"Well, arresthim, then. He stole the stuff in the first place."


"For God's sake, Paul, if I arrest him I have to arrest him for a reason, and that reason is now in Charlie Flynn's building yard, thanks to you. There's no way that you can get out of this, and there's no way that I'm going to get through it without having to resign."


Paul stared at her blearily. "Resign? You don't have to resign! Why do you have to resign?"


"Can you imagine the headlines? Top Woman Detective Is Married To Million-Euro Brick Thief. Who's going to believe that you were dealing in stolen property without my knowing anything about it?"


Paul didn't answer. Instead, he got up from the couch and went over to the drinks cabinet, and poured himself an absurdly large whiskey.


"What good do you think that's going to do?" she asked him.


"I don't think it's going to do any good whatsoever, but at least I won't be conscious to know that it isn't."


Katie stood up, came around the couch, and put her arms around his waist.


"Paul," she said.


He stroked her hair, but his eyes were focused on nothing at all. "I know, love," he told her. "I know." But he didn't know, not anymore, and Katie knew then that he had given up trying.



He had been working for nearly three and a half hours now, and his hands were trembling with effort. He had removed all of the flesh from her upper arm, and now he was using a hooked scalpel to scrape away the muscle between the bones of her forearm. Her fingers would be the most complicated, cutting the last red shreds away from the metacarpals and the phalanges.


She was still alive, but her breathing was very shallow, and he doubted that she would survive until the morning. As soon as she died, he would have to cut open her abdomen and start stripping her skeleton as quickly as he could, so that her flesh was still fresh.


He thought that he would enjoy baring her face most of all, opening the nose, peeling away the fatty tissue underneath the cheeks, and discovering the skull beneath the skin.


20


Katie knew what a risk she was taking, but she had lain awake all night and she hadn't been able to think of any other way out of it, apart from going straight into Chief Superintendent O'Driscoll's office and handing over her gun and her badge and resigning from the Garda on the spot.


She met Eamonn Collins at Dan Lowery's pub at eleven o'clock the next morning, before the lunchtime rush. "Foxy" was dressed as dapper as ever, in a dark green blazer and a camel waistcoat and a Hermčs necktie with stirrups on it. His minder Jerry was hunched in the opposite corner, cramming down a bowlful of French fries with so much tomato ketchup that it looked as if his fingers were smothered in blood.


Katie didn't even take off her raincoat. "I need a favor," she said.


"A favor?" said Eamonn. "What kind of a favor could a fellow like me possibly do for a lady like yourself?"


"I have a little problem which I can't deal with in the usual way. There's no evidence, you see, and not much chance of finding any."


"All right. This is nothing to do with those skeletons, is it?"


Katie shook her head. "This is somebody who took something that didn't belong to him."


"I see. A transgression which you know for a fact but which you couldn't prove in court, is that it?"


"Something like that."


Eamonn sat back and systematically cracked his knuckles. "What do you want me to do about it? And dare I ask what I might expect in return?"


"I want you to pay a visit to the party involved and tell him to soften his cough, that's all."


"That doesn't sound too onerous. Who is it?"


"Dave MacSweeny. He helped himself to some building materials up at Mallow, but somebody else helped himself to the very same building materials and sold them on, and Dave MacSweeny's a little unhappy about it."


"Well, he would be. Dave MacSweeny's not exactly a forgiving sort of fellow. Who was the somebody else who relieved him of his ill-gotten gains?"


"That doesn't concern you."


Eamonn stared at her with his dead gray eyes. "It concernsyou, though, doesn't it?"


"That's beside the point." Katie wished her heart would stop banging so hard.


Eamonn had a long think. At the next table, Jerry was noisily sucking his fingers clean. After a while, Eamonn leaned forward and said, "All right, you're on. I'll have a quiet word in Dave MacSweeny's ear myself. Is there anything specific you want me to say to him?"


"Just tell him to develop amnesia about the building materials and whoever it was that took them. If you like, you can tell him that Charlie Flynn sent you."


"Charlie Flynn? You surprise me. I thought that Charlie Flynn would have been gently floating out to sea by now, or sinking in a bog on Little Island."


"No, Charlie's still with us."


"All right, then. How forceful do you want me to be?"


"Emphatic, that'll do."


"No problem at all. I can be emphatic."


"You'll be wanting something in return. I can have the dealing charges against Billy Phelan reduced to possession."


Eamonn said, "Hm. That's not much of a bargain."


"Okay," said Katie. "I'll see if I can drop the charges altogether."


"That's better. And maybe your people could leave my fellows alone for a while-stopping them and searching them wherever they go. They even stopped Jimmy Twomey when he was coming out of mass with his grandma."


"I can probably ease off you for a month or so. But any more than that and my chief superintendent's going to start asking awkward questions."


"Well, awkward questions. We can't have those, can we?"


Katie left Dan Lowery's and stepped out into dazzling, colorless sunshine. She felt nervous and sick, and she was almost tempted to go back and tell Eamonn Collins to forget that she had ever talked to him. But it was too late now. She was committed.


She drove back to Garda headquarters and somehow the city looked different-as if scene shifters had been at work during the night, changing the bridges around, and altering the streets, and rearranging the quays. And of course itwasdifferent, because she had changed her life forever, and there was no going back to the day before yesterday.


21


The phone rang at 7:05 on Sunday morning. Katie reached across to the nightstand and pulled the receiver back under the covers. "Yes? Who is it?"


"Dermot O'Driscoll here, Katie. Have you seen the Sunday papers yet?"


"I've only just woken up."


"Well, get yourself out of bed and buy yourself a copy of theSunday Times. Page three, you won't miss it. Then call me here at home."


"Yes, sir."



She took Sergeant with her along the road to the newspaper shop. It was a sparkling morning, even though it must have rained heavily during the night, and she could see a large white cruise ship anchored in the harbor.


She bought theSunday Timesand theIrish News of the World. She opened theTimesas she walked back home, and immediately she slowed and stopped, while Sergeant bounded around her, wagging his tail and urging her to carry on.


The headline on page three readBritish Soldiers "Murdered Eleven Irish Women."There was a photograph of Katie standing over the excavations at Meagher's Farm, and another photograph of Jack Devitt, the white-haired writer whom Katie had met with Eugene Ó Béara in The Crow Bar.


The story said that "The eighty-six-year-old mystery of eleven young Cork women who disappeared without trace between 1915 and 1916 may have been solved yesterday by the well-known republican author Jack Devitt. He claims to have proof that they were murdered by British soldiers in revenge for a Fenian bomb attack.


"Eleven women's skeletons were uncovered last week during building work at a farm at Knocknadeenly. An examination by State Pathologist Dr. Owen Reidy showed that all of their flesh had been scraped from their bones before they were buried, possibly to hamper identification."


Katie read on, the paper flapping in the morning breeze. Sergeant was growing impatient and started to bark at her. But she read the article right to the end, and then she stood where she was, lost in thought.


TheTimessaid that Jack Devitt had been given access to private letters and police reports showing that before they went missing, three of the eleven women had been seen by reliable witnesses talking to a young British officer with a moustache, and two of them had been seen climbing into a car with him. "It was never discovered whether the officer was acting on official orders or if he was carrying out a personal vendetta. However, the investigation was pursued no further and no British officers were ever questioned by police or military police. Three months after the last disappearance (Mary Ahern, on the morning of Good Friday, 1916) the case was officially declared to be closed."


Katie could understand that Eugene Ó Béara and Jack Devitt would want to make as much political hay out of the case as they possibly could, but it was obvious that neither they nor theTimesknew that the skeletons had been ritualistically decorated. If these were the same women, it was entirely possible that theyhadbeen murdered by a British officer, but why would a British officer drill holes in their thighbones and hang them with rag dolls? Perhaps it had some religious or political meaning. During the Indian Mutiny, British soldiers had sewn condemned Muslims into pig skins before hanging them, because Muslims considered that pigs were unclean. But if this had been done for a similar reason, to insult and intimidate the Irish, why had all these women been killed in a way that had no significance that anybody knew about, and then buried in secret?


She walked home. Paul was still lying on the couch in the living room, his head tipped back, snoring in a coarse, steady rasp. She stood watching him and then she went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee.



She called Dermot O'Driscoll. "Sorry," he said, chewing in her ear. "I've got a mouthful of scone."


"I read theTimes."


"Yes, and what do you think?"


"I still think that there are dozens of questions left unanswered-even if Jack Devitt's evidence turns out to be authentic."


"Well, that's as may be, but the commissioner called me this morning and said that the minister of justice wants us to drop the investigation completely."


"What about Professor O'Brien's research?"


"That, too. The minister wants no further action of any kind and absolutely no comments to the media. Things between Dublin and London are touchy enough as they are without taking eighty-year-old skeletons out of the closet."


"But, sir-"


"Drop it, Katie. There's no future in it. How are you getting along with Charlie Flynn?"


"I, ah-I think I may be getting somewhere."


"Good. The sooner you find out what happened to him the better. Perhaps city hall will give my head some peace."


22


John Meagher was driving up toward the farmhouse on Tuesday afternoon when he saw scores of crows flapping over the top field, close to Iollan's Wood. He parked his Land Rover and went to investigate, climbing over the low stone wall and taking a shortcut across the dark, crumbly furrows.


The crows had obviously found something to eat-a dead fox or a rabbit-because they were wheeling and diving and cawing, and squabbling among themselves. They were so preoccupied that many of them didn't even notice him as he approached, and continued to flap and quarrel over their feast. A few of them resentfully hopped away, but they didn't go far.


There were so many crows that at first he couldn't understand what he was looking at. But as he came nearer he gradually realized that they were tearing at a radically dismembered human body.


He felt as if the entire field had suddenly tilted beneath his feet. He stumbled, and stopped. But then he stepped closer, as close as he dared, and stared at the apparition in front of him in total horror.


All of the body's bones had been entirely stripped of flesh, except a few scarlet rags around the joints. Each bone had then been pushed upright into the soil to form a kind of picket fence. On the far side of the fence, the skull was perched on a small cairn of lesser bones, shoulder bones and toe bones and finger bones. On each side of the skull stood the body's thighbones, and the top of each thighbone had been drilled right through and a small linen doll tied onto it with string.


Inside this compound lay a heap of human offal. John recognized the gristly-looking heart, the sacklike lungs, and the half-deflated stomach-as well as pieces of raw flesh that were still identifiable as calf muscles and forearms. Even as he stood staring at it, panting in ever-increasing nausea, one of the crows snatched up an ear in its beak and went flying off with it, hotly pursued by three or four other crows, all of them screeching in fury.



He walked back down the field, stiff-legged. Gabriel and the boy Finbar were still digging the foundations of the new boiler house. Gabriel looked up as he approached, and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.


"What's wrong, John?"


"There's been-some sort of an accident."


"Accident? Where?"


"Up by Iollan's Wood. You see where those crows are. Stay here-don't go up there, whatever you do, and don't let the boy go up there, either. Or anybody else."


Gabriel could see by the expression on his face that something was seriously wrong. "What is it-somebody dead?"


John nodded, and then he abruptly turned around, and leaned against the wall, and gawked up his lunch, potato-and-leek soup and soda bread. Gabriel and the boy stood solemnly watching him, and didn't say anything until he had wiped his mouth, and spat, and spat again.


"You want me to call the guards?" asked Gabriel.


"That's okay. I've got that woman detective's number. You just keep an eye on things."


He called Katie on his cell phone. She took a long time to answer, and when she did the signal was very poor.


"Superintendent?" he shouted, with his finger in his ear. "It's John Meagher, from Meagher's Farm."


"Sorry can't-back in a-"


"It's John Meagher. I've found another body. Another skeleton."


"Another skeleton? Same place? Under the feed store?"


"No…in the top field. This one's new."


"Sorry, where did you say?I'm just-Jack Lynch Tunnel-"


There was a short crackling pause, and then she came back more clearly."Sorry about that, I'm just on my way to the south infirmary. Where did you say the skeleton was?"


"It's in the top field, up by the woods. But this isn't the same as the others. The rest of the body… all the flesh…it's all still here. By the looks of it, it hasn't been here longer than a few hours."


"All right. I'm on my way. Don't go near it again, will you? There could be footprints or other evidence."


"I wouldn't go near it again if you paid me."



Liam Fennessy pushed aside the blue PVC sheeting and came inside. He took a long look at the skull and the bones and the glistening viscera and then he shook his head and said, "Jesus."


"Dr. Reidy's flying back down this evening," said Katie. She pushed another Richie's mint into her mouth. "He wants to see the remainsin situ."


"It's a woman, yes?"


Katie nodded. "We've found part of her external genitalia and one of her breasts. We've found her scalp, too. Long natural-blond hair. Apart from that there are large sections of flesh from her back still intact, and her skin looks quite firm. Without second-guessing Dr. Reidy, I'd say we're looking at a girl in her early twenties. The skin's quite suntanned, too. Either she's a local girl who's recently been on holiday or else she's a tourist from somewhere warm."


"I'm checking on missing persons inquiries," put in Jimmy O'Rourke, with an unlit cigarette waggling between his lips. "If she was a tourist or a backpacker, though, it could be difficult to find out who she was…a lot of them go away for months before their families start wondering where they are."


"Any identifying marks?" asked Liam. "Any tattoos, studs, or earrings?"


"No tattoos, no studs, and unfortunately the crows made off with the ears. But we have the skull, and we have part of the nose, and most of the facial muscles. It shouldn't be too difficult to build up an identifiable MRI image."


Liam hunkered down in front of one of the thighbones, and flicked the little rag doll.


"Those, of course, are the really baffling part," said Katie. "As far as we're aware nobody knew about those dolls except us."


"And the two fellows who found the skeletons," put in Liam. "And farmer John Meagher himself. And his mother."


"You don't seriously think that John Meagher committed a copycat murder on his own farm?"


"I don't seriously think anything at the moment. But so far we haven't come across any folk legends that mention rag dollies tied to women's thighbones, have we? So it's fair to assume that whoever did this knew about the dollies from the first lot of bones.


He took off his James Joyce spectacles and peered at the thighbone even more closely.


"This hole was drilled with an electric drill, by the look of it. The others were all drilled with a brace and bit."


"I've already confiscated three electric drills from the farmhouse toolshed," said Katie. "I've taken all the drill bits, too. Two complete sets of specialist bits, only two of them missing, plus a tobacco tin containing eleven assorted bits. Oh-and three balls of twine, too."


"And you don't think that John Meagher had anything to do with this?"


"I'm just being thorough, Liam, that's all."


"How about footprints? This is ideal for footprints, a freshly plowed field."


"We're taking casts. But considering the way the body was arranged, there seem to be surprisingly few."


"Well, what do you want me to do?"


"Initiate a house-to-house, and pub-to-pub, and knock on the door of every bed-and-breakfast in a ten-mile radius. You're asking about a suntanned girl with long blond hair."


"And you?"


"I have to talk to Dermot. Then I have to give a statement to the press."


Liam stood up. "The rag dollies are the key to this. If we can find out what they mean, I think we'll know what happened here, and why, and who did it."


Jimmy O'Rourke came over and said, "Take a look at this, Superintendent."


He led Katie around the right-hand side of the garden of bones, and pointed to a large section of flesh that had been cut from the victim's hip, buttock and upper thigh. It looked almost like a boned leg of beef from a supermarket display cabinet.


"See there… there's a deep indentation around the upper thigh… really, really deep. The last time I ever saw anything like that was when a fellow caught his arm in a printing machine in Douglas. His workmates tied a tourniquet around his upper arm to stop him from bleeding to death."


"So what do you deduce from that?" asked Katie.


"I'm not sure. But why would anybody tie a tourniquet around the leg of a dead body?"


"You mean that this woman might have had her leg amputated while she was still alive?"


"Well, not amputated, no. Look at all these bones, they're all intact. They haven't been sawn through, any of them."


Katie looked down at the grisly chaos of the girl's disassembled body. She tried to study the pieces of flesh objectively. She didn't want to think about the cruelty of what had happened to this girl, or the appalling pain she must have endured. "What a mess," she said. "But see how neatly those muscles have been cut. Whoever did this had quite a talent with a knife, didn't he?"


"I'll have a word around the hospitals," said Liam. "You never know. We might be looking for a mad surgeon. Dr. Frankenstein in reverse."


"Talk to the local butchers, too," said Katie.


"Good idea. One of my nephews works for O'Reilly's in the English Market. That's how I get all my black puddings cheap."


"All right," said Katie. There was a dazzling flicker of flashlights as the photographers got to work, and she had to turn her face away. In spite of her attempts to be detached, she was shaking.


"Here," said Liam. He reached inside his leather jacket and took out a clean white handkerchief.


"What?" she frowned. He unfolded the handkerchief for her but she still didn't understand what he meant until he pointed to his eyes, one after the other, to indicate that there were tears in her eyes.


23


That evening, Katie held another media conference at Anglesea Street. It was packed with more than sixty reporters and cameramen. She gave the bare facts that the body of an unidentified young woman had been found at Meagher's Farm and that her skeleton had been stripped of its flesh and arranged "in a manner suggesting some kind of ritual or fetishistic behavior."


"Is there any similarity between the way this skeleton was arranged and the way the first eleven skeletons were arranged?" asked Dougal Cleary from RTÉ One.


"No. The first eleven skeletons seemed to have been buried at random. This skeleton was very systematically laid out in the open, along with the flesh that had been removed from it."


"Removed from it how?"


"Expertly, I'd say. With a scalpel or a knife."


"So you could be looking for somebody with medical skills?"


"Possibly. We're keeping an open mind until we receive the autopsy report from Dr. Reidy."


"You keep mentioning this word 'ritualistic'-but what ritual are you referring to, exactly?"


"So far I'm only using it in the sense that this woman wasn't murdered in anger, or haphazardly, but in a carefully considered procedure. We don't know if this procedure has any religious or occult implications. Professor Gerard O'Brien at the university has been helping us in our research but so far he hasn't come up with any complete explanation."


"Does he have anincompleteexplanation?"


"Nothing that's useful to discuss at this time."


"Does this latest murder cast any doubt on Jack Devitt's theory that a British army officer was responsible for murdering those eleven women in 1915?"


"Again, we're keeping an open mind. Of course the same perpetrator couldn't have committed today's murder. But we're looking into the theory that both murderers could belong to the same cult, or have similar mystical beliefs. In fact, we're looking into every theory that anybody can think of."


"Does this mean that you're reopening the 1915 murder investigation?"


"We have to…insofar as it could shed valuable light on today's case. We'll be publishing a list of all eleven women in tomorrow's papers, and appealing for anybody who might be related to them to get in touch with us immediately, so that we can perform mitochondrial DNA tests."


"I gather that you, personally, never wanted to close it?"


"Twelve women have been inexplicably killed. No matter when they were killed, no matter who they were, we owe it to all of them to find out who killed them. I want you to know that I am absolutely determined to give them peace."



That evening she left Garda headquarters just after six o'clock and went into Tesco in Paul Street to do some shopping. She walked up and down the aisles with her shopping trolley, trying not to think about the dismembered body in the field. Unless some fresh evidence came up, there was nothing she could usefully do until tomorrow, and she needed time to calm herself down. She had seen the bodies of people who had been shot in the face with shotguns. She had seen the bodies of people who had been drowned, and burned, and crushed. She had even seen the bodies of people who had been systematically tortured with red-hot pokers and pliers. But she had never yet seen a body that had been so completely desecrated, so stripped of its humanity, so totally disassembled. It reminded her more of a burglary than a homicide. It was almost as if her murderer had been tearing her body apart, piece by piece, in a determined search for her soul.


She had been thinking of cooking beef in Guinness this evening, and she bought some carrots and rutabaga and onions. But as she wheeled her trolley toward the meat chiller she found herself breathing more and more deeply, until she was hyperventilating. She clutched the trolley handle tightly and closed her eyes. She could feel cold perspiration sliding down her back.


"Are you all right, love?" an elderly woman asked her.


She opened her eyes and right in front of her, brightly lit like a traffic accident, she saw glistening dark brown livers and scarlet joints of beef and soft creamy-yellow folds of tripe.


"I'm fine," she said. "I'm just a little faint." She left her trolley where it was and walked quickly out of the store and into the street.


24


She was leaving the Paul Street multistory car park when her mobile phone warbled.


"Superintendent? It's Liam Fennessy. You'd better get up to the Blarney Road crossroads, quick as you can."


"What's happened?"


"It's an old friend of ours. It looks like somebody's decided to teach him a lesson he'll never forget."


"I'm down on Lavitt's Quay. I'll be with you in five minutes at the most."


She drove across the river and headed west, running three red lights. She turned up by the dark flinty walls of Cork Gaol, and up onto the Blarney Road. It began to rain, one of those sharp, rattling showers that the Atlantic brings in without warning.


There were two patrol cars already parked at the crossroads, as well as Liam's green Vectra. As Katie pulled into the side of the road, an ambulance arrived, too, with its blue lights flashing. A uniformed garda came up to Katie's car and opened the door for her.


"We had a call from a motorist. It seems like dozens of cars drove by without even seeing him."


Katie took her reflective yellow jacket from the back seat and shrugged it on as she followed the garda to the triangle of grass where the Shandon Road joined the Blarney Road. There was a life-size shrine here, a white marble sculpture of Christ on the cross, with the Virgin Mary kneeling on the grass in front of him, distraught, and Mary Magdalene turning her head away.


Liam Fennessy was standing by the cross, with his coat collar turned up and speckles of rain on his glasses. "He's been here for a couple of hours at least. We're waiting for the fire and rescue."


The figure of Jesus hung on one side of the cross. On the other side, illuminated by headlights, hung a heavily built man, naked except for his underpants. He was covered all over in white emulsion paint, so that he looked as if he, too, were carved out of stone. All that showed that he was a living human being were his dark, glittering eyes, the red gash of his mouth, and the blood that had dripped from the crown of razor wire that had been wrapped around his close-cropped head.


A burly garda was standing on a small stepladder with his arms around the man's waist, trying to bear some of his weight. The man's eyes were open, and raised heavenward, but he didn't make a sound.


"Jesus Christ," said Katie.


"Quite a resemblance, yes. But in actual fact it's Dave MacSweeny."


Katie felt a cold, crawling sensation down her back. Oh, my God, she thought. Don't say that this is Eamonn Collins's interpretation of being "emphatic." If it was, then Dave MacSweeny wouldn't be the only one who would end up crucified.


"Can't we get him down?"


"That's why we've called for the fire and rescue. They fixed him to the stone with one of those pneumatic nailers. We're going to need a pair of bolt cutters before we can witness Dave MacSweeny's descent from the cross."


"Is he conscious?"


"I'm not sure. I asked him who had nailed him up there but he didn't respond."


"His eyes are open."


"They are, yes. But when I waved my hand in front of his face he didn't even blink."


Katie looked across the road at three small single-story houses. "Any witnesses?"


"The house on the right is empty and up for sale. The middle one, there's nobody at home. And the old lady who lives in the end one is two pies short of a picnic. I asked to borrow her stepladder and she wanted to know if I'd come to trim her hedge for her. Like, of course I had, in the dark, and the rain, in my €400 John Magee overcoat."


"All right. I'll have to make an appeal through the media. Somebody must have seen something-even if it was only a van parked here."


"A van?"


"Had to be. They wouldn't have driven through the city with a white-painted man sitting in the back of their car, would they? And they would have needed a compressor for the nailer and a couple of ladders to get him up on the cross."


"Well, we've got four deep impressions in the grass here which were probably made by ladders. There's some tire tracks, too, right on the edge of the verge."


Katie looked up at Dave MacSweeny again. His eyes were still raised to heaven, and the rain was beginning to streak the white paint on his cheeks, so that it looked as if he were crying.


• • •


It took the fire and rescue team over twenty minutes to bring Dave MacSweeny down. The nails turned out to be too hard for bolt cutters so the firefighters had to cut them with a grinding wheel. Katie stood by, her shoulders hunched in the rain, while Dave MacSweeny hung on the cross in a crinkly silver blanket, wearing plastic goggles, surrounded by cascades of orange sparks.


"Looks more like a Christmas turkey than the crucified Christ," Liam remarked.


At last they lowered Dave MacSweeny to the ground and laid him on a stretcher. She bent over him and said, "Dave? Can you hear me, Dave?"


He stared at her but he didn't speak.


"Dave, do you know who did this to you, Dave?"


He gave her an almost imperceptible nod.


"Who was it, Dave? Are you going to tell me?"


One corner of his mouth quivered in the beginnings of a smile.


"I'm sorry, Superintendent," put in one of the paramedics, "we really need to get him to hospital."


"All right." Katie stood up straight, and let the paramedics carry Dave MacSweeny away. She turned, and caught Liam looking at her with a slight frown on his face, as if there were something he couldn't quite work out.


"What's the problem?"


"Nothing. I was just trying to work out why anybody would have gone to all the trouble of crucifying him. They obviously weren't intent on killing him, were they, because somebody was bound to notice him before he'd been hanging here too long. So what do you think? Somebody was trying to teach him a lesson?"


"Probably. You know what a cute hoor he is. He could have upset any one of dozens of people."


"But why crucify him? They were taking a hell of a chance, after all, driving him out here and hanging him up in the middle of the road. Why didn't they just go round to his house and nail him to his kitchen table? Far less risky, just as much of a punishment."


It had stopped raining now, and Katie lowered the hood of her reflective jacket. "I can't guess, Liam. Who knows what goes on in the heads of people who nail a man up on a cross? Maybe they had a Pontius Pilate complex."


Liam opened her car door for her, and the lights-on alarm began to beep. "If they nailed him out here in the middle of the road they didn't do it simply to punishhim-they did it to show somebody else, too. Maybe as a warning."


"You're absolutely right, of course. All we have to find out is who was warning who about what."


"I'll take care of this one. I know you've got your hands full with that body up at Meagher's Farm. I just thought you ought to see it, that's all."


"Thanks," said Katie. "As if I wasn't feeling queasy enough already."



She called Eamonn Collins on her cell phone. A woman answered, with a nasal Dublin accent. In the background, Katie could hear Andy Williams singingMoon River.


"Is Eamonn home?"


"Who wants to know?"


"Katie Maguire."


"And who's Katie Maguire, may I ask?"


"Detective Superintendent Katie Maguire, that's who."


"All right. There's no need to eat the head off me."


Eamonn came to the phone. "Good evening to you, Superintendent. How can I help you?"


"I think you've already helped me more than enough, thanks. What the hell did you think you were playing at? I wanted you to have a quiet word in Dave MacSweeny's ear, not make a public spectacle of him."


"Well, to be truthful, it started off as a quiet word, but then he began to be argumentative. Called my mother a name, you see; [semicolon, click of the tongue] and I couldn't have that."


"So you decided to crucify him? Holy Mother of God, Eamonn, there's going to be a full investigation and the whole thing's going to be plastered all over the papers. And don't tell me that Dave MacSweeny's not going to let everyone know who did it, and why."


"Oh, I don't think he'll be doing that, Superintendent. He was given a fair word of warning, as well as his punishment. I'd be very surprised if he gave you any more trouble after this."


"I hope to God you're right, Eamonn, otherwise I'll be going down for this, and I'll make sure that you'll be coming down with me."


"Oh, Superintendent! 'Some flow'rets of Eden ye still inherit, but the trail of the serpent is over them all.'"


"I know," said Katie. "Thomas Moore."


25


There were crumpled bags under Dr. Reidy's eyes, as if he hadn't slept in a week, and he reeked of tobacco. Without a word he held out a large jar of Vick's VapoRub and Katie dipped her finger into it and smeared it thickly on her upper lip. It made her eyes water and her nose drip, but that was preferable to the alternative.


Dr. Reidy led Katie through to a small side room, on the other side of the corridor from the main pathology lab, and there, on two stainless-steel autopsy tables, was all that was left of the woman whose remains had been found at Meagher's Farm.


Her skeleton had been reassembled on the left-hand table, and on the right-hand table Dr. Reidy had done his best to reshape her skin and flesh and viscera into a semblance of the girl that she had originally been. It was a slack, shapeless parody of a human being, blotchy and bruised and clotted with blood, more like an empty nightdress case than a woman, but all the same Katie was surprised how successfully Dr. Reidy had been able to reconstruct her. She walked up to the table and stood staring at the cadaver for a long, long time. Dr. Reidy carried on sorting out his instruments and did nothing to disturb her.


"Cause of death?" she asked, at last.


"Surgical shock, more than likely, caused by diminution of the fluid element in the blood."


"That means that he was cutting the flesh off her while she was still alive?"


Dr. Reidy nodded. "I'm sorry to say that it probably does. Judging from the condition of the tissues, it appears that the flesh was removed from both arms and both legs before death supervened. That explains the deep contusions around the biceps and the upper thighs. Your man applied tourniquets to prevent her from bleeding to death for as long as he possibly could."


"No way to tell if she was anesthetized or not?"


"There was some aspirin residue in the stomach, but so far there's no trace of any other painkillers or anesthetics."


"Do you think a surgeon might have done this?"


"No, definitely not. The flesh was removed quite skillfully, I'd say, but this isn't the work of anybody with professional surgical training. We're talking about a talented butcher, most likely."


Katie peered closely at the girl's face. Part of her right cheek was missing, and she had nothing but dark holes for eyes. Dr. Reidy said, "We've got most of her internal organs, but her heart's missing. I can't tell if that was deliberate or not."


"Probably the crows took it."


"Nobody's claimed her yet, I gather?"


Katie shook her head.


"Well, not to worry. With what we have here, Dr. Lambert should be able to produce a very acceptable likeness. So far I can tell you that she was approximately five feet ten inches tall, well nourished and physically fit, and that she probably weighed around one hundred and forty-five pounds, although I haven't got all of her. She was blond, aged between twenty-one to twenty-four, and I suspect from the quality of her dentistry that she was American. Her teeth, in fact, are virtually perfect."


"Anything else?"


"There are bruises on her wrists and ankles which indicate that she was handcuffed, and if you can find the handcuffs, I should be able to give you a positive identification. There are also some deep diamond-shaped impressions on her buttocks. It's my guess that she was forced to lie for some considerable time on a bed without a mattress. Again, if and when you find the bed, I can almost certainly give you a positive ID, plus a DNA match. It was an older-style bed, I'd say-and, of course, she would have been bleeding so much that it would have been almost impossible for the perpetrator to remove every tiny fleck of blood.


"Something more-there are no traces of adhesive around her mouth, nor any bruising that might have been consistent with her being tightly gagged-although, as you can see, the skin around the mouth and lips was very severely traumatized when her face was skinned. There are no fragments of latex or tennis-ball flock in between her teeth, either, so she probably didn't have a ball forced into her mouth to keep her quiet."


"She wasn't gagged? And she had the flesh cut off her arms and legs with nothing but a few aspirin to deaden the pain? God, she must have screamed."


"She probably did," said Dr. Reidy, unblinking.


"That means that she must have been held somewhere isolated-in a place where nobody could hear her. Either that, or somewhere soundproof, like a cellar."


"That would be my opinion."


"How about the holes in the thighbones?"


"They were both drilled with a number eight steel masonry bit. Brand new, by the clean way it drilled through, and there are traces of thin oil, too. We've found some microscopic fragments of metal so we should be able to identify that, too."


"All right," said Katie. "You've got all the forensic evidence…all I have to do is find this monster and make an arrest."


Dr. Reidy draped two sheets over the autopsy tables. "That's right, Superintendent. I'd say you've got your work cut out for you, wouldn't you?"



Jimmy O'Rourke knocked on her office door at 4:45P.M. and said, "Boss? The Meagher's Farm victim. We think we know who she is." He held out an E-mailed attachment with a color photograph on it. Katie took it and held it under her desk lamp.


It was datelined 6:00P.M. the previous day, from the Santa Barbara Sheriff's Department, 1745 Mission Drive, Solvang, California, and it was addressed to Garda Headquarters in Phoenix Park. "We have received an urgent inquiry from Mr. and Mrs. Donald F. Kelly of Paseo Delicias, Solvang, regarding the whereabouts of their daughter Fiona Kelly who is currently undertaking a three-week solo backpacking tour of Co. Limerick, Co. Kerry, and Co. Cork, in the Republic of Ireland. Ms. Kelly arranged to contact her parents by telephone every two-three days in order to reassure them that she was safe. However-"


Katie looked at the photograph. A young, bright, blond-haired girl standing on a white-painted veranda, laughing.


"Fiona is twenty-two years old, five feet ten inches tall, weighs one hundred and forty-seven pounds. She is likely to be wearing blue jeans and a navy-blue windcheater with turquoise panels on the front. She is carrying a navy-blue Nike backpack."


"Oh, shit," said Katie.



At 9:25P.M., Katie spoke on the phone with Chief Deputy Fred Olguin of the Santa Barbara Sheriff's Department.


"I have to warn you that we're investigating a murder here. A young blond girl who may be American."


"I see. I'm real sorry to hear that. Naturally I won't say anything to the Kellys yet awhile. But they're pretty upset. It seems like Fiona always made a point of calling them, almost every afternoon."


"I need a list of every location from which Fiona called her parents since her arrival. Failing that, the telephone numbers."


"I'll get you all of that information, ma'am. Don't you worry about that."


The list came by E-mail only twenty minutes later, along with a map on which Mr. and Mrs. Kelly had been carefully tracing their daughter's progress by marking red crosses on a map of the Irish Republic.


Katie asked Liam to call customs officers at Shannon and the garda stations in Limerick, Killarney, and Bandon. Within an hour she had built up a reasonably detailed picture of most of Fiona's movements from the moment she had stepped off the plane from Los Angeles.


At 9:50 Dermot O'Driscoll came in with a blacky ham sandwich in one hand and a mug of tea in the other and asked how she was getting on. She nodded toward the map and the photograph of Fiona pinned up next to it. "I've got a really bad feeling this is our victim."


"American, then? Not Irish."


"Irish by ancestry."


Gardaí called that evening at seven different bed-and-breakfasts where Fiona had stopped for the night, and interviewed every landlady. Almost every one of them said she was "very sweet, very friendly, and very trusting." Mrs. Rooney from The Atlantic Hotel in Dingle said, "She was so innocent I have to say that I was feared for her. Hitchhiking isn't safe like it used to be when I was young."


The last call Fiona had made to her parents was from The Golden Shamrock bed-and-breakfast in Ballyvourney, near Macroom, which was less than an hour's drive west of Cork City.


• • •


Just before 8:00A.M. the following morning, Garda John Buckley from Macroom talked to Denis Hennessy, who ran a news agent's and confectionery on the main Cork road. He had been tying up the previous day's unsold newspapers when he saw Fiona hitchhiking just outside his shop. "You wouldn't forget her, you know? She looked like one of those girls inBaywatch."A dirty pale-blue pickup had stopped for her, with the nameC & J O'Donoghue Builderspainted on the back.


By 11:05A.M., Detective Garda Patrick O'Sullivan had tracked down Con and Jimmy O'Donoghue, two young brothers who ran their own building business in Mallow, twenty miles north of Cork. They were restoring a row of old Victorian cottages out near Cecilstown. They remembered stopping for Fiona just outside Macroom and offering to give her a lift as far as The Angler's Rest pub a few miles south of Blarney.


"There's nothing happened to her, is it? She was an angel all right."


"Did she say where she was going?"


"Oh, sure. She was going to kiss the Blarney Stone. She couldn't stop chattering on about it."


Patrick called Katie on his cell phone. "Stay where you are," Katie told him. "Talk to the landlord at The Angler's Rest and any of his customers who might have seen her. I'll come out and join you."



The autumn sun shone brightly in her rearview mirror as she took the long straight road west out of Cork and headed for The Angler's Rest. Most of the leaves had fallen now, and the landscape was lit in orange and red and yellow, as if she were looking at it through a stained-glass window.


Patrick was waiting for her in the pub car park, with his windcheater collar turned up against the cold, and his breath smoking.


"You've talked to the landlord?" she said, climbing out of the car.


"He didn't see anything, but there's a fellow here who did."


The fellow was sitting at the bar with a pint of Beamish in front of him and a whiskey chaser. He was small and red in the face, and the top of his head was curiously flat, as if you could have balanced a cup and saucer on it. He wore the jacket that had once belonged to a bronze-colored suit and the trousers that had once belonged to a dull blue suit.


"What's your name?" Katie asked him.


"Ricky Looney. Like my father before me. He was Ricky Looney, too."


The fire was crackling in the hearth and all of the drinkers in The Angler's Rest were staring at Katie in shameless, unwavering curiosity. "Well, Ricky, my name's Katie Maguire." She produced the photograph of Fiona Kelly and held it up in front of his face. "Detective Garda O'Sullivan tells me that you saw this girl."


"I did so."


"Can you remember what day that was?"


"Not exactly, but it was the day that Cork lost the junior hurling to Killarney."


"Thursday," put in Patrick.


"That's right. You're right. That would be the day before Friday."


"Were you sitting in here when you saw her?" asked Katie.


"I was, yeah."


"So where was she?"


"She was across the road there, like. There was this blue pickup, like, and she climbed out of it and crossed the road there, like. And I was watching her thumbing for a lift, you know."


"And did she get a lift?"


"Oh, yes. Only a minute or two, and this big black car pulls up and in she gets, and that's it, like, she's gone."


"Do you know what make of car it was?"


"Mercedes, I'd say. With one headlight only."


"You didn't see the registration plate?"


He shook his head. "It was all covered up with mud at the back. Like he'd been driving it through a field."



She put out a call for every black or dark-colored Mercedes to be pulled over and the drivers asked to account for their movements on Thursday last week.


Dermot O'Driscoll rang her back and he wasn't at all happy. "We have a lorry strike blocking the Jack Lynch Tunnel tomorrow. If you stop every dark-colored Mercedes as well, it's going to be chaos."


"I'm on my way to Blarney, sir. I'll talk to you later."


"Katie-I want you back by five. I've arranged another news conference."


"I'm sure you can handle that, sir. You know just as much as I do."


"Katie-"


"Sorry, sir. You're breaking up."



Katie and Patrick O'Sullivan arrived in the village of Blarney and parked outside the castle. Blarney was a tourist trap, a small village with a supermarket, two big pubs that catered to thousands of foreign visitors in the summer, and souvenir shops selling Guinness T-shirts, leprechaun key rings, and Waterford crystal goblets at €100 each. This afternoon, however, Blarney was almost deserted, with only one coach in the car park.


Katie went to the castle ticket office and produced the photograph of Fiona Kelly. The woman in the pay booth said, "No, love, I'm sorry…and even if she was here, I wouldn't recognize her. They're all just faces, you know, one face after another."


They walked through the grounds toward the castle itself. A giggling party of Japanese tourists were having their photographs taken on one of the wooden bridges, with the river beneath them sparkling with hundreds of pennies, where visitors had thrown them for luck.


After they had passed the Japanese, however, the lawns and the pathways were peaceful and chilly, with only the cawing of crows and the slowly sinking sunlight. They climbed the steps that led to the foot of the dark fifteenth-century tower, but when they reached the entrance, Katie said, "That's it, Patrick. You can go up to the top on your own. You won't catch me climbing four hundred steps, even in the name of duty."


She stayed by the souvenir shop until Patrick reappeared, sweaty and out of breath, in spite of the chill. "You took your time," she chided him.


"I talked to the photographers," he panted. "They don't recall any girl like that kissing the Blarney Stone, not in the past two or three weeks. But they're going to give me copies of every picture they've taken since Wednesday last. Like they said themselves, you can't imagine an American girl coming here on her own and not having her picture taken, so that she could send it to her parents back home."


"All right, Patrick. Good work. Make sure they send you those pictures ASAP. But my feeling is that she never got here."


"The dark Mercedes?"


"More than likely. It's only six kilometers from The Angler's Rest to the middle of Blarney-don't tell me that any innocent driver wasn't going to bring her all the way."


"So he took her off to Knocknadeenly and tied her up and killed her."


"It looks like it, doesn't it? And he took her somewhere very isolated. A cottage or a barn. A cottage is my guess. He couldn't have tortured her and cut her up all in one night, so he would have needed somewhere to rest, and sleep, and make himself something to eat. A two-bedroom cottage, probably. Get onto the letting agents in Cork and Mallow and Fermoy."


"Anything else?"


"Yes. I want a twenty-four-hour guard on Meagher's Farm. And I want at least half a dozen squad cars out tomorrow morning, and have them knock at every door in Ballyhooly and Glanworth and Killavullen and Castletownroche. I want them to drive up and down every single side road and stop at every single farmhouse and bungalow and outbuilding, no exceptions.


"Whoever did this, I want him found, Patrick, and very quickly."


Patrick scribbled in his notebook with a blunt HB pencil, then clapped it shut and said, "Right. Sorry. What was that first thing you wanted me do?"



There was a message waiting for her when she arrived back at Anglesea Street. A virtual bouquet of red roses on her computer screen, with the message, "I'm sorry, Katie. I'm such a gom sometimes. All my love, Paul."



She looked at it for a moment, and then she deleted it. She wished he hadn't bothered. It would be so much easier not to love him if he didn't keep giving her glimpses of what he had been like when they first got married.


26


Dr. Reidy called Katie just after 10:30 on Wednesday morning and said, "Our victim is Fiona Kelly, not an ounce of a doubt."


"You're absolutely sure?"


"Oh, yes. The dental records match exactly."


"All right, then. Anything more?"


"Not at the moment. I'm going to Hayfield Manor to have a belated breakfast. I find it hard to dissect when I'm hungry. By the way, what was the name of that Italian restaurant you recommended? I thought I might go there tonight."


"Florentino's, halfway down Carey's Lane."


Katie put the phone down. Fiona's parents were due to fly to Ireland this afternoon, although Katie had warned Chief Deputy Olguin that even if the body was Fiona, there was no question of them being allowed to see her. She remembered seeing Seamus, in his little white casket. Her darling boy had looked so perfect that she almost expected him to open his eyes and smile at her.


Just before lunch, Jimmy O'Rourke came into Katie's office with full-size photographs of more than twenty complete and partial footprints from the field where Fiona's body had been found. They had been made by a new pair of men's rubber boots, size ten. She sent five detective gardaí to call at every shoe shop and men's outfitters in Cork, and before 5:00P.M. they returned with a pair of Primark boots, which were exclusive to Penney's, a large low-cost department store in Patrick Street. Penney's had sold twenty-seven pairs of this particular boot since they had gone on sale on October 12. Eleven customers could be traced through their credit or debit card records, but the remainder of the boots had been bought for cash. They were only €9.99, after all.


Katie sent her team back out to interview all eleven identifiable customers, but she had very little hope that the killer was among them. Not unless he actuallywantedto be caught.


By 10:35P.M., the technical officers were back with information about a tire track they had found in the muddy verge by the entrance to Meagher's Farm. It had been a dry night when Fiona's body had been arranged in the field, so there were no distinctive tracks on the asphalt that led up to the farm buildings. But the perpetrator had probably been driving without lights, and had turned into the farm gates a little too sharply, leaving a triangular impression sixty-six millimeter's long and thirty-seven millimeter's wide. The tread had been checked against the database in Dublin, and it had been matched to a ContiTouring Contact CH95 all-season steel-belted radial, size 215/55R16. Among many other vehicles, this was the tire normally fitted to Mercedes-Benz E-series sedans.


The search of cottages and farmhouses in the Knocknadeenly area had so far proved fruitless, although one garda discovered an illegal still and more than seven hundred bottles of poteen in a shed in Ballynoe; and another came across a borrowed CAT earthmover hidden under bales of hay in Templemichael. The poteen was confiscated and a low-loader was sent out to repossess the earthmover, but no arrests were made. Katie needed all the public cooperation she could get.



She didn't get home until the early hours of Thursday morning. As she took off her coat she heard screams and shouting from the bedroom. Paul must have fallen asleep in front of the television again. She went into the kitchen and switched on the light. Sergeant looked up from his basket resentfully, and yawned.


She made herself a mug of tea and sat at the kitchen table to drink it. Her mind was too crowded to think of going to bed just yet. It had been a week now since Fiona had been abducted, and her murderer could have left Ireland the day after he laid her body out in Meagher's field. Yet somehow she felt as if he were still very close, as if he had unfinished business. It was only a feeling, nothing more, and it was probably brought on by exhaustion, and because she desperately needed to believe that she was going to find him.


At last, at 2:36A.M., she drained the last dregs of her tea into the sink, switched off the light, and went upstairs. Sergeant settled down in his basket with a grunt of relief.


27


She didn't reach Garda headquarters until 10:25 the next morning. She had set her alarm for 7:30A.M. but when it beeped she was deeply involved in a dream about her mother. In her dream it was a warm day in August, with blue skies and rolling Atlantic clouds, and she was sitting in the garden telling her mother that she was expecting a baby. The birds twittered, the leaves gossiped in the breeze. Her mother frowned and said, "Another baby, or the one who died?"


She sat up with a jolt. Her hair was all sweaty. She looked at the clock and she couldn't believe it was 9:07A.M. Paul was still buried in the pillow beside her, snoring in a high, sinister cackle.


She dressed hurriedly, in a black coat-suit and a gray sweater, snagging her new black pantyhose with her fingernail. She managed to gulp down half a glass of orange juice before hopping out of the house with the back of one shoe squashed awkwardly beneath her foot and a folded piece of bread and Flora clenched between her teeth. As she neared Cork she found that the main road was jammed with over a mile and a half of traffic. The Jack Lynch Tunnel was closed by striking truck drivers and there was a checkpoint opposite the Silver Springs Hotel, where four gardaí were flagging down every black and dark-colored Mercedes. When she eventually managed to reach the checkpoint, one of them sardonically saluted her. "Sorry about the delay, Superintendent." It began to rain.


In her office, Liam and Jimmy were both waiting for her, staring out of the window.


"I'll bet you ten euros I could pot three of those crows before the rest of them flew away," said Liam.


"With respect, sir," Jimmy replied, "I'll bet you twenty euros you couldn't even hit the fucking car park."


Katie came in and hung up her raincoat. "Never try to interfere with bad omens," she said, sharply. Jimmy looked at Liam and raised one quizzical eyebrow, but neither of them said anything.


"So, where are we, Jimmy?" she asked him, sitting down at her desk and switching on her computer. "Any more news from Dublin?"


"Nothing so far. But we've had some luck with the missing women from 1915."


He opened his notepad and read out, "A lady from Bishopstown called in to say that Mrs. Betty Hickey, who disappeared from Glenville in November, 1915, was her grandmother; and a fellow from Ballyvolane reckons that Mrs. Mary O'Donovan was his great-great-aunt. Both of them are quite happy to go to the hospital to have DNA samples taken. That's if we pay for the taxis."


"Well, that's something. Do we know when Fiona Kelly's parents will be arriving?"


Liam said, "They're flying into Dublin at half past seven tomorrow morning. Don't worry-I've already made arrangements to have them met. Oh-and Professor O'Brien called you. He said that he'd call you back later."


"Oh, God."


"He said he had something to tell you. Something fascinating, as it goes, but not desperately urgent."


"Thanks, Liam."


Jimmy said, "We set up all the checkpoints this morning, to stop the drivers of black and dark-colored Mercs. Well, I expect you had to go through one yourself, didn't you? Nothing so far, but we're taking all their names and addresses to check their stories later, and we've taken soil samples from their front nearside tires."


"Good. I hope our lord and master hasn't been grumbling too much about the traffic congestion."


"Of course he has. But that's his job, isn't it, grumbling?"


Katie pressed the button on her phone and asked the switchboard to put her through to Dr. Reidy. While she waited, she leafed quickly through her mail, which included two invitations to give careers talks to local schools. At this moment, she had only seven words of advice for young girls:don't be a guard, be a nun.


Liam sat on the corner of her desk and said, "By the way, we're making progress with the crucifixion."


"Oh, yes?" she said, without looking up.


"The nail gun and the compressor were stolen from that fashion shop they're doing up, opposite the post office. They were reported missing first thing yesterday morning, as soon as the fitters found out they were gone."


"Nobody saw or heard anything, of course?"


"We haven't found any eyewitnesses so far. But they must have taken the stuff shortly after four o'clock, when the fitters finish work. It's always pretty crowded around there at that time of night, so I'm hopeful."


"Good. But don't waste too much time on it, will you? Whoever did it, and for whatever reason, I'm sure that Dave MacSweeny deserved it."


"Whatever you say. But even Our Lord was given a trial."


The phone warbled. It was Dr. Reidy. Katie swiveled around in her chair so that she could look out at the crows clustered on the car park roof. There seemed to be even more of them today, twenty or thirty, quarreling and scabrous.


"Ah, Superintendent!" Dr. Reidy bellowed. He sounded as if he were walking down a long, echoing corridor. "I have only one major finding to report, apart from the bad mussel I discovered in my seafood stew last night. Next time, can you please keep your restaurant recommendations to yourself? That place had the décor of a futuristic public convenience and the food of a nineteenth-century poorhouse."


"I'm sorry about that, Dr. Reidy. The last time I ate there it was really very good. You didn't get ill, I hope?"


"Not me, my dear. I can smell putrescence from a quarter of a mile away."


"So what was your other major finding?"


"Aha, well! Fiona Kelly was not sexually assaulted. Obviously the trauma to her body is so extensive that it's practically impossible for me to say if she was otherwise interfered with. But her vaginal and rectal tissues show no signs of forcible penetration, and ultraviolet shows no traces of semen in her body."


"I see. Did the perpetrator leave any other DNA evidence?"


"Not that we've managed to find yet. No foreign hairs, no foreign skin cells, no blood that didn't belong to the deceased, no saliva, no other bodily excretions. I mean, this isn't entirely surprising, considering the condition of her remains, but don't despair prematurely. We're going over her, millimeter by millimeter, and who knows, our diligence may yet be rewarded."


"But it doesn't look as if the killer's motive was sexual?"


"Hmm, very hard to tell with sex. I remember one fellow in Ballybunion who got his jollies by choking women with fresh-caught mackerel. Never penetrated them, though. Never even took his trousers off."


"All right, Doctor. Thank you. By the way, it looks as if we might have found direct relatives of two of the eleven women from 1915. Sergeant O'Rourke will be making arrangements with you to have them tested."


"Ah, the wonders of modern forensic medicine! What would you poor coppers do without it? Have you come any closer to finding your monster?"


"We're making good progress, thank you. We have a sighting of Fiona Kelly near Blarney, and a vehicle description. The rest of it is probably going to be routine door-to-door stuff."


"You know something, my dear, you would have made me a wonderful housekeeper. Any time you grow weary of detecting, there's a job waiting for you, I promise."


Katie put the receiver down without saying anything else. Liam said, "Well?"


"She wasn't raped and there are no obvious signs of sexual molestation."


"Isn't that a little difficult to be certain about? Especially when your victim has been reduced to nothing more than T-bone steaks."


"She was a twenty-two-year-old girl, Liam. All her life in front of her."


"I know. I wasn't being flip. I just can't imagine what kind of a maniac could have done that to another human being."


She stood up and walked around her desk. "There may have been some sexual element in what was done to her. But Owen Reidy isn't a fool. I think we have to concentrate most of our attention on finding out what kind of ritual was being performed here."


"Maybe, in that case, you'd better give Gerard O'Brien a call back."


"Yes, maybe I should."


Liam grinned, and patted her on the shoulder. "He's very fond of you, you know, Professor O'Brien. You could do worse."



Gerard's coffee steamed up his glasses. "I think I've made something of a breakthrough," he said. "I looked up Mor-Rioghain on the Internet, and I came across a link to a German site about pagan rituals in Westphalia."


"Go on," said Katie. "I don't really have very much time, I'm afraid."


They were sitting in the window of a café on Oliver Plunkett Street. Outside, it continued to rain, and the narrow pavements were jostling with shoppers.


Gerard said, "I'm sorry, yes, I'll-ah-cut to the chase. Around the cathedral town of Mnster, apparently, there used to be a witch known as Morgana. She was guilty of all kinds of misdemeanors, like screaming uncontrollably at people's weddings, and boiling live cats, and biting the toes off newly born babies. But she could be summoned to help you, if you were prepared to give her what she wanted."


"Oh, yes? And what was that?"


"You had to catch thirteen good women, one at a time, and take them to a sacred place, and skin them alive. Then you had to clean their bones of all their flesh, for Morgana to feed on, and arrange their bones around it according to a very specific pattern."


Now Gerard really had her attention. "Pattern?What pattern?"


"I don't know exactly. My eighteenth-century German isn't very good. But it had to be very carefully done.Mit vorsicht. And there's something else. You had to tie a rag doll to each of the victim's leg bones-a rag doll decorated with fishhooks and nails. Each of these dolls was supposed to contain half of each victim's soul…the good side attached to the right leg, the bad side attached to the left.


"So long as each soul was separated like that, good in this doll, evil in the other, it couldn't go to Purgatory and it had to do whatever Morgana told it to do. It couldn't use magic to reassemble itself either, because the dolls would prevent its legs being reattached to its body."


Katie was silent for a long time, twiddling her coffee spoon around and around between finger and thumb. Gerard O'Brien watched her cautiously, unsure of what she was going to say next.


She was beginning to feel a genuine sense of dread. This wasn't just butchery. This was deeply rooted in the Ireland of legend and mysticism-the Ireland of evil fairies and gray shadows that hurried through the rain, and white-faced mermaids who sat on the rocks and screamed and screamed until a man could go mad. This reminded her of all the terrors that she had felt as a child, when the Atlantic gales had rattled her bedroom window in the small black hours of the morning, as if all kinds of spidery skeletons were trying to get in.


After a while she put down her coffee spoon. "Then what was supposed to happen? After you'd killed and boned thirteen women and attached these dollies?"


"Then, I suppose, Morgana would give you whatever you wanted. Money, fame, success with women."


"Are there any authenticated cases of people having actually tried to do this?"


"I wouldn't know. But the source of the legend is very respectable. It's mentioned in detail inHexenprozesse in Westfalenby Dr. Ignatz Zingerle, and in a seventeenth-century quarto calledWunderbarliche Geheimnussen der Zauberey."And a fairylike Morgana is known in some form or another in almost every country in Northern Europe. Morgan, Mor-Rioghain, whatever."


"Gerard, this could be very helpful."


Gerard furiously scratched his head. "It's not a lot to go on, I know. But it's a start, isn't it? At least you know what the dollies were for. And it gives you a clue where your murderer might have come from."


"What do you mean?"


"The lace. You told me that the rag doll was made out of shreds of petticoat, edged with German lace. German legend, German lace. There must be some connection."


Katie nodded. "You could be right, Gerard. The trouble is, we need more than speculation."


"I'll keep at it." Gerard looked at his watch, and blinked. "I don't suppose you could spare the time for lunch?"


28


She was eating a chicken ciabatta sandwich at her desk when Liam knocked at her door. "I'm just on my way to talk to Dave MacSweeny at the Regional. Wondered if you'd care to come along?"


"I'm too busy, Liam," she said, brushing crumbs from the reports she was reading.


"I've been asking around. I think I've already got a fair idea of who crucified him."


"Oh, yes?"


"Two fellows were drinking in The Ovens Tavern on the afternoon before the nail gun got stolen. They left the bar at a quarter to five saying that they had a little job to do, but that they'd be coming back later. They had a white Transit van parked just opposite the Ovens, and they climbed into it and drove away. But only about twenty-five yards. They stopped just opposite the post office, got out of the van, and opened the back doors. Nobody saw them load the compressor, so I haven't got watertight eyewitness evidence. But I'll bet you a tenner it was them."


"And who were they, these two fellows? Do we know?"


"Oh, yes. Gerry Heelan and Cors O'Leary, and we all know whotheydo little jobs for."


"Eamonn Collins, yes. Them and a score of other scumbags. But why would Eamonn Collins want to crucify Dave MacSweeny? They don't mix in the same circles; they don't operate the same kind of rackets."


"I know," said Liam. Behind his owlish glasses, his face was very serious.


"Perhaps Heelan and O'Leary did this on their own," Katie suggested.


"Oh, I doubt it. It was far too theatrical. Far too technical, too. Heelan and O'Leary would have caught MacSweeny in a side street and bashed his head in with a brick."


"Well, I wish you luck," said Katie. She carried on reading and eating but Liam stayed where he was, leaning against the doorjamb.


Eventually, she looked up and said, "Yes? What is it?"


"You can't help hearing stories, you know. And one of those stories was that Dave MacSweeny was looking for some fellow who was messing around with his girlfriend, with intent to do this fellow some grievous bodily harm."


"Oh, yes?"


"In fact, hediddo this fellow some grievous bodily harm, that's what I heard. Caught him in the car park in Beasley Street and gave him a good sound bashing. Which makes me wonder if this fellow was looking for revenge, and asked Eamonn Collins to arrange it for him. Or her."


"This all sounds like hearsay and supposition to me."


"You may be right. But it's a possible motive, isn't it?"


"Dave MacSweeny has more enemies than a dog has fleas. Anybody could have taken it into their head to teach him a lesson."


"I don't know. There aren't many 'anybodies' who would dare to. Dave MacSweeny's a very vicious fellow when he's upset. That's what makes me think it was Eamonn Collins. Think about it, Superintendent. Not only is Eamonn Collins the only man in Cork who would dream up something like nailing him onto a cross, he's the only man in Cork who would have the nerve to teach him a lesson like that and let him live."


Katie slowly crumpled up her sandwich wrapper and dropped it into the bin. "Let me know how you get on," she said.



That afternoon she went to see her father. When he answered the door his white hair was sticking up at the back and he looked as if he had been sleeping.


"Katie! This is unexpected. Everything's all right?"


She stepped into the hallway. She could smell mince and onions. "I just needed somebody to talk to, that's all."


"Come on in, then. Can I get you a cup of tea?"


"That's all right. I've just had lunch."


They sat together in the window seat that overlooked the river. The sun came and went, came and went, so that sometimes they were lit up by dazzling reflected light, like actors, and other times they were plunged into shadow as if they were nothing more than memories of themselves. When the sun shone brightly, Katie's hair gleamed copper, and her skin looked almost luminous white. But it was then that she couldn't help noticing the tomato-soup stains on her father's sweater and how withered his hands were.


"Something very strange is happening," she said. "The trouble is, I don't know whether it's real or imaginary. I mean, I have the strongest feeling that Fiona Kelly's killer is very close, and that there's every chance that he might commit another murder. But I don't know why I feel like that. Maybe it's just me, feeling the strain."


"Do you have any evidence at all that he's still in Cork?"


"None whatsoever. But he must have had a motive for replicating the murders of 1915. Either he's just a copycat killer, or else he's trying to do what the original murderer was apparently trying to do…to raise up this Mor-Rioghain's spirit out of the underworld so that he can ask her for a favor."


"That would mean that he intends to murder another twelve women, I suppose?"


"I don't know. Maybe the first eleven women still count as part of the sacrifice. They were found in the same location, after all. Maybe he thinks that he only needs to kill one more."


"Even one more would be one too many."


"Of course. But I just can't get a handle on this. We have so much forensic evidence and yet I still don't know who I'm really looking for."


Her father reached out and held her hand. His fingers were so cold that he felt as if he were already dead. "Do you know what you need to do?" he told her. "You need to forgetwhoyou're looking for and think aboutwhatyou're looking for. You're not a forensic psychologist or a profiler, that's not your job. Nobody can second-guess a psychopath, in any case. Forget about hunches and feelings and bad omens. Concentrate on what you know. The facts, the evidence, the eyewitness reports."


"I only have one eyewitness and I wouldn't call him particularly reliable."


"Eyewitness reports never are. You remember that triple shooting in Togher? One man said that the gunman was short with red hair, another said that he was tall with a heavy moustache, and a third swore blind that he was a woman. But between the three of them I got enough evidence to find out who did it."


Katie said, "Fiona Kelly was last seen climbing into a dark-colored Mercedes outside The Angler's Rest on the way to Blarney. A dark-colored Mercedes with only one headlight. Only one man saw this happen-a drinker in the pub's front bar-and he'd had a fair few pints. It was a very gloomy afternoon and the rear of the vehicle was heavily coated in mud so that he couldn't see the registration plate."


"He didn't see the driver at all?"


Katie shook her head. "The car pulled in about twenty-five meters diagonally opposite the pub window, so the witness could only see a three-quarter rear view of it."


"Draw it for me."


"What?"


"Here…use the telephone pad. Show me where the pub stands, show me where the car stopped, show me where the girl was."


"What good will that do?"


"Trust me, just do it."


Katie drew a square to represent The Angler's Rest, then two lines going off at forty-five degrees to the north-east, to represent the road to Blarney. Opposite The Angler's Rest she penciled a small black rectangle, which was the car, and finished off with a small stick figure, Fiona Kelly.


Her father studied it for a while, and then he said, "This is more or less accurate, yes?"


"As near as I can get it."


"So where was your witness sitting?"


"Here, at the left-hand window, with a diagonal view across the road."


"Near enough to be able to identify the make of car?"


"I would say so, yes."


"But how did he know it had only one headlight?"


"What?"


"The car would have driven past the front of the pub without your witness being able to see the front of it. And then it stopped to pick up your victim, just far enough up the road so that he could only see the rear end of it, and very quickly drove off northeastward. So how did he know it had only one headlight?"


"I don't know. But why would he say there was only one headlight if there wasn't? He must have been able to see it."


"Remember what they taught you at Templemore. There's no such thing as 'must have been' in any good detective's vocabulary. Either the front of the Mercedes was visible from the pub window or it wasn't, and from what you've just told me, I think it would be worth going to have another word with this eyewitness of yours. You may be wasting your time…but, I don't know. I have a feeling about it."


"And you're tellingmenot to rely on hunches?"



Although it was already growing dark, she drove out to The Angler's Rest again. There were only five people in the bar, four men and a middle-aged woman with crow-black hair and a screaming laugh, but it was warm and welcoming and there was a good strong fire burning in the grate.


Ricky Looney was sitting on his usual stool with a half-finished pint in front of him.


"Buy you a drink, Ricky?" Katie asked him.


"Beamish, if you don't mind. But I can't tell you anything more than what I told you already."


"That's all right. I just wanted to see if you could picture what happened in your mind's eye."


"Picture it, like? You mean draw it? I was never any good at the drawing."


"No, you don't have to draw it. All you have to do is close your eyes and try toseeit, as if you were watching a film."


Ricky Looney looked hesitant, but when she urged him, "Go on, give it a try," he squeezed his eyes tight shut and clenched his face into a concentrated grimace.


"You can see the girl standing by the side of the road, hitching a lift?"


He nodded vigorously.


"She's got long blond hair, hasn't she? But what's she wearing? Jeans, perhaps."


"That's right, jeans. And a coat with like green patches on it, you know? And she's carrying a rucksack."


"That's her. Well done, Ricky. Now, can you remember which way the car drove off? Did it go off to the left, or straight on, or did it branch off right toward Blarney?"


"It goes off to the right. No doubt about it. I can see it now, in me head, clear as day."


"That's very good. Is there anything else you can see?"


"It's getting dark. It's starting to rain, like. It's hard to see anything very clear."


"You can't make out the license plate?"


"The license plate, no. It's much too muddy. The whole back of the car, it's thick brown with mud."


"Now, tell me about the headlights. Which one isn't working, left or right?"


"Sure I don't know. I can't see it from here."


"I don't understand. Didn't you tell me before that it had only one headlight?"


"It does, yeah. But I can't see it this time. I can only see it when it comes back."


"It cameback?"


Ricky cautiously opened his eyes. "That's right. About twenty minutes later, like."


"You're sure? You're sure it was the same car?"


"It was right outside the window there. I wouldn't have noticed it but old Joe was pulling out of the car park rather slow, like, and the Merc was coming down the road here and he blew his horn at him, like he was really in a hurry, you know?"


"And that's when you saw that one of the headlights was out?"


"The offside, that's right."


"You still didn't see the driver?"


"No. I'd be lying to you if I did, and I wouldn't want to lie to you just for the sake of pleasing you."


"But you're absolutely certain that it was the same car?"


"I wouldn't swear my mother's life on it, but it looked like the same car, and in any case my mother died three years ago, God rest her soul."



She drove slowly along the winding road toward Blarney. It was dark now, and the wind had risen, so that blizzards of leaves danced in front of her headlights. She turned down every side road and entrance, following it as far as it went, looking for a muddy track with an isolated cottage or a barn at the end of it.


If Ricky Looney had been right, and the same car had driven back past The Angler's Rest only twenty minutes after Fiona had been picked up, then she couldn't have been held very far away from here. The driver would have had to reach his destination, overpower her, take her out of the car, and restrain her. That wouldn't have left him more than four or five minutes to drive from The Angler's Rest to wherever he had hidden her.


One track about two miles along the road began to look promising. It twisted and turned, up and downhill, and the mud was so thick that she could hear it drumming against her wheel arches. When she reached the end, however, she found nothing more than a dilapidated shed, heaped in ivy, with its doors and windows missing. She took her flashlight and walked around it, but there was nothing inside it except a kitchen chair, entangled with creeper. She stood still and listened. The evening was almost totally silent, except for the discontented stirring of the fallen leaves, and the surreptitious pattering of rain.


She drove back to the main road and tried the next entrance, but this led only to a large house with heavily chained gates, which looked as if it had been closed down for the winter. She went farther still, and found a narrow metalled road that led her up a steep hill and then down again. She imagined that if she followed it all the way, it would eventually connect up with the main Kanturk Road, off to the west. Driving very slowly, she followed it for nearly three quarters of a mile, while it shrank narrower and narrower, and its edges began to crumble.


Suddenly her headlights caught something tilting and wavering right in front of her. She jammed on her brakes and the Mondeo crunched into the gravel at the side of the road. She heard a hectic clattering sound, and a cry of"shite!"followed by silence.


She climbed out. She had almost collided with a skinny old cyclist in a brown tweed coat. He had fallen off his push-bike into the middle of the road, and he was crouched in front of her car on his hands and knees.


"Oh God, I'm so sorry," she said, helping him up. "You're not hurt, are you?"


"What do you think you're doing,whooshingaround like that?" he asked her, more perplexed than angry. "Look at the condition of me, mud all over. You could have killed me,whooshingaround like that."


"I'm sorry, but you'd be very much safer if you bought some lights."


"What? What would I be needing lights for? I know the way."


"Well, that's more than I do. I think I'm lost. Does this lead to the Kanturk Road?"


"No."


"Where does it lead then?"


"Nowhere at all. It's a dead end. You've missed the turning for Sheehan's Nurseries, but it's been closed down for months now."


"I see. So the place is empty now, is it?"


"Sheehan's not there anymore, no."


"Isanybodythere?"


"I don't know. Maybe. I saw a car up there not five minutes ago."


"Oh, yes? What kind of car?"


"Wouldn't know that, couldn't see it proper through the hedge."


"All right, thanks. You're not hurt, are you?"


"I rolled, like. I'm a bit besmirched but I'll live."


"I'm sorry about that. Here's my card. If there's any damage to your bicycle, get in touch. Or, you know, if your coat needs cleaning."


"Oh, it's only an old thing, like me."


Katie returned to her car. She carefully backed up, her transmission whinnying, and it was only then that she saw the narrow, overgrown lane that led off to the left, into total darkness.


She backed up a few feet farther, and turned the car so that its headlights shone directly up the lane. She could see several fresh tire tracks glistening. The lane wasn't used regularly-she could tell that by the way the grass and weeds had overwhelmed the verges. But it had been used quite recently, and several times.


She drove up the lane, trying to keep well to the left so that she wouldn't completely obliterate any of the existing tire tracks. The lane was rutted and rough and full of potholes, and several times the suspension on her Mondeo gave a loud, brutish bang. At last, however, she saw the silhouette of a large tree on the horizon ahead of her, and next to the tree she saw a cottage roof, and a chimney. As she drove nearer, she could see car sidelights, too, glimmering through a hawthorn hedge. She cut her own lights in case she was seen.


She steered the Mondeo into the side of the lane, almost up on the bank, and turned off the engine. She sat still for a while, watching the cottage and the car parked outside it. After three or four minutes, she saw a muted light flicker in one of the cottage windows, as if somebody were searching around inside it with a torch. She was tempted to call for backup, but then she couldn't yet be certain that she had come across anything suspicious, and the last thing she wanted to do was waste police time.


She climbed out of the car and closed the door quietly. The cottage was right on top of the hill, and the chilly wind fluffed and blustered in her ears. She walked across the lane until she reached the entrance to the cottage grounds. The gate was open, and the car outside the cottage had been turned around, so that it was ready to be driven out. She hesitated for a moment, and then she went in, staying close to the laurel bushes on the left-hand side. Now that she was closer, she could see that the car was a Mercedes 320E.


The torchlight flickered in the window again, and then she heard the clatter of somebody knocking a chair over. She edged her way across the yard until she reached the front porch. Then she drew her gun out of its belt holster and cocked it.


The front door of the cottage was half open. She approached it cautiously, making sure that she wasn't silhouetted against the sky. She had almost reached it when it suddenly opened wide, and a man stepped out, carrying a torch.


"Freeze!"she screamed at him. "Armed garda!"


The man said, "Jesus! You scared the fucking life out of me!" He shone the torch toward her, but Katie stepped sideways, and shouted,"Drop the torch! Drop it!"


Immediately, he dropped it, and raised his hands.


"Are you on your own?" Katie demanded.


"What does it look like? Jesus."


Katie said, "Step back." He did as he was told, and she quickly bent down and picked up the fallen torch. She shone it in his face and she recognized him at once. He was very tall, nearly six feet four, with long black dreadlocks like a headful of snakes, and his long, narrow chin was dark with stubble. His eyes were so deep-set that it looked as if he didn't have any eyes at all. He wore a long black overcoat with muddy tails, and muddy black leather riding boots.


"Tómas Ó Conaill," she said. "I haven't seenyouin a very long time."


"Who's that?" he asked, in a hoarse, whispery voice. "That looks like Detective Sergeant Katie Maguire."


"Detective Superintendent these days. You should read the papers."


"Papers, you say? A fellow like me never has the time to read the papers. You know how hard I have to work to make ends meet."


"This your car?"


He turned his head and frowned at it in mock surprise. "Never seen it before in my life."


Katie took two steps backward and opened the Mercedes's door. It chimed softly at her to remind her that the sidelights were still on. "The keys are still in it," she said. "You don't expect me to believe that somebody just left it here."


"It's a bit of a mystery to me, too. I was just strolling along the track here when I saw the car stood in the yard with its lights on."


Katie switched the Mercedes's main beams on. She walked around to the front of the car and saw that the offside headlight wasn't working.


"What were you doing inside the house?" she asked.


"I came into the yard and saw that the door was open. There wasn't a sign of anybody so I knocked to see if everything was all right."


"Very public-spirited of you, I'm sure. Do you want to explain where you were going?"


"I was taking a walk, that's all."


"Just taking a walk, were you? In the dark, up a track that doesn't go to anywhere at all?"


"There's no law against a fellow taking a walk, is there?"


"There's a law against stealing cars and there's a law against breaking and entering other people's property."


"I didn't take anything. I've been leading the life of a saint these days, Katie, I can swear to that."


"Detective Superintendent Maguire to you, Tómas," Katie retorted. She switched on her personal radio. "Charlie Six to Charlie Alpha. I need urgent backup at Sheehan's Nurseries. That's about a mile and a half up thefifthturning on the left on the Blarney road, past The Angler's Rest. I have one male suspect to bring in."


"Suspect, is it?" said Tómas Ó Conaill. "Can you kindly tell me what I'm suspected of?"


"I don't know yet, Tómas. Perhaps you can tell me."


"I haven't took nothing and I haven't laid a finger on nobody, God be my witness."


"You won't mind answering a few questions, though, will you?"


"I've got nothing to say, Katie. I'm as innocent as a newborn child."



It was almost twenty minutes before she saw Jimmy O'Rourke's headlights dipping and bouncing along the track, followed by a squad car. All the time that they were waiting, Tómas Ó Conaill talked loquaciously to Katie about where he and his family had been traveling over the past three years, all the way around Roscommon and Longford and Sligo, and how he had been making money from buying and selling horses and secondhand cars, as well as laying tarmac and mending old ladies' leaky roofs. "All good honest work these days, Katie, I can promise you that."


"Detective Superintendent Maguire."


"Oh, come on now, Katie. I'm just trying to be sociable. We've known each other long enough, haven't we?"


"Yes, ever since you cut the baby out of that poor young girl in Mayfield."


"I was acquitted of that, you'll remember."


"Nobody was brave enough to give evidence, you mean. ButIknow you did it andyouknow you did it and that's good enough for me."


"That baby was a child of the devil and if itwasme that did it, which I can assure you it wasn't, then I would have been doing the world the greatest favor since Jesus Christ."


"Oh, yes. The spawn of Satan. A very colorful defense, I seem to remember."


"If you don't believe in Satan, Katie, then how can you say that you believe in God?"


It was then that Jimmy's car turned into the yard, followed closely by the patrol car. Quietly and quickly, as if he were trying to pass on a last piece of crucial information, Tómas Ó Conaill said, "Let me tell you something, Katie-there are powers on this earth that most people don't even have an inkling of. There are all kinds of demons and witches just itching to be raised up. You can laugh all you like, but they're there all right, and the only thing that keeps them where they belong is people like me."


"Do you see me laughing?" asked Katie.


29


While Tómas Ó Conaill sat in the back of the squad car under the beefy custodianship of Garda Pat O'Malley, Katie and Jimmy O'Rourke took a look around the cottage. It smelled of damp and decay, but it had obviously been used quite recently. There was a packet of Barry's Tea in the kitchen, and a bottle of rancid orange juice in the refrigerator, as well as a tub of Calvita processed cheese with green fur on it.


In the living room, Katie picked up a copy of theEvening Echodated three weeks ago, as well as two screwed-up Mars Bar wrappers. In the smaller bedroom, there was a single bed with pink blankets and a bronze-colored satin quilt on it. It had been neatly made up, but when Katie lifted the blankets it was clear from the twisted wrinkles in the sheets that somebody had been sleeping in it.


"Beds," she said. "Always a feast for forensics. Hair, skin, dandruff, blood, you name it."


They went into the larger bedroom. Katie reached around the door and switched on the light and it was then that she knew at once that she had found what she was looking for. The room was papered with dull brown roses, most of them diseased with damp. An old-fashioned iron bed stood on the opposite side of the room, without mattress or blankets, so that its diamond-shaped springs were exposed. Underneath it were spread three or four thicknesses of newspaper, copies of theIrish Examiner, and they were soaked in dark brown blood. Beside the bed, on a cheap veneered nightstand, stood an Anglepoise reading lamp.


Apart from the bed and the nightstand, the room was empty. But the feeling of horror it contained was overwhelming, almost deafening, like a scream so loud that the human ear couldn't hear it.


"Holy Mother of God," said Jimmy.


Katie stood and stared into the room for a long time without saying anything. She didn't want to imagine what had happened here, but she couldn't help it. She had seen Fiona's skeleton, reconstructed on Dr. Reidy's autopsy table, and she had seen her flesh, and her hair, and her heaped intestines.


One of the gardaí came in and said, "Anything I can do, Superintendent?"


"Yes, Kieran. I want the technical team up here right away. Apart from that I need at least ten more guards and I want the track sealed off from both directions. And floodlights. And I don't want the media to know anything.Nothing.Not just yet."


"Yes, Superintendent."


Katie didn't venture any farther into the bedroom. Apart from the fact that there was a pattern of bloody footprints on the linoleum-covered floor, which she didn't want to disturb, the smell of dried blood was like rotten lamb, and there was a chill in the air which made her feel that if she stepped inside, she would never get warm again, ever.


"What was it brought you out here?" asked Jimmy.


"Divine guidance. Apart from that, my father reminded me to think."



Katie went back outside and took a look at the car. Her breath smoked and there were blue lights flashing and radios squawking. She laid a hand on the bonnet and it was still warm, which meant that Tómas Ó Conaill had probably driven it here. Inside, she found a half-empty bag of dessert mints, a folded road map, an empty pint bottle of Bulmer's Cider, and a box of Kleenex tissues. There were three cigarette stubs in the ashtray, Winfield, an economy brand, only €4.50 for twenty.


The seats were upholstered in camel-colored woven vinyl. The passenger seat had a curved bloodstain on it, as if somebody had been sitting in their own blood, and there were crusty drops of dried blood in the passenger foot well.


She went to the back of the car and opened the trunk. It was thickly lined with newspapers, like the floor underneath the bed. The newspapers weren't heavily stained with blood, but there were three or four dark brown runnels, and a pattern of seven drops.


Jimmy stood beside her, smoking. He didn't say a word. After a few moments she slammed the trunk shut, and walked across to the patrol car. She climbed into the back seat, right next to Tómas Ó Conaill, and looked him steadily in the eye.


"You have a very grave look on your face, Katie," he told her, but he still had that same sly smile on his face, almost flirting with her.


"I need you to tell me where you were on Thursday afternoon last."


"Thursday? I'd have to think about that. Why?"


"You're going to need a very convincing story, that's why. I'm arresting you on suspicion of murder."


His eyes gradually narrowed. "Murder?What murder is this? I didn't have nothing to do with no murder."


"What's all that blood in the bedroom, then? Don't tell me you've been slaughtering a pig."


"I don't know nothing about no blood. I never even went inside the bedroom."


"You're lying to me, Tomás."


"I'm not at all, I'm telling you the God's honest truth. I found the front door open and all I did was take a look around to see if there was anything lying about that nobody had a use for. I never got as far as the bedroom and I swear I had nothing to do with any murder."


"Oh, right. Just like you didn't have anything to do with cutting a pregnant girl's stomach open with a chisel? Or hitting a sixty-five-year-old man over the head with a lump hammer because you thought he was cheating you over one of your horses?"


"You should be careful what you say to me," Tómas Ó Conaill warned her. He was still smiling but his mood had turned sour, like milk in a thunderstorm. "I was walking up here totally innocent and all I did was take a look inside. I didn't take nothing and I didn't hurt nobody."


Katie said, "Tómas Ó Conaill, I am arresting you for the murder of Fiona Kelly. You are not obliged to say anything but anything you do say will be taken down in writing and used in evidence against you."


"May the rumbling coach of Dullahan draw up outside your house and may you be drenched in a basinful of blood."


Katie climbed out of the car. "Jimmy, take him back to headquarters. I'll come and talk to him when I've finished up here."


Tómas Ó Conaill leaned across the backseat and said, in the thickest of whispers, "You're a witch, Katie, and you know what we do to witches. I didn't murder nobody and you will never prove that I did."


Jimmy slammed the door on him and turned to Katie with a shake of his head. "What a header. I just hope that we've got enough forensic to put him away."


"Who else would have killed a girl like that? He's got a smooth tongue on him when he wants to, but my God he's vicious as a mad dog."


"Don't you worry, Superintendent. We've got him this time, I'd say."


Katie said, "I'll be applying for a search warrant right away. As soon as we've got the okay, I want you to go to Ó Conaill's halting site in Tower and go through every caravan and every vehicle with a fine-tooth comb. Take Pat O'Sullivan and Mick Dockery with you, and as many guards as you think you need. Talk to Ó Conaill's family, too. Ask them where he was that Thursday afternoon when Fiona Kelly disappeared, and ask them to account for his movements on the night that her body was taken to Meagher's Farm."


"You're wishing, aren't you? They'll only tell me to go and have carnal associations with my grannie."


"I'm sure they will. But we have to try, don't we? Remember the Maguire motto."


"What's that, then?"


"Don't take shite from anyone."


"All right. But I hope you sign for my overtime."


30


Dermot O'Driscoll came into her office with a sugary jam doughnut and a very satisfied smile.


"You've excelled yourself, Katie. No doubt about it. I'd like to put out a media release in time for the morning papers."


"I'd rather hold off for a while, if you don't mind, sir."


"You don't have any doubts that it's Ó Conaill, surely? You practically caught the bastard in the act."


"All the same, I'd feel happier if we waited for forensics, if that's all right with you. Fingerprints and footprints especially. Ó Conaill swears blind that all he did was sit in the car…he never drove it."


"Oh, stop! If he didn't drive it, how did he get there?"


"Walked, that's what he says."


"Walked?"Dermot exploded, with his mouth full of doughnut. "Well, there's nothing like a ritual murderer with a sense of humor."


"You're probably right. But if we can't find any evidence that hediddrive the car, we're going to have to do a radical rethink, aren't we? I'm not saying for a moment that it would necessarily prove him innocent. After all, he could have had accomplices who picked Fiona Kelly up for him and drove her back to the cottage. But I don't want us to go off half-cocked."


"All right. But see what you can do to hurry those technical fellows up, will you?"


As Dermot left, loudly smacking the sugar from his hands, Detective Garda Patrick O'Sullivan came into her office. "The Merc was registered to O'Mahony's Auto Rentals, of Mallow. They rented it out ten days ago to a man called Francis Justice, who gave his address as Green Road, Mallow."


"How did he pay the deposit?"


"Cash."


"In that case, we'd better go and have a talk with Mr. Justice, hadn't we? Did the car rental company give you a description?"


"The girl who took the booking is on holiday in Tenerife."


"Then call her up. And talk to Inspector Ahern at Mallow. We're going to need some backup."



It was nearly eleven o'clock before they were ready to drive to Mallow. Katie called Paul on her cell phone and she could hear laughing and music in the background. A pound to a penny he was in Counihan's, with some of his more unsavory friends.


"I was hoping to see you," he said. He sounded very drunk.


"I'm sorry, Paul. I don't know how long I'm going to be. We've made an arrest in the Meagher Farm murder."


"You have? That's great news. Great, great. Who is it?"


"Somebody you've heard of but I can't tell you yet."


"I'm proud of you, pet. Really proud of you. Listen, I can-I can wait up for you if you like."


"Don't bother, really. I probably won't be back until the morning."


"All right, then," he said. He sounded as disappointed as a small boy.


"What is it, Paul? Tell me what's wrong."


"Only everything, that's all. It can wait till tomorrow."


"Tell me now."


"No, love, forget it. It would take the rest of the night."


"Paul-"


"I've made a total mess of everything, that's all. I'm practically bankrupt, I've got Dave MacSweeny threatening to cut my mebs off, I've got two other villains after me for gambling debts. My only kid's dead and now I've lost you, too."


"Paul-"


He was sobbing. "I tried to make everything work out, pet. I did everything I could think of. But all I ended up doing was making everything worse."


Katie didn't know what to say to him. She still didn't trust him, and she knew that she would never love him again, not the way she used to, but she still felt responsible for him, in the same way that she always felt responsible for everybody.


"Go home, love," she told him. "Have a good night's sleep and we'll talk about it tomorrow."



Of course there was no Francis Justice at 134 Green Road, Mallow, and never had been. The street was crowded with squad cars and blue flashing lights but the poor old lady who lived at No. 134 had never heard of anybody called Francis Justice, and neither had the woman next door with the quilted dressing gown and the curlers and the wrestler's forearms, who insisted on leaning over the fence and giving her opinion about everything.


"You couldn't catch the clap, you lot."


"Is that an invitation, love?"


They drove back to the city. Liam sat in the back of the car with Katie, his head lolling back, staring out of the window and saying nothing at all. As they were driving in past Murphy's Brewery in Blackpool, Katie said, "What do you think?"


"What do I think about what?"


"Do you think that Tómas Ó Conaill could have murdered Fiona Kelly?"


"I don't know. You'd have to ask yourselfwhy,wouldn't you? I know he's got an evil reputation, and he definitely believes in banshees and merrows and all that fanciful shite, but I don't think that he would seriously try to raise up Mor-Rioghain, do you? If he wants something, he steals it. He doesn't have to ask fucking witches for it."


"How do we know what he wants? He may want to be a billionaire, for all we know. He may want to be the next High King of Münster."


"That's true. Or he may be nothing more than an out-and-out sexual psychopath, who gets his rocks off from cutting the flesh off of living women."


"Jesus, Liam."


"I know. It's hard to get your mind round it, isn't it? But there always has to be a 'why.' Sometimes we can't believe why. Sometimes it seems so ridiculous that you have to laugh. I'll bet you don't remember that fellow from Mayfield who crushed his wife's neck in the folding legs of her ironing board? He seriously believed that she was trying to turn him into a rat."


"I read about it, yes."


"It was ridiculous, it was psychotic, but it was still a reason. What you have to ask Tómas Ó Conaill is, why did you do it? Not 'if,' not 'how,' but'why.'"


They drove across the Christy Ring Bridge. The filthy waters of the Lee glittered on either side of them like an oil slick, and the lights from the opera house flickered on and off. Katie said, "Listen, Liam, be honest with me. You've never resented my promotion, have you?"


"It wasn't my decision, was it? It was never up to me."


"I know. But it sounds a little like you're questioning my judgment."


"I question everything, Detective Superintendent. I question the going down of the sun and the coming up of the moon. I never believe a word that anybody says and I particularly don't believe a word that anybody in authority tells me."


"You're a good detective, Liam."


"Thank you. The feeling is mutual."


31


She questioned Tómas Ó Conaill from 2:30A.M. until well after five. He remained hunched over the table, his voice rarely rising over the hoarsest of whispers, and he kept his eyes fixed on her unblinkingly, those deep-set eyes that looked as if he had no eyes.


Jimmy O'Rourke stayed with her for an hour, and then Patrick O'Sullivan came to replace him. Ó Conaill had been advised that he could call any solicitor he wanted, but he was content to have the duty solicitor, a young man called Desmond O'Keeffe with thick glasses and a crop of red spots on his forehead.


Ó Conaill smoked incessantly, until the bare, gray-painted interview room was filled with a surrealistic haze.


"Where did you get the car, Tómas?"


"I've told you twenty times, witch. I never saw the fucking car before in my life."


"The engine was still warm when you were arrested. Don't tell me you hadn't been driving it."


"I had not."


"I'll bet you money that your fingerprints are all over the steering wheel."


"They probably are. I've told you already that I sat in it, like, to see what it felt like. But no more than that."


"You really expect us to believe that?"


"You can believe whatever you wish. I didn't murder any girl."


Katie took out a color photograph of Fiona Kelly and held it in front of his face. He didn't blink, didn't even focus on it.


"I want to know where you were on Thursday afternoon."


"I was over in Dripsey, seeing a man about some horses."


"Which man?"


"Cootie, everybody calls him. I don't know his real name."


"How did you get to Dripsey?"


"I went with my cousin Ger and my second son Tadgh. Ger drove us in his what-d'ye-call-it. His Land Cruiser."


"We'll check that, of course. Where were you on Friday?"


"A whole lot of us went to Mallow to see about some felt roofing."


Katie kept the photograph of Fiona Kelly hovering in front of him. "Have you ever heard of Mor-Rioghain?"


For the first time, Tómas blinked. "Of course I have."


"Tell me, then."


"Tell you what?"


"Tell me about Mor-Rioghain. Who she is, what she can do for you."


Desmond O'Keeffe tapped his ball pen on the table. "Sorry…I don't see the relevance of this."


Katie said, "You're here to protect Mr. Ó Conaill's rights, Mr. O'Keeffe, not to second-guess the lines of our inquiry."


"All the same," Desmond O'Keeffe protested, flushing very red.


"I don't mind answering," said Tómas Ó Conaill. "I didn't do nothing to nobody, as the witch here very well knows. Mor-Rioghain is abean-sidhe,a banshee, which means a woman of the fairy."


"You believe in the fairies?"


"I believe in Mor-Rioghain, and why not? Didn't I hear her myself the night before my poor father died, moaning and keening at the back door?"


"I thought that banshees only cried for five particular families."


"They do," he agreed, and he counted them off on his fingers. "The O'Neills, the O'Briens, the O'Connors, the O'Gradys, and the Kavanaghs. But my father was an O'Grady by marriage."


"Do you believe that Mor-Rioghain can be called up out of the fairy world if you offer her a human sacrifice?"


Tómas Ó Conaill shrugged, and flicked ash into the overcrowded ashtray.


"Have you heard about the eleven women's skeletons which were found up at Knocknadeenly?"


"I have, yes. I saw it on the telly."


"One of our experts thinks that somebody may have been trying to make a sacrifice to Mor-Rioghain. If you kill thirteen women and take the flesh off their bones, so that she can feed on it, apparently Mor-Rioghain will reward you by giving you whatever you want."


"I know of that, yes.""


It looks as if our 1915 murderer was interrupted before he could give her all of the sacrifices she demands. It wouldn't have occurred to you, by any chance, that if you killed just two more women, you could call on Mor-Rioghain and ask her to make you rich? Easier than winning the Lotto."


"You shouldn't make mock of thesidhe, Detective Superintendent Witch."


"I'm asking you straight out, Tómas. Did you kill Fiona Kelly?"


"The answer to that is no, I didn't. And if I was minded to call on Mor-Rioghain, there's only one thing that I'd ask her for, and that's to make you blind and lame."


"You're all heart, Tómas."



A few minutes later, Liam knocked on the door of the interview room and beckoned Katie to come outside. "Interview suspended at 5:09A.M.," she said, and left Tómas Ó Conaill lighting yet another cigarette.


Liam held up a note from the technical department. "They've made a preliminary check on the car. Ó Conaill's left his dabs all over the doors, the door handles, the steering wheel, the gearshift, the hand brake, the radio controls, the keys, the trunk, everywhere. There's a perfect thumbprint on the rearview mirror where he must have adjusted it to suit his driving position."


"Anybody else's prints?"


"Fiona Kelly's, on the passenger door handle, which backs up your witness's story that she willingly accepted a lift."


"Nobody else's?"


"One or two random prints around the filler cap, which probably came from a garage attendant. But nothing consistent with anybody else having driven the car, apart from Ó Conaill."


"How about the bloodstains?"


"O positive. Same group as Fiona Kelly. They haven't had the DNA back yet."


"Any results from the cottage?"


"Footprints, yes. Size ten boots the same as we found at Meagher's Farm. But fingerprints, no, and this is the odd part. They found a partial palm print on the front door handle, but none of Ó Conaill's fingerprints inside. Plenty of other prints, but not his. Not yet, anyway."


"None at all?"


Liam shook his head.


"Why would he take such trouble not to leave any prints in the cottage if he was going to cover the car with them? Especially since the car still had Fiona Kelly's blood in it."


"You surprised him, didn't you? He was probably intending to drive off and never go back there."


"All the same…it doesn't really add up, does it?"


"There's only one way to find out, and that's to ask him."


"What about his alibis?"


"His family all say that he went to see this Cootie fellow on Thursday and drove to Mallow on Friday. But then they would, wouldn't they? His mother looks as if she eats blocks of prestressed concrete for breakfast. And you should see his sister. The words 'red' and 'brick' and 'shitter' came to mind, I can tell you."


"What about their vehicles? Anything?"


"We searched the whole lot of them, seven in all. Two brand-new Jeep Cherokees, a top-of-the-range BMW, one Winnebago Chieftain, and three caravans. We took the door trim out of the cars and we even pulled up the caravan floors. Nothing at all, except twenty-eight bottles of Paddy's and some women's designer clothing that looks as if it was lifted from Brown Thomas."


"All right, thanks, Liam."



She went back into the interview room. Tómas Ó Conaill didn't even raise his eyes to look at her. She sat down and laid the forensic report on the table between them.


"I want you to tell me where you got the car from," she said.


"I've already told you, witch. I found it in the yard in front of the house. I might have touched it but touching isn't a crime, the last I heard."


"Your fingerprints were plastered all over it. Your fingerprints and nobody else's, except for the girl you murdered."


"How many times do I have to tell you that I didn't murder any girl."


"You stole the car, though, didn't you?"


Tómas Ó Conaill was silent for a very long time. Then he took out another cigarette and lit it, and blew smoke out of his nostrils like two long tusks. "I drove it," he admitted. "But I didn't steal it. I found it, and all I did was to lend a borrow of it."


"Youfoundit?"


"Yes, found it."


"Do you think that I was born yesterday?"


He stared her dead in the eyes. "No, witch, I don't think you were. You may look young and you may look pretty but you have the hag's face on you."


"So where did youfindthis car, Tómas?"


"It was halfway in a ditch by the side of the road about a mile north of Curraghnalaght crossroads. Not locked, with the keys still in it."


"Parked, in other words?"


"Not parked, dumped. Obviously dumped. There was nobody for miles."


"When exactly was this?"


"Yesterday evening around nine I'd say."


"Why didn't you report it to the Garda?"


Tómas said nothing, but gave her an amused shake of his serpentine hair.


"So you found this car abandoned and you decided to steal it?"


"Not steal, I told you, borrow. My own car had gearbox trouble and I needed to get over to Cork for some spares."


"You were simply going to use this dumped car to drive to Coachford and then take it back?"


"That was my first intention, yes."


"All right," said Katie. "Supposing I believe this fantastical story, which I don't for a minute. What were you doing in the cottage up at Sheehan's Nursery? It's not exactly on the way from Curraghnalaght to Cork, is it? In fact, that track doesn't go anywhere at all."


"I found a piece of paper in the glove box and it had the name of Sheehan's Nursery on it, and a bit of a map."


"Oh, really? Do you still have this piece of paper in your possession?"


"I don't know." He poked in his pockets, but all he could find was a packet of Rizla cigarette papers. "No. I probably dropped it somewhere."


"Very convenient."


"I thought that if I went up to Sheehan's Nursery, I might be able to find out who the car belonged to, and maybe there might be a reward in it for taking it back."


"Oh, I believe you, Tómas, I really do."


"You don't have any cause not to. I swear to God it's the truth."


"I don't think so. I think the truth is that you used a false name and address to rent that Mercedes, and then you used it to pick up the first innocent girl you could find. You took her up to Sheehan's Nursery, where you tied her up to the bed and you coldbloodedly mutilated, tortured, and killed her. Then you drove her poor butchered remains to Meagher's Farm and arranged them in the field, as a sacrifice to Mor-Rioghain."


Tómas Ó Conaill shook his head and kept on shaking it. "You're a witch, Detective Superintendent Witch. You're nothing better than abean-nighe;you're death's own washerwoman, washing the blood out of dying people's clothing. I'm innocent of any murder and that's my final word."


Katie leaned forward and looked directly into his deep-set eyes. "I will see you locked up for this, Tómas. And long after I'm retired, and I'm sitting at home in the evening, by the fire, I want to have the warm, satisfying feeling of knowing that you're still inside the Bridewell, and that you'll stay inside until the day you breathe your very last breath."


32


Siobhan was in such a rush to catch the bus that she forgot to pick up her fashion folder with all her preparatory sketches in it. She was halfway down Wellington Road when she realized that she had left it behind and she had to run back to the house, her big knitted bag swinging from her shoulder. She unlocked the front door and panted up the stairs to her bedsit, snatching her folder from the table, and clattering downstairs again.


By the time she reached St. Luke's Cross, the bus was just leaving. She frantically waved at the driver, but he pulled away from the curb in front of the news agent's without even seeing her, and the bus was off down Summerhill in a big black cloud of diesel smoke, leaving her behind. There was no use running after it. She was going to be late for her design class now, and Mrs. Griffin would greet her with her usual sarcasm, and make a show of her in front of the rest of the students, because she was almost always late, and even if she managed to finish her project, she would still feel hot and humiliated.


One arm swinging, she started to walk at a furious pace down the long steep gradient toward Cork, past the gray Victorian spire of St. Luke's Church, and the higgledy-piggledy tenement buildings that were stacked up on either side of Summerhill with their damp walled gardens and their rusting cast-iron gates. The low November sun shone into her eyes like a migraine. At this time of the morning, traffic was teeming into the city from the north side and the noise was deafening.


Siobhan had furiously flaming hair, wavy and almost uncontrollable, which she brushed back every morning and tied with a knotted scarf. She was pretty in a pre-Raphaelite way, like her mother, and like her mother she had deathly white skin and sapphire-blue eyes and whenever she was embarrassed her cheeks caught alight.


Ever since she was a little girl she had wanted to design dresses. In nursery school she had drawn pictures of ladies in glittering ballgowns, and when she was eleven she had won anEvening Echocompetition for the best party dress design for teenagers. Her father had always been skeptical, and told her to think about training for a "proper job," like working on the checkout at Dunnes Stores, but her mother had encouraged her and protected her and believed in her. She was old enough now to realize that her mother saw her as the girl thatshehad always wanted to be-talented, free, independent, and acknowledged-not pregnant at seventeen and exhausted at twenty-three.


She was less than halfway down Summerhill when a large white car drew into the curb beside her and the passenger window came down.


"Hallo, there! You look like you could use a lift."


Siobhan bent down and peered into the darkness of the car's interior. She could see a man's silhouette, a man with tiny dark-lensed sunglasses. There was a strong smell of leather upholstery and expensive aftershave.


"No, you're grand. I don't have far to go."


"You look as if you're in a hurry, that's all."


"It's all right, thanks."


"Suit yourself. I've got a few minutes to spare before my first appointment, that's all. I can take you anywhere you need to go."


She hesitated. She had never accepted a lift from anyone she didn't know, but it wasn't as if this was two o'clock in the morning, with nobody else around. The pavements were crowded with walkers just like her, making their way down the hill to the city, and the roads were full of buses and cars.


"All right," she said, climbing into the passenger seat and tucking her portfolio down beside her. "I'm going to the Crawford College of Art and Design. Do you know where that is?"


"Oh, yes," said the man, and smoothly pulled out into the traffic. "I thought you might be an art student, from that colorful red coat of yours."


"I designed it myself. I'm studying fashion."


They stopped at the traffic lights at the bottom of Summerhill. The man turned to her and she could see her own white face reflected in his sunglasses. "Such extraordinary hair," he remarked. "The true Celtic fire."


"I used to hate it."


"How could you? It's like acohullen druith."


Siobhan gave him an awkward smile. She didn't have the faintest idea what acohullen druithwas.


"It's a scarlet cap, made of feathers," said the man, as if he knew what she was thinking. "It's worn by the Irish mermaids, the merrows, to help them swim through the water. The merrows are strikingly beautiful, like you, and very promiscuous in their relations with mortal men. Not that I'm suggesting, of course-" He paused in what he was saying as he released the parking brake and drove away from the lights.


They crossed the river and drove along Merchants' Quay. When they reached the next set of traffic lights the man said, "The merrows have to take off their caps when they come on land, and hide them. Any man who happens to find one has complete power over her, because she can't return to the sea without it."


"I think we learned something about that at school," said Siobhan. She was beginning to feel very uneasy. The man had stopped in the right-hand lane, as if he intended to double back across the river, over Patrick's Bridge, instead of straight ahead toward Sharman Crawford Street, where she wanted to go.


"I could walk from here," she told him.


"I wouldn't dream of it."


"It isn't far now, honestly."


The man turned to her and grinned, showing his teeth. "What's your name?" he asked her.


"Siobhan, why?"


"Let me tell you something, Siobhan, every journey is an adventure. When you take that first step out of your house in the morning, you never know where fate is going to take you."


"I think I can walk from here," she told him, in sudden urgency, and tugged at the door handle. The lights changed to green and the man turned right, over the river, and up to MacCurtain Street, which would take them back eastward.


"Please, stop. I want to get out."


"Impossible, I'm afraid. This is one of those journeys that, once begun, has to continue right to the very end. No dawdling, no diversions. Keep right on to the end of the road, as the song goes."


"Really, stop, please. I want to get out."


The man ignored her. Already flustered, Siobhan began to hyperventilate. They had to stop at the pedestrian crossing just outside the Everyman Theater, and she beat on the window with her fists, trying to attract the attention of the van driver who had drawn up next to them.


"Help me!" she screamed. "Help me!"


But the van driver was talking on his cell phone, and he obviously thought that Siobhan was simply fooling around. He gave her a wink and a nod of his head, and then the lights changed and they were off again, past Summerhill, past the railway station, and out along the road which ran close beside the wide glassy waters of the River Lee.


The man drove very fast, with only one hand on the wheel. Siobhan wrestled with the door handle again, but he reached across and snatched her wrist, gripping it painfully tight. "You can't getout, Siobhan, so I wouldn't even attempt it. Sit back and enjoy the rollercoaster. This is an adventure, darling… much more exciting than going to college and designing coats! You can design a coat any day. A coat, for Christ's sake! But how often do you come face-to-face with fate?"


"Let me out!" she shrieked. She kicked and struggled and her cheeks were hectic with panic. "Let me out! Let me out!"


The man wrenched the steering wheel first to one side and then the other. The car slewed across the road, narrowly missing an oncoming truck. There was a shrill chorus of protesting tires and a cacophony of car horns.


"You want to die so soon?" the man demanded, and there was an extraordinary note of triumph in his voice.


"Please stop. Please let me out."


He wrenched the wheel again, and this time the car hit the nearside curb and one of its hubcaps flew off, and bounded into the bushes.


"What do you want?"Siobhan screamed at him."What do you want?"


The man steered them deftly across the Skew Bridge-left, then right, tires howling, across the railway. "What do you think? I want everything that you can give me, my darling Siobhan, and a little bit more besides." He lifted her hand up and crushed it triumphantly between his fingers.


She took three or four shuddering breaths, like somebody stepping waist-deep into cold water. She was trying to stay calm, trying to stay calm. Her mother had always said to her that no matter how threatening men could be, she should never lose control of herself, never get hysterical. They wanted you to go off the edge. It gave them an excuse for raging back at you, for hitting you. Her father used to hit her mother, every Sunday morning, after mass, with monotonous regularity, and she never heard her mother even so much as say "don't, Tom, don't."


The man said, "I could introduce you to all kinds of pleasures…all kinds of sensations…feelings that you never could have imagined. I could give you such ecstasy, Siobhan, you'd be begging me for more. But there's so little time for that, these days. Everything's hurry, hurry, hurry, isn't it, and far too many years have rolled by already."


"I won't let you hurt me," said Siobhan, trying to be defiant.


"Excuse me, you don't have any say in the matter. If I want to hurt you, I will."


"I want you to let me out of the car."


"What? So that you can call the cops and have me collared? I don't think so, my darling. This is much too important. I need only one more life, and then I can have everything I've ever wanted. The day is nearly with us, Siobhan. The greatest day ever in romantic history. And all of the glory will be yours. Well, most of it. Some of it, anyway. A little."


They passed Tivoli Docks, with its tall triangular cranes reflected in the river, and then he turned up the long, steep hill toward Mayfield. Siobhan began to slump down in her seat, lower and lower, as if she were trying to hide.


"You mustn't be scared," the man told her. "The only thing to be scared about is to die a nonentity. And that certainly won't happen to you."


"I'm late," said Siobhan. "I'm late for my fashion class. They'll be wondering where I am."


The man released her wrist and ran his fingers deep into her wiry, coppery hair, tugging at her roots, massaging her scalp. "This is a different path, Siobhan. This is a different way to go. When you woke up this morning you thought that your life was going to be just the same as yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. But, believe me, it isn't."


He took his fingers out of her hair and sniffed at them. "It's strange, isn't it, that redheads smell so different from the rest of us? Like foxes, I suppose."


After a while, as they approached the crossroads at Ballyvolane, he reached down and groped beneath his seat as if he had dropped something. When he sat up again, he was holding a brand-new claw hammer, with the price sticker still on the handle. Siobhan glimpsed something shining, but she didn't understand what he was going to do until he swung his arm back as far as he could and knocked her dead center in the middle of the forehead.



When she woke up she was naked. Her head was thumping from the hammer blow and her vision was blurred. She didn't have any idea where she was, although it looked like an upstairs apartment, because there was a window opposite, and she could make out the fuzzy tops of fir trees, and a distant skyline, with clouds, and the sun shining behind it.


She tried to stand up, but then she realized that she was tied to the armchair that she was sitting in, her wrists and ankles tightly bound with nylon cord. She was freezing cold. The room was bare, with a green-flecked linoleum floor and an empty cast-iron fireplace, and the cream-colored wallpaper was stained with damp and peeling away from the walls.


There was a damp-rippled picture of Jesus on the opposite wall, surrounded by baby animals. He was smiling at her beatifically, with one hand raised. She licked her lips. Her mouth was dry and she could barely summon the strength to breathe in. "Help," she called out, in a pathetic whisper. "Help."



She slept. Several hours must have passed by because when she opened her eyes again the sky had softened to a pale nostalgic blue and the sun had hidden itself behind the right-hand side of the window frame, so that it illuminated nothing more than the picture of Jesus. She was so stiff that she felt that if somebody were to cut her free, and she tried to stand up, her arms and legs would snap off.


Her skin looked even whiter than ever, and she could see the veins in her breasts and her thighs as if they were an arterial road map. She had never felt so cold in her entire life.


"Mummy," she said, desperately. Then, much more quietly, "Mummy, I'm here."


33


Katie was ready to go home when Conor Cronin from the Travelers' Support Movement knocked at her door.


"I've been expecting you," she said, slamming shut the drawers in her desk and locking them.


Conor was a man of fifty-something, with a walrus moustache and puffy, Guinness-drinker's eyes. He wore an old green raincoat and carried a wide-brimmed hat in his hands. "I'd heard from Tadgh Ó Conaill. It seems like you've arrested Tómas on a charge of murder."


"He's assisting us with our inquiries."


"Voluntarily?"


"When did Tómas Ó Conaill ever help the Garda voluntarily?"


"So he's been formally charged?"


"Yes."


Conor looked around Katie's office as if he had lost something. "Do you mind if I sit down?"


"You can, of course. I'm afraid they borrowed all my chairs for a conference. Here." She took a heap of papers from a small stool and dragged it over toward her desk. Conor sat on it and laid his hat on his knee, as if it were part of a ventriloquist's act, Conor Cronin and his Talking Hat.


"I need to know that you're respecting his rights," said Conor. "Whatever he's supposed to have done, he's not automatically guilty because he's a Traveler. I wouldn't like to think that you've picked on him for racial reasons."


"Conor, you and I know Tómas Ó Conaill of old. He's a totally evil bastard and he gives Travelers a reputation that, for most of the time, they don't deserve."


"He's not a murderer, Detective Superintendent, until a judge and a jury have decided that he's a murderer. And there's only one power that can decide if he's truly evil, and that's-" Conor pointed to the ceiling.


Katie said, "I'm holding a press conference later today, Conor. I'm going to announce that we've arrested Tómas for the murder of Fiona Kelly, but don't worry. I'm also going to remind them of the media protocols for reporting Travelers."


"All the same, I'm very concerned for Tómas's human rights. You have a very prejudicial attitude, I'd say."


Katie tapped her pencil on the desk. "A young American girl came to Ireland on a touring holiday. Tómas Ó Conaill picked her up, tortured her, cut the flesh off her legs while she was still alive, dismembered her body, and then used it to make a sacrifical display in the middle of a field. I don't think you can actually blame me for having a prejudicial attitude, can you?"


Conor abruptly stood up. "We'll have to see about that. The Travelers have been persecuted ever since the days of Oliver Cromwell and I'm not having Tómas Ó Conaill made the latest object of your persecution simply because he doesn't have a fixed abode."


"And I'm not going to let him get away with this, just because he calls himself a Traveler."


Conor flared his nostrils. He said, "Good day to you, Detective Superintendent." Then he jammed his hat onto his head, and pushed his way past Patrick O'Donovan, who was just coming into her office with a sheaf of reports.


"What's got into him?"


"A severe case of sociological self-importance, that's all. What have you got for me there?"


"Two more relatives have come forward to say that their great-grandmothers went missing in 1915. Here you are…Kathleen Harrington and Brigid Lehane. They've both agreed to take DNA tests, too."


"That's good news. Anything else?"


"Mr. and Mrs. Kelly will be here at four o'clock. Fiona's parents."


"All right, I'll be here."


• • •


Katie called Paul on her cell phone as she drove home, but there was no reply. He was probably still in bed, sleeping off whatever he had been drinking last night. She called Liam Fennessy, and his phone rang and rang for nearly half a minute before his girlfriend Caitlin answered it. Katie had known Caitlin even longer than Liam: she had dated Katie's brother Mark until Mark had gone off to work in Dublin.


"Caitlin? It's Katie. Is Liam home?"


"He went out about twenty minutes ago. I don't know when he's coming back."


"I need to talk to him urgently but I can't raise him on his cell phone."


"It's broken."


"Oh…I see. Well, as soon as he comes home, can you ask him to contact me?"


Caitlin said nothing, but made a sharp sniffing noise, as if she were crying.


"Caitlin? Is everything all right?"


"I'm fine. Really, I'm fine."


"You don't sound fine."


Suddenly, Caitlin started to sob-a deep, grieving sob that came right from the back of her throat.


"Caitlin, what's wrong? Tell me."


"It's nothing. Time of the month, that's all."


"Listen, I've got a bit of time to spare. I'm coming round to see you."


"Please, don't. It's really nothing."


"I'm still coming."



Liam and Caitlin lived in a two-bedroom house on a neat new housing estate just outside Douglas, a village and shopping center off to the southeast of Cork City. Katie parked her Mondeo in the steeply sloping front drive and walked up to the front door. She pressed the bell and heard it chime inside the house. The sky was the color of slate and the temperature was dropping fast.


She had to press the bell a second time before Caitlin opened the door. She was a thin, pretty girl, with short black hair and a pointed nose. She was wearing a headscarf and a baggy oatmeal sweater and jeans. She was also wearing sunglasses.


"What happened?" said Katie.


Caitlin shrugged in despair. She turned back into the house and Katie followed her, closing the door behind her. In the hallway, a large reproduction of a Jack Yeats painting was propped up against the telephone table, its glass cracked and its gilt frame split. In the kitchen beyond, there was a swept-up heap of broken plates and cups.


"It was all about nothing," said Caitlin, sitting down at the kitchen table. "We were talking about going on holiday, that's all. Liam said that he wanted to go fishing in Galway. I said I'd rather go to Portugal and get some sun."


"That's all right. What's wrong with that?"


Caitlin's fingers traced an invisible butterfly pattern on the varnished pine tabletop, again and again. "He said that I'd probably end up getting my way, whatever, because women always get their way, no matter how irrational they are, because they're women. And-I don't know-I told him not to be stupid and the argument just got worse and worse. He threw his phone across the room. He broke all the breakfast plates. I told him to get out and not to come back until he was calm and that was when he hit me."


She took off her sunglasses. Her left cheekbone was bruised and swollen and her left eye was almost completely closed. There was a cut above her right eyebrow and another on the bridge of her nose.


Katie sat down beside her and took hold of her hand. "I'm so sorry, Caitlin. I'm really so sorry."


Tears streamed down Caitlin's cheeks. "He never used to be like this. He was always so gentle. Like a poet, almost. Now he seems so bitter and so angry."


"Maybe he needs a rest," said Katie. "I've been pushing him very hard in the past six months. I rely on him a great deal-you know-his experience and his expertise. Maybe I've been expecting too much of him."


"You won't make trouble for him, will you?"


"It depends. He's physically assaulted you, Caitlin, and that's a criminal offense. You could press charges against him if you wanted to."


"That would finish him, though, wouldn't it? I mean, it would finish his career?"


"He's a garda inspector, Caitlin. He's supposed to uphold the law. He has a greater responsibility than most people to behave decently."


Caitlin tugged out a Kleenex and dabbed her eyes. "What will you do?"


"I don't know yet. But I can't just turn a blind eye. I'll have to have a talk with him, when I see him."


"It was partly my fault as well. I shouldn't have told him that he was stupid. I should have realized that he was stressed."


"Come on, Caitlin, shouting is one thing. Battery is quite another."


"He seems to have so muchrageinside him. So much resentment."


Katie gently squeezed her fingers. "How about I make us a cup of coffee?"


34


As she drove home, she met Paul walking Sergeant along the road, about a half a mile from the house. It was starting to rain so she stopped and gave them a lift. Sergeant jumped around on the backseat, panting furiously from his walk, and occasionally slobbering her on the back of the neck. Paul looked hungover and distracted. He hadn't combed his hair and he was wearing his old gray jogging bottoms with the white emulsion paint on them.


"So you've caught your ritual murderer, then," he said, not looking at her.


"We're making a media announcement this afternoon at three o'clock."


"Am I allowed to know who he is?"


"As long as you don't tell anybody else."


"I see. Married all these years and you still don't trust me."


"Of course I trust you. Sergeant, for God's sake, stop licking me! It's Tómas Ó Conaill."


"Tómas Ó Conaill, that psychopath. That doesn't come as much of a surprise. Has he confessed?"


"He's denying it one hundred percent. Despite the fact that I arrested him next to a Mercedes car with Fiona Kelly's blood in the boot and his own fingerprints all over it."


"Any idea what his motive was? Or did he just do it for the hell of it?"


"I don't know. Gerard O'Brien thinks that he was making a human sacrifice-trying to raise up the spirit of Mor-Rioghain, thebean-sidhe. Presumably he was tired of selling used cars and tarmacking driveways and wanted to get rich the easy way. By magic."


"Jesus. I didn't think that evenhewould be as mad as that."


"I don't know. We all like to think that we can get rich by magic, don't we? The Lotto, or the horses, or the football pools."


"Or selling off a million euros' worth of building materials that don't belong to us," Paul put in.


"I didn't say that."


"You would have done, if I hadn't said it first."


They said nothing as they parked outside the house and went inside. It was raining hard now, and the sitting room was so gloomy that Katie switched on the chandelier. Sergeant went to his bowl in the kitchen and noisily lapped up water. Paul poured himself a whiskey.


"You want one?"


"God, no. It's only ten o'clock. I'm going to take a shower."


"Listen, when you called last night…I didn't mean to sound so down."


"You've got every right to be down. Life hasn't been very good to you lately, has it? Even if most of your problemshavebeen your own fault."


Paul sat down. "Maybe Tómas Ó Conaill isn't so mad after all."


"What do you mean?"


"Well…think of the things that we could ask this Mor-Rioghain for, ifwecould raise her up."


"Such as?"


He swilled whiskey around in the bottom of his glass, around and around, and then swallowed it. "For a start, we could ask for Seamus back."


"What?"


"That would make things better between us, wouldn't it? I mean if Seamus hadn't-"


He stopped when he saw the look on Katie's face. Without another word she left the sitting room and went upstairs. She stripped off her jacket, took off her holster, and unbuttoned her blouse. She strewed the rest of her clothes across the pink-and-white quilt, and then she went into the en suite bathroom and turned on the shower. She stared at her face in the mirror over the washbasin and she looked like somebody in shock.


We could ask for Seamus back. Holy Mother of God, how could he have said it?


She took a deep breath and stepped into the shower cabinet. She stood for a long time with her forehead pressed against the tiles and the water coursing down the back of her neck.


We could ask for Seamus back.



She was still in the shower when Paul came rapping on the frosted glass door. "Are you all right, pet?"


"I'm fine. I'll be out in a minute."


"Listen…I didn't mean to upset you. I'm sorry. I've had things on my mind, that's all."


"I can't hear you."


He opened the shower cabinet door. "I've been having some more trouble about these building materials."


"What kind of trouble?"


"A fellow I didn't know from Adam came up to me in the pub yesterday evening and said that I had forty-eight hours and then he was going to come after me."


Katie stepped out of the shower and wrapped a pink towel around her, twisting another pink towel around her head in a turban.


"Did he mention Dave MacSweeny?"


Paul shook his head. "All he said was, 'You've got forty-eight hours, boy, and then I'm coming after you.'"


"But you took him to mean that Dave MacSweeny wants his building materials back?"


"What else do you think he was talking about? Believe me, pet, if Icouldgive them back, I'd do it like a shot. But Winthrop Developments won't return them until they're fully reimbursed, and Charlie Flynn's still sunning his fat arse in Florida and how can I gethimto pay the money back, even if he hasn't spent it, and you know what happened to my commission."


Katie didn't know what to say. Even public crucifixion at the crossroads didn't seem to have deterred Dave MacSweeny from seeking his revenge. If she was going to protect Paul from being badly hurt, it was beginning to look as if she was going to have to admit to Dermot O'Driscoll that she knew where Charlie Flynn was, and why he was hiding, and what Paul's involvement was. In plain language, the shite was going to have to hit the fan.


At least she had arrested Tómas Ó Conaill for killing Fiona Kelly. She may have saved another girl's life, too, if Ó Conaill had been planning to make up the number of sacrificed women to thirteen. But that wasn't much of a consolation for losing her career.


The phone rang, and Paul picked it up. "It's for you," he said. "It's Jimmy O'Rourke."


35


She was dressed and back at Anglesea Street in less than forty-five minutes, her hair still damp. Detective Sergeant Jimmy O'Rourke was talking to a distraught redhaired woman on the landing outside her office. "Mrs. Buckley?" said Katie, holding out her hand. "My name's Detective Superintendent Katie Maguire. Why don't you come in here and sit down? Jimmy-how about a cup of coffee?"


Mrs. Buckley sat down on the edge of the chair. She was a very pale, defeated-looking woman. Her wild red hair was untidily arrayed with plastic combs and she wore a cheap gray anorak from Penney's. Katie noticed her nicotine-stained forefinger and offered her a cigarette. Mrs. Buckley took it and lit it and blew out clouds of smoke.


"I was going to surprise her by taking her out for her dinner," she said. "I went into the fashion department and she wasn't there. They said she never showed up in the morning and nobody knew where she was, not even her best friend. So I walked up to her flat and she wasn't there, either.


"I was walking back down when I met the fellow who lives downstairs from her. He's had heart trouble or something so he's on the unemployment. He said he saw her walking down the road in front of him at about five past nine, and a car stopped and she got into it."


"Has she ever taken days off before? Just gone off, without telling anybody?"


"She might have done. She lives on her own now because of our family situation. But today was important. She had to finish the work for her leaving certs. That's why I was going to take her out for her dinner. I thought she might like a bit of a treat."


Jimmy O'Rourke came back, followed by a young woman garda carrying a tray with four cups of coffee. "Frank O'Leary's below, the witness. They just brought him down in a squad car. Do you want me to bring him up?"


"Yes, please." Katie pried the lids off the coffee cups and passed one to Mrs. Buckley. "You want sugar? Here. Tell me about your family situation."


"I left my husband about seven months ago, the day after Paddy's Day. He was always spending all his wages on drink and I suppose I just decided that I'd had enough. I went to stay with my sister and unfortunately her husband Kieran was a little too sympathetic, I suppose. We started an affair and this went on for three or four months before my sister found out. Me and Kieran left and for three weeks we had to live in his car because none of the rest of the family would take us in. My mam still won't speak to me even now, and Kieran's family treat him like he's got the foot-and-mouth disease. Siobhan couldn't stay with us, of course, and so my sister helped her to find a little room of her own on Wellington Street."


"You don't think that your family situation could have upset Siobhan enough to want to go away for a while? Girls of that age, you know, they often get very distressed without telling anybody. Bottle up their feelings."


"We were getting along grand. Siobhan liked Kieran all right. She knew that Kieran makes me happy in spite of everything, like. And she would never have missed her college this morning without telling me."


"Do you have a picture of her?"


Mrs. Buckley opened her purse and took out a photograph. "This was her nineteenth birthday party."


Katie looked at the laughing redhead holding up a glass of champagne, while Mrs. Buckley anxiously bit her lips. "You will find her, won't you?"



Frank O'Leary was a proud, portly, slow-spoken man with thick glasses and a bobbly green sweater.


"I saw Siobhan walking down Summerhill about maybe fifty yards in front of me, although the sun was in my eyes. I recognized her red coat and her red hair. She was almost as far as York Hill by the off-license when a big white car pulled up beside her and I could see that she was bending over and talking to the driver."


"You couldn't see the driver?"


"Not from that distance, no."


"How long did Siobhan stand beside the car talking before she got in?"


"Oh, not long at all. I didn't even have the chance to catch up to her. I was going to say hello but she suddenly opened the door and climbed in and then the car was away."


"Do you know what kind of a car it was?"


"It was big, and it was white."


"No idea of the make?"


Frank O'Leary shook his head, but said, "It could have been Japanese, you know. It had a sort of a Japanesey look to it."


"You didn't see the license plate?"


"It didn't really occur to me to look, and the sun was dead in my eyes, so I was what you might call half dazzled."


"Did you see which way it went?"


"Down to the bottom of Summerhill, then straight across the lights into Brian Boru Street, but I couldn't see where it went after that."


"All right, Frank, you've been very helpful. If you can remember anything more-no matter how insignificant you think it is-please don't hesitate to call me, will you?"


Frank O'Leary finished his coffee and stood up. "I remember one more thing. The car had the Cork hurling colors on the aerial-the blood and bandages."


"That could be very useful, thank you."



When he was gone, Katie went to see Dermot O'Driscoll. Dermot was sitting at his desk, going through his in-tray.


"Paperwork," he grumbled, as Katie came in. "They won't need to bury me when I die, I'll already be six foot under in traffic statistics."


Katie closed the door. Dermot looked up. The only time that anybody closed his door was when they needed to talk about something personal, or highly confidential.


Katie said, "I don't know whether you've heard, but a girl of nineteen went missing from St. Luke's this morning. A fashion student called Siobhan Buckley."


"Jimmy told me, yes. But she's only been gone for a few hours, hasn't she? It's not exactly unusual for a nineteen-year-old girl to go on the hop from college."


"Well, you're right. But I don't know…I've got an uncomfortable feeling about this one. We have an eyewitness who says that she accepted a lift from somebody in a large white car."


"What are you trying to tell me?"


"It's hard to put into words. I'm just wondering if we might postpone the media conference until we know a little more."


"What are you suggesting? Don't tell me you're having second thoughts about Tómas Ó Conaill? Most of the press boys already know that we've got him in custody. Conor Cronin shooting his mouth off, as usual."


"All I'm trying to say is that Siobhan Buckley disappeared in very similar circumstances to Fiona Kelly and perhaps we ought to wait for a while before we make any official announcement."


Dermot had a think about that, waggling his fountain pen between his fingers. At last he said, "You're sure in your own mind that it was Tómas Ó Conaill who murdered Fiona Kelly, aren't you?"


"I wouldn't have arrested him if I didn't. And all of the forensic evidence we have so far supports it."


"Well, then, what are you worried about?"


"I'm just being cautious, that's all. Especially since Siobhan Buckley's mother doesn't think that she'd have taken a day off college without telling her."


"Is that her?" asked Dermot, nodding toward the photograph that Mrs. Buckley had given her. Katie gave it to him and he put on his glasses to peer at it.


"My God. What do girls expect if they dress like this?"


"She wasn't wearing a sequin microskirt when she was picked up."


"No, but all the same…"


"Chief, I'd simply like to be sure about what happened to Siobhan Buckley before we tell the world about Tómas Ó Conaill. It could be that Ó Conaill had an accomplice, who's still at large. There could even be a ring of killers."


Dermot handed the photograph back. "I've already told the commissioner that we've wrapped this up."


"Oh, and you don't want us to look like culchies, is that it?"


"That's nothing at all to do with it," Dermot retorted. "We have overwhelming circumstantial evidence that Tómas Ó Conaill was involved in the murder of Fiona Kelly and that's good enough for me. Don't tell me that you don't want to see him behind bars as much as I do."


"Of course I do. But I just have this nagging feeling that we're still missing something."


Dermot tossed down his pen. "Listen, girl, I'm retiring in three and a half months from now. I want to go out with the best possible record. Not only that, I want to feel that I've made a difference. Putting a major scumbag like Tómas Ó Conaill behind bars is really going to count for something. Even if hedidn'tkill Fiona Kelly-which I think he probably did-he deserves to be locked up for everything else he's done."


"Not our decision to make, sir-with respect."


"I wish to God it was. But that's enough. The media conference is going to go ahead at fifteen hundred hours, as planned, and we're going to announce to the world that we've caught and charged the man who murdered Fiona Kelly. I'll tell you what you can do, if it makes you feel any better-ask the lads at 96FM to put out a shout for this Buckley girl. She's probably hanging around the Victoria Sporting Club with the rest of the riffraff."


"Yes, sir."


"By the way, any luck with Charlie Flynn? I've had another call from city hall."


"I think I may have made a breakthrough, sir. Give me twenty-four hours."


"Do your best, then. I'm supposed to be making a speech at the civic reception on Saturday night…it would be very good for kudos to announce that we've cracked that one, too."


"Yes, sir."


36


She went back to talk to Tómas Ó Conaill. When they brought him into the interview room he looked deeply tired, and he sat opposite her with his head resting in his hands, staring at the table.


"Tómas…I want to ask you two questions."


"Go away, Detective Superintendent Witch. Leave me alone."


"Tómas, I want to know if you were working by yourself, or if you had somebody else with you."


"What? What do you mean? When I was selling those trotting ponies in Limerick, or when I was nailing down that roofing felt in Glanmire?"


"When you abducted Fiona Kelly."


He raised his head and stared at her wearily. "I told you. I never saw her, I never abducted her, I never killed her. What do you want me to do, make a record, so that you can listen to me saying that a thousand times over?"


"We know you did it, Tómas. Why don't you just admit it? It'll make things much easier if you do."


"And what else do you want me to admit? That I killed those women in 1915, as well? That I'm one of the fairy folk, who never grows old, and never dies, and delights in abducting women and cutting them up into fillets and chops and bodices?"


"Are you?"


He sat back, ramming his straight black-jeaned legs underneath the table. "So what if I am? Would you like me to be?"


She picked up a plastic evidence bag and laid it flat on the table in front of him.


"What do you make of this?" she asked him.


His tiny eyes glittered at her. "What do you want me to make of it?"


"I'm simply asking you, what do you think it is?"


"A piece of lace, it looks like."


"That's right, it's a piece of lace. But where do you think it comes from?"


Tómas Ó Conaill slowly shook his head. "I wouldn't like to guess."


"What do you think you could make of it, if you twisted it around, and knotted it?"


He didn't answer for a long time, but then he slowly smiled. "A noose, to twine around your neck?"



She was hurrying downstairs to the media conference when her cell phone warbled. It was Gerard O'Brien, and he sounded excited.


"I've been doing some more research on Mor-Rioghain. A theology professor in Osnabrück has e-mailed me with some fascinating background information. Do you mind if I come round to see you?"


"It'll have to be later, Gerard, or maybe tomorrow. Keep it to yourself for the moment, but we've made an arrest. I'm on my way to announce it to the press."


"Oh, I see," said Gerard, and his disappointment was obvious. "If you've made an arrest, you won't really want to know about any of this."


"I will, of course. But not just now. Call me at five o'clock."



The media conference was packed, and when Katie stepped up to the podium there was an epileptic barrage of flashlights. She hesitated for a moment, waiting for quiet, and then she said, "Yesterday evening we arrested and charged Tómas Ó Conaill, thirty-seven, of no fixed abode, for the kidnap and subsequent murder of Fiona Kelly. A file is being prepared for the prosecutor's office. That is all we have to say at the moment, except to thank you, the media, who gave us so much support in this investigation and the scores of gardaí who put in days of extra work in order to ensure that Fiona Kelly's killer would be brought to justice."


"Has Ó Conaill confessed to the killing?" called out Dermot Murphy.


"No, he denies it."


"What evidence do you have that it was him?"


"At the moment the evidence is still being examined by our technical bureau. But I can assure you that even our preliminary findings are enough to make us feel confident that we have the right man."


"What do you have to say about the allegation that you're using Ó Conaill as a scapegoat, simply because he's a Traveler?"


"I refute it absolutely. And I think the Traveling community themselves would take it as an insult. Ó Conaill is not your typical Traveler in any respect."


"You said before that this might have been a ritual killing. Now that you've made an arrest, do you still hold that view?"


"We're looking into a number of different motives."


"Of which ritual killing is still one?"


"Yes."


"Do you have a clearer idea of what kind of ritual this might have been?"


"I have some idea, yes."


"Would you like to share that with us?"


"Not at this time, no."


"This girl who went missing this morning-what's her name, Siobhan Buckley. Do you think there could be a link with Fiona Kelly's abduction?"


Before Katie could answer, Dermot O'Driscoll stepped forward and said, "There's no evidence of any connection whatsoever. We're very optimistic that we'll find Siobhan Buckley safe and well. If she fails to return home within twenty-four hours we will of course be setting up a thorough search. But with Tómas Ó Conaill in custody I can reassure all the young women of Cork that it is very much safer for them to walk the city streets."



When she returned to her office, she found that the light on her telephone was flashing. She picked it up and pressed the button for the operator.


"There's someone downstairs to see you, Detective Superintendent."


"I'm sorry, I'm completely tied up right now. Ask him to leave his name and telephone number, and a short note of what he wants to see me about."


"It's a woman, actually. She says it's very important. Something to do with Siobhan Buckley."


At that moment Liam came in with a stack of technical reports. He put them down on her desk and turned to go. "Liam-" she said, holding out her hand. "Liam, I have to talk to you."


"I've got an appointment in Glanmire," he told her, and he tapped his wristwatch. "I'm running half an hour late as it is."


"I'll catch you later, then."


"What do you want me to do about this woman?" asked the operator, impatiently.


"Ask her if she can wait for a couple more minutes. Then I'll come down."


She picked up the technical reports and quickly thumbed through them. Most of them were fingerprint matches from the doors and steering wheel of the stolen Mercedes, although there was also a preliminary DNA report on several blond hairs found in the front foot well. There was almost no doubt at all that they had belonged to Fiona Kelly.


A search of the cottage itself, though, had still failed to produce any fingerprints that matched Tómas Ó Conaill's, although blankets and bedding and cushions had been sent off for analysis, as had cups and glasses and cutlery and a bar of soap.


After she had looked through the folder, Katie went downstairs to the main reception area. Next to the cheese plant just inside the doorway sat a dowdy middle-aged woman in a brown knitted hat and a brown coat surrounded by plastic shopping bags. Katie started to walk across to her, but the receptionist called out, "Superintendent!" and when Katie turned around, she pointed with her ball pen toward a tall attenuated figure standing in the far corner, staring at her own reflection in the window.


Katie approached her. Her hair was ash blond, cut very short and slashed back with gel. She wore a long black leather overcoat, calf length, with its collar turned up, and black leather high-heeled boots, which made her seem even taller than she was. Katie found herself standing up very straight.


Katie said, "I'm Detective Superintendent Katie Maguire. I understand you've got some information about Siobhan Buckley."


The woman turned. She was probably about the same age as Katie, but her makeup gave her skin an extraordinary porcelain smoothness. She had angular, Marlene Dietrich features, with high cheekbones and feline eyes. She wore large rimless spectacles with purple-tinted lenses, above which her eyebrows had been plucked into immaculate arches. She was wearing a perfume that Katie couldn't place, but which had heavy notes of roses and vanilla. She could have been a fashion model, or an actress.


"Lucy Quinn," she said, in a warm American accent, and held out her hand. She was wearing black leather gloves that felt eerily soft. "I'm so glad you could spare me your time."


"I'm very busy, as you can imagine. It would help if you got to the point."


"I read about the Fiona Kelly case inTimemagazine, and all about those eleven skeletons that were dug up. The article said that they might have been victims of some kind of ritual sacrifice-and of course-well-that aroused my interest immediately."


"I thought you had some information on Siobhan Buckley."


"I'm so sorry, I should introduce myself. I don't want you thinking that I'm one of those weird women who believes in witchcraft and writes love letters to Charlie Manson. I'm a professor in comparative mythologies at the University of California at Berkeley. Scandinavian and Celtic legends, those are my specialties. I've done years of research into ancient Celtic rituals, and I really think I could help you."


"Well, Lucy, I appreciate your offer, but we've already charged a man with murdering Fiona Kelly."


"What about Siobhan Buckley?"


"We don't yet have any reason to think that Siobhan Buckley's disappearance is connected to Fiona Kelly."


"Of course they're connected. Siobhan's a redhead, right, and she's a fashion student? That's what they said on the radio."


"Yes," said Katie. "But what does that have to do with it?"


"If anybody wanted to make a ritual sacrifice to Mor-Rioghain, they would have to choose thirteen women, but not just any thirteen women. They would have to be thirteen very special women."


Katie's eyes narrowed. "How do you know about Mor-Rioghain?"


"Eleven women's skeletons with their flesh scraped off? And then another girl murdered in exactly the same way, and her body left in exactly the same place? It has to be a sacrifice to Mor-Rioghain."


"You say you've studied this?"


"I've done eight years of research on ritual sacrifice alone. The skeletons all had little dolls in the tops of their thighbones, didn't they?"


"Dolls?"


"Little raggy dolls, full of hooks and nails."


"I'm afraid I can't comment about that."


"Of course they all had dolls. You never released that to the media, did you? But I guess you must have had your reasons."


Katie said, "All right, yes, you're quite correct. They did have dolls. We didn't tell the media because we needed a way of checking the credentials of anybody who made a false confession-or anybody who pretended to know who the murderer was, or why he did it."


Lucy Quinn shook her head. "Believe me, Detective Superintendent, if it's credentials you want, I have a much more extensive knowledge about sacrifices to Mor-Rioghain than almost anybody. I've even published two papers on the subject-Mystic Ritual in Rural Ireland and The Invisible Kingdom."


"Listen," said Katie, "why don't you come up to my office? Would you like a cup of coffee?"


She led the way upstairs. They passed Jimmy O'Rourke in the corridor and Jimmy raised his eyebrows in appreciation. They went into Katie's office and Lucy took off her coat. Underneath she was wearing tailored black slacks and a tight black polo-neck sweater, which showed off her very full breasts. Patrick O'Donovan passed the office door and then found a reason to pass back again. Lucy sat down and crossed her legs and gave Katie a wide, generous smile.


"Tell me about these thirteen women, then," said Katie.


"Before Mor-Rioghain can take on human form and come out of the world beyond, the person who wants to raise her has to find thirteen women, each of whom has to represent one of thirteen different aspects of womanhood. He has to kill them, dismember them, and lay them out in a very specific pattern for Mor-Rioghain to feed on. He himself has to eat their hearts, to show his devotion. I presume you didn't find Fiona Kelly's heart?"


"We thought that the crows had probably taken it."


"No. Her killer would have sliced it up and eaten it raw."


"Mother of God."


"It's a ritual that goes back to druidic days, maybe even earlier. There was a recorded case in Ardfert, in County Kerry, in the seventeenth century, but until you dug these bones up, and until Fiona Kelly was murdered, the most recent sacrifices we knew about took place around Boston, in the United States, in 1911."


"Somebody tried to raise Mor-Rioghain in America?"


"A man named Jack Callwood. There's no reason why you can't raise Mor-Rioghain anyplace in the world, providing you find the right spot to do it."


"Was he caught, this Jack Callwood?"


"No. The police nearly had him once or twice, but he disappeared without trace. He sacrificed at least thirty-one women, so he was obviously well into his third attempt to raise Mor-Rioghain."


"What happened?"


"One of his victims escaped, and raised the alarm."


"You'll have to tell me more about this. But what about the man who killed Fiona Kelly? Would he have had to start from scratch, and sacrifice another thirteen women, or would the eleven who were murdered in 1915 and 1916 count toward the total?"


"Oh, those eleven would certainly count-so long as all the sacrifices were made in the same place and according to the same strict ritual. All your killer had to do was murder Fiona Kelly and one more girl, and eatherheart, too, and Mor-Rioghain would appear and grant him anything he wanted. Theoretically, of course.


"The killer has to cut all of the flesh off the victim's legs, which is kind of symbolic, you know-so that she can't run away to the netherworld. Then he cuts all the flesh on her arms, and the idea of this is that friendly spirits can't pull her through to the Invisible Kingdom, either. After that, he cuts all the flesh from her face so that nobody in the afterlife will know who she was. Then he cuts her abdomen open so that she can no longer eat or drink, even in the world beyond. He removes her lungs so that she can no longer breathe, and finally her heart is stolen away from her-which represents her soul, her spiritual identity."


"You said that each of these thirteen women had to be special."


"That's right. Here, I've made a list for you." Lucy opened her black leather pocketbook and produced a folded sheet of paper. "The women have to be sacrificed in this order, so you can see that raising Mor-Rioghain isn't exactly a piece of cake."


Katie opened the paper and read the neatly typed list. "1, A Laughing Virgin; 2, A Sad Mother Of Twins; 3, A Singing Cook; 4, A Curly-Headed Prostitute; 5, A Gray-Haired Midwife; 6, A Fortune-Teller With No Children; 7, An Unrepentant Adulteress; 8, A Widow With No Teeth Of Her Own; 9, A Youngest Daughter With Eyes As Green As The Sea; 10, An Only Child With Eyes As Blue As The Sky; 11, A Dancer With Hair As Black As The Night; 12, A Traveling Woman With Hair As Bright As The Sun; 13, A Seamstress With Hair As Red As Any Fire."


"One of those women who disappeared between 1915 and 1916 was a midwife; another was a prostitute; a third one worked as a cook for one of the British officers on Military Hill. I don't know about the rest but three out of eleven…? Fiona Kelly was number twelve and she was a blonde, and she was traveling. When I heard on the radio that Siobhan Buckley was a redhead and a fashion student…well I don't know. Perhaps I'm making a mistake, but I really don't think so."


Katie said, "I'm keeping an open mind. But all of the evidence that we have so far suggests that the man we have in custody, Tómas Ó Conaill, was the man who killed Fiona Kelly. He left his fingerprints all over the vehicle in which her body was probably driven to the farm where it was found. Not only that, he has a comprehensive knowledge of Irish mythology and he actually believes in the existence of Mor-Rioghain. There's always the possibility that he wasn't working alone, but so far we don't have any evidence that he had an accomplice."


"Do you think it might be worthwhile my talking to him?"


"I couldn't sanction that, I'm afraid. But if you can think of any questions that might give us a clearer idea of how much he knows about Mor-Rioghain…well, obviously we'd appreciate it."


"Okay, sure, I'll give it some thought. How about the place where Fiona Kelly's body was discovered? Do you think I could go take a look at it? It could give you some very valuable insights. When it comes to ritual, you know, location is always extremely meaningful."


"I'm sorry. I'm really going to need some identification if I'm going to allow you to get involved any further."


"Oh, sure." Lucy opened her black alligator purse and took out an identity card. It read University of California Berkeley, Department of Comparative Mythology, 1700 University Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94720, Lucy T. Quinn, Ph.D., FAIM, and carried a color photograph of Lucy in a black polo-neck sweater.


Katie handed it back. "All right. I'm taking Fiona's parents up to the crime scene tomorrow morning. If they don't object, I can't think of any reason why you shouldn't come along. I definitely want to talk to you some more about this Jack Callwood. Is nine o'clock all right for you? Meanwhile, I'd like to make a copy of this list, if I can. It could help us to verify the identity of some of the women who went missing."


"Please, keep it," said Lucy, standing up and reaching for her coat. "I'll see you tomorrow. I'm just glad that I can help. If you need to get in touch with me I'm staying at Jury's Inn."


When she had gone, Katie sat back in her chair, tapping her Biro thoughtfully against her teeth. Lucy didn't look at all like an academic. She was so immaculately groomed, and her sexual presence was so strong that even Katie had been aware of it. But she certainly knew all about Mor-Rioghain and the rituals to raise her, and right now Katie needed all the background information she could get. She thought:don't be so skeptical,Maguire. Sometimes help can be heaven-sent.


Patrick O'Donovan knocked on the door. "Who wasthat?"he wanted to know. "I didn't know that impure thoughts could walk around on legs."


"Stunning, isn't she?" said Katie. "She's an expert in Celtic mythology and she's going to be giving us some background assistance with the Fiona Kelly case."


Jimmy O'Rourke came in, too, and was obviously disappointed that Lucy had already left. He even looked behind the door.


"Don't you start getting ideas, Sergeant," said Patrick. "You're married with three children and a tankful of goldfish to look after."


Katie said, "If it's any consolation, you can check on her credentials for me. University of California Berkeley campus, Professor Lucy T. Quinn."


"Can't I just give her a body search?"


37


Fiona Kelly's mother and father arrived half an hour late. It had started to rain outside, heavily, and their Burberry raincoats sparkled. Katie crossed the reception area to meet them and Mrs. Kelly spontaneously put her arms around her, and held her tight, as if they had both lost a daughter.


Mrs. Kelly was blond, and looked like a tireder and sadder version of the young girl that Katie had seen in Fiona's photograph. Mr. Kelly had cropped gray hair and glasses and reminded Katie of George Bush, Senior.


"I'm so sorry," said Katie. "The whole Garda station want you to know how much we sympathize." She had dressed in black, too, as had Liam.


Mrs. Kelly took out a tissue and wiped her eyes. "Your sergeant told us that we wouldn't be able to see her."


"I'm afraid not. As you probably read in the newspaper reports, her injuries were extremely severe."


"This man you're holding in custody," asked Mr. Kelly. "What is he, some kind of gypsy?"


"In Ireland they're officially called Travelers, but a lot of people have other names for them. Tinkers, or knackers. Tómas Ó Conaill has been living the life of a Traveler, and speaks their secret language, their cant, but most of the other Travelers stay well away from him."


Mr. Kelly's lips puckered with grief. "I thought she'd be safe, coming to a country like this. I've never been here before, but I've always considered Ireland home."


"I know, Mr. Kelly, and we deeply regret it. We have very little violent crime here, compared with other countries. But drugs are on the increase, I'm sorry to say, and racketeering, and you can never predict what somebody like Tómas Ó Conaill is going to do. The trouble is he's very glib, very persuasive, like a lot of men who prey on young women. I can't tell you how sad I am that he picked on your Fiona."


"I really need to see her," said Mr. Kelly. "You know…just to understand in my own mind that she's actually gone."


"That's impossible, I'm afraid."


"I know she was badly hurt. But I can accept that. My younger brother was killed in a motorcycle accident."


Katie took his right hand between both of hers. "Mr. Kelly, what happened to Fiona wasn't like a motorcycle accident. You'd be much better off remembering her the way she was when she last said good-bye to you. Please, trust me on that."


"Donald…" said his wife, and took hold of his other hand. "Leave it, Donald. Let her be."


Mr. Kelly's shoulders began to shake, and he burst into uncontrollable sobbing. There was nothing that Katie could do but stand beside him while he let all of his agony out.



It was well past midnight when the door opened and the man came back in again. It was almost completely dark, and all that Siobhan could see of him was his silhouette against the curtains. She was shuddering with cold, and about an hour ago she had been unable to stop herself from wetting the foam-rubber seat of her chair.


She said nothing as he walked up to her and stood close beside her. He sniffed twice and took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. "I suppose you're getting hungry," he said, and sniffed again.


"Please let me go," she whispered.


"I can't do that. Not yet. I can't have my merrow swimming back to the sea, now can I?"


Without warning, he switched on the standard lamp beside her chair. The light was very bright, 150 watts, and she had to turn her head away. Even so, she was left with a bright green retinal after-image, a ghost of her tormentor which swam in front of her no matter where she looked.


"You've peed yourself," he remarked, without compassion. "Well that, my little merrow, is about as close as you'll ever get back to the briny."


"Please," she begged him. "My mam's going to be so worried about me."


"That's what mothers are for. They're never happy unless they're anxious."


He reached into the inside pocket of his black coat and produced a pair of wallpapering scissors, with blades almost ten inches long. He snipped them a few times, like the long red-legged scissorman inStruwwelpeter,and gave her a smile which made her shiver even more, because it was so benign.


"I told you what a man has to do to stop his merrow going back to the sea. He has to take her bright red feathery cap, hercohullen druith.And that's exactly what I'm going to do to you."


He stepped closer, and gripped her hair. She jerked her head wildly from side to side and tried to wrench herself out of the chair, but he pulled her hair viciously hard by the roots and said, "If you don't keep still, you little bitch, I may change my mind and snip your nipples off instead. It is a matter of total indifference to me."


Siobhan let out a moan of fear, and stopped struggling.


"That's better," he said, and he was so close that she could feel him breathing on her forehead. "There's nothing like a little cooperation, is there? A little cooperation makes the world a very much happier place."


He took hold of the front of her hair, and cut into it with a crunch. She closed her eyes, and hot tears began to pour down her cheeks. She was so terrified now that she was unable to speak-unable even to sob.


The man cut off more and more of her thick red hair, cropping it as close to the scalp as he could. Siobhan could feel it dropping onto her shoulders and onto her breasts. When he came round to cutting the back, she obediently bent her head forward and he cut it so close that the cold scissor blades were nicking her ears.


When he had finished he gathered up her fallen hair, brushing it off her stomach and her thighs, and he triumphantly lifted it up in front of her. "There…no more swimming away foryoufor a while, my darling merrow. Now you'll have to stay here with me."


He took a rubber band out of his pocket and twisted it around her hair to keep it together. "What acohullen druiththis is…what a souvenir of youth and beauty and the strange love between mermaids and men."


Without warning, he tugged down the zipper of his pants and took out his penis, which was already half erect. He trailed Siobhan's hair across it, from side to side, and gradually it rose harder and harder. Siobhan tried to turn her head away, but there was something so mesmerizing about what he was doing that she kept having to look back at him.


"Do you know what this feels like? It feels like being caressed by animals. It feels like being stroked by a woman who isn't even human."


He drew her hair one way, and then the other, and the gaping head of his penis grew a darker and angrier purple. At first he stroked it quite gently, but as he grew increasingly aroused, he began to whip at himself harder and harder. Soon he was lashing at himself in a controlled frenzy, his mouth clenched, his chest heaving, his whole body tense.


Suddenly he cried out, "Ahh!" and a thick white jet of sperm jumped out. Siobhan felt it loop against the side of her neck, while one drop of it dangled from her earlobe in a glutinous parody of a pearl earring. The man gave himself two or three luxurious squeezes, his eyes closed, and then he pushed his dwindling penis back into his trousers and zipped them up.


"Do you know how much you excite me?" the man breathed, opening his eyes, and giving her that same benign smile. "We're soclosenow…so very, very close. You're going to change my life, Siobhan. You're going to give me pleasure beyond anything that you can think of."


Siobhan looked dully away. It wasn't his abuse that had degraded her, it was the cutting of her hair. She felt as if she weren't Siobhan anymore, as if she were nothing but a scarecrow. A tear ran out of her right eye and dripped onto her forearm. That, and the man's semen, were the only warm things that she had felt all day.


38


That evening, Katie made a point of cooking them a proper meal. She sliced potatoes and mushrooms and onions and interleaved them in a casserole dish with fresh marjoram, before adding pork chops and chicken stock and putting them into the oven.


Paul, watching television and playing with Sergeant's ears, said, "That smells good, pet. I'm starving."


"Sorry. It won't be ready till eight."


She sat down next to him and looked at him for a while without saying anything. His cheekbones were still covered with rainbow-colored bruises, and his split lip had a black crusty scab, but the swellings around his eyes had gone down.


"What are you going to do, Paul?" she asked him.


"What am I going to do about what?"


"Dave MacSweeny and his building materials, of course. I'm really worried that something's going to happen to you."


He poured himself another whiskey. "Can't you give me some Garda protection?" he asked, wryly.


"Seriously, I wish I could. But if I asked for police protection I'd have to explain why."


"You're a guard. Why can'tyouprotect me?"


"I've been trying to, believe me. But I can't watch you twenty-four hours of the day, can I? And there's no knowing what Dave MacSweeny will do next."


"What are you suggesting, then? That I do a Charlie Flynn and run off to Florida?"


"You could get out of Cork for a while."


"What good would that do? I couldn't stay away forever, and what would I do for money? Anyway, I'm a Corkman. I was born here and brought up here and this is my home, and I'm not going to be frightened away by some waste of space like Dave MacSweeny. I'll think of something. Something will turn up."


"Something like what?"


"I was talking to Ricky Deasy today. He wants me to invest in a housing project out near Carrigaline."


"How can you afford to invest in a housing project when you have to raise six hundred and fifty thousand euros to pay back Winthrop Developments?"


"I can't. But the land that Ricky Deasy wants to build on doesn't have planning permission, not at the moment."


"That doesn't sound like much of an investment to me."


"No - but it's going dirt-cheap as agricultural land and there could be a hefty EU subsidy for anyone who takes it on to farm it."


"You've lost me, Paul. You're thinking of taking upfarming?"


"Of course not. But Ricky's uncle is the deputy chairman of An Bórd Pleanála and once we've bought the land we could see about fixing a change of use. You know, a little sweetener for Jimmy's uncle and a couple of the other board members."


"Paul, you're desperate! You're just digging yourself in deeper and deeper!"


He put down his drink and took hold of her hand. "I have to do something big, Katie. I have to do something dramatic. Otherwise I'mnevergoing to get myself out of this mess, ever; and I'm going to have to spend the rest of my life watching my back for Dave MacSweeny."


Katie reached up and stroked his bruised and swollen cheek. "Tell me a joke," she said.


"What?"


"Tell me a joke, the way you used to, when we first went out together."


"I'm fighting for my very life here, Katie. This isn't any time to be telling jokes."


"I know. But just for me."


He looked into her eyes as if he were looking for evidence that she wasn't mocking him. Then he said, "There was this Kerryman who spent an hour staring at a carton of orange-juice because it said 'concentrate.'"


Katie gave him the faintest of smiles and kissed him. He still smelled the same as always, too much Boss after shave. But it was strangely reassuring, as if the past hadn't completely disappeared; as if yesterday were still lying in the chest-of-drawers upstairs, sleeping in the tissue-paper that Seamus' baby-clothes were wrapped in.


39


When she came into her office at 8:35 the next morning, Dermot O'Driscoll was waiting for her, along with a thin, serious-faced man in a dark business suit. Even Dermot looked tidier than usual: he had crammed his shirttails into his waistband and even made an attempt to straighten his livid green necktie.


"Katie, this is Patrick Goggin from the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin."


Katie held out her hand and Patrick Goggin gave her a soft, recessive handshake.


Dermot said, "Apparently we're having some trouble with your friend Jack Devitt about these disappearances in 1915."


"I never said that Jack Devitt was any friend of mine."


"Figure of speech. Jack Devitt's demanding that the British Ministry of Defense produce documentary evidence to show what happened to those women. Whether they were murdered on official orders, you see, or whether it was a renegade officer who took them, or whether it was just some fellow who was masquerading as a member of the Crown forces. The trouble is, Devitt's got official backing from Sinn Féin. Here in Cork, and in the Dáil, too. We could have a very embarrassing political situation here, unless we clear this up quick."

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