White Bones (33 page)

“Because you have the hair, Siobhan, and the skills that the ritual calls for. Because you are very, very,
very
beautiful, and you embody everything mystical and magical and mythological that makes Ireland the land it is, where the world of fairies is only a shimmer away from the world of men and women.”

“Why?”

He hesitated, confused. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what it is you’re asking me.”

She opened her eyes and stared at him, and there was a wild look on her face that made him involuntarily jerk up his right hand, as if to protect himself. “
Why do you have to hurt me like this
?” she demanded, and her voice was unnervingly coarse, like Regan’s in
The
Exorcist
.

“Siobhan, Siobhan, you wouldn’t understand, even if I tried to explain it to you. It’s the only possible way that I can get what I need. Believe me, if there was any alternative at all – ”

Tears began to slide down Siobhan’s cheeks. “I feel sorry for you,” she said. “I feel desperately sorry for you.”

“You feel
sorry
for me? Why?”

“Because, when you die, you’re going to go to hell, for ever and ever. And you’re going to feel like I’m feeling now, worse, and it won’t ever end. Never.”

The man said nothing for a while, but then he reached out and touched one of her tears with his fingertip. “The true spirit of Catholic sainthood,” he said. “I may very well go to hell, Siobhan, but there’s no doubt at all where you’re going.”

John Meagher’s Land Rover was already waiting in the driveway when she arrived back home. She climbed out of her borrowed Opel Omega into the lashing rain, and hurried toward the porch. John got out and followed her. He was wearing a long black raincoat and she could see that he had taken the trouble to dress up in a shirt and necktie.

“I’m sorry if I’m late,” she said. “I was visiting my husband in the hospital.”

“I read about it in the papers. Is he going to be all right?”

She opened the front door and let him in. “They don’t know yet. Technically he drowned.”

“I’m sorry.”

She hung up her coat and then she went through to the kitchen and let Sergeant out. Sergeant rushed out and did his usual over-excited dance and hurled himself up and down, but John laid the flat of his hand on the top of Sergeant’s head, between his ears, and said, “Sssh, boy. Sssh. Time enough for prancing about in heaven, believe me.”

Sergeant immediately calmed down, and whined in his throat, and slunk off back to the kitchen.

“Well,” said Katie. “Who are you? The Mongrel-Whisperer?”

“My father taught me. When I was a kid I was terrified of dogs so he trained me to control them. It’s an authority thing. If the dog knows that you won’t tolerate any kind of stupid behavior, he’ll behave himself.”

“Let me take your coat.”

Katie approached him and lifted his raincoat from his shoulders. For a moment they were close enough to kiss, if they had wanted to. He looked into her eyes and she looked back into his. “Do you know something?” he said. “The first time I saw you – when we discovered those bones – ”

“What? I have to heat the soup up.”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s stupid. I felt that I’d met you before someplace.”

“That’s not stupid. Our identification experts will tell you that. There are certain facial characteristics that particular types of people have in common. I reminded you of someone else, that’s all. I just hope that it was someone you liked.”

“Well… it must have been.”

They went through to the sitting-room. “Do you want a drink?” Katie asked him. “I can’t join you, I’m afraid. But I have some cans of Murphy’s in the fridge. Or some wine, if you’d rather.”

“Sure, a Murphy’s would be good.”

When she came back from the kitchen, John was standing in the far corner of the room, looking through the books on her bookshelf. “I wouldn’t have had you down as somebody who liked Maeve Binchy,” he said, putting back a well-thumbed copy of
Tara Road
.

“I’m an escapist,” she admitted.

“Well, I can’t say that I blame you, in your line of work. You must get to see some pretty sickening stuff, I’ll bet.”

“It’s not so much that. It’s seeing people at their worst, that’s what gets to you, in the end. It’s seeing how violent and stupid people can be. Sometimes it isn’t easy to keep your faith in humanity.”

John raised his beer-glass. “Ah, well. Here’s to faith.”

Katie sat down on the end of the sofa. “You said you had something you wanted to say to me.”

John nodded. “I’ve tried talking to my mother about it, but you’ve seen what she’s like, bless her. And Gabriel, well… he’s not exactly the sharpest tool in the box. The trouble is, I wonder if I’m losing it. I mean, can you
tell
when you’re losing it?”

“I don’t exactly know what you mean.”

“It’s that farm. It’s really grinding me down. Day after day, week after week, month after month. It’s milking and plowing and digging and fence-mending and getting soaked to the skin and all I can hear in the middle of the night is the rain beating against the windows and my mother snoring like a walrus. You don’t know what I’d give to go out in the evening and meet my friends at Salvatore’s and fill my face with
linguine pescatora
.”

Katie couldn’t help smiling; but John said, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t whinge. I chose to come here and do it, but I genuinely think that I’m losing my marbles.”

“Sit down,” said Katie. “Have some more Murphy’s, it’s good for what you’re suffering from.”

John sat on the far end of the sofa, next to the pink-dyed pampas grass. Sergeant came back from the kitchen and stared at him balefully for a while, but then he made a squeaky sound in this throat and trotted to his bed.

John said, “I saw something.”

He hesitated for so long that Katie said, “Go on. What was it?”

“I’m not entirely sure. I was putting the tractor back in the shed when I thought I saw somebody standing in the field up by the woods, in the place where I found that young girl’s body.”

“Did you call the garda on duty?”

John shook his head. “He was right down by the front gate. It just seemed easier to go up the field myself. I thought it was probably somebody taking a short cut. Some of the young kids on the estate do that sometimes, to get to the main road.”

“And?”

“I climbed over the fence and walked up the field. The sun was just going down behind the trees and it was shining right in my eyes. But when I got nearer I could see that it was a woman, wearing a long gray coat, with a gray shawl around her shoulders, or a pashmina, something like that.”

He paused again, and then he said, “I called out to her. Like, ‘Excuse me, but nobody’s allowed in this field at the moment.’ And it was then that she disappeared.”

“You mean she walked away?”

“No. She literally disappeared. She faded. Very gradually, so that I could still see the faint outline of her when I was only twenty or thirty yards away. But by the time I reached the place where she had been standing, she had completely vanished. No trace of her. No footprints, nothing.”

“What did you do?”

“What could I do? There was nobody there.”

“You didn’t tell the garda on duty?”

“What was the point? He would have thought that I was off my head. That’s what I’m saying. Maybe I
am
off my head.”

“So why did you decide to tell me?”

“Because I couldn’t keep it to myself and I couldn’t think of anybody else to tell. My mother thinks there’s something strange about me because I don’t eat mashed potatoes with my knife.”

Katie looked at John for a long time without saying anything. The way she saw it, there were several possible explanations. One, he was simply trying to attract her attention, because he liked her, and this was the only way he could think of doing it. Or two, he had seen nothing more ghostly than the setting sun, shining on the early-evening mist. Or three, he was suffering from delusions, brought on by isolation and depression and stress.

“What do
you
think it was?” she asked him.

“I don’t have any idea. I guess it could have been a mirage or an optical illusion.”

“But you don’t think it was?”

“No. I was looking at it for far too long and it was far too – I don’t know,
substantial
. It wasn’t just a trick of the light or a puff of smoke.”

“Nobody could have simply laid down in one of the furrows so that you couldn’t see them?”

“I told you. She didn’t fall over, or drop down, or anything like that. She
faded
.”

Katie had another long think. Then she said, “Can I show you something?”

“Sure, if it explains what I saw.”

She went to the front door, but as she did so the doorbell chimed. She opened it up and there was a young man in
oil-stained
blue coveralls with a Maxol badge on his pocket. He had curly fair hair and a smudge of oil on his upturned nose and there was no mistaking that he was Patrick Logan’s son.

“Superintendent Maguire? Declan Logan. My father called me to look at your car so.”

“That’s great. Thanks for coming. I don’t have any idea what’s wrong with it, but my husband couldn’t get it started.”

“My dad said that your husband was in the hospital. I’m sorry to hear about that.”

“Thanks. Look – here are the keys.”

Katie went outside, and Sergeant followed her, intently sniffing at Declan’s trainers. His bright yellow Transit van was parked by the front gate, with Declan Logan Auto Doctor emblazoned in red on the side. Katie went to her car and took out the picture of Mor-Rioghain that Gerard had given her.

“Come on, Sergeant,” she called. “You’re being a pest.”

“Oh, he’s grand,” said Declan, slapping Sergeant’s flanks. “I like dogs.”

Katie went back into the sitting-room. “Would you like another beer?” she asked John.

“I’m okay, thanks. You have to keep your wits about you when you’re operating farm machinery. Especially when you’re going nuts, like me.”

“Here,” said Katie, sliding the drawing of Mor-Rioghain out of the envelope. “Does this look anything like the woman you saw?”

John studied the picture intently. Then he nodded. “It could have been. Obviously she wasn’t so distinct. But, yes.”

He handed the picture back. Outside, they could hear Paul’s Pajero whinnying as Declan tried to start it up. Katie opened her mouth to say something, but suddenly the air in the sitting-room became strangely
compressed
, like an airplane at high altitude. There was a deep creaking sound, and Katie immediately knew what was happening. She threw herself across the sofa and dragged John onto the carpet, just as the windows exploded with an ear-splitting bang, and the curtains flew up in a blizzard of glittering glass.

Clouds of thick black smoke rolled in through the window, so that Katie could barely see from one side of the room to the other. Thousands of cushion-feathers drifted down on top of them, as well as shreds of burning Dralon and fragments of sponge-rubber.

John struggled to sit up. He said, “What the hell was that?” but then he realized that he was deafened, and he couldn’t even hear what he was saying.

“Bomb,” Katie shouted at him. “Don’t get up. Stay where you are. There might be another.”

“
Bomb
? I didn’t think that happened in the South.”

“Just stay where you are.”

She stood up. The smoke was clearing, and through the frameless window she could see Paul’s Pajero blazing in the middle of the driveway. Declan’s van was parked right next to it, connected by jump-leads. The Pajero’s roof had been blown upward into an extraordinary question-mark shape. The driver’s door was lying in the herbaceous border by the front gates, and Declan was lying next to it, with his hand still clutching the handle. Katie could see blood.

She heaved aside a tipped-over armchair and ran out into the rain. John followed her. The air was pungent with the smell of wet laurels and exploded Semtex.

“Told you to stay where you were,” snapped Katie.

“Look at him – this guy needs medical attention, and he needs it right now.”

Katie rang Anglesea Street and called for an ambulance, a fire pump and the bomb-disposal unit, as well as Liam Fennessy and Jimmy O’Rourke and eight other gardaí, no matter where they were or what they were doing.

“Stay well away from the car,” she warned John, but he was already skirting around it. He crossed the lawn, which was scorched with streaks of black, and knelt down next to Declan in the flowerbed.

Declan was quaking like a man suffering from an epileptic fit. His hair was cinder-black and sticking up on end. His face was blackened, too, and when John gently lifted his head, his right eye slid glutinously out of its socket and dangled on his cheek. But the worst blast damage was on his left side. His left arm was missing, so that his shoulder-bone was gleaming through the bloody shreds of his sleeve, and his left leg had been blown off just above the knee. Katie saw his leg, right in the middle of the road, with his neatly-tied Adidas trainer still on it.

Blood was jetting out of Declan’s femoral artery and darkening the soil beneath his leg. Without any hesitation, John pulled off his belt, tore back the tatters of Declan’s overalls, and lashed the belt around his thigh, pulling it so tight that the blood stopped spurting almost at once. “Get me a towel,” he told Katie. “We’ve got to stop his arm from bleeding, too. And blankets, to keep him warm. He’s in serious shock.”

Katie ran into the house and stripped blankets off her bed. When she came back out John had stripped off his coat and was using his bundled-up shirt as a pad to press against Declan’s shoulder. Rain dripped from his hair and ran down his bare, muscular back.

“Here,” she said, and gave him two bath-towels. Then she covered Declan with blankets, and knelt over him to keep the rain off his mutilated face. The Pajero’s tires were burning now, with a malevolent hissing noise, and there was a stench of rubber that made her eyes water and went right down her throat.