White Bones (31 page)

“I don’t know, Katie… I don’t usually like to tread on another academic’s toes.”

“You wouldn’t be. And who knows, the two of you together might come up with something that really cracks this whole case wide open.”

“I’m not sure.”

“Lucy, I’d really like to see you – mainly to thank you for yesterday, but I also want to hear more about this Jack Callwood character. Besides, you’d be doing me a personal favor. To put it diplomatically, Gerard O’Brien is a little sweet on me.”

“I see. You need a bodyguard.”

“I was thinking of ‘chaperone’, but bodyguard will do. Why don’t you meet us at Isaac’s in MacCurtain Street at about one o’clock?”

“All right. You’ve twisted my arm.”

Shortly after 10:00 am, Patrick Goggin knocked on the door of her office. She was busy going through the detailed technical reports on the cottage where Fiona Kelly had been killed, and she wasn’t particularly happy to see him.

He sniffed, sharply. “That’s a very attractive perfume you’re wearing, superintendent.”

“Thank you. But I’m afraid I’m up to my eyes this morning.”

“Of course,” he swallowed. “But I just wanted to tell you that I’ve had a response from the Ministry of Defence in London relating to the disappearance of Irish women around north Cork in 1915–16.”

“And?”

“They say that they’ve made a thorough search of the Public Records Office at Kew and it appears that all the daily dispatches relating to the period in question were destroyed by enemy action during World War Two. Whatever happened to them, they’re missing, and nobody can find them.”

“How convenient. Do you believe them?”

“I don’t have any choice, do I?”

“You don’t think they’re deliberately being obstructive?”

“They may be. But, I don’t know. Jack Devitt has made it his life’s work to publicize British atrocities in Ireland. As often as not I think he’s justified in what he says, especially when it comes to the Black and Tans and the Irish Volunteers. But personally I find it very difficult to believe that a British commanding officer would officially order the systematic abduction and the murdering of eleven young women, don’t you?”

Katie sat back. “I have to say that I’m inclined to agree with you. Especially since the women were sacrificed in an ancient Celtic ritual. The Brits never gave a frig for Celtic rituals – in fact they did their best to stamp them out. And the raising-up of Mor-Rioghain, that’s a particularly obscure ritual that very few
Irish
know about, let alone Brits. But… if the Ministry of Defence can’t or won’t produce the dispatches, it’s not going to make things any easier, is it?”

“It isn’t, no. That’s why I’m relying on you to find out what really happened to those women. If Jack Devitt’s right, and they
were
kidnapped and murdered by British soldiers, then I need to know for sure. He may have even more evidence than he’s telling us; and we can’t do a whitewash until we know exactly what it is we’re supposed to be whitewashing.”

Katie dropped her ballpen onto the papers in front of her. “I can only tell you, Mr Goggin, that we’re doing our best. So far we’ve located and DNA-tested eleven people who thought they might be related to the victims, and seven of them have proved positive – so I think it’s reasonably safe to assume that the skeletons that were found at Knocknadeenly were those of the eleven women who were abducted between 1915 and 1916.

“Some of the relatives have hand-me-down stories of ‘the day that Great Auntie Betty disappeared’, but unfortunately none of them throw any light on how the women were taken, or who took them. Mary O’Donovan’s great-great-grand-niece did mention a scare story that she had told her about a ‘demon Tommy’, who was supposed to have been preying on young women around St Luke’s Cross and Montenotte. But it could have been nothing more than a warning to stop local girls from flirting with British soldiers.”

“I could really do without this,” said Patrick Goggin, pulling tiredly at his cheeks as if they were Plasticine.

“Well, that makes two of us, Mr Goggin. But I’m having lunch with my two experts in Celtic mythology today and maybe they’ll come up with some bright ideas.”

“Oh.” He looked disappointed. “I was going to ask you if you wanted to come and have a drink with me.”

Siobhan’s eyes flickered open. Almost at once she was overwhelmed by a tide of pain that swept her away like a broken doll in a heavy sea. She felt the floor rising and falling and tilting beneath her, and the walls rushing towards her and then rushing away again. She vomited, not that she had much left to vomit, only some tinned tomato soup that the man had given her, and a few strings of phlegm.

The pain was so overwhelming that she couldn’t think what she was doing here or what had happened to her, or even who she was. All she could think about was pain, and why the room wouldn’t stay level.

The man was standing close to her, although she couldn’t see anything more than a dark, distorted shadow. “You’re awake?” he asked her.

She didn’t answer, so he knelt down beside her and peeled back one of her fluttering, wincing eyelids with his thumb. “You’re awake? You’ve done very well, Siobhan. How are you feeling?”

She retched again; and then again; and he stood well away until she had finished. Then he said, “I’m going to leave you to rest now. See if you can get some more sleep. I’ll be back in a while to feed you. Would you like something to drink before I go?”

She nodded. She was hurting so much that she couldn’t even cry. The man left her for a while and then came back with a large glass of water. He cupped his hand behind her white, red-tufted head, and helped her to take three or four swallows. Almost immediately she retched again, and water splashed over her legs.

She sat with her head hanging down, her eyes clenched shut, while the pain continued to wash her from one side of the room to the other.

“I’ll be back later,” the man said, gently. “Then we can really discover some pain together.”

He closed the door behind him. Siobhan sat limply in her chair while the floor heaved beneath her like a raft. “Mama…” she whispered. “Mama, please help me.”

Gradually she opened her eyes. Her legs looked different, and at first she couldn’t understand why. Then she realized that she was looking at bones, not skin. Two cream-colored thighbones, and two kneecaps that were still joined to her legs by gristle and fragments of flesh. The seat-cushion beneath her was soaked in blood.

She was in such a state of clinical shock that she didn’t fully understand that the thighbones were hers. They reminded her of the skeleton that used to be dangling in the corner of the biology lab at school. She closed her eyes again. The bones frightened her, and she needed to sleep.

Outside the window, the rain began to clear, and the sun came out, so that a wide rainbow gleamed over Lough Mahon and Passage West, where the ships sailed out of Cork on their way to the ocean.

Lucy arrived ten minutes late, wearing a black leather jacket and a thick rollneck sweater of fluffy black angora, and tight black jeans. A large silver cross swung around her neck, studded with dark purple gemstones.

Gerard stood up and knocked his glass of water over. The waitress rushed over to do some frantic mopping with a
tea-towel
while Katie said, “Gerard, this is Professor Lucy Quinn… Lucy, this is Professor Gerard O’Brien.”

“Very pleased to meet you,” said Gerard. Lucy was at least four inches taller than he was, and he found himself addressing her bosom. “Katie’s been telling me how you saved her from drowning. I’m very impressed.”

Lucy sat down. “Anybody would have done the same.”

“Anybody who could swim like Flipper,” Katie put in. “How about a drink?”

Isaac’s was always noisy at lunchtime. It was a modern, starkly-decorated restaurant that was popular with young Cork businessmen and tourists and middle-aged ladies who had finished their shopping. With the same self-protective instincts as Eamonn Collins, Katie had chosen a table in the alcove right at the back, so that she could see everybody who came in.

“Katie tells me that your university funded your trip here specially,” Gerard remarked, with his mouth full of soda-bread. “I wish Cork was so generous. They won’t even send me to Wales to look at Celtic stone-circles.”

“Oh, those skeletons at Knocknadeenly were a
very
rare discovery,” said Lucy. “As I was telling Katie, the only other similar case we know about happened in Boston in 1911. But what really had my head of department all fired up was the fact that somebody was actually trying to complete the ritual – you know,
now
, today.”

“Have you got any more out of Tómas Ó Conaill?” Gerard asked Katie.

“I’m planning to interview him again this afternoon, but I’m still waiting for DNA tests and some other technical evidence.”

“What do you know about him? It said in the paper that he was a Traveler.”

“He calls himself a Traveler, yes. He’s the thirteenth son of a very well-known family of Travelers who spend most of their year in Galway and Donegal. But he had a fight with his father when he was fifteen or sixteen. Blinded him in one eye. After that he went off on his own. He likes to think of himself as the King of All the Travelers, but I don’t think you’ll find many other Travelers who agree with him.”

“How does he know so much about Celtic ritual? Presumably he never went to school.”

“No… but he told me once that he was taught to read by a schoolmaster who used to live close to the family’s halting-site near Claremorris, and that the schoolmaster was also a great supporter of Celtic traditions and the Gaelic language. Tómas Ó Conaill knows everything there is to know about the old superstitions and the old druidic rituals. He seems to believe that he’s some kind of chosen descendant of the High Kings of Ireland, and that he possesses supernatural powers.

“Apart from that, he can be very rational at times. He can be charming. He can be amusing. Even – God knows – seductive.”

Gerard and Lucy shared a bottle of Chilean white wine. Katie would have given a week’s overtime for a double vodka, but she stayed on the mineral water. Their orders arrived: Gerard had chosen a mixed-leaf salad with Clonakilty black pudding, while Lucy had tempura prawns and Katie had grilled monkfish with clapshot – potato and swede mashed together.

“This is very good,” said Lucy. “Gerard – Katie said that you had some new research material from Germany.
Exciting
research material, apparently.”

Gerard blushed. “Yes, well,
I
think it is, anyway. I managed to get in touch with a famous criminal historian in Osnabrück, Dr Franz Kremer. He’s written several books about notorious mass-murders in Germany and Belgium and Poland.

Gerard produced a spring-bound notebook filled with rounded, almost childish writing. “I talked to Dr Kremer on the phone for almost an hour. He said that between the summer of 1913 and the spring of 1914, more than a hundred and twenty women went missing from towns around Münster, in Westphalia. Before their disappearance, several of them were seen talking to a man dressed in a gray Wehrmacht uniform. Nobody knew who he was. No army units in the area reported any of their soldiers unaccounted for. By Christmas, 1913, the local newspapers were calling him
Der Graue Geist
… the Gray Ghost.”

“My God,” said Lucy. “I can’t believe it.” But all Katie could think of was the whisper that she had heard in her dreams. “
Beware the Gray-Dolly Man
,” and of what “Knocknadeenly” meant in English.
The Hill of the Gray People
.

Gerard forked too much salad into his mouth, and had to spend a moment getting all the leaves under control. At last he said, “By chance – on June 4, 1914 – a priest in the town of Drensteinfurt happened to see a man in gray army uniform talking to his cook on the opposite side of the town square. The man and the housekeeper left the square together and the priest followed them around the corner where the man had a motor-car parked. The two of them drove off together and of course the priest couldn’t follow them, but when his housekeeper failed to return that evening he informed the police.

“Three days later a gamekeeper found the car in a wood. The area was searched with dogs for any sign of the cook, and after only two or three hours the dogs discovered a clearing in the woods where the soil had been disturbed, although it had been cleverly camouflaged with pine-needles and twigs. The police dug up the clearing and discovered the bones of ninety-six women, all fleshless. And here’s the cruncher – the thighbones of every one of them had been pierced, and every thighbone hung with a little lace doll full of fish-hooks and nails and other assorted ironmongery.”

“So,” said Lucy. “The Gray Ghost had been trying to raise up Morgana.”

“Without much success, by the sound of it,” Katie put in. “Ninety-six skeletons, divided by thirteen – that means he tried seven times, and was halfway through his eighth attempt. Why do you think he persisted, if the ritual obviously didn’t work?”

“Who says it didn’t work?” said Lucy. “For all we know, Morgana may have given him everything he asked for, only he kept coming back for more.”

“Well, yes,” said Katie, trying not to sound schoolmistressy. “But that’s only if you’re prepared to accept that witchcraft actually works.”

Lucy gave a little shrug. “When it comes to Celtic mythology, Katie, I try to keep a very open mind. Especially when it comes to fairies.”

“All right, then,” Katie conceded. “What happened next?”

Gerard finished the last slice of black pudding and earnestly wiped the salad dressing from the bottom of his plate with a piece of bread. “The police waited and two days later the man came back to collect his car. He was arrested and taken to Münster police headquarters. The police chief interrogated him for three days but he refused to say anything except that his name was Jan Rufenwald and that he was an engineer from Hamm. He knew nothing about any missing women and he denied owning the car.”