A Terrible Beauty

'I love dogs myself, Katie,' he told her, in the softest of voices. 'I had a grand black Labrador once, who died. He was mostly Labrador, anyway. It was almost as bad as losing a friend.'

Katie said, 'A young art student called Siobhan Buckley was abducted from Summerhill two and a half days ago and we still haven't been able to find her. A witness saw her accepting a lift in a car, just like Fiona Kelly. If you know anything about this-if you had an accomplice when you took Fiona Kelly-I need to know who he is, Tomas, and I need to know where to locate him, and very fast. Because if you know where she is, and something bad happens to her, I swear to God that I'll have you in prison for the rest of your life.'

Tomas took out a cigarette, and lit it, and blew out voluminous quantities of smoke. 'I've told you, Katie. I had no accomplice, and I don't know nothing. But if it helps, let me tell you this.'

'Tomas-' Michael Kidney warned him.

'No, Michael,' said Tomas. 'I've done nothing particularly wrong and if it helps Katie with her investigation, then why not? I'll confess it now. Bless me dearest Katie for I have sinned. I didn't find the Mercedes where I said I found it. I saw it in the driveway of the old garden center and there was nobody around and the keys were still in it and I admit to you freely that I was thinking of robbing it. I didn't actually rob it because you turned up, didn't you, like the baddest of bad pennies. But I did look around the cottage and I did see that something fiercely horrible must have happened there, and I was ready to go away when you shouted 'armed garda' at me and I was caught.

'But if this is something to do with the raising up of Mor-Rioghain, let me advise you of this, if you didn't know it already. Mor-Rioghain can only be summoned by a witch, and only a witch can speak the final words which will set Mor-Rioghain free. So if it's a man who took Fiona Kelly and murdered her for the purpose of bringing Mor- Rioghain through from the other side, then he wasn't working alone, as you rightly guess. He must have been working along with a woman.'

'My client didn't say that,' put in Michael Kidney, crossly. 'You can't accept any of that as part of his interview.'

'Shut your gob, Mr. Kidney,' said Tomas O Conaill, placidly. 'What I'm doing now is helping Katie to find the fellow that she's really looking for, because when she finds the fellow that she's really looking for, she'll know that it wasn't me who laid a finger on Fiona Kelly or nobody else.'

'So you think that I should be looking for a man and a woman, together?' asked Katie.

Tomas O Conaill lifted his cigarette as if to say, that's it, you've got it.

Katie stood up. 'Mr. Kidney?I think we'll need to talk to Mr. O Conaill again in the morning.'

'I'm not sure that's going to be convenient.'

'Then make it convenient, if you don't mind, or send somebody else.'

'All right, Superintendent. No need to get upset.'

Gerard O'Brien called her just as she was driving out of Anglesea Street.

'Katie, I think we need to have a talk.'

'Gerard, can't it wait until tomorrow? I'm on my way to the Regional to see Paul.'

'I've been on the Internet all afternoon. I've come up with something. I don't know exactly what it means, but I think you ought to know about it.'

'All right,' she said, steering one-handed toward Sullivan's Quay, with the gray afternoon light reflected in the river. 'Why don't you tell me what it is?'

'It's difficult to tell you everything on the phone. Perhaps you could meet me for a coffee later on, or even dinner.'

'Gerard, I really appreciate it, but this investigation is taking up all of my time, and a number of things have been getting on top of me, and I'd really-'

Somebody blew their car horn at her, and she suddenly realized that the lights at the junction of George's Quay had changed to green.

'Gerard,' she said, 'I can't talk now. Give me an hour and I'll call you right back.'

'I called the university,' he said, and then his voice broke up into a crackle.

She dropped her cell phone onto the seat beside her, and waved her hand in acknowledgment to the car behind her. She drove to the Regional Hospital past St. Finbarr's Cathedral. A few spots of rain spattered onto her windshield, and already it was beginning to grow dark.

She couldn't stop thinking about her interview with Tomas O Conaill. All of the circumstantial evidence indicated that he had at least been a party to Fiona Kelly's murder, even if he hadn't actually dissected her himself. But what if he was right, and the legend of Mor-Rioghaindiddemand a female witch to summon her up from the Invisible Kingdom? Who was the most likely candidate for that?

The only person she could picture was John Meagher's mother, coughing her way from room to room. It was hard to imagine that John alone was capable of killing anybody, even though he was depressed and lonely and financially strapped. But if his mother was acquainted with the ritual, and if his mother had always been aware of the skeletons that were buried under the feed store, she would have known how to finish the sacrifice, how to add two more victims to the toll of eleven, and bring Mor-Rioghain out of the darkness.

John thought that he had seen an apparition by Iollan's Wood, a ghostly wraith that could have been Mor- Rioghain. In the mental state that he was in, his mother could have led him to believe that he had actually seen her, even though it had probably been nothing more than a twist of evening mist, or smoke, or the last of the sunlight falling between the trees.

Katie decided that she would go up to Meagher's Farm again tomorrow morning and talk to John and his mother, separately, and see if she couldn't push this line of thinking a little further. There might be aPsychofactor behind these sacrifices: a mother exerting her influence over her favorite son, in order to give him the strength and the confidence that he hadn't been born with.