White Bones (23 page)

Her skin looked even more white than ever, and she could see the veins in her breasts and her thighs as if they were an arterial roadmap. She had never felt so cold in her entire life.

“Mummy,” she said, desperately. Then, much more quietly, “Mummy, I’m here.”

Katie was ready to go home when Conor Cronin from the Traveler’s Support Movement knocked at her door.

“I’ve been expecting you,” she said, slamming shut the drawers in her desk and locking them.

Conor was a man of fifty-something, with a walrus moustache and puffy, Guinness-drinker’s eyes. He wore an old green raincoat and carried a wide-brimmed hat in his hands. “I’d heard from Tadgh Ó Conaill. It seems like you’ve arrested Tómas on a charge of murder.”

“He’s assisting us with our inquiries.”

“Voluntarily?”

“When did Tómas Ó Conaill ever help the Garda voluntarily?”

“So he’s been formally charged?”

“Yes.”

Conor looked around Katie’s office as if he had lost something. “Do you mind if I sit down?”

“You can, of course. I’m afraid they borrowed all my chairs for a conference. Here.” She took a heap of papers from a small stool and dragged it over toward her desk. Conor sat on it and laid his hat on his knee, as if it were part of a ventriloquist’s act, Conor Cronin and his Talking Hat.

“I need to know that you’re respecting his rights,” said Conor. “Whatever he’s supposed to have done, he’s not automatically guilty because he’s a Traveler. I wouldn’t like to think that you’ve picked on him for racial reasons.”

“Conor, you and I know Tómas Ó Conaill of old. He’s a totally evil bastard and he gives Travelers a reputation that, for most of the time, they don’t deserve.”

“He’s not a murderer, detective superintendent, until a judge and a jury have decided that he’s a murderer. And there’s only one power that can decide if he’s truly evil, and that’s – ” Conor pointed to the ceiling.

Katie said, “I’m holding a press conference later today, Conor. I’m going to announce that we’ve arrested Tómas for the murder of Fiona Kelly, but don’t worry. I’m also going to remind them of the media protocols for reporting Travelers.”

“All the same, I’m very concerned for Tómas’ human rights. You have a very prejudicial attitude, I’d say.”

Katie tapped her pencil on the desk. “A young American girl came to Ireland on a touring holiday. Tómas Ó Conaill picked her up, tortured her, cut the flesh off her legs while she was still alive, then dismembered her body and used it make a sacrifical display in the middle of a field. I don’t think you can actually blame me for having a prejudicial attitude, can you?”

Conor abruptly stood up. “We’ll have to see about that. The Travelers have been persecuted ever since the days of Oliver Cromwell and I’m not having Tómas Ó Conaill made the latest object of your persecution simply because he doesn’t have a fixed abode.”

“And I’m not going to let him get away with this, just because he calls himself a Traveler.”

Conor flared his nostrils. He said, “Good day to you, detective superintendent.” Then he jammed his hat onto his head, and pushed his way past Patrick O’Donovan, who was just coming into her office with a sheaf of reports.

“What’s got into him?”

“A severe case of sociological self-importance, that’s all. What have you got for me there?”

“Two more relatives have come forward to say that their great-grandmothers went missing in 1915. Here you are… Kathleen Harrington and Brigid Lehane. They’ve both agreed to take DNA tests, too.”

“That’s good news. Anything else?”

“Mr and Mrs Kelly will be here at four o’clock. Fiona’s parents.”

“All right, I’ll be here.”

Katie called Paul on her cellphone as she drove home, but there was no reply. He was probably still in bed, sleeping off whatever he had been drinking last night. She called Liam Fennessy, and his phone rang and rang for nearly half-a-minute before his girlfriend Caitlin answered it. Katie had known Caitlin even longer than Liam: she had dated Katie’s brother Mark until Mark had gone off to work in Dublin.

“Caitlin? It’s Katie. Is Liam home?”

“He went out about twenty minutes ago. I don’t know when he’s coming back.”

“I need to talk to him urgently but I can’t raise him on his cellphone.”

“It’s broken.”

“Oh… I see. Well, as soon as he comes home, can you ask him to contact me?”

Caitlin said nothing, but made a sharp sniffing noise, as if she were crying.

“Caitlin? Is everything all right?”

“I’m fine. Really, I’m fine.”

“You don’t sound fine.”

Suddenly, Caitlin started to sob – a deep, grieving sob that came right from the back of her throat.

“Caitlin, what’s wrong? Tell me.”

“It’s nothing. Time of the month, that’s all.”

“Listen, I’ve got a bit of time to spare. I’m coming round to see you.”

“Please, don’t. It’s really nothing.”

“I’m still coming.”

Liam and Caitlin lived in a two-bedroomed house on a neat new housing estate just outside Douglas, a village and
shopping-center
off to the south-east of Cork City. Katie parked her Mondeo in the steeply-sloping front drive and walked up to the front door. She pressed the bell and heard it chime inside the house. The sky was the color of slate and the temperature was dropping fast.

She had to press the bell a second time before Caitlin opened the door. She was a thin, pretty girl, with short black hair and a pointed nose. She was wearing a headscarf and a baggy oatmeal sweater and jeans. She was also wearing sunglasses.

“What happened?” said Katie.

Caitlin shrugged in despair. She turned back into the house and Katie followed her, closing the door behind her. In the hallway, a large reproduction of a Jack Yeats painting was propped up against the telephone table, its glass cracked and its gilt frame split. In the kitchen beyond, there was a swept-up heap of broken plates and cups.

“It was all about nothing,” said Caitlin, sitting down at the kitchen table. “We were talking about going on holiday, that’s all. Liam said that he wanted to go fishing in Galway. I said I’d rather go to Portugal and get some sun.”

“That’s all right. What’s wrong with that?”

Caitlin’s fingers traced an invisible butterfly pattern on the varnished pine tabletop, again and again. “He said that I’d probably end up getting my way, whatever, because women always get their way, no matter how irrational they are, because they’re women. And – I don’t know – I told him not to be stupid and the argument just got worse and worse. He threw his phone across the room. He broke all the breakfast plates. I told him to get out and not to come back until he was calm and that was when he hit me.”

She took off her sunglasses. Her left cheekbone was bruised and swollen and her left eye was almost completely closed. There was a cut above her right eyebrow and another on the bridge of her nose.

Katie sat down beside her and took hold of her hand. “I’m so sorry, Caitlin. I’m really so sorry.”

Tears streamed down Caitlin’s cheeks. “He never used to be like this. He was always so gentle. Like a poet, almost. Now he seems so bitter and so angry.”

“Maybe he needs a rest,” said Katie. “I’ve been pushing him very hard in the past six months. I rely on him a great deal – you know – his experience and his expertise. Maybe I’ve been expecting too much of him.”

“You won’t make trouble for him, will you?”

“It depends. He’s physically assaulted you, Caitlin, and that’s a criminal offence. You could press charges against him if you wanted to.”

“That would finish him, though, wouldn’t it? I mean, it would finish his career?”

“He’s a Garda inspector, Caitlin. He’s supposed to uphold the law. He has a greater responsibility than most people to behave decently.”

Caitlin tugged out a Kleenex and dabbed her eyes. “What will you do?”

“I don’t know yet. But I can’t just turn a blind eye. I’ll have to have a talk with him, when I see him.”

“It was partly my fault as well. I shouldn’t have told him that he was stupid. I should have realized that he was stressed.”

“Come on, Caitlin, shouting is one thing. Battery is quite another.”

“He seems to have so much
rage
inside him. So much resentment.”

Katie gently squeezed her fingers. “How about I make us a cup of coffee?”

As she drove home, she met Paul walking Sergeant along the road, about a half-a-mile from the house. It was starting to rain so she stopped and gave them a lift. Sergeant jumped around on the back seat, panting furiously from his walk, and occasionally slobbering her on the back of the neck. Paul looked hungover and distracted. He hadn’t combed his hair and he was wearing his old gray jogging bottoms with the white emulsion paint on them.

“So you’ve caught your ritual murderer, then,” he said, not looking at her.

“We’re making a media announcement this afternoon at three o’clock.”

“Am I allowed to know who he is?”

“As long as you don’t tell anybody else.”

“I see. Married all these years and you still don’t trust me.”

“Of course I trust you. Sergeant, for God’s sake stop licking me! It’s Tómas Ó Conaill.”

“Tómas Ó Conaill, that psychopath. That doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Has he confessed?”

“He’s denying it one hundred percent. Despite the fact that I arrested him next to a Mercedes car with Fiona Kelly’s blood in the boot and his own fingerprints all over it.”

“Any idea what his motive was? Or did he just do it for the hell of it?”

“I don’t know. Gerard O’Brien thinks that he was making a human sacrifice – trying to raise up the spirit of Mor-Rioghain the
bean-sidhe
. Presumably he was tired of selling used cars and tarmacking driveways and wanted to get rich the easy way. By magic.”

“Jesus. I didn’t think that even
he
would be as mad as that.”

“I don’t know. We all like to think that we can get rich by magic, don’t we? The Lotto, or the horses, or the football pools.”

“Or selling off a million euros’ worth of building materials that don’t belong to us,” Paul put in.

“I didn’t say that.”

“You would have done, if I hadn’t said it first.”

They said nothing as they parked outside the house and went inside. It was raining hard now, and the sitting-room was so gloomy that Katie switched on the chandelier. Sergeant went to his bowl in the kitchen and noisily lapped up water. Paul poured himself a whiskey.

“You want one?”

“God, no. It’s only ten o’clock. I’m going to take a shower.”

“Listen, when you called last night… I didn’t mean to sound so down.”

“You’ve got every right to be down. Life hasn’t been very good you lately, has it? Even if most of your problems
have
been your own fault.”

Paul sat down. “Maybe Tómas Ó Conaill isn’t so mad after all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well… think of the things that we could ask this
Mor-Rioghain
for, if
we
could raise her up.”

“Such as?”

He swilled whiskey around in the bottom of his glass, around and around, and then swallowed it. “For a start, we could ask for Seamus back.”

“What?”

“That would make things better between us, wouldn’t it? I mean if Seamus hadn’t – ”

He stopped when he saw the look on Katie’s face. Without another word she left the sitting-room and went upstairs. She stripped off her jacket, took off her holster and unbuttoned her blouse. She strewed the rest of her clothes across the pink-
and-white
quilt, and then she went into the en-suite bathroom and turned on the shower. She stared at her face in the mirror over the washbasin and she looked like somebody in shock.

We could ask for Seamus back
. Holy Mother of God, how could he have said it?

She took a deep breath and stepped into the shower cabinet. She stood for a long time with her forehead pressed against the tiles and the water coursing down the back of her neck.

We could ask for Seamus back
.

She was still in the shower when Paul came rapping on the frosted glass door. “Are you all right, pet?”

“I’m fine. I’ll be out in a minute.”

“Listen… I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m sorry. I’ve had things on my mind, that’s all.”

“I can’t hear you.”

He opened the shower cabinet door. “I’ve been having some more trouble about these building materials.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“A fellow I didn’t know from Adam came up to me in the pub yesterday evening and said that I had forty-eight hours and then he was going to come after me.”

Katie stepped out of the shower and wrapped a pink towel around her, twisting another pink towel around her head in a turban.

“Did he mention Dave MacSweeny?”

Paul shook his head. “All he said was, ‘You’ve got forty-eight hours, boy, and then I’m coming after you.’”

“But you took him to mean that Dave MacSweeny wants his building materials back?”

“What else do you think he was talking about? Believe me, pet, if I
could
give them back, I’d do it like a shot. But Winthrop Developments won’t return them until they’re fully reimbursed, and Charlie Flynn’s still sunning his fat arse in Florida and how can I get
him
to pay the money back, even if he hasn’t spent it, and you know what happened to my commission.”

Katie didn’t know what to say. Even being nailed to the wall of a cell in Cork City Gaol didn’t seem to have deterred Dave MacSweeny from seeking his revenge. If she was going to protect Paul from being badly hurt, it was beginning to look as if she was going to have to admit to Dermot O’Driscoll that she knew where Charlie Flynn was, and why he was hiding, and what Paul’s involvement was. In plain language, the shite was going to have to hit the fan.

At least she had arrested Tómas Ó Conaill for killing Fiona Kelly. She may have saved another girl’s life, too, if Ó Conaill had been planning to make up the numbers of sacrificed women to thirteen. But that wasn’t much of a consolation for losing her career.