Blood Sisters (46 page)

‘Was that all he saw? Two fellows in black hoodies? He didn’t see anybody else, or any vehicles nearby that might have been theirs?’

‘No. Two fellows in black hoodies, that’s all. Just like the two fellows who dropped Sister Barbara’s body into the fountain. But at least we know who one of
them
was, even if we haven’t found him yet.’

Katie said, ‘I can see the press hovering over there. I’ll have a quick word with them and then I’ll go to the station and wake a few people up. We’re going to need a pathologist, on the double, and we’re going to need the footage from those two CCTV cameras. I think we’ll be needing to pay another visit to the Bon Sauveur Convent, too. If this victim was one of their congregation, they may be able to help us identify who she was. Or
not
, of course – depending on how public-spirited Mother O’Dwyer happens to be feeling.’

‘I was going to go up to the convent myself after,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘The search team told me they should be winding up their excavating later today, or sometime tomorrow at the latest. They’ve finished digging up the vegetable garden and they’ve already taken up more than two thirds of the lawn’

‘What’s the latest body count?’ asked Katie. ‘Yesterday morning, Sergeant O’Farrell told me that it was up to three hundred and eighty.’

‘More than that now, ma’am. It was well over four hundred by the time they stopped work in the evening. I reckon by the time they’ve finished it’ll hit the five hundred mark, easy. Maybe even six. There were certainly four hundred in the septic tank and another hundred under the lawns and the flower beds.’

‘It’s a massacre,’ said Katie. ‘God knows how long it’s going to take the pathologists to examine every one of them. And all we have is bones. It’s not going to be easy to establish the cause of death, even if we can establish it at all. The real problem is we haven’t found any record of their deaths, although I find it really hard to believe that there isn’t one.’

‘That’s what I was thinking myself,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘Sure, the sisters believed that most of those poor children were the spawn of the Devil, but you would have thought that they would have made
some
note of them leaving this world, wouldn’t you? It’s bad enough for kids to die when they’re only two or three years old – do you know what I mean, like? – especially when they’ve been nothing but hungry and unhappy all of their lives. But for nobody to have written down that they even existed, I think that’s a tragedy.’

‘It’s more than a tragedy,’ said Katie. ‘It’s going to be crucial in deciding what action we take against the Bon Sauveurs – that’s if we decide to take any action at all.’

‘Exactly,’ nodded Detective Inspector O’Rourke. He was watching the technicians as they carefully cut through the nylon cords that had been used to fasten the stiff black figure up against the lamp post. One of them was standing on the parapet holding the dead woman’s head to make sure that it didn’t suddenly drop forward and snap her spine.

Katie said, ‘At the moment, I don’t see how we’re going to be able to determine if the sisters were guilty of causing death by wilful negligence, or if the children simply died of natural causes.’

‘For all anybody knows, they could have strangled them, like, or poisoned them, or drowned them,’ said Detective O’Donovan.

‘Well, I very much doubt it, but you’re right, and there’s no way of telling for certain.’

Without taking his eyes off the figure tied to the lamp post, Detective Inspector O’Rourke said, ‘We could prosecute them for failing to report all of those deaths, couldn’t we, and for disposing of their remains illegally?’

‘Theoretically, yes,’ said Katie. ‘But I very much doubt if the DPP would go along with it. And what would be the point of taking action against a handful of doddery old nuns? They would have the diocese defending them in court, no expense spared, and even if they were found guilty, what would you do with them? They’ve spent most of their lives locked up in a convent in any case. It would be a complete waste of public money – not to mention bad publicity for us. There are still plenty of people who think that young women who get themselves pregnant out of wedlock are not much better than harlots.’

Oh God
, she thought, even as she said it.
That includes me
.

Now the woman’s body was being lifted down from the lamp standard and lowered on to a stretcher. She would be taken to the mortuary at CUH and Katie would have to call the cantankerous Dr Reidy to send down a deputy state pathologist to examine her, because Dr O’Brien had already returned to Dublin.

‘If you could stall there for just a second, please,’ Katie called out as the two technicians lifted up the stretcher. They waited patiently while she went over and pulled on a pair of black latex gloves. She took hold of the hem of the woman’s rain-sodden habit and folded it back as far as the middle of her thighs. Unlike her face, her bare legs were amber rather than brown, but they were just as glossy, as if they had been lacquered, or suntanned. Where the skin was thinner, her kneecaps and shin bones had broken through, and the skin of her left thigh had split apart. What interested Katie was that the flesh that had been exposed underneath wasn’t bloody and raw, as she normallywould have expected in a severe burns victim, but a pale beige colour, like cooked pork.

She knocked against the skin of the woman’s right thigh with her knuckle and it felt and sounded brittle.

Detective Inspector O’Rourke was standing close beside her. ‘I think you’re dead right,’ he said. ‘She’s been roasted. But where would you find an oven big enough? At a bakery, maybe? Or a restaurant?’

‘I think we need to find out who she is first,’ said Katie. ‘Then I think we’ll be able to discover how she died.’

‘Whoever she is, I hope for her sake that she was dead before they roasted her,’ put in Detective O’Donovan as the technicians carried the stretcher away.

Katie snapped off her gloves. ‘If she really is a nun, Patrick, and she was killed by the same person who killed those other three nuns, then I wouldn’t count on it. If there’s anything they all have in common, these three murders, it’s maximum premeditated pain.’

* * *

She approached the small group of TV and radio and newspaper reporters who had been hanging around smoking by the statue of Father Mathew. They greeted her with a fusillade of coughs and ‘g’mornings’.

‘What’s the story, Detective Superintendent?’ asked Michael Malone from the
Examiner
.

‘All I can tell you at the moment is that a deceased female dressed in a nun’s vestments was tied to one of the lamp standards,’ said Katie. ‘An eyewitness saw two men in black hoodies tying her up there at approximately four thirty-five this morning. We’re appealing for anybody else who might have seen this being done to contact us, or anybody who might have seen two men behaving suspiciously in the city centre in the early hours.’

‘Was the victim actually a nun?’

‘I can’t give you any more details about her for the time being, but as soon as I know more we’ll be holding a full media conference at the station.’

‘From what I could see of her, I don’t know, she looked like she was African,’ said Jean Mulligan from the
Echo
. ‘Do you think this could be a race-hate crime?’

‘We don’t yet know who she is or what her nationality might be,’ Katie told her. ‘I can assure you, though, that she wasn’t black.’

‘So why did she look like that? Was that something to do with the cause of death?’

‘I can’t answer any more questions at the moment,’ said Katie. ‘Mathew McElvey from the press office will be in touch with you later.’

‘This is the fourth nun found murdered in Cork in not much more than a matter of days,’ said Michael Malone. ‘Like, not just murdered, but murdered in a really unusual way. Don’t tell us there’s no connection.’

‘All I can say is that we’re continuing to make enquiries and we’re continuing to make progress in our efforts to find out who’s responsible.’

‘Well, that’s a relief, because it’s beginning to seem like less of a series of unrelated killings and more like a cull.’

* * *

Katie went into her office and switched on the lights because it was still dark outside. Even before she had taken off her wet raincoat she rang John again. His phone rang and rang but he still didn’t answer.

She thought about leaving him another message, but she had already told him that she loved him and that she wanted to talk to him. What more could she say? Besides, he had said that he needed some time and some space to think, and it would probably be better if she allowed him to do that.

She had threatened to wake people up to get this investigation into motion, but in all seriousness she knew it was far too early to ring Dr Reidy and that it would also be several hours before they would be able to run through all of the CCTV coverage from St Patrick’s Bridge and the surrounding streets. There were more than thirty high-definition CCTV cameras around Cork city centre and even though the radio room was manned by gardaí twenty-four hours a day it was impossible to watch every monitor screen continuously.

Still, she now had two or three hours of comparative peace in which she could calm down from the events of the night, have a latte and a Miracle Munch bar, and catch up with all of her paperwork.

* * *

Shortly after seven the rain stopped and the grey clouds cleared away and a wan sunlight shone into her office window. She was wondering whether she felt like another latte when Detective Dooley knocked at her door.

‘Good morning, ma’am!’ he greeted her. ‘I think we might have a bit of a lead on Roisin Begley.’

‘Really? Have you seen who she met up with?’

‘Not directly. But I went through all the CCTV footage around Hanover Street around the time she left Havana Brown’s. You can see her coming out of the doors and she stops and looks around, because there’s nobody there to meet her. But then it seems like somebody’s called out to her and caught her attention, because she starts walking quickly west towards Arthur’s Bar on the corner. Of course, it’s double yellows on both sides of the road outside Havana Brown’s, so if somebody was waiting for her with a car they would have had to park in Cross Street.

‘She walks out of our field of vision, so we don’t see her meeting anybody or getting into a car, but after about thirty seconds we see a black Lexus GS driving east along Hanover Street, back past the entrance to Havana Brown’s. It has dark tinted windows, so we can’t identify the occupants. It turns right when it reaches South Main Street and then right again into French’s Quay and after that we lose it, but it doesn’t really matter because we have its registration plate.’

‘Well, that’s a break,’ said Katie. ‘And from the smug look on your face I’d say that you’ve traced who it belongs to.’

‘Oh yes. Who said that Christmas comes only once a year? It’s registered to Savitas Clothing Traders of Ballycurreen Industrial Estate. “Savitas” is Lithuanian for “distinctive”, and the distinctive thing about Savitas Clothing Traders is that its principal partner is Dovydas Karosas.’

‘Well how about that?’ said Katie. ‘We prosecuted Karosas about three years ago for stealing charity clothing bags from people’s doorsteps in Glasheen. He was sending them off to Lithuania for processing and he was making a fortune out of it. That was quite apart from the pimping of underage girls that he’s always been involved in, along with my dear friend Michael Gerrety.’

‘You actually prosecuted Karosas? How did that turn out?’

‘What do you think? Case dismissed for lack of evidence. In other words, case dismissed because all of our witnesses were threatened with having their tongues cut out with Stanley knives. Literally.’

‘Jesus,’ said Detective Dooley. But then he said, ‘That CCTV footage, that’s no proof at all that Karosas took Roisin. But I’ll see if I can get a search warrant for his car. It’s possible that she left fingerprints in it, or maybe hairs if there was any kind of a struggle.’

‘That’s fantastic, you do that,’ Katie told him. ‘But when you do get your warrant, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t, let me know. If you’re searching Karosas’s car, I want to be there personally, just to enjoy his discomfort.’

‘Ma’am?’

‘Karosas is one of those scumbags who likes to taunt me because he thinks that I can never successfully prosecute him. Even if we don’t find anything in his car, I want to see him squirm, that’s all.’

* * *

A little over forty minutes later, Detective O’Donovan called her. He asked her to come down to the radio room so that she could watch the footage of the nun-figure being lashed to the lamp post on St Patrick’s Bridge.

‘It’s not what you’d call enlightening, though, do you know what I mean?’

Katie went downstairs and after she had watched the footage being played back on one of the larger screens she had to agree with him. The CCTV cameras appeared to have picked up nothing more than they already knew. At 4.11 a.m. two bulky men in black hoodies appeared from Bridge Street, on the north side of the river, supporting the woman’s body between them. They held her arms wrapped around their shoulders and her bare feet were trailing on the pavement. From a distance they could easily have been mistaken for two men who were helping home a woman who had drunk too much.

They crossed over to the south side of the bridge, lifted her up and lashed her to the lamp post. A white private-hire taxi drove past while they were doing it, but that was the only moving vehicle in sight. After they had finished tying her up the men walked quickly back the way they had come, their hands in their pockets, their faces always hidden in the shadow of their hoodies.

‘But just watch this,’ said Detective O’Donovan. After a few minutes, a hooded crow flew up and landed on the nun-figure’s shoulder. It hesitated for a while and then it pecked at her lips. It was joined soon after by another hooded crow, which perched on top of her cowl and bent forward to peck at her eyes.

It wasn’t too long, though, before the first squad car arrived, and then another, and the crows reluctantly flapped away. There was no sound, but Katie could imagine them cawing in annoyance.