Blood Sisters Read online

  She approached the nun’s body, with Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán close behind her. The nun lay on her stomach with her head turned to the left, so that most of her face was visible. She was pale, with wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, and wisps of white hair showing from underneath her coif. As Sergeant Finlay had said, her eyes were wide open, the palest duck-egg blue, but spotted with tiny red petechial haemorrhages.

  ‘Think there’s any connection to Sister Bridget?’ asked Katie.

  ‘She’s a nun, and she’s elderly, and from the looks of her eyes she died of strangulation, but who knows? Maybe there’s no connection at all. What’s the date? Maybe it’s just open season on nuns.’

  They waited around for another twenty minutes until the Technical Bureau van arrived, as well as the chief technical officer, Bill Phinner, in his bronze estate car. Three technicians suited up on the bridge and were then helped to climb down to the river bank by the gardaí.

  ‘Well, well,’ said Bill Phinner. ‘I thought I’d seen everything. But a crash-landed nun? Jesus.’

  ‘The wind’s blowing from the south-south-west,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘That means she must have floated up the Glashaboy from Lota. Or it could have been even further. She could have come all the way across the river from the south side, Blackrock even.’

  ‘Kieran! I want at least three samples of gas before that fat feller totally deflates!’ Bill Phinner shouted out. One of his technicians gave him the thumbs up and clambered around to the other side of the bulging balloon, carrying a Gresham gas-sampling kit in a small black case. Sergeant Finlay looked up sharply, as if he had thought for a moment that Bill Phinner was referring to him.

  An ambulance arrived, but it took another hour before the technicians had finished photographing and measuring the nun’s body in situ. It was beginning to grow dark now, and a chilly evening wind was ruffling the surface of the river, so Katie raised the hood of her duffel coat and pulled on her thick brown woollen gloves.

  Two of the gardaí went to the Cafe Chino in the Glanmire bus park and came back with burgers and chips and buttered scones, and Tayto chocolate bars with bits of cheese and onion crisps in them, as well as polystyrene cups of coffee and tea and cans of soft drinks. Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán and Detective O’Donovan both hounded their burgers as if they hadn’t eaten for a week, and O’Donovan ate a Tayto bar, too, but all Katie could manage was a raisin scone and half a can of Coke Zero. She was beginning to feel very cold and tired.

  At last, one of the technicians climbed back up to the bridge and said, ‘She’s all ready to be moved now, sir. Do you want me to call the paramedics?’

  ‘Let’s go down first and take a look at the poor soul,’ said Bill Phinner, draining the last of his tea and perching his empty cup on the wall.

  He went down first, turning around now and again to give Katie a hand, with Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán and Detective O’Donovan following behind them. They gathered around the nun’s body, which was still lying face-down as she had landed. The last balloon was almost completely deflated now and hung drooping in the trees, like an elephant’s skin.

  Two of the technicians knelt down beside the nun and very carefully turned her over on to her back. They had already closed her eyelids, so that at least she wasn’t staring at the sky. Twenty or thirty horse chestnut leaves were stuck to her habit, yellow and brown and shiny red. One of the technicians shone a bright LED forensic flashlight on to them, and it was only than that they saw that the red leaves weren’t naturally red but bloodstained. The intense white light showed that her habit was soaked in blood, too.

  ‘Would you look at this?’ said Bill Phinner. He tugged on a pair of white latex gloves and crouched down beside the body. He took hold of her habit between finger and thumb and lifted it up, heavy and wet. They realized now that it had been cut apart all the way down the front, from the coif to the hem. As Bill Phinner folded the two sides apart, Katie could see the nun’s thin, pale legs, with squiggly blue varicose veins. There were drips and runnels of blood down her shins and her grey socks were soaked with blood.

  Without a word, Bill Phinner opened up the nun’s habit even further, right up to her collarbone, exposing her naked body in its entirety. Her breasts lay flat on either side of her chest, but from just below her breastbone her abdomen had been sliced wide open. Her intestines were bulging out and hanging halfway down her thighs in beige and bloody coils, and Katie could smell the sharp tang of bile and excrement.

  She stared at the nun with her hand pressed over her mouth. She had seen worse, but this was making her stomach muscles clench and unclench. She had seen a woman in Knocka whose husband had pressed her face against an electric hotplate for over half a minute. She had seen a man in Barnavara who had fallen up to his waist in a feed-mincing machine, and had been virtually chopped in half, but was still able to talk to the firefighters who were trying to extricate him with crowbars.

  But the sight of this disembowelled nun made her feel hot and sweaty and breathless, and she began to gag.

  ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. ‘What on earth kind of a devil did this?’

  Katie thought that she might be able to control her gagging, but she couldn’t. With her hand still pressed against her mouth, she stared at Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán with watering eyes. Then she turned around and bent over the water’s edge and splashed out a torrent of half-chewed scone and raisins and warm brown cola.

  Detective O’Donovan grasped her left arm to stop her from teetering forward into the river, while Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán put her arm around her shoulders. She waited, breathing deeply, until the spasms subsided.

  ‘Are you all right now?’ Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán asked her, and she nodded and stood up straight. Almost at once, though, her stomach convulsed again and she had to lean back over the river. This time she brought up nothing but saliva, but she still felt as if her insides had been twisted into a complicated knot.

  She stayed where she was for a minute or so, but at last she began to feel better. She took out a tissue to wipe her eyes and her mouth and blow her nose, and then she said, ‘Thanks. I’m fine now. Thanks a million.’

  ‘Let’s get one of these officers to drive you home,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘You’ve probably been overdoing it lately, the caseload you’ve got. Either that or you’ve eaten one of them salmon sandwiches from the station canteen.’

  ‘No, no, I’m grand altogether. I have to stay here and see this through.’

  Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán said, ‘No, ma’am. I know it sounds insubordinate, like, but I really think you should go home and take it easy for the rest of the day. I mean it.’

  She was holding Katie’s right hand with her left and looking directly into her eyes. Did she realize that Katie was pregnant? There was something in her tone of voice that suggested she had sensed a change in her lately – a change that wasn’t connected to dead horses, or suffocated nuns, or her relationship with John. Maybe it was just female intuition.

  ‘No, you’re all right,’ Katie told her. ‘And don’t worry about insubordination. I appreciate the thought.’

  ‘You’re sure? You needn’t go back to the station, I could have somebody come to your house tomorrow morning to pick you up.’

  ‘No, thanks a million. I didn’t have time for any lunch and it was just an attack of the gawks, that’s all.’

  They climbed back up to the bridge while the technicians took more photographs. Katie was still feeling nauseous and she made sure that she didn’t look back down at the nun’s body. Her mouth kept flooding with saliva, but she managed to suppress any more spasms.

  After another half-hour, the nun was zipped into a black vinyl body bag. She was then lifted up to the road, laid on a trolley, and wheeled over to the ambulance. Earlier in the day Dr O’Brien had come down to Cork from the State Pathologist’s Office in Dublin so that he could carry out a post-mortem on Sister B
ridget. Once he had finished with her, he would be able to turn his attention to this nun, too.

  Detective O’Donovan came over. ‘What about the horses, ma’am?’ he asked her. ‘I could drive over to Dromsligo now if you like and see what kind of progress they’re making.’

  Katie checked her watch, ‘Let me call that fellow from the ISPCA first. It’s getting a bit late now and they’re probably wrapping up for the day. I’ll probably be going over there myself tomorrow morning, unless something else comes up. It’s not a very nice thing to say, but dead humans have to take precedence over dead horses.’

  She took out her iPhone and called the number that Tadhg Meaney had given her. He took a long time to answer and she thought she would have to leave him a message, but she rang him a second time and this time he picked up immediately and said, ‘Hallo? Hallo? Tadhg Meaney here!’ He sounded out of breath.

  ‘Oh, Tadhg, how are you doing? It’s Detective Superintendent Maguire. I’m sorry I couldn’t get out to see you this afternoon. I had a bit of an incident to deal with.’

  ‘That’s all right, superintendent. We’ve only just finished disentangling all the bodies and laying them out. Some of them are in a fierce terrible state, I can tell you.’

  Katie swallowed and hoped he wouldn’t try to tell her exactly how badly the horses had decomposed. ‘You still don’t know how they died, then? If they were alive when they were pitched off the top of the cliff, or already dead?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Tadhg Meaney told her. ‘To be honest with you, we may never know, not unless they died of some disease or other, or they were put down. And there is one thing that’s got us scratching our heads already.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘We’ve scanned three of the horses already, three that were still in fairly good condition. We found the microchips all right in all three of them, but here’s the puzzle. None of the microchip numbers corresponded with any numbers registered at Weatherbys.’

  ‘Now, that is a puzzle,’ said Katie. Weatherbys was the keeper of the Irish Stud Book and the passport details and microchip numbers of every horse and donkey had to be lodged with them by law.

  Tadhg Meaney said, ‘The mystery is, superintendent, why would you bother to microchip a horse at all if you weren’t going to register it? As far as we can work out, these horses aren’t just dead. Legally, they never existed in the first place.’

  10

  The next morning was so dark and thundery that Katie had to switch the lights on in her office. She had managed to eat some of John’s smoked chicken stew the previous night and this morning she hadn’t suffered morning sickness at all. She had slept well, too, and if she had dreamed about the disembowelled nun, she didn’t remember it.

  She read all of the messages that had been left on her desk, and signed all her letters, and she was ready to leave for Dromsligo when Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán came into her office, holding up a sheet of paper.

  ‘Sister Rose just emailed me a plan of the convent garden,’ she said. ‘She must have had to wait until all the other sisters were meditating.’

  She laid the plan down on Katie’s desk. The convent garden was a large rhomboid, just under a third of a hectare, with walls on the east and south sides separating the convent from the housing estate next to it. Under the east wall there was a vegetable garden, and under the south wall a wide herbaceous border. In the middle of the herbaceous border, about twenty-five metres from where it met the east wall, Sister Rose had drawn a cross. She hadn’t written anything on the plan, not even I found the jawbone here, and there was no message attached to it.

  ‘She’s absolutely petrified of being found out,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán.

  Katie studied the plan for a while and then she said, ‘It’s bound to come out sooner or later that it was her. We’ll have to apply for a search warrant and the judge is going to want to know what grounds we have for digging up the convent garden.’

  If the search had been urgent, Katie could have issued the warrant herself, but Sister Rose had waited six weeks to report that she had found a jawbone and it didn’t appear as if anybody’s life was in immediate jeopardy. Not only that, it was unlikely that Mother O’Dwyer and the congregation of the Bon Sauveur were likely to try and leave the country in a hurry, so Katie would have to make an application to the district court.

  ‘I’ll go and raise the warrant now,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. ‘It should be ready by the time you get back from Dromsligo.’

  ‘All right, grand. But God alone knows what we’re going to find in that garden. Hopefully, nothing but poppies.’

  * * *

  Detective Horgan drove her in the station’s unmarked Toyota Prius. It started to rain as they made their way northwards to Mallow on the N20 – rain that clattered against the windscreen so hard that the wipers could barely cope.

  Katie thought that Detective Horgan was unusually quiet. Most of the time he was cracking jokes and telling tall stories and playing ridiculous tricks on his fellow officers, like having his girlfriend call up and complain that she had been ‘graped’. When they said, ‘Don’t you mean “raped”?’ she said, ‘No, there was a whole bunch of them.’

  This morning, though, he had been driving for over twenty minutes and hadn’t said a word. He was frowning, too, as if he had something on his mind.

  ‘Everything all right?’ Katie asked him.

  ‘Oh. What? No. Everything’s grand, thanks.’

  ‘Well, something’s bothering you. You’re not having problems with any of your cases, are you?’

  ‘No, no. I need to be leaning on a couple of witnesses a little harder, do you know what I mean? But that’s all.’

  They drove for another few miles in silence. The rain began to ease off and the clouds began to drift apart, so that the morning was suddenly brighter.

  ‘Then what is it?’ Katie persisted.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said Detective Horgan. ‘It’s personal.’

  ‘Look, if it’s affecting your morale, whatever it is, I need to know about it. DI Fennessy had problems at home, without going into too much detail, and look what happened to him. Well, we still don’t know what’s happened to him. He could be dead for all we’ve heard.’

  They had nearly reached Mallow now. The Victor Dowling Equine Rescue Centre was on the north-west side of the town. It had been almost eight years since Katie had last come out here, soon after the centre had opened. There had been a desperate need in Cork for a shelter for abandoned horses – old barren mares, broken-down racehorses, ponies with laminitis, and badly abused sulky trotters. Katie had visited the centre because they also took care of horses that were being held pending Garda prosecutions, either for theft or mistreatment.

  Before they reached the turn-off for Dromsligo, Detective Horgan slowed down and drew the Toyota into the side of the road. He switched off the engine and then he turned to Katie and said, ‘It’s my girlfriend, Muireann. The fact is, I’ve knocked her up. It wasn’t intentional, but now I don’t know what I’m going to do.’

  ‘How far gone is she?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly. Well, I think I do. Two months at least. It was that time we went to Dingle and stayed at the Skellig. It did nothing but piss with rain the whole time so we stayed in our hotel room and, you know. There was nothing worth watching on TV.’

  ‘Is she going to get rid of it?’

  Detective Horgan shook his head. ‘I suggested it, like, and said that I’d pay for her to go to England if she had to. But she won’t hear of having an abortion. She’s told her ma already, and the whole family’s dead religious, do you know what I mean?’

  ‘So what are you going to do? Marry her?’

  Detective Horgan’s face was a picture of misery. ‘I like her, like. She’s great for a laugh and she likes to go clubbing and all that. She used to, anyway. Now she’s being all serious and careful and she won’t touch drink. But marry her – Jesus, I couldn’t imagine sp
ending more than a couple of days with her – not consecutive, like – let alone my whole fecking life.’

  ‘Does she think that you’re going to marry her?’

  Detective Horgan nodded. ‘We were walking through French Church Street the other day, and she stopped outside that bridal shop and stared in the window. She didn’t say nothing, but she couldn’t stop smiling and squeezing my hand, do you know what I mean, like?’

  ‘If you don’t want to marry her, you’d better tell her. The sooner the better.’

  ‘Jesus, she’s going to lose the head with me if I do that!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Horgan,’ said Katie, ‘you don’t have a choice. You can tell her that you’ll look after the baby financially once it’s born, and take an interest in it. But don’t think about marrying her if you don’t really love her. It wouldn’t be fair to either of you, or the wain.’

  Detective Horgan puffed out his cheeks in resignation. ‘You’re right, ma’am, I know it. My ma and da got married because of me and they hated each other. Like, intensely. My ma always used to say that God gave us the light of love but the Devil gave us children to snuff it out.’

  Katie unconsciously laid a hand on her own stomach and thought of what John was going to say when she told him that she was pregnant.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s take a look at these horses. I made sure I didn’t eat anything this morning before I came out here and I’m starved.’

  Detective Horgan started up the Toyota again and drove them up the narrow hedge-lined road to Dromsligo.

  * * *

  They parked outside the Victor Dowling Equine Rescue Centre, a sandy-coloured building covered with ivy, with white-painted stables all around it. As Katie climbed out of the car, Tadhg Meaney came out to meet her, wearing a tweed cap and a noisy brown oilskin raincoat.