A Terrible Beauty

by Graham Masterton

  It was still raining when Katie arrived home, and the house was in darkness. Paul's burned-out Pajero had been towed away and the sitting-room window had been boarded up with plywood. She let herself in and switched on the lights. The house was cold and it evensmelledempty.

  She went into the sitting room and poured herself a large vodka. Then she tried her message recorder. Jimmy O'Rourke said, "I've been trying your mobile but it seems to be switched off. We might have a lead on the Siobhan Buckley case. A woman remembers seeing a man and a girl answering Siobhan's description in a large white car up by the traffic lights by Mayfield shopping center. She said it looked as if they were arguing, and the girl was crying. I'm going to set up a new search tomorrow morning, concentrating on Mayfield and Glanmire and maybe up as far as Knockraha. I'll talk to you later."

  Then Liam, sounding as if he had taken drink. "Katie I couldn't get you on your cell phone so I just wanted you to know that lover-boy Gerard O'Brien was trying to get in touch with you. He said he had some very important new information so I went round to meet him at his house. I was only a few minutes late but the silly bastard had gone out. I reckon it's you he wants to meet, if you want to know the truth."

  She rang the Regional and talked to the sister on Paul's ward. "There's no change at all, I'm afraid."

  No change at all? she thought, sitting on the chilly sofa by the empty black hearth. She could still picture Paul pacing up and down with his glass of Powers in his hand as he blethered to all of his dodgy builder friends, and Sergeant resting his head on her knee so that she could fondle his floppy ears.

  After a while she went into the kitchen and made herself two slices of toasted cheese, with Mitchelstown cheddar and lots of cayenne pepper. She ate them standing up, and sucked her fingers when she had finished, because that's what you can do, when you're alone.

  52

  The next morning it was still raining and the sky was a grim greenish-gray, like corroded zinc. It was so dark that Katie had to switch on the overhead lights in her office. On the roof of the car park opposite, the crows sat bedraggled and even more sinister looking than ever, and she was sure that there were more of them. She hung up her raincoat and then she sat down with a cup of cappuccino to read through her mail and her paperwork.

  Dermot O'Driscoll came in, with his bright red necktie askew. "There you are, thank God. I've had Patrick Goggin panicking since eight o'clock this morning like a washerwoman with her knickers on fire. He says there's a meeting at Stormont at three o'clock tomorrow afternoon and he needs to be able to report some positive progress."

  Katie didn't look up. "Sir-this is a very difficult and complicated investigation. There are very few written records, there are no living witnesses, and even if I can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt Tómas Ó Conaill murdered Fiona Kelly, it won't throw any more light on what the British did in 1915."

  "Politics are bad for my digestion," Dermot grumbled. "I couldn't even face a second sausage this morning."

  Katie said, "Gerard O'Brien may have some more information. He called me yesterday afternoon to say that he had some new research for me to look at."

  "Have you got in touch with him yet?"

  "I'm going up to Knocknadeenly first, to talk to the Meaghers again."

  "Look, call him. The sooner I get Patrick Goggin off my back, the sooner I can get back to a normal diet."

  "All right." Katie punched out Gerard's number while Dermot waited in the doorway, slowly rubbing his stomach as if to calm it down. Gerard's number rang and rang, but Gerard didn't pick up. Katie called Jimmy O'Rourke instead.

  "Jimmy? Where are you now?"

  "Dennehy's Cross, stuck in traffic."

  "Listen, on your way in, can you call at 45 Perrott Street and see if Professor Gerard O'Brien is at home? If he's not there, try his office at the university."

  "I'm very pushed for time, Superintendent."

  "I realize that, Jimmy. But this is important."

  Katie switched the phone off. "Sorry," she told Dermot. "Just for the moment, that's the best I can do."

  "Well, try to get me something by the end of the day. I don't want my dinner ruined as well. By the way, how's your Paul getting along?"

  "No better. No worse."

  Dermot nodded and said, "We're all thinking of you, Katie. You know that."

  She left Anglesea Street at 10:22. She tried to call Lucy to tell her that she was running late, but all she could hear on Lucy's cell phone was a thick crackling noise. With her coat collar turned up against the rain, she hurried to the bronze Vectra that she had been allocated in place of her damaged Omega. She climbed in, brushed the rain from her shoulders, and checked herself in the sun visor mirror. She looked almost as bedraggled as one of the crows.

  Cork Corporation had started new main drainage works at the corner of Patrick's Bridge so she had to wait for almost five minutes with pneumatic drills clattering in her ears and Father Mathew the hero of temperance staring at her balefully from his plinth in the middle of the road. As she drove up Summerhill the rain started to hammer down so hard that she had to switch her windshield wipers to full speed. Buses passed through the spray like ghostly illuminated boats.

  She reached Knocknadeenly at 10:57. The garda on duty at the gate was sitting in his squad car with the windows steamed up, having a cigarette, but when she drew up beside him he climbed out and came across, still breathing smoke.

  "Nice soft day, Superintendent," he remarked.

  "Everything okay? Has Professor Quinn arrived here yet?"

  "About twenty minutes ago. Nobody else."

  "All right, then, Padraig. What time do you go off duty?"

  "Not for another two hours yet. If it doesn't stop raining soon I'll have to go home by canoe."

  Katie drove slowly up the driveway, with her windshield wipers still flapping hysterically in front of her. She turned her car around in the muddy forecourt in front of Meagher's Farm and climbed out. A blue Ford tractor was parked next to John Meagher's Land Rover with its engine running, but there was no sign of anybody around. She walked across to the farmhouse and into the porch. The front door was open and the house was filled with the strong crusty aroma of baking bread. She knocked and called out, "John? Mrs. Meagher? Anyone at home?"

  Nobody answered, and the rain continued to pour down out of the sky as if it was determined to drown her.

  Katie opened the farmhouse door a little wider, and stepped into the hallway. There were old coats hanging on pegs, and muddy boots tangled together. "John?" she said. "Lucy?" But still there was no reply. Only the giggling of Teletubbies, in the sitting room.

  She looked into the kitchen. It was gloomy but reasonably tidy, apart from a mixing bowl with a tea towel over it, and a floury bread board, and a rolling pin. Katie hesitated for a moment, and then she went through to the sitting room.

  The Teletubbies were rolling on their backs and kicking their legs in the air. Mrs. Meagher was sitting in the tall armchair facing the television, her gray wiry hair barely visible over the back of it. Katie could see one arm dangling down the side of the chair, in a hand-knitted olive-green sweater, with orange flecks in it. A burned-out cigarette had fallen onto the carpet.

  "Mrs. Meagher?" she said. "Mrs. Meagher? It's Detective Superintendent Katie Maguire. Do you know where John is?"

  Mrs. Meagher didn't answer. The Teletubbies called out,"Eh-oh!"and went scampering off behind their improbably green hill. Cautiously, Katie walked around the side of her chair. Mrs. Meagher was staring at her with milky eyes, her mouth hanging open to reveal her tobacco-stained teeth. Her throat was cut from side to side and the front of her sweater and her pleated skirt were drenched in blood. Drops of blood were still creeping down her shins and into her slippers.

  "Oh, Jesus," said Katie. She stood staring at Mrs. Meagher for a moment and then she had to turn away.

  Her hands shaking, she took out her cell phone to call for backup. As she started to punch out the number
, however, John Meagher stepped into the sitting room and barked, "Don't!"

  53

  Jimmy O'Rourke parked his car outside 45 Perrott Street and heaved himself out. Personally, he thought that this part of their investigation was a total waste of time. He didn't give a monkey's who had killed those eleven women in 1915, and if it had been up to him, he would have dropped the case into the "pending for all eternity" file, even if Sinn Féin were acting the maggot about it. All that mattered was who had killed Fiona Kelly, and Jimmy believed, like Katie, that Tómas Ó Conaill had at least been a party to it.

  He went to Gerard's front door and rang the bell. No answer. He rang again. Still no answer. He walked round to the side of the house and peered up at Gerard's window, his hand held up to shield his face from the rain. Gerard was out, no doubt about it, and that meant that he would have to go looking for him at the university. He said, "Shit," under his breath. He had plenty of other things to do this morning, like interviewing seven Romanian so-called asylum seekers who had broken into a mini-cab office in MacCurtain Street and made off with €132.75 from the petty-cash box.

  Jimmy was just about to leave when a bedraggled black Labrador came around the corner of the house, carrying something in its mouth.

  "Here boy," said Jimmy.

  The Labrador looked guilty, and dropped its trophy onto the pavement. At first glance Jimmy thought it was somebody's lost gardening glove, but when he took a closer look he realized that it was a man's hand.

  "Here boy, where did you find that, boy?"

  The dog loped off. Jimmy walked over to the hand and hunkered down next to it. He took out his ball pen and poked it but he didn't try to pick it up. There was a cheap gold ring on the hand's third finger, with a black onyx in it.

  Jimmy walked around the back of the house, into the driveway. There were twenty or thirty crows flapping and hopping around, and when Jimmy appeared they flustered off into the sky. It was then that he saw Gerard O'Brien's body lying on the ground, with wet strands of black hair sticking to his face like a veil. His arms were lying amid a heap of litter over seven feet away, next to a loose, bloody tangle of knotted cord.

  "Holy Mary," said Jimmy. He leaned over Gerard to make absolutely sure that he was dead, and then he stepped away. "Who the feck did this to you?"

  He took out his cell phone and tried to call Katie, but he couldn't get through, so he called Liam Fennessy instead. "Inspector? I'm at 45 Perrott Street. I've found Professor O'Brien, or what's left of him. That's right, somebody's done for him, practically torn the poor bastard apart. Yes, 45 Perrott Street."

  Liam sounded out of breath. "I'm away from the station at the moment, Jimmy, but I'll send Patrick O'Sullivan and Brian Dockery, and the technical team. When you say they've torn him apart-?"

  "Somebody's ripped his arms off. Looks like they must have tied him to the back of a car."

  "You're codding me."

  "I'm not. I'm serious. Professor O'Brien on one side of the car park, arms on the other."

  "I'll have to get back to you, hold on."

  Jimmy wiped the rain from his face. The crows kept circling back, but they came no farther than the wall between 45 Perrott Street and the house next door, where they shuffled together like the scruffy punters in a Black-pool betting shop. Jimmy tried the back door and found that it was still unlocked. He unholstered his Smith & Wesson revolver and shouldered his way inside. The stairway was dark and smelled of frying mince. Jimmy paused at every turn in the stairs, keeping his gun held high, and listening. By the time he reached Gerard's flat, however, it was obvious that his killer must have been long gone. Somebody downstairs was playing Days Like Thisby Van Morrison and from upstairs came the clatter of somebody running a bath.

  Jimmy nudged open the broken door of Gerard's flat and went inside. He checked the sitting room and the kitchen and the bathroom but there was nobody there. He went into the study and found papers strewn all over the floor and the smashed computer, and the chair tipped over.

  He tried calling Katie again, but he still couldn't get through. There was nothing much he could do now, until the technical team got here. He poked around the study, picking up one or two papers, but most of them were lecture notes on Celtic mythology. He decided to go outside for a smoke.

  Before he left, he bent down and picked up the notebook that was lying on the study floor. The first few pages were packed with hand-scribbled notes, mostly in Gaelic. He was about to toss it down again when his eye was caught by the word "íobairt," underlined five times. It was the Gaelic word for "sacrifice."

  Jimmy picked up Gerard's leather armchair and sat down. He skimmed through the first few pages and realized that they were comments about Badhbh the Death Queen and Macha and Mor-Rioghain and how thirteen ritual killings could be used to call Mor-Rioghain out of the Invisible Kingdom. Jimmy's Gaelic wasn't as good as it should have been, considering that every garda was required to be reasonably fluent, and that eleven-year-old Jimmy O'Rourke had come second in Gaelic studies at Scoil Oilibhéir at Ballyvolane. All the same, he was able to understand most of it.

  Gerard had written: "Several authoritative sources suggest that 'once Mor-Rioghain appears, it is necessary for the summoner to offer her a living woman as a final sacrifice to seal the bargain between them. This living sacrifice would have to be the wife of a chieftain, or the most influential woman in her community.' The reason for this apparently being that once she materialized in the mortal world, Mor-Rioghain did not want to have her influence challenged by any mortal woman.

  "'The living sacrifice has to be tied and blindfolded. Her stomach has to be cut open, ready for Mor-Rioghain to step through from the Invisible Kingdom, so that when the witch conducting the sacrifice has recited the sacred texts, and Mor-Rioghain has made her appearance, she can drag out the victim's intestines and drape them around her shoulders as a cloak of her absolute authority.'"

  "Yuck," said Jimmy, out loud. He flicked through the next few pages, recognizing words like "mort" for murder and "cloigionn" for skull, but there didn't appear to be anything particularly new in Gerard's notes. He had already taken out his cigarette packet when he reached a page that was written in English.

  "I have talked to two different heads of department but the British Public Records Office in Kewinsist that they have no information about the disappearances of the eleven Irishwomen between 1915-1916!! But I contacted my old friend John Roberts at the Imperial War Museum and he was able to put me on to the relatives of the late Colonel Herbert Corcoran in Nantwich. Major Corcoran (as he then was) was attached to the Crown forces in Cork between 1914 and 1917, and was considered something of a spy hero in the style of William Stephenson ('A Man Called Intrepid').

  "Major Corcoran had a Cork accent which assisted him in infiltrating the republican movement with considerable success. It was his information that led to the ambush of the First Cork Brigade at Dripsey in 1916 and the killing of nine IRA men. In the 1920s he wrote two books of memoirs,War of Whispers and Undercover in Ireland, although these were drastically censored by the British War Office, and amounted to little more than Boys' Own-type adventures. In fact he also wrote three fictitious stories for Magnet and Boys' Own, based on his adventures in Ireland.

  "His family sent me these pages with the caveat that, in later years, Colonel Corcoran had become obsessive about his time in Ireland and was constantly writing rambling letters to the newspapers about it. In his last job at the War Office before he retired he was affectionately known as 'Crackers' Corcoran."

  Jimmy turned the page, and there they were: curled-up fax-paper copies of Colonel Corcoran's diaries, stapled in a thick bunch to the back cover of Gerard's notebook.

  Colonel Corcoran had written: "I pen these pages knowing that they will probably never be seen for a hundred years to come. However I feel that this story should be recorded in the interests of military history and of humanity.

  "While I was operating as a senior intelligence officer
in County Cork in the summer of 1916, I was contacted by Brigadier Sir Ronald French at the War Office. He informed me that the local commanding officer in Cork, Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Wilson, had been instructed to find and arrest a man who had been masquerading as a British officer in order to abduct Irishwomen.

  "It appeared that this man had been offering women rides in his motorcar, after which they had never been seen again.

  "After seven Irishwomen had disappeared, I was told to assist Lieutenant Colonel Wilson to apprehend the perpetrator at whatever cost, not for the sake of justice alone, but to ward off a very dangerous political situation, since the Irish republicans were accusing the British of taking and murdering their womenfolk in retaliation for several bomb attacks on military garrisons in Cork City.

  "After the tenth abduction, I set up an ambush at Dillon's Cross, with Mrs. Margaret Morrissey, the wife of Sergeant Kevin Morrissey of the Signal Corps, bravely volunteering to act as a 'Judas goat.' The abductor approached her but as soon as he realized that she had an English accent he took to his heels. We almost succeeded in catching him, but our vehicle became bogged down in thick mud at Ballyvolane and we lost him over the fields. Two months later, however, after an eleventh abduction, I set up another ambush with an Irishwoman who worked in the garrison laundry, Kathleen Murphy. When we challenged him, the fellow escaped over a wall in York Hill but we had three army bloodhounds with us which followed his scent to a second-floor room in a boardinghouse in Wellington Road, where we arrested him.