, but they had been thrown into the sea a hundred yards offshore, with all of their belongings, and none of them could swim.
During the night, Paul rolled over onto his back and started to snore. Katie elbowed him and hissed, '
She found herself walking through a dark, dripping abattoir. She wasn't aware that she was asleep. Somewhere close by she could hear a shrill chorus of band saws, and the sound of men whistling as they worked.
She turned a corner and found herself on the killing floor. Five or six slaughter men were standing around steel-topped tables, wearing long leather aprons and strangely folded linen hats. They were nonchalantly cutting up carcasses, and tossing them into heaps. Arms on one heap, legs on another, heads in the opposite corner.
Katie walked toward them, even though the floor was slimy with connective tissue and she could feel the blood sticking to her bare feet. As she came closer, she suddenly saw that the carcasses were human-men, women, and children.
She came up behind one of the slaughter men and lifted her hand to touch him on the shoulder. '
'
'Stop! I'm a police officer!' Katie screamed at the slaughter man. But without hesitation he pushed the head into his band saw. There was a screech of steel against bone, and Katie's face was sprayed with blood.
Katie woke up with a jolt. Paul was still snoring, and rain was spattering against the window. She waited for a few minutes, then she climbed out of bed and went through to the kitchen for a drink of sparkling Ballygowan water. She could see herself reflected in the blackness of the window as she drank directly out of the neck of the bottle. The ghost again, looking back at her.
You need a break, she told herself. She and Paul hadn't had a holiday since February, when they had taken a cheap package to Lanzarote for ten days and it had rained for nine of them. Or maybe she needed a different kind of break. A break from her entire life. A break from pain and violence and kicking down doors to damp-smelling apartments. A break from her guilt about little Seamus.
But she couldn't forget those eleven skulls, lined up higgledy-piggledy beside the excavation where the rest of their bodies were strewn. And she couldn't forget those little rag dolls, dangling from their thighbones. Eleven people, deserving of justice. She just prayed to God that they hadn't suffered too much.
5
Wednesday was colder but very much brighter, and Katie had to wear sunglasses when she drove into the city. The roads were shining silvery wet from the early morning rain, and the Lee was glittering like a river of broken glass.
She took the road that ran alongside the quays, where red-and-white tankers and cattle ships were moored, as well as a three-masted German training clipper. The river divided into two branches as it reached the large Victorian customhouse, so the center of the city was built on an island less than a mile wide and two miles long, connected by more than a dozen bridges and crisscrossed with narrow, devious streets and hidden lanes.
The buildings along the river were painted in greens and oranges and blues, which gaveCork the appearance of somewhere inDenmark , rather than the late-Victorian English-built city it actually was.
Katie drove past city hall and turned south onAnglesea Street to the modern concrete block of the Garda headquarters. As she climbed out of her car in the car park, she saw seven hooded crows sitting on the barbed-wire fence at the back. They stayed there even when she walked close by, their feathers ruffled by the sharp early morning breeze, their eyes as black as buttons.
She remembered that one of the nuns at Our Lady of Lourdes had told her that crows had once been white, but when Noah sent a crow from the ark to look for land, it had never returned, so God had tarred its feathers so that it looked as black as Satan.
She collected a plastic cup of cappuccino from the machine at the end of the corridor, and then walked along to her office. Sergeant Jimmy O'Rourke was standing outside her door waiting for her in a cloud of cigarette smoke.
'Dr. Reidy's office sent us an E-mail this morning. I'll go up to the airport to meet him at half past eleven.'
She hung up her raincoat. Today she was wearing a green jacket in herringbone tweed and a black sweater. 'That's okay,' she said. 'I'd like to pick him up myself.'
'Patrick's left a printout of missing persons on your desk. I've sent Dockery and O'Donovan out to call on all of the farms around the Meagher place. But for what it's worth, I heard something that could be interesting. I called up to the halting site at Hollyhill last night, and one of the Travelers happened to mention that Tomas O Conaill had been seen around Cork, him and some of his family.'
'O Conaill? That devil? I thought he was in Donegal.'
'He was, but he and his family haven't been seen since the middle of August at least. Never mind, wherever he is, I'll find him.'
'Thanks, Jimmy.'
Katie sat down at her desk and wrote 'Tomas O Conaill' on her jotter, and underlined it three times. Two years ago, she had arrested Tomas O Conaill for a vicious attack on a pregnant girl in Mallow, almost disemboweling her with a chisel, but nobody had been prepared to testify against him, not even the girl herself. He was intelligent and charismatic, but he was an out-and-out sociopath who gave the Traveling people a bad name that they didn't deserve-using their cant language and their intense secrecy to conceal his activities from the law.
