Blood Sisters (22 page)

‘No, I wouldn’t expect you to try,’ said Katie. ‘Even if you did manage to fit them all back together, we wouldn’t necessarily know who they were, not unless their mothers came forward – and those mothers who aren’t deceased would probably be very reluctant to admit that they once gave birth to an illegitimate child.’

She peered down into the septic tank again. One tiny skull seemed to be frowning at her, as if it were saying,
Where am I? What am I doing down here? I should be in my own little coffin, in a cemetery, with a gravestone to mark who I was
. It even had some stray blonde hairs still attached to it.

Bill said, ‘We’ll be able to calculate how long they’ve been down here, and how old they were when they died, and what sex they were, too. Girls have more advanced skeletal maturation than boys after birth, but boys’ bones have higher mineral density and their long bones tend to be larger. There are plenty of other tests, too, although some of them are less reliable than others.’

Katie turned to Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. ‘Those books that Mother O’Dwyer handed over, do they include a record of all the children who were born here but died?’

‘No,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. ‘All we’ve seen so far is live births. If they did keep a register of stillborns, or deaths, she didn’t produce it.’

The digger chugged into silence and two of the technicians began to prise up the next access cover with crowbars. It took them a minute or two to lift it, but when they had done so they shone flashlights down into the second chamber of the septic tank. Detective O’Donovan took a look inside and then came across to Katie with a serious expression on his face.

‘There’s more,’ he said. ‘At least as many again, I’d say.’

Katie went over and looked into the second chamber for herself.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Keep at it. I think now’s the time that I need to have a word with Mother O’Dwyer.’

She heard a harsh croaking sound. She looked up and saw that six or seven hooded crows were perched on the convent roof, ruffling their feathers to shake off the rain.

By now, Sister Barbara’s voice was nothing more than a hoarse, delirious mumble, punctuated by occasional high-pitched squeals which sounded more like a puppy yelping than an eighty-three-year-old woman in pain. Riona was still holding her pinned down to the mattress, but she was semi-conscious and offering hardly any resistance, apart from shivering as if she were suffering from flu.

Dermot cut off the last of her toes. He had left the big toe until last, because it was easier to get a good grip on it with the secateurs when the toe next to it had already been removed. He still had to squeeze the handles together three times to ratchet up enough power to cut right through the bone. Sister Barbara was silent when he did it, so that the crunch sounded even louder.

‘That’s it then, Riona,’ he told her. ‘Now she’ll take notice of ye. No-toe
bene
, like. You know, like
nota bene
.’

‘I can’t believe you sometimes, Dermot,’ said Riona. ‘You thought that Ebola was a rock band and yet you just made a joke in Latin.’

Dermot was picking up the bloody severed toes from the bed and dropping them into a plastic food bag. ‘The Christian Brothers taught me. There was three things you came out of that school with any kind of a qualification for, and one of them was Latin. Very handy, Latin, if you wanted to be a motor mechanic, like, or a plasterer.’

‘So what were the other two things they taught you?’

Dermot sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of the hand in which the bag of toes was dangling. ‘Sodomy, and how to duck your head so that you didn’t get hit by a cheeser.’

‘Those Christian Brothers,’ said Riona, in the same tone of voice she might have used to say ‘cockroaches’.

Sister Barbara groaned and coughed and licked her lips and then she opened her eyes.

‘My feet hurt,’ she said. ‘My feet hurt so much. What have you done to me?’

‘No-toe
bene
,’ Dermot grinned, holding up the bloody bag and waving it from side to side so that Sister Barbara could see it.

‘Could I please have a little water?’ said Sister Barbara.

‘No,’ said Riona.

‘I’m so thirsty. I’m begging you.’

‘I don’t care if your mouth is as dry as Gandhi’s flip-flop. This is all part of the Saint Anastasia experience. You always wanted to be a martyr like her, didn’t you? Well, this is your chance.’

‘I’m in fierce terrible pain,’ said Sister Barbara. Tears were sliding from the sides of her eyes. ‘Please don’t hurt me any more. I can understand now how much we wronged you at Saint Margaret’s, taking your babies away from you. But please. That was a long time ago and the world – the world – it was all very different then.’

‘Do you remember that picture of Saint Anastasia you had hanging above your bed, Sister Barbara?’ said Riona. ‘One day about a week before my little Sorley was born, you took me into your room and you showed me that picture and explained what all of the symbols meant, Saint Anastasia’s attributes. A palm branch there was, to represent her peace-making, and a medicine pot, because she was a healer and an exorcist. But a bowl of fire, too, because she was martyred.

‘Oh, I remember you telling me all about her attributes like it was yesterday, and how you told me how shameful I was, and how I didn’t have a scrap of decency, not compared with your blessed Saint Anastasia.’

Sister Barbara groaned again and winced, although she managed to keep her eyes open.

‘I don’t have a bowl of fire to martyr you with, I’m sorry to say,’ Riona told her. ‘What I do have, though, is what you might call the up-to-date equivalent. Dermot? Can you do the honours?’

Dermot went back to his canvas bag. He rummaged around some more and then he lifted out a kitchen food processor with a heavy black base and a glass blender jar. He unwound the cable as he came back across the bedroom and plugged it in at the end of the bed. Sister Barbara tried to lift her head up to see what he was doing, but Riona was still pressing down on her too heavily and obscuring her view.

Sister Barbara let her head drop back down on the mattress. ‘I hope that the Lord forgives you for what you are doing this day, Riona. I know that you have suffered, child, but the suffering you will have to endure in hell for all eternity – that suffering will far exceed anything you have had to endure in your life so far.’

‘I don’t believe in hell, Sister Barbara,’ said Riona. ‘I don’t believe in hell any more than I believe in heaven. What you did to me and my Sorley, you shook my belief right down to the very core of me. Maybe there is a God. Somebody had to make the world and everything in it. But so far as I’m concerned, there are kind people and there are cruel people, that’s all, and sure enough the cruel people can make you suffer, but the people who can make you suffer worst of all are the kind people who think they know what’s best for you.’

‘You – you may have lost your faith in God, Riona,’ said Sister Barbara. She was shivering so violently now that she could barely get the words out. ‘But God still has faith in you.’

‘Dermot,’ said Riona over her shoulder. ‘The bowl of fire, will you?’

Dermot had fitted the blender jar on to the food processor. He tilted it up at an angle so that he could fit Sister Barbara’s bloodied left foot into it, as far as it would go, with the stumps of her toes pressed right up against the metal cutting blades.

Sister Barbara closed her eyes again. ‘
Veni, Santa Anastasia, et salva me
,’ she whispered. Then Dermot switched the food processor on to pulse and there was a crashing sound of blades against bone and flesh, and blood sprayed out of the blender jar all over the mattress, and Riona even felt it pattering against her sweater at the back. She kept Sister Barbara pressed against the bed and she didn’t mind the blood. Sweaters could be washed, but there was no detergent that could ever wash away forty years of grief.

Dermot kept the blender running for nearly a quarter of a minute, but then Sister Barbara’s foot bones jammed between the blades and he had to switch it off.

‘Stall the ball for a minute,’ he said. ‘I need to dig out some of this shite.’

As he said that, though, Sister Barbara convulsed. Her bony chest heaved against Riona’s breasts and then she shuddered and let out a thin, airy squeak.

‘Sister Barbara?’ said Riona. ‘
Sister Barbara
!’

But Sister Barbara stayed utterly still. Her eyes were open and she looked as if she were staring at the lampshade on the ceiling, but her face had turned a chalky beige, almost the same colour as the plastered walls.

‘Sister Barbara?’ Riona repeated, and shook her, but there was no response.

‘What’s up?’ said Dermot, who was poking a spatula into the blender jar to clear out the fragments of bone and ribbons of skin and bloody lumps of flesh. He peered over Riona’s shoulder and said, ‘Jesus, she’s horrid shook-looking. She hasn’t passed away on us, has she? We’ve only just got fecking started.’

Riona let go of Sister Barbara’s wrists and shook her, but all Sister Barbara did was jiggle lifelessly on the bed.

‘Sister Barbara! Can you hear me? Sister Barbara!’

She slapped Sister Barbara’s face, first the left cheek and then the right, but Sister Barbara didn’t even blink.

‘Maybe you should try that seepy thing on her,’ Dermot suggested. He gave the food processor two quick whizzes to make sure the blades were clear.

‘What seepy thing? Oh, you mean CPR. Firstly, because I don’t have any idea at all how to do it, and secondly, because I think it’s too late.’

Dermot came around the side of the bed and frowned at Sister Barbara. ‘You’re right. She’s brown bread. Not surprising, I suppose, at her age, do you know what I mean? The old ticker probably couldn’t take it.’

Riona stood up, dry-washing her hands. ‘That was a pity. It looks like her precious Saint Anastasia took her after all.’

‘Well, it wouldn’t be worth praying to them if the saints never showed us any mercy, would it?’

‘I still want her to look like she’s been tortured in the same way as Saint Anastasia,’ said Riona.

‘She’s gone to meet her maker, Riona. What’s the fecking point of that?’

‘The point is that I’m making a point, and I want everybody to know that I’m making a point. What those sisters did was pure murder.’

‘They never murdered your Sorley.’

‘They might just as well. They might just as well have murdered me, too, while they were at it.’

They both stood beside the bed, looking at Sister Barbara. Very gradually, Sister Barbara’s clenched fingers opened up, as if she were letting go of the last faint ghost of life, and then her chin sagged. With a sharp click her false teeth came detached from her palate, and Dermot jumped.

‘Jesus, I thought she was going to say something to me then. I fecking did.’

‘She’ll be saying something to whoever finds her, don’t you worry. She’ll be saying, “Look at me, this is what happens when you treat an unfortunate young girl like a whore and her child like a whore’s melt.”’

‘So what do you want me to do?’ Dermot asked her.

‘I want you to do what I was after telling you before.’

‘What, the diddies and everything?’

Riona turned to him. There was a faraway look in her eyes, as if her thoughts were somewhere else altogether, and at that moment the low winter sun shone in through the window and illuminated her face and the thick black hair that crowned her. She had that Spanish appearance that some people call Black Irish, although these days her hair was dyed rather than natural.

Suddenly she focused. ‘Yes, Dermot. Everything. That’s what I’m paying you for, isn’t it?’

Dermot shrugged and said, ‘No bother whatsoever. It’s your yoyo.’

‘I’m going to get myself changed now,’ said Riona, twisting her head around and tugging at her sweater so that she could see the blood spatters on it. ‘Call me when you’ve finished and I’ll tell you where we’re going to take her.’

‘Not more balloons, is it?’

‘No. Saint Anastasia was supposed to have worked all manner of miracles, but Saint Anastasia never flew.’

Mother O’Dwyer’s study door was closed, so Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán gently knocked on it. While they waited for an answer, she gave Katie a quick, hesitant smile. Katie read something in that smile that disturbed her. It wasn’t conspiratorial, or humorous, or wry. It was more like the smile of somebody who needs to come out and make a confession but hasn’t yet summoned up the courage to do so.

She was about to ask Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán if there was anything wrong when the door opened and Mother O’Dwyer appeared in her jet-black habit, breathing hard, like a diminutive Darth Vader.

‘Yes?’ she demanded.

‘I don’t mean to disturb you, Mother O’Dwyer,’ said Katie.

‘Well, I’m afraid that you are. I have one of the vicars general on the phone.’

‘You must know by now what we’ve uncovered underneath your garden.’

A moment’s silence. Two harsh breaths. Then, ‘Sister Brenda Murphy has made me aware of it, yes.’

‘We’ll be needing to ask you some questions about it,’ said Katie. ‘Is it all right if we come in?’

‘I can’t respond to any of your enquiries at the moment, Detective Superintendent,’ said Mother O’Dwyer. She raised her hand towards the door as if she were about to close it again.

Katie raised her hand, too, as if she would stop her if she tried. ‘Mother O’Dwyer, we’ve discovered the skeletal remains of what must be hundreds of infants. Not just a few.
Hundreds
.
You’re the mother superior in charge of this convent, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to assume that you knew of their existence.’

‘I told you, I’m not saying anything to you,’ said Mother O’Dwyer. ‘I’ve already contacted the Right Reverend Monsignor O’Leary at the diocesan offices once this morning. In fact, that’s him who’s waiting on the phone for me now.’

‘And what did
he
say when you told him what we’d found?’

‘He’s instructed me to wait until the bishop has been informed, and until he’s had the opportunity to talk the principal church legal adviser, Diarmuid O’Cathaín.’