Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) Read online

  Father Quinlan was beginning to grasp that he must have been drugged, or anaesthetized. He was certain now that he wasn’t dreaming, and that he wasn’t dead. But he decided in a strange detached way that he was ready for death. It wasn’t so much the pain he was suffering – his dislocated shoulders and his cracked ribs and his broken toes. It wasn’t even the humiliation of lying naked in a bathtub while he was insulted and reviled and told that his sins were beyond forgiveness.

  He was prepared for death because he was certain in his own mind that during his ministry he had tried his very best to delight the Lord his God, even if he had failed. He believed that God had understood what he had been trying to do, albeit vainly, and would take him into His arms when he died, the way a father holds a son who has done everything possible to please him, regardless of whether he has succeeded or not.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘In that case, you had better do your worst.’

  The Grey Mullet Man needed no more prompting. Without hesitation he reached into the bathtub and manhandled Father Quinlan on to his stomach. Father Quinlan couldn’t stop himself from gasping out in pain. There was still a half-inch of rusty water in the bottom of the bath, and it splashed into his face, so that he could taste it. It tasted as bitter as blood.

  The Grey Mullet Man pulled back each of Father Quinlan’s wrists, one after the other, like a garda making an arrest, and bound them together with wire, so tight that it almost cut off his circulation. He snipped the wire with a pair of pliers, and then rolled Father Quinlan on to his back once more. The pain from his shoulders was so overwhelming that all Father Quinlan could manage to say was ‘daah!’.

  He lay there for a few seconds, shivering and gasping, but then he heard the sound of somebody else walking across the bathroom, and another voice. It was a reedier voice than that of the Grey Mullet Man, as if its owner were suffering from catarrh, or had just reached puberty. Father Quinlan strained his eyes through the fog and he could dimly make out another figure standing beside the bathtub, looking down at him. This figure appeared to be wearing a mask, too, and a tall pointed hat, but a hat that had two points instead of one – more like a bishop’s mitre than the capirote of the Grey Mullet Man.

  ‘Look at him now, the gowl,’ said this second voice. ‘You couldn’t have imagined it, could you? The way he used to strut up and down the corridors, like a bantam cock! Cluck, cluck, cluck! I never once dreamed that I’d see him like this.’

  Father Quinlan felt sure that he knew who this was. There was something in his sing-song, clogged-up intonation that brought back the grainy image of a boy’s white face, in a gloomy changing room somewhere, a boy with short brown hair and wing-nut ears. The boy was crying. There were dirty tear stains down his cheeks, but Father Quinlan couldn’t remember what he was crying about.

  Perhaps if he could remember what the boy’s name was, and what had upset him so much, he and the Grey Mullet Man might forgive him, and stop torturing him, and let him live.

  Before he could think about it any further, however, he heard the door slam and more footsteps cross the bathroom floor, heavier this time. Yet another smudgy figure loomed over the bathtub and a third voice said, ‘Well, now! Look who it feckin’ isn’t! Queer Balls Quinny!’

  This figure spoke in a derisive, Hollyhill accent. All the same his voice was high and clear, and every ‘l’ from ‘well’ to ‘look’ to ‘balls’ was pronounced with liquid precision, as if he had taken elocution lessons.

  Father Quinlan squinted up at him. He, too, was wearing a conical hat. He was wearing a mask too, but it looked more like a pierrot’s mask than a white cloth with holes in it. More theatrical than religious, but just as scary.

  ‘Hullo, Queer Balls, how’s it going, boy? Long time no see. Looking a little thin on top these days. How about a transplant? You could borrow some bazz from your bollocks.’

  In response, Father Quinlan could only pant, his chest heaving laboriously up and down like a fox hunted to exhaustion. Apart from that, he couldn’t think of anything else to say, or anything else to ask. Whoever these men were, it was clear that they were determined to punish him for something terrible that he had done to them, and there seemed to be no point in trying to understand why they refused to forgive him for it.

  ‘Want to say a last prayer, father, before we get down to business?’ asked the Grey Mullet Man.

  Father Quinlan shook his head. ‘I’ve already tried to make my peace with God, thank you.’

  ‘Fair play to you, then,’ said the Grey Mullet Man. Then, without any further hesitation, he reached down and grasped Father Quinlan’s left leg, dragging it upwards and hooking it over the left-hand rim of the bathtub, and pinning it there with all of his weight. The man wearing the white pierrot mask did the same with Father Quinlan’s right leg, so that the priest was lying on his back with his knees wide apart. In this position, his buttocks didn’t quite reach the bottom of the bath, so all of his weight was resting on his bruised and dislocated shoulders.

  ‘God in heaven, what are you doing to me?’ he screamed. ‘Haven’t you punished me enough? Please – why don’t you kill me here and now!’

  ‘Soon enough, Quinny!’ retorted the man in the pierrot mask. ‘And you can count yourself as lucky, boy, believe me! Not like all of us poor bastards who have had to live with what you did to them for twenty years and more!’

  The man in the bishop’s mitre came up close beside the Grey Mullet Man. Whatever Father Quinlan had been anaesthetized with, it was rapidly beginning to wear off, and he could see and hear much more distinctly, although his eyes were still unfocused, and the voices of his tormentors still sounded as if they were talking with their heads in metal buckets.

  The man in the bishop’s mitre made a show of lifting up both of his hands, in the same way that a priest raises a chalice to be blessed at the altar, during communion. But when Father Quinlan realized what the man was actually holding up, his spine quivered convulsively with dread. God in heaven, no. Merciful God in heaven, save me from this. Let my heart stop first, before they do this to me.

  ‘I’ll bet you reck this well enough, don’t you, father?’ taunted the Grey Mullet Man. ‘Not too many of these in the world, are there? Very specialist piece of equipment, I’d say.’

  ‘Please,’ said Father Quinlan. ‘You will never get away with this. The guards will find you, sooner or later.’

  ‘They never found you, did they, boy?’ the man in the bishop’s mitre taunted him, and made six or seven slicing noises with the instrument he was holding up in his hands.

  Father Quinlan recognized it, all right. It was made up of two half-moon blades, each about seven inches long, with wooden handles. The blades were joined at the top with a hinge, more like a pair of nutcrackers than a pair of shears. It was old, crudely cast out of blackened steel, although the edges of the blades had recently been whetted, and were shining, and very sharp.

  O God in heaven, please, not this. When we used it, we used it for a reason. Not out of cruelty, not for revenge. When we used it, it was only for the greater glorification of God, and of the diocese.

  Now the choir was singing ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo’. Outside the windows, a dark bank of clouds was rolling over the city, like a stallholder dragging a tarpaulin over his stall at the end of the day, and the interior of the bathroom was plunged into gloom.

  ‘No,’ said Father Quinlan.

  But the Grey Mullet Man reached down and took hold of Father Quinlan’s shrivelled penis between finger and thumb, and stretched it upwards as far as he could. It looked like a mussel, dragged out of its shell.

  ‘No,’ said Father Quinlan, and then he started to gabble under his breath, as if he were trying to break the world prayer speed record. ‘O Lord, Jesus Christ, Redeemer and Saviour, forgive my sins, just as You forgave Peter’s denial and those who crucified You.’

  The man in the bishop’s mitre tilted over the bathtub, with the metal instrument in his left hand, and posi
tioned Father Quinlan’s crinkled testicles so that they bulged between its two crescent-shaped blades. Then he grasped the right handle, too.

  ‘Count not my transgressions but rather my tears of repentance,’ Father Quinlan gabbled. ‘Remember not my iniquities but more especially my sorrow for the offences I have committed against You.’

  ‘Ready?’ asked the Grey Mullet Man.

  The man in the bishop’s mitre nodded.

  ‘Have mercy on me and deliver me from these terrible torments, call me and admit me to Thy most sweet embrace in paradise.’

  Father Quinlan heard the crunch, and knew what had happened, but for some reason he felt nothing at all. But then the man in the bishop’s mitre held his bloody hand up in front of his face and said, ‘There, father. Welcome to the heavenly choir.’

  Father Quinlan looked at what he was holding, and then looked up at the man’s expressionless mask. It was only then that he understood the enormity of what he had done, and what had been done to him, and it was only then that the pain and shock hit him as if he had stepped out in front of a hurtling express train.

  17

  John’s silver Toyota was already parked outside Katie’s father’s house by the time she arrived.

  Katie’s father lived in Monkstown, on the west side of Cork harbour, in a tall green Victorian house that overlooked the half-mile stretch of water that separated Monkstown from Cobh, where Katie lived. On a clear day she could glimpse her own front wall behind the dark row of elm trees that lined the opposite shore, but this evening it had started to rain again, hard, and she could barely see the ferry that plied its way from one side of the inlet to the other. Through the sheets of spray, she thought that it looked like a ghost of all the ships that had left Cobh on other rainy evenings, carrying emigrants who would never come back to Ireland, ever. She didn’t know why she thought that. Maybe she was just feeling tired and sentimental and upset about John.

  She made her way around John’s Toyota and up the steps to the front door. She had her own key, of course, in case of emergencies, but her father always liked to answer the doorbell himself. She waited, while the rainwater clattered from the broken guttering over the porch. She rang again; and at last her father appeared, with John standing close behind him.

  ‘Ah, Katie! John thought that he’d heard the doorbell.’

  ‘Dad – did I not tell you last week to buy yourself a new hearing aid?’

  ‘There’s nothing at all wrong with this one that a new battery wouldn’t fix.’

  ‘Then buy yourself a new battery, for the love of God. They hardly cost anything.’

  ‘Maybe so. But how often does anybody ring the doorbell? That’s nine euros to hear just three rings a month.’

  John was smiling. He said, ‘Hullo, Katie,’ and held out his hand to her.

  ‘Hullo, John. How’s the form?’

  As Katie stepped into the hallway, John tried to put his arm around her shoulder, but she ducked to one side and embraced her father instead. Her father seemed so shrunken these days. She used to think that he was so stocky, and bull-like, but now he felt like a laundry bag filled with old coat hangers. His wild white hair was thinning and there were wriggling veins in his temples.

  ‘John’s been telling me about all of his plans,’ said Katie’s father, as he led her through the hall to the living room, with John following behind. As usual, the hallway smelled fusty and damp. There were two chaise-longues, one on either side, that nobody had sat on in decades, and a long-case clock that ticked so wearily that Katie used to wonder that it didn’t stop from sheer exhaustion.

  However, there was a sharp little log fire crackling in the living room, and a spray of orange roses on one of the side tables, and a savoury smell coming from the direction of the kitchen. Katie’s father had been almost inconsolable after the loss of her mother, three years ago, and of course he still missed her grievously, but Katie had recently found him a housekeeper, Ailish Walsh, who washed and cleaned and cooked for him, and gave him much of the companionship that he missed so much, and at last he seemed to Katie to be enjoying his life more. He had even joined the Fota Golf Club, even though by his own admission he played like a gimp.

  ‘You’ll have a sherry?’ he asked her.

  ‘I think I’d rather have a Paddy’s if you don’t mind. It’s been one of those days. Manic.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I read about that homicide you’ve been looking into – that priest. I’m only surprised that nobody’s had a crack at one of them before.’ He poured her a tumbler of whiskey and brought it over. ‘Those pious gowls deserve everything they get. I’d castrate them, myself, I tell you, and stick their balls on cocktail sticks.’

  ‘Funny you should say that,’ said Katie. ‘We haven’t told the media yet, but that’s exactly what was done to him. Well, not the cocktail-stick bit.’

  ‘What? Somebody—?’ and Katie’s father made a slicing gesture in the air.

  ‘Jesus,’ said John. ‘You’ve just made my eyes water. Do you have any idea who did it?’

  Katie shook her head. ‘Still working on it. We’ve been given a possible lead by Monsignor Kelly, one of the vicars general, but I’m not one hundred per cent convinced.’

  ‘Monsignor Kelly?’ said Katie’s father, pouring himself another sherry. ‘You’re talking about Monsignor Kevin Kelly?’

  ‘That’s your man. He gave us a handwritten confession from a handyman who worked at St Patrick’s on the Lower Glanmire Road, a fellow called Brendan Doody. It seemed to be a suicide note, too, but so far we haven’t found a body, or any evidence that Brendan Doody might have actually killed himself. That’s why I’m not too sure about it.’

  Katie’s father slowly nodded. ‘I knew Monsignor Kelly years ago when he was the Reverend Kelly, priest-in-charge at St Joseph’s in Mayfield. Good-looking fellow, admittedly, but a bit on the short side, and I’ve never trusted fellows under five foot four.’

  ‘That’s kind of height-ist, isn’t it?’ said John.

  ‘Oh, you know what these short fellows are like. Always overcompensating for their lack of inches, in one way or another. Little Reverend Kelly was very ambitious, as I recall, but devious. Well, maybe “devious” isn’t exactly the word. I never thought that he would ever tell you a lie, straight to your face, but on the other hand I never felt that he was telling you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

  ‘I’ll give you an example. The first time I met him, it must have been twenty years ago, easy. Some of the boys in the parish swimming club had complained to their parents that one of the young priests had been playing snap-towel with them in the changing rooms in what you might call rather too friendly a fashion. But the Reverend Kelly managed to persuade everybody that it had all been good clean fun. Horseplay, he called it, that’s all, and no need to make a fuss.’

  ‘And what did you think?’

  Katie’s father pulled a face. ‘I thought that he was telling everybody what they wanted to hear, rather than admitting the very real possibility that the boys might have been interfered with. But you have to remember that, in those days, people were much more intimidated by their parish priest than they are today. In the end we took no action. After all, we had only the boys’ word for what had been done to them. But I thought to myself: I don’t entirely trust that Reverend Kelly. He’s got more sides to him than a Rubik’s cube.’

  ‘My feeling exactly,’ said Katie. ‘Dermot agrees with me, too. But I don’t really know what we can do about it.’

  ‘You should talk to him again, on your own,’ her father suggested. ‘Go back over everything that he told you, in detail, two or three times, as if you suspect that there’s something that doesn’t quite sit right. That should get him well riled up. He’s that kind of arrogant little whippersnapper who always likes to feel that he’s in charge, isn’t he, and you might be surprised what he comes out with when loses his temper.’

  The long-case clock in the hallway struck a dolor
ous half-hour, and at the same time Ailish Walsh appeared in the doorway, a round-faced woman in a red-striped apron, with her grey hair braided into a tight coronet. She looked hot, but pleased with herself.

  ‘Supper’s ready,’ she announced. And then, ‘Hallo, Katie, how’s yourself?’

  ‘Grand, thanks, Ailish. Something smells good.’

  They followed Ailish into the huge, old-fashioned kitchen, tiled from floor to ceiling in shiny cream ceramics, with decorative green borders. A large deal table stood in the middle, spread with a checked green and white cloth. A woven basket at one end of the table was filled with freshly baked slices of soda bread; and at the other end, a deep earthenware salad bowl was crowded with rocket and lamb’s lettuce and fennel, which looked as if they had been harvested from a nearby hedgerow.

  Katie and John sat down opposite each other, while Katie’s father took four bottles of Murphy’s stout out of the fridge and poured out a glass for each of them.

  ‘Here’s to us, and the blood and bandages, and the general confusion of the clergy,’ said Katie’s father, raising his glass. ‘The blood and bandages’ was the red and white strip of Cork’s champion hurling team.

  ‘Here’s to the future,’ said John, looking directly at Katie.

  ‘Now you’re tempting fate, boy!’ said Katie’s father. He glanced from Katie to John and back again. ‘My old grandma always swore that she could tell the future. She told my sister that she was going to marry the steadiest man in County Cork, and what happened? She ended up wed to a high-wire walker from Tom Duffy’s Circus. He was steady all right on his high wire, rock steady, but he chased after every bit of skirt that ever came within sniffing distance.’

  Ailish let down the door of the oil-fired oven with a reverberating bang, and took out a baking tray with what looked like eight golden-brown chicken legs on it. She used tongs to lay two on each plate, and handed them around the table, and then she took off her apron and sat down herself.