Blood Sisters Read online

  Katie looked up from the vet’s report that Tadhg Meaney had sent her. The preliminary toxicology test on each of the twenty-three dead horses had revealed that all of the one- and two-year-olds had traces of xylazine or detomidine, drugs that were administered either to sedate a horse so that it could be medically treated or else to slow it down on the racetrack.

  ‘So what’s the roster?’ she asked. She pushed aside the vet’s report and picked up the search warrant for the Bon Sauveur Convent, as well as a copy of the sketch map that Sister Rose had emailed to Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán.

  ‘Fifteen altogether. Three technicians, four officers and eight reservists. Sergeant O’Farell is just about to give them a briefing and then they’ll be ready for the off. Kyna Ni Nuallán told me that you were keen to serve the search warrant yourself.’

  ‘Yes, I am. From what she’s told me about Mother O’Dwyer, I think I need to meet her face to face. If experience has taught me anything about mother superiors, it’s that they’re all as wily as foxes and about as straight as a drawerful of corkscrews.’

  ‘That’s a little harsh, isn’t it?’ said Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin. He almost managed to smile.

  ‘Take my word for it, sir, they’ll do anything to protect themselves from the outside world, these nuns. Not straight-out lying maybe, but lying by what they don’t tell you. Look what happened at Tuam, and I pray to God we don’t find anything like that here. Kenny Horgan used to say that the church taught the gospels of Saint Mark, Saint Luke, Saint John and Saint Matt-the-liar.’

  Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin looked depressed again. ‘Yes. Kenny Horgan. The commissioner’s been in touch, by the way, about holding a state funeral for him.’

  ‘He deserves it. They did it for Detective Donohue in Dundalk, didn’t they?’

  They were both silent for a moment, thinking about Detective Horgan, but then Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin said, ‘So, Katie, what’s your plan of action?’

  Katie looked up at the clock. ‘I have to be in court at two-thirty for Michael Gerrety’s plea hearing, so I think I’ll go up to the Bon Sauveur now, while the search team are finishing off their briefing. The sooner we get started, the better. There’s something going on there, connected with those holy sisters, I’m convinced of it.’

  ‘They didn’t identify that flying nun as one of theirs, though, did they?’

  ‘Didn’t or wouldn’t,’ said Katie. ‘Patrick took her picture her up there yesterday evening and they all denied knowing who she was, Mother O’Dwyer included. What really struck him, though, was that some of the sisters scarcely seemed to give the picture a glance. He definitely had the feeling that they’d been told to say that they didn’t recognize her.’

  ‘You can’t read too much into that, Katie. It’s fair off-putting to look at the picture of a dead person, especially if you might have known them.’

  ‘Well, all right, I agree with you there, and none of the sisters at any of the other convents recognized her, either. We showed her picture to all of them – the Poor Clares, the Ursuline Sisters, the Good Shepherd Sisters, the Mercy Sisters, the Little Sisters of the Assumption, the Presentation. The convent schools, too. But I still have that feeling about the Bon Sauveurs.’

  ‘Just don’t be vexing this Mother O’Dwyer. I don’t want Bishop Buckley coming down on me like a ton of bricks.’

  ‘I think you know me better than that, sir. I’ll be all sweetness and light.’

  Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin looked at her for a moment, with his head tilted to one side, and then he said, ‘You won’t get vexed yourself if I pay you a compliment?’

  Katie couldn’t stop herself from feeling suddenly and uncomfortably hot. It was almost unheard of for ‘Chief Superintendent Aingesoir’ to say anything complimentary about any other officer, or indeed about anything. He couldn’t eat a ham sandwich in the canteen without complaining loudly halfway through that it tasted of nothing very much at all.

  ‘You’re blooming,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what it is, but you have a shine about you.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Katie, trying to make her reply sound as official as possible. ‘Kind of you to say so.’

  * * *

  Mother O’Dwyer put on her spectacles and read through the search warrant with a frown, her lips moving as she did so.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said when she had finished. Her hand was trembling. ‘Why in the name of God would you wish to carry out a search here?’

  Katie said, ‘It’s only routine, Mother O’Dwyer. As you can see from the warrant, a young child’s jawbone was discovered in the gardens and we have to make sure that there are no further remains.’

  ‘Further remains? What do you mean by further remains?’

  ‘Any more bones of the child whose jawbone was discovered. Or any other children, for that matter.’

  ‘That’s absurd!’ protested Mother O’Dwyer. ‘Our sisters tend our gardens daily. We grow all our own vegetables. Cabbages, potatoes, turnips. And our own flowers, too. If there were further remains to be discovered, surely we would have discovered them by now.’

  ‘I understand completely,’ said Katie. ‘It’s just that the law requires us to be sure. I’m very sorry for any disturbance that we may be causing you.’

  ‘So who was it who found this child’s jawbone?’ Mother O’Dwyer demanded. ‘No outsiders have access to our gardens. You’re not telling me that one of our sisters came across it.’

  ‘I’m not at liberty to tell you that, I’m afraid.’

  Mother O’Dwyer opened and closed her mouth as if she were struggling for air. ‘We are a community here, Detective Superintendent. More than a community, we are a family, all related in the sight of God. If one of us has transgressed in any way, it is essential that the rest of us are aware of it.’

  ‘Reporting to the Garda that you have discovered a young child’s jawbone is hardly a religious transgression, Mother O’Dwyer.’

  ‘Well! That’s what you say! But our congregation depends on complete openness and mutual loyalty! You realize that I will have to ask each sister in turn if it was she who contacted you?’

  ‘I’m afraid I have to require you not to do that,’ said Katie. ‘It could obstruct our enquiries.’

  ‘I am the mother superior of this convent, Detective Superintendent. It’s my duty.’

  Katie tried to sound light-hearted but at the same time she wanted Mother O’Dwyer to understand that she was deadly serious. ‘If you attempt to question your congregation regarding the discovery of this bone fragment, Mother O’Dwyer, I shall have to consider arresting you under the Public Order Act, 1994, section 19. That could mean a fine or six months’ imprisonment, or both. I’ve never had occasion to arrest a mother superior before, not in my whole career, but you know what they say. There’s always a first time.’

  Mother O’Dwyer slowly removed her spectacles and stared at Katie as if she had uttered the greatest blasphemy that she had ever heard in her life. She inhaled deeply, so that her nostrils flared, but she didn’t reply. You have great Christian self-restraint, thought Katie, I admire you for that, at least.

  At that moment, Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán appeared in the doorway of Mother O’Dwyer’s office. Close behind her there was a young novice nun, dressed in white. Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán gave a little knuckle tap on the open door and said, ‘Ma’am? Sorry to interrupt you, ma’am, but the search team’s arrived.’

  ‘With your permission, then, we’ll make a start,’ said Katie to Mother O’Dwyer, although both of them knew that it would make no difference at all if she refused it.

  ‘Very well, then,’ said Mother O’Dwyer. But as Katie turned to go she said, sharply, ‘I assume you’ve had no luck at all in finding Sister Barbara?’

  ‘No, regretfully not,’ said Katie. ‘We had tracker dogs out looking for her yesterday afternoon and they picked up a scent outside her rest home, but they lost it aft
er only twenty metres or so. That would indicate that she was probably taken away in a waiting vehicle – willingly or unwillingly, we have no way of telling. We’ve issued a description, of course, but no response so far. You’ve probably seen it yourself on the news.’

  ‘I haven’t, no,’ said Mother O’Dwyer. ‘I’ve been praying and meditating. Sister Barbara is in the hands of God, as are all of us. We should never forget that our achievements are His, our failings are our own.’

  Katie knew that this was a subtle dig at the Garda’s inability to solve the murder of Sister Bridget and to find out what had happened to Sister Barbara, but all she did was to give Mother O’Dwyer the weakest of smiles and say, ‘Thank you for your cooperation. We’ll try to keep damage to your garden to a minimum and create as little disturbance inside the convent as we can.’

  ‘Suspicion of any kind is always a disturbance, and it always leaves a trail of irreparable damage behind it,’ retorted Mother O’Dwyer.

  ‘Yes, well,’ said Katie. ‘In the meantime, perhaps you’d be kind enough to show Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán where your records are kept, especially the records relating to the Bon Sauveur’s years as a home for single mothers. We’ll need to see them at least as far back as 1950.’

  ‘Sister Rose, go and find Sister Caoilainn, would you?’ said Mother O’Dwyer. ‘Sister Caoilainn keeps all the books. There’s a room here where you can look through them, if you wish. I assume you won’t be needing to take them off the premises.’

  ‘It depends what we find, if anything,’ said Katie.

  Mother O’Dwyer looked up at her with her lips tightly pursed. Katie was only five foot four, but Mother O’Dwyer could barely have been more than four foot eleven inches. As tiny as she was, she looked as if she could explode with such a devastating blast of anger that she would demolish the entire convent.

  ‘If you need me,’ she quivered, ‘you can find me in the chapel. I shall be praying that God grants you discretion and sound judgement, and that He forgives you any sins of commission or omission.’

  She turned and walked out of her office before Katie could think of a reply that wouldn’t bring Bishop Buckley down on Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin like a ton of bricks.

  * * *

  Katie went out into the convent garden. The technicians had already started work, kneeling in the flower bed around the spot where Sister Rose had marked the X on her sketch map. The rest of the team that had been assembled so far were standing around talking and clapping their hands together to keep warm.

  Bill Phinner had turned up and was drinking coffee from a cardboard cup. Although the morning was so sunny and the sky was bright blue, the high convent wall kept the south side of the garden in shadow so that it was damp and bone-chillingly cold.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Bill as Katie came up to him. ‘It’s baltic out here. I should have stayed in the lab and finished those drug tests.’

  ‘I don’t know if we’re going to find anything here,’ said Katie, looking around. ‘That jawbone could have come from almost anywhere. A dog or a fox might have dug it up somewhere totally different and just dropped it here.’

  ‘Well, there’s always that possibility,’ said Bill. ‘We’ll find out soon enough. By the way, I went up to your office earlier but you’d already gone out. I left a report on your desk about the balloons that were used for that flying nun.’

  ‘Oh yes? Anything interesting?’

  ‘They were weather balloons, you can buy them online from any number of sources, such as Weather Balloons ‘R’ Us, and they don’t cost much. They were all inflated with helium, but so far we don’t know where that might have come from. We’ve contacted all the industrial suppliers in the area, even the party suppliers, but none of them have sold the quantity that would have been required to lift a forty-four kilo woman off the ground.’

  ‘Where else would anybody get that that amount of helium? From a factory, maybe? They might have some over at Collins Barracks for army balloons. How about the UCC Physics Department? Or the weather station up at the airport? Do they send up balloons from there, or would they get in the way of the planes?’

  Bill shook his head. ‘I had a word with Sergeant O’Farrell. Nobody’s reported any missing helium up until now.’

  Katie said, ‘I still can’t work out why anybody would go to all that trouble. If you want to murder a nun, why not just murder her and bury her where nobody’s ever going to find her. Putting on a show like that, with those balloons, it hugely increases your risk of being caught.’

  ‘Well, you know as well as I do, ma’am, a lot of murderers are out to make a point. Whoever strung up that nun to those balloons obviously believed that they had something important to say. Only God or the Devil knows what it was.’

  ‘I agree with you,’ said Katie, watching as one of the technicians carefully sieved soil through a garden riddle. ‘Look at Sister Bridget, assaulted with that statuette. I’ll bet you money that there was some significance to that, if only we could work it out.’

  ‘One of my guys had an explanation, but I won’t repeat it.’

  ‘I’ll leave you to it, then,’ said Katie. ‘Give me a ring if you come up with anything.’

  She was already walking away when the technician with the riddle raised his hand and called out, ‘Here! Over here, sir! I have something here!’

  Bill crossed the lawn and Katie came back to join him. The technician was on his knees in the flower bed, about halfway between the place where Sister Rose said she had found the jawbone and the grey limestone wall of the convent. He held up the riddle for Katie and Bill to see what he had found. It was a stick-like bone, about eight centimetres long, mottled brown by the soil in which it had been buried. Bill pulled on his black forensic gloves and picked it up. He examined it closely and then he said, ‘Human, no doubt about it. It’s a tibia, a shin bone. I’d say it came from a child about a year old, depending on how well nourished it was.’

  ‘How long do you think it’s been buried?’ Katie asked him.

  Bill stuck out his lower lip. ‘Hard to say offhand. But if it belongs to the same child as that piece of jawbone, then we’re talking about forty years at least, give or take a couple of years. It certainly looks it.’

  ‘And what if it belongs to a different child?’ said Katie.

  Bill raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.

  * * *

  Although it was getting late and Katie would soon have to go back to Anglesea Street to pick up the paperwork for Michael Gerrety’s committal proceedings in the criminal court, she stayed for a while longer. She almost felt that she owed it to the lost children whose sad little remains had been found in this garden.

  Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán came out to join her. Katie nodded her head towards the technicians sifting soil. ‘You see there? They’ve found another bone, a small child’s tibia this time.’

  ‘Oh God. I’m getting a bad, bad feeling about this place,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. ‘You should see some of the stuff we’ve dug up in the convent records and we haven’t even scratched the surface yet.’

  ‘What have you come up with so far?’

  ‘A lot of what you’d expect, of course. The names of all of the unmarried mothers the Bon Sauveur sisters ever took in, and their children and the dates of their baptism. But there are files of correspondence, too, with adoption agencies in the USA.’

  ‘What’s wrong about that? Most of those girls wouldn’t have been able to take care of their own children, would they, especially if they didn’t have the support of their parents?’

  ‘No, but when every baby was born the sisters used to make its mother sign away all of her parental rights. Then they routinely separated babies and young toddlers from their mothers, whether the mother liked it or not, and sent them off to be adopted by families in America. We can’t be sure how many yet, but it could be more than a hundred. Maybe even twice that.’

  Katie couldn’t help thinking
of the child that was growing inside her, and of the grief she had felt when she discovered little Seamus dead in his cot – which she felt still.

  ‘Please don’t tell me we’ve got another Philomena situation,’ she said. ‘I’m still getting ruptions from the diocese over those poor castrated choirboys.’

  ‘I think it could be worse than that,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. ‘Judging by what we’ve found in the account books it looks as if the sisters were demanding payment from the adoptive parents, and not just nominal sums, either. We’ll have to bring in that forensic accountant to check through the figures because they’re not at all straightforward.’

  ‘How much were they asking?’

  ‘In some cases, eight or nine or even ten thousand dollars, and when you think what the dollar must have been worth back in the 1960s – seven times as much as it is now, easy. Some of the payments have been entered into the books as “expenses”, but most of them are classified as “charitable donations to the Sacred Mission of the Congregation of the Bon Sauveur”.’

  ‘I see,’ said Katie. ‘Is there any record of what they actually did with all of that money?’

  ‘It’s not clear. Almost all the payments we’ve managed to identify so far just seem to vanish off the books. That’s why we need to have them looked at by somebody who knows all about false accountancy.’

  ‘But it looks as if the sisters might have been selling off the children of unmarried mothers for profit?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it quite as blunt as that. Not to Mother O’Dwyer, anyway. But essentially, yes. It does look like that.’

  ‘All right,’ said Katie. ‘I think the best course of action is to take all the books and records back to the station. You can do that, can’t you, under the terms of the search warrant? If you’re not sure that a book is relevant to this investigation, take it regardless. We can always give it back.’