Blood Sisters (27 page)

‘
Riona
!’ called out her stable lad.

‘Of course they’re setting me up,’ said Paddy. ‘That’s fecking obvious. But I thought I’d warn you. If they’re on to me, then they could be on to you, too. So if they come sniffing around, like, I hope you won’t be telling them that it was me who disposed of them horses for you.’

‘And why not? Didn’t you just say that you took them to a knackery, legitimate like?’

‘Riona!’ her stable lad repeated. ‘The stewards are telling us to make a bust or else we won’t be running at all!’

‘You didn’t take them to any knackery, did you, Paddy?’ said Riona. ‘You threw them off the cliffs. It was you, you lying pox! You kept the money I gave you and you threw them off the cliffs!’

‘I’m not saying nothing,’ Paddy told her. ‘I’m warning you, that’s all.’

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, I can’t believe you. What did you do with their passports?’

‘I probably burned them. Well, if it had been me I would have done.’

‘Ri-
ona
!’ shouted her stable lad, and now he sounded desperate. Even Gerry shouted out, ‘Riona! What’s the hold-up?’

Riona said, ‘I have to go, but I’ll talk to you after the weigh-in. I’ll text you so and tell you where to meet me.’

‘No, don’t text me. It wouldn’t surprise me if the shades were hacking my phone. I’ll meet you up in the Owners, Trainers and Members’ Bar.’

‘Don’t tell me that you’re a member?’

Paddy tapped the side of his nose, turned around, and elbowed his way into the jostling crowd. Riona stood there for a moment, the red feathers on her hat ruffled by the breeze, and then hurried after Saint Sparkle.

* * *

‘What was all that about?’ asked Gerry as they made their way to the rails to watch the start. There were eleven runners in the O’Grady Insurance Group Steeplechase and they were all prancing around now, waiting for the flag.

‘Oh, he’s a vet,’ said Riona. ‘One of my foals has epiphysitis and he was asking if he could put him on steroids.’

‘I don’t see what’s so urgent about that,’ said Gerry, looking over his shoulder to see if Paddy was still in sight. ‘ Besides, he doesn’t look much like a vet.’

‘Doesn’t he? I don’t know. What are vets supposed to look like?’

‘Not so much like bookies’ runners, I suppose,’ said Gerry. He turned back and shaded his eyes with both hands so that he could focus on the start. ‘I’ll tell you something, though, Riona. Saint Sparkle is looking the best I’ve ever seen him. I’m really delighted the way he’s been coming on. Top of the range.’

‘Well, he really scored over the timber at Ballinrobe, didn’t he?’ said Riona. ‘Let’s hope he does even better today. Thirty-two and a half thousand euros if he wins it.’

Suddenly the flag waved and the horses were off. A roar went up from the crowd in the grandstand and the new pavilion, and a smartly dressed girl next to Riona began to jump and down and squeal, ‘Lucky William! Go on, Lucky William!’

As they reached the first fence the field was still tightly bunched, with Saint Sparkle in fourth place. They all jumped over smoothly and by the time they reached the second fence they were still close together. Over the first ditch, though, one horse fell and two of them collided as they landed, and the rest of the field began to thin out more. Saint Sparkle still seemed to be running strongly and he moved up to third place.

‘He’s going to do it, isn’t he?’ said Gerry, gripping Riona’s arm. ‘He’s only going to fecking do it!’

Riona patted his hand and said, ‘Don’t start counting your prize money yet, Gerry! But he’s going brilliant, isn’t he? Just look at him! Come on, Josh! Now’s your moment! Come on, boy,
now
!’

As the horses came around the last bend Saint Sparkle was still in third place. On the final straight towards the winning post there were two regulation fences with a ditch in between them, which were designed to test the horses’ stamina to the very last furlong. The sound of the crowd began to swell even louder now, so that it sounded like a gale-force wind blowing through a concrete tunnel.

Saint Sparkle jumped the first of the two fences, but he stumbled badly and was overtaken by Lucky William, and then by White Russian.

‘
Come on
!’ Gerry bellowed. ‘Come on, Josh, for the love of God! You can still do it, boy! Come on!’

Josh tried to whip Saint Sparkle back up to speed, but the horse had completely lost his momentum and as he approached the ditch he dipped his head two or three times to show that he did have the strength, or the willpower, to clear it. Josh circled him around, but there was no point in attempting to jump the ditch a second time. He steered Saint Sparkle off the track and guided him back towards the grandstand.

There was an even greater roar from the crowd as Gentleman Jim passed the post first. Gentleman Jim’s starting price had been 10-1, while Saint Sparkle’s had been 7-2.

Gerry’s face was purple with anger and disappointment. ‘What the
feck
went wrong there?’ he demanded. ‘He should have
walked
it and he didn’t even finish!’

Riona shook her head and said, ‘I’m sorry, Gerry. I’m really sorry. He should have walked it, like you said, but you could see that he landed badly after that fence. I just pray he hasn’t broken his ankle.’

‘You and me both, Riona. If he’s broken his ankle, that’s the end of him. I can’t fecking believe it.’

They pushed their way through the crowds to the grassy ring at the back of the pavilion, where Josh had already dismounted. Two girls from Riona’s stables were holding Saint Sparkle and patting him to calm him down. He was sweating and breathing harshly, and snuffling repeatedly. Ryan, the stable lad, was bending over to feel each of Saint Sparkle’s fetlocks and pastern joints in turn.

‘Well?’ demanded Gerry. ‘Has he broken anything?’

Ryan felt the last of the horse’s ankles and stood up straight. ‘Not that I can tell, sir. He could have sustained a fracture, but he seems to be comfortable standing, like, and he’s walking okay.’

‘So what went wrong?’ asked Gerry. ‘He was right up there, ready to go to the wire, and he just ran out of steam. He didn’t do that at Ballinrobe. He went like a fecking express train at Ballinrobe and he would have kept running all the way to Castlebar if you hadn’t reined him in.’

‘I have to say I felt him fading at the fourth fence,’ said Josh, the jockey, taking off his red and yellow cap. He had a pointy nose and glittery, near-together eyes. ‘He was bowling along great to start with. He was jumping high, like, giving all of the fences plenty of air, but that didn’t seem to be slowing him down at all. But then, click! like, do you know what I mean? It was just like somebody switched him off.’

‘He’s a horse, not a fecking TV,’ snapped Gerry. ‘I just pray to God he doesn’t have the virus.’

‘There’s no Lyme disease in my stables, Gerry,’ Riona retorted. ‘Sparkle’s always been nervy, you know that. For some reason, he lost his confidence today, that’s all.’

‘Oh yes? And what reason would that be? You’re his trainer, Riona. You’re supposed to know all this horse psychology.’

‘I don’t know yet, Gerry, but I’ll find out, and I’ll do everything I can to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.’

‘You do that. Put him on the couch and get him to talk to you about his unhappy childhood or whatever it is that caused him to lose his confidence. He’s only lost his confidence, but I’ve lost the chance to win thirty two thousand five hundred euros. Even if he’d only come second I would have won nine thousand, for Christ’s sake!’

‘Gerry, I’ve told you I’m sorry,’ said Riona. ‘But it’s the luck of the track, isn’t it, as always? I’ll have Sparkle thoroughly checked over by the vet and I’ll call you if it’s anything serious, or even if it isn’t.’

Gerry turned around in a circle, trying to think of something else to say to vent his anger, but all he could manage was, ‘Jesus, I need a drink!’

* * *

Riona found Paddy sitting on a stool at the end of the bar, furthest away from the windows, with a large glass of whiskey in front of him. He looked like a shabby old brown bird perched on a gatepost.

‘What are you having, girl?’ he asked her, without looking at her.

‘From you, Paddy, nothing at all, thanks very much. What’s on your mind?’

‘You’ll be wanting to dispose of that horse, too, won’t you, and sharpish? Lost his sparkle today, didn’t he? Not that he was Sparkle to begin with.’

‘I thought I made it crystal-clear that I want nothing more to do with you,’ said Riona. ‘How in the name of God did you think that you were going to get away with throwing all those horses off the cliffs? You must be cracked.’

‘They did it in Clare and got away with it. Not that I’m saying that it was me.’

‘So what are you going to do about the horses that this garda has paid you to get rid of?’

‘Well, nothing at all, of course. For what he’s paid me I can’t afford to take them to Fitzgerald’s.’

‘And you think the guards are just going to forget about it? If you don’t show up to collect those horses they’re going to be knocking on the door of your not-so-mobile home before you know it. What will you say to them then?’

‘I’ll deny everything,’ said Paddy. ‘I’ll deny I ever saw your man before in the whole of my life.’

Riona shook her head in exasperation so that her scarlet feathers nodded. ‘You’re even dimmer than I thought, Paddy Fearon. If your man was an undercover cop, don’t you think he would have been recording everything you were saying? He might even have a video of it. They have cameras in their coat buttons these days.’

‘Well, I don’t know, feck it. I’ll think of something,’ said Paddy.

‘That’s entirely up to you,’ Riona told him. ‘But what you will
not
do is give the guards even the slightest hint of my name, do you hear? Because if you do, it won’t just be horses that’s going over the cliffs at Nohaval Cove.’

Paddy was about to put his whiskey glass to his lips, but now he lowered it and stared at her.

‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘You don’t know who you’re dealing with when you’re dealing with me, and you’d be better off not finding out.’

At that moment Gerry came in from the balcony that overlooked the racecourse and weaved his way across the bar.

‘Ah, Riona!’ he called out as he approached. ‘Come up here to drown your sorrows? And your vet! He’s still here! I thought he went off to treat your foal for its effy – its eppy – do you know something, I can’t even fecking pronounce it.’

‘He was just on his way, weren’t you?’ said Riona, staring at Paddy without blinking.

Paddy knocked back the last of his whiskey and climbed off his bar stool.

‘G’luck to you so,’ he told Riona and left.

‘And good luck to you, too, boy,’ said Riona under her breath. ‘You’re going to need it.’

Katie arrived at Anglesea Street early on Monday morning. It was a bright, dry day and even though it was chilly she knew that the search team up the Bon Sauveur Convent would have made a start already. Not only that, Detectives Dooley and Brennan would be following Paddy Fearon after he had picked up the first three horses from the field at Kilmichael – and she had been called late the night before and told that customs officers had arrested a number of handicapped people at the ferry port at Ringaskiddy, all of whom had been carrying substantial quantities of heroin concealed in their clothing.

It was common practice for smugglers to use mentally challenged people or children to carry drugs for them. Under the law, a person could only be searched if they understood the reason for the search.

A stack of notes and reports was waiting for her when she arrived in her office, but when she glanced through them she saw to her relief that there was nothing further about the Ombudsman inquiry. She was doing her best to keep that out of her mind, because she knew that she was right and that she could prove that she was right. It wasn’t going to be easy, though, since it sounded as though Bryan Molloy was doing his very best to subvert her witnesses.

She was prising open the lid of her cappuccino when Detective O’Donovan came in, carrying a framed black and white photograph. He looked very much fresher this morning, as if he had managed to get a good night’s sleep, and he was smartly dressed in a yellow shirt and tan corduroy jacket. Katie said nothing, but she was pleased that he looked less stressed. She made a point of watching for the slightest signs of fatigue and nervous tension in her detectives, especially since Detective Inspector Liam Fennessy had so comprehensively fallen apart when his marriage had broken up. Liam had left her a letter that appeared to be a suicide note, but there had been no sign of him for nearly three months, alive or dead.

‘It’s your wan all right,’ Detective O’Donovan told her and laid the photograph on top of the files in front of her.

It was a picture of the sisters of the Bon Sauveur Convent, with the mothers and babies and small children in their charge, dated 7 March 1972. The nuns looked grim, the mothers looked miserable, and the babies and children looked bewildered. Detective O’Donovan pointed to a nun on the right-hand side of the photograph, at the back.

‘That’s her,’ he said, and next to the photograph he held the post-mortem picture of the flying nun that they had been circulating around all of the convents and schools and day centres. ‘There’s over forty years between these two pictures, but we checked it with the facial recognition system and there’s no doubt about it. In both of them she looks as if her head is wrecked, but that was a help. Bill said that the biometric software can get confused if the subject’s smiling.’

Katie examined both photographs closely. ‘Well... maybe she looks so angry because she wasn’t enjoying her life at the convent. And I certainly don’t think I’d be smiling if I’d been gutted like she was and sent off up in the air. How about a name for her? Do we know who she was?’

Detective O’Donovan turned the framed photograph over. On the back there was a yellowing label with the names of all of the sisters handwritten on it. None of the young mothers, the ‘fallen women’, were identified, and neither were their babies or little children.