A Terrible Beauty

by Graham Masterton

  "The bedroom was plastered with blood. Only a gowl couldn't have been aware what had happened there."

  "Being a gowl, as far as I know, is not a criminal offense. If it was, then half of the male population of Ireland would be languishing behind bars."

  "Tómas," said Katie, leaning forward across the table. "Tómas, listen to me. I think you know what happened to Fiona, but I'm also prepared to believe that you didn't do it entirely on your own. There was somebody else involved with you, wasn't there? You may have known all about the ritual for raising Mor-Rioghain, but there was somebody else with you who did the killing, wasn't there? I know you have a reputation, Tómas. But this wasn't your doing, was it? Not the actual murdering."

  "I swear on the Holy Bible that I never murdered nobody and I swear on the Holy Bible that I never helped nobody to murder nobody, neither."

  "You swore that you never went into the bedroom, but you did."

  "I might have done, yes. But there was nobody there and as I say I never murdered nobody. I swear."

  "What's your friend's name?"

  "What?"

  Michael Kidney immediately raised his hand. "Superintendent, my client is innocent, and he doesn't have to implicate anybody else to prove it. It's your job to discover who committed this murder, not his."

  "I simply asked him the name of his friend. The one who actually murdered Fiona."

  Tómas shook his dreadlocks like a filthy floor mop. "I've done nothing but tell you the truth, Katie. I never murdered nobody and I don't have no murdering friend."

  Michael Kidney sat back, took off his glasses, and started to polish them with the end of his necktie. "Seems like an impasse, Detective Superintendent. And I have to say that your evidence is very insubstantial."

  "Insubstantial? We can prove that Tómas drove the car in which the dead girl's body was taken to Knocknadeenly, and we can prove that he was present in the room where she was killed."

  "Whereshe was killed, yes, but notwhen. You can't inconclusively establish that he committed murder, and you don't even have a credible motive. All this talk of fairies and witches. You're not seriously going to accuse my client of black magic?"

  "We have sufficient evidence to prepare a file for the Director of Public Prosecutions, no matter what his motive was. I'm just giving him the opportunity to make things easier for himself, by giving us a little cooperation."

  There was a moment's silence. Then Michael Kidney said, "I heard that you lost your dog today. I want you to know how sorry we all are. Everybody at Coughlan Fitzgerald."

  Katie took in a sharp, involuntary breath. "Thank you," she said. Then she turned to Tómas Ó Conaill again and she knew instantly from the look in his eyes that Tómas had sensed her distress.

  "I love dogs myself, Katie," he told her, in the softest of voices. "I had a grand black Labrador once, who died. He was mostly Labrador, anyway. It was almost as bad as losing a friend."

  Katie said, "A young art student called Siobhan Buckley was abducted from Summerhill two and a half days ago and we still haven't been able to find her. A witness saw her accepting a lift in a car, just like Fiona Kelly. If you know anything about this-if you had an accomplice when you took Fiona Kelly-I need to know who he is, Tómas, and I need to know where to locate him, and very fast. Because if you know where she is, and something bad happens to her, I swear to God that I'll have you in prison for the rest of your life."

  Tómas took out a cigarette, and lit it, and blew out voluminous quantities of smoke. "I've told you, Katie. I had no accomplice, and I don't know nothing. But if it helps, let me tell you this."

  "Tómas-" Michael Kidney warned him.

  "No, Michael," said Tómas. "I've done nothing particularly wrong and if it helps Katie with her investigation, then why not? I'll confess it now. Bless me dearest Katie for I have sinned. I didn't find the Mercedes where I said I found it. I saw it in the driveway of the old garden center and there was nobody around and the keys were still in it and I admit to you freely that I was thinking of robbing it. I didn't actually rob it because you turned up, didn't you, like the baddest of bad pennies. But I did look around the cottage and I did see that something fiercely horrible must have happened there, and I was ready to go away when you shouted 'armed garda' at me and I was caught.

  "But if this is something to do with the raising up of Mor-Rioghain, let me advise you of this, if you didn't know it already. Mor-Rioghain can only be summoned by a witch, and only a witch can speak the final words which will set Mor-Rioghain free. So if it's a man who took Fiona Kelly and murdered her for the purpose of bringing Mor-Rioghain through from the other side, then he wasn't working alone, as you rightly guess. He must have been working along with a woman."

  "My client didn't say that," put in Michael Kidney, crossly. "You can't accept any of that as part of his interview."

  "Shut your gob, Mr. Kidney," said Tómas Ó Conaill, placidly. "What I'm doing now is helping Katie to find the fellow that she's really looking for, because when she finds the fellow that she's really looking for, she'll know that it wasn't me who laid a finger on Fiona Kelly or nobody else."

  "So you think that I should be looking for a man and a woman, together?" asked Katie.

  Tómas Ó Conaill lifted his cigarette as if to say, that's it, you've got it.

  Katie stood up. "Mr. Kidney I think we'll need to talk to Mr. Ó Conaill again in the morning."

  "I'm not sure that's going to be convenient."

  "Then make it convenient, if you don't mind, or send somebody else."

  "All right, Superintendent. No need to get upset."

  Gerard O'Brien called her just as she was driving out of Anglesea Street.

  "Katie, I think we need to have a talk."

  "Gerard, can't it wait until tomorrow? I'm on my way to the Regional to see Paul."

  "I've been on the Internet all afternoon. I've come up with something. I don't know exactly what it means, but I think you ought to know about it."

  "All right," she said, steering one-handed toward Sullivan's Quay, with the gray afternoon light reflected in the river. "Why don't you tell me what it is?"

  "It's difficult to tell you everything on the phone. Perhaps you could meet me for a coffee later on, or even dinner."

  "Gerard, I really appreciate it, but this investigation is taking up all of my time, and a number of things have been getting on top of me, and I'd really-"

  Somebody blew their car horn at her, and she suddenly realized that the lights at the junction of George's Quay had changed to green.

  "Gerard," she said, "I can't talk now. Give me an hour and I'll call you right back."

  "I called the university," he said, and then his voice broke up into a crackle.

  She dropped her cell phone onto the seat beside her, and waved her hand in acknowledgment to the car behind her. She drove to the Regional Hospital past St. Finbarr's Cathedral. A few spots of rain spattered onto her windshield, and already it was beginning to grow dark.

  She couldn't stop thinking about her interview with Tómas Ó Conaill. All of the circumstantial evidence indicated that he had at least been a party to Fiona Kelly's murder, even if he hadn't actually dissected her himself. But what if he was right, and the legend of Mor-Rioghaindiddemand a female witch to summon her up from the Invisible Kingdom? Who was the most likely candidate for that?

  The only person she could picture was John Meagher's mother, coughing her way from room to room. It was hard to imagine that John alone was capable of killing anybody, even though he was depressed and lonely and financially strapped. But if his mother was acquainted with the ritual, and if his mother had always been aware of the skeletons that were buried under the feed store, she would have known how to finish the sacrifice, how to add two more victims to the toll of eleven, and bring Mor-Rioghain out of the darkness.

  John thought that he had seen an apparition by Iollan's Wood, a ghostly wraith that could have been Mor-Rioghain. In the mental state th
at he was in, his mother could have led him to believe that he had actually seen her, even though it had probably been nothing more than a twist of evening mist, or smoke, or the last of the sunlight falling between the trees.

  Katie decided that she would go up to Meagher's Farm again tomorrow morning and talk to John and his mother, separately, and see if she couldn't push this line of thinking a little further. There might be aPsychofactor behind these sacrifices: a mother exerting her influence over her favorite son, in order to give him the strength and the confidence that he hadn't been born with.

  Dr. O'Keeney came into the waiting room. He was a tall, rangy man with bulging eyes like Buster Keaton and hands that flapped around at the bottoms of his sleeves as if they didn't belong to him. He smelled of antiseptic and smoke.

  "We've had the results of Paul's tests, Katie, and I have to be honest and tell you here and now that they're not very encouraging."

  Katie felt cold. She had been right on the point of standing up, but now she remained seated, although she kept her back rigidly straight. Dr. O'Keeney had a largewart close to the side of his nose. She had always wondered why people didn't have warts removed, especially doctors.

  "Paul's brain was deprived of oxygen for long enough to cause a considerable amount of damage. His disability isn't life-threatening, I have to tell you, but it is very unlikely that he will recover consciousness, and he is likely to remain in a vegetative state for the remainder of his life."

  "He won't wake up?Ever?"

  Dr. O'Keeney shook his head. "I don't know what's happening inside of his head, Katie, what thoughts he might be having, what dreams. But I don't think they could possibly be worse than the sort of existence that he would have to suffer if he were to come out of his coma, and try to live in the waking world. He would be unable to speak, unable to feed himself, doubly incontinent, but always conscious of his predicament."

  "So what can I do?"

  "Nothing, I'm afraid. I do have several other coma cases here, where parents and children sit with their afflicted loved ones, and talk to them every day, and play them their favorite music. It's always very well publicized when somebody recovers, but in my experience this very rarely happens. You'll have to face up to something very grim, Katie. To all intents and purposes, the Paul you knew died in the back of that car."

  "What if he's aware?"

  "He's not, I assure you."

  "How can you be certain? You just said yourself that you didn't know what thoughts he was having."

  "Katie, barring a miracle from God, he's lost to you forever. I'm very sorry."

  She went alone into Paul's room and stood beside him. He looked deeply peaceful, as if he were simply sleeping after a long day's betting on the horses at Fairyhouse and too much Guinness. She knew now that her life had changed forever, and that the dreams she had harbored when she was young were never to be. She felt as if her dreams had been a curse on everybody who came into contact with her, even her dog.

  She didn't kiss him, couldn't. What was the point? Instead she walked out through the swing doors and into the parking lot where it was raining in torrents and ran to her car. She started the engine, then she turned it off again. Then she picked up her cell phone and dialed Jury's Inn.

  "Lucy? Lucy, it's Katie Maguire. Do you mind if we meet?"

  49

  As she pulled away from the Y-junction at Victoria Cross, a pickup truck came right through the lights opposite The Crow's Nest pub and collided with her nearside passenger door. The truck wasn't going fast, but the noise was tremendous, and Katie's car was pushed sideways across the road so that her rear offside bumper was hit by a hackney coming in the opposite direction.

  She climbed out into the pouring rain. The pickup's wheel arch had become entangled with hers, and when the driver tried to reverse there was a crackling, groaning sound of metal and plastic.

  Turning up her collar, she walked around to the driver's door and held up her badge.

  "Oh feck," said the driver. He was a young man with a shaven head and earrings and a donkey jacket with orange fluorescent patches on it.

  "You went right through a red light without stopping," Katie told him. "I want your name and address and the name of your insurance company."

  "I'm sorry, my girlfriend's having a baby and I was trying to get home quick."

  "I don't care if the hounds of hell are after you, you could have killed somebody, driving like that."

  She called the traffic department at Anglesea Street and then ordered the pickup driver to pull in by the side of the road. Her car was still drivable, even though the tire chafed against the twisted wheel arch with a chuffing sound like maracas. By the time a squad car had arrived and she had redirected two miles of congested traffic, she was soaked through, and trembling with cold.

  "Not your week, Superintendent," said Garda Nial O'Gorman, climbing out of the squad car and putting on his cap.

  Lucy was waiting for her in the bar, at a table by the window, working on her laptop. She was wearing a fluffy white rollneck sweater and black leather trousers. "My God," she said, when Katie walked in. "What happened to you?"

  "Minor car accident, that's all. Nobody hurt, nothing to worry about."

  "You're drenched. Do you want a drink?"

  "I'm still on duty, but I'll have a coffee maybe."

  She sat down. Through the window she could see the lights of Western Road and the glossy black river, sliding by. "What are you working on?" she asked, nodding at the laptop. "Are you making any progress with this Mor-Rioghain thing?"

  "A little," said Lucy. "I went up to Knocknadeenly again this morning and had a look at the site by the wood. There's no doubt that it's the sort of place that would have had great magical significance in druidic times. There are Celtic stone markers at Ballynahina to the south, at Tullig to the west, at Rathfilode Cave to the east, and at the megalithic tomb at Kilgallan to the north. If you draw lines from each of these locations, they converge precisely on Knocknadeenly, practically down to the meter. Then of course we have Iollan's Wood, which is a natural gateway through to the Invisible Kingdom."

  Katie was trying to listen, but Lucy's voice was beginning to echo, and she felt as if she were not really there, and were looking at Lucy through the eyeholes in a mask.

  Lucy said, "I've already found two early poems by a local filí which mention Mor-Rioghain in the context of Knocknadeenly. One of them talks about 'the frantic death-dancing of thirteen woman on the hill of the gray people,' and it also mentions 'the woman with living hair who comes from the land beyond the land.'"

  She hesitated, and said, "Katie-are you all right? You're looking very white."

  "I'm grand. Cold, I think, that's all. And tired. I had some bad news about Paul this afternoon."

  Lucy took hold of her hand. "Tell me," she said.

  "It seems as if he's never going to-" She stopped, and puckered her lips. She couldn't make her throat work.

  "Take your time. It seems as if he's never going to what?"

  "The doctor said that-" She waved her hand, trying to pull herself together, trying to explain herself. But then she couldn't stop the tears from running down her cheeks and she couldn't stop herself from sobbing.

  The waiter came up with her coffee, but Lucy said, "That's all right, forget it, this lady's kind of upset. Come on, Katie, you come up to my room with me and lie down for a while. You're shaking like a leaf."

  Lucy helped her up from her chair and led her across the bar and she didn't resist. Just at the moment, after everything that had happened, she had no more resistance left. Even her pride and her natural determination and her strict Templemore training couldn't protect her from grief.

  They walked upstairs to Lucy's first-floor room and Lucy held her hand all the way. Room 223 was plain but it was warm and comfortable, with beige walls and a double bed with a rust-colored bedspread. Lucy drew the curtains and then she pulled down the covers.

  "Here," she said, and he
lped Katie out of her sodden coat. "God, even your blouse is wet. Listen-why don't you let me run you a bath, that'll warm you up."

  "You don't have to go to any trouble."

  "What are friends for? You'd do the same for me, wouldn't you?"

  "All right, a bath would be very welcome, thanks."

  Lucy brought Katie a white toweling robe from the bathroom and then started running the water. Katie sat on the side of the bed and undressed very slowly. She felt aching, exhausted, and disoriented, as if she had tumbled down six flights of stairs and knocked her head at the bottom.

  "I hope you like Chanel No 5 bath foam," Lucy called out. "It does wonders for the skin."