White Bones (37 page)

“This is a message from Eircell. You have one new message in your mailbox. To listen to your message, press one.”

She pressed 1. It was Gerard O’Brien, and he sounded worried.

“Katie? It’s Gerard again. Listen, Katie, I really need to talk to you very urgently. I don’t want to tell you too much over the phone, but I think I’ve found out who Callwood was, and what happened to him; and I’ve also found out some very worrying information that might affect the way you decide to pursue this investigation, which is about the discreetest way I can think of to put it.”

He paused, and then he said, “Call me back as soon as you can. I’ll try leaving a message with Liam Fennessy, too.”

Lucy kept the cellphone pressed against her ear. After a while, the Eircell voice said, “
To erase your message, press 7.
”

She looked down at Katie, who was now sleeping deeply with her mouth open and one hand intermittently jittering on the pillow next to her as if she were trying to catch the smallest of dusty-gray moths.

Liam was about to leave his office when his telephone rang.

“Inspector Fennessy? It’s the switchboard here. Is
Superintendent
Maguire there with you?”

“I haven’t seen her all afternoon. Have you tried her mobile?”

“I have, but she isn’t answering. It’s Professor O’Brien, he says he has something important to tell her but he can’t seem to find her.”

“Is he on the phone now? Put him on.”

There was a sharp crackle, and then Gerard said, “Is that Inspector Fennessy? I’ve been trying to locate Superintendent Maguire.”

“Anything I can help you with?”

“It’s to do with these murders. I really have to talk to her urgently. I’ve tried her cellphone, I’ve tried calling her up at Meagher’s Farm – ”

“Professor, I’m assigned to this case, too. If you’ve found out anything critical – ”

“Critical? It’s absolutely
cataclysmic
. I’m waiting on some final bits and pieces of information from America, but when I get it, I think we may be able to solve the 1915 murders
and
the Fiona Kelly murder, too. And change the face of modern history, besides.”

“Listen, professor, I don’t actually know where Katie is, right at this moment, but I expect that I’ll be hearing from her sometime this evening. Why don’t you tell me what it is that you’ve found out, and then I can pass it on to Katie when she calls me?”

“Well, ah – I think I’d better try to talk to Katie first. I’m not sure she’d be – ”

“We’re talking about a murder inquiry, Professor O’Brien. If you have material evidence that could help to bring somebody to justice, then you ought to tell me about it, and you ought to tell me as soon as possible.”

There was a long pause, and then Gerard said, “All right, then. But this is not a thing that I can explain to you over the phone.”

“I’ll come to see you, then. Where are you now?”

“I’m at home. Number 45 Perrott Street, up at the back of the university.”

“Give me twenty minutes. There’s one or two things I have to sort out first.”

“All right, then. But if you do hear from Katie in the meantime, you’ll let her know?”

“I will of course.”

He met Jimmy O’Rourke in the lobby. “Fancy an old beer, sir, before you go?” Jimmy asked him, blowing out cigarette-smoke.

“Just a quick one. Have you seen Katie anywhere?”

“She went home I think. Did you hear about her accident?”

“I did, yes. Christ. That must have been the end to a perfect day.”

“She needs to take a week off, if you ask me.”

Outside it was clattering with rain. Liam pulled on his overcoat and buttoned it up to the neck. “I always thought this job was too much for a woman. If Katie’s not careful she’ll be cracking up.”

“I’d be careful, if I were you,” said Jimmy. “She’s a whole lot tougher than she looks.”

“We’ll see,” said Liam. “Where do you want to go? O’Flaherty’s?”

Katie was dreaming that she was walking through a slaughterhouse. Cattle-carcasses were heaped on every side, and the whole building reeked of blood. Above her she could see a filthy skylight, clotted with fallen leaves, onto which the rain was ceaselessly pattering. Somewhere, music was playing, echoing and indistinct, as if a radio had fallen down the bottom of a well.
The Fields of Athenry.

What are you doing here?
somebody whispered, close to her ear.
This is a place of death. This is where the Gray-Dolly Man lives, and cuts up people for his own purposes. Women and children, innocent and guilty. He cuts off their arms and legs and saws their screaming heads in half.

She turned a corner and found herself in another part of the slaughterhouse. The floor was glistening with rainwater and strewn with indescribable pieces of flesh and fragments of bone. Not far away a tall man in a strange five-cornered hat was standing at a metal table, feeding carcasses into a bandsaw. The saw let out a fierce, intermittent scream, and blood and bone was flying everywhere.

Cautiously, she approached him. She lifted her hand to touch him on the shoulder, but as she did so he slowly turned around. She was so shocked that she almost lost her balance. His face was not a face at all, but a mass of crawling beetles.

“
Your turn next,
” he whispered, between lips that literally dripped with insects. “
Your turn next, and you’d better believe it.
”

It was almost ten o’clock now and Gerard was growing irritable. He drew back the sitting-room curtains and peered down the street. It was raining like the Great Flood tonight and he was beginning to suspect that Inspector Fennessy might have decided that he would rather sit at home in front of the TV than visit a professor of Celtic mythology in a large,
damp-smelling
Victorian apartment that was crowded with books and
National Geographic
s and empty Bulmer’s cider bottles. That was all right by him. He preferred to talk to Katie in any case. He just wished Inspector Fennessy could have had the common courtesy to call him and say so.

Gerard was wearing a partially-unraveled sweater of thick green wool that he had bought on a walking holiday in Kerry, and a pair of baggy beige corduroy trousers. In his tiny study, the only light came from his computer, which he had switched on so that he could show Liam Fennessy what he had discovered.

He tried ringing Katie again. But her cellphone rang and rang, and then he was answered by the Eircell answering service. “
If you want to re-record your message
…”

That was the limit. Katie couldn’t be found and Liam Fennessy couldn’t be bothered to turn up. Gerard believed that he had discovered one of the most dramatic secrets of the twentieth century and when it came down to it, nobody cared. He went back to his study to switch off his computer. He would take his golf umbrella, walk down to Reidy’s Vault Bar in the Western Road and console himself with a few pints of cider.

Just as he had clicked the computer off, however, his doorbell shrilled. He gave an old-womanly cluck of exasperation and went over to the intercom by the front door. “Inspector Fennessy?”

“
It is, yes
.” Liam’s voice was distorted and barely audible, as if he were standing too far away from the intercom. “
It’s raining buckets out here. Are you going to be after letting me in
?”

“You’re very late. You said twenty minutes. I was just about to go out.”

“
I’m sorry, but I’m here now.
”

Pressing the entry buzzer, Gerard went back to the study and switched on his computer again. While it booted itself up, he blew his nose on a tiny fragment of crumpled Kleenex. He had really wanted to tell Katie what he had discovered, and Katie alone. He had even rehearsed what he was going to say to her, and he knew how impressed she would have been. Perhaps then she would have looked beyond his plumpness and his
combed-over
hair and seen what he was really like inside: a man who had all the romance of a mythological hero from the days of Tara and Aileach and Cruachan. All the same, he supposed that it would still be fairly dramatic to tell Inspector Fennessy. “What I am about to reveal to you, inspector, will change the way that historians think about the twentieth century for ever.”

There was a sharp knock at the door of his apartment, and then another. He called out, “All right – I’m coming!” and drew back the chain.

Before he could open it properly, the door was kicked with such force that it hit him on the side of the face and he fell back against the door of his coat-cupboard. He said, “What –?” but before he could say anything else a man in a black coat and black balaclava stormed in through the door, seized his sweater, and threw him across the floor, knocking over his coffee-table and all his empty Bulmer’s bottles.

Gerard tried to stumble to his feet but the man grabbed his sweater yet again, lifting him almost off his feet, and slamming him against the door-frame that led to his kitchenette. He felt his shoulder crack, and an indescribable pain in the small of his back.

“What are you doing?” Gerard shrilled at him. “For God’s sake you’re hurting me!”

The man said nothing, but twisted one of his arms behind his back and pressed him against the wall beside his study door.

“The gardaí are coming!” gasped Gerard. “I just called them and they’ll be here at any minute.”

“Shut up,” the man ordered him, calmly.

“I’m telling you the truth, I’ve got an appointment with Inspector Liam Fennessy. That’s why I let you in. I thought you were him.”

“And what were you going to tell him?”

“Nothing. Just some research I’ve been doing, that’s all.”

“Oh, yes? And what have you managed to find out?”

“Nothing – nothing important. For God’s sake, you’re hurting me.”

“Something about those bones up at Knocknadeenly, was it? Something about Fiona Kelly?”

“I’m not telling you. You can do whatever you like, I – ”

The man gripped Gerard between the legs and twisted. Gerard let out a cry of agony that sounded more like a tortured dog than a man. The man twisted him again, even more fiercely, and this time Gerard babbled out, “
I found out who killed all those women
!
That’s all
!”

“And what about Fiona Kelly? Did you find out who killed Fiona Kelly?”

Gerard shook his head. Tears were streaming down his cheeks and if the man hadn’t been holding him up he would have collapsed on the carpet.

“I’m asking you again. Did you find out who killed Fiona Kelly?”

“I don’t know, I swear to God. The gardaí still think it was Tómas Ó Conaill, but if it wasn’t Tómas Ó Conaill then I don’t know who it was.”

“You’d better be telling me the truth.”

The man released his grip, and Gerard crouched his way over to the sofa and lay down with his knees drawn up under him, coughing.

The man went into his study. All around Gerard’s computer, his desk was heaped with books and magazines and
spring-bound
notebooks. The man picked up a notebook on top of the heap and said, “What’s this? Does this have anything to do with it?”

“Gaelic legends,” Gerard coughed, miserably. “Preparation for a lecture on Friday. Nothing to do with – Knocknadeenly.”

The man tossed the notebook aside and swept the papers onto the floor. Then he lifted up Gerard’s computer and threw it against the wall. The monitor imploded with a dull bang and a shower of glass. The man stamped on the drive unit, denting the case and breaking the plastic inlets. Then he came back into the sitting-room.

“Up, come on.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Up!”

One-handed, he heaved Gerard off the sofa. He jostled him out of his front door, along the landing, and down the high Victorian stairs. Gerard did everything he could to resist, flapping his arms and trying to make his legs turn to jelly, but the man was frighteningly powerful, and when his legs collapsed beneath him the man simply picked him up by the scruff of his Kerry sweater and made him dance along like a puppet.

“Where are we going?” Gerard panted, as the man forced him along the corridor that led to the back door.

“Shut up.”

He opened the back door and pushed Gerard out into the narrow courtyard at the back of the house. It used to be part of a larger garden but now it was all tarmacked over and Gerard used it to park his old red Nissan. Through the teeming rain, Gerard saw a large white car parked only inches away from his.

“Where are you taking me? You can’t do this… this is abduction!”

“No it isn’t,” the man assured him.

“You can’t take me away against my will!”

“I don’t intend to. Now, shut up.”

The man pulled Gerard to the back of the car. He unlocked the trunk and took out a length of nylon washing-line. Then he kicked the back of Gerard’s calves, so that Gerard dropped to the ground like a knackered cow.

“What do you want? Who are you? I haven’t done anything to anyone.”

The man said nothing. He bent over Gerard and deftly tied his wrists together. He cut the washing-line with a craft-knife, and then he looped Gerard’s wrists over the car’s towing-hook.

“What the hell are you doing to me?” Gerard shrilled at him. “If you think you’re going to drag me along the road – ”

“I’m not,” said the man. “So shut up.”

“Look, I don’t know what this is all about, but if there’s something else that you’re after…”

“Shut up,” the man repeated. He took the rest of the
washing-line
and tied it to Gerard’s ankles. Then he knotted it tightly around a sign saying
Residents Parking Only
.

Gerard lay on the ground and looked up at him, so terrified that he could hardly breathe.

“What are you going to do to me? Are you going to
leave
me here?”

“Some of you, I expect.”

“
What are you going to do to me
?”

The man stood over him for a while, and Gerard could see the raindrops sparkling all around his head, caught in the streetlights so that they looked like an endless shower of tiny meteorites.