A Terrible Beauty

'It's a possibility. Especially since we still haven't been able to find Siobhan Buckley, and Mor-Rioghain needs one more sacrifice before she can make her appearance.'

'You're beginning to sound as ifyoubelieve in Mor-Rioghain.'

'I'm simply trying to think like our killer, that's all. Or killers.Theybelieve she exists, and because of that, I have to believe in her, too.'

'And do you have any suspicions about who they might be?'

'John Meagher told me that he actually saw Mor-Rioghain. Or a figure of some kind, anyway, standing in the field where he found Fiona's body.'

'You're kidding me.'

'He swore it. He said he saw it as plain as the nose on his face.'

'He's probably hallucinating. It must have been a hell of a shock, finding Fiona's body like that.'

'All right. But when you think about it, John Meagher has a very compelling motive for wanting to raise up a spirit like Mor-Rioghain-a spirit who can help people to solve all of their problems. He hates farming, he's gradually going bankrupt. And his mother?well, she may not be a real witch but she certainly looks like one. And she might very well have known about the bones buried under the feed store. After all, she's been living at Meagher's Farm ever since she was nineteen years old.'

'Do you have any material evidence that the Meaghers could have been involved?'

'None. We searched the fields, the outbuildings, the farmhouse. We even dug up the floor of the piggery.'

'In that case, maybe you can get them to confess? Always presuming they did it, of course.'

'Easier said than done. If they did it together, mother and son, it's going to be very difficult to break that kind of a relationship. I had to deal with a father-and-daughter situation a couple of years ago, in Carrigaline. The father got together with the daughter and crushed his wife's head under his tractor, with the daughter actually holding her mother down. I knew they'd done it, and they knew that I knew that they'd done it, but I could never get either of them to admit it, and they're still free today. Jesus, I saw them shopping in Roches Stores.'

'Maybe I can help you,' said Lucy, propping herself up on one elbow. 'After all, I know just about everything there is to know about Mor-Rioghain, and how she's summoned up, and the rituals that have to be performed to persuade her to help you. If you and I can talk to the Meaghers together? well, there's a possibility that we could get them to slip up, isn't there?'

Katie shook her head. 'I think you've been watching too many American cop shows.'

'Unh-hunh. I hardly ever watch TV. I did a two-year postgraduate course in business psychology at UC Santa Cruz. I was trained to ask people the kind of questions that show them up for what they really are. Ambitious, boastful, deceitful, whatever. Whoever killed Fiona Kelly must have been supremely confident that he or she was going to get away with it, and when somebody's as confident as that they'reveryprone to making mistakes. They think that everybody else is stupid, that's why, so they don't bother to work on their stories.'

Katie thought about that for a moment and then said, 'All right. Why don't you and I take a trip up to Knocknadeenly tomorrow morning-say around ten?'

Lucy laid her hand on Katie's shoulder. 'The main thing is-are you feeling better?'

'Thanks to you, yes.'

'So what are you going to do now?'

Katie looked into her rain-gray eyes and she could almost have loved her. 'I'm going home now, I suppose.'

'I don't know why you don't close your eyes for an hour. It's only seven.'

'No, I have to get back.'

Lucy leaned over her, and stroked her hair, and traced a pattern around her eyebrows with her fingertips, and touched her lips. 'Close your eyes. It'll do you good, I promise you. In the gym, they always make you take a short sleep, after a massage. Otherwise you walk out feeling like your brains have turned into scrambled eggs.'

'It's only seven?'

'Six fifty-five, as a matter of fact.'

There was no question that Katie felt overwhelmingly drowsy. She felt almost like Dorothy, wandering through the field of poppies inThe Wizard of Oz. The hotel room was warm and her toweling bathrobe was warm and there was Lucy lying next to her, shushing her and stroking her and touching her ears. She had never even allowed Paul to touch her ears, because they were sensitive, but Lucy tenderly ran her fingers around them as if they were winter roses, and she was coaxing the scent from their petals.

'I should go,' she said, trying to raise her head.

Lucy gently pushed her back down onto the pillow. 'An hour won't do you any harm. And you'll feel much better afterward, I promise you.'

'You'll wake me up, though, at eight?'

Lucy kissed her on the lips. It was totally chaste, but somehow it made Katie feel as if she had discovered a whole new dimension, a mirror world, where everything was still familiar, but everything was back to front. It was alarming, in a way, but it was also strangely alluring.

'I'll wake you up, I promise you.'

Katie lay still for two or three minutes with her eyes still open, but then it seemed as if it was impossible not to close them for a while-only for a minute. When she was a detective sergeant, sitting in a squad car watching a house all night, she had developed the capability of sleeping for three or four minutes at a time, and she knew that she could still do that now.