‘I see,’ said Katie.
There was a long silence between them, and then Doctor Walid said, ‘I am sorry. If you would like to see him, he is in the recovery room at the moment. Yes, I know. Not a very appropriate name under the circumstances. Then he will be taken down to the mortuary. I presume that you will be asking for his remains to be examined by a state pathologist.’
‘I will be, yes. His family’s on the way here and they should arrive soon. Is he fit for them to see him?’
‘We will do our best to make his appearance acceptable, of course.’
Once Dr Walid had left, Katie turned to Kyna and said, ‘I’ll wait here for Gerry’s next of kin. Will you be free later this evening? I think I’m going to need a shoulder to cry on, even if you’re one of the reasons I’m going to need it.’
Kyna gently twisted her fingers free from Katie’s and then took her face in both hands and kissed her on the lips.
‘Just call me,’ she said. ‘You know what they say. A shoulder to cry on is better than money found in a sycamore tree.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I don’t know, Katie. Not really. I’m beginning to wonder what anything means.’
Five
It was nearly half past nine before Katie returned to Anglesea Street. Detective Barry’s mother and two brothers had arrived at the hospital at six from Tipperary and she had tried to explain to them as gently as possible how he had died, and that the shock would have meant that he suffered very little.
His mother was unable to speak. All she could do was wring her handkerchief between her hands and stare at Katie as if she were pleading with her to tell her that she was lying and that her darling son wasn’t dead at all, but simply sleeping. His older brother stood behind his mother with his hands on her shoulders and tears running freely down his face, so that they dripped into her hair.
Katie hung up her jacket and sat down at her desk. She was so exhausted she thought she would probably stay at the station overnight and call her new neighbours, the Tierneys, to feed her Irish setter, Barney, for her. She didn’t feel hungry any more, but she knew she ought to eat something, so she would probably go down to the canteen and see if they could make her a bowl of lentil soup and a ham sandwich to go with it.
She was leafing through the files that had been left for her to look at when Inspector O’Rourke appeared at her door, carrying a tablet. He was short and blocky and red-faced, and with his shirt sleeves rolled halfway up his biceps he looked as if he were ready to claim anybody who annoyed him.
‘Francis, are you still here?’ said Katie. ‘I thought you were getting up early tomorrow to go to Kinsale.’
‘I was, ma’am. I am. But something’s come up and I thought I’d wait for you to come back before I briefed you about it. I didn’t want to disturb you at the hospital, like.’
‘Well, thanks for that,’ said Katie. ‘Gerry’s family turned up and it wasn’t the happiest of occasions, as you can imagine. So, what’s happened?’
‘We’ve kept this totally under wraps at the moment because we think there could be political ramifications, do you know what I mean, like?’
‘Go on.’
‘Two fellers were renovating a cottage just behind the Blarney woollen mills this morning and when they lifted up the floorboards in the living room they found the remains of a whole family – father, mother, two kids and even two dogs. Not recently deceased, though. They were practically mummified.’
‘Mother of God. Do we know how they died?’
‘All of them were killed by a single shot to the back of the head. All of them – even the baby and the dogs. That’s what made me think that it could well have been political. I mean, it could have been a gang killing, but I think that’s unlikely considering the whole family was executed.’
‘Who did you send out there?’
‘Two of your Kids, Markey and Ó Doibhilin. They’ve interviewed the two fellers who discovered the remains and all of the neighbours, and they’ve sealed the cottage off. The technical experts will be going up there first thing tomorrow morning, but I don’t think there’s any real need to make a bust. Ó Doibhilin sent me a few pictures and I’d say that by the style of the clothes they’re wearing and the dried-up look of them, that family’s been lying under those floorboards for a good fifty years, or even longer.’
‘That doesn’t make it any less tragic,’ said Katie. ‘A whole family murdered – name of Jesus, children, too. You would have thought that somebody would have missed them, especially in a small community like Blarney.’
‘Sure, that’s one of the first questions we’ll have to be asking,’ said Inspector O’Rourke. ‘But if the bodies have been lying there for all that length of time, that solves one problem, doesn’t it? For us, at least. Whoever killed them has almost certainly passed away themselves by now.’
‘You’re probably right, Francis. But we still have to find out who they are and how they died. I’ll tell you one thing for certain, Dr Reidy isn’t going to be pleased. You know how much historical pathology costs, and I gather he’s overspent this year’s budget already. He threw a sevener last summer when they dug up that bog woman in Mayfield. It cost a rake of money to carry out a post-mortem, even though she’d been lying there since the Iron Age.’
‘Still and all, I don’t think identification is going to be all that difficult,’ Inspector O’Rourke told her. ‘That row of houses was built specifically for workers at the Martin Mahony mill, so the odds are that the father was employed there, and maybe the mother, too.’
‘But the mill went out of business in the seventies, didn’t it? Does anybody still have any records of who worked there?’
‘It went into receivership in 1973 and it seems like when it closed down the last employee was told to burn all the company records in the furnace. However, he decided to keep them for posterity’s sake, along with some sample cards of wool, and when he died he donated them to the Blarney Historical Society and they still have them. We’ve already been in touch with them and they’ve said that they’ll be more than happy to cooperate. They’re in a bit of a mess, apparently, but they’ll search through them for us and see if they can find what we’re looking for.’
‘Do you have the pictures that Ó Doibhilin sent you?’ Katie asked him.
‘Oh, sure, yes,’ said Inspector O’Rourke. He prodded at his tablet, frowned, prodded again, then handed it across. Detective Ó Doibhilin had taken at least a dozen photographs from different angles of the bodies lying between the joists, including close-ups of the father’s desiccated hand and the backs of the heads of all four victims, clearly showing bullet entry wounds.
Katie examined the pictures closely. ‘I don’t know,’ she said after a while. ‘It’s not easy to tell for certain when they were killed – not from what they’re wearing, anyway, because their clothes are so plain. From the style of the children’s smocks, though, I’d guess early to mid-1920s. Maybe a little earlier, looking at the baby’s little lace-up boots.’
‘Myself, I reckon 1910 or thereabouts,’ said Inspector O’Rourke. ‘But like you say, they’re dressed very plain because they were most likely millworkers and they wouldn’t have been able to afford the latest fashion, even if they knew what it was. They probably wore the same clothes for years until they wore out, so I could be a decade adrift either way. My old feller wore the same pair of green corduroy trousers for thirty years. After he died my mother swore that she could still hear them walking around the house at night, all on their own.’
Katie said, ‘I’ll go up to Blarney tomorrow morning and take a sconce at those bodies for myself. You were totally right to keep it quiet, though. I don’t want this getting out until we know a whole lot more about the circumstances. You know what people in Cork are like – far more touchy about the past than they are about the present.’
‘Tell me about it,’ said Inspector O’Rourke. ‘The mother-in-law still goes on about the old Opera Hou
se catching fire in 1955 and how she stood for hours in the lashing rain with her da watching it burn right down to the ground. Not too many people had TV in those days of course.’
‘Well, my father’s the same,’ said Katie. ‘He can’t stop talking about Coal Quay in the old days. But let’s get back to Gerry Barry. Has O’Donovan played back the CCTV?’
‘He did, yes. I watched it myself, too. You can see Denny Quinn come running around the corner from MacCurtain Street and Barry running after him. Then almost immediately the Land Rover appears around the corner, very slow, like it’s been following him. Quinn crosses the bridge, but halfway across he’s slowing down and Barry’s beginning to catch up to him. The Land Rover is creeping along just behind Barry. You can make out two fellers in it, but they’re both wearing dark glasses and the sun’s reflecting off the windscreen so you can’t clearly see their faces. You can just make out that the driver’s wearing a black Cork Hurling T-shirt, but that’s all.’
‘Number plate?’
Inspector O’Rourke shook his head. ‘Stolen. It was taken about six months ago from a Honda Civic registered to some music teacher in Carrigaline.’
‘How about the hit-and-run itself?’
Inspector O’Rourke shook his head again. ‘As bad luck would have it, this huge great container lorry from John O’Donovan’s Haulage goes past just at the moment when Barry was hit. By the time the lorry’s balled on you can only see the Land Rover reversing off the pavement and then shooting off down Clontarf Street as fast as you like. Then you can see some old feller coming to help Barry, but that’s about it.’
‘Have you managed to identify what model of Land Rover it was?’
‘It’s a Discovery TDV6 5E, probably dating from 2004 or maybe 2005. The colour doesn’t tally but it’s probably been resprayed. We’ve been checking with the NVDF of course, and our own records of stolen vehicles, but so far nothing at all.’
‘You’ve checked with the DVA in Coleraine? And the DVLA in Cardiff?’
‘Of course, yes, but still nothing. I contacted Knock Road, too, Quilty being an Armagh man. Don’t worry, though, I didn’t mention Quilty by name or give any indication that we suspect him of being involved.’
‘Good man yourself,’ said Katie. She stood up and said, ‘I think I’ll get myself down to the canteen now. Are you finished for today?’
‘I’d be better be, otherwise the old doll will kill me. Her sister was coming around this evening for dinner, with her husband, and she’s not exactly buzzing that I had to cry off. Mind you, to be honest with you, I’d rather be here than there. That brother-in-law, he works for the county council and all he ever talks about is the never-ending battle against fly-tipping. He’d break your melt.’
Katie smiled. Francis O’Rourke was a hard-bitten, uncompromising officer with twenty-three years of experience, but she had seen who enforced the law in the O’Rourke family and it was definitely Maeve.
*
Because it was so late, there was only one cook on duty in the canteen and all she had to offer was leek and potato soup and Cooleeney cheese rolls, but Katie was too tired to leave the station and go to a restaurant, and not hungry enough, either. As she sat alone at a table by the window, eating her roll, she couldn’t stop herself from seeing Detective Barry smiling under his oxygen mask, fatally crushed but dreaming optimistic dreams.
The soup was thick with plenty of pepper, the way she made it herself, but she had only taken three or four spoonfuls when her iPhone pinged and she saw that she had a text message.
Are you coming home tonight? I’m here outside waiting for you. I love you and need to talk. J.
Katie slowly lowered her spoon. She could hardly believe what she was reading. She had been sure that she would never hear from John again, ever. When he had discovered that her fling with her former neighbour had left her pregnant he had reacted with such fury that he had ripped in half the portrait of her that he had been painting, and stormed out of the house. That had happened before Christmas and since then he had answered none of her texts or emails. She hadn’t even known if he was still in the country.
She felt as if the floor were sliding away beneath her, like in an earthquake. She didn’t know if she ought to reply to him or not. She had been deeply in love with him, which was one of the reasons she had left it so late to tell him she was expecting another man’s baby. After all, he had already left her once before, to go and work in America, and that was when her brief entanglement with her neighbour had taken place. The man was dead now, and she had miscarried, but had John found out about that?
The cook came out from behind the counter and approached her.
‘Your soup all right, ma’am?’ she asked her, with a worried frown.
‘Yes, yes, it’s very tasty,’ said Katie. She held up her iPhone and said, ‘Something critical’s come up, that’s all. It goes with the job.’
The cook was a young, plump girl, no more than nineteen. She had a pink plastic hair slide to pin up her floppy fringe and unplucked eyebrows and a smooth puppy-fat face that was still untouched by disappointment or grief or betrayal – or by love that unexpectedly turned to bitter resentment, if she had ever been in love at all. How could Katie explain to a girl who looked like that why she was suddenly unable to finish her soup?
She read John’s message again. She was tempted simply to trash it, but then she thought that would be petty. She thought for a few moments, and then she wrote: Not at home tonight. Up the walls tomorrow. But could meet you at Hayfield Manor bar maybe 6-ish.
She stared at her text for a long time before she sent it. She had chosen the five-star Hayfield Manor because the bar was dark and discreet and she was less likely to be seen there by any of her fellow officers or Cork’s resident skangers. But was she also trying to remind John of what he had walked out on? Last year they had spent a very expensive and romantic night there to celebrate her birthday.
She took a deep breath and pressed Send.
Six
When she arrived in Blarney the following morning, she found that two white Technical Bureau vans were already parked on Millstream Row, nose to tail behind the green builder’s skip, as well as three Garda patrol cars and two unmarked Ford Mondeos. She had to park right at the end of the row, next to the grey stone wall that surrounded the Blarney Woollen Mills Hotel. After Mahony’s mill had closed down in 1973 the factory had become derelict, but two years later a former employee called Christy Kelleher had raised enough investment capital to reinvent the site as the largest Irish shop in the country and, eventually, as a hotel, too.
A light drizzle was falling, but every now and then the sun gleamed silver behind the clouds, so there was hope for a brighter afternoon. All the same, Katie had put on her black waterproof jacket with the pointed hood that John had always said made her look like Fuamnach, the witch goddess. She had reminded him that Fuamnach had turned her husband’s second wife into a pool of water, and then a worm, and finally into a beautiful butterfly that had fluttered away out of his grasp.
Detective Ó Doibhilin had seen her arriving and was waiting for her by the front door. He was a tall, serious, good-looking young man, even though his face was very long, which had led to his fellow officers giving him the nickname ‘Horse’. They would rib him when he walked down the corridor by singing the Rubberbandits’ song ‘Horse Outside’.
Even before she reached the house Katie could see intermittent flashes from the technical experts’ cameras coming from inside, like summer lightning. Two technicians were dragging a dark green tarpaulin over the top of the skip and tying it down with cords.
‘How’s it going?’ she asked Detective Ó Doibhilin.
‘Slow,’ he told her. ‘Bill Phinner says the bodies are so fragile it’s going to take days to get them out of there without breaking them all into bits. He says the pathologist ought to study them in situ before they’re moved, in case they do damage that destroys any evidence – like breaking their ski
n, like, or dislocating their bones.’
‘Well, I called the State Pathologist’s Office first thing this morning and they’re sending down the acting deputy, Dr Kelley.’
‘Come on anyway, I’ll show you,’ said Detective Ó Doibhilin, and led Katie through the front door and into the narrow hallway, which was already crowded with two gardaí, one male and one female, both of them bulked out in their hi-viz jackets, and a technical expert in a white Tyvek suit.
Katie had known what to expect, but when she entered the living room and saw the bodies lying face-down between the joists, their clothes and hair covered in a fine layer of dust, she felt a sense of sorrow that she rarely experienced when she confronted the bodies of recent murder victims. She had seen entire families killed before: in head-on crashes on the N20, or asphyxiated by carbon monoxide fumes in holiday homes in West Cork. But even before she knew who this family were, she strongly suspected that Inspector O’Rourke had been right and that their killing had been political. It had been not only a tragedy for this father, and this mother, and these two small children, but part of the ongoing sadness of Irish history.
She balanced her way over the joists and the few remaining floorboards to the opposite side of the room where Bill Phinner was showing one of his newer assistants how to take a fibre sample from the woman’s faded maroon dress. He didn’t look at Katie as she joined him, but said, ‘Bring tears to a stone, wouldn’t it? Doesn’t matter how long ago it happened, somebody came into this house one day and shot every one of them, and we can’t even tell in what order. I pray to God they shot the parents first. The last thing you’d ever want to see is your own children murdered in front of you.’
From the doorway, Detective Ó Doibhilin said, ‘The fellow from the Blarney Historical Society is going through the records for us, but he says they’re in no kind of order at all, so he’s still trawling through them and we don’t have a name for this family yet. But an auld wan two doors down thinks they were called Langtry, because her mother used to talk about them.’
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