Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) (8 page)

‘I’m not sure, but I expect so.’ Monsignor Kelly gave Katie the impression that he was both disappointed and cross. ‘Would you like me to call him and ask him?’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll be going down to see him myself so,’ Katie told him. ‘Is there anything else you have to tell us? The sooner we get this investigation up and running, the better.’

‘No, no. I only wanted to show you the note. But I did want to pass on the bishop’s extreme concern, and ask you if you could handle your inquiries as discreetly as you possibly can.’

‘We’ll not be making any sensational statements to the press, if that’s what you’re worried about,’ Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll assured him. ‘We deal with evidence, monsignor, and not with wild specumulation.’

Monsignor Kelly stood up and they shook hands again. As they did so, he gave Katie an intense, unblinking look, which she couldn’t clearly interpret. He was a cleric, but it put her in mind of the looks that Cork gangsters like Dave McSweeney would give her, if they thought that she was coming a shade too close to discovering what rackets they had been running lately.

On the way down the wide curving staircase, as two young priests flattened themselves against the wall to let them by, Katie said, ‘What did you make of that, then, sir?’

‘I’m damned if I know yet,’ said Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll, taking out his handkerchief and blowing his nose. ‘But you sensed the anxiety, did you? Fair play, Katie, somebody’s pruned a priest, dirty old whacker or not, but why should that worry the bishop so much?’

‘I don’t know, sir, but I agree with you. Our Monsignor Kelly was definitely trying a little too hard to point our noses in one particular direction – away from something that makes him feel very uncomfortable.’

Katie held up Brendan Doody’s green-scrawled note. ‘I’ll tell you another thing,’ she said, ‘this confession doesn’t ring true at all.’

‘He admits he did it, like.’

‘I know. But it reads like it was written by an educated man pretending to be uneducated. There’s misspellings in it, for sure, but whoever wrote it has misspelled words like “intimate” that an uneducated man would never have used in the first place. Like “
torment
”. Did you ever meet an odd-job man who talked about “torment”?’

They crossed the car park and climbed back into their car. Katie said, ‘I just don’t understand why the church is so set on laying the blame on this Brendan Doody fellow. I mean, is he really dead, or have they spirited him away for some reason so that we can never find him?’

Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll pulled a face. ‘Let’s see if he shows up first. And if he shows up dead, let’s hope and pray that he really did do himself in. If he
didn’t
, this case is going to turn into a right pig’s dinner, and no mistake.’

Father Quinlan heard a clock strike five somewhere in the street outside. His whole being throbbed with pain – every nerve, every tendon, every muscle – but he had been hanging here for so long that, in some otherworldly way, he had begun to grow used to it. He wondered if Christ had felt the same, nailed to the cross.

The afternoon sun had moved around, so that only a thin triangular slice of it was shining in through the windows. He was alone in the bathroom, but he could still hear the thin, high voices of the St Joseph’s Orphanage Choir. They were singing ‘Bring Flowers of the Rarest’, which was traditionally sung in May – next month – to accompany the crowning of a statue of the Virgin Mary with a garland of flowers. It brought a sudden flood of tears to Father Quinlan’s eyes, even more copious than the tears that he had been weeping all afternoon because of the agony that he was suffering.

He sobbed, and his sobbing made his broken ribs grind against each other, and he cried out even louder.

‘
Where are you
?’ he shouted, or tried to shout, because his throat was dry and he could hardly draw breath. ‘
Where are you, you devil
?
Why don’t you kill me and have
done with it
?’

The singing went on, and again Father Quinlan thought that he heard somebody galumphing down a flight of stairs, but still nobody appeared. It was worse in a way to suffer alone than to be taunted by the Grey Mullet Man. At least when the Grey Mullet Man had been here he had felt as if somebody cared about his pain, even if he relished it.

Suddenly, however, the bathroom door opened and for a moment, before it closed again, he heard the choir singing louder:

‘
O Mary! We crown you with blossoms today,

Queen of the flowers, Queen of the May!
’

He lifted his head, even though he could feel the tendons in his neck crackling. The Grey Mullet Man was standing on the other side of the room beside the bathtub, with his arms folded. He had taken off his grey jacket, and was now wearing an ankle-length apron made of red rubber. His bare forearms were decorated with tattoos, mostly of fish, as far as Father Quinlan could see.

‘Did I hear you calling out for me, father?’ he asked. This time, he spoke softly and melodiously, like a mother who hears her child crying in the night.

‘I thought I was alone,’ wept Father Quinlan.

‘How could you
think
such a thing, father?’ said the Grey Mullet Man – but now his voice was hoarser and harsher, the same as it had been before. ‘Don’t you know that God is always with us, and even when God has to take His eyes off us, for a moment or two, one of his angels is always watching? We are
never
alone.’

‘Why don’t you kill me and put me out of my pain?’ Father Quinlan asked him.

‘Because I need to hear you confess your sin, father, and I need you to tell me the names of all of those who were complicit with you in committing that sin, and most of all I need to know who instigated that whole terrible madness.’

‘I can’t,’ croaked Father Quinlan.

‘Can’t, father, or
won’t
?’ the Grey Mullet Man demanded, coming closer, with his rubbery apron rustling. He smelled of stale sweat and onions. The fish on his forearms looked like the sea monsters on medieval mariners’ maps, with bulging eyes and thick lips. One of them had been cut open so that torrents of smaller fish were pouring out its belly.

Father Quinlan said, ‘I took an oath of silence. All of us did. None of us can speak of what we did or who we did it with, or why.’

Without warning, the Grey Mullet Man violently shook the rope from which Father Quinlan was hanging, so that Father Quinlan let out a girlish squeal of pain.

‘At the very least you could confess your own sin, couldn’t you, father? Then who knows? I might be minded to let you down, if you did.’

‘But it wasn’t a sin. We never once thought of it –
ever
– as a sin.’ Father Quinlan had to pause between each sentence to catch his breath, and to cough, but the Grey Mullet Man waited as if he had all the time in the world, gently swinging the rope backward and forward to make Father Quinlan feel even more defenceless than he did already.

‘Oh, so it
wasn’t
a sin. But if it wasn’t a sin, what was it?’

‘Let me explain to you why it was done. It was done – it was all done—’

‘Go on, father. Don’t stop now.’

Father Quinlan closed his eyes. The pain was too much for him. He could see nothing behind his eyelids but solid scarlet, the colour of hell, but he could still hear the choir singing ‘O Sanctissima’, and the honking of traffic on Patrick Street outside, and the pitter-pattering of shoppers’ feet, like the eager crowds hurrying in their sandals up Calvary Hill, to see Christ and the robbers crucified.

‘It was all done for the greater glory of God. And of the diocese.’

‘Come here to me? What you and your fellow priests did – exactly how was that supposed to glorify God? Or the diocese for that matter? What you and your fellow priests did, that was the work of the Devil, that was, and no mistake about it.’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘No, you’re absolutely right, father, I
don’t
understand, and unless you tell me I won’t understand, either.’

‘What difference does it make? You’re going to torture me and kill me whether I tell you or not. I would rather keep my oath to my brother priests, and to God.’

The Grey Mullet Man shrugged. ‘It’s your decision, father. But I don’t think you realize that there’s a difference between torture and torture. Hanging there, I’ll bet you that feels like torture. Oh, yes! But at least when you’re hanging there, you still have a hope of surviving, like, and living a normal life afterwards. Maybe your arms will never be the same again, but you’ll still be able to walk and talk and eat fish and chips and wipe your own arse.’

The Grey Mullet Man leaned forward. The flap that covered his face rose and fell as he breathed. ‘Supposing, though, you had your feet cut off? Or maybe your hands? Supposing you lost your ears, or your nose, or had your eyes poked out? All without the benefit of anaesthetic, of course. That wouldn’t just hurt while it was being done to you, would it? You’d know while it was being done that you would never be the same man again, ever.’

He said nothing for twenty long seconds, his face flap rising and falling, his eyes glinting through the cut-out holes. Then he whispered, ‘Then, father,
then
you’d be begging me to kill you. I promise you.’

He pushed Father Quinlan hard, and Father Quinlan swung around and around, his legs kicking, screeching in pain.

‘I’ll confess!’ he cried out. ‘I’ll confess! Please! Holy Mary, Mother of God, I’ll confess!’

‘Well, now, that’s a start,’ said the Grey Mullet Man. ‘Why don’t you mull it over a little longer, an hour or so maybe, just to make absolutely sure, then I’ll come back and let you down.’

‘Please,’ Father Quinlan begged him. ‘Please let me down now. I’ll confess.’

But the Grey Mullet Man ignored him, and walked out of the bathroom, closing the door very quietly behind him. Father Quinlan spun slowly on his rope, both of his arms now dislocated from their sockets, humming rather than moaning, with a string of bloody dribble dangling from his lips.

The choir sang,

Ye watchers and ye holy ones,

bright seraphs, cherubim, and thrones,

raise the glad strain, Alleluia!

Cry out, dominions, princedoms, powers,

virtues, archangels, angels’ choirs: Alleluia!

Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

It was dark before the Grey Mullet Man came back, and the only illumination in the bathroom was the orange sodium light from the street lamps outside.

Father Quinlan had been fading in and out of consciousness, and he had been hallucinating, too. He had thought that he was walking along the seashore, taking a break from a weekend retreat at Myross Wood, near Leap in West Cork. It was a warm August afternoon with only a few horse’s-tail clouds, but a stiff breeze was blowing off the ocean and making his soutane billow as he clambered up the rocks.

He was thinking deeply about the discussion he had attended that morning: about ‘shepherding’ and ‘discipleship’, in which new converts to Christianity were supposed to submit themselves completely to more mature members of their church, and obey them as blindly as a dog chasing a stick. ‘The dog doesn’t know
why
he’s chasing the stick. He doesn’t realize that the exercise is doing him good. But then he doesn’t have to. His obedience is all that’s important.’

Panting, his black boots sliding in the shale, Father Quinlan struggled up the side of a rough granite outcrop so that he could get a better view of the bay. As he approached the top, however, he saw a girl’s red hair, blowing in the wind; and when he climbed up two or three more steps, the girl herself came into view.

She was kneeling in the grass, pale-skinned and pretty and completely naked. She stared at him as he appeared, but she didn’t seem to be at all abashed. She had small breasts with pink nipples that were stiffened by the wind, and vase-like hips, and a small flame of red hair between her thighs. She was grasping in her left hand the erect penis of a skinny young man, who was lying on his back with his head behind the rocks, obscured from Father Quinlan’s view. His pubic hair was ginger, too, and the girl had just pulled his foreskin down, so that his lavender-coloured glans was exposed. Her lips were wide open in an ‘O’, as if Father Quinlan had caught her just as she was about to take it into her mouth.

For five long seconds, Father Quinlan and the girl remained frozen in a tableau. The wind blew Father Quinlan’s soutane, so that it flapped and snapped, and it blew the girl’s hair in long art-nouveau skeins. The ocean gnashed at the rocks below them, and the gulls circled around them, screaming, but for all of that time, neither of them moved.

Father Quinlan suddenly jerked up his right hand, as if to give the girl a blessing, or an apology, or to wave goodbye. Then he turned and stumbled down the side of the outcrop, half jumping and half falling, until he reached the pathway that would take him back to the road.

He felt hot, as he walked, but not from embarrassment. He felt as if he had inadvertently opened up a furnace door and been scorched by the red-hot fires of temptation. For the first time in his life, he had seen with absolute clarity what kind of man he was, and what it was that he really lusted after, but had never allowed himself to admit to it. He had seen his own sin as vividly as if it had been depicted in a painting by Brueghel, with beetle-headed demons trying to drag him down to hell, and trumpeting angels trying to give him the strength and the courage to resist them.

It was not the red-headed girl who had aroused him. He had seen her as a siren, yes – a seductress, like Eve, or Lamia, the beautiful child-eating granddaughter of Poseidon. But what had aroused him was the anonymous young man who had been lying on his back while the girl stroked his penis. So thin, so narrow-hipped, so boy-like. Father Quinlan had pictured himself kneeling in the girl’s place, ready to take him into his mouth.