Blood Sisters (16 page)

A shaven-headed man about the same age as Paddy was sitting on the sofa in a white sleeveless body warmer and black tracksuit trousers, smoking a cigarette. Sitting close to him was a girl in shocking-pink leggings with a nest of backcombed blonde hair. She was painfully thin, so that her eyes looked huge, like a Disney character.

‘What did you say your name was?’ Paddy asked Detective Dooley.

‘Declan. Declan O’Leary.’

Paddy turned to the shaven-headed man and said, ‘Declan was there at Waxy’s that night when Danny Perrott’s dog did the dirty on me.’

The shaven-headed man gave a gap-toothed grin, with smoke leaking out of the gaps. ‘Jesus, that was one night I’ll never forget, if I could only fecking remember it.’ He held out a horny hand encrusted with gold signet rings and said, ‘Beval. And this skinny malink is Patia.’

‘Will you stop calling me that?’ Patia protested in a nasal whine.

‘Why the feck should I? It’s fecking true, isn’t it? There’s more fecking meat on a butcher’s pencil than there is on you.’

‘Declan says he has a job for us,’ said Paddy. ‘Would you care for a drink, Declan?’

‘No – no, thanks,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘I’ve been stopped by the shades a couple of times and the last thing I want is to lose my licence.’

‘Sit down, anyway. What’s this job about, then?’

Detective Dooley nodded towards Patia. ‘Is it all right to talk about it in front of her, like?’

‘You’re all right. Patia don’t know shite from chocolate.’

‘Will you ever stop
talking
about me like that?’ whined Patia.

‘Oh, shut your gob,’ said Beval.

Patia pouted sulkily but she didn’t argue. Detective Dooley couldn’t even guess what her relationship was to Beval – whether she was his wife or his girlfriend or his daughter, or just some stray spicer who had wandered in off the halting site. He sat down next to her anyway and she shuffled up nearer to Beval to give him more room.

‘I have a friend in Kilmichael who has some horses to be taken care of,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘Nine altogether.’

‘Nine? I can handle nine no bother at all,’ said Paddy.

‘The problem is that none of them is fit for human consumption, so my friend can’t sell them to the slaughterhouse. All but two of them’s thoroughbreds and if they’re not full of xylazine they’re full of bute or steroids. But you told me when we was talking together in Waxy’s that you could get rid of horses cheap-like, without having to pay the full charge to the knackery.’

Paddy took out a cigarette and tucked it between his lips, so that it waggled when he talked. ‘That’s right, like. All the knackeries have whacked up their prices lately, more than thirty-three per cent some of them, so by comparison I can offer you a very economical service. For a full-grown horse, Fitzgerald’s will sting you anything up to a hundred and fifty yoyos, depending on its weight, like, and how far they have to go to pick it up. But for nine horses, I could dispose of them for you – let’s say – five hundred the lot.’

Detective Dooley raised his eyebrows. ‘That don’t sound too bad at all. You couldn’t make it four fifty?’

Paddy lit his cigarette with a Zippo and shook his head without saying anything.

‘That’s rock bottom, five hundred,’ put in Beval. ‘You won’t get nobody to do it for you cheaper than that.’

‘Okay,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘I’ll give my friend a ring, see what he says.’

‘He has all of their passports, like?’ asked Paddy.

‘So far as I know, yes, and I believe they’ve all been chipped. That’s not a problem, is it?’

‘No, not at all. They can have their names embroidered on the arses for all I care.’

‘So, ah, what you would be doing with them exactly?’

Paddy tapped the side of his nose with his finger. ‘Trade secret, boy. If I told you, then you’d be fecking doing it instead of me and putting me out of work.’

Detective Dooley took out his iPhone and held it up. He prodded it and then he said, ‘No, I’m not getting any decent reception in here, I’ll have to go outside.’

‘Don’t forget to ask your friend when he wants the job done,’ said Paddy. ‘There’s a few race meetings coming up at Mallow and Greenmount Park that I’ll be off to and there’s a rake of other jobs I’ve got in me diary. No fecking peace for the wicked.’

Detective Dooley went outside and called Detective Inspector O’Rourke. As soon as he answered, he said, ‘Dooley, sir. I’m up at Spring Lane. I just spoke to Paddy Fearon and a butty of his. He says he can dispose of nine horses for me for five hundred euros.’

‘Good work, Dooley. How long is it going to take us to get nine horses together?’

‘I’ve talked to two trainers already – Michael O’Malley and Kevin Corgan. O’Malley can let us have five that are ready for the knackery and Corgan can let us have another four. We could set this up for Saturday or Monday, depending on Fearon.’

‘All right, then. That’s grand. Go ahead.’

As he was talking, Detective Dooley saw Tauna standing on the opposite side of the halting site, still chatting to her friends. When she caught sight of him she blew out cigarette smoke and then she blew him a kiss. Jesus, he thought. I wonder what my friends and my family would say if I turned up on the doorstep with a twenty-four-year-old Traveller, with her ponytail and her dangly earrings and her barrel arse, not to mention her four young kids?

He climbed back up the steps into Paddy’s caravan.

‘Well?’ said Paddy. ‘What did your friend have to say to ye?’

‘He says five hundred is acceptable and he’d like you to do it as soon as you can.’

‘Okay,’ Paddy told him. ‘I’ll be away this weekend, but I can probably manage it Monday or Tuesday. It’ll take a while, like, because I can only carry three horses at a time, but, yes, we can do that for him. If you come back tomorrow morning with his address and the grade.’

‘You want all of the money even before you’ve done it?’

‘Those are my usual terms of business, yes.’

‘And what if you take the money and I never see you again?’

Paddy grinned at him, and so did Beval, but their grins were threatening rather than amused. ‘That’s the kind of suggestion I don’t take kindly to,’ said Paddy. ‘If you don’t think you can trust me, then why don’t you take three steps back and fuck yourself.’

‘Don’t worry, I was only messing,’ said Detective Dooley. ‘I’ll be here tomorrow with the necessary.’

Paddy spat copiously into the palm of his hand and held it out. Detective Dooley shook it, looking straight into his bloodshot eyes.

After he had climbed back into his car, he took a plastic bottle of lemon-scented antibacterial gel out of the glovebox and washed his hands with it, over and over.

Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin came into Katie’s office and said, ‘Good morning, Katie, and a grand sunny morning it is, too! We can start excavations at the Bon Sauveur whenever you’re ready. We have most of the team assembled now and we won’t need ground-penetrating radar or the mechanical digger until later, if at all. It depends what we find.’

Katie looked up from the vet’s report that Tadhg Meaney had sent her. The preliminary toxicology test on each of the twenty-three dead horses had revealed that all of the one- and two-year-olds had traces of xylazine or detomidine, drugs that were administered either to sedate a horse so that it could be medically treated or else to slow it down on the racetrack.

‘So what’s the roster?’ she asked. She pushed aside the vet’s report and picked up the search warrant for the Bon Sauveur Convent, as well as a copy of the sketch map that Sister Rose had emailed to Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán.

‘Fifteen altogether. Three technicians, four officers and eight reservists. Sergeant O’Farell is just about to give them a briefing and then they’ll be ready for the off. Kyna Ni Nuallán told me that you were keen to serve the search warrant yourself.’

‘Yes, I am. From what she’s told me about Mother O’Dwyer, I think I need to meet her face to face. If experience has taught me anything about mother superiors, it’s that they’re all as wily as foxes and about as straight as a drawerful of corkscrews.’

‘That’s a little
harsh
, isn’t it?’ said Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin. He almost managed to smile.

‘Take my word for it, sir, they’ll do anything to protect themselves from the outside world, these nuns. Not straight-out lying maybe, but lying by what they don’t tell you. Look what happened at Tuam, and I pray to God we don’t find anything like that here. Kenny Horgan used to say that the church taught the gospels of Saint Mark, Saint Luke, Saint John and Saint Matt-the-liar.’

Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin looked depressed again. ‘Yes. Kenny Horgan. The commissioner’s been in touch, by the way, about holding a state funeral for him.’

‘He deserves it. They did it for Detective Donohue in Dundalk, didn’t they?’

They were both silent for a moment, thinking about Detective Horgan, but then Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin said, ‘So, Katie, what’s your plan of action?’

Katie looked up at the clock. ‘I have to be in court at two-thirty for Michael Gerrety’s plea hearing, so I think I’ll go up to the Bon Sauveur now, while the search team are finishing off their briefing. The sooner we get started, the better. There’s something going on there, connected with those holy sisters, I’m convinced of it.’

‘They didn’t identify that flying nun as one of theirs, though, did they?’

‘Didn’t or wouldn’t,’ said Katie. ‘Patrick took her picture her up there yesterday evening and they all denied knowing who she was, Mother O’Dwyer included. What really struck him, though, was that some of the sisters scarcely seemed to give the picture a glance. He definitely had the feeling that they’d been
told
to say that they didn’t recognize her.’

‘You can’t read too much into that, Katie. It’s fair off-putting to look at the picture of a dead person, especially if you might have known them.’

‘Well, all right, I agree with you there, and none of the sisters at any of the other convents recognized her, either. We showed her picture to all of them – the Poor Clares, the Ursuline Sisters, the Good Shepherd Sisters, the Mercy Sisters, the Little Sisters of the Assumption, the Presentation. The convent schools, too. But I still have that feeling about the Bon Sauveurs.’

‘Just don’t be vexing this Mother O’Dwyer. I don’t want Bishop Buckley coming down on me like a ton of bricks.’

‘I think you know me better than that, sir. I’ll be all sweetness and light.’

Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin looked at her for a moment, with his head tilted to one side, and then he said, ‘You won’t get vexed yourself if I pay you a compliment?’

Katie couldn’t stop herself from feeling suddenly and uncomfortably hot. It was almost unheard of for ‘Chief Superintendent Aingesoir’ to say anything complimentary about any other officer, or indeed about anything. He couldn’t eat a ham sandwich in the canteen without complaining loudly halfway through that it tasted of nothing very much at all.

‘You’re blooming,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what it is, but you have a shine about you.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Katie, trying to make her reply sound as official as possible. ‘Kind of you to say so.’

* * *

Mother O’Dwyer put on her spectacles and read through the search warrant with a frown, her lips moving as she did so.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said when she had finished. Her hand was trembling. ‘Why in the name of God would you wish to carry out a search
here
?’

Katie said, ‘It’s only routine, Mother O’Dwyer. As you can see from the warrant, a young child’s jawbone was discovered in the gardens and we have to make sure that there are no further remains.’

‘Further remains? What do you mean by
further
remains?’

‘Any more bones of the child whose jawbone was discovered. Or any other children, for that matter.’

‘That’s absurd!’ protested Mother O’Dwyer. ‘Our sisters tend our gardens daily. We grow all our own vegetables. Cabbages, potatoes, turnips. And our own flowers, too. If there were further remains to be discovered, surely we would have discovered them by now.’

‘I understand completely,’ said Katie. ‘It’s just that the law requires us to be sure. I’m very sorry for any disturbance that we may be causing you.’

‘So who was it who found this child’s jawbone?’ Mother O’Dwyer demanded. ‘No outsiders have access to our gardens. You’re not telling me that one of our sisters came across it.’

‘I’m not at liberty to tell you that, I’m afraid.’

Mother O’Dwyer opened and closed her mouth as if she were struggling for air. ‘We are a community here, Detective Superintendent. More than a community, we are a family, all related in the sight of God. If one of us has transgressed in any way, it is essential that the rest of us are aware of it.’

‘Reporting to the Garda that you have discovered a young child’s jawbone is hardly a religious transgression, Mother O’Dwyer.’

‘Well! That’s what
you
say! But our congregation depends on complete openness and mutual loyalty! You realize that I will have to ask each sister in turn if it was she who contacted you?’

‘I’m afraid I have to require you not to do that,’ said Katie. ‘It could obstruct our enquiries.’

‘I am the mother superior of this convent, Detective Superintendent. It’s my duty.’

Katie tried to sound light-hearted but at the same time she wanted Mother O’Dwyer to understand that she was deadly serious. ‘If you attempt to question your congregation regarding the discovery of this bone fragment, Mother O’Dwyer, I shall have to consider arresting you under the Public Order Act, 1994, section 19. That could mean a fine or six months’ imprisonment, or both. I’ve never had occasion to arrest a mother superior before, not in my whole career, but you know what they say. There’s always a first time.’

Mother O’Dwyer slowly removed her spectacles and stared at Katie as if she had uttered the greatest blasphemy that she had ever heard in her life. She inhaled deeply, so that her nostrils flared, but she didn’t reply.
You have great Christian self-restraint
, thought Katie,
I admire you for that, at least
.