Blood Sisters by Graham Masterton Page B

the nun was zipped into a black vinyl body bag. She was then lifted up to the road, laid on a trolley, and wheeled over to the ambulance. Earlier in the day Dr O’Brien had come down to Cork from the State Pathologist’s Office in Dublin so that he could carry out a post-mortem on Sister Bridget. Once he had finished with her, he would be able to turn his attention to this nun, too.
    Detective O’Donovan came over. ‘What about the horses, ma’am?’ he asked her. ‘I could drive over to Dromsligo now if you like and see what kind of progress they’re making.’
    Katie checked her watch, ‘Let me call that fellow from the ISPCA first. It’s getting a bit late now and they’re probably wrapping up for the day. I’ll probably be going over there myself tomorrow morning, unless something else comes up. It’s not a very nice thing to say, but dead humans have to take precedence over dead horses.’
    She took out her iPhone and called the number that Tadhg Meaney had given her. He took a long time to answer and she thought she would have to leave him a message, but she rang him a second time and this time he picked up immediately and said, ‘Hallo? Hallo? Tadhg Meaney here!’ He sounded out of breath.
    ‘Oh, Tadhg, how are you doing? It’s Detective Superintendent Maguire. I’m sorry I couldn’t get out to see you this afternoon. I had a bit of an incident to deal with.’
    ‘That’s all right, superintendent. We’ve only just finished disentangling all the bodies and laying them out. Some of them are in a fierce terrible state, I can tell you.’
    Katie swallowed and hoped he wouldn’t try to tell her exactly how badly the horses had decomposed. ‘You still don’t know how they died, then? If they were alive when they were pitched off the top of the cliff, or already dead?’
    ‘Not yet,’ Tadhg Meaney told her. ‘To be honest with you, we may never know, not unless they died of some disease or other, or they were put down. And there is one thing that’s got us scratching our heads already.’
    ‘Oh yes?’
    ‘We’ve scanned three of the horses already, three that were still in fairly good condition. We found the microchips all right in all three of them, but here’s the puzzle. None of the microchip numbers corresponded with any numbers registered at Weatherbys.’
    ‘Now, that is a puzzle,’ said Katie. Weatherbys was the keeper of the Irish Stud Book and the passport details and microchip numbers of every horse and donkey had to be lodged with them by law.
    Tadhg Meaney said, ‘The mystery is, superintendent, why would you bother to microchip a horse at all if you weren’t going to register it? As far as we can work out, these horses aren’t just dead. Legally, they never existed in the first place.’

10
    The next morning was so dark and thundery that Katie had to switch the lights on in her office. She had managed to eat some of John’s smoked chicken stew the previous night and this morning she hadn’t suffered morning sickness at all. She had slept well, too, and if she had dreamed about the disembowelled nun, she didn’t remember it.
    She read all of the messages that had been left on her desk, and signed all her letters, and she was ready to leave for Dromsligo when Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán came into her office, holding up a sheet of paper.
    ‘Sister Rose just emailed me a plan of the convent garden,’ she said. ‘She must have had to wait until all the other sisters were meditating.’
    She laid the plan down on Katie’s desk. The convent garden was a large rhomboid, just under a third of a hectare, with walls on the east and south sides separating the convent from the housing estate next to it. Under the east wall there was a vegetable garden, and under the south wall a wide herbaceous border. In the middle of the herbaceous border, about twenty-five metres from where it met the east wall, Sister Rose had drawn a cross. She hadn’t written anything on the plan, not