Blood Sisters Read online

  Bill Phinner, the chief forensic officer, was standing beside the high, hospital-type bed, while a young female technician was down on her hands and knees with a small hand-held vacuum cleaner, taking samples from the mottled-green carpet. Another technician was dusting the bedside cabinet for fingerprints. Bill Phinner was lean, with swept-back grey hair, and was almost as hollow-cheeked and cadaverous as the victims he was called to examine.

  ‘Good morning to you, ma’am,’ he said to Katie, without looking at her.

  ‘What’s the story, Bill?’ said Katie. The room was uncomfortably hot and she unfastened the toggles of her duffel coat.

  Against the left-hand wall stood a tall mahogany cabinet crowded with books, most of them Bibles or lives of the saints, as well as a variety of religious ornaments and statuettes. The most outstanding was a monstrance – a stand supporting a gilded metal sunburst with a circular crystal in the middle to display a communion wafer, the body of Christ. There was also a purple crystal rosary and a plaster figure of Saint Francis with his arms outspread, surrounded by birds and rabbits. One of the rabbits had its head broken off.

  On top of the folded-up blankets at the foot of the bed, sealed in a vinyl evidence bag, lay the pale-blue figurine of the Virgin that the doctor had removed from Sister Bridget. She was staring up through the plastic with a serene expression on her medicine-pink face.

  Katie approached the bed and looked down at Sister Bridget. She was a hawk-like woman with a large curved nose, a sharply pointed chin and a tightly pinched-in mouth. Her hooded eyes were half-open, as if she were still dozing, but Katie could see that the whites of her eyes were spotted with lesions that looked like tiny red tadpoles.

  ‘Petechial haemorrhages of the conjunctiva,’ Bill intoned in his dry, abrasive voice. ‘I’d say that she was smothered with her own pillow.’

  ‘So, not natural causes?’

  ‘Oh, not a chance. Asphyxiation, no doubt of it.’

  ‘And what about the figurine?’

  ‘It’s the Immaculate Heart of Mary. A good-quality resin and stone statuette, hand-painted, twenty-five point five centimetres high, suitable for use both indoors and out. It has a maker’s mark on the base – Pilgrim Fine Editions – so we may be able to trace where it was purchased. I’d say it easily cost close to three hundred euros, maybe more.’

  ‘Any prints on it?’

  ‘A few smudgy partials, but when we take it back to the lab there’s a good chance that we can enhance them.’

  ‘And when was it inserted?’ asked Katie. ‘Before or after she was suffocated?’

  Bill lifted up Sister Bridget’s ankle-length brushed-cotton nightgown. She was skeletally thin, with patches of dry skin and purple blotches that were consistent with liver disease. Her left breast was smudged with a large crimson bruise, half-moon shaped, as if her assailant had forced her down on to the bed with the heel of a hand. There were even more bruises on her stomach and the insides of her skinny thighs. Her grey-haired vagina was gaping and between her legs her nightgown was stained with a wide brown patch of dried blood.

  The technician who had been collecting particles from the carpet switched off her vacuum cleaner and stood up, so that apart from the crinkly sound of her oversized Tyvek suit, the bedroom was silent. Bill continued to hold up Sister Bridget’s nightgown for a few moments and then carefully and respectfully covered her up again. He didn’t have to say anything. Katie knew that if Sister Bridget had bled when she was assaulted, her heart had still been beating.

  3

  They went back down to the vestibule, where Noel Pardoe was waiting with Nevina Cormack. The director of nursing was a short woman with thick-rimmed spectacles and a severe black bob with streaks of grey in it, cut high at the back of her neck. She was wearing a nubbly grey cardigan which looked as if she had knitted it herself, and as she came forward to introduce herself, Katie could smell a strong musky perfume that didn’t seem to sit with her skin type at all.

  ‘I’m sorry to confirm that Sister Bridget was deliberately suffocated,’ said Katie.

  ‘Oh. So she didn’t pass from natural causes?’ asked Nevina. ‘She wasn’t at all well, you know.’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not. She was physically assaulted and then asphyxiated with her pillow.’

  Nevina crossed herself. ‘That’s awful!. I can’t imagine who might have done such a thing! I told your sergeant here that she had no visitors this morning and we saw nobody suspicious at all around the premises.’

  ‘Was Sister Bridget well liked here?’ Katie asked her.

  ‘Oh yes. Absolutely. She had her ways, of course. Most elderly people do. But she wasn’t disliked, let me say that.’

  ‘Please, she’s gone now,’ said Katie. ‘No matter what you say about her, you can’t hurt her, and if we’re going to find out who killed her, it’s very important that you tell me the truth.’

  Nevina glanced across at Noel. He made a face at her and shrugged, as if to say that she ought to be candid.

  ‘To be honest with you,’ she said, ‘she was inclined to be a little haughty.’

  ‘Haughty?’

  ‘Well, a lot of the time she forgot that she wasn’t running the Bon Sauveur Convent any more, and she seemed to believe that she was in charge of the whole nursing home. Our nurses were very patient with her, but she expected them to wait on her hand and foot, like, and never gave them a single word of thanks. There was one of our gentleman residents, too, and they were always arguing because she kept sitting in his chair in the TV room.’

  ‘We’ll have to have a word this gentleman,’ said Katie. ‘But it doesn’t sound as if anyone here bore enough of a grudge against Sister Bridget to suffocate her.’

  ‘We try to encourage a family atmosphere here,’ said Nevina. ‘Like I say, many of the residents do have their ways, and some of them are not aware of where they are, or even who they are, God protect them. But I certainly can’t see any of them doing what was done to Sister Bridget.’

  She stood there twitchily for a moment, squeezing and unsqueezing her fists. ‘If that’s all, then?’ she said. ‘It’ll be lunchtime soon and I have so much to be getting on with.’

  ‘Oh yes, please, carry on,’ Katie told her. ‘We may need to talk to you again, but that’ll do for the moment. We’ll be removing Sister Bridget’s body in a short while and taking her to the University Hospital for an autopsy. We’ll keep in touch with you so that you can inform any relatives or friends she may have had.’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ said Nevina. ‘She told me once that all of her brothers and sisters and cousins had died and she was alone in the world.’

  Katie and Detective Inspector O’Rourke and Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán went outside, and Detective O’Donovan came out to join them. The fog had lifted now and the wet car park was dazzling, so Katie put on her round-lensed sunglasses.

  ‘I’ve questioned almost all of the residents now, ma’am,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘About a third of them make some sort of sense, but like Nevina said, the rest of them don’t know one end of a knife from the other.’

  ‘Maybe one of them could have suffered some kind of psychotic episode?’ Katie suggested.

  ‘Theoretically, like, I suppose it’s possible. But none of them that I’ve interviewed so far would have had the physical strength to hold Sister Bridget down and spiflicate her, even though she was so old and feeble. Most of them couldn’t wave their arms to swat a wazzer.’

  ‘What about visitors, or intruders?’ asked Detective Inspector O’Rourke.

  ‘Nobody saw anybody coming to see Sister Bridget this morning,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallan. ‘In any case, they don’t usually allow visitors until the residents have had their lunch, which is about twelve. If they get too excited or upset it puts them off their food. There’s a CCTV recording from the reception area, though, and we’ll be running through that. The only other access into the building is through the garden gate, and that’s always k
ept locked to stop the residents from wandering off.’

  ‘Do you think the motive was sexual?’ said Katie, as she walked back towards her car.

  Detective Inspector O’ Rourke shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t have thought so. I mean, I’ve come across a few cases where sexual predators have a taste for ladies of a certain age, and more than a few cases where priests have taken advantage of elderly nuns. It could be a bit of both, admittedly, but that figurine – that definitely leads me to think that the motive was more religious than sexual.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. ‘It’s like a deliberate blasphemy. Like, your religion hurt me so I’m going to use your religion to hurt you back.’

  ‘You might be on the right track,’ said Katie. ‘It’s conceivable, of course, that the offender could have been nothing more than a header. On the other hand, it does seem more likely that somebody wanted to take their revenge on Sister Bridget, for some grievance or other.’

  She paused. ‘Maybe they weren’t looking for revenge on Sister Bridget herself – not personally, like – but on the nuns of Bon Sauveur, or nuns in general. When you think of those priests who were murdered in revenge for abusing young boys – ’

  She opened her car door and said, ‘Kyna, why don’t you go up to the Bon Sauveur Convent and ask a few questions about Sister Bridget? I doubt if there’s anybody still there who knew her, but she might still have a reputation. There might be stories about her, and there must be records.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. ‘I’ll get up there directly. It’ll only take us another half-hour to finish off our interviews with all of the residents here. Especially the chair fellow. I can remember how my grandpa used to get pure tick if anybody sat in his favourite seat.’

  ‘Fair play,’ said Katie. ‘People have been killed for less than that, after all.’

  * * *

  She returned to the station and put on the electric kettle in her office to brew herself a mug of ginger tea. As she poured the boiling water into it, her iPhone pinged. It was a text message from John, asking her if she would be finished early enough for them to have supper that evening at the Eastern Tandoori.

  She hadn’t yet told him that she was pregnant. She hadn’t been able to think how she was going to explain it to him. He had come all the way back from San Francisco to be with her and mend their relationship, and he had sworn that he hadn’t been unfaithful to her with any other woman while he had been away. Sooner or later she would have to tell him, though, and she would also have to tell him that the baby’s father had been her next-door neighbour, and that he had eventually turned out to be a wife-beater.

  So far she had managed to conceal her morning sickness, too, just as she had pretended to Detective Inspector O’Rourke that she was feeling unwell because had she eaten a bad prawn at an Indian restaurant. It had been the most nauseating thing she had been able to think of, but now John wanted to go for a curry. The Eastern Tandoori had been one of her favourite restaurants, on the first floor on Emmet Place overlooking the river, but now the very thought of it made her feel queasy. In her imagination, she could even smell fenugreek.

  She sat down at her desk and texted back: Might be held up. Sorry. Major case just come up. Prob. have to make do w. takeaway. XXX.

  She was still texting when Chief Superintendent Denis MacCostagáin came in, as tall and round-shouldered and mournful as ever. Detective Horgan called him ‘Chief Superintendent Aingesoir’ behind his back, which meant ‘Anguished’ because he always appeared to be so sad. Since he had been promoted, though, he had taken to his new position very comfortably. He was mournful, but he was highly organized and so methodical that sometimes he could make Katie itch with impatience. However, he was not at all misogynistic. He talked to Katie in the same dreary drawn-out tones as he talked to all of his other officers, and showed her no prejudice – although he showed her no favours, either.

  He came up to her desk with a torn-off sheet of notepaper in his hand and studied it for a few moments before he said anything, as if he wasn’t at all sure where he had found it.

  ‘There’s been some dead horses found,’ he said at last.

  ‘Dead horses?’ Katie asked him. ‘Where exactly?’

  ‘Down at the foot of the cliffs at Nohaval Cove. Twenty-three of them, according to Kenneth Kearney. A member of the public reported it and Kenneth sent one of his ISPCA officers to investigate. The officer found one animal still alive but in a very poor condition with three of its legs broken, so he put it down.’

  ‘Nohaval Cove?’ said Katie. ‘Those are fierce steep, those cliffs there. How did the horses get down there? They weren’t driven over, were they?’

  ‘Kenneth seems to think so. Either driven over or thrown over bodily. It’s near on eighty-five metres from the cliff top down to the beach, so it’s a miracle that even one of them survived it.

  Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin checked his wristwatch, even though there was a clock on Katie’s office wall. ‘How are you fixed?’ he asked her. ‘The thing of it is the media are all gathering there and I know how good you are with the media. It’ll show how concerned we are, too, if we send out a senior officer. You know that the public get much more upset about cruelty to animals than they do about women and children being mistreated.’

  ‘You’re not wrong about that, sir,’ said Katie. She stood up and said, ‘Okay, then, I’ll take Horgan and Dooley with me. I imagine you’ve sent out a patrol car already?’

  ‘Three altogether. Two from here and one from Carrigaline. And Bill Phinner’s sending out a technical team. I want to get those cliffs cordoned off as soon as possible. When word of this gets around there’s going to be the usual crowd of rubberneckers and we don’t want any of them taking the high dive off the top.’

  When Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin had left, Katie tried to sip her ginger tea, but it was scalding hot and she had to leave it. She hadn’t eaten this morning because she had been so sick, so she was pleased that she had at least made herself a cold chicken and soda bread sandwich, the leftovers from last night’s supper. She took the foil packet out of her desk drawer and put it into her satchel.

  4

  The rain had passed over by the time Katie reached Nohaval Cove, although the wind was still strong, and she tugged up the hood of her duffel coat as she climbed towards the grassy edge of the cliffs. Detectives Horgan and Dooley followed close behind her, their raincoats noisily flapping.

  Three gardaí were knocking metal stakes into the ground and unrolling blue and white crime scene tape, while five more were standing around talking to an ISPCA officer and two technicians in white Tyvek suits. They were all stamping their feet and jigging up and down to keep warm, so that they looked as if they were performing an old-style step dance.

  Two officers had managed to drive their Land Cruiser close to the path that led down to the beach, but everybody else had parked in a line along the muddy farm track – two patrol cars, a blue animal rescue ambulance, an estate car and a van from the Technical Bureau, and three cars which Katie recognized as belonging to news reporters. There was no sign yet of a TV outside broadcast van.

  As she approached, the guards all stopped jigging and respectfully stepped back, while Sergeant Kevin O’Farrell came forward to greet her. He was a big, blocky man, with bright sandy hair and a red face that always seemed to be close to bursting.

  ‘Glad you could make it out here, ma’am,’ he told her. ‘The press over there, they’ve been coming at me with all kinds of awkward questions, like do I think that Travellers were responsible for tossing these horses off the cliff.’

  ‘Okay, and what did you say?’ Katie asked him.

  ‘I’ve told them no comment just at the moment. The last time I talked to the press about Travellers was when they ran that sulky race up the main Mallow Road, and I got myself corped for what I said about that.’

  ‘Oh yes, I remember,’ said Katie. ‘You
must never forget, sergeant, that everything the Travellers do is traditional. Traditional fighting, traditional shoplifting, traditional trespass. I don’t know if throwing horses off the top of cliffs is traditional, but I expect we’ll find out soon enough. Is this the inspector from the ISPCA?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Sergeant O’Farrell. He beckoned the inspector to come forward – a small, neat man with a dark-brown beard. He had the gentlest brown eyes that Katie had ever seen, almost Jesus-like, and she could easily imagine him gathering abandoned puppies in his arms or leading broken-down donkeys into peaceful fields.

  ‘Tadhg Meaney,’ he said, taking off his glove and holding out his hand. ‘Normally I’m based at the Victor Dowling Equine Rescue Centre at Dromsligo. Kenneth Kearney called me this morning and asked me to come down here. It’s appalling – totally shocking. I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire nine years of working for the ISPCA. Never.’

  ‘I was told one horse was still alive,’ said Katie.

  ‘Barely. I doubt if it would have survived another twelve hours. I shot it. Quickest way.’

  ‘Do you want to take us down to the beach so that we can have a look?’

  ‘Of course. But be careful. It’s very steep and slippy and I nearly took a hopper myself. It’s better if I go first.’

  Tadhg Meaney led Katie and Detectives Horgan and Dooley to the deep cleft in the rocks where the path down to the beach began. Then the four of them made their way down to the cove, clinging to the rocks and gorse bushes to stop themselves from losing their footing. Detective Horgan had bought himself a new pair of tan brogues only the day before yesterday and he swore under his breath all the way down.

  ‘Less of the effing and blinding if you don’t mind, Horgan,’ said Katie, as they came to the most precipitous part of the climb. ‘You can indent for a new pair when you get back to the station.’