White Bones Page 12

  Katie looked down at the grisly chaos of the girl’s disassembled body. She tried to study the pieces of flesh objectively. She didn’t want to think about the cruelty of what had happened to this girl, or the appalling pain she must have endured. “What a mess,” she said. “But see how neatly those muscles have been cut. Whoever did this had quite a talent with a knife, didn’t he?”

  “I’ll have a word around the hospitals,” said Liam. “You never know. We might be looking for a mad surgeon. Dr Frankenstein in reverse.”

  “Talk to the local butchers, too,” said Katie.

  “Good idea. One of my nephews works for O’Reillys in the English Market. That’s how I get all my black puddings cheap.”

  “All right,” said Katie. There was a dazzling flicker of flashlights as the photographers got to work, and she had to turn her face away. In spite of her attempts to be detached, she was shaking.

  “Here,” said Liam. He reached inside his leather jacket and took out a clean white handkerchief.

  “What?” she frowned. He unfolded the handkerchief for her but she still didn’t understand what he meant until he pointed to his eyes, one after the other, to indicate that there were tears in her eyes.

  23

  That evening, Katie held another media conference at Anglesea Street. It was packed with more than sixty reporters and cameramen. She gave the bare facts that the body of an unidentified young woman had been found at Meagher’s Farm and that her skeleton had been stripped of its flesh and arranged “in a manner suggesting some kind of ritual or fetishistic behavior.”

  “Is there any similarity between the way this skeleton was arranged and the way the first eleven skeletons were arranged?” asked Dougal Cleary from RTÉ 1.

  “No. The first eleven skeletons seemed to have been buried at random. This skeleton was very systematically laid out in the open, along with the flesh that had been removed from it.”

  “Removed from it how?”

  “Expertly, I’d say. With a scalpel or a knife.”

  “So you could be looking for somebody with medical skills?”

  “Possibly. We’re keeping an open mind until we receive the autopsy report from Dr Reidy.”

  “You keep mentioning this word ‘ritualistic’ – but what ritual are you referring to, exactly?”

  “So far I’m only using it in the sense that this woman wasn’t murdered in anger, or haphazardly, but in a carefully considered procedure. We don’t know if this procedure has any religious or occult implications. Professor Gerard O’Brien at the university has been helping us in our research but so far he hasn’t come up with any complete explanation.”

  “Does he have an incomplete explanation?”

  “Nothing that’s useful to discuss at this time.”

  “Does this latest murder cast any doubt on Jack Devitt’s theory that a British Army officer was responsible for murdering those eleven women in 1915?”

  “Again we’re keeping an open mind. Of course the same perpetrator couldn’t have committed today’s murder. But we’re looking into the theory that both murderers could belong to the same cult, or have similar mystical beliefs. In fact, we’re looking into every theory that anybody can think of.”

  “Does this mean that you’re re-opening the 1915 murder investigation?”

  “We have to… insofar as it could shed valuable light on today’s case. We’ll be publishing a list of all eleven women in tomorrow’s papers, and appealing for anybody who might be related to them to get in touch with us immediately, so that we can perform mitochondrial DNA tests.”

  “I gather that you, personally, never wanted to close it?”

  “Twelve women have been inexplicably killed. No matter when they were killed, no matter who they were, we owe it to all of them to find out who killed them. I want you to know that I am absolutely determined to give them peace.”

  That evening she left Garda headquarters just after six o’clock and went into Tesco in Paul Street to do some shopping. She walked up and down the aisles with her shopping trolley, trying not to think about the dismembered body in the field. Unless some fresh evidence came up, there was nothing she could usefully do until tomorrow, and she needed time to calm herself down. She had seen the bodies of people who had been shot in the face with shotguns. She had seen the bodies of people who had been drowned, and burned, and crushed. She had even seen the bodies of people who had been systematically tortured with red-hot pokers and pliers. But she had never yet seen a body that had been so completely desecrated, so stripped of its humanity, so totally disassembled. It reminded her more of a burglary than a homicide. It was almost as if her murderer had been tearing her body apart, piece by piece, in a determined search for her soul.

  She had been thinking of cooking beef in Guinness this evening, and she bought some carrots and swede and onions. But as she wheeled her trolley toward the meat chiller she found herself breathing more and more deeply, until she was hyperventilating. She clutched the trolley handle tightly and closed her eyes. She could feel cold perspiration sliding down her back.

  “Are you all right, love?” an elderly woman asked her.

  She opened her eyes and right in front of her, brightly-lit like a traffic accident, she saw glistening dark brown livers and scarlet joints of beef and soft creamy-yellow folds of tripe.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m just a little faint.” She left her trolley where it was and walked quickly out of the store and into the street.

  24

  She was leaving the Paul Street multi-story car-park when her mobile phone warbled.

  “Superintendent? It’s Liam Fennessy. You’d better get up to the City Gaol, quick as you can.”

  “The Gaol? What’s happened?”

  “It’s an old friend of ours. It looks like somebody’s decided to teach him a lesson he’ll never forget.”

  “At the Gaol?”

  “Well, you’ll see for yourself, superintendent, when you get here.”

  “All right. I’m down on Lavitt’s Quay. I’ll be with you in five minutes at the most.”

  She drove across the river and headed west to Sunday’s Well, running three red lights. She turned up the steep incline of Convent Road until she reached the gray sandstone walls of Cork City Gaol. It began to rain, one of those sharp, rattling showers that the Atlantic brings in without warning.

  There were two patrol cars already parked in the yard outside the Gaol, as well as Liam’s green Vectra. As Katie pulled up beside them, an ambulance arrived, too, with its blue lights flashing. A uniformed garda hurried up to Katie’s car and opened the door for her.

  “So who is it?” she said.

  “Dave MacSweeny, ma’am.”

  “Dave MacSweeny? Jesus. Is he dead?”

  “Not quite, ma’am. But let’s just say that he’s not feeling too bright.”

  Katie felt a cold, crawling sensation down her back. Oh my God, she thought. Don’t say that this is Eamonn Collins’ interpretation of being “emphatic.” If it was, then Dave MacSweeny wouldn’t be the only one who could expect to be taught a lesson that he wouldn’t forget.

  She turned up her collar and climbed out of her car. In the dark, and the rain, Cork City Gaol appeared even more forbidding than usual. It had been built high on this hill in 1824 to resemble a medieval castle, with crenellated towers. For years it had been a women’s prison, although men had been locked up here, too, during the troubles in 1922. It had closed in 1923, and now it was a tourist attraction, populated with life-size wax figures of warders and inmates to give visitors a feeling of what it had been like to be incarcerated here.

  Katie climbed the steps to the front gates, with the garda following close behind her, and walked quickly along the path that led to the Gaol’s main buildings. The rain was coming down even harder now, turning her hair into dark red rats’ tails.

  “One of the cleaners found him, ma’am, after they’d closed. God alone knows how long he’d been here. The
y’ve had visitors in and out all day, one hundred and seven according to the ticket sales.”

  “Is the manager here?”

  “We’ve called her, ma’am, and she’s on her way.”

  They reached the governor’s house. The garda opened the front door for her, and then he led her across the chilly, echoing vestibule to the Gaol’s West Wing. This was an echoing, high-ceilinged hallway, with three galleries of cells on either side, connected by catwalks and iron staircases. Up on the very top catwalk, the waxwork figure of a prison warder was leaning on the railing and looking down at her. Katie saw Liam Fennessy up on the first floor catwalk, with four or five other gardaí. She climbed the staircase with her shoes clanging on the iron treads.

  Liam was standing by an open cell door, with his arms folded. He nodded toward the cell and said, “Dave MacSweeny. I have absolutely no idea how long he’s been here. We’re waiting on fire and rescue.”

  Katie looked inside the cell. It was little more than six feet by ten feet, with a wooden bed and a plain wooden chair. The walls and ceiling were painted with scabby whitewash, and there was a strong smell of damp and urine.

  Standing up against the right-hand wall was Dave MacSweeny, barefoot, wearing a soiled gray shirt and dark blue trousers, with his left arm lifted as if he were waving to a distant friend. His face was covered with a mask of thick medicine-pink emulsion paint, and his hair had been spiked up with creosote, some of which had slid in dark brown runnels down the back of his neck.

  His eyes were closed, although the fine cracks in the emulsion paint around his eyelids showed that he must have opened them at some time after it had dried. There were deep fissures in the paint on either side of his mouth, too, and both of these were filled with congealed blood. His silver hoop earring was missing, torn out of his ear-lobe, leaving a ragged hole.

  He remained standing up against the wall, with his arm raised, because he had no choice. His left wrist and his shoulders and both of his knees had been fastened to the whitewashed stone with heavy-duty brads. Whoever had nailed him here, they had turned him into a living parody of all the other waxwork prisoners who occupied the cells around him.

  Katie stepped into the cell and tilted her head close to Dave MacSweeny’s face. His eyes remained closed but she could hear him breathing. Rapid, shallow gasps, with a harsh rattle at the end of each gasp. He smelled strongly of stale sweat and cigarettes and alcohol and he had wet his trousers.

  “Dave?” she said. “Dave, can you hear me?” But he didn’t answer.

  She turned to Liam and said, “Can’t we get him free?”

  “That’s why we’ve called for the fire and rescue. They’ve fixed him to the stone with one of those pneumatic nailers. Ninety millimeter brads at least. We’re going to need a pair of bolt-cutters before we can spring our Dave MacSweeny out of the slammer.”

  “Has he said anything to you?”

  “His eyes were open when I first arrived here, and of course I asked him who did it, but he didn’t say a word. Or wouldn’t, more like.”

  “Any witnesses? Somebody must have seen him being dragged up here. Where was the manager when this was going on?”

  “Taking a day off, so I understand.”

  “What about the rest of the staff? One of the tour guides? A visitor? In the name of Jesus, a sixteen-stone man with his face painted bright pink? And those nailers make enough of a racket, don’t they?”

  “Nobody saw a thing, superintendent. Nobody heard anything, neither.”

  Katie thought: that doesn’t really surprise me, if Eamonn Collins had anything to do with it.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll have to make an appeal through the media. Somebody must have seen something – even if it was only a van parked here.”

  “A van?”

  “Had to be. They wouldn’t have driven through the city with a fellow painted bright pink sitting in the back of their car, would they? And they would have needed a compressor for the nailer.”

  Katie turned and looked at Dave MacSweeny again. He had opened his eyes now, and was staring up at the ceiling, as if he were praying to be released. He still said nothing, but bright pink tears began to run down his cheeks and drip onto his shirt.

  It took the fire and rescue team over an hour to free Dave MacSweeny from the wall. The nails turned out to be too hard and too deeply-embedded for bolt-cutters so the fire-fighters had to hack away the stone all around them with hammers and chisels and then cut them with a grinding wheel. Katie stood out on the catwalk, covering her ears as metal screeched against metal.

  At last they lowered Dave MacSweeny to the floor of the cell and brought in a stretcher. As the paramedics carried him out, Katie bent over him and said, “Dave? Can you hear me, Dave?”

  He stared at her but he didn’t speak.

  “Dave, do you know who did this to you, Dave?”

  He gave her an almost imperceptible nod.

  “Who was it, Dave? Are you going to tell me?”

  One corner of his mouth quivered in the beginnings of a smile.

  “I’m sorry, superintendent,” put in one of the paramedics, “we really need to get him to the hospital.”

  “All right.” Katie stood up straight, and let them carry Dave MacSweeny away. She turned, and caught Liam looking at her with a slight frown on his face, as if there were something he couldn’t quite work out.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Nothing. I was just trying to work out why anybody would have gone to all the trouble of dolling him up to look like a waxwork and then nailing him to the wall like that. They obviously weren’t intent on killing him, were they, because somebody was bound to notice him there before too long. So what do you think? Somebody was trying to teach him a lesson?”

  “Probably. You know what a cute hoor he is. He could have upset any one of dozens of people.”

  “But why do this to him – right here in the Gaol? They were taking a hell of a chance, after all. Why didn’t they just go round to his house and nail him to his kitchen table? Far less risky, just as much of a punishment.”

  “I can’t guess, Liam. Who knows what goes on in the heads of people who do things like that? Perhaps they were trying to show us that even if we couldn’t put him in prison, they could, whenever they felt like it.”

  Liam opened her car door for her, and the lights-on alarm began to beep. “I think they didn’t do it simply to punish him – they did it to show somebody else, too. Maybe as a warning.”

  “You’re absolutely right, of course. All we have to find out who was warning who about what.”

  “I’ll take care of this one. I know you’ve got your hands full with that body up at Meagher’s Farm. I just thought you ought to see it, that’s all.”

  “Thanks,” said Katie. “As if I wasn’t feeling queasy enough already.”

  She called Eamonn Collins on her cellphone. A woman answered, with a nasal Dublin accent. In the background, Katie could hear Andy Williams singing Moon River.

  “Is Eamonn home?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Katie Maguire.”

  “And who’s Katie Maguire may I ask?”

  “Detective Superintendent Katie Maguire, that’s who.”

  “All right. There’s no need to eat the head off me.”

  Eamonn came to the phone. “Good evening to you, superintendent. How can I help you?”

  “I think you’ve already helped me more than enough, thanks. What the hell did you think you were playing at? I wanted you to have a quiet word in Dave MacSweeny’s ear, not make a public spectacle of him.”

  “Well, to be truthful, it started off as a quiet word, but then he began to be argumentative. Called my mother a name, you see; and I couldn’t have that.”

  “So you decided to take him to the City Gaol and nail him to the wall? Holy Mother of God, Eamonn, there’s going to be a full investigation and the whole thing’s going to be plastered all over the papers. And don�
��t tell me that Dave MacSweeny’s not going to let everyone know who did it, and why.”

  “Oh, I don’t think he’ll be doing that, superintendent. He was given a fair word of warning, as well as his punishment. I’d be very surprised if he gave you any more trouble after this.”

  “I hope to God you’re right, Eamonn, otherwise I’ll be going down for this, and I’ll make sure that you’ll be coming down with me.”

  “Oh, superintendent! ‘Some flow’rets of Eden ye still inherit, but the trail of the serpent is over them all.’”

  “I know,” said Katie. “Thomas Moore.”

  25

  There were crumpled bags under Dr Reidy’s eyes, as if he hadn’t slept in a week, and he reeked of tobacco. Without a word he held out a large jar of Vick’s Vapor Rub and Katie dipped her finger into it and smeared it thickly on her upper lip. It made her eyes water and her nose drip, but that was preferable to the alternative.

  Dr Reidy led Katie through to a small side-room, on the other side of the corridor from the main pathology lab, and there, on two stainless-steel autopsy tables, was all that was left of the woman whose remains had been found at Meagher’s Farm.

  Her skeleton had been reassembled on the left-hand table, and on the right-hand table Dr Reidy had done his best to reshape her skin and flesh and viscera into a semblance of the girl that she had originally been. It was a slack, shapeless parody of a human being, blotchy and bruised and clotted with blood, more like an empty nightdress-case than a woman, but all the same Katie was surprised how successfully Dr Reidy had been able to reconstruct her. She walked up to the table and stood staring at the cadaver for a long, long time. Dr Reidy carried on sorting out his instruments and did nothing to disturb her.

  “Cause of death?” she asked, at last.

  “Surgical shock, more than likely, caused by diminution of the fluid element in the blood.”

  “That means that he was cutting the flesh off her while she was still alive?”