A Terrible Beauty

'You remember Detective Superintendent Maguire, don't you, Ma?'

Mrs. Meagher lifted her head and peered through her thick-lensed glasses. 'Of course. It seems like time caught your man before you could.'

'Yes, I'm afraid it did.'

John said, 'You should switch the light on, Ma. How can you see what you're doing?'

'I can sew on buttons with my eyes closed.'

'I can eat hamburgers with my eyes closed, but why would I want to?'

'Get away with you. Ever since you went to America, you've been talking Greek.'

'What would you like?' John asked Katie. 'Tea? Coffee?'

'Tea would be fine. No milk, thanks.'

He switched on the electric kettle. His mother coughed and crushed out her cigarette and went to the larder for shortbread biscuits and fruitcake.

'I didn't realize you were such a celebrity,' said John, pulling out a chair so that Katie could sit down.

'Oh, yes. I get wheeled out for TV interviews every time somebody wants to talk about the New Irish Woman.'

'Couldn't have been easy, though, getting as far as you have.'

'It wasn't. As far as most gardai are concerned, women officers are there to direct traffic, comfort grieving widows, and go out for sandwiches-and if they're not too ugly, to have their bottoms pinched at every opportunity.'

'Somehow I can't imagineyouputting up with that.'

'I didn't, and I don't. But I was lucky, too. At the time when I applied to become a detective, there was very strong pressure from the commissioner's office to promote more women to the upper ranks. Not only that, I had a chief superintendent who happened to be a close friend of my father's. Then, about two months after I graduated as a detective garda, I solved a double murder in Knockraha, two women drowned in a well, mother and daughter. All I did was overhear a drunken conversation in a pub, but I still got the credit for it.'

'You're very modest.'

'Well, I try to be efficient, John, as well as modest.'

John laughed. 'How's your tea? Are you sure it's not too strong?'

'It's fine. It's hot, that's all.'

Mrs. Meagher shuffled out of the kitchen, leaving them alone. They sat and smiled at each other for a while, then John said, 'What happens now?'

'About the skeletons, you mean? We've commissioned somebody from the university to see if he can find out how and why they were killed, but there's not much else we can do.'

'It was a ritual killing, though, wasn't it?'

'Ritualistic, yes.'

'My grandfather always used to say that this farm was possessed.'

'Possessed? Possessed by what?'

'He never really explained. But he always used to say that if you knew where to look for it, and you knew how to get it, and you were prepared to pay the price, you could have anything your heart desired.'

'That's interesting. Professor O'Brien at the university said that this farm was called the Hill of the Gray People because a witch called Mor-Rioghain was supposed to have used it as a way through from the underworld. Mor-Rioghain would give you anything you wanted, so long as you fed her on the bodies of young women.'

'That's a pretty gruesome story.'

Katie sipped her tea. 'I don't take it seriously, not for a single moment.'

'Of course not. But you never know?eighty years ago,somebodymight have believed it.'

'That's one of the possibilities that Professor O'Brien is going to be looking into.'

John offered her a shortbread biscuit. 'Go on, spoil yourself?they're all homemade. My mother still bakes enough for half the population of Ireland.'

Katie accepted, and snapped the biscuit in half. 'How about you? How are you coping with the farm?'

'Not as well as I thought I was going to. Everybody back in California said they envied me because I was really getting back to nature. But I don't know. There's California nature, like orange groves and grapes and sunshine, and then there's Knocknadeenly nature. Which is mainly mud.'

'You're managing all right, though, aren't you?'

John shook his head. 'Not too well, to tell you the truth. The economics don't really work out. Cattle feed costs almost as much as caviar, but the price of milk is so low that it's cheaper to pour it down the drain than it is to bottle it. The plastic trays I pack my chickens in cost more than the chickens. Apart from that I need a new differential for my tractor and a new diesel generator, and two thirds of my winter wheat has gone rotten in the rain. I sold my business in the States for a very good profit, but at this rate I calculate that I'm going to be pretty close to bankruptcy by the beginning of July.'

'Why don't you cut your losses?'