Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) (12 page)

The man in the bishop’s mitre tilted over the bathtub, with the metal instrument in his left hand, and positioned 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.

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 dolorous 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.

‘Crubeens, my favourite!’ said Katie’s father, rubbing his hands together.

John poked at one of them of his with his fork. ‘Wow. It’s a been coon’s age since I had crubeens. But they don’t look too much like the crubeens my mam used to make.’

‘These are what my auntie used to call “polite company crubeens”,’ said Ailish. ‘In other words, you can eat them with a knife and fork.’

‘Me? Polite company?’ grinned John, still trying to catch Katie’s eye. ‘I’m honoured. You must tell me how you make them.’

‘Oh, it’s fiddly, like, but it’s easy enough. You take the hairs off the trotters, of course, and you wrap them up in cheesecloth, just the same as you usually would, and then you boil them for two or three hours with onions and carrots and bay leaves and peppercorns.’

‘And parsley,’ put in Katie’s father. ‘Don’t forget the parsley.’

‘Parsley, that’s right. But after they’re done, and you unwrap the cheesecloth, you skin them, and you use your fingers to take all the meat off the bones.’

‘Like you would at table, if you’d cooked them as normal,’ said Katie’s father.

Ailish said, ‘You lay a piece of trotter skin on the bottom of a bowl, and fill it up with a portion’s worth of trotter meat. Then you wrap it in cling film, and put it in the fridge for a couple of hours to set.

‘Afterwards, you dip them in beaten egg and breadcrumbs and bake them in bacon fat for half an hour, and there you have them, pigs’ trotters you can eat without making a holy mess of yourself.’

‘I hope you’re taking this all in, John,’ said Katie’s father. ‘You could serve them up at a barbecue, couldn’t you, when you get back to California? They’d go down a treat, I’ll bet you.’

Katie had cut her first crubeen in half but hadn’t yet taken a mouthful. ‘Do you have a date yet?’ she asked him.

‘Not a firm date,’ said John, looking at her steadily. ‘But my friends want me over there as soon as possible, and I can leave Buckley’s to sell the farm for me. I’ll be leaving by the end of April, I guess, at the very latest.’

‘As soon as that? What about your mother?’

‘She’s in a very good home now. I couldn’t take care of her any better.’

‘This online pill business sounds like a very exciting business proposition, I’d say,’ put in Katie’s father, wiping his mouth with his napkin. ‘Better than anything you’d ever be able to set up here in Cork, especially now.’

‘What are you suggesting?’ said Katie.

‘I’m not suggesting anything, my darling. But each of us only has one life, and sometimes it’s worth taking a risk, and going for something completely new. Sean O’Riordan offered me a partnership once, in Globetrotters, his travel business, on Grand Parade. Well, you know how
that
prospered, and think of all the wonderful places your mam and I could have visited, all over the world, but we never did. The furthest we ever went was Dingle, and then it rained for four days solid.’

‘Come on. You wouldn’t really have quit the Garda, would you?’

‘Oh, I thought about it, Katie. I thought about it long and serious, believe me. Mind you, I was only a detective sergeant, I wasn’t a superintendent like you. Not nearly so exalted, and not nearly so well paid, which was more to the point, so I was very cautious about risking my pension. But think about it, Katie. There’s a whole lot more to life than chasing after small-time drug dealers and pimps and prostitutes and priests who should have kept their soutanes buttoned up. There’s a whole world out there, with sunshine and money and
fun
, for the love of God.’

‘Well, well. John
has
been working on you, hasn’t he?’

John said, ‘Katie – I’ve only been telling it like it is. You and I, we could have a really great life out there.’

‘I told you before, John. How can I just drop everything at a moment’s notice, and walk away? I’ve had years of training, years of experience. If I leave the Garda now, they’re going to lose all of that. I have so many contacts, so many informants. Who’s going to talk to a piece of work like Eamonn Collins if I go? Or a header like Eugene Ó’Béara?’