A Terrible Beauty

Kelly.'

'Of course they're connected. Siobhan's a redhead, right, and she's a fashion student? That's what they said on the radio.'

'Yes,' said Katie. 'But what does that have to do with it?'

'If anybody wanted to make a ritual sacrifice to Mor-Rioghain, they would have to choose thirteen women, but not just any thirteen women. They would have to be thirteen very special women.'

Katie's eyes narrowed. 'How do you know about Mor-Rioghain?'

'Eleven women's skeletons with their flesh scraped off? And then another girl murdered in exactly the same way, and her body left in exactly the same place? It has to be a sacrifice to Mor-Rioghain.'

'You say you've studied this?'

'I've done eight years of research on ritual sacrifice alone. The skeletons all had little dolls in the tops of their thighbones, didn't they?'

'Dolls?'

'Little raggy dolls, full of hooks and nails.'

'I'm afraid I can't comment about that.'

'Of course they all had dolls. You never released that to the media, did you? But I guess you must have had your reasons.'

Katie said, 'All right, yes, you're quite correct. They did have dolls. We didn't tell the media because we needed a way of checking the credentials of anybody who made a false confession-or anybody who pretended to know who the murderer was, or why he did it.'

Lucy Quinn shook her head. 'Believe me, Detective Superintendent, if it's credentials you want, I have a much more extensive knowledge about sacrifices to Mor-Rioghain than almost anybody. I've even published two papers on the subject-Mystic Ritual in Rural Ireland and The Invisible Kingdom.'

'Listen,' said Katie, 'why don't you come up to my office? Would you like a cup of coffee?'

She led the way upstairs. They passed Jimmy O'Rourke in the corridor and Jimmy raised his eyebrows in appreciation. They went into Katie's office and Lucy took off her coat. Underneath she was wearing tailored black slacks and a tight black polo-neck sweater, which showed off her very full breasts. Patrick O'Donovan passed the office door and then found a reason to pass back again. Lucy sat down and crossed her legs and gave Katie a wide, generous smile.

'Tell me about these thirteen women, then,' said Katie.

'Before Mor-Rioghain can take on human form and come out of the world beyond, the person who wants to raise her has to find thirteen women, each of whom has to represent one of thirteen different aspects of womanhood. He has to kill them, dismember them, and lay them out in a very specific pattern for Mor-Rioghain to feed on. He himself has to eat their hearts, to show his devotion. I presume you didn't find Fiona Kelly's heart?'

'We thought that the crows had probably taken it.'

'No. Her killer would have sliced it up and eaten it raw.'

'Mother of God.'

'It's a ritual that goes back to druidic days, maybe even earlier. There was a recorded case in Ardfert, in County Kerry, in the seventeenth century, but until you dug these bones up, and until Fiona Kelly was murdered, the most recent sacrifices we knew about took place around Boston, in the United States, in 1911.'

'Somebody tried to raise Mor-Rioghain in America?'

'A man named Jack Callwood. There's no reason why you can't raise Mor-Rioghain anyplace in the world, providing you find the right spot to do it.'

'Was he caught, this Jack Callwood?'

'No. The police nearly had him once or twice, but he disappeared without trace. He sacrificed at least thirty- one women, so he was obviously well into his third attempt to raise Mor-Rioghain.'

'What happened?'

'One of his victims escaped, and raised the alarm.'

'You'll have to tell me more about this. But what about the man who killed Fiona Kelly? Would he have had to start from scratch, and sacrifice another thirteen women, or would the eleven who were murdered in 1915 and 1916 count toward the total?'

'Oh, those eleven would certainly count-so long as all the sacrifices were made in the same place and according to the same strict ritual. All your killer had to do was murder Fiona Kelly and one more girl, and eatherheart, too, and Mor-Rioghain would appear and grant him anything he wanted. Theoretically, of course.

'The killer has to cut all of the flesh off the victim's legs, which is kind of symbolic, you know-so that she can't run away to the netherworld. Then he cuts all the flesh on her arms, and the idea of this is that friendly spirits can't pull her through to the Invisible Kingdom, either. After that, he cuts all the flesh from her face so that nobody in the afterlife will know who she was. Then he cuts her abdomen open so that she can no longer eat or drink, even in the world beyond. He removes her lungs so that she can no longer breathe, and finally her heart is stolen away from her-which represents her soul, her spiritual identity.'

'You said that each of these thirteen women had to be special.'

'That's right. Here, I've made a list for you.' Lucy opened her black leather pocketbook and produced a folded sheet of paper. 'The women have to be sacrificed in this order, so you can see that raising Mor-Rioghain isn't exactly a piece of cake.'