A Terrible Beauty

'You're codding me.'

'I'm not. I'm serious. Professor O'Brien on one side of the car park, arms on the other.'

'I'll have to get back to you, hold on.'

Jimmy wiped the rain from his face. The crows kept circling back, but they came no farther than the wall between 45 Perrott Street and the house next door, where they shuffled together like the scruffy punters in a Black-pool betting shop. Jimmy tried the back door and found that it was still unlocked. He unholstered his Smith & Wesson revolver and shouldered his way inside. The stairway was dark and smelled of frying mince. Jimmy paused at every turn in the stairs, keeping his gun held high, and listening. By the time he reached Gerard's flat, however, it was obvious that his killer must have been long gone. Somebody downstairs was playing Days Like Thisby Van Morrison and from upstairs came the clatter of somebody running a bath.

Jimmy nudged open the broken door of Gerard's flat and went inside. He checked the sitting room and the kitchen and the bathroom but there was nobody there. He went into the study and found papers strewn all over the floor and the smashed computer, and the chair tipped over.

He tried calling Katie again, but he still couldn't get through. There was nothing much he could do now, until the technical team got here. He poked around the study, picking up one or two papers, but most of them were lecture notes on Celtic mythology. He decided to go outside for a smoke.

Before he left, he bent down and picked up the notebook that was lying on the study floor. The first few pages were packed with hand-scribbled notes, mostly in Gaelic. He was about to toss it down again when his eye was caught by the word 'iobairt,' underlined five times. It was the Gaelic word for 'sacrifice.'

Jimmy picked up Gerard's leather armchair and sat down. He skimmed through the first few pages and realized that they were comments about Badhbh the Death Queen and Macha and Mor-Rioghain and how thirteen ritual killings could be used to call Mor-Rioghain out of the Invisible Kingdom. Jimmy's Gaelic wasn't as good as it should have been, considering that every garda was required to be reasonably fluent, and that eleven-year-old Jimmy O'Rourke had come second in Gaelic studies at Scoil Oilibheir at Ballyvolane. All the same, he was able to understand most of it.

Gerard had written: 'Several authoritative sources suggest that 'once Mor-Rioghain appears, it is necessary for the summoner to offer her a living woman as a final sacrifice to seal the bargain between them. This living sacrifice would have to be the wife of a chieftain, or the most influential woman in her community.' The reason for this apparently being that once she materialized in the mortal world, Mor-Rioghain did not want to have her influence challenged by any mortal woman.

''The living sacrifice has to be tied and blindfolded. Her stomach has to be cut open, ready for Mor-Rioghain to step through from the Invisible Kingdom, so that when the witch conducting the sacrifice has recited the sacred texts, and Mor-Rioghain has made her appearance, she can drag out the victim's intestines and drape them around her shoulders as a cloak of her absolute authority.''

'Yuck,' said Jimmy, out loud. He flicked through the next few pages, recognizing words like 'mort' for murder and 'cloigionn' for skull, but there didn't appear to be anything particularly new in Gerard's notes. He had already taken out his cigarette packet when he reached a page that was written in English.

'I have talked to two different heads of department but the British Public Records Office in Kewinsist that they have no information about the disappearances of the eleven Irishwomen between 1915-1916!! But I contacted my old friend John Roberts at the Imperial War Museum and he was able to put me on to the relatives of the late Colonel Herbert Corcoran in Nantwich. Major Corcoran (as he then was) was attached to the Crown forces in Cork between 1914 and 1917, and was considered something of a spy hero in the style of William Stephenson ('A Man Called Intrepid').

'Major Corcoran had a Cork accent which assisted him in infiltrating the republican movement with considerable success. It was his information that led to the ambush of the First Cork Brigade at Dripsey in 1916 and the killing of nine IRA men. In the 1920s he wrote two books of memoirs,War of Whispers and Undercover in Ireland, although these were drastically censored by the British War Office, and amounted to little more than Boys' Own-type adventures. In fact he also wrote three fictitious stories for Magnet and Boys' Own, based on his adventures in Ireland.

'His family sent me these pages with the caveat that, in later years, Colonel Corcoran had become obsessive about his time in Ireland and was constantly writing rambling letters to the newspapers about it. In his last job at the War Office before he retired he was affectionately known as 'Crackers' Corcoran.'

Jimmy turned the page, and there they were: curled-up fax-paper copies of Colonel Corcoran's diaries, stapled in a thick bunch to the back cover of Gerard's notebook.

Colonel Corcoran had written: 'I pen these pages knowing that they will probably never be seen for a hundred years to come. However I feel that this story should be recorded in the interests of military history and of humanity.

'While I was operating as a senior intelligence officer in County Cork in the summer of 1916, I was contacted by Brigadier Sir Ronald French at the War Office. He informed me that the local commanding officer in Cork, Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Wilson, had been instructed to find and arrest a man who had been masquerading as a British officer in order to abduct Irishwomen.

'It appeared that this man had been offering women rides in his motorcar, after which they had never been seen again.

'After seven Irishwomen had disappeared, I was told to assist Lieutenant Colonel Wilson to apprehend the perpetrator at whatever cost, not for the sake of justice alone, but to ward off a very dangerous political situation, since the Irish republicans were accusing the British of taking and murdering their womenfolk in retaliation for several bomb attacks on military garrisons in Cork City.

'After the tenth abduction, I set up an ambush at Dillon's Cross, with Mrs. Margaret Morrissey, the wife of Sergeant Kevin Morrissey of the Signal Corps, bravely volunteering to act as a 'Judas goat.' The abductor approached her but as soon as he realized that she had an English accent he took to his heels. We almost succeeded in catching him, but our vehicle became bogged down in thick mud at Ballyvolane and we lost him over the fields. Two months later, however, after an eleventh abduction, I set up another ambush with an Irishwoman who worked in the garrison laundry, Kathleen Murphy. When we challenged him, the fellow escaped over a wall in York Hill but we had three army bloodhounds with us which followed his scent to a second-floor room in a boardinghouse in Wellington Road, where we arrested him.