A Terrible Beauty

'Oh, you know me and my incomparable omelets.'

'Dad,' she said. She didn't have to say any more. He was standing in the living room doorway, half silhouetted by the misty-gray light, sad, tired, still grieving. Nothing could bring her mother back, not even the lamb cutlets and the Kerr's Pink potatoes she was carrying in her Tesco bag.

She took her raincoat off and left her shopping in the hall. Her father went into the living room and poured out two glasses of sherry. 'Slainte,' he said, when she appeared. 'You're the best daughter a man could ever ask for.'

'Slainte.'

They sat down side by side on the green velvet Victorian sofa. Over the fireplace hung a large dark oil painting of people walking through a wood. On either side of the room there were small tables with assorted knickknacks on them, glass paperweights and Meissen statuettes and a strange bronze figure of a man with a flute and a sack slung over his back. When she was young, Katie had always thought that he was the Pied Piper, whistling children away to the magical land beyond the mountain.

'I saw you on the news,' said her father. His eyes had always been green, like hers, but now they were no particular color at all. Does everything fade, when you grow older, even your eyes?

'Those skeletons up at Knocknadeenly.' She nodded. 'Yes.'

'You're not taking your investigation any further, are you? Even if those womenweremurdered, there's not much chance of the perpetrator still being alive today, is there? Or fit to stand trial, even if he is.'

'Well, I'll be talking to Dermot O'Driscoll tomorrow morning. He'll probably close it down.'

'But?'

'I didn't say 'but'.'

'I know you didn't say it but don't forget that I was a detective, too. Maybe I never made the exalted rank of detective superintendent, but I passed out from Templemore with top marks, just like you. And I can always tell when somebody has a 'but' on the tip of their tongue.'

'All right. I do have a 'but.' Those eleven women were ritually murdered for some particular purpose and I really want to know what that purpose was. I really,badlywant to know. If I don't find out-I don't know, I'll feel that I've let them all down-that they died and nobody ever cared.'

Her father finished his sherry and put down his glass. 'People kill other people for all kinds of unfathomable reasons. I once arrested a farmer in Watergrasshill for cutting a fellow's head off with a scythe.Whack!One blow, just like that. He said that the fellow was trying to put the evil eye on him.'

'We're talking about eleven women here, Dad.'

'Well, I don't know. You have to remember that Ireland in 1915 wasn't anything like the Ireland that you know now. Times were very difficult. There was terrible poverty, there was oppression. There was superstition and there was very little education. Who knows why somebody killed eleven women.'

'I wish I did.'

Her father shook his head. 'If I were you, I'd leave this investigation to the archivists and the archeologists.'

'There was something else, Dad. Something I didn't release to the media. You have to promise me that you'll keep it a secret.'

'Oh, yes. I'll ring theEchoright away.'

'Every thighbone that we dug up had a hole drilled through it, at the thick end, where it connects with the pelvis. And every hole had a string knotted through it, and a little rag dolly on the end.'

'A rag dolly? Now thatisunusual. I never heard of anything like that before. What are they like, these dollies?'

'They're made out of torn strips of old linen, all about four or five inches tall, and pierced through with hooks and screws and rusty nails. More like an African fetish than anything you'd ever see in Ireland.'

Her father frowned, and shook his head. 'I never came across anything like that before. There used to be all kinds of rituals in Ireland, especially where the roads were bad, and among the Travelers. But if you ask me the only rituals now are television, and the National Lotto. You're probably talking about something that died out years ago, and nobody remembers. My advice to you is leave this case alone. Hand it over to somebody who likes picking through historical stuff. Some retired inspector, I can give you a couple of names. It won't do your career any good if you start looking as if you're obsessed with some peculiar eighty-year-old mystery, believe me.'

'I'd better start cooking,' said Katie. She got up and went into the large, old-fashioned kitchen with its pine cupboards and its green-and-cream tiles, and her father followed her, and sat on a wooden chair by the window.

'How's things at home?' he asked her.

'You mean me and Paul?' She washed the lamb cutlets and dried them on kitchen paper. 'I'm not sure that I know. We don't seem to be very close these days. Sometimes I think we don't even speak the same language.'

Her father looked at her narrowly as she started to chop onions on the thick pine chopping board. 'You're hurting,' he said.

'Hurting?'

'You can't fool me, Katie. You were always the quietest of the seven of you, but I could always tell when there was something troubling you.'

'I'm not hurting, Dad. I just wish I knew exactly where I stood.'