“LOOKS YOUNGER THAN the first,” said the coroner later in the week, after performing proper autopsies on all three women, and he snapped his rubber gloves off with a practiced gesture that gave him no joy at all.
This last one had been tucked away inside a tiny crawl space that was really part of the outer wall. Reached only through a door tiny enough to have suited a dollhouse, a narrow air duct led from the first girl’s room to her damp corner. Absent any ID, she was determined to have been in her early twenties, with black wiry hair that would have been beautiful when it was still clean enough to be brushed. Her skin, except for sores brought about by poor hygiene and lack of protein, was unblemished by blows. In contrast to the first girl, she had died of massive organ failure, brought about by gradual poisoning and malnourishment. Her arms were so thin no muscle tone remained. When they found her, she lay in a dirty blanket like a whipped dog. Like the first girl, she bore marks of having been routinely shackled. In fact, one of the officers gently unlocked a set of leg cuffs that had caused her ankles to bleed. What nobody had a satisfactory answer for was why both palms were ink-stained. A leaky ballpoint pen was eventually found, but no paper. If she had been writing to somebody in the darkness of her prison cell, what had she done with the message?
A few days went by while the guards inventoried every stick of furniture found inside the house.
Then, when one of Moira Hegarty’s many keys was found to unlock a dresser drawer, the story grew worse. And even the foulest gossip in Malahide was momentarily silenced at the sheer calculated ugliness of what the law dogs found.
The drawer first yielded two driver’s licenses. One was made out to a red-haired, well-nourished Fiona Walsh, twenty-four, of Castletownbere, County Cork; clearly the first girl found on the top floor. The other belonged to twenty-two-year-old Róisín Walsh, whose black locks and pale skin in the photograph bore little resemblance to the skeletal creature now lying on the metal slab next to her sister. It was unclear how and when the girls had arrived at Moira Hegarty’s house, but that’s not what moved newspapers off racks that week. No, the salient detail that gave the Evening Herald and the Irish Daily Star golden days for far longer than the initial shock value of the news was something most had already guessed.
Fiona and Róisín weren’t just two sisters who had suffered a grim death.
Moira—their jailer and killer—was their aunt.
SLAVE SISTERS SLAIN BY KILLER AUNT, barked one headline. BEAUTIES AND THE BEAST blared another. And despite their lack of tact, both were right. The girls were found to have ingested small, steady amounts of the anticoagulant rat poison coumatetratyl over a period of at least seven weeks, probably mixed in with their water and what passed for food. “Put simply,” the coroner said, “the girls’ organs gradually fell apart, and any cuts they sustained wouldn’t have healed. The youngest died of internal bleeding. And each would appear to have been chained to her bed at night. Their aunt really planned this one out.” The newspapers, as well as Desmond’s neighbors and former friends, just called it diabolical, which was true enough, too.
But the dresser drawer still didn’t offer up any clues as to why any of this had happened.
Among the inventoried effects were several sealed plastic bags with clumps of black dirt inside. Upon further analysis, the bags were also found to contain a button, one damask napkin, a crumpled pack of Marlboro Lights, and a used 12-gauge shotgun shell. None of these items seemed connected, but for the fact that the dirt on them had the same pH value. Some stationery was found, too, of which exactly one envelope and a sheet of expensive writing paper had been used. But forensics couldn’t determine for what purpose. Perhaps Róisín had used it but, if so, the questions went, for what?
After a few days, the neighborhood grew restless and less enamored of the cops’ authority. Kids dared one another to cross the white-and-blue Garda tape and grab a trophy from the wall, a stunt never repeated once the house had been shuttered and silenced and officially become inhabited by ghosts. One boy made off with a plastic Jesus figurine with a 40-watt bulb inside it to illuminate the halo. Another managed to get as far as the corner before a garda nabbed him and made him give back a gilt-edged portrait of the once-so-revered Taoiseach Eamon de Valera, the prime minister’s long face seeming to disapprove of the dead woman who had hung him above her mantelpiece.
The police were rapidly running out of clues and got ready to close the case.
Then the house offered up one more secret all by itself.
It came in the form of a previously overlooked scuff mark by the back door, which looked like someone had nearly ripped it off the hinges trying to get out. A fingerprint was found on the handle that didn’t match any of the three dead women’s, and theirs were the only ones otherwise discovered in the house. But a third soiled bed was found in the basement, and more of the same unknown prints were found on a sewage pipe. Whoever it was had managed to saw through the pipe with a primitive cutting tool and had very likely fled the house with handcuffs still attached to at least one wrist.
The two girls hadn’t been suffering alone. Someone else had been there with them, until very recently, a someone who was still out there, alive. And undiscovered.
When the last floorboard had been unpeeled and every spoon in the kitchen itemized without turning up anything new, number 1 Strand Street was finally cleaned out, boarded up, and offered for sale by the city. And as tantalizing as the unknown fourth person in that house might have been, with no apparent clues or even a single living relative to suggest any compelling explanation for the carnage, the gardaí quietly shuttered the case after a few months. Even the press eventually moved on to fresher kills.
Around the town’s bars, the case was still being tried, however.
“Moira was off her head,” went one popular theory. “She had it in for the girls. Murdering their beauty for jealousy’s sake.” Another version had the girls plotting to murder their aunt for her money in an extortion scheme that had backfired on themselves, but no cash was found anywhere in the house. “What a waste,” the neighbors said, and they were right, whatever the truth. “The mystery guest was Moira’s lover, who killed them all and left before getting what was coming to him,” went one particularly fanciful notion. But none of these theories lasted any longer than the time it took to utter them.
“What happened here began somewhere else,” a regular down at Gibney’s finally ventured one night after a half pint of stout and a lot of listening to crap gossip from people with more alcohol in them than common sense. “This kind of bloodletting takes years of hatred to ripen properly.”
If the boys in blue down on the Mall could have heard him just then and put down their breakfast rolls, they might well have cracked the case. But they still wouldn’t have understood the half of it. Because the story the women inside Moira’s house nearly took to their graves did begin somewhere else, in a small town in West Cork where everyone was driven by something far stronger and more combustible than hate.
It was love that put Moira and her two nieces into the quiet section of the tiny graveyard behind St. Andrew’s Church.
The kind of love that burns hotter than a blast furnace.
AT THE SAD little funeral carried out and paid for by Social Services the following week, no relatives or friends came by to pay their last respects to the Walsh sisters and their murderous aunt. Fiona and Róisín were placed a few feet apart from Moira, which the funeral director insisted upon, “because I’ll be damned if that awful woman should be able to reach out and touch those poor children.” As if to mock the two young girls, God had turned the coke-colored weather cape inside out and now shone bright sunlight through a misty rain, creating a banal rainbow beautiful enough to make the only guest in attendance weep so loudly it bothered mourners at another funeral two graves over.
Desmond appeared to have aged ten years inside of a month.
From the day the two Walsh sisters and their aunt had been carted o
ut to the meat wagon, he hadn’t been seen in public. That’s because the first thing he did when he came home to his freezing little flat was to take off his uniform and burn it. As days turned to weeks, the usual sounds of rare Jelly Roll Morton tunes seeping like golden pearls underneath the door from his old stereo went silent. Neighbors thought they heard quiet weeping. Children stuck their noses near his windowpane to catch a glimpse of the weirdo, and a few saw a flash of messy hair atop a pallid face. “Freak!” they whispered to one another, threw rocks at his front door, then ran home laughing. Parents knew, of course, but allowed that bit of exorcism. Better someone other than they take the blame for what had happened. What’s more, it appeared to have worked. A nice unsuspecting Polish family would eventually move into number 1, which once again looked like just another house on the block.
Desmond wore a shiny black suit with worn elbows and knees, like a waiter at a ferry cafeteria. He trembled as Father Donnelly said the requisite prayer. And he had to cover his mouth with both hands when the priest got to “Blessed art Thou amongst women.” Below the church hill, the soot-colored rooftops were slick with rain. Desmond remained standing long after the graves had been properly padded and marked. He still stood there as it really began to pour.
When he started back for his flat and nodded at a group of kids in the street, that’s the last anyone ever saw of him.
If it hadn’t been for another postman, named Niall, whose curiosity likewise picked him out of his humdrum existence and catapulted the poor lad headlong into the biggest adventure of his short life, the whole story might have ended there.
But the secret of the Walsh sisters was only just beginning to unfold.
Anybody walking near the cemetery that night might have had enough imagination to see the girls’ spirits rise from their cheap state-sponsored coffins and hover in the air near the service window of the post office, tapping on the glass. For they had unfinished business inside.
Desmond, poor soul, had been closer than he thought.
And neither Fiona nor Róisín, even in death, would be denied.
Interlude
DEAD LETTER
• 2 •
Niall heard no faint, spooky noises outside his window of the post office sorting section. Not because he didn’t enjoy a good ghost story as much as the next man and was likewise attuned to the faintest noise after nightfall.
No, it was because his wolf had turned into complete shite once again and he knew it, even before giving up on coloring its amber eyes.
“Arh, bollocks,” he muttered, and looked at the fifth drawing of the night. How was this possible? He used to draw felines pretty well back in art school; even old Professor Vassilchikov had to admit as much. Leopards and pumas leaped effortlessly across his pages in living color and burst out of their flat world into the third dimension every comic book fanboy lived for. But his canines never came off right. Niall would finish the head, work his way toward the strong hind legs, and add silver fur, hoping to preserve the animal’s feeling of pure lethal menace. But with astounding regularity, the creature always looked like an overfed dog or an arthritic fox by the time he got to the tail.
If he kept at it, he might one day become a decent clean-up artist for one of the comic book creators he admired, like the godlike American penciler Todd Sayles, whose seminal 1980s sci-fi series Space Colonies he’d read as a boy. It had featured a heavily armed intergalactic bounty hunter named Stash Brown and his talking monkey, Pickles, as they battled scores of murderous mutated aliens all across the Alpha Centauri star system and points west. But who was he kidding? Realistically, Niall had to admit, he could merely hope to shine the shoes of Mr. Sayles—or of his new prodigy, the artist Jeff Alexander, who had just inked and colored the four-part Wild West adventure Six-guns to Yuma for DarkWorld Comics and dazzled the bright eyes of boys all over Ireland and the world with classic gunslinger “Ain’t-enough-room-for-the-both-of-us-in-this-here-town-pilgrim fantasies.”
Niall looked at his pathetic, un-dangerous wolf one more time and realized he’d never get as far as either of those men’s front offices. He had been trying to create a cover for some kind of medieval fantasy comic book and had drawn castle keeps all night after clocking out from work, complete with falling-down walls and towers, tree stumps sprouting infestations of verdant moss, and creatures of all kinds roaming the lost world of a distant Ireland that had never even existed. The ravens to the far left, just above the fearsome gibbet, had come off well. Their mouths were red and expectant, and it was possible to believe they were about to swoop down and gnaw off a piece of the condemned man still swinging from the noose below. Knights farther back on the page, returning from the hunt with falcons tethered to thick gloves, were nearly majestic. Even the fair maiden Niall had drawn cowering in the forest clearing was a partial success; her black hair half shielded her milky face as she fled ever deeper into the protective darkness of the branches.
This, of course, is where he’d messed everything up.
Because he’d intended a wolf to appear suddenly in her path, head lowered and eyes ablaze, poised for the attack. It would have set the entire piece apart and guided every snot-nosed preteen lad into a wider world of adventure, where ravenous beasts feasted on defenseless young girls to the tune of at least ten euros per issue. But now, all the maiden would have to do to get past was feed the fat dog a Snickers bar from her handbag. It was pitiful.
Niall crumpled the paper and lobbed the ball where he’d disposed of the previous four—into the massive metal-caged bin where the mail sorters tossed all the dead letters, cases where senders had forgotten postage or a complete address. Each week, unless they came by to pay the penalty or reclaim the posted item, the bin was emptied into the trash.
The crumpled-up wolf didn’t go gently. The paper ball glanced off a few envelopes, rattled downward on the white avalanche, and bumped up against a bulky package, which loosed itself from the rest and shifted a few inches until it bounced into one of the steel bars with a loud thump! and settled there. Whatever was still inside that last envelope, it wasn’t mittens for granny but something with a harder edge and some weight on its bones.
For the first time that night, Niall forgot his self-pity and turned his head at the sound.
The dead-letter bin, which tonight looked to Niall’s once-so-excitable, still-adolescent inner eye as a half-lit guard tower in front of the maiden’s castle, stood less than three feet from the battered wooden desk his superintendent had recently sandwiched between a boiler and two out-of-order stamp-vending machines. Mr. Raichoudhury had pointed to the chipped piece of furniture with a grave mien as if the gesture would make invisible all its coffee and cigarette stains.
Niall hesitated, then got up. In the two years since quitting art school in silent agony and reluctantly donning the funereal uniform of an entry-level An Post junior postperson so he could pay rent, he had grown to hate opening the latch every Thursday and climbing inside the metal cage to empty its never-sated paper guts. But something about tonight was different. A mean winter draft coughed loose sheets of paper across the floor. Stash Brown would have cocked the hammer on his laser shotgun and expected alien vermin to come crashing out of the bin, Niall thought. Pickles would have bared his teeth and shrieked like the killer monkey he was.
Niall walked over to the bin, opened the latch, and climbed inside.
A fat envelope, dark brown and stained, lay at the bottom of an improvised paper sled run. Niall picked it up and was about to toss it back among the others when he flipped it over and glanced at the sender’s name and address. It looked as if it had been scribbled in a hurry. The letters were crooked and smudged, but could still be read:
From: Fiona Walsh
1 Strand Street, Malahide
The name of the murdered girl, who had died in a vain attempt to protect her little sister Róisín? Impossible. A hoax, surely, now. Niall stopped breathing for just a moment. His brain didn’t quite know how to pro
ceed after that. Toss it aside as a joke? Freeze in terror at the ghastly implication? After realizing he was involuntarily hugging the bulky package, he went for option number three, one that usually plays more tricks on enlightened minds than the previous two. Niall pretended to suspend judgment, thereby rendering himself secretly more afraid of what might lurk inside. He quickly stepped out of the bin, which to him had begun to resemble the forest from his own pathetic cover drawing, and made for his desk.
Open it right away, yes, of course. That would have been the only natural thing to do. But as the light from the battered desk lamp (which he had recently “liberated” from Mr. Raichoudhury’s secret supply by the overseas bins) shone onto the paper, more was revealed that rendered his fingers quite still. No postage had been affixed, which is what had got it sent to the reject bin to begin with. It had been simply addressed to:
Anyone at all
Post Office
Townyard Lane, Malahide
Niall turned the envelope over once more and squinted like an old diamond cutter. Now he could clearly see that a second, more harried message had been added to the brown paper before dispatch. It had once been covered in rain droplets, but was still readable. It was a prayer, a last wish told to an unknown soul from one about to be extinguished. The words, askew and jumbled, read:
We are already gone. Read this tale only to remember us.
At this, Niall couldn’t stop the light trembling of his hands, even if he’d wanted to. Of course he’d read the newspapers and knew about what was already being called “the battle on the second floor,” where Fiona had fought off the beast who had pretended to be a kindly woman. How could he not follow her written incantation? He began to loosen the flap and could see a shadow of something black inside when he heard a booming voice and a set of heels clacking together behind him as if on the parade ground.
Darling Jim Page 2