There was a brown leather briefcase standing on the floor next to the cheap walnut-veneered wardrobe. He picked it up, and sat down on the side of the bed frame, and opened it. Fiona didn't take her eyes away from the end of the bed, even when he produced a case of surgical instruments, a length of hairy twine, and a small white doll fashioned out of torn linen, pierced all over with fishhooks and screws and tin tacks.
'This is a very ancient ritual,' he said. 'Nobody knows exactly how far back it goes. But throughout the ages, its purpose has always been the same. To open the door to the other world, and coax some of its monstrosities to come through. Interesting, isn't it, how men and women have always wanted to play with fire?to risk their lives and their sanity by calling up their worst nightmares? They could let their demons sleep in peace, but they insist on prodding them into wakefulness, like naughty children taunting a mad dog.'
Fiona remained in a trancelike state as he opened up the flat, rectangular case of surgical instruments. It contained two bone saws, a selection of scalpels, and a shining collection of stainless-steel knives. He took out a long-bladed scalpel, closed the case, and then stood up again.
'I don't know if you want to pray,' he said.
10
Katie and Liam were early for their three o'clock appointment with Eugene O Beara. They pushed their way through the battered red doors of The Crow Bar in Blackpool, across the street from Murphy's Brewery. The bar was crowded and foggy with cigarette smoke. A hurling match between Cork and Kilkenny was playing on the television at deafening volume, while the pub radio was tuned equally loudly to an easy-listening station.
A few months ago, the pub doors would have been locked between two and four for 'The Holy Hour,' even though it would have been just as jam-packed inside, but the Irish licensing laws had been relaxed during the summer. Katie and Liam made their way along the darkly varnished bar to a booth at the very back, partitioned from the rest of the pub by a wooden screen.
Katie got some hard looks as she walked through the pub. Every man there knew who she was, and she recognized Eoin O'hAodhaire and both of the Twohig brothers, whom she had personally arrested for car theft in her first year as detective sergeant. Micky Cremen was there, too, sitting in the far corner glowering at her over his pint. Micky had tried to start up his own protection racket until Eamonn Collins had got to hear of it; and Micky had been lucky to end up in prison instead of the Mercy Hospital.
'What can I fetch you folks?' asked Jimmy the barman.
'We're fine for now, thanks,' said Katie. 'We're waiting for some friends.'
'Friends, is it?' said Jimmy, as if he couldn't believe that gardai could have any friends, and if they did they certainly wouldn't find a welcome in The Crow Bar. But then the front door opened and Eugene O Beara and another older man walked in, with a huge Irish wolfhound on a lead. The pub noticeably hushed, and everybody paid extra attention to the hurling match, or to what they were saying to their friends, or to anything else at all except for Eugene O Beara and his white-haired companion, and his giant dog.
Eugene came directly down the length of the bar and slid into the booth next to Katie, while the older man eased himself in beside Liam, facing her. Eugene was about thirty-eight years old, with tight curly chestnut hair that was just beginning to turn gray, and the features of a plump, pugnacious baby. He wore a khaki anorak and a Blackpool GAA necktie, and he laid an expensive Ericsson mobile phone on the table in front of him.
The older man had a hawklike face, and white hair cropped so short that Katie could see every bump and scar on his skull. She thought she recognized him but he didn't introduce himself and neither did Eugene. His fingernails were very long and chalky and he wore three silver rings with Celtic insignia on them. His dog buried itself under the table and lay there with its spine pressed uncomfortably against Katie's legs.
'Eugene tells me you were asking him about some people gone missing,' said the older man. His voice sounded like somebody sandpapering a cast-iron railing.
'That's right. But that was before we found out how long they'd been dead. I expect you've seen it on the news. The pathologist estimates that they were probably killed more than seventy-five years ago.'
'I saw that, yes. But that's why I called Eugene about it and that's why I'm here today.'
Katie leaned forward expectantly but the old man sat back and noisily sniffed and didn't volunteer anything more. Katie looked at Eugene and then she looked at Liam, and Liam made a little wobbling gesture with his hand to indicate that it might be a good idea to buy him a drink.
'A glass of Beamish and a double Paddy's, thanks,' the old man told her. He had caught Liam's hand-wobble out of the corner of his eye.
'Eugene? Guinness, isn't it?' Katie asked, and Eugene gave her a barely perceptible wink, as if he had got a fly in his eye.
Everybody in the pub suddenly roared and cheered as Cork scored a goal, and the old man waited patiently for the noise to die down. Then he said, 'I told Eugene that there haven't been any killings like that in recent times, not eleven females, not to my knowledge. But when I saw it on the telly that they were buried there for nearly eighty years, that's what rang a bell.'
Jimmy the barman brought the old man's Beamish over and he took a small sip and fastidiously wiped his mouth.
'When he was alive, God bless his soul, my great-uncle Robert told me all kinds of stories about what the boys got up to in the old days. He said that in the summer of 1915 a bomb was planted by the British barracks wall up on Military Hill, and that it went off premature, and killed the wives of two of the British officers, and badly hurt another. Blew her arms off, that's what great-uncle Robert told me.
'A week after that, a young woman went missing from her home in Carrignava, and then two more girls from Whitechurch. By September there were five gone altogether, and of course the boys blamed the English for it, thinking they were taking their revenge for the officers' wives. A sixth woman went on Christmas Day, and then three more before the end of January.
'The boys hit back in February. They ambushed a British Army truck at Dillon's Cross, and they shot two Tommies. You can read all about it in the history books. There was bad enough blood between the Irish and the English at that time, and all of this made it ten times worse. But girls went on disappearing, right up until the spring of 1916, around the time of the Easter Rising. No more went missing after that, but no trace of none of them was ever found, nowhere.'
'How many altogether?' asked Katie.
