T
he priest was straining his eyes to read his prayer book when there was a knock at the door. The abbot of the monastery appeared, framed in the doorway, looking tired and anxious.
“Father Fee, there is a man waiting in the hall to see you about an urgent matter.”
Fee looked up in surprise. “In the hall?”
“Yes. It would be helpful if you would take him back to your room and talk to him here.” The abbot’s voice was drained of its usual benevolence. “We don’t want to disturb the peace for our other guests.”
The priest followed the abbot down a corridor toward the stairs that led to the entrance hall. The walls were flaking and peeling. From a large prayer room to the right wafted the reassuring smell of beeswax polish and incense.
Inspector Daly’s first sight of Father Fee was of a gray-faced, elderly man in a black gown worn to a shiny veneer.
“Father, I’m glad to meet you at last,” said Daly, stretching out his hand. “I’m here to talk about Joseph Devine.”
The features of the priest’s face bulged with anxiety, like a shellfish too big for its cavity. He clung to the banister.
“You’re too late. He’s dead.”
“I know. My name is Inspector Celcius Daly. I’m investigating his murder.”
Again, the priest’s pale face appeared to undergo a slight expansion and contraction. “You had better come with me,” he said quickly.
Daly was led to a small, sparsely furnished room. He sniffed a complex holy odor compounded of incense, wine, soap, and old books, which brought him back instantly to his schooldays. A desk was covered with papers, and an opened sketchpad showed an unfinished drawing of the monastery’s landscaped gardens. In a corner sat an unused easel and a set of watercolors. An image of the Sacred Heart on the wall drew a gloomy mantle of suffering around itself.
“It had always been a plan of mine to take up painting when I had the time,” said the priest, following Daly’s eye.
“I thought it would be a good excuse to sit for hours doing very little other than observing nature. Unfortunately, I’ve found it very unsettling for the mind.”
By now the priest seemed to have collected himself. A faint color pulsed in his cheeks.
Daly thrust forward with the purpose of his visit. “You were called to the scene of Mr. Devine’s murder to give the last rites. I need as much information from you as possible about the telephone caller.”
The priest folded his plump white hands on the rounded perch of his belly. “The caller only said a few words. Enough to identify the location, nothing more.” He furrowed his brow. “From what I remember, he spoke in a monotone, as though he was mouthing a prayer. I couldn’t place the accent.”
“We’ve been anxious to speak to you for the past fortnight,” said Daly. “Why did you come here so quickly after finding the body?”
“I just needed to recharge my batteries. Call it sick leave. I had booked myself in several weeks before.”
The priest appeared to have stopped breathing for a second. As though bracing himself against an upsetting revelation.
“Mr. Devine was a parishioner of yours. Did you know him well?”
“Well enough.” Father Fee glanced away. “Or, at least I thought I did.”
“Did Devine ever speak to you about his past?” Daly’s eyes steadied on the priest’s face, which had slipped into shadow. In his black clothes, and with his face in the dark, the priest looked to have crossed the line between day and night.
“You should know that priests keep their confidences close to their chests.” The priest’s voice was thin. “The confessional booth permits glimpses of the soul’s privacy, which I am utterly forbidden to disclose.”
Daly studied his notepad.
“I’m not looking for details, Father. Just your impressions. Did he seem afraid of anything or worried about his safety?”
The priest switched on a lamp.
“Joseph was a hard-boiled character, but lately his conscience had been troubling him. In this part of the world, the worst thing a person can be is an informer, of any type. Whether it’s to do with smuggling, or someone doing the double, anything at all. What Joseph did, however, was beyond the pale. He knew he was living on borrowed time.”
“Did his death come as a shock?”
The priest slumped in his chair. “There’s nothing as absolute and awesome as death.”
“But what was your reaction when you realized the dead body was Mr. Devine? Was it surprise? Anger?”
“Surprise, no. Regret, perhaps.”
Daly looked up sharply. “What do you mean, regret?”
“I didn’t have much of an idea about what Joseph was involved in, or who his victims were, but I fear I had a hand in his murder.”
“How?”
“I’m not sure. The last time I spoke to him was in the confessional. I’m afraid I can’t divulge what either of us said.” His face was grim. “But I’m convinced I sent him to his death.”
“I need more details. You can’t make a statement like that to a detective in a murder investigation and expect it to be left unquestioned.”
“I wish I could tell more.”
“I’ll get to the bottom of this, sooner or later, even if it takes a court of law.” Daly tried to keep the threat out of his voice.
The priest stood up. “I’ve been trying to make sense of Joseph’s death for the past fortnight. Trying to make it hang together according to some divine law.”
Daly said nothing, letting the silence reel out wider and wider.
Father Fee was standing at the window. “Every morning, the monks here tidy the rooms. They clean the toilets, plump up the pillows, replace the towels. Their satisfaction lies in caring for the troubled souls who come here on retreat. It reminds me of the pleasure I used to get from the confessional. Listening to parishioners’ tales of woe and betrayal. Providing a soothing word here, a formulaic penance there. I was able to construct a jigsaw image of the outside world from their stories. Better listening to it than inhabiting it, I told myself.” He sighed. “But after the Troubles ended, a new type of penitent started coming to my booth. Former paramilitaries, mostly. Men and women trying to pick up the threads of ordinary life again.”
Daly nodded. It wasn’t for nothing that Northern Ireland still had some of the highest Mass attendances in Europe.
“Hour after hour I listened as these men and women hid behind the metal grille and squawked and gibbered their terrible crimes. They came in droves seeking forgiveness. As if salvation could be guaranteed that easily. It was a terrible burden that made me tremble and weep. I felt uncertain about what I was doing, and I suppose that left me malleable to human weakness.
“Joseph Devine’s confession was the first time I ever withheld an absolution. Six months ago, I would have handled his revelation differently. His story was not that strange or evil, and his soul was already beginning its tortuous journey back to salvation. But it was the depth of winter, and I felt old and tired. The booth reeked of alcohol and his sweat. Instead of the usual penance, I asked him to contact a relative of one of the men he had sent to his death. Make some form of reparation and ask for forgiveness. Undo the evil of his actions, so to speak. After he had done that I told him he could return to the confessional and I would finish the sacrament.”
“I need to know who he contacted.”
“I left the choice to him. We only talked in the abstract about his crimes. I knew he was a marked man. Not that that will ease my guilt or give me any peace. It won’t make me feel better thinking he would have died anyway or that he might have been killed a month or two or a year later. I’ve confessed my sin to the abbot, and I’ve prayed harder than at any other time in my life. Forgiveness is not that easy, though. This is my penance. To think that he suffered because I decided not to grant him God’s absolution.”
Daly nodded.
“I want to know where this ends.” The priest’s voice echoed in the bare room.
“What?”
“Your investigation.”
“Cases like these sometimes never end.”
The priest swallowed.
Eventually he asked, “Do you believe in divine intervention?”
“I only piece events together,” replied Daly. “I don’t believe in any pattern or explanation beyond that of criminal motive.”
“What do you believe in, then?” asked the priest, his face inquisitive.
Daly felt suddenly wrong-footed. He gazed out the window. “I believe in death. And life, of course.”
The priest coughed. “As a priest I have to believe in a greater pattern, the possibility of a more mysterious explanation. I saw it perfectly on the morning I gave the last rites to Joseph. Unfortunately, it vanished quickly afterwards, the feeling that God had planned his death, and that I was an intimate part of His intervention.”
The priest appeared embarrassed by his disclosure and joined Daly in looking out the window. The two men stared at the wide lawn dotted with yew trees and lined with laurel hedges. Small groups of men and women walked up and down the paths, deep in thought.
Fallen angels who’d suddenly found mortal shoes, thought Daly. He could almost identify with the priest’s agonizing sense of plummeting, his fall from grace into confusion and self-doubt.
“Are all these people from the religious life?” Daly asked.
“No. They’re from different walks. Mostly they’ve experienced some sort of short-circuit in their relationships or career. They find consolation in the monk’s routine of prayer and meditation.”
The priest glanced at Daly. “You should try it sometime.”
A bell rang somewhere. A door opened and slammed. The figures walking in the garden slowly returned indoors. The air in the room felt oppressive. It smelled of dust and the musty days of winter.
The solution as to why Devine was killed appeared simple enough. Prompted by a troubled conscience and a misguided priest he had revealed his past to someone and they had sought revenge, or employed someone else. The irony of it produced a grim smile on Daly’s face, which he hoped the priest did not notice. The informer had finally informed on himself.
Daly’s eyes were drawn back to the view from the window. It was like a picture with a message for him, holding back some sort of a secret, like the postcard from David Hughes. A line from it rang in his mind:
My kind hosts are looking after me. If only they would stop talking about God and salvation
. Daly surveyed the lawn closely, but the people in the garden had disappeared.
“I need to see the abbot, now,” said Daly, trying to keep the urgency out of his voice.
D
ermot Jordan and David Hughes made their way along the ridge of whitethorn trees until, suddenly, out of the mist, a grotto of death appeared. The heavy stench of rotting flesh and the buzzing of flies hit them as they approached the edge of a disused quarry. For one nightmarish moment, Dermot wondered whether the smell of decomposing flesh could be from his father’s corpse. Then he saw the gaping carcasses of chickens, and the bodies of bloated sheep melting back into the earth amid split bin bags and piles of rubble.
Hughes explained to Dermot how the IRA men had brought his father’s body to this godforsaken place and buried him in the bottom of the pit.
Dermot shook his head. He wished he had never discovered the location. Never had a landscape produced such a sharp mood change in him. The anticipation and sense of adventure he had felt all morning was transformed in an instant into a dark, suffocating depression.
Over the years, the quarried hole had been turned into a grim bunker of illegally dumped rubbish, and judging from the smell, the waste products from laundered diesel. It was a dump, a place for criminals to discard what they would rather forget. Like a ghastly tapestry of death, the bodies of chickens hung from the blackened thorn trees growing along the sides.
Before them lay a sea of black bin bags, more animal carcasses, and, incongruously, several prosthetic limbs like the ones in Mitchell’s back room, sticking out at odd angles from the rubbish. It would take months to excavate the quarry to find his father’s body, and even then, the bones would be lost amid the skeletons of dead farm animals. It would be a revolting and painstaking search for the truth.
A series of dry retches gripped his stomach, but he remained where he was, trapped by curiosity and a wish to burn upon his memory the details of his father’s burial place.
Hughes edged away on his own, counting under his breath, scanning the pit for terms of reference, a familiar rock or shrub, something for the mind to hold on to and trigger a memory. He circled the edge of the hole, then disappeared from view.
Dermot’s clothes felt cold and clammy. Right then he realized that all these years what he had been searching for was a window, a window offering light and warmth, and a view of his father, the man whom he had wanted to love dearly but who had been taken away from him. He had never seen his father, but still he had an impression, an inverted memory of him, an illusion based on the stories he had heard and the photographs he had studied. But in the dark pit before him all he saw were the shadows of evil men. How easy it would be to give the old man a push and send him flailing into that pit along with all the other horrible secrets of the past. A sense of foreboding rose in his chest. Had he come all the way up this mountain just to follow in the footsteps of his father’s killers?
“Let’s go back.” Hughes had reappeared. He stood close by, a fine rain drifting between them.
“We should have turned back a long time ago,” mumbled Dermot.
B
y the time Daly entered the abbot’s office, he was accompanied by Inspector Irwin, and two squad cars of police waited at the monastery gates.
The abbot nodded politely at their request and began explaining how the monastery ran its retreats.
“Catholic monasteries used to be regarded as strange or the stuff of medieval myth,” he said. “The irony is that at a time of dwindling congregations around the world, our monasteries are being besieged by people seeking some form of retreat. In fact, we’re oversubscribed for the summer. Our guests stay in former monk cells, and payment is made on a free-will basis.” He smiled at the two detectives and steepled his fingers together. “No accommodation can promise silence and serenity like a monastery. Our only problem is keeping the growing hordes down to the genuine spiritual seekers, not just vacationers at ‘Club God.’”