From the creases at the corners of Sister Margaret’s eyes, Eileen would have guessed that she was in her early to mid-fifties. She still had the looks of a much younger woman, though, with blue feline eyes and high cheekbones and slightly sulky lips, and Eileen found it hard to imagine why somebody so attractive should have taken holy orders.
In spite of that, she couldn’t have been completely unaware of how attractive she was. Eileen noticed that her eyebrows were shaped and her fingernails manicured and varnished, even though the varnish was clear. Perhaps nuns these days were allowed a little modest grooming.
‘Would you care for a cup of tea, Sister?’ she asked her. ‘Sister Barbara, would you like a cup?’
‘I’m fine, thank you,’ said Sister Margaret. ‘I’m just after having one.’
‘Yes, please, I’d like one,’ said Sister Barbara. Then she reached across to take hold of Sister Margaret’s hand. ‘You don’t know what this means to me, your coming to see me like this. I truly thought that I’d been forgotten.’
‘Get away with you,’ smiled Sister Margaret. ‘You know what you did at the Bon Sauveur, you and your sisters? How could anybody ever forget that?’
‘Tell me, then, what were they saying about me? No, I shouldn’t ask, should I? That’s too much like vanity. But I’m surprised that any of them remember me.’
‘Oh, not many of the sisters remember you, I shouldn’t think. Most of them are far too old now, or passed away. But quite a few of the girls you took in, those girls who had fallen from grace, they remember you. Them and their children, too. They remember you like it was yesterday. They have dreams about you, some of them. They see your face in front of them as clear as I can see it now.’
Sister Barbara slowly released her hold on Sister Margaret’s hand. She picked up the red jasper rosary that she had left in her lap and wound it around her fingers. She was frowning now, staring at Sister Margaret as if she had spoken to her in a foreign language that she could only half understand.
‘And those girls? And their children?’ she asked. ‘What do they say about me?’
‘They say all kinds of things. How you read the Bible to them, how you taught them to sew, and how to wash clothes, and do the ironing, and sweep the floors, and polish the windows. How you made them realize what sluts they had been, and what whores, and how they would never be fit to mix with pious people ever again.’
Sister Barbara was about to say something when Eileen’s assistant came back with a cup of tea, with two shortbread biscuits in the saucer. She set it down on the small table beside her and then gave both women a smile.
‘You’re all right?’ she asked.
‘Oh, we’re grand altogether, thanks,’ said Sister Margaret. ‘Sister Barbara and me, we’ve just been reminiscing about our days at the convent, weren’t we, Sister?’
Sister Barbara didn’t answer, but continued to stare at Sister Margaret with deep suspicion.
‘Tell me something,’ she said, when Eileen’s assistant had gone back to the office. ‘Who sent you here today?’
‘God,’ said Sister Margaret. She reached over and picked up one of the shortbread biscuits and bit into it. ‘God sent me.’
She chewed for a while and then she said, ‘I’m on a sacred mission, Sister Barbara. I’m surprised you haven’t been sitting here all these years wondering with some trepidation when this moment would arrive.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about,’ said Sister Barbara. ‘What moment? All I do is pray to Saint Anastasia. I would much rather be in heaven with her instead of here, with every day empty and every day the same.’
‘Yes. Saint Anastasia. What a martyr she was. How she suffered for her faith. What a shining light.’
Sister Barbara was silent for a while, watching Sister Margaret finish her biscuit. Then she said, ‘Who are you, really? What do you want from me?’
* * *
‘Eileen!’ called out Breda, in a quavery voice. ‘Eileen, it’s fierce cold in here!’
Eileen appeared at her office door with her phone in her hand. ‘The heating’s on full, Breda, what are you cribbing about? I’m right in the middle of a conversation with the HSE.’
‘I know the heating’s on, but there’s a draught.’
‘What draught? What are you talking about?’
‘Come here and feel it for yourself. As if I don’t feel enough twinges.’
Eileen came out into the conservatory and almost immediately she realized that Breda was right and that there was a sharp, stone-cold draft blowing from the opposite side of the room. Most of the other old women had nodded off, but Breda was sitting up straight with her blanket pulled right up to her neck.
Over the canned laughter coming from the television Eileen heard a distinctive knocking sound, irregular but repetitive. Knock – knock-knock – knock – knock. She realized then that the conservatory’s fire door was open, the door that gave out on to the yard at the back. It could only be opened from the inside, with a panic bar, and it couldn’t be closed from the outside.
As she crossed the room towards it, she saw that Sister Barbara’s chair was empty and that her blanket was lying on the floor, with her rosary next to it. Her teacup was empty, although there was a single shortbread biscuit left in the saucer.
Eileen stepped outside into the yard. It was a bright, grey morning, not raining but damp and very cold. She hurried around the front of the rest home, past the porch. On the far side of the building there was a parking space for three cars and a high wooden gate to the back garden. The only car parked there was her own Peugeot 206, and when she tried the gate she found that it was firmly bolted, as it should have been.
She went out on to the pavement and looked up and down Carrigaline Road. It was deserted. There was no traffic and no other cars parked within a hundred metres.
She went back inside, closing the fire door behind her but taking care not to touch the panic bar. Then she hurried to her office and said to Lucy, ‘Call the guards for me, would you, Lucy? Right now. I think Sister Barbara has been kidnapped.’
‘What?’
‘She’s gone, and there’s no sign of her. She had a visitor, a sister from the Bon Sauveurs. They were sitting there chatting away, but now she’s gone and the fire door was left open.’
‘Are you sure she’s not in her room?’ asked Lucy. ‘She could have taken her visitor to see that shrine of hers.’
‘But why would they open the fire door?’
‘Maybe she took her out to show her that statue of Padre Pio but didn’t close it properly.’
Eileen said, ‘Wait there.’ She hurried along the corridor that led to the residents’ rooms, turning sharp right and then almost running along the last fifty metres to Sister Barbara’s room. She fumbled with her bunch of master keys and then opened it. There was nobody there – only Sister Barbara’s neatly made bed, with its dark-brown coverlet, and the shrine that she had created for Saint Anastasia with candles and artificial flowers and a mournful picture of the martyred saint herself.
She hurried back to the office. ‘She’s not there,’ she said. ‘Call 112. That nun has taken her, I’m sure of it.’
‘Maybe she took her back to the convent with her. You know, a trip down memory lane, like.’
‘Lucy, will you stop theorizing, for the love of God, and do like I asked you!’
Lucy shrugged and pressed 112. ‘Can’t see why a nun would want to kidnap another nun, though. I mean, what’s the point, like? I could understand if it was a feller.’
14
By nine o’clock, when Katie and Detective O’Donovan arrived at Cork University Hospital, Dr O’Brien was already at work in the morgue.
He didn’t say anything when they came through the double swing doors because he was wearing a surgical mask, but he lifted one hand, like Columbo, to acknowledge that he had seen them.
Katie and Detective O’Donovan waited for him to invite them over to the stainless-s
teel autopsy table. He was leaning over the pale, naked body of the nun who had been hung from the balloons over Glanmire, watching closely as a young assistant pathologist sutured up her stomach. Katie hadn’t been sick that morning, but she was more than willing to wait until they had finished before she came any closer.
There were four other trolleys in the morgue, all of them covered in dark-green sheets. She guessed that under one of them lay the body of Detective Horgan, brought in from Dromsligo.
It was chilly in the morgue and the silvery-grey light that filtered down from the clerestory windows made Katie feel as if they were standing in a black-and-white photograph, and that all of this had happened a long time ago. In a way, it might have done, because so many of the crimes that she investigated in Cork had their root cause in long-standing grudges and family feuds, and the Corkonian’s inability ever to forget the slightest of slights. She knew people who would turn their backs on British tourists because the Black and Tans had burned down the centre of the city in 1920.
Eventually the assistant pathologist knotted up the last suture.
Dr O’Brien tugged down his mask and said, ‘That’s first-class work there, Aoife. I’ll be asking you to sew some new shirts for me next.’
He beckoned Katie and Detective O’Donovan to come over. He was short and rotund, with heavy-rimmed spectacles, and he seemed to have put on some weight since he had last come down to Cork, and developed a bulging double chin.
‘Hallo, Ailbe,’ said Katie.
‘Good to see you again, Detective Superintendent,’ said Dr O’Brien. ‘It’s a pity we always have to meet under such tragic circumstances. Good to see you, too, Detective.’
Katie looked down at the nun’s body and the Frankenstein stitches that had closed up her abdomen. Apart from that terrible injury, though, and the blotchy purple bruising where the cord had been tied around her neck, she looked as if she had been in fairly good physical condition before she was killed. Her skin was finely wrinkled but she appeared to be well fed, and her fingernails and toenails had been recently cut. Her hair was neatly styled and her eyebrows plucked.
Her eyes were closed now, but she looked like a woman who was dreaming rather than dead. She had a long, oval face, and a long, thin nose, and a small, rather petulant mouth.
‘She looks well cared for,’ said Katie. ‘How old would you say she was? Late seventies?’
‘Older than that, I’d say. Mid-eighties. But as you say, she’s been well looked after. It’s pure amazing the difference in appearance I’ve seen according to somebody’s lifestyle. I’ve had fellows on this table you would have sworn were in their late sixties and then you find out they’re only forty-five. Alcohol and cigarettes and chips, they’re the main culprits.’
He reached across and pulled down the dead nun’s jaw so that Katie could see her teeth. ‘Look at that. Only two crowns. The rest of the teeth are all her own, with the exception of her wisdom teeth and one missing premolar.’
Detective O’Donovan peered over Katie’s shoulder. ‘That might help to confirm that she’s a genuine nun. A fair number of women of her age had all their teeth taken out as a wedding present, didn’t they?’
‘I haven’t been able to establish conclusively if she’s a virgin or not,’ said Dr O’Brien. ‘I can tell you, though, that she’s never given birth. So that might be another factor in establishing that she’s a real nun. But your technicians have taken scores of photographs, so I imagine you’ll be able to identify her soon. If she’s been so well fed and taken care of, somebody must have been looking after her on a daily basis, and whoever they are they’ll be missing her, won’t they?’
‘What was used to cut her open?’ asked Katie. ‘Can you tell?’
‘Probably a craft knife, I’d say, judging by the angle it first went in, just below the sternum. Also, there are two or three places where the blade didn’t quite slice all the way through the muscle to the abdominal cavity – see here? Because of that, her assailant had to repeat the cut more than once. This leads me to think that the blade was very short, even though it was extremely sharp.’
‘Was she alive when this was done?’
Dr O’Brien took off his glasses, breathed on the lenses and then polished them on the tail of his apron. ‘No question of that. I’d say she was probably still alive even when she came down to earth, although by then she would have been suffering from irreversible brain damage from oxygen deprivation and loss of blood.’
‘I assume you’ve tested her for drugs,’ said Katie.
‘Of course. And this will interest you. She was taking propranolol, which is a treatment for heart irregularities, which isn’t unexpected for a woman of her age. But I also found traces of flunitrazepam.’
‘That’s Rohypnol,’ said Katie. ‘You mean somebody might have given her a date rape drug?’
‘Well, she could have taken it to cure insomnia. Whatever the media say about it, that’s by far the most common use for it.’
‘Somebody slipping a nun a roofie,’ said Detective O’Donovan, shaking his head. ‘You hear something new every day in this job, don’t you?’
Katie stared at the dead nun for a long time without speaking, almost as if she expected her to sit up and explain what had happened to her. The nun remained still and silent, her hair shining silver in the silvery grey daylight.
Detective O’Donovan asked, ‘Is there any bruising on her that might give us an idea if she was beaten with anything, or if she was being held down, like, or maybe the size of a handprint?’
‘Nothing at all,’ said Dr O’Brien. ‘Again, that’s not conclusive evidence of anything, although it could be an indication that her attacker dosed her with Rohypnol. If he did, he wouldn’t have needed to hit her or restrain her, because she would have been dead to the world, so to speak.’
‘What we need to do first is find out who she is and where she came from,’ said Katie. ‘Patrick, would you arrange to have her picture taken out to every convent and every hospital and every school and charity shop where nuns might be working? I’ll talk to Mathew McElvey and have him email her picture to the press. Check with the social media, too – Twitter and Facebook and all the rest of them. See if anybody’s been posting threats against any religious order, and against nuns in particular.’
‘Gollun, there’ll be thousands of them!’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘Millions, I shouldn’t wonder! We’ll be sorting through them for weeks!’
‘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.’
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