A Terrible Beauty

again. The bones frightened her, and she needed to sleep.

Outside the window, the rain began to clear, and the sun came out, so that a wide rainbow gleamed over Lough Mahon and Passage West, where the ships sailed out of Cork on their way to the ocean.

44

Lucy arrived ten minutes late, wearing a black leather jacket and a thick rollneck sweater of fluffy black angora, and tight black jeans. A large silver cross swung around her neck, studded with dark purple gemstones.

Gerard stood up and knocked his glass of water over. The waitress rushed over to do some frantic mopping with a tea towel while Katie said, 'Gerard, this is Professor Lucy Quinn?Lucy, this is Professor Gerard O'Brien.'

'Very pleased to meet you,' said Gerard. Lucy was at least four inches taller than he was, and he found himself addressing her bosom. 'Katie's been telling me how you saved her from drowning. I'm very impressed.'

Lucy sat down. 'Anybody would have done the same.'

'Anybody who could swim like Flipper,' Katie put in. 'How about a drink?'

Isaac's was always noisy at lunchtime. It was a modern, starkly decorated restaurant that was popular with young Cork businessmen and tourists and middle-aged ladies who had finished their shopping. With the same self- protective instincts as Eamonn Collins, Katie had chosen a table in the alcove right at the back, so that she could see everybody who came in.

'Katie tells me that your university funded your trip here specially,' Gerard remarked, with his mouth full of soda bread. 'I wish Cork was so generous. They won't even send me to Wales to look at Celtic stone circles.'

'Oh, those skeletons at Knocknadeenly were averyrare discovery,' said Lucy. 'As I was telling Katie, the only other similar case we know about happened in Boston in1911. But what really had my department head all fired up was the fact that somebody was actually trying to complete the ritual-you know,now, today.'

'Have you got any more out of Tomas O Conaill?' Gerard asked Katie.

'I'm planning to interview him again this afternoon, but I'm still waiting for DNA tests and some other technical evidence.'

'What do you know about him? It said in the paper that he was a Traveler.'

'He calls himself a Traveler, yes. He's the thirteenth son of a very well-known family of Travelers who spend most of their year in Galway and Donegal. But he had a fight with his father when he was fifteen or sixteen. Blinded him in one eye. After that he went off on his own. He likes to think of himself as the King of All the Travelers, but I don't think you'll find many other Travelers who agree with him.'

'How does he know so much about Celtic ritual? Presumably he never went to school.'

'No?but he told me once that he was taught to read by a schoolmaster who used to live close to the family's halting site near Claremorris, and that the schoolmaster was also a great supporter of Celtic traditions and the Gaelic language. Tomas O Conaill knows everything there is to know about the old superstitions and the old druidic rituals. He seems to believe that he's some kind of chosen descendant of the High Kings of Ireland, and that he possesses supernatural powers.

'Apart from that, he can be very rational at times. He can be charming. He can be amusing. Even-God knows-seductive.'

Gerard and Lucy shared a bottle of Chilean white wine. Katie would have given a week's overtime for a double vodka, but she stayed on the mineral water. Their orders arrived: Gerard had chosen a mixed-leaf salad with Clonakilty black pudding, while Lucy had tempura prawns and Katie had grilled monkfish with clapshot-potato and rutabaga mashed together.

'This is very good,' said Lucy. 'Gerard-Katie said that you had some new research material from Germany.Excitingresearch material, apparently.'

Gerard blushed. 'Yes, wellIthink it is, anyway. I managed to get in touch with a famous criminal historian in Osnabruck, Dr. Franz Kremer. He's written several books about notorious mass murders in Germany and Belgium and Poland.'

Gerard produced a spring-bound notebook filled with rounded, almost childish writing. 'I talked to Dr. Kremer on the phone for almost an hour. He said that between the summer of 1913 and the spring of 1914, more than a hundred and twenty women went missing from towns around Munster, in Westphalia. Before their disappearance, several of them were seen talking to a man dressed in a gray Wehrmacht uniform. Nobody knew who he was. No army units in the area reported any of their soldiers unaccounted for. By Christmas, 1913, the local newspapers were calling himDer Graue Geist?the Gray Ghost.'

'My God,' said Lucy. 'I can't believe it.' But all Katie could think of was the whisper that she had heard in her dreams.'Beware the Gray-Dolly Man,'and of what 'Knocknadeenly' meant in English.The Hill of the Gray People.

Gerard forked too much salad into his mouth, and had to spend a moment getting all the leaves under control. At last he said, 'By chance-on June 4, 1914-a priest in the town of Drensteinfurt happened to see a man in gray army uniform talking to his cook on the opposite side of the town square. The man and the housekeeper left the square together and the priest followed them around the corner where the man had a motorcar parked. The two of them drove off together and of course the priest couldn't follow them, but when his housekeeper failed to return that evening he informed the police.

'Three days later a gamekeeper found the car in a wood. The area was searched with dogs for any sign of the cook, and after only two or three hours the dogs discovered a clearing in the woods where the soil had been disturbed, although it had been cleverly camouflaged with pine needles and twigs. The police dug up the clearing and discovered the bones of ninety-six women, all fleshless. And here's the cruncher-the thighbones of every one of them had been pierced, and every thighbone hung with a little lace doll full of fishhooks and nails and other assorted ironmongery.'

'So,' said Lucy. 'The Gray Ghost had been trying to raise up Morgana.'

'Without much success, by the sound of it,' Katie put in. 'Ninety-six skeletons, divided by thirteen-that means he tried seven times, and was halfway through his eighth attempt. Why do you think he persisted, if the