White Bones (26 page)

“Can’t I just give her a body search?”

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 blonde, 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 that Ireland was 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 goodbye to you. Please, trust me on that.”

“Patrick…” said his wife, and took hold of his other hand. “Leave it, Patrick. 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 in
Struwwelpeter
, 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 stop his merrow going back to the sea. He has to take her bright red feathery cap, her
cohullen 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 co-operation, is there? A little co-operation 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 for
you
for 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 a
cohullen druith
this 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 much you excite me?” the man breathed, opening his eyes, and giving her that same benign smile. “We’re so
close
now… 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 wasn’t Siobhan any more, 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.

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’t
you
protect 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 for ever, 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 up
farming
?”

“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’m
never
going 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 aftershave. 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.

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 shirt-tails 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 Defence produces 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.”

Patrick Goggin had a scrawny throat in which his
Adam’s-apple
rose and fell as he spoke, as if he was trying to regurgitate something unpleasant that he had eaten for breakfast. “Do you yet have any idea at all who might have abducted those women? Even an informed guess will do. There’s another summit meeting at Stormont next week and the last thing we need is Sinn Féin making an issue out of something that happened more than eighty years ago.”

Katie shook her head. “I’m afraid we haven’t made much progress. I’m working closely with Dr Reidy, the State Pathologist, and also with an expert in Celtic mythology, Dr Gerard O’Brien. But, you know, these things take time.”

“Haven’t you even got a theory about it? If the Crown Forces really did order those women to be abducted and murdered, it’s going to cause all manner of ructions. The Taoiseach is going to have to ask for an apology from the British government, and some form of compensation for their families, and the whole peace process is going to be knocked back months, or even years. Or even
decades
, for the love of God.”