Blood Sisters (35 page)

Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán looked up from her keyboard. ‘This is fierce difficult,’ she said. ‘I’ve checked with the General Register Office in Roscommon and Sister Grainne McNevin died eight years ago, but unless somebody failed to register their deaths the other three are still with us.’

‘Oh, okay,’ said Katie. ‘I don’t mean to be callous, but I was rather hoping they would have peacefully passed away by now.’

‘I thought I’d tracked one of them down, Sister Virginia O’Cleary. She was living with her younger sister in Rochestown but her younger sister died of the cancer and so she was moved to a rest home in Carrigaline. I’ve just tried to contact the rest home but it was closed two years ago and now it’s somebody’s private house and they don’t have any idea what happened to any of the old folks who used to live there.’

‘What about the others?’

‘Sister Nessa Bolan left the convent fifteen years ago to work with the Bon Sauveurs in Malawi. They had set up a school for children blinded by Vitamin A deficiency or measles. However, the school closed after two years because of lack of funding and I can’t find out what happened to Sister Nessa, whether she came back to Ireland or stayed in Africa. She didn’t return to the convent here in Cork.

‘Sister Aibrean Callery, she had to leave the congregation seven years ago when she developed kidney disease. She spent three months being treated at CUH but then she was discharged and so far I can’t find any record of where she went or who might have taken her.’

‘All right. Well, keep trying,’ said Katie. ‘Let’s hope that if we can’t find them, our killers can’t find them either.’

As she turned to go, Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán said, ‘Ma’am – I need to talk to you.’

‘Yes, what is it? There’s no problem, is there?’

‘Well, yes and no. Maybe this isn’t the right time.’

‘Kyna, if something’s bothering you, you should tell me about it,’ said Katie. ‘That’s what I’m here for.’

Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán raised her eyes to her and her lower lip protruded like a sad child. She looked so miserable that Katie went back across to her and laid a hand on her shoulder.

‘
Kyna
, what is it? Tell me.’

‘I’m thinking of applying for a transfer,’ she said. ‘Dublin, if there’s any vacancies.’

‘But why? Aren’t you happy here? Don’t tell me you’re bored with living amongst us culchies?’

Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán said, ‘No, I love it here. But that’s the trouble. I love it because of you.’

Katie took her hand away. ‘Kyna,’ she said.

‘I know. It’s insane. It’s insane and it’s impossible and there’s no way that anything is ever going to happen between us. But I can’t help it. I’ve tried to meet other women and stop thinking about you, but every day I come into the station and there you are and I’m in love with you and it
hurts
, and the only way I’m going to be able to stop it from hurting is if I apply for a transfer and move away and never see you again, ever.’

Detective Brennan was sitting on the opposite side of the squad room, laboriously typing with two fingers. He glanced up at Katie and Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán, but he was too far away to hear what they were saying. Katie wished she could take Kyna in her arms and hold her close and kiss her and tell her how fond she was of her, and how much she would miss her if she left, but of course she couldn’t.

‘Let’s talk about this later,’ she said. ‘Don’t go rushing off before we’ve had a chance to discuss what your options are.’

‘There are no options. Being in love is not an option. You’ve put a
geis
on me and there’s nothing I can do about it.’

‘I’ll meet you after, anyway, Kyna. I don’t want you being upset.’

She said nothing, but went back to her keyboard. Katie stayed beside her for a few moments and then said, ‘Smile, would you, just for me?’

Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán looked up and smiled, although her eyes were filled with tears.

* * *

By the time Katie drove up to the Bon Sauveur Convent, the sun had gone down behind the three spires of Saint Finbarr’s Cathedral in the centre of the city and it was growing grainy and dark.

When she parked, however, a dazzling array of halogen lamps were shining behind the convent chapel and lighting up the garden as if it were a sports stadium, and she could hear the hum of generators and the clanking of shovels. The car park was crowded with cars and vans from the Technical Bureau and RMR Engineering.

She walked around into the garden and found Eithne O’Neill talking to two men in yellow high-visibility jackets and hard hats. They were standing around a wide machine on wheels that resembled a lawnmower without any blades. Eithne herself was wearing a pale-blue Tyvek suit that looked as if belonged to somebody much bigger than her, and her hair was sticking up like a fledgling that had fallen out of its nest.

‘Oh, good, Detective Superintendent Maguire,’ she said. ‘This is Stephen Murtry, the technical director of RMR, and this is his ground-radar expert, Dermot Brooke. They’re showing me what they’ve discovered under the ground so far.’

Both men shook hands with Katie. Stephen Murtry had a trim salt-and-pepper beard and horn-rimmed spectacles, and could almost have been a menswear model for the older man, while Dermot Brooke was young and overweight with florid cheeks.

‘It seems to me that you have something of a delicate situation here, Detective Superintendent,’ said Stephen, looking around. ‘Excavating a convent garden, with the nuns still in residence. At least in Galway the nuns had already sold their building and gone.’

‘Before they left, though, didn’t they, the nuns in Galway made sure that they exhumed their dear sisters who had been buried there?’ put in Eithne. ‘They gave them a fine reburial in County Mayo, with a blessing from the parish priest and all, and a memorial stone with all their names on it. Not like the bodies of all the infants they left behind, thrown into a hole like so much rubbish.’

‘Sorry – hold on for a moment, could you?’ said Stephen. ‘We need to do some adjustments if we’re going to start scanning deeper.’

He and Dermot bent over their ground-radar machine to fine-tune its frequency settings. As they did so, Katie frowned at Eithne and lifted her fingertip to her lips. She agreed with her absolutely, but however strongly they felt about the cases they were investigating, it was not the place of technical experts or rank and file gardaí to express their opinions publicly.

Stephen turned back to Katie and said, ‘So far we’ve covered only the north-west side of the lawn here, but we’ve already found two anomalies under the ground where it looks as if the soil has been disturbed by human activity. Inside both of these anomalies we’ve identified a number of objects of higher density than the surrounding soil, so I’m recommending that you bring in another contractor to dig some exploratory slit trenches.’

‘How deep are these objects buried?’ asked Katie.

‘One of the anomalies is very deep indeed and so far we’ve only managed to scan the top of it. I mean, what we have here is one of the latest ground-radar machines, the RIS-K2. It costs the thick end of a hundred thousand euros and it can detect underground anomalies up to three metres deep. But this anomaly goes a whole lot deeper than that and it’s been partially covered, too, maybe with sheets of plywood. In my opinion, whoever dug it was trying to conceal the objects they were burying for good and all.’

‘But you have no way of telling for sure if they’re bones?’

‘Not until we dig them up and see them with our own eyes. That’s the only way to tell for certain.’

‘I’ll see that we bring in somebody to start trench digging first thing tomorrow morning,’ said Katie. ‘What area will you be scanning next?’

‘Underneath that vegetable bed next. You’ve already discovered several bones there, close to the surface, so I should imagine that the bodies there weren’t buried nearly so deep.’

Dermot switched the ground-radar machine on again and began slowly to roll it across the grass. Katie watched him at work for a few moments and then she said to Eithne, ‘How’s it going with the septic tank? How many have you managed to fish out so far?’

‘Come and see,’ said Eithne. Then, as they walked across the lawn, she said, ‘That bombing today at Spring Lane, that was terrible. You were there, weren’t you? Holy Mary. Are you all right? You weren’t hurt at all, were you?’

‘I’m okay, but I’m still slightly deaf,’ said Katie. ‘Bill Phinner hasn’t left the halting site yet, has he?’

‘No. As a matter of fact, he called me only about five minutes ago. It’s probably going to take them most of tomorrow before they’ve finished combing the ground around the caravan. Then they’re going to tow it in to Anglesea Street examine it. He says he has a strong suspicion about who built the device, but he’s not one hundred per cent sure yet.’

‘Oh, Bill’s very good at that,’ said Katie. ‘He only has to smell the residue from an IED and he can tell who put it together. He’s better than a sniffer dog when it comes to Semtex. Anyway – these bones.’

Since her last visit to the convent garden the brightly lit blue tent had been extended towards the eastern wall and more groundsheets laid out. She stopped at the entrance to the tent and she could hardly believe what was laid out in front of her. There were now eight rows of tiny skeletons arranged on the groundsheets, close together, and in each row there must have been more than thirty.

‘We’ve counted two hundred and seventy so far,’ said Eithne, snapping off her black forensic glove so that she could push her hair out of her eyes. ‘Of course, we can’t be sure that all the individual bones belong to the correct skeletons, but we’re being very careful to photograph them in situ before we move them. We’ve measured every bone, too, and that’s given us quite an accurate idea of how old they were, taking their poor diet into account.’

‘So what ages were most of them, when they died?’ asked Katie. She couldn’t help thinking of the small white casket that her late husband Paul had carried by himself into the church, with little Seamus inside it, in his best blue romper suit.

Eithne said, ‘This is only the roughest of estimates, but so far we think that about twenty-five were stillborn, while the majority of them were eighteen months to two and a half years old. Some are obviously much older, though. You see that skeleton on the end of the second row there? That child was at least seven when she died, although her growth was well below average for a girl of her age, almost certainly because her diet was badly lacking.’

‘You know it was a girl?’

Eithne nodded. ‘It’s her teeth that give her away. Up until the age of five or six, there’s no difference between the dental development of boys and girls. After the age of six, girls start to outstrip boys, particularly in the growth of their mandibular teeth.’

Katie walked over and crouched down beside the girl’s skeleton.

‘You sad, hard-done-by little girl,’ she said. ‘I wonder what your name was.’

Two middle-aged reservists in blue anoraks came waddling up to Eithne and said, ‘We’ve finished sifting through that end of the flower bed now. We’ve found no more bones, like, but Sergeant O’Farrell says he wants us back tomorrow morning.’

‘Okay, grand, thanks. I’ll see you tomorrow so,’ Eithne told them.

Katie stood up and together she and Eithne left the tent. Stephen and Dermot were still plodding slowly up and down the lawn with their ground-radar machine, occasionally stopping to frown at the screen.

‘By the way,’ said Katie. ‘I paid a visit to the Begleys regarding Roisin’s suicide note.’

‘And?’

‘After a whole lot of huffing and puffing, Jim Begley finally admitted to me that he had written it himself.’

‘
Serious
? He actually admitted it?’

‘He didn’t have much choice, did he? When Roisin went missing there was nobody else in the house, only the Begleys. He said that he had written it so that it would look as if Roisin was penitent for working for Cork Fantasy Girls and hadn’t wanted to shame her family any further.’

‘That’s fantastic,’ said Eithne. ‘I mean, it’s tragic, but it’s fantastic. But it doesn’t help to explain how she died, does it? It makes it more of mystery than ever.’

‘I asked Jim Begley outright if he’d drowned her. He gave out with a whole lot more bluster, but he wouldn’t give me a straight answer. I told him that I’d be consulting Detective Dooley and that we’d almost certainly be wanting to question him further.’

‘My God. Do you think he
did
drown her?’

Katie looked back at the children’s skeletons lying on the groundsheets. As she did so, one of the reservists untied the tent flap and hid them from view, and she was glad of that. They had been given little enough respect when they were alive.

‘Oh, I think he’s quite capable of it,’ she said. ‘He’s like thorny wire and he’s very protective of his family’s good name. In other words, he can’t tolerate people looking down their noses at the Begleys during Mass because their daughter’s a slapper.’

‘But to actually drown her? What kind of a father would do that to his daughter, even if she was a bit of a slut?’

‘I don’t know, Eithne, to tell you the truth. I stopped speculating about people’s motivations a long time ago, especially when it comes to religion.’

As if to emphasize her point, Mother O’Dwyer appeared around the side of the chapel and stopped and stared at her. Her eyes were bright and hard, as if two steel nails had been hammered into her face. Katie considered walking over to tell her the latest count of infants’ skeletons they had lifted out of the septic tank, but she decided that she would rather keep her in suspense until they had all been recovered. Unless, of course, she knew already how many there were.

Riona was riding Saint Sparkle around and around the back field when Andy Flanagan came driving into the stud farm in his dusty green Range Rover. Dermot was leaning on the fence watching Riona and smoking a cigarette and Andy stopped beside him and climbed out.

Riona rode over to them and dismounted. She handed the reins to Dermot and said, ‘Take him back to his stall for me, would you, Dermot? The vet will be here soon, anyway.’