Blood Sisters (26 page)

‘And that was done post-mortem?’ asked Katie.

‘Again, I’d guess so,’ said Bill. ‘I can’t be one hundred per cent sure, but the reddening looks less severe than it would been if she had been still alive.’

‘What about her hands and her feet?’

‘I’m fairly certain that she was alive when her toes were severed, and maybe her fingers, too, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was the shock of that that killed her. She was an elderly lady, after all. We won’t know what kind of a condition her heart was in until Dr O’Brien examines her, or we can lay our hands on her medical records.’

Katie took a long look at Sister Barbara’s mutilated body, with the sun-ray burns around her breasts. Maimed and whipped and branded like this, she could almost have been the victim of some ancient Gaelic punishment from the days of Tuatha Dé Danaan, the mythical gods who ruled Ireland before the arrival of Christianity.

‘So,’ she said, ‘we have three murdered nuns, and all three of them interfered with in some ritualistic way after they were dead.’

‘Well, they were either dead or so close to death that it would have made no difference,’ Bill put in. ‘In any case, I doubt if they would have been conscious of what was happening to them.’

‘That’s precisely my point,’ said Katie. ‘If they weren’t conscious of what was happening to them, why do it?’

Bill shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t have a clue, to tell you the truth. Like you say, maybe the offender was just being vengeful.’

‘I think there’s more to it than that,’ said Katie. ‘I don’t think their bodies were mutilated to teach
them
a lesson. I think it was done to show
us
– and when I say
us
I mean the whole of society, you and me and the church. All of us. But the church more than anybody else.’

‘Well, that narrows it down a bit,’ said Bill. ‘Introduce me to one middle-aged person in Cork who isn’t still bearing a grudge against some nun or priest from when they were younger and I’ll show you a kipper that can sing “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam”.’

It was growing light by the time Katie returned to Anglesea Street, although it looked as if it was going to be another grey, drizzly day. She had a shower and changed her underwear and then she went to the canteen for breakfast. She felt tired but she didn’t feel like going to bed, not yet. There was too much milling around in her head and she knew that even if she lay in the dark with her eyes closed, she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep.

She was sitting by the rain-spotted canteen window with two boiled eggs and a plate of toast when Detective O’Donovan came in. He looked even more dishevelled and exhausted than he usually did.

‘Good morning to you, ma’am. Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin told me you were back. Okay if I sit down for a minute? I don’t want to interrupt your breakfast, like.’

‘No, go ahead,’ Katie told him, and he pulled out the chair opposite her.

‘That nun, that Sister Barbara?’ he asked her. ‘What sort of a state was she in, like?’

‘Worse than you can imagine, believe me. Her fingers and toes were cut off, you saw that for yourself, but she’d also been lashed all over with some kind of a whip and both of her breasts had been burned. It looked like her killer had heated up a monstrance until it was red-hot and pressed it against her chest like a branding iron. It’s unthinkable.’

‘Mother of God,’ said Detective O’Donovan. He looked down at Katie’s boiled eggs and said, ‘I’m not surprised you didn’t order the bacon.’ Then, ‘Sorry. Bad joke. Sort of thing that Kenny Horgan would have said.’

Katie shook her head to show him that she was too tired to care. ‘Did you get the chance yet to run through the CCTV footage and the video?’

‘I did, yeah. That’s why I came to find you. There’s a CCTV camera on Property House on the corner of Oliver Plunkett Street and it picked up two fellers with the nun in between them coming out of Tuckey Street opposite. They carry her straight across the pavement to the fountain and heave her into the basin. Then they stroll off again the same way they came.’

‘And nobody noticed them doing it?’

‘There were so many kids there messing around and they were all totally langered. There was even some girls jumping into the fountain while the two fellers were dropping her in.’

‘What did they look like, these two fellows?’

‘Both of them are wearing black hoodies, so you can’t see their faces, and for most of the time they stay on the blind side of the fountain from the camera, like they’re hidden behind the basins and you can’t see them clearly at all. They’re both of them chunky, though, do you know what I mean? They’re carrying that nun between them, but you’d swear to God that she’s walking on her own. It’s only when you look at the footage closer that you can see her feet trailing along the pavement.’

‘Does the iPhone video show them any clearer?’

‘Not really. The young feen who was taking it was just as langered as all of his mates, so it’s jerking and jumping around, and you can only see the two fellows for a split second, like, turning their backs after they’ve dropped the nun into the water.’

‘You have some photographs, too, though, don’t you?’ asked Katie.

‘Well, I was coming to that,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘There’s seven pictures altogether, all of them showing these three young girls dancing in the fountain and pulling up their skirts and flashing their knickers. But in one of them you can see half of the face of one of the two hoodie fellows. He’s turned his head to look at the girls and the camera’s caught him. Like I say, it’s only half of his face but he’s a right mog and it should be enough for somebody to reck him. He’s got an earring, too, so that should help.’

‘Good work, Patrick,’ said Katie. ‘As soon as I’ve finished this I’ll come and take a look. Meanwhile, why don’t you call Eithne O’Neill, if she hasn’t gone home to bed yet? She was working last night on Sister Barbara’s body. See if she can use some of her computer wizardry to turn half a face into a whole face.’

‘Not a bother at all,’ said Patrick, clicking his tongue. ‘Any excuse to chat up Eithne.’

Katie glanced up at him sharply and he said, ‘Sorry. Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m on the wrong side of knackered, that’s all. I’ll see you after.’

Katie’s second egg had gone cold now and the yolk had mostly solidified, but she made herself eat it. She sat there for a while looking down at the car park while the rain dribbled down the window. For the first time in a long time she wondered if she had sacrificed too much to her sense of duty.

* * *

When she had finished her breakfast she went down to the CCTV room to see for herself the footage of the two men in hoodies carrying Sister Barbara from Tuckey Street to the fountain and dumping her into the water. Detective O’Donovan had been right: as they crossed the pavement, the two men were jiggling her along between them and any casual observer would have assumed that she was walking unaided. They certainly wouldn’t have realized that she was dead.

A young man was climbing out of the water as the two men approached the fountain, and three girls jumped in immediately after him, which was when Sister Barbara’s body was dropped in, face-down. The two men then walked unhurriedly back towards Tuckey Street and out of camera range.

She also asked for the iPhone photographs to be displayed on a screen for her. The second to last shot showed the man who had turned to look at the girls, and Detective O’Donovan had been right about him, too. He was flat-faced and ugly: ‘bone ugly’, Katie’s grandmother would have called him – meaning a child so hideous that his mother would have to tie a bone around his neck before the family dog would play with him.

There was nothing much more Katie could do today. Excavation work at the Bon Sauveur Convent had halted for the weekend and the ground-radar equipment wouldn’t be brought in from Dublin until Tuesday next week at the earliest. The investigation into the shooting of Detective Horgan was making no progress at all. Forensic examination of the burned-out Mercedes had given up no clues whatsoever. As for the twenty-three dead horses, Detective Dooley had still been unable to trace who had forged their passports or where they had come from. It might well have been Paddy Fearon who had thrown them over the cliff, but they were in no position to prove that, either.

She drove herself home. When she got there, she found John sitting at the coffee table in the living room with a small table-top easel and a palette and a box of acrylic paints.

‘Hey, sweetheart,’ he said. He put down his brush and came over to give her a hug. ‘Did you get any sleep last night?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘None at all. I spent most of the night in the mortuary.’

‘Oh, wonderful. The mortuary! Come on, you must be exhausted. Why don’t you get some sleep now? You don’t have to go back to the station today, do you?’

‘No,’ she said. Barney came up and she patted his head and tugged at his ears. ‘I don’t feel like going to bed, though. Not yet.’

‘Have you eaten?’

‘Yes. I had some breakfast. I wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee, though.’

‘Sure. Come and sit down. I’ll move all these paint things out of the way.’

‘Is that the picture of me?’ she asked, nodding towards the art board on the easel.

John angled it sideways so that she couldn’t see it. ‘Yes, it is. But it’s not finished yet. So – no peeking until it is.’

‘If it looks anything like I feel, I don’t want to see it anyway.’

But John smiled at her and gently stroked her cheek, and she could see from the look in his eyes how much he loved her and it made her feel more comforted already. She sat down on the couch and Barney came to sit next to her, very upright, as if to guard her.

By the time John came back out of the kitchen with her coffee, she was asleep.

Riona was walking out of the parade ring with Saint Sparkle and his owner, Gerry Brickley, when Paddy Fearon caught up with her. He glanced furtively around like a pantomime villain to make sure that no TV cameras were pointing in their direction, and that there weren’t any gardaí close by, and then said, ‘Riona? I need a word with ye, girl. Urgent, like.’

Gerry had been talking to Riona about the stud fees they could charge for Saint Sparkle and he frowned at Paddy in annoyance. He wasn’t the kind of man who was used to being interrupted.

‘It’ll have to wait, Paddy,’ Riona told him, without looking at him, and smiling instead at the crowd behind the railings. ‘We’ve less than ten minutes to go before the flag.’

Saint Sparkle’s colours were scarlet and white and she was wearing a scarlet woollen suit to match, as well as a conical scarlet hat with feathers in it and scarlet shoes. Gerry sported a red silk rose in the lapel of his velvet-collared Crombie, which clashed with the terracotta colour of his face. It was Sunday afternoon, the first race day of the year at Mallow, and the course was thronged with thousands of racegoers.

‘I think you’ll be wanting to hear this, like,’ said Paddy, holding the collars of his sheepskin coat together with one hand, as if he were worried that somebody in the crowd might be reading his lips.

Although their jockey, Josh Teagan, had already mounted Saint Sparkle in the parade ring, the four-year-old bay was still being led by Riona’s grizzled-looking stable lad – the same stable lad that Sister Barbara had seen her shouting at, from her upstairs window.

‘Take him on for me, Ryan, would you?’ said Riona. Then, to Gerry, ‘Sorry, Gerry. This won’t take a moment. I’ll catch up with you.’

Gerry frowned again at Paddy and said, ‘There’s not a problem, is there?’

‘No, no, everything’s grand altogether. I won’t be two ticks.’ She kept on following Saint Sparkle around the side of the grandstand, but she slowed down until Gerry was ten metres ahead of her and out of earshot. Then she turned back to Paddy and said, ‘Well, come on, then. Make it snappy. I don’t have all day.’

‘I’ll be quick, then,’ he said. ‘But a feller came to see me at Spring Lane a couple of days ago and said he’d met me one evening in Waxy’s, though I don’t remember seeing him there myself, like.’

The noise of the crowd and the echoing announcements from the public address speakers made it difficult for Riona to hear what Paddy was saying, so she had to lean closer to him than she would have liked. He smelled strongly of cigarettes and whiskey.

‘Go on, then,’ she said, keeping her eyes on Saint Sparkle’s glossy brown haunches and his swishing black tail.

‘Any road, the feller asked me to dispose of some horses for him, nine altogether. He said I’d told him at Waxy’s that I could do it for cheap. He gave me five hundred yoyos and I’m supposed to be picking the horses up tomorrow morning.’

Riona stopped dead. ‘And what were you planning to do with them? Throw them over a cliff, like you did with mine?’

‘Hey, come on now! Fair play! They were never yours, those horses. I took yours to the knackery. Besides, that wasn’t me who did that.’

‘Of course it was you. It’s been all over the news, in case you hadn’t noticed. Twenty-three thoroughbreds found on the beach at Nohaval Cove.’

Riona’s stable lad had halted now and was waiting for her, so she started walking again, even more quickly. Paddy caught up with her and said, ‘That
proves
it, though, doesn’t it? You never gave me twenty-three to get rid of. Only eleven. Well, fifteen with the foals.’

‘That proves nothing except that some other unsuspecting eejit paid you to get rid of their horses, too. Hop off, Paddy, I want nothing more to do with you.’

‘Wait, you haven’t heard this. The feller who wanted me to dispose of the horses for him, one of the girls up at Spring Lane took a shine to him, like. Tauna.’

‘Paddy, in case you hadn’t noticed, my horse is just going in for the biggest race of the day.’

‘Yeah, I know, but the thing of it is, Tauna saw this feller yesterday morning in the city centre. He was standing on the steps outside the Garda station on Anglesea Street, talking and laughing with two gardaí in uniform. He’s not some chancer at all. He’s the filth.’

Riona stopped again. She stared up at Paddy with her eyes narrowed and her scarlet lips puckered. ‘You know what that means, don’t you? It means the guards have a strong suspicion that it was you who dumped those horses on to the beach, and that they’re setting you up.’