Taken for Dead (Kate Maguire) Read Free

room was silent and the decorative streamers and balloons pinned up around the ceiling only made it seem more abandoned. Every table was crowded with half-finished glasses of champagne.
    Detectives Horgan and Dooley were standing by the wreckage of the wedding cake, along with the hotel’s deputy manager and John O’Malley. Katie thought that the deputy manager looked very young, although his blond hair was thinning. As she approached he took a step back, and then another. It occurred to her that she must appear rather schoolmistressy in her long black overcoat and the light grey suit she had worn for her court appearance. She had recently had her hair cropped very short, which her sister Moirin said made her look too stern.
    John O’Malley blurted out, ‘I’m shocked, Katie. Totally devastated. This has ruined Connor and Niamh’s day completely.’
    Katie looked at the blackened nose protruding from the sponge. The ripe smell of rotting flesh and vanilla was enough to make her hold her hand over her face.
    ‘Where did the cake come from?’ she asked.
    ‘Crounan’s. I ordered it from Micky Crounan myself.’
    ‘When did it arrive here?’
    ‘Only this morning,’ said the deputy manager. ‘It came about a quarter to eleven.’
    ‘Who brought it?’
    ‘A van pulled up outside and two fellows in white overalls carried it in between them. They said they came from Crounan’s, although there was no lettering on the van. It was just plain white. I signed for the cake myself and that was it.’
    ‘Would you know these two men if you saw them again?’
    The deputy manager shook his head. ‘I doubt it very much. I was so busy at the time. I would say that one of them at least came from north Limerick, the way he said “G’luck teh yeh so” when he left. My grandpa always said that, in exactly that accent, and he came from Moyross Park.’
    ‘All right,’ said Katie. ‘I expect the media will be here soon asking you questions about this. Can you please not make any comment to them until we let you know that it’s okay for you to do so? And when you do, can you keep any speculation down to the minimum?’
    The deputy manager blinked at her as if he didn’t understand what she meant.
    ‘For instance, can you please not tell the media that you think that somebody was deliberately trying to ruin this wedding ceilidh, or any other theory that might occur to you?’
    ‘Oh, yes. No,’ said the deputy manager.
    Detective Horgan said, ‘We’ve been interviewing every single guest, but we’re not getting much out of them. The cake was already on display here when they arrived, so none of them could have tampered with it. The O’Malleys and the Gallaghers are both very popular, what with everything they do for charity and all, and not one of the guests can think of anyone who would want to spoil things for them.’
    Katie turned to John O’Malley and said, ‘You’ve had no arguments with anybody lately? No threats made against you, for any reason?’
    ‘I voted against the Lower Lee flood barrier last week, and that didn’t go down too well with some of the city-centre shopkeepers, but that’s about all. Nothing that would justify an atrocity like this. If I’ve upset somebody this bad, why didn’t they cut my head off and bake it into a cake, instead of whoever this is?’
    ‘How about the hotel?’ asked Katie. ‘Have you had any troublesome guests lately?’
    ‘No more than usual,’ said the deputy manager. ‘You get some of them drinking too much and making a nuisance of themselves, or making too much noise in their rooms. We threw out one fellow last week for nearly burning the place down. He was so langered he couldn’t work out how to turn up the heating, so he set fire to his mattress.’
    ***
    It was another forty-five minutes before the technicians arrived. Three of them came rustling across the function room in their white Tyvek suits, as if they had just arrived from a space