Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) Read online

  But the man kept edging closer and closer, jabbing at the air and snorting and saying, ‘Come on, boy, come on!’ Gerry lifted his hands and backed away from him. ‘I’m not going to fight you, you gowl. Go home and sober yourself up.’

  ‘What are you frightened of, father? Frightened that somebody knows who you really are? O’Dwyer, my skinny arse. You’re Father O’Gara from St Joseph’s and you have hell to pay.’

  Gerry kept on backing slowly away, both hands defensively lifted. He was so preoccupied with this prancing, jabbing idiot that he didn’t hear the van that started up its engine and pulled away from the kerb less than two hundred feet off to his right. It accelerated towards him without any headlights, and he became aware of it only at the moment when he stepped backwards into the road.

  He tried to leap back on to the pavement, but the man in the black leather jacket took two brisk steps towards him and pushed him in the chest, in the same way that Gerry had pushed him. The man didn’t have much weight behind him, but he caught Gerry off balance.

  Gerry stumbled and swayed, both arms whirling, trying to stop himself from falling over. He was too late: the van hit him with a deafening bang. It was going no faster than twenty miles an hour, but that was enough to send him tumbling across the street, over and over and over, until he hit a litter bin and came to a stop, his face bloody, his arms and legs awkwardly bent in a swastika pattern.

  He lay with his cheek against the concrete, staring at the leg of the litter bin. He was still conscious, but the world was dark around the edges, and growing darker. He wasn’t at all sure what had happened to him. His body felt as it had once felt when a rugby scrum had collapsed on top of him and he had been trampled by the boots of half a dozen of his fellow players as they tried to disentangle themselves.

  He could see his left hand lying on the pavement and he tried to move it, but it didn’t seem to be connected to his brain. He wasn’t at all sure that his legs were still attached to his body. He wondered if he would ever be able to walk again.

  A girl’s voice said, ‘Can you hear me? You’re not dead, are you?’

  He tried to look up. All he could see was a pair of red wedge sandals and two skinny legs in tight black jeans.

  Another girl’s voice said, ‘He’s not dead, Mar, look. His eyes are moving. I’ll call for an ambulance.’

  There was a moment’s pause. He heard feet scuffling on the pavement and several people talking, but he couldn’t make out clearly what they were saying. The only distinct voice was that of a woman who kept repeating, ‘You shouldn’t move him. They teach you that in the Guides. You shouldn’t move him. He might have broken his neck, like. Or ruptured his spleen or something.’

  But then a man’s voice said, ‘It’s all right. We’ll take him to the Mercy ourselves. It’ll be much quicker than calling for an ambulance.’

  Gerry thought the man’s voice sounded very melodious and soothing, almost like a mother calming her children, or an angel consoling a widower at his wife’s deathbed.

  ‘You shouldn’t move him,’ the woman repeated. ‘He could be paralysed for life if you move him. I mean his legs look all wrong, don’t they? All bent the wrong way, like.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, love. I’m a trained first-aider. St John’s Ambulance, every weekend at Páirc Uí Chaoimh. The sooner we get him into A and E the better, believe me.’

  ‘I still think you shouldn’t move him.’

  The world was growing even darker, but Gerry was aware that three or four pairs of hands were taking hold of him, and that he was being lifted up. He felt as if his insides had been crushed and that all of his bones were grating together. Logically, he knew that he should be in terrible pain, but perhaps the pain was so unbearable that his brain refused to acknowledge it.

  He looked up and saw the street lights jiggling as he was carried across the road. The men who were carrying him stopped for a few seconds, and he heard two metal doors creak open. Then he was lifted into the back of a van and dropped on to what felt and smelt like a pile of empty sacks.

  He tried to speak – tried to say, ‘Where are you taking me?’ but all that came out of his throat was a breathy squeak, like the sound of a blocked nostril. The van doors were slammed shut, and almost immediately the van was started up and driven away. The driver didn’t show any consideration for his injured passenger either. He drove fast and jerkily, and whenever he took a corner, Gerry slid from one side of the vehicle to the other, colliding with the wheel wells. He tried to cling on to the sacks, but they slid across the floor, too.

  After five minutes of bouncing and jouncing, he realized in a fragmentary way that he wasn’t being driven to the Mercy, because the Mercy was only round the corner from Patrick Street, where the van had hit him. They must be driving uphill, because the sacks were gradually creeping toward the van’s rear doors, and he could hear that the driver had changed down to third.

  Uphill meant north, away from the city centre. Uphill meant that he wasn’t being taken to hospital at all, because the nearest hospital anywhere in this direction was in Mallow, which was over twenty miles away.

  The van drove into a pothole, and then another, and Gerry was jolted violently up and down, banging the back of his head against the floor. It was then that the pain first hit him, and it was a pain like nothing he had ever experienced in his life. It felt as if he had been pushed alive between the rollers of a crematorium’s bone crusher, and that he was being dragged into it, feet first.

  The pain rose inexorably up his legs, into his groin, and then it overwhelmed his chest so that he found it impossible to breathe, let alone cry out for help. He blacked out for a few seconds, but then he regained consciousness, and all he could feel was icy-cold agony. He could never have believed that such pain was possible. His legs hurt, his pelvis felt as if it had been cracked in two like a broken washbasin, and his ribs were digging into his lungs. Even his teeth hurt, right down to the roots.

  He saw black and red flickering in front of his eyes, and he passed out again, but again he came to, and the pain was still there, only even more unbearable.

  O dear God, I beg you to save me from this. O dear God, please turn around and see me. I was only trying to please you, my beloved Lord. Please don’t your keep back turned against me.

  But the van kept on whining its way relentlessly up the hill, and the pain grew worse with every beat of Gerry’s heart and every bump in the road surface. It was so intense, the pain, that it was almost audible, like a high, terrible scream that was just beyond the range of human hearing.

  The van slewed round noisily on what sounded like shingle; and then it stopped. Gerry lay on the sacks with his eyes closed, praying to be lifted out of there, but terrified that he was going to be manhandled, and hurt even more.

  The rear doors were opened with a double bang, and somebody climbed up inside the van and knelt down next to him.

  ‘How’re you feeling, father?’ said the same sweet conciliatory voice that he had heard when he was lying stunned on the pavement in Patrick Street.

  He managed to open one eye. All he could see was a dark blurry figure bent over him, wearing a pointed hood that completely covered its face, except for two ghostly eyeholes.

  ‘I apologize if you feel battered and bruised, father,’ the figure told him. ‘Unfortunately we had to snatch you quick, and that was the best possible way. Otherwise you would have kicked up all kinds of a fuss, right there in the street, and you’re a big strong fellow still.’

  ‘Doctor,’ Gerry whispered. He felt a warm tear sliding out of the side of his one open eye. ‘Please, get me a doctor.’

  ‘All in good time,’ said the figure in the pointed hat. ‘There’s plenty of other things we have to do first.’

  ‘It hurts... so much. I can’t bear it.’

  ‘What did you say yourself, father? “Christ bore unimaginable pain on the cross to save our souls. The least we can do is return the favour.”‘

  ‘
I’ll do anything,’ Gerry pleaded with him. ‘Just get me to a doctor. Please.’

  ‘Well, like, the straight answer to that is no. Come on, lads, he’s ready for shifting here! Carry him into the house, if you will, but make sure you carry him gentle. We don’t want to be accused of being unfeeling, do we?’

  ‘No!’ said Gerry. ‘Please just call for an ambulance. I won’t tell them anything. I swear to God that I won’t tell them what you did.’

  ‘You swore to God that you weren’t Father O’Gara. How do you expect me to trust your word now?’

  ‘I promise on my wife’s life. I promise on my daughter’s life.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve made all kinds of promises, haven’t you, father? “I promise you that this will be the making of you, young fellow.” That was the favourite, along with “I promise you that this won’t hurt you a bit.”‘

  ‘Don’t touch me, please. Don’t try to move me. Just let me lie here till the ambulance arrives. Please.’

  ‘In that case, you’re going to have a fierce long wait, father, because I’ll not be calling for ambulance. Not now, not later. Not tomorrow morning. Not ever. Look at you. Even when you were wearing the cloth you always thought you were such a sham-feen, didn’t you? Such a hard man. Now look at you, whimpering like a baby.’

  Gerry said nothing. He had just been deafened and blinded by a tidal wave of pain, and he couldn’t think of anything else.

  The man in the pointed hat shuffled to the rear of the van and jumped down on to the shingle. ‘I’ll be seeing you later, father. Maybe you won’t be hurting so much by then. Okay, lads. Take him away.’

  29

  Katie slept badly. She dreamed that an intruder had broken into the house and was hiding in another room, but she didn’t know which one. In her dream, she stood in the corridor, perfectly still, holding her breath, but the intruder must have been holding his breath, too, because she couldn’t hear him.

  ‘Who’s there?’ she said, trying to sound authoritative. ‘Whoever you are, you’d best be showing yourself, with your hands on top of your head.’

  No answer. Perhaps she was mistaken and there was no intruder after all. But she didn’t dare to go back to bed, in case he came rushing into her bedroom when she was asleep and attacked her with his hammer.

  Her alarm woke her just before 6 a.m. She climbed out of bed and shuffled into the bathroom, and stood under the shower for over five minutes with her eyes closed. Afterwards, she stared into the steamed-up mirror over the washbasin as if she didn’t recognize the face that was staring back at her. Her wet hair was plastered over her shoulders and her breasts like a merrow, a voluptuous Irish mermaid.

  Mary, Mother of God, she thought, why does my life have to be such a mess? She was tempted to ring up Chief Superintendent Dermot O’Driscoll and tell him that she was resigning, as of now; and then calling John to say that she would definitely come with him to San Francisco, whether he found her a job with Pinkerton’s or not. She felt so exhausted. She felt so weighed down. She may have looked like a merrow, but a merrow who had to drag the whole of Cork City behind her in a net, with all of its chancers and drug dealers and pimps and political wheeler-dealers, while the love of her life sailed blithely away to the other side of the ocean.

  She dressed in an oatmeal-coloured sweater and dark brown trousers. Then she went into the kitchen and made herself a mug of black coffee. She stood by the kitchen sink to drink it, looking out over her small back garden. The sky was grey and it was raining. The stone statuette of the Virgin that stood in the middle of the rockery had a drip on the end of her nose.

  Her phone rang. It was Detective O’Donovan.

  ‘Morning, ma’am. I got hold of that photograph from the Examiner. Tim O’Leary, the night editor, dug it out of the files for me. I’ll be taking it around to the technical boys as soon as I can.’

  ‘Thanks, Patrick. I’m going to the hospital now to see my sister but I should be in around 9.30.’

  ‘Well, we’re all praying that she gets better real quick. We’ll probably get the forensics back later today – not that your man left us much in the way of physical evidence. Only that felt-tip marker and a couple of partials on the living-room door, but in truth they could be anybody’s.’

  ‘I’ll see you later, Patrick. Thanks for your prayers.’

  ‘They work sometimes, ma’am. I’ve had first-hand evidence, like.’

  ‘You must tell me about it some time. I’m beginning to think that God’s on His holliers.’

  When Katie reached the intensive care unit, she found that Siobhán was still unconscious. She looked waxy and pale underneath her oxygen mask, but the nurse reassured Katie that her vital signs were stable, and her blood pressure had risen during the course of the night.

  ‘After Mr Hahq has been to see her, we’ll be sending her downstairs for another CT scan, just to make sure that there’s been no more bleeding, among other things.’

  Katie took hold of Siobhán’s hand, and squeezed it. ‘Come on, Siobhán. Remember that Sleeping Beauty game we used to play, when one of us would pretend to be asleep and the other one had to find a way to wake her up? You only had to tickle me and that was enough, but you – I could pour a cup of cold water over your face and you wouldn’t even twitch.’

  She paused, and the rain pattered against the window.

  ‘We’re not playing Sleeping Beauty now, Siobhán. We’re all grown-up now, and we can’t pretend any more, not about anything. Please wake up, darling. Please open your eyes. I know you want to win the game, but playtime’s over.’

  She was still talking to Siobhán when Michael walked into the room. He was wearing a droopy khaki anorak and baggy jeans and he looked worn out.

  ‘Michael,’ she said.

  Michael lifted one hand to show how helpless he felt. ‘Look at the state of her la. She could have been killed.’

  ‘When did you find out?’

  ‘Yesterday evening. I was trying to call her all day and she didn’t answer her moby so in the end I phoned her work.’

  ‘You know how badly she’s been injured?’

  Michael nodded. ‘The nurse said that she’s going to pull through all right, but they don’t know if she’s going to turn out doolally. You know, on account of the brain injuries.’

  Katie didn’t know what to say. Michael approached Siobhán’s bedside and gently laid his hand on her forehead.

  ‘You know something, Katie?’ he said. ‘We should never of split up, Siobhán and me. You never know when you’ve got something truly precious, do you, until after you’ve lost it?’

  ‘You have Nola now.’

  Michael kept his hand on Siobhán’s forehead. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to fecking remind me.’

  On the way back to Anglesea Street, her mobile phone played ‘The Fields of Athenry’. It was Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll calling her. She flipped her phone open and said, ‘Chief? I’ll be there in ten minutes.’

  ‘Make it quicker if you like. I think we might have another dead priest on our hands. Well, he’s not dead yet, not that we know of, but he’s missing, and we’ve half a dozen witnesses who saw him run over right in the middle of Pana by a black van with a question mark on the back of it, and then bundled inside and taken away.’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Yesterday evening, around eleven, but would you believe that nobody reported it until an hour ago? All of the witnesses thought that the van was taking him off to the Mercy, but when one of them went to the A and E this morning to check if he was still living and breathing, she was told that he had never arrived there.

  ‘We called Mallow General and Bantry General and St Anthony’s Hospital in Dunmanway, but he wasn’t taken to any of those, either – not that it was very likely that he would have been.’

  ‘All right,’ said Katie. ‘I’ve just reached the Magic Roundabout. I’ll be with you as quick as I can.’

  She found Chief Superintenden
t O’Driscoll in the interview room, talking to a pale woman with close-together eyes and a dreary wing of grey hair down one side of her face, like a pigeon run over in the road. Inspector Liam Fennessy was standing by the window, cleaning his circular spectacles with his necktie, looking more like a young James Joyce than ever, while Detective Sergeant Jimmy O’Rourke was sitting close beside the woman, with a sympathetic hand on the shoulder of her rusty-red hand-knitted jumper.

  Detective Horgan was leaning against the far wall, one hand cupped against his face to mask the fact that he was picking his nose.

  ‘Ah, Katie,’ said Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll. ‘This is Mrs Maureen O’Dwyer. It was her husband, Gerry O’Dwye, who was knocked down on Patrick Street last night and apparently abducted by the fellows who knocked him down.’

  Katie pulled out a chair and sat down opposite Mrs O’Dwyer. ‘We know it was him for sure?’ she asked.

  Without turning around, Liam Fennessy said, ‘Two of the witnesses identified him, ma’am. He runs the Mighty Minstrel music store on Maylor Street.’

  ‘Yes, I know the Mighty Minstrel, of course. And I think I know him, by sight anyway. But why should anybody want to knock him down and then abduct him?’

  Mrs O’Dwyer looked across at Katie with red-rimmed eyes. ‘We were married seven and a half years. He’s a good man, like, but he isn’t easy. He always says that his conscience is following around after him like a dog with the rabies, just waiting for the chance to jump on him and take a bite out of his neck.’

  ‘His conscience? Why, what has he done to feel guilty about?’

  ‘I’ve just been telling your man here. He wasn’t always Gerry O’Dwyer. Before that, and a few years before he met me, he was Father Gerry O’Gara.’

  ‘He used to be a priest?’

  Mrs O’Dwyer nodded. ‘He was one of the priests they investigated at St Joseph’s Orphanage for messing with the children. They never proved anything against Gerry, and none of the children ever pointed the finger and said that he’d been molesting them. He swore blind to me that he never did anything of a sexual nature with those boys. But all the same he felt the shame of being accused of it terrible hard, so he said, and he gave up the priesthood and changed his name and tried to start a new life.’