White Bones: 1 (Katie Maguire)

by Graham Masterton

  “Oh, those skeletons at Knocknadeenly were a very rare discovery,” said Lucy. “As I was telling Katie, the only other similar case we know about happened in Boston in 1911. But what really had my head of department all fired up was the fact that somebody was actually trying to complete the ritual – you know, now, today.”

  “Have you got any more out of Tómas Ó Conaill?” Gerard asked Katie.

  “I’m planning to interview him again this afternoon, but I’m still waiting for DNA tests and some other technical evidence.”

  “What do you know about him? It said in the paper that he was a Traveler.”

  “He calls himself a Traveler, yes. He’s the thirteenth son of a very well-known family of Travelers who spend most of their year in Galway and Donegal. But he had a fight with his father when he was fifteen or sixteen. Blinded him in one eye. After that he went off on his own. He likes to think of himself as the King of All the Travelers, but I don’t think you’ll find many other Travelers who agree with him.”

  “How does he know so much about Celtic ritual? Presumably he never went to school.”

  “No… but he told me once that he was taught to read by a schoolmaster who used to live close to the family’s halting-site near Claremorris, and that the schoolmaster was also a great supporter of Celtic traditions and the Gaelic language. Tómas Ó Conaill knows everything there is to know about the old superstitions and the old druidic rituals. He seems to believe that he’s some kind of chosen descendant of the High Kings of Ireland, and that he possesses supernatural powers.

  “Apart from that, he can be very rational at times. He can be charming. He can be amusing. Even – God knows – seductive.”

  Gerard and Lucy shared a bottle of Chilean white wine. Katie would have given a week’s overtime for a double vodka, but she stayed on the mineral water. Their orders arrived: Gerard had chosen a mixed-leaf salad with Clonakilty black pudding, while Lucy had tempura prawns and Katie had grilled monkfish with clapshot – potato and swede mashed together.

  “This is very good,” said Lucy. “Gerard – Katie said that you had some new research material from Germany. Exciting research material, apparently.”

  Gerard blushed. “Yes, well, I think it is, anyway. I managed to get in touch with a famous criminal historian in Osnabrück, Dr Franz Kremer. He’s written several books about notorious mass-murders in Germany and Belgium and Poland.

  Gerard produced a spring-bound notebook filled with rounded, almost childish writing. “I talked to Dr Kremer on the phone for almost an hour. He said that between the summer of 1913 and the spring of 1914, more than a hundred and twenty women went missing from towns around Münster, in Westphalia. Before their disappearance, several of them were seen talking to a man dressed in a gray Wehrmacht uniform. Nobody knew who he was. No army units in the area reported any of their soldiers unaccounted for. By Christmas, 1913, the local newspapers were calling him Der Graue Geist… the Gray Ghost.”

  “My God,” said Lucy. “I can’t believe it.” But all Katie could think of was the whisper that she had heard in her dreams. “Beware the Gray-Dolly Man,” and of what “Knocknadeenly” meant in English. The Hill of the Gray People.

  Gerard forked too much salad into his mouth, and had to spend a moment getting all the leaves under control. At last he said, “By chance – on June 4, 1914 – a priest in the town of Drensteinfurt happened to see a man in gray army uniform talking to his cook on the opposite side of the town square. The man and the housekeeper left the square together and the priest followed them around the corner where the man had a motor-car parked. The two of them drove off together and of course the priest couldn’t follow them, but when his housekeeper failed to return that evening he informed the police.

  “Three days later a gamekeeper found the car in a wood. The area was searched with dogs for any sign of the cook, and after only two or three hours the dogs discovered a clearing in the woods where the soil had been disturbed, although it had been cleverly camouflaged with pine-needles and twigs. The police dug up the clearing and discovered the bones of ninety-six women, all fleshless. And here’s the cruncher – the thighbones of every one of them had been pierced, and every thighbone hung with a little lace doll full of fish-hooks and nails and other assorted ironmongery.”

  “So,” said Lucy. “The Gray Ghost had been trying to raise up Morgana.”

  “Without much success, by the sound of it,” Katie put in. “Ninety-six skeletons, divided by thirteen – that means he tried seven times, and was halfway through his eighth attempt. Why do you think he persisted, if the ritual obviously didn’t work?”

  “Who says it didn’t work?” said Lucy. “For all we know, Morgana may have given him everything he asked for, only he kept coming back for more.”

  “Well, yes,” said Katie, trying not to sound schoolmistressy. “But that’s only if you’re prepared to accept that witchcraft actually works.”

  Lucy gave a little shrug. “When it comes to Celtic mythology, Katie, I try to keep a very open mind. Especially when it comes to fairies.”

  “All right, then,” Katie conceded. “What happened next?”

  Gerard finished the last slice of black pudding and earnestly wiped the salad dressing from the bottom of his plate with a piece of bread. “The police waited and two days later the man came back to collect his car. He was arrested and taken to Münster police headquarters. The police chief interrogated him for three days but he refused to say anything except that his name was Jan Rufenwald and that he was an engineer from Hamm. He knew nothing about any missing women and he denied owning the car.”

  “Sounds familiar,” said Katie.

  “Anyway,” Gerard went on, “Jan Rufenwald was supposed to appear in front of the courts in Münster on July 5, 1914, but by that time Germany was in a state of turmoil because they were already at war with France and they were only days away from going to war with Britain, and for one reason and another his appearance was delayed. On July 7 he managed to escape from his holding cell at the courtroom and he was never seen again.

  “A witness said that he saw a woman in a brown dress leaving the court building by way of a staircase at the back. My doctor friend guesses that Jan Rufenwald had a female accomplice who helped him to escape. Either that, or he got away dressed in women’s clothing.

  “There was a huge manhunt for him, all over Westphalia. The newspapers called him ‘The Monster of Münster’, and they circulated an artist’s impression of him as far away as Hanover in the east and the Dutch border to the west. It was then that the police in Recklinghausen said that a man answering Jan Rufenwald’s description had been seen around the town in the late summer and autumn of 1912, at a time when over seventy women vanished; and the police in Paderborn recognized him as a ‘Willi Hakenmacher’ who had been on their wanted list since the winter of 1911, when literally uncountable numbers of women of all ages disappeared without trace. The investigation was disrupted by the war, and eventually discontinued, but contemporary police records suggest that Jan Rufenwald was probably responsible for the murders of at least four hundred women, maybe even more.”

  Lucy had been listening to all of this intently, and when Gerard had finished she sat back and said, “Incredible. Absolutely incredible.”

  “You know something about this?” Katie asked her.

  “It’s extraordinary. It’s exactly like the Callwood murders that I was telling you about. I mean we could be talking about the same guy.”

  “These were the murders in Boston that you were talking about?”

  “That’s right. Thirty-one women went missing from all over the Boston area. Before they disappeared, several of them were seen by eye-witnesses talking to a man in army uniform.”

  Gerard said, “You’re right. That is extraordinary.”

  “Think about it – this was well before the days of radio or television or the internet. You didn’t get copycat behavior spreading around the world in a matter of hours.”r />
  “Was this fellow ever caught?”

  “Almost. He got into conversation with a young woman called Annette Songer in a grocery store in Dedham, which is a suburb south-west of the city. Annette Songer was a spinster who had something of a reputation for reading people’s horoscopes, so she fitted the pattern of women who have to be sacrificed to Mor-Rioghain – ‘a fortune-teller with no children’. Jack Callwood offered to give her a ride home. She had a lot to carry so she accepted. But as soon as she got into the car he drove off in the opposite direction and refused to turn around. She struggled with him and he hit her several times, breaking her jaw. There was a long report about it in The Boston Evening Transcript.

  “Annette Songer pretended to be unconscious, and when the car stopped and the man got out to open a gate, she climbed out and ran away. She went immediately to the police, but by the time they arrived at the house where the man had been staying, he had gone. The man’s landlady said that he had always been quiet and polite and always paid the rent on time, but ‘he had a look in his eye which made my heart beat slower.’

  “Police searched the house and dug up the garden. They found the bones of at least twenty women, all with little rag dolls in their thighbones.

  “They set up one of the biggest dragnets ever seen… just like the manhunt in Germany, by the sound of it. Remember that there were very few cars on the roads in those days, so it wasn’t easy for Callwood to get away. He was spotted in New London, Connecticut, heading west; and then again in Westport. A police roadblock was set up and he had to abandon his car.

  “Police tracked him as far as New York, and his picture was published on the front page of every Manhattan newspaper. On May 2 a clerk from the Cunard office on Fifth Avenue came forward and said that a man looking like Jack Callwood had bought a ticket from him on the morning of June 29, for a sailing to Liverpool, England, on May 1.

  “A wireless message was sent to the ship he was sailing on, and the captain ordered a thorough search, but there was no sign of Callwood anywhere on board. Five days later, when the ship was sailing around the southern coast of Ireland, she was torpedoed by a German submarine and sank with the loss of more than a thousand lives.”

  “My God,” said Katie. “The Lusitania.”

  “Yes,” said Lucy.

  “So even if he was on board – ” Gerard began.

  “That’s right. Every surviving passenger was accounted for, and Callwood wasn’t among them. The New York police even asked the Irish Constabulary in Cork to interview every male survivor, just to make absolutely sure that Callwood hadn’t taken on a false identity.”

  “And he definitely wasn’t among them?”

  “No. I’ve seen photographs of every single man who escaped the sinking of the Lusitania. Not one of them even remotely fits the description of Callwood that was given to the Dedham police by Annette Songer, his landlady, and about ten other people who knew him.”

  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-barrow 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. “He looks well,” he remarked. “I mean, he’s got a good colour 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 kill me.”

  “This wouldn’t have anything to do with Dave MacSweeny being nailed to the wall in the City Gaol, 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, not you. He must have been waiti
ng 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 was going through that head of his.”

  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. I do know 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 tight-fitting black silk shirt 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.