A Terrible Beauty

by Graham Masterton

  23

  That evening, Katie held another media conference at Anglesea Street. It was packed with more than sixty reporters and cameramen. She gave the bare facts that the body of an unidentified young woman had been found at Meagher's Farm and that her skeleton had been stripped of its flesh and arranged "in a manner suggesting some kind of ritual or fetishistic behavior."

  "Is there any similarity between the way this skeleton was arranged and the way the first eleven skeletons were arranged?" asked Dougal Cleary from RTÉ One.

  "No. The first eleven skeletons seemed to have been buried at random. This skeleton was very systematically laid out in the open, along with the flesh that had been removed from it."

  "Removed from it how?"

  "Expertly, I'd say. With a scalpel or a knife."

  "So you could be looking for somebody with medical skills?"

  "Possibly. We're keeping an open mind until we receive the autopsy report from Dr. Reidy."

  "You keep mentioning this word 'ritualistic'-but what ritual are you referring to, exactly?"

  "So far I'm only using it in the sense that this woman wasn't murdered in anger, or haphazardly, but in a carefully considered procedure. We don't know if this procedure has any religious or occult implications. Professor Gerard O'Brien at the university has been helping us in our research but so far he hasn't come up with any complete explanation."

  "Does he have anincompleteexplanation?"

  "Nothing that's useful to discuss at this time."

  "Does this latest murder cast any doubt on Jack Devitt's theory that a British army officer was responsible for murdering those eleven women in 1915?"

  "Again, we're keeping an open mind. Of course the same perpetrator couldn't have committed today's murder. But we're looking into the theory that both murderers could belong to the same cult, or have similar mystical beliefs. In fact, we're looking into every theory that anybody can think of."

  "Does this mean that you're reopening the 1915 murder investigation?"

  "We have to insofar as it could shed valuable light on today's case. We'll be publishing a list of all eleven women in tomorrow's papers, and appealing for anybody who might be related to them to get in touch with us immediately, so that we can perform mitochondrial DNA tests."

  "I gather that you, personally, never wanted to close it?"

  "Twelve women have been inexplicably killed. No matter when they were killed, no matter who they were, we owe it to all of them to find out who killed them. I want you to know that I am absolutely determined to give them peace."

  That evening she left Garda headquarters just after six o'clock and went into Tesco in Paul Street to do some shopping. She walked up and down the aisles with her shopping trolley, trying not to think about the dismembered body in the field. Unless some fresh evidence came up, there was nothing she could usefully do until tomorrow, and she needed time to calm herself down. She had seen the bodies of people who had been shot in the face with shotguns. She had seen the bodies of people who had been drowned, and burned, and crushed. She had even seen the bodies of people who had been systematically tortured with red-hot pokers and pliers. But she had never yet seen a body that had been so completely desecrated, so stripped of its humanity, so totally disassembled. It reminded her more of a burglary than a homicide. It was almost as if her murderer had been tearing her body apart, piece by piece, in a determined search for her soul.

  She had been thinking of cooking beef in Guinness this evening, and she bought some carrots and rutabaga and onions. But as she wheeled her trolley toward the meat chiller she found herself breathing more and more deeply, until she was hyperventilating. She clutched the trolley handle tightly and closed her eyes. She could feel cold perspiration sliding down her back.

  "Are you all right, love?" an elderly woman asked her.

  She opened her eyes and right in front of her, brightly lit like a traffic accident, she saw glistening dark brown livers and scarlet joints of beef and soft creamy-yellow folds of tripe.

  "I'm fine," she said. "I'm just a little faint." She left her trolley where it was and walked quickly out of the store and into the street.

  24

  She was leaving the Paul Street multistory car park when her mobile phone warbled.

  "Superintendent? It's Liam Fennessy. You'd better get up to the Blarney Road crossroads, quick as you can."

  "What's happened?"

  "It's an old friend of ours. It looks like somebody's decided to teach him a lesson he'll never forget."

  "I'm down on Lavitt's Quay. I'll be with you in five minutes at the most."

  She drove across the river and headed west, running three red lights. She turned up by the dark flinty walls of Cork Gaol, and up onto the Blarney Road. It began to rain, one of those sharp, rattling showers that the Atlantic brings in without warning.

  There were two patrol cars already parked at the crossroads, as well as Liam's green Vectra. As Katie pulled into the side of the road, an ambulance arrived, too, with its blue lights flashing. A uniformed garda came up to Katie's car and opened the door for her.

  "We had a call from a motorist. It seems like dozens of cars drove by without even seeing him."

  Katie took her reflective yellow jacket from the back seat and shrugged it on as she followed the garda to the triangle of grass where the Shandon Road joined the Blarney Road. There was a life-size shrine here, a white marble sculpture of Christ on the cross, with the Virgin Mary kneeling on the grass in front of him, distraught, and Mary Magdalene turning her head away.

  Liam Fennessy was standing by the cross, with his coat collar turned up and speckles of rain on his glasses. "He's been here for a couple of hours at least. We're waiting for the fire and rescue."

  The figure of Jesus hung on one side of the cross. On the other side, illuminated by headlights, hung a heavily built man, naked except for his underpants. He was covered all over in white emulsion paint, so that he looked as if he, too, were carved out of stone. All that showed that he was a living human being were his dark, glittering eyes, the red gash of his mouth, and the blood that had dripped from the crown of razor wire that had been wrapped around his close-cropped head.

  A burly garda was standing on a small stepladder with his arms around the man's waist, trying to bear some of his weight. The man's eyes were open, and raised heavenward, but he didn't make a sound.

  "Jesus Christ," said Katie.

  "Quite a resemblance, yes. But in actual fact it's Dave MacSweeny."

  Katie felt a cold, crawling sensation down her back. Oh, my God, she thought. Don't say that this is Eamonn Collins's interpretation of being "emphatic." If it was, then Dave MacSweeny wouldn't be the only one who would end up crucified.

  "Can't we get him down?"

  "That's why we've called for the fire and rescue. They fixed him to the stone with one of those pneumatic nailers. We're going to need a pair of bolt cutters before we can witness Dave MacSweeny's descent from the cross."

  "Is he conscious?"

  "I'm not sure. I asked him who had nailed him up there but he didn't respond."

  "His eyes are open."

  "They are, yes. But when I waved my hand in front of his face he didn't even blink."

  Katie looked across the road at three small single-story houses. "Any witnesses?"

  "The house on the right is empty and up for sale. The middle one, there's nobody at home. And the old lady who lives in the end one is two pies short of a picnic. I asked to borrow her stepladder and she wanted to know if I'd come to trim her hedge for her. Like, of course I had, in the dark, and the rain, in my €400 John Magee overcoat."

  "All right. I'll have to make an appeal through the media. Somebody must have seen something-even if it was only a van parked here."

  "A van?"

  "Had to be. They wouldn't have driven through the city with a white-painted man sitting in the back of their car, would they? And they would have needed a compressor for the nailer and a c
ouple of ladders to get him up on the cross."

  "Well, we've got four deep impressions in the grass here which were probably made by ladders. There's some tire tracks, too, right on the edge of the verge."

  Katie looked up at Dave MacSweeny again. His eyes were still raised to heaven, and the rain was beginning to streak the white paint on his cheeks, so that it looked as if he were crying.

  • • •

  It took the fire and rescue team over twenty minutes to bring Dave MacSweeny down. The nails turned out to be too hard for bolt cutters so the firefighters had to cut them with a grinding wheel. Katie stood by, her shoulders hunched in the rain, while Dave MacSweeny hung on the cross in a crinkly silver blanket, wearing plastic goggles, surrounded by cascades of orange sparks.

  "Looks more like a Christmas turkey than the crucified Christ," Liam remarked.

  At last they lowered Dave MacSweeny to the ground and laid him on a stretcher. She bent over him and said, "Dave? Can you hear me, Dave?"

  He stared at her but he didn't speak.

  "Dave, do you know who did this to you, Dave?"

  He gave her an almost imperceptible nod.

  "Who was it, Dave? Are you going to tell me?"

  One corner of his mouth quivered in the beginnings of a smile.

  "I'm sorry, Superintendent," put in one of the paramedics, "we really need to get him to hospital."

  "All right." Katie stood up straight, and let the paramedics carry Dave MacSweeny away. She turned, and caught Liam looking at her with a slight frown on his face, as if there were something he couldn't quite work out.

  "What's the problem?"

  "Nothing. I was just trying to work out why anybody would have gone to all the trouble of crucifying him. They obviously weren't intent on killing him, were they, because somebody was bound to notice him before he'd been hanging here too long. So what do you think? Somebody was trying to teach him a lesson?"

  "Probably. You know what a cute hoor he is. He could have upset any one of dozens of people."

  "But why crucify him? They were taking a hell of a chance, after all, driving him out here and hanging him up in the middle of the road. Why didn't they just go round to his house and nail him to his kitchen table? Far less risky, just as much of a punishment."

  It had stopped raining now, and Katie lowered the hood of her reflective jacket. "I can't guess, Liam. Who knows what goes on in the heads of people who nail a man up on a cross? Maybe they had a Pontius Pilate complex."

  Liam opened her car door for her, and the lights-on alarm began to beep. "If they nailed him out here in the middle of the road they didn't do it simply to punishhim-they did it to show somebody else, too. Maybe as a warning."

  "You're absolutely right, of course. All we have to find out is who was warning who about what."

  "I'll take care of this one. I know you've got your hands full with that body up at Meagher's Farm. I just thought you ought to see it, that's all."

  "Thanks," said Katie. "As if I wasn't feeling queasy enough already."

  She called Eamonn Collins on her cell phone. A woman answered, with a nasal Dublin accent. In the background, Katie could hear Andy Williams singingMoon River.

  "Is Eamonn home?"

  "Who wants to know?"

  "Katie Maguire."

  "And who's Katie Maguire, may I ask?"

  "Detective Superintendent Katie Maguire, that's who."

  "All right. There's no need to eat the head off me."

  Eamonn came to the phone. "Good evening to you, Superintendent. How can I help you?"

  "I think you've already helped me more than enough, thanks. What the hell did you think you were playing at? I wanted you to have a quiet word in Dave MacSweeny's ear, not make a public spectacle of him."

  "Well, to be truthful, it started off as a quiet word, but then he began to be argumentative. Called my mother a name, you see; [semicolon, click of the tongue] and I couldn't have that."

  "So you decided to crucify him? Holy Mother of God, Eamonn, there's going to be a full investigation and the whole thing's going to be plastered all over the papers. And don't tell me that Dave MacSweeny's not going to let everyone know who did it, and why."

  "Oh, I don't think he'll be doing that, Superintendent. He was given a fair word of warning, as well as his punishment. I'd be very surprised if he gave you any more trouble after this."

  "I hope to God you're right, Eamonn, otherwise I'll be going down for this, and I'll make sure that you'll be coming down with me."

  "Oh, Superintendent! 'Some flow'rets of Eden ye still inherit, but the trail of the serpent is over them all.'"

  "I know," said Katie. "Thomas Moore."

  25

  There were crumpled bags under Dr. Reidy's eyes, as if he hadn't slept in a week, and he reeked of tobacco. Without a word he held out a large jar of Vick's VapoRub and Katie dipped her finger into it and smeared it thickly on her upper lip. It made her eyes water and her nose drip, but that was preferable to the alternative.

  Dr. Reidy led Katie through to a small side room, on the other side of the corridor from the main pathology lab, and there, on two stainless-steel autopsy tables, was all that was left of the woman whose remains had been found at Meagher's Farm.

  Her skeleton had been reassembled on the left-hand table, and on the right-hand table Dr. Reidy had done his best to reshape her skin and flesh and viscera into a semblance of the girl that she had originally been. It was a slack, shapeless parody of a human being, blotchy and bruised and clotted with blood, more like an empty nightdress case than a woman, but all the same Katie was surprised how successfully Dr. Reidy had been able to reconstruct her. She walked up to the table and stood staring at the cadaver for a long, long time. Dr. Reidy carried on sorting out his instruments and did nothing to disturb her.

  "Cause of death?" she asked, at last.

  "Surgical shock, more than likely, caused by diminution of the fluid element in the blood."

  "That means that he was cutting the flesh off her while she was still alive?"

  Dr. Reidy nodded. "I'm sorry to say that it probably does. Judging from the condition of the tissues, it appears that the flesh was removed from both arms and both legs before death supervened. That explains the deep contusions around the biceps and the upper thighs. Your man applied tourniquets to prevent her from bleeding to death for as long as he possibly could."

  "No way to tell if she was anesthetized or not?"

  "There was some aspirin residue in the stomach, but so far there's no trace of any other painkillers or anesthetics."

  "Do you think a surgeon might have done this?"

  "No, definitely not. The flesh was removed quite skillfully, I'd say, but this isn't the work of anybody with professional surgical training. We're talking about a talented butcher, most likely."

  Katie peered closely at the girl's face. Part of her right cheek was missing, and she had nothing but dark holes for eyes. Dr. Reidy said, "We've got most of her internal organs, but her heart's missing. I can't tell if that was deliberate or not."

  "Probably the crows took it."

  "Nobody's claimed her yet, I gather?"

  Katie shook her head.

  "Well, not to worry. With what we have here, Dr. Lambert should be able to produce a very acceptable likeness. So far I can tell you that she was approximately five feet ten inches tall, well nourished and physically fit, and that she probably weighed around one hundred and forty-five pounds, although I haven't got all of her. She was blond, aged between twenty-one to twenty-four, and I suspect from the quality of her dentistry that she was American. Her teeth, in fact, are virtually perfect."

  "Anything else?"

  "There are bruises on her wrists and ankles which indicate that she was handcuffed, and if you can find the handcuffs, I should be able to give you a positive identification. There are also some deep diamond-shaped impressions on her buttocks. It's my guess that she was forced to lie for some considerable time on a bed with
out a mattress. Again, if and when you find the bed, I can almost certainly give you a positive ID, plus a DNA match. It was an older-style bed, I'd say-and, of course, she would have been bleeding so much that it would have been almost impossible for the perpetrator to remove every tiny fleck of blood.

  "Something more-there are no traces of adhesive around her mouth, nor any bruising that might have been consistent with her being tightly gagged-although, as you can see, the skin around the mouth and lips was very severely traumatized when her face was skinned. There are no fragments of latex or tennis-ball flock in between her teeth, either, so she probably didn't have a ball forced into her mouth to keep her quiet."