Blood Sisters (17 page)

At that moment, Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán appeared in the doorway of Mother O’Dwyer’s office. Close behind her there was a young novice nun, dressed in white. Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán gave a little knuckle tap on the open door and said, ‘Ma’am? Sorry to interrupt you, ma’am, but the search team’s arrived.’

‘With your permission, then, we’ll make a start,’ said Katie to Mother O’Dwyer, although both of them knew that it would make no difference at all if she refused it.

‘Very well, then,’ said Mother O’Dwyer. But as Katie turned to go she said, sharply, ‘I assume you’ve had no luck at all in finding Sister Barbara?’

‘No, regretfully not,’ said Katie. ‘We had tracker dogs out looking for her yesterday afternoon and they picked up a scent outside her rest home, but they lost it after only twenty metres or so. That would indicate that she was probably taken away in a waiting vehicle – willingly or unwillingly, we have no way of telling. We’ve issued a description, of course, but no response so far. You’ve probably seen it yourself on the news.’

‘I haven’t, no,’ said Mother O’Dwyer. ‘I’ve been praying and meditating. Sister Barbara is in the hands of God, as are all of us. We should never forget that our achievements are His, our failings are our own.’

Katie knew that this was a subtle dig at the Garda’s inability to solve the murder of Sister Bridget and to find out what had happened to Sister Barbara, but all she did was to give Mother O’Dwyer the weakest of smiles and say, ‘Thank you for your cooperation. We’ll try to keep damage to your garden to a minimum and create as little disturbance inside the convent as we can.’

‘Suspicion of any kind is always a disturbance, and it always leaves a trail of irreparable damage behind it,’ retorted Mother O’Dwyer.

‘Yes, well,’ said Katie. ‘In the meantime, perhaps you’d be kind enough to show Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán where your records are kept, especially the records relating to the Bon Sauveur’s years as a home for single mothers. We’ll need to see them at least as far back as 1950.’

‘Sister Rose, go and find Sister Caoilainn, would you?’ said Mother O’Dwyer. ‘Sister Caoilainn keeps all the books. There’s a room here where you can look through them, if you wish. I assume you won’t be needing to take them off the premises.’

‘It depends what we find, if anything,’ said Katie.

Mother O’Dwyer looked up at her with her lips tightly pursed. Katie was only five foot four, but Mother O’Dwyer could barely have been more than four foot eleven inches. As tiny as she was, she looked as if she could explode with such a devastating blast of anger that she would demolish the entire convent.

‘If you need me,’ she quivered, ‘you can find me in the chapel. I shall be praying that God grants you discretion and sound judgement, and that He forgives you any sins of commission or omission.’

She turned and walked out of her office before Katie could think of a reply that wouldn’t bring Bishop Buckley down on Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin like a ton of bricks.

* * *

Katie went out into the convent garden. The technicians had already started work, kneeling in the flower bed around the spot where Sister Rose had marked the X on her sketch map. The rest of the team that had been assembled so far were standing around talking and clapping their hands together to keep warm.

Bill Phinner had turned up and was drinking coffee from a cardboard cup. Although the morning was so sunny and the sky was bright blue, the high convent wall kept the south side of the garden in shadow so that it was damp and bone-chillingly cold.

‘Jesus,’ said Bill as Katie came up to him. ‘It’s baltic out here. I should have stayed in the lab and finished those drug tests.’

‘I don’t know if we’re going to find anything here,’ said Katie, looking around. ‘That jawbone could have come from almost anywhere. A dog or a fox might have dug it up somewhere totally different and just dropped it here.’

‘Well, there’s always that possibility,’ said Bill. ‘We’ll find out soon enough. By the way, I went up to your office earlier but you’d already gone out. I left a report on your desk about the balloons that were used for that flying nun.’

‘Oh yes? Anything interesting?’

‘They were weather balloons, you can buy them online from any number of sources, such as Weather Balloons ‘R’ Us, and they don’t cost much. They were all inflated with helium, but so far we don’t know where that might have come from. We’ve contacted all the industrial suppliers in the area, even the party suppliers, but none of them have sold the quantity that would have been required to lift a forty-four kilo woman off the ground.’

‘Where else would anybody get that that amount of helium? From a factory, maybe? They might have some over at Collins Barracks for army balloons. How about the UCC Physics Department? Or the weather station up at the airport? Do they send up balloons from there, or would they get in the way of the planes?’

Bill shook his head. ‘I had a word with Sergeant O’Farrell. Nobody’s reported any missing helium up until now.’

Katie said, ‘I still can’t work out why anybody would go to all that trouble. If you want to murder a nun, why not just murder her and bury her where nobody’s ever going to find her. Putting on a show like that, with those balloons, it hugely increases your risk of being caught.’

‘Well, you know as well as I do, ma’am, a lot of murderers are out to make a point. Whoever strung up that nun to those balloons obviously believed that they had something important to say. Only God or the Devil knows what it was.’

‘I agree with you,’ said Katie, watching as one of the technicians carefully sieved soil through a garden riddle. ‘Look at Sister Bridget, assaulted with that statuette. I’ll bet you money that there was some significance to that, if only we could work it out.’

‘One of my guys had an explanation, but I won’t repeat it.’

‘I’ll leave you to it, then,’ said Katie. ‘Give me a ring if you come up with anything.’

She was already walking away when the technician with the riddle raised his hand and called out, ‘Here! Over here, sir! I have something here!’

Bill crossed the lawn and Katie came back to join him. The technician was on his knees in the flower bed, about halfway between the place where Sister Rose said she had found the jawbone and the grey limestone wall of the convent. He held up the riddle for Katie and Bill to see what he had found. It was a stick-like bone, about eight centimetres long, mottled brown by the soil in which it had been buried. Bill pulled on his black forensic gloves and picked it up. He examined it closely and then he said, ‘Human, no doubt about it. It’s a tibia, a shin bone. I’d say it came from a child about a year old, depending on how well nourished it was.’

‘How long do you think it’s been buried?’ Katie asked him.

Bill stuck out his lower lip. ‘Hard to say offhand. But if it belongs to the same child as that piece of jawbone, then we’re talking about forty years at least, give or take a couple of years. It certainly looks it.’

‘And what if it belongs to a different child?’ said Katie.

Bill raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.

* * *

Although it was getting late and Katie would soon have to go back to Anglesea Street to pick up the paperwork for Michael Gerrety’s committal proceedings in the criminal court, she stayed for a while longer. She almost felt that she owed it to the lost children whose sad little remains had been found in this garden.

Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán came out to join her. Katie nodded her head towards the technicians sifting soil. ‘You see there? They’ve found another bone, a small child’s tibia this time.’

‘Oh God. I’m getting a bad, bad feeling about this place,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. ‘You should see some of the stuff we’ve dug up in the convent records and we haven’t even scratched the surface yet.’

‘What have you come up with so far?’

‘A lot of what you’d expect, of course. The names of all of the unmarried mothers the Bon Sauveur sisters ever took in, and their children and the dates of their baptism. But there are files of correspondence, too, with adoption agencies in the USA.’

‘What’s wrong about that? Most of those girls wouldn’t have been able to take care of their own children, would they, especially if they didn’t have the support of their parents?’

‘No, but when every baby was born the sisters used to make its mother sign away all of her parental rights. Then they routinely separated babies and young toddlers from their mothers, whether the mother liked it or not, and sent them off to be adopted by families in America. We can’t be sure how many yet, but it could be more than a hundred. Maybe even twice that.’

Katie couldn’t help thinking of the child that was growing inside her, and of the grief she had felt when she discovered little Seamus dead in his cot – which she felt still.

‘Please don’t tell me we’ve got another Philomena situation,’ she said. ‘I’m still getting ruptions from the diocese over those poor castrated choirboys.’

‘I think it could be worse than that,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. ‘Judging by what we’ve found in the account books it looks as if the sisters were demanding payment from the adoptive parents, and not just nominal sums, either. We’ll have to bring in that forensic accountant to check through the figures because they’re not at all straightforward.’

‘How much were they asking?’

‘In some cases, eight or nine or even ten thousand dollars, and when you think what the dollar must have been worth back in the 1960s – seven times as much as it is now, easy. Some of the payments have been entered into the books as “expenses”, but most of them are classified as “charitable donations to the Sacred Mission of the Congregation of the Bon Sauveur”.’

‘I see,’ said Katie. ‘Is there any record of what they actually did with all of that money?’

‘It’s not clear. Almost all the payments we’ve managed to identify so far just seem to vanish off the books. That’s why we need to have them looked at by somebody who knows all about false accountancy.’

‘But it looks as if the sisters might have been selling off the children of unmarried mothers for profit?’

‘I wouldn’t put it quite as blunt as that. Not to Mother O’Dwyer, anyway. But essentially, yes. It does look like that.’

‘All right,’ said Katie. ‘I think the best course of action is to take all the books and records back to the station. You can do that, can’t you, under the terms of the search warrant? If you’re not sure that a book is relevant to this investigation, take it regardless. We can always give it back.’

She paused and then she said, ‘Say nothing to Mother O’Dwyer or any of the other sisters. In fact, keep it to yourself as much as you can. It’s remotely possible that this may have some relevance to Sister Bridget and that flying nun being murdered, and maybe that other nun who’s gone missing. If it does, I don’t want the offender to know that we know.’

‘All right, I have you,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán, although she sounded a little guarded about it. She was always very procedural, rather than inspirational, which was one of the reasons Katie had detailed her to check the Bon Sauveur’s records.

Katie heard the reservation in her voice and said, ‘Listen, Kyna, it may turn out that there’s no connection at all with those other nuns, but there are still plenty of people alive today who were involved in this adoption racket, if that’s what it was, and I don’t want
them
alerted, either. Not if it turns out that we can still build a case against them.’

‘No, I understand,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. She paused and then she said, ‘Do you know something? You have only to look at those photographs in Mother O’Dwyer’s waiting room, all those teenage mothers and their little children. You never in your whole life saw so many young people looking so sad and so hopeless, and now I know why.’

Katie took hold of Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán’s hand and said, ‘You know me, I’m usually dead set against jumping to conclusions before I have all the evidence, but we’re dealing with the church here and the church are past masters in deviosity and they count on us being reverential towards them just because they wear the cloth. In this case, I would rather be proved disrespectful than gullible.’

She wound her scarf around her neck and turned to leave. Before she could, though, Bill called out to her, ‘Detective superintendent!’ and beckoned her back across the grass. He was holding something in the palm of his black-gloved hand that looked like a broken teacup. As she came closer she realized that it was a tiny pelvis. It was completely undamaged but as mottled as the tibia.

‘I don’t think there’s any question about it now,’ he said. ‘This wasn’t dropped by a dog or a fox. There’s a whole child here somewhere in this flower bed and it was buried here deliberate by a human being. Or some creature that passed for a human being.’

Sister Barbara opened her eyes. She was lying on a single bed in a bare bedroom bright with winter sunlight. The walls were of unpainted plaster, as if they had once been wallpapered but now it had all been scraped off. The single window had no curtains and the floor was uncarpeted. Apart from the bed, the only furniture was a wheelback chair.

Gradually, she managed to pull herself up into a sitting position. Her head was banging and she found it difficult to focus. She couldn’t think where she was. The last thing she could remember was sitting in her chair in the rest home talking to that sister who had come to visit her from the Bon Sauveur Convent – what was her name?

She heard voices outside and a car door slamming. Then she heard the car drive away and somebody shouting. There was a moment’s silence, but that was soon broken by the clopping sound of a horse’s hooves. Then more voices and the horse impatiently snorting.

Where in the name of the Holy Father am I?
she thought,
and how did I get here?

She stood up. She felt swimmy at first and the floor rose and fell underneath her feet like a sluggish incoming tide. However, she managed to grip the brass rail at the end of the bed to steady herself and after a while she regained her sense of balance.