The Seventh Body

by Catherine Kirwan

Genres: Noir; Thrillers

Synopsis

After decades of dereliction and inner-city neglect, Barrack Street, Cork is finally being excavated. The work uncovers the skeletal remains of six men, scattered around the site, their hands and feet all bound, all clearly killed violently, but many decades, even centuries, ago.

When a seventh body is found, Detective Garda Alice McCann knows immediately this one is different. It's female, for a start, and considerably more recent. Who was she? And who killed her?

Alice is determined to find the truth and bring the killer to justice - and, desperately seeking a way back to who she used to be, she also senses that this might be the case to do it.

But powerful forces are determined to stop her. Cork is small, with all kinds of hidden connections, and plenty of people who used to be friends, who now live very different lives... But their shared history unites them. And their secrets.

Release date: March 6, 2025

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 320

Sample

COMING UP TO MIDDAY, THE DOOR BURSTS IN. Detective Sergeant Sadie O’Riordan. Her hair in a messy ponytail as usual, but she has on a black suit jacket, a white T-shirt tucked into black trousers, and black Asics trainers. Normally in the station, she wears a grey hoodie and brown leather Birkenstocks with thick socks.

She narrows her eyes. ‘What are you doing? Are you hiding or something?’

‘No?’ It comes out like a question.

She makes a point of looking around. At the grimy disused interview room. The slowly collapsing mountain of bloated document boxes in one of the corners. The dim October morning filtering queasily through windows not cleaned in a decade or three.

Looking at me straight again, she says, ‘There’s no one else here so it’s just you and me. Get your butt out of that chair. Unless you’re welded to it. Are you?’

I press my fingernails hard into my palms and stand up.

‘Apparently not,’ she says.

Snapping my laptop shut, I stuff the loose pages I’ve been working on into a file cover and follow her out through the general office – quiet but far from empty, I notice – down the hall and stairs to the back door. She’s taller than I am, with a longer stride, so it’s an effort to keep up. Full disclosure, I haven’t exactly been beating a path to the gym lately.

❖

I’ve spent half the morning slogging through the statements for the burglary of a semi-detached house in Deerpark. Parsing the statements line by line. Listening to the recording of the complaint call that I requested specially and saved to a folder marked ‘VARIOUS’ on my computer. Doing all this – overdoing it – even though the case is as low level as it gets. Even though there used to be a time when an investigation like this wouldn’t have cost me a thought.

Yeah, well, it does now. It’s not just this one either. These days, I agonise over everything, second-guessing myself so often that I feel like someone permanently going the wrong way on an escalator.

I’ve ended up as lead detective on the Deerpark burglary because Fintan Deeley, the original lead, has gone up in the world. Because, in an ironic twist, he’s been granted a dream transfer to the Garda National Bureau of Criminal Investigation – the GNBCI – in Dublin.

To the place I used to work, in other words, and I can’t say it doesn’t sting a little, or even a lot. Apart from anything else, Deeley’s younger than me. Yet he’s risen, while I’m lucky to be clinging on here by my fingernails.

❖

In the car park I say, ‘You told me there was no one else here.’

‘You’ve got to get back on the horse sometime, Alice,’ Sadie says. She throws the keys at me. I feel a foolish sense of achievement that I manage to catch them without fumbling. She says, ‘You might get lucky. It actually could be a horse. I read somewhere that they used to bury horses’ heads beneath the floors of houses for luck, I don’t know, to keep the devil or the fairies away. Might be one of those. But whatever it is, it’s no longer alive. You up for that?’

I feel the wind go out of me but manage to ask, ‘Where are we headed?’

‘The big building site around the middle of Barrack Street.’

‘On the right going towards town?’

‘That’s the one.’

After starting the engine, I roll down the driver’s-side window but traffic is heavy. We climb at crawling pace along the crammed, potholed streets, moving from riverside to higher ground, and the fresh cool air I need never comes. By the time we get to where we’re going, my hands are leaving sweat marks on the steering wheel and I know that my face is as red as ketchup even though I don’t dare look in the mirror to check.

Two high-vis-vested uniformed members shift the barrier erected at the four-way junction with Noonan’s Road and Green Street, allowing our unmarked vehicle to pass. When we get through, on Sadie’s ‘Here’s fine,’ I swing the car into a tidy spot in front of Broderick’s chemist at the top of the street. Behind us, on Bandon Road, is the Gallows pub.

Sadie pulls the elastic band from her hair – it’s shoulder length – and gives it a quick comb through with her fingers, retying it more securely in a tight bun at the nape of her neck. I reach into the back seat for my GARDA-emblazoned rain jacket, a handy reminder of who I’m supposed to be.

We get out. She flips open the boot, hands me a white suit and a pack of shoe covers. ‘You’ll be fine,’ she says, and my face gets even hotter as I realise she’s noticed my discomfort.

But the short stroll downhill through the drizzle does me some good. We’re walking on what used to be the main access route into the city from the west, a narrow road more suited to horse and foot traffic than motorised transport. The majority of the buildings along here are two or three storeys high, most at least a hundred years old, many older. Every door and window on the street and the skinny side alleys off it used to hold a shop or pub or other business, not all of them legal. If we had the time, and listened closely enough, maybe we could hear the ghosts.

‘I told you you’d be fine,’ she says, as we reach the site. ‘Now, breathe, take notes and as many photos as you can. Keep a log. That’s why you’re here. Nothing you haven’t done a million times before. It’s like riding a bike.’

‘No probs, skipper,’ I say, double-blinking like a faulty windscreen wiper.

Immediately inside the site perimeter, we suit up, don hard hats and bend to put on our shoe covers. She finishes faster, presumably because her hands aren’t shaking. Pulling a notebook and pen from the inside pocket that also contains my phone, I go after her.

BEHIND PROTECTIVE HOARDINGS THAT PROMISE forty-six new apartments, the building site is extensive. What used to be here has been demolished, but nothing has been erected to replace it yet. It feels bleak and eerily quiet, the giant yellow and black machines stalled and empty.

I find Sadie in front of a Portakabin, surrounded by construction workers, silent and serious-looking. I stand beside her and listen. The first thing I find out is that the man facing her isn’t a builder. Unshaven and slightly hunched, he has longish grey hair and looks about sixty.

‘Yeah, right,’ he says. ‘We’ve been kind of expecting something like this. Watching for it. We’re less than five hundred metres from the old gallows field up in Greenmount and there were numerous battles fought around here over the centuries too. It could be Viking, possibly, though it’s not deep enough, I think, on my initial assessment. After that, take your pick. The Nine Years War, maybe? The Williamite War? We can’t say with certainty yet, but . . .’

‘You reckon it’s probably old,’ Sadie says. She turns to me, ‘Detective Garda Alice McCann, this is Dr Tim Hanna, the resident . . . Em, what are you? What’s your title?’

‘I’m the director of excavations,’ he says, ‘because we’re in a historic part of the city. I’m here under one of the planning conditions.’ He grins like it’s Christmas Day and Santa Claus has been extra generous.

I take down his name and contact details. Sadie nods her approval. As I write, I breathe more easily with every word. Old is nothing to worry about. Old is as okay as it gets.

‘Tell us what happened, Tim,’ Sadie says.

‘It was shortly after eleven and the lad here, Johnny Mac,’ he gestures to the man standing behind him, ‘was digging out to the rear of what used to be Bertie Allen’s pub.’

‘Digging out how? By hand?’ she asks.

‘He was using a digger. We take the site down in layers. What’s below is normally older than what’s above. Archaeologists call it the rule of superposition. It’s based on geological . . . Yeah, I guess you don’t need to know that. When we find something that looks interesting, it’s then we dig by hand. I was observing the works when I noticed a change in the soil conditions that led me to suspect an event.’

‘An event?’ Sadie asks.

‘A change in colour. A cut into the level of the earth that might indicate something, a burial or . . . Anyway, I waved at Johnny Mac and told him to stop the machine. I then entered the area myself and, after some further excavation, I uncovered a section of what appear to be human skeletal remains. Given the depth, it’s a possible criminal-law issue. I called for a halt to work and, as per protocol, I alerted An Garda Síochána and the city archaeologist. Uniformed gardaí arrived within about fifteen minutes and they set up an exclusion zone.’

‘And the coroner’s been notified too, obviously,’ Sadie says. ‘Come on, let’s have a look.’

She and Dr Hanna set off at a diagonal across the open rutted ground. I hang back to take the name and contact details of the JCB driver: Johnny McDonagh from Galway, age thirty-four and as sulky as a teenager. That bleached, rangy west of Ireland look about him and eyes of the palest blue. Working via a construction agency. Here a few weeks. Specialist archaeological digger and mini-digger driver.

‘Not intending on staying around long,’ he says. ‘Soon as the job’s done, I’m off.’

I make a note for myself to double-check his home address with our guys up his way. He’s a link in the potential chain of evidence so we have to be able to track him down if need be. Although, with an attitude like that, you’d hope to God he’d never have to give evidence.

Another man introduces himself. ‘Artur Lewandowski. Site foreman. You need anything, you ask me. No one else.’ A bear of a man with a delicate pink-skinned face, he says, ‘The body is this way.’

YOU DON’T SEE IT COMING, THE THING THAT derails you. That’s what I told other people, my family, my work friends, before they stopped calling. Truth is, back of it all, I’ve always known there’s a flaw in me, that if something’s going well, no matter how long it takes, I’ll wreck it. I did my best to hide it, my flaw, worked so hard, but there was no escaping it.

Inside the inner cordon, there’s a big tarpaulin erected on steel poles over the dig area and, beneath the makeshift tent, a lamp lights the scene.

I ask, ‘Who erected the tent?’

Dr Hanna replies, ‘We did. To protect the area. After we saw that.’ He points to the indistinct line of earth that indicates the grave site. ‘That’s the fill there,’ he says, ‘where the earth was replaced on top of the body.’

It doesn’t look like much – less of a different colour than a marginally different grade of the same colour – but he’s the expert. I take notes and more photographs than we’ll ever need with my phone. I’m not the official photographer but I’m using my phone to keep a record of initial impressions of the scene. It’s essential work because, if this does end up being declared a crime scene, every stage of the process must be noted. You can’t predict what defence counsel will seize on. As I know to my cost.

Sadie will make an assessment, based on what we discover, and report back to the superintendent. He’s the one who designates it as a crime scene or not. For now, we’re acting as if it is, because a case is always live until it isn’t.

Dr Hanna gets down on his knees, steadying himself on one of the thick planks of scaffolding wood edging the digging area. He’s wearing milky latex gloves, his large bony hands like monstrous chicken feet. Leaning carefully over the dig area, he points to the item that caused him to alert the authorities. It looks like a dark brown stick.

‘It’s too big to be anything but a femur, a thigh bone,’ Hanna says, straightening up again. ‘Now that you’re here, can I continue?’

Sadie says, ‘Given what you’ve said about the likely age of the find, I don’t see why not. But you’ll need to wear one of these outfits just in case.’ She unzips and digs out the car keys. ‘Detective McCann will sort you out.’ She hands me the keys. ‘Fast as you can. Bring a few. And extra masks, shoe covers and gloves.’

❖

The crowd of builders has moved from the Portakabin to the edge of the inner cordon around the tented area by the time I return. I pass a suit, gloves, mask and shoe covers to Dr Hanna.

I say to him, ‘You’ll need new gloves, and you should put up the hood. Your hair.’

‘Do you not like it?’ he asks.

‘I just mean . . .’

He laughs. ‘It’s not my first rodeo.’

Sadie addresses the builders like their hearing-aid batteries are running low. ‘Move away, lads.’ She turns to me then and, not quietly enough for my liking, says, ‘Keep them back. Remember why you’re here. Make yourself useful.’

She’s treating me like a raw recruit but my anger morphs into shame as I recall that, in the months since I’ve moved here, I’ve given her no reason to think she can rely on me.

After Hanna lowers himself into the trench – hip height and the size of two jagged double beds – I side step to a spot beside the lamp so that my photographs will be well-lit.

‘Here goes,’ Hanna says, but he doesn’t move straight away. He stands and surveys the area afresh, his head bent, arms hanging loosely by his sides. He holds a small trowel in his right hand and a tiny scraping tool in the other.

He kneels and, painstakingly slowly, centimetre by centimetre, removes the soil to the left of the original excavation area. As he works, I monitor the smell: reassuringly musty. In time, he exposes a second, third and fourth bone, all smaller than the first.

He looks up. ‘This is part of the ribcage,’ he says, ‘not where I’d expect to find it.’

I hear myself ask, ‘What does it mean?’ My voice sounds strange to me.

He replies, ‘I’ll tell you as soon as I know.’

The minutes slow and the buzz of the city quietens. The only thing that matters is happening down in the trench in front of me. Hanna moves back to the line of the first bone and concentrates on the area above it, using the tools and his gloved fingers gently to prise the earth free. All of a sudden, he stops and angles his head backwards so that he can look up at Sadie. He pulls down his mask, smiles.

‘More ribs, DS O’Riordan,’ he says. ‘I think there are two of them.’

HE’S WRONG. THERE ARE FOUR SKELETONS IN THAT grave, all of them tea-stained the colour of the rich earth in which they’re buried. The bodies lie head to toe, face up in a terrible rictus, their arms and hands stretched behind their backs, as if they’ve been bound, knees bent, their feet likely to have been bound too, though nothing remains of the bindings or of any clothing.

Hanna says, ‘The way they’re buried appears hurried and disrespectful. Careless.’

A few days later, a double burial is discovered, upper bodies only, both lower skeletons missing, perhaps as a result of previous building work or another post-mortem disturbance, any alternative explanation being too terrible to contemplate. Six bodies in total in less than a week.

A shock to see them, the skeletons, I’m not going to say otherwise, but the shock fades. None of them is my fault or my responsibility. They’re dead a long time – a few hundred years at least, according to Dr Hanna’s estimate, though the full set of scientific tests will take time – which means that the chances of a garda inquiry are zero.

But the word is out that bones have been discovered and half the town wants to drop in for a gawk. Quickly, the policing emphasis switches to management, and to health and safety. Inside the excavation area, the archaeologists are running the show. Uniformed mules from the Bridewell are in charge of securing the site overall and ensuring only authorised persons have access, but the exclusion zone is now limited to the site itself and the footpath just outside it. For days, I’ve been the only detective on the street. I’ve had little to do and a lot of time to think.

Like how it is that a person who died hundreds of years ago matters less than someone who died more recently, and why. The quick answer? Because there’s no one left behind to miss them, and no one alive to blame.

Which brings me to another question. What am I still doing here? The others don’t need or want me. I’m like a lonely kid at Halloween, wandering aimlessly in my white crime-scene costume day after day, taking a photo or note every so often.

That said, I’m glad of the mask. Wish I could wear it the whole time.

‘You’re performing an important role for us,’ Sadie had lied, as she shook the dust off and returned to base – metaphorically, because there’s no actual dust. As more rain falls and more boffins arrive to examine the finds, the boggier it becomes, wellies a prerequisite for navigating the puddles and the clinging, sucking, Glastonbury-worthy mud.

I think back to something else Sadie said, in her office at Coughlan’s Quay a few days before all this. ‘Just a chat,’ she’d said, ‘about how things are going for you.’ She was smiley. Warm, encouraging, leaning back in the chair, all casual like.

She’d beckoned me in as I was passing on my way back from the photocopier. Pulled out a seat for me and shut the door so fast I didn’t realise what was happening. Hadn’t a chance to escape. Felt jolted backwards at first, but I gathered myself. ‘I’m doing great. Good. Really feel like I’m starting to fit in.’

‘Glad to hear it,’ she said, after a pause that felt longer than it was, ‘but remember you’ve plenty of other options, both within and outside the force. No shame in any of those choices either. You made detective however many years ago, but it’s not a life sentence. What d’you reckon? Any thoughts?’

‘One or two, maybe.’

‘Right,’ Sadie said, and then, her tone just as casual, ‘because there’s no room for passengers here at Coughlan’s Quay.’

‘I get that, of course.’

‘And there is the formal date with the Cig. Which is out of my hands, obviously. Four weeks, to be precise, actually, that meeting.’

She meant my upcoming performance review with Inspector Feeney. Which is make or break for me. If I don’t pass muster, I’m out. Back in uniform at best. Trouble is, Feeney’s an old-school hard man. Less carrot, more stick.

‘Shape up or ship out, McCann,’ he says to me, every time I pass him in the hall.

I said to Sadie, ‘I haven’t forgotten about the review.’

‘I didn’t think you had.’ Another smile. Less convincing, this one. ‘And remember, my door’s always open. Unless it’s shut, of course. Might be doing my nails, or something.’

I laughed slightly more than the joke deserved.

‘You don’t do enough of that, you know,’ Sadie said. ‘Go on, get to it.’

After the ‘just a chat’, I’d scuttled back to sit at what should have been my desk. Thirty seconds I lasted before retreating again to what had become my semi-official lair, the aforementioned grubby interview room, rarely used by anyone except yours truly, knowing that when Sadie passed by later she’d be annoyed or disappointed not to see me in my rightful place.

A feeling of drenching uselessness then, even though Sadie and I aren’t far apart in age, and could easily be the same rank by now. Not just the same. Me outranking her wouldn’t have been beyond the bounds of possibility at one stage. Now the chances of that are as remote as an undiscovered moon in a faraway galaxy.

Funny thing is, I used to see it as my superpower on the job. My flaw, I mean. I thought it gave me X-ray vision. Used to think, if inside I’m a mess, I can see other people.

Suspects, I mean, scrabbling to come up with the right story, the one that’ll get them out of trouble. I’d probe and I’d poke till they’d crack open like a Kinder Egg. Till they’d spill their spangly guts for me, signing confessions like stage-door autographs.

Whenever it happened, I never thought it was because I was good at my job. I thought it was because I’d got lucky that one day.

That it was only a matter of time before I was found out.

 

Fallen.

Faded.

Factories closed.

Think Detroit.

Think Cork too.

Nothing left but the tunes.

The beats.

Deep and low and slow.

Smog overhanging the city.

Keeping the music in.

I’VE TAKEN TO CALLING ON ARTUR LEWANDOWSKI, the foreman, in his Portakabin, when I hit the site in the mornings. A tad later as we enter week two, but not indecently so: my ins and outs are being faithfully recorded by whatever hapless junior is staffing the access point.

‘How’s tricks?’ he asks, with a rising cadence, the Kraków accent nearly vanquished by a decade and a half on Leeside. My own native tones are returning too, growing stronger as the months pass.

‘Ah, sure you know yourself, like,’ I say.

‘This fucking shit,’ he says. ‘My completion schedule is gone out the window. All I want to do is build my fucking apartments. Why such a big delay?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ I say. ‘It’s different from what I’m used to as well.’

Which brings me back to why I’m still here.

Out of harm’s way is the conclusion I’ve come to. Out of sight, out of Sadie’s mind. And Inspector Feeney’s. An attempt to buy me time before the review. Or maybe she thinks the fresh air will help to shake me out of my paralysis.

If that’s her reason, despite the constant rain, she’s not wrong. The space she’s given has led me into considering things. These last few nights at home, and during the endless days on the site, however vaguely, I’ve started turning over what the other options she mentioned in her office might be. I haven’t got much beyond surmising that a jump is better than a push, that honest labour somewhere else has to be an improvement on the hiding and worrying I’ve been doing. That a complete change of scene might be what I need. Somewhere far away from the reminders. Away from humans in general, maybe.

‘Fucksake,’ Artur says, ‘you want coffee?’

‘Just had one, thanks.’ His coffee is stuck-together mouse-coloured powder and comes out of a jar. ‘What’s going on anyway?’

‘Moving inside the back wall of the pub today, at fucking last,’ he says, ‘where it used to be. I had to bring back a couple of guys to help lift the floor. Fucking archaeologists, destroying my fucking life. You too, huh?’

‘Chalk it down,’ I say, an expression I haven’t used since I don’t know when. It’s all coming back to me. Whether I want it to or not.

Like the job I used to do. Not the whole job, part of it. Something I got diverted into because I got results. Interviewing sex offenders. Nasty men. The nastier the better.

They liked me. Said things to me they wouldn’t say to anyone else. Because I was nice to them. I smiled. Made them consoling cups of sweet tea.

I was thinner back then. Smaller. They liked that too.

I LEAVE ARTUR AND CIRCLE AROUND THE BACK of the site, approaching the excavation from the rear. Easier to move than yesterday. Someone has laid a path of hardcore, rough but serviceable, and a big improvement on what was here.

The former Bertie Allen’s pub looks like it’s been bombed from the air. The roof is gone, but for a few horizontal laths, like bony fingers, stretching across the gap. The front and one of the side walls are all that remain of the structure, two sides of a right-angled triangle, steel girders holding them in place.

Everything is gone from inside too, no bar counter or shelving or tables or benches. The marks left by removed ceilings, the rectangles in the peeling paint where pictures once hung and windows blocked with rotting plywood give the only clues to what was here before.

Artur’s men have already lifted some of the flagstones from the floor and stacked them by the side wall. They’re rectangular, in good condition, and look like high-quality stone, the kind of thing you’d find in a salvage yard. I figure that an enterprising member of the building crew – Artur himself maybe – will ensure that that’s exactly where they’ll end up.

I take up a position beside one of the lamps. There are three today, and the extra two are needed: with the heavy cloud cover, and despite the missing roof, the walls cast more shadows and steal more light than you’d expect. It’s presumably for that reason that, although the archaeology team have put up the tent poles, they’ve held off raising the tarpaulin. Plus, by now, it’s several days since anything’s been found.

And yet I sense an air of anticipation, but it’s not about what might be lying beneath the floor. It’s because this is the last plot to be explored. After this, the builders will be able to start and the archaeologists will move on to their next dig, or to writing up this one. I’ll be going too, back to Coughlan’s Quay station and the decision I have to make. Before it’s made for me.

As the morning passes, the work goes on with an almost pleasant hum. The floor is being excavated in strips. As each length is removed, the mini-digger, operated by Johnny McDonagh, moves in. I’m watching closely but I’m wearing ear protectors and the effect is almost hypnotic. The flagstones lining up. The careful digging and scraping and shifting of earth. Mission accomplished, or near enough.

But in the early afternoon, as everything feels like it’s winding down for the day, the director of excavations, Dr Hanna, starts to wave frantically. Surprised, I yank back my right ear protector. He’s shouting, ‘Stop the machine. Stop it now.’

I step forward. ‘What is it?’

Hanna points to an area near where the rear corner of the pub would have been, by the s. . .