White Bones Read online

  “I’ll do anything you want. I can call my father and ask him to send you money.”

  “Money?”

  “I don’t know… anything you want. Anything.”

  “I’ll see you later,” he said. “And, really, don’t bother to scream.”

  9

  The afternoon went past like a strange grainy dream. Fiona heard his car scrunching out of the driveway in front of the cottage, and then the only sounds were the cawing of the crows and the whispering of the ivy against the window.

  For the first five or ten minutes she struggled furiously to get herself free, but he had tied her with such complicated knots that all she managed to do was tug them even tighter. In spite of what he had said, she tried shouting for help, but it was obvious that he had been telling her the truth. The cottage was far too isolated for anybody to be able to hear her.

  She shivered with cold and wept with self-pity. Her right leg had turned a pale turquoise color and she couldn’t feel it at all. She tried talking to her mother, in the hope that her mother would somehow sense that she was in danger, like people did in Stephen King stories.

  But then there was nothing but the crows, and the surreptitious sniggering of the ivy, and the throb, throb, throb of her circulation in her ears.

  He came back in less than an hour. He didn’t go straight in to see her. Instead, he went directly to the kitchen and heaped his bags of groceries onto the Formica-topped table. “How are we feeling?” he called, but she didn’t reply. He filled the kettle and put it onto the old-fashioned gas-stove, lighting the hob with a newspaper spill. Then he put away his cans of baked beans and his packets of biscuits, slamming the cupboard doors. He hadn’t bought much in the way of frozen food: there was a refrigerator in the corner which rattled and coughed like a wardful of emphysema victims but only managed to keep food somewhere just below tepid.

  He made himself a mug of instant coffee, and stirred it with an irritating tinkle. He could hear Fiona weeping quietly in the bedroom. On the wall beside the stove hung a yellowed calendar for 1991, with a picture of Jesus on it, entering Jerusalem in triumph. As he sipped his coffee, he leafed through the months. On June 11, somebody called Pat had died. On June 14, Pat had been buried. Requiescat in pace, Pat, he thought.

  Eventually, he rinsed his mug and left it upside-down on the draining-board. Then he went back into the bedroom, and switched on a dazzling Anglepoise lamp beside the bed. Fiona flinched and turned her face away from it.

  “Well, then! Sorry it’s so bright, but I have to see what I’m doing.”

  “Please,” she sobbed. “I can hardly feel my leg at all.”

  “Well, that’s good. That’s very good. From your point of view, anyhow.”

  “You’re not going to hurt me, are you?”

  He looked down at her with a thoughtful expression on his face. “Yes,” he said. “I probably am.”

  “Can’t you give me something to deaden the pain? Aspirins, anything.”

  “Of course. I’m not a sadist.”

  “Then why?” she said, her voice rising in hysteria. “Why are you doing this? If you’re not a sadist, why?”

  “There are things I need to know, that’s all.”

  “What things? I don’t understand.”

  “There are other worlds, apart from this. Other existences. Darker places, inhabited by dark monstrosities. I need to know if they can be summoned. I need to know if any of the rituals really work.”

  “Oh dear God, why do you have to do it to me?”

  “No special reason, Fiona. You were there, that’s all, standing by the side of the road. Fate. Kismet. Or just plain shitty luck.”

  “But you don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me. How can you kill me?”

  “If it wasn’t you, it would have to be somebody else.”

  “Then let it be somebody else. Please. Not me. I don’t want to die.”

  This time he said nothing, but left the room again, and came back a minute later with a mug of water and a brown glass bottle of aspirin tablets. He held the tablets out in front of her in the palm of his hand, as if he were feeding an animal, and she bent her head forward and choked them down, three and four at a time, crunching some of them between her teeth and swallowing some of them whole. All the time she was mewling and sobbing and the tears were streaming down her cheeks.

  “Imagine that you’re going on a journey,” he said, and his voice became curiously monotonous, as if he were trying to hypnotize her. “Imagine that you’re going to be traveling not through some undiscovered country, but through the landscape of your own suffering. Instead of forests you will walk through the thorns and brambles of tearing nerves, and instead of snowy mountain-tops, you will see the white peaks of utter agony.”

  He held the mug against her lips and she drank as much water as she could, even though most of it ran down her chin.

  “I’ll do anything,” she said. “Just let me go, please. I’ll do anything at all.”

  “You don’t understand, Fiona. I simply want you to lie back and experience what’s coming to you.”

  Maybe it was the effect of the aspirins; or maybe it was shock, but Fiona suddenly stopped sobbing and lowered her head, and stared at the end of the bed with oddly unfocused eyes. Maybe it was despair – the realization that no matter how much she begged, he was going to kill her anyway.

  There was a brown leather briefcase standing on the floor next to the cheap walnut-veneered wardrobe. He picked it up, and sat down on the side of the bed-frame, and opened it. Fiona didn’t take her eyes away from the end of the bed, even when he produced a case of surgical instruments, a length of hairy twine, and a small white doll fashioned out of torn linen, pierced all over with fish-hooks and screws and tintacks.

  “This is a very ancient ritual,” he said. “Nobody knows exactly how far back it goes. But throughout the ages, its purpose has always been the same. To open the door to the other world, and coax some of its monstrosities to come through. Interesting, isn’t it, how men and women have always wanted to play with fire… to risk their lives and their sanity by calling up their worst nightmares? They could let their demons sleep in peace, but they insist on prodding them into wakefulness, like naughty children taunting a mad dog.”

  Fiona remained in a trancelike state as he opened up the flat, rectangular case of surgical instruments. It contained two bone-saws, a selection of scalpels, and a shining collection of stainless-steel knives. He took out a long-bladed scalpel, closed the case, and then stood up again.

  “I don’t know if you want to pray,” he said.

  10

  Katie and Liam were early for their three o’clock appointment with Eugene Ó Béara. They pushed their way through the battered red doors of The Crow Bar in Blackpool, across the street from Murphy’s Brewery. The bar was crowded and foggy with cigarette-smoke. A hurling match between Cork and Kilkenny was playing on the television at deafening volume, while the pub radio was tuned equally loudly to an easy-listening station.

  A few months ago, the pub doors would have been locked between 2 and 4 for “The Holy Hour,” even though it would have been just as jampacked inside, but the Irish licensing laws had been relaxed during the summer. Katie and Liam made their way along the darkly-varnished bar to a booth at the very back, partitioned from the rest of the pub by a wooden screen.

  Katie got some hard looks as she walked through the pub. Every man there knew who she was, and she recognized Eoin O’hAodhaire and both of the Twohig brothers, whom she had personally arrested for car theft in her first year as detective sergeant. Micky Cremen was there, too, sitting in the far corner glowering at her over his pint. Micky had tried to start up his own protection racket until Eamonn Collins had got to hear of it; and Micky had been lucky to end up in prison instead of the Mercy Hospital.

  “What can I fetch you folks?” asked Jimmy the barman.

  “We’re fine for now, thanks,” said Katie. “We’re waiting for som
e friends.”

  “Friends, is it?” said Jimmy, as if he couldn’t believe that gardaí could have any friends, and if they did they certainly wouldn’t find a welcome in The Crow Bar. But then the front door opened and Eugene Ó Béara and another older man walked in, with a huge Irish wolfhound on a lead. The pub noticeably hushed, and everybody paid extra attention to the hurling match, or to what they were saying to their friends, or to anything else at all except for Eugene Ó Béara and his white-haired companion, and his giant dog.

  Eugene came directly down the length of the bar and slid into the booth next to Katie; while the older man eased himself in beside Liam, facing her. Eugene was about 38 years old, with tight curly chestnut hair that was just beginning to turn gray, and the features of a plump, pugnacious baby. He wore a khaki anorak and a Blackpool GAA necktie, and he laid an expensive Ericsson mobile phone on the table in front of him.

  The older man had a hawklike face, and white hair cropped so short that Katie could see every bump and scar on his skull. She thought she recognized him but he didn’t introduce himself and neither did Eugene. His fingernails were very long and chalky and he wore three silver rings with Celtic insignia on them. His dog buried itself under the table and lay there with its spine pressed uncomfortably against Katie’s legs.

  “Eugene tells me you were asking him about some people gone missing,” said the older man. His voice sounded like somebody sandpapering a cast-iron railing.

  “That’s right. But that was before we found out how long they’d been dead. I expect you’ve seen it on the news. The pathologist estimates that they were probably killed more than seventy-five years ago.”

  “I saw that, yes. But that’s why I called Eugene about it and that’s why I’m here today.”

  Katie leaned forward expectantly but the old man sat back and noisily sniffed and didn’t volunteer anything more. Katie looked at Eugene and then she looked at Liam, and Liam made a little wobbling gesture with his hand to indicate that it might be a good idea to buy him a drink.

  “A glass of Beamish and a double Paddy’s, thanks,” the old man told her. He had caught Liam’s hand-wobble out of the corner of his eye.

  “Eugene? Guinness, isn’t it?” Katie asked, and Eugene gave her a barely-perceptible wink, as if he had got a fly in his eye.

  Everybody in the pub suddenly roared and cheered as Cork scored a goal, and the old man waited patiently for the noise to die down. Then he said, “I told Eugene that there haven’t been any killings like that in recent times, not eleven females, not to my knowledge. But when I saw it on the telly that they were buried there for nearly eighty years, that’s what rang a bell.”

  Jimmy the barman brought the old man’s Beamish over and he took a small sip and fastidiously wiped his mouth.

  “When he was alive, God bless his soul, my great-uncle Robert told me all kinds of stories about what the boys got up to in the old days. He said that in the summer of 1915 a bomb was planted by the British barracks wall up on Military Hill, and that it went off premature, and killed the wives of two of the British officers, and badly hurt another. Blew her arms off, that’s what great-uncle Robert told me.

  “A week after that, a young woman went missing from her home in Carrignava, and then two more girls from Whitechurch. By September there were five gone altogether, and of course the boys blamed the English for it, thinking they were taking their revenge for the officers’ wives. A sixth woman went on Christmas Day, and then three more before the end of January.

  “The boys hit back in February. They ambushed a British Army truck at Dillon’s Cross, and they shot two Tommies. You can read all about it in the history books. There was bad enough blood between the Irish and the English at that time, and all of this made it ten times worse. But girls went on disappearing, right up until the spring of 1916, around the time of the Easter Rising. No more went missing after that, but no trace of none of them was ever found, nowhere.”

  “How many altogether?” asked Katie.

  “Eleven exactly. Eleven, same as it said on the news, which was why I thought you ought to know.”

  “So what you’re suggesting is, the English could have murdered those girls.”

  “The dates tally, don’t they? And there was motive enough.”

  “You could be right, although it isn’t going to be easy to prove anything. I can’t see the British Army giving me much assistance, can you?”

  “Somebody must know what happened,” put in Eugene. “If those girls were taken by official order, that order must be somewhere on file, even after all these years. And even if they were taken unofficially, don’t tell me that nobody ever spoke about it or wrote about it.”

  “Long shot,” said Liam. “Very long shot. But at least it gives us a better idea of when the women were actually killed.”

  Katie thought about mentioning the rag dolls, in case they, too, rang a bell; but then she decided against it. The dolls were the only way she had of authenticating any evidence she was given.

  “I don’t suppose your great-uncle kept a diary of his experiences,” she said.

  The old man gave another sniff. “Couldn’t write. My father was the very first man in our family who was educated, God bless his memory. Very proud of it he was, too. And that’s why he made sure that I was given the gift of language.”

  “I know who you are now,” said Katie. “Jack Devitt. The Blood of My Fathers.”

  The old man smiled, and raised his glass to her. “You’re a very fine young lady. ’Tis a fierce pity you’re a cop.”

  They left Eugene Ó Béara and Jack Devitt to their drinks, and elbowed their way out of The Crow Bar into the gray, bright street outside. Steam was rising from the chimneys of Murphy’s Brewery and there was a pungent smell of malt and hops in the air, like the fumes from a crematorium.

  “What do you think?” asked Liam, as they crossed over to Katie’s Mondeo. “Accurate vernacular history or load of old Fenian codswallop?”

  “I don’t know. But I want you to initiate a search for anything that will tell us more about those eleven disappearances. Have Patrick go through the old police records and the newspaper morgues. Let’s see if we can find out what the women’s names were, and if any of them still have family that we can trace. If Devitt is correct, we should be able to confirm their identity through DNA tests.”

  “Okay, boss.”

  “I also want the deeds and titles of Meagher’s Farm, going back as far as you can. I’d like to know who owned that property, back in 1915.”

  “I’ll bet you money it was an Englishman.”

  11

  After she had dropped Liam in the city center, Katie drove to Monkstown to see her father. Monkstown stood on the western bank of Cork Harbor, and if she looked across the half-mile stretch of water to Cobh, she could see the dark elm trees that surrounded her own house on the eastern side. It was drizzling, and the ferry that plied between Monkstown and Cobh was barely visible in the mist.

  Her father owned a tall pale-green Victorian house that was perched on a hill with a fine harbor view. He kept a pair of binoculars in the bedroom so that he could watch the ocean liners and the cruise ships coming in and out. Since Katie’s mother had died, though, two years ago last July, the house had seemed damper and colder every time she visited it, and it seemed to Katie that her mother’s ghost had left it for ever.

  Paul had gone along the coast to Youghal “to sort out a bit of business,” so Katie had called her father and offered to cook him a lamb stew, which had always been one of his favorites, and one of her mother’s specialties. Katie had always loved cooking, especially Irish traditional cooking, and if she hadn’t joined the Garda she would have taken a cookery course at Ballymaloe House and opened her own restaurant. But none of her six brothers had wanted to be gardaí, and she alone had seen how deep her father’s disappointment was. When she had told him that she was going to carry on the McCarthy family tradition, and sign up for Templemore, his eyes
had promptly filled up with tears.

  She parked her car in the roadway by the gate, and climbed the steep steps to the front door. The drizzle was coming in soft and heavy now, and the front garden was dripping, with shriveled wisteria and long-dead dahlias. There was grass growing through the shingle path. When her mother was alive, the garden had always been immaculate.

  Her father took a long time to answer the door, and when he did it seemed for a moment that he didn’t recognize her. He was a small man – bent-backed now, and painfully thin, with wriggling veins on his forehead and his hands. He wore a baggy beige cardigan and worn-out corduroy slippers.

  “Well, you came,” he said, as if he were surprised.

  “I said I was going to come, didn’t I?”

  “You did. But sometimes you give me the feeling that you’re going to come and then you don’t.”

  “Dad, I didn’t just give you the feeling this time. I called you.”

  “So what are you doing on the doorstep?”

  “I’m getting rain down the back of my neck and I’m waiting for you to invite me in.”

  “You don’t need an invitation, Katie. This is your house, too.”

  She stepped into the large, gloomy hallway. The smell of damp was even worse than the last time she had visited, in September. There were two old chaise-longues on either side of the hallway, and a slow, lugubrious long-case clock. A wide, curving staircase led up to the upper floors. There were no flowers anywhere.

  She kissed him. His cheek was patchy and prickly, as if he hadn’t been shaving properly. “How are you keeping?” she asked him. “Are you eating properly?”

  “Oh, you know me and my incomparable omelets.”

  “Dad,” she said. She didn’t have to say any more. He was standing in the living-room doorway, half-silhouetted by the misty-gray light, sad, tired, still grieving. Nothing could bring her mother back, not even the lamb cutlets and the Kerr’s Pink potatoes she was carrying in her Tesco bag.