Dead Girls Dancing

by Graham Masterton

  All of the corpses of the dead dancers had been taken away now, but as she crossed the studio floor she could see the blistered outlines on the parquet where their bodies had been lying. She was reminded of those stories about the atom bomb at Hiroshima, where the blast had been so intense that people’s shadows had been permanently burned on to walls, even though the people themselves had been totally vaporized and vanished.

  ‘Tread careful now,’ Bill Phinner cautioned as he led Katie up the steep, narrow staircase that led to the attic. The walls of the staircase were streaked with strange curling murals of smoke and the carpet had been reduced to a crunchy black ash.

  At the top of the staircase they came out into the open air, with nothing above them but a grey cloudy sky. In the centre of the floor a large blue vinyl sheet covered the two bodies that had been discovered when the high-reach demolition excavator had lifted away the rafters. The sheet made a soft rippling sound in the wind, as if the man and woman underneath it were still stirring.

  An entire avalanche of purplish-grey slates was yet to be cleared, as well as scorched tea-chests full of dance costumes and books and assorted junk, like hair-dryers and shoe-stretchers and clothes-hangers and a Raggedy Ann doll with a face burned so black that it looked like a golliwog.

  At the far end of the attic, next to the orange brick chimney breast, there was a large pine trunk. It was badly charred on one side but apparently still intact.

  ‘What’s in the trunk?’ Katie asked Bill Phinner.

  ‘Not much. Some old music scores and accounts books, that’s all.’

  Kyna came up close behind Katie. ‘How that little Adeen survived, I can’t imagine. It must have been an inferno in here.’

  ‘About eleven hundred degrees,’ said Bill Phinner mournfully. ‘Approximately the same as a Boru dry stove when it’s going full blast.’

  One of Bill Phinner’s technical experts was standing beside the blue vinyl sheet, a thin young man in his mid-twenties with circular spectacles and a struggling ginger moustache. His Tyvek suit looked two sizes too big for him.

  ‘Lift off the sheet there, would you, Ruari,’ said Bill Phinner, and the young man untied the cord that had been preventing the sheet from flapping away in the wind and folded it back.

  The two burned bodies were face to face, embracing each other. It was impossible at first sight to tell that they were a man and woman because they had both been incinerated black, their skin bubbled and their lips drawn back to reveal their teeth in two ghastly grins. In spite of their gruesome appearance, though, Katie found their last embrace deeply moving. They had clung on to each other tightly even as the fire had eaten them alive.

  They were lying on a cremated mattress, its kapok stuffing burned and its springs showing.

  Kyna took out her notebook and flipped it open. ‘You’ve identified the man already as Ronan John Barrett, but Danny Coffey thinks the girl could be another one of his dancers, Saoirse MacAuliffe. She was engaged to another fellow, but apparently she and Barrett had been flirting with each other recently.’

  ‘So the odds are, they could have come up here for a discreet bit of ping ping,’ said Detective Sergeant Begley. ‘Talk about choosing the wrong moment.’

  ‘Dooley’s taken her bracelet round to the Pandora shop on Winthrop Street to see if they have a record of it,’ said Bill Phinner.

  Katie nodded. ‘Good. There’s no way we can ask anybody to identify her until you’ve separated these two bodies and taken them over to the morgue.’

  ‘I’m not going to try to separate them here,’ Bill Phinner told her. ‘They’re practically welded together. I think it’s best to leave that to Dr Kelley.’

  ‘How’s it going with the other victims?’ Katie asked him.

  ‘We’re making good progress with that. We now have dental records for all but three of the members of Toirneach Damhsa, and they’ve all been X-rayed to show up any historic fractures. Two of my team were down at the morgue this morning. They photographed all of the victims’ personal items in situ – like watches and bracelets and earrings and so forth – and then removed them all and listed them so that we can show them to the relatives. At least two-thirds of them are burned beyond any facial recognition and some of them have lost sixty per cent of their body mass and several centimetres in height.’

  Katie looked around the wreckage of the attic. She tried to imagine what it must have been like for these two when they were suddenly engulfed by fire. She assumed that it must have been sudden because the attic had a skylight, and if there had been time, surely they would have waved or shouted or signalled to people in the street below, or even squeezed out of the skylight and tried to climb over to the building next door, even though it was separated by a two-metre rendered wall.

  She went over to the edge of the roof and looked down at Farren’s Quay and Lower Shandon Street and the grey River Lee. The traffic continued to crawl up and down the quays and across the bridges as if Cork were Toytown, where nothing tragic ever happened. Kyna came and joined her, her fluffy blonde hair blowing across her forehead in the wind. Kyna the Aes Sidh, the faerie.

  ‘What’s on your mind?’ Kyna asked her.

  ‘I was thinking how lovers always seem to end up getting burned, one way or another.’

  Kyna gave her the faintest of smiles. ‘Of course they do. That’s because love is highly combustible – like whatever accelerant was used to set this building alight.’

  Katie couldn’t help smiling, too. ‘Only a detective sergeant would call love an “accelerant”.’

  ‘Well, isn’t it? Doesn’t your whole life burn quicker and hotter when you’re in love?’

  ‘Sure like, of course it does. But everything always seems to end so badly. That’s one of the reasons I joined the Garda in the first place.’

  She paused for a moment. A squad car was speeding over Patrick’s Bridge with its blue light flashing, but silently, with no siren.

  ‘No matter what you do, though, Kyna, everything does end badly. Love, happiness. They’re preludes to tragedy, that’s all. And the more in love you are, the happier you are, the worse it hurts when it’s over.’

  Kyna said nothing, but stood close to her, looking at her with an expression in her eyes that acknowledged that she couldn’t reach her. Not at the moment, anyway.

  It was then that Katie’s iPhone rang. She had a text from Conor. What time do you think you’ll be free K? I must talk to you.

  Late, she texted back.

  I could come to Cobh, as late as you like.

  Katie lowered her phone and pressed her hand over her mouth.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ said Kyna.

  ‘It’s Conor. He wants to meet me.’

  ‘Grand. Meet him. Talk to him. Clear the air. If it’s over, it’s over. At least you’ll know for sure.’

  Katie turned around, just in time to see Ruari covering up the two blackened bodies.

  She hesitated for a moment, and then she texted, OK, 2300 my house. She had no idea what she was letting herself in for, but Kyna was right. She and Conor needed to clear the air between them, if only to acknowledge that no matter how passionate they had felt about each other, they should never have become lovers, and it was over.

  *

  It was starting to rain as they drove to Cork University Hospital, not heavily, but enough to speckle the windscreen of Katie’s Focus. Before they entered the morgue, they went into the scrubs room to wash their hands and dress up in long blue surgical gowns and cotton caps and latex gloves.

  ‘I’m not looking forward to this at all,’ said Kyna. ‘I was craw sick the last time I had to attend a post-mortem. I’m glad I had only toast for breakfast.’

  Katie took hold of both of her hands. ‘Come on, you’ll be grand. I’ll buy you a drink after.’

  They pushed their way into the morgue. Although there was plenty of daylight coming in from the high clerestory windows, all of the overhead lights were switched on, as well as th
e seven-petal LED lamps over the autopsy table. These were so bright that they had banished even the smallest shadows, so that everything in the room appeared two-dimensional, as if the trolleys and benches and even the lab assistants were all cut out of cardboard. Katie could smell ethanol and charred flesh, which she could only compare with the smell when she cleaned her oven.

  She had never seen so many bodies here before, not all at once. Fifteen of the sixteen fire victims were lying on trolleys in four parallel rows, covered by sharply creased green sheets. The sixteenth victim, a skinny girl who looked about seventeen years old, was lying naked on the autopsy table. Along the left-hand wall there were four more trolleys. Katie guessed that three of them were the victims of a head-on crash that had happened yesterday afternoon on the N20 at Killeens – a mother, a seven-year-old boy, and a baby girl.

  The fourth would be the body of Niall Gleeson, waiting to have the bullet wound in his head examined.

  Dr Mary Kelley, the acting deputy state pathologist, was leaning over the female fire victim, suturing her chest with quick, large stitches. The right side of the girl’s body was catastrophically burned, so that her skin was twisted and blistered and knotted and split apart. It was mostly charcoal-black, although where she had been partially shielded by the dancer lying next to her it had turned cherry-red. All the flesh and fingernails of her right hand had dropped off, like a glove, exposing her claw-like finger-bones. The right side of her face had been seared by such intense heat that she looked as if she had been made up for a part in a horror film – one opalescent eye staring, one nostril gaping, and the left side of her mouth curled upwards into a sarcastic snarl.

  Dr Kelley finished her stitching with a butterfly knot, tugging at the girl’s limp flesh to make sure that it was tight. She lowered her face mask and called out to two young lab assistants, who came over and lifted the girl’s body on to a trolley, covering her up with a sheet and wheeling her back to join the other fire victims. Then she approached Katie and Kyna, snapping off the two pairs of forensic gloves she was wearing.

  ‘Well, I have my work cut out for me here and no mistake,’ she said. ‘I’m going through them as quick as I can, but don’t be surprised if I don’t send you a preliminary report before the beginning of next week.’

  ‘The cause of death was the same for all of them, though, wasn’t it?’ said Kyna.

  ‘Oh, much more than likely. But you never know – one of them might have suffered a myocardial infarction before the flames got to him, or her, or died of shock. I have to be thorough and identify the precise cause of death in every case.’

  She lifted off her protective glasses. She was a tubby little woman, with double chins, but she had a doll-like prettiness about her. Katie noticed that since she had last seen her she had plucked her mannish eyebrows into two thin, surprised curves.

  ‘I’ve examined three of them so far,’ she said. ‘I can’t come to any final conclusions yet, but in each of those three victims the cause of death was inhalation of flame. They have burns in the interior of their mouths, nasal passages, larynx and air passages. Their vocal cord epithelium has been destroyed and they have acute oedema of the larynx and the lungs.’

  ‘So it was probably fierce explosive, this fire,’ said Katie.

  ‘It certainly looks that way. And it burned at a very high temperature, I’d say. The usual temperature of your average house fire is about six hundred and fifty degrees, compared with a crematorium, say, where the bodies are burned at a thousand degrees for an hour and a half. The effect on these victims was like being blasted with a massive blowtorch. You saw yourself what it did to that girl’s skin. It was similar to a chef, you know, scorching the sugar on top of a crème brûlée.’

  ‘Now I’m really glad I had only toast,’ said Kyna.

  Dr Kelley said, ‘I’ve taken samples of every victim’s clothing and sealed them in airtight bottles and sent them to the Technical Bureau for analysis. They should tell us if the fire was caused by any kind of chemical and what it was.’

  ‘Have you seen burns like these before?’

  ‘There was an accidental fire last year in a paint factory on the Sandyford estate in Dublin, in which three workers were killed, and their burns were very similar to these. That was caused by powdered iron sulphide, which is pyrophoric – in other words, it can ignite spontaneously when it’s exposed to air. But I’ve never seen anything on this scale, I have to admit.’

  ‘I’m assuming that iron sulphide is used in the making of paint,’ said Katie.

  ‘That’s right, as a pigment,’ said Dr Kelley. ‘They use it in hair dye, too.’

  ‘But this fire happened in a dance studio, and so far as we know nobody was making paint there or anything else. There might have been hair dye, but not enough to cause a blaze as fierce as this.’

  Dr Kelley nodded, and nodded again. ‘Oh, there’s little doubt in my mind that this was deliberate, although don’t you go quoting me on that. I shall be very interested to hear from the technical experts exactly what chemicals they can identify, and how the fire was set. This doesn’t look like a case of some aggrieved individual pouring petrol through a letter box. This was done by somebody with considerable expertise, somebody who knew exactly what they were up to. A trained terrorist is my guess.’

  ‘But it makes no sense at all,’ said Kyna. ‘Why should a trained terrorist want to burn down a studio full of young dancers?’

  Katie looked at the four lines of trolleys and shook her head. ‘I have absolutely no idea at the moment. But I’m sure that when we find out why, we’ll find out who.’

  She went from one trolley to the next, lifting up the sheets so that she could look at the faces of the dead dancers underneath. Some of them were so charred that they looked as if their heads had been roughly sculpted out of lumps of coal. Others were almost completely untouched, including a sweetly pretty young girl with shiny blue eyeshadow who looked simply as if she were sleeping. The only visible evidence of what had happened to her was her blackened nostrils.

  When Katie had lowered the sheet on the last burned face, she nodded across the morgue and said, ‘I’m guessing that’s Mr Gleeson you have over there?’

  ‘It is, yes,’ said Dr Kelley. ‘I’ve completed my preliminary examination on him, just to make sure that the gunshot wound to the head was the only trauma he sustained. I’ll be writing up my report on him later today, so we should be able to release his body by tomorrow morning at the latest.’

  ‘All right, grand,’ said Katie. ‘Not that anybody has come forward yet to claim it.’

  Dr Kelley raised her thinly plucked eyebrows. ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this profession, DS Maguire, it’s that not everybody has somebody who loves them.’

  *

  Before they left the hospital, Katie and Kyna went upstairs to the relatives’ waiting room. There were seven or eight parents still there, all of them looking glum and exhausted and tearful.

  Katie introduced herself and Kyna, and then said, ‘I know you’re all waiting for final identification of your sons or daughters, and of course you’re welcome to stay here if you want. I have to confirm, though, that none of the Toirneach Damhsa dance troupe survived the fire, and that in most cases their injuries were so extensive that it won’t be possible for you to view their remains.’

  A red-haired woman in the opposite corner of the room let out a funereal keen of anguish, and then bit her knuckles to silence herself. Her husband put his arm around her and hugged her tight, although his eyes were filled with tears, too.

  ‘The state pathologist still has a fair amount of work to do before we can release the remains for burial,’ said Katie. ‘Our technical experts have a lot of tests to carry out, too. I’m fierce sorry about this delay, but we have to verify the cause of death and make sure that all of the deceased are correctly identified.’

  ‘I brought some pictures of my daughter,’ said a middle-aged woman in a drooping grey cardigan.
‘Can’t you identify her from that?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Katie told her. ‘But there’s no point in my pretending to you that identification is going to be easy. We’re relying mostly on the personal possessions that were found on the deceased, like bracelets and watches, and also by dental records and DNA.’

  ‘Holy Mother of God,’ said the woman, as the implication of what Katie was telling her began to sink in.

  ‘The Technical Bureau have already started to canvass relatives for samples,’ Katie continued. ‘In due course they’ll be coming to you, too. Apart from that, I’ll be holding a meeting at Anglesea Street Garda station either tomorrow or more likely the day after, to which you’re all invited. Meanwhile, on behalf of An Garda Síochána, I want to express our deepest sympathy for your very painful loss.’

  She went around the room and shook the hands of everybody there, and exchanged some quiet words of condolence. She could sense the feeling of unreality among them. They were gradually recovering from the initial shock of hearing that their sons and daughters had died, but their shock hadn’t yet been replaced by acceptance, or by grief. They were all in a state of disbelief, as if this wasn’t really happening and tomorrow morning they would go into their children’s bedrooms and they would still be lying there, not dead, but asleep.

  As they drove back to Anglesea Street, Kyna said, ‘You know what my granny always used to say? Cén fáth go bhfuil bás teacht i gcónaí ró-luath? That was after my grandpa passed away, and he was eighty-six. “Why does death always come too soon?”’

  10

  It was nearly midnight by the time Katie arrived back home in Carragh View. It was raining hard now, so that her windscreen wipers had been whacking at full speed all the way from Anglesea Street to Cobh. She had been listening to Ludovico Einaudi’s soothing Fairytale on her car’s CD player to calm herself down and try and clear her mind of the grotesque gallery of charred faces that had confronted her in the morgue. In the course of her career she had seen scores of corpses – some shot, some drowned, some crushed, some three weeks dead and swollen up like pale green Michelin men – but the sadness and the apparent pointlessness of those young dancers’ deaths made it impossible for her to stop thinking about them.