White Bones (39 page)

Her hands shaking, she took out her cellphone to call for back-up. As she started to punch out the number, however, John Meagher stepped into the sitting-room and barked, “
Don’t
!”

Jimmy O’Rourke parked his car outside 45 Perrott Street and heaved himself out of his car. Personally, he thought that this part of their investigation was a total waste of time. He didn’t give a monkey’s who had killed those eleven women in 1915, and if it had been up to him, he would have dropped the case into the “pending for all eternity” file, even if Sinn Féin were acting the maggot about it. All that mattered was who had killed Fiona Kelly, and Jimmy believed, like Katie, that Tómas Ó Conaill had at least been a party to it.

He went to Gerard’s front door and rang the bell. No answer. He rang again. Still no answer. He walked round to the side of the house and peered up at Gerard’s window, his hand held up to shield his face from the rain. Gerard was out, no doubt about it, and that meant that he would have to go looking for him at the university. He said, “Shit,” under his breath. He had plenty of other things to do this morning, like interviewing seven Romanian so-called asylum-seekers who had broken into a mini-cab office in MacCurtain Street and made off with €132.75 from the petty-cash box.

Jimmy was just about to leave when a bedraggled black Labrador came around the corner of the house, carrying something in its mouth.

“Here boy,” said Jimmy.

The Labrador looked guilty, and dropped its trophy onto the pavement. At first glance Jimmy thought it was somebody’s lost gardening glove, but when he took a closer look he realized that it was a man’s hand.

“Here boy, where did you find that, boy?”

The dog loped off. Jimmy walked over to the hand and hunkered down next to it. He took out his ballpen and poked it but he didn’t try to pick it up. There was a cheap gold ring on the hand’s third finger, with a black onyx in it.

Jimmy walked around the back of the house, into the driveway. There were twenty or thirty crows flapping and hopping around, and when Jimmy appeared they flustered off into the sky. It was then that he saw Gerard O’Brien’s body lying on the ground, with wet strands of black hair sticking to his face like a veil. His arms were lying amidst a heap of litter over seven feet away, still tied together by the wrists.

“Holy Mary,” said Jimmy. He leaned over Gerard to make absolutely sure that he was dead, and then he stepped away. “Who the feck did
this
to you?”

He took out his cellphone and tried to call Katie, but he couldn’t get through, so he called Liam Fennessy instead. “Inspector? I’m at 45 Perrott Street. I’ve found Professor O’Brien, or what’s left of him. That’s right, somebody’s done for him, practically torn the poor bastard apart. Yes, 45 Perrott Street.”

Liam sounded out of breath. “
I’m away from the station at the moment, Jimmy, but I’ll send Patrick O’Sullivan and Brian Dockery, and the technical team. When you say they’ve torn him apart
–?”

“Somebody’s ripped his arms off. Looks like they must have tied him to the back of a car.”

“You’re codding me.”

“I’m not. I’m serious. Professor O’Brien on one side of the car park, arms on the other.”

“I’ll have to get back to you, hold on.”

Jimmy wiped the rain from his face. The crows kept circling back, but they came no further than the wall between 45 Perrott Street and the house next door, where they shuffled together like the scruffy punters in a Blackpool betting shop. Jimmy tried the back door and found that it was still unlocked. He unholstered his Smith & Wesson revolver and shouldered his way inside. The stairway was dark and smelled of frying mince. Jimmy paused at every turn in the stairs, keeping his gun held high, and listening. By the time he reached Gerard’s flat, however, it was obvious that his killer must have been long gone. Somebody downstairs was playing
Days Like This
by Van Morrison and from upstairs came the clatter of somebody running a bath.

Jimmy nudged open the broken door of Gerard’s flat and went inside. He checked the sitting-room and the kitchen and the bathroom but there was nobody there. He went into the study and found papers strewn all over the floor and the smashed computer, and the chair tipped over.

He tried calling Katie again, but he still couldn’t get through. There was nothing much he could do now, until the technical team got here. He poked around the study, picking up one or two papers, but most of them were lecture-notes on Celtic mythology. He decided to go outside for a smoke.

Before he left, he bent down and picked up the notebook that was lying on the study floor. The first few pages were packed with hand-scribbled notes, mostly in Gaelic. He was about to toss it down again when his eye was caught by the word “
íobairt
,” underlined five times. It was the Gaelic word for “sacrifice.”

Jimmy picked up Gerard’s leather armchair and sat down. He skimmed through the first few pages and realized that they were comments about Badhbh the Death Queen and Macha and Mor-Rioghain and how thirteen ritual killings could be used to call Mor-Rioghain out of the Invisible Kingdom. Jimmy’s Gaelic wasn’t as good as it should have been, considering that every garda was required to be reasonably fluent, and that 11-year-old Jimmy O’Rourke had come second in Gaelic studies at Scoil Oilibhéir at Ballyvolane. All the same, he was able to understand most of it.

Gerard had written: “Several authoritative sources suggest that
once Mor-Rioghain appears, it is necessary for the
summoner
to offer her a living woman as a final sacrifice to seal the bargain between them. This living sacrifice would have to be the wife of a chieftain, or the most influential woman in her community
.” The reason for this apparently being that once she materialized in the mortal world, Mor-Rioghain did not want to have her influence challenged by any mortal woman.

“
The living sacrifice has to be tied and blindfolded. Her stomach has to be cut open ready for Mor-Rioghain to step through from the Invisible Kingdom, so that when the witch conducting the sacrifice has recited the sacred texts, and
Mor-Rioghain
ha
s made her appearance, she can drag out the victim’s intestines and drape them around her shoulders as a cloak of her absolute authority
.”

“Yuck,” said Jimmy, out loud. He flicked through the next few pages, recognizing words like “
mort
” for murder and “
cloigionn
” for skull, but there didn’t appear to be anything particularly new in Gerard’s notes. He had already taken out his cigarette-packet when he reached a page that was written in English.

“I have talked to two different heads of department but the British Public Records Office in Kew
insist
that they have no information about the disappearances of the 11 Irishwomen between 1915–1916!! But I contacted my old friend John Roberts at the Imperial War Museum and he was able to put me on to the relatives of the late Colonel Herbert Corcoran in Nantwich. Major Corcoran (as he then was) was attached to the Crown Forces in Cork between 1914 and 1922, and was considered something of a spy-hero in the style of William Stephenson (‘A Man Called Intrepid’).

“Major Corcoran had a Cork accent which assisted him in infiltrating the republican movement with considerable success. It was his information that led to the ambush of the 1st Cork Brigade at Dripsey in 1921 and the killing of nine IRA men. In the late 1920s he wrote two books of memoirs,
War of Whispers
and
Undercover in Ireland
, although these were
drastically
censored by the British War Office, and amounted to little more than
Boy’s Own-
type adventures. In fact he also wrote three fictitious stories for
Magnet
and
Boy’s Own
, based on his adventures in Ireland.

“His family sent me these pages with the caveat that, in later years, Colonel Corcoran had become obsessive about his time in Ireland and was constantly writing rambling letters to the newspapers about it. In his last job at the War Office before he retired he was affectionately known as ‘Crackers’ Corcoran.”

Jimmy turned the page, and there they were: curled-up
fax-paper
copies of Colonel Corcoran’s diaries, stapled in a thick bunch to the back cover of Gerard’s notebook.

Colonel Corcoran had written: “I pen these pages knowing that they will probably never be seen for a hundred years to come. However, I feel that this story should be recorded in the interests of military history and of humanity.

“While I was operating as a senior intelligence officer in County Cork in the summer of 1916, I was contacted by Brigadier Sir Ronald French at the War Office. He informed me that the local commanding officer in Cork, Lieutenant-Colonel Gordon Wilson, had been instructed to find and arrest a man who had been masquerading as a British officer in order to abduct Irishwomen.

“It appeared that this man had been offering women rides in his motor-car, after which they had never been seen again.

“After seven Irishwomen had disappeared, I was told to assist Lieutenant-Colonel Wilson to apprehend the perpetrator at whatever cost, not for the sake of justice alone, but to ward off a very dangerous political situation, since the Irish republicans were accusing the British of taking and murdering their womenfolk in retaliation for several bomb attacks on military garrisons in Cork City.

“After the tenth abduction, I set up an ambush at Dillon’s Cross, with Mrs Margaret Morrissey, the wife of Sergeant Kevin Morrissey of the Signal Corps, bravely volunteering to act as a ‘Judas goat’. The abductor approached her but as soon as he realized that she had an English accent he took to his heels. We almost succeeded in catching him, but our vehicle became bogged down in thick mud at Ballyvolane and we lost him over the fields. Two months later, however, after an eleventh abduction, I set up another ambush with an Irishwoman who worked in the garrison laundry, Kathleen Murphy. When we challenged him, the fellow escaped over a wall in York Hill but we had three Army bloodhounds with us which followed his scent to a second-floor room in a boarding-house in Wellington Road, where we arrested him.

“To begin with, he claimed that his name was Jan Vermeeling, and that he was a Dutch merchant-seaman. However, we discovered papers and letters under the floorboards of his room in the names of John or Jack Callwood, Jan Rufenwald and a birth certificate in the name of Dieter Hartmann, from Münster, in Westphalia. To my astonishment we also found a ticket that showed that he had arrived in Ireland from New York on the illfated
Lusitania
, and so must have been one of her 765 survivors. Yet when I checked the manifest of all the
Lusitania
survivors, and their photographs, Dieter Hartmann (or whatever his real name happened to be) did not appear to be among them.

“The answer to this conundrum, however, was in Dieter Hartmann’s wardrobe. Apart from a British Army uniform and a tweed jacket and several men’s shirts, we found three women’s dresses, as well as bodices and lace petticoats. At first we assumed that he was co-habiting with a woman companion, but then it occurred to me to look again at the photographs of those who had been rescued when the
Lusitania
was torpedoed. My intuition proved to be correct: among the survivors was a woman called Miss Mary Chaplain, described in the original list of survivors as a retired teacher from White Plains, New York. The face in the photograph, however, was of a much younger person than any retired teacher would have been, and on closer examination I realized that ‘Miss Mary Chaplain’ was in fact Dieter Hartmann in women’s clothing and a wig.

“Under intensive interrogation, Hartmann eventually admitted that he had taken on the identity of ‘Miss Mary Chaplain’ to avoid detection on board the
Lusitania
. He confessed that he was wanted for questioning by the Massachusetts police and he was afraid that a wireless message might be sent to the
Lusitania
’s captain to detain him. His fear was well-founded because there had been a thorough search of the vessel in
mid-Atlantic,
although as ‘Miss Mary Chaplain’ he evaded discovery. He claimed that there had been some ‘misunderstandings’ between him and the Massachusetts police concerning the disappearance of several women.

“I contacted my superiors at the War Office and informed them that we had successfully arrested the man we believed to be responsible for abducting the eleven Irishwomen. I told them that I believed him to be Dieter Hartmann, although I also gave them his several aliases – Jan Rufenwald, John Callwood and Mary Chaplain. I was satisfied that I would be able to send him for trial to the Cork County courts.

“Almost by return, however, I received a coded wireless message ordering me to execute Dieter Hartmann summarily and to ‘eliminate’ all evidence of his existence. I was to tell Colonel Wilson and all of the other officers and men who had assisted me that my investigation was now concluded and that they were not to speak of it again, in the interests of national security.

“With three NCOs I took Dieter Hartmann that same evening to a bog close to Glanmire, where he was made to kneel and shot once in the back of the head with a service revolver. He was buried very deep in the bog and we left no marker.

“I wondered for many years afterward why I should have been ordered to execute Dieter Hartmann so expeditiously and so secretly. After all, he was a German, and in my estimation at the time it would have been matchless propaganda for the Crown Forces if we were credited with catching the man who had abducted and presumably murdered so many Irishwomen – not that we ever found their remains.”

Jimmy lit up his cigarette and blew smoke out of his nostrils. Katie would love this stuff, and it would mean that they could wind up their own investigation, too, thank God.

Colonel Corcoran had written: “I thought no more about Dieter Hartmann until 1923, when I received a copy in the post of a rather sensational American magazine called
True Crime Monthly
. It had been sent to me without any attached comment whatsoever by Lieutenant-Colonel Wilson, who was now working for a merchant bank in New York. The magazine carried an article about the notorious ritual murders of scores of women in Massachusetts. The man suspected to be responsible was ‘Jack Callwood’ – believed to be one of Germany’s worst mass-murderers, ‘Jan Rufenwald’. The article said that Jack Callwood had booked passage on the
Lusitania
to escape from the United States and had almost certainly drowned with the other 1,195 victims – ‘so even if he escaped the electric chair, natural justice caught up with him.’ But of course Colonel Wilson and I knew full well that Callwood had survived, and that it wasn’t natural justice that had caught up with him – but us.