Blood Sisters

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Good. And don’t take any nonsense from Mother O’Dwyer. If you can’t identify the flying nun immediately, the search warrant gives you the authority to requisition the photographs as possible evidence and bring them into the station so that you can take a look at them closer.’

  The ambulance was backed up closer to the fountain and Sister Barbara’s body was lifted on to a stretcher. Bill came up and said, ‘They’re ready to take her off to the mortuary now. I’ll go along there myself with Tyrone and Eithne and we’ll start the preliminaries straight away. It’ll be Christmas before we know it and we could all do with the overtime.’

  ‘Oh stop,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘I hate fecking Christmas.’

  ‘How about you, ma’am?’ Bill asked Katie. ‘I’ll give you an update in the morning. What time do you think you’ll be getting in, like?’

  Katie said, ‘No, Bill. I think I’ll come with you. I want to see what’s been done to this poor woman.’

  Bill raised one black eyebrow like a crow taking off from a rooftop. ‘You’re sure about that? It’s going to be taking us three or four hours at least. Maybe longer.’

  But Katie thought of going home to John, who would still be awake and waiting for her, and would probably want to carry on where they had left off. She knew that she would be lying next to him trying to be responsive while all she would be able to picture in her mind would be Sister Barbara’s mutilated feet.

  ‘No, I’ll come along,’ she said. ‘I’m wide awake now, and besides, it’s about time I came and breathed down your neck while you’re at work.’

  ‘Please yourself,’ said Bill. ‘Just don’t be overdoing it, like, okay?’

  ‘Bill, are you trying to tell me something?’ she asked him.

  ‘Nothing that you don’t know yourself already, ma’am. But I have three daughters and I’ve been working for the Technical Bureau for twenty-three years next February, so I’ve encountered women in all kinds of conditions. So let’s just leave it at that, shall we?’

  He gave her a small, conspiratorial smile and walked off. Katie stood there for a moment watching him go, feeling partly upset that he had noticed the change in her, but partly relieved, too, that somebody else knew she was pregnant, or had guessed, at least, and that the knowledge wasn’t a secret any more.

  Detective O’Donovan was standing over by the fountain now, so she waved to him and called out, ‘Patrick! I’m off to the hospital! I’ll see you after so!’

  * * *

  Outside Cork University Hospital the car park was in chaos. A coach carrying thirty-two Cork supporters back from a hurling match against Kerry had overturned on the N22 at the roundabout with Model Farm Road. Seventeen people had been injured, three of them seriously. The rest were wandering around outside the hospital, dazed and still drunk. Some of them were bruised and bloodied and sitting on the wall with their heads in their hands. Others were teetering about, shouting and swearing.

  Katie went through reception and made straight for the mortuary. After all the commotion outside, it seemed even more deathly silent in there than usual. Bill Phinner was already there, with his two technical experts, as well as a mortuary assistant whose white coat was buttoned up wrongly and whose hair was sticking up as though he had just got out of bed. They were down at the far end of the mortuary and only the fluorescent lights immediately above them were switched on, so that they looked as if they were on a stage set. They were standing around the body of Sister Barbara who was lying on a steel autopsy table. They had taken off her coif and scapular, but she was still wearing her tunic, with a belt of woven black wool.

  ‘Ah, here you are, ma’am,’ said Bill.

  ‘That’s one hell of a rumpus outside,’ said Katie.

  ‘The perils of drinking and driving,’ said Bill. ‘I was talking to the garda outside and he said the coach driver had fifty-three micrograms of alcohol in his breath and couldn’t even pronounce his own name. Fair play, though, his name was O’Siodhachain.’

  Katie approached the autopsy table. She felt calmer than she had before, and more detached. Sister Barbara was still in rigor, so that she looked more like a fibreglass dummy from Brown Thomas’s window than a real nun.

  Bill said, ‘We’ve taken another body temperature reading and we’ve examined her eyes. I’d say the time of death was fifteen hundred hours yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘That’s very precise of you.’

  ‘Well, to be honest with you, it could have been an hour either side of that. But I’m a great believer in what the eyes can tell you. They’re a much more accurate indicator of t.o.d. than rigor mortis or livor mortis. Here, take a closer look. See... they’re cloudy, because the potassium in the red blood cells has broken down, and the eyeballs themselves have flattened because of the loss of blood pressure.’

  Katie looked down at Sister Barbara and Sister Barbara stared blindly back at her, with her mouth still dismally drawn down as if she were saying, Dear God in heaven, what did I ever do to deserve this?

  ‘We’ll be taking off her clothing to see what other injuries she might have sustained and take all the necessary pictures and measurements, but then we can leave the rest to Dr O’Brien. Who could wish for a better birthday present? Go ahead, Tyrone.’

  Tyrone was a serious-looking young man with rimless spectacles and spiky black hair. He picked up a pair of surgical scissors and began to cut into the black fabric of Sister Barbara’s tunic. Normally, a nun would have been wearing two underskirts, a top skirt of black serge and a skirt of black cotton, but as Tyrone snipped all the way up to her woollen belt, her blotchy, stick-like legs appeared and they could see that she was naked underneath.

  ‘She didn’t have on a holy habit when she went missing from the rest home,’ said Katie. ‘Whoever killed her dressed her up like this on purpose.’

  ‘Believe me, ma’am, I’m glad that you’re the one who has to work out the motive,’ said Bill. ‘All I have to do is work out what was done to her. You remember that fellow who was stabbed to death in Sallybrook and the fellow who killed him dressed his body up in his mother’s clothing, underwear and all? You never did find out why he did that, did you?’

  ‘Ah, he was nothing but a header,’ said Katie. ‘I don’t think he knew himself why he did it.’

  Katie watched as Tyrone finished cutting Sister Barbara’s tunic all the way up to the coif, including the sleeves. Bill and Tyrone then lifted her up so that Eithne could tug the tunic out from under her and then fold it and drop it into a large evidence bag. Eithne was a very pretty girl, with blonde hair cut like a dandelion, and although she had only been attached to Bill’s team for five months, she was already proving herself to be highly professional as a forensic artist as well as a technical expert.

  ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God,’ said Katie, as Sister Barbara’s body was fully exposed. ‘The state of her la.’

  It looked as if Sister Barbara had been viciously whipped. Her body was striped with scores of purple diagonal furrows, all the way down from her neck to her knees, and across her upper arms. Most of the furrows were less than five centimetres apart, although they were lumpier and more concentrated around the lower part of her stomach and her genitals, where some of them had broken the skin.

  It was what had been done to her breasts, though, that Katie found the most disturbing. Her pale-brown nipples hadn’t been touched, but all around them the flesh of each breast had been scorched and blistered in a pattern like the rays of the sun, about fifteen centimetres in diameter. At the top of each pattern there was a small cross, although this was more pronounced on the right breast than the left.

  Bill reached out and stroked one of the furrows on Sister Barbara’s right thigh with his black-gloved finger.

  ‘I’d say she was whipped with something like a cat-o’-nine-tails. Multiple thongs of thin cotton cord, knotted at the end. You can tell by the way the contusions are bunched up and how they’ve criss-crossed over each other. Very painful if y
ou’re alive.’

  ‘But you don’t think she was?’

  Bill shook his head. ‘Dr O’Brien will have to do some tests to make absolutely certain, but I’d guess she was dead already. It’s often difficult to tell for sure, especially if a body’s been handled roughly, but you’ll find a chemical present in bruises that were inflicted when a person was still alive, leukotriene, which is what causes inflammation. It’s noticeably absent in post-mortem bruises, which I’d say these are.’

  ‘How much hatred would you have to be feeling to whip somebody like this when they couldn’t even feel it?’ said Katie.

  ‘Like I say, ma’am, I only collect the evidence. I leave the motivation up to you.’

  ‘What about her breasts? That pattern around them, it looks almost like a monstrance.’

  Bill peered at Sister Barbara’s breasts more closely. ‘Eithne? What do you think?’

  ‘I think Detective Superintendent Maguire is absolutely right,’ Eithne said, so quietly that Katie could hardly hear her. ‘It looks as if somebody’s taken the luna out of the middle of a monstrance and then heated it up red-hot and pressed it over each of her breasts. My grandma has a monstrance almost exactly like that, with the cross on top of it and everything.’

  ‘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”.’

  26

  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 ho
odies 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.’