The Last Drop of Blood, page 1
INTRODUCING
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 into An Garda Síochána.
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 in which she bore, and lost, a son – an event that continues to haunt her. Despite facing turmoil at home and prejudice at work, she is one of the most fearless detectives in Ireland.
ALSO BY GRAHAM MASTERTON
Ghost Virus
THE KATIE MAGUIRE SERIES
White Bones
Broken Angels
Red Light
Taken for Dead
Blood Sisters
Buried
Living Death
Dead Girls Dancing
Dead Men Whistling
Begging to Die
The Last Drop of Blood
THE BEATRICE SCARLET SERIES
Scarlet Widow
The Coven
GRAHAM
MASTERTON
THE LAST
D R O P
OF
BLOOD
www.headofzeus.com
First published in the UK in 2020 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Graham Masterton, 2020
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.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB): 9781789544114
ISBN (XTPB): 9781789544121
ISBN (E): 9781789544107
Cover design: Estuary English
Images: Shutterstock
Head of Zeus Ltd
First Floor East
5–8 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG
WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM
‘Is minic Cuma aingeal ar an Diabhal féin.’
‘There’s often the look of an angel on the Devil himself.’
IRISH PROVERB
Contents
Introducing Katie Maguire
Also by Graham Masterton
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
1
The two gardaí were still struggling to pull the drunken traveller out of The Bridle’s front door when they heard a boom! in the distance, like a bomb going off.
Garda Micky Phelan looked around and said, ‘What in the name of Jesus was that?’
‘Take your filthy crubeens off me, will you?’ the traveller blurted at him. ‘I’ll report you for racial discrimification, you see if I don’t.’
‘Shut your bake, you’re totally mouldy,’ Garda Neasa O’Connor snapped at him. ‘You know full well that you’re barred from The Bridle. And the bang of benjy off of you, I swear – it’s enough to make a maggot gag.’
Patrick the barman came out of the doorway, wiping his hands on his apron. ‘Holy Mother of God, that was one hell of a wallop, wasn’t it? What do you think it was?’
‘No idea at all,’ said Garda Phelan. ‘It was way too loud for a crow banger.’
‘You’re right. It sounded to me like it came from those new houses – the ones over there at Sean-áit Feirme. Let’s hope it wasn’t a gas main blew up. They had a ball of trouble there with gas leaks only a couple of months ago. Bord Gáis was around there every other day.’
‘For feck’s sake, will you let go of me,’ the traveller demanded. He must have been somewhere in his mid-fifties, with wild grey hair like a bramble patch and a face so crimson with drink that it was almost purple. He was wearing a tan leather jerkin and a soiled check shirt with his belly hanging out. The front of his baggy green corduroy trousers was dark with urine.
‘We’ll let you go, boy, as soon as we’re sure that you’re well on your way.’
‘Okay, okay. My truck’s over there, see, next to them rubbish bins.’
‘If you think we’re going to let you drive you must be Fecky the Ninth. Off you go. It’s only a couple of kilometres down to your halting site. If you don’t fall into too many ditches you should be able to get there before it starts pouring.’
Between them, Garda Phelan and Garda O’Connor managed to heave the traveller across the car park like a sackful of rotten potatoes. Once they had reached the pavement they released their grip on his arms and he stood in front of them for a few moments, swaying.
‘Curse a God on you altogether, both of you,’ he slurred, and let out a ripping two-tone burp. ‘My cat’s curse on you, too. I hope the Devil uses your spines for a ladder.’
With that, he went shuffling off down the Ballyhooly Road, occasionally stumbling, and at one point stopping and holding on to a telephone pole to steady himself.
‘Maybe we should have given him a lift,’ said Garda O’Connor.
‘What, and have the back seat soaked in Pavee piss? No thanks.’
The traveller had just disappeared around the bend in the road when they heard another boom, not as loud as the first, but still enough to make them frown at each other and then turn around. About half a kilometre away, somewhere along the Ballincollie Road, a column of thick black smoke was piling up into the pale grey afternoon sky.
‘That’s no gas main,’ said Garda Phelan. ‘I don’t know what the feck that is but we need to go and check it out so.’
The barman was still standing in the doorway as they hurried past him. He raised his hand and said, ‘Thanks a million! Come along and have a scoop when you’re off-duty! It’s on the house!’
The two officers climbed into their squad car, slammed the doors, and sped out of The Bridle’s car park with a squitter of tyres. They turned down Ballincollie Road, a narrow hedge-lined boreen that ran south-westwards towards Dublin Pike. As they passed the new housing estate at Sean-áit Feirme with its red-brick detached houses, they could see now that the smoke was rising from somewhere further down the road. There was scarcely any wind, and so the smoke was towering up above them, higher and higher like some mythical ogre.
About three hundred metres past Sean-áit Feirme they came around a curve and saw a burning car by the side of the road. It was blazing so fiercely that it had set the hedge alight, too, so that the blackthorn and hazel bushes were lit up with thousands of crackling orange sparks. The car was white, but already its roof and the upper part of its bodywork had been blackened by the fire. All its windows had shattered and inside it was an inferno, so it was impossible to see if there was anybody inside it.
A tractor had been parked about fifty metres away, blocking the road, and a farmer in a tweed cap and a black donkey jacket was standing close to it, holding a bucket and looking hopeless.
Garda Phelan pulled their squad car into the verge and both he and Garda O’Connor jumped out. Garda O’Connor opened the boot and lifted out their fire extinguisher, and as they walked quickly towards the burning car, Garda Phelan called the fire station at Ballyvolane and Garda headquarters at Anglesea Street, breathlessly giving them the car’s location and its registration number.
The heat was so ferocious that they were still ten metres away from the flames when their faces began to feel scorched. They slowed down and stopped, and even backed away a little. All around the car, the asphalt road surface was bubbling up, and above its roof the air was rippling like a desert mirage.
Garda
The farmer came bustling up to join them. His boots made a wobbling sound as he walked, and he shielded his face with his arm as he passed close to the car.
‘Ah, Jesus. I never saw nothing like it. I tried chucking dirt over it, but it was like pissing in the wind, do you know what I mean?’
‘Did you see it go up?’ asked Garda Phelan.
‘I didn’t, no. I was on my way up to that field yonder to pick up some bales of hay and that’s when I heard it. Badoom! like. I drove back down the hill as fast as I could but by that time it was raging away already. I could see that there was a feller sitting behind the wheel but he was flames all over and I couldn’t get nearly close enough to pull him out of there. I just pray to God that he didn’t suffer too much.’
The farmer crossed himself and shook his head. In the distance – over the snapping and popping of the burning car – they could hear a siren. Ballyvolane fire station was only five minutes away, and there was always an engine there on standby, twenty-four hours a day. At least one more engine would probably be sent up from Cork city centre.
By the time the fire engine appeared, with its blue lights flashing, the flames had begun to die down, although the tyres were still smouldering and smoke was billowing out of the passenger compartment even thicker than before. Garda O’Connor tugged at Garda Phelan’s sleeve and said, ‘Look, Micky. You can just about see the driver. Mother of God, he’s burned to a cinder.’
‘Could be a she, like.’
‘Not in a car like this. I doubt it. It’s a Jaguar XJ6, isn’t it, an old one? That’s probably why we heard two explosions. It has the twin petrol tanks, one in each wing.’
‘Okay, if you say so. You know a whole lot more about cars than I do, Neasa, but then my da didn’t run a garage like yours did.’
Three firefighters had started spraying the car with copious streams of white foam, which rolled in puffballs across the road and clung to the hedges on either side. Noel Hogan, the station officer, strode over to Garda Phelan and Garda O’Connor, chunky and broken-nosed like a middleweight boxer and brusque as ever, with no time at all for ‘what’s the story?’ or ‘how’re ye going on?’
‘Totally gutted,’ he said. ‘Any notion how it happened?’
‘Not a clue, Noel. Neasa and me were busy at The Bridle, slinging out this langered knacker who’d gawked all over the shop and then had the gall to call out for another pint of Murphy’s. We heard it, though. One fecking great bang, and then another, but the second one not so loud. Neasa here reckons it has two fuel tanks, this car, and so maybe one went up after the other. Hard to say for sure, looking at the state of it now.’
The farmer came forward again, his hand raised like a boy in school. ‘There’s something I didn’t tell you. When I heard the first badoom, like, there was another car stopped right in front of this one. It went shooting off straight away, though, so I didn’t get much of a look at it.’
‘What type of car? Any idea?’
‘No, I couldn’t tell you. It was a fair old size, though, do you know what I mean? One of your VSUs I’d say. Silver, or grey. But I couldn’t say what make or nothing like that. Maybe a Toyota, or a Range Rover – something like one of them.’
‘And which direction did it go in?’
‘That way… down towards Ferncarrig.’
Two of the firefighters approached them now. One of them took off his helmet and tucked it under his arm.
‘There’s only the one occupant, sir,’ he told Station Officer Hogan. ‘Still strapped in his seat belt. If he had any ID on him I’d say it’s been thoroughly incinerated, along with him.’
‘Well, I’ve already called in the reg number, so we may find out who he is in a minute or two,’ said Garda Phelan. ‘I’ll be after calling in a description of that other vehicle, too – the SUV. It could be that somebody spotted it going through Ferncarrig, especially if it was speeding along real quick. You never know.’
The five of them walked towards the blackened wreckage of the Jaguar, although Garda Phelan turned around to the farmer and said, ‘If you don’t mind staying back, sir. I’ll be taking a statement from you later so.’
‘I’ve seen burned bodies before,’ the farmer protested. ‘My cousin worked at the Rocky Island crematorium.’
Despite saying that, he held back as Garda Phelan, Garda O’Connor and Station Officer Hogan approached the car. Both of its rear wings had been blown upward in tatters, so that it looked as if a monstrous crow had landed on it.
‘You were spot on about them two petrol tanks, Neasa,’ said Garda Phelan.
A stooped figure was sitting in the driver’s seat, charred completely black. From its apparent height, it was more likely than not to be a man. He was wearing an epaulette of foam on each shoulder and a foam wig on top of his head, which was gradually dripping down on each side, where his ears had been. He was still wearing steel-rimmed spectacles, although the heat had melted the plastic lenses so that they were drooping down from the bottom of the frames like teardrops.
For almost half a minute, none of the officers spoke. Then Station Officer Hogan turned to the firefighters and said, ‘Give it all a while to cool off, like. Then haul the sheet over it. It looks like rain’s on the way.’
Garda Phelan’s phone rang. He walked away to answer it, one finger in his ear to drown out the roaring noise of the fire engine.
‘Okay, yes, I have you,’ he said. Then, ‘You’re not codding me, are you? Jesus. Okay. Well, we can’t say for sure if it’s him, the state he’s in. Totally, yes. Clonakilty black pudding isn’t in it. No, not yet. But okay, that’s grand altogether. Thanks a million, Josh.’
He came back to join Garda O’Connor and Station Officer Hogan.
‘It’s a Jaguar XJ6 all right, V12, first registered in 1992 to Mr Sean Buttivant. Ownership was transferred in 1998 to Mr Garrett Quinn, and the car hasn’t been re-registered since then to anybody else.’
‘Not the Garrett Quinn?’ said Garda O’Connor. She looked back at the blackened corpse sitting behind the Jaguar’s steering wheel with an expression of both horror and disbelief.
‘That’s your man. The Honourable Mr Justice Garrett Quinn, of the Central Criminal Court, may he rest in peace. Always supposing that’s him, of course.’
‘Well – he has the wig, like,’ said Station Officer Hogan, just before the lump of foam finally slid off the top of the corpse’s head and into his lap.
2
Katie and Kyna were passing Rathcormac on the main M8 road back to Cork city when drops of rain started to measle their windscreen.
‘At least it held off for the burial,’ said Kyna.
Katie didn’t answer. She was still feeling that she had dreamed the funeral they had attended at Caherelly Graveyard in Limerick. She had loved Conor so much that it had been impossible for her to think it had really been him inside the pale oak coffin that had been lowered into the ground right in front of her feet. Him – or what had been left of him after he had blown himself up.
Over a hundred mourners had come to the service, including Conor’s former wife, Clodagh, although Clodagh had been dressed in grey rather than black, with a white lily in her lapel, as if to show she wasn’t altogether sorry that he was dead.
Most of the mourners had been relatives or friends from the ISPCA or people whose stray or stolen dogs Conor had found during his career as a dog detective. Katie had thought it was sadly appropriate that he was being buried not far from the grave of Dolores O’Riordan, the singer from the Cranberries. Her ‘Dreams’ had been one of Conor’s favourite songs: The person falling here is me.
The rain fell harder and harder, so that Katie had to switch the windscreen wipers to beat backwards and forwards as fast as they would go. There was hardly any other traffic on the road, and they drove for several kilometres without seeing any other cars at all, which increased Katie’s feeling of desolation. Kyna must have sensed how she was feeling, because she reached across and gave her thigh a gentle squeeze.
