Eye for an Eye by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online

Romanian gang for cigarette-smuggling and she had to read through the Book of Evidence, which was almost as thick as the Old Testament but a great deal less exciting.
    When she had finished that, she leafed quickly through a report from Detective Brennan on five arrests that had been made that afternoon during a violent public protest on Centre Park Road. Cork Petroleum had applied for planning permission to extend their storage facility on the south bank of the River Lee, which would mean that a terrace ofnineteenth-century houses would have to be demolished and half of a small public park paved over. She had already tossed the report aside when she remembered what Redmond Keane had said to her when she had asked him about Clodagh’s wages.
    Toolmate is growing really fast, and if we’re going to keep up with demand we need new storage facilities and at least three new workshops.
    That was all very well, thought Katie, but where could they possibly find the space to build them? The Toolmate factory was sited in a north-pointing triangle where the R614 to Rathcormac joined the road from Upper Glanmire. On the south side, which was the only direction in which they could expand their site, stood Mary O’Donnell’s bungalow.
    She called Detective O’Donovan and asked him to check through all the applications made to Cork County Council’s planning department over the past twelve months, and what their decisions had been.
    He came back in less than an hour. ‘An application was made on 26 March this year by Toolmate Ltd for outline planning permission. They wanted to demolish a single-storey dwelling called Killshallow adjacent to their premises and construct in its place three workshops and two storage sheds.’
    ‘And what was the outcome?’
    ‘Permission was granted, yes. But there’s an addendum attached to the council’s decision, noting that the owner of the single-storey dwelling would have to agree to sell voluntarily at the market price. The council were not prepared to make a compulsory purchase order on Toolmate’s behalf.’
    ‘So that’s what Satan was doing in Mary O’Donnell’s garden,’ said Katie. ‘She didn’t want to sell, and the county council wouldn’t force her to move out, so Redmond Keane summoned His Satanic Majesty to frighten her away.’
    ‘That still doesn’t explain why Satan had to kill Father Fiachra. That’s assuming that it was Satan who killed him – but then Bill found no evidence that anybody else had been in the garden that morning. The fellow was in disguise, after all, and what threat could an eighty-three-year-old retired priest have been to him?’
    ‘He’d lost one of his eyes. Maybe he lost the head, too.’
    *
    Shortly after ten the next morning, when Katie was peeling the lid off her macchiato, Eithne came into her office with the first results of the DNA tests.
    Her sleeves were untidily rolled up and her blonde hair was sticking up even spikier than usual. She had shadowy circles under her eyes.
    ‘Don’t tell me you’ve been working on these all night,’ said Katie.
    ‘Don’t worry, ma’am,’ said Eithne. ‘Tyrone’s finishing off the rest and I’ve been given the rest of the day off to catch up with my sleep. But we thought you should see these right away because we’ve come up with a probable match.’
    She laid a plastic folder on Katie’s desk and pointed to the long list of figures on the sheet of paper inside it. ‘We found three long grey hairs inside the hood and traces of saliva. When we made a DNA comparison, we found that we couldn’t exclude a forge operator named Dermot Breen.’
    ‘Which is lab-speak for being 99.9 per cent certain that it was him?’
    ‘That’s right, ma’am, and he’s the only person who’s been wearing that hood. Nobody else has been playing Satan, only him.’
    ‘Thank you, Eithne,’ smiled Katie. ‘Now you can go and get your head down on that pillow. You deserve it.’
    *
    It was nearly