Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) Page 4

  ‘Hurting you, am I?’ the man replied. ‘Hurting you, am I, you miserable gobshite?’ He spoke in a soft, hoarse roar, like the voice that a father puts on to scare his little children. I’m a monster, grrrr, and I’m coming to get you!

  ‘What do you want?’ Father Quinlan screeched back at him. ‘Is it money? Do you want my mobile? Take whatever you want, for the love of God! You’re breaking my leg!’

  ‘I don’t want your money and I don’t want your mobile and I couldn’t care less if I’m breaking your leg. Get out of the car, father. You’re coming with me.’

  The man took a step back and opened the door wide. Father Quinlan immediately shouted out, ‘Help! Somebody help me! Help!’

  Without hesitation, the man punched him in the face, breaking his nose with an audible snap. Blood gushed out of Father Quinlan’s nostrils, instantly giving him a bloody red moustache and beard, and turning his dog collar bright red. He lifted both hands to his face, honking and bubbling, while the man stood over him, leaning against his car in exaggerated impatience.

  ‘Have you finished your whingeing?’ the man growled at him. ‘You’re coming with me, father, whether you like it or not.’

  Father Quinlan rummaged in his trouser pocket and dragged out his handkerchief. He dabbed at his nose and his handkerchief was instantly soaked red. ‘Please,’ he begged. ‘Please don’t hit me again.’

  ‘That’s a laugh, that is, father. I can remember asking the same thing of you once. Pleading with you. And what did you do?’

  Father Quinlan looked up. ‘Do I know you?’ he asked, his lips sticking together with congealing blood. ‘Are you one of my orphanage boys? It’s not Dooley, is it?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if you know me or not, father. The point is that I know you.’

  ‘But if you’re one of my orphanage boys, and you think that I ever mistreated you, you have to give me the chance to tell you how sorry I am.’

  ‘Mistreated? Mistreated? Is that what you call it? I’ve heard it called a whole lot of things, but mistreated – that takes the all-time fecking biscuit.’

  ‘I was misguided, I freely confess. But, believe me, it was all for the greater glory of God.’

  The man leaned forward so that Father Quinlan could see his eyes glittering inside his eyeholes. His tall conical hat made him seem even more frightening, like a character out of a nursery rhyme, the Man in the Moon who came down too soon. ‘Come on, father. Time to pay the price.’ He grasped Father Quinlan’s right arm and lifted him up, out of the driver’s seat. Father Quinlan sagged to his knees, but the man heaved him upright.

  ‘Please, I’ll do anything you ask,’ said Father Quinlan.

  ‘You’re dead right there, father,’ the man told him. He frogmarched him to the far end of the car park, where a black Renault van was hidden in the shadows, close to the church wall. He opened the rear doors and threw him in like a bag of old bones.

  Father Quinlan tumbled on to a heap of folded sacks, jarring his shoulder, but immediately pulled himself up on his knees. ‘Help me!’ he shouted out. ‘Somebody please help me!’

  Without another word, the man banged the doors, and locked them. Father Quinlan felt the van sway as the man climbed into the driver’s seat, and then he started the engine and pulled away.

  ‘Dear God in heaven,’ whispered Father Quinlan, clasping his hands together. ‘Please, somebody help me.’

  8

  Katie was rinsing out her coffee mug when Siobhán came shuffling into the kitchen in her stripy nightshirt, her cheeks flushed and her curly red hair all messed up as if she had been out sailing in the harbour.

  ‘You came back late last night,’ said Siobhán.

  ‘Oh – yes. After John went home I went back to Anglesea Street. I had a whole lot of paperwork to catch up with.’

  ‘At two in the morning?’

  ‘I didn’t feel tired, that’s all.’

  ‘Too excited, were you? I mean, he did propose, didn’t he, the gorgeous John?’

  ‘No,’ Katie admitted. ‘No, he didn’t.’

  ‘Oh, there’s a disappointment,’ said Siobhán, opening up a cupboard door and taking down a box of Special K. ‘So what was this really important thing he wanted to talk to you about?’

  Katie turned away from her. ‘Nothing very much. He’s thinking of selling the farm, that’s all.’

  ‘Serious?’

  ‘Yes. His mother’s too ill to help him out now and the way things are going he can’t make it pay.’

  ‘So what’s he going to do now?’

  Katie shrugged and said, ‘Who knows? Listen – I have to get to work. Dr Collins is coming down from Dublin this morning to perform an autopsy on Father Heaney. She won’t thank me if I’m late.’

  As she went toward the door, Siobhán caught the sleeve of her blouse. ‘Look at you, girl. Your eyes are all puffed up. You’ve been howling, haven’t you?’

  ‘Of course not. Hay fever, that’s all.’

  ‘He’s never dumped you?’

  ‘No, he hasn’t. No.’

  ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ said Katie. ‘Right now I’ve got too much on my mind.’

  ‘He’s selling up and he’s going back to the States. That’s it, isn’t it?’

  Katie said nothing, but went through to the room that she still called the nursery, but which these days she used as her home office. This had been little Seamus’s room, but she and Paul had stripped off the blue wallpaper and the rocking-horse frieze, and now the only reminder of Seamus was a small framed photograph taken on his first and only birthday.

  She unlocked the top drawer of her desk and took out her nickel-plated Smith & Wesson .38 revolver. She flipped it open to check that it was fully loaded, and then she clipped into the flat TJS holster on her right hip.

  Siobhán came to the door and repeated, ‘I’m right, aren’t I? He’s selling the farm and going back to the States.’

  Katie could see half of her face reflected in the window. She looked strangely emotionless, even though her brain was feeling like smashed china. She closed the drawer and said, ‘Yes, he is.’

  ‘Are you going to go to the States with him?’

  ‘Of course not. How can I?’

  ‘You love him, don’t you?’

  Katie pushed past her into the hallway and took her raincoat down from the peg. ‘Yes. No. I can’t,’ she said. ‘It’s out of the question.’

  Siobhán said, ‘Katie – you only have one life, girl. I could have stayed with Sean. Maybe I should have stayed with Sean, but what a gowl. Your John, you shouldn’t let him go away without you. I mean it.’

  Katie opened the front door. The sun was shining and she could see the sea sparkling between the trees on the opposite side of the road.

  ‘I’ll see you after,’ she told Siobhán. ‘I’m going round to Dad’s for tea, but I shouldn’t be late.’

  She drove up to Cork airport. Dr Collins’s flight from Dublin had arrived early and she was waiting impatiently next to the statue of Christy Ring, the champion hurler. Dr Collins was a tall, axe-featured woman with bronze-coloured hair pinned back in a lopsided pleat. She reminded Katie of Katharine Hepburn, if Katharine Hepburn had worn narrow horn-rimmed spectacles and sported a large mole on her chin.

  ‘Sorry if I kept you waiting, doctor,’ said Katie.

  ‘I could just as easily have taken a taxi,’ sniffed Dr Collins, wiping her pointed nose on her handkerchief. ‘It would have saved you a drive so, and it would have saved me a twenty-minute wait in the cold.’

  Katie opened the boot of her car and helped Dr Collins lift her suitcase inside. ‘I wanted to talk to you about this autopsy before you got stuck into it,’ she said. They climbed into the car and Katie started the engine and drove out of the airport.

  ‘I prefer not to have my assessments second-guessed, if you don’t mind,’ said Dr Collins.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t dream of doing that. It’s jus
t that this case has some odd ramifications, and I think you ought to be aware of them. The victim is a one-time parish priest from Mayfield, Father Dermot Heaney. He was tied up and garrotted with wire, and he was also castrated.’

  ‘So, he’s been sent to meet his maker incomplete, so to speak?’

  ‘In 2005 he was accused of child molestation, although the bishop stood by him and he was never prosecuted. But now the church seems to be taking a different view altogether. You’d think they’d be wanting to distance themselves from this whole business as far as they possibly could, wouldn’t you? But they seem all too ready to suggest that one of his childhood victims might have murdered him in revenge. That he deserved it, almost.’

  ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘I haven’t come to any conclusions, not yet,’ Katie told her. ‘Not enough evidence.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But it surprises me that the church should be in such a hurry to admit that he was a child abuser. All I can say is that it’s given them a legitimate excuse to ask us to keep our investigation as low-key as possible – in case more former victims get the idea of attacking the priests who abused them. It’s a complete turnaround, though. When Father Heaney was first accused of abuse, in 2005, the diocese defended him to the hilt. They went so far as to claim that all of his accusers were fantasists.’

  ‘Well, times have changed, haven’t they?’ said Dr Collins. ‘It’s all abject apologies and breast-beating these days, isn’t it? Mea culpa, mea culpa – the hypocrites.’ She took out her handkerchief again and unfolded it. ‘I don’t really see how this concerns my autopsy.’

  Katie drove around the Kinsale Road roundabout and headed into the city. ‘It might not have any bearing on it at all. I simply wanted you to be aware of it, in case you come across some piece of forensic evidence that doesn’t look like much on the surface of it, but which might explain why the church is so keen to suggest that Father Heaney was a predatory paedophile who got what was coming to him.’

  As Katie turned into the entrance to the University Hospital, Dr Collins finished wiping her nose and looked at her sharply. ‘You suspect that he might have done something much worse, don’t you?’

  9

  Sergeant O’Rourke and Detective O’Donovan were waiting for her when she arrived at Anglesea Street. She put down her plastic cup of cappuccino on her desk, hung up her raincoat, and asked, ‘What’s the form, then? Have we found any witnesses yet?’

  ‘Two, so far,’ said Sergeant O’Rourke. ‘One of them’s the Ballyhooly postie. The other’s an auld girl who was taking her dog for a walk.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The postie had made his delivery to the Grindell farm about 7.20 in the morning when a black van overtook him and nearly forced him into the ditch. He reckons the van was doing at least forty and you saw for yourself how narrow that road is.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he made a note of its number.’

  ‘No, but he says it was a Cork plate right enough. And he did notice one thing about it, there was a white question mark stuck on to one of the back windows.’

  ‘Well... that should make it relatively easy to find. You’ll put out that description, won’t you?’

  ‘Have already, ma’am.’

  ‘What about the other witness? The old woman with the dog?’

  ‘She was crossing the bridge between Bloomfield and Ballyhooly just after seven o’clock, she thinks it was. She says it was misty then, so she couldn’t see too clearly. But she saw a black van parked down by the riverbank, with its back doors wide open, and a fellow dragging something through the water.’

  ‘Did she say what this something was?’

  ‘No, the mist was too thick. But she said it must have been heavy, like, because of the way that he was dragging it. I asked her to guess what it might have been and she said a sack of coal.’

  ‘Could she describe the man at all?’

  ‘Big, she said. Fat, in fact, and round-shouldered. He was wearing a grey raincoat and wellingtons, but what really caught her attention was his hat. She said it was tall and pointed, like a dunce’s cap.’

  ‘That’s odd. Who wears hats like that?’

  ‘Search me. Dunces, I suppose. Most of the time he had his back to her, but when her dog kept on barking he turned around for a split second and she glimpsed his face.’

  ‘So? What did he look like?’

  ‘Like I say, she only caught a glimpse, and she didn’t have the best powers of description. Fat, she said, but she did make a point of saying that he wasn’t ugly. Fat like a cherub, that’s what she said, rather than fat like a pig.’

  ‘Fat like a cherub? Okay... I think I’d like to talk to her myself, to see if she can describe him a little more precisely.’

  ‘I could take you to see her this afternoon, ma’am,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘There are still four or five more houses I have to knock at where there was nobody in this morning, so I was going back up to Ballyhooly in any case.’

  ‘Good,’ said Katie. ‘At least we have an idea now of when Father Heaney was dumped in the river. Let’s check all the CCTV cameras in a fifteen-mile radius... Cork City, Mallow, Limerick, Fermoy. We might be able to pick up this van on its way to Ballyhooly, find out where it came from.’

  ‘Right you are. I’ll get on to it.’

  Just then Chief Superintendent Dermot O’Driscoll knocked at her office door. ‘Katie – spare me a moment, would you?’

  ‘Of course.’ She always had time for Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll. He was a big man, with a red face the colour of corned beef and a wild wave of white hair. He was a man’s man, an enthusiastic follower of rugby and hurling, and a prodigious drinker on his days off, but he had supported Katie’s promotion from the very beginning and he continued to defend her whenever he thought she needed it. He had great respect for what he called her ‘detectivating talents’ and he believed that women have a much keener nose than men for liars and cheats and chancers. ‘Women can smell a load of cat’s malogian a mile off.’

  Sergeant O’Rourke and Detective O’Donovan left the office and Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll came in and hoisted his huge left buttock on to the edge of Katie’s desk. He was eating a pasty and every now and then he had to brush the crumbs from his belly.

  ‘How’s it going, then?’ he asked her, with his mouth full.

  ‘Too soon to say yet. I think the autopsy will tell us a lot more.’

  ‘Would you believe that I’ve just this minute had a phone call from the diocese offices on Redemption Road? The Right Reverend Monsignor Kevin Kelly, vicar general.’

  ‘Oh, yes? What did he want?’

  ‘He says that he might have solved our murder for us.’

  ‘Really? I know that some clergy are supposed to be able to work miracles, but how exactly has he managed to do that?’

  ‘He preferred not to tell me over the phone, but respectfully asked if we could pay him a visit at the diocese office.’

  ‘Oh, well, fair play to him. If he asked us respectfully. And if he really has solved it, that will save us quite a bit of trouble, won’t it?’

  Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll finished his pasty and smacked his hands together to get rid of the crumbs. ‘You never know, Katie. Stranger things have happened. About six or seven years ago I was totally stumped by a stabbing I was looking into, in Sunday’s Well. I had no witnesses, no weapon, and no forensics at all. But as soon as the victim’s name was printed in the paper, a priest rang me up and said that by chance he had got a crossed line when he was calling his mother, and he had overheard the dead fellow arguing with another fellow, and this other fellow had threatened to come around and stick a knife in him. The priest only caught the other fellow’s nickname, which was Tazzer, but since the dead fellow had only ever known one fellow whose nickname was Tazzer, I was able to collar him in about half an hour flat.’

  ‘And the priest was given a reward, I hope?’

 
‘No. The budget didn’t run to it. But he’ll get his reward in heaven, one day, you can be sure of that.’

  10

  As he regained consciousness, Father Quinlan became aware that he could faintly hear singing – the high, sweet, penetrating voices of St Joseph’s Orphanage Choir, singing ‘Ave Maria’.

  He opened his eyes to see a triangle of sunshine on the ceiling. His vision was blurry and he felt as if he had been beaten all over. His nose was throbbing and blocked up with dried blood, his shoulders ached, and his ribs were so tender that he had to breathe in quick, shallow gasps. Both of his knees were painfully swollen, and even his toes felt smashed, as if somebody had repeatedly stamped on his feet.

  He grunted and tried to sit up but he had been lashed with nylon washing line to the single bed he was lying on, and he could manage only to lift his head two or three inches. Apart from that, his neck was so stiff that he could hold it up only for a few seconds.

  He was lying in an upstairs bedroom with grubby whitewashed walls and a floor covered in worn-out dark green carpet. Apart from the bed, the only other furniture was a sagging brown leather armchair. The windows were old-fashioned sashes, and the plaster on the ceiling was flaking and covered in hairline cracks, so he could tell that he was in an old, nineteenth-century building. Straining his head up a second time, he saw the flat pastel-coloured facades of shop buildings on the opposite side of the street, and the painted letters ‘Tom Murphy Outfitters’. He recognized at once that he was on the third storey of a shop or office on the north side of Patrick Street, Cork’s main thoroughfare.

  ‘Dear God,’ he breathed, through split lips, and let his head drop back. Judging by the sunlight, it must be about eleven o’clock in the morning. He could remember yesterday evening, stepping out of the sacristy and locking the door and saying goodnight to Mrs O’Malley. He could remember thinking that there was somebody standing in the shadows close to his car, but he couldn’t think what had happened to him after that. He couldn’t even remember being beaten, although he must have been, and viciously.