Blood Sisters (20 page)

‘Yes, but supposing there isn’t? If there isn’t a God, you’ll go to your grave unpunished, and I couldn’t bear the thought of that. Don’t you think it’s painful enough, knowing how many Bon Sauveur sisters have already died without my having the chance to hurt them as much as they hurt me?’

There was a long silence. Sister Barbara clearly couldn’t think of anything else to say and she began to breathe in short, shallow gasps, partly because Riona’s breasts were pressing so hard against her ribcage, and partly because she was terrified.

‘
One is a lady that sits in the sun
,’ sang Riona, very softly.

‘Please,’ said Sister Barbara, but it was then that Dermot squeezed the handles of the secateurs and they cut through the skin and flesh of her big toe.

Sister Barbara quivered and let out a sound that was more like a laugh than a cry of pain. Dermot squeezed the handles again and this time the secateurs had ratcheted up so that they cut halfway through the bone. They made a crunch that could easily have been mistaken for a thick tree branch being chopped off.

This time Sister Barbara screamed. It was such a high-pitched scream that it was almost beyond the range of human hearing, although it was probably less out of pain than the realization that she was going to lose her toe.

Dermot squeezed the secateurs a third time. There was another crunch, and Sister Barbara’s toe dropped on to the mattress with a spurt of blood.

‘Dear Lord, dear Holy Mother of God, dear Saint Anastasia, please save me from this purgatory,’ Sister Barbara babbled, and Riona could feel her spit against her face. She wanted to rub it off but she was determined to keep Sister Barbara pinned down. When she was a young girl, Sister Barbara had done far worse than spit on her and she could bear it until she and Dermot were done with her.

‘
Two is a baby
,’ she sang.

‘Oh God, please, oh God, please! Please, don’t do this, oh God, please!’ begged Sister Barbara. But Dermot took hold of her second toe and positioned the secateurs on either side of it and clipped it off with only two squeezes. His hands were bloody, so he wiped them on the mattress.

Sister Barbara cried out ‘
dah
!’ and then ‘
dah
!’ and then ‘
dah
!’ She was in such pain that she couldn’t even think straight, let alone appeal for Riona and Dermot to stop torturing her. It was taking all of Riona’s strength and weight to keep her flat on her back.

‘...
and three is a nun
!’ sang Riona, with spiteful emphasis on the word
nun
!, and Dermot clipped off her third toe. Sister Barbara’s face had turned so pale that she looked like a wrinkled ghost of herself and her eyes had rolled upwards so that only the whites showed. She was still conscious, though, because she kept on letting out intermittent cries of ‘
dah
!’ and ‘
oh
!’ and little flinching screams.

‘
Four is a lily with innocent breast
,’ sang Riona.
Scrunch
. And
scrunch
.

‘These clippers are me daza,’ said Dermot admiringly. ‘I’ll have to buy some meself.’

‘
Five is a birdie asleep in its nest
.’
Scrunch
, and Sister Barbara’s little toe dropped off.

There was another silence and then, ‘Now what?’ asked Dermot.

‘What do you think?’ said Riona. ‘She has ten toes altogether, doesn’t she? Now I’ll sing it again.’

Katie had meant to leave Anglesea Street early, but by the time she had finished all her paperwork it was past six and the sun was setting. The clocks would go back this weekend and so at this time on Sunday it would already have been dark for nearly an hour. She hated the early winter nights. They always reminded her that little Seamus hadn’t lived to see his second Christmas.

She closed the file on her desk and stood up. As she did so, Detective Dooley came in, still wearing his brown oilskin jacket.

‘Oh, good. Glad I caught you, ma’am. I just came back from the Begleys.’

‘How are they taking it, as if I have to ask?’

‘Very bad altogether. Mrs Begley is in a terrible state. I left the counsellor with her, to calm her down if she could.’

‘I’ll see if I can’t visit them myself tomorrow, but I don’t really want to intrude.’

Detective Dooley held up a transparent plastic folder with a sheet of paper inside it. ‘Roisin left a note. It was tucked under her pillow in her bedroom, so they didn’t find it till it was too late.’

He handed it to Katie. The paper was A4 size, lined, and looked as if it had been torn out of a school exercise book. The writing on it was large and scrawly, in blue liquid-ink pen.

Dear Ma and Pa and Shauna and Keeva and Tom, you will hate me I know but I cannot face going to court and having to tell everyone what I did. I love you all so much but I wish I had never been born. Everything was so wrong inside my head and the only way I can think of putting it right is to switch off the light for ever. Try to think good things about me. Love and love and love again Roisin XXXXX
.

Katie read it a second time and then handed it back. ‘Holy Mary,’ she said. ‘It’s enough to bring the tears to your eyes. Poor girl.’

‘I took one of her schoolbooks as well, so the technicians can make a comparison and verify her handwriting. They’ll be checking the paper for dabs, too, of course, and DNA, although I doubt if they’ll find much of that.’

‘Thanks, Robert. I’m sorry you had to do the news-breaking duty.’

‘No, you’re grand. It had to be me. Her mum and dad knew it was me that got her out of that so-called massage parlour. She was a beautiful girl, you know. Just too frisky for her own good.’

Katie put on her duffel coat. The last of the evening sun was gleaming on the green glass windows of the Elysian Tower and she could see the lights shining in Michael Gerrety’s top-floor apartment. She wondered what he was thinking right now – whether he had Roisin Begley on his mind at all, or had completely wiped her from his conscience already. Whether Roisin had genuinely drowned herself or not, he was still responsible for it.

‘Everything all right, like?’ asked Detective Dooley.

‘Yes, sure, fine, thanks, Robert. Just a little tired, that’s all.’

‘You remember what you said to me my first day here?’

Katie switched off her desk lamp. ‘I can’t say that I do.’

‘You said, “You can’t take care of everybody, just give the best care possible to the people you can.”’

‘Did I say that? That was very philosophical of me.’

‘You also said, “There is often the look of an angel on the Devil himself.”’

Katie closed her office door behind her and walked along the corridor with him. ‘My granny used to say that. I think she was talking about her local priest, but it’s equally true of criminals. And politicians. And one or two assistant commissioners, too.’

And David Kane, who used to live next door to me and made me pregnant
.

* * *

John was out when she arrived home, although he had left the porch light on for her, and a table lamp in the living room, as well drawing the curtains.

There was a note on the kitchen table:
Gone to Bishopstown. Won’t be late. Barney’s been walked. Made my spicy shepherd’s pie. Love you, Det. Supt!

Katie changed out of her grey tweed work suit into jeans and a sloppy white sweater. The waistband of her jeans was becoming a little tight, so she left the top button undone, but the sweater covered it and she hoped John wouldn’t notice She sat down in the living room with a glass of Tanora and switched on the television.
Fair City
had just started, but she had missed so many episodes that she couldn’t follow what Callum was trying to do to help Dermot and Jo.

She was still channel-hopping, looking for something else to watch, when she heard John’s car arriving outside. She went to open the front door for him, with Barney jostling excitedly around her knees.

John came in carrying a large black artist’s portfolio, over a metre wide. He took it into the living room and propped it up against the sofa, then he removed his tan corduroy coat and hung it up in the hallway. Katie put her arms around him and kissed him, and he kissed her back.

‘So, what did you go to Bishopstown for?’ she asked him.

He walked back into the living room, ruffling his hair. ‘For this. It’s a lunchbox for giant sandwiches.’

‘Oh, stop codding.’

‘It’s my drawings and my paintings. When I sold the farm I put them into storage at William O’Brien’s. I always imagined that when I went to San Francisco I’d be far too busy to be doing any art. But now I’m back here, well, I have a reasonable amount of free time, so I can take it up again. And I was vain enough to think that you’d be interested to take a look.’

‘You never told me you were good at art,’ said Katie.

‘There were three or four of my landscapes up on the walls at the farm, and a portrait of my ma, God bless her.’

‘Well, yes, I remember them. But I didn’t realize
you
’d painted them.’

‘I’ve always liked drawing. I was top in art at school. Look.’

John unzipped the portfolio and laid it open on the floor. Inside were twenty or thirty sheets of cartridge paper with sketches of fields and trees and drinkers sitting in pubs. He lifted these out and underneath lay at least a dozen oil-painting boards with landscapes and riverside scenes and portraits of local people, mostly women. All of the paintings were rendered in sombre colours, varying shades of grey and green, but John had caught the greyness of Cork on wet and cloudy days, and his portraits were so highly finished that their sitters almost looked as if they were alive and would open their mouths to speak at any moment .

‘John,’ said Katie, ‘these are
fantastic
. I had no idea.’

She looked through them all, one by one, until she came to the last one, which was a picture of a thin naked girl looking out of a window at a rainy garden. She had long brunette hair tied up in a grey velvet ribbon and she had her face turned coyly towards the artist.

‘Who’s this?’ asked Katie.

‘Erm, well, that’s my ex, Belinda.’

‘She’s a very pretty girl.’

‘Pretty, yes, but argumentative. Whatever I said to her, she’d say different. If I said chalk was cheese, she’d say it was champ.’

Katie laughed, ‘Sounds like my sister Moirin. She disagrees with me on principle. She’d eat a bowlful of spiders for her breakfast if I told her that I couldn’t stand the taste of them.’

John carefully stacked the paintings and drawings back into the portfolio and zipped it up again.

‘The thing is, Katie, it’s you who’s inspired me to take up painting again.’

‘Oh yes? And how did I manage to do that?’

‘Serious, I want so much to show you how much I love you. If I can paint you, it will give me a way of proving how committed I am to us being together. And apart from that, goddamnit, you’re beautiful. I really want to celebrate that beauty in a portrait.’

‘You don’t mean nude, like Belinda?’ asked Katie.

John shrugged. ‘If you’ll let me. You have the most fantastic body.’

‘I’ve put on weight lately. Too many boxty lunches in the canteen.’

‘Oh, come on. You look great. You’re not overweight at all.’

‘John – I’m a senior Garda officer. I’m not sure that posing for a portrait in the nude is exactly prudent. Supposing somebody else gets hold of it.’

‘Like who? We’ll hang it on the bedroom wall and keep it to ourselves. Katie – I love you, darling, I’m crazy about you, and it would give me so much pleasure. Musicians write songs for the women they love, don’t they? “Lady in Red”, “Wonderful Tonight”, “Layla”, songs like that. Painting this picture would be the same kind of thing for me.’

‘I don’t know, John. I love you, too. I really, really do. But maybe wearing one of those lovely Sarah Pacini dresses I bought last week. Or just head and shoulders.’

John held her close and kissed her, again and again. ‘Katie Maguire, I want you naked, just as you are. I want to paint every inch of you.’

She smiled, and kissed him back. ‘Let me think about it.’

‘Of course. Think about it, and then say yes. I’ll be waiting, darling – with my palette all filled up and my brush poised ready.’

Katie laughed and gave him a playful push. ‘You’re a sex maniac, do you know that?’

‘And why do you think that is?’ asked John. ‘Because of you.’

* * *

At about two in the morning, John reached across the bed and started to lift up Katie’s nightgown. He stroked her thigh and then he began to reach around her hip.

‘No, John, please,’ she told him and pushed her nightgown down again.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked her. ‘When was the last time we made love?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You don’t have to be sorry. Just tell me what’s wrong. Is it something I’ve done? You’re upset because I want to paint you? Is that it?’

She twisted herself around in bed and stroked his prickly cheek. ‘It’s not that at all. It’s just that work has been fierce traumatic lately, what with Kenny Horgan getting shot like that, and then today there was Roisin Begley.’

‘What about her?’

‘She was found in the river. It looks like she committed suicide because she couldn‘t face giving evidence against Michael Gerrety.’

‘Jesus, Katie. Why didn’t you tell me? No wonder you’re upset.’

‘I don’t like to bring my work home, that’s all. What am I supposed to do, sit at the supper table and talk about people being glassed in the face and smashed up in car crashes and choking on their own vomit?’

John held her close and kissed her forehead and ran his fingers through her hair. She thought that it felt dry and that, last time, her hairdresser had cut it too short. ‘Hey,’ he told her, in that American way he had picked up while he was working in San Francisco. ‘I’ve known right from the very beginning what you have to cope with. Look what happened at Knocknadeenly, that was enough to give anybody the screaming ab-jabs for the rest of their life, those women getting all cut up like that. I still have nightmares about it.’