A Terrible Beauty

'But it doesn't look as if the killer's motive was sexual?'

'Hmm, very hard to tell with sex. I remember one fellow in Ballybunion who got his jollies by choking women with fresh-caught mackerel. Never penetrated them, though. Never even took his trousers off.'

'All right, Doctor. Thank you. By the way, it looks as if we might have found direct relatives of two of the eleven women from 1915. Sergeant O'Rourke will be making arrangements with you to have them tested.'

'Ah, the wonders of modern forensic medicine! What would you poor coppers do without it? Have you come any closer to finding your monster?'

'We're making good progress, thank you. We have a sighting of Fiona Kelly near Blarney, and a vehicle description. The rest of it is probably going to be routine door-to-door stuff.'

'You know something, my dear, you would have made me a wonderful housekeeper. Any time you grow weary of detecting, there's a job waiting for you, I promise.'

Katie put the receiver down without saying anything else. Liam said, 'Well?'

'She wasn't raped and there are no obvious signs of sexual molestation.'

'Isn't that a little difficult to be certain about? Especially when your victim has been reduced to nothing more than T-bone steaks.'

'She was a twenty-two-year-old girl, Liam. All her life in front of her.'

'I know. I wasn't being flip. I just can't imagine what kind of a maniac could have done that to another human being.'

She stood up and walked around her desk. 'There may have been some sexual element in what was done to her. But Owen Reidy isn't a fool. I think we have to concentrate most of our attention on finding out what kind of ritual was being performed here.'

'Maybe, in that case, you'd better give Gerard O'Brien a call back.'

'Yes, maybe I should.'

Liam grinned, and patted her on the shoulder. 'He's very fond of you, you know, Professor O'Brien. You could do worse.'

Gerard's coffee steamed up his glasses. 'I think I've made something of a breakthrough,' he said. 'I looked up Mor-Rioghain on the Internet, and I came across a link to a German site about pagan rituals in Westphalia.'

'Go on,' said Katie. 'I don't really have very much time, I'm afraid.'

They were sitting in the window of a cafe on Oliver Plunkett Street. Outside, it continued to rain, and the narrow pavements were jostling with shoppers.

Gerard said, 'I'm sorry, yes, I'll-ah-cut to the chase. Around the cathedral town of Mnster, apparently, there used to be a witch known as Morgana. She was guilty of all kinds of misdemeanors, like screaming uncontrollably at people's weddings, and boiling live cats, and biting the toes off newly born babies. But she could be summoned to help you, if you were prepared to give her what she wanted.'

'Oh, yes? And what was that?'

'You had to catch thirteen good women, one at a time, and take them to a sacred place, and skin them alive. Then you had to clean their bones of all their flesh, for Morgana to feed on, and arrange their bones around it according to a very specific pattern.'

Now Gerard really had her attention. 'Pattern?What pattern?'

'I don't know exactly. My eighteenth-century German isn't very good. But it had to be very carefully done.Mit vorsicht. And there's something else. You had to tie a rag doll to each of the victim's leg bones-a rag doll decorated with fishhooks and nails. Each of these dolls was supposed to contain half of each victim's soul?the good side attached to the right leg, the bad side attached to the left.

'So long as each soul was separated like that, good in this doll, evil in the other, it couldn't go to Purgatory and it had to do whatever Morgana told it to do. It couldn't use magic to reassemble itself either, because the dolls would prevent its legs being reattached to its body.'

Katie was silent for a long time, twiddling her coffee spoon around and around between finger and thumb. Gerard O'Brien watched her cautiously, unsure of what she was going to say next.

She was beginning to feel a genuine sense of dread. This wasn't just butchery. This was deeply rooted in the Ireland of legend and mysticism-the Ireland of evil fairies and gray shadows that hurried through the rain, and white-faced mermaids who sat on the rocks and screamed and screamed until a man could go mad. This reminded her of all the terrors that she had felt as a child, when the Atlantic gales had rattled her bedroom window in the small black hours of the morning, as if all kinds of spidery skeletons were trying to get in.

After a while she put down her coffee spoon. 'Then what was supposed to happen? After you'd killed and boned thirteen women and attached these dollies?'

'Then, I suppose, Morgana would give you whatever you wanted. Money, fame, success with women.'

'Are there any authenticated cases of people having actually tried to do this?'

'I wouldn't know. But the source of the legend is very respectable. It's mentioned in detail inHexenprozesse in Westfalenby Dr. Ignatz Zingerle, and in a seventeenth-century quarto calledWunderbarliche Geheimnussen der Zauberey.'And a fairylike Morgana is known in some form or another in almost every country in Northern Europe. Morgan, Mor-Rioghain, whatever.'

'Gerard, this could be very helpful.'

Gerard furiously scratched his head. 'It's not a lot to go on, I know. But it's a start, isn't it? At least you know what the dollies were for. And it gives you a clue where your murderer might have come from.'

'What do you mean?'