Taken for Dead (Kate Maguire) Read Free Page A

mission.
    Katie said, ‘How’s your man in Ballea?’
    ‘Oh, dead,’ said the chief technician. ‘ Very dead.’ He was very grey, with short grey hair and a grey, lined face. Katie imagined that all the horrors he had witnessed in his career had gradually leached all the colour out of him, in the same way that people’s hair was supposed to turn white when they encountered a ghost.
    ‘Apparently the victim suffered from epilepsy,’ he added. ‘Whatever the cause might have been, he fell backwards out of the seat of his tractor into a double-direction disc plough.’
    ‘Oh. Ow ! Nasty.’
    ‘We had the devil’s own job getting him out of there, I can tell you. Have you ever got a lamb bone stuck in your mincer?’
    ‘Thank you, Bill. I feel sick enough as it is. Look at the state of this. The bride and groom were cutting their cake when they felt there was something inside it. Mr O’Malley here took it apart and this is what he discovered.’
    The chief technician leaned forward and examined the tip of the nose closely. ‘Partly decomposed and partly cooked ,’ he said. ‘We’ll photograph this here, in situ , and then I think we’ll take it with us back to the lab. We’ll be able to scan it then with the ultrasound and test it for fingerprints and any other evidence before we cut it up any more. People often lick the spoon when they’re icing a cake so we may be lucky and find some DNA.’
    ‘I’ll leave it with you, then,’ said Katie. ‘But please send me an image of the victim’s face the minute you have one. The sooner we know who he is, the sooner we’ll be able to track down our Demon Baker.’

3
    To Katie’s relief, Acting Chief Superintendent Molloy had already left the station by the time she returned to Anglesea Street.
    Katie’s working relationship with Bryan Molloy had been growing steadily more scrappy ever since August when he had been shipped in from Limerick to take over from Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll. Unlike Dermot O’Driscoll, Molloy believed that women were nothing but a nuisance in the Garda. They weren’t clubbable, like men, and they couldn’t be trusted to close ranks if one of their fellow officers was found to have bent the rules a little.
    Her phone rang even before she had taken off her coat. It was Detective Horgan, calling from just outside the Crounans’ house on Alexander Place, up by St Luke’s.
    ‘We went to the bakery on Maylor Street but all the shutters were down. There’s no sign on the door or anything, it’s just closed. Now we’re up at the Crounans’ but there’s nobody home and no cars outside or nothing.’
    ‘Have you tried ringing them on their mobiles?’
    ‘Of course, yeah. But Micky’s is switched off and we couldn’t get an answer from his missus.’
    ‘What about the bakery staff? They must know why the bakery’s closed and where the Crounans are.’
    ‘Well, that’s our next plan. But first of all we have to find out who the staff are, and how to get in touch with them. We’re going to try asking at the shops next door, and some of the other bakers. Somebody at Scoozi’s might know.’
    ‘Okay, then. Keep me in touch.’
    Katie began to leaf through the files that had been left on her desk, but almost at once there was a knock on her open office door and Inspector Liam Fennessy came in. With his circular spectacles and brush-cut hair and his tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows he looked more like a lecturer in English from Cork University than a Garda inspector.
    ‘We’ve had a sighting of Roisin Begley,’ he said. ‘One of her school friends saw her in a car driving along Pope’s Quay less than an hour ago. She said that Roisin didn’t appear to be distressed at all. In fact, she was laughing.’
    ‘She was sure it was Roisin?’
    ‘One hundred per cent. Blonde hair, red and white woolly hat. She says she waved to her, but either Roisin didn’t see her, or else she didn’t want to.’
    ‘Who