prejudice that she had encountered from other Garda officers. It was probably because his wife Maeve always kept him in order.

Assistant Commissioner Jimmy O’Reilly had never made any secret of his dislike of high-ranking female officers, which hadn’t been ameliorated by the appointment of Noirin O’Sullivan as the first-ever woman commissioner.

Katie said, ‘There’s no question at all that this “Satan” who’s been scaring Mary O’Donnell is some fellow dressed up. But what’s the point of it? She’s an old woman with no money and nothing worth stealing, unless you count the biggest collection of plaster saints outside of the Holy Shop.’

‘Maybe somebody has a grudge against her, though that would be a fierce quare way of getting their own back, wouldn’t it? Dooley’s located one of her younger brothers in Carrigaline and he’ll be going down there later this afternoon to talk to him, for whatever good that will do.’

‘All right,’ said Katie. ‘I’m going back up to White’s Cross myself a little later to have a word with the fellow who runs the Toolmate factory. He won’t be back from Dublin until five, but I want him to get his whole workforce together so that we can question them en masse, like, and see if any of them saw anything suspicious. I’ve met him before, at a charity do. Redmond Keane, his name is. Very charming man indeed, so I’m sure he’ll help us, if he can.’

Inspector O’Rourke said, ‘It’s the motive that has me puggalized, If that was the real Satan, all right, I can see that he would have wanted to kill a priest who was trying to exorcize him – although the real Satan would probably would have struck him with a bolt of lightning or pronged him with his fork, like, wouldn’t he, rather than bash him on the head with a rock? But if it was a fellow dressed up, why would he want to kill him? He’s not going to be afraid of a bit of chanting and a splash of the holy water, is he? Not unless he’s a total header.’

‘Maybe he recognized Father Fiachra as a priest who’d once abused him,’ said Katie. ‘That’s always a possibility.’

‘Well, yes, I suppose so,’ said Detective Inspector O’Rourke. ‘To be fair, though, the priests who taught me at school were all great, and right comedians one or two of them, but not one of them touched me, ever. I think the ones who are guilty of kiddy-fiddling deserve everything they get, but it’s a fierce pity that the good ones never seem to get any credit.’

Katie smiled. ‘I have to go to a social services meeting tomorrow. I’ll tell the bishop you said so. He’ll be happy out, I can tell you.’

*

Redmond Keane stood up from behind his desk as Katie and Detective O’Donovan were shown in by his plump young secretary.

‘Katie!’ he smiled, holding out his hand. ‘Very good to see you again. Well – not under these circumstances, I suppose. But you’re looking just as radiant as the last time I saw you. Do you know what I said to my cousin after that night? I’ve met a merrow with legs! Red hair, wonderful figure, and the sweetest of smiles!’

Redmond was tall and good-looking, with dark brown hair brushed up in a fashionable quiff. He was wearing a tailored black three-piece suit and a dazzling white shirt, although he didn’t have a tie and his collar was open. His eyes were bright blue, but they had a slight cast, which Katie found disconcerting, because she was never quite sure if he was looking at her directly or not.

His office was stark and bare, with a white desk and a plum-coloured carpet and white Venetian blinds, through which Katie could see factory entrance and the car park and the concrete workshops outside. The only decoration was an array on the wall behind him of spades and shovels and adjustable wrenches, and several other tools that his factory manufactured.

‘Please, sit down,’ he said. ‘I was still on the train when you sent me your text, and then Clodagh filled me in with all the rest of the details as soon as I got back. I was very sorry to hear about that priest. And to think he was murdered right next door – that’s desperate!’

‘That’s the reason I wanted to talk to your workforce,’ said Katie. ‘The forensic evidence indicates that the offender gained access to Mary O’Donnell’s garden through a gap in the fence that separates her property from yours.’

‘Now, stall there a minute,’ said Redmond. ‘You’re not suggesting surely that one of our workforce was responsible?’

‘I’m not suggesting anything at the moment. All I want to do is to ask your staff if any of them saw anything that might help us in our investigation. The individual we suspect of having killed Father Fiachra could have been dressed very distinctively, in black clothing with a black hood and what may have been a black mask covering his or her face, with shiny red eyes.’

Redmond raised his eyebrows. ‘Jesus, that sounds scary! Why would they have dressed up like that? It’s not Hallowe’en for a few months yet, is it?’

‘We believe that our suspect may have been trying to persuade Mary O’Donnell that he or she was Satan. Why, we have no idea, to be honest with you. But he’s been appearing repeatedly in her garden for the past several weeks and she was growing increasingly frightened of him. As you would expect her to be, a little old lady living on her own.’

Redmond said, ‘That’s totally understandable. I’ll call all the staff together into the canteen and you can put your questions to them. So long as they don’t feel that they’re being accused of anything, you know. I vet all my employees personally and I can vouch for every one of them.’

He called in his secretary and told her to put out an announcement that everybody in the Toolmate workforce was to gather as soon as possible in the staff canteen. Then he stood up and came over to Katie and said, ‘That was a grand evening, that autistic dogs do. Perhaps we should do it again sometime. Just you and me, you know.’

Detective O’Donovan looked up at him and cleared his throat sharply, as if he were warning him to keep his distance.

Katie said, ‘Too busy these days, I’m afraid, Redmond. If it’s not a charity evening it’s a public meeting and if it’s not a public meeting it’s a late-night sitting of the district court. I hardly even get the time to take my dog for a walk.’

‘There’s a pity,’ said Redmond. ‘If you do ever have a free evening, though, give me a call.’

‘Thank you, Redmond,’ said Katie. ‘I’m flattered, but it wouldn’t be appropriate, not at the moment, not right in the middle of this investigation.’

‘You’re not saying that I’m a suspect, are you?’ said Redmond, pressing one hand over his heart with mock sincerity.

‘Like I say, I’m not suggesting anything at the moment,’ Katie told him. ‘It’s just a matter of procedure.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Redmond. ‘That’s the first time a woman’s turned me down as a matter of procedure, I have to admit.’

It would help if I knew which way you were looking, thought Katie.

*

Redmond ushered Katie and Detective O’Donovan into the staff canteen, where Toolmate’s workforce had assembled. As he did so, he laid his hand gently on Katie’s shoulder.

There were thirty-five workers altogether. All but four of them were men, wearing blue overalls with the Toolmate logo – a smiling cartoon workman carrying a shovel over his shoulder. They varied in age from boys who looked as if this was their first job after leaving school to hardened, middle-aged men with shaved heads and nicotine-stained fingers and tattoos.

‘Thanks for your time, all of you,’ said Redmond. ‘I know how busy you are keeping up with all our new orders. Tsunami isn’t the word for it! I don’t need to remind you that this has been Toolmate’s most successful year yet, and that we’re expanding exponentially.

‘However, we’re sparing a moment for the Garda this afternoon to show that we’re good citizens, and for Toolmate to play a responsible part in the local community. As you all know, a priest was found dead this morning in the garden of the house next door. Detective Superintendent Maguire here and Detective O’Donovan are investigating his death. They’d like to ask you a few questions to see if there’s any way you can be of assistance to them.’

There was shuffling and coughing and scraping of chairs, and from the hostile way some of the older men were looking at her, Katie thought that if any other woman were to ask them a question, they’d give her a good slap and tell her get on with cooking their dinner.

She waited until they were all settled and then she said, ‘Around nine-fifteen this morning, did any of you notice a person walking around the factory premises, somebody who wasn’t authorized to be here?’

There was a general shaking of heads and ‘No, didn’t see nobody.’

‘This person may well have been dressed completely in black, with a black hat or a hoodie,’ said Katie. ‘It’s also possible that they were wearing a black mask, too, although they could have been African.’

Again, there was head-shaking and a muttered chorus of ‘No, didn’t see nobody like that.’

‘What about sounds? Did any of you hear any unusual noises? Any shouting or screaming?’

‘Are you serious, girl?’ asked one of the older workers. ‘We have a forging press and a die-cutter and a broaching tool here, and they’re all banging out combination wrenches twenty-four hours of the day, not to mention about five hundred wrenches being dropped into a collection box whenever they’re ready. Even if we didn’t wear ear-protectors you could scream your head off like a banshee and none of us would hear you.’

‘All right, I understand, you couldn’t hear anything,’ said Katie. ‘But it seems like this person might have entered the next-door garden several times in the past few weeks, and they probably entered by way of the factory grounds. Are you all absolutely sure that none of you has ever caught a sight of them?’

There was more shaking of heads, and now the workforce was becoming restless.

Katie said, ‘That’s all, then. Thank you for your time. But if any one of you does happen to remember anything, you can always call the Garda Confidential number, or you can contact me personally at Anglesea Street. Nobody will ever know that you spoke to me, so there won’t be any comeback.’

Redmond asked, ‘Is that all, Katie? Okay, that’s it. You can all go back to work now, folks – and thank you.’

He walked Katie and Detective O’Donovan out to their car. ‘I’m sorry we couldn’t help you more,’ he told them. ‘All I can do is wish you good luck.’

He leaned on Katie’s open car door as she buckled up her seat belt. ‘And – Katie – when you’ve cracked this case, which I’m totally confident that you will – my offer still stands. Dinner at the Hayfield Manor. Champagne, music.’

‘Thank you for your help, Redmond,’ said Katie, and slammed the door hard, almost catching his fingers in it.

*

She had tidied her desk and was just about to switch off her desk lamp when Eithne appeared at her open office door.

‘Eithne? What’s the story? Have you finished up at White’s Cross now?’

‘We have, ma’am, pretty much. But I’m glad I caught you. We found this pressed down in the soil of the flower bed, like somebody had accidentally stepped on it.’

She came forward and held up a small evidence bag. Inside it was an oval piece of red translucent plastic. Katie took it and examined it closely.

‘Mary O’Donnell told me that Satan had shining red eyes. “Like two hot coals,” that’s how she described them. I wonder if this is one of them. Maybe it fell out of his mask when he was attacking Father Fiachra.’

‘That’s exactly what Bill Phinner thought,’ said Eithne.

‘All right,’ Katie told her. ‘If you can let me have some pictures of it by the morning, I’ll have them circulated round the fancy-dress hire shops and theatrical costumiers, and have them checked against online suppliers, too. Maybe somebody will recognize where it came from.’

*

Katie had just opened her front door when her iPhone played ‘The Last Rose of Summer’. Her Irish setter, Barney, was jostling around her and she had to push him into the living room with her knees as she answered the phone.

‘DS Maguire here. Who is it?’

It was a girl on the other end, and she sounded nervous. ‘It’s Clodagh. Mr Keane’s secretary, if you remember me.’

‘Oh, yes, Clodagh. I remember you, of course. What’s the story?’

‘I don’t know if I should be telling you this, because Mr Keane was very strict about us all keeping quiet about it. But I knew Father Fiachra when he was still at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Watergrasshill. He baptized me, and he often used to drop in to my mother’s for tea when I was little. He was a dear old man, he really was.’

‘Go on,’ said Katie, sitting down on the sofa and tugging off her shoes. She threw them across the room one after the other so that Barney would go and fetch them and stop snuffling around her for a few seconds.

‘Well, the thing of it is, I saw the fellow in black that you were asking about today. I reckon some of the others did, too, but Mr Keane said that we weren’t to breathe a word about it to the guards even if we had, because even if we had, we had not, do you know what I mean?’

‘Not entirely, I must say. Did he tell you why you shouldn’t mention it to us?’

‘He said it was something to do with health and safety. He said that if we told you, we might get shut down for breach of the regulations.’

‘A man walks around with a black hood and shining red eyes, making out that he’s Satan himself, and that’s in breach of health and safety?’

‘I don’t know. I’m just telling you what Mr Keane told us.’

‘But you say you saw him, this fellow in black?’ asked Katie.

‘I did, yes, about a week ago. I think it was a Monday. No, it must have been the Tuesday because that’s when they bring all the clean overalls round from the laundry. Anyway, I went outside to talk to the postman because he’d delivered two letters that weren’t meant for us, and as I went back I saw this fellow in the black hood. I couldn’t see if he had red eyes or not because he had his back turned to me, and he was quite a long way away down the end of the polishing shop. He was talking to Mr Keane. Then he went around the corner and disappeared.’

‘Did Mr Keane realize that you’d seen him?’

‘I’m not sure. I think he might have done because he kind of frowned in my direction, but the sun was in his eyes so maybe he didn’t. Anyway, I went directly back into the office and when he came back in himself he didn’t say anything.

Clodagh paused, and then she said, ‘You won’t tell him I rang you, will you? I’ll lose my job if he finds out. Maybe I shouldn’t have rung you at all.’

‘Don’t you worry, Clodagh,’ said Katie. ‘Nobody is ever going to know that you got in touch with me. This information that you’ve given me, though, it could prove very helpful. It could very well lead us to whoever it was that killed Father Fiachra.’

*

She called Detective O’Donovan and explained what Clodagh had told her.

‘Well, I have to say that doesn’t surprise me at all,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘I had a feeling about that scobe right from the start. I’m allergic to fellows like him.’

‘That’s beside the point, Patrick. The point is, what’s a factory manager doing conspiring to frighten the wits out of some poor old woman and then aiding and abetting the murder of a priest who’s come to give her a little reassurance?’

‘Search me,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘Maybe he thinks she’s a witch and she’s been putting a hex on his factory for making too much noise. You remember that so-called witch in Montenotte – the one who tried to cast a spell on the oil tankers whenever they docked into the Shell depot on the river because their pumping kept her awake all night?’

‘I do, yes. The difference is that Shell didn’t try to scare that old woman to death, or bash her head in with a rock. Anyway... I think another visit to Toolmate is called for. Think about it: the only access to Mary O’Donnell’s back garden fence is through the factory grounds, and if Satan had come from outside the factory, surely Redmond Keane must have seen him through his office window?’

‘So you reckon that Satan came from inside the factory?’

‘Yes, I do, and if Redmond Keane won’t voluntarily allow us to search the premises to see if his outfit’s hidden there anywhere, I’ll apply for a warrant.’

*

‘I rang her back for you,’ said Desmond Keane, as Clodagh came into the office. ‘I told her you’d only gone to the toilet and you wouldn’t be long.’

Clodagh glanced over at her iPhone which she had left on her desk.

‘Who was it?’ she said, although she felt like saying, ‘You’ve no business, answering my private calls!’ She would have done, if he hadn’t been her boss, and if she hadn’t been so frightened of him.

‘Well, who were you expecting?’ asked Redmond, getting up from his desk and walking across the office until he was close enough to touch her. Or slap her.

‘I don’t know,’ said Clodagh. She was flustered now and she clutched her large white handbag defensively in front of her. She tried to get past Redmond so that she could sit down, but he took a step sideways and blocked her. ‘I wasn’t expecting anybody.’

‘Are you sure of that, Clodagh? Not even Detective Superintendent Kathleen Maguire?’

Clodagh blushed and again she tried to get past him, but this time he took hold of the cuff of her white Aran sweater and twisted it.

‘Let me go, please,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Oh, don’t you, now? Well, that’s very strange altogether because she left you a message. Would you like to hear it, this message?’

Redmond picked up her phone and held it up in front of her. Clodagh made a snatch for it, but he held it tantalizingly out of her reach.

‘Look, if I put it on the speakerphone, then we’ll both be able to hear it, won’t we?’

There was nothing that Clodagh could do. Redmond switched on her phone and they heard Katie’s voice saying, ‘Clodagh? I just wanted to thank you for your help and advise you that we’ll be acting on it immediately. When you see me, though, say nothing at all to suggest that you might have spoken to me. I’ll call you later so.’

‘Well, your mystery caller didn’t give her name, so I rang her back,’ said Redmond. As it happened, she was engaged on another call, but her answerphone told me who she was and invited me to leave a message. Which I did.’

He released his grip on her sleeve and handed her back her iPhone. Clodagh stood there miserably, glancing towards the door every now and then, as if all she wanted to do was escape.

‘So you spoke to Detective Superintendent Maguire, did you? And what exactly did you speak about that she’s going to be acting on immediately?’

‘It was nothing,’ said Clodagh. ‘It was about my brother Ciaran. He’s thinking of joining the Garda.’

‘Oh, your brother Ciaran is thinking of joining the Garda, is he? But if that’s all you were talking about, why did Detective Superintendent Maguire tell you to say nothing to suggest that you’d spoken to her? I would have thought your brother becoming a guard would be something to be proud of – something to tell all your friends about, not keep to yourself.’

Clodagh shrugged, at a loss for words. Redmond stood close to her for a while, looking her up and down with that cast in his eyes, which always unnerved her even when he wasn’t angry, which he was now.

‘You saw me, didn’t you?’ he said. ‘You saw me outside with that fellow in the hood. I thought I saw you looking, but I wasn’t sure.’

Clodagh sat down at her desk, still clutching her handbag. ‘I don’t know what you mean, Mr Keane. I didn’t see anything. I was chasing after the postie, that’s all.’

‘Oh, is that right? Well, let me tell you this, Clodagh, that fellow I was talking to had nothing to do with what happened to that priest next door. He’s just a fellow who does a bit of electrical work for us now and again. He’s cheap, right, but he isn’t licensed, so I can’t have the guards knowing about him. Do you understand me?’

Clodagh nodded.

‘Right, then,’ said Redmond. ‘You’d better get on with your work. That letter has to go out to the county council this morning and I still need you to find those nitrate solution prices for me from McGean’s.’

‘Yes, Mr Keane. I’ll get right on to it so.’

*

While Clodagh sat at her keyboard, typing, Redmond stood staring out of the window. It was raining outside, not heavily, but the wind was blowing ghosts of spray across the car park.

After ten minutes or so, his mobile phone rang. He picked it up and put it to his ear, but whoever was calling him, he said nothing at all, not even ‘Hello.’ He put it down, went over to his desk and took a manila envelope out of his drawer. He approached Clodagh and held it up in front of her.

‘Could you take this to Dermot in the plating shop? It’s a bit of a bonus I promised him.’

‘I will of course,’ said Clodagh. She was just relieved that he seemed to have forgiven her for contacting Detective Superintendent Maguire. It took the pressure off her, for the moment at least.

She picked up her folding umbrella and left Redmond’s office. As she crossed the yard she could hear the monotonous banging of the press that stamped wrenches out of red-hot metal billets. The workshop where they were polished and chromium-plated was right at the back of the factory site, close to Mary O’Donnell’s garden fence.

When she entered the plating shop she found that Dermot was standing alone by the tank where the wrenches were lowered into chromium chloride solution, his arms folded, as if he were waiting for her. He was well over six feet tall and everything about him seemed larger than a normal human being. His head was enormous, with a bulbous nose and massive chin, and his hands were like two shovels. He was wearing the largest size of Toolmate overall, but it was still too tight for him and two of the buttons had broken off. His tangled grey hair and deep-set eyes gave him the look of an ogre from a children’s picture book

‘Mr Keane said to give you this,’ she said, holding out the envelope.

Dermot took it, but didn’t take his eyes off her. She was turning to go when he said, ‘Did you ever wonder what a person would look like, you know, if they was chromium-plated?’

‘What?’ said Clodagh. She didn’t understand what he was saying.

Dermot tossed the envelope on to the workbench beside him and came right up to her. He nodded towards the huge, waist-high plating tank and said, ‘Did you ever wonder what a person would look like, if they was to take a swim in that? If they’d come out all bright and shiny?’

‘No, of course not. Of course they wouldn’t, they’d drown. And that’s poison, like, isn’t it? That’s what Mr Keane told me. You shouldn’t get even the tiniest splash on your skin, that’s what he said, and he said there was one woman who worked here who died from swallowing some by mistake.’

‘Oh, you don’t want to believe everything Mr Keane tells you,’ said Dermot. He opened his mouth to bare his oddly tiny teeth, but it was more of a grimace than a grin.

Clodagh turned away, but as she did so, Dermot seized her by the shoulders.

‘Leave go!’ she screamed. ‘Leave go of me, will you!’

Without a word, though, Dermot pushed her towards the plating tank, so that her shoes made a clanking sound against its metal sides. She let out another scream, high-pitched and piercing, and tried to twist herself free. But Dermot was overwhelmingly strong. He grabbed the back collar of her sweater and thrust his other hand deep between her legs and heaved her over the rail into the chromium solution. There was a wallowing splash and for a split second she disappeared beneath the surface.

When she burst out of the solution, she was frantically spitting, but then she closed her mouth tight to stop herself swallowing any more of it. She had to shut her eyes, too, because it stung so much. Waving her arms blindly in front of her, she groped for the side of the tank. Dermot, however, was methodically pulling on a pair of heavy-duty black rubber gloves, and when she managed to seize the rail he levered her fingers away from it and gave a hefty push against her forehead with the heel of his hand.

Clodagh’s wedge-heeled shoes slipped on the bottom of the tank. She fell backwards, with one last gargling sound, and disappeared under the surface again. Dermot stood and watched her for a while, and when she slowly began to float in a circle, her white face staring upwards through the ripples, he took off his gloves.

He picked up his mobile phone, jabbed at it, sniffed, and then said, ‘We’ve had a bit of an accident, like, in the plating shop. Yeah. That’s right. Don’t know what the feck she thought she was doing, stupid cow.’

*

Katie said, ‘You understand, don’t you, what this looks like?’

‘Oh, well, yes, I can see why you might be suspicious,’ said Redmond. ‘It was nothing but an accident, though, as far as I can tell. I can’t even begin to imagine what she was doing in the plating shop. And how she managed to fall into the tank, only God knows.’

‘You’re obviously aware that she called me yesterday.’

‘Of course, yes. She went to the toilet and her phone rang and I answered it for her. I wouldn’t have done normally, but she told me when she came to work that she had some old school friend she was anxious to hear from, so I didn’t want her to miss her call.’

‘She told me that she saw you talking to some fellow wearing a black hood, very much like the fellow who was making out to Mrs O’Donnell that he was Satan.’

Redmond had been watching as the ambulance backed into the car park and the paramedics opened up its doors. It had stopped raining now and the car park was shining with a watery sunlight. He turned around with his mouth turned down dismissively and shook his head. ‘I can’t think why she should have said that. Maybe she was trying to cause me some bother. She’d asked me for a pay rise but I’d had to tell her that we couldn’t afford it.’

‘I thought Toolmate was doing really well,’ said Katie.

‘It is, yes. But that doesn’t mean I can give everybody an increase in wages. I have to plough money back into expansion. Toolmate is growing really fast and if we’re going to keep up with demand we need new storage facilities and new workshops.’

‘So you think that Clodagh was simply making that up – about you and the man in the hood?’

‘Well, of course, since it never happened.’

‘And you’re convinced that she fell into that tank of chromium solution by accident?’

‘I couldn’t say for sure, Katie. I wasn’t there at the time and neither was anybody else. Maybe she just leaned over too far and lost her balance. Maybe she decided to take her own life. She always seemed happy enough to me, but who knows what problems she might have had? Maybe she was pregnant. Maybe her boyfriend had left her. I simply couldn’t tell you.’

Katie stared at Redmond for a long time without saying anything. He was trying to look both bemused and sympathetic, but as the seconds went by she could tell that he was finding it harder and harder to keep it up. She had interviewed hundreds of liars in her career and she could sense his tension. He couldn’t keep even one of his eyes fixed on her – his gaze continually darted towards the window, as if he wanted to make sure that Clodagh really was dead and wasn’t going to sit up on the stretcher on which she was being carried to the ambulance and start denouncing him.

At last, Katie said, ‘All right, Redmond. But I’d like my officers to make a thorough search of the premises, if that’s all right with you.’

Redmond’s expression abruptly changed from bemused and sympathetic to prickly and defensive. ‘Why would you want to be doing that? We’ve nothing to hide here. All you’re going to find is shovels and spanners.’

‘It’s just a matter of procedure, Redmond, like I said before.’

‘That’s as may be, but Toolmate has its procedures as well. I’m only the manager here, not the owner, and I’m not at all sure what my CEO would have to say about a search.’

‘What reason could your CEO possibly have for saying no?’ Katie asked him.

‘I couldn’t tell you. She’s a woman, by the way, and not a very obliging woman at that. If I let you search the place without her say-so, she might very well sack me for overstepping my authority.’

Katie pointed towards the phone on his desk. ‘Why don’t you call her and ask her? I assume you know her number.’

‘Toolmate’s headquarters is in San Jose, California. She won’t be awake yet. And even when she is awake, she still might refuse. She’s very legalistic.’

‘In that case, it’ll be easier and quicker if I apply for a search warrant,’ said Katie. ‘Don’t go anywhere, and tell all of your workforce to remain on the premises. I’ll be back as soon as I’ve drummed up a district court judge.’

‘Do what you have to,’ said Redmond, lifting his hands in a show of resignation. ‘I can tell you now, though, that you won’t find anything. You’d be better off not wasting your time or taxpayers’ money.’

*

As Katie walked across the car park she saw that the ambulance was still there, with its doors open. The paramedics were talking to Bill Phinner and Detective O’Donovan and Eithne and another three gardaí, including Sergeant O’Malley. Detective O’Donovan had Clodagh’s blue coat over his arm and he was holding her handbag as well as a plastic shopping bag containing her personal possessions from her desk – a hairbrush and some eyeliner and her address book, even the ham sandwich and the bag of Taytos she had brought for her lunch.

‘Is it a go for a search, ma’am?’ asked Sergeant O’Malley.

Katie shook her head. ‘Keane’s trying to delay it. Says his dragon of a boss in California will give him the sack if he allows us to search the place without her clearing it first.’

‘So what?’ said Bill. ‘You’re a superintendent. You have the authority to instigate a search yourself.’

‘I do, yes, but only if I have reasonable grounds for thinking that we might turn up some incriminating evidence, and in this case I think I’d rather have a warrant. Apparently Toolmate’s boss is very litigious. There’s a dead young girl in there and I don’t want to mess this up because we haven’t played it exactly by the book.’

‘At a guess, I’d say she died almost instantly,’ said Bill. ‘That solution we fished her out of is a mixture of chromium chloride, glycolic acid and various citrates. One swallow of that and you’d probably die of cardiogenic shock.’

Katie climbed up into the ambulance. Clodagh was covered by a green sheet, but Katie folded it down so that she could see her face. Her eyes were closed and she looked as if she were a statue of herself on a medieval tomb – not metallic and shiny, but as if her skin had turned to polished granite.

Bill was close behind her. ‘I can’t see a young girl like that throwing herself into a tank full of chemicals, can you?’ he asked her.

‘I don’t know for sure,’ said Katie. ‘We find enough of them floating in the river, don’t we? And if they don’t leave a note, you can never tell for certain if they fell, or if they jumped, or if they were pushed.’

‘Well, I’m like you, ma’am, and I don’t happily make assumptions, but in my estimation the sides of the tank are too high for her to have fallen into it accidentally, and she would have had to climb up on something if she had deliberately thrown herself in.’

Katie gently covered Clodagh’s pale grey face again and crossed herself. She stepped down from the ambulance and said to the paramedics, ‘All right, then, you’re good to go. I’ll call Dr Reidy and have him send a pathologist down.’

She went over to Detective O’Donovan. ‘I’ll drum up a judge, Patrick, if you can go to the court and collect a search warrant.’

‘I will of course.’

Katie nodded at Clodagh’s possessions. ‘Have you looked in her bag?’

‘Not yet, no. I had a quick flick through her address book to see if she had her parents’ phone number written down, but that was all. I was going to go through all of her things when I got back to the station.’

Katie took a crumpled pair of black forensic gloves out of her coat pocket and tugged them on. Detective O’Donovan passed her the handbag and she opened it. Inside she found the usual clutter that she would have expected to find in a young woman’s handbag – a red plastic purse and make-up and keys and a roll of peppermints and shopping receipts and Always pads.

At the back of the handbag there was another zipped-up compartment and she opened that, too. Crammed tightly inside it was something made of black material, which she carefully pulled out. She gave the handbag back to Detective O’Donovan and unfolded the material to see what it was.

‘Holy Mother of God,’ said Detective O’Donovan, and Bill Phinner and Eithne and Sergeant O’Malley came across to look at it, too.

It was a hood, with two pointed peaks that had the appearance of horns. It was made out of thick black cotton which looked as if it had been hand-stitched. The left eye-hole was empty, with two or three loose threads hanging from it, but the right eye-hole had a red transparent oval of plastic sewn into it.

‘Will you look at that?’ said Bill. ‘That’s identical to the piece of red plastic we found in the garden. I’d say what you have there, ma’am, is Satan himself.’

Katie glanced towards the office building to make sure that Redmond Keane hadn’t seen her holding up the hood. Then she folded it up and pushed it back into Clodagh’s handbag.

‘What do you reckon, ma’am?’ said Detective O’Donovan.

‘For the time being I’m trying to keep an open mind,’ Katie told him. ‘All the same, I think we can discount the possibility that Clodagh herself was dressing up as Satan, even if she had the mask in her bag. Mary O’Donnell said that Satan was very tall, with a voice like gravel going round in a concrete mixer. Clodagh was about five foot three and sounded more like one of the Nolans.’

‘She wouldn’t have had the strength, either, to bash in Father Fiachra’s head with that rocker,’ Bill put in.

‘You’re right,’ said Katie. ‘I think she must have found that hood somewhere in the factory and hidden it in her handbag so that she could show it to me later. The tragic thing is that Satan got to her first.’

Bill said, ‘I’ll take the hood back to the lab directly and test it for hair and DNA. If the fellow was talking while he was wearing it, there’s bound to be saliva on it.’

‘That’s grand,’ said Katie. ‘And I think we can speed things up by taking DNA samples from all of Toolmate’s workforce right now. We won’t need a warrant for that. Eithne? Tyrone? Do you have what you need to screen everybody here? I think the workforce numbers just under forty altogether.’

‘We have millions of swabs in the van so,’ said Tyrone. ‘We could test half of Munster if you wanted us to.’

Katie snapped off her forensic gloves. ‘Very good. I’ll just go and have a word with Mr Keane and tell him what we’re intending to do. I don’t think he’s going to be best pleased about it, but you know what they say. If you’re going to dance with the devil, make sure you’re wearing your fireproof shoes.’

*

It was late in the afternoon before the technical team had finished taking DNA samples from all of the workers at Toolmate. One by one they had reluctantly shuffled into the staff canteen for Eithne and Tyrone to swab the insides of their cheeks, and then shuffled out again, scowling.

Redmond Keane had protested at first, but Katie had sharply told him that she was sufficiently high-ranking to authorize an ad hoc DNA screening and in the end he had shrugged and given in, pretending to be good-humoured about it. Technically, she could also have authorized a search of the premises without a district court warrant. As she had told Bill, however, she didn’t want her chances of successfully prosecuting Clodagh’s killer to be jeopardized by some last-minute legal hair-splitting.

Besides, she already had in her possession the single most important piece of evidence that she would have been looking for – Satan’s hood.

At 4.15 p.m., Detective O’Donovan came back to the Garda station at Anglesea Street with the search warrant from Judge Michael Flanagan.

‘Good – but I’m going to hold off the search until we have the DNA results,’ Katie told him. ‘That way we’ll know if one of those workers is a viable suspect or not and it’ll save us a whole lot of time and money.’

‘What if it’s none of them?’

‘Then we’ll have to think again, won’t we? But I’ll bet you money that Clodagh was right and that Redmond Keane is behind all of this, along with some other fellow in the factory – maybe more than one of them. Clodagh managed to find Satan’s hood, didn’t she? – although I wish I knew where she found it.’

‘I’ll tell you, though, it didn’t seem to me like Keane knew that she’d taken it,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘He would have searched her bag, like, wouldn’t he?’

‘I think you’re right,’ said Katie. ‘When I told Keane we were going to take DNA samples of everybody in the factory he wasn’t too happy about it, but he didn’t go mental. That makes me think that he didn’t realize the hood was already missing and that he was he confident he had plenty of time to dispose of it before I came back with a search warrant.’

‘How long before we get the results?’ asked Detective O’Donovan.

‘Another eight or nine hours, and that’s them going flat out. But I’ve ordered Keane’s home to be kept under surveillance tonight and we’ll be intercepting his phone calls and emails.’

‘It’s the motives that are clear as mud,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘Why did Satan bash the priest’s brains out – that’s always supposing it was Satan that did it. And why was Clodagh drowned in that tank like that, especially if they didn’t know that she’d found that hood?’

*

Katie spent the rest of the day going through her paperwork. She was prosecuting a fifteen-strong Romanian gang for cigarette-smuggling and she had to read through the Book of Evidence, which was almost as thick as the Old Testament but a great deal less exciting.

When she had finished that, she leafed quickly through a report from Detective Brennan on five arrests that had been made that afternoon during a violent public protest on Centre Park Road. Cork Petroleum had applied for planning permission to extend their storage facility on the south bank of the River Lee, which would mean that a terrace of nineteenth-century houses would have to be demolished and half of a small public park paved over. She had already tossed the report aside when she remembered what Redmond Keane had said to her when she had asked him about Clodagh’s wages.

Toolmate is growing really fast, and if we’re going to keep up with demand we need new storage facilities and at least three new workshops.

That was all very well, thought Katie, but where could they possibly find the space to build them? The Toolmate factory was sited in a north-pointing triangle where the R614 to Rathcormac joined the road from Upper Glanmire. On the south side, which was the only direction in which they could expand their site, stood Mary O’Donnell’s bungalow.

She called Detective O’Donovan and asked him to check through all the applications made to Cork County Council’s planning department over the past twelve months, and what their decisions had been.

He came back in less than an hour. ‘An application was made on 26 March this year by Toolmate Ltd for outline planning permission. They wanted to demolish a single-storey dwelling called Killshallow adjacent to their premises and construct in its place three workshops and two storage sheds.’

‘And what was the outcome?’

‘Permission was granted, yes. But there’s an addendum attached to the council’s decision, noting that the owner of the single-storey dwelling would have to agree to sell voluntarily at the market price. The council were not prepared to make a compulsory purchase order on Toolmate’s behalf.’

‘So that’s what Satan was doing in Mary O’Donnell’s garden,’ said Katie. ‘She didn’t want to sell, and the county council wouldn’t force her to move out, so Redmond Keane summoned His Satanic Majesty to frighten her away.’

‘That still doesn’t explain why Satan had to kill Father Fiachra. That’s assuming that it was Satan who killed him – but then Bill found no evidence that anybody else had been in the garden that morning. The fellow was in disguise, after all, and what threat could an eighty-three-year-old retired priest have been to him?’

‘He’d lost one of his eyes. Maybe he lost the head, too.’

*

Shortly after ten the next morning, when Katie was peeling the lid off her macchiato, Eithne came into her office with the first results of the DNA tests.

Her sleeves were untidily rolled up and her blonde hair was sticking up even spikier than usual. She had shadowy circles under her eyes.

‘Don’t tell me you’ve been working on these all night,’ said Katie.

‘Don’t worry, ma’am,’ said Eithne. ‘Tyrone’s finishing off the rest and I’ve been given the rest of the day off to catch up with my sleep. But we thought you should see these right away because we’ve come up with a probable match.’

She laid a plastic folder on Katie’s desk and pointed to the long list of figures on the sheet of paper inside it. ‘We found three long grey hairs inside the hood and traces of saliva. When we made a DNA comparison, we found that we couldn’t exclude a forge operator named Dermot Breen.’

‘Which is lab-speak for being 99.9 per cent certain that it was him?’

‘That’s right, ma’am, and he’s the only person who’s been wearing that hood. Nobody else has been playing Satan, only him.’

‘Thank you, Eithne,’ smiled Katie. ‘Now you can go and get your head down on that pillow. You deserve it.’

*

It was nearly nine-thirty in the evening and Dermot was still denying that he had struck Father Fiachra with the rock.

Katie and Detective O’Donovan had been interviewing him now for almost five hours, but all he would say was, ‘I was wearing the hood, I admit it. I was there in the auld wan’s garden, I admit it.’

‘There’s no way at all that you can deny it, Dermot,’ said Katie. ‘Your hair and your spit were found inside the hood and your footprint and one of the eyes from your hood was found in Mary O’Donnell’s flower bed.’

‘I never saw no priest, though. I swear on the Bible. I never saw no priest and I never hit him with no rocker.’

‘If you didn’t see him it would have been hard for you to hit him, I’ll grant you that,’ Katie told him. ‘But the fact is, Dermot, there was nobody else in that garden that morning except for you and him, so who else could have attacked him?’

‘I never saw no priest, I swear on the Holy Bible. I never saw no priest and I never hit him with no rocker.’

Dermot’s solicitor Bryan Doody gave a long, exaggerated sigh. He was a short, portly man with a snub nose and a comb-over, and a navy pinstriped suit that was two sizes too tight for him, and he smelled strongly of stale cigars. All the same, he was a partner in one of the most expensive firms of lawyers on South Mall and Katie knew from experience that he wasn’t to be underestimated.

‘I don’t see the need for you to keep repeating the same question over and over again, Detective Superintendent,’ he told her. ‘My client has admitted that he was attempting to alarm Mrs O’Donnell, but only as joke. A bad joke, I’ll grant you, but Mrs O’Donnell’s refusal to sell her property to the Toolmate company had caused a great deal of ill feeling, since the future of so many local jobs depended on it. It wasn’t as if Toolmate weren’t offering her a price that was far above the market valuation.’

He dragged out a handkerchief and loudly blew his nose. Then he said, ‘You have circumstantial evidence that shows that my client was at some time in Mrs O’Donnell’s garden, I’m prepared to grant you that. But your evidence in no way establishes that he was there at the same time as Father Fiachra, and it certainly doesn’t prove that he attacked him.

‘Quite apart from that, my client is an extremely God-fearing man and it would be totally against his faith to inflict harm of any kind on a member of the clergy.’

‘Very well,’ said Katie, checking her watch. ‘Let’s call an end to this interview for now. But I have to advise you that I’ll be asking your client further questions tomorrow morning.’

Bryan Doody stood up and tucked his notes into his briefcase. ‘You can question him as much as you like, Detective Superintendent, but you’ll only get the same answer. He played a prank on Mrs O’Donnell, but as far as I know there has never been a law in Ireland against playing pranks. If there were, every member of the Dáil would have been locked up years ago.’

He smiled and held out his hand, but Katie didn’t take it.

‘I’m in court tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘If you need to contact me, here’s my card. As I say, you can question my client until you’re black in the face, for all the good it will do you. He can’t admit to something that he didn’t do, and in any event you’ll have to release him by lunchtime, unless your chief superintendent makes an application to the district court to hold him for longer.’

*

That night, before she went to bed, Katie stood for a long time in front of the full-length mirror in her wardrobe. It had been two weeks since she had been to the hairdresser and her dark red hair looked as if she had been standing in a hurricane, but she had dropped a dress size since Easter and even though she was pale she thought she looked much better than she felt.

It was the endless legal wrangling that made her feel so tired. Bryan Doody suspected as strongly as she did that Dermot Breen had killed Father Fiachra, and they were both aware that Redmond Keane had probably put him up to his satanic ‘prank’. But there had been no eye-witnesses and none of the forensic evidence was conclusive. Clodagh had seen Redmond talking to a man in a hood, but even if Clodagh hadn’t been killed her evidence would have carried very little weight in court.

Katie stared at her reflection. If only she and her reflection could be twins, and one Katie could go on a few days’ holiday to Gran Canaria while the other Katie stayed here in Cork, questioning Dermot Breen until he broke down and admitted what he had done – not that she believed for one moment that he would admit it. He was physically gigantic and mentally impervious and she could tell that he had never been afraid of anyone in his life.

But then she thought: maybe one twin could ask him what had really happened in Mary O’Donnell’s garden. Not a twin of herself, but Father Fiachra’s twin, Deaglán. If Father Fiachra had lived until he was eighty-three, there was a remote chance that his brother had, too, even if he had led the life of a gangster.

She picked up her phone and rang Detective Aileen Brody, who was on night duty.

‘Aileen? It’s DS Maguire. See if you can find me a fellow called Deaglán Caomhánach, He has a whole rake of criminal convictions so it shouldn’t be too hard to find him, if he’s still living and breathing. The family came from Fair Hill, originally. That’s right, Caomhánach. Call me back if you have any luck, or even if you don’t.’

*

He was sitting by the window in the residents’ lounge with a tartan blanket over his knees, white-haired, his cheeks deeply lined, staring at the small brick-paved courtyard outside, where pigeons were pecking at some slices of soda bread.

Katie walked over and stood close beside him, but he continued to stare at the pigeons, making small sipping noises with his false teeth and occasionally clearing his throat.

‘Deaglán?’ said Katie, after a while.

‘Who wants to know?’ asked Deaglán, still without looking up at her.

‘My name’s Kathleen – Kathleen Maguire. I’m a detective superintendent from the Garda station at Anglesea Street.’

‘Are you now? Are you shades still going to be bothering me when I’m lying in my casket?’

‘I’m not after you, Deaglán,’ said Katie. ‘I’ve come about your brother, Fiachra,’

‘My saintly brother Fiachra, God rest his soul,’ said Deaglán. ‘Don’t worry, Detective Superintendent, the matron told me yesterday what had happened to him. Of all the people in the world who didn’t deserve to die a horrible violent death like that, it was Fiachra.’

‘We have a suspect in custody,’ said Katie. ‘We’re ninety-nine per cent sure that he murdered your brother, but he’s denying it of course and our evidence isn’t exactly what you’d call watertight.’

Deaglán turned his head around and looked at Katie for the first time, and he looked so much like his brother that it was unnerving. Of course she had never seen Father Fiachra alive, but she doubted that his eyes would have been so cold and so penetrating. Deaglán had the appearance of a man who didn’t care how much he hurt people, so long as he got what he wanted.

He sipped at his false teeth again and then he said, ‘Why don’t you bring your man around here and leave me alone with him for half an hour? I’ll make sure that justice is done.’

‘I think I have a better idea,’ said Katie. ‘One that wouldn’t entail me having to arrest you afterwards for manslaughter.’

Deaglán suddenly grinned, and then just as suddenly stopped grinning. ‘Go on, then,’ he said. ‘What’s your better idea, Kathleen?’

*

When Katie and Detective O’Donovan entered the interview room, Dermot was drumming his enormous fingers on the table top and he didn’t stop drumming when Katie sat down opposite him and switched on the digital recorder.

‘I’m going to give you the opportunity to admit to what you did, Dermot,’ she told him. ‘If you confess to killing Father Fiachra, and show that you’re genuinely sorry for what you did, I can almost guarantee that your sentence will be very much lighter.’

‘I never saw no priest,’ said Dermot in a flat, expressionless voice. ‘I never saw no priest and I never hit him with no rocker.’

‘You do realize that God will convict you in the court of Heaven, don’t you, for what you’ve done – especially if you lie about it?’

Dermot flinched, as if he had been bitten on the cheek by a gnat, but all he said was, ‘I never saw no priest. I never hurt him.’

It was then that Katie nodded to Detective O’Donovan, who stood up and went to the door of the interview room. Dermot didn’t look at him, but continued to stare at the table in front of him, where his large hands lay.

Detective O’Donovan opened the door and said quietly, ‘Come in, Father Fiachra. He’s here.’

Deaglán Caomhánach walked in, dressed in a black suit with a white priest’s collar. He had shaved, and his white hair had been cut and combed in a wave so that he exactly resembled his dead twin brother.

‘It was you!’ he said in a croaky voice. He pointed at Dermot, his arm stiff, his eyes cold and accusing. ‘Don’t you try to deny it! It was you!’

Dermot’s mouth slowly dropped open. He stared at Deaglán and then he stared at Katie and then he stared back at Deaglán again. He was speechless with shock.

Deaglán walked towards the table, still pointing. Dermot let out an extraordinary noise that was halfway between a cough and a screech, and tumbled off his chair on to his knees. He clasped both of his hands together like a penitent. ‘I was scared, father! I was scared! I only hit you because I was scared!’

‘Scared?’ said Deaglán. ‘How could a beast of a yoke like you be scared of an auld fella like me?’

‘Because you knew me, father, that’s why! Because you spoke out my name! You recognized me from church even though I was all dressed up like the Devil! Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have grassed me out to the shades! You would have done, wouldn’t you, and how many colours of shite would I have been in then?’

‘And that was your justification for beating my head in with a rock?’ Deaglán demanded. Katie had to admit to herself that he was playing his part with almost theatrical relish. He was clearly enjoying every moment of Dermot’s near-hysteria.

‘I didn’t do it from choicer, father! My boss would have killed me! Same reason I had to throw that Clodagh into the plating tank! He said that nobody had to know what game we’d been playing, trying to scare that old woman!’

‘And you’ll swear that you murdered me?’ Deaglán persisted. ‘You’ll swear it in on the Holy Bible, in front of a judge? If you don’t, boy, I’m going to drag you to Hell with me, right here and now!’

‘I will, I will, I promise you, father. Please forgive me.’

Katie said, ‘You’ll swear that you murdered young Clodagh, too? And that Redmond Keane put you up to it?’

Dermot was sweating now and shaking as if he had a fever. He nodded so frantically that spit flew from his lips and said, ‘I’ll swear it! I’ll swear it! Please don’t take me to Hell, father! Please!’

Deaglán didn’t answer immediately but continued to point at him and stare at him hard. Then he said, ‘If you don’t keep your promise, I shall come back for you. Don’t think that I won’t.’

With that, he turned around and walked out of the door, and Detective O’Donovan closed it behind him. Dermot remained on his knees, wringing his hands together, with tears sliding down his face.

Katie stood up and said, ‘Take care of this miserable wretch for me, would you, Patrick? I have an appointment at White’s Cross to keep.’

*

Redmond Keane was on the phone when Katie entered his office with two uniformed gardaí. As soon as he saw her, he said, ‘I’ll ring you later so,’ and hung up.

‘Good morning, Redmond,’ said Katie. ‘I think you can guess why I’m here.’

‘Not to invite me out on a date, I imagine,’ Redmond smiled. He went over to the coat stand and took down his trench coat. When he had shrugged it on, one of the gardaí came up to him and put handcuffs on him.

‘What’s the charge, Katie?’ he asked her.

‘Conspiracy to murder under Section 4 of the Offences Against the Person Act,’ said Katie. ‘Otherwise known as “dancing with the devil”.’

~

We hope you enjoyed this book!

For an exclusive preview of White Bones, the first full-length novel in the Katie Maguire series, read on or click the image.

The next thrilling instalment in the Katie Maguire series will be released in summer 2016

For more information, click one of the links below:

About Graham Masterton

About the Katie Maguire series

An invitation from the publisher

Preview

Read on for a preview of

One wet, windswept November morning, a field on Meagher’s farm gives up the dismembered bones of eleven women...

Their skeletons bear the marks of a meticulous butcher. The bodies date back to 1915. All were likely skinned alive.

But then a young woman goes missing, and her remains, the bones carefully stripped and arranged in an arcane pattern, are discovered on the same farm.

With the crimes of the past echoing in the present, D.S. Katie Maguire must solve a decades-old murder steeped in ancient legend... before this terrifying killer strikes again.

Can’t wait? Buy White Bones here now!

1

John had never seen so many hooded crows circling around the farm as he did that wet November morning. His father always used to say that whenever you saw more than seven hooded crows gathered together, they had come to gloat over a human tragedy.

It was tragedy weather, too. Curtains of rain had been trailing across the Nagle Mountains since well before dawn, and the north-west field was so heavy that it had taken him more than three hours to plow it. He was turning the tractor around by the top corner, close to the copse called Iollan’s Wood, when he saw Gabriel frantically waving from the gate.

John waved back. Jesus, what did the idiot want now? If you gave Gabriel a job to do, you might just as well do it yourself, because he was always asking what to do next, and was it screws or nails you wanted, and what sort of wood were you after having this made from? John kept on steadily plowing, with big lumps of sticky mud pattering off the wheels, but Gabriel came struggling up the field toward him, still waving, with crows irritably flapping all around him. He was obviously shouting, too, although John couldn’t hear him.

As Gabriel came puffing up to him in his raggedy old brown tweeds and gumboots, John switched off the tractor’s engine and took off his ear-protectors.

“What’s wrong now, Gabe? Did you forget which end of the shovel you’re supposed to be digging with?”

“There’s bones, John! Bones! So many fecking bones you can’t even count them!”

John wiped the rain off his face with the back of his hand. “Bones? Where? What kind of bones?”

“Under the floor, John! People’s bones! Come and see for yourself! The whole place looks like a fecking graveyard!”

John climbed down from the tractor and ankle-deep into the mud. Close up, Gabriel smelled strongly of stale beer, but John was quite aware that he drank while he worked, even though he went to considerable pains to conceal his cans of Murphy’s under a heap of sacking at the back of the barn.

“We was digging the foundations close to the house when the boy says there’s something in the ground here, and he digs away with his fingers and out comes this human skull with its eyes full of dirt. Then we were after digging some more and there was four more skulls and bones like you never seen the like of, leg-bones and arm-bones and finger-bones and rib-bones.”

John strode long-legged down toward the gate. He was tall and dark, with thick black hair and almost Spanish good looks. He had only been back in Ireland for just over a year, and he was still finding it difficult to cope with running a farm. One sunny May morning he had been just about to close the door of his apartment on Jones Street in San Francisco when the telephone had rung, and it had been his mother, telling him that his father had suffered a massive stroke. And then, two days later, that his father was dead.

He hadn’t intended to come back to Ireland, let alone take over the farm. But his mother had simply assumed that he would, him being the eldest boy, and all his uncles and aunts and cousins had greeted him as if he were head of the Meagher family now. He had flown back to San Francisco to sell his dot.com alternative medicine business and say goodbye to his friends, and here he was, walking through the gate of Meagher’s Farm in a steady drizzle, with a beery-breathed Gabriel following close behind him.

“I’d say it was a mass murder,” Gabriel panted.

“Well, we’ll see.”

The farmhouse was a wide green-painted building with a gray slate roof, with six or seven leafless elms standing at its south-eastern side like an embarrassed crowd of naked bathers. A sharply-sloping driveway led down to the road to Ballyhooly, to the north, and Cork City, eleven miles to the south. John crossed the muddy tarmac courtyard and went around to the north side of the house, where Gabriel and a boy called Finbar had already knocked down a rotten old feed store and were now excavating the foundations for a modernized boiler-house.

They had cleared an area twelve feet by twenty. The earth was black and raw and had the sour, distinctive smell of peat. Finbar was standing on the far side of the excavation, mournfully holding a shovel. He was a thin, pasty-faced lad with a closely-cropped head, protruding ears, and a soggy gray jumper.

On the ground in front of him, like a scene from Pol Pot’s Cambodia, lay four human skulls. Nearer to the damp, cement-rendered wall of the farmhouse, there was a hole which was crowded with muddy human bones.

John hunkered down and stared at the skulls as if he were expecting them to explain themselves.

“God Almighty. These must have been here for a pretty long time. There isn’t a scrap of flesh left on any of them.”

“An unmarked grave, I’d say,” put in Gabriel. “A bunch of fellows who got on the wrong side of the IRA.”

“Scared the shite out of me,” said Finbar, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “I was digging away and all of a sudden there was this skull grinning up at me like my old uncle Billy.”

John picked up a long iron spike and prodded amongst the bones. He saw a jawbone, and part of a ribcage, and another skull. That made at least five bodies. There was only one thing to do, and that was to call the Garda.

“You don’t think your dad knew about this?” asked Gabriel, as John walked back to the house.

“What do you mean? Of course he didn’t know.”

“Well, he was a great republican, your dad.”

John stopped and stared at him. “What are you trying to say?”

“I’m not trying to say nothing, but if certain people wanted a place to hide certain remains that they didn’t want nobody to find, your dad might have possibly obliged them, if you see what I mean.”

“Oh, come on, Gabriel. My dad wouldn’t have allowed bodies to be buried on his property.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure, John. There was certain stuff buried here once, under the cowshed, for a while.”

“You mean guns?”

“I’m just saying that it might be better for all concerned if we forgot what we found here. They’re dead and buried already, these fellows, why disturb them? Your dad’s dead and buried, too, you don’t want people raking over his reputation now, do you?”

John said, “Gabe, these are human beings, for Christ’s sake. If we just cover them up, there are going to be five families who will never know where their sons or their husbands went. Can you imagine anything worse than that?”

“Well, I suppose you’re right. But it still strikes me as stirring up trouble when there’s no particular call to.”

John went into the house. It was gloomy inside, and it always smelled of damp at this time of year. He took off his boots and washed his hands in the small cloakroom at the side of the hall. Then he went into the large quarry-tiled kitchen where his mother was baking. She seemed so small these days, with her white hair and her stooped back and her eyes as pale as milk. She was sieving out flour for tea brack.

“Did you finish the plowing, John?” she asked him.

“Not quite. I have to use the telephone.”

He hesitated. She looked up and frowned at him. “Is everything all right?”

“Of course, mam. I have to make a phone call, that’s all.”

“You were going to ask me something.” Oh, she was cute, his mother.

“Ask you something? No. Don’t worry about it.” If his father really had allowed the IRA to bury bodies on his land, he very much doubted that he would have confided in his mother. What you don’t know can’t knock on your door in the middle of the night.

He went into the living-room with its tapestry-covered furniture and its big red-brick fireplace, where three huge logs were crackling and Lucifer the black Labrador was stretched out on the rug with his legs indecently wide apart. He picked up the old-fashioned black telephone and dialed 112.

“Hallo? I want the Garda. I need to speak to somebody in charge. Yes. Well, this is John Meagher up at Meagher’s Farm in Knocknadeenly. We’ve dug up some bodies.”

Available now!

About Eye for an Eye

Meet DS Katie Maguire. With her bright green eyes and short red hair, she looks like an Irish pixie. But she is no soft touch.

In this exclusive short story, Ireland’s most fearless detective hunts down a priest-killer in county Cork.

Reviews

‘One of the most original and frightening storytellers of our time.’

Peter James

‘One of the few true masters.’

James Herbert

‘Graham Masterton’s best book yet, and that’s as good as they come!’

John Farris

‘His setting is unique, his killer is gruesomely fascinating, and his storyteller is visceral and graphic.’

Booklist

‘A superlative writer.’

Philadelphia Inquirer

‘The living inheritor to the realm of Edgar Allen Poe.’

San Francisco Chronicle

‘[Masterton] moves from the familiar and credible to the fanciful and disturbing. The drama is tense, the writing superb.’

Sunday Times

‘Multifaceted and fascinating.’

Los Angeles Times

‘A mesmerizing storyteller whose fascination with the finer points of human weakness and deft touch keep the pages turning.’

Publishers Weekly

About Graham Masterton

GRAHAM MASTERTON was a bestselling horror writer for many years before he turned his talent to crime. He lived in Cork for five years, an experience that inspired the Katie Maguire series.

Find out more on Graham’s website, www.grahammasterton.co.uk or connect with him on Twitter, @GrahamMasterton

About the Katie Maguire Series

KATIE MAGUIRE

Katie Maguire was one of seven sisters born to a police Inspector in Cork, but the only sister who decided to follow her father and join An Garda Siochana. With her bright green eyes and short red hair, she looks like an Irish pixie, but she is no soft touch. To the dismay of some of her male subordinates, she rose quickly through the ranks, gaining a reputation for catching Cork’s killers, often at great personal cost. Katie spent seven years in a turbulent marriage with builder Paul Maguire, with whom she bore, and lost, a son. She is now in a long-distance relationship with Irish-American John Meagher.

1. White Bones

One wet, windswept November morning, a field on Meagher’s farm gives up the dismembered bones of eleven women...

Their skeletons bear the marks of a meticulous butcher. The bodies date back to 1915. All were likely skinned alive.

But then a young woman goes missing, and her remains, the bones carefully stripped and arranged in an arcane pattern, are discovered on the same farm.

With the crimes of the past echoing in the present, D.S. Katie Maguire must solve a decades-old murder steeped in ancient legend... before this terrifying killer strikes again.

White Bones is available here.

Jump to free preview here.

2. Broken Angels

As they came nearer, the black-clad body came into view, lying on its side in the shallows…

One cold spring morning in County Cork, two fishermen find a body floating in the Blackwater River: the mutilated corpse of a retired music teacher. His hands and feet are bound, and his neck bears the mark of a garrotting wire.

The Garda want to wrap this case up before the press get hold of it. But when a second man is found murdered, the body bears all the same marks as the first. And Detective Superintendent Katie Maguire fears this case carries the hallmark of a serial murderer…

Broken Angels is available here.

3. Red Light

On a bloodstained mattress, a burly man lies dead. Gunshots have shattered his face, and, where his hands used to be are two bloody stumps. A terrified girl kneels over his body. She is half-naked, starving, screaming. She has been trapped here for three days.

It doesn’t take DS Katie Maguire long to identify the murder victim. He is someone she has been trying to convict for years – a cruel and powerful pimp who terrorised the girls who worked for him. Has one of his rivals caught up with him? Or did one of his girls finally snap?

It’s Katie’s job to catch the killer. But with men like this dead, the city is safer – and so are the young women who are trafficked into Cork and forced to sell their bodies to strangers. When a second pimp is horrifically murdered, Katie must decide. Should she do her job, or follow her conscience?

Should she allow the killer to strike again?

Red Light is available here.

4. Taken For Dead

It is a sunny Saturday in county Cork, and an Irish wedding is in full swing. Drunk uncles are toasting the bride. The Ceilidh band have played for hours. No one could predict that the cutting of the cake would bring this wedding to a horrifying end.

The severed head of Micky Crounan, local baker, is grinning gruesomely up from the bottom tier of his own cake. Katie Maguire, of the Irish Garda, is baffled – until another local businessman goes missing in horrific circumstances. Soon Katie is on the trail of a debt-collecting gang calling themselves The Kings of Erin. But these are very dangerous men. And they will stop at nothing to throw Katie off the trail...

Taken for Dead is available here.

5. Blood Sisters

Katie Maguire hunts a serial killer targeting nuns in the gruesome new thriller from Graham Masterton.

In a nursing home on the outskirts of Cork, an elderly nun lies dead. She has been suffocated. It looks like a mercy-killing – until another sister from the same convent is found viciously murdered, floating in the Glashaboy river.

The nuns were good women, doing God’s work. Why would anyone want to kill them? But then a child’s skull is unearthed in the garden of the nuns’ convent, and DS Katie Maguire discovers a fifty year old secret that just might lead her to the killer... if the killer doesn’t find her first.

Blood Sisters is available here.

A Letter from the Publisher

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HeadofZeusBooks

The story starts here.

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright © Graham Masterton, 2015

Jacket Design © Estuary English, 2015

The moral right of Graham Masterton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (E) 9781784970727

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Contents

Cover

Welcome Page

Eye for an Eye

Preview

About Eye for an Eye

Reviews

About Graham Masterton

About the Katie Maguire Series

An Invitation from the Publisher

Copyright