‘Yes,’ said Dr O’Brien. ‘But that’s life for you, in the end, isn’t it? Myself, I see the proof of it every day, stretched out on the table. Young and old, pretty and not so pretty. You’re absolutely right, Katie. It’s pointless and it’s sad.’
* * *
Katie hurried into the courtroom. Finola McFerren was talking to the beetroot-faced clerk of the court and when Katie appeared she raised her eyebrows in relief.
‘Oh, you made it! Thank God! I thought I was going to have to ask for an adjournment.’
‘Are you all set, DS Maguire?’ asked the clerk. He beckoned to the tipstaff sitting at the side of the courtroom to go and tell the judge that the hearing was ready to begin.
Katie could see Michael Gerrety sitting in the dock with a garda next to him. Handsome as ever, with his broad face and his wavy chestnut hair, wearing a white shirt and purple silk necktie and a navy designer suit. A pink ribbon was pinned to his lapel, to show his support for the Irish Breast Cancer campaign. Jesus, thought Katie, you don’t miss a trick, do you?
He didn’t look at her, although he was obviously aware that she was looking at him because he yawned, as if the hearing was completely futile and nothing but a waste of his time.
‘You don’t – you don’t have to call the judge,’ said Katie. ‘We’re dropping this case, as of right now.’
‘What?’ said Finola. She was a tall, hawk-like woman and even sitting down she was formidable, especially in her wig. She picked up some of the papers that were spread out in front of her and crumpled them in frustration. ‘Detective Superintendent Maguire! This has taken us weeks to prepare. Weeks! I thought you had your teeth into Gerrety. What’s changed?’
‘Roisin Begley has been found drowned. The pathologist called me not five minutes ago.’
Finola dropped the papers back on the bench. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God. That’s terrible. Have her parents been told?’
‘I’ve sent a detective round to tell them now. I’ll go and see them myself after.’
‘So, that’s it, then?’ the clerk chipped in. ‘You won’t be pursuing this prosecution any further?’
‘Given that our only complainant has passed away – no,’ said Katie.
‘Well, I’m very sorry to hear that,’ said the clerk. ‘I’ll go and inform the defendant.’
Finola McFerren stood up, took off her wig, and started to gather her documents together. ‘Was it suicide, do we know? Did she leave a note or anything?’
‘I haven’t heard yet,’ Katie told her. ‘If she did, we’ll probably find it at her home or on her phone.’
All the time she was watching Michael Gerrety intently. She wanted to see his expression when the clerk told him that the prosecution was entering no evidence against him and that the case was being abandoned. If she saw the merest glimmer that he already knew that Roisin Begley was dead, that would be incentive enough for her to set up a full-scale investigation into how she had drowned, even if she had left a suicide note.
But if he did already know, Michael Gerrety was clever enough to do nothing but frown slightly when the clerk spoke to him, and then nod. No hint of a smile. No over-reaction. Just grave acknowledgement. As the garda ushered him out of the dock, he turned to Katie and caught her looking at him and his face was unreadable.
‘So, what do we do now?’ asked Finola.
‘There’s only one thing we can do. Keep up our surveillance on Gerrety and wait for him to make another mistake. There’s plenty of crimes we can entrap people into committing, but pimping an underage girl isn’t one of them.’
They walked out of the courtroom. On the steps outside, Michael Gerrety was talking to Fionnuala Sweeney from RTÉ, as well as reporters from the Examiner and the Echo.
‘It’s a tragedy, yes,’ he was saying, ‘and for me part of that tragedy is that I will never have the opportunity to prove to the world that I never took advantage of that unfortunate girl. Roisin was a free spirit – beautiful and vivacious. She did what she wanted to do and there was nobody could stop her. We don’t know yet how or why she died, but I am totally certain in my own mind that it had nothing whatsoever to do with her career with Cork Fantasy Girls.’
Martin Docherty from the Examiner lifted up his voice recorder. ‘That’s all very well for you to say that, Mr Gerrety, but the critical question is that, did you have sex with her?’
‘Roisin was underage,’ said Michael Gerrety.
‘With respect,’ said Martin Docherty, ‘that wasn’t the question.’
‘I know, but that’s the only answer you’re going to get out of me. If you want to suggest in your newspaper that I had intimate relations with a girl who was under the legal age of consent, then go ahead and I shall have the considerable pleasure of seeing you back here in court, faced with an action for libel.’
Michael Gerrety’s solicitor, James Moody, stepped forward then and called a halt to the questioning. In any case, Fionnuala Sweeney had caught sight of Katie and came hurrying down the courthouse steps with her microphone, followed by her cameraman.
‘Detective Superintendent Maguire! As a woman police officer, you must be very upset that this case has had to be abandoned.’
‘All I’m upset about today is the loss of a lovely young life,’ said Katie. ‘As far as the case against Michael Gerrety is concerned, that can wait.’
‘You’ve said more than once, though, that you’re determined to clean up Cork’s sex trade.’
‘I have said that, and I’m determined to. But that’s the only comment I’m going to make at the moment, except to send Roisin Begley’s family and friends my personal condolences and to pass on the deepest sympathy of the whole of the Cork City Garda.’
A shiny black Mercedes drew into the kerb and Michael Gerrety and James Moody climbed into it, accompanied by a shaven-headed man in a black nylon bomber jacket who looked as if he could break slates with his teeth.
Before he ducked his head down into the car, Michael Gerrety glanced up the steps at Katie and again his expression was utterly lacking in emotion.
She could guess what he was thinking, though. Did I have Roisin Begley drowned? Wouldn’t you like to know?
19
Riona sat on the wheelback chair while Dermot rummaged in his canvas bag, sniffing repeatedly as he did so.
‘We really thought that we were doing the best for you,’ Sister Barbara repeated. ‘You’d gone astray, you girls. Your families had rejected you. The whole of decent society had turned its back on you. We were the only ones who were prepared to take you in and care for you. What would you have done without us?’
‘Oh, we would have struggled, no question about it,’ said Riona. ‘Some of us might even have died, if you hadn’t given us shelter. But did it ever occur to you that we weren’t fallen women, we were only silly young girls who had done nothing worse than give in to the feelings that God Himself gave us?’
‘We never judged you! We opened our hearts to you!’
‘No, you didn’t, you sanctimonious hypocrites! You made our lives unbearable! Instead of taking us in, why didn’t you tell our parents to show us some Christian forgiveness, instead of dragging us around to Saint Margaret’s, like they did, and disowning us? My own mother threw my suitcase at me and it broke open and all of my clothes fell out on the ground, and it was raining.’
‘You have to understand that you’d brought shame on them,’ said Sister Barbara. ‘You can’t deny that. Their friends and neighbours would never have spoken to them again.’
‘Then maybe you should have gone around to their friends and neighbours and told them to show us some mercy, too,’ said Riona. ‘Oh, sure, you probably fooled yourselves that you were being saintly, but all you were doing was agreeing with the whole lot of them that we were sluts. What about the lads who knocked us up? None of them got shut up in monasteries and had to work like slaves for nothing. Where were the laundries for the boys who couldn’t keep their kecks zipped up?’
‘Wish I’d had these when I cut my own fecking finger off. They don’t cut all the way through, not the first go.’
Sister Barbara looked at him anxiously but all he did was give her a snaggle-toothed grin.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked in a hoarse, whispery voice.
But Riona said, ‘You took our children away from us, Sister Barbara. Our own children. Our babies. I don’t know how many you neglected so badly that they died, but I know that it was more than a few. Even when they managed to survive you stole them from us, you stole them right from out of their cradles, and you sent them away to be adopted. You changed their names on their birth certificates. You even changed the date they were born and where they were born so that even when they grew up they wouldn’t ever be able to find us again. Do you have any idea at all of the pain you caused? Not just to us, but our children, too? Do you know how many tears have been shed, and are still being shed, because of you? We could have filled the Atlantic Ocean twice over with our tears!’
‘You weren’t fit and decent mothers,’ Sister Barbara retorted, and now she began to sound angry. ‘They didn’t ever belong to you, those children. They belonged to God. That was why we had them adopted.’
‘And all the ones who died of pneumonia, or the flu, or choked to death on biscuits they shouldn’t have been given? What about them?’
‘They were all God’s children, too. Not yours. It was God who decided to take them back into His arms. Who are we to tell what dismal lives He was saving them from?’
‘Who was God to know whether their lives were going to be dismal or not? And even if they were going to be dismal, didn’t you always teach us how holy it is to bear the worst of our sufferings without complaint?’
‘Well, yes, that much is true,’ Sister Barbara agreed. ‘So why are you complaining now?’
‘Because I never pretended to be holy, unlike you and your sisters at Saint Margaret’s,’ said Riona. ‘But now I’m going to give you the chance to show me how holy you are.’ She stood up, crossed over to Sister Barbara, and sat down on the bed close beside her.
‘What are you going to do?’ asked Sister Barbara.
‘Do you remember, when my Sorley was very little, you used to come into the dormitory at bedtime and sing him that little song?’
‘No, I’m sorry. I don’t remember you or your son. There were so many girls. So many babies.’
‘I was allergic to you doing it. The way you used to talk to us girls, it used to set my teeth on edge. But what could I do? I was fifteen and you were a holy sister. I could hardly tell you to go and feck yourself, could I?’
‘What song?’ said Sister Barbara.
Riona leaned over her and grasped both of her skinny, blue-veined wrists, pinning them down hard against the horsehair mattress. Her face was now so close to Sister Barbara’s that their noses were almost touching and it was clear from the way Sister Barbara was blinking that she was finding it difficult to focus.
Riona’s large breasts were pressing down against Sister Barbara’s chest and she could feel the wires of the firm support bra underneath her sweater.
‘Do you know something, Sister Barbara?’ said Riona. ‘Your breath smells. It smells like chicken that’s gone off and the insides of old women’s handbags. You know what it smells of, most of all, though? It smells like you’re dead already.’
‘I don’t care what you do to me,’ said Sister Barbara, her eyes swivelling in all directions to avoid looking at Riona directly. ‘Saint Anastasia told her torturers to do their worst because that would only mean that she went to meet Jesus even sooner.’
Riona said, ‘Dear little bare feet, dimpled and white.’
‘Oh, that song!’ said Sister Barbara. ‘Of course I remember it! But I used to sing it to all the babies, not just yours!’
‘In your long nightgown, wrapped for the night,’ Riona continued, still staring into Sister Barbara’s face from only an inch away. ‘Come, let me count all your queer little toes... pink as the heart of a shell, or a rose.’
She paused. She didn’t turn around to Dermot, or give him any sign, but he reached down and took hold of Sister Barbara’s left foot. She tried to kick herself free, but Dermot was far too strong for her and she couldn’t move her foot even a millimetre, as if she were paralysed. He opened the curved blades of the secateurs and inserted her big toe between them.
‘No!’ said Sister Barbara. ‘Please, don’t do this! I admit that I didn’t forgive you all those years ago for your sinful behaviour, but I do now! I do! I will pray for you and your son every day for the rest of my life!’
‘What? I thought Saint Anastasia told her torturers to hurry up and get on with it.’
‘That was in another time, Riona, in another place. That was in the third century, in what is now Serbia.’
‘And what difference does that make? Pain is pain, Sister Barbara, no matter when you feel it, or where. Do you think I suffered any less than Saint Anastasia when I lost my Sorley? More probably, because I’ve been suffering my pain for more than forty years.’
‘I am pleading with you not to do this,’ said Sister Barbara. ‘What purpose will it serve?’
‘It’s your punishment, that’s the purpose!’ said Riona. ‘Don’t you think you deserve to be punished for what you did?’
‘If I have done wrong, then God will punish me!’
‘That’s always assuming that there is a God.’
‘Of course there’s a God! What are you talking about?’
‘Yes, but supposing there isn’t? If there isn’t a God, you’ll go to your grave unpunished, and I couldn’t bear the thought of that. Don’t you think it’s painful enough, knowing how many Bon Sauveur sisters have already died without my having the chance to hurt them as much as they hurt me?’
There was a long silence. Sister Barbara clearly couldn’t think of anything else to say and she began to breathe in short, shallow gasps, partly because Riona’s breasts were pressing so hard against her ribcage, and partly because she was terrified.
‘One is a lady that sits in the sun,’ sang Riona, very softly.
‘Please,’ said Sister Barbara, but it was then that Dermot squeezed the handles of the secateurs and they cut through the skin and flesh of her big toe.
Sister Barbara quivered and let out a sound that was more like a laugh than a cry of pain. Dermot squeezed the handles again and this time the secateurs had ratcheted up so that they cut halfway through the bone. They made a crunch that could easily have been mistaken for a thick tree branch being chopped off.
This time Sister Barbara screamed. It was such a high-pitched scream that it was almost beyond the range of human hearing, although it was probably less out of pain than the realization that she was going to lose her toe.
Dermot squeezed the secateurs a third time. There was another crunch, and Sister Barbara’s toe dropped on to the mattress with a spurt of blood.
‘Dear Lord, dear Holy Mother of God, dear Saint Anastasia, please save me from this purgatory,’ Sister Barbara babbled, and Riona could feel her spit against her face. She wanted to rub it off but she was determined to keep Sister Barbara pinned down. When she was a young girl, Sister Barbara had done far worse than spit on her and she could bear it until she and Dermot were done with her.
‘Two is a baby,’ she sang.
‘Oh God, please, oh God, please! Please, don’t do this, oh God, please!’ begged Sister Barbara. But Dermot took hold of her second toe and positioned the secateurs on either side of it and clipped it off with only two squeezes. His hands were bloody, so he wiped them on the mattress.
Sister Barbara cried out ‘dah!’
and then ‘dah!’ and then ‘dah!’ She was in such pain that she couldn’t even think straight, let alone appeal for Riona and Dermot to stop torturing her. It was taking all of Riona’s strength and weight to keep her flat on her back.
‘...and three is a nun!’ sang Riona, with spiteful emphasis on the word nun!, and Dermot clipped off her third toe. Sister Barbara’s face had turned so pale that she looked like a wrinkled ghost of herself and her eyes had rolled upwards so that only the whites showed. She was still conscious, though, because she kept on letting out intermittent cries of ‘dah!’ and ‘oh!’ and little flinching screams.
‘Four is a lily with innocent breast,’ sang Riona. Scrunch. And scrunch.
‘These clippers are me daza,’ said Dermot admiringly. ‘I’ll have to buy some meself.’
‘Five is a birdie asleep in its nest.’ Scrunch, and Sister Barbara’s little toe dropped off.
There was another silence and then, ‘Now what?’ asked Dermot.
‘What do you think?’ said Riona. ‘She has ten toes altogether, doesn’t she? Now I’ll sing it again.’
20
Katie had meant to leave Anglesea Street early, but by the time she had finished all her paperwork it was past six and the sun was setting. The clocks would go back this weekend and so at this time on Sunday it would already have been dark for nearly an hour. She hated the early winter nights. They always reminded her that little Seamus hadn’t lived to see his second Christmas.
She closed the file on her desk and stood up. As she did so, Detective Dooley came in, still wearing his brown oilskin jacket.
‘Oh, good. Glad I caught you, ma’am. I just came back from the Begleys.’
‘How are they taking it, as if I have to ask?’
‘Very bad altogether. Mrs Begley is in a terrible state. I left the counsellor with her, to calm her down if she could.’
‘I’ll see if I can’t visit them myself tomorrow, but I don’t really want to intrude.’
Detective Dooley held up a transparent plastic folder with a sheet of paper inside it. ‘Roisin left a note. It was tucked under her pillow in her bedroom, so they didn’t find it till it was too late.’
Blood Sisters Page 15