'There's nobody here but me and Gabriel and the Ryan brothers, Denis and Bryan. They do the general laboring, and Maureen O'Donovan helps me to run the creamery.'
'I'll be wanting to talk to them, too.'
'Sure, absolutely. But this is a total mystery, so far as I'm concerned. I'm no expert, but it looks to me as if these people have been dead for a heck of a long time.'
Katie said nothing, but stood looking at the bones with her hand pressed over her mouth.
John waited until Katie had walked around to the other side of the excavation before he said to Sergeant O'Rourke, 'Kind of
'Oh, not usually. But she's very humorless when it comes to homicide, Superintendent Maguire. Doesn't see the funny side of it, if you know what I mean.'
John watched her as she circled around the bones. A very striking woman, he thought, not more than five feet five inches, just turned forty maybe, with cropped coppery hair and sage-green eyes and sharply chiseled cheekbones. She had that Irish-elfin look of being related to the fairy folk, ten generations removed. The sort of woman you find yourself looking at a second time, and then again. But then she glanced up and caught him looking at her and he found himself immediately turning away, as if he had something to be guilty about. God knows how she would make him feel if he actually knew how these skeletons had come to be buried here.
Eventually she came back over. The raindrops were sparkling in her hair. 'You haven't heard any local stories about anybody going missing? Not necessarily recent stories. Something that might give us a rough idea when these people died.'
'I don't have too much time for local gossip, I'm afraid. I go down to Ballyvolane once in a while and have a couple of drinks at the Fox and Hounds. But I'm still a foreigner, as far as the locals are concerned. Not surprising, really. I still can't understand the Cork accent and up until I came here I thought that hurling was something you did after drinking too much Guinness.'
'All right, John,' said Katie. 'You won't be going anywhere, will you? Once we've had the chance to clear this site properly, and the state pathologist has examined the remains, there'll be quite a few more questions that are going to need answering.'
'Listen, whatever I can do.'
Katie went over to her car and picked up her mobile phone. 'Paul? It's me. I'm up at Knocknadeenly. Yes, somebody's found some remains. Yes, I know. Listen, it doesn't look as if I'm going to be home until late. There's a Marks & Spencer chicken pie in the freezer. You put it in a preheated oven at gas mark eight. Yes. Well, you know how to peel a potato, don't you? All right, go to the pub if you like, it's up to you, but eat something decent. I'll call you later.'
A white Garda van was coming up the driveway. The technical bureau. Katie walked back to the excavation and waited for them to kit up in their Tyvek suits and their rubber boots. She looked down at the heap of bones and wondered who on earth they had belonged to. Normally, when she attended a death scene, it was immediately obvious who had done what to whom, and why. Bloody carving knives in the kitchen sink. Babies, gray-faced from suffocation. Girls lying facedown and muddy-thighed in a ditch somewhere, strangled with their own scarves.
But this was something very different, and until she knew how long these people had been lying here it was futile for her to try and guess who might have killed them, or why. All that was immediately apparent was that none of the skulls had a bullet hole in the back. That would have been very strong evidence that they were the victims of a political execution, or maybe a revenge killing by one of the local gangs.
Although she was going to inform Operation Trace about these skeletons as a matter of protocol, she didn't think that they were connected with Superintendent O'Connell's investigation. The girls he was looking for had disappeared one by one over nearly a decade-the last one in July, 1998-and Katie's immediate impression was that these bodies had been buried all at once.
Liam came up to her and offered her an extra-strong mint. 'What do you think? Could have been Meagher's father who did it, possibly?'
'We won't know that until we find out who all these people were, and when they were killed, and why.'
'You're not looking for a motive? Look around you-a godforsaken place like this. Struggling from dawn to dusk to scrape a half-decent living and nobody to take out your economic and sexual frustrations on, except the livestock, or the occasional passing cyclist, looking for somewhere to spend the night. Remember that bed-and-breakfast business, down in Crosshaven? Three of them, stuffed in an airing cupboard?'
Katie lifted her hand to shield her eyes against the rain. 'I don't know. I don't get that kind of a feeling. I wouldn't totally rule it out, but there's something very dark about this. The way the different skeletons are all tangled up?it's like they were all taken apart before they were buried.'
A series of lightning-bright flashes illuminated the blue plastic screens. The photographer was getting to work, and now the forensic retrieval team were waddling around in their protective suits, marking out the positions of skulls and rib cages.
One of them picked up a thighbone which appeared to have something dangling from the end of it. Then he bent over and picked up another, and another. He examined them for a while and then he came over to Katie and said, 'Superintendent? Have a sconce at these.'
Katie tugged on a tight plastic glove and accepted one of the bones. It had been pierced at the upper end, where it would have fitted into the hip socket, and a short length of greasy twine had been tied through the hole. On the end of the twine dangled a small doll-like figure, apparently fashioned out of twisted gray rags, with six or seven rusted nails and hooks pushed into it. Every thighbone had been pierced in the same way, and every one had a tiny rag doll tied onto it.
'What do you make of this, Liam?' Katie asked him. 'Ever see anything like this before?'
Liam peered at the little figure closely, and shook his head. 'Never. It looks like one of your voodoo effigies, doesn't it, the ones you stick pins in to get your revenge on people.'
'Voodoo? In Knocknadeenly?'
The scene-of-crimes officer took the thighbone and went back to work. Katie said, 'I don't know what happened here, Liam, but it was seriously strange.'
