Peeler (10 page)

Major Wells considered the question for a moment before replying. ‘It’s possible. But I believe, based on the bruising here,’ he pointed again to the wound, ‘that the instrument was attached to a hilt or hand-guard of some sort. Speculation, of course.’

The subaltern continued to minute the inquiry and, for some moments, his pen nib rasping the ledger on the desk was the only sound in the room.

‘How did you conclude that she didn’t die from strangulation first?’ Mathew-Pare asked.

‘Your name sir, once again for the record?’ the surgeon asked him.

‘Detective Sergeant Thomas Mathew-Pare, Major. Scotland Yard.’

The surgeon took a long look at the DS and seemed to decide something about him. O’Keefe wondered what it was. The subaltern entered his name into the minutes.

Wells said, ‘I determined this because, in cases of death by strangulation, the blood vessels in the eyelids show signs of profound oxygen deprivation. Our victim’s one eyelid that remained undamaged by scavengers shows none of the burst capillaries one would expect to find in cases of death by asphyxiation. This young woman continued to breathe for some time after she was strangled and was killed by a single blow from a sharp object, severing her first vertebra and entering the brain stem, causing disruption of mid-brain nerve pathways, extensive bleeding, paralysis and almost instant death. Silent death too, I imagine.’

The room was quiet before Mathew-Pare spoke again. ‘You say a single blow. Indicating …’

He had taken the words from O’Keefe’s mouth. Maybe, O’Keefe thought, the Yard man would be of some help after all.

‘Indicating,’ Wells replied, ‘that the killer was either exceptionally fortunate – or unfortunate, as the case may be – in his first thrust. Or …’ and here the surgeon paused, ‘as I’m inclined to believe, the killer knew what he was doing and has done it before. More than once, if I were to hazard a guess.’

The words shunted through O’Keefe’s mind like the echoes of the dreams he had at night.
Silent death. Night work. Body-snatching.
‘Major Wells,’ he said, ‘have you ever before, by chance, come across a person suffering this type of injury?’

‘Not a living person, Sergeant, and not by chance.’

O’Keefe nodded, knowing exactly what he meant.

One of the court-martial officers spoke up. ‘Meaning what, Major?’ He was a young man, perhaps in his early twenties.

‘In the war, Lieutenant,’ Wells answered, ‘a quick and quiet way to remove a sentry on a night raid was a single thrust to the base of the skull with a very sharp knife or pick. The men used to fashion their own. Ugly things. The innovation of men and their means to kill shouldn’t surprise one, I suppose.’

‘But you said, forgive me, Major,’ Masterson wasn’t going to risk humiliation again, but there was an urgency in his voice that seemed to override his caution ‘… you also said it could have been a lucky blow? An accident even?’

‘Yes, District Inspector. I did say that, but if this was an accident, it was an accident a trained assassin would be proud of.’

‘Indeed,’ the DI said, nodding to himself. ‘I’ve heard that the IRA have recruited German war veterans into their ranks to swell the numbers, add some combat experience to the rabble of country boys.’

‘Their very own Auxiliaries, Inspector? Imagine.’ It was Mathew-Pare. O’Keefe smiled inwardly. He was beginning to like the man.

Wells said, ‘There were hundreds, thousands, of our own chaps who were rather proficient at this type of killing, Inspector, though I suppose, yes, the wounds could have been inflicted by a German. However, as I stated before, it could have been a lucky blow struck by an angry amateur. Not my line, I’m afraid, the “who done it” side of things. I’m in the “how it’s done” line, Inspector.’ O’Keefe caught the barest traces of a sad smile on the surgeon’s face, a bunching around the eyes.

‘Indeed,’ the DI said again, nodding.

Masterson was right about one thing, O’Keefe thought: the IRA was in need of men with combat experience, but he dismissed the idea of German killers. It was ludicrous. There were plenty of Irishmen around the country who had fought in the trenches and plenty of those who could handle a knife. It was common knowledge that, although a history of service in the British army was cause enough to get a man shot as a spy by the IRA, the republicans nonetheless had among their ranks men who had served in the war. There had been mention in recent dispatches of a Rosscarbery man who had fought in the Mesopotamian campaign, in charge of training and ambush parties in West Cork, and no doubt there were others. There was also talk of Irish-Americans returning to the ‘Old Country’ as they called it, to do their bit for the struggle for freedom. This was pure speculation since none had been captured, but O’Keefe reckoned the returned Yank theory to be far more plausible than Boche assassins stabbing their way around the Irish countryside.

There was more to come from the surgeon. O’Keefe watched as he and his assistant rolled the body onto its back and drew the sheet up to the shoulders. Before recommencing with his findings, Wells said, ‘Gentlemen, feel free to smoke. The smell could use some masking.’

The men in the cold storage shed welcomed the suggestion. Wells himself took a pipe from a pocket underneath his white surgeon’s smock and proceeded to stuff it with plug tobacco. O’Keefe accepted a Gold Flake from Mathew-Pare and lit a match, holding it out for him and DI Masterson, extinguishing it and lighting another for himself. Mathew-Pare smiled.

‘First to spot, second to get the wind …’

‘Third to get the bullet,’ O’Keefe said. It was a soldier’s superstition. The sniper’s curse. Never take the third light from a match.

The nurse folded back the sheet, exposing the gaping wounds on either side of the Y-shaped post-mortem incision where the young woman’s breasts had once been. A white rib bone, O’Keefe noticed, was visible in one of the wounds. Cut to the bone, he thought.

Wells continued: ‘The victim was also, I’m sure you’ll be aware, mutilated about the breasts. I have determined that the mutilation was caused by an extremely sharp blade. The cuts were clean. No tearing about the edges of the incision, suggesting a cutting tool such as might be used by a butcher or surgeon. There were also no cut marks on the breastbone or ribs, suggesting, perhaps, an experienced hand at work. Speculation again, gentlemen.’

O’Keefe noted down:
Butcher? Surgeon? Combat exp.?

The older of the two court-martial officers spoke now: Lambert, O’Keefe remembered. ‘What …’ he said, unsure of how to phrase his question, ‘what did the killer do, ah, with …’ He gestured towards the wounds on the chest.

‘Couldn’t begin to tell you, Lieutenant Lambert. We may never know. Unless Sergeant O’Keefe has the good fortune to catch the person who committed this crime and asks him.’

I’ll need more than good fortune, O’Keefe thought, exhaling smoke.

Wells puffed on his pipe for a moment and then went on. ‘The victim was tarred and feathered about her midsection, lower abdomen and thighs. I removed the feathering prior to autopsy, but photographs have been taken and will, of course, be entered as evidence in the case file. As well as this, the young lady was found to be wearing one earring in a piercing in her left ear. It has been photographed and entered as evidence.’ He pointed at two cardboard boxes sitting on a large wooden crate of bully beef in the corner of the room.

‘Only one earring, Major?’ O’Keefe asked, remembering the earring as he’d seen it on the girl when they had found her.

‘Yes, Sergeant. You might consider having another look around the site where the body was found, but I think it more than likely that it was removed or fell off at the scene of her actual death, as opposed to where she was left. Perhaps the earring was dislodged by the blow that killed her. Or perhaps she only had one and had lost the other.’

The young subaltern scribbled. Smoke gathered in lazy swirls about the hanging bulb as the surgeon carefully folded down the sheet, exposing the girl’s abdomen and lower extremities. The pubic area, which had been so elaborately tarred and feathered before, was now starkly naked, the area of skin a cleaned, deathly grey. The surgeon explained how he had used a chemical solution to dissolve the tar and how he had retained the feathers as evidence. O’Keefe asked him why he had done this.

‘Because the feathers struck me as unique, Sergeant. From more than one type of bird, I’d venture. Some of them quite beautiful, and deliberately arrayed about the pubic region in a pattern of light-coloured feathers at the outside,’ he pointed to the girl’s hipbones with his pipe stem, ‘to a brown and black speckled dark selection closest to the genitalia. The choice of feathers seemed both deliberate and carefully arranged.’

O’Keefe nodded. ‘So it would have taken some time to do, Major? The feathering?’

‘Yes, exactly. Hours at best guess, and hours he had, I’d say. There was no burn trauma to the skin where the tar was applied.’ The surgeon stopped and pulled again on his pipe, exhaling a thin stream of smoke into the arc of light above the body.

Mathew-Pare broke the uneasy silence. ‘Meaning what?’

The surgeon nodded at his assistant, who folded down the sheet. O’Keefe had known doctors far less considerate of the dead and was thankful that Wells had seen in the young woman the life that had once been, the innocence maybe, which demanded respect, reverence, even in death. For a man who had no doubt seen as much carnage inflicted on the human form as he had, the surgeon had retained his sense of humanity. O’Keefe wondered if he could say the same of himself.

‘Meaning,’ Wells said, ‘that, like the cuts to the breasts, she was already dead when the tarring was done.’

The surgeon went on to describe minor lacerations to the victim’s genitals, which he allowed could have been caused during consensual sexual relations. There was ante-mortem bruising and some slight tearing in the lining of the vaginal walls.

‘So was she raped?’ asked Mathew-Pare. ‘Was this a sex crime as well as an execution?’

Masterson shook his head slowly, as if in disgust.

The surgeon said, ‘I’d lean more towards a sex crime than execution, myself. But there’s no reason to say that it wasn’t both. Rape and war have come as a matched pair for as long as they have existed. Sometimes, I imagine, it’s rather difficult to separate the two.’

‘Was there … evidence of emission?’ Masterson asked, apparently having conquered his squeamishness.

‘If there was, it was too degraded by the elements for us to say. If I were to guess, however, I’d say that whoever did this had a more than normal sexual interest in the young woman, God rest her soul.’

***

O’Keefe waited for Wells outside the shed.

‘Major, could I ask you one or two more questions, if you wouldn’t mind, I …’

‘Is there a public house in this town that still serves our like, Sergeant?’

‘There is. Sure, there’s always a publican who’s not troubled with the choice between politics and money.’

The surgeon smiled. ‘Whiskey doesn’t know the difference between left and right, does it?’

‘No, it doesn’t. Let me change out of uniform and I’ll take you.’

Ten minutes later, O’Keefe led the surgeon to the gate and a young constable let them out of the barracks’ compound. He walked with the surgeon down Macroom Street, passing the darkened shop windows, soft rain peppering the tops of gas lamps. There was no one on the street, though the curfew was still an hour away. People tended to begin the curfew early. Trigger-happy army patrols were known to do their own timekeeping, once darkness fell.

They passed several blacked-out public houses, front doors shut, curtains and shades drawn. At the third, the surgeon touched O’Keefe’s arm and stopped.

‘Sounds as if there’s life in this one, Sergeant.’ O’Keefe noticed the surgeon licking his lips and imagined 6.45 in the evening was long past the hour Wells normally had his first drink.

‘There is, Major. But that’s not a pub we’d want to go into now. One of the first to bring in the boycott and one of the few to take it seriously. The publican’s uncle was killed in a baton charge by one of our boys years back, during the land wars. The odd time some of the lads from barracks stop in, just to make a point that they’ve a right as Irishmen to drink anywhere they please. Not that the constabulary is supposed to take a drink in the first place, mind. But the publican won’t touch their money, so they serve themselves and leave their money on the counter and sit in the bitter silence with the flaps of their holsters open. I’ve heard the measures are generous.’

The surgeon shook his head and walked on. ‘I’ll never understand your country, Sergeant.’

O’Keefe smiled. ‘What’s not to understand, Major?’

They entered the Ballycarleton Hotel by the rear entrance, avoiding the restaurant and lounge, and made their way to the residents’ bar. It was a separate room with a small oak bar where they seated themselves on high stools. As if by magic, the owner of the hotel, Dominic Murphy, a stocky man in his fifties with the ability to please Peeler and Volunteer alike, appeared through swing doors behind the bar. O’Keefe asked Wells what he was drinking and the surgeon told him Bushmills. Murphy frowned and shook his head in a pretend show of sadness.

‘Now Bushmills, sir. Of all the whiskeys a man could want, it’s the one I can’t give you. Made up north, it is, I’m sure you know. Subject to the boycott on Ulster-made goods.’

The surgeon’s face fell. ‘But they’ve got it still in Cork. Surely …’

Murphy smiled and went on. ‘Shame, the whole thing. Imagine, the boys putting a boycott on Protestant-made goods in Ulster, when it’s their own that suffers through lack of work? Not right at all, it isn’t.’

‘But …’

‘How much will it run us, Mr Murphy?’ O’Keefe asked, tired of the charade. The Murphys of the world had ways of getting whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, for the right price.

Murphy smiled. ‘For yourself Sergeant, eighteen bob would do me just fine. Fair enough, gentlemen?’

‘Fair’s not a word I’d use, Mr Murphy, but it’ll do.’