Blood Sisters (45 page)

‘No, John, not like that,’ she told him. ‘Not tonight.’ She reached down and took hold of his penis again, pulling him back towards her. ‘Let’s just carry on like this.’

‘Oh, come on, baby, you know how much you love it.’

‘No, John, please.’

He must have caught something in her tone of voice, because he stayed perfectly still for a moment and she could hear that he was suppressing his heavy breathing. Then he dropped sideways, back on to the bed.

‘What’s wrong, Katie?’ he asked her.

‘Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s grand.’

‘But you didn’t want me to make love to you like that. You didn’t think I was going to try to put it up the wrong hole, did you?’

‘No, and you know I like that sometimes. It’s too – it’s too violent, that’s all.’

‘
Violent
?’ said John, propping himself up on one elbow. ‘What do you mean by “violent”? When have I ever been violent?’

‘Sorry, “violent” isn’t the word I was looking for, not at all.’ She lifted her hand in the darkness and touched his unshaven cheek. ‘What I meant was, when we do it like that, you go too far into me.’

‘You never complained about that before. I thought that was the whole point of doing it like that.’

‘Yes, but—’ and now she couldn’t stop the words coming out because they tumbled out all on their own, like children rushing out of school, and once she had spoken them she couldn’t unspeak them. ‘When we did it like that before, I wasn’t pregnant.’

The silence that followed seemed to Katie to last for hours. John’s breathing gradually returned to normal, but he didn’t say anything and he didn’t move. She almost wondered if he had fallen asleep again. Perhaps he had fallen asleep before she had admitted that she was pregnant, in which case the Blessed Virgin had granted her a few more days’ grace.

‘John?’ she said.

He sat up, reached over and switched on his bedside lamp. His curly black hair looked wild and his eyes were puffy.

‘Pregnant?’ he said. ‘How far gone?’

‘Eleven weeks the end of this week.’

‘I came back only seven weeks ago.’

‘Yes.’

‘So it’s not mine, then? I mean, it’s not ours – yours and mine? That’s insane. How could it be?’

‘No. No, it isn’t.’

Katie had thought that when it came to this moment she might burst into tears and beg for his understanding, but now that she had actually told him she felt very calm, and also deeply protective of the child inside her. No matter what the circumstances, it had been conceived and she was going to be its mother.

John had walked out on her to go to America and she had believed that he would never come back, so why should she have stayed celibate? He might have refrained from having any affairs himself because he had missed her so much, but it was totally unreasonable for him to expect her to have done the same.

He stood up and walked naked across to the wardrobe. He still had crimson scratches from Katie’s fingernails across one shoulder.

‘Don’t you want to know who the father is?’ Katie asked him.

‘What difference would it make?’ he said, keeping his back turned to her. He took out a thick maroon roll-neck sweater and a pair of dark grey corduroy trousers.

‘I think that if you knew the circumstances, you might find it easier to come to terms with it.’

‘What do you mean, “circumstances”? The circumstances were that you fucked some other fellow. I don’t need to know if he bought you dinner beforehand.’

Katie watched him as he dressed. Physically, she thought he was so beautiful. She didn’t want to lose him, but already she was beginning to feel that dull emotional pain that she had experienced when he had left for San Francisco. As he pulled on his trousers she could see that his penis was still reddened and half swollen from their lovemaking, but his erection was dying fast.

‘What are you getting dressed for?’ she said. ‘Why don’t you come back to bed and we can talk about this in the morning. You’re as tired as I am.’

‘I’m going to take a walk, that’s all.’

‘John, don’t be mental. It’s not even four o’clock in the morning and it’s teeming outside by the sound of it. Not only that, there’s a very good reason why there’s two armed protection officers sitting outside keeping a watch out.’

He turned around. She couldn’t read the expression on his face at all. His eyes were always dark ocean blue, but now they looked even darker. ‘Okay, then, I’ll go for a drive.’

‘Please, John, stay,’ Katie begged him. ‘I’ll go and sleep on the couch if you don’t want to sleep with me.’

‘What kind of a scummer do you think I am? You think I’d throw a woman out of her own bed when she’s eleven weeks’ pregnant?’

‘John – we need to talk about this. We really do.’

‘Talk?’ He tugged his fingers through his curls but only succeeded in making them even more tangled. ‘Sure we do. You’re right. We
do
need to talk. But give me a little time to think it over, would you?’

He left the bedroom, closing the door very quietly behind him, like a parent who doesn’t want to wake a sleeping child. Katie thought about going after him, but she knew that John was never easily persuaded. He wasn’t inflexible, but if he ever changed his mind about anything he had to believe that he had changed it himself.

She heard him going into the living room, and then a clatter and a noise like fabric tearing. She stayed where she was. If he was angry and he had broken some of her ornaments, she didn’t want a physical confrontation. Apart from anything else, she could probably beat him in a fight, because she was a second-dan black belt at kick-boxing and still attended the Miko academy as often as she could, and she didn’t want to humiliate him any more than she had already.

She heard the beeping sound of him switching off the burglar alarm and then the front door slamming. Soon after that, she heard his car start up and reverse out of the driveway. Then there was nothing but the pattering of the rain against the bedroom window.

She continued to lie in bed, but she kept the light on because she knew perfectly well that she wouldn’t be able to sleep.

She said a prayer, asking God to protect John while he was feeling so angry and jealous and resentful, but also to help him understand how much she loved him, and that she hadn’t slept with David Kane as a deliberate act of betrayal.

* * *

After about an hour the rain stopped. Katie climbed out of bed and took her thick pink bathrobe down from its hook on the back of the door. She went into the kitchen first and filled the kettle. Barney looked up from his bed, confused that she was walking around the house at this time of the morning, and wuffled at her.

‘It’s okay, Barns. It’s only human beings behaving like human beings. Stone mad, in other words.’

While the kettle boiled, she went through to the living room. As soon as she switched on the light she saw that John’s half-squashed tubes of acrylic paint were scattered all across the carpet, as well as his brushes and his wooden palette. Lying on the coffee table was the nude painting of her. He had torn it in half, diagonally.

Katie went over and picked up the two halves. It looked as if he had folded the board backwards and forwards several times before tearing it, so that it was damaged beyond repair.

Again, she didn’t cry, although it grieved her so much that she had to sit down on the couch, still holding the two pieces, one in each hand. She understood the message.
You’ve torn me in half, so now I’ve torn
you
in half, too
. Barney came and stood in the living-room doorway, with his head on one side, and made that mewling sound in the back of his throat as if he were asking her what was wrong.

She had been sitting there only a few minutes when her phone rang, which made her jump.

‘Detective Superintendent Maguire? It’s Garda Sergeant Mulliken. Sorry to be calling you at this ungodly hour, ma’am, but there’s something you need to be coming into the city to see for yourself first-hand. Detective Inspector O’Rourke and Detective O’Donovan are here already.’

‘What is it ? Where?’ asked Katie.

‘Patrick’s Bridge, ma’am. It’s one of your nuns.’

She tried ringing John before she left the house, but he didn’t answer. She walked across to the two protection officers sitting in their dark unmarked car in the rain and tapped on their window.

‘I’ve been called into city and I doubt I’ll be back until much later today. My partner’s gone out for a drive but he didn’t tell me how long he was going to be.’

‘He had a word with us himself, ma’am,’ said the garda in the passenger seat. ‘He told us he’d be coming back in a couple of hours but he wouldn’t be staying for long, like.’

‘Oh,’ said Katie. Then, ‘Oh, yes, that’s right,’ trying not to sound surprised. ‘What time are you going to be relieved?’

‘06.00.’

‘All right. Tell the officers who relieve you that as soon as my partner’s come and gone, they can stand down. I’ll sort it all out with your sergeant as soon as he gets into the station.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘And – thanks,’ she said. ‘Do either of you need the toilet before I go?’

‘No, we’re grand. You have to have bladders of steel for this duty.’

Katie walked back to her car, climbed in and started the engine. She sat in the driveway for a few moments with the windscreen wipers squeaking from side to side. So John would be back but he wouldn’t be staying for long. Did that mean that he was going to pack his bags and leave her? She tried ringing him again but he still didn’t answer, so she left him a message.

‘John,’ she said. ‘Call me. I have to go into the city, but we really, really need to talk. Don’t walk out on me again, darling. I love you, and what happened was nothing to do with not loving you. So, please.’

She didn’t know what else to say. She didn’t think that she had to make excuses. When she had gone to bed with David Kane he had assured her that he had had a vasectomy, but why should she have to explain that to John?

She drove into the city. It was still dark and it was still raining hard. As she drove along Penrose Quay, however, she could already see dazzling halogen lights up ahead of her on St Patrick’s Bridge, as well as blue and red flashing lights. When she turned off St Patrick’s Quay on to the bridge itself she saw that it been cordoned off with crime-scene tapes and that it was crowded with squad cars and vans and an ambulance. At least fifteen gardaí were milling around, as well as three technical experts and a fire crew.

She parked behind a squad car and walked across the bridge. Detective Inspector O’Rourke and Detective O’Donovan caught sight of her and came up to meet her. Detective Inspector O’Rourke was wearing a baggy fawn raincoat and a brown brimmer that looked as if he had inherited it from his grandfather. Detective O’Donovan looked surprisingly smart in a short black overcoat, as if he had been out last night and hadn’t been to bed yet.

‘You won’t believe this, ma’am, when you see it,’ said Detective Inspector O’Rourke. ‘This
has
to be the same offenders who threw that nun’s body in the fountain and did for the other ones, too. You couldn’t make this up, like.’

Four cast-iron lamp standards stood on the bridge’s parapets, two on either side, with large glass lanterns on top of them. Lashed to the lamp standard on the south-east side was a sodden black figure, and as Detective Inspector O’Rourke and Detective O’Donovan led Katie towards it she could see that it was dressed in a nun’s cowl and vestments. Two technicians who had been taking photographs of the figure stood aside so that she could step up close to it.

‘Holy Mary,’ she said, and crossed herself. The figure could have come straight out of a horror film. Its face was dark brown and shiny, like a tribal mask of varnished mahogany. Its eye sockets were hollow and dark, and its lips were stretched back in a hideous grimace. The cowl and scapular had been soaked by the rain and water was dripping from the blackened fingertips that dangled out of the sleeves, as well as the toes that hung below the hem of the habit.

‘It’s a woman all right,’ said Detective Inspector O’Rourke. ‘Like, they hoicked up her habit and took a quick lamp to make sure. Whether she’s a genuine nun or not we can’t tell just yet because she’s been burned so bad. These are fourth-degree burns, easy. But she has a totally different look about her than most of the burns victims that I’ve ever come across, what do you think?’

Katie shaded her eyes against the halogen lamps and stared up at the figure’s face. Detective Inspector O’Rourke was right. She had seen several victims of arson attacks herself, and people who had burned to death in car crashes. Where their skin had been exposed to the flames it had always looked blackened on the outside and red-raw where it had been split open by the heat. Sometimes people’s faces looked as if they had melted, like Salvador Dalí’s floppy watches. The skin of this victim’s face, however, was glossy and taut and smooth. The only exception was her blistered lips, which were crisp and bubbly and ragged, as if somebody had been tearing bits away from them with pliers.

‘I don’t know,’ said Katie. ‘We’ll have to wait and see what the pathologist has to say about it.’

‘What I’m saying is, she doesn’t look like she’s had petrol splashed all over her, or that somebody’s had a go at her with a blowtorch or chucked her on to a bonfire.’

‘I have you, Francis. I know exactly what you mean. She looks more like she’s been roasted in an oven.’

‘Roasted nun, Jesus,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘I won’t be ordering any black pudding with
my
breakfast this morning. But however they killed her, like, they dressed her
after
she was dead. Her clothes aren’t burned at all. Not even scorched.’

‘Any witnesses?’ asked Katie. She looked around, checking where the CCTV cameras were positioned. There were two that covered the bridge, one on the north side of the river on the English College building, which used to be the AIB bank, and another on the corner of St Patrick’s Street.

‘It was a taxi driver who reported it,’ said Detective Inspector O’Rourke. ‘He was coming back from an early call to the airport. He said he saw two fellows tying something up to the lamp post, one of them standing right up on the parapet. He thought they might be council workers or something at first, fixing the lamp, but then he thought that was fierce queer, that time of the morning, and both of them were wearing black hoodies and not your high-vis jackets like you’d expect from council workers. So he turned around and went back to take a look. The two fellows were gone by then, but the body here was here all tied up to the lamp post.’