Free Red Light by Graham Masterton

is only a nickname. That means I can put out an appeal through the media tomorrow morning, asking for anybody to come forward if “Mawakiya” rings a bell, or if they ever saw a black feller walking around the city in a purple suit, or if they remember seeing anybody answering that description at the restaurant or anywhere else around Lower Shandon Street.
    ‘We can also ask if anybody noticed that black girl in black – the one the butcher boy saw. The one who looked like Rihanna. If she really
does
look like that, somebody must reck her.’
    She scribbled a note to herself and then said, ‘I’ll go to the hospital first thing and try talking to the girl again. You and Horgan and Dooley see if you can find those three black pimps, if only to eliminate them. There’s that Johnny-G, isn’t there? And the one who calls himself The Spider. Terence Somebody.’
    ‘Terence Chokwu. The other one is Ambibola Okonkwo, although don’t ask me how in the name of Jesus I can ever remember that.’
    ‘If you can’t find them, or you can’t find all of them, you can start asking around the brothels and massage parlours. In fact, you can do that anyway.’
    ‘Do you know how many brassers we’ve got on our books as of yesterday?’ said Detective O’Donovan.’ Seventy-six in the city centre alone. That’s going to take us forever. Besides,’ he said, taking out his tissue again and wiping his nose, ‘I can’t see any of them telling us much. There’s usually only one reason they open their mouths and it’s not to grass on anybody.’
    ‘Oh, come on, Patrick,’ Katie cajoled him. ‘I know how persuasive you can be, especially with the ladies.’
    ‘What about the autopsy?’ O’Donovan asked.
    ‘A pathologist is coming down tomorrow afternoon. Not Dr Reidy, I’m sorry to say – or on the other hand, perhaps I’m not.’ She peered at the notepad on her desk and said, ‘Dr O’Brien. Never met him before. He doesn’t like to fly, so they told me, so he’s coming on the train. He can start by doing some DNA tests. Since our victim has no hands he has no fingers, and since he has no fingers we have no fingerprints. The technical boys didn’t find any at the scene, did they? Only the girl’s.
    ‘Meanwhile, I’ll have Kyna talk to INIS and the UK Immigration Service, too. And the Nigerian embassy of course.’
    Detective O’Donovan dry-washed his face with his hands. ‘Okay then, unless there’s anything else you want me to do I’m going to shave a bullock.’
    ‘No, you go. I’ll see you in the morning.’
    Before he went, though, O’Donovan stopped and said, ‘You do realize something about this woman who allegedly blew this feller’s head off?’
    ‘What?’ said Katie. She was already skimming through a report about farm machinery that had been stolen from Coolyduff and Templehill. O’Donovan didn’t answer immediately, and so after a while she looked up.
    ‘What?’ she repeated.
    ‘Well, I’d say that she’s done us a considerable favour, ridding the city of a scumbag like that. Wouldn’t you?’
    By the time she turned into the driveway in front of her single-storey house in Cobh it had stopped raining. The clouds had cleared away and the moon was reflected like a broken plate in the half-mile stretch of water that separated Cobh from Monkstown on the opposite shore. A soft breeze was blowing and it was unusually warm, almost as if somebody were breathing on her face.
    She paused in the porch for a moment with her front-door key held up to the lock. The breeze had made her think of little Seamus breathing against her face, and it had given her one of those terrible and unexpected pangs of grief. She knew there was no point in grieving. She could cry for the rest of her life and it would never bring him back again. She just hoped that he could see her now, wherever he was, in some baby’s heaven, and that he knew how desperately she missed him.
    She was still standing there when the