White Bones: 1 (Katie Maguire)

by Graham Masterton

  Katie said nothing, but closed the car door and watched him being driven off, his car bouncing and swaying over the potholes. She crossed the road and walked back into the Garda headquarters, her head bowed, and when Garda Maureen Dennehy said, “Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll has been looking for you, ma’am,” she didn’t look up, not once.

  Eamonn “Foxy” Collins was already waiting for her when she walked into Dan Lowery’s pub in MacCurtain Street. It was a small pub, its walls crowded with bottles and mirrors advertising Murphy’s stout and souvenirs and vases of dried flowers. Eamonn Collins liked it partly because of its theatrical connections (it was right next door to the Everyman Palace theater) but mainly because of its gloomy stained-glass window, which had originally come from a church in Killarney, and which made it impossible for anybody to see into the pub from the pavement outside.

  He was sitting in the small back room where he could watch both the front door and the stairs which led up to the toilets. Opposite him sat a big silent man with a blue-shaved head and protruding ears and python tattoos crawling out of the neck of his sweatshirt. Eamonn himself was lean and dapper, with russet brushed-back hair that was beginning to turn white in the front and which had earned him his nickname. He wore a beautifully-tailored two-piece suit in mottled gray tweed, a black waistcoat and very shiny black Oxfords.

  Katie sat down opposite him, deliberately obscuring his view of the front door.

  “Will I buy you a drink?” he asked her. They didn’t need to exchange any pleasantries. His eyes were like two gray stones lying on a beach in winter.

  “A glass of water will do.”

  “Jerry,” said Eamonn, and the big silent man stood up and went to the bar.

  “You’ve been taking it very easy lately,” said Katie. “Five days’ fishing in Sligo… two weeks golf in South Carolina.”

  “It’s good to know that I’m missed.”

  “I miss you like a dose of hepatitis A.”

  “You’re the light of my life, detective superintendent. But a little more live-and-let-live would go a long way.”

  “I don’t think that drugs have anything much to do with letting people live, do you?”

  Eamonn gave a one-shouldered shrug. “What I always say is, you shouldn’t let nefarious activities fall into the wrong hands; you have to keep crime clean.”

  “Is that what happened up at Meagher’s Farm? Somebody was keeping crime clean?”

  “I don’t know what happened up at Meagher’s Farm, I’m sorry to say. Things have been very peaceful here in Cork in the past few months, that’s why I went off on two weeks’ holliers. The only thing I can tell you for sure is that it wasn’t anything to do with me; or with anybody else that I know of.”

  Eamonn was the only man she knew who actually pronounced his semi-colons, sticking out the tip of his tongue and making a soft little clicking sound. She had always found his fastidiousness to be the most alarming thing about him. He ran one of the most profitable drug rackets in the city, and he had been personally responsible for the brutal murders of at least five people. Yet all his clothes were handmade in Dublin and he was always quoting from Yeats and Moore.

  There weren’t many of Cork’s criminals who actually gave her that bristling-down-the-back-of-the-neck feeling, but “Foxy” Collins did.

  “Have you eaten at all?” he asked her. “I know that you detectives are often too busy to eat, and the beef sandwiches here are particularly good. Or the Kinsale fish chowder.”

  “I’ve had lunch already, thank you,” Katie lied. “What I need to know from you is who’s gone missing in the past six months. Eleven people, that’s a lot of bodies. If they’re your bodies, I’m sure that you’ll be anxious to have your revenge. If they’re not, then I’m sure you’ll be equally anxious to make sure that one of your competitors gets what’s coming to him.”

  “But what if I’m responsible?” asked Eamonn. “I wouldn’t tell you that, now would I?”

  “I don’t think you are responsible. You’re more flamboyant than that. When you deal with somebody, you like the whole world to know about it. Like that time you set fire to Jacky O’Malley in the middle of Patrick Street.”

  Eamonn came close to smiling. He took a sip of his Power’s whiskey and fixed her over the rim of his glass with those stones for eyes. “You know what it looks like to me, this massacre of yours? It looks like the work of knackers. There’s been some bad blood feuds between some of the families, and if I were you I’d be looking to talk to some of the Traveling folk.

  “Tómas Ó Conaill?”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me. He was always a vicious bastard, and his head was always full of fairy nonsense.”

  There was a long silence between them. In the front of the pub, a businessman was shouting on his mobile phone. “I will, yeah. I did, yeah. I am, yeah.” Eventually Eamonn leaned forward and traced a pattern on top of the varnished table with his well-manicured fingertip.

  “The way it was done, you see. The bones all mixed up like that. The knackers do that to stop a person from being admitted to heaven. If you can’t find your feet, how can you walk through the Pearly Gates?”

  Katie said, “I didn’t know that you were such an expert on Irish superstitions.”

  “I take a very keen interest in anything that’s a matter of luck.”

  “Well, you’ll let me know, won’t you, if you hear about anybody whose luck ran out up at Meagher’s Farm?”

  “I will, of course. It’s always been my policy to co-operate with the Garda.”

  “One day, Eamonn, I promise, I will break you.”

  Eamonn gave her a smile. “‘You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will… but the scent of the roses will hang round it still.’”

  She left the pub without touching her glass of water and without saying goodbye. The big silent man with the shaved head followed her to the door and opened it for her.

  7

  Dr Reidy called her from the University Hospital at 11:25 on Friday morning.

  “I’ll be finishing my written report over the weekend, detective superintendent. But I think you ought to come over to the path lab so that I can give you some preliminary findings. Which will surprise you.”

  “Surprise me? Why?” asked Katie, but he had already banged down the phone.

  Liam drove her to the hospital. It was a gray day, dry, and not particularly chilly, but with low cloud pouring endlessly over the city from the west. One of those days when you could easily imagine that you would never see the sun again, for the rest of your life.

  She didn’t need an overcoat: just her prune-colored wool suit with the red speckles and a cream-colored rollneck sweater. Liam wore his new black leather jacket.

  Liam said, “There’s no doubt about it, so far as I’m concerned. Whichever way you look at it, Michael Meagher had to know that the bodies were buried under his feedstore. I know that Mrs Meagher plays down his republican connections, but it’s totally possible that he never told her what he was doing, most of the time.”

  “Eugene Ó Béara denied any knowledge, though, didn’t he?”

  “He did, yes, but that was hardly the surprise of the century.”

  They parked at the front of the hospital and Katie led the way through the double swing doors and along the corridor to the pathology laboratory. An old man in a plaid dressing-gown sat in a wheelchair at the end of the corridor, and frowned at her through glasses that were so fingerprinted that they were almost opaque. He looked the spitting double of Samuel Beckett, but if you had said to him “nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!” he might very well have agreed with you but he wouldn’t have known that it came from Waiting for Godot.

  Dr Reidy was standing at the far end of the pathology laboratory wrapped in a green plastic apron. The pearly gray light from the clerestory windows lent him a halo. Eleven trestle tables were arranged in two lines, each table draped in a dark green sheet, and on each t
able lay a collection of bones, with paper labels attached to every one of them. When Katie saw them like this, she thought they looked even more vulnerable and pathetic than they had when she had first seen them up at Meagher’s Farm, a family of fleshless orphans. She felt a sense of desperate sadness, not least because it was far too late to do anything to save them.

  Three laboratory assistants were still carefully sorting through the bones, trying to reassemble the skeletons into their previous selves. They were using a wallchart with eleven skeletal diagrams on it to chart their progress.

  Dr Reidy blew his nose into a large white handkerchief. “We have identified most of the component parts of these unfortunate individuals – and, yes, they were all female, of varying ages. I will be giving you a list of the bones that are still missing so that you can send your officers back up to Meagher’s Farm to search with rather more diligence than they obviously did before. I will attach drawings of what each particular bone looks like. I don’t have any optimism that any of your officers can tell their coccyx from their humerus.”

  “You mean their arse from their elbow,” said Katie, without smiling.

  “Quite, detective superintendent. What an anatomist you are.”

  Katie walked around the nearest table and looked at the skull lying forlornly at one end, its bones arranged beneath it. “You said you had a surprise for me, doctor.”

  “That’s right. Not an unpleasant surprise, you’ll be happy to know. I’ve made some preliminary tests on these bones and I can tell you with absolute certainty that none of these ladies died in your lifetime… or even my lifetime, so we can forget about Operation Trace. All the marrow’s decayed but I should be able to retrieve some identifiable DNA. I’ve also sent some bone-samples off to Dublin for full amino-acid racemization and when I get the results back I should be able to give you a much more accurate date. But you’ll probably be relieved to know that you’re not looking for a murderer who’s likely to be still alive today.”

  “You’re sure they were murdered?”

  “I think it’s ninety-nine percent likely but not totally certain. Apart from the holes drilled in the top of the femurs, and the doll-figures attached, each had a narrow chisel-like object pushed into both eye-sockets. Each was obviously dismembered, but it won’t be possible for me to determine whether this process began before or after death. There’s something else very interesting, too.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  Dr Reidy lifted a tibia from the table in front of them and handed it over so that Katie could examine it more closely. “What do you make of that?”

  “It’s a leg-bone.”

  “Of course it’s a leg-bone, detective superintendent. But do what detectives are supposed to do and detect what’s noteworthy about it.”

  Katie turned it this way and that. “I don’t know. What am I looking for?”

  With one blunt, trembling, nicotine-stained forefinger, Dr Reidy pointed to a series of diagonal scratches all the way down the side of the bone. “These striations,” he said. “They appear to have been made with a very sharp short-bladed knife of the kind that butchers use for trimming ribs.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that their flesh didn’t naturally decay. Before they were interred, every one of them was completely boned.”

  Katie said nothing, but looked around the laboratory at the ivory litter of human remains. There was something so tragic about them. Unknown, unburied and unmourned. And God alone knew what they must have suffered, before they were killed.

  Liam lifted his spectacles so that he could take a closer look. “What are we talking about here, sir? Why would somebody want to scrape people’s flesh off?”

  Dr Reidy struggled under his plastic apron, found a handkerchief, and loudly blew his nose. “Cannibalism?” he suggested.

  “Cannibalism? Jesus, this isn’t Fiji.”

  “I’m just giving you the forensic findings, Inspector Fennessy. But the findings are that quite apart from the obvious attachment of small cloth figures to their femurs, all of these skeletons had the flesh scraped off them, with considerable care and effort, as if it was being done for a specific, ritualized purpose. Of which cannibalism may have been part.”

  Katie said, “Can you give me just a rough idea of how old these skeletons are?”

  “From the tests I’ve done so far, which – as I say – are not at all conclusive, I’d say that their bones have been lying under Meagher’s feedstore for about eighty years, and possibly more. Long before John Meagher’s grandfather bought the property, and long before Michael Meagher owned it.”

  “What about the dolls?”

  “They’re all made out of linen, knotted and wound around like the funeral-windings of a mummy. The screws and nails and hooks are handmade, most of them, and we can probably date them very accurately indeed. Certainly their corrosion is consistent with them having been buried for at least three-quarters of a century, and possibly longer.”

  Katie said, “Have you ever come across any killings like this, ever before?”

  Dr Reidy shook his head. “Never. As I say, there was obviously some ritualistic element in what happened to these women, but precisely what it was I can’t tell you. I never saw bones so methodically stripped of their flesh before. And I’ve never seen anything like these dolls. And that’s in twenty-nine years of medical jurisprudence.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “My dear, I really can’t tell you. I’m going off to play golf in Killarney. You, presumably, will be trying to find what kind of people could have committed such an idiosyncratic crime, and why.”

  Katie stood close to Dr Reidy for a while, looking at all of the eleven skulls with their crooked, jawless grins. Then she simply said, “Thank you.”

  “You’re quite welcome,” Dr Reidy replied, laying an uncharacteristically avuncular hand on her shoulder. “It always makes life more interesting to see something new, even if it is rather stomach-churning.”

  That afternoon, she held a media conference at Anglesea Street. The conference room was dazzled by television floods and the epileptic flickering of flashlights. She held her hand up in front of her face to shield her eyes.

  “Early forensic examination indicates that these skeletons were interred over eighty years ago. Until we receive more information from Dublin, we won’t have a precise date, but it looks as if they could have been victims of a some kind of ritual massacre.”

  “A Celtic ritual?” asked Dermot Murphy, from the Irish Examiner, lifting his ballpen.

  “We don’t know yet. But we’ll be talking to several experts on Irish folklore, to see if there’s any kind of religious or social precedent for killings like these.”

  “You said that the bones had been cleaned by a butcher’s knife. Could this be cannibalism we’re talking about here? Or a farmer feeding human beings off to his livestock? I read a horror story about that once.”

  “This is not a story, Dermot. This is reality.”

  “So what can we say? Without being too sensational?”

  “You can simply say that we’ll be calling in all of the qualified assistance that we can. We’re also appealing for anybody who has any knowledge of similar killings to come forward and share their information with us, no matter how inconsequential they think it may be. This is a difficult and highly unusual case, but you can rest assured that we’re making progress.”

  “Is there any point in continuing a full-scale investigation?” asked Gerry O’Ryan, from the Irish Times. “The murderer’s more than likely dead by now, surely?”

  “So far the investigation is still open,” said Katie. “I’m going to be talking to Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll tomorrow morning, and we’ll decide what action to take next. Obviously we don’t want to waste taxpayers’ money on pursuing a case that will give us no useful result.”

  The media conference broke up, and the television lights were switched off, leaving the room in sudden gloom. Kati
e talked for a while to Jim McReady from RTÉ News, and then she walked back to her office.

  She was halfway there when she heard the jingling of loose change as somebody tried to catch up with her. “Superintendent!” called a voice. It was Hugh McGarvey, a freelance journalist from Limerick, a skinny little scarecrow of a man with a withered neck and a beaky nose. “You’re right on top of this case, then, superintendent?”

  “I’m doing everything I possibly can, yes.”

  “Would it be impertinent of me to ask you, then, who your husband is on top of?”

  “What?” she said, baffled.

  “Your husband, Paul. I was having a few drinks with some friends at the Sarsfield Hotel in Limerick on Thursday night and lo and behold I saw your husband stepping into the lift with some dark-haired girl in a short blue dress. A fine half she was, very vivacious. And very friendly they looked, too.”

  Katie suddenly felt short of breath, as if somebody had slapped her in the stomach.

  Hugh McGarvey added, “There was no Paul Maguire in the hotel register that night, but then, well, you wouldn’t have expected there to be, would you?”

  “Mistaken identity,” said Katie. “You should be careful of that, Hugh. A lot of people get themselves into serious trouble, pointing the finger at the wrong person.”

  “Oh, I’m pretty sure it was him.”

  “Couldn’t have been. He wasn’t even staying at the Sarsfield.”

  “I was only checking, superintendent. It would make a bit of a story, wouldn’t it, if it was true?”

  “Listen,” said Katie. “You were invited here for a media conference about a serious crime – even though that crime was committed over eighty years ago. That’s the story. Not me.”

  “You’ll always be the story. At least you will be until another woman makes the rank of detective superintendent.”

  “Your breath smells,” said Katie.

  Paul said, “Nothing happened in Limerick, Katie. I was trying to buy some building supplies from Jerry O’Connell, that’s all. We had a bite to eat together, and a couple of drinks, and then I went to bed. On my own.”