A Terrible Beauty

Outside it was clattering with rain. Liam pulled on his overcoat and buttoned it up to the neck. 'I always thought this job was too much for a woman. If Katie's not careful she'll be cracking up.'

'I'd be careful, if I were you,' said Jimmy. 'She's a whole lot tougher than she looks.'

'We'll see,' said Liam. 'Where do you want to go? O'Flaherty's?'

Katie was dreaming that she was walking through a slaughterhouse. Cattle carcasses were heaped on every side, and the whole building reeked of blood. Above her she could see a filthy skylight, clotted with fallen leaves, onto which the rain was ceaselessly pattering. Somewhere, music was playing, echoing and indistinct, as if a radio had fallen down the bottom of a well.The Fields of Athenry.

What are you doing here?somebody whispered, close to her ear.This is a place of death. This is where the Gray-Dolly Man lives, and cuts up people for his own purposes. Women and children, innocent and guilty. He cuts off their arms and legs and saws their screaming heads in half.

She turned a corner and found herself in another part of the slaughterhouse. The floor was glistening with rainwater and strewn with indescribable pieces of flesh and fragments of bone. Not far away a tall man in a strange five-cornered hat was standing at a metal table, feeding carcasses into a band saw. The saw let out a fierce, intermittent scream, and blood and bone was flying everywhere.

Cautiously, she approached him. She lifted her hand to touch him on the shoulder, but as she did so he slowly turned around. She was so shocked that she almost lost her balance. His face was not a face at all, but a mass of crawling beetles.

'Your turn next,' he whispered, between lips that literally dripped with insects. 'Your turn next, and you'd better believe it.'

It was almost ten o'clock now and Gerard was growing irritable. He drew back the sitting-room curtains and peered down the street. It was raining like the Great Flood tonight and he was beginning to suspect that Inspector Fennessy might have decided that he would rather sit at home in front of the TV than visit a professor of Celtic mythology in a large, damp-smelling Victorian apartment that was crowded with books andNational Geographics and empty Bulmer's cider bottles. That was all right by him. He preferred to talk to Katie in any case. He just wished Inspector Fennessy could have had the common courtesy to call him and say so.

Gerard was wearing a partially unraveled sweater of thick green wool that he had bought on a walking holiday in Kerry, and a pair of baggy beige corduroy trousers. In his tiny study, the only light came from his computer, which he had switched on so that he could show Liam Fennessy what he had discovered.

He tried ringing Katie again. But her cell phone rang and rang, and then he was answered by the Eircell answering service. 'If you want to rerecord your message?'

That was the limit. Katie couldn't be found and Liam Fennessy couldn't be bothered to turn up. Gerard believed that he had discovered one of the most dramatic secrets of the twentieth century and when it came down to it, nobody cared. He went back to his study to switch off his computer. He would take his golf umbrella, walk down to Reidy's Vault Bar in the Western Road, and console himself with a few pints of cider.

Just as he had clicked the computer off, however, his doorbell shrilled. He gave an old-womanly cluck of exasperation and went over to the intercom by the front door. 'Inspector Fennessy?'

'It is, yes.'Liam's voice was distorted and barely audible, as if he were standing too far away from the intercom. 'It's raining buckets out here. Are you going to be after letting me in?'

'You're very late. You said twenty minutes. I was just about to go out.'

'I'm sorry, but I'm here now.'

Pressing the entry buzzer, Gerard went back to the study and switched on his computer again. While it booted itself up, he blew his nose on a tiny fragment of crumpled Kleenex. He had really wanted to tell Katie what he had discovered, and Katie alone. He had even rehearsed what he was going to say to her, and he knew how impressed she would have been. Perhaps then she would have looked beyond his plumpness and his combed-over hair and seen what he was really like inside: a man who had all the romance of a mythological hero from the days of Tara and Aileach and Cruachan. All the same, he supposed that it would still be fairly dramatic to tell Inspector Fennessy. 'What I am about to reveal to you, Inspector, will change the way that historians think about the twentieth century forever.'

There was a sharp knock at the door of his apartment, and then another. He called out, 'All right-I'm coming!' and drew back the chain.

Before he could open it properly, the door was kicked with such force that it hit him on the side of the face and he fell back against the door of his coat cupboard. He said, 'What-?' but before he could say anything else a man in a black coat and black balaclava stormed in through the door, seized his sweater, and threw him across the floor, knocking over his coffee table and all his empty Bulmer's bottles.

Gerard tried to stumble to his feet but the man grabbed his sweater yet again, lifting him almost off his feet, and slamming him against the door frame that led to his kitchenette. He felt his shoulder crack, and an indescribable pain in the small of his back.

'What are you doing?' Gerard shrilled at him. 'For God's sake, you're hurting me!'

The man said nothing, but twisted one of his arms behind his back and pressed him against the wall beside his study door.

'The gardai are coming!' gasped Gerard. 'I just called them and they'll be here at any minute.'

'Shut up,' the man ordered him, calmly.

'I'm telling you the truth, I've got an appointment with Inspector Liam Fennessy. That's why I let you in. I thought you were him.'

'And what were you going to tell him?'

'Nothing. Just some research I've been doing, that's all.'