It was safe to say that Inspector O’Brien was even less pleased to be disturbed at home than the courts HR manager had been. His sour face when he saw Chris and Kennedy on his doorstep was worth a thousand words.
‘This better be important,’ he growled as he ushered them into the kitchen. ‘We’re entertaining – my wife will murder me.’
He flicked on the kitchen light, and headed straight for a corner cupboard and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. The detectives waited impatiently as O’Brien poured himself a generous measure into a cut-glass tumbler. He took a sip.
‘So what’s so important that you have to come and disturb me at home at ten o’clock at night?’
‘We’re pretty sure we know who the punisher is,’ Chris announced, gritting his teeth as, out of nowhere, another wave of pain struck.
‘Pretty sure?’ O’Brien raised an eyebrow. ‘If you’re here at this time I hope to God you have a solid reason for your suspicions.’
Kennedy jumped in. ‘The murders are all linked by one incident, sir, a rape a few years ago of a girl called Amanda Harrington.’
O’Brien gave them a sharp glance; the name obviously meant something to him and Chris wondered if Reilly had been right about Crowe’s comment in the video about this particular case going higher up the food chain. He couldn’t process something like that just now, not when his faith in the system he himself was a part of had already been shaken to the core.
Their boss contemplated his drink and Chris was thinking that he wouldn’t mind one of those himself. The tremors were particularly bad at the moment, possibly because it was such a long bloody day.
‘Nasty affair – Roger Webb’s son was involved, as I recall?’
Involved? Well, that was one way of putting it. Seemed like their boss was another one of the deceased developer’s cronies.
‘At first we believed that the girl’s biological father was the one responsible for the murders,’ Kennedy told him quickly, when Chris remained silent. ‘Her parents moved to Australia the year after the trial, but her real father, Simon Darcy, lives in Dublin – he’s a court artist, works down at the Central Criminal Court.’
O’Brien looked thoughtful. ‘An artist? The guy fits the profile Knight gave, then, and he’s certainly got motive if this is indeed about the Harrington case.’
‘It’s not the father – he’s disabled. But we’re pretty sure it’s his son, Luke Darcy, Amanda’s brother.’ Chris explained about the sketchpad of drawings Simon had reluctantly shown them.
When they’d got the call from Reilly about the farmhouse location, they’d left Simon in the custody of a couple of local officers, under instructions that he be brought in for further questioning. From there they’d gone straight to O’Brien.
The older man looked incredulous ‘Well, what are you doing here then? Bring the son in, question him.’
The detectives exchanged a look. ‘He’s currently off the radar.’
‘Then find him.’ O’Brien glanced at his watch.
‘We think Ricky Webb is his next victim,’ Chris said.
‘Webb. He’s inside, isn’t he?’
‘He was released yesterday. Now seems he’s disappeared – no one knows where he is.’
O’Brien lifted his glass, took another sip of whiskey. ‘Well, he’s been inside. He’s probably lying drunk in a ditch somewhere, or shacked up with some woman.’
‘Actually, sir, we believe Luke Darcy has seized Webb, and is currently holding him at a farm in Kildare,’ Kennedy said quickly. ‘It’s why we’re here. We need you to authorize the response unit. And a search warrant.’
‘A tactical weapons team? You’re that sure?’
Chris met Kennedy’s eye. They both trusted Reilly’s judgement, knew that she wouldn’t have given the location unless she was absolutely sure. ‘Yes, sir.’
A woman in her early sixties with a nervous, thin face poked her head out of the dining room. ‘Are you coming, Donal? I’m nearly ready to serve dessert.’
O’Brien nodded to his wife. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
He looked at the two detectives. ‘You’d bloody better be sure. These guys cost a feckin’ fortune, so for your sakes, you’d better hope this doesn’t turn out to be a fool’s errand.’
Having located the Harrington farm, Reilly then called Lucy to her office and asked her to describe in greater detail the farmsteads she’d visited on her recent renegade trip to Kildare.
‘A woman in the pub pretty much gave me the heads-up about where to go,’ she told Reilly. ‘The places I checked out all fit the profile: isolated farmhouses with stables or a barn onsite, totally unoccupied ... apart from the one with the dogs, of course.’
‘Dogs?’ Reilly’s ears pricked up at this. Why would dogs be present on an unoccupied farm? Either they would have left the property at the same time as their owners, or they were being kept there for a reason. As guard dogs perhaps?
‘Actually,’ Reuben put in, ‘this is what I had come to tell you.’
‘Tell me what?’
‘Once again it all comes back to Inferno. In the Seventh Circle, there are a selection of hellish torments meted out to sodomites and rapists – a rain of fire, rivers of boiling blood ... And while our man is inventive, I’m not entirely sure these are torments anyone could reconstruct. But another such punishment,’ he added with a pause, his tone heavy with meaning, ‘is being is torn apart by dogs.’
Reilly met his gaze, understanding immediately. ‘So if Luke has got Ricky Webb,’ she finished, ‘he’s going to throw him to the dogs.’
Kennedy turned on the blue strobes and siren and maneuvered impatiently through the traffic at speed. He glanced over at Chris.
‘What’s up with you? You’ve barely said a word since we left O’Brien’s. Having second thoughts about all this?’
Chris gripped the door handle tightly, as his body was once again racked by convulsing pain. He tried to keep his voice even. ‘Of course not. Reilly will have done her homework. This is the endgame, I’m certain of it.’
They cleared the suburbs and the road opened up before them. The engine growled as Kennedy pushed the hammer down.
‘Althought, to be honest with you, I’m still not sure why we’re rushing ...’ Chris said to his partner quietly.
Kennedy shook his head. ‘I know what you’re thinking but don’t even go there.’ He changed down, tore past two slow-moving lorries. ‘Our job is to catch criminals, and prevent crimes. We have the opportunity to do that today.’ He glanced over at Chris, frowning. ‘What are you saying, mate? That you want me to slow down, that you’d rather we get there after Darcy has done a number on Webb?’
Chris gazed out the window at the dark fields dashing by. ‘The guy’s a convicted rapist, not exactly a great loss ...’
Kennedy didn’t reply. He slowed to thirty as they entered a village near Kildare. The bright lights of a pub loomed up ahead. ‘OK, maybe we’ll stop here then,’ he suggested archly. ‘We could have a quick drink, talk about the weather for while ...’
Chris gazed at the pub. Through the window he could see people talking, drinking, relaxing. Safe. Secure. And who kept them safe?
People like him and Kennedy, that’s who. Or at least, they tried to.
Kennedy drove slowly through the village, past the bright lights of the pub Lucy had visited before. ‘We’ll be there inside five minutes.’ He glanced across at Chris. ‘You ready for this – or not?’
Chris nodded automatically, thinking he might be ready if he had any idea what ‘this’ was likely to be.