Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) (16 page)

She climbed up to reach the very last rung, as high as she could, trying to peer down between Father X’s legs. His soutane had the traditional thirty-three buttons – each one representing a year that Christ had spent on earth. Enough buttons had been left unfastened to expose his badly bruised shins and knees, but his blood-smeared thighs were bound so closely together that she couldn’t see for sure if he had been castrated or not.

His soutane, however, had a glossy sheen to it that showed her that it was soaking wet. She reached across and squeezed the edge of it, and her latex glove was blotched with red.

‘Everything okay up there?’ called Detective O’Donovan.

Katie twisted around and said, ‘I’m grand, thanks!’ but as she did so she felt a sickening wave of vertigo and she had to grip the ladder tightly and close her eyes.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, please don’t let me fall off. It’s such a long way down to the ground
.

She kept completely still, though, and after a moment she recovered her sense of balance. She opened her eyes and took a deep breath to steady herself.
Right. Now let’s take a closer look at this fellow
.

She leaned as far to the right as she dared. Father X’s nose had been broken in a zig-zag and his eyes were swelled up like two over-ripe damsons. His jaw was dislocated, too, leaving his mouth wide open in a silent shout.

From his thinning plume of white hair and the papery skin on the backs of his hands, Katie guessed that he was at least seventy, and probably quite a few years older.

She could see the cord around his neck that Detective O’Donovan had mentioned. It was very thin, so thin that it had cut deep into his flesh, and most of it was invisible. But there were two trailing ends, each at least seven or eight inches long, which his murderer must have gripped in order to strangle him. The cord was made of purple and blue threads, intertwined. It appeared to be decorative, but Katie couldn’t imagine what it could have been used to decorate.

‘Coming down!’ she called, and carefully descended the ladder, one rung at a time. When she reached the ground and looked back up at the top of the flagstaff, it didn’t seem to be very high up at all, but it had certainly felt like it when she was up there.

‘What do you think?’ asked Detective O’Donovan.

Katie shrugged. ‘I still can’t think how they hauled him up there, but I’d say that you’re probably right, and there were two or three of them. All the same, I’m pretty sure that at least one of them was the same perpetrator who killed Father Heaney. Those loops at the end of each wire – we never told the media about those, did we?’

‘So much for Monsignor Kelly and his suicidal odd-job man,’ said Sergeant O’Rourke, wiping his nose with a crumpled Kleenex and making no attempt to hide his satisfaction.

‘That’s right,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘Your suicidal odd-job man couldn’t have committed
this
murder because he’s dead.’

‘That’s if he genuinely did go ahead and top himself,’ said Sergeant O’Rourke. ‘He could easily have changed his mind. We don’t have any evidence, do we, except for that suicide note? We haven’t found his body yet.’

‘Well, no, that’s true. But we haven’t found him living and breathing either.’

‘Maybe he was so pleased with himself for killing Father Heaney that he decided to go for another priest – this unfortunate old whacker here, whoever he is. On the other hand, maybe he didn’t kill Father Heaney at all and he didn’t kill this fellow either, and the perpetrator was somebody else altogether, although Monsignor Kelly wants us to believe that it
was
him, for reasons known only to himself.’

Katie said, ‘Jesus! I thought I was confused before, but you’ve got my head spinning now. But – yes, I agree with you.’

‘You do? I’m not even sure that I agree with myself.’

‘No, Jimmy – neither I nor Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll were convinced that Brendan Doody killed Father Heaney, and I don’t think he killed Father X here either. Come on, Doody just doesn’t fit the profile. Whoever killed Father Heaney was carrying out a ritual revenge – very complex and very specific – the same as this killing here. He was sophisticated and he was cruel and he really took his time.

‘But Doody – you only had to look at Doody’s lifestyle to realize that he could never do anything like that. Whoever committed these murders doesn’t push sweetie wrappers down the back of their sofa cushions. Doody wasn’t exactly a retard, but from what Father Lenihan said, he was somewhat on the slow side. I don’t believe that he would have hurt anybody unless he was really goaded into losing his temper. He surely would never have gone to the trouble of trussing his victims up with wire and torturing them. In my opinion, he would have simply bashed their skulls in with a hammer, and probably regretted it the minute he did it.’

‘But why was the Right Reverend Kelly so keen for us to think that Doody
was
the killer?’ asked Detective O’Donovan.

‘That’s the million-euro question,’ said Katie. ‘And when I tell him there’s been a second murder, I’d very much like to hear what the good monsignor has to say for himself. Like you say, if Brendan Doody really
has
committed suicide, we can’t blame him for this killing, can we?’

She looked up at Father X’s body again, slowly rotating at the top of the flagstaff.

‘Don’t worry – I’ll be going across to the diocese later to talk to Monsignor Kelly about it. I think he knows a lot more about this than he’s been telling us.’

It took the scissor-lift nearly an hour to arrive, and by that time a blanket of cloud had slowly moved across the sky and the sun had disappeared. Not only that, a fretful wind had risen, blowing dust and dead leaves across the car park. Katie was beginning to wish that she had brought her coat.

While they were waiting, she went across and spoke to the media. She told them only that the body was that of an elderly man, so far unidentified, dressed in a priest’s soutane. It was highly likely that he
was
a priest, but they couldn’t be one hundred per cent sure. His assailant had bound him hand and foot with wire, and beaten him severely, but it wasn’t yet possible to tell the full extent of his injuries.

‘Gelded, was he, the same as Father Heaney?’ asked Dan Keane, his pen poised over his notebook.

‘Like I said, Dan, we can’t tell that for certain. We have to get him down off that flagstaff first.’

‘But it wouldn’t surprise you if he was?’

‘Nothing surprises me, Dan. Not any more.’

As she was walking back across the road, a white flat-bed truck appeared, with a scissor-lift platform on the back, and turned into the car park. Two council workers in orange fluorescent jerkins jumped down from the cab, Fat and Fatter. They stared up at Father X suspended from the top of the flagpole and shook their heads in disbelief.

‘Holy shite, how did he get himself up
there
?’

‘We don’t have a clue,’ said Sergeant O’Rourke. ‘But what we’d like
you
to do is get him down.’

Long pause from Fatter. Then, ‘He’s dead, right?’

‘There’s no fooling you, boy.’

‘Yeah, but the thing is, we’re not allowed to touch him, not manually, with our hands, not if he’s dead. Health and safety, like. EU regulations.’

‘It’s all right. Our technicians will be handling the body. All you have to do is get them up there and bring them back down again.’

‘He’s not infectious, is he?’

‘I don’t think so. The last I heard, you can’t catch bruises or a broken nose.’

Fatter stared at him with piggy eyes. ‘Are you taking the piss, like?’

‘What do you think?’

Grumbling and muttering under his breath, Fatter heaved himself into the driver’s seat and made a noisy performance of backing the truck up close to the flagstaff. As soon as had done so, the other council worker helped the two garda technicians to climb up on to the scissor-lift platform. Fatter gunned the truck’s engine, and the scissor-lift gradually opened up like a concertina and raised the platform up to the same level as Father X’s body.

It took over forty minutes for the two technicians to photograph Father X from every conceivable angle, and to take samples of the paint on the flagstaff. At last, however, they cut the wire that was bound around Father X’s ankles and lowered him carefully on to the platform. The council worker whistled to his colleague that they wanted to come down again, and they slowly descended.

A paramedic wheeled over a trolley covered with a shiny green vinyl sheet, and together she and the two technicians lifted Father X’s body up on to it. Katie stood close by while the younger of the two unfastened the remaining buttons of the dead priest’s soutane, and the older technician meticulously snipped the brass wire that bound his wrists, his knees and his ankles.

‘I have no idea at all who fastens their wires in loops like these,’ said the older technician. ‘They’re not like the work of any electricians that I’ve ever come across, nor telephone engineers either.’

‘Picture framers?’ Sergeant O’Rourke suggested.

‘Jimmy – I thought I told you to go home and change and get yourself some breakfast,’ said Katie.

‘You did, ma’am. But I really need to see if he’s been – you know – discombobulated.’

Father X’s soutane fell wide open, exposing his bony, greyish-white body. He was covered in bruises – some crimson, some purple, some turning yellow – and it was obvious from the way that his arms lay askew that they must have been wrenched from their sockets.

His penis was still intact, lying against his left thigh like a featherless fledgling that had fallen out of its nest. But immediately below it there was no scrotum – only a soggy, gaping cavity, dark with clotting blood.

The older technician leaned forward so that he could inspect the wound more closely. ‘There – see that V-shaped nick just above his anus? He was castrated by the same instrument as Father Heaney, I’d swear to it. Two overlapping blades, similar to sheep shears.’

‘I was fancying a couple of sausages for breakfast,’ said Sergeant O’Rourke. ‘But now – I don’t know. I think I’ll stick to Shredded Wheat.’

‘Was he alive or dead when he was castrated?’ asked Katie.

‘Oh, he was alive,’ said the older technician. ‘You have only to feel his habit. It weighs a
ton
, because it’s absolutely drenched. There’s no doubt at all that his heart was still beating when they cut off his testes.’

‘So he probably died from loss of blood?’

‘That, and shock, I expect. We’ll just have to wait and see what the illustrious Dr Collins has to say about it. You never know. She always seems to have some theory of her own.’

‘Well, I’m seeing her this afternoon,’ said Katie. ‘She said that she’ll be finished with Father Heaney by three.’

Just then, a lanky young garda came loping across the car park and said, ‘Excuse me, ma’am, but there’s a woman here who thinks she knows who this is.’

‘Good, I’ll come and talk to her. Frank – can you cover the body with a sheet or something, just up to his neck? Make him presentable anyway. I may ask this woman to come and take a look at him. The sooner we know who he is, the sooner we’ll be able to find out who wanted to cut his mebs off.’

She followed the lanky young garda to the police barrier that had been set up across the Old Youghal Road. A plumpish woman in a black coat and a black bonnet like a rook’s wing was standing behind the yellow tape, clutching a large black handbag. Her mouth was so grimly turned down that she looked as if she were taking part in a gurning competition.

‘Madam?’ Katie beckoned her. ‘Why don’t you come and join me over here?’

The woman bent down and struggled awkwardly under the tape. She presented herself to Katie, panting slightly, still clutching her handbag as if she were afraid that somebody was going to try and snatch it away from her.

‘I’m Detective Superintendent Kathleen Maguire. And you are?’

‘Mary O’Malley. Mrs Mary O’Malley, but I’m a widow. My husband was taken from me seven years ago this Pentecost. It was the throat cancer, although he never smoked.’

‘I see. I’m sorry. This guard tells me you might know who our deceased is.’

‘My friend Eileen told me that there was a dead priest hanging from the flagpole outside of the orphanage, and so I came up here directly.’

‘So, who do you think it is?’

‘There’s only one priest missing that I know of, which is why I thought it must be him.’

‘Okay. So what’s his name?’

‘I arrange the flowers at St Luke’s, see, but on Tuesday morning Moran’s didn’t send up enough lilies, they only sent the five bunches instead of the usual six, so I had to go in early on Wednesday morning before the bereavement Mass to finish off my arrangement in the Lady chapel.’

‘Yes?’

Mrs O’Malley stared at Katie as if she were educationally subnormal. ‘If it hadn’t been for that, I wouldn’t have gone in at all, would I? And if I hadn’t have gone in, I wouldn’t have realized that he was missing.’

‘No, I don’t suppose you would.’

‘Father Lynott knew that he hadn’t turned up, because Father Lynott had to take the bereavement Mass instead, but Father Lynott said not to worry because at his age he’s always taking odd days off without any explanation and we just had to be tolerant.’

‘What’s his name, Mary?’ Katie asked her.

‘Who?’

‘The priest who’s missing. The one you think might be our deceased.’

‘Father Quinlan, of course. I just told you.’

‘Of course,’ said Katie, glancing across at the lanky young garda, who was rolling up his eyes in mock despair. ‘Do you think you could come and identify the body? It wouldn’t upset you, would it?’

‘Not at all. He always looked like he was half-dead, anyway.’

She found Monsignor Kelly on the touchline of the football field at Sunday’s Well Primary School for Boys, watching a second eleven game against Holy Cross. He was standing in a small group with the principal and the principal’s wife and several of the school governors and three priests – all of whom were holding on to their hats because the wind had risen, and everything was flapping – flags, coats, dresses and soutanes.