Eye for an Eye Read Online Free PDF Page B

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