White Bones (15 page)

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 blonde 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’Reillys 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.

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 1.

“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 an
incomplete
explanation?”

“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 re-opening 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 swede 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.

She was leaving the Paul Street multi-story car-park when her mobile phone warbled.

“Superintendent? It’s Liam Fennessy. You’d better get up to the City Gaol, quick as you can.”

“The Gaol? 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.”

“At the
Gaol
?”

“Well, you’ll see for yourself, superintendent, when you get here.”

“All right. 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 to Sunday’s Well, running three red lights. She turned up the steep incline of Convent Road until she reached the gray sandstone walls of Cork City Gaol. It began to rain, one of those sharp, rattling showers that the Atlantic brings in without warning.

There were two patrol cars already parked in the yard outside the Gaol, as well as Liam’s green Vectra. As Katie pulled up beside them, an ambulance arrived, too, with its blue lights flashing. A uniformed garda hurried up to Katie’s car and opened the door for her.

“So who is it?” she said.

“Dave MacSweeny, ma’am.”

“Dave MacSweeny? Jesus. Is he dead?”

“Not quite, ma’am. But let’s just say that he’s not feeling too bright.”

Katie felt a cold, crawling sensation down her back. Oh my God, she thought. Don’t say that this is Eamonn Collins’ interpretation of being “emphatic.” If it was, then Dave MacSweeny wouldn’t be the only one who could expect to be taught a lesson that he wouldn’t forget.

She turned up her collar and climbed out of her car. In the dark, and the rain, Cork City Gaol appeared even more forbidding than usual. It had been built high on this hill in 1824 to resemble a medieval castle, with crenellated towers. For years it had been a women’s prison, although men had been locked up here, too, during the troubles in 1922. It had closed in 1923, and now it was a tourist attraction, populated with life-size wax figures of warders and inmates to give visitors a feeling of what it had been like to be incarcerated here.

Katie climbed the steps to the front gates, with the garda following close behind her, and walked quickly along the path that led to the Gaol’s main buildings. The rain was coming down even harder now, turning her hair into dark red rats’ tails.

“One of the cleaners found him, ma’am, after they’d closed. God alone knows how long he’d been here. They’ve had visitors in and out all day, one hundred and seven according to the ticket sales.”

“Is the manager here?”

“We’ve called her, ma’am, and she’s on her way.”

They reached the governor’s house. The garda opened the front door for her, and then he led her across the chilly, echoing vestibule to the Gaol’s West Wing. This was an echoing,
high-ceilinged
hallway, with three galleries of cells on either side, connected by catwalks and iron staircases. Up on the very top catwalk, the waxwork figure of a prison warder was leaning on the railing and looking down at her. Katie saw Liam Fennessy up on the first floor catwalk, with four or five other gardaí. She climbed the staircase with her shoes clanging on the iron treads.

Liam was standing by an open cell door, with his arms folded. He nodded toward the cell and said, “Dave MacSweeny. I have absolutely no idea how long he’s been here. We’re waiting on fire and rescue.”

Katie looked inside the cell. It was little more than six feet by ten feet, with a wooden bed and a plain wooden chair. The walls and ceiling were painted with scabby whitewash, and there was a strong smell of damp and urine.

Standing up against the right-hand wall was Dave MacSweeny, barefoot, wearing a soiled gray shirt and dark blue trousers, with his left arm lifted as if he were waving to a distant friend. His face was covered with a mask of thick medicine-pink emulsion paint, and his hair had been spiked up with creosote, some of which had slid in dark brown runnels down the back of his neck.

His eyes were closed, although the fine cracks in the emulsion paint around his eyelids showed that he must have opened them at some time after it had dried. There were deep fissures in the paint on either side of his mouth, too, and both of these were filled with congealed blood. His silver hoop earring was missing, torn out of his earlobe, leaving a ragged hole.

He remained standing up against the wall, with his arm raised, because he had no choice. His left wrist and his shoulders and both of his knees had been fastened to the whitewashed stone with heavy-duty brads. Whoever had nailed him here, they had turned him into a living parody of all the other waxwork prisoners who occupied the cells around him.

Katie stepped into the cell and tilted her head close to Dave MacSweeny’s face. His eyes remained closed but she could hear him breathing. Rapid, shallow gasps, with a harsh rattle at the end of each gasp. He smelled strongly of stale sweat and cigarettes and alcohol and he had wet his trousers.

“Dave?” she said. “Dave, can you hear me?” But he didn’t answer.

She turned to Liam and said, “Can’t we get him free?”

“That’s why we’ve called for the fire and rescue. They’ve fixed him to the stone with one of those pneumatic nailers. Ninety millimeter brads at least. We’re going to need a pair of bolt-cutters before we can spring our Dave MacSweeny out of the slammer.”

“Has he said anything to you?”

“His eyes were open when I first arrived here, and of course I asked him who did it, but he didn’t say a word. Or
wouldn’t
, more like.”

“Any witnesses? Somebody must have seen him being dragged up here. Where was the manager when this was going on?”