Living Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

they’re not the same as love’ ?
    ‘Bridie will be here soon,’ she told him. ‘She’s a grand girl, very experienced, and very good-humoured. I got her through Seamus O’Shea at Caremark. She’ll be looking after you while I’m at work. Jenny Tierney will be coming in from next door to take Barney for his walk, so you don’t have to worry about that.’
    ‘I think Barney’s taken against me for some reason. Look at him staring at me. If looks could kill.’
    ‘He doesn’t reck you, that’s all, and he’s very protective. He’ll get used to you again, the longer you stay here.’
    John said, ‘Bless you, Katie. Without you, my life wouldn’t be worth the living, I can tell you that.’
    Katie was about to ask him if he was hungry when her iPhone played the first two bars of ‘Tá Mo Chleamhnas a Dhéanamh, The Matchmaking Song’.
    Oh I walked east and I walked west
    I walked Cork and Dublin’s streets
    An equal to my love I didn’t meet
    She’s the wee lass that’s left my heart broken.
    It was Detective Sergeant Begley. By the sound of it, he was standing outside somewhere, in the wind and the rain. Katie could hear somebody shouting in the background, and the sudden whooping of an ambulance siren, which abruptly stopped.
    ‘Sorry to be disturbing you today, ma’am. I know you have the day booked off. But there’s been a fatal shooting early this morning out at Ballinroe East, and under the circumstances I thought you need to be informed as soon as possible. You’ll have the media wanting to talk to you, if they haven’t been chasing you already.’
    Katie held up one finger to John to show him this was a serious conversation and that she needed to give it all her attention.
    ‘What’s the story, Sean?’ she asked Detective Sergeant Begley.
    ‘The victim’s a male in his late thirties, no identification on him of any kind at all. He was shot at a boarding kennels just off the R604, a little short of a kilometre south of Barrell’s Crossroads. The owner of the kennels is a fellow called Eoin Cassidy. He and his wife were disturbed around four o’clock this morning by a gang of fellers stealing their dogs. Almost all of them are pedigree, spaniels and suchlike, so they’re worth thousands, some of them.’
    ‘Go on,’ said Katie.
    ‘Well, this Eoin Cassidy took his shotgun and went outside to challenge them, like. They started to come for him, so he fired a warning shot in the air. But that didn’t stop them, and he says he was afeard of his life, so he fired another shot at them directly, and blew the head off of one of them. After that the rest of them scattered quick.’
    ‘I assume that Superintendent Horgan knows all about this.’
    ‘He does of course. There’s five officers from Bandon up here now, including Inspector O’Brien. They’re just waiting around for the Technical Bureau to go over the scene before they have the body moved. But the thing of it is, this gang who was robbing the kennels, they sound like the same bunch of dognappers that we’ve been having such trouble with around the city. They was driving a Range Rover and a white van and there was about six of them altogether.’
    ‘You’re right,’ said Katie. ‘It does sound like them. What does Dooley call them? The Labrador Lifters.’
    ‘Those are the fellows. And if it’s the same gang, like, Superintendent Horgan didn’t want to be talking to the media until he’d had the chance to discuss it with you. Didn’t want to be treading on your toes, like, do you know what I mean?’
    ‘Well, yes, fair play to him and I appreciate that. But this dognapper getting shot, that puts a whole different complexion on this. They’ve been nothing much more than a nuisance so far, this gang, but if dog owners are going to start using lethal force to protect their animals—’
    ‘Lethal force? He only blew his whole entire brain ten metres out of his head.’
    ‘Where is this Cassidy fellow now?’ asked