A Terrible Beauty

by Graham Masterton

  Fiona remained in a trancelike state as he opened up the flat, rectangular case of surgical instruments. It contained two bone saws, a selection of scalpels, and a shining collection of stainless-steel knives. He took out a long-bladed scalpel, closed the case, and then stood up again.

  "I don't know if you want to pray," he said.

  10

  Katie and Liam were early for their three o'clock appointment with Eugene Ó Béara. They pushed their way through the battered red doors of The Crow Bar in Blackpool, across the street from Murphy's Brewery. The bar was crowded and foggy with cigarette smoke. A hurling match between Cork and Kilkenny was playing on the television at deafening volume, while the pub radio was tuned equally loudly to an easy-listening station.

  A few months ago, the pub doors would have been locked between two and four for "The Holy Hour," even though it would have been just as jam-packed inside, but the Irish licensing laws had been relaxed during the summer. Katie and Liam made their way along the darkly varnished bar to a booth at the very back, partitioned from the rest of the pub by a wooden screen.

  Katie got some hard looks as she walked through the pub. Every man there knew who she was, and she recognized Eoin O'hAodhaire and both of the Twohig brothers, whom she had personally arrested for car theft in her first year as detective sergeant. Micky Cremen was there, too, sitting in the far corner glowering at her over his pint. Micky had tried to start up his own protection racket until Eamonn Collins had got to hear of it; and Micky had been lucky to end up in prison instead of the Mercy Hospital.

  "What can I fetch you folks?" asked Jimmy the barman.

  "We're fine for now, thanks," said Katie. "We're waiting for some friends."

  "Friends, is it?" said Jimmy, as if he couldn't believe that gardaí could have any friends, and if they did they certainly wouldn't find a welcome in The Crow Bar. But then the front door opened and Eugene Ó Béara and another older man walked in, with a huge Irish wolfhound on a lead. The pub noticeably hushed, and everybody paid extra attention to the hurling match, or to what they were saying to their friends, or to anything else at all except for Eugene Ó Béara and his white-haired companion, and his giant dog.

  Eugene came directly down the length of the bar and slid into the booth next to Katie, while the older man eased himself in beside Liam, facing her. Eugene was about thirty-eight years old, with tight curly chestnut hair that was just beginning to turn gray, and the features of a plump, pugnacious baby. He wore a khaki anorak and a Blackpool GAA necktie, and he laid an expensive Ericsson mobile phone on the table in front of him.

  The older man had a hawklike face, and white hair cropped so short that Katie could see every bump and scar on his skull. She thought she recognized him but he didn't introduce himself and neither did Eugene. His fingernails were very long and chalky and he wore three silver rings with Celtic insignia on them. His dog buried itself under the table and lay there with its spine pressed uncomfortably against Katie's legs.

  "Eugene tells me you were asking him about some people gone missing," said the older man. His voice sounded like somebody sandpapering a cast-iron railing.

  "That's right. But that was before we found out how long they'd been dead. I expect you've seen it on the news. The pathologist estimates that they were probably killed more than seventy-five years ago."

  "I saw that, yes. But that's why I called Eugene about it and that's why I'm here today."

  Katie leaned forward expectantly but the old man sat back and noisily sniffed and didn't volunteer anything more. Katie looked at Eugene and then she looked at Liam, and Liam made a little wobbling gesture with his hand to indicate that it might be a good idea to buy him a drink.

  "A glass of Beamish and a double Paddy's, thanks," the old man told her. He had caught Liam's hand-wobble out of the corner of his eye.

  "Eugene? Guinness, isn't it?" Katie asked, and Eugene gave her a barely perceptible wink, as if he had got a fly in his eye.

  Everybody in the pub suddenly roared and cheered as Cork scored a goal, and the old man waited patiently for the noise to die down. Then he said, "I told Eugene that there haven't been any killings like that in recent times, not eleven females, not to my knowledge. But when I saw it on the telly that they were buried there for nearly eighty years, that's what rang a bell."

  Jimmy the barman brought the old man's Beamish over and he took a small sip and fastidiously wiped his mouth.

  "When he was alive, God bless his soul, my great-uncle Robert told me all kinds of stories about what the boys got up to in the old days. He said that in the summer of 1915 a bomb was planted by the British barracks wall up on Military Hill, and that it went off premature, and killed the wives of two of the British officers, and badly hurt another. Blew her arms off, that's what great-uncle Robert told me.

  "A week after that, a young woman went missing from her home in Carrignava, and then two more girls from Whitechurch. By September there were five gone altogether, and of course the boys blamed the English for it, thinking they were taking their revenge for the officers' wives. A sixth woman went on Christmas Day, and then three more before the end of January.

  "The boys hit back in February. They ambushed a British Army truck at Dillon's Cross, and they shot two Tommies. You can read all about it in the history books. There was bad enough blood between the Irish and the English at that time, and all of this made it ten times worse. But girls went on disappearing, right up until the spring of 1916, around the time of the Easter Rising. No more went missing after that, but no trace of none of them was ever found, nowhere."

  "How many altogether?" asked Katie.

  "Eleven exactly. Eleven, same as it said on the news, which was why I thought you ought to know."

  "So what you're suggesting is, the English could have murdered those girls."

  "The dates tally, don't they? And there was motive enough."

  "You could be right, although it isn't going to be easy to prove anything. I can't see the British Army giving me much assistance, can you?"

  "Somebody must know what happened," put in Eugene. "If those girls were taken by official order, that order must be somewhere on file, even after all these years. And even if they were taken unofficially, don't tell me that nobody ever spoke about it or wrote about it."

  "Long shot," said Liam. "Verylong shot. But at least it gives us a better idea of when the women were actually killed."

  Katie thought about mentioning the rag dolls, in case they, too, rang a bell; but then she decided against it. The dolls were the only way she had of authenticating any evidence she was given.

  "I don't suppose your great-uncle kept a diary of his experiences," she said.

  The old man gave another sniff. "Couldn't write. My father was the very first man in our family who was educated, God bless his memory. Very proud of it he was, too. And that's why he made sure that I was given the gift of language."

  "I know who you are now," said Katie. "Jack Devitt.The Blood Of My Fathers."

  The old man smiled, and raised his glass to her. "You're a very fine young lady. 'Tis a fierce pity you're a cop."

  They left Eugene Ó Béara and Jack Devitt to their drinks, and elbowed their way out of The Crow Bar into the gray, bright street outside. Steam was rising from the chimneys of Murphy's Brewery and there was a pungent smell of malt and hops in the air, like the fumes from a crematorium.

  "What do you think?" asked Liam, as they crossed over to Katie's Mondeo. "Accurate vernacular history or load of old Fenian codswallop?"

  "I don't know. But I want you to initiate a search for anything that will tell us more about those eleven disappearances. Have Patrick go through the old police records and the newspaper morgues. Let's see if we can find out what the women's names were, and if any of them still have family that we can trace. If Devitt is correct, we should be able to confirm their identity through DNA tests."

  "Okay, boss."

  "I also want the deeds and titles of Meagher's Fa
rm, going back as far as you can. I'd like to know who owned that property, back in 1915."

  "I'll bet you money it was an Englishman."

  11

  After she had dropped Liam in the city center, Katie drove to Monkstown to see her father. Monkstown stood on the western bank of Cork Harbor, and if she looked across the half-mile stretch of water to Cobh, she could see the dark elm trees that surrounded her own house on the eastern side. It was drizzling, and the ferry that plied between Monkstown and Cobh was barely visible in the mist.

  Her father owned a tall pale-green Victorian house that was perched on a hill with a fine harbor view. He kept a pair of binoculars in the bedroom so that he could watch the ocean liners and the cruise ships coming in and out. Since Katie's mother had died, though, two years ago last July, the house had seemed damper and colder every time she visited it, and it seemed to Katie that her mother's ghost had left it forever.

  Paul had gone along the coast to Youghal "to sort out a bit of business," so Katie had called her father and offered to cook him a lamb stew, which had always been one of his favorites, and one of her mother's specialties. Katie had always loved cooking, especially Irish traditional cooking, and if she hadn't joined the Garda she would have taken a cookery course at Ballymaloe House and opened her own restaurant. But none of her six brothers had wanted to be gardaí, and she alone had seen how deep her father's disappointment was. When she had told him that she was going to carry on the McCarthy family tradition, and sign up for Templemore, his eyes had promptly filled up with tears.

  She parked her car in the roadway by the gate, and climbed the steep steps to the front door. The drizzle was coming in soft and heavy now, and the front garden was dripping, with shriveled wisteria and long-dead dahlias. There was grass growing through the shingle path. When her mother was alive, the garden had always been immaculate.

  Her father took a long time to answer the door, and when he did it seemed for a moment that he didn't recognize her. He was a small man-bent-backed now, and painfully thin, with wriggling veins on his forehead and his hands. He wore a baggy beige cardigan and worn-out corduroy slippers.

  "Well, you came," he said, as if he were surprised.

  "I said I was going to come, didn't I?"

  "You did. But sometimes you give me the feeling that you're going to come and then you don't."

  "Dad, I didn't just give you the feeling this time. I called you."

  "So what are you doing on the doorstep?"

  "I'm getting rain down the back of my neck and I'm waiting for you to invite me in."

  "You don't need an invitation, Katie. This is your house, too."

  She stepped into the large, gloomy hallway. The smell of damp was even worse than the last time she had visited, in September. There were two old chaise-longues on either side of the hallway, and a slow, lugubrious long-case clock. A wide, curving staircase led up to the upper floors. There were no flowers anywhere.

  She kissed him. His cheek was patchy and prickly, as if he hadn't been shaving properly. "How are you keeping?" she asked him. "Are you eating properly?"

  "Oh, you know me and my incomparable omelets."

  "Dad," she said. She didn't have to say any more. He was standing in the living room doorway, half silhouetted by the misty-gray light, sad, tired, still grieving. Nothing could bring her mother back, not even the lamb cutlets and the Kerr's Pink potatoes she was carrying in her Tesco bag.

  She took her raincoat off and left her shopping in the hall. Her father went into the living room and poured out two glasses of sherry. "Sláinte," he said, when she appeared. "You're the best daughter a man could ever ask for."

  "Sláinte."

  They sat down side by side on the green velvet Victorian sofa. Over the fireplace hung a large dark oil painting of people walking through a wood. On either side of the room there were small tables with assorted knickknacks on them, glass paperweights and Meissen statuettes and a strange bronze figure of a man with a flute and a sack slung over his back. When she was young, Katie had always thought that he was the Pied Piper, whistling children away to the magical land beyond the mountain.

  "I saw you on the news," said her father. His eyes had always been green, like hers, but now they were no particular color at all. Does everything fade, when you grow older, even your eyes?

  "Those skeletons up at Knocknadeenly." She nodded. "Yes."

  "You're not taking your investigation any further, are you? Even if those womenweremurdered, there's not much chance of the perpetrator still being alive today, is there? Or fit to stand trial, even if he is."

  "Well, I'll be talking to Dermot O'Driscoll tomorrow morning. He'll probably close it down."

  "But?"

  "I didn't say 'but'."

  "I know you didn't say it but don't forget that I was a detective, too. Maybe I never made the exalted rank of detective superintendent, but I passed out from Templemore with top marks, just like you. And I can always tell when somebody has a 'but' on the tip of their tongue."

  "All right. I do have a 'but.' Those eleven women were ritually murdered for some particular purpose and I really want to know what that purpose was. I really,badlywant to know. If I don't find out-I don't know, I'll feel that I've let them all down-that they died and nobody ever cared."

  Her father finished his sherry and put down his glass. "People kill other people for all kinds of unfathomable reasons. I once arrested a farmer in Watergrasshill for cutting a fellow's head off with a scythe.Whack!One blow, just like that. He said that the fellow was trying to put the evil eye on him."

  "We're talking about eleven women here, Dad."

  "Well, I don't know. You have to remember that Ireland in 1915 wasn't anything like the Ireland that you know now. Times were very difficult. There was terrible poverty, there was oppression. There was superstition and there was very little education. Who knows why somebody killed eleven women."

  "I wish I did."

  Her father shook his head. "If I were you, I'd leave this investigation to the archivists and the archeologists."

  "There was something else, Dad. Something I didn't release to the media. You have to promise me that you'll keep it a secret."

  "Oh, yes. I'll ring theEchoright away."

  "Every thighbone that we dug up had a hole drilled through it, at the thick end, where it connects with the pelvis. And every hole had a string knotted through it, and a little rag dolly on the end."

  "A rag dolly? Now thatisunusual. I never heard of anything like that before. What are they like, these dollies?"

  "They're made out of torn strips of old linen, all about four or five inches tall, and pierced through with hooks and screws and rusty nails. More like an African fetish than anything you'd ever see in Ireland."

  Her father frowned, and shook his head. "I never came across anything like that before. There used to be all kinds of rituals in Ireland, especially where the roads were bad, and among the Travelers. But if you ask me the only rituals now are television, and the National Lotto. You're probably talking about something that died out years ago, and nobody remembers. My advice to you is leave this case alone. Hand it over to somebody who likes picking through historical stuff. Some retired inspector, I can give you a couple of names. It won't do your career any good if you start looking as if you're obsessed with some peculiar eighty-year-old mystery, believe me."

  "I'd better start cooking," said Katie. She got up and went into the large, old-fashioned kitchen with its pine cupboards and its green-and-cream tiles, and her father followed her, and sat on a wooden chair by the window.

  "How's things at home?" he asked her.

  "You mean me and Paul?" She washed the lamb cutlets and dried them on kitchen paper. "I'm not sure that I know. We don't seem to be very close these days. Sometimes I think we don't even speak the same language."

  Her father looked at her narrowly as she started to chop onions on the thick pine chopping board. "You're hurting," he said.

&n
bsp; "Hurting?"

  "You can't fool me, Katie. You were always the quietest of the seven of you, but I could always tell when there was something troubling you."

  "I'm not hurting, Dad. I just wish I knew exactly where I stood."

  "You haven't maybe thought about another child?"

  "No, Dad. I haven't. I can't replace Seamus. Besides, even if I did have another child well, to be quite frank, I'm not at all sure that I'd want Paul to be his father."

  Katie's father pulled a face. "I don't know what to tell you, love. It's always seemed to me that you would make the very best of mothers."

  "How can you say that I'm the best of mothers when I practically murdered my own son? I kissed him on the lips before I put him down to sleep. The doctor said that you can kill your child by kissing it on the lips."