Blood Sisters Read online

  ‘Never?’

  ‘She even checked the records for me. They had a Mary Rooney once, but that was back in 1931, and according to Ms O’Shea this nun only looked about forty-something.’

  ‘You’ve put out a description?’

  ‘I have, yes. Sergeant O’Farrell has told all of his patrols to keep an eye out for them. Hard to miss an eighty-five-year-old woman in a long mustard-coloured cardigan accompanied by a nun in a long black cape. That’s if she really was a nun. Ms O’Shea noticed that her eyebrows were plucked and her nails were varnished.’

  ‘Ms O’Shea should have been a detective, by the sound of it, instead of running a rest home. Sherlock O’Shea. Listen, I’m just leaving the hospital now, I’ll be back at the station in ten.’

  They climbed into their car and O’Donovan started the engine.

  ‘More nun trouble,’ said Katie.

  ‘I gathered that. What’s happened now?’

  Katie told him as they drove back towards the centre of the city. ‘I’m just praying to God that we don’t find this one dead, like the other two.’

  ‘You think there’s a connection?’

  ‘You know me. I make it a firm rule never to jump to conclusions. But three nuns in three days. I can’t help thinking that there must be some link between Sister Bridget being murdered and this flying nun and now this other nun going missing.’

  ‘And that link is?’

  ‘The Bon Sauveur Convent.’

  ‘You could be right,’ said O’Donovan. ‘We’ll be going round there tomorrow morning to start digging up their gardens, won’t we, if the search team’s ready? Those nuns are really going to start thinking we’ve got it in for them.’

  ‘Well, I hope they understand that we’re just looking for the truth, that’s all. Somebody may have it in for them, but it isn’t us.’

  15

  Detective Dooley parked his Ford Focus outside the entrance to the Spring Lane Halting Site, close behind an abandoned caravan with its door missing and weeds growing out of its windows. He folded down the sun visor so that he could brush up his Jedward-style hair in the mirror, then he climbed out and tugged on the shiny black quilted nylon jacket he had bought that morning at Penney’s.

  He looked around. He could hear children screaming and loud music playing. Apart from that, this was a very desolate place, north of the city behind the Ballyvolane Business Park, next to a semi-private housing estate and some scrubby uncultivated fields. The clouds hung low overhead, grey and pillowy, and there was scarcely any wind.

  He walked down the hill towards the halting site, jumping now and then over water-filled potholes. The site itself was a ramshackle collection of static caravans and prefabricated houses which were little more than sheds. To the north and the east, the site was overlooked by steep slopes of sand and gravel, over twenty metres high. The eastern slope was almost vertical, with a spiked fence along the top to separate it from the housing estate. On the opposite side of the site there was a wide lagoon of tan-coloured water where the recent rain had flooded the septic tanks from the outside toilets, and two small boys were cycling through it on their bicycles, around and around in circles, so that it rippled.

  A group of six or seven women were standing outside one of the mobile homes, smoking and chatting to each other. They all turned around and stared as Detective Dooley approached. He gave them a wave, although he thought they were probably the most formidable collection of women that he had ever encountered in his life. At least three of them had bare upper arms that looked like the hams that hung up on Tom Durcan’s stall in the English Market, except that they were decorated with tattoos. Most of them wore huge hoop earrings and had their hair scraped back from their foreheads in that style commonly known as a ‘knacker’s facelift’.

  Not far away, three young men were standing around a motorbike, while another was bouncing up and down in the saddle, trying to get it started. Every now and then it would roar into life and they would all cheer, but then it would immediately cut out again, to a loud disparaging chorus of ‘Jeez, feck it, Michael!’

  ‘Slum hawrum,’ said Detective Dooley, as he came up to the women. ‘What’s the craic?’

  ‘What do you want, boy?’ asked an older woman, blowing out smoke. She had long, greasy grey hair streaked ginger and black, and a fading black eye.

  ‘Looking for Paddy Fearon,’ he said. ‘Is he here at all?’

  ‘Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t. What would you be wanting him for?’

  ‘Got a little job for him, like, if he’s interested. He said I could find him here if anything ever came up.’

  ‘Oh yeah, and where do you know him from?’

  ‘Here and there. Waxy’s, the last time I saw him.’

  One of the younger women said, ‘Oh yeah? And what makes you think that a feller like Paddy Fearon would be living in a shit-hole like this?’

  Detective Dooley shrugged. ‘It’s where he said to look for him, like, that’s all.’

  The woman flipped her cigarette butt across the concrete and then she said, ‘Come on, then, feen, I’ll show you.’

  She started to walk away, with her hips undulating, and so Detective Dooley followed her. She had soot-black hair, with a ponytail, and if she hadn’t been wearing double false eyelashes and thick orange foundation she might have looked quite attractive. She was overweight, though, with huge breasts underneath her leopard-skin bolero and bulging black leggings that only emphasized the size of her buttocks and her thighs.

  ‘What’s your name, then?’ she asked him. They walked past the young men trying to get the motorbike started and they all turned around to stare at them.

  ‘Declan. What’s yours?’

  ‘Tauna.’

  ‘Been living here at Spring Lane long, Tauna?’

  ‘I was born and reared here, wasn’t I? Nineteen ninety-two. Sagittarius. And my kids was born here, too.’

  ‘You just said that it was a shit-hole. Why do you stay here, if it’s all that bad?’

  ‘Where else would I go?’

  ‘I don’t know. Won’t they give you a council house?’

  ‘Ah, no! I wouldn’t want it any road. I tried living in a house once, but I never want to get caught up in a house again. Jesus, it was so depressing. It was like being trapped, like, so that I couldn’t scarcely breathe, and so fecking lonely without all my family and my friends around me.’

  ‘But this place?’ asked Detective Dooley. They were walking past the breeze-block shed that housed the communal toilets, with a single washing machine out in the open.

  ‘It’s terrible, like. The kids are always getting sick with the gastric flu and there’s no bathrooms and no showers and the water tastes of chlorine so strong you wouldn’t want to be drinking it. The local people look at us as if they have dirt in their eyes. They want to build a wall instead of that fence so they can forget that we exist.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But, like I said, Declan, I was born here and reared here and where else would I go?’

  They reached a beige-painted Willerby caravan at the far end of the site, close to the foot of the eastern slope. It was larger than most of the others on the site, and in better condition, although it was surrounded by a whole variety of junk, including a rusty diesel compressor, and a kitchen cabinet with no drawers, and a bicycle with no front wheel, and a sofa with no seat cushions, and an ironing board. A brindled pony was tethered outside, eating oats from a yellow plastic bucket tied to its nose.

  Not far away, a military-green horsebox was parked on a rectangular patch of concrete next to a dark-blue Opel Insignia, which was splattered with mud but looked reasonably new.

  Tauna climbed the steps to the caravan’s front door and knocked on it loudly. Then she climbed back down because the door opened outwards.

  A middle-aged man appeared wearing a pale-brown corduroy cap and a yellow and black chequered shirt. He had small squinchy eyes and a broken nose and his cheeks and n
eck were pitted with acne scars.

  ‘What do you want, Tauna?’ he said, although he was staring at Detective Dooley. ‘I’m up to me bollocks.’

  ‘Declan says he might have a job for you, Paddy. That’s right, isn’t it, Declan?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘How’s it going, Paddy? Long time no see.’

  ‘What do you mean, “long time no see”? I never saw you before in the whole of me fecking life.’

  ‘Ah, you’re laughed at,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘Six months ago, not even that, in Waxy’s.’

  ‘Well, I must have been langered because I don’t remember seeing you there, boy.’

  ‘That was the night that Danny Perrott brought his pit bull into the bar and it shat on your shoe. Don’t tell me you don’t remember that.’

  Tauna let out a hoarse, cigarette-smoker’s laugh. ‘You never told me about that, Paddy! Shat on your shoe? That’s hilarious!’

  ‘Danny didn’t think so after I gave him a slap and kicked his fecking dog up the arse,’ Paddy retorted. But then he squinted even more intently at Detective Dooley and said, ‘Yeah, maybe I do remember you. What was we talking about, like?’

  ‘Horses, of course,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘What else?’

  ‘Horses, yeah,’ said Paddy. He nodded, and kept on nodding as if he were gradually beginning to recall their conversation after all.

  ‘You told me all about what you’d been up to with the horses, like, so I said that I might have a job for you now and then. And now I do.’

  ‘Yeah? Oh – yeah. That’s right. So, ah – what is it, this job?’

  Detective Dooley looked at Tauna and said, ‘Maybe we should talk about it in private. No offence meant, Tauna.’

  Tauna pulled a face and said, ‘It doesn’t bother me, boy. I have to go and feed the kids any road.’

  ‘Thanks. I appreciate it. How many kids do you have?’

  ‘Only the four of them. There was a fifth one on the way but the Lord decided to take him back when I was five months gone. He’ll be up there somewhere, in a much better place than this, I can tell you. Along with me brother.’

  Detective Dooley watched her walk back past the toilet block to join her friends. Halfway there, she turned around and gave him a wink and a little finger wave.

  ‘You’re in there, boy,’ said Paddy, with a phlegmy cackle. ‘That’s if you like skangers.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ said Detective Dooley.

  ‘Come inside, any road,’ said Paddy and beckoned him up the steps.

  Inside, the caravan’s living area was so crammed with furniture and ornaments that there was hardly any room to move around. There were gold velvet curtains at the windows, with brown tassels and tie-backs, and the huge brown Dralon-covered sofa was piled with brown and gold cushions. Every shelf was crowded with floral vases and religious statuettes and onyx boxes and china animals, although there wasn’t a single book in sight.

  A shaven-headed man about the same age as Paddy was sitting on the sofa in a white sleeveless body warmer and black tracksuit trousers, smoking a cigarette. Sitting close to him was a girl in shocking-pink leggings with a nest of backcombed blonde hair. She was painfully thin, so that her eyes looked huge, like a Disney character.

  ‘What did you say your name was?’ Paddy asked Detective Dooley.

  ‘Declan. Declan O’Leary.’

  Paddy turned to the shaven-headed man and said, ‘Declan was there at Waxy’s that night when Danny Perrott’s dog did the dirty on me.’

  The shaven-headed man gave a gap-toothed grin, with smoke leaking out of the gaps. ‘Jesus, that was one night I’ll never forget, if I could only fecking remember it.’ He held out a horny hand encrusted with gold signet rings and said, ‘Beval. And this skinny malink is Patia.’

  ‘Will you stop calling me that?’ Patia protested in a nasal whine.

  ‘Why the feck should I? It’s fecking true, isn’t it? There’s more fecking meat on a butcher’s pencil than there is on you.’

  ‘Declan says he has a job for us,’ said Paddy. ‘Would you care for a drink, Declan?’

  ‘No – no, thanks,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘I’ve been stopped by the shades a couple of times and the last thing I want is to lose my licence.’

  ‘Sit down, anyway. What’s this job about, then?’

  Detective Dooley nodded towards Patia. ‘Is it all right to talk about it in front of her, like?’

  ‘You’re all right. Patia don’t know shite from chocolate.’

  ‘Will you ever stop talking about me like that?’ whined Patia.

  ‘Oh, shut your gob,’ said Beval.

  Patia pouted sulkily but she didn’t argue. Detective Dooley couldn’t even guess what her relationship was to Beval – whether she was his wife or his girlfriend or his daughter, or just some stray spicer who had wandered in off the halting site. He sat down next to her anyway and she shuffled up nearer to Beval to give him more room.

  ‘I have a friend in Kilmichael who has some horses to be taken care of,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘Nine altogether.’

  ‘Nine? I can handle nine no bother at all,’ said Paddy.

  ‘The problem is that none of them is fit for human consumption, so my friend can’t sell them to the slaughterhouse. All but two of them’s thoroughbreds and if they’re not full of xylazine they’re full of bute or steroids. But you told me when we was talking together in Waxy’s that you could get rid of horses cheap-like, without having to pay the full charge to the knackery.’

  Paddy took out a cigarette and tucked it between his lips, so that it waggled when he talked. ‘That’s right, like. All the knackeries have whacked up their prices lately, more than thirty-three per cent some of them, so by comparison I can offer you a very economical service. For a full-grown horse, Fitzgerald’s will sting you anything up to a hundred and fifty yoyos, depending on its weight, like, and how far they have to go to pick it up. But for nine horses, I could dispose of them for you – let’s say – five hundred the lot.’

  Detective Dooley raised his eyebrows. ‘That don’t sound too bad at all. You couldn’t make it four fifty?’

  Paddy lit his cigarette with a Zippo and shook his head without saying anything.

  ‘That’s rock bottom, five hundred,’ put in Beval. ‘You won’t get nobody to do it for you cheaper than that.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘I’ll give my friend a ring, see what he says.’

  ‘He has all of their passports, like?’ asked Paddy.

  ‘So far as I know, yes, and I believe they’ve all been chipped. That’s not a problem, is it?’

  ‘No, not at all. They can have their names embroidered on the arses for all I care.’

  ‘So, ah, what you would be doing with them exactly?’

  Paddy tapped the side of his nose with his finger. ‘Trade secret, boy. If I told you, then you’d be fecking doing it instead of me and putting me out of work.’

  Detective Dooley took out his iPhone and held it up. He prodded it and then he said, ‘No, I’m not getting any decent reception in here, I’ll have to go outside.’

  ‘Don’t forget to ask your friend when he wants the job done,’ said Paddy. ‘There’s a few race meetings coming up at Mallow and Greenmount Park that I’ll be off to and there’s a rake of other jobs I’ve got in me diary. No fecking peace for the wicked.’

  Detective Dooley went outside and called Detective Inspector O’Rourke. As soon as he answered, he said, ‘Dooley, sir. I’m up at Spring Lane. I just spoke to Paddy Fearon and a butty of his. He says he can dispose of nine horses for me for five hundred euros.’

  ‘Good work, Dooley. How long is it going to take us to get nine horses together?’

  ‘I’ve talked to two trainers already – Michael O’Malley and Kevin Corgan. O’Malley can let us have five that are ready for the knackery and Corgan can let us have another four. We could set this up for Saturday or Monday, depending on Fearon.’

&nb
sp; ‘All right, then. That’s grand. Go ahead.’

  As he was talking, Detective Dooley saw Tauna standing on the opposite side of the halting site, still chatting to her friends. When she caught sight of him she blew out cigarette smoke and then she blew him a kiss. Jesus, he thought. I wonder what my friends and my family would say if I turned up on the doorstep with a twenty-four-year-old Traveller, with her ponytail and her dangly earrings and her barrel arse, not to mention her four young kids?

  He climbed back up the steps into Paddy’s caravan.

  ‘Well?’ said Paddy. ‘What did your friend have to say to ye?’

  ‘He says five hundred is acceptable and he’d like you to do it as soon as you can.’

  ‘Okay,’ Paddy told him. ‘I’ll be away this weekend, but I can probably manage it Monday or Tuesday. It’ll take a while, like, because I can only carry three horses at a time, but, yes, we can do that for him. If you come back tomorrow morning with his address and the grade.’

  ‘You want all of the money even before you’ve done it?’

  ‘Those are my usual terms of business, yes.’

  ‘And what if you take the money and I never see you again?’

  Paddy grinned at him, and so did Beval, but their grins were threatening rather than amused. ‘That’s the kind of suggestion I don’t take kindly to,’ said Paddy. ‘If you don’t think you can trust me, then why don’t you take three steps back and fuck yourself.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I was only messing,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘I’ll be here tomorrow with the necessary.’

  Paddy spat copiously into the palm of his hand and held it out. Detective Dooley shook it, looking straight into his bloodshot eyes.

  After he had climbed back into his car, he took a plastic bottle of lemon-scented antibacterial gel out of the glovebox and washed his hands with it, over and over.

  16

  Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin came into Katie’s office and said, ‘Good morning, Katie, and a grand sunny morning it is, too! We can start excavations at the Bon Sauveur whenever you’re ready. We have most of the team assembled now and we won’t need ground-penetrating radar or the mechanical digger until later, if at all. It depends what we find.’