A Terrible Beauty

Paul wrapped his arms around her waist and gave her a kiss on the back of the neck. 'Well, now. How's everything? I saw you on the TV news at eight o'clock. You looked gorgeous. If I wasn't married to you already I would have called the TV station and asked for your phone number.'

She turned and kissed him back. 'I'd have had you arrested for harassment.'

Paul Maguire was a short, pillowy man, only two or three inches taller than she was, with a chubby face and dark-brown curly hair that came down over the collar of his bright green shirt in the 1980s style that used to be called a 'mullet.' His eyes were bright blue and slightly bulging and he always looked eager to please. He hadn't always been overweight. When she had married him seven and a half years ago he had taken a fifteen-inch collar and a thirty-inch waist and had regularly played football for the Glanmire Gaelic Athletic Association.

But five years ago his construction business had suffered one serious loss after another, and his confidence had taken a beating from which he hadn't yet recovered. These days he spent most of his time trying to make quick, profitable fixes-wheeling and dealing in anything from used Toyotas to cut-price building supplies. There were too many late nights, too many pub lunches with men in wide-shouldered Gentleman's Quarters suits who said they could get him something for next to nothing.

'Did you eat, in the end?' Katie asked him.

'I had a ham-and-cheese toastie at O'Leary's. And a packet of dry-roasted.'

'That's not eating, for God's sake.'

'Oh, don't worry about it. I don't have much of an appetite, if you must know.'

'The whiskey's killed it, that's why.'

'Come on, now, Katie, you know what pressure I've been under, working this deal out with Dave MacSweeny.'

'I wouldn't mention Dave MacSweeny and a decent man on the same day. I don't know why you have anything to do with him.'

'He went inside just the once, and what was that for? Receiving a stolen church piano. Not exactly Al Capone, is he?'

'He's still a chancer.'

She went through to the kitchen, with Sergeant still pursuing her feet. Paul followed her as she opened the bread bin and took out a cut bran loaf. 'This is always the way, isn't it? I'm married to the only female detective superintendent in the whole of Ireland , so no matter what I do I have to conduct myself like a saint.'

'Not a saint, Paul. Just a law-abiding citizen who doesn't have any dealings with people who hijack JCBs from public roadworks and smuggle cigarettes through the quays and steal lorryloads of car tires from Hi-Q Motors.'

Paul watched her in frustration as she cut herself a thick slice of red cheddar and started to slice up some tomatoes. 'I'm doing my best, Katie. You know that. But I can't check the credentials of everybody I do business with, can I? They wouldn't give me the time of day if I did. It's bad enough you being a cop.'

Katie sprinkled salt on her sandwich and cut it into quarters. 'Hasn't it ever occurred to you that my being a cop is precisely why they do business with you? Who's going to touch you, garda or villain, when you're Mr. Detective Superintendent Kathleen Maguire?'

Paul was about to say something else, but he stopped himself. He followed Katie back into the living room, stumbling over Sergeant as he did so. 'Would you ever hump off, you maniac?'

Katie sat down and took a large bite of sandwich, using the remote to switch on the television. Paul sat beside her and said, 'Anyway, forget about Dave MacSweeny. How was your day? What's all these skeletons about? They said on the news there was nearly a dozen.'

Katie's mouth was full of sandwich, but with eerie timing her own face suddenly appeared on the screen, standing in the afternoon gloom up at Meagher's Farm, and she turned the volume up.'We can't tell yet how long these people have been buried here, or how they died. We're not excluding any possibility at all. We could be looking at a mass execution or a series of individual murders or even death by natural causes. First of all the remains have to be examined by the state pathologist, and as soon as he's given us some indication of the time and cause of death, you can be sure that we'll be pursuing our inquiries with the utmost rigor.'

'There,' said Katie. 'Now you know as much as I do.'

'That's it? You don't have any clues at all?'

'Nothing. It could have been an innocent family who died of typhus, and who were buried on the farm because they couldn't afford the funerals. Or it could have been eleven fellows who upset somebody nasty in the Cork criminal fraternity.'

'I hope you're not making a point.'

'No, Paul. I'm very tired, that's all. Now how about you taking Sergeant out to do his business, so that we can go to bed and get some sleep?'

While Paul put on his raincoat and took Sergeant for his run, Katie went through to the small room at the back of the house where she kept her desk and her PC. They still called it The Nursery, although they had stripped off the pale blue wallpaper, and the sole reminder of little Seamus was a small color photograph taken on his first and only birthday.

She took her nickel-plated Smith & Wesson .38 revolver out of the flat TJS holster on her hip and locked it in the top drawer of her desk. Then she sat for a long time staring at her reflection in the gray screen of her computer. When she was young she used to sit on the window seat at night, looking out of the window, and imagine that there was a ghostly girl looking back at her out of the darkness. She even used to talk to her reflection, sometimes.Who are you, and what are you doing, floating in the night, and why do you look so sad?

She didn't fully understand why, but today's discovery up at Meagher's Farm had given her a feeling of deep disquiet?as if something terrible was about to happen. The last time she had felt anything like this was late last spring, when the coast guard had discovered the body of a Romanian woman, washed up on the beach at Carrigadda Bay , in her multi-colored dress. During the course of the next few weeks, all along the coastline as far as Kinsale, they had discovered thirty-seven more. Each woman had paid ?2,000 to be smuggled illegally into Ireland