A Terrible Beauty Read online

  "Have Jimmy talk to his Traveler friends they might know something."

  "And me?"

  "You know what I'm going to ask you to do. Go and have a drink with Eugene Ó Béara."

  "You don't think he's really going to tell me anything, do you?"

  "If the Provos had a hand in this, no. But you might persuade him to confirm that they didn't, which would save me a whole lot of time and aggravation and a few hundred pounds of wasted budget."

  4

  It was nearly ten o'clock when she finally got home, turning into the gates of their bungalow in Cobh , and parking her Mondeo next to Paul's Pajero 4x4. The rain was falling from the west as soft as thistledown. Paul still hadn't drawn the curtains, and as she walked up the drive she could see him in the living room, pacing up and down and talking on the phone. She tapped on the window with her door key, and he lifted his whiskey tumbler in salute.

  She let herself in and was immediately pounced on by Sergeant, her black Labrador , his tail pattering furiously against the radiator like a bódhrán drum.

  "Hallo, boy, how are you? Did your daddy take you for a walk yet?"

  "Haven't had the time, pet," called Paul. "I've been talking to Dave MacSweeny all evening, trying to sort out this Youghal contract. I'll take him out in a minute."

  "Poor creature. He'll be ready to burst."

  Katie pried off her shoes and hung up her coat and went through to the living room. It was brightly lit by a crystal chandelier, with mock-Regency furniture, all pink cushions and white and gilt. The walls were hung with gilt-framed reproductions, seascapes mostly, with yachts tilting against the wind. One corner of the room was dominated by an enormous Sony widescreen television, with a barometer on top of it in the shape of a ship's wheel. In the opposite corner stood a large copper vase filled with pink-dyed pampas grass.

  Paul said, "Okay, Dave. Grand. I'll talk to you first thing tomorrow. That's right. You have my word on that."

  Katie opened up the white Regency-style sideboard and took out a bottle of Smirnoff Black Label. She poured herself a large drink in a cut-crystal glass and then went over to draw the curtains. Sergeant followed her, sniffing intently at her feet.

  Paul wrapped his arms around her waist and gave her a kiss on the back of the neck. "Well, now. How's everything? I saw you on the TV news at eight o'clock. You looked gorgeous. If I wasn't married to you already I would have called the TV station and asked for your phone number."

  She turned and kissed him back. "I'd have had you arrested for harassment."

  Paul Maguire was a short, pillowy man, only two or three inches taller than she was, with a chubby face and dark-brown curly hair that came down over the collar of his bright green shirt in the 1980s style that used to be called a "mullet." His eyes were bright blue and slightly bulging and he always looked eager to please. He hadn't always been overweight. When she had married him seven and a half years ago he had taken a fifteen-inch collar and a thirty-inch waist and had regularly played football for the Glanmire Gaelic Athletic Association.

  But five years ago his construction business had suffered one serious loss after another, and his confidence had taken a beating from which he hadn't yet recovered. These days he spent most of his time trying to make quick, profitable fixes-wheeling and dealing in anything from used Toyotas to cut-price building supplies. There were too many late nights, too many pub lunches with men in wide-shouldered Gentleman's Quarters suits who said they could get him something for next to nothing.

  "Did you eat, in the end?" Katie asked him.

  "I had a ham-and-cheese toastie at O'Leary's. And a packet of dry-roasted."

  "That's not eating, for God's sake."

  "Oh, don't worry about it. I don't have much of an appetite, if you must know."

  "The whiskey's killed it, that's why."

  "Come on, now, Katie, you know what pressure I've been under, working this deal out with Dave MacSweeny."

  "I wouldn't mention Dave MacSweeny and a decent man on the same day. I don't know why you have anything to do with him."

  "He went inside just the once, and what was that for? Receiving a stolen church piano. Not exactly Al Capone, is he?"

  "He's still a chancer."

  She went through to the kitchen, with Sergeant still pursuing her feet. Paul followed her as she opened the bread bin and took out a cut bran loaf. "This is always the way, isn't it? I'm married to the only female detective superintendent in the whole of Ireland , so no matter what I do I have to conduct myself like a saint."

  "Not a saint, Paul. Just a law-abiding citizen who doesn't have any dealings with people who hijack JCBs from public roadworks and smuggle cigarettes through the quays and steal lorryloads of car tires from Hi-Q Motors."

  Paul watched her in frustration as she cut herself a thick slice of red cheddar and started to slice up some tomatoes. "I'm doing my best, Katie. You know that. But I can't check the credentials of everybody I do business with, can I? They wouldn't give me the time of day if I did. It's bad enough you being a cop."

  Katie sprinkled salt on her sandwich and cut it into quarters. "Hasn't it ever occurred to you that my being a cop is precisely why they do business with you? Who's going to touch you, garda or villain, when you're Mr. Detective Superintendent Kathleen Maguire?"

  Paul was about to say something else, but he stopped himself. He followed Katie back into the living room, stumbling over Sergeant as he did so. "Would you ever hump off, you maniac?"

  Katie sat down and took a large bite of sandwich, using the remote to switch on the television. Paul sat beside her and said, "Anyway, forget about Dave MacSweeny. How was your day? What's all these skeletons about? They said on the news there was nearly a dozen."

  Katie's mouth was full of sandwich, but with eerie timing her own face suddenly appeared on the screen, standing in the afternoon gloom up at Meagher's Farm, and she turned the volume up."We can't tell yet how long these people have been buried here, or how they died. We're not excluding any possibility at all. We could be looking at a mass execution or a series of individual murders or even death by natural causes. First of all the remains have to be examined by the state pathologist, and as soon as he's given us some indication of the time and cause of death, you can be sure that we'll be pursuing our inquiries with the utmost rigor."

  "There," said Katie. "Now you know as much as I do."

  "That's it? You don't have any clues at all?"

  "Nothing. It could have been an innocent family who died of typhus, and who were buried on the farm because they couldn't afford the funerals. Or it could have been eleven fellows who upset somebody nasty in the Cork criminal fraternity."

  "I hope you're not making a point."

  "No, Paul. I'm very tired, that's all. Now how about you taking Sergeant out to do his business, so that we can go to bed and get some sleep?"

  While Paul put on his raincoat and took Sergeant for his run, Katie went through to the small room at the back of the house where she kept her desk and her PC. They still called it The Nursery, although they had stripped off the pale blue wallpaper, and the sole reminder of little Seamus was a small color photograph taken on his first and only birthday.

  She took her nickel-plated Smith & Wesson .38 revolver out of the flat TJS holster on her hip and locked it in the top drawer of her desk. Then she sat for a long time staring at her reflection in the gray screen of her computer. When she was young she used to sit on the window seat at night, looking out of the window, and imagine that there was a ghostly girl looking back at her out of the darkness. She even used to talk to her reflection, sometimes.Who are you, and what are you doing, floating in the night, and why do you look so sad?

  She didn't fully understand why, but today's discovery up at Meagher's Farm had given her a feeling of deep disquiet as if something terrible was about to happen. The last time she had felt anything like this was late last spring, when the coast guard had discovered the body of a Romanian woman, washed up on th
e beach at Carrigadda Bay , in her multi-colored dress. During the course of the next few weeks, all along the coastline as far as Kinsale, they had discovered thirty-seven more. Each woman had paid €2,000 to be smuggled illegally into Ireland , but they had been thrown into the sea a hundred yards offshore, with all of their belongings, and none of them could swim.

  During the night, Paul rolled over onto his back and started to snore. Katie elbowed him and hissed, "Shut up, will you?" and he stopped for a while, but then he started up again, even louder. She buried her head under the duvet and tried to get back to sleep, but all the time she could hear that high, repetitive rasping.

  She found herself walking through a dark, dripping abattoir. She wasn't aware that she was asleep. Somewhere close by she could hear a shrill chorus of band saws, and the sound of men whistling as they worked.

  She turned a corner and found herself on the killing floor. Five or six slaughter men were standing around steel-topped tables, wearing long leather aprons and strangely folded linen hats. They were nonchalantly cutting up carcasses, and tossing them into heaps. Arms on one heap, legs on another, heads in the opposite corner.

  Katie walked toward them, even though the floor was slimy with connective tissue and she could feel the blood sticking to her bare feet. As she came closer, she suddenly saw that the carcasses were human-men, women, and children.

  She came up behind one of the slaughter men and lifted her hand to touch him on the shoulder. "Stop," she mouthed, but no sound came out. He was lining up a decapitated human head, ready to saw it in half.

  "Stop," she repeated, still silently. At that moment, the decapitated head opened its eyes and stared at her. It started to jabber and babble, and with a thrill of horror she realized that it was trying to explain to her what had happened up at Meagher's Farm.

  "The Gray-Dolly Man! You have to look for the Gray-Dolly Man!"

  "Stop! I'm a police officer!" Katie screamed at the slaughter man. But without hesitation he pushed the head into his band saw. There was a screech of steel against bone, and Katie's face was sprayed with blood.

  Katie woke up with a jolt. Paul was still snoring, and rain was spattering against the window. She waited for a few minutes, then she climbed out of bed and went through to the kitchen for a drink of sparkling Ballygowan water. She could see herself reflected in the blackness of the window as she drank directly out of the neck of the bottle. The ghost again, looking back at her.

  You need a break, she told herself. She and Paul hadn't had a holiday since February, when they had taken a cheap package to Lanzarote for ten days and it had rained for nine of them. Or maybe she needed a different kind of break. A break from her entire life. A break from pain and violence and kicking down doors to damp-smelling apartments. A break from her guilt about little Seamus.

  But she couldn't forget those eleven skulls, lined up higgledy-piggledy beside the excavation where the rest of their bodies were strewn. And she couldn't forget those little rag dolls, dangling from their thighbones. Eleven people, deserving of justice. She just prayed to God that they hadn't suffered too much.

  5

  Wednesday was colder but very much brighter, and Katie had to wear sunglasses when she drove into the city. The roads were shining silvery wet from the early morning rain, and the Lee was glittering like a river of broken glass.

  She took the road that ran alongside the quays, where red-and-white tankers and cattle ships were moored, as well as a three-masted German training clipper. The river divided into two branches as it reached the large Victorian customhouse, so the center of the city was built on an island less than a mile wide and two miles long, connected by more than a dozen bridges and crisscrossed with narrow, devious streets and hidden lanes.

  The buildings along the river were painted in greens and oranges and blues, which gaveCork the appearance of somewhere inDenmark , rather than the late-Victorian English-built city it actually was.

  Katie drove past city hall and turned south onAnglesea Street to the modern concrete block of the Garda headquarters. As she climbed out of her car in the car park, she saw seven hooded crows sitting on the barbed-wire fence at the back. They stayed there even when she walked close by, their feathers ruffled by the sharp early morning breeze, their eyes as black as buttons.

  She remembered that one of the nuns at Our Lady of Lourdes had told her that crows had once been white, but when Noah sent a crow from the ark to look for land, it had never returned, so God had tarred its feathers so that it looked as black as Satan.

  She collected a plastic cup of cappuccino from the machine at the end of the corridor, and then walked along to her office. Sergeant Jimmy O'Rourke was standing outside her door waiting for her in a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  "Dr. Reidy's office sent us an E-mail this morning. I'll go up to the airport to meet him at half past eleven."

  She hung up her raincoat. Today she was wearing a green jacket in herringbone tweed and a black sweater. "That's okay," she said. "I'd like to pick him up myself."

  "Patrick's left a printout of missing persons on your desk. I've sent Dockery and O'Donovan out to call on all of the farms around the Meagher place. But for what it's worth, I heard something that could be interesting. I called up to the halting site at Hollyhill last night, and one of the Travelers happened to mention that Tómas Ó Conaill had been seen around Cork, him and some of his family."

  "Ó Conaill? That devil? I thought he was in Donegal."

  "He was, but he and his family haven't been seen since the middle of August at least. Never mind, wherever he is, I'll find him."

  "Thanks, Jimmy."

  Katie sat down at her desk and wrote "Tómas Ó Conaill" on her jotter, and underlined it three times. Two years ago, she had arrested Tómas Ó Conaill for a vicious attack on a pregnant girl in Mallow, almost disemboweling her with a chisel, but nobody had been prepared to testify against him, not even the girl herself. He was intelligent and charismatic, but he was an out-and-out sociopath who gave the Traveling people a bad name that they didn't deserve-using their cant language and their intense secrecy to conceal his activities from the law.

  Tómas Ó Conaill. If anybody was capable of killing and dismembering eleven people, it was him.

  As she sipped her cappuccino, she glanced out of the window toward the new multistory car park at the back of the Garda station, and saw over a dozen crows clustered along the top of it.

  She stood up and went to the window and stared at them. She had never been seriously superstitious, although she never walked under ladders. But all these crows on the car park roof strengthened her conviction that something bad was about to happen.

  She sat down again. Next to her computer terminal stood a framed photograph of herself and Paul, on their wedding day, four years ago. She had never noticed before that Paul's right eye seemed to be looking one way, while the left eye was looking another. She reached out and touched the photograph with her fingertips and whispered, "Sorry."

  At 7:35A.M. there was a rap at her open door and Chief Superintendent Dermot O'Driscoll came in, eating a piece of toast. He was a huge, sprawling man with a high white wave of hair and a pinkish-gray face like a joint of corned beef. His hairy white belly bulged out between his shirt buttons. He heaved himself into one of Katie's chairs and said, "Well, Kathleen? How's tricks? I hope you realize that the eyes of the world are on us."

  "I sawSky Newsthis morning, yes. But until I get Dr. Reidy's analysis-"

  "All right. It's just that the media are getting very impatient for fresh developments. And I've already had two calls fromDublin this morning, asking for progress reports."

  Katie liked Dermot, and trusted him. After she was unexpectedly promoted to detective superintendent, he had protected her from some very rancid criticism, especially from some of the male detectives who had been passed over. But she didn't care much what the press thought about her, unless they got their facts ass-about-face, and she was too impatient to get results to
share his constant concern about "presentation."

  "I'm sure we can handle it here, sir," she told him. "We have all the manpower and all the facilities we need. But I think there's more to this case than meets the eye and the last thing I want to do is jump to any lurid conclusions for the sake of amusing the media."

  "So where are we so far?"

  Katie held up the file that Detective Garda O'Sullivan had left for her. "In the past ten years, over four hundred and fifty people have gone missing without trace in theNorth Cork area, although never more than three together at any one time, and that was in 1997 near Fermoy. Even when eleven people or more have gone missing in a short space of time, there hasn't been any kind of connection or consistency between them. Summer, 1995: A forty-five-year-oldWaterford man disappeared from the bridge over the River Bride near Bridebridge. The next day a thirteen-year-old English girl vanished from her parents' caravan at Shanballymore. The same evening, a thirty-three-year-old electrician failed to return home to his family in Castletownroche. Eight other people went missing in the next two days. That's eleven in total. But they didn't have anything in common-not sex, or appearance, or age, or financial background, or even where they were last sighted, and none of them gave any evidence of being distressed or upset before they left."