White Bones: 1 (Katie Maguire) Read online

  “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.

  She took her raincoat off and left her shopping in the hall. Her father went into the living-room and poured out two glasses of sherry. “Sláinte,” he said, when she appeared. “You’re the best daughter a man could ever ask for.”

  “Sláinte.”

  They sat down side by side on the green velvet Victorian sofa. Over the fireplace hung a large dark oil-painting of people walking through a wood. On either side of the room there were small tables with assorted knick-knacks on them, glass paperweights and Meissen statuettes and a strange bronze figure of a man with a flute and a sack slung over his back. When she was young, Katie had always thought that he was the Pied Piper, whistling children away to the magical land beyond the mountain.

  “I saw you on the news,” said her father. His eyes had always been green, like hers, but now they were no particular color at all. Does everything fade, when you grow older, even your eyes?

  “Those skeletons up at Knocknadeenly,” she nodded. “Yes.”

  “You’re not taking your investigation any further, are you? Even if those women were murdered, there’s not much chance of the perpetrator still being alive today, is there? Or fit to stand trial, even if he is.”

  “Well, I’ll be talking to Dermot O’Driscoll tomorrow morning. He’ll probably close it down.”

  “But?”

  “I didn’t say ‘but’.”

  “I know you didn’t say it but don’t forget that I was a detective, too. Maybe I never made the exalted rank of detective superintendent, but I passed out from Templemore with top marks, just like you. And I can always tell when somebody has a ‘but’ on the tip of their tongue.”

  “All right. I do have a ‘but’. Those eleven women were ritually murdered for some particular purpose and I really want to know what that purpose was. I really, badly want to know. If I don’t find out – I don’t know, I’ll feel that I’ve let them all down – that they died and nobody ever cared.”

  Her father finished his sherry and put down his glass. “People kill other people for all kinds of unfathomable reasons. I once arrested a farmer in Watergrasshill for cutting a fellow’s head off with a scythe. Whack! One blow, just like that. He said that the fellow was trying to put the evil eye on him.”

  “We’re talking about eleven women here, dad.”

  “Well, I don’t know. You have to remember that Ireland in 1915 wasn’t anything like the Ireland that you know now. Times were very difficult. There was terrible poverty, there was oppression. There was superstition and there was very little education. Who knows why somebody killed eleven women.”

  “I wish I did.”

  Her father shook his head. “If I were you, I’d leave this investigation to the archivists and the archeologists.”

  “There was something else, dad. Something I didn’t release to the media. You have to promise me that you’ll keep it a secret.”

  “Oh, yes. I’ll ring the Echo right away.”

  “Every thighbone that we dug up had a hole drilled through it, at the thick end, where it connects with the pelvis. And every hole had a string knotted through it, and a little rag dolly on the end.”

  “A rag dolly? Now that is unusual. I never heard of anything like that before. What are they like, these dollies?”

  “They’re made out of torn strips of old linen, all about four or five inches tall, and pierced through with hooks and screws and rusty nails. More like an African fetish than anything you’d ever see in Ireland.”

  Her father frowned, and shook his head. “I never came across anything like that before. There used to be all kinds of rituals in Ireland, especially where the roads were bad, and among the Travelers. But if you ask me the only rituals now are television, and the National Lotto. You’re probably talking about something that died out years ago, and nobody remembers. My advice to you is leave this case alone. Hand it over to somebody who likes picking through historical stuff. Some retired inspector, I can give you a couple of names. It won’t do your career any good if you start looking as if you’re obsessed with some peculiar eighty-year-old mystery, believe me.”

  “I’d better start cooking,” said Katie. She got up and went into the large, old-fashioned kitchen with its pine cupboards and its green-and-cream tiles, and her father followed her, and sat on a wooden chair by the window.

  “How’s things at home?” he asked her.

  “You mean me and Paul?” She washed the lamb cutlets and dried them on kitchen-paper. “I’m not sure that I know. We don’t seem to be very close these days. Sometimes I think we don’t even speak the same language.”

  Her father looked at her narrowly as she started to chop onions on the thick pine chopping-board. “You’re hurting,” he said.

  “Hurting?”

  “You can’t fool me, Katie. You were always the quietest of the seven of you, but I could always tell when there was something troubling you.”

  “I’m not hurting, dad. I just wish I knew exactly where I stood.”

  “You haven’t maybe thought about another child?”

  “No, dad. I haven’t. I can’t replace Seamus. Besides, even if I did have another child… well, to be quite frank, I’m not at all sure that I’d want Paul to be his father.”

  Katie’s father pulled a face. “I don’t know what to tell you, love. It’s always seemed to me that you would make the very best of mothers.”

  “How can you say that I’m the best of mothers when I practically murdered my own son? I kissed him on the lips before I put him down to sleep. The doctor said that you can kill your child by kissing it on the lips.”

  Her father stood up, without a word, and put his arms around her, and squeezed her very tight. “Katie,” he said. “Katie.”

  He kept hold of her until the onions started to burn.

  12

  Fiona was suddenly woken up by the most shattering pain that she had ever felt in her life. She felt as if her right thigh had been forced through the grating of a white-hot furnace. She opened her mouth and tried to scream, but the pain was so horrifying that she couldn’t even draw breath, and she could utter only a choked-up, gargling sound.

  Oh God, she couldn’t bear it, she just couldn’t bear it. She tried to move her leg but it wouldn’t respond. She wrenched at the cords that fastened her wrists to the bedframe, and thrashed her head from side to side, but she couldn’t get free, and nothing helped to lessen the blazing agony that engulfed her hip.

  Again she tried to scream, and this time she managed a shrill, distorted whoop, and then another.

  The bedroom door opened with a sharp click. He stood in the doorway for a moment, smiling at her, and then he walked up to the side of the bed.

  “I told you that I was going to hurt you. Do you believe me now?”

  She stared up at him, her chest heaving. She opened and closed her mouth but she was speechless with pain.

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it, how much physical trauma we human beings can endure? You’d think that our brain would shut down once the pain reached a certain level, to prevent us from suffering any more. But it doesn’t, does it – as you can testify. Our minds allow us to experience almost unimaginable agony.

  He paused, and licked his lips, as if he could actually taste what she was feeling. “My father died of stomach cancer, you know, and he said that sometimes it hurt so much that the pain was almost beautiful. He said it was like a huge scarlet flower, opening up inside his very soul, one luxuriant petal after another.”

  Fiona swallowed, and swallowed again. “Please,” she panted.

  “Please what? Please let you go? Please give you some more aspirin? Please kill
you?”

  “Please.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t do anything for you. My hands are tied, so to speak, just as much as yours. I have to perform the ritual according to tradition. If I don’t, God alone knows what could happen. It’s all very well summoning something, you see, but you have to make sure that you can control it, once it appears.

  Fiona kept on staring at him, as if she could will him into releasing her, or at least give her something to relieve the pain. But all he did was reach out and lift one sweat-damp lock of hair away from her forehead, and smile.

  “You’ve been wonderful,” he said. “It’s a good thing you’re so physically fit. Physically fit, and beautiful, too. I couldn’t have asked for anybody better.”

  He walked around to the other side of the bed, and peered closely down at her right leg. “Have you looked at it yet? It’s amazing. Just like an anatomy lesson.”

  “What?” she said, in a blurry voice. She felt that she was going to lapse back into unconsciousness at any moment. The pain was now so overwhelming that she couldn’t believe that she was the one who was feeling it. There must be another Fiona, who was suffering so much.

  “Here,” he said. He leaned over her and lifted her head so that she could look down and see her leg. Through all of the pain, she could smell his underarm deodorant, like lavender. “There – what do you think? It’s extraordinary, isn’t it?”

  At first she couldn’t understand what she was seeing. Her left leg was normal, suntanned and muscular from jogging and swimming. But where her right leg was supposed to be, there was nothing but a long white thighbone, and a bare kneecap, and then two slender shinbones, and an anklebone, and a skeletal foot. All of these bones were scraped completely clean of flesh, except a few red shreds and thin white sinews which had been left to keep them loosely connected together. The newspapers underneath the bed were thickly splattered with blood.

  Fiona stared up at him in panic. “What have you done to me?” she panted. “What have you done?”

  “I’ve started to prepare you for the feeding,” he told her, easing her head back down onto the bedsprings.

  “What have you done to me, you bastard?”

  “Sssh, quiet,” he said, lifting his hand. “You’re going to need all of your strength for this ordeal, believe me.”

  “What, you’re not going to – ”

  “It takes time, and care, and everything has to be performed exactly according to ritual.”

  “Tell me what you’re going to do. Tell me!”

  “I’m going to prepare you as an offering to the greatest occult power that ever existed – ever.”

  “You’ll never get away with this. My father will find you and when he does I swear to God he’ll kill you with his bare hands.”

  He laughed. “Your father will never know who did this to you, ever. Even on his deathbed he will still be wondering who it was, and why he ever let you come to Ireland on your own. His torture will be far worse than yours.”

  “Oh God,” gasped Fiona. She was suddenly overwhelmed by another wave of pain, and went into shock. Her head fell back onto the bedsprings, and her face turned as white as wax. He stood watching her for a while, quite impassive, and then he went out to the living-room and pulled the mustard-colored throw off the couch. He came back and draped it over her to keep her warm.

  After all, he couldn’t have her dying.

  13

  Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll looked up from his desk and said, “Ah, Katie.” He picked up a green cardboard folder and handed it to her. “I’d like you to take over the Flynn investigation. Sergeant Ahern has been going around in ever-decreasing circles and I’m afraid that he’s going to disappear up his own rear end, which is probably what happened to Charlie Flynn.”

  Charlie Flynn was a well-known Cork businessman who had gone missing in the first week of October. His car had been found by the side of the road near Midleton, about ten miles east of the city, but there had been no sign at all of Charlie Flynn – not a footprint, not a bloodstain, nothing. He was the Lord Mayor’s brother-in-law, and so Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll was under persistent pressure from City Hall to find out what had happened to him.

  “What about our eleven skeletons?” asked Katie, opening the folder and flicking through the black-and-white photographs at the front. An empty black Mercedes, with its door wide open, from several different angles.

  “The Meagher’s Farm case? We’re going to have to close it down, of course – as an active file, anyway. I was thinking of passing the information over to Professor Gerard O’Brien at the university… he’s your man when it comes to folklore.”

  “But what happened at Meagher’s Farm, that wasn’t just folklore, sir. Eleven women were murdered.”

  “Of course they were. But what’s the point in pursuing their killer when he’s almost certainly deceased? Don’t you worry, Katie – even if the murderer never had to answer to an earthly court, he’ll have had to stand before God. There’s nothing more that you and I can do about it.”

  “I’d just like two or three more days on it, sir. The way those women were killed – it was so unusual that I think we need to find out what happened.”

  Dermot O’Driscoll shook his head, so that his jowls wobbled. “Sorry, Katie, it’s out of the question. Apart from the Flynn case, I want you to go over to the South Infirmary and have another chat with Mary Leahy. Detective Garda Dockery went to see her last night and he thinks that she may be ready to tell us who shot her Kenny.”

  Katie pursed her lips but she knew that there was little point in arguing. “All right,” she said. “But let me take the Meagher folder over to Professor O’Brien myself. I’d like to talk to him about it.”

  “You can, of course. But do try to make some progress with this Flynn investigation. It’s making us look like a bunch of culchies.”

  Dermot O’Driscoll had once worked for the Criminal Assets Bureau in Dublin, and he was especially sensitive to any gibes that he was now in charge of a rural police force. His old colleagues at Phoenix Park had even sent him a model of a tractor with a blue light on it.

  On the way out, Katie met Sergeant O’Rourke. “I think I have something for you, superintendent. Photocopies of the Cork Examiner from the summer of 1915 to the spring of 1916.”

  “Come through to my office,” said Katie. She spread the photocopies out on her desk, and put on her small steel-rimmed reading glasses. Jimmy had circled a dozen stories in red marker. Mysterious Disappearance of Rathcormac Woman. No Trace of Whitechurch Girl After Three Weeks. Mrs Mary O’Donovan Missing for Nine Days.

  There was a leader column, too, in which the newspaper’s editor spoke of “the local community’s grave concern at the spiriting-away of seven young women, all of whom were of spotless reputation and character. We hesitate to point a finger without evidence of any kind, not even a single body having been discovered, but we would remind our readers of the words of Bacon, who wrote that ‘a man who studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green’.”

  “What do you think he’s trying to suggest here?” asked Katie. “That the women were taken as an act of retaliation?”

  “It seems like it, I’d say. But he doesn’t name any names.”

  “Well, that’s what Jack Devitt was telling us, too. Maybe this newspaper editor had a good idea of who was abducting these women, but couldn’t say it openly, for fear of a libel action, or worse.”

  “I don’t see how we can ever find out who it was. Not after eighty years.”

  “Well, maybe Professor O’Brien can come up with something. The chief superintendent’s closed the case and we’re passing it over to him.”

  “Oh. You won’t want to be talking to Tómas Ó Conaill, then?”

  “You’ve found Ó Conaill? Where?”

  “I had a tip-off late last night that he and his family have a Winnebago and three mobile homes parked on a derelict farm about a mile outside of Tower, on the Blarney road.�
��

  “Well, no… I don’t suppose I need to talk to him now. But do me a favor, Jimmy, and keep a sharp eye on him, will you?”

  “Oh, yes. I’ve told the fellows up at Blarney Garda station, too, so that they know where to look for absconding road-drills and runaway tarmac spreaders, and any other property that goes for a walk.”

  It was so sunny that morning that Professor O’Brien suggested they take a walk through Lee Fields, alongside the river. On the western side of the city the waters of the Lee were much clearer, and they slid over a wide, glassy weir. On the opposite bank, on a high hill, stood the gray Victorian spires of of Our Lady’s Hospital, once a lunatic asylum, the building with the longest frontage in Europe.

  Children scampered and screamed around the gardens, and a snappy breeze was blowing through the willow trees, so that they glittered in the sunshine. Katie tied a green silk scarf around her head to keep her ears warm.

  “Does me good to get out,” said Professor O’Brien. “I seem to spend my life in front of a computer screen these days.” He was quite young, only about 34 or 35, although he was balding on top and he had combed his hair over to try and hide it. He was small, too, with little pink hands that peeked out from the cuffs of his brown corduroy overcoat like pigs’ trotters – what the Cork people call crubeens.

  Katie said, “Gerard – I want you to think of this as an active murder investigation, rather than just an academic exercise. It may be eighty years since these women were killed, but they were real women and they were murdered for some very specific reason.”

  “Do you really think that it was anything to do with the British Army, taking their revenge?”

  “It’s a possibility. After all, the Crown Forces burned most of the city of Cork down to the ground, out of revenge. But it’s these little rag dollies that don’t make any sense.”

  “Well, I can’t say offhand that I’ve ever come across anything like them,” said Professor O’Brien. “They don’t seem to relate to any particular culture or any particular period. Before we were converted to Christianity, we used to have dozens of different gods, and all kinds of extraordinary ceremonies to appease them. But I’ve never found any mention of human sacrifice, or dismemberment, and I’ve never seen these particular dolls before.