White Bones Read online

  She made herself a mug of tea and sat at the kitchen table to drink it. Her mind was too crowded to think of going to bed just yet. It had been a week now since Fiona had been abducted, and her murderer could have left Ireland the day after he laid her body out in Meagher’s field. Yet somehow she felt as if he were still very close; as if he had unfinished business. It was only a feeling, nothing more, and it was probably brought on by exhaustion, and because she desperately needed to believe that she was going to find him.

  At last, at 2:36 am, she drained the last dregs of her tea into the sink, switched off the light and went upstairs. Sergeant settled down in his basket with a grunt of relief.

  27

  She didn’t reach Garda headquarters until 10:25 the next morning. She had set her alarm for 7:30 am but when it beeped she was deeply involved in a dream about her mother. In her dream it was a warm day in August, with blue skies and rolling Atlantic clouds, and she was sitting in the garden telling her mother that she was expecting a baby. The birds twittered, the leaves gossiped in the breeze. Her mother frowned and said, “Another baby, or the one who died?”

  She sat up with a jolt. Her hair was all sweaty. She looked at the clock and she couldn’t believe it was 9:07 am. Paul was still buried in the pillow beside her, snoring in a high, sinister cackle.

  She dressed hurriedly, in a black coat-suit and a gray sweater, snagging her new black pantyhose with her fingernail. She managed to gulp down half a glass of orange-juice before hopping out of the house with the back of one shoe squashed awkwardly beneath her foot and a folded piece of bread-and-Flora clenched between her teeth. As she neared Cork she found that the main road was jammed with over a mile-and-a-half of traffic. The Jack Lynch Tunnel was closed by striking truck-drivers and there was a checkpoint opposite the Silver Springs Hotel, where four gardaí were flagging down every black and dark-colored Mercedes. When she eventually managed to reach the checkpoint, one of them sardonically saluted her. “Sorry about the delay, superintendent.” It began to rain.

  In her office, Liam and Jimmy were both waiting for her, staring out of the window.

  “I’ll bet you ten euros I could pot three of those crows before the rest of them flew away,” said Liam.

  “With respect, sir,” Jimmy replied, “I’ll bet you twenty euros you couldn’t even hit the fucking car-park.”

  Katie came in and hung up her raincoat. “Never try to interfere with bad omens,” she said, sharply. Jimmy looked at Liam and raised one quizzical eyebrow, but neither of them said anything.

  “So, where are we, Jimmy?” she asked him, sitting down at her desk and switching on her computer. “Any more news from Dublin?”

  “Nothing so far. But we’ve had some luck with the missing women from 1915.”

  He opened his notepad and read out, “A lady from Bishopstown called in to say that Mrs Betty Hickey, who disappeared from Glenville in November, 1915, was her grandmother; and a fellow from Ballyvolane reckons that Mrs Mary O’Donovan was his great-great-aunt. Both of them are quite happy to go to the hospital to have DNA samples taken. That’s if we pay for the taxis.”

  “Well, that’s something. Do we know when Fiona Kelly’s parents will be arriving?”

  Liam said, “They’re flying into Dublin at half-past seven tomorrow morning. Don’t worry – I’ve already made arrangements to have them met. Oh – and Professor O’Brien called you. He said that he’d call you back later.”

  “Oh God.”

  “He said he had something to tell you. Something fascinating, as it goes, but not desperately urgent.”

  “Thanks, Liam.”

  Jimmy said, “We set up all the checkpoints this morning, to stop the drivers of black and dark-colored Mercs. Well, I expect you had to go through one yourself, didn’t you? Nothing so far, but we’re taking all their names and addresses to check their stories later, and we’ve taken soil samples from their front nearside tires.”

  “Good. I hope our lord and master hasn’t been grumbling too much about the traffic congestion.”

  “Of course he has. But that’s his job, isn’t it, grumbling?”

  Katie pressed the button on her phone and asked the switchboard to put her through to Dr Reidy. While she waited, she leafed quickly through her mail, which included two invitations to give careers talks to local schools. At this moment, she had only seven words of advice for young girls: don’t be a guard, be a nun.

  Liam sat on the corner of her desk and said, “By the way, we’re making progress with Dave MacSweeny’s forced incarceration.”

  “Oh, yes?” she said, without looking up.

  “The nail-gun and the compressor were stolen from that fashion shop they’re doing up, opposite the Post Office. They were reported missing first thing yesterday morning, as soon as the fitters found out they were gone.”

  “Nobody saw or heard anything, of course?”

  “We haven’t found any eye-witnesses so far. But they must have taken the stuff shortly after four o’clock when the fitters finish work. It’s always pretty crowded around there at that time of night, so I’m hopeful.”

  “Good. But don’t waste too much time on it, will you? Whoever did it, and for whatever reason, I’m sure that Dave MacSweeny deserved it.”

  “Whatever you say. But even the Fenians were given a trial.”

  The phone warbled. It was Dr Reidy. Katie swiveled around in her chair so that she could look out at the crows clustered on the car-park roof. There seemed to be even more of them today, twenty or thirty, quarreling and scabrous.

  “Ah, superintendent!” Dr Reidy bellowed. He sounded as if he were walking down a long, echoing corridor. “I have only one major finding to report, apart from the bad mussel I discovered in my seafood stew last night. Next time, can you please keep your restaurant recommendations to yourself? That place had the décor of a futuristic public convenience and the food of a nineteenth-century poorhouse.”

  “I’m sorry about that, Dr Reidy. The last time I ate there it was really very good. You didn’t get ill, I hope?”

  “Not me, my dear. I can smell putrescence from a quarter of a mile away.”

  “So what was your other major finding?”

  “Aha, well! Fiona Kelly was not sexually assaulted. Obviously the trauma to her body is so extensive that it’s practically impossible for me to say if she was otherwise interfered with. But her vaginal and rectal tissues show no signs of forcible penetration, and ultraviolet shows no traces of semen in her body.”

  “I see. Did the perpetrator leave any other DNA evidence?”

  “Not that we’ve managed to find yet. No foreign hairs, no foreign skin cells, no blood that didn’t belong to the deceased, no saliva, no other bodily excretions. I mean, this isn’t entirely surprising, considering the condition of her remains, but don’t despair prematurely. We’re going over her, millimeter by millimeter, and who knows, our diligence may yet be rewarded.”

  “But it doesn’t look as if the killer’s motive was sexual?”

  “Hmm, very hard to tell with sex. I remember one fellow in Ballybunion who got his jollies by choking women with fresh-caught mackerel. Never penetrated them, though. Never even took his trousers off.”

  “All right, doctor. Thank you. By the way, it looks as if we might have found direct relatives of two of the eleven women from 1915. Sergeant O’Rourke will be making arrangements with you to have them tested.”

  “Ah, the wonders of modern forensic medicine! What would you poor coppers do without it? Have you come any closer to finding your monster?”

  “We’re making good progress, thank you. We have a sighting of Fiona Kelly near Blarney, and a vehicle description. The rest of it is probably going to be routine door-to-door stuff.”

  “You know something, my dear, you would have made me a wonderful housekeeper. Any time you grow weary of detecting, there’s a job waiting for you, I promise.”

  Katie put the receiver down without saying anything else. Liam
said, “Well?”

  “She wasn’t raped and there are no obvious signs of sexual molestation.”

  “Isn’t that a little difficult to be certain about? Especially when your victim has been reduced to nothing more than T-bone steaks.”

  “She was a twenty-two-year-old girl, Liam. All her life in front of her.”

  “I know. I wasn’t being flip. I just can’t imagine what kind of a maniac could have done that to another human being.”

  She stood up and walked around her desk. “There may have been some sexual element in what was done to her. But Owen Reidy isn’t a fool. I think we have to concentrate most of our attention on finding out what kind of ritual was being performed here.”

  “Maybe, in that case, you’d better give Gerard O’Brien a call back.”

  “Yes, maybe I should.”

  Liam grinned, and patted her on the shoulder. “He’s very fond of you, you know, Professor O’Brien. You could do worse.”

  Gerard’s coffee steamed up his glasses. “I think I’ve made something of a breakthrough,” he said. “I looked up Mor-Rioghain on the internet, and I came across a link to a German site about pagan rituals in Westphalia.”

  “Go on,” said Katie. “I don’t really have very much time, I’m afraid.”

  They were sitting in the window of a café on Oliver Plunkett Street. Outside, it continued to rain, and the narrow pavements were jostling with shoppers.

  Gerard said, “I’m sorry, yes, I’ll – ah – cut to the chase. Around the cathedral town of Münster, apparently, there used to be a witch known as Morgana. She was guilty of all kinds of misdemeanors, like screaming uncontrollably at people’s weddings, and boiling live cats, and biting the toes off newly-born babies. But she could be summoned to help you, if you were prepared to give her what she wanted.”

  “Oh, yes? And what was that?”

  “You had to catch thirteen good women, one at a time, and take them to a sacred place, and skin them alive. Then you had to clean their bones of all their flesh, for Morgana to feed on, and arrange their bones around it according to a very specific pattern.”

  Now Gerard really had her attention. “Pattern? What pattern?”

  “I don’t know exactly. My eighteenth-century German isn’t very good. But it had to be very carefully done. Mit vorsicht. And there’s something else. You had to tie a rag doll to each of the victim’s leg-bones – a rag doll decorated with fish-hooks and nails. Each of these dolls was supposed to contain half of each victim’s soul… the good side attached to the right leg, the bad side attached to the left.

  “So long as each soul was separated like that, good in this doll, evil in the other, it couldn’t go to Purgatory and it had to do whatever Morgana told it to do. It couldn’t use magic to reassemble itself either, because the dolls would prevent its legs being re-attached to its body.”

  Katie was silent for a long time, twiddling her coffee-spoon around and around between finger and thumb. Gerard O’Brien watched her cautiously, unsure of what she was going to say next.

  She was beginning to feel a genuine sense of dread. This wasn’t just butchery. This was deeply rooted in the Ireland of legend and mysticism – the Ireland of evil fairies and gray shadows that hurried through the rain, and white-faced mermaids who sat on the rocks and screamed and screamed until a man could go mad. This reminded her of all the terrors that she had felt as a child, when the Atlantic gales had rattled her bedroom window in the small black hours of the morning, as if all kinds of spidery skeletons were trying to get in.

  After a while she put down her coffee-spoon. “Then what was supposed to happen? After you’d killed and boned thirteen women and attached these dollies?”

  “Then, I suppose, Morgana would give you whatever you wanted. Money, fame, success with women.”

  “Are there any authenticated cases of people having actually tried to do this?”

  “I wouldn’t know. But the source of the legend is very respectable. It’s mentioned in detail in Hexenprozesse in Westfalen by Dr Ignatz Zingerle; and in a seventeenth-century quarto called Wunderbarliche Geheimnussen der Zauberey.” And a fairy like Morgana is known in some form or another in almost every country in Northern Europe. Morgan, Mor-Rioghain, whatever.”

  “Gerard, this could be very helpful.”

  Gerard furiously scratched his head. “It’s not a lot to go on, I know. But it’s a start, isn’t it? At least you know what the dollies were for. And it gives you a clue where your murderer might have come from.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The lace. You told me that the rag doll was made out of shreds of petticoat, edged with German lace. German legend, German lace. There must be some connection.”

  Katie nodded. “You could be right, Gerard. The trouble is, we need more than speculation.”

  “I’ll keep at it.” Gerard looked at his watch, and blinked. “I don’t suppose you could spare the time for lunch?”

  28

  She was eating a chicken ciabatta sandwich at her desk when Liam knocked at her door. “I’m just on my way to talk to Dave MacSweeny at the Regional. Wondered if you’d care to come along?”

  “I’m too busy, Liam,” she said, brushing crumbs from the reports she was reading.

  “I’ve been asking around. I think I’ve already got a fair idea of who nailed him to the wall.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “Two fellows were drinking in The Ovens Tavern on the afternoon before the nail-gun got stolen. They left the bar at a quarter to five saying that they had a little job to do, but that they’d be coming back later. They had a white Transit van parked just opposite The Ovens, and they climbed into it and drove away. But only about twenty-five yards. They stopped just opposite the Post Office, got out of the van, and opened the back doors. Nobody saw them load the compressor, so I haven’t got watertight eye-witness evidence. But I’ll bet you a tenner it was them.”

  “And who were they, these two fellows? Do we know?”

  “Oh, yes. Gerry Heelan and Cors O’Leary, and we all know who they do little jobs for.”

  “Eamonn Collins, yes. Them and a score of other scumbags. But why would Eamonn Collins want to do such a thing to Dave MacSweeny? They don’t mix in the same circles; they don’t operate the same kind of rackets.”

  “I know,” said Liam. Behind his owlish glasses, his face was very serious.

  “Perhaps Heelan and O’Leary did this on their own,” Katie suggested.

  “Oh, I doubt it. It was far too theatrical. Far too technical, too. Heelan and O’Leary would have caught MacSweeny in a side-street and bashed his head in with a brick.”

  “Well, I wish you luck,” said Katie. She carried on reading and eating but Liam stayed where he was, leaning against the door-jamb.

  Eventually, she looked up and said, “Yes? What is it?”

  “You can’t help hearing stories, you know. And one of those stories was that Dave MacSweeny was looking for some fellow who was messing around with his girlfriend, with intent to do this fellow some grievous bodily harm.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “In fact, he did do this fellow some grievous bodily harm, that’s what I heard. Caught him in the car-park in Beasley Street and gave him a good sound bashing. Which makes me wonder if this fellow was looking for revenge, and asked Eamonn Collins to arrange it for him. Or her.”

  “This all sounds like hearsay and supposition to me.”

  “You may be right. But it’s a possible motive, isn’t it?”

  “Dave MacSweeny has more enemies than a dog has fleas. Anybody could have taken it into their head to teach him a lesson.”

  “I don’t know. There aren’t many ‘anybodies’ who would dare to. Dave MacSweeny’s a very vicious fellow when he’s upset. That’s what makes me think it was Eamonn Collins. Think about it, superintendent. Not only is Eamonn Collins the only man in Cork who would dream up something like locking him up in a cell in the City Gaol and nailing him to the wa
ll, he’s the only man in Cork who would have the nerve to teach him a lesson like that and let him live.”

  Katie slowly crumpled up her sandwich-wrapper and dropped it into the bin. “Let me know how you get on,” she said.

  That afternoon she went to see her father. When he answered the door his white hair was sticking up at the back and he looked as if he had been sleeping.

  “Katie! This is unexpected. Everything’s all right?”

  She stepped into the hallway. She could smell mince and onions. “I just needed somebody to talk to, that’s all.”

  “Come on in, then. Can I get you a cup of tea?”

  “That’s all right. I’ve just had lunch.”

  They sat together in the window-seat that overlooked the river. The sun came and went, came and went, so that sometimes they were lit up by dazzling reflected light, like actors, and other times they were plunged into shadow as if they were nothing more than memories of themselves. When the sun shone brightly, Katie’s hair gleamed copper, and her skin looked almost luminous white. But it was than that she couldn’t help noticing the tomato-soup stains on her father’s sweater and how withered his hands were.

  “Something very strange is happening,” she said. “The trouble is, I don’t know whether it’s real or imaginary. I mean, I have the strongest feeling that Fiona Kelly’s killer is very close, and that there’s every chance that he might commit another murder. But I don’t know why I feel like that. Maybe it’s just me, feeling the strain.”

  “Do you have any evidence at all that he’s still in Cork?”

  “None whatsoever. But he must have had a motive for replicating the murders of 1915. Either he’s just a copycat killer, or else he’s trying to do what the original murderer was apparently trying to do… to raise up this Mor-Rioghain’s spirit out of the underworld so that he can ask her for a favor.”