Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) Read online

  ‘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.’

  ‘What did they use to castrate him?’ asked Katie. ‘Our technician thought that it was shears. You know, like they shear sheep with.’

  ‘The wonders of the internet,’ said Dr Collins. She picked up her Apple laptop from the table where all of her instruments were arrayed, opened it up, and passed it over so that Katie could see what was on the screen.

  She saw a picture of a bespectacled grey-haired man who looked like a professor. He was wearing latex gloves and holding up a pair of crudely fashioned metal shears. Unlike sheep shears, however, these had half-moon-shaped blades and they were hinged at the top.

  ‘Castratori, these were called,’ Dr Collins told her. ‘They were specifically designed for the castration of young boys, so that their voices wouldn’t grow deeper when they reached puberty.’

  ‘You’re talking about castrati,’ said Katie.

  ‘That’s right. In the sixteenth century women weren’t allowed to sing in church, or on the stage, so they used boys instead. Castrati became fantastically popular and they were still in huge demand right up until the nineteen hundreds.’

  ‘But – Christ on a bicycle,’ put in Sergeant O’Rourke. ‘To cut a young lad’s mebs off, just so he could sing like a girl. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  ‘It did if you were a dirt-poor family with half a dozen children and this was your only chance to make any real money. The very top castrati – the ones who became professional opera singers, or the ones who were chosen to sing in some of the great church choirs – they were like today’s rock stars. World-famous, and idolized, and very wealthy. You can forget about Bono. Farinelli, in the eighteenth century, was openly compared to God.’

  ‘How about that, then? I didn’t know God had a squeaky voice.’

  ‘Castrati’s voices weren’t at all squeaky,’ said Dr Collins. ‘They had extraordinary pitch, like a woman or a pre-pubertal boy, but much stronger and much more resonant. After they were castrated, their vocal cords grew only to the same length as a female high soprano, but their pharynx and oral cavity were fully developed, and they had the lung capacity of an adult male.

  ‘Farinelli’s voice spanned three octaves, and he could hold a note for whole minute without taking a breath.’

  ‘Sounds exactly like my Maeve,’ put in Sergeant O’Rourke.

  Katie looked again at the bloody cavity where Father Heaney’s scrotum had been sliced off, with its flaccid lips. ‘The question I’m asking myself is, why?’

  Dr Collins said, ‘Why is your area of expertise, detective superintendent, not mine. The only question I’m here to answer is how.’

  ‘But if you castrate a grown man it doesn’t affect his voice, does it, even if you allow him to live?’

  ‘No, of course not. When a boy reaches puberty, testosterone lengthens his vocal cords by more than sixty per cent, while a girl’s vocal cords lengthen by only half that, or even less. Testosterone also thickens up a boy’s vocal cords, which helps to give him a deeper voice, and that thickening is permanent.

  ‘In boys, the thyroid cartilage increases in length three times more than it does in girls, which gives men their Adam’s apple. You can’t reverse any of these physical changes by castration or hormone injections or any other means.’

  Katie slowly shook her head. ‘So these two priests were castrated only to cause them suffering, or to humiliate them as men, or to make some point that we don’t yet know about? Or all three?’

  ‘I think it was revenge,’ said Sergeant O’Rourke. ‘That’s the most likely motive, the way I see it. This was done by somebody who was molested when he was younger. And of course, once he’d tortured them, and castrated them, he didn’t have much of a choice. He had to kill them.’

  ‘You’re probably right, Jimmy,’ Katie agreed. ‘But think about it: if the perpetrator was trying to punish these priests for molesting him, why didn’t he cut everything off?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why didn’t he cut their penises off, as well as their testicles?’

  ‘Now that is a very interesting question,’ said Dr Collins. ‘Especially if we’re talking about a victim who was forced to give oral sex, or who was sodomized. It’s the penetration that abuse victims find the most traumatic – the feeling that they’ve been physically violated. I’ve talked to dozens of rape victims, and they almost always have a vivid mental picture of their rapist’s penis – even when they can barely recall what his face looked like.’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Sergeant O’Rourke. ‘I can remember like it was yesterday Father O’Grady standing by the lockers and calling out, “Look at this, O’Rourke!” and there it was sticking out of his soutane like one of McWhinney’s Bigfoot sausages. I ran off so fast my rubber dollies never touched the floor.’

  ‘I hope you reported him,’ said Katie.

  ‘Get away with you, I was only seven and I was much too scared, and it would have only been my word against his, and in any case he’s long dead now and St Peter will have decided how to punish him. If there’s any justice in the world he’ll be grilling his sausage in hell.’

  Dr Collins said, ‘I should
finish examining Father Quinlan by midday tomorrow, detective superintendent, so that may tell us more. So far, however, I can formally tell you that the primary cause of Father Heaney’s death was strangulation.’

  ‘He didn’t bleed out?’

  ‘That wasn’t the primary cause, no. He probably would have died from loss of blood if he hadn’t been garrotted first. His inferior vesical artery was severed when he was castrated, and he also suffered a ruptured spleen, which caused more blood loss internally. He also had three broken ribs and massive internal bruising.’

  She held up her latex-gloved hand and counted on her fingers. ‘But these are all the things we don’t have. One – we don’t have any fingerprints or distinctively shaped bruises or marks on his body that could help us to identify his assailant. Two – we don’t have any saliva or other bodily fluids either on his skin surface or in any of his body orifices that might yield incriminating DNA. Three – we don’t have any epithelial cells under his fingernails that might have resulted from scratching or fighting with his assailant. Four – we don’t have any human or animal hairs or any foreign fibres.’

  ‘So – five,’ said Sergeant O’Rourke, sticking up his thumb, ‘we seem to be well and truly clueless.’

  ‘I admit that it’s not going to be easy, especially if Father Quinlan’s body is the same.’

  ‘We have the harp wire,’ said Katie. ‘There can’t be too many places in Cork where you can find wire like that. A music shop, maybe. Or a college that teaches music. Or an orchestra.’

  Sergeant O’Rourke took out his Blackberry and prodded at it, frowning. After a minute or two, he said, ‘There are six music shops in the city itself, like, and another five within a twenty-five mile radius – in Mallow and Bandon and Carrigaline.

  He did some more prodding, and then he said, ‘We have at least five music schools in the area, including the Cork School of Music on Union Quay and Cork City Music College, but some of them teach only keyboards or guitar.’

  ‘Well, we’re going to need to do some legwork,’ said Katie. ‘Call O’Donovan and Horgan and have them start to go round the shops. Tell them they’re looking for – what was it? – seventh-octave harp wire, and the names of anybody who buys it from them.’

  She turned back to Dr Collins and said, ‘I’ll come back tomorrow, when you’ve finished with Father Quinlan.’

  As she did so, however, she was sure she saw movement under the green sheet that covered Father Quinlan’s body. Only a slight stirring at first, followed by a moment’s stillness, but then a quick, convulsive shake, as if Father Quinlan had woken up and was struggling to pull the sheet away.

  ‘He’s still alive!’ Katie whispered. She felt as if her scalp were shrinking.

  ‘What?’ said Dr Collins, staring at her.

  Katie pointed toward the trolley. ‘Father Quinlan – he’s still alive! I just saw him move!’

  Sergeant O’Rourke said, ‘There’s no way! Didn’t we see him dead as a doornail? The paramedics checked his pulse and his pupils and nobody gets any deader than he was.’

  Even as he was speaking, however, the sheet suddenly humped up and shifted rhythmically from side to side. It looked as if Father Quinlan had heard them talking and was waving his left hand in an effort to attract their attention.

  ‘This is impossible,’ snapped Dr Collins, as if it was a personal affront that anyone should come back to life after she had conclusively decided that they were dead.

  She crossed over to the trolley and wrenched off the sheet. Sergeant O’Rourke crossed himself and said, ‘Name of Jesus,’ under his breath.

  Father Quinlan was still lying on his back with his eyes closed, as bruised and broken as Father Heaney – worse, if anything, because his shoulders had been dislocated and his arms were lying at his sides at such an awkward angle.

  Out of a glistening hole in the left side of his stomach, just below his ribcage, a wet, dark, narrow-nosed creature was rearing up. It was writhing around and around, frantically trying to get itself free, and it was this convulsive writhing that they had mistaken for Father Quinlan attempting to tell them that he was still alive.

  ‘A rat,’ said Dr Collins, and her voice was soaked with genuine horror.

  The rat continued to twist itself around, although for some reason it made no sound, no bruxing or chattering like a rat would normally do to show that it was stressed. Dr Collins reached across to the table where she kept all of her surgical equipment and found herself a thick pair of red industrial gloves. She pulled them on, and then she grasped the rat in both hands and started to tug it inch by inch out of Father Quinlan’s body.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Sergeant O’Rourke.

  The rat emerged with a thick, glutinous sound that reminded Katie of rabbit guts dropping into the kitchen sink when her mother was preparing a rabbit stew, and it made her feel just as queasy.

  Dr Collins stalked over to the opposite side of the laboratory, holding the waggling rat at arm’s length.

  ‘Sergeant O’Rourke!’ she cried out, ‘the locker, will you?’

  Sergeant O’Rourke flung open one of the wire cages that were usually used as a temporary store for odd items of evidence, such as hats and shoes and purses. Dr Collins tossed the rat inside, where it landed with a heavy wet thump. She slammed the door and fastened it with wire.

  ‘Rats,’ she said. ‘Rats and maggots. Ugh! They disgust me. Sometimes I think I should have been a florist, or a confectioner.’

  Katie looked down at the soft, boggy hole in Father Quinlan’s stomach. ‘Can you believe it? They must have sewed it up inside him. Holy Mary, Mother of God. You don’t think he was still alive when they did it, do you?’

  Dr Collins took off her industrial gloves and snapped on a pair of latex gloves instead. She went back to Father Quinlan’s body, lifted his penis out of the way and opened up the wound where he had been castrated, parting the flesh with her fingertips as wide as she could.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘See those stitches? You’re absolutely right. They pushed the rat inside him and then they sewed him up so that it couldn’t escape.’

  Neither Katie nor Sergeant O’Rourke said anything, and Sergeant O’Rourke kept his hand pressed over his mouth, as if he were concentrating very hard on the evidence, or trying to prevent himself from retching.

  Dr Collins went back and peered at the rat through the criss-cross wires of its makeshift cage. ‘I can’t say yet if Father Quinlan was still alive when they did it. But look – they tied the rat’s front and rear paws together with thread, so that it couldn’t burrow its way out of him, and they must have severed its vocal cords, so that it couldn’t make any sound. Maybe they thought that nobody would ever discover it was there, and he’d be buried with the rat still inside him.’

  The rat hopped round and round, its back paws still fastened together. It was obviously in a panic, and it repeatedly hurled itself up against the sides of its cage.

  Dr Collins said, ‘See? It managed to bite through the thread that was holding its front paws together, and then it used its claws and its teeth to tunnel through Father Quinlan’s intestines.’

  Katie said, ‘I want photographs of this, please, doctor, lots and lots of photographs. And CT scans. And blood samples. Both human blood and rat blood.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll get all of those, I promise you,’ Dr Collins assured her. ‘And by the looks of things, I’ll be able to give you a lot more besides. Nobody can commit a homicide like this and leave no trace of themselves at all. It simply isn’t possible.’

  Outside, it was bright but still blustery, and as they came out of the front door of the hospital they were caught up in a whirlwind that stung Katie’s eyes with grit.

  ‘What do you think, boss?’ asked Sergeant O’Rourke. ‘Are we dealing with a header, or are we dealing with a header?’

  ‘I think I need a drink,’ Katie told him. ‘We can stop at the Hayfield Manor on the way back, if you like.’

  ‘What, and
ask them if they’ve counted their spoons lately?’

  24

  It was past seven by the time she arrived back at her desk at Anglesea Street. The last of the sun was shining through the window, and her pot plant cast a shadow on the wall that reminded her of a scowling witch.

  On the roof of the multi-storey car park opposite, even more hooded crows had gathered, their feathers ruffled by the wind. Under her breath, Katie said, ‘Shoo,’ but of course they stayed where they were, a living reminder of the very close presence of death.

  Detectives O’Donovan and Horgan came barging in through her office only five minutes later, both of them looking exhausted and smelling strongly of cigarette smoke. Detective O’Donovan slumped into the chair on the opposite side of her desk and dry-washed his face with his hands. Detective Horgan went over to the window and peered out of it as if he had seen something of riveting interest, like a girl undressing in a nearby apartment, or his long-dead grandmother walking along the street with her long-dead spaniel.

  ‘Well?’ she asked them. ‘Did you have any luck?’

  ‘Oh we did, yeah,’ said Detective O’Donovan, which was Corkinese for absolutely no expletive luck at all. ‘I don’t know what it is about these sausage jockeys who run these music shops. It’s like they’ve all got these scraggy little beards and slitty little specs and they can’t give you a straight answer to a straight question to save their lives.

  ‘Like, “Excuse me, boy, in the past six months have you happened by any chance to have sold any seventh-octave phosphor-bronze harp wire?” I mean, you feel like enough of a gowl just asking it.

  ‘So they say, “Seventh-octave? Ooh no. But plenty of light-gauge fifth-octave. We’ve sold more light-gauge fifth-octave than you could shake a stick at. By the way, have you heard Jean Kelly? She played harp on the soundtrack for Lord of the Rings, and she’s a Cork girl. You should hear her play Handel.”