Blood Sisters (29 page)

‘No bother at all, boy,’ said Paddy, with smoke leaking out of his nostrils. ‘You’re forgiven.’

Detective Dooley turned to go. For a nerve-wracking moment the four young Travellers barred his way and he stayed where he was, trying to avoid eye contact.
Don’t look at them. Even a look they might take as a challenge. Just try to appear as if you’ve been humbled and all you want to do is get away from here without being hurt
.

‘
Stafa tapa hu, feen
!’ called out Paddy hoarsely. Detective Dooley knew that in cant that meant ‘Long life to you, feller!’

When he said that, the young men stood aside, still chewing gum, still with their arms folded. He made his way back across the halting site, dodging the potholes in the asphalt. Halfway across, he caught sight of Tauna at one of the caravan windows, watching him. As soon as she realized he had seen her, she lifted her middle finger at him and then turned her back. It was only a gesture but it was enough to tell him that the Travellers had found out that he was a garda. If he had simply been some gomie that Paddy had duped out of five hundred euros, she wouldn’t have felt any animosity towards him. But she had discovered that he was a shade, and what was worse, she had fancied him.

He climbed back into the car. It was cold in there because Detective Brennan had been smoking with the passenger window wide open.

‘Well, did you bog the ginnet?’ Detective Brennan asked him. ‘Full marks for speed if you did.’

‘No. And you were right. Somehow they’ve twigged who I am. Maybe one of them recognized me, I don’t know. Fearon made out like he’d never seen me before in his life. I never asked him to dispose of any horses for him and I never gave him five hundred euros to do it.’

‘You’re messing! What an eejit!’

‘I know. All he had to do was give me the money back and say he wasn’t going to get rid of the horses for me because he couldn’t afford it. Or he could have said that he’d only been boasting and he didn’t really do that kind of thing. If he’d done that, I wouldn’t have been able to stick anything on him at all. Now I’ve got him for extorting money with menaces.’

Detective Brennan put up his window. ‘I don’t know what the feck the super’s going to say. She was dead set on catching him red-handed throwing horses off a cliff. Still, if you can charge him under section 17, that might give us some leverage.’

‘You’d best call Michael O’Malley and Kevin Corgan,’ said Detective Dooley as they drove out of Spring Lane towards Ballyvolane. ‘Tell them they can go back to Kilmichael and collect their horses, and thanks for the loan of them, like.’

‘Oh, they’ll be well pissed off about that,’ said Detective Brennan. ‘They were hoping to see the last of those old nags and make a bit of a profit out of it, too.’

‘The more you want something, the less chance you have of getting it, that’s what my nan used to say.’

‘Mine, too, or something like that,’ said Detective Brennan. ‘She always dreamed of marrying Christy Ring, and what did she get? My dipso of a grandpa. Mind you, he may not have been Cork’s greatest hurler, my grandpa, not like Christy Ring, but give him ten pints of Murphy’s, point him at an open window, and he could hurl with the best of them.’

Katie was buttoning up her red duffel coat when Detective Dooley called her to tell her what had happened.

‘So Fearon found out somehow that you were the law?’ she said. ‘Oh well, there was always a risk of that. But good, yes, it may be second-best but we can charge him with extortion. I’m on my way now to the Bon Sauveur Convent to talk to the mother superior, but as soon as I get back we’ll go up to Spring Lane and pull him in. Jesus, you almost have to feel sorry for them sometimes, these poor eejits like Paddy Fearon, don’t you?’

She was already on her way along the corridor when Eithne from the Technical Bureau stepped out of the lift and came towards her, waving a black plastic folder.

‘Eithne, what’s the story?’ asked Katie. ‘How did you get on with that ugly fellow’s face?’

‘I’ve done that, ma’am. I’ve just given a copy to Detective O’Donovan, and I have one here for you.’

She unzipped the folder and took out a full-face computer image of the man in the hoodie who had dumped Sister Barbara’s body into the fountain.

‘Holy Mary,’ said Katie.

‘No, he’s not pretty, is he?’ said Eithne. ‘He may not look exactly like that in real life, but the software is very good at extrapolating facial structure – like it takes into account that one side of your face is not a mirror image of the other.’

‘All right,’ said Katie. ‘I’m on my way out now, so if you could leave that on my desk.’

‘This is not really what I came to see you about,’ said Eithne. She brought out a sheet of paper in a transparent plastic cover. ‘We’ve been examining the note that Roisin Begley was supposed to have left under her pillow.’

‘
Supposed
to have left?’

‘Superficially, you’d think that she wrote it. But – look, this is the note and this is a page from her biology notes from school.’

‘They look the same to me,’ said Katie.

‘Well, at first sight they do, I agree. There’s distinct similarities, like the way the
g
s and the
y
s have that sharp-angled tail, and the
i
s have the long mark, the
fada
, rather than dots. But the
a
s and the
e
s are formed in totally different ways – you see how Roisin almost goes around them twice – and all of her writing in her schoolbook has a measurable left-leaning slope to it, which the note doesn’t.’

Katie looked more closely at the two samples of handwriting. Eithne was right. At a glance, they seemed to be almost identical. But apart from the differences in some of the letters, it was apparent that whoever had written the note had been pressing much harder, as if they had been writing slowly and carefully. Copying, in fact.

‘I’d stand up in court and testify that Roisin herself didn’t write this note,’ said Eithne. ‘There’s no DNA on it, and no fingerprints, but it was written with a blue liquid ink pen that we couldn’t find in Roisin’s bedroom and that’s another indication that it was written by somebody else.’

‘But somebody who had access to Roisin’s bedroom, and to her schoolbooks,’ said Katie.

Eithne said nothing. Katie handed back the note and the handwriting sample. ‘Thank you, Eithne,’ she said. ‘I’ve been putting off paying a visit to the Begleys, but it looks like I’ll have to now.’

* * *

As she parked outside the Bon Sauveur Convent, Detective Inspector O’Rourke called her. He was on his way back from Dublin and wanted to tell her that he made all the arrangements for RMR to bring their ground-radar equipment down to Cork tomorrow.

‘I’m catching the three o’clock from Heuston so I’ll be back at five-thirty. There’s a couple of things I need to talk to you about that I can’t do over the phone.’

‘Now you have me worried,’ said Katie.

‘Well, it’s best that you know what’s going on,’ Detective Inspector O’Rourke told her. ‘How’s it going generally? Did Dooley catch Fearon chucking his horses off the cliff?’

‘That all went pear-shaped. The Travellers found out that Dooley was a cop. I don’t know how, but it’s not a total disaster because we have a plan B. I’ll give you the SP when you get back. I’m just off to talk to Mother O’Dwyer. We’ve identified the flying nun and she used to be a member of the Bon Sauveurs.’

‘Mother O’Dwyer definitely said that she wasn’t, didn’t she? How about that? We have the flying nun and the lying nun.’

‘That’s true. Take care, Francis. I’ll see you later so.’

Before she went into the convent building, Katie walked around to the garden to see what progress the search team was making. Seven or eight reservists were still carefully raking through the flower bed and sifting the black peaty soil through riddles, while another three had started on the vegetable garden. They had dug up scores of potatoes and winter cabbages and piled them beside the wall.

The technical experts had erected a large blue nylon tent which completely sheltered the septic tank. The triangular entrance flap was tied back and as she walked across the grass Katie could see the technicians in their white Tyvek suits with masks over their faces, kneeling beside one of the open access ports. They were lifting the bones out of the septic tank with an Unger pick-up tool, which had rubber-covered claws to prevent the bones from being marked or damaged. As they were retrieved, the bones were laid out on a groundsheet and the technical experts were making every effort to reassemble them as individual skeletons.

Bill Phinner was there and he was wearing a Tyvek suit, too, and had obviously been helping. He never looked particularly happy. He always reminded Katie of Peter Cushing when Dracula’s ashes start to come back to life, pinch-faced and anxious. Today, though, he seemed to more serious than ever.

‘How many so far?’ she asked him.

He snapped off one of his latex gloves and ran his hand through his thinning grey hair. ‘Eighteen so far. Of course, that has to be an estimate. The way they’re all jumbled together, we can’t be sure whose skull belongs to whose vertebrae, or which ribcage is which. But when we’re finished we’ll be able to work out how many exactly were disposed of here, and at least we’ll be able to give their remains something that the nuns never did, and that’s a respectful burial.’

‘How many more have you found in the garden?’

‘Three in the flower bed, but that’s only a guess because we haven’t located all of their skeletons yet. None in the vegetable garden so far. The mother superior was giving us a hard time because we’re digging up all their vegetables and what are they going to do for food over the next few months? I politely suggested she went up to Dunne’s Stores like everybody else, like it’s only up the road, like.’

‘Well, they’re bringing the radar scanners down tomorrow, so if there are any more to be found, we’ll find them.’

Bill looked down at the tiny skeletons laid out in three rows, not all of them complete. Some were still missing legs or arms and two of them had no skulls. ‘What a way to end up, eh? Just because their mothers weren’t married. I hope there’s a playground for them up in heaven – although I very much doubt it.’

‘Bill!’ said Katie, laying her hand on his shoulder. ‘I didn’t realize you were so sentimental!’

‘Oh, I’m not sentimental at all, ma’am. I’m bitter, if you must know. I’ve probably been in this job too long, but I can never come to terms with what human beings are capable of doing to each other, the weak and defenceless most of all. Look at them. They were so little, they never even found out what they were supposed to have done wrong.’

‘Bill, you’re going to make me cry in a minute.’

Bill looked at her and gave her a weary smile. ‘No, I’m not. You’re harder than that, Detective Superintendent Maguire. And you’re in this job for the same reason I am. So that the scumbags who hurt innocent kiddies like this don’t get away with it.’

Katie nodded but didn’t say any more. She didn’t need to, the children’s skeletons laid out on the groundsheet spoke for her.

‘Sir!’ called out one of Bill’s technicians. They had brought up another small skull and Bill said to Katie, ‘I’ll see you after, ma’am,’ and went over to take a look at it.

* * *

Mother O’Dwyer was sitting at her desk with a Bible in front of her. Sister Rose showed Katie into her study and as she did so, Mother O’Dwyer stood up. The deep lines around her mouth made it appear as if her lips had been sewn together by headhunters.

‘Good afternoon, Detective Superintendent,’ she said, and her voice was precise and cold. ‘Is it too much to hope that you have come to tell me that you have almost finished ravaging our gardens?’

‘I’m afraid we still have a lot more to do, Mother. We did advise you that we were thinking of bringing in ground-radar scanners to see if there were any more bones buried under the lawns. They should be here and starting work tomorrow.’

‘I see. You do understand that you have shattered our lives? Our peace, our tranquillity, our ability to meditate? We have done nothing but devote ourselves wholly and completely to God and the service of others, but you have even dug up our cabbages.’

Katie said, ‘May I sit down? I have something serious to ask you.’

‘I told you the last time you were here, I have been instructed by our legal adviser to say nothing to you at all. Mr O’Cathaín or one of his representatives should be in touch with you shortly.’

Katie pulled the bucket-like chair around and sat down anyway. ‘My detective showed you a post-mortem picture of the nun who was found dead in Glanmire. You said that you didn’t know her, but it was recognizably Sister Mona Murphy, who used to belong to this congregation. In one of the photographs we borrowed from you she is standing right next to you. There’s no question at all that you knew who she was, so why did you lie to us?’

Mother O’Dwyer didn’t answer, but went back to her desk and sat down. She laid her hand on the open Bible and stared at Katie as if she didn’t understand what she was doing there, or as if Katie had asked her a question in a foreign language.

‘Mother O’Dwyer?’ said Katie. ‘I really need to know why you didn’t tell us the truth.’

‘I was afraid,’ said Mother O’Dwyer. She sounded as if she had barbed wire in her throat, to try and catch her words before they came out.

‘You were
afraid
? Afraid of what? The sooner we find out who’s been killing these sisters, the better it will be for everybody.’

‘Will it? Is that what you think?’

‘Of course it will,’ said Katie. ‘You don’t want any more sisters to be murdered, do you? And whoever did this, you want to see them punished, don’t you?’

‘Sometimes it is better to die than tell the truth,’ said Mother O’Dwyer.

‘Oh, really? And under what circumstances is that?’

Mother O’Dwyer was silent for almost half a minute, her lips tightly pursed, but Katie didn’t ask her any more questions because she could sense that she was carefully thinking of what she was going to say.