ritual obviously didn't work?'
'Who says it didn't work?' said Lucy. 'For all we know, Morgana may have given him everything he asked for, only he kept coming back for more.'
'Well, yes,' said Katie, trying not to sound schoolmistressy. 'But that's only if you're prepared to accept that witchcraft actually works.'
Lucy gave a little shrug. 'When it comes to Celtic mythology, Katie, I try to keep a very open mind. Especially when it comes to fairies.'
'All right, then,' Katie conceded. 'What happened next?'
Gerard finished the last slice of black pudding and earnestly wiped the salad dressing from the bottom of his plate with a piece of bread. 'The police waited and two days later the man came back to collect his car. He was arrested and taken to Munster police headquarters. The police chief interrogated him for three days but he refused to say anything except that his name was Jan Rufenwald and that he was an engineer from Hamm. He knew nothing about any missing women and he denied owning the car.'
'Sounds familiar,' said Katie.
'Anyway,' Gerard went on, 'Jan Rufenwald was supposed to appear in front of the courts in Munster on July5, 1914, but by that time Germany was in a state of turmoil because they were already at war with France and they were only days away from going to war with Britain, and for one reason and another his appearance was delayed. On July 7 he managed to escape from his holding cell at the courtroom and he was never seen again.
'A witness said that he saw a woman in a brown dress leaving the court building by way of a staircase at the back. My doctor friend guesses that Jan Rufenwald had a female accomplice who helped him to escape. Either that, or he got away dressed in women's clothing.
'There was a huge manhunt for him, all over Westphalia. The newspapers called him 'The Monster of Munster,' and they circulated an artist's impression of him as far away as Hannover in the east and the Dutch border to the west. It was then that the police in Recklinghausen said that a man answering Jan Rufenwald's description had been seen around the town in the late summer and autumn of 1912, at a time when over seventy women vanished; and the police in Paderborn recognized him as a 'Willi Hakenmacher' who had been on their wanted list since the winter of 1911, when literally uncountable numbers of women of all ages disappeared without trace. The investigation was disrupted by the war, and eventually discontinued, but contemporary police records suggest that Jan Rufenwald was probably responsible for the murders of at least four hundred women, maybe even more.'
Lucy had been listening to all of this intently, and when Gerard had finished she sat back and said, 'Incredible. Absolutely incredible.'
'You know something about this?' Katie asked her.
'It's extraordinary. It's exactly like the Callwood murders that I was telling you about. I mean, we could be talking about the same guy.'
'These were the murders in Boston that you were talking about?'
'That's right. Thirty-one women ended up missing from all over the Boston area. Before they disappeared, several of them were seen by eyewitnesses talking to a man in an army uniform.'
Gerard said, 'You're right. That
'Think about it-this was well before the days of radio or television or the Internet. You didn't get copycat behavior spreading around the world in a matter of hours.'
'Was this fellow ever caught?'
'Almost. He got into a conversation with a young woman called Annette Songer in a grocery store in Dedham, which is a suburb southwest of the city. Annette Songer was a spinster who had something of a reputation for reading people's horoscopes, so she fitted the pattern of women who have to be sacrificed to Mor- Rioghain-'a fortune-teller with no children.' Jack Callwood offered to give her a ride home. She had a lot to carry so she accepted. But as soon as she got into the car he drove off in the opposite direction and refused to turn around. She struggled with him and he hit her several times, breaking her jaw. There was a long report about it in
'Annette Songer pretended to be unconscious, and when the car stopped and the man got out to open a gate, she climbed out and ran away. She went immediately to the police, but by the time they arrived at the house where the man had been staying, he had gone. The man's landlady said that he had always been quiet and polite and always paid the rent on time, but 'he had a look in his eye which made my heart beat slower.'
'Police searched the house and dug up the garden. They found the bones of at least twenty women, all with little rag dolls in their thighbones.
'They set up one of the biggest dragnets ever seen?just like the manhunt in Germany, from the sounds of it. Remember that there were very few cars on the roads in those days, so it wasn't easy for Callwood to get away. He was spotted in New London, Connecticut, heading west, and then again in Westport. A police roadblock was set up and he had to abandon his car.
'Police tracked him as far as New York, and his picture was published on the front page of every Manhattan newspaper. On May 2 a clerk from the Cunard office on Fifth Avenue came forward and said that a man looking like Jack Callwood had bought a ticket from him on the morning of June 29, to sail to Liverpool, England, on May 1.
'A wireless message was sent to the ship he was sailing on, and the captain ordered a thorough search, but there was no sign of Callwood anywhere on board. Five days later, when the ship was sailing around the southern coast of Ireland, she was torpedoed by a German submarine and sank with the loss of more than a thousand lives.'
'My God,' said Katie. 'The
'Yes,' said Lucy.
'So even if he was on board-' Gerard began.
'That's right. Every surviving passenger was accounted for, and Callwood wasn't among them. The New York police even asked the Irish Constabulary in Cork to interview every male survivor, just to make absolutely sure that Callwood hadn't taken on a false identity.'
