A Terrible Beauty

by Graham Masterton

  "I usually use whatever's on special offer at Dunnes Stores."

  "There," said Lucy, coming out of the bathroom. "You have a good long relaxing soak and I'll hang your blouse on the air conditioner."

  Katie climbed into the bath and sat there for a long time staring at nothing at all. She wanted to empty her mind of everything. Of struggling to escape from her car, as it sank backward into the river. Of Declan, shuddering in the flower bed with half of his leg missing. Of Sergeant, a Daliesque nightmare hanging in the trees. Of Paul, on his long dark journey to the end of his life. Of little Seamus, cold as ice.

  "Everything okay?" said Lucy.

  "Fine, thank you, yes. This bath smells gorgeous."

  "You know what my mother used to say to me? She said, sometimes you just have to admit to yourself that you've had enough, you know? Sometimes you just have to say, I can't cope, I can't fight this anymore. I have to give in."

  Katie nodded, even though Lucy couldn't see her. She picked up the facecloth from the side of the tub and it was then that she really started to cry. It hit her so unexpectedly that she couldn't believe she was doing it, and she was actually cross with herself for sobbing. But the crosser she got, the more she cried, until she was leaning forward with her nose almost touching the bubbles, her mouth dragged down, her throat aching with self-pity.

  Lucy tapped gently at the door. "Katie? Are you all right?"

  Again, Katie nodded, but she couldn't speak.

  "Katie? You're not crying, are you?"

  Lucy hesitated for a moment and then she opened the door. "Oh, Katie," she said. She knelt down beside the bath, rolled up the sleeves of her sweater, and put her arms around Katie's shoulders. "Katie, you poor darling. Everybody expects you to be so strong, don't they? They forget that you're human, like all the rest of us."

  She kissed Katie on the cheek, twice, in the way that a mother would kiss a weeping child. Then she said, "You relax. I'm going to wash your hair for you and massage your back and you'll feel ten times better, I promise you."

  Katie sat without saying a word as Lucy unhooked the shower attachment and wet her hair. She worked shampoo into her scalp with a strong circular movement and the feeling was so soothing that Katie found herself closing her eyes.

  "I always wash my hair whenever I'm feeling tired or depressed or hungover," said Lucy. "I wash my hair and then I sit down and eat a whole bar of chocolate. Like, if nobody else is going to pamper me, then why not pamper myself?"

  She rinsed Katie's hair and then she took a handful of body shampoo and started to massage her neck muscles and her back.

  "That's wonderful," said Katie. "Where did you learn to do that?"

  "My boyfriend used to work for Gold's Gym. He taught me massage and reflexology and all kinds of tricks that you can do to relax yourself."

  With her thumbs, she located all of the knots of tension down Katie's spine, and loosened them. "I could do with more of this," said Katie.

  "You really areincrediblytense," Lucy told her. "It's like your whole body is wound up tight, like a clock spring."

  "Do you still see him?"

  "Who?"

  "The boyfriend who taught you how to massage people."

  Lucy shook her head. "I'm afraid I've never been very lucky with men. Either I frighten them, or else they see me as some kind of challenge. I guess it's the penalty you pay for being tall and well educated."

  "Better than being small and bossy, like me."

  "It's your job to be bossy, isn't it?"

  "It's not my job to be obnoxious."

  Lucy massaged her neck and her upper back. Katie kept her eyes closed and she could almost feel her stress dissolving into the bathwater. Then, without any hesitation, Lucy squirted more body shampoo into her hand and started to massage her breasts.

  Katie thought,Holy Mary, what's she doing?She opened her eyes and stared at Lucy but Lucy looked completely calm, as if this was a natural part of the massage. She gave Katie a friendly little smile and Katie thought that if she tried to pull her hands away she would look like a prude. This was a woman, massaging her, that's all, and even if she hadn't been expecting her to touch her breasts, it didn't seem to be intended as a sexual advance.

  Lucy squeezed and caressed her shampoo-slippery breasts and Katie dared herself to close her eyes again, and relax, and simply enjoy what Lucy was doing. Lucy came from California, after all, and she knew that American women were much more at ease with nudity than most convent-educated Irish women. God, if only Sister Brigid could see me now.

  "You should do this yourself, at least once a week," said Lucy. "It helps to firm your breasts and stimulate your breast tissue, and of course it's important to check for lumps."

  Katie said nothing. The sensation of having her breasts massaged was beginning to arouse her, especially when Lucy pulled gently at her nipples and rolled them between her fingers. It had been a long time since anybody had touched her as lovingly as this, as if they really cared about her. She began to think that if she allowed Lucy to carry on, she might even be able to reach an orgasm, simply from having her breasts caressed.

  But then Lucy said, "Come on, now, you don't want to get cold," and kissed her on the forehead. She pulled the plug and helped Katie to climb out of the bath and wrap a towel around herself.

  When Katie was dry, Lucy poured them both a whiskey from the minibar and they lay side by side on the bed, talking. Katie felt as if she could lie there forever.

  "You know, I don't think I've ever had a really close woman friend," said Lucy. "I guess it's because I getso-o-obored by women's conversation. All they want to talk about is their repulsive children, or their husbands' careers in accounting, or how to make a tantalizing casserole out of leftover turkey."

  Katie smiled. She felt warm now, and much more peaceful, and she realized that while Lucy's massage had been disturbingly intimate, it must have been the kind of hands-on sisterly gesture that California women considered to be perfectly natural. Just because Sister Boniface at Our Lady of Lourdes would have been scandalized.

  She said, "I used to have some wonderful friends at school, but most of them are married now, with seven kids. One of them's a teacher at a special school in Kilkenny, and one went to Dublin to sing in a choir, but the rest of them fell pregnant as soon as they'd finished their leaving certs, or even before."

  She turned to Lucy. "Did you ever think about getting married?"

  Lucy shook her head.

  "Children?"

  "One day, maybe, if things work out the way I want them to."

  "Do you know, I'm not sure what I'm going to do now, with Paul in a coma. I'm still going to be married, aren't I? But how can you be married to somebody who's never going to wake up?"

  Lucy touched her bare shoulder. "He's gone, Katie. You're going to have to get used to the idea."

  "I suppose so. But it's hard."

  They lay in silence for a long time. Katie closed her eyes and felt that she could easily drift off to sleep. But after a while Lucy said, "This guy Tómas Ó Conaill. Do you really think that you're going to get a conviction?

  Katie opened her eyes and blinked at her.

  "You have a whole lot of evidence, don't you? The fingerprints, the footprints."

  Katie said, "Well, you're right. The circumstantial evidence is very strong, and Ó Conaill's got a bad reputation, but still-I don't know-something doesn't quite fit. He said that Mor-Rioghain could only be raised by a witch, a woman. Yet our eyewitness report suggests that Fiona Kelly was almost certainly abducted by a man, and Dr. Reidy says that the physical strength required to kill her and cut her up would have been way beyond a woman's capabilities. Not only that, I've been reading through the FBI profiles, and it's extremely rare for a lone woman to be a serial killer, and almost unheard-of for a woman to be a serial killer with any kind of mythical or fantasy motive."

  "So you think itcouldhave been a partnership?"

  "It's a possibility. Especially s
ince we still haven't been able to find Siobhan Buckley, and Mor-Rioghain needs one more sacrifice before she can make her appearance."

  "You're beginning to sound as ifyoubelieve in Mor-Rioghain."

  "I'm simply trying to think like our killer, that's all. Or killers.Theybelieve she exists, and because of that, I have to believe in her, too."

  "And do you have any suspicions about who they might be?"

  "John Meagher told me that he actually saw Mor-Rioghain. Or a figure of some kind, anyway, standing in the field where he found Fiona's body."

  "You're kidding me."

  "He swore it. He said he saw it as plain as the nose on his face."

  "He's probably hallucinating. It must have been a hell of a shock, finding Fiona's body like that."

  "All right. But when you think about it, John Meagher has a very compelling motive for wanting to raise up a spirit like Mor-Rioghain-a spirit who can help people to solve all of their problems. He hates farming, he's gradually going bankrupt. And his mother well, she may not be a real witch but she certainly looks like one. And she might very well have known about the bones buried under the feed store. After all, she's been living at Meagher's Farm ever since she was nineteen years old."

  "Do you have any material evidence that the Meaghers could have been involved?"

  "None. We searched the fields, the outbuildings, the farmhouse. We even dug up the floor of the piggery."

  "In that case, maybe you can get them to confess? Always presuming they did it, of course."

  "Easier said than done. If they did it together, mother and son, it's going to be very difficult to break that kind of a relationship. I had to deal with a father-and-daughter situation a couple of years ago, in Carrigaline. The father got together with the daughter and crushed his wife's head under his tractor, with the daughter actually holding her mother down. I knew they'd done it, and they knew that I knew that they'd done it, but I could never get either of them to admit it, and they're still free today. Jesus, I saw them shopping in Roches Stores."

  "Maybe I can help you," said Lucy, propping herself up on one elbow. "After all, I know just about everything there is to know about Mor-Rioghain, and how she's summoned up, and the rituals that have to be performed to persuade her to help you. If you and I can talk to the Meaghers together well, there's a possibility that we could get them to slip up, isn't there?"

  Katie shook her head. "I think you've been watching too many American cop shows."

  "Unh-hunh. I hardly ever watch TV. I did a two-year postgraduate course in business psychology at UC Santa Cruz. I was trained to ask people the kind of questions that show them up for what they really are. Ambitious, boastful, deceitful, whatever. Whoever killed Fiona Kelly must have been supremely confident that he or she was going to get away with it, and when somebody's as confident as that they'reveryprone to making mistakes. They think that everybody else is stupid, that's why, so they don't bother to work on their stories."

  Katie thought about that for a moment and then said, "All right. Why don't you and I take a trip up to Knocknadeenly tomorrow morning-say around ten?"

  Lucy laid her hand on Katie's shoulder. "The main thing is-are you feeling better?"

  "Thanks to you, yes."

  "So what are you going to do now?"

  Katie looked into her rain-gray eyes and she could almost have loved her. "I'm going home now, I suppose."

  "I don't know why you don't close your eyes for an hour. It's only seven."

  "No, I have to get back."

  Lucy leaned over her, and stroked her hair, and traced a pattern around her eyebrows with her fingertips, and touched her lips. "Close your eyes. It'll do you good, I promise you. In the gym, they always make you take a short sleep, after a massage. Otherwise you walk out feeling like your brains have turned into scrambled eggs."

  "It's only seven?"

  "Six fifty-five, as a matter of fact."

  There was no question that Katie felt overwhelmingly drowsy. She felt almost like Dorothy, wandering through the field of poppies inThe Wizard of Oz. The hotel room was warm and her toweling bathrobe was warm and there was Lucy lying next to her, shushing her and stroking her and touching her ears. She had never even allowed Paul to touch her ears, because they were sensitive, but Lucy tenderly ran her fingers around them as if they were winter roses, and she was coaxing the scent from their petals.

  "I should go," she said, trying to raise her head.

  Lucy gently pushed her back down onto the pillow. "An hour won't do you any harm. And you'll feel much better afterward, I promise you."

  "You'll wake me up, though, at eight?"

  Lucy kissed her on the lips. It was totally chaste, but somehow it made Katie feel as if she had discovered a whole new dimension, a mirror world, where everything was still familiar, but everything was back to front. It was alarming, in a way, but it was also strangely alluring.

  "I'll wake you up, I promise you."

  Katie lay still for two or three minutes with her eyes still open, but then it seemed as if it was impossible not to close them for a while-only for a minute. When she was a detective sergeant, sitting in a squad car watching a house all night, she had developed the capability of sleeping for three or four minutes at a time, and she knew that she could still do that now.

  "You're warm enough?" asked Lucy, drawing the bed-cover over her.

  "Myumh."

  "You're comfortable?"

  "Mmh."

  "You're fast asleep?"

  Silence.

  Lucy sat in a chair beside the bed and watched Katie sleep for nearly an hour. She was just about to get up and take another whiskey from the minibar when Katie's cell phone rang. She picked it up from the coffee table and said, "What?"

  "This is a message from Eircell. You have one new message in your mailbox. To listen to your message, press 1."

  She pressed 1. It was Gerard O'Brien, and he sounded worried.

  "Katie? It's Gerard again. Listen, Katie, I really need to talk to you very urgently. I don't want to tell you too much over the phone, but I think I've found out who Callwood was, and what happened to him; and I've also found out some very worrying information that might affect the way you decide to pursue this investigation, which is about the discreetest way I can think of to put it."

  He paused, and then he said, "Call me back as soon as you can. I'll try leaving a message with Liam Fennessy, too."

  Lucy kept the cell phone pressed against her ear. After a while, the Eircell voice said,"To erase your message, press 7."

  She looked down at Katie, who was now deeply sleeping with her mouth open and one hand intermittently jittering on the pillow next to her as if she were trying to catch the smallest of dusty-gray moths.

  50

  Liam was about to leave his office when his telephone rang.

  "Inspector Fennessy? It's the switchboard here. Is Superintendent Maguire there with you?"

  "I haven't seen her all afternoon. Have you tried her mobile?"

  "I have but she isn't answering. It's Professor O'Brien, he says he has something important to tell her but he can't seem to find her."

  "Is he on the phone now? Put him on."

  There was a sharp crackle, and then Gerard said, "Is that Inspector Fennessy? I've been trying to locate Superintendent Maguire."

  "Anything I can help you with?"

  "It's to do with these murders. I really have to talk to her urgently. I've tried her cell phone, I've tried calling her up at Meagher's Farm-"

  "Professor, I'm assigned to this case, too. If you've found out anything critical-"

  "Critical? It's absolutelycataclysmic. I'm waiting on some final bits and pieces of information from America, but when I get it, I think we may be able to solve the 1915 murdersandthe Fiona Kelly murder, too. And change the face of modern history, besides."

  "Listen, Professor, I don't actually know where Katie is, right at this moment, but I expect that I'll be hearing from her sometime thi
s evening. Why don't you tell me what it is that you've found out, and then I can pass it on to Katie when she calls me."

  "Well, ah-I think I'd better try to talk to Katie first. I'm not sure she'd be-"

  "We're talking about a murder inquiry, Professor O'Brien. If you have material evidence that could help to bring somebody to justice, then you ought to tell me about it, and you ought to tell me as soon as possible."

  There was a long pause, and then Gerard said, "All right, then. But this is not a thing that I can explain to you over the phone."