The Drowned (3 page)

‘So did he show up, this feller?’ asked Detective Scanlan. ‘And did the lads buy their Es?’

Maeve nodded. ‘That was about ten o’clock, I’d say. Then this taxi showed up and they all got into the taxi and left. And I’ve not seen one of them since. And neither have you, Colm, have you? Admit it!’

‘Oh go and feck yourself,’ said the stubble-chinned boy, flicking the glowing butt of his joint into the darkness.

Detective Scanlan stood up. ‘Have
any
of you seen any of these five lads since Tuesday evening? Come on, speak up. Maeve may be right and we may be talking about saving their lives here.’

Reluctantly, the rest of the young people shook their heads and mumbled, ‘No.’

‘Did any of you see where the taxi came from?’ asked Detective Ó Doibhilin. ‘Did it have the name of the cab company written on the side of it? Or any kind of picture, or a badge?’

One of the boys said, ‘It was like a people carrier, do you know what I mean? I don’t think it had any kind of a taxi light on the top of it. Black, I’d say it was, or very dark blue, or maybe brown.’

‘So it looked like they’d ordered it?’

‘That’s right. The driver parked right over there, like, and waited for them. We had a couple of minutes’ more craic, and then they said, “G’luck so, this is our ride.” They all went over and climbed into the taxi, and zoom, off they shot.’

‘Right,’ said Detective Ó Doibhilin, taking out his notebook again. ‘I’m going to want all of your names and addresses and mobile phone numbers.’

‘Just don’t go ringing me,’ said one of the boys. ‘My old man will personally kneecap me with his Black & Decker if he finds out I’ve been talking to the law.’

‘Me too,’ said the boy who had told them about the taxi. ‘I’d rather stay unanimous, if that’s all right.’

*

When Katie came back from the district court she found Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán waiting for her in her office, talking to Moirin, her personal assistant.

Kyna Ni Nuallán had returned to duty only three weeks before. Last year she had been wounded in the stomach while stepping in to shield Katie from being shot and it had taken her over six months to recuperate. She had lost over twelve kilos during her convalescence, but she no longer looked so gaunt, and with her blonde hair cut very short and wispy Katie thought that she was looking far too pixie-pretty to be a detective sergeant.

‘What’s the story, ma’am?’ asked Kyna, as Katie dropped her files on to her desk and unbuttoned her raincoat.

‘I’m happy to say that Seamus McDonnell was given eighteen months for assaulting a garda and perverting the course of justice. And I’m even happier to say that Michael Gerrety’s second appeal for early parole was turned down flat. We have enough pimps in this city without letting that scumbag out. How’s your inquiry into that college gang-rape coming along?’

‘Um, slow, I’m sorry to tell you. Almost all of the witnesses have suddenly started to suffer from memory loss. Even the two girls themselves are beginning to say that they’re unsure of what happened, exactly. “I was totally steamed that night... I can’t remember who did what to me... I mean, I might have led them on, like.”’

‘Do you think somebody’s leaning on them?’

‘I’m beginning to think so. One of the suspects is a big fellow named Ruarí Barrett. He was pure aggressive when I talked to him and I noticed when I was interviewing other students that he was always hovering in the background somewhere. When they realized he was watching, they started to be very cautious about what they were telling me.’

‘Did you check up on this Ruarí Barrett?’

‘I did, yes. He’s twenty-three years old and served for five years as an engineer in the Naval Service. He’s currently doing a one-year master’s course in mechanical engineering. I looked him up on PULSE, too, but he doesn’t have any offences recorded against him.’

‘So what are you planning to do next?’ Katie asked her.

‘I’m going to interview the two girls again, but separately, and away from the UCC campus. I suspect that one of them was right on the verge of telling me everything that was done to her – Niamh Nolan, she’s only seventeen and very shy. But the other girl, Aileen, came into her room while I was talking to her and after that she clammed up on me. It was Aileen who said she might have been too stocious to remember anything.’

‘All right, good,’ said Katie. ‘I’ll be interested to hear what you get out of them when you talk to them alone. There’s been too many of these mass sexual assaults lately. It’s almost like it’s a new craze. You’d think that boys these days would have more respect for girls, not less. I mean, Jesus, they’re politically correct enough when it comes to racism, or gay marriage, or transgenders.’

‘Father O’Reilly told me that it was the pornography on the interweb. That’s what’s causing it. The boys see it and think that’s the way girls like it.’

‘Oh yes, and how much of it does Father O’Reilly watch?’

Kyna couldn’t help smiling. ‘What time are you finishing?’ she asked Katie.

Katie knew what she was going to ask her: whether she might like to have a drink with her, in some bar where they wouldn’t be recognized. She seemed to have accepted that Katie wasn’t prepared to take their relationship any further, not so long as they were both serving at Anglesea Street, but that didn’t mean that she didn’t still crave her company – just to talk to her, and look at her, and give her a goodnight kiss when they parted.

‘Not tonight, Kyna,’ she said. ‘I have to talk to Michael Pearse about the search he’s setting up for these five missing Mayfield lads. Then I have to discuss with Denis MacCostagáin and Mathew McElvey how we’re going to present it to the media. But... maybe another night. Or maybe you’d like to come down to Cobh this weekend and have some lunch. I think I might actually have Saturday off, God willing.’

Kyna nodded and pushed out her lower lip in a little mock-regretful pout, but said nothing. Katie knew that she owed Kyna her life, but she wasn’t yet sure if she owed Kyna her heart.

*

The rain eased off that evening, so even though it was late, she took her Irish setter, Barney, for a walk as far as the Passage West ferry terminal.

The river Lee was as black as Indian ink, although it glittered with reflected lights. On the way back, Katie walked along the path that ran right beside the water’s edge. She stopped and lowered the pointed hood of her raincoat so that the evening wind could blow through her hair, and she stood for a while with her hands in her pockets while Barney snuffled around the bushes.

She was beginning to question what love really was, and if it always came with infidelity and betrayal. Did one partner always love the other more than they were loved in return? Most of all, she wondered if her job as detective superintendent had made her too independent and too strong for men to love her. She knew that they found her physically attractive, but were they put off because she was too domineering?

What would it be like, an intimate relationship with another woman? Would it matter what sex her partner was, so long as their affection was mutual and equal? She knew that Kyna was infatuated with her. Perhaps it was a crush and nothing more. Yet when they had kissed she had sensed that Kyna was deeply excited, and she had felt strongly aroused herself.

Barney barked at her. He was beginning to feel cold and hungry and tired. As if it were answering him, a ship out in the harbour let out a long, homesick hoot. Katie put up her hood and clipped on Barney’s lead and together they walked back along Carrig View.

*

Before she went up to her office the next morning she stopped in to see Superintendent Pearse. He was standing by his window looking out at Old Station Road and eating a sausage roll, his hand cupped underneath it to catch the crumbs.

‘Sorry, Michael,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt your breakfast.’

‘I’ve had my breakfast,’ he told her. ‘This is my lunch. I was here at half-past five this morning. There was a big fight outside Cubin’s round about 3 a.m. Two fellers got stabbed and some brasser had her nose broke.’

‘Well, nobody can complain that the nightlife in Cork isn’t lively,’ said Katie. ‘Have you had any response yet to those appeals we put out for those five missing lads?’

‘Thirteen responses to the TV appeal. Five of them were hoaxes, or high, or langered. The rest of them sounded genuine and said that they knew all or some of the lads by sight, but none of them had seen them since Monday dinner time at the very latest.’

‘A fat lot of use that is. Did any of them have any idea where they might have gone to?’

‘Not one of them. Not for that length of time.’

‘How about the radio?’

Superintendent Pearse shook his head. ‘Nothing at all. And it’s too early yet to expect any responses from the papers.’

Katie said, ‘This is beginning to vex me now. How can five young lads totally vanish and nobody has a clue where they’ve gone to? I can understand one person going missing like that, but five of them?’

‘We’ve questioned all the taxi companies, by the way,’ said Superintendent Pearse. ‘None of them had a request that night to send a car up to Barnavara Crescent and pick up five passengers. I can only guess that they must have been given a lift by a pal of theirs.’

‘Okay,’ said Katie. ‘All you can do is keep looking. I’ll go and see Mathew McElvey in the press office and tell him to put out some appeals on the social media.’

After she had talked to Mathew McElvey, Katie went up to her office. She had enough cases on her hands at the moment not to worry too much about five missing lads from Mayfield. Two men had been arrested in Togher yesterday afternoon after they had been involved in a road-rage incident on the South Ring and were found to be carrying guns, and a young Romanian girl had been badly beaten by her pimp in a Grafton Street brothel after she had refused to have sex with three men at once.

Later that morning, Kyna came in to tell her that she had managed to have a private conversation with Niamh Nolan, the younger of the two girl students who had complained of being gang-raped.

‘I took her for coffee at The Bookshelf, where it’s quiet and friendly and nobody would know her. I tell you, she poured her heart out.’

‘Will she give evidence in court?’ asked Katie.

‘I think so. I hope so, but I’m not so sure about the other girl, Aileen. Up until this happened Aileen was Ruarí Barrett’s steady girlfriend and Niamh said she’s still fierce afraid of him. Apparently he used to beat her if he caught her even chatting to another lad.’

‘Ruarí Barrett sounds like one of those scummers I’d love to see locked up on Rathmore Road. Preferably sharing a cell with a violent psychopath.’

‘Well, me too. But listen to this. This gang-rape happened a week ago yesterday. Ruarí took Aileen and Niamh and another two students into the city for a Chinese. After that, around eleven o’clock, they all went to Havana Brown’s. Niamh said that everything was grand up until then and she was really enjoying herself. They had a few scoops, like, and a bit of a dance, then they met up with five other lads. These five other lads weren’t UCC students, but it seemed like they knew Ruarí and the other two really well.’

‘Five other lads?’ said Katie. ‘Did she know where they came from, or catch any of their names?’

‘She said that they were right gurriers. She was getting quite langered by then but she thinks that one of them was called Darragh, he was the loudest, and another one was called Aidan, and he was a bit quieter.’

‘Mother of God,’ said Katie. ‘Are we talking about those five who’ve gone missing? Those two names are the same.’

‘I can’t say for sure. But when it was closing time at Havana Brown’s, Ruarí said that he knew of an all-night party that another student was having at his apartment at Davcon Court. So off they all went. It’s only a five-minute walk to Barack Street but Niamh says she was pure langered by then. She was very unsteady on her feet, so two of the lads helped her along, in inverted commas, but they were both groping her while they were doing it.

‘She told Ruarí that she was going to call it a night and carry on walking back to UCC, but he told her not to be a wuss. Any road, the long and the short of it is that there was no party. When they reached this student’s apartment there was nobody there. So what you had was eight lads and two girls. Plus a whole lot of pot and MasterCards and whiskey and beer.’

‘Go on,’ said Katie grimly.

‘They stripped the girls and held them down on the bed while they raped them, over and over. Oral, anal, sometimes two or three of them at once. Finishing up with bukkake, for those who could still manage it.’

Katie stood up and went over to the window. The Elysian building, the tallest in Ireland, was gleaming pale green in a hazy sunshine. Huge white cumulus clouds were sailing high above it. Her granny had always told her that each cloud had its own crew of angels, but after what she had witnessed in her time in the Garda she knew for certain that there were no angels, and that the clouds were nothing but ghost ships sailing to nowhere.

Kyna came and stood close beside her. She lifted her hand as if to touch her shoulder, but then lowered it again. At work they were detective superintendent and detective sergeant, not friends.

‘From what Niamh told me, this wasn’t the first time that Ruarí and these five other lads had got together for the same purpose,’ she said. ‘While they were raping her, she kind of blanked herself out, like, but she caught one or two snatches of conversation between them and it sounded like they were making comparisons with other girls they’d assaulted. Like, “At least these two have decent diddies, unlike that last one.”’

Katie said, ‘Bring that Ruarí in here for questioning. Arrest him if he refuses. And make sure the other girl knows that she has nothing to fear from him at all – what’s her name, Aileen. Tell her that he’ll only have to scowl at her and we’ll charge him with threatening behaviour.’

‘It’ll be my pleasure,’ Kyna told her.

Katie turned around. ‘Even if it turns out that these five lads who joined him for that gang-rape are the same lads who have disappeared, that still doesn’t explain where they’ve gone.’