A Terrible Beauty

'They are, yes. But when I waved my hand in front of his face he didn't even blink.'

Katie looked across the road at three small single-story houses. 'Any witnesses?'

'The house on the right is empty and up for sale. The middle one, there's nobody at home. And the old lady who lives in the end one is two pies short of a picnic. I asked to borrow her stepladder and she wanted to know if I'd come to trim her hedge for her. Like, of course I had, in the dark, and the rain, in my ?400 John Magee overcoat.'

'All right. I'll have to make an appeal through the media. Somebody must have seen something-even if it was only a van parked here.'

'A van?'

'Had to be. They wouldn't have driven through the city with a white-painted man sitting in the back of their car, would they? And they would have needed a compressor for the nailer and a couple of ladders to get him up on the cross.'

'Well, we've got four deep impressions in the grass here which were probably made by ladders. There's some tire tracks, too, right on the edge of the verge.'

Katie looked up at Dave MacSweeny again. His eyes were still raised to heaven, and the rain was beginning to streak the white paint on his cheeks, so that it looked as if he were crying.

?   ?   ?

It took the fire and rescue team over twenty minutes to bring Dave MacSweeny down. The nails turned out to be too hard for bolt cutters so the firefighters had to cut them with a grinding wheel. Katie stood by, her shoulders hunched in the rain, while Dave MacSweeny hung on the cross in a crinkly silver blanket, wearing plastic goggles, surrounded by cascades of orange sparks.

'Looks more like a Christmas turkey than the crucified Christ,' Liam remarked.

At last they lowered Dave MacSweeny to the ground and laid him on a stretcher. She bent over him and said, 'Dave? Can you hear me, Dave?'

He stared at her but he didn't speak.

'Dave, do you know who did this to you, Dave?'

He gave her an almost imperceptible nod.

'Who was it, Dave? Are you going to tell me?'

One corner of his mouth quivered in the beginnings of a smile.

'I'm sorry, Superintendent,' put in one of the paramedics, 'we really need to get him to hospital.'

'All right.' Katie stood up straight, and let the paramedics carry Dave MacSweeny away. She turned, and caught Liam looking at her with a slight frown on his face, as if there were something he couldn't quite work out.

'What's the problem?'

'Nothing. I was just trying to work out why anybody would have gone to all the trouble of crucifying him. They obviously weren't intent on killing him, were they, because somebody was bound to notice him before he'd been hanging here too long. So what do you think? Somebody was trying to teach him a lesson?'

'Probably. You know what a cute hoor he is. He could have upset any one of dozens of people.'

'But why crucify him? They were taking a hell of a chance, after all, driving him out here and hanging him up in the middle of the road. Why didn't they just go round to his house and nail him to his kitchen table? Far less risky, just as much of a punishment.'

It had stopped raining now, and Katie lowered the hood of her reflective jacket. 'I can't guess, Liam. Who knows what goes on in the heads of people who nail a man up on a cross? Maybe they had a Pontius Pilate complex.'

Liam opened her car door for her, and the lights-on alarm began to beep. 'If they nailed him out here in the middle of the road they didn't do it simply to punishhim-they did it to show somebody else, too. Maybe as a warning.'

'You're absolutely right, of course. All we have to find out is who was warning who about what.'

'I'll take care of this one. I know you've got your hands full with that body up at Meagher's Farm. I just thought you ought to see it, that's all.'

'Thanks,' said Katie. 'As if I wasn't feeling queasy enough already.'

She called Eamonn Collins on her cell phone. A woman answered, with a nasal Dublin accent. In the background, Katie could hear Andy Williams singingMoon River.

'Is Eamonn home?'

'Who wants to know?'

'Katie Maguire.'

'And who's Katie Maguire, may I ask?'

'Detective Superintendent Katie Maguire, that's who.'

'All right. There's no need to eat the head off me.'

Eamonn came to the phone. 'Good evening to you, Superintendent. How can I help you?'

'I think you've already helped me more than enough, thanks. What the hell did you think you were playing at? I wanted you to have a quiet word in Dave MacSweeny's ear, not make a public spectacle of him.'