A Terrible Beauty

Graham Masterton

For Wiescka, with all my love.

For Roland and Kirsty; for Dan and Sarah; and for Luke. With thanks to An Garda Síochána for their good-humored help; and with deep appreciation to all of those people inCork who made us welcome.

"Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireas na daoine."

"People live in one another's shadow."

Irish proverb

Author's Note

The Cunard liner Lusitania set sail from New York on May 1, 1915, bound for Liverpool, England, even though the German authorities had published warnings in U.S. newspapers on the very morning of her departure. By this stage of the war, a considerable number of British merchant ships had already been sunk by German submarines, but it was thought that the Lusitania's superior speed would enable her to outrun any U-boat attack.

On May 7, as she approached southern Ireland, Captain William Turner was warned that there was U-boat activity in the area and that three British ships had already been sunk in the waters through which he intended to sail. However, he maintained his course and even-inexplicably-slowed down.

As the Lusitania approached Queenstown harbor (now called Cobh) she was sighted by the submarine U-20 under the command of Kapitan leutnant Walther Schwieger. He fired a single torpedo, which penetrated the Lusitania just below the waterline. The first explosion set off a devastating secondary blast, and the huge liner sank in 18 minutes, with the loss of 1,195 of the 1,959 men, women, and children who were on board her, including 123 Americans.

In a note to her embassy in Washington on May 10, 1915, Germany gave various unsatisfactory explanations about the disaster, and eventually even struck a medal to commemorate U-20's successful action. President Wilson and the American public were outraged, and more than any other single event, the sinking of the Lusitania turned public opinion and led to the United States entering the First World War.

Many questions still hang over the incident. At the time, it was claimed that the huge secondary explosion was caused by contraband American munitions hidden in the liner's hold. But recent dives on the wreck of the Lusitania showed lumps of coal scattered all over the seabed-suggesting that the most likely cause was a coal-dust explosion in her almost empty bunkers.

What still remains unanswered is why Captain William Turner slowed down. He claimed that he was worried about fog, but he couldn't explain why he was so close to shore, and why he was taking no evasive action.

A memorial to all those who died on the Lusitania stands today in the center of Cobh, the figure of a sorrowing angel.

A Selected Guide to Cork Slang

Corkonians have a distinctive accent of their own, which sounds very different from the Dublin brogue which is usually presented as "Irish" in movies and television. They also have their own local slang vocabulary, although many of their expressions are used throughout the Republic. Some phrases date back to the days of Elizabeth I, and are a living memory that Sir Walter Raleigh and other Tudor sailors used to dock in Cork , which is the second deepest harbor in the world.

Men and women of any age commonly address each other as "boy" and "girl." Even a temporary departure will elicit the remark "Are ye going away?" followed by the reassurance that "I'll see ye after."

Acting the maggot: behaving foolishly or annoyingly.

Bags: making a mess of a job-"he made a bags of it."

Banjaxed: broken.

Bazzer: a haircut.

Bodice: spare ribs.

Bold: naughty-"you're a very bold boy."

Claim: fight-"I claim ya."

Codding: teasing or fooling-"I'm only codding."

Craic: good fun and stimulating conversation.

Craw sick: hung over.

Culchies: hayseeds or country people.

Cute hoor: sly, untrustworthy man.

Desperate: in a bad state.

Eat the head off: snap at, attack verbally.

Fair play: approval of somebody's actions-"fair play to him, mind."

Feck: slightly less offensive version of the other word.

Fierce: extreme-"there was a fierce crowd in there."

Fine half: nice-looking girl.

Flah: to have sex with.

Flah'd out: exhausted.

Full shilling (not the): mentally challenged.

Funt: kick.

Ganky: unpleasant (of a person's looks).

Gawk: stare at, or vomit.

Gob: mouth.

Gobdaw: fool.

Gom: thickhead.

Gowl: idiot.

Grand: good, fine, okay.

Header: mentally unstable person.

High babies: grade school.

Holliers: holidays.

Holy show: spectacle-"you made a holy show of yourself."

Hop (on the): playing hooky.

Hump off: go away.

Hurling: a Gaelic game played with sticks, not unlike hockey.

Jag: a date.

Langered/langers: drunk.

Letting on: pretending.

Massive: lovely-"your dress is only massive."

Me Daza: very nice.

Mebs: testicles.

Messages: shopping-"I have to get the messages."

Mighty: very good-"that was mighty."

Monkey's (don't give a): don't give a damn.

Mooching: sponging for money.

One: woman-"some oul one."

Rubber dollies: sneakers.

Sconce: look-"have a sconce at that."

Scratcher: bed.

Septic: vain (of a girl).

Show: movie.

Shelityhorn: snail.

Slagging: making good-natured fun, teasing.

Soften his cough: teach him a lesson.

Soot: satisfaction-"I wouldn't give you the soot."

Twisted: drunk.

Twigged: understood, caught on.

1

John had never seen so many hooded crows circling around the farm as he did that wet November morning. His father always used to say that whenever you saw more than seven hooded crows gathered together, they had come to gloat over a human tragedy.

It was tragedy weather, too. Curtains of rain had been trailing across the Nagle Mountains since well before dawn, and the northwest field was so heavy that it had taken him more than three hours to plow it. He was turning the tractor around by the top corner, close to the copse called Iollan's Wood, when he saw Gabriel frantically waving from the gate.

John waved back. Jesus, what did the idiot want now? If you gave Gabriel a job to do, you might just as well do it yourself, because he was always asking what to do next, and was it screws or nails you wanted, and what sort of wood were you after having this made from? John kept on steadily plowing, with big lumps of sticky mud pattering off the wheels, but Gabriel came struggling up the field toward him, still waving, with crows irritably flapping all around him. He was obviously shouting, too, although John couldn't hear him.

As Gabriel came puffing up to him in his raggedy old brown tweeds and gum boots, John switched off the tractor's engine and took off his ear protectors.

"What's wrong now, Gabe? Did you forget which end of the shovel you're supposed to be digging with?"

"There's bones, John!Bones!So many fecking bones you can't even count them!"

John wiped the rain off his face with the back of his hand. "Bones? Where? What kind of bones?"

"Under the floor, John! People's bones! Come and see for yourself! The whole place looks like a fecking graveyard!"

John climbed down from the tractor and ankle-deep into the mud. Close up, Gabriel smelled strongly of stale beer, but John was quite aware that he drank while he worked, even though he went to considerable pains to conceal his cans of Murphy's under a heap of sacking at the back of the barn.

"We was digging the foundations close to the house when the boy says there's something in the ground here, and he digs away with his fingers and out comes this human skull with its eyes full of dirt. Then we were after digging some more and there was four more skulls and bones like you never seen the like of, leg bones and arm bones and finger bones and rib bones."

John strode long-legged down toward the gate. He was tall and dark, with thick black hair and almost Spanish good looks. He had only been back in Ireland for just over a year, and he was still finding it difficult to cope with running a farm. One sunny May morning he had been about to close the door of his apartment on Jones Street in San Francisco when the telephone had rung, and it had been his mother, telling him that his father had suffered a massive stroke. And then, two days later, that his father was dead.

He hadn't intended to come back toIreland , let alone take over the farm. But his mother had simply assumed that he would, him being the eldest boy, and all his uncles and aunts and cousins had greeted him as if he were head of the Meagher family now. He had flown back toSan Francisco to sell his dot.com alternative medicine business and say good-bye to his friends, and here he was, walking through the gate of Meagher's Farm in a steady drizzle, with a beery-breathed Gabriel following close behind him.

"I'd say it was a mass murder," Gabriel panted.

"Well, we'll see."

The farmhouse was a wide green-painted building with a gray slate roof, with six or seven leafless elms standing at its southeastern side like an embarrassed crowd of naked bathers. A sharply sloping driveway led down to the road to Ballyhooly, to the north, and Cork City , eleven miles to the south. John crossed the muddy tarmac courtyard and went around to the north side of the house, where Gabriel and a boy called Finbar had already knocked down a rotten old feed store and were now excavating the foundations for a modernized boiler house.

They had cleared an area twelve feet by twenty. The earth was black and raw and had the sour, distinctive smell of peat. Finbar was standing on the far side of the excavation, mournfully holding a shovel. He was a thin, pasty-faced lad with a closely cropped head, protruding ears, and a soggy gray jumper.

On the ground in front of him, like a scene from Pol Pot's Cambodia, lay four human skulls. Nearer to the damp, cement-rendered wall of the farmhouse, there was a hole which was crowded with muddy human bones.

John hunkered down and stared at the skulls as if he were expecting them to explain themselves.

"God Almighty. These must have been here for a pretty long time. There isn't a scrap of flesh left on any of them."

"An unmarked grave, I'd say," put in Gabriel. "A bunch of fellows who got on the wrong side of the IRA."

"Scared the shite out of me," said Finbar, wiping his nose on his sleeve. "I was digging away and all of a sudden there was this skull grinning up at me like my old uncle Billy."

John picked up a long iron spike and prodded among the bones. He saw a jawbone, and part of a rib cage, and another skull. That made at least five bodies. There was only one thing to do, and that was to call the Garda.

"You don't think your dad knew about this?" asked Gabriel, as John walked back to the house.

"What do you mean? Of course he didn't know."

"Well, he was a great republican, your dad."

John stopped and stared at him. "What are you trying to say?"

"I'm not trying to say nothing, but if certain people wanted a place to hide certain remains that they didn't want nobody to find, your dad might have possibly obliged them, if you see what I mean."

"Oh, come on, Gabriel. My dad wouldn't have allowed bodies to be buried on his property."

"I wouldn't be too sure, John. There was certain stuff buried here once, under the cowshed, for a while."

"You mean guns?"

"I'm just saying that it might be better for all concerned if we forgot what we found here. They're dead and buried already, these fellows, why disturb them? Your dad's dead and buried, too. You don't want people raking over his reputation now, do you?"

John said, "Gabe, these are human beings, for Christ's sake. If we just cover them up, there are going to be five families who will never know where their sons or their husbands went. Can you imagine anything worse than that?"

"Well, I suppose you're right. But it still strikes me as stirring up trouble when there's no particular call to."

John went into the house. It was gloomy inside, and it always smelled of damp at this time of year. He took off his boots and washed his hands in the small cloakroom at the side of the hall. Then he went into the large quarry tiled kitchen where his mother was baking. She seemed so small these days, with her white hair and her stooped back and her eyes as pale as milk. She was sieving out flour for tea brack.

"Did you finish the plowing, John?" she asked him.

"Not quite. I have to use the telephone."

He hesitated. She looked up and frowned at him. "Is everything all right?"

"Of course, Mam. I have to make a phone call, that's all."

"You were going to ask me something." Oh, she was cute, his mother.

"Ask you something? No. Don't worry about it." If his father really had allowed the IRA to bury bodies on his land, he very much doubted that he would have confided in his mother. What you don't know can't knock on your door in the middle of the night.

He went into the living room with its tapestry-covered furniture and its big redbrick fireplace, where three huge logs were crackling and Lucifer the black Labrador was stretched out on the rug with his legs indecently wide apart. He picked up the old-fashioned black telephone and dialed 112.

"Hallo? I want the Garda. I need to speak to somebody in charge. Yes. Well, this is John Meagher up at Meagher's Farm in Knocknadeenly. We've dug up some bodies."

2

It was raining even harder by the time Katie Maguire arrived at Meagher's Farm in her muddy silver Mondeo. She could see that Detective Inspector Liam Fennessy was already there, as well as two other detectives and three or four uniformed gardaí who were struggling against the gusty wind to erect bright blue plastic screens.

She climbed out of the car and walked across the farmyard with her raincoat collar turned up. Liam was standing by the open grave with his hands in the pockets of his long brown herringbone overcoat, undeterred by the rain, smoking a cigarette. Detective Garda Patrick O'Sullivan was hunkered down in his windcheater, frowning at the bones with a studious expression on his face, while Detective Sergeant Jimmy O'Rourke was standing under the shelter of the farmhouse roof, talking to John Meagher.

"Afternoon, Superintendent," said Liam. He was thin and hollow-cheeked, with fair, greased-back hair and circular wire-rimmed spectacles, which were spotted with rain. He looked more like a young James Joyce than a Garda inspector. "Seems as if we've got a few bones to pick, doesn't it?"

"God Almighty." She had never seen anything like this in her entire career. "How long before the team from the technical bureau get here?"

"Half an hour, I'd say. And the venerable Dr. Owen Reidy is coming down first thing tomorrow morning. Reidy the Ripper. He'd have your duodenum for a fancy necktie before you even breathed your last gasp."

Katie gave him the faintest of smiles. "Did you talk to Superintendent O'Connell in Naas?"

Jerry O'Connell was in charge of Operation Trace, which had spent the last nine years looking for eight young women who had disappeared without trace in the eastern counties ofIreland .

Liam said, "I put a message in, yes."

Katie walked slowly around the excavation, trying to make sense of all the bones that were lying there, jumbled up like pick-a-sticks as if somebody had tossed them up into the air and let them scatter at random. She could make out at least three pelvises, two breastbones, and innumerable vertebrae.

She was used to dead bodies-three or four bluey-green floaters were fished out of the River Lee every week, and then there were the blackened and bloated druggies they regularly found in Lower Shandon Street, and the maroon-faced winos crouched in shop doorways in Maylor Street, their hearts stopped by Paddy's whiskey and hypothermia.

But this was different. This was wholesale butchery. She could almost smell the dread of what had happened here, along with the peaty reek of the rain-soaked soil.

Sergeant O'Rourke came up to her. He was a short, sandy-haired man with a rough-hewn block of a head, like an unfinished sculpture. "What do you think, Jimmy?" she asked him.

"I never saw nothing like it, ma'am, except in a picture on Father Francis's wall, at St. Michael's, which had heaven at the top and hell at the bottom, you know, and this is what hell looked like. All skeletons, all in a heap."

Katie said, "This is John Meagher, is it?"

"That's right. John-this is Detective Superintendent Kathleen Maguire. She's in charge of this investigation."

John held out his hand. "Oh, I see. I'm sorry, I didn't realize that-"

"That's all right, John," said Katie. "An Garda Síochána is an equal opportunity employer, and occasionally they bend over backward to beveryequal."

"It looks so far like there could be six skeletons, or even seven," said Sergeant O'Rourke. "Kevin's counted thirteen ankle bones so far."

"Do you have any idea at all how these remains might have come to be buried here?" Katie asked John.

John shook his head. "None at all. Absolutely none. I've been running the farm for fourteen months now so nobody could have buried them here after I took over."

"What aboutbeforeyou took over?"

"Meagher's Farm has been in my family since 1935. I can't see my father burying any bodies here. Why would he? Nor my grandfather, either."

Katie nodded. "Does anybody else have access to your property here? Like tenant farmers, anybody like that? Or holidaymakers? Or Travelers?"

"There's nobody here but me and Gabriel and the Ryan brothers, Denis and Bryan. They do the general laboring, and Maureen O'Donovan helps me to run the creamery."

"I'll be wanting to talk to them, too."

"Sure, absolutely. But this is a total mystery, so far as I'm concerned. I'm no expert, but it looks to me as if these people have been dead for a heck of a long time."

Katie said nothing, but stood looking at the bones with her hand pressed over her mouth.

John waited until Katie had walked around to the other side of the excavation before he said to Sergeant O'Rourke, "Kind ofintense, isn't she?"

"Oh, not usually. But she's very humorless when it comes to homicide, Superintendent Maguire. Doesn't see the funny side of it, if you know what I mean."

John watched her as she circled around the bones. A very striking woman, he thought, not more than five feet five inches, just turned forty maybe, with cropped coppery hair and sage-green eyes and sharply chiseled cheekbones. She had that Irish-elfin look of being related to the fairy folk, ten generations removed. The sort of woman you find yourself looking at a second time, and then again. But then she glanced up and caught him looking at her and he found himself immediately turning away, as if he had something to be guilty about. God knows how she would make him feel if he actually knew how these skeletons had come to be buried here.

Eventually she came back over. The raindrops were sparkling in her hair. "You haven't heard any local stories about anybody going missing? Not necessarily recent stories. Something that might give us a rough idea when these people died."

"I don't have too much time for local gossip, I'm afraid. I go down to Ballyvolane once in a while and have a couple of drinks at the Fox and Hounds. But I'm still a foreigner, as far as the locals are concerned. Not surprising, really. I still can't understand the Cork accent and up until I came here I thought that hurling was something you did after drinking too much Guinness."

"All right, John," said Katie. "You won't be going anywhere, will you? Once we've had the chance to clear this site properly, and the state pathologist has examined the remains, there'll be quite a few more questions that are going to need answering."

"Listen, whatever I can do."

Katie went over to her car and picked up her mobile phone. "Paul? It's me. I'm up at Knocknadeenly. Yes, somebody's found some remains. Yes, I know. Listen, it doesn't look as if I'm going to be home until late. There's a Marks & Spencer chicken pie in the freezer. You put it in a preheated oven at gas mark eight. Yes. Well, you know how to peel a potato, don't you? All right, go to the pub if you like, it's up to you, but eat something decent. I'll call you later."

A white Garda van was coming up the driveway. The technical bureau. Katie walked back to the excavation and waited for them to kit up in their Tyvek suits and their rubber boots. She looked down at the heap of bones and wondered who on earth they had belonged to. Normally, when she attended a death scene, it was immediately obvious who had done what to whom, and why. Bloody carving knives in the kitchen sink. Babies, gray-faced from suffocation. Girls lying facedown and muddy-thighed in a ditch somewhere, strangled with their own scarves.

But this was something very different, and until she knew how long these people had been lying here it was futile for her to try and guess who might have killed them, or why. All that was immediately apparent was that none of the skulls had a bullet hole in the back. That would have been very strong evidence that they were the victims of a political execution, or maybe a revenge killing by one of the local gangs.

Although she was going to inform Operation Trace about these skeletons as a matter of protocol, she didn't think that they were connected with Superintendent O'Connell's investigation. The girls he was looking for had disappeared one by one over nearly a decade-the last one in July, 1998-and Katie's immediate impression was that these bodies had been buried all at once.

Liam came up to her and offered her an extra-strong mint. "What do you think? Could have been Meagher's father who did it, possibly?"

"We won't know that until we find out who all these people were, and when they were killed, and why."

"You're not looking for a motive? Look around you-a godforsaken place like this. Struggling from dawn to dusk to scrape a half-decent living and nobody to take out your economic and sexual frustrations on, except the livestock, or the occasional passing cyclist, looking for somewhere to spend the night. Remember that bed-and-breakfast business, down in Crosshaven? Three of them, stuffed in an airing cupboard?"

Katie lifted her hand to shield her eyes against the rain. "I don't know. I don't get that kind of a feeling. I wouldn't totally rule it out, but there's something very dark about this. The way the different skeletons are all tangled up…it's like they were all taken apart before they were buried."

A series of lightning-bright flashes illuminated the blue plastic screens. The photographer was getting to work, and now the forensic retrieval team were waddling around in their protective suits, marking out the positions of skulls and rib cages.

One of them picked up a thighbone which appeared to have something dangling from the end of it. Then he bent over and picked up another, and another. He examined them for a while and then he came over to Katie and said, "Superintendent? Have a sconce at these."

Katie tugged on a tight plastic glove and accepted one of the bones. It had been pierced at the upper end, where it would have fitted into the hip socket, and a short length of greasy twine had been tied through the hole. On the end of the twine dangled a small doll-like figure, apparently fashioned out of twisted gray rags, with six or seven rusted nails and hooks pushed into it. Every thighbone had been pierced in the same way, and every one had a tiny rag doll tied onto it.

"What do you make of this, Liam?" Katie asked him. "Ever see anything like this before?"

Liam peered at the little figure closely, and shook his head. "Never. It looks like one of your voodoo effigies, doesn't it, the ones you stick pins in to get your revenge on people."

"Voodoo? In Knocknadeenly?"

The scene-of-crimes officer took the thighbone and went back to work. Katie said, "I don't know what happened here, Liam, but it was seriously strange."

At that moment, John came over and said, "What about a drink, Superintendent?"

She would have done anything for a double vodka, but she said, "Tea, thank you. No milk, no sugar."

"And you, Inspector?"

"Three sugars, please. And unstirred, if you don't mind. I'm very partial to the sludge at the bottom."

Gradually, the weather began to clear from the west, and the farm was illuminated by a watery gray sunlight. Katie went into the house to talk to John's mother. She was sitting in the living room with a pond-green cardigan draped around her shoulders, watching Fair City and stroking the dog. A large photograph of a white-haired man who looked almost exactly like an older John was standing on the table next to her, along with an empty teacup and a crowded ashtray.

"I'm going to have to ask you some questions, Mrs. Meagher."

"Oh, yes?" said John's mother, without taking her eyes off the television.

"Do you mind if I sit down?"

"You'll be after taking off your raincoat."

"I will, of course." Katie took off her coat and folded it over the back of a wooden chair that was standing behind the door. Underneath she wore a smart gray suit and a coppery-colored blouse that almost matched her hair. She sat down opposite Mrs. Meagher but Mrs. Meagher still kept her attention focused on her soap opera. The living room smelled of damp and food and lavender furniture polish.

"So far we've discovered the remains of eight people, and it looks as though there may be more."

"God rest their souls."

"You wouldn't have any idea who might have buried them there?"

"Well, it must have been somebody, mustn't it? They weren't after burying themselves."

"No, Mrs. Meagher, I'd be very surprised if they did. But I'd be interested to know if you were ever aware that your late husband was doing any work in the old feed store."

"He was always in and out of there. The cattle needed feeding, didn't they?"

"Of course. But what I meant was-were you ever aware that he was doing anything unusual in there? Like construction work, or digging?"

"Sacred heart of Jesus, you're not suggesting for a moment that my Michael buried these poor folk, are you?"

"I'm just trying to get some idea of how they got there, and when."

"I'm sure I don't have a clue. It would have taken a lot of work, wouldn't it, to bury so many people, and Michael would never have had the time for anything like that. He always said that he worked harder than two horses and a brown donkey."

"Did he take any interest in politics?"

"I know what you're saying. He read An Phoblacht but he never had the time for anything like that, either. Not the meetings. It was all I could do to get him to mass on Sunday."

"Did he have any special friends that you know of?"

"One or two fellows he met in The Roundy House in Ballyhooly. He used to play the accordion with them sometimes, on a Thursday night. That was the only time he was ever away from the farm, on a Thursday night. But it was feeble old fellows they were, couldn't have killed a fly, let alone find the strength to bury the poor creature afterward."

"Did anybody strange ever come to visit him? Anybody you didn't know yourself?"

Mrs. Meagher shook her head. "Michael liked his family around him but he wasn't one for entertaining. Whenever that fat good-for-nothing priest Father Morrissey came visiting and I gave him a piece of cake or a ham sandwich, Michael used to say that he felt like cutting his belly open to get it back, to think of all the hard work that every mouthful had cost him."

"I see. Was he a difficult man, Michael, would you say? I don't mean to speak ill of him."

Mrs. Meagher sniffed sharply. "He had his opinions and he didn't care for eejits. But, no-tut-he wasn't any more difficult than any other man," she said, as if all men were quite impossible.

"Did he ever have any long-running arguments with anybody?"

"What? He hardly spoke a single word to anyone from one day's end to the next, leave alone argue."

"One more thing. Did you ever hear any stories about people going missing anywhere in the area? Not necessarily recently, but at any time?"

"People going missing?" Mrs. Meagher took her attention away from the television for the first time. "No, I never heard of anybody going missing. Of course when I was a girl my mother was always telling us tales about folk who had been taken by the fairies, off to the Invisible Kingdom, but that was just to frighten us into eating our potatoes."

Katie smiled and nodded. Then she said, "One more thing. Have you ever seen anything like this before?" She reached into her pocket and took out a sealed plastic evidence bag, with one of the little gray rag dolls in it.

"What's that, then?"

"You've never seen anything like it before?"

"That's not a very good toy for a child, now, is it? Full of hooks and all."

"I don't think it's a toy, Mrs. Meagher. To be quite honest with you, I don't know what it is. But I'd prefer it if you didn't mention it to anyone."

"Why should I?"

"Well, just in case anybody asks. Anybody from the newspapers or the TV."

Mrs. Meagher picked up a half-empty pack of Carroll's cigarettes, and offered one to Katie. "No? Well, I shouldn't either, with my chest. The doctor says I've got a shadow on my lung."

"Why don't you give them up?"

She lit her cigarette and blew out a long stream of smoke. "Give them up? Why in God's name would I try to do something when I know for sure that I'd never be able to do it?"

3

By the time it grew dark, the technical team had uncovered eleven human skulls and most of the skeletons that went with them-as well as nineteen thighbones pierced and hung with little gray dolls. The excavation had been photographed at every stage, and the position of every bone precisely marked with little white flags and logged on computer. At first light tomorrow, they would begin the careful process of bagging and removing the remains and taking them to the pathology department at Cork University Hospital . There they would be examined by Dr. Owen Reidy, the state pathologist, who was flying down from Dublin bringing his black bag and his famous bad temper.

Liam came over as Katie left the house. "Well?" he asked her, chafing his hands together.

"Nothing. It's hard to believe that John Meagher's father had anything to do with this. But someone managed to excavate a hole in the floor of his feed store and bury eleven skeletons in it, not to mention drilling their thigh bones and decorating them with little dollies, and how they did that without Michael Meagher being aware of it, I can't imagine. As Mrs. Meagher says, he was in and out of there every single day, fetching and carrying feed."

"So, it stands to reason. He must have known what was going on."

"And what do we deduce from that? That he conspired with an execution squad?"

"I don't think these were executions," said Liam. "With executions it's almost always phutt! in the back of the head, after all. And what about all these dollies? What execution squad would bother to dismember their victims and drill holes in their thighbones? They'd have the graves dug and the bodies thrown in and they'd be off. But even if this was an execution, and John's father did bury the bodies, we can't necessarily assume that he did it willingly. He might have been warned to keep his mouth shut or else the same thing would happen to him."

Katie took out a handkerchief and wiped her nose. "I don't know. I think we're going to have to look somewhere else for the answer to this."

"Well, let's keep an open mind about our Michael Meagher. Like I said, there's something about these out-of-the-way farms that puts me in mind of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The rain, the mud, and nobody to tell your woes to but the pigs and the cows. It's not good for a man's sanity to be speaking nothing but Piggish and Cattleonian all day."

Katie checked her watch. "We've done all we can for tonight. General briefing at ten o'clock tomorrow morning, sharp. Meanwhile, can you get Patrick started on a comprehensive check of missing persons in the North Cork District for the past ten years? Tell him to pay special attention to people who went missing in groups, and anybody who was cycling or hitchhiking or backpacking. They're always the most vulnerable.

"Have Jimmy talk to his Traveler friends…they might know something."

"And me?"

"You know what I'm going to ask you to do. Go and have a drink with Eugene Ó Béara."

"You don't think he's really going to tell me anything, do you?"

"If the Provos had a hand in this, no. But you might persuade him to confirm that they didn't, which would save me a whole lot of time and aggravation and a few hundred pounds of wasted budget."

4

It was nearly ten o'clock when she finally got home, turning into the gates of their bungalow in Cobh , and parking her Mondeo next to Paul's Pajero 4x4. The rain was falling from the west as soft as thistledown. Paul still hadn't drawn the curtains, and as she walked up the drive she could see him in the living room, pacing up and down and talking on the phone. She tapped on the window with her door key, and he lifted his whiskey tumbler in salute.

She let herself in and was immediately pounced on by Sergeant, her black Labrador , his tail pattering furiously against the radiator like a bódhrán drum.

"Hallo, boy, how are you? Did your daddy take you for a walk yet?"

"Haven't had the time, pet," called Paul. "I've been talking to Dave MacSweeny all evening, trying to sort out this Youghal contract. I'll take him out in a minute."

"Poor creature. He'll be ready to burst."

Katie pried off her shoes and hung up her coat and went through to the living room. It was brightly lit by a crystal chandelier, with mock-Regency furniture, all pink cushions and white and gilt. The walls were hung with gilt-framed reproductions, seascapes mostly, with yachts tilting against the wind. One corner of the room was dominated by an enormous Sony widescreen television, with a barometer on top of it in the shape of a ship's wheel. In the opposite corner stood a large copper vase filled with pink-dyed pampas grass.

Paul said, "Okay, Dave. Grand. I'll talk to you first thing tomorrow. That's right. You have my word on that."

Katie opened up the white Regency-style sideboard and took out a bottle of Smirnoff Black Label. She poured herself a large drink in a cut-crystal glass and then went over to draw the curtains. Sergeant followed her, sniffing intently at her feet.

Paul wrapped his arms around her waist and gave her a kiss on the back of the neck. "Well, now. How's everything? I saw you on the TV news at eight o'clock. You looked gorgeous. If I wasn't married to you already I would have called the TV station and asked for your phone number."

She turned and kissed him back. "I'd have had you arrested for harassment."

Paul Maguire was a short, pillowy man, only two or three inches taller than she was, with a chubby face and dark-brown curly hair that came down over the collar of his bright green shirt in the 1980s style that used to be called a "mullet." His eyes were bright blue and slightly bulging and he always looked eager to please. He hadn't always been overweight. When she had married him seven and a half years ago he had taken a fifteen-inch collar and a thirty-inch waist and had regularly played football for the Glanmire Gaelic Athletic Association.

But five years ago his construction business had suffered one serious loss after another, and his confidence had taken a beating from which he hadn't yet recovered. These days he spent most of his time trying to make quick, profitable fixes-wheeling and dealing in anything from used Toyotas to cut-price building supplies. There were too many late nights, too many pub lunches with men in wide-shouldered Gentleman's Quarters suits who said they could get him something for next to nothing.

"Did you eat, in the end?" Katie asked him.

"I had a ham-and-cheese toastie at O'Leary's. And a packet of dry-roasted."

"That's not eating, for God's sake."

"Oh, don't worry about it. I don't have much of an appetite, if you must know."

"The whiskey's killed it, that's why."

"Come on, now, Katie, you know what pressure I've been under, working this deal out with Dave MacSweeny."

"I wouldn't mention Dave MacSweeny and a decent man on the same day. I don't know why you have anything to do with him."

"He went inside just the once, and what was that for? Receiving a stolen church piano. Not exactly Al Capone, is he?"

"He's still a chancer."

She went through to the kitchen, with Sergeant still pursuing her feet. Paul followed her as she opened the bread bin and took out a cut bran loaf. "This is always the way, isn't it? I'm married to the only female detective superintendent in the whole of Ireland , so no matter what I do I have to conduct myself like a saint."

"Not a saint, Paul. Just a law-abiding citizen who doesn't have any dealings with people who hijack JCBs from public roadworks and smuggle cigarettes through the quays and steal lorryloads of car tires from Hi-Q Motors."

Paul watched her in frustration as she cut herself a thick slice of red cheddar and started to slice up some tomatoes. "I'm doing my best, Katie. You know that. But I can't check the credentials of everybody I do business with, can I? They wouldn't give me the time of day if I did. It's bad enough you being a cop."

Katie sprinkled salt on her sandwich and cut it into quarters. "Hasn't it ever occurred to you that my being a cop is precisely why they do business with you? Who's going to touch you, garda or villain, when you're Mr. Detective Superintendent Kathleen Maguire?"

Paul was about to say something else, but he stopped himself. He followed Katie back into the living room, stumbling over Sergeant as he did so. "Would you ever hump off, you maniac?"

Katie sat down and took a large bite of sandwich, using the remote to switch on the television. Paul sat beside her and said, "Anyway, forget about Dave MacSweeny. How was your day? What's all these skeletons about? They said on the news there was nearly a dozen."

Katie's mouth was full of sandwich, but with eerie timing her own face suddenly appeared on the screen, standing in the afternoon gloom up at Meagher's Farm, and she turned the volume up."We can't tell yet how long these people have been buried here, or how they died. We're not excluding any possibility at all. We could be looking at a mass execution or a series of individual murders or even death by natural causes. First of all the remains have to be examined by the state pathologist, and as soon as he's given us some indication of the time and cause of death, you can be sure that we'll be pursuing our inquiries with the utmost rigor."

"There," said Katie. "Now you know as much as I do."

"That's it? You don't have any clues at all?"

"Nothing. It could have been an innocent family who died of typhus, and who were buried on the farm because they couldn't afford the funerals. Or it could have been eleven fellows who upset somebody nasty in the Cork criminal fraternity."

"I hope you're not making a point."

"No, Paul. I'm very tired, that's all. Now how about you taking Sergeant out to do his business, so that we can go to bed and get some sleep?"

While Paul put on his raincoat and took Sergeant for his run, Katie went through to the small room at the back of the house where she kept her desk and her PC. They still called it The Nursery, although they had stripped off the pale blue wallpaper, and the sole reminder of little Seamus was a small color photograph taken on his first and only birthday.

She took her nickel-plated Smith & Wesson .38 revolver out of the flat TJS holster on her hip and locked it in the top drawer of her desk. Then she sat for a long time staring at her reflection in the gray screen of her computer. When she was young she used to sit on the window seat at night, looking out of the window, and imagine that there was a ghostly girl looking back at her out of the darkness. She even used to talk to her reflection, sometimes.Who are you, and what are you doing, floating in the night, and why do you look so sad?

She didn't fully understand why, but today's discovery up at Meagher's Farm had given her a feeling of deep disquiet…as if something terrible was about to happen. The last time she had felt anything like this was late last spring, when the coast guard had discovered the body of a Romanian woman, washed up on the beach at Carrigadda Bay , in her multi-colored dress. During the course of the next few weeks, all along the coastline as far as Kinsale, they had discovered thirty-seven more. Each woman had paid €2,000 to be smuggled illegally into Ireland , but they had been thrown into the sea a hundred yards offshore, with all of their belongings, and none of them could swim.

During the night, Paul rolled over onto his back and started to snore. Katie elbowed him and hissed, "Shut up, will you?" and he stopped for a while, but then he started up again, even louder. She buried her head under the duvet and tried to get back to sleep, but all the time she could hear that high, repetitive rasping.

She found herself walking through a dark, dripping abattoir. She wasn't aware that she was asleep. Somewhere close by she could hear a shrill chorus of band saws, and the sound of men whistling as they worked.

She turned a corner and found herself on the killing floor. Five or six slaughter men were standing around steel-topped tables, wearing long leather aprons and strangely folded linen hats. They were nonchalantly cutting up carcasses, and tossing them into heaps. Arms on one heap, legs on another, heads in the opposite corner.

Katie walked toward them, even though the floor was slimy with connective tissue and she could feel the blood sticking to her bare feet. As she came closer, she suddenly saw that the carcasses were human-men, women, and children.

She came up behind one of the slaughter men and lifted her hand to touch him on the shoulder. "Stop," she mouthed, but no sound came out. He was lining up a decapitated human head, ready to saw it in half.

"Stop," she repeated, still silently. At that moment, the decapitated head opened its eyes and stared at her. It started to jabber and babble, and with a thrill of horror she realized that it was trying to explain to her what had happened up at Meagher's Farm.

"The Gray-Dolly Man! You have to look for the Gray-Dolly Man!"

"Stop! I'm a police officer!" Katie screamed at the slaughter man. But without hesitation he pushed the head into his band saw. There was a screech of steel against bone, and Katie's face was sprayed with blood.

Katie woke up with a jolt. Paul was still snoring, and rain was spattering against the window. She waited for a few minutes, then she climbed out of bed and went through to the kitchen for a drink of sparkling Ballygowan water. She could see herself reflected in the blackness of the window as she drank directly out of the neck of the bottle. The ghost again, looking back at her.

You need a break, she told herself. She and Paul hadn't had a holiday since February, when they had taken a cheap package to Lanzarote for ten days and it had rained for nine of them. Or maybe she needed a different kind of break. A break from her entire life. A break from pain and violence and kicking down doors to damp-smelling apartments. A break from her guilt about little Seamus.

But she couldn't forget those eleven skulls, lined up higgledy-piggledy beside the excavation where the rest of their bodies were strewn. And she couldn't forget those little rag dolls, dangling from their thighbones. Eleven people, deserving of justice. She just prayed to God that they hadn't suffered too much.

5

Wednesday was colder but very much brighter, and Katie had to wear sunglasses when she drove into the city. The roads were shining silvery wet from the early morning rain, and the Lee was glittering like a river of broken glass.

She took the road that ran alongside the quays, where red-and-white tankers and cattle ships were moored, as well as a three-masted German training clipper. The river divided into two branches as it reached the large Victorian customhouse, so the center of the city was built on an island less than a mile wide and two miles long, connected by more than a dozen bridges and crisscrossed with narrow, devious streets and hidden lanes.

The buildings along the river were painted in greens and oranges and blues, which gaveCork the appearance of somewhere inDenmark , rather than the late-Victorian English-built city it actually was.

Katie drove past city hall and turned south onAnglesea Street to the modern concrete block of the Garda headquarters. As she climbed out of her car in the car park, she saw seven hooded crows sitting on the barbed-wire fence at the back. They stayed there even when she walked close by, their feathers ruffled by the sharp early morning breeze, their eyes as black as buttons.

She remembered that one of the nuns at Our Lady of Lourdes had told her that crows had once been white, but when Noah sent a crow from the ark to look for land, it had never returned, so God had tarred its feathers so that it looked as black as Satan.

She collected a plastic cup of cappuccino from the machine at the end of the corridor, and then walked along to her office. Sergeant Jimmy O'Rourke was standing outside her door waiting for her in a cloud of cigarette smoke.

"Dr. Reidy's office sent us an E-mail this morning. I'll go up to the airport to meet him at half past eleven."

She hung up her raincoat. Today she was wearing a green jacket in herringbone tweed and a black sweater. "That's okay," she said. "I'd like to pick him up myself."

"Patrick's left a printout of missing persons on your desk. I've sent Dockery and O'Donovan out to call on all of the farms around the Meagher place. But for what it's worth, I heard something that could be interesting. I called up to the halting site at Hollyhill last night, and one of the Travelers happened to mention that Tómas Ó Conaill had been seen around Cork, him and some of his family."

"Ó Conaill? That devil? I thought he was in Donegal."

"He was, but he and his family haven't been seen since the middle of August at least. Never mind, wherever he is, I'll find him."

"Thanks, Jimmy."

Katie sat down at her desk and wrote "Tómas Ó Conaill" on her jotter, and underlined it three times. Two years ago, she had arrested Tómas Ó Conaill for a vicious attack on a pregnant girl in Mallow, almost disemboweling her with a chisel, but nobody had been prepared to testify against him, not even the girl herself. He was intelligent and charismatic, but he was an out-and-out sociopath who gave the Traveling people a bad name that they didn't deserve-using their cant language and their intense secrecy to conceal his activities from the law.

Tómas Ó Conaill. If anybody was capable of killing and dismembering eleven people, it was him.

As she sipped her cappuccino, she glanced out of the window toward the new multistory car park at the back of the Garda station, and saw over a dozen crows clustered along the top of it.

She stood up and went to the window and stared at them. She had never been seriously superstitious, although she never walked under ladders. But all these crows on the car park roof strengthened her conviction that something bad was about to happen.

She sat down again. Next to her computer terminal stood a framed photograph of herself and Paul, on their wedding day, four years ago. She had never noticed before that Paul's right eye seemed to be looking one way, while the left eye was looking another. She reached out and touched the photograph with her fingertips and whispered, "Sorry."

At 7:35A.M. there was a rap at her open door and Chief Superintendent Dermot O'Driscoll came in, eating a piece of toast. He was a huge, sprawling man with a high white wave of hair and a pinkish-gray face like a joint of corned beef. His hairy white belly bulged out between his shirt buttons. He heaved himself into one of Katie's chairs and said, "Well, Kathleen? How's tricks? I hope you realize that the eyes of the world are on us."

"I sawSky Newsthis morning, yes. But until I get Dr. Reidy's analysis-"

"All right. It's just that the media are getting very impatient for fresh developments. And I've already had two calls fromDublin this morning, asking for progress reports."

Katie liked Dermot, and trusted him. After she was unexpectedly promoted to detective superintendent, he had protected her from some very rancid criticism, especially from some of the male detectives who had been passed over. But she didn't care much what the press thought about her, unless they got their facts ass-about-face, and she was too impatient to get results to share his constant concern about "presentation."

"I'm sure we can handle it here, sir," she told him. "We have all the manpower and all the facilities we need. But I think there's more to this case than meets the eye and the last thing I want to do is jump to any lurid conclusions for the sake of amusing the media."

"So where are we so far?"

Katie held up the file that Detective Garda O'Sullivan had left for her. "In the past ten years, over four hundred and fifty people have gone missing without trace in theNorth Cork area, although never more than three together at any one time, and that was in 1997 near Fermoy. Even when eleven people or more have gone missing in a short space of time, there hasn't been any kind of connection or consistency between them. Summer, 1995: A forty-five-year-oldWaterford man disappeared from the bridge over the River Bride near Bridebridge. The next day a thirteen-year-old English girl vanished from her parents' caravan at Shanballymore. The same evening, a thirty-three-year-old electrician failed to return home to his family in Castletownroche. Eight other people went missing in the next two days. That's eleven in total. But they didn't have anything in common-not sex, or appearance, or age, or financial background, or even where they were last sighted, and none of them gave any evidence of being distressed or upset before they left."

"What about revenge killings, or executions?"

"Far too soon to tell. It could have been political, it could have been criminal. We really don't know. Liam's talking to Eugene Ó Béara but I'm not especially hopeful."

"How about Eamonn Collins?"

"I'll talk to him myself, later today."

"You said yourself it could have been a natural disaster-an epidemic?"

"Patrick O'Sullivan's looking into that…going back over hospital and doctors' records for the Mallow and Fermoy and Mitchelstown area. But eleven people…that's a lot of people to die at once and nobody to notice it. And of course we've got these mysterious little dolls."

"Do you have any ideas whatthey'reall about?"

"None at all. They suggest some kind of folk ritual, don't they? But none of us have ever come across any ritual like this before."

"Any other leads?"

"Jimmy's been talking to some of his contacts in the Traveling community. Apparently Tómas Ó Conaill's been seen in the area."

"Ó Conaill? That piece of work. I thought he was up north these days. Ireland 's answer to Charles Manson."

"Well, he may be nothing to do with any of this, but I want to be sure. Apart from that, I'd like at least twenty guards so that we can make house-to-house inquiries around the Knocknadeenly area, and make a thorough search of the whole of Meagher Farm."

"And what should I be after telling the media?"

"You can tell them we're on top of it."

"Well, Katie, they may want something a little more exciting than that."

"This isn't entertainment, sir, with all due respect."

"Katie-come on, now. Diplomacy. You know as well as I do that if you want their assistance, you'll have to give the media fellows something to keep their salivatory juices flowing. You're a story in yourself, don't forget."

"I don't want to release anything about the dolls, not yet. Not till we know what their significance is."

"Fair enough. But whatcanyou release?"

"I'll tell them we're trying some secret new techniques to establish the victims' identities."

"That's good. I like that. And what secret new techniques might these be?"

"I don't know. That's why they're secret."

Chief Superintendent O'Driscoll shook his head. "You're a great detective, Katie. One of the best I've ever had. But you have to understand that the job requires sometact,my love, as well as skill."

"When I find out who dismembered eleven people and buried them on Meagher's Farm, sir, then I'll be sweetness itself."

The briefing was short and inconclusive and full of smoke. The technical team showed pictures of the scattered skeletons, but there didn't appear to be any pattern to their disposal. All that they could usefully deduce was that the bodies must have been dismembered before they were buried, because nine femurs were located at the bottom level of the excavation, with three rib cages on top, and then dozens of assorted tibias and fibulas and scapulas, with finger bones and toe bones and skulls.

And, of course, the legs must have been cut off so that holes could be drilled, and little rag dolls tied onto them.

Detective Sergeant Edmond O'Leary pointed mournfully to the blown-up photographs. "There was no way of telling for certain which thighbone belonged to which pelvis; or which patella belonged to which thighbone; or which anything belonged to anything else."

At the back of the room, Liam sang, under his breath,"The hipbone was disconnected from the…thighbone! The thighbone was disconnected from the…knee bone!"

Katie turned around and gave him an exasperated frown, but he gave her a grin of apology and a wave of his hand.

"Until we have a full pathological report, all we can say for sure is that these skeletons were probably all buried under the feed store in Meagher's Farm at the same time…even though they may not have actually died or been killed at Meagher's Farm. Their remains may have been transported from another location, and we don't yet have any evidence that they died or were killed on the very same day."

"Any footprints found?" asked Liam.

"Only John Meagher's, and his mother's, and those of his various laborers."

"Tire tracks?"

"John Meagher's Land Rover Discovery, that's all. And the milk lorry from Dawn Dairies. And the young boy's bicycle."

"Any clothing found, or shoes?" asked Katie.

"No, nothing."

"Any buttons, or hooks and eyes, or zippers, or fastenings of any kind?"

"No, and that was unusual, peaty soil being such a preservative."

"So we could be looking for clothes, as a possible clue?"

"We could, yes. And jewelry, of course. They were all adults, by the size of them, and it would be rare to find eleven adults without a single crucifix, or wristwatch, or wedding ring between them."

"Get onto that," Katie told Edmond O'Leary. "Ask around the jewelers' shops inCork , in particular…see if they've been offered a quantity of wedding rings and other personal knickknacks. Lenihan's would be a good bet, inFrench Church Street . We pulled in Gerry Lenihan twice last year for fencing stolen rings."

"The only other thing I can tell you so far is that the bones were probably those of young adult females, although I will obviously bow to Dr. Reidy's greater expertise in this matter if he says different."

At that moment, Garda Maureen Dennehy came into the briefing room and handed Katie a note.Eamonn Collins: Dan Lowery's, 2:30 pm.

"Thanks, Maureen."

"By the way, your husband called you, too. He said he may have to go toLimerick tonight, so don't wait up for him."

"All right," Katie nodded, thinking to herself,What the hell is Paul up to now?

6

She was talking to one of the airport security police when Dr. Owen Reidy came through the automatic sliding doors, impatiently pushing two young children aside. He was wearing a billowing tan trench coat that was belted too tight in the middle and a wide-brimmed trilby hat.

"They kept us waiting on the runway atDublin for over twenty minutes," he grumbled, pushing his medical bag and his bulging overnight case at the young garda. "What do they think, we have time to waste waiting for these package holidaymakers to land fromFlorida ? They should make them circle until they run out of fuel. And crash. And burn."

Dr. Reidy had a big, mottled face and sumptuous ginger eyebrows, and he always sported a huge spotted bow tie. He had been closely involved with Charlie Haughey, when he was Taoiseach, and theIrish Examinerhad claimed that he was "the fifth man" in a middle-aged orgy at the Grafton Hotel inDublin , which Dr. Reidy had always firmly denied. Deny it or not, he was a grand stegosaurus from the mid-1980s, when the Irish economy had begun to boom, and certain people had made a great deal of money, thanks to nods and winks and tax breaks and special favors, and he still expected to be treated like one of the great and the good.

"Glad to see you're well, Dr. Reidy," said Katie, as they walked out into the sunshine.

"Pphh!I was hoping for two days of golf in Killarney. Not picking over skeletons inCork ."

"So far, we've exhumed eleven skulls, which presupposes eleven different individuals, and a corresponding collection of assorted bones."

"Well, your people can count then, can they? That's one mercy."

"We don't have any suspects yet. It depends very largely on the way they died, and when."

"So-as usual-you'll be depending on me to crack your case for you."

"You're a great pathologist, Dr. Reidy."

"And you, Detective Superintendent, should be home minding your kids."

Katie looked out of the car window as they were driven down the long hill toward Kinsale Roundabout, andCork . She could have said all kinds of things, in answer to that. She could have been dismissive, or bitter, or told him how she had gone to feed Seamus on that chilly January morning and found him dead, not breathing.

Instead, she said, "We've booked you your usual room, up at the Arbutus Lodge. I'll have to warn you, though…it's changed hands since you were here last, and the food's not what it used to be."

"I'll take my chances with that, Inspector."

They drove into the city, and dropped Katie off inAnglesea Street . Dr. Reidy said, "I'll be letting you know my findings as soon as I can. I'm aiming to get at least two days' golf in, after all."

Katie said nothing, but closed the car door and watched him being driven off, his car bouncing and swaying over the potholes. She crossed the road and walked back into the Garda headquarters, her head bowed, and when Garda Maureen Dennehy said, "Chief Superintendent O'Driscoll has been looking for you, ma'am," she didn't look up, not once.

Eamonn "Foxy" Collins was already waiting for her when she walked into Dan Lowery's pub inMacCurtain Street . It was a small pub, its walls crowded with bottles and mirrors advertising Murphy's Stout and souvenirs and vases of dried flowers. Eamonn Collins liked it partly because of its theatrical connections (it was right next door to theEverymanPalace theater) but mainly because of its gloomy stained-glass window, which had originally come from a church in Killarney, and which made it impossible for anybody to see into the pub from the pavement outside.

He was sitting in the small back room where he could watch both the front door and the stairs which led up to the toilets. Opposite him sat a big silent man with a blue-shaved head and protruding ears and python tattoos crawling out of the neck of his sweatshirt. Eamonn himself was lean and dapper, with russet brushed-back hair that was beginning to turn white in the front and which had earned him his nickname. He wore a beautifully tailored two-piece suit in mottled gray tweed, a black waistcoat and very shiny black oxfords.

Katie sat down opposite him, deliberately obscuring his view of the front door.

"Will I buy you a drink?" he asked her. They didn't need to exchange any pleasantries. His eyes were like two gray stones lying on a beach in winter.

"A glass of water will do."

"Jerry," said Eamonn, and the big silent man stood up and went to the bar.

"You've been taking it very easy lately," said Katie. "Five days' fishing in Sligo…two weeks' golf inSouth Carolina ."

"It's good to know that I'm missed."

"I miss you like a dose of hepatitis A."

"You're the light of my life, Detective Superintendent. But a little more live-and-let-live would go a long way."

"I don't think that drugs have anything much to do with letting people live, do you?"

Eamonn gave a one-shouldered shrug. "What I always say is, you shouldn't let nefarious activities fall into the wrong hands; you have to keep crime clean."

"Is that what happened up at Meagher's Farm? Somebody was keeping crime clean?"

"I don't know what happened up at Meagher's Farm, I'm sorry to say. Things have been very peaceful here inCork in the past few months; that's why I went off on two weeks' holliers. The only thing I can tell you for sure is that it wasn't anything to do with me, or with anybody else that I know of."

Eamonn was the only man she knew who actually pronounced his semi-colons, sticking out the tip of his tongue and making a soft little clicking sound. She had always found his fastidiousness to be the most alarming thing about him. He ran one of the most profitable drug rackets in the city, and he had been personally responsible for the brutal murders of at least five people. Yet all his clothes were handmade inDublin and he was always quoting from Yeats and Moore.

There weren't many ofCork 's criminals who actually gave her that bristling-down-the-back-of-the neck feeling, but "Foxy" Collins did.

"Have you eaten at all?" he asked her. "I know that you detectives are often too busy to eat, and the beef sandwiches here are particularly good. Or the Kinsale fish chowder."

"I've had lunch already, thank you," Katie lied. "What I need to know from you is who's gone missing in the past six months. Eleven people, that's a lot of bodies. If they'reyourbodies, I'm sure that you'll be anxious to have your revenge. If they're not, then I'm sure you'll be equally anxious to make sure that one of your competitors gets what's coming to him."

"But what ifI'mresponsible?" asked Eamonn. "I wouldn't tell you that, now would I?"

"I don't think youareresponsible. You're more flamboyant than that. When you deal with somebody, you like the whole world to know about it. Like that time you set fire to Jacky O'Malley in the middle ofPatrick Street ."

Eamonn came close to smiling. He took a sip of his Power's whiskey and fixed her over the rim of his glass with those stones for eyes. "You know what it looks like to me, this massacre of yours? It looks like the work of knackers. There's been some bad blood feuds between some of the families, and if I were you I'd be looking to talk to some of the Traveling folk.

"Tómas Ó Conaill?"

"That wouldn't surprise me. He was always a vicious bastard, and his head was always full of fairy nonsense."

There was a long silence between them. In the front of the pub, a businessman was shouting on his mobile phone. "I will, yeah. I did, yeah. I am, yeah." Eventually Eamonn leaned forward and traced a pattern on top of the varnished table with his well-manicured fingertip.

"The way it was done, you see. The bones all mixed up like that. The knackers do that to stop a person from being admitted to heaven. If you can't find your feet, how can you walk through the pearly gates?"

Katie said, "I didn't know that you were such an expert on Irish superstitions."

"I take a very keen interest in anything that's a matter of luck."

"Well, you'll let me know, won't you, if you hear about anybody whose luck ran out up at Meagher's Farm?"

"I will of course. It's always been my policy to cooperate with the Garda."

"One day, Eamonn, I promise, I will break you."

Eamonn gave her a smile. "'You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will…but the scent of the roses will hang round it still.'"

She left the pub without touching her glass of water and without saying good-bye. The big silent man with the shaved head followed her to the door and opened it for her.

7

Dr. Reidy called her from theUniversityHospital at 11:25 on Friday morning.

"I'll be finishing my written report over the weekend, Detective Superintendent. But I think you ought to come over to the path lab so that I can give you some preliminary findings. Which will surprise you."

"Surprise me? Why?" asked Katie, but he had already banged down the phone.

Liam drove her to the hospital. It was a gray day, dry, and not particularly chilly, but with low clouds pouring endlessly over the city from the west. One of those days when you could easily imagine that you would never see the sun again, for the rest of your life.

She didn't need an overcoat: just her prune-colored wool suit with the red speckles and a cream-colored rollneck sweater. Liam wore his new black leather jacket.

Liam said, "There's no doubt about it, so far as I'm concerned. Whichever way you look at it, Michael Meagherhadto know that the bodies were buried under his feed store. I know that Mrs. Meagher plays down his republican connections, but it's totally possible that he never told her what he was doing, most of the time."

"Eugene Ó Béara denied any knowledge, though, didn't he?"

"He did, yes, but that was hardly the surprise of the century."

They parked at the front of the hospital and Katie led the way through the double swing doors and along the corridor to the pathology laboratory. An old man in a plaid dressing gown sat in a wheelchair at the end of the corridor, and frowned at her through glasses that were so fingerprinted that they were almost opaque. He looked the spitting double of Samuel Beckett, but if you had said to him "nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!" he might very well have agreed with you but he wouldn't have known that it came fromWaiting for Godot.

Dr. Reidy was standing at the far end of the pathology laboratory wrapped in a green plastic apron. The pearly gray light from the clerestory windows lent him a halo. Eleven trestle tables were arranged in two lines, each table draped in a dark green sheet, and on each table lay a collection of bones, with paper labels attached to every one of them. When Katie saw them like this, she thought they looked even more vulnerable and pathetic than they had when she had first seen them up at Meagher's Farm, a family of fleshless orphans. She felt a sense of desperate sadness, not least because it was far too late to do anything to save them.

Three laboratory assistants were still carefully sorting through the bones, trying to reassemble the skeletons into their previous selves. They were using a wall chart with eleven skeletal diagrams on it to chart their progress.

Dr. Reidy blew his nose into a large white handkerchief. "We have identified most of the component parts of these unfortunate individuals-and, yes, they were all female, of varying ages. I will be giving you a list of the bones that are still missing so that you can send your officers back up to Meagher's Farm to search with rather more diligence than they obviously did before. I will attach drawings of what each particular bone looks like. I don't have any optimism that any of your officers can tell their coccyx from their humerus."

"You mean their arse from their elbow," said Katie, without smiling.

"Quite, Detective Superintendent. What an anatomist you are."

Katie walked around the nearest table and looked at the skull lying forlornly at one end, its bones arranged beneath it. "You said you had a surprise for me, Doctor."

"That's right. Not an unpleasant surprise, you'll be happy to know. I've made some preliminary tests on these bones and I can tell you with absolute certainty that none of these ladies died in your lifetime…or evenmylifetime, so we can forget about Operation Trace. All the marrow's decayed but I should be able to retrieve some identifiable DNA. I've also sent some bone samples off toDublin for full amino-acid racemization and when I get the results back I should be able to give you a much more accurate date. But you'll probably be relieved to know that you're not looking for a murderer who's likely to be still alive today."

"You're sure they were murdered?"

"I think it's ninety-nine percent likely but not totally certain. Apart from the holes drilled in the top of the femurs, and the doll figures attached, each had a narrow chisel-like object pushed into both eye sockets. Each was obviously dismembered, but it won't be possible for me to determine whether this process began before or after death. There's something else very interesting, too."

"Oh, yes?"

Dr. Reidy lifted a tibia from the table in front of them and handed it over so that Katie could examine it more closely. "What do you make of that?"

"It's a leg bone."

"Of course it's a leg bone, Detective Superintendent. But do what detectives are supposed to do and detect what's noteworthy about it."

Katie turned it this way and that. "I don't know. What am I looking for?"

With one blunt, trembling, nicotine-stained forefinger, Dr. Reidy pointed to a series of diagonal scratches all the way down the side of the bone. "These striations," he said. "They appear to have been made with a very sharp short-bladed knife of the kind that butchers use for trimming ribs."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning that their flesh didn't naturally decay. Before they were interred, every one of them was completely boned."

Katie said nothing, but looked around the laboratory at the ivory litter of human remains. There was something so tragic about them. Unknown, unburied, and unmourned. And God alone knew what they must have suffered, before they were killed.

Liam lifted his spectacles so that he could take a closer look. "What are we talking about here, sir? Why would somebody want to scrape people's flesh off?"

Dr. Reidy struggled under his plastic apron, found a handkerchief, and loudly blew his nose. "Cannibalism?" he suggested.

"Cannibalism? Jesus, this isn'tFiji ."

"I'm just giving you the forensic findings, Inspector Fennessy. But the findings are that quite apart from the obvious attachment of small cloth figures to their femurs, all of these skeletons had the flesh scraped off them, with considerable care and effort, as if it was being done for a specific, ritualized purpose. Of which cannibalism may have been part."

Katie said, "Can you give me just a rough idea of how old these skeletons are?"

"From the tests I've done so far, which-as I say-are not at all conclusive, I'd say that their bones have been lying under Meagher's feed store for about eighty years, and possibly more. Long before John Meagher's grandfather bought the property, and long before Michael Meagher owned it."

"What about the dolls?"

"They're all made out of linen, knotted and wound around like the funeral windings of a mummy. The screws and nails and hooks are handmade, most of them, and we can probably date them very accurately indeed. Certainly their corrosion is consistent with them having been buried for at least three quarters of a century, and possibly longer."

Katie said, "Have you ever come across any killings like this, ever before?"

Dr. Reidy shook his head. "Never. As I say, there was obviously some ritualistic element in what happened to these women, but precisely what it was I can't tell you. I never saw bones so methodically stripped of their flesh before. And I've never seen anything like these dolls. And that's in twenty-nine years of medical jurisprudence."

"So what do we do now?"

"My dear, I really can't tell you. I'm going off to play golf in Killarney. You, presumably, will be trying to find what kind of people could have committed such an idiosyncratic crime, and why."

Katie stood close to Dr. Reidy for a while, looking at all of the eleven skulls with their crooked, jawless grins. Then she simply said, "Thank you."

"You're quite welcome," Dr. Reidy replied, laying an uncharacteristically avuncular hand on her shoulder. "It always makes life more interesting to see something new, even if it is rather stomach-churning."

That afternoon, she held a media conference atAnglesea Street . The conference room was dazzled by television floods and the epileptic flickering of flashlights. She held her hand up in front of her face to shield her eyes.

"Early forensic examination indicates that these skeletons were interred over eighty years ago. Until we receive more information fromDublin , we won't have a precise date, but it looks as if they could have been victims of some kind of ritual massacre."

"A Celtic ritual?" asked Dermot Murphy, from theIrish Examiner,lifting his ball pen.

"We don't know yet. But we'll be talking to several experts on Irish folklore, to see if there's any kind of religious or social precedent for killings like these."

"You said that the bones had been cleaned by a butcher's knife. Could this be cannibalism we're talking about here? Or a farmer feeding human beings off to his livestock? I read a horror story about that once."

"This is not a story, Dermot. This is reality."

"So what can we say? Without being too sensational?"

"You can simply say that we'll be calling in all of the qualified assistance that we can. We're also appealing for anybody who has any knowledge of similar killings to come forward and share their information with us, no matter how inconsequential they think it may be. This is a difficult and highly unusual case, but you can rest assured that we're making progress."

"Is there any point in continuing a full-scale investigation?" asked Gerry O'Ryan, from theIrish Times."The murderer's more than likely dead by now, surely?"

"So far the investigation is still open," said Katie. "I'm going to be talking to Chief Superintendent O'Driscoll tomorrow morning, and we'll decide what action to take next. Obviously we don't want to waste taxpayers' money on pursuing a case that will give us no useful result."

The media conference broke up, and the television lights were switched off, leaving the room in sudden gloom. Katie talked for a while to Jim McReady from RTÉ News, and then she walked back to her office.

She was halfway there when she heard the jingling of loose change as somebody tried to catch up with her. "Superintendent!" called a voice. It was Hugh McGarvey, a freelance journalist fromLimerick , a skinny little scarecrow of a man with a withered neck and a beaky nose. "You're right on top of this case, then, Superintendent?"

"I'm doing everything I possibly can, yes."

"Would it be impertinent of me to ask you, then, who your husband is on top of?"

"What?" she said, baffled.

"Your husband, Paul. I was having a few drinks with some friends at the Sarsfield Hotel inLimerick on Thursday night and lo and behold I saw your husband stepping into the lift with some dark-haired girl in a short blue dress. A fine half she was, very vivacious. And very friendly they looked, too."

Katie suddenly felt short of breath, as if somebody had slapped her in the stomach.

Hugh McGarvey added, "There was no Paul Maguire in the hotel register that night, but then, well, you wouldn't have expected there to be, would you?"

"Mistaken identity," said Katie. "You should be careful of that, Hugh. A lot of people get themselves into serious trouble, pointing the finger at the wrong person."

"Oh, I'm pretty sure it was him."

"Couldn't have been. He wasn't even staying at the Sarsfield."

"I was only checking, Superintendent. It would make a bit of a story, wouldn't it, if it was true?"

"Listen," said Katie. "You were invited here for a media conference about a serious crime-even though that crime was committed over eighty years ago. That's the story. Not me."

"You'll always be the story. At least you will be until another woman makes the rank of detective superintendent."

"Your breath smells," said Katie.

Paul said, "Nothing happened inLimerick , Katie. I was trying to buy some building supplies from Jerry O'Connell, that's all. We had a bite to eat together, and a couple of drinks, and then I went to bed. On my own."

"You were staying at the Sarsfield, though? You told me you were staying at Dwyer's."

"I was going to stay at Dwyer's but they didn't have a room."

"Dwyer's didn't have a room?Dwyer's?In the middle of the week?"

"For God's sake, Katie. Outside of this house you're a detective superintendent, but inside of this house you're my wife. I don't expect you to put me through the third degree just because some ratty reporter imagined he saw me with some fictitious woman."

Katie said, "All right. Sorry. You're right."

"It's always the same. You're always making me feel guilty even when I haven't done anything."

"I said I'm sorry."

"Jesus Christ," said Paul. "I love you and this is what I get in return."

Katie didn't know whether to believe his protestations of innocence or not. If he had been one of her suspects, she wouldn't have accepted his story for a second. Of course she could call Dwyer's and check if he was telling the truth, and she could call the manager at Sarsfield's, too, but what good would that do? Paul was her husband and at some point she had to trust him, not just because she felt so responsible for him, not just out of loyalty, but also because she wasn't yet ready to face the alternative. She didn't want to choose which CDs were hers and which were his. She didn't want to sell the house, because The Nursery was here, and she couldn't leave The Nursery.

Not to be able to walk into that room again, and close her eyes, and imagine that she could still smell that baby smell of talcum powder, and still hear that clogged, high-pitched breathing-just now, that would be more than she could bear.

Paul swallowed whiskey and said, "Hugh McGarvey's stirring it, that's all. He's a scumbag. He's probably still sore because you complained about that rubbish he wrote about police overtime."

"Forget it, Paul. He made a mistake, that's all."

"Me and Jerry went through a whole bottle of whiskey between us. I couldn't have flahed anybody if I'd wanted to."

"I said forget it."

He sat down on the pink-upholstered sofa next to her, and stroked her cheek. "There's only one woman I love, Katie, and that's you."

"What's wrong with you, Paul? Why can't you tell me?"

"There's nothing at all wrong with me, Katie. I'm just trying to find my feet again, that's all. Can't you ever give me a chance, for Christ's sake?"

"I'm always giving you a chance. But what happened to the happiness, Paul?"

He was just about to say something when the phone rang. Katie picked it up and it was Liam, and he sounded as if he were standing next to a busy road junction.

"I've had a call from Eugene Ó Béara. He says that there's somebody who wants to talk to us. Three o'clock on Sunday, inBlackpool ."

"All right, then. He didn't give you any idea what it was about?"

"No, he was being all mysterious."

Katie put down the phone. She looked at Paul but Paul looked back at her with an expression that said nothing but:what?She wanted so much for him to give her some hope. She wanted him to say that he had got his self-confidence back, that everything was going to be different. But Paul took another swallow of whiskey, and tugged at Sergeant's ears, and said, "You like that, boy, don't you? You like that."

8

By the time the two builders had dropped her off at the bridge by the Angler's Rest, on the way toBlarney , the tarmac-gray sky had grown even darker, and huge spots of rain had begun to fall across the road. The builders gave her a wave and a toot of their horn and turned off westward toward Dripsey. She crossed the road and stood with her thumb sticking out.

The breeze blew the long blond hair that streamed out from underneath her knitted woolen cap. She was a tall, athletic-looking girl, with a honey-coloredCalifornia suntan. She was wearing a navy blue windcheater and blue denim jeans and Timberland hiking boots, and carrying a rucksack.

Hitchhiking through Ireland had been magical for her. She had planned this trip for over eighteen months, sitting on the veranda of her parents' home inSanta Barbara , poring over photographs of misty green mountains and rugged beaches and picturesque pubs with raspberry-painted frontages and bicycles propped outside. Most of those pictures had come to life, and she had stood on the rocks on the Ring of Kerry overlooking the pale turquoise sea, and tapped her feet to Gaelic music in tiny one-room bars, and walked along the banks of the Shannon and the Lee, knee-deep in wet green grass.

Now she was on her way toBlarneyCastle , a few miles northwest ofCorkCity , to do what all conscientious tourists were obliged to do, and kiss the Blarney Stone.

She had only been thumbing for a lift for five minutes before a black Mercedes pulled into the side of the road and waited for her with its engine running. Its hood was highly polished but its sides and trunk were thickly coated with brown mud. She ran up to it and opened the door.

"Pardon me, are you going throughBlarney ?"

"Blarney?" he said. "I can take you anywhere your heart desires."

"I only need to get toBlarney ."

"Then, of course."

She climbed into the front passenger seat. The interior of the car was immaculately clean and smelled of leather. "I'm not taking you out of your way?" she said, tossing her rucksack onto the backseat.

"Of course not. Iamthe way."

They drove smoothly off towardBlarney . Although it was only three o'clock in the afternoon, the day grew suddenly so dark that the driver had to switch on his lights. There were no other cars in sight, and both sides of the road were overhung with shadowy green woods.

"You're American," he said.

"Yes, but Irish heritage. Fiona Kelly, I'm fromSanta Barbara,California . My great-great-grandfather came fromCork , and he emigrated toNew York in 1886."

"So you're rediscovering your roots?"

"It's something I've always wanted to do. I don't really know why. My parents have never been back here, but I saw a Discovery program about Ireland two or three years ago, and do you know, the minute I saw those mountains, and those fabulous green meadows…"

"Ah, yes. They say that if you come from Ireland , you have to come back to Ireland to say your last words.In articulo vel periculo mortis. If you're dying, you know, your last plea for absolution can be heard by any priest at all, even if degraded or apostate, even if you've committed grievous sins which can normally be forgiven only by some ecclesiastical superior."

"Well, wow. You seem to be pretty well versed. Are you a priest?"

"No," he smiled. "I'm not a priest. But, yes, I'm pretty well versed, as you put it."

Suddenly, it began to rain thunderously hard. The driver slowed down, but his windshield wipers were still whacking from side to side at full speed, and Fiona found it almost impossible to see where they were going.

"Maybe we should pull over," Fiona suggested, nervously.

"Oh, no, we're going to be fine. We're almost there now."

She peered through the windshield but she still couldn't see any signs sayingBlarney .

"I have to kiss the Blarney Stone. That was something my dad made me promise."

"Well, of course. Everybody who comes toCork has to kiss the Blarney Stone. It gives you the gift of a silver tongue."

At last the rain began to die away, and the driver switched off the windshield wipers, and unexpectedly a pale golden sun came swimming out of the clouds. The driver remarked, "They say that we don't have a climate here, only weather."

He turned a sharp left, and up a steep muddy road with a sign saying Sheehan's Nurseries. The road became narrower and narrower, and eventually Fiona said, "This isn't the way toBlarney , is it?"

"It's a detour, that's all. We'll be there in a trice."

"No, no. I really don't think so. I want you to stop, right now, and I want to get out."

"Don't be ridiculous. It's only half a mile intoBlarney from here."

"In that case, I can walk it, okay? I want to get out."

"You're not frightened, are you?"

"No, I'm not. But I want to get out. It's stopped raining and I can walk the rest of the way."

"Hm," said the driver, and suddenly put his foot down, so that the Mercedes surged forward, and its rear tires slithered on the muddy road.

"Stop, will you?" Fiona demanded. "I want to get out!"

"Sorry, Fiona Kelly. That's not really an option."

Fiona reached into her jeans pocket and tugged out her mobile phone. "Are you going to stop and let me out or am I going to call the police?"

Without warning, the driver wrenched the mobile phone out of her hand and then punched her on the cheek. He hit her so hard that her head banged against the window.

"Oh, God!" she screamed. "Stop! Let me out!Stop!"

The driver slammed his foot on the brake. The car slewed sideways and stopped halfway up the verge. Fiona grappled with the door handle but it was centrally locked and she couldn't open it.

"Let me out!Are you crazy?Let me out!"

The driver punched her a second time, right in the side of the nose, snapping her cartilage. The front of the car was suddenly spattered with blood. Then he seized her shoulders and hit her head against the window again and again, while she struggled and pushed and flailed her arms.

"You could have-saved me from-doing this," he grunted, as he thumped her head against the glass, and then against the door pillar. "You could have-sat there-and behaved yourself-like a good little-girl."

He seized a handful of long blond hair, pulled her head toward him, and then knocked her head so hard against the window that she slumped unconscious, with blood pouring from her nose in a thin, continuous river.

He sat where he was for two or three minutes, breathing heavily. "Shit," he said, under his breath. Then he started up the car again, backed it off the verge, and continued to drive down the lane. Fiona sat next to him, joggling limply as he drove over lumps and potholes. Every now and then he glanced across at her and shook his head in annoyance. He wasn't used to girls who twigged so quickly that he was trying to take them away. Usually they were still smiling right up to the moment when he produced the ropes-and, sometimes, even after he'd tied them up.

He turned left up a steep, winding hill, where the nettles and the brown-seeded foxgloves crowded even closer. At the top of the hill there was a sagging five-bar gate, every bar still bejeweled with raindrops, and beyond that stood a damp-looking cottage, with one side thickly shrouded in creeper. He drove the Mercedes all the way around the cottage to the back garden, so that it couldn't be seen from the lane, and parked it beside the overgrown vegetable patch. As he climbed out of the car he saw dozens of hooded crows perched on the telephone lines above his head. He clapped his hands and shouted,"Hoi!"but they stayed where they were, all facing southwest, into the wind.

Opening the passenger door, he dragged Fiona out of the car and across the yard, her heels bumping on the broken concrete. She was still unconscious, but her nose had stopped bleeding, and she had a congealed black moustache. He propped her up against the side of the porch as he searched in his pocket for his keys.

"Shit," he repeated, like a litany.

He managed to turn the key in the green-painted cottage door, and nudge it open with his shoulder. Winding Fiona's arm around his neck, he shuffled her inside, and across the hallway, and into the gloomy, damp-smelling living room. He dropped her onto the worn-out couch, with its mustard-colored throw, and then he went back to close the front door, and lock it.

"Now," he said to himself. He crossed the living room and drew the cheap yellow cotton drapes. Then he shrugged off his coat and tossed it across the back of one of the armchairs, and rolled up his shirtsleeves. "Couldn'tbe nice, could you? Couldn't be agreeable. Had to put up a fight."

The clock on the mantelpiece chimed four. Fiona, on the couch, started to stir, and groan. Immediately, and very quickly, he unlaced her boots, and pulled them off her feet, and let them tumble onto the floor. Then her thick red hiking socks.

She groaned again, and tried to lift her arm. He leaned over her and said, "Shush, shush, everything's fine. You're going to be fine in a minute." He unbuckled her belt, opened up her jeans, and wrenched them halfway down her thighs. He was surprised and mildly aroused to find that she wasn't wearing any panties. Then he pulled off her denim jacket, and her red ribbed sweater. She mumbled, "Mom…what's happening, Mom? Don't want to go to bed."

"Everything's fine. Don't worry about it."

"Mom, my head hurts."

"It's okay…I'll bring you some aspirin. Just lie still."

He took off her jeans and threw them into the corner of the room. He lifted her up, so that she was sitting, and then he knelt in front of her and tilted her over his shoulder. Panting with effort, he stood up, and carried her into the hallway, her arms dangling down his back, and into the bedroom next door. She was a big girl, well-nourished, and by the time he managed to lower her onto the bed he was trembling with the strain.

"Shit," he said.

The bed had a green cast-iron frame and no mattress or blankets, but several thicknesses of newspaper had been spread on the floor underneath it. Its springs creaked and complained as he tied her wrists with cords, and then her ankles. She opened her eyes for a moment and said, "What…what's happening?" but then she closed them again and started to breathe thickly through her open mouth.

He stood up and looked at her. His expression was completely impassive, although he was gripping his genitals through his black corduroy pants, and systematically squeezing them. After a while he went through to the kitchen and came back with a pair of orange-handled scissors. He cut through the front of her bra, and then the straps, and took the pieces away.

"Mom?" she said.

He reached out and stroked her forehead, and the crusted blood on her upper lip. He didn't know why victimhood made girls so appealing, but it always did. It made them so much more feminine and vulnerable, no matter how strong and self-confident they had acted when he first met them.Stop the car and let me out!It was such a futile, arrogant demand that it made him smile to think about it.

Eventually he went back into the kitchen and came back with the coil of thin nylon cord. He looped it around the top of her left thigh, and knotted it, and pulled it as tight as he could, one foot braced against the bed frame. It cut deep into her suntanned flesh, so deep that it almost disappeared. She suddenly blinked her eyes and started to struggle.

"Oh God, that hurts! What are you doing to me? What are you doing?"

He leaned over her and touched his finger against her lips. "Don't shout, nobody can hear you. You're miles and miles from anywhere."

"God, you're hurting my leg, you're hurting my leg!"

"That's necessary, I'm afraid. You wouldn't want to bleed to death, would you?"

Her eyes flicked wildly from side to side. "What do you mean? What are you talking about? Where am I?"

"You're alone with me, that's all you need to know. You're alone with me and Morgan."

"Listen, you creep, you'd better let me go. My father's president of CalForce Electronics."

"Oh, CalForce Electronics? Never heard of them, I'm sorry to say."

"You're really, really hurting my leg."

"I know, my sweet. I'm sorry. But, as I say, it's necessary for your survival."

"What do you want? What are you going to do to me? My father can pay you money."

"I expect he can. But I'm not interested in money. Not in the slightest."

"Then what? What do you want? Are you going to rape me, or what?"

"Rape you? Of course not. You don't think I look like arapist, do you?"

"I don't know. But please take this cord off my leg. It's so tight."

"I know. It's supposed to be."

"For whatreason?What are you going to do? Look at my leg, it's turning blue."

"That's a very good sign. Shows that I've restricted your circulation."

"Please," begged Fiona. "If anything happens to me, my parents are going to be devastated."

"Well, that's very selfless of you. But I'm afraid that you have a destiny which far supercedes any consideration for your parents."

"What do you mean? Please…if you let me go, I won't tell anybody what happened here. I'll go right back home and I won't mention any of this to anybody."

He nodded, almost ruefully. "Of course you won't, because you'll be dead."

"You're going to kill me?"

"It's a regrettable but inevitable part of the ritual."

"Please. I'm twenty-two years old."

"Yes?"

Tears suddenly started to drip down her cheeks. "I'm twenty-two years old and I haven't lived any kind of life yet. I've seen Ireland, and that's about all. I want to do so much more. I want to be a teacher, and teach little kids."

"Do you have a boyfriend?"

Fiona nodded, still snuffling. "His name's Richard. I've known him since I was fourteen."

"Um. He's going to miss you, then."

"Please don't kill me. Please don't kill me. I'll do anything."

"Now, then. Don't be too hasty in what you wish for. By the time tomorrow morning comes, you'll be pleading with me to have it done with, believe me."

"Please."

He looked at his watch and gave a little negative shake of his head. "I'm going to have to leave you for a while. Only about half an hour…but you took me by surprise, you see. I wasn't expecting to come across somebody so suitable so soon. I have to make a few purchases, to see us through the next few days."

"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'sverygood. 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."

"Thenwhy?"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 tome?"

"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 mountaintops, 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 fishhooks and screws and tin tacks.

"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 two and four for "The Holy Hour," even though it would have been just as jam-packed 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 some 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 thirty-eight 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. "Verylong 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 forever.

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.

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 knickknacks 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 womenweremurdered, 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,badlywant 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 theEchoright 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 thatisunusual. 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 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 have 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."

"That's all right. I'll get you one."

He went out to the kitchen and came back with a thick blue mug filled with warm, peaty-tasting water. She drank all of it, dribbling it down her chin.

"Do you hate me?" she said.

It was incredible, but he actually blushed. "Of course I don't hate you. I think you're very, very special."

"But look what you've done to me."

"I know. I know that. And that's what makes you so special. That's what they don't tell you in the history books, do they, that every human sacrifice was a person, with a mother and a father and ideas of her own? But that's what makes every human sacrifice so valuable. That's why it means so much. You can sacrifice a goat, but what does a goat know? To sacrifice a human life… especially like this…that's what brings the demons out of hiding. That's what really causes a rustle in hell."

He opened his instrument case and selected one of his scalpels. "You know, Fiona Kelly, this is the best time of all for stirring up demons. The third hour of the day, when the angels of death come fluttering down through the darkness to squeeze the struggling hearts of the elderly, and to press their hands over the faces of sleeping babies."

Fiona tried not to listen to him, or even to focus her eyes on what he was doing. She tried instead to think of her mother, sitting at the end of the veranda in her whitepainted rocker, sewing and smiling; and she tried to visualize her bedroom, with its pink gingham bedspread, and the crimson bougainvillea that fluttered on either side of the window.

She tried to think of a song that her mother had taught her when she was little. She had never really understood what it meant, but now she sang it over and over, silently, inside her mind, like a mantra. Anything to keep her mind off the pain.

One girl asked for rosemary

One girl asked for thyme

Another girl asked for locks and keys

And clocks that never chimed.

But all I want is a door that leads

To the road that leads to the sea

And to know when I turn that my shadow

Will still be following me.

She had often asked her mother what it meant, and who had taught it to her, but her mother would never say. When she was older she had looked it up in books of children's poetry and nursery rhymes, but she had never found out. It had always disturbed her, for some reason, especially the line about wanting to know if her shadow was following her. Supposing it wasn't? What then?

She was repeating the rhyme for the third time when he cut into her thigh. He cut deep, right through the skin and the fat and the femoral muscles, until the tip of his scalpel touched her bone. Blood welled out of the wound and pattered onto the newspapers underneath the bed.

The scalpel was so sharp that she hardly felt it. She had once cut her tongue on an envelope that she was licking, and she hadn't realized until blood came pouring down her chin. This incision hurt even less than that, but all the same she let out a long wail of despair.

"Don't cry," he told her. "This is only just the beginning. You wait until tomorrow. Then you'll know what pain is. Then you'll not only feel it, you'llunderstandit."

He sliced through all of the quadriceps, all the way around, right through to the femur. All the time he was breathing steadily through his nose, the way that dentists do. When he had cut around her upper thigh, he moved down and made another cut about an inch above her knee. His hands were smothered in blood now, and there were bloody fingerprints all over her leg. She let her head fall back, so that she wouldn't have to look, but then she raised it again, her chin shuddering with pain and effort. She found a terrible fascination in watching her own mutilation. He had been right: it was like a journey through an undiscovered country, a country where anything was possible, where no pain was too great and no horror was too excessive.

Having cut one circle around the top of her leg and another circle above her knee, he then took another scalpel from his instrument case and incised a vertical line down the front of her thigh to join the two together. This time, she felt the point sliding all the way down her bone, and she screamed so long and so loud that he stopped for a moment and watched her with a patient frown until she had finished.

"Are you all right?" he asked her. "This won't take very long, I promise."

"I can't-you can't-I can't bear it, I can't bear it."

"I can stop if you like. Only for a while, though. The bones have to be stripped before the light of day."

"Please, please, I can't bear it anymore, please."

"I'm sorry…why don't you try to think of something else?"

"I can't take any more! I can't take any more!"

She threw her head back on the bedsprings and hit it again and again, screaming and weeping, as if she wanted to knock herself unconscious. He stood with his scalpel in his hand, the ruby-colored blood congealing on the blade, and frowned at her as if she were nothing more than a toddler who was throwing a tantrum.

At last she stopped screaming and banging her head, and lay back with her eyes rolling wildly from side to side, breathing in high, harsh yelps.

He bent over her again, and continued to cut the rectus femoris muscle all the way down to the knee. Then he laid down his scalpel, and with the thumbs of both hands, spread the incision wide apart, until the bone was visible. The flesh glistened in the bright light of the Anglepoise lamp, as scarlet as freshly butchered beef.

"There," he said, "the very substance of you, coming to light."

He picked up a small boning knife, and carefully began to cut the flesh away from the femur. Fiona lay still now, her face gray, her hands gripping the bed head, her whole body totally rigid and glistening with sweat. Apart from the scrunging of the bedsprings, all she could hear was the sound of wet flesh, like somebody quietly and persistently licking their lips.

She passed beyond agony into a place where she could see nothing but blinding whiteness and feel nothing but utter cold. The North Pole of pain. And still he worried the flesh away from the bone, scraping it meticulously clean.

After a quarter of an hour he gave a last scrape, and eased away the muscle of her entire upper leg, in one bloody piece, like a plumber easing the pink foam lagging off a hot-water pipe. He wiped his forehead with the back of his shirtsleeve, and then he carried the flesh into the kitchen and flopped it into the sink. He rinsed his hands and dried them on a ragged tea towel, and then he leaned his head under the faucet and took a long, noisy drink.

When he returned to the bedroom, Fiona was unconscious. Better that way, he thought to himself. The next part was taking the flesh off the knee, and that was especially agonizing.

He held out both hands, palm upward, and then he turned them over. Not a tremble. He picked up the boning knife again, and went to work.

15

Katie was woken up by the sound of the front door slamming and somebody falling heavily against the coat stand in the hall. Then she heard Sergeant barking, and a voice saying, "Shush, shush, you maniac."

"Paul?" she called, sitting up in bed.

"Sawrigh," Paul blurted back. "Everything sawrigh."

She swung her legs out of bed and found her bed jacket on the back of the chair. "Paul, what the hell's going on down there? Are you drunk?"

"Don't come down," he told her, in a clogged up voice. "I'll stay down here for tonight. Just don't come down."

She switched on the landing light and went down the stairs. Sergeant was running in and out of the living room door, panting excitedly. She went into the living room and switched on the chandeliers. Paul was lying facedown on the sofa, one arm dangling on the floor. His navy-blue coat was split all the way up the back, revealing the torn white lining. One of his loafers was missing and his curly hair was matted with blood.

"Holy Mother of God," said Katie, and knelt down beside him.

He opened one eye and blinked at her. There was a deep semicircular cut around his eyebrow that was already crusted with dried blood, and his cheekbones were crimson.

"What happened to you, Paul? Let me look at you."

"Sawrigh. Everything's grand."

"Paul, for Christ's sake look at the state of you! What's happened?"

He lifted his head and it was only then that she could see how badly he was hurt. Both nostrils were clotted with blood and it looked as if his nose had been broken. His lips were swollen and split, and he was obviously missing some teeth. A long string of bloody saliva connected his mouth to the cushion.

"Who did this to you, Paul? Was it Dave MacSweeny?"

"It doesn't matter, pet. I just need some shlee, that's all. Some shleep."

"Paul, I want to know who attacked you."

"Forget it. You'll only make a bother. The only female detective superintendent in Ireland …she can't have anyone beating up her husband, now can she?"

"Sit up, Paul. Let me take a good look at you. You'll be after needing a doctor. Look at that cut. That's going to take stitches."

"Will you stop-fussing,for Christ's sake. It's only a couple of knocks. My father used to beat me up much worse than this when I was a kid."

Katie stood up. Paul blinked up at her and his face was so pummeled and swollen that it looked twice its normal size. "Paul…I'm not joking about this. Whoever attacked you, I'm going to have them arrested, and charged."

Paul managed to struggle himself into a sitting position. His left eye was completely bloodshot, like a vampire's. "Ouch, shit," he said, pressing his hand against his side. "Broken my fucking ribs."

"Paul-"

"Katie…forget it. I made a bags of things, that's all. What you might call an error of judgment. If you start making a bother…it's going to be ten times worse. They'll kill me, the next time, I promise you. In fact they're probably going to kill me anyway."

Katie gently touched his forehead, where his hair was sticky with blood. "God, Paul, you're such a fool sometimes. Don't you realize how much I love you? Weren't we happy once? Wasn't everything perfect?"

He gave her a wry, puffy smile. "That was then, Katie. This is now."

"You can't let them get away with this, Paul. I need to know who did it. It's my duty to uphold the law."

"I'm not telling you, Katie. I can't. They'll kill me. That's ifyoudon't kill me first."

She sat back, and lifted her hand away from his knee. "Why shouldIwant to kill you?"

"Well, I'm not much of a husband to you, am I?"

Katie said, "It's about that girl, isn't it? That one at the Sarsfield Hotel?"

"God Almighty. Who'd marry a detective?"

"Tell me, Paul. It's about that girl, isn't it?"

"It's partly. But that's not all of it."

"Paul, I'm calling an ambulance."

He snatched at her sleeve. "Leave it, Katie. The last thing they said to me was 'We bet your old lady's going to come looking for us now.' And what do you think I'd look like, if you did? A man needs his-manhood."

Katie was silent for a long time. She needed time to think, time to get her balance back. Then she said, "How about a drink? You should really go to hospital, but if you won't-"

"It's not so bad as it looks. They punched me around a bit, and kicked me all right. But you don't get anywhere at all unless you take chances, do you?"

Katie went across to the sideboard and poured him a large whiskey. Sergeant followed her protectively, and stood beside her when she sat down, panting. "So what does this girl at the Sarsfield Hotel have to do with business?"

Paul shook his head. "I made a mistake, Katie, that's all."

"Yes, but who was she? And what did you do?"

"I suppose I was looking for something different. Escape, you might call it. The truth is that I still can't look at you without thinking about poor little Seamus."

"You don't think thatIdon't blame myself for what happened to Seamus, every minute of every hour of every day?"

"I don'tblameyou, pet. God wanted Seamus back in heaven and that was all there was to it. But-I don't know. I suppose I thought you were magic, and that you'd never let us come to any harm. When Seamus was taken, I realized then that you weren't magic after all."

"Paul, I was Seamus's mother but I'm not yours."

He dabbed his nose with his fingertips. "Oh, it was my fault, too. If my business hadn't gone to the wall you wouldn't have had to work."

"What are you saying? That Seamus died because I went to work?"

"Well, I don't know. Maybe you would have paid him more mind."

"Paul-I'm a career Garda officer. I would have carried on with my job whether we had a baby or not. And for you to suggest that he died because I neglected him-Holy Mother of God, what's wrong with you?"

Paul didn't say anything, but lowered his head and sniffed.

"Tell me about this girl," Katie insisted. The central heating didn't come on for another three hours and she was trembling with tiredness and cold and exasperation.

"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 fuckinghurt."

"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-eggshellsround 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 her 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, hersidhe,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 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 forces 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 likecrubeens,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 jam jar. 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 potpourri, and the bell jingled.

Eileen came out of the back room with an armful of embroidered bathrobes. She was only twenty-four but she had taken a course in Brussels on lace making 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 straightaway 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 theExaminerhad 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's 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 casual wear 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 around 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 thick-lensed 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."

"It wasn't. As far as most gardaí are concerned, women officers are there to direct traffic, comfort grieving widows, and go out for sandwiches-and if they're not too ugly, to have their bottoms pinched at every opportunity."

"Somehow I can't imagineyouputting up with that."

"I didn't, and I don't. But I was lucky, too. At the time when I applied to become a detective, there was very strong pressure from the commissioner's office to promote more women to the upper ranks. Not only that, I had a chief superintendent who happened to be a close friend of my father's. Then, about two months after I graduated as a detective garda, I solved a double murder in Knockraha, two women drowned in a well, mother and daughter. All I did was overhear a drunken conversation in a pub, but I still got the credit for it."

"You're very modest."

"Well, I try to be efficient, John, as well as modest."

John laughed. "How's your tea? Are you sure it's not too strong?"

"It's fine. It's hot, that's all."

Mrs. Meagher shuffled out of the kitchen, leaving them alone. They sat and smiled at each other for a while, then John said, "What happens now?"

"About the skeletons, you mean? We've commissioned somebody from the university to see if he can find out how and why they were killed, but there's not much else we can do."

"It was a ritual killing, though, wasn't it?"

"Ritualistic, yes."

"My grandfather always used to say that this farm was possessed."

"Possessed? Possessed by what?"

"He never really explained. But he always used to say that if you knew where to look for it, and you knew how to get it, and you were prepared to pay the price, you could have anything your heart desired."

"That's interesting. Professor O'Brien at the university said that this farm was called the Hill of the Gray People because a witch called Mor-Rioghain was supposed to have used it as a way through from the underworld. Mor-Rioghain would give you anything you wanted, so long as you fed her on the bodies of young women."

"That's a pretty gruesome story."

Katie sipped her tea. "I don't take it seriously, not for a single moment."

"Of course not. But you never know…eighty years ago,somebodymight have believed it."

"That's one of the possibilities that Professor O'Brien is going to be looking into."

John offered her a shortbread biscuit. "Go on, spoil yourself…they're all homemade. My mother still bakes enough for half the population of Ireland."

Katie accepted, and snapped the biscuit in half. "How about you? How are you coping with the farm?"

"Not as well as I thought I was going to. Everybody back in California said they envied me because I was really getting back to nature. But I don't know. There's California nature, like orange groves and grapes and sunshine, and then there's Knocknadeenly nature. Which is mainly mud."

"You're managing all right, though, aren't you?"

John shook his head. "Not too well, to tell you the truth. The economics don't really work out. Cattle feed costs almost as much as caviar, but the price of milk is so low that it's cheaper to pour it down the drain than it is to bottle it. The plastic trays I pack my chickens in cost more than the chickens. Apart from that I need a new differential for my tractor and a new diesel generator, and two thirds of my winter wheat has gone rotten in the rain. I sold my business in the States for a very good profit, but at this rate I calculate that I'm going to be pretty close to bankruptcy by the beginning of July."

"Why don't you cut your losses?"

"Family pressure. I'm the head of the Meagher family now, and what would they think if I sold Meagher's Farm to some developer?"

"That's it? Family pressure?"

"Well, pride, too. I'm not the kind of guy who likes to admit defeat."

Katie smiled. "That's one thing that you and I have in common, then. Blind stubbornness in the face of overwhelming adversity."

John looked at her for a long time, his chin resting on his hand. She looked directly back at him, and for some reason neither of them felt any particular need to talk. Katie hadn't felt so immediately comfortable with anyone for a long time, and it was obvious that he felt comfortable with her, too.

"So what do you do when you're not being a detective superintendent?"

"I don't get much time to do anything. But I like to cook, and take my dog for a walk on the beach."

"You're married."

She twisted her wedding band. "Yes, well."

"No children?"

She shook her head. She was still smiling but her smile was a little tighter. John must have realized that he had touched a sensitive spot because he raised his hand in a gesture that meant, okay, I won't ask you any more.

After a while, Mrs. Meagher came back in, still coughing, and looking for her cigarettes.

"I'd better get back," said Katie, checking her watch.

"Sure…and I've got three hectares of red potatoes to plow up."

They walked outside together and it was raining again. "Thanks for the tea," said Katie. "You won't forget, will you, if you find anything unusual…"

John nodded. He opened her car door for her, and stood watching her while she fastened her seat belt. As she drove down toward the gates of Meagher's Farm, she glanced in her rearview mirror and he was still standing there with his hands in his pockets, and she thought that she had never seen any man look so alone.

18

That afternoon, around half past three, she had a telephone call from a man with a thick northside accent.

"Are you the one who's after investigating where Charlie Flynn's gone missing?"

"That's right. Why? Do you know where he is?"

"I might."

"Well, either you do or you don't. Which is it?"

"Why don't you meet me and we can talk it over. St. Finbarr's Cathedral, in half an hour. Make sure you come by yourself."

"I know you, don't I?"

"I should hope so, by now. I'll see you at four."

She drove to St. Finbarr's. It was only four o'clock but the afternoon was already gloomy. She parked on a double yellow line outside the cathedral gates and walked in through the graveyard. Beneath the dripping trees, under crosses and obelisks and weeping cherubim, some of Cork's most prominent families lay silently at rest.

A young priest came galloping through the graveyard and called out, "Forgot my umbrella!" as if he needed to explain why he was in such a hurry.

Katie walked in through the main entrance, her heels echoing on the tiled floor, past the sculptures of the wise and foolish virgins gathered on either side of Christ the Bridegroom.

The interior of the cathedral was echoing and dim, with high columns of Bath stone and walls lined with red Cork marble. Hardly any light penetrated the stained-glass windows, and Katie had to pause for a moment to allow her eyes to become accustomed to the gloom.

Slowly, she approached the altar. She genuflected and crossed herself, and then she sat in one of the pews on the right-hand side, and bowed her head. In front of her, a middle-aged woman was praying in an endless, desperate whisper.

After a few minutes, she heard rubbery-soled shoes approaching from behind her. Somebody came and sat in the pew right behind her, and she could smell cigarette breath and Gucci aftershave.

"Good to see you again, Katie," said the same northside accent she had heard on the phone. "Haven't seen you in a while."

"Dave MacSweeny," she said, without turning around. "I thought I recognized you on the phone. What do you want?"

"I told you…I know where Charlie Flynn is hiding himself. I knowwhy, too."

"You've got some nerve coming to me, after what you did to Paul."

"Paul took advantage of me. Just like Charlie Flynn."

"Paul was fooling around with Geraldine, that's all. And don't tell me that Geraldine wasn't just as much to blame as he was."

"That's not the point. She's my woman, at least she was, and he didn't have the right to be messing with her ever. He should have had more respect. Especially since he did me over for half a million pounds' worth of building materials, him and that Charlie Flynn."

"What?"

"Charlie Flynn promised Winthrop Developments that he could supply them with breezeblocks and facing bricks and uPVC window frames and God knows what else, for a very special price. The trouble was, he couldn't. So he came to your husband cap-in-hand asking for help and your husband sold him six hundred and fifty thousand euros' worth of building materials and pocketed twenty thousand euros of commission. Which would have been grand for all concerned…except that those building materials were actually worth more than a million, and they didn't belong to your husband, they belonged to me, and I was left neck-deep in shite trying to explain to Erin Estates why I couldn't meet my contract.

"Me and my friends called on Charlie to ask him what was going on, but he was long gone by then. Florida…look, here's some Polaroids." He passed over four or five photographs of a fat-bellied gingery man in red flowery swimming trunks. "Charlie by the pool in Kissimmee. Charlie on the beach at St. Petersburg. Looks cheerful, doesn't he? Put on weight, hasn't he? That's what happened to Charlie. He cheated me, and now he's afraid to come back."

"And Paul?"

"That's why I wanted to see you today, Katie. That's why I wanted to see you here, on holy ground. Besides, they don't have security cameras. I felt very betrayed when your Paul went off with Geraldine. Well, how didyoufeel? We were both betrayed, weren't we? But, you know, a fuck's nothing more than a fuck, is it, and you can always wash yourself afterward. But now I find out that Paul's made off with my property, almost a million euros' worth, and you can't wash that away."

"So what are you saying?" asked Katie. She felt angry and officious, but at the same time she felt highly alarmed, too. She had seen so many other garda detectives compromised by men like Dave MacSweeny, their careers ruined for the sake of a housing loan or a new BMW or a holiday in Gran Canaria, and she didn't want the same thing to happen to her. Her father would never forgive her, and more than anything else she had joined An Garda Síochána to win his approval.

Dave MacSweeny was silent for a moment. Then he said, "I'm a very accommodating person, Katie. I don't want any trouble and I know that you don't want any trouble, either. All I'm asking is that Paul brings my building materials back to the yard at Blackpool, all of them, not one brick missing, and we'll forget this ever happened. I'll give him three days, which is fair considering the amount of materials he took."

"And if he doesn't? Or can't?"

"You'd look lovely in black."

Katie turned around, but Dave MacSweeny was already walking back up the aisle, his rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the tiles. Big, wide shouldered, in a long black raincoat, one silver hoop earring glinting in the dim cathedral light.

She stayed there for a while, and said a novena to St. Martha, promising to light a candle every Tuesday, just like her mother used to. Then she stood up, and crossed herself again, and left St. Finbarr's with her head bowed, like somebody leaving a funeral.

19

He came again that night, with his case of instruments. She was delirious now, and no longer knew where she was or what was happening to her. Both her legs were scraped of almost every scrap of flesh, and the bones shone like strange musical instruments carved out of ivory. Her face was a death mask, gleaming and gray, with two dark hollows for eyes.

"Mom,"she whispered.

He leaned over her and stroked her forehead. "Don't worry, Fiona. This will soon be over."

"Mom, my legs hurt. They hurt so bad, Mom."

"Ssh, you mustn't complain. You ought to be grateful that you're sacrificing your body for such a momentous purpose."

She suddenly opened her eyes and stared at him. "Who are you?" she demanded, in a dry, hoarse voice, almost a squeak.

"Don't say you don't recognize me. I'm your friend. I'm your very best friend."

"No, you're not. What are you doing in my bedroom?"

He touched one finger to his lips and smiled at her indulgently. "Ssh. We don't want to wake up the rest of the house, do we?"

"I don't know who you are. What are you doing here?"

He sat down on the edge of the bed frame and opened his instrument case. "I've come here to take you on the next stage of your journey."

"My legs hurt. They really, really hurt."

"Of course they do. But no matter how bad it is, you know, any pain can always be relieved by an even greater pain."

"I have to get up. I have to meet my mother."

"First things first."

He took a length of nylon cord and tied it in a slipknot around the top of her left arm.

"What are you doing? What's that for? I have to meet my mother."

"You will meet her, one day. I promise."

He pulled the cord tight, grunting with the effort. She let out a high, breathy sound, but it couldn't be called a scream. He pulled the cord tighter still, until it almost disappeared into her arm, and it was then that her eyes rolled upward so that only the whites were staring at him, like a broken doll.

He picked a scalpel, and started to cut a circle around her upper arm. Blood welled out of the incision and poured into her armpit. He started to humBom Dia, Amigo, but then, as his work grew more difficult, he fell silent, and he frowned in concentration. The only sound now was the quick dripping of blood onto the newspapers under the bed.

Paul didn't come home until 2:35 in the morning but Katie was waiting for him. She was sitting in the living room in her green-and-white satin dressing gown with Sergeant lying by her feet, watching Vincent Price inThe Abominable Dr. Phibes.

Paul stood in the doorway, swaying slightly. His bruises had started to turn red and yellow, so that he looked like a small boy who had been playing clowns with his mummy's makeup.

"What?" he said, at last.

Katie used the remote to switch off the sound. "You're asking me 'what'? I'll tell you what. I had a very unpleasant meeting today with a friend of yours."

Paul let out a barking, sardonic laugh. "That can't be right. You know as well as I do, I don't have any friends. Not anymore."

"This particular friend was Dave MacSweeny. Apparently, it's not just your messing around with Geraldine Daley that's bothering him. He urgently wants to find out what's happened to one million euros' worth of his building materials."

"Building materials? How should I know?"

"Because you sold them to Charlie Flynn for six hundred and fifty thousand, that's why, and took twenty thousand for yourself."

"Listen, pet. None of that stuff even belonged to Dave MacSweeny. He lifted the whole lot from a housing development up in Kilmallock."

"And you think that excuses you from selling it on to Charlie Flynn?"

"It was already stolen, pet. You can't steal something twice."

"Jesus, Paul, you're certifiable, you are."

Paul came into the living room and plonked himself down on the couch. "Charlie Flynn needed the stuff and I needed the money. How do you think I paid off this year's prelim tax?"

"Paul-you took property that you knew to be stolen and you sold it illegally. What kind of position do you think that puts me in? By rights I should arrest you. What do you think this is going to do to my career?"

"You don't have to tell anybody."

Katie shook her head in disbelief. "To think I used to boast to my mother that you were the sharpest guy I'd ever met. How can I not tell anybody? I'm supposed to be heading up the search for Charlie Flynn and now I know where he is, and why he's gone there, and that directly involves you. Worse than that, Dave MacSweeny wants his building materials back and if he doesn't get them he's going to kill you."