Blood Sisters (21 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ Katie repeated.

‘Don’t be sorry. You don’t have a single thing to be sorry about, believe me. But I love you, darling, and you turn me on and I would like to think that we can have a good sex life together.’

Tell him you’re pregnant
.

No, I can’t. Not now. I’m too tired and stressed and he’s all stressed, too, even though he’s trying to sound so calm and reassuring
.

They held each other for a while in silence. Somewhere in the distance, in Cobh, a clock struck three, a clock she never heard in the daytime. A clock for the lonely and those who couldn’t sleep.

She touched his cheek again. ‘I’ll do it,’ she said.

‘Do what?’

‘The portrait. I’ll pose for you.’

‘I don’t want you to feel like you’re obliged to do it.’

‘I don’t. I’ll do it. I won’t be able to sit very still for you, you know that. My mother always used to call me Fairy Fidget. But I’ll do my best, I promise. It’s something you want, and if you want it, then I want it, too. I love you, John. Don’t ever forget that, no matter what happens.’

John kissed her. ‘Do you know what my ma used to say to my da? “Sometimes I hate the face off ye, but I couldn’t live without ye.”’

‘Very romantic woman, your mother, wasn’t she?’ said Katie. ‘Now I need to get some sleep.’

The two investigating officers from the Garda Ombudsman arrived from Dublin at 11:30 the next morning, while Katie was talking on the phone to Dr O’Brien. They knocked at her open office door and she waved them inside.

They sat down in the two chairs facing her desk, giving her brief, uncomfortable smiles. Both of them wore grey suits. One was a barrel-chested man with rough red cheeks and a greasy comb-over. The other was a very thin woman with a large complicated nose and sad eyes, who looked as if she might start silently weeping at any moment. One of them smelled of liniment, although Katie couldn’t be sure which one.

‘I’ve completed the post-mortem on Roisin Begley now,’ said Dr O’Brien. ‘I’m still waiting on the hair follicle tests for drug metabolites, but I should get those by late tomorrow or the day after. There are no drugs or alcohol in her blood or urine. You can tell the Begleys that they can send the undertakers round to collect her now.’

‘Thanks a million, Ailbe. Let me know the minute you get the results from the hair tests.’

She put down the phone and walked around her desk to shake the two GSOC officers by the hand.

‘I’m Enda Blaney and this is my deputy, Partlan McKey,’ said the woman, in a sharp D4 accent. ‘We’re here to investigate a complaint that’s been lodged against you by former Acting Chief Superintendent Bryan Molloy.’

‘Yes,’ said Katie, sitting down. ‘I was notified by Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin and I received your email. What I don’t understand is why he made his complaint to the GSOC and what your justification is for following it up. I thought you only handled complaints against Garda officers from the public.’

‘Well, that’s right,’ said Enda. ‘But with Bryan Molloy we’re dealing with what you might call a grey area, in that he’s resigned from the Garda and is now legally a civilian.’

‘That might well be the case,’ Katie told her. ‘But surely his complaint relates to the time when he was still a serving officer.’

‘That’s part of what makes this a grey area,’ said Enda. ‘But there’s an added complication. We have a related complaint from a woman called Jilleen Quaid. She says you coerced her into providing you with false evidence – specifically that her brother Donie had been hired by Bryan Molloy to execute a Limerick gangster called Niall Duggan.’

‘
Coerced
her? Coerced her how? She gave me her evidence of her own free will. She handed me the very gun that Bryan Molloy had supplied to her late brother so that he could shoot Niall Duggan, and a letter signed by Donie confessing to what he’d done. I still have them.’

Partlan opened a pale-green folder on his lap and said, ‘Ms Quaid told us that before she met you in the Cauldron Bar in Limerick she had never seen either the gun or the so-called letter of confession. You told her that you were dead set on ousting Bryan Molloy from his position as acting chief superintendent, and if she helped you to prove that he had paid Donie Quaid to murder Niall Duggan, that would be the finish of him. Your actual words were, “he’d be hockeyed”.’

‘She was talking
raiméis
, if you’ll excuse my saying so,’ Katie replied. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever said “hockeyed” in my life. Besides, I have a very reliable witness. I was introduced to Jilleen Quaid by Gary Cannon, who used to be a sergeant at Henry Street, and he was sitting right next to us in the Cauldron when Jilleen gave me the gun and the letter.’

Enda tugged at the tip of her nose as if she were moderately surprised to find that it was still there. ‘We’re aware of that, Detective Superintendent. Ms Quaid told us that it was former Garda sergeant Cannon who arranged for her to meet you. I’m sorry to have to inform you, though, that he was found deceased at his house on Thursday last week.’

‘He’s
dead
?’ said Katie. ‘How? What happened?’

‘Apparent suicide,’ put in Partlan. ‘Shot himself in the mouth with a shotgun. Almost took his head off.’

‘Did he leave a note?’

‘You know as well as we do that only one in six suicides leaves a note,’ said Enda. ‘In this particular case, no, he didn’t.’

‘Was he married?’

‘Yes, he was. His wife said that he had been depressed about not finding work, and it seemed he had some serious gambling debts, too.’

‘Had he talked to his wife about Bryan Molloy? Or to any of his friends?’

‘His attitude towards Bryan Molloy was generally resentful and he blamed him for his losing his job at Henry Street. That may have been why he was willing to assist you in fitting up Bryan Molloy with false evidence.’

Katie said, ‘Now, you listen. You’re talking as if I actually did falsify the evidence against him, but I didn’t. I had the pistol checked by the Technical Bureau and they confirmed that it was a Garda-issued weapon with the serial number filed off it, although it didn’t come from Limerick. It was signed out of Tipperary Town Garda station by Inspector Colm McManus, who happened to be a fellow Freemason and golfing partner of Bryan Molloy’s. Inspector McManus claimed that he had lost the weapon while pursuing a suspect who was trying to escape along the River Ara. But, quite clearly, he wasn’t telling the truth.’

‘Have you interviewed Inspector McManus?’ asked Enda.

‘No. He’s another deceased witness, I’m frustrated to say. Of all the ways for a Garda inspector to go, he was poisoned by carbon monoxide while he was on a caravan holiday in Killorglin.’

‘So you have nobody to rebut Jilleen Quaid’s allegation against you?’

Katie was growing increasingly impatient with Enda and Partlan’s questioning, but she was trying very hard to keep her temper in check. ‘Apparently not,’ she said. ‘But the material evidence is conclusive enough, whether I have any living witnesses or not. I have Donie Quaid’s confession and I can have the handwriting checked to confirm that he wrote it. Most important, though, the bullet that was retrieved from Niall Duggan’s body was definitely fired from the gun that I have in evidence, and where would I have got that gun from if Jilleen Quaid hadn’t given it to me?’

‘It’s possible that Gary Cannon gave it to you,’ said Partlan. ‘He was just as determined to see Bryan Molloy lose his job as you were.’

‘You can suggest that Gary Cannon gave it to me until you’re black in the face,’ Katie retorted. ‘The plain truth is that he didn’t, and where would
he
have got it from? If anybody wanted anybody else to lose their job, it was Bryan Molloy who was taking every conceivable opportunity to undermine
me
. You have only to see what he said about me at media conferences, and read his reports.’

‘Well, we have,’ said Enda. ‘He
is
critical of you, but with some justification. It seems clear that you mishandled your investigation into a series of kidnappings, to say the very least, and the consequence was that two young gardaí lost their lives.’

Partlan held up a sheet of paper from his folder. ‘We also have a report on that case from Assistant Commissioner O’Reilly, and what he says supports and corroborates Bryan Molloy’s complaint. His specific comments are that you behaved “rashly and unprofessionally, and that you took unnecessary risks before you had sufficient intelligence to deal with all foreseeable outcomes”.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ Katie told him. ‘Assistant Commissioner O’Reilly has an overwhelming motive for wanting to be rid of me, just like Bryan Molloy. And I also happen to have a letter from Detective Inspector Fennessy that confirms what they were up to. Extorting money from public funds.’

‘We’ve seen that letter,’ said Partlan. ‘By his own admission, Detective Inspector Fennessy was mentally unstable at the time that he wrote it. And, of course, we have no idea where he is – whether he’s alive or dead. There’s a strong suggestion in the letter that he might have been considering suicide.’

Katie was about to answer him when her phone rang. She picked it up and said, snappily, ‘DS Maguire.’

‘It’s Kyna, ma’am. You need to come up to the convent, as soon as you can.’

‘What is it? That Mother O’Dwyer’s not giving you ire, is she?’

‘Mother O’Dwyer? No. She’s shut herself up in her study and isn’t talking to anybody. No, it’s what’s been found in the garden. We’ve uncovered a disused septic tank and it’s filled up with children’s bones. It looks like it could be hundreds of them. It’s Tuam all over again. It may even be worse.’

‘I’ll be right there,’ said Katie. ‘You have Patrick with you there, don’t you?’

‘Yes, and Sergeant O’Farrell, too. He’s sealed off the convent, but discreet, like, so that we don’t attract any attention from the media.’

‘Good. I shouldn’t be more than ten minutes so.’

She put down the phone. Enda and Partlan were both staring at her expectantly.

‘I’ll have to wind this up,’ she said. ‘Something critical has come up, and I’ll have to love you and leave you.’

‘We’ve come down specially from Dublin,’ said Enda. ‘This interview has been prearranged for days.’

‘I know. But you can’t prearrange fate, I’m afraid. This is much more important. Besides, I don’t really have anything more to say to you, not at this stage. I’ll need to see the complaint in writing, in full, with any substantiating evidence, not just supposition and unfounded accusations. I’ll be talking to my lawyers and they’ll be getting back to you.’

‘We have a lot more questions for you, Detective Superintendent,’ said Enda.

‘That’s as may be, but right at this moment I’m not prepared to give you any more answers. Have you arranged to meet anybody else here in Cork?’

‘No. We came only to see you this morning. We spoke yesterday to Assistant Commissioner O’Reilly at Phoenix Park. I must say this is all very unsatisfactory. At the very least we were expecting some kind of response from you about Bryan Molloy’s complaints of bullying and harassment.’

‘This is totally off the record,’ said Katie. ‘But let me put it this way: for Bryan Molloy to complain that I bullied him is like an Irish Staffie saying that a woman provoked it into biting her leg because she made a point of looking too defenceless.’

‘I don’t think Irish Staffies can talk,’ said Enda.

‘And neither any more will I,’ Katie told her. ‘Now, I have to go. Good luck to you so.’

* * *

It had started to drizzle again and the two gardaí who were standing at the gates of the Bon Sauveur Convent were looking wet and miserable, but they gave Katie a salute as she drove into the car park.

Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán was waiting for her in the garden at the back of the building, wearing a dark-blue raincoat with a tall peaky hood that made her look like a character out of
The Lord of the Rings
.

The garden was crowded with at least thirty reservists and technicians and even more gardaí. Katie could see the pale faces of some of the sisters watching them from the windows. A small yellow Hanix digger had been brought in now and it was jolting backwards and forwards on its caterpillar tracks, scraping up the turf from the lawn to expose the wet grey concrete of the septic tank underneath it. Part of the flower bed had already been dug up and a large heap of soil had been piled up against the convent wall.

Bill Phinner came over, looking as miserable as everybody else.

‘Hard to believe this,’ he said. ‘First those kiddies’ skeletons in County Galway and now here. It seems to have been the nuns’ default method of disposing of dead babies.’

He led Katie across the garden to an area next to the flower bed where the grass on top of the septic tank had already been scraped away. A metal lid about forty-five centimetres square had been lifted up, giving access to the chamber beneath it. Bill shone his Scorpion forensic flashlight down into the hole and beckoned Katie to take a look.

‘Holy Mother of God,’ she said. The chamber was filled almost to the top with a tangled clutter of diminutive bones. She could see baby-sized skulls and tiny ribcages and pelvises even smaller than the first one that they had discovered in the flower bed. Kyna had been right: the bodies of hundreds of little children must have been dropped in here.

The smell was like nothing she had ever smelled before. Usually she thought that death smelled green, but this was dark brown.

‘I only pray they were dead when they were disposed of,’ she said.

‘Well, me too,’ said Bill. ‘But I don’t think that even the sisters of the Bon Sauveur would have been so callous as to sling a living baby into a septic tank.’

‘It’s going to be a fierce brutal job getting them all out of there,’ said Katie. ‘You’re not thinking of trying to fit them all together, are you?’

‘That was what I was going to ask you about,’ said Bill. ‘This is your fairly average septic tank, which means it has three chambers, each with a thousand-gallon capacity. If all three chambers are filled up with bones like this one, God alone knows how many skeletons we have here. Fitting them all back together will mean that we have to test almost every single bone for a DNA match. The cost would be astronomic. Like, the overtime alone.’