Red Light by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online

rain, and the mud, under the most stressful of circumstances. But after Katie’s first husband, Paul, had died, she and John had started an affair, and their affair had gradually grown fiercer, and stronger, and more passionate.
    ‘You’re my Greek god,’ she had written to him in a note – because that was what he reminded her of, with his curly black hair and his straight nose and his muscles that had been sculpted by months of ploughing and raking and toting bales of hay.
    But no matter how hard John worked, eking a living out of the farm had been a losing battle, even before the recession. When the Irish economy collapsed, John had been forced to sell the farm for a loss. He had planned to go back to the United States and join some of his friends in a new online pharmacy business, and he had asked Katie to resign from An Garda Síochána and come with him. He had even arranged a job for her with Pinkerton’s detective agency.
    Katie’s father had advised her to go. You have only the one life, girl. Don’t end up a miserable old spinster with nobody but cats for company. But she had found it impossible to think about quitting the senior position that she had struggled so hard to achieve. More than that, she felt that she had sworn to give her life to protecting the people of Cork, and what was she going to do, turn her back on them, just because she had fallen in love?
    She had called Aidan Tierney, the chief executive officer of ErinChem, the pharmaceutical company out at Ringaskiddy, and they had met for lunch at Isaac’s. Only a few months before, Katie had helped to keep Aidan’s daughter Sinéad out of the courts when she was arrested along with several other teenagers for organized shoplifting in Penneys, of all places. The clothes in Penneys were so cheap they were practically giving them away anyhow. Aidan had been toying with the idea of setting up an online sales division at ErinChem, and Katie had suggested that John might be just the man to do it for them.
    Now John could stay in Ireland, with a job that he was really good at, and a respectable income, and Katie could stay at Anglesea Street. She felt so happy she could have gone for a drink, instead of a lukewarm latte from Costa Coffee.
    ‘Ma’am?’ said Detective O’Donovan, at last.
    ‘Sorry, Patrick, yes, what is it?’
    ‘You’re smiling, ma’am.’
    ‘Yes, detective, I’m smiling. Is that a crime?’
    ‘No, ma’am. Just to let you know that we interviewed the staff in Nolan’s the butcher’s and the African restaurant opposite. One of the lads who works in the butcher’s says he was laying out sausages in the window on Friday morning when this black feller comes past in this bright purple suit. The lad looks up at him and the black feller looks back, and he’s wearing a beard. The black feller, not the lad.’
    ‘Well, our victim had a beard, but he didn’t have a purple suit. In fact he didn’t have any clothes at all. Did the boy remember what time this was?’
    ‘About midday, he said. But a few minutes later, just before they opened, he sees a black woman walk past, too.’
    ‘That’s not unusual for Lower Shandon Street. If you stand there long enough, half of Africa’s going to walk past you.’
    ‘He only noticed her because of what she was wearing,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘Like, the African women, they’re usually wearing some kind of wrapping, what do they call them,
abayas
, and a headscarf. And I’m not being racist or nothing but most of them seem to have arses the size of Cork and they walk very slow and deliberate like they own the place. I was trying to get past one of them in Penneys the other day and it was like trying to push my way in through a fecking turnstile at Páirc Uí Chaoimh.’
    ‘
Patrick
,’ Katie admonished him.
    ‘Well, yes, no, I know I shouldn’t say that, but you know. It’s like it’s a national characteristic, like.’ He held out both hands as if he were measuring