A Terrible Beauty

'All right, Patrick,' said Jimmy. 'Liam's called out the technical team. Any idea where Superintendent Maguire has got herself to?'

'Not a clue. I wouldn't blame her if she was drowning her sorrows.'

54

Katie followed John up the angled field, her shoes clogged with mud. The rain was lashing down slantwise now, and she was completely soaked and shuddering with cold. John turned back and looked at her, but there was nothing she could do to help him, not yet. What was most important now was their survival.

'Move it, will you?' Lucy snapped at them.

'For God's sake,' Katie protested.

'There is no God, Katie. You should have realized that by now.'

'You're crazy. You really think this is going to happen? You really think that Mor-Rioghain is going to appear?'

'Shut up. Everything's ready. Thirteen sacrifices, it's all been done, everything.'

'You're crazy.'

'And you're not crazy? Going to mass every Sunday, and eating a biscuit, and thinking that it's Jesus you're eating?'

'Mor-Rioghain is a myth. Nothing but a fairy story.'

'And Jesus isn't?'

Lucy looked wilder than Katie had ever seen her before. Her blond hair was brushed up in spikes, and she was wearing her long black leather coat, which was rolling with raindrops, and her knee-length black-leather boots. She was walking beside them, with Katie's nickel-plated gun in her right hand and a four-inch butcher's boning knife in the other, and Katie was in no doubt at all that she was prepared to use both of them. She had forced Katie to hand over her weapon by sticking the point of the knife into John Meagher's ear, lancing his eardrum. Blood was still dripping from his earlobe and into his shirt collar.

They reached the crest of the field by Iollan's Wood, where John had found the remains of Fiona Kelly. Katie dreaded to think what they would see there, and her stomach started to spasm. She gagged up a mouthful of half- chewed breakfast, and had to stop.

'Comeon, will you?' Lucy shouted at her, hoarsely. 'We can't waste any more time! Mor-Rioghain has waited too long already.'

They trod over the last thick furrows, their feet almost disappearing into the saturated soil, and there spread out in the mud in front of them in reds and grays and fatty yellows was a disassembled human body. Katie had seen Fiona Kelly's remains, but this was still difficult to take in, especially since she was badly scared now, and had no control over what was going to happen to her.

'Siobhan Buckley,' said Lucy, stalking around the remains in satisfaction. 'Pretty girl, sensitive, artistic. Just what Mor-Rioghain was looking for.'

In the same way that Fiona Kelly's remains had been arranged, Siobhan Buckley's ribs were stuck into the ground in a circle and her fleshless skull was perched on top of her pelvis. Her intestines were heaped into the middle like a knot of large pale snakes. Her liver lay shining in a puddle next to her deflated lungs. The rain was pelting down so hard that even the crows were discouraged from coming down to peck at them.

There, too, were her thighbones, with holes drilled through them, and little gray dollies dangling from them.

'She made me help her,' said John, with almost overwhelming self-disgust. 'She said she'd kill my mother if I didn't, but then she did anyway.'

'I never thought that I would see this day,' said Lucy, pacing from side to side and making a curious ducking movement with her head every time she turned. 'I never thought I would ever see this happen. Mor-Rioghain, the great and terrible Morgana, summoned through from the other side!'

Katie and John stayed where they were. John's fists were clenched tight and his face was very white.

'My colleagues will be wondering where I am,' Katie called out. 'I was supposed to interview Tomas O Conaill again at twelve. If I don't show up, and they can't get in touch with me by telephone, they're going to come looking for me.'

'Let them come looking for you,' said Lucy, still pacing from side to side. 'By the time they find you, there won't be very much left of you.'

'What are you talking about?'

'You don't know, do you? When Mor-Rioghain comes through from the other side, she needs a fourteenth sacrifice, a living woman, the strongest woman in the tribe. You were perfect, right from the very beginning. It was always going to be you.'

Katie said, 'What do you mean, 'right from the very beginning'?'

'Right from the moment I saw you on the television nightly news, when you first discovered all of those women's bones. I heard you talking about ritual murder, and I knew at once what kind of ritual it was, because I could see one of the thighbones in the background, with a dolly hanging from it.'

'You told me your university sent you.'

'University? I've never been to any university. I was living in Boston when I first saw you, working as a window dresser. Haltmann's Stores, at Downtown Crossing.'

'So how did you know so much about Mor-Rioghain?'

'She's my reason for living, Katie. She has been for years. I studied Jack Callwood's sacrifices in endless detail, trying to locate the exact spot where he laid the bodies out, and how many women he had managed to kill. I went out almost every weekend, but I was beginning to think that I would never find what I was looking for. His