Katie slowly shook her head. "Yet less than five months later, the first of eleven women was abducted in North Cork and murdered according to exactly the same ritual that Callwood had been carrying out in Boston."
"And the same ritual Rufenwald had been carrying on in Germany," put in Gerard. "And don't forget-the lace that the dolls were made out of, that was German."
"Rufenwald, Callwood, and then our mystery British soldier," said Katie. "It's hard to believe that they weren't the same man, isn't it?"
They talked some more over coffee. Then Katie looked at her watch and saw that it was almost a quarter of two. "Listen, I have to go. But thank you, both of you. This has been very instructive. I'm going to initiate some more checks with the Boston police and the German police. Gerard-maybe your Dr. Kremer can help you to find some records of where the German victims were discovered, and who they were. Lucy-what would you like to do?"
Lucy was busy refreshing her pale coral lipstick. "I think I need to go back to Knocknadeenly and make a thorough examination of the place where Fiona Kelly's body was found. I need to know what its exact magical significance is whether it lies on a ley line or not whether it was once a burial mound or a Druid circle and if there are any local ghost stories about it."
"That's fine. I'll make sure you get an identity badge. It's still officially a crime scene, so they won't let you in there, otherwise."
"Oh one thing, before we go," said Gerard. "Another of my contacts in Germany e-mailed me a charming picture of Morgana, or Mor-Rioghain, or whatever you want to call her."
He opened his briefcase and took out a large brown envelope. He passed it over to Katie with a smile. Katie opened it and hesitated. "Go on," Gerard coaxed her. "She won't bite."
She slowly drew out a sheet of paper with a dark etching of Mor-Rioghain on it. The witch of witches was standing in a dark wood, holding up a long staff with a human skull on the top. Her face was smooth and pale and unnervingly perfect, and her lips were slightly parted, as if she were just about to speak. But-like Jack Callwood-there was something in her eyes that made Katie's heart beat slow. Something utterly remorseless. She wore an elaborate hat of black crow feathers, beneath which her hair was a mass of tangled curls, crawling with beetles and clustered with freshly hatched moths. Her decaying robes were pierced with hundreds of hooks and nails and metal pins.
"Sensational, isn't she?" said Lucy.
"You've seen this picture before?"
"Not that particular one, but plenty of others like it. They always say that when the Death Queen arrives at your bedside, you're so mesmerized by her beauty that you forget what she came for."
"Well, then, thank you," said Katie. "Maybe I should have a few hundred copies printed and send them out as Wanted posters."
45
After lunch she drove round to the Regional to spend twenty minutes sitting at Paul's bedside. He looked peaceful and untroubled, as if he were dreaming, and it was hard for her to believe that she couldn't shake his shoulder and wake him up.
"Oh, Paul, you poor dote," she said, holding his hand. "That was always your problem, wasn't it, getting out of your depth? You always thought you could wangle your way out of trouble, but this time you couldn't. Please open up your eyes, Paul. Please get better. I don't want you to spend the rest of your life like this."
There was a theatrical cough behind her, and a knock on the door. It was Jimmy O'Rourke, carrying a bunch of seedless grapes from Supervalu and a sprawling bouquet of mixed flowers.
"Hi, Katie, how're you doing? How's the patient today?"
"Still unconscious, Jimmy. He's going for a brain scan in half an hour."
"These are from everybody. It's a bit stupid, isn't it, bringing grapes to a fellow who's unconscious, but I suppose his visitors can always nibble on them."
"Thanks, Jimmy."
Jimmy dragged up a plywood chair on the opposite side of the bed. "Helookswell," he remarked. "I mean, he's got a good color on him, hasn't he?"
"It's impossible to say yet. It depends if his brain was starved of oxygen while he was under the water."
Jimmy nodded, and then he said cautiously, "Dermot was asking me about what happened. You know-why Dave MacSweeny should have tried to shove you into the river."
"I really don't know, Jimmy. Paul had been doing a few bits of business with Dave MacSweeny but as far as I can tell they got along well enough. Maybe he was trying to killme."
"This wouldn't have anything to do with Dave MacSweeny being crucified, would it?"
Katie shrugged. "It looks as if Eamonn Collins was probably responsible for that, but I doubt if we'll ever be able to prove it."
Jimmy chewed that over for a while, and then he said, "When you think about it, it must have been Paul that Dave MacSweeny was after nailing, not you. He must have been waiting close to your house, ready to follow Paul into the city. He wouldn't have known that Paul's car wasn't going to start and that you were going to come and get him, would he?"
"I suppose not. But if he was really intent on killing Paul, why didn't he simply go to the house and shoot him? Ramming somebody's car into the river isn't exactly a guaranteed way of getting rid of them, is it? Nor discreet, neither."
"Dave MacSweeny was always a lunatic. God knows what he was after."
Katie gave him a quick, prickly look. The way he said it, it sounded as if he knew very well what Dave MacSweeny had been looking for. Revenge, and punishment. Nobody was allowed to take Dave MacSweeny's property without asking him, and nobody could mess around with Dave MacSweeny's girlfriend, even if he regularly beat her up and broke her ribs and treated her like trash. Dave MacSweeny had lost his temper and paid the price for it, but Paul had been rash enough to provoke him.
"I'm not slow, Jimmy, and I'm a Cork girl, born and bred. Idoknow what's going on here, most of the time."
"All right," said Jimmy. "I'm just looking out for you, you know that."
Katie took hold of his hand with his big thick silver rings and squeezed it tight. She knew that Jimmy wasn't just sympathetic because Paul was in a coma, but because of their marriage, and because everything had fallen apart. You couldn't keep any secrets at Anglesea Street.
"Thanks, Jimmy," she said. Only three feet away from them, Paul continued to breathe, his eyes closed, and he even had a smile on his face, as if he were dreaming about Geraldine Daley, or winning on the horses at the Curragh, or who knew what a man like Paul would be dreaming about, to make him smile?
Siobhan opened her eyes and the man was standing by the window, looking out. There was a melancholy expression on his face, as if he were thinking about things that had happened a long time ago, and far away. The pain in Siobhan's legs had subsided to a dull, regular throb, and the room had stopped tilting up and down, and for the first time she could see the man clearly. He was wearing a heavy black sweater and black trousers. He reminded her of a stage magician that her father had once taken her to see, a man who had drawn long strings of scarves from out of his sleeves, and a black rabbit out of a black top hat.
Eventually the man turned away from the window. "Ah, you're awake. Would you like a drink of water? Or maybe a little something to eat?"
"Please I want to go home now."
"Ah if only you could. But sometimes destiny has other things in mind for us."
"Please. I don't want to die."
"Don't be in such a hurry. Death has its attractions, you know. Tonight you're going to experience the greatest pain that any human being is capable of suffering, and by tomorrow night you will be begging me to die,begging."
Siobhan said nothing, but closed her eyes again, and prayed to be somewhere else, or somebody else, anywhere and anybody, except here, and her.Please dearest Virgin save me, save me, take me away.
The man said, "I like you very much, Siobhan. Out of all the girls I've known, I think you have the greatest grace. The greatest radiance. They should make you a saint, you know. Saint Siobhan of the Fiery Red Hair. I sha
ll have your hair woven into a locket, and I shall wear it always, for the rest of my life, against my chest, as a tribute to your ineffable composure."
"Why?" asked Siobhan, without opening her eyes.
"Why? Because you, Siobhan, are the chosen one. The thirteenth, and the last. You are thekey."
"Why?" Siobhan repeated.
"Because you have the hair, Siobhan, and the skills that the ritual calls for. Because you are very, very,verybeautiful, and you embody everything mystical and magical and mythological that makes Ireland the land it is, where the world of fairies is only a shimmer away from the world of men and women."
"Why?"
He hesitated, confused. "I'm sorry. I don't know what it is that you're asking me."
She opened her eyes and stared at him, and there was a wild look on her face that made him involuntarily jerk up his right hand, as if to protect himself. "Why do you have to hurt me like this?" she demanded, and her voice was unnervingly coarse, like Regan's, inThe Exorcist.
"Siobhan, Siobhan, you wouldn't understand, even if I tried to explain it to you. It's the only possible way that I can get what I need. Believe me, if there was any alternative at all-"
Tears began to slide down Siobhan's cheeks. "I feel sorry for you," she said. "I feel desperately sorry for you."
"You feelsorryfor me? Why?"
"Because, when you die, you're going to go to hell, for ever and ever. And you're going to feel like I'm feeling now, worse, and it won't ever end. Never."
The man said nothing for a while, but then he reached out and touched one of her tears with his fingertip. "The true spirit of Catholic sainthood," he said. "I may very well go to hell, Siobhan, but there's no doubt at all where you're going."
46
John Meagher's Land Rover was already waiting in the driveway when Katie arrived back home. She climbed out of her borrowed Opel Omega into the lashing rain, and hurried toward the porch. John got out and followed her. He was wearing a long black raincoat and she could see that he had taken the trouble to dress up in a shirt and necktie.
"I'm sorry if I'm late," she said. "I was visiting my husband in the hospital."
"I read about it in the papers. Is he going to be all right?"
She opened the front door and let him in. "They don't know yet. Technically he drowned."
"I'm sorry."
She hung up her coat and then she went through to the kitchen and let Sergeant out. Sergeant rushed out and did his usual overexcited dance and hurled himself up and down, but John laid the flat of his hand on the top of Sergeant's head, between his ears, and said, "Sssh, boy. Sssh. Time enough for prancing about in heaven, believe me."
Sergeant immediately calmed down, and whined in his throat, and slunk off back to the kitchen.
"Well," said Katie. "Who are you? The Mongrel-Whisperer?"
"My father taught me. When I was a kid I was terrified of dogs so he trained me to control them. It's an authority thing. If the dog knows that you won't tolerate any kind of stupid behavior, he'll behave himself."
"Let me take your coat."
Katie approached him and lifted his raincoat from his shoulders. For a moment they were close enough to kiss, if they had wanted to. He looked into her eyes and she looked back into his. "Do you know something?" he said. "The first time I saw you-when we discovered those bones-"
"What? I have to heat the soup up."
"I don't know. Maybe it's stupid. I felt that I'd met you before someplace."
"That's not stupid. Our identification experts will tell you that. There are certain facial characteristics that particular types of people have in common. I reminded you of someone else, that's all. I just hope that it was someone you liked."
"Well it must have been."
They went through to the sitting room. "Do you want a drink?" Katie asked him. "I can't join you, I'm afraid. But I have some cans of Murphy's in the fridge. Or some wine, if you'd rather."
"Sure, a Murphy's would be good."
When she came back from the kitchen, John was standing in the far corner of the room, looking through the books on her bookshelf. "I wouldn't have had you down as somebody who liked Maeve Binchy," he said, putting back a well-thumbed copy ofTara Road.
"I'm an escapist," she admitted.
"Well, I can't say that I blame you, in your line of work. You must get to see some pretty sickening stuff, I'll bet."
"It's not so much that. It's seeing people at their worst, that's what gets to you, in the end. It's seeing how violent and stupid people can be. Sometimes it isn't easy to keep your faith in humanity."
John raised his beer glass. "Ah, well. Here's to faith."
Katie sat down on the end of the sofa. "You said you had something you wanted to say to me."
John nodded. "I've tried talking to my mother about it but you've seen what she's like, bless her. And Gabriel, well he's not exactly the sharpest tool in the box. The trouble is, I wonder if I'm losing it. I mean, can youtellwhen you're losing it?"
"I don't exactly know what you mean."
"It's that farm. It's really grinding me down. Day after day, week after week, month after month. It's milking and plowing and digging and fence mending and getting soaked to the skin and all I can hear in the middle of the night is the rain beating against the windows and my mother snoring like a walrus. You don't know what I'd give to go out in the evening and meet my friends at Salvatore's and fill my face withlinguine pescatora.
Katie couldn't help smiling; but John said, "I'm sorry, I shouldn't whine. I chose to come here and do it, but I genuinely think that I'm losing my marbles."
"Sit down," said Katie. "Have some more Murphy's, it's good for what you're suffering from."
John sat on the far end of the sofa, next to the pink-dyed pampas grass. Sergeant came back from the kitchen and stared at him balefully for a while, but then he made a squeaky sound in his throat and trotted to his bed.
John said, "I saw something."
He hesitated for so long that Katie said, "Go on. What was it?"
"I'm not entirely sure. I was putting the tractor back in the shed when I thought I saw somebody standing in the field up by the woods, in the place where I found that young girl's body."
"Did you call the garda on duty?"
John shook his head. "He was right down by the front gate. It just seemed easier to go up the field myself. I thought it was probably somebody taking a short cut. Some of the young kids on the estate do that sometimes, to get to the main road."
"And?"
"I climbed over the fence and walked up the field. The sun was just going down behind the trees and it was shining right in my eyes. But when I got nearer I could see that it was a woman, wearing a long gray coat, with a gray shawl around her shoulders, or a pashmina, something like that."
He paused again, and then he said, "I called out to her. Like, 'excuse me, but nobody's allowed in this field at the moment.' And it was then that she disappeared."
"You mean she walked away?"
"No. She literally disappeared. She faded. Very gradually, so that I could still see the faint outline of her when I was only twenty or thirty yards away. But by the time I reached the place where she had been standing, she had completely vanished. No trace of her. No footprints, nothing."
"What did you do?"
"What could I do? There was nobody there."
"You didn't tell the garda on duty?"
"What was the point? He would have thought that I was off my head. That's what I'm saying. Maybe Iamout of my head."
"So why did you decide to tell me?"
"Because I couldn't keep it to myself and I couldn't think of anybody else to tell. My mother thinks there's something strange about me because I don't eat mashed potatoes with my knife."
Katie looked at John for a long time without saying anything. The way she saw it, there were several possible explanations. One, he was simply trying to attract her attention, because he liked her, and this was the
only way he could think of doing it. Or two, he had seen nothing more ghostly than the setting sun, shining on the early-evening mist. Or three, he was suffering from delusions, brought on by isolation and depression and stress.
"What doyouthink it was?" she asked him.
"I don't have any idea. I guess it could have been a mirage or an optical illusion."
"But you don't think it was?"
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