John went into the house. It was gloomy inside, and it always smelled of damp at this time of year. He took off his boots and washed his hands in the small cloakroom at the side of the hall. Then he went into the large quarry tiled kitchen where his mother was baking. She seemed so small these days, with her white hair and her stooped back and her eyes as pale as milk. She was sieving out flour for tea brack.
'Did you finish the plowing, John?' she asked him.
'Not quite. I have to use the telephone.'
He hesitated. She looked up and frowned at him. 'Is everything all right?'
'Of course, Mam. I have to make a phone call, that's all.'
'You were going to ask me something.' Oh, she was cute, his mother.
'Ask you something? No. Don't worry about it.' If his father really had allowed the IRA to bury bodies on his land, he very much doubted that he would have confided in his mother. What you don't know can't knock on your door in the middle of the night.
He went into the living room with its tapestry-covered furniture and its big redbrick fireplace, where three huge logs were crackling and Lucifer the black Labrador was stretched out on the rug with his legs indecently wide apart. He picked up the old-fashioned black telephone and dialed 112.
'Hallo? I want the Garda. I need to speak to somebody in charge. Yes. Well, this is John Meagher up at Meagher's Farm in Knocknadeenly. We've dug up some bodies.'
2
It was raining even harder by the time Katie Maguire arrived at Meagher's Farm in her muddy silver Mondeo. She could see that Detective Inspector Liam Fennessy was already there, as well as two other detectives and three or four uniformed gardai who were struggling against the gusty wind to erect bright blue plastic screens.
She climbed out of the car and walked across the farmyard with her raincoat collar turned up. Liam was standing by the open grave with his hands in the pockets of his long brown herringbone overcoat, undeterred by the rain, smoking a cigarette. Detective Garda Patrick O'Sullivan was hunkered down in his windcheater, frowning at the bones with a studious expression on his face, while Detective Sergeant Jimmy O'Rourke was standing under the shelter of the farmhouse roof, talking to John Meagher.
'Afternoon, Superintendent,' said Liam. He was thin and hollow-cheeked, with fair, greased-back hair and circular wire-rimmed spectacles, which were spotted with rain. He looked more like a young James Joyce than a Garda inspector. 'Seems as if we've got a few bones to pick, doesn't it?'
'God Almighty.' She had never seen anything like this in her entire career. 'How long before the team from the technical bureau get here?'
'Half an hour, I'd say. And the venerable Dr. Owen Reidy is coming down first thing tomorrow morning. Reidy the Ripper. He'd have your duodenum for a fancy necktie before you even breathed your last gasp.'
Katie gave him the faintest of smiles. 'Did you talk to Superintendent O'Connell in Naas?'
Jerry O'Connell was in charge of Operation Trace, which had spent the last nine years looking for eight young women who had disappeared without trace in the eastern counties ofIreland .
Liam said, 'I put a message in, yes.'
Katie walked slowly around the excavation, trying to make sense of all the bones that were lying there, jumbled up like pick-a-sticks as if somebody had tossed them up into the air and let them scatter at random. She could make out at least three pelvises, two breastbones, and innumerable vertebrae.
She was used to dead bodies-three or four bluey-green floaters were fished out of the River Lee every week, and then there were the blackened and bloated druggies they regularly found in Lower Shandon Street, and the maroon-faced winos crouched in shop doorways in Maylor Street, their hearts stopped by Paddy's whiskey and hypothermia.
But this was different. This was wholesale butchery. She could almost smell the dread of what had happened here, along with the peaty reek of the rain-soaked soil.
Sergeant O'Rourke came up to her. He was a short, sandy-haired man with a rough-hewn block of a head, like an unfinished sculpture. 'What do you think, Jimmy?' she asked him.
'I never saw nothing like it, ma'am, except in a picture on Father Francis's wall, at St. Michael's, which had heaven at the top and hell at the bottom, you know, and this is what hell looked like. All skeletons, all in a heap.'
Katie said, 'This is John Meagher, is it?'
'That's right. John-this is Detective Superintendent Kathleen Maguire. She's in charge of this investigation.'
John held out his hand. 'Oh, I see. I'm sorry, I didn't realize that-'
'That's all right, John,' said Katie. 'An Garda Siochana is an equal opportunity employer, and occasionally they bend over backward to be
'It looks so far like there could be six skeletons, or even seven,' said Sergeant O'Rourke. 'Kevin's counted thirteen ankle bones so far.'
'Do you have any idea at all how these remains might have come to be buried here?' Katie asked John.
John shook his head. 'None at all. Absolutely none. I've been running the farm for fourteen months now so nobody could have buried them here after I took over.'
'What about
'Meagher's Farm has been in my family since 1935. I can't see my father burying any bodies here. Why would he? Nor my grandfather, either.'
Katie nodded. 'Does anybody else have access to your property here? Like tenant farmers, anybody like that? Or holidaymakers? Or Travelers?'
