A Terrible Beauty

death. There's something else very interesting, too.'

'Oh, yes?'

Dr. Reidy lifted a tibia from the table in front of them and handed it over so that Katie could examine it more closely. 'What do you make of that?'

'It's a leg bone.'

'Of course it's a leg bone, Detective Superintendent. But do what detectives are supposed to do and detect what's noteworthy about it.'

Katie turned it this way and that. 'I don't know. What am I looking for?'

With one blunt, trembling, nicotine-stained forefinger, Dr. Reidy pointed to a series of diagonal scratches all the way down the side of the bone. 'These striations,' he said. 'They appear to have been made with a very sharp short-bladed knife of the kind that butchers use for trimming ribs.'

'Meaning?'

'Meaning that their flesh didn't naturally decay. Before they were interred, every one of them was completely boned.'

Katie said nothing, but looked around the laboratory at the ivory litter of human remains. There was something so tragic about them. Unknown, unburied, and unmourned. And God alone knew what they must have suffered, before they were killed.

Liam lifted his spectacles so that he could take a closer look. 'What are we talking about here, sir? Why would somebody want to scrape people's flesh off?'

Dr. Reidy struggled under his plastic apron, found a handkerchief, and loudly blew his nose. 'Cannibalism?' he suggested.

'Cannibalism? Jesus, this isn'tFiji .'

'I'm just giving you the forensic findings, Inspector Fennessy. But the findings are that quite apart from the obvious attachment of small cloth figures to their femurs, all of these skeletons had the flesh scraped off them, with considerable care and effort, as if it was being done for a specific, ritualized purpose. Of which cannibalism may have been part.'

Katie said, 'Can you give me just a rough idea of how old these skeletons are?'

'From the tests I've done so far, which-as I say-are not at all conclusive, I'd say that their bones have been lying under Meagher's feed store for about eighty years, and possibly more. Long before John Meagher's grandfather bought the property, and long before Michael Meagher owned it.'

'What about the dolls?'

'They're all made out of linen, knotted and wound around like the funeral windings of a mummy. The screws and nails and hooks are handmade, most of them, and we can probably date them very accurately indeed. Certainly their corrosion is consistent with them having been buried for at least three quarters of a century, and possibly longer.'

Katie said, 'Have you ever come across any killings like this, ever before?'

Dr. Reidy shook his head. 'Never. As I say, there was obviously some ritualistic element in what happened to these women, but precisely what it was I can't tell you. I never saw bones so methodically stripped of their flesh before. And I've never seen anything like these dolls. And that's in twenty-nine years of medical jurisprudence.'

'So what do we do now?'

'My dear, I really can't tell you. I'm going off to play golf in Killarney. You, presumably, will be trying to find what kind of people could have committed such an idiosyncratic crime, and why.'

Katie stood close to Dr. Reidy for a while, looking at all of the eleven skulls with their crooked, jawless grins. Then she simply said, 'Thank you.'

'You're quite welcome,' Dr. Reidy replied, laying an uncharacteristically avuncular hand on her shoulder. 'It always makes life more interesting to see something new, even if it is rather stomach-churning.'

That afternoon, she held a media conference atAnglesea Street . The conference room was dazzled by television floods and the epileptic flickering of flashlights. She held her hand up in front of her face to shield her eyes.

'Early forensic examination indicates that these skeletons were interred over eighty years ago. Until we receive more information fromDublin , we won't have a precise date, but it looks as if they could have been victims of some kind of ritual massacre.'

'A Celtic ritual?' asked Dermot Murphy, from theIrish Examiner,lifting his ball pen.

'We don't know yet. But we'll be talking to several experts on Irish folklore, to see if there's any kind of religious or social precedent for killings like these.'

'You said that the bones had been cleaned by a butcher's knife. Could this be cannibalism we're talking about here? Or a farmer feeding human beings off to his livestock? I read a horror story about that once.'

'This is not a story, Dermot. This is reality.'

'So what can we say? Without being too sensational?'

'You can simply say that we'll be calling in all of the qualified assistance that we can. We're also appealing for anybody who has any knowledge of similar killings to come forward and share their information with us, no matter how inconsequential they think it may be. This is a difficult and highly unusual case, but you can rest assured that we're making progress.'

'Is there any point in continuing a full-scale investigation?' asked Gerry O'Ryan, from theIrish