Blood Sisters (28 page)

‘Pure amazing, isn’t it?’ said Katie. ‘These girls and their wains might just as well have not existed at all as far as these holy sisters were concerned. All they cared about was themselves.’

‘Sister Mona Murphy, that’s her name,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘And look, standing right next to her, there’s Sister Hannah O’Dwyer – now
Mother
O’Dwyer, the mother superior. Yet didn’t Mother O’Dwyer tell us barefaced without the slightest hint of a hint of a blush that she didn’t recognize her?’

‘Unfortunately you can’t arrest somebody for claiming to have a poor memory,’ said Katie. ‘Otherwise half of Cork would be behind bars, especially on a Sunday morning.’

‘But this does show us, doesn’t it, that all three of the nuns came from the Bon Sauveur Convent? And that must mean something.’

‘Yes, of course. I don’t know if three is enough to establish a pattern but it’s looking increasingly likely. What interests me, though, is what was done to each of them. Sister Bridget assaulted with a figurine of Mary; Sister Barbara with her fingers and toes chopped off, and branded; and now this Sister Mona, disembowelled and floated through the air. All three of them sisters from the same convent, but all three of them tortured or mutilated in completely different ways.’

‘Well, those are the differences, like,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘But I think there’s a really important similarity between them, and that’s their age. All three of them were in their eighties, so all three of them must have been resident at the convent at around the same time, do you know what I mean?’

Katie studied the framed photograph again. ‘What you’re suggesting is that whoever killed them was also at the convent at the same time they were, and for some reason still bears a grudge against them? Yes, that’s a fairly obvious supposition. Maybe it was one of the unmarried mothers they were supposed to be taking such good care of?’

She looked at all the sad, pale faces of the ‘fallen women’, but there was no guarantee that whoever had murdered the nuns was one of them. The killer could have been a girl from any of the twenty-odd years that the three sisters had been contemporaries at the convent. Every year Saint Margaret’s Mother and Baby Home had taken in an average of twenty-three girls from Cork City and the surrounding area, and that meant that Katie’s detectives would have to track down more than four hundred and fifty potential suspects.

‘You can see the problem, can’t you?’ she said. ‘Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán says that the books the sisters kept are very scant when it comes to detail. They recorded the girls’ names and home addresses when they first arrived, and they recorded the births of their children. But they kept no record at all of the children’s deaths, and you only have to take a quick sconce at all the skeletons we’ve discovered to see that there were hundreds. The main trouble for us, though, is that they kept no record of when the girls eventually left the home, or where they went.

‘Even if their families still live at their original home addresses, I doubt if many of them kept up contact with the parents who threw them out. I expect almost all of them went off somewhere and got married and changed their names. It’s not going to be feasible for us to go looking for them all. We don’t have the manpower and we don’t have the money. Besides, it’s only a supposition that one of the girls is responsible. We could be barking up the wrong tree altogether. It might be some rapacious old priest who took advantage of them when they were younger and doesn’t want anybody to find out about it.’

‘I can’t see an eighty-year-old priest hanging a dead nun off of a bunch of helium balloons. I mean, serious.’

‘Well, maybe not, but stranger things have happened. Think about that old fellow in Doughcloyne who cut his wife’s stomach open and stuffed her with apples and fed her to the pigs.’

‘I’ve just had an apple for my breakfast, so I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you,’ said Detective O’Donovan. He picked up the photograph and held it up in front of him, his eyes focused on it intently, as if one of those despondent faces might magically come to life and give him a clue. A nod of the head, a movement of the lips, anything.

‘So, any road, what’s the plan?’ he asked Katie, still staring at the photograph.

‘The plan is we don’t really have a plan. But we carry on searching the convent garden for more remains and we try to identify the ugly fellow who dropped Sister Barbara’s body in the Berwick Fountain.’

‘That shouldn’t be too hard, the head on him. Rough as a bagful of mangled badgers.’

‘Well, maybe
he
’s the one who’s been murdering the nuns. He could have been a home boy and you know what those home children suffered. My father said he had some home children in his class at school. The nuns always made them wear big noisy wooden clogs because they never wore out, and they got treated like they weren’t even human, even by the other kids. If my father misbehaved in class the teacher made him sit next to one of the home boys and that was supposed to be a punishment. Well, it was, because they smelled.’

‘Don’t ever talk to my ma about home children,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘She told me that she and some of the older girls played a trick on a home girl once. They wrapped up a stone in an empty sweetie wrapper and gave it to her, saying that it was a treat. When the girl opened it she burst into tears because they were never given sweeties in the children’s home. My ma still feels guilty about it after all these years.’

‘What do you think, Patrick?’ asked Katie. ‘Suffering a childhood like that, is that motive enough to murder three nuns and abuse their bodies?’

‘I couldn’t say for sure, like,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘But I would reckon it’s possible, do you know what I mean? My ma said the nuns were always cold as ice to the children in their charge because they were illegitimate, and the teachers treated them as if they were dirt, so the other kids did, too. If you’re brought up like that, who knows what that can do to your mind psychologically? It wouldn’t be something you’d forget, would it? If my ma can’t get that stone wrapped up as a sweetie out of her mind – and she was seven years old when she did that – what about the girl she gave it to?’

Katie stood up and walked over to the window. Unconsciously, she laid her hand on her stomach. Down in the street below she could see a little girl of about three skipping along beside her mother. She wondered if her own baby was going to be a girl. Somehow she felt that it was. She was due at the hospital for a scan soon, but even so it would be too early to tell.

‘Are you all right, ma’am?’ asked Detective O’Donovan.
God
– sometimes she wished she wasn’t surrounded by detectives. If anybody was feeling even slightly out of kilter, they picked up on it immediately. She could only be grateful that John didn’t seem to have the same hypersensitive antennae.

‘I’m grand, thanks, Patrick. That was good work, identifying Sister Mona. Have you found out where she was living?’

‘As far as I know, in a downstairs flat in Upper Lotabeg Road. According to the register of electors, she was sharing it with another woman. Stall the ball, I have it written down here somewhere – another woman called Enda McMahon,
Mrs
Enda McMahon. I’ll be calling round there directly myself in person to see if she can help at all.’

‘Grand. The sooner the better. Meanwhile I think I’ll get myself up to the Bon Sauveur and have another word with Mother O’Dwyer.’

‘You can tell Mother O’Dwyer from me that she’s some spoofer. And that’s me being polite.’

Detectives Dooley and Brennan had been sitting in their car outside the Kilmichael Bar for over two hours before they began to suspect that Paddy Fearon wasn’t going to make an appearance.

‘This is so fecking typical,’ said Detective Brennan. He was big and broad-shouldered, with a bulbous nose and acne-scarred cheeks that looked as if they had been peppered with airgun pellets. ‘You can’t even trust these fecking knackers to incriminate themselves.’

Detective Dooley looked at his watch and said, ‘What do you think? Give him another half-hour? Maybe the horsebox broke down.’

‘No, feck it. Let’s go look for him. I know that Paddy Fearon from way back. A right scobe. I wouldn’t trust him to hold my dog’s lead even if there was no dog on it.’

In the field diagonally opposite the pub, nine ill-assorted thoroughbred horses were grazing. Most of them were retired racehorses with their glory days behind them, although three were young horses that had suffered injuries or sickness and would never be able to race. Detective Dooley had arranged with the owner of the field to let the horses loose in it for twenty-four hours and yesterday afternoon Michael O’Malley and Kevin Corgan had sent their stable lads with three horseboxes to deliver them. If any harm came to any of them, the agreement was that their trainers would be compensated by An Garda Síochána to their full meat-processing value, whether they were actually fit for human consumption or not.

Detective Dooley climbed out of the car and stood there for a while, listening. All he could hear was the wind. Kilmichael was out in the middle of nowhere, up back of leap, and the only signs of human habitation were the yellow and red painted Kilmichael Bar and the single petrol pump on the opposite side of the road that served as the filling station.

It was famous for the IRA ambush in November 1920, when Tom Barry and thirty-six local volunteers had stopped two lorries full of Auxiliaries and killed seventeen of them. After that, though, Kilmichael had been famous for nothing at all.

No cars drove past. No planes flew overhead. Occasionally one of the horses snorted, but that was all. Detective Dooley got back into the driver’s seat and fastened his seat belt.

‘I reckon he sussed you for the law,’ said Detective Brennan.

‘I don’t see how he could have done. If I was the law, how could I have known about that night at Waxy’s? And one of the girls at the halting site kept giving me the eye. She wouldn’t have done that if she’d any idea at all that I was a cop. Jesus, I’d have been lucky if she spat at me.’

‘He’s not turning up, though, is he? And there’s only one way to find out why.’

Detective Dooley started the engine. As he did so, the owner of the Kilmichael Bar came out of the pub’s front door in a brown zig-zag patterned sweater and stared at them.

‘Sorry, my friend,’ said Detective Brennan. ‘We’d love a drink but we’re a little pressed at the moment.’

* * *

They arrived at the Spring Lane Halting Site just after noon. Detective Dooley parked close to the entrance but out of sight of the mobile homes.

‘Watch out for that beour who has the hots for you,’ said Detective Brennan. ‘If she tries to drag you into her caravan for a bulling, give me a ring on my moby and I’ll come and save you.’

‘Oh, g’way, will you,’ said Detective Dooley. He left Detective Brennan in the car and walked into the halting site. Six or seven children were playing there, but he was relieved that there was no sign of the cluster of women who had been smoking and gossiping there the last time he visited. Most of the pool of brown sewage water had drained away, too. He went past the toilets to Paddy Fearon’s caravan. The brindled pony was still tethered outside, and more importantly, Paddy’s horsebox was still parked on the hard standing opposite.

Detective Dooley knocked on the caravan door and stepped back down to wait for it to open. Nobody answered, so he stepped back up again and knocked a second time.

After a long pause, the door opened and Paddy Fearon appeared in a cloud of cigarette smoke. He was wearing only a grubby vest and a pair of navy-blue trackies with food stains on them.

‘Yes?’ he said, taking his cigarette out of his mouth. ‘What d’ye want, boy?’

‘I thought you were going to come and collect my horses. That was the arrangement, wasn’t it?’

Paddy blinked, as if he were mystified. ‘What horses? What arrangement?’

‘You know what horses and you know what arrangement. The arrangement I paid you five hundred euros in cash for. The arrangement to pick up my horses and get shot of them for me.’

Paddy took a long drag at his cigarette. ‘I don’t have the first idea what you’re talking about. Sorry. I don’t know who the feck you are or what the feck you’ve been drinking, but if I was you I’d switch to something that doesn’t give you the galloping delusions.’

‘Don’t give me that,’ said Detective Dooley, ‘You know perfectly well who I am. Now, are you going to go to Kilmichael and collect those horses for me and dispose of them like you agreed to?’

‘Kilmichael? Why in the name of feck should I go to Kilmichael?’

‘Because I paid you to, that’s why, and you agreed you’d do it.’

Paddy slowly shook his head. ‘No, kid. Not me. Why don’t you try that caravan over there? That yellow one. Maybe you’re colour-blind, like. Whatever the reason, I’d say that you’ve made a mistake, wouldn’t you? And you know what happens to people who make mistakes. They have to live with the consequences.’

As they were talking, four young men appeared from the direction of the toilets. They walked up to Detective Dooley and stood close behind him, with their arms folded. He recognized them as the same young men who had been trying to get the motorbike started. They had shaven heads or close-cropped hair and tattoos on their necks and earrings. At least one of them smelled strongly of Lynx aftershave, which for some reason Detective Dooley found more menacing than if they had smelled of beer or ganja.

He glanced at them over his shoulders, first left and then right. They stared back at him, expressionless, ceaselessly chewing gum. One of them had a squint. Detective Dooley guessed that Paddy must have called them the first time that he had knocked at his caravan door. He was carrying his SIG Sauer automatic in a shoulder holster, but he could imagine what would happen if he pulled it out. Somebody would end up seriously injured, or dead, and it could easily be him.

He turned back to Paddy and said, ‘Yes, Paddy. I think you’re right. I must have made that arrangement with somebody else altogether. What am I like, eh? I’ll forget my own name next.’