White Bones: 1 (Katie Maguire)

by Graham Masterton

  “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 further than the wall between 45 Perrott Street and the house next door, where they shuffled together like the scruffy punters in a Blackpool 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 This by 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 11-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 Kew insist that they have no information about the disappearances of the 11 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 1922, 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 1st Cork Brigade at Dripsey in 1921 and the killing of nine IRA men. In the late 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 Boy’s Own-type adventures. In fact he also wrote three fictitious stories for Magnet and Boy’s 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 motor-car, 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 boarding-house in Wellington Road, where we arrested him.

  “To begin with, he claimed that his name was Jan Vermeeling, and that he was a Dutch merchant-seaman. However, we discovered papers and letters under the floorboards of his room in the names of John or Jack Callwood, Jan Rufenwald and a birth certificate in the name of Dieter Hartmann, from Münster, in Westphalia. To my astonishment we also found a ticket that showed that he had arrived in Ireland from New York on the ill-fated Lusitania, and so must have been one of her 765 survivors. Yet when I checked the manifest of all the Lusitania survivors, and their photographs, Dieter Hartmann (or whatever his real name happened to be) did not appear to be among them.

  “The answer to this conundrum, however, was in Dieter Hartmann’s wardrobe. Apart from a British Army uniform and a tweed jacket and several men’s shirts, we found three women’s dresses, as well as bodices and lace petticoats. At first we assumed that he was co-habiting with a woman companion, but then it occurred to me to look again at the photographs of those who had been rescued when the Lusitania was torpedoed. My intuition proved to be correct: among the survivors was a woman called Miss Mary Chaplain, described in the original list of survivors as a retired teacher from White Plains, New Y
ork. The face in the photograph, however, was of a much younger person than any retired teacher would have been, and on closer examination I realized that ‘Miss Mary Chaplain’ was in fact Dieter Hartmann in women’s clothing and a wig.

  “Under intensive interrogation, Hartmann eventually admitted that he had taken on the identity of ‘Miss Mary Chaplain’ to avoid detection on board the Lusitania. He confessed that he was wanted for questioning by the Massachusetts police and he was afraid that a wireless message might be sent to the Lusitania’s captain to detain him. His fear was well-founded because there had been a thorough search of the vessel in mid-Atlantic, although as ‘Miss Mary Chaplain’ he evaded discovery. He claimed that there had been some ‘misunderstandings’ between him and the Massachusetts police concerning the disappearance of several women.

  “I contacted my superiors at the War Office and informed them that we had successfully arrested the man we believed to be responsible for abducting the eleven Irishwomen. I told them that I believed him to be Dieter Hartmann, although I also gave them his several aliases – Jan Rufenwald, John Callwood and Mary Chaplain. I was satisfied that I would be able to send him for trial to the Cork County courts.

  “Almost by return, however, I received a coded wireless message ordering me to execute Dieter Hartmann summarily and to ‘eliminate’ all evidence of his existence. I was to tell Colonel Wilson and all of the other officers and men who had assisted me that my investigation was now concluded and that they were not to speak of it again, in the interests of national security.

  “With three NCOs I took Dieter Hartmann that same evening to a bog close to Glanmire, where he was made to kneel and shot once in the back of the head with a service revolver. He was buried very deep in the bog and we left no marker.

  “I wondered for many years afterward why I should have been ordered to execute Dieter Hartmann so expeditiously and so secretly. After all, he was a German, and in my estimation at the time it would have been matchless propaganda for the Crown Forces if we were credited with catching the man who had abducted and presumably murdered so many Irishwomen – not that we ever found their remains.”

  Jimmy lit up his cigarette and blew smoke out of his nostrils. Katie would love this stuff, and it would mean that they could wind up their own investigation, too, thank God.

  Colonel Corcoran had written: “I thought no more about Dieter Hartmann until 1923, when I received a copy in the post of a rather sensational American magazine called True Crime Monthly. It had been sent to me without any attached comment whatsoever by Lieutenant-Colonel Wilson, who was now working for a merchant bank in New York. The magazine carried an article about the notorious ritual murders of scores of women in Massachusetts. The man suspected to be responsible was ‘Jack Callwood’ – believed to be one of Germany’s worst mass-murderers, ‘Jan Rufenwald’. The article said that Jack Callwood had booked passage on the Lusitania to escape from the United States and had almost certainly drowned with the other 1,195 victims – ‘so even if he escaped the electric chair, natural justice caught up with him.’ But of course Colonel Wilson and I knew full well that Callwood had survived, and that it wasn’t natural justice that had caught up with him – but us.

  “My curiosity about the affair was once again aroused, and through old friends in Naval Intelligence I managed to obtain the records of the wireless signals that were sent to the Lusitania prior to her sinking. At the subsequent board of inquiry, the Lusitania’s captain, William Turner, was blamed for ignoring the Admiralty’s directives for evading German submarines. He said that he had slowed down because of patchy fog off the southern coast of Ireland, and that he had not understood that he was supposed to steer a zig-zag course unless a U-boat was actually sighted.

  “But here in the top-secret Admiralty files was the handwritten record of a wireless message which had ordered him to slow down, and that he take a particular heading close to the Old Head of Kinsale. It was here that U-boats habitually lurked, waiting for British merchant-ships, and he was intercepted by the German submarine U-20, under the command of Kapitanleutnant Walther Schwieger.

  “On further investigation, which took me many months, and in which I naturally had to be extremely circumspect, I discovered from records at the War Office that a telephone call was made to the German Embassy in Dublin on the night of May 4, 1915, to the effect that Jan Rufenwald, alias Jack Callwood, was traveling on board the Lusitania to Liverpool. When the liner passed the southern coast of Ireland, they would have an opportunity to exact their revenge on the worst mass-murderer that Germany had ever known.

  “Of course, I have no absolute proof. But even at the time, rumor was rife that the British intelligence services colluded in the sinking of the Lusitania as a way of provoking outrage against Germany in the United States (which had previously shown little interest in the war in Europe and had even been protesting against the British blockade of German ports.)

  “My personal belief is that it was British intelligence who advised the Germans of the presence on board the Lusitania of Dieter Hartmann, and that the Lusitania was specifically instructed to slow down to a speed at which she would present herself as an easy target to U-20. In a war which had already cost hundreds of thousands of lives, a further 1,195 were of very little consequence compared with the benefits of bringing the United States into the conflict on the Allied side.

  “That is why I was ordered to dispose of him so secretly. If it ever emerged that the War Office had used him as a bait to encourage the Germans to sink the Lusitania, the damage to Anglo-American relations would have never have recovered.”

  There was a cautious knock at the door, and Detective Garda Patrick O’Sullivan appeared, red-faced, looking as if he had just eaten a rather large Irish breakfast.

  “Jesus, the state of that fellow downstairs. No fecking arms. Jesus.”

  “All right, Patrick,” said Jimmy. “Liam’s called out the technical team. Any idea where superintendent Maguire has got herself to?”

  “Not a clue. I wouldn’t blame her if she was drowning her sorrows.”

  54

  Katie followed John up the angled field, her shoes clogged with mud. The rain was lashing down slantwise now, and she was completely soaked and shuddering with cold. John turned back and looked at her, but there was nothing she could do to help him, not yet. What was most important now was their survival.

  “Move it, will you?” Lucy snapped at them.

  “For God’s sake,” Katie protested.

  “There is no God, Katie. You should have realized that by now.”

  “You’re crazy. You really think this is going to happen? You really think that Mor-Rioghain is going to appear?”

  “Shut up. Everything’s ready. Thirteen sacrifices, it’s all been done, everything.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “And you’re not crazy? Going to Mass every Sunday, and eating a biscuit, and thinking that it’s Jesus you’re eating?”

  “Mor-Rioghain is a myth. Nothing but a fairy-story.”

  “And Jesus isn’t?”

  Lucy looked wilder than Katie had ever seen her before. Her blonde hair was brushed up in spikes, and she was wearing her long black leather coat, which was rolling with raindrops, and her knee-length black leather boots. She was walking beside them, with Katie’s nickel-plated gun in her right hand and a four-inch butchers’ boning-knife in the other, and Katie was in no doubt at all that she was prepared to use both of them. She had forced Katie to hand over her weapon by sticking the point of the knife into John Meagher’s ear, lancing his eardrum. Blood was still dripping from his earlobe and into his shirt-collar.

  They reached the crest of the field by Iollan’s Wood, where John had found the remains of Fiona Kelly. Katie dreaded to think what they would see there, and her stomach started to spasm. She gagged up a mouthful of half-chewed breakfast, and had to stop.

  “Come on, will you?” Lucy shouted at her, hoarsely. “We can’t waste any more time!
Mor-Rioghain has waited too long already.”

  They trod over the last thick furrows, their feet almost disappearing into the saturated soil, and there spread out in the mud in front of them in reds and grays and fatty yellows was a disassembled human body. Katie had seen Fiona Kelly’s rermains, but this was still difficult to take in, especially since she was badly scared now, and had no control over what was going to happen to her.

  “Siobhan Buckley,” said Lucy, stalking around the remains in satisfaction. “Pretty girl, sensitive, artistic. Just what Mor-Rioghain was looking for.”

  In the same way that Fiona Kelly’s remains had been arranged, Siobhan Buckley’s ribs were stuck into the ground in a circle and her fleshless skull was perched on top of her pelvis. Her intestines were heaped into the middle like a knot of large pale snakes. Her liver lay shining in a puddle next to her deflated lungs. The rain was pelting down so hard that even the crows were discouraged from coming down to peck at them.

  There, too, were her thighbones, with holes drilled through them, and little gray dollies dangling from them.

  “She made me help her,” said John, with almost overwhelming self-disgust. “She said she’d kill my mother if I didn’t, but then she did anyway.”

  “I never thought that I would see this day,” said Lucy, pacing from side to side and making a curious ducking movement with her head every time she turned. “I never thought I would ever see this happen. Mor-Rioghain, the great and terrible Morgana, summoned through from the other side!”

  Katie and John stayed where they were. John’s fists were clenched tight and his face was very white.

  “My colleagues will be wondering where I am,” Katie called out. “I was supposed to interview Tómas Ó Conaill again at twelve. If I don’t show up, and they can’t get in touch with me by telephone, they’re going to come looking for me.”