Buried

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Langtry. I see. Did her mother say anything about them disappearing all of a sudden?’

  ‘She did, yeah. She said she used to play with the little Langtry girl but one day she called for her and she wasn’t there any more. That was about all she could remember, though she heard somebody say that the family had all headed off to America.’

  ‘It’s biggus ovus that they didn’t,’ said Bill Phinner, glumly surveying the bodies that lay at their feet. ‘Did this auld wan give you any idea when it was, that the Langtrys went missing?’

  ‘No, she couldn’t tell me exactly.’

  ‘Well, how old is she?’

  ‘Mid- to late seventies, I’d say.’

  ‘That would mean she was born in the 1940s. This little girl here is probably seven or maybe eight years old, taking into account that children were less well nourished in those days, and so they didn’t grow nothing like as big as they do now. Let’s suppose that when your auld wan’s mother was playing with this little girl they were roughly the same age, and then let’s suppose that she was around nineteen or twenty when she brought your auld wan into this world. That means we’re talking about 1920 for these killings, or thereabouts.’

  Katie knelt down so that she could examine the bodies more closely. ‘I think you’re right. Francis O’Rourke showed me the pictures you took yesterday and I thought their clothes had a 1920s look about them. Of course we’ll be able to pin down the date exactly if the Historical Society can find them in their records.

  She gently stroked the little girl’s dress. ‘Provided these are the Langtrys, that is. For all we know at the moment, the Langtrys murdered another family and hid them under their floorboards and that’s why they took off to America.’

  ‘You have a very imaginative mind, detective superintendent,’ said Bill Phinner. ‘You ought to be writing them mystery novels.’

  ‘Until I have all of the facts, Bill, I have to think about all of the possibilities.’

  ‘Listen, we’re taking the floorboards back to the lab. They have some dark marks on them which could be bloodstains, and we can test those for DNA.’

  ‘I read that report you produced last year on historical DNA testing. But after more than ninety years? Is that possible?’

  ‘It should be. You remember that case in Togher, when that feller who ran the bicycle shop was accused of stabbing his wife to death?’

  ‘Of course. You found bloodstains on the legs of the bed, and you proved that they were hers. But they weren’t more than fifteen years old, were they?’

  ‘No, but if we do find any bloodstains on these floorboards, I have pretty high hopes that we can still get full DNA profiles, even if they’re a whole lot older. DNA is a fierce stable molecule, do you know what I mean? In every one of those tests we ran last year the bloodstains came from cold cases that were more than twenty-five years old, and we got positive results from 82 per cent of them. We’ll be running the same kind of tests on these floorboards.’

  ‘Well, good luck with it. We need to know for certain who this family were, even if we never find out who killed them, or why.’

  ‘We’ll start by using crossover electrophoresis. That’s the same method they used to identify bloodstains in Kosovo. It was more than a year and a half after an ambush and the blood was soaked right into the soil, but they still managed to put a name to most of the victims. And they identified the body of that young mountain climber in New Zealand, didn’t they, even though he’d been missing for forty-two years?’

  Katie said, ‘My father used to say “if bloodstains could only talk”. Now it seems like they can.’

  ‘Oh, not just bloodstains. Semen and vaginal fluid – they’re fierce talkative, too.’

  Tell me about it, thought Katie, thinking of John, and of David Kane who had made her pregnant even though he had sworn he had had a vasectomy. We think we pass through this world without leaving any trace that we were here, but all of us leave lasting evidence behind us, every day, wherever we go. Blood, skin, sweat and fingerprints, hair and saliva. Even our breathing tells where we’ve been.

  ‘All right, Bill,’ she said. ‘I’ll let you crack on. I think I’ll go and have a chat with this auld wan two doors along.’ She turned to Detective Ó Doibhilin and said, ‘Would you care to introduce me to her? Sometimes a woman will say things to another woman that she wouldn’t think of saying to a man.’

  ‘You can say that again, like,’ said Detective Ó Doibhilin, more to himself than to Katie.

  They walked to the house two doors down and rang the bell. The door was opened by a small boy with his hair sticking up at the back and a half-eaten jam sandwich in his hand.

  ‘How’s it going, sham?’ asked Detective Ó Doibhilin. ‘Okay if I have another word with your granny?’

  ‘Granny!’ the boy called out, with his mouth full. ‘Granny, it’s the shades again!’

  After a few moments a diminutive woman appeared, wearing a long pond-green cardigan. She was almost as small as the boy, with curly grey hair stained orange from nicotine at the front and a face that was puckered up from years of heavy smoking. She was clutching tightly at the large glass beads around her neck, as if Katie and Detective Ó Doibhilin were vampires, and her necklace was a crucifix.

  ‘I told you all that I can remember,’ she said, and coughed, and coughed again.

  ‘I know you did, girl,’ said Detective Ó Doibhilin. ‘I’m pure grateful for it, too. But this is Detective Superintendent Maguire and she wanted to come and see you personal-like, so that she could show her appreciation for the assistance you’ve given us.’

  ‘Oh?’ said the woman expectantly, as if she thought that Katie might have come to give her some kind of reward.

  ‘Is it all right if I come inside and talk to you?’ Katie asked her.

  ‘I told this feen all that I can remember.’

  ‘I know. But I’d appreciate it if you could go over it again. Maybe there’s some little detail that you thought you’d forgotten.’

  The woman shrugged and said, ‘All right.’ She dug into the drooping pocket of her cardigan and brought out a crumpled ten-euro note. ‘Run down to the SuperValu would you, Micky, and bring me twenty Carroll’s? And make sure you’re back before you get there. You can keep the cobbage.’

  ‘There won’t be no cobbage, Gran, they’ve gone up.’

  The woman tutted and dug into her pocket again and gave him fifty cents. ‘The price of fags these days, it’s enough to make you weep.’

  Katie gave her a tight smile, but said nothing. The price of cigarettes was the reason why Detective Barry had been killed.

  The boy ran off, still holding his jam sandwich, while the woman opened the front door wider and shuffled into the living room. Katie said to Detective Ó Doibhilin, ‘It’s okay. I’ll take it from here.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ he said, although he didn’t try to hide his relief.

  ‘Go on,’ said Katie, and followed the woman inside.

  The living room was gloomy and wallpapered with faded brown roses. The Artex ceiling was brown, too, but that had been stained by cigarette smoke. The carpet was slime-green, almost the same colour as the woman’s cardigan, with smaller off-cuts of carpet on top of it to keep it from wearing out. A picture of the pope hung over the fireplace and there was a 3-D picture of Jesus over a display cabinet crowded with china dogs and tarnished silver teapots.

  Katie sat down opposite the woman in a large armchair upholstered with slippery brown plastic. ‘I don’t know your name,’ she said.

  The woman was poking about in a crowded glass ashtray until she found a half-smoked cigarette. She lit it, took a deep drag, and then breathed out twin tusks of smoke from her nostrils. ‘Nora,’ she said. ‘Nora O’Neill.’

  ‘So you’ve lived here all your life, Nora?’

  Nora had swallowed smoke, so to begin with she could only shake her head. Then she said in a strangulated voice, ‘I only moved back here when my husband Bry
an passed away. Ah, I tell you, it was shocking, how quick he went. The panchromatic cancer, that’s what it was. One minute he was eating pork sausages, the next minute he was knocking on heaven’s door. That was in 1989. Then my ma passed away, so I’m here on my own now.’

  ‘Who’s the boy?’

  ‘Oh, Micky. I take care of him while his ma goes to work. She’s a waitress at the Muskerry Arms and that’s only across The Square, like. He’s a bit of a cheeky scheltawn but he’d do anything for me. I’m not really his gran, but that’s what he calls me.’

  Katie said, ‘Your mother used to play with the little Langtry girl.’

  ‘That’s right. Aideen, her name was. My ma often used to wonder why the Langtrys disappeared like that, without so much as saying goodbye to no one. There one day, vanished the next. Well, now we know why, God have mercy on their souls. It wasn’t only my ma who was playmates with Aideen of course. My granny was best friends with Aideen’s mother, Radha.’

  Nora sucked the butt end of her cigarette down to the filter and then crushed it out. ‘Do you have children yourself?’ she asked Katie. ‘Must be fierce difficult, with your job, having children.’

  ‘Yes it is, but no, I haven’t,’ said Katie. ‘I had a little boy, Seamus, but he passed away when he was only a year old. Cot death.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. Will you be trying again? You’re still young enough, aren’t you? I think that children bring such a light to your life. You see your kids, do you know what I mean? – you see your kids and you think to yourself, at least I’ve done something with all these years that God gave me, apart from smoking fags and playing bingo and watching the telly.’

  ‘Sure I’d like to have another child,’ Katie told her. ‘It’s just that I don’t have a partner at the moment.’

  ‘You’re wearing a ring, though.’

  Katie held up her left hand. ‘I was married. Not any more. I think I wear this just as a souvenir. You know, a reminder to myself not to do it again, or to be very careful if I do.’

  Nora was poking around in the ashtray again, but then she stopped poking and said, ‘Talking of souvenirs, my ma left me one that my granny passed on to her. She said that Radha Langtry had given it to her, not as a present, like, but to keep it safe. Of course when the Langtrys disappeared like that, my granny kept it because she didn’t know what else to do with it. Radha had made her promise that she wouldn’t let anybody know that she had it, ever, and she kept her word right until the day she died.’

  ‘Do you still have it?’ Katie asked her.

  ‘It’s upstairs, at the bottom of the press. I haven’t thought about it in years.’

  ‘What exactly is it?’

  Nora stood up, brushing ash from her skirt. ‘I’ll show you so, if you wait there for a minute.’

  She left Katie in the living room while she climbed the stairs, coughing all the way. Katie heard her footsteps creaking across the bedroom floor above her and then the press door banging. She prayed that Nora wouldn’t take too long. The smoke in the room left her feeling as if she couldn’t breathe, and she wondered how she had ever smoked herself when she was in her teens.

  After a while, though, she heard Nora coughing her way back down the stairs. She paused in the hallway and said, ‘What’s taking that Micky? He’s as slow as a spa’s appetite that boy.’ Then she came back into the living room and handed Katie a small cardboard box with the lid fastened with withered elastic bands. The box was no more than ten centimetres square. It was yellowed and its edges worn through with age.

  ‘Open it,’ said Nora. ‘See for yourself. It doesn’t mean nothing to me. I only held on to it because my granny promised Radha Langtry she’d keep it safe.’

  Katie snapped off the elastic bands and carefully opened the lid. Inside, wrapped in tissue paper, she found a bronze metal badge with a shield on it. On the top of the shield there was a terrestrial globe, covered with bees, and on the shield itself there was a ship under sail. On the left side stood a heraldic antelope, with a chain around it, and on the right side a lion, guardant. There was a motto beneath the shield, Concilio et Labore, and beneath that the name Manchester.

  Underneath the badge there was a small folded sheet of paper. Katie opened it and saw that there was a message on it, written in faded blue ink.

  My Darling, this protected me through every battle. May it always protect you. Yours for all eternity, Gerald.

  ‘What do you make of it?’ asked Nora. ‘It looks like Radha may have had a fancy-man, don’t you think? A British soldier, too.’

  Katie carefully replaced the sheet of paper and the badge. ‘That’s a possibility, yes. But we’ll have to do a lot more research into it first. The note doesn’t mention Radha by name, so it may not even have been hers, but something she was keeping for a friend. Would you mind if I borrowed it? I’ll give you a receipt and we’ll take very good care of it.’

  Nora flapped her hand and said, ‘Keep it if you like. It’ll only go back in the press until I die, and then what?’

  ‘I’ll still give you a receipt for it,’ Katie told her. ‘I’ll also need your written acknowledgement that it’s yours and that you inherited it from your mother.’

  The front door opened and Micky appeared with a lollipop stick protruding from his mouth. He tugged a packet of Carroll’s cigarettes out of his trouser pocket and handed them over. Nora had peeled the cellophane off the packet with her claw-like fingernails and taken out a cigarette and lit it before Katie had even had time to compliment Micky on how quickly he had run to The Square and back.

  Katie took out her notebook and pen and wrote Nora a receipt, as well as a short note for Nora to sign to confirm that the badge was hers and how she had come by it.

  As she opened the door to leave, Nora said, ‘This isn’t going to cause trouble, is it? I suddenly have this feeling in my water that this is going to cause trouble.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Katie. ‘And thank you for your help. It could prove very valuable.’

  As she walked back to the house where the dead family had been discovered, however, and where the technicians’ cameras were still flashing, she had the strongest feeling that Nora was right and that it might have been better if the badge had remained at the bottom of her press, unopened until all of Cork’s old enmities were long forgotten – or forever, whichever came the sooner.

  Seven

  As she drove back to Anglesea Street, Detective O’Donovan called her to say that the Land Rover had been found at the end of a small track off the road between Frenchfurze and Boycestown, south-east of Carrigaline.

  ‘It was totally burned out, like, so it probably won’t be much use for forensics, but the goms left the number plates on it so we know for sure it was the same vehicle that hit Gerry Barry. We’ve checked the VIN and it seems like it went missing six weeks ago from a farm in Tassagh, just south of Armagh. The owner reported it stolen at Newtownhamilton and the peelers there are scanning the incident sheet for me and sending it down as a PDF.’

  ‘Mother of God, this smells more and more like Bobby Quilty by the minute,’ said Katie.

  When she arrived back at her office she rang Eithne O’Neill, one of Bill Phinner’s technical experts. Eithne specialized in identifying bodies that were decomposed or crushed or mangled beyond all recognition, and one of the ways she did that was by tracing and dating the jewellery they had been wearing.

  Katie was prising the lid off her cappuccino when Eithne came in, looking scarlet-cheeked and flustered. She was a very pretty girl, but this morning she was wearing no make-up at all and her hair was tousled.

  ‘Eithne, you’re looking kind of shook there,’ said Katie. ‘Are you all right?’

  Eithe took a balled-up tissue out of her pocket and wiped her nose. ‘I’m not, as it happens. I’ve got one of my summer colds and they’re always worse than the winter ones. I’m as sick as a small hospital, to tell you the truth.’

  ‘You should go home, make
yourself a goody and go to bed.’

  ‘I can’t. I’m too busy. I’ve more than a dozen DNA tests to get through.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll talk to Bill and make sure he gives you a couple of days off. If you’re up to it, though, I’d appreciate it if you’d to take a look at this for me.’

  She handed Eithne the box with the badge in it. Eithne opened it up and peered at it closely.

  ‘It’s a British Army cap badge,’ she said. ‘I mean, that’s obvious of course, because it has “Manchester” on it.’

  ‘Any ideas how old it might be?’

  ‘Not offhand. It’s oldish, of course, but I couldn’t give you a precise date until I look it up. It might be easier than you think, though, because quite a few British regiments changed their badges or amalgamated or got disbanded, especially after the First World War.’

  ‘So early 1920s would be a fair guess?’

  ‘I’ll check it for you. It shouldn’t take long. I’ve a record of just about every military badge that ever was.’

  ‘There’s a letter in there, too. Perhaps you could test that for age. I’m pretty sure it’s contemporary with the cap badge, but I just want to be certain, especially after that Yeats business.’

  Katie was referring to a case they had dealt with in March, when a Cork art dealer had sold a smeary-looking seascape as a genuine Jack Butler Yeats. The buyer had paid nearly 50,000 euros for it but had later become suspicious and made a complaint to the Garda. The dealer had produced a letter allegedly written by Yeats and specifically mentioning the seascape, but Eithne had used a video spectral comparator to prove that the signature was a good, but not perfect, copy.

  ‘Sure I can do that for you,’ said Eithne. ‘I’ll check it out with the spectrometer.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Katie. ‘But make sure you get yourself well.’