Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) (17 page)

Katie and Sergeant O’Rourke walked up behind Monsignor Kelly, so close that Katie could have tapped him on the back. At first he didn’t look round, but Katie could tell by the way that his shoulders shrank that he was aware of her presence.

‘Come on, Sunday’s Well!’ he shouted, still without looking round. ‘You’re three goals behind and it’s almost half-time!’ Then he turned to face her and said, much louder than he needed to, ‘
Katie
! This is a surprise!’

‘Good afternoon, monsignor.’

‘You must have some news for me, yes?’

‘I think we need to talk in private,’ Katie told him. She smiled at the principal, the curly-haired Martin Shaughnessy, and said, ‘You don’t mind my stealing the monsignor a moment, do you, Mr Shaughnessy?’

‘You’ll bring him back directly, I hope? Right now, our team needs all the spiritual help it can get.’

They walked together to the back of the school building, and went inside. It was suddenly silent in there, and smelled of paint and glue and children who were given a bath only once a month, if that. Katie led the way into one of the classrooms, and sat down on the edge of a desk. There was a large mural on the wall that the children had painted themselves: a forest, with twisted trees in it, and wolves, and dark creatures with yellow eyes that looked like leprechauns, or goblins.

‘Well, what’s this about?’ asked Monsignor Kelly, chafing his hands. ‘Have you found Brendan Doody yet? Is that it?’

‘No, we haven’t found Brendan Doody.’

‘Threw himself off Patrick’s Bridge, it wouldn’t surprise me, and floated out to sea. He’ll be halfway to France by now.’

‘That hardly ever happens, monsignor. In fact, it never happens. The tide always brings them back in again.’

Monsignor Kelly gave her that sideways look that meant ‘you’re a woman, don’t you contradict me, even if I’m wrong’.

‘As a matter of fact, most of the floaters get themselves stuck by Horgan’s Quay,’ put in Sergeant O’Rourke, with a cheerful smile and a twirl of his finger. ‘They swirl around and around until somebody spots them and then we come along to fish them out.’

Monsignor Kelly said nothing. Katie could sense that he was deeply reluctant to ask her why she had come to find him. If Brendan Doody hadn’t turned up yet, dead or alive, she could only be here because she had some more awkward questions to put to him. From the way his lips were so tightly pursed, she could tell that he wasn’t in the mood this afternoon for awkward questions. Not that he often was, she imagined, even from God.

‘Do you happen to be acquainted with a Father Vincent Quinlan from St Luke’s in Montenotte?’ Katie asked him.

Monsignor Kelly’s eyes darted from side to side like two minnows in a jam jar, as if he were trying to decide what the right answer was. ‘I’m not sure. Is there any special reason why I should?’

‘He’s been serving at St Luke’s for the past eighteen years, so I’d be surprised if you hadn’t come across him once or twice, at least. And he was sent there after several boys at St Andrew’s Youth Club accused him of molestation. He was never formally charged, because there wasn’t sufficient evidence, but I would have thought that the diocese would have kept him on their radar, at the very least.’

‘That would imply that we didn’t trust him, wouldn’t it?’

‘Not necessarily. But it’s always better to be safe than sorry, isn’t it?’

Monsignor Kelly’s face reddened. ‘We’re not like the Spanish Inquisition, Katie. We believe in forgiveness, and forgiveness means forgetting, too. If a priest has shown himself to be truly penitent, we don’t feel that we have to regard him with suspicion for the rest of his life.’

‘Well, thankfully, monsignor, you won’t have to do that with Father Quinlan.’

‘Oh, yes? And what would be the reason for that, exactly?’

‘Father Quinlan was found this morning hanging from the top of the flagpole outside St Joseph’s, upside down. He was hog-tied with brass wire and throttled with string, and he had been beaten so viciously that almost every bone in his body was broken. He had been castrated, too.’

The flush on Monsignor Kelly’s face drained away as swiftly as if Katie had pulled out a plug. He said, ‘Name of Jesus,’ and crossed himself, and then he promptly sat down on one of the child-sized chairs.

‘Murdered? My God. And then castrated?’

‘Not in that order, by the look of it.’

‘Jesus.’

Katie stood over Monsignor Kelly for a few moments, saying nothing. He kept shaking his head and crossing himself, and glancing up at Katie because he knew what she was going to say next. In fact, it was so obvious that she hardly had to say it at all.

‘The way that he was tied up and mutilated, monsignor... we don’t have definitive evidence yet, but in my mind there’s very little question that he was murdered by the same perpetrator as Father Heaney.’

‘So what do you want me to say to that? “Dear God Almighty, I’ve been taken for a fool, and Brendan Doody is still alive after all!”?’

Katie leaned over him, in his little chair. ‘I have no idea if Brendan Doody is still alive or not. He may have murdered Father Heaney, but if he did, he probably murdered Father Quinlan, too. Personally I don’t believe that he murdered either one of them. I don’t believe that he wrote that suicide note either.’

‘And what are you implying by that? What are you accusing me of, Detective Superintendent Maguire? Stupidity, or forgery, or conspiracy, or maybe you’re accusing me of all three?’

‘I’m not accusing anybody of anything at all at this early stage. We haven’t even finished our autopsy on Father Heaney yet. But I want you to be aware that I won’t bend to any pressure from you or anybody else to close this case before I’m satisfied that we’ve thoroughly examined all of the evidence.’

Monsignor Kelly was plainly furious and Katie could tell that he was tempted to jump to his feet. But even if he jumped up, he would still be no taller than she was, so in spite of his fury he stayed where he was, crouched in his little child’s chair, and he lowered his voice so that Katie had to lean even closer and Sergeant O’Rourke wouldn’t be able to hear him.

‘Let me tell you this,’ he said. ‘Only one other person in all of my years in the church has dared to suggest that I have conducted myself at any time with anything but the greatest of propriety. And that person bitterly regretted having uttered that calumny for the remainder of her life. And I mean
bitterly
.’

Katie narrowed her eyes at him.

‘Are you threatening me, monsignor?’

‘I’m giving a word to the wise, that’s all, detective superintendent.
Cineri gloria sera
est.
You may solve this case, and you may be given all the credit for solving it, but applause is of no use to those who can no longer hear it.’

‘You
are
threatening me, aren’t you?’

‘I’m simply making it clear to you that the reputation of the diocese could depend on this, and that the diocese has some very powerful friends in all kinds of high places – people who it would be advisable for you for your own safety not to cross.’

‘I could arrest you for saying that to me.’

‘I never said a word, Katie. I was just trying to be helpful.’

‘In that case,
be
helpful,’ said Katie, standing up straight. ‘Who do you suggest I ought to go looking for – apart from Brendan Doody? Who else can I arrest without ruffling any diocesan feathers?’

Sergeant O’Rourke caught the sarcasm in her voice, and realized that there was a confrontation going on here. He came and stood at her right-hand side, his arms folded, to give her support.

‘I really don’t know,’ said Monsignor Kelly, looking away. ‘I still think that Brendan Doody is your most likely suspect, but then I’m not a detective, am I? I’m one of the vicars general, that’s all. What do I know, except of the ways of God?’

Katie said, ‘I’ll talk to you again later, monsignor, after I’ve been to see Dr Collins. Look – half-time’s over. The Sunday’s Well boys are going to need all the support you can give them. You’d better get back out there on touchline and get down on your knees and start praying.’

Monsignor Kelly stood up, and his little chair tilted back and clattered on to the floor. There was a look in his eyes that Katie recognized. She had seen it in the eyes of drug dealers and fraudsters and murderers and wife-beaters, but she had never seen it in a cleric’s eyes before. It was a look that said
bitch
.

‘Fascinating, this case,’ said Dr Collins, lifting up the green sheet that was covering Father Heaney’s body. ‘Well...
both
of them, in fact. Fascinating.’

Her bronze-coloured hair was still tacked up in a chaotic French pleat, and her starched overall was buttoned up wrongly, but she seemed much calmer and much more approachable than when Katie had picked her up at the airport. It obviously put her at ease, being surrounded by the dead. The dead spoke to her unambiguously in the language of bruises and contusions and swollen blue tongues. The dead never argued, and they were never hypocritical.

Katie and Dr Collins and Sergeant O’Rourke were gathered around Father Heaney’s autopsy table. It was right at the far end of the long, chilly pathology laboratory at the University Hospital. The opalescent light that shone in through the clerestory windows gave the laboratory an almost spiritual appearance, as if it really was the waiting room to heaven, and when the coroner had finished examining the dead, and sewing them up again, angels would come in through the double doors in a fluster of white feathery wings to carry them away.

Four other bodies lay in an orderly row on the opposite side of the laboratory. Sheets had been drawn up to their chests, and although their faces were waxy, they all looked serene, as if they were dreaming rather than dead. They were a family of four – father, mother and twin boys of nine – who had all been killed instantly in a head-on collision on the N25 at Carrigtwohill.

Next to the door, Father Quinlan’s body was still completely shrouded. The paramedics had wheeled him in less than twenty minutes ago, and Dr Collins had only had time for a very cursory look at him.

Katie had seen for herself that Father Quinlan was stone dead, hanging upside down from the flagstaff. All the same, she couldn’t stop herself from glancing over at his trolley from time to time, just to make sure that she hadn’t seen the sheet stirring. After her first visit to a mortuary, as a young garda trainee, she had suffered weeks of nightmares about bodies suddenly sitting bolt upright.

Dr Collins noticed her repeatedly turning her head. ‘It’s quite all right, detective superintendent. He’s as dead as mutton, I promise you.’

‘What? Oh, yes, I know he is. It’s only my imagination, working overtime.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Dr Collins told her. ‘I used to get the heebie-jeebies, too, when I was a junior.’

Katie said, ‘It was my husband’s fault – my late husband, Paul. He used to love all of those zombie films. You know –
Night of the Living Dead
, that kind of thing. They were all total rubbish, those films, and those zombies – they were nothing compared to the drunks you get outside the Maltings on a Saturday night, believe me. But they still frightened the shite out of me.’

Dr Collins smiled. ‘In the path lab, the middle of the night was the scariest, on the graveyard shift, when I was all alone with the recently departed. All of those people lying there, and no matter how hard you listened, you couldn’t hear a single one of them breathing, because none of them were.’

‘You’re giving me the shivers,’ said Sergeant O’Rourke.

Dr Collins drew the sheet away from Father Heaney’s naked body, and folded it up. His face had begun to collapse like a rubber Halloween mask, and his hands could have been mistaken for empty household gloves. She had cut open his torso in a dramatic Y shape and then sutured him up again. His skin had turned grey but he was blotched all over with florid crimson bruises. Katie was reminded of a pair of rose-patterned curtains that used to hang in her mother’s sewing room.

Dr Collins prodded Father Heaney’s distended stomach with her forefinger. ‘You can tell by the colour of these contusions that they were inflicted only a short time before death,’ she said. ‘I found some extremely deep internal bruises, too, which have only just begun to appear on the skin surface, and it’s likely that he has others that will never emerge at all.’

She lifted his left shoulder and turned him on his side so that they could take a look at his back.

‘Most of this bruising, though, is quite superficial. It shows us clearly that the victim was punched and pushed around, so that he collided with doors and walls and various items of furniture. You see these parallel bruises? Tramlines, we call them. These tell us that he was beaten with a cane or a walking stick of some kind, in the same way that you would thrash a misbehaving donkey, say, or a very naughty schoolboy.’

Next she held up one of Father Heaney’s hands. ‘His wrists were tightly secured with wire – just before he was castrated, most likely, to prevent him from struggling. It’s no ordinary wire either. You’ll be intrigued to hear that it’s seventh-octave harp wire.’

‘It’s what?’ said Katie. ‘
Harp
wire?’

Dr Collins nodded. ‘I confess that I wouldn’t have known what it was myself, but one of your young lab technicians is a keen amateur harpist. Let me check my notes here, what he told me about it. Yes – apparently they use this particular wire for the clàrsach, the Irish low-headed harp. It’s made of braided phosphor bronze wrapped in nylon, although your technician tells me that a real aficionado would only consider silver or gold monofilaments.’

‘My Uncle Stephen used to play the clàrsach,’ said Sergeant O’Rourke. He sniffed, took out his handkerchief and wiped his nose. ‘He could reduce a whole parlourful of people to tears, believe me. He knew only the one tune, ‘Brian Boru’s March’, and that’s about the most depressing piece of music you ever heard in all your born days.’

Dr Collins raised up Father Heaney’s right knee. ‘After he was castrated, Father Heaney’s knees and ankles were bound together with the same type of wire, and then he was garrotted. Again with the same type of wire, with a soup spoon handle to tighten it like a tourniquet. The soup spoon is engraved with the initials HM, which tells us that it came from the Hayfield Manor Hotel. There were no fingerprints on it, I’m afraid.’