Taken for Dead (Kate Maguire) Read Online Free PDF Page A

possible DNA.’
    ‘Well, whoever did it, their motive completely escapes me,’ said Katie. ‘Why on earth would you cut off a baker’s head and bake it into one of his own cakes?’
    ‘I have no idea, like,’ said Bill Phinner. ‘But you know the proverb. “The most dangerous food in the whole world is wedding cake.”’

4
    Acting Chief Superintendent Molloy had texted Katie to come and see him in his office as soon as she arrived at Anglesea Street. However, she knew that whatever he had to say to her would only make her irritable for the rest of the day, and so first she went up to the technical laboratory.
    Bill Phinner, the chief technician, and two of his assistants were standing in their long white coats around one end of a stainless-steel autopsy table. The sun was shining in through the window and lighting them up like three angels from some medieval painting depicting a beheaded martyr. On the table in front of them, four large Tupperware containers had been filled with lumps of wedding cake, each numbered according to the quadrant of the cake from which they had been cut.
    Still resting on the circular silver stand on which the cake had been carried into the wedding ceilidh was a man’s severed head. He had wispy grey hair from which cake had been painstakingly cleaned, and a bushy grey moustache. His face was pale yellowish, the colour of good-quality smoked haddock, with the tip of his nose and his earlobes tinged black and dark brown. His eyes were closed as if he were peacefully sleeping, even though the rest his body was missing. Bill Phinner had been right: his neck had been cut through so raggedly that it looked as if he had been beheaded with a large cross-cut saw.
    ‘Here’s your man,’ said Bill Phinner. ‘We’re certain now that it’s Micky Crounan. We’ve found several photographs of him on Google Images, at various business and charity functions, and it’s unmistakably him.’
    ‘He’s such a strange colour,’ said Katie.
    ‘So would you be if you’d been dead for nearly a week and then baked in the oven for an hour and a half at 160 degrees.’
    ‘He’s been dead that long?’
    ‘I’m sure the state pathologist can give us a more accurate estimate of when he was killed, but I’d hazard a guess at six or seven days ago, at least.’
    ‘So why did nobody report him missing, I wonder?’
    ‘Don’t ask me, ma’am. It’s not like he was some homeless tramp, was he, who nobody’s going to miss? He had a wife and a family and a business to run, and he was on every council committee you could think of.’
    ‘Yet he was murdered almost a week ago and nobody asked where he was?’
    Bill Phinner shrugged. ‘There must have been a reason for it. I’m glad it’s not my job to find out what it was. But here, look, come and take a sconce of the pictures.’
    He took her over to a laboratory bench on the opposite side of the room, under the window, and showed her the ultrasound scan that they had take of Micky Crounan’s head while it was still inside the cake. A dark, shadowy face with its eyes closed, like a ghost from the TV series Most Haunted . Then he spread out a selection of pictures that they had taken as the sponge cake was gradually scraped away.
    Finally, he laid out ten or eleven pictures that they had downloaded from Google Images, showing a smiling Micky Crounan shaking hands with various Cork dignitaries, and at the Fota Golf Club annual dinner, and showing off some of his soda bread loaves for a feature in the Echo .
    ‘It’s really hard to understand who would want to kill a man like that,’ said Katie. ‘It’s not as if anybody has been in touch with us, or with the media, to take credit for it. Like, “We killed Micky Crounan for such and such a reason, and he deserved it.”’
    Katie went back across to the autopsy table and stared for a long time at Micky Crounan’s head. Then she turned to Bill Phinner and said, ‘Thanks,’ and left the