A Terrible Beauty Page 8

  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 bed frame, 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 wellsummoningsomething, 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 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 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 ha
ve something for you, Superintendent. Photocopies of theCork Examinerfrom 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'vefoundÓ 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 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 thirty-four or thirty-five, 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 callcrubeens.

  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."

  He held up the plastic evidence bag and peered at the doll more closely, wrinkling up his nose in concentration. "I suppose you could say that there's a passing resemblance to the little cotton figures that some people used to hang on their doorposts when one of their children was sick. They did that so that the Death Queen Badhbh would take away the little figure instead of the person lying inside. But those effigies were invariably sewn out of a remnant of the sick child's clothing, and filled with clippings from its hair and fingernails, so that when Queen Badhbh came sniffing for them in the darkness, she would mistakenly think it was them."

  "No hooks or nails or screws?"

  Dr. O'Brien shook his head. "That does sound more like a voodoo ritual, doesn't it? There were some witches in Denmark, in the seventeenth century, who used to bang magic nails into copies of their victims' heads, to give them splitting headaches, and there's some evidence that Danish sailors could have brought that practice to Cork."

  Katie stopped and looked across the river. Three swans were swimming against the current, almost invisible in the diamond dazzle from the sun. Three white S's.

  "I'd appreciate it if you kept me closely in touch with what you're doing," she said. "If you need any help of any kind maybe a car to take you out to visit Meagher's Farm, anything at all, just let me know."

  "Of course. This is one of the most interesting things I've been asked to do for a long time. Exciting, even."

  "Well, then," said Katie, and held out her hand.

  The breeze lifted a long strand of Dr. Kelly's hair high from the top of his head. "There's one thing," he said.

  "Yes?"

  "When I've had the chance to go through the file and check up a few preliminary facts do you think that you and I could talk about this investigation over dinner?"

  "Overdinner?"

  He gave her a sly, schoolboyish grin. "Nothing like mixing business with a little pleasure. Have you ever been to that French restaurant in Phoenix Street?"

  She squeezed his littlecrubeenhand. "Let's just see how it goes, shall we?"

  "Of course."

  She walked back to the parking lot and he stood by the river and watched her go. She turned back once and he gave her a stiff-armed wave, like a semaphore signal. She didn't know why, but when she unlocked her car she felt quite shocked. Not so much at Gerard O'Brien for asking her out, but at herself, for not having conclusively said no.

  "Holy Mother of God," she said to herself, in her rearview mirror. "You're notflattered, are you?"

  14

  Fiona was sleeping fitfully when the door banged open and he switched on the overhead light.

  She didn't say a word as he approached the bed and peered into her face. She was still in too much pain, even though she had managed during the day to get used to it, the way that anybody can get used to anything, like the roar of traffic, or loud rock music, or the constant rattling of an air conditioner.

  "Are you ready for the next adventure?"

  "I don't care what you do. Just do it and get it over with."

  "You don't mean that."

  "I don't have any choice, do I? You're going to do it anyhow."

  "Well, you're right about that."

  He opened his case of surgical instruments. "It's been a great day today, hasn't it? I went to Blarney and the sun was shining and it was so warm."

  "I didn't notice."

  "These are your last few days, Fiona. You ought to make the most of them."

  She began to cry, although she didn't feel sorry for herself anymore. She had already accepted that she had been abducted entirely by chance, and that ifshewasn't enduring this agony, it would have been another girl. And who could wish this pain on anybody else? Extreme suffering can bring on a very clear, self-sacrificial state of mind.

  He tied a thin nylon cord around the top of her left thigh, and pulled it viciously tight, grunting with the effort.

  "Not the other leg," she said, dully.

  He nodded. "I'm sorry. It's the way it has to be. Right leg, left leg."


  "But why? Why are you doing it? Can't you just kill me?"

  "I could, yes. Scalpel, carotid artery, that'd be quick. But a ritual is a ritual. If I don't observe all the niceties, then it wouldn't work, would it, and you wouldn't want to go through all of this for nothing, would you? To die in agony, that's bad enough. But to die in agony for no purpose whatsoever well, what can I say?"

  "What time is it?" she asked him.

  "Two-thirty in the morning."

  "I need a drink of water."