A Terrible Beauty

assorted bits. Oh-and three balls of twine, too.'

'And you don't think that John Meagher had anything to do with this?'

'I'm just being thorough, Liam, that's all.'

'How about footprints? This is ideal for footprints, a freshly plowed field.'

'We're taking casts. But considering the way the body was arranged, there seem to be surprisingly few.'

'Well, what do you want me to do?'

'Initiate a house-to-house, and pub-to-pub, and knock on the door of every bed-and-breakfast in a ten-mile radius. You're asking about a suntanned girl with long blond hair.'

'And you?'

'I have to talk to Dermot. Then I have to give a statement to the press.'

Liam stood up. 'The rag dollies are the key to this. If we can find out what they mean, I think we'll know what happened here, and why, and who did it.'

Jimmy O'Rourke came over and said, 'Take a look at this, Superintendent.'

He led Katie around the right-hand side of the garden of bones, and pointed to a large section of flesh that had been cut from the victim's hip, buttock and upper thigh. It looked almost like a boned leg of beef from a supermarket display cabinet.

'See there? there's a deep indentation around the upper thigh? really, really deep. The last time I ever saw anything like that was when a fellow caught his arm in a printing machine in Douglas. His workmates tied a tourniquet around his upper arm to stop him from bleeding to death.'

'So what do you deduce from that?' asked Katie.

'I'm not sure. But why would anybody tie a tourniquet around the leg of a dead body?'

'You mean that this woman might have had her leg amputated while she was still alive?'

'Well, not amputated, no. Look at all these bones, they're all intact. They haven't been sawn through, any of them.'

Katie looked down at the grisly chaos of the girl's disassembled body. She tried to study the pieces of flesh objectively. She didn't want to think about the cruelty of what had happened to this girl, or the appalling pain she must have endured. 'What a mess,' she said. 'But see how neatly those muscles have been cut. Whoever did this had quite a talent with a knife, didn't he?'

'I'll have a word around the hospitals,' said Liam. 'You never know. We might be looking for a mad surgeon. Dr. Frankenstein in reverse.'

'Talk to the local butchers, too,' said Katie.

'Good idea. One of my nephews works for O'Reilly's in the English Market. That's how I get all my black puddings cheap.'

'All right,' said Katie. There was a dazzling flicker of flashlights as the photographers got to work, and she had to turn her face away. In spite of her attempts to be detached, she was shaking.

'Here,' said Liam. He reached inside his leather jacket and took out a clean white handkerchief.

'What?' she frowned. He unfolded the handkerchief for her but she still didn't understand what he meant until he pointed to his eyes, one after the other, to indicate that there were tears in her eyes.

23

That evening, Katie held another media conference at Anglesea Street. It was packed with more than sixty reporters and cameramen. She gave the bare facts that the body of an unidentified young woman had been found at Meagher's Farm and that her skeleton had been stripped of its flesh and arranged 'in a manner suggesting some kind of ritual or fetishistic behavior.'

'Is there any similarity between the way this skeleton was arranged and the way the first eleven skeletons were arranged?' asked Dougal Cleary from RTE One.

'No. The first eleven skeletons seemed to have been buried at random. This skeleton was very systematically laid out in the open, along with the flesh that had been removed from it.'

'Removed from it how?'

'Expertly, I'd say. With a scalpel or a knife.'

'So you could be looking for somebody with medical skills?'

'Possibly. We're keeping an open mind until we receive the autopsy report from Dr. Reidy.'

'You keep mentioning this word 'ritualistic'-but what ritual are you referring to, exactly?'

'So far I'm only using it in the sense that this woman wasn't murdered in anger, or haphazardly, but in a carefully considered procedure. We don't know if this procedure has any religious or occult implications. Professor Gerard O'Brien at the university has been helping us in our research but so far he hasn't come up with any complete explanation.'

'Does he have anincompleteexplanation?'

'Nothing that's useful to discuss at this time.'

'Does this latest murder cast any doubt on Jack Devitt's theory that a British army officer was responsible for murdering those eleven women in 1915?'

'Again, we're keeping an open mind. Of course the same perpetrator couldn't have committed today's