A Terrible Beauty

by Graham Masterton

  Three laboratory assistants were still carefully sorting through the bones, trying to reassemble the skeletons into their previous selves. They were using a wall chart 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 evenmylifetime, 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 toDublin 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'tFiji ."

  "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 feed store 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 atAnglesea 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 fromDublin , we won't have a precise date, but it looks as if they could have been victims of some kind of ritual massacre."

  "A Celtic ritual?" asked Dermot Murphy, from theIrish Examiner,lifting his ball pen.

  "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 theIrish 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. Katie 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 fromLimerick , 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.<
br />
  "Your husband, Paul. I was having a few drinks with some friends at the Sarsfield Hotel inLimerick 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 inLimerick , 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."

  "You were staying at the Sarsfield, though? You told me you were staying at Dwyer's."

  "I was going to stay at Dwyer's but they didn't have a room."

  "Dwyer's didn't have a room?Dwyer's?In the middle of the week?"

  "For God's sake, Katie. Outside of this house you're a detective superintendent, but inside of this house you're my wife. I don't expect you to put me through the third degree just because some ratty reporter imagined he saw me with some fictitious woman."

  Katie said, "All right. Sorry. You're right."

  "It's always the same. You're always making me feel guilty even when I haven't done anything."

  "I said I'm sorry."

  "Jesus Christ," said Paul. "I love you and this is what I get in return."

  Katie didn't know whether to believe his protestations of innocence or not. If he had been one of her suspects, she wouldn't have accepted his story for a second. Of course she could call Dwyer's and check if he was telling the truth, and she could call the manager at Sarsfield's, too, but what good would that do? Paul was her husband and at some point she had to trust him, not just because she felt so responsible for him, not just out of loyalty, but also because she wasn't yet ready to face the alternative. She didn't want to choose which CDs were hers and which were his. She didn't want to sell the house, because The Nursery was here, and she couldn't leave The Nursery.

  Not to be able to walk into that room again, and close her eyes, and imagine that she could still smell that baby smell of talcum powder, and still hear that clogged, high-pitched breathing-just now, that would be more than she could bear.

  Paul swallowed whiskey and said, "Hugh McGarvey's stirring it, that's all. He's a scumbag. He's probably still sore because you complained about that rubbish he wrote about police overtime."

  "Forget it, Paul. He made a mistake, that's all."

  "Me and Jerry went through a whole bottle of whiskey between us. I couldn't have flahed anybody if I'd wanted to."

  "I said forget it."

  He sat down on the pink-upholstered sofa next to her, and stroked her cheek. "There's only one woman I love, Katie, and that's you."

  "What's wrong with you, Paul? Why can't you tell me?"

  "There's nothing at all wrong with me, Katie. I'm just trying to find my feet again, that's all. Can't you ever give me a chance, for Christ's sake?"

  "I'm always giving you a chance. But what happened to the happiness, Paul?"

  He was just about to say something when the phone rang. Katie picked it up and it was Liam, and he sounded as if he were standing next to a busy road junction.

  "I've had a call from Eugene Ó Béara. He says that there's somebody who wants to talk to us. Three o'clock on Sunday, inBlackpool ."

  "All right, then. He didn't give you any idea what it was about?"

  "No, he was being all mysterious."

  Katie put down the phone. She looked at Paul but Paul looked back at her with an expression that said nothing but:what?She wanted so much for him to give her some hope. She wanted him to say that he had got his self-confidence back, that everything was going to be different. But Paul took another swallow of whiskey, and tugged at Sergeant's ears, and said, "You like that, boy, don't you? You like that."

  8

  By the time the two builders had dropped her off at the bridge by the Angler's Rest, on the way toBlarney , the tarmac-gray sky had grown even darker, and huge spots of rain had begun to fall across the road. The builders gave her a wave and a toot of their horn and turned off westward toward Dripsey. She crossed the road and stood with her thumb sticking out.

  The breeze blew the long blond hair that streamed out from underneath her knitted woolen cap. She was a tall, athletic-looking girl, with a honey-coloredCalifornia suntan. She was wearing a navy blue windcheater and blue denim jeans and Timberland hiking boots, and carrying a rucksack.

  Hitchhiking through Ireland had been magical for her. She had planned this trip for over eighteen months, sitting on the veranda of her parents' home inSanta Barbara , poring over photographs of misty green mountains and rugged beaches and picturesque pubs with raspberry-painted frontages and bicycles propped outside. Most of those pictures had come to life, and she had stood on the rocks on the Ring of Kerry overlooking the pale turquoise sea, and tapped her feet to Gaelic music in tiny one-room bars, and walked along the banks of the Shannon and the Lee, knee-deep in wet green grass.

  Now she was on her way toBlarneyCastle , a few miles northwest ofCorkCity , to do what all conscientious tourists were obliged to do, and kiss the Blarney Stone.

  She had only been thumbing for a lift for five minutes before a black Mercedes pulled into the side of the road and waited for her with its engine running. Its hood was highly polished but its sides and trunk were thickly coated with brown mud. She ran up to it and opened the door.

  "Pardon me, are you going throughBlarney ?"

  "Blarney?" he said. "I can take you anywhere your heart desires."

  "I only need to get toBlarney ."

  "Then, of course."

  She climbed into the front passenger seat. The interior of the car was immaculately clean and smelled of leather. "I'm not taking you out of your way?" she said, tossing her rucksack onto the backseat.

  "Of course not. Iamthe way."

  They drove smoothly off towardBlarney . Although it was only three o'clock in the afternoon, the day grew suddenly so dark that the driver had to switch on his lights. There were no other cars in sight, and both sides of the road were overhung with shadowy green woods.

  "You're American," he said.

  "Yes, but Irish heritage. Fiona Kelly, I'm fromSanta Barbara,California . My great-great-grandfather came fromCork , and he emigrated toNew York in 1886."

  "So you're rediscovering your roots?"

  "It's something I've always wanted to do. I don't really know why. My parents have never been back here, but I saw a Discovery program about Ireland two or three years ago, and do you know, the minute I saw those mountains, and those fabulous green meadows "

  "Ah, yes. They say that if you come from Ireland , you have to come back to Ireland to say your last words.In articulo vel periculo mortis. If you're dying, you know, your last plea for absolution can be heard by any priest at all, even if degraded or apostate, even if you've committed grievous sins which can normally be forgiven only by some ecclesiastical superior."

  "Well, wow. You seem to be pretty well versed. Are you a priest?"

  "No," he smiled. "I'm not a priest. But, yes,
I'm pretty well versed, as you put it."

  Suddenly, it began to rain thunderously hard. The driver slowed down, but his windshield wipers were still whacking from side to side at full speed, and Fiona found it almost impossible to see where they were going.

  "Maybe we should pull over," Fiona suggested, nervously.