Blood Sisters (25 page)

Detective O’Donovan unfastened the pocket of his jacket and took out two iPhones, both in separate evidence bags, with the names and addresses of their owners written on them. ‘One of them was taking a video, although he says that he can’t guarantee how steady it is because he wasn’t too steady himself, and it may contain strong language, like. The other was taking photos of a couple of girls who were paddling in the fountain and flashing their knickers. That was just before the body was first discovered, so there could well be something useful in the background. I’ve taken a quick lamp at the video myself but there are so many kids looning around in it that it’s hard to make out anything for certain, like.’

‘Thanks, Patrick,’ said Katie. ‘If we can get those back to the station as soon as we can and see if we can’t enhance them. And run through the CCTV footage , too.’

She looked around again. ‘It’s pure amazing that an offender should dump a victim’s body in the middle of one of the most crowded streets in the city on a Friday night. They must have known they’d be caught on camera.’

Patrick nodded. ‘It’s like they’re sticking up two fingers, like, do you know what I mean?’

Bill said, ‘We’ve completed taking pictures of the victim and the fountain. We’ve taken some water samples from the fountain basin, too. There’s a chance that they might tell us if the victim was still bleeding when she was dumped into the water – in other words, if she was alive or dead.’

‘Is she ready to be removed?’

‘Once you’ve taken a sconce at her, yes, she’ll be on her way to the Wilton Hilton.’

‘Jesus, Dr O’Brien’s going to be happy out. He was hoping to get back to Dublin tomorrow. It’s his birthday.’

‘Are you ready?’ asked Bill. He held out his hand towards her in what was almost a fatherly way and Katie felt that he had sensed her reluctance to view the dead nun’s body.
Is it that obvious that I’m feeling hormonal?
she thought.
First Francis O’Rourke and now
Bill Phinner
.
I might just as well walk around with a large placard announcing Pregnant Woman, Handle With Care Or I’ll Cry. Or Be Sick. Or Lose My Temper
.

They walked over to the nun and a young female technical expert lifted the sheet that covered her. Both gardaí who were standing there made a point of turning away.

The nun was dressed in a black tunic, with a black scapular over it. Her head and neck were covered with a white coif, but her black veil was missing. Her face was pale grey, the colour and texture of a papier-mâché mask. Her eyes were open but clouded over and her mouth was gaping downwards, as if in terrible dismay.

Bill crouched down beside her and lifted up her tunic so that Katie could see her feet. All of her toes were missing. Not only that, the skin on both feet had been shredded and tangled, and the flesh underneath had somehow been ripped away so that the jagged toe bones protruded like a set of broken teeth.

‘I hope to God she wasn’t alive and conscious when that was done to her,’ said Katie.

‘No way of telling at the moment,’ said Bill. ‘But that’s not all.’

He folded back the nun’s outer sleeves and showed Katie that both of her hands had been mutilated in the same way. Her fingers had gone and her hands were badly mangled so that they resembled paws.

‘We don’t know yet if she’s suffered any other injuries. She’s already in rigor and her body temperature indicates that she’s probably been dead for six to eight hours, depending on where she’s been. The ambient temperature is seven degrees right now and the water temperature in the fountain is just under five, so that may have cooled her down a little, but she couldn’t have been in the water for very long. We’ll be able to tell a whole lot more when we get her into the mortuary.’

‘And we think this is the same nun who went missing from the Greendale Rest Home?’ Katie asked Detective O’Donovan.

He prodded at his iPhone and then showed her the picture of Sister Barbara that had been given to them by Eileen O’Shea. Katie took it and looked at it closely and then held it over the body to compare it.

‘I’d say that it’s her, all right. What was her name again?’

‘Sister Barbara Flynn. She spent nearly fifty years at the Bon Sauveur Convent.’

‘Well, now we know for sure that two out of the three murdered nuns were members of the Bon Sauveur. But nobody at the convent recognized the flying nun?’

‘They all swore that they didn’t, any road.’

‘Well, maybe they didn’t, Patrick, and maybe they did. I’ll tell you this, though. In the waiting room outside the mother superior’s office there’s a whole collection of group photographs hanging on the walls. I don’t know how far they go back, but there’s all of the sisters in them, as well as the young mothers and the babies that the sisters were supposed to be caring for.’

‘I’ll go up there tomorrow first thing and see if I can’t pick her out in one of them, then,’ said Detective O’Donovan.

‘Good. And don’t take any nonsense from Mother O’Dwyer. If you can’t identify the flying nun immediately, the search warrant gives you the authority to requisition the photographs as possible evidence and bring them into the station so that you can take a look at them closer.’

The ambulance was backed up closer to the fountain and Sister Barbara’s body was lifted on to a stretcher. Bill came up and said, ‘They’re ready to take her off to the mortuary now. I’ll go along there myself with Tyrone and Eithne and we’ll start the preliminaries straight away. It’ll be Christmas before we know it and we could all do with the overtime.’

‘Oh stop,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘I hate fecking Christmas.’

‘How about you, ma’am?’ Bill asked Katie. ‘I’ll give you an update in the morning. What time do you think you’ll be getting in, like?’

Katie said, ‘No, Bill. I think I’ll come with you. I want to see what’s been done to this poor woman.’

Bill raised one black eyebrow like a crow taking off from a rooftop. ‘You’re sure about that? It’s going to be taking us three or four hours at least. Maybe longer.’

But Katie thought of going home to John, who would still be awake and waiting for her, and would probably want to carry on where they had left off. She knew that she would be lying next to him trying to be responsive while all she would be able to picture in her mind would be Sister Barbara’s mutilated feet.

‘No, I’ll come along,’ she said. ‘I’m wide awake now, and besides, it’s about time I came and breathed down your neck while you’re at work.’

‘Please yourself,’ said Bill. ‘Just don’t be overdoing it, like, okay?’

‘Bill, are you trying to tell me something?’ she asked him.

‘Nothing that you don’t know yourself already, ma’am. But I have three daughters and I’ve been working for the Technical Bureau for twenty-three years next February, so I’ve encountered women in all kinds of conditions. So let’s just leave it at that, shall we?’

He gave her a small, conspiratorial smile and walked off. Katie stood there for a moment watching him go, feeling partly upset that he had noticed the change in her, but partly relieved, too, that somebody else knew she was pregnant, or had guessed, at least, and that the knowledge wasn’t a secret any more.

Detective O’Donovan was standing over by the fountain now, so she waved to him and called out, ‘Patrick! I’m off to the hospital! I’ll see you after so!’

* * *

Outside Cork University Hospital the car park was in chaos. A coach carrying thirty-two Cork supporters back from a hurling match against Kerry had overturned on the N22 at the roundabout with Model Farm Road. Seventeen people had been injured, three of them seriously. The rest were wandering around outside the hospital, dazed and still drunk. Some of them were bruised and bloodied and sitting on the wall with their heads in their hands. Others were teetering about, shouting and swearing.

Katie went through reception and made straight for the mortuary. After all the commotion outside, it seemed even more deathly silent in there than usual. Bill Phinner was already there, with his two technical experts, as well as a mortuary assistant whose white coat was buttoned up wrongly and whose hair was sticking up as though he had just got out of bed. They were down at the far end of the mortuary and only the fluorescent lights immediately above them were switched on, so that they looked as if they were on a stage set. They were standing around the body of Sister Barbara who was lying on a steel autopsy table. They had taken off her coif and scapular, but she was still wearing her tunic, with a belt of woven black wool.

‘Ah, here you are, ma’am,’ said Bill.

‘That’s one hell of a rumpus outside,’ said Katie.

‘The perils of drinking and driving,’ said Bill. ‘I was talking to the garda outside and he said the coach driver had fifty-three micrograms of alcohol in his breath and couldn’t even pronounce his own name. Fair play, though, his name was O’Siodhachain.’

Katie approached the autopsy table. She felt calmer than she had before, and more detached. Sister Barbara was still in rigor, so that she looked more like a fibreglass dummy from Brown Thomas’s window than a real nun.

Bill said, ‘We’ve taken another body temperature reading and we’ve examined her eyes. I’d say the time of death was fifteen hundred hours yesterday afternoon.’

‘That’s very precise of you.’

‘Well, to be honest with you, it could have been an hour either side of that. But I’m a great believer in what the eyes can tell you. They’re a much more accurate indicator of t.o.d. than rigor mortis or livor mortis. Here, take a closer look. See... they’re cloudy, because the potassium in the red blood cells has broken down, and the eyeballs themselves have flattened because of the loss of blood pressure.’

Katie looked down at Sister Barbara and Sister Barbara stared blindly back at her, with her mouth still dismally drawn down as if she were saying,
Dear God in heaven, what did I ever do to deserve this?

‘We’ll be taking off her clothing to see what other injuries she might have sustained and take all the necessary pictures and measurements, but then we can leave the rest to Dr O’Brien. Who could wish for a better birthday present? Go ahead, Tyrone.’

Tyrone was a serious-looking young man with rimless spectacles and spiky black hair. He picked up a pair of surgical scissors and began to cut into the black fabric of Sister Barbara’s tunic. Normally, a nun would have been wearing two underskirts, a top skirt of black serge and a skirt of black cotton, but as Tyrone snipped all the way up to her woollen belt, her blotchy, stick-like legs appeared and they could see that she was naked underneath.

‘She didn’t have on a holy habit when she went missing from the rest home,’ said Katie. ‘Whoever killed her dressed her up like this on purpose.’

‘Believe me, ma’am, I’m glad that you’re the one who has to work out the motive,’ said Bill. ‘All I have to do is work out what was done to her. You remember that fellow who was stabbed to death in Sallybrook and the fellow who killed him dressed his body up in his mother’s clothing, underwear and all? You never did find out why he did that, did you?’

‘Ah, he was nothing but a header,’ said Katie. ‘I don’t think he knew himself why he did it.’

Katie watched as Tyrone finished cutting Sister Barbara’s tunic all the way up to the coif, including the sleeves. Bill and Tyrone then lifted her up so that Eithne could tug the tunic out from under her and then fold it and drop it into a large evidence bag. Eithne was a very pretty girl, with blonde hair cut like a dandelion, and although she had only been attached to Bill’s team for five months, she was already proving herself to be highly professional as a forensic artist as well as a technical expert.

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God,’ said Katie, as Sister Barbara’s body was fully exposed. ‘The state of her la.’

It looked as if Sister Barbara had been viciously whipped. Her body was striped with scores of purple diagonal furrows, all the way down from her neck to her knees, and across her upper arms. Most of the furrows were less than five centimetres apart, although they were lumpier and more concentrated around the lower part of her stomach and her genitals, where some of them had broken the skin.

It was what had been done to her breasts, though, that Katie found the most disturbing. Her pale-brown nipples hadn’t been touched, but all around them the flesh of each breast had been scorched and blistered in a pattern like the rays of the sun, about fifteen centimetres in diameter. At the top of each pattern there was a small cross, although this was more pronounced on the right breast than the left.

Bill reached out and stroked one of the furrows on Sister Barbara’s right thigh with his black-gloved finger.

‘I’d say she was whipped with something like a cat-o’-nine-tails. Multiple thongs of thin cotton cord, knotted at the end. You can tell by the way the contusions are bunched up and how they’ve criss-crossed over each other. Very painful if you’re alive.’

‘But you don’t think she was?’

Bill shook his head. ‘Dr O’Brien will have to do some tests to make absolutely certain, but I’d guess she was dead already. It’s often difficult to tell for sure, especially if a body’s been handled roughly, but you’ll find a chemical present in bruises that were inflicted when a person was still alive, leukotriene, which is what causes inflammation. It’s noticeably absent in post-mortem bruises, which I’d say these are.’

‘How much hatred would you have to be feeling to whip somebody like this when they couldn’t even feel it?’ said Katie.

‘Like I say, ma’am, I only collect the evidence. I leave the motivation up to you.’

‘What about her breasts? That pattern around them, it looks almost like a monstrance.’

Bill peered at Sister Barbara’s breasts more closely. ‘Eithne? What do you think?’

‘I think Detective Superintendent Maguire is absolutely right,’ Eithne said, so quietly that Katie could hardly hear her. ‘It looks as if somebody’s taken the luna out of the middle of a monstrance and then heated it up red-hot and pressed it over each of her breasts. My grandma has a monstrance almost exactly like that, with the cross on top of it and everything.’