Authors: Graham Masterton
‘I know. But that’s our job, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Right. Okay. Maybe I can ask them to leave out any tweets about Cardinal Seán Brady and then there won’t be so many.’
Katie turned back to Dr O’Brien. ‘Is that Detective Horgan you have there?’ she asked, nodding towards the three trolleys covered in sheets.
‘Yes. He’s next on my list. Do you want to see him?’
‘No, I don’t think that’ll be necessary. What about the other two?’
‘Floaters found in the river this morning. A man and a teenage girl. Nothing to arouse any suspicions about the demise of either of them. I’ll be certifying the cause of death since I’m here, but I don’t think there’ll be any need for me to be carrying out a full post-mortem.’
‘Do we know who they are?’
‘I don’t think they’ve been identified yet, either of them. But gardaí were called when they were fished out, so your lot know all about it. A drunk and a suicide, that’s my first assessment.’
‘That’s the story of Cork,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘I sometimes wonder what the Almighty was thinking when he built a city full of boozers and brothels with a river running through it.’
‘He was giving you the opportunity for self-retribution,’ said Dr O’Brien. ‘It saves Him a fortune on lightning bolts.’
* * *
As they were about to leave the mortuary, Katie hesitated and turned around. She looked at the three trolleys draped with sheets and wondered if she ought to ask Dr O’Brien to show her the bodies that were lying on them, after all.
‘What?’ said Detective O’Donovan, holding the swing door half open.
‘Oh, nothing,’ said Katie. ‘Let’s go. I just had a funny feeling about those two floaters, that’s all.’
‘What kind of a funny feeling? Do you want to take a sconce at them?’
‘No, you’re all right,’ Katie told him. ‘Dr O’Brien said there was nothing suspicious about them drowning, didn’t he?’
‘Well, we know the statistics,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘Thirty-six per cent of all the people who drown in the Lee are suicides, and thirty per cent of
them
are langered. The rest are accidents, but less than one per cent are pushed in deliberate.’
‘It’s not that – it’s just that—’ Katie began, but then her phone warbled. It was Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán.
‘Ma’am? We’ve just had a report that an elderly nun has gone missing. It seems like she was taken from a rest home in Douglas by another nun who came to visit her.’
‘Mother of God, Kyna. I don’t believe this.’
Detective O’Donovan pushed the door open wider and they both left the mortuary and walked out into the car park. It was chilly out there, and while she talked to Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán Katie used her left hand to fasten the toggles of her duffel coat.
‘Do we know where this other nun came from?’ she asked.
‘Not really. I’ve just been talking on the phone with the person in charge at the rest home, a woman called Eileen O’Shea. She told me that the nun arrived about seven-fifteen, saying she wanted to see Sister Barbara Flynn. She gave her own name as Sister Margaret Rooney and said that she had come from the Bon Sauveur Convent, which is where Sister Barbara used to live before she was taken into care.
‘Ms O’Shea left them talking together, but about ten minutes later she had to take a phone call in her office and when she came out they were gone, the both of them. She went looking for them outside but there was no sign of them at all.’
‘Have you contacted the Bon Sauveur?’
‘Yes, of course. I spoke to Mother O’Dwyer herself. She confirmed that Sister Barbara was once a member of the congregation there, but there was never a Sister Margaret Rooney.’
‘Never?’
‘She even checked the records for me. They had a
Mary
Rooney once, but that was back in 1931, and according to Ms O’Shea this nun only looked about forty-something.’
‘You’ve put out a description?’
‘I have, yes. Sergeant O’Farrell has told all of his patrols to keep an eye out for them. Hard to miss an eighty-five-year-old woman in a long mustard-coloured cardigan accompanied by a nun in a long black cape. That’s if she really
was
a nun. Ms O’Shea noticed that her eyebrows were plucked and her nails were varnished.’
‘Ms O’Shea should have been a detective, by the sound of it, instead of running a rest home. Sherlock O’Shea. Listen, I’m just leaving the hospital now, I’ll be back at the station in ten.’
They climbed into their car and O’Donovan started the engine.
‘More nun trouble,’ said Katie.
‘I gathered that. What’s happened now?’
Katie told him as they drove back towards the centre of the city. ‘I’m just praying to God that we don’t find this one dead, like the other two.’
‘You think there’s a connection?’
‘You know me. I make it a firm rule never to jump to conclusions. But three nuns in three days. I can’t help thinking that there must be some link between Sister Bridget being murdered and this flying nun and now this other nun going missing.’
‘And that link is?’
‘The Bon Sauveur Convent.’
‘You could be right,’ said O’Donovan. ‘We’ll be going round there tomorrow morning to start digging up their gardens, won’t we, if the search team’s ready? Those nuns are really going to start thinking we’ve got it in for them.’
‘Well, I hope they understand that we’re just looking for the truth, that’s all. Somebody may have it in for them, but it isn’t us.’
Detective Dooley parked his Ford Focus outside the entrance to the Spring Lane Halting Site, close behind an abandoned caravan with its door missing and weeds growing out of its windows. He folded down the sun visor so that he could brush up his Jedward-style hair in the mirror, then he climbed out and tugged on the shiny black quilted nylon jacket he had bought that morning at Penney’s.
He looked around. He could hear children screaming and loud music playing. Apart from that, this was a very desolate place, north of the city behind the Ballyvolane Business Park, next to a semi-private housing estate and some scrubby uncultivated fields. The clouds hung low overhead, grey and pillowy, and there was scarcely any wind.
He walked down the hill towards the halting site, jumping now and then over water-filled potholes. The site itself was a ramshackle collection of static caravans and prefabricated houses which were little more than sheds. To the north and the east, the site was overlooked by steep slopes of sand and gravel, over twenty metres high. The eastern slope was almost vertical, with a spiked fence along the top to separate it from the housing estate. On the opposite side of the site there was a wide lagoon of tan-coloured water where the recent rain had flooded the septic tanks from the outside toilets, and two small boys were cycling through it on their bicycles, around and around in circles, so that it rippled.
A group of six or seven women were standing outside one of the mobile homes, smoking and chatting to each other. They all turned around and stared as Detective Dooley approached. He gave them a wave, although he thought they were probably the most formidable collection of women that he had ever encountered in his life. At least three of them had bare upper arms that looked like the hams that hung up on Tom Durcan’s stall in the English Market, except that they were decorated with tattoos. Most of them wore huge hoop earrings and had their hair scraped back from their foreheads in that style commonly known as a ‘knacker’s facelift’.
Not far away, three young men were standing around a motorbike, while another was bouncing up and down in the saddle, trying to get it started. Every now and then it would roar into life and they would all cheer, but then it would immediately cut out again, to a loud disparaging chorus of ‘Jeez, feck it, Michael!’
‘
Slum hawrum
,’ said Detective Dooley, as he came up to the women. ‘What’s the craic?’
‘What do you want, boy?’ asked an older woman, blowing out smoke. She had long, greasy grey hair streaked ginger and black, and a fading black eye.
‘Looking for Paddy Fearon,’ he said. ‘Is he here at all?’
‘Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t. What would you be wanting him for?’
‘Got a little job for him, like, if he’s interested. He said I could find him here if anything ever came up.’
‘Oh yeah, and where do you know him from?’
‘Here and there. Waxy’s, the last time I saw him.’
One of the younger women said, ‘Oh yeah? And what makes you think that a feller like Paddy Fearon would be living in a shit-hole like this?’
Detective Dooley shrugged. ‘It’s where he said to look for him, like, that’s all.’
The woman flipped her cigarette butt across the concrete and then she said, ‘Come on, then, feen, I’ll show you.’
She started to walk away, with her hips undulating, and so Detective Dooley followed her. She had soot-black hair, with a ponytail, and if she hadn’t been wearing double false eyelashes and thick orange foundation she might have looked quite attractive. She was overweight, though, with huge breasts underneath her leopard-skin bolero and bulging black leggings that only emphasized the size of her buttocks and her thighs.
‘What’s your name, then?’ she asked him. They walked past the young men trying to get the motorbike started and they all turned around to stare at them.
‘Declan. What’s yours?’
‘Tauna.’
‘Been living here at Spring Lane long, Tauna?’
‘I was born and reared here, wasn’t I? Nineteen ninety-two. Sagittarius. And my kids was born here, too.’
‘You just said that it was a shit-hole. Why do you stay here, if it’s all that bad?’
‘Where else would I go?’
‘I don’t know. Won’t they give you a council house?’
‘Ah, no! I wouldn’t want it any road. I tried living in a house once, but I never want to get caught up in a house again. Jesus, it was so depressing. It was like being trapped, like, so that I couldn’t scarcely breathe, and so fecking lonely without all my family and my friends around me.’
‘But this place?’ asked Detective Dooley. They were walking past the breeze-block shed that housed the communal toilets, with a single washing machine out in the open.
‘It’s terrible, like. The kids are always getting sick with the gastric flu and there’s no bathrooms and no showers and the water tastes of chlorine so strong you wouldn’t want to be drinking it. The local people look at us as if they have dirt in their eyes. They want to build a wall instead of that fence so they can forget that we exist.’
‘But?’
‘But, like I said, Declan, I was born here and reared here and where else would I go?’
They reached a beige-painted Willerby caravan at the far end of the site, close to the foot of the eastern slope. It was larger than most of the others on the site, and in better condition, although it was surrounded by a whole variety of junk, including a rusty diesel compressor, and a kitchen cabinet with no drawers, and a bicycle with no front wheel, and a sofa with no seat cushions, and an ironing board. A brindled pony was tethered outside, eating oats from a yellow plastic bucket tied to its nose.
Not far away, a military-green horsebox was parked on a rectangular patch of concrete next to a dark-blue Opel Insignia, which was splattered with mud but looked reasonably new.
Tauna climbed the steps to the caravan’s front door and knocked on it loudly. Then she climbed back down because the door opened outwards.
A middle-aged man appeared wearing a pale-brown corduroy cap and a yellow and black chequered shirt. He had small squinchy eyes and a broken nose and his cheeks and neck were pitted with acne scars.
‘What do you want, Tauna?’ he said, although he was staring at Detective Dooley. ‘I’m up to me bollocks.’
‘Declan says he might have a job for you, Paddy. That’s right, isn’t it, Declan?’
‘That’s right,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘How’s it going, Paddy? Long time no see.’
‘What do you mean, “long time no see”? I never saw you before in the whole of me fecking life.’
‘Ah, you’re laughed at,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘Six months ago, not even that, in Waxy’s.’
‘Well, I must have been langered because I don’t remember seeing you there, boy.’
‘That was the night that Danny Perrott brought his pit bull into the bar and it shat on your shoe. Don’t tell me you don’t remember that.’
Tauna let out a hoarse, cigarette-smoker’s laugh. ‘You never told me about that, Paddy! Shat on your shoe? That’s hilarious!’
‘Danny didn’t think so after I gave him a slap and kicked his fecking dog up the arse,’ Paddy retorted. But then he squinted even more intently at Detective Dooley and said, ‘Yeah, maybe I do remember you. What was we talking about, like?’
‘Horses, of course,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘What else?’
‘Horses, yeah,’ said Paddy. He nodded, and kept on nodding as if he were gradually beginning to recall their conversation after all.
‘You told me all about what you’d been up to with the horses, like, so I said that I might have a job for you now and then. And now I do.’
‘Yeah? Oh – yeah. That’s right. So, ah – what is it, this job?’
Detective Dooley looked at Tauna and said, ‘Maybe we should talk about it in private. No offence meant, Tauna.’
Tauna pulled a face and said, ‘It doesn’t bother me, boy. I have to go and feed the kids any road.’
‘Thanks. I appreciate it. How many kids do you have?’
‘Only the four of them. There was a fifth one on the way but the Lord decided to take him back when I was five months gone. He’ll be up there somewhere, in a much better place than this, I can tell you. Along with me brother.’
Detective Dooley watched her walk back past the toilet block to join her friends. Halfway there, she turned around and gave him a wink and a little finger wave.
‘You’re in there, boy,’ said Paddy, with a phlegmy cackle. ‘That’s if you like skangers.’
‘Yeah, well,’ said Detective Dooley.
‘Come inside, any road,’ said Paddy and beckoned him up the steps.
Inside, the caravan’s living area was so crammed with furniture and ornaments that there was hardly any room to move around. There were gold velvet curtains at the windows, with brown tassels and tie-backs, and the huge brown Dralon-covered sofa was piled with brown and gold cushions. Every shelf was crowded with floral vases and religious statuettes and onyx boxes and china animals, although there wasn’t a single book in sight.