White Bones Read online

  “There’s nothing to tell. We went to the Sarsfield and had a few drinks and it’s the old, old story, isn’t it?”

  “Who is she?”

  “That’s the whole trouble. She’s Dave MacSweeny’s girlfriend.”

  “Geraldine Daley? That tart?”

  “I’m sorry, Katie. Losing your only son… that’s not exactly an aphrodisiac, is it?”

  She slapped him, hard, across the cheek. She didn’t mean to, but she had done it before she could think. He shouted out, “Jesus!” and lifted one hand to protect himself. “Jesus, Katie. That fucking hurt.”

  “You don’t think you deserved it?”

  “For what? For trying to get a few minutes’ pleasure out of my life, instead of having to tiptoe on – eggshells round you and your everlasting grief? You don’t have the monopoly on sorrow, Katie, believe me… and you don’t have any right to take your misery out on everybody around you. I’m glad I’m not one of your suspects. It’s bad enough being your husband.”

  Katie didn’t know what to say. Perhaps Paul was right, and she was dragging her cross around with her wherever she went. Perhaps, on the other hand, he could have put his arms around now and again, in the darkness of the night, and showed her that they could find a way to be happy again.

  “Don’t you worry,” said Paul. “I’ll sleep on the couch. At least Sergeant will show me some sympathy.”

  A long, long pause. Paul picked a bloody scab out of his nostril and stared at it.

  “Has it been going on long?” Katie asked him.

  “What?”

  “You and Geraldine Daley. Was it just the one night, or have you been making a fool of me for longer than that?”

  “What does it matter?”

  “It matters because the nature of my job requires me to have a private life that’s free of any scandal whatsoever. And most of all it matters because we’re married, for better or for worse.”

  “Well, if it’s any consolation at all, it was, yes, just the one night. Geraldine was sick to the back teeth with Dave because he never takes her anywhere and she’s never allowed to look at other men. He hits her about, too. I guess she wanted to get her own back on him.”

  “And what about you? Did you want to get your own back on me? What? For killing Seamus?”

  Paul flapped his hand dismissively. Katie was about to say something else, something really hurtful, but then she decided against it. Without a word, she turned around and left Paul sitting on the couch, with Sergeant licking his bloody knuckles.

  16

  The next morning it was raining again, that fine misty rain that can soak right through your coat before you know it. She walked into her office to find Professor O’Brien waiting for her with a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums, a folded raincoat and a bright, enthusiastic grin.

  “Gerard, what a surprise.”

  He stood up and held out the flowers as if they were a conjuring-trick “I hope you like yellow. It reminds me of sunshine. Just what we need on days like these.”

  “Thank you,” she said. They looked past their best, and one of them was broken, but she took them anyway. “I’ll – ah – put them in water.”

  “You don’t mind me coming here to report to you personally? In person, I mean?”

  She felt tired and fractured after last night, and the last thing she needed was a flirtatious conversation with Professor O’Brien, but all the same she managed a smile and sat down behind her desk. At the back of the Garda station the crows were still perched along the roof of the parking-lot. Sometimes one or two of them flew off and circled around, but they always came back, the way that blowflies will never leave a decomposing body alone.

  “Would you like some coffee?” she asked Professor O’Brien.

  “No, thanks all the same. Coffee gives me the jitters. I don’t sleep very well as it is. I was up for most of the night, reading through your file on the Meagher’s Farm case.”

  “Oh, yes?” said Katie, prying the plastic lid off her cappuccino. “Did you find out anything interesting?”

  He produced a large manila envelope from underneath his folded raincoat, and took out a copy of an ordnance survey map. He spread it out on Katie’s desk and smoothed it with the side of his hand. “The first step I always take when I look into any historical event is to look at a contemporary map, if I can. So many things can change over the years – the roads, the place-names, everything. This is the area north of Cork as it was in 1911. This is the road from Cork City to Ballyhooly, and this red outline is Meagher’s Farm. You’ll notice that there wasn’t a farm there, in those days, but there was a small collection of three or four dwellings which was already known as Knocknadeenly. In Gaelic, that’s Cnoc na Daoine Liath.”

  “The Hill of the Gray People?”

  “That’s right. But ‘Beings’, perhaps, more than ‘people’. It was supposed to be a gateway between the fairy world and the real world – the place where Mor-Rioghain lived whenever she came to Ireland. I think if there was any place in County Cork where anyone would be likely to perform a ritual ceremony, it would be here.”

  “Excuse me, Gerard,” asked Katie. “But who was Mor-Rioghain?”

  “Mor-Rioghain? She was an evil sorceress – a malign fairy. She appears in dozens of different legends all over Europe and Scandinavia. In England she was called Morgan Le Fay and she was supposed to be King Arthur’s wicked half-sister, who was always plotting to kill him. Here in Ireland she was a cousin of the Death Queen Badhbh, or perhaps another side of Badhbh’s personality, and she was supposed to come out of her magic hill, her sidhe, in the shape of a wolf-bitch. If you fed her with the flesh of innocent women, she would grant you any wish you wanted.”

  “So you think these killings could have been part of what? Some folkloric ceremony?”

  “Not a ceremony that I’ve ever come across before, as I told you. But – yes, I believe it’s a distinct possibility.”

  “And that’s what you’ve managed to find out?”

  “Yes,” he blinked, and sat down. “I mean that’s quite an exciting step forward, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a start, I suppose. Do you think there’s any way of finding out if there were any pagan sects around Knocknadeenly at the time? Like, devil-worshippers, anything like that?”

  “Anybody who wanted to summon up Mor-Rioghain wouldn’t have been a devil-worshipper. They would have been ordinary folk looking for wealth, and fame, and power… all of the gifts that the fairies can give you.”

  “And that was worth murdering eleven women for?”

  “I still don’t know why that was done; or what the ritual of the little rag dollies was all about, but I promise you I will. We may not bring a murderer to book, but at least we’ll find out why he did it. That should give you some satisfaction, shouldn’t it?”

  Katie frowned at him. “Satisfaction? I suppose so.”

  “Look,” said Professor O’Brien, “perhaps we could discuss this over lunch.”

  “I’m sorry, not today. I have two other important cases I’m dealing with. Not to mention the disappearance of Charlie Flynn.”

  “They do a great open sandwich at Morrison’s Island Hotel. Tuna, or Cajun chicken. I go there twice a week at least.”

  “Gerard, I’m sorry. I’m really too busy. But thank you for coming in; and for all of your information.”

  Professor O’Brien gave her a bashful smile and then he said, “I think you’re a very striking-looking woman, superintendent. I hope you don’t object to my saying that.”

  Katie smiled. “No, of course not. It’s very flattering. But – ”

  She nearly said “ – I’m married, Gerard,” but she didn’t, because that simply wasn’t the reason that she was turning him down. Instead, she said, “I’m sorry. I’ve got far too much on my plate already.”

  Professor O’Brien had a noisy wrestling-match with his map. “I understand. But I’ll keep on digging. You never know, you see – the Crown Force
s may have murdered these women and then hung these dollies on their thighbones to make it look like a ritual sacrifice, even when it wasn’t.”

  “That’s another possibility, yes.”

  Professor O’Brien shook her hand, ducking his head forward as if he was going to try to give her a kiss on the cheek, but then thinking better of it.

  “I was engaged once,” he volunteered. “Mairie, her name was. She looked very similar to you. Or, rather, you look very similar to her.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Katie, and immediately regretted it, because it sounded so patronizing.

  “It was a bit of a surprise. One day she said she loved me and the next day she said she didn’t. Women! I don’t think I’ll ever understand them.”

  Katie looked at him with his combed-over hair and his folded raincoat and his little hands like crubeens, and she thought to herself, why is it that we can never tell people the truth?

  Only an hour later, Dr Reidy called her, and he sounded deeply grumpy.

  “I sent your dollies in for analysis, and I’m not at all pleased that you’ve already closed this investigation without having the common courtesy to inform me.”

  “I’m sorry, Dr Reidy. I was under the impression that Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll was going to get in touch with you.”

  “O’Driscoll? That fathead! He wouldn’t tell his proctologist if he sat on a jamjar. As it is we’ve spent serious time and budget for no purpose whatsoever.”

  “Did you find out anything interesting about the dolls?”

  “Oh, yes, even though it doesn’t matter two hoots now, does it? We’ve got a very talented young lady here at Phoenix Park who’s an expert on fabrics. She dismembered a number of your little effigies and she says they’re made out of torn strips of linen, some of which have lace edging. In other words, she thinks they were made out of a woman’s petticoats, ripped into pieces. The lace, though, isn’t Irish. It’s a pattern she’s never seen before.”

  “What about the screws and the hooks?”

  “We’ve made a provisional identification. They were probably handmade in a workshop just off French’s Quay in Cork in 1914 or thereabouts. They were in common use in Cork City; in fact, you could probably find quite a few of them now, in some of the older houses.”

  “So, what do you think, Dr Reidy?”

  “I don’t think anything, my dear, not unless I’m paid to think and not unless there’s some specific purpose.”

  “I’d like to see your full report as soon as possible.”

  “My dear, those poor women have already waited eighty years. You don’t think that a couple of days more is going to make any difference?”

  “Well, I don’t know. But I think it might.”

  Dr Reidy wheezed in and out, saying nothing for a while. Then he said, “You’ve got a feeling about this, haven’t you, detective superintendent?”

  “It depends what you mean by a feeling.”

  “You’ve got a feeling that this business is going to turn out very black.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’ve been the State Pathologist for twenty-two years, my dear. I saw it in your eyes. I heard it in the way you spoke to me.”

  Katie didn’t know what to say to him. But it was like listening to somebody recount a very old nightmare that you hadn’t ever told to anyone.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll see if I can have some of the lace samples analyzed here.”

  Dr Reidy said, “I’m not a superstitious man, superintendent. I don’t believe in signs and wonders. But my knees tell me with great reliability when the weather’s going to be wet; and my scalp tingles when there’s any kind of evil around; and there is.”

  That afternoon, Katie took one of the dollies out of its evidence bag, removed all the hooks and the screws, and carefully unfolded it. It had been fashioned out of a long strip of linen, roughly torn, with a lacy hem. She tucked it into an envelope and took it around to Eileen O’Mara, who ran a Victorian-style lace shop in what had once been the old Savoy Cinema, in Patrick Street. Katie opened the door to her little triangular shop, with all of its period nightgowns and its lace pillow-covers and its bowls of pot-pourri, and the bell jingled.

  Eileen came out of the back room with an armful of embroidered bathrobes. She was only 24 but she had taken a course in Brussels on lacemaking and needlework and she was an expert on anything sewn or embroidered. She had wavy brown hair and fiery red cheeks and she always reminded Katie of a souvenir doll, too Irish to be true.

  “Katie! Haven’t seen you for months.”

  “Oh, well, I’ve been busy enough. How’s business?”

  “It’s quiet now, but that’s what you’d expect in the winter. I saw you on TV, all those old skeletons up at Knocknadeenly. That must have been desperate!”

  “That’s partly the reason I’m here.”

  “I didn’t kill anybody, honest!”

  “No,” said Katie, and took the strip of linen out of her purse. “There was some fabric found up there, quite a few pieces of it, that looked like a woman’s petticoat. It has a lace edging on it, if you look here, but it’s not Irish, that’s what they say in Dublin anyway. I was wondering if you knew where it might have come from. Bearing in mind, now, it’s probably eighty years old.”

  Eileen picked up the fabric and held it up to the light. “I don’t know. It’s very old, I’d say. Not a pattern that I’ve ever seen before. You’ll have to give me a little time on it. But I can tell you straight away that it’s handmade and that your man in Dublin has got it right, it certainly isn’t Irish.”

  “My woman in Dublin, actually.”

  “I might have guessed. But this lace isn’t based on any machine‑made patterns, like Alençon or Chantilly or Valenciennes. And it certainly bears no resemblance at all to anything I’ve ever seen in Ireland. My first guess is that it’s Belgian, or German.”

  “Well, I don’t know what that tells me,” said Katie.

  “All it tells you is that whoever it belonged to, she was probably quite wealthy. This is very fine work, and it would have cost a lot of money, even eighty years ago.”

  “I see.” Katie took the lace back and held it up to the light. If it had been really expensive, then the likelihood that it had been taken from any of the women who had died up at Meagher’s Farm was extremely remote. She didn’t have a complete list of all the women who had gone missing in the North Cork area between the summer of 1915 and the spring of 1916, but those whose names had appeared in the Examiner had been farmers’ wives and shopgirls and (in the case of Mrs Mary O’Donovan) a postmistress. Not the sort of women who would have been wearing petticoats of handmade Continental lace.

  So whose was it? And where had it come from? And if it was such fine lace, why had it had been ripped up?

  Katie left the Savoy Center and walked across Patrick Bridge, back to her car. Two crows were sitting precariously on rotten wooden posts in the middle of the river. She was beginning to feel that they were watching her, following her, like a witch’s familiars.

  17

  John Meagher was standing outside the front door of his farmhouse when Katie drove into the courtyard. It was almost as if he were expecting her. The rain had stopped but the morning was still gray, and the clouds were almost as low as the tops of the elm-trees.

  “Hi,” he said, opening the car door for her. He was wearing a navy-blue waterproof jacket and tan corduroy pants. He looked more like a model from a men’s casualwear catalog than a Cork farmer.

  She climbed out. “I just came up to tell you that the case is officially closed and you can carry on with your building work.”

  “That’s it, then? We never get to find out who did it?”

  “Well, I hope we do. We’re not pursuing it as an active investigation, but we haven’t closed it completely. Everybody deserves justice, even if it’s eighty years too late.”

  “Sure, I guess they do.”

  She looked aro
und the courtyard. “If you do happen to come across anything else… maybe not bones, but anything that strikes you as out-of-the-ordinary…”

  “Oh, sure. I won’t hesitate. You gave me your number. Listen – I’m being very rude here – how about a cup of tea or a cup of coffee?”

  Katie hesitated, but then she smiled and said, “All right. That’d be welcome.” John Meagher had an air about him that really attracted her. It wasn’t just his looks – even though she had always liked men with dark, curly hair and chocolate-brown eyes. It was his quiet, amused, self-contained manner, and his cultured West Coast accent. She felt that he would always be interesting, and protective, too.

  He led her into the house. His mother was sitting at the kitchen table, sewing, with a cigarette dangling between her lips.

  “You remember Detective Superintendent Maguire, don’t you, ma?”

  Mrs Meagher lifted her head and peered through her thicklensed glasses. “Of course. It seems like time caught your man before you could.”

  “Yes, I’m afraid it did.”

  John said, “You should switch the light on, ma. How can you see what you’re doing?”

  “I can sew on buttons with my eyes closed.”

  “I can eat hamburgers with my eyes closed, but why would I want to?”

  “Get away with you. Ever since you went to America, you’ve been talking Greek.”

  “What would you like?” John asked Katie. “Tea? Coffee?”

  “Tea would be fine. No milk, thanks.”

  He switched on the electric kettle. His mother coughed and crushed out her cigarette and went to the larder for shortbread biscuits and fruitcake.

  “I didn’t realize you were such a celebrity,” said John, pulling out a chair so that Katie could sit down.

  “Oh, yes. I get wheeled out for TV interviews every time somebody wants to talk about the New Irish Woman.”

  “Couldn’t have been easy, though, getting as far as you have.”