Blood Sisters (23 page)

Katie said, ‘I’ve told you before that if you refuse to assist us, I could arrest you for obstruction.’

‘You’ll have to do whatever you think fit,’ Mother O’Dwyer retorted.

‘All these children – do you have records of their deaths?’ Katie asked her. ‘You didn’t give any to Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán here. Were they registered with the coroner, as they should have been?’

‘Stillborn children don’t have to be registered.’

‘I know that, but you can clearly see from the size of some of the bones in your septic tank that most of them were considerably older than newborns.’

‘I have no comment about that.’

‘Let me ask you this, though, Mother O’Dwyer. Straight out: did you know that they were there?’

‘I’ve nothing at all to say about that, either. I’m sure that Mr O’Cathaín or one of his associates will be in touch with you shortly. My only comment is that illegitimate children could not be baptized and anybody who had not been baptised could not be buried in consecrated ground.’

It took all of Katie’s self-control not to ask Mother O’Dwyer how she would like her own body to be disposed of when she died? Dumped naked into the wastewater plant at Carrigrenan? She thought of the funeral they had held for Seamus, and the flowers, and the reverence with which his little casket had been buried. Apart from the hymns, they had sung “Morning Has Broken”. She thought of the tiny life that was growing inside her even now.

‘We’ll let you get back to Monsignor O’Leary,’ she said. ‘We don’t want him cribbing that you might be spilling the beans, do we?’

Mother O’Dwyer bowed her head and said, ‘Good day to you so, detective superintendent. May the Lord be with you.’

* * *

Katie held her daily briefing later that afternoon than usual. After coming back from the Bon Sauveur Convent she had spent over two hours with her solicitor, Casie Driscoll, discussing how she should respond to the investigation by the Garda Ombudsman. Casie wore a loud suit of yellow and black checked tweed and huge horn-rimmed glasses, and her maroon-coloured hair was always a mess, but in spite of her appearance and her assertive attitude she advised Katie to be reactive rather than aggressive.

‘Whatever Bryan Molloy did and said about you, Katie,
you
did nothing wrong at all. Everything you did as far as I can understand it was totally by the book. So don’t be slinging any mud back at them. It will only dignify the mud that they’re slinging at you.’

Katie wasn’t sure how you dignified mud, but she understood what Casie was saying to her.

The daily briefing afterwards was short and frustrating. They had made hardly any progress at all in trying to find out who had murdered Detective Horgan. A silver Mercedes S-class of the type from which the shot had been fired had been found burned out behind Tesco’s at the Manor West Retail Park in Tralee, in Kerry. It had originally been supplied by Frank Hogan Motors in Limerick, who had sold it to William Innes, an insurance broker who lived in Castletownroche. William Innes’s son had borrowed the Mercedes and badly damaged it, so he had sold it to a man called Devine for cash rather than lose his no-claims bonus.

‘Do we know this Devine fellow?’ asked Katie.

Detective Inspector O’Rourke said, ‘No. Your man gave Mr Innes a business card with a Limerick address on it, but the address turned out to be Donkey Ford’s chipper in Cathedral Square and the phone number was the Samaritans.’

‘Where is the car now? Have the Technical Bureau had the chance to examine it?’

‘It’s here now. We had it brought in about an hour ago. We took a quick sconce at it, but there’s nothing obvious in it in the way of forensics. No cartridge cases or anything like that. It may not even be the same car as the one that was used to shoot at you, so we’re still looking.’

‘Any luck with the flying nun?’ asked Katie.

Detective O’Donovan shook his head. ‘No luck at all. We must have shown her picture to everybody in Cork who’s taken holy orders, and of course it’s been shown on the TV, too, and in the papers. She may not have been a genuine nun at all, of course, but whoever killed her dressed her up like that.’

‘And what do you think the motive might be for that?’

‘God knows. What was the motive for cutting her tripes out and floating her up the Glashaboy?’

Katie said, ‘If we can work that out, Patrick, we’ll have a much clearer profile of our offender.’ She paused. ‘Either that, or we’ll be even more confused than we are now.’

‘Nothing more to report on Roisin Begley,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘She was picked up on CCTV crossing over Pana at 10:34 p.m. on Sunday evening. Her parents thought she was in bed at that time. She was wearing the same pink coat that she was wearing when they fished her out of the river. She’s on her own, though, on Pana and there’s no obvious indication that she’s being followed.’

‘Was that the last sighting of her?’

‘It was, yeah. She must have gone into the river soon after, whether she jumped or was pushed.’

‘How about the horses?’ asked Katie.

‘That’s all going according to plan. I went up to Spring Lane this morning and took Paddy Fearon his five hundred and he was very appreciative to say the least. He’s going to pick up the first three horses at Kilmichael early Monday morning and then come back for the other six during the course of the day.’

‘He won’t be able to tell where the horses really came from?’

‘No. All of their passports will be fakes and they’ll all be fly-grazing in a field about three kilometres from Josh O’Malley’s stud farm. We’ll follow Fearon wherever he takes them and hopefully catch him before he does them any harm. I doubt if it will be Nohaval Cove, though – that’s been too much on the news lately.’

‘But you’re quite sure he doesn’t suspect you?’ asked Katie. ‘He’s not just going to keep the five hundred and fail to show up and deny all knowledge of what you asked him to do?’

‘I don’t think so, ma’am,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘I think I’ve convinced him that he’s met me before. One of my Pavee girls told me that he was in Waxy’s one night and a friend’s dog pooped on his shoe. I made out that I’d been there, too, that night and it was then that he’d he tipped me the wink that he could dispose of horses on the cheap. He must have been so stocious he couldn’t remember if I was there or not.’

‘A dog pooped on Paddy Fearon’s shoe?’ said Detective Sheedy. ‘Jesus! I’m surprised the poor creature lived to tell the tale.’

‘How about the dead horses?’ asked Katie. ‘Have we heard any more from Tadhg Meaney?’

‘Nothing much at all,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘The vets are sure now that the horses must have been alive when they were driven off the cliff. Most of them have traces of performance-inhibiting drugs in them, but not enough to kill them. That backs up Tadhg Meaney’s first impression that they died from the fall, rather than being dead horses that were thrown off the cliff just to get rid of them.’

‘We haven’t been able to discover where any of these horses came from?’

‘Weatherbys have been very cooperative, but since they don’t have any record of their chip numbers there isn’t a whole lot more they can do. These were like the ghost horses that never were, do you know what I mean?’

‘All right,’ said Katie. ‘DS Ni Nuallán called me just before we started this briefing and so I can bring you up to date on the progress we’re making up at the Bon Sauveur Convent. They’ve lifted up the access cover to the third chamber of the septic tank and
that
chamber, too, is almost completely filled up with children’s bones. It’s impossible at the moment to tell how many.

‘The technical experts are taking photographs and measurements, but they’re going to be leaving the bones undisturbed for tonight. They’ll start removing them tomorrow, but that’s going to be a very slow and painstaking business altogether.’

Detective Byrne put up her hand and said, ‘Will they be able to reassemble each child’s skeleton? You know, like individually, so they can give each child its own coffin?’

‘It’s doubtful, Maureen,’ Katie told her. ‘If we can find a record of their names, that would be a start, but so far the convent hasn’t produced one. Apart from that, we’d have to test the DNA of nearly every single bone and that would be hugely expensive and time-consuming. To be honest with you, I think the best we can hope for is a decent mass burial and a memorial stone put up. They all had short lives, those children, and unhappy ones, too, most likely, but at least we’ll be giving them some acknowledgement that they existed – which is more than the sisters at the Bon Sauveur ever did.’

‘Well, amen to that,’ said Detective Brennan, crossing himself.

‘We might have found the skeletons in the septic tank, but I don’t think we can stop searching,’ said Katie. ‘As you know, we were originally alerted to the existence of these remains by one of the sisters who had found part of a child’s jawbone in the flower bed, and when we started digging we found a pelvis and a leg bone in the flower bed, too. It may very well be that more children were buried in other locations in the convent garden.

‘Because of this, I’m going to request that we bring in RMR Engineering. Detective Inspector O’Rourke is going up to Dublin this weekend in any case for a security conference and he’ll discuss it with RMR while he’s there. They have a radar scanner that can detect any signs of human activity under the ground, no matter how long ago it took place – like grave-digging or other soil disturbances.’

‘Can they locate actual bones?’ asked Detective Brennan.

‘No, they can’t,’ said Katie. ‘But if they pick up any anomaly beneath the lawns, we can then call in another contractor to dig a series of slit trenches at regular intervals. If there are any bones there, that should find them for sure.

‘I’ve checked out the cost of doing this. It’s about two thousand euros a day and RMR say they can complete the survey in three days or less. I think that’s a small price to pay to find out how so many children died, and who was responsible for them dying, and who disposed of their bodies as if they were nothing but waste matter, to put it politely.

‘It’s far too early to say for sure, but I believe we could be looking at the possibility of some criminal prosecutions.’

She suddenly felt faint and swimmy. She sat down, rather abruptly, and then said, ‘Sorry. It’s been a long day.’

‘You’re all right, ma’am?’ asked Detective Inspector O’Rourke, close to her ear.

‘Of course, yes, thank you, Francis,’ said Katie.

She looked around at all the detectives in the room and said, ‘Everybody – I just want to say this. Some of the major cases that we’re working on at the moment, they’re unusually difficult, and highly sensitive, too – especially the remains we’ve found at the Bon Sauveur. I want to thank you all of you for the work you’ve been putting into them, which has been exemplary. If you have no more questions, that’s it for today.’

She remained seated while everybody left the room, all except for Detective Inspector O’Rourke, who was sitting beside her. He poured a glass of Ishka spring water from one of the small bottles on the table and passed it over to her. He didn’t say anything, but she could see a look in his eye and she knew that he was far from stupid.

‘May the roof above us never fall in,’ she said, lifting the glass.

Detective Inspector O’Rourke smiled, but he didn’t complete the toast she was giving him.
And may we, as friends, never fall out
.

Before she drove home, Katie went shopping at Dunne’s Store on Patrick’s Street. She needed to do a full shop because her fridge was almost empty, but that would have to wait until Sunday. She picked up some pork chops and green beans for tonight, as well as muesli and grapefruit juice and coffee for breakfast.

While she was standing in the queue at the checkout, a short, heavily built man came past her, wearing a long brown raincoat that almost reached the floor. He had greased-back hair and a single gold earring, and a squashed-looking face that looked as if he was being pressed very hard up against a shop window.

When he saw Katie, he stopped and grinned at her. Although he was so ugly, he had immaculate white teeth. She pretended that she hadn’t seen him, because she knew who he was: Dovydas Karosas, one of the pimps who worked for Michael Gerrety. She had tried several times to have him deported back to Lithuania, but he had family here and she had never been able to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he was involved in the sex trade.

She knew that he was grinning at her because she had been forced to abandon her prosecution of Michael Gerrety, and that made her feel even more depressed than she was already. She couldn’t help thinking about Roisin Begley, and all the hundreds of children’s bones at the Bon Sauveur Convent. When it was her turn to pay she found that she had left her purse in her car and she had to swallow hard to stop tears coming to her eyes.

What’s the matter with you, Katie Maguire?
she asked herself as she walked back along Patrick’s Street.
You’re a grown woman, not a girl. More than that, you’re a detective superintendent. It’s your responsibility always to be strong and to take care of other people, not to be pussing just because you’re feeling emotional and you’ve forgotten your purse
.

As she unlocked her car, though, and reached across to the passenger seat,to pick up her purse she suddenly felt very lonely and vulnerable, as if she had nobody to take care of
her
. She knew she had John waiting for her at home, but how long would that last once he discovered that she was pregnant?

On her way back to Dunne’s, she passed Dovydas Karosas, who was standing outside Gentleman’s Quarters, the menswear store, talking to a dark-haired young woman in a short leopard-print coat. He grinned at her again and called out, ‘
Labas vakaras
,
mano numylétinis. Gera matyti tave
!’

She had no idea what he had said, but she ignored him. She took a deep breath and went back into Dunne’s to pick up the basket that she had left by the checkout. She felt stronger now, but she also felt conscious of all the gloomy clouds that were looming in her life. After she had graduated from Templemore her father had said, ‘I’m fierce proud of you, Katie, but you’re a garda now, and I have to tell you this: no matter what the weather, for you it’ll always be lashing.’