White Bones (10 page)

Children scampered and screamed around the gardens, and a snappy breeze was blowing through the willow trees, so that they glittered in the sunshine. Katie tied a green silk scarf around her head to keep her ears warm.

“Does me good to get out,” said Professor O’Brien. “I seem to spend my life in front of a computer screen these days.” He was quite young, only about 34 or 35, although he was balding on top and he had combed his hair over to try and hide it. He was small, too, with little pink hands that peeked out from the cuffs of his brown corduroy overcoat like pigs’ trotters – what the Cork people call
crubeens
.

Katie said, “Gerard – I want you to think of this as an active murder investigation, rather than just an academic exercise. It may be eighty years since these women were killed, but they were real women and they were murdered for some very specific reason.”

“Do you really think that it was anything to do with the British Army, taking their revenge?”

“It’s a possibility. After all, the Crown Forces burned most of the city of Cork down to the ground, out of revenge. But it’s these little rag dollies that don’t make any sense.”

“Well, I can’t say offhand that I’ve ever come across anything like them,” said Professor O’Brien. “They don’t seem to relate to any particular culture or any particular period. Before we were converted to Christianity, we used to have dozens of different gods, and all kinds of extraordinary ceremonies to appease them. But I’ve never found any mention of human sacrifice, or dismemberment, and I’ve never seen these particular dolls before.

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

“No hooks or nails or screws?”

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

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

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

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

“Well, then,” said Katie, and held out her hand.

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

“Yes?”

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

“Over
dinner
?”

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

She squeezed his little
crubeen
hand. “Let’s just see how it goes, shall we?”

“Of course.”

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

“Holy Mother of God,” she said to herself, in her rearview mirror. “You’re not
flattered
, are you?”

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

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

“Are you ready for the next adventure?”

“I don’t care what you do. Just do it and get it over with.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I don’t have any choice, do I? You’re going to do it anyhow.”

“Well, you’re right about that.”

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

“I didn’t notice.”

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

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

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

“Not the other leg,” she said, dully.

He nodded. “I’m sorry. It’s the way it has to be. Right leg, left leg.”

“But why? Why are you doing it? Can’t you just kill me?”

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

“What time is it?” she asked him.

“Two-thirty in the morning.”

“I need a drink of water.”

“That’s all right. I’ll get you one.”

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

“Do you hate me?” she said.

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

“But look what you’ve done to me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t cry,” he told her. “This is only just the beginning. You wait until tomorrow. Then you’ll know what pain is. Then you’ll not only feel it, you’ll
understand
it.”

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

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

“Are you all right?” he asked her. “This won’t take very long, I promise.”

“I can’t – you can’t – I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it.”

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

“Please, please. I can’t bear it any more, please.”

“I’m sorry… why don’t you try to think of something else?”

“
I can’t take any more! I can’t take any more!
”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Paul?” she called, sitting up in bed.

“Sawrigh,” Paul blurted back. “Everything sawrigh.”

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