Free Living Death by Graham Masterton

from lack of sleep that it looked as if he could barely see out of them. He was wearing a beige shawl-collared cardigan with nothing underneath but a stained white vest, green-striped pyjama trousers and odd socks, one brown and one blue.
    ‘Jesus and Mary and the Wain,’ he said, and he sounded exhausted. ‘If I’ve told you once what happened, Inspector O’Brien, I’ve told you ten times over. What more do you want me to say?’
    ‘I know that, Mr Cassidy. But DS Maguire hasn’t heard it. Not from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.’
    Eoin took a deep breath. Without looking up at Katie, he recited what he must have told Inspector O’Brien at Bandon Garda Station.
    ‘Cleona woke me up to say that the dogs were going doolally. I took my shotgun and went outside to see what they were so het up about. There was a gang of maybe eight fellers taking our dogs out of their kennels and loading them into a van. I shouted at them to stop but they came for me, and I was afeard they were going to give me a beating, or worse. I fired the one shot up in the air, but they took no notice and kept on coming, so I fired again, and I hit the feller in the head. That’s all.’
    ‘All right, Mr Cassidy, thank you,’ said Katie. ‘I completely understand how traumatic this has been for you, so I don’t blame you for being reluctant to go over it yet again. Is your wife at home? Cleona?’
    ‘She didn’t have nothing to do with this at all. I made her stay upstairs.’
    ‘All the same, I’d like to have a word with her.’
    ‘What’s the point of that? All she heard was the dogs barking. She didn’t see nothing. Nothing at all.’
    ‘Where is she, Mr Cassidy?’ Katie asked him.
    ‘I don’t want her upset, not any more than she is already. She’s devastated.’
    ‘We’ll do everything we can not to distress her, I promise you.’
    Eoin Cassidy hesitated for a moment, his lips moving around as if he were chewing on a lump of gristle and couldn’t decide whether to swallow it. Then he said, ‘Okay, then. I’ll fetch her down.’
    ‘We’d prefer to talk to her on her own, if that’s all right with you.’
    ‘All right. I’ll take her through to the kitchen. But like I say, she won’t be able to tell you nothing. She was here in the house the whole time.’
    He stood up and left the living-room. When they had heard him going upstairs, Katie turned to the two gardaí who had been watching over him. ‘How’s he been? Has he talked to you at all about what happened?’
    Both gardaí shook their heads. One of them said, ‘He hasn’t uttered a single word, like, except to tell us that we could make ourselves a cup of tea. I’d say the feller was in post-dramatic stress disorder, do you know what I mean?’
    ‘Traumatic,’ said Detective Scanlan.
    ‘You’re right,’ said the garda. ‘It must have been.’
    ‘Now I come to think of it, we did hear him say one thing,’ the second garda put in. ‘After we’d first come into the house, his missus come halfway down the stairs, wanting to know who we were. She was kind of whispering and screaming both at the same time, if you know what I mean, like she was panicking but she didn’t want us to hear. But any road your man pushes her back upstairs and says, “It’s all right, love, it’s only the guards – it’s not them other fellers come back.” So she goes back upstairs. But that’s all he said. He comes back in and sits right down and switches on the telly and doesn’t look at us and you wouldn’t even think we was even there, like.’
    ‘Are you quite sure that’s exactly what he said?’ Katie asked him. ‘“ It’s not them other fellers come back” ?’
    ‘Well, words to that effect,’ said the garda.
    Katie turned to the first garda. ‘And you heard him say that, too?’
    The garda pulled a face and shrugged. ‘It was something like that, yes. Or, “It’s not them again” – something of that nature.’
    ‘But Mr Cassidy was