White Bones (3 page)

Liam came over as Katie left the house. “Well?” he asked her, chafing his hands together.

“Nothing. It’s hard to believe that John Meagher’s father had anything to do with this. But someone managed to excavate a hole in the floor of his feedstore and bury eleven skeletons in it, not to mention drilling their thighbones and decorating them with little dollies, and how they did that without Michael Meagher being aware of it, I can’t imagine. As Mrs Meagher says, he was in and out of there every single day, fetching and carrying feed.”

“So, it stands to reason. He
must
have known what was going on.”

“And what do we deduce from that? That he conspired with an execution squad?”

“I don’t think these
were
executions,” said Liam. “With executions it’s almost always
phutt
! in the back of the head, after all. And what about all these dollies? What execution squad would bother to dismember their victims and drill holes in their thighbones? They’d have the graves dug and the bodies thrown in and they’d be off. But even if this
was
an execution, and John’s father
did
bury the bodies, we can’t necessarily assume that he did it willingly. He might have been warned to keep his mouth shut or else the same thing would happen to him.”

Katie took out a handkerchief and wiped her nose. “I don’t know. I think we’re going to have to look somewhere else for the answer to this.”

“Well, let’s keep an open mind about our Michael Meagher. Like I said, there’s something about these out-of-the-way farms that puts me in mind of
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
. The rain, the mud, and nobody to tell your woes to but the pigs and the cows. It’s not good for a man’s sanity to be speaking nothing but Piggish and Cattle-onian all day.”

Katie checked her watch. “We’ve done all we can for tonight. General briefing at ten o’clock tomorrow morning, sharp. Meanwhile, can you get Patrick started on a comprehensive check of missing persons in the North Cork district for the past ten years? Tell him to pay special attention to people who went missing in groups, and anybody who was cycling or hitch-hiking or backpacking. They’re always the most vulnerable.

“Have Jimmy talk to his Traveler friends… they might know something.”

“And me?”

“You know what I’m going to ask you to do. Go and have a drink with Eugene Ó Béara.”

“You don’t think he’s really going to tell me anything, do you?”

“If the Provos had a hand in this, no. But you might persuade him to confirm that they didn’t, which would save me a whole lot of time and aggravation and a few hundred euros of wasted budget.”

It was nearly 10 o’clock when she finally got home, turning into the gates of their bungalow in Cobh, and parking her Mondeo next to Paul’s Pajero 4x4. The rain was falling from the west as soft as thistledown. Paul still hadn’t drawn the curtains, and as she walked up the drive she could see him in the living-room, pacing up and down and talking on the phone. She tapped on the window with her doorkey, and he lifted his whiskey tumbler in salute.

She let herself in and was immediately pounced on by Sergeant, her black Labrador, his tail pattering furiously against the radiator like a bodhrán drum.

“Hallo, boy, how are you? Did your daddy take you for a walk yet?”

“Haven’t had the time, pet,” called Paul. “I’ve been talking to Dave MacSweeny all evening, trying to sort out this Youghal contract. I’ll take him out in a minute.”

“Poor creature. He’ll be ready to burst.”

Katie pried off her shoes and hung up her coat and went through to the living-room. It was brightly-lit by a crystal chandelier, with mock-Regency furniture, all pink cushions and white and gilt. The walls were hung with gilt-framed reproductions, seascapes mostly, with yachts tilting against the wind. One corner of the room was dominated by an enormous Sony widescreen television, with a barometer on top of it in the shape of a ship’s wheel. In the opposite corner stood a large copper vase, filled with pink-dyed pampas grass.

Paul said, “Okay, Dave. Grand. I’ll talk to you first thing tomorrow. That’s right. You have my word on that.”

Katie opened up the white Regency-style sideboard and took out a bottle of Smirnoff Black Label. She poured herself a large drink in a cut-crystal glass and then went over to draw the curtains. Sergeant followed her, sniffing intently at her feet.

Paul wrapped his arms around her waist and gave her a kiss on the back of the neck. “Well, now. How’s everything? I saw you on the TV news at eight o’clock. You looked gorgeous. If I wasn’t married to you already I would have called the TV station and asked for your phone number.”

She turned and kissed him back. “I’d have had you arrested for harassment.”

Paul Maguire was a short, pillowy man, only two or three inches taller than she was, with a chubby face and dark-brown curly hair that came down over the collar of his bright green shirt in the 1980s style that used to be called a “mullet.” His eyes were bright blue and slightly-bulging and he always looked eager to please. He hadn’t always been overweight. When she had married him seven-and-a-half years ago he had taken a 15-inch collar and a 30-inch waist and had regularly played football for the Glanmire Gaelic Athletic Association.

But five years ago his construction business had suffered one serious loss after another; and his confidence had taken a beating from which he hadn’t yet recovered. These days he spent most of his time trying to make quick, profitable fixes – wheeling and dealing in anything from used Toyotas to cut-price building supplies. There were too many late nights, too many pub lunches with men in wide-shouldered Gentleman’s Quarters suits who said they could get him something for next-to-nothing.

“Did you eat, in the end?” Katie asked him.

“I had a ham-and-cheese toastie at O’Leary’s. And a packet of dry-roasted.”

“That’s not eating, for God’s sake.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it. I don’t have much of an appetite, if you must know.”

“The whiskey’s killed it, that’s why.”

“Come on, now, Katie, you know what pressure I’ve been under, working this deal out with Dave MacSweeny.”

“I wouldn’t mention Dave MacSweeny and a decent man on the same day. I don’t know why you have anything to do with him.”

“He went inside just the once, and what was that for? Receiving a stolen church piano. Not exactly Al Capone, is he?”

“He’s still a chancer.”

She went through to the kitchen, with Sergeant still pursuing her feet. Paul followed her as she opened the breadbin and took out a cut bran loaf. “This is always the way, isn’t it? I’m married to the only female detective superintendent in the whole of Ireland, so no matter what I do I have to conduct myself like a saint.”

“Not a saint, Paul. Just a law-abiding citizen who doesn’t have any dealings with people who hijack JCBs from public roadworks and smuggle cigarettes through the quays and steal lorryloads of car tires from Hi-Q Motors.”

Paul watched her in frustration as she cut herself a thick slice of red cheddar and started to slice up some tomatoes. “I’m doing my best, Katie. You know that. But I can’t check the credentials of everybody I do business with, can I? They wouldn’t give me the time of day if I did. It’s bad enough you being a cop.”

Katie sprinkled salt on her sandwich and cut it into quarters. “Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that my being a cop is precisely
why
they do business with you? Who’s going to touch you, garda or villain, when you’re Mr Detective Superintendent Kathleen Maguire?”

Paul was about to say something else, but he stopped himself. He followed Katie back into the living-room, stumbling over Sergeant as he did so. “Would you ever hump off, you maniac?”

Katie sat down and took a large bite of sandwich, using the remote to switch on the television. Paul sat beside her and said, “Anyway, forget about Dave MacSweeny. How was your day? What’s all these skeletons about? They said on the news there was nearly a dozen.”

Katie’s mouth was full of sandwich, but with eerie timing her own face suddenly appeared on the screen, standing in the afternoon gloom up at Meagher’s Farm, and she turned the volume up.
“We can’t tell yet how long these people have
been buried here, or how they died. We’re not excluding any possibility at all. We could be looking at a mass execution or a series of individual murders or even death by natural causes. First of all the remains have to be examined by the State Pathologist, and as soon as he’s given us some indication of the time and cause of death, you can be sure that we’ll be pursuing our enquiries with the utmost rigor.”

“There,” said Katie. “Now you know as much as I do.”

“That’s it? You don’t have any clues at all?”

“Nothing. It could have been an innocent family who died of typhus, and who were buried on the farm because they couldn’t afford the funerals. Or it could have been eleven fellows who upset somebody nasty in the Cork criminal fraternity.”

“I hope you’re not making a point.”

“No, Paul. I’m very tired, that’s all. Now how about you taking Sergeant out to do his business, so that we can go to bed and get some sleep?”

While Paul put on his raincoat and took Sergeant for his run, Katie went through to the small room at the back of the house where she kept her desk and her PC. They still called it The Nursery, although they had stripped off the pale blue wallpaper, and the sole reminder of little Seamus was a small color photograph taken on his first and only birthday.

She took her nickel-plated Smith & Wesson .38 revolver out of the flat TJS holster on her hip and locked it in the top drawer of her desk. Then she sat for a long time staring at her reflection in the gray screen of her computer. When she was young she used to sit on the window-seat at night, looking out of the window, and imagine that there was a ghostly girl looking back at her out of the darkness. She even used to talk to her reflection, sometimes.
Who are you, and what are you doing, floating in the night, and why do you look so sad?

She didn’t fully understand why, but today’s discovery up at Meagher’s Farm had given her a feeling of deep disquiet… as if something terrible was about to happen. The last time she had felt anything like this was late last spring, when the coastguard had discovered the body of a Romanian woman, washed up on the beach at Carrigadda Bay, in her multi-colored dress. During the course of the next few weeks, all along the coastline as far as Kinsale, they had discovered thirty-seven more. Each woman had paid £2,000 to be smuggled illegally into Ireland, but they had been thrown into the sea a hundred yards offshore, with all of their belongings, and none of them could swim.

During the night, Paul rolled over onto his back and started to snore. Katie elbowed him and hissed, “
Shut up, will you
?” and he stopped for a while, but then he started up again, even louder. She buried her head under the duvet and tried to get back to sleep, but all the time she could hear that high, repetitive rasping.

She found herself walking through a dark, dripping abattoir. She wasn’t aware that she was asleep. Somewhere close by she could hear a shrill chorus of bandsaws, and the sound of men whistling as they worked.

She turned a corner and found herself on the killing floor. Five or six slaughtermen were standing around steel-topped tables, wearing long leather aprons and strangely-folded linen hats. They were nonchalantly cutting up carcasses, and tossing them into heaps. Arms on one heap, legs on another, heads in the opposite corner.

Katie walked toward them, even though the floor was slimy with connective tissue and she could feel the blood sticking to her bare feet. As she came closer, she suddenly saw that the carcasses were human – men, women and children.

She came up behind one of the slaughtermen and lifted her hand to touch him on the shoulder. “
Stop
,” she mouthed, but no sound came out. He was lining up a decapitated human head, ready to saw it in half.

“
Stop
,” she repeated, still silently. At that moment, the decapitated head opened its eyes and stared at her. It started to jabber and babble, and with a thrill of horror she realized that it was trying to explain to her what had happened up at Meagher’s Farm.

“The Gray-Dolly Man! You have to look for the
Gray-Dolly
Man!
”

“Stop! I’m a police officer!” Katie screamed at the
slaughterman
. But without hesitation he pushed the head into his bandsaw. There was a screech of steel against bone, and Katie’s face was sprayed with blood.

Katie woke up with a jolt. Paul was still snoring, and rain was spattering against the window. She waited for a few minutes, then she climbed out of bed and went through to the kitchen for a drink of sparkling Ballygowan water. She could see herself reflected in the blackness of the window as she drank directly out of the neck of the bottle. The ghost again, looking back at her.

You need a break, she told herself. She and Paul hadn’t had a holiday since February, when they had taken a cheap package to Lanzarote for ten days and it had rained for nine of them. Or maybe she needed a different kind of break. A break from her entire life. A break from pain and violence and kicking down doors to damp-smelling apartments. A break from her guilt about little Seamus.

But she couldn’t forget those eleven skulls, lined up
higgledy-piggledy
beside the excavation where the rest of their bodies were strewn. And she couldn’t forget those little rag dolls, dangling from their thighbones. Eleven people, deserving of justice. She just prayed to God that they hadn’t suffered too much.

Wednesday was colder but very much brighter, and Katie had to wear sunglasses when she drove into the city. The roads were shining silvery-wet from the early-morning rain, and the Lee was glittering like a river of broken glass.