Blood Sisters (53 page)

Gerry bent down and examined Saint Sparkle’s right front hoof. ‘He had a bruise on the inside wall there, after that race at Mallow. It’s gone.’

‘Oh, come on, Gerry, horses often suffer bruises on their hooves,’ said Riona.

‘It’s totally disappeared, though. Totally.’

‘That’s not unusual. Most of the time bruises are caused by the crimping of the lamina between the hoof wall and the coffin bone. It’s not often that they’re serious. On a fit horse like Sparkle, they can disappear almost overnight.’

‘But that other horse – the one I just looked at, thinking he was Sparkle –
he
has a bruise in exactly the same place that Sparkle did – in the dish there, on the side of his hoof.’

‘Coincidence,’ said Riona. ‘O’Donoghue’s Delight suffers from a slight lack of balance. That can cause bruises, too.’

‘Well, all right, I’ll take your word for it,’ said Gerry. ‘I’m not a vet, I have to admit.’ He stepped back and folded his arms and looked up at Saint Sparkle admiringly. ‘I must say you’ve done a fantastic job with him, Riona. The Lord alone knows what happened at Mallow, but I think he’s going to do us proud at the Boyle Sports Race Day.’

Dermot picked up his Murphy’s bottle from the floor and held it up. ‘
Sláinte mhaith
!’ he grinned. ‘I’ll drink to that!’

‘I’ll tell you what you
will
do, Dermot,’ Riona told him. ‘You’ll go around to the back of the garage and you’ll fix that leaking tap I asked you to fix two days ago.’

‘Of course, yeah,’ said Dermot. ‘I’m on me way now.’

As he passed them, Gerry stared at Dermot narrowly. Then he saw that Riona was looking at him, so he smiled and said, ‘I’d best be going, then. Lots to do. People to meet. Welding to oversee. Let me know if you’re still having problems with that barn, Riona, and I’ll see if I can pull a few strings for you.’

‘Thanks, Gerry,’ said Riona. ‘Bye-bye.’

* * *

He had driven less than three miles towards Coachford when Gerry pulled into a farm gate by the side of the road and took out his iPhone. He was breathing heavily as he tapped out the number 1800 666 111.

‘Garda Confidential,’ said the operator. ‘How can I help you?’

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘they were appealing on the telly yesterday evening for information about a fellow with a finger missing on his left hand.’

‘I see, sir. Do you think you might have seen him?’

‘Only a few minutes ago. It’s the same fellow for sure, because I recognized his face from the telly, too. He’s kind of an odd-job worker at the Clontead Stud, north of Coachford. His name’s Dermot. I don’t know what his surname is, but you can’t fail to recognize him. He’s the bulb off his picture.’

‘Thank you, sir. I’ll pass this information on to the officers in charge of this investigation.’

‘There’s something else, too. I think there’s some kind of a horse-racing racket going on at Clontead More.’

‘A horse-racing racket? Can you tell me something more about it?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Gerry. He was feeling panicky now and kept glancing into his rear-view mirror to make sure that nobody from the stud farm was coming after him. ‘ I don’t have much in the way of proof, but I think that they might be running ringers. You know, substituting one horse for another so that they can fix the betting.’

‘What makes you think that, sir?’

‘I can’t tell you now. I have to go.’

‘If you can possibly call in at a Garda station, sir, and give them that information in person. They’ll treat it as confidential, I can assure you of that.’

‘All right, all right. Grand. I’ll think about it. But now I have to go.’

He rang off and dropped his iPhone on to the seat beside him. Then he put his foot down and drove away from the farm gate in a slithering spray of mud and grass.

Even before Gerry’s car was out of sight, Riona hurried around to the back of the garage, where Dermot was crouching down and sorting through his bag of tools, searching for a spanner.

‘Dermot! Quick! Andy’s found them! Sister Nessa and Sister Virginia! I’m just going to change and then we’re going after them!’

‘What about this tap?’ said Dermot.

‘You’ve left it leaking for two days. You don’t think another day is going to make any difference? Now hurry!’

‘What’s all the fecking rush?’ Dermot asked her, closing up his tool bag and standing up.

‘I’ve been waiting thirty years for this, that’s the rush! I don’t want to wait a minute longer!’

Dermot saw something in Riona’s eyes that he had never seen before, even when they were slitting open Sister Mona’s stomach or branding Sister Barbara’s breasts with that red-hot monstrance, or cooking Sister Aibrean in the hog roaster. Her pupils had darkened until they appeared almost black, so that he could have believed that she was possessed. He had seen women in the Carraig Mor asylum who had looked like that – women who had screamed that Satan was inside them. Even the way she walked seemed to have changed – making her way back to the house with jerky arm and leg movements, as if she were being controlled by some demonic puppeteer.

While she went inside to change, Dermot opened the garage and started up his car. He had emptied most of the rubbish out of the back of it but there were still several tins of Ronseal in there which gave the interior a strong smell of fence varnish. He drove out into the stable yard and waited for Riona with his window open, smoking.

Ryan came out of Saint Sparkle’s stable and said, ‘You off, boy?’

Dermot handed him a cigarette and said, ‘It’s herself. She’s gone skitzo again.’

‘Well good fecking luck with that then.’

After about ten minutes Riona came out of the house with a long black coat slung over her shoulders. She was dressed in her full nun’s vestments, complete with a cowl and a scarf and a large silver cross around her neck. Ryan put his hands together as if he were praying, which plainly didn’t amuse her at all.

‘Have you finished rubbing down Sparkle yet?’ she snapped at him. ‘Or are you just giving yourself another one of your undeserved breaks?’

‘Sparkle’s finished. He’s grand. I’ve fed him his turbo flakes, too.’

‘Right, well, I’ll probably be away for at least two hours. You can take Mister Lintock out for a breeze, but go very easy. I think that bowed tendon has pretty much healed but I don’t want it damaged again.’

‘I have you. Don’t worry. I’ll ride him as if he was my own.’

‘Yes. That’s what I’m worried about.’

Riona climbed into the passenger seat of Dermot’s car, tugging at her scapular and habit so that she was sitting comfortably, and they drove off.

‘We’ll go for Sister Nessa first, in Knocka,’ she said.

‘Poor Sister Nessa,’ said Dermot. He had thrown away his cigarette but he was still breathing out smoke as he talked. ‘She doesn’t know what she’s in for. By the way, what
is
she in for? We don’t need anything special, like, do we? Not another hog roaster? That was a pig to clean, that fecking hog roaster. Hey – get it? Pig, hog! I’m a fecking comedian and I don’t even know it!’

‘Sister Nessa was a mean and nasty piece of work,’ said Riona. ‘She’d have you washing and ironing all the sheets and if you made even the smallest brown mark on the sheets when you were pressing them, she’d pick them up and drop them on the floor and wipe her feet on them so you’d have to wash and iron them all over again. And if anybody gave a biscuit to Sorley, she’d snatch it away from him because she said that bastards didn’t deserve treats.’

‘She sounds like a saint all right,’ said Dermot. They had reached Coachford now and he turned towards Dripsey and Cork. The sky was cloudless and frost was still sparkling in the hedgerows.

‘Oh, she thought she was a saint,’ said Riona. ‘She modelled herself on Saint Agnes of Rome, the patron saint of virgins, so she believed that all of us girls at the home were the dirtiest of the dirty.’

‘And what happened to Saint Agnes?’ Dermot asked her. ‘What I mean is, how did they top her, like?’

‘She refused to burn incense to the Roman gods, because she said she was promised to Christ. She was only twelve years old and still a virgin, so by Roman law they couldn’t execute her until she had lost her virginity.’

‘That sounds sensible,’ said Dermot. ‘Chopping a girl’s head off before she’d had it away, that would be a total waste of good pussy.’

Riona ignored that. ‘The Roman priests sent her to a brothel to lose her virginity. They stripped her naked and dragged her through the streets behind a horse. The legend has it that her hair miraculously grew to cover her modesty, but I don’t think that’s going to happen with Sister Nessa.’

Dermot glanced over at her. ‘Is that what you have in mind, then? Dragging her through the streets in the nip? Don’t you think that somebody might notice?’

‘We’re not going to drag her down St Patrick’s Street, for the love of God. A nice gritty country road, that’s what I’m thinking. And we’ll use this car instead of a horse.’

‘That should send her on her way to join that saint of hers.’

‘Well, I hope so. Although Saint Agnes survived it and they had to cut her head off in the end. She told the executioner to hurry up because a bride shouldn’t keep her groom waiting. Meaning Jesus, of course.’

‘Jesus,’ said Dermot, as they joined the main R618 towards Cork. ‘These fecking martyrs. Enough to make your hair stand on end. What about the other one? Sister Vinegar, or whatever her name is?’

‘Sister Virginia. But you’re right for once. She should have been called Sister Vinegar. I only have to remember the way she treated me and Sorley and it gives me the worst sour taste in my mouth. When Sorley wet the bed she made him sleep in it all night to teach him a lesson even though the sheets were soaking, and when he was potty training she wouldn’t let him change his pants for the rest of the day if he accidentally shit himself, and the poor little boy was only eighteen months old.’

‘And what do you have planned for her?’ asked Dermot.

‘Oh, something painful, I can assure you. She was devoted to Saint Perpetua, the patron saint of expectant mothers. Saint Perpetua was a married noblewoman in Carthage, which was part of the Roman Empire, and she was a nursing mother, too. She was martyred, though, because of her Christian faith. They stabbed her in between every bone in her body so that she would feel as much pain as possible before she died, and it was said that she was shrieking. She was in so much agony that she grabbed hold of the blade of the exectioner’s sword and cut her own throat with it.’

‘I don’t know how you remember all that fecking stuff,’ said Dermot.

‘I remember it because I can’t forget it, and those sisters made sure of that.’

‘The only thing that I can remember from when I was younger is “The Bog Down in the Valley-O”, said Dermot. He tapped the rings on his fingers on the steering wheel and sang, in a flat and wheezy voice, ‘
The flea on the feather, and the feather on the bird, and the bird in the egg, and the egg in the nest, and the nest in the tree, and the tree in the bog, and the bog down in the valley-o
!’

‘Mother of God,’ said Riona. ‘Apart from the fact that you missed out half of it, you’ve made my ears bleed.’

It took them just under an hour to reach Knocknaheeny, on the north-west side of the city. They turned off Kilmore Road into Dunmore Gardens, which was a row of neat but depressing bungalows facing a fenced-off sports ground.

‘Sister Nessa’s – that’ll be further along,’ said Riona. She pulled at her sleeves to straighten them and Dermot could tell that she was becoming agitated, the same as she had been when he dropped her off at the Greendale Rest Home to spirit Sister Barbara away.

He drove slowly, thinking about tying Sister Nessa to his tow bar, naked, and driving along the road with her dragging along behind him. He wondered how fast he could go before bits of her would start to fall off.

‘
The tree in the bog
,’ he murmured under his breath. ‘
And the bog down in the
valley-o
.’

‘Stop!’ said Riona.

‘Oh come on,’ he said. ‘I’m not that shite at singing.’

‘No, stop the car, I mean! Turn around!’

‘What? What’s the problem?’

‘Look up ahead of us, you blind eejit! Turn around!’

Further up the road, outside a small grey bungalow with a hedge around it, a Garda patrol car was parked and two uniformed gardaí were standing by the concrete pillars on either side of its driveway. Dermot jammed his foot on the brake and reversed, his Toyota whinnying like a horse. Then he wrestled with the steering wheel so that they could execute a three-point turn.

As he did so, Riona saw a blonde-haired woman in a dark-grey business suit walk up the driveway and speak to one of the guards.

‘The shades!’ Dermot panted, as they drove back down Dunmore Gardens towards the main road. ‘What were the shades doing there?’

‘I think they’re on to us,’ said Riona. ‘That blonde woman – did you see her? I’ll bet anything she’s a detective. I think they’ve worked out what we’re doing.’

‘That’s no fecking surprise. We haven’t exactly been keeping a low profile, like, have we? I don’t know why we haven’t been advertising on the telly! We could have buried them in a bog somewhere and nobody would have been any the wiser!’

‘But that’s the whole
point
!’ Riona retorted, clenching her teeth. ‘I want them to be wiser!’

When they reached Kilmore Road, Dermot said, ‘Now what? Do you want to go back to Clontead?’

‘No. Let’s go for Sister Virginia. Maybe the guards don’t yet know that we’re after her, too.’

‘You mean
now
, like?’

‘Yes, now! When did you think I meant? Next Thursday fortnight?’

‘This is getting crazier than ever,’ said Dermot. ‘They’re going to catch us, like. You know that.’

‘Of course I know that. I don’t care.’

‘Well, me neither, so long as they put me in a proper prison and not that Carraig Mor shitehole with all them loonies. I’m allergic to loonies, I tell you.’

Riona unfolded the sheet of paper from Andy’s notebook. ‘Here it is. Sister Virginia lives in Iona Road, Mayfield. Do you know how to get there?’