Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) (15 page)

‘Are you threatening me?’

‘I wouldn’t dare, girl! You might arrest me! Mary, Mother of God, what it is to have a moral guardian for a sister!’

‘Oh, get back to bed,’ said Katie.

Michael put his arm around Siobhán and said, ‘Come on, darling. I think it’s time we called it a night, don’t you?’

‘You haven’t had your curry yet,’ said Siobhán, looking defiantly at Katie.

‘Forget it,’ Michael told her. ‘I couldn’t eat it now if I tried. My throat’s gone all constricted, like.’

There was a long moment when Siobhán stared at Katie and Katie saw something in her eyes that she had never seen before. It wasn’t hatred, but it might have been resentment. Perhaps she had always wanted to be like Katie, but had never known how. Katie thought:
If only
I
knew how
.

She slept badly, and dreamed that she was walking through the grounds of Blarney Castle in the pouring rain. She was sure that she could hear little Seamus crying, but every time she stopped to listen, so that she could tell where the crying was coming from, she could hear only the rain, pattering on the grass.

She didn’t know if she ought to call out for him or not. If she called out for him, the witches who clustered in the caves around the castle might realize that there was a child there, and go out hunting for him, rustling and cackling in the darkness. There was nothing that witches liked better than roasting babies on an open fire. It was said that almost every morning the ground-keepers of Blarney Castle found dying embers in the cave they called the Witches’ Kitchen.

When she reached the top of the hill that overlooked the castle gardens, she decided to risk it. She took a deep breath and cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted out, ‘
Seamus
!
Are you there, Seamus
?
Seamus, my little darling
!’

She listened, and listened, and she thought she could hear him crying, but maybe it was only a seagull, because seagulls cry like lost children. She didn’t know what to do next. She couldn’t simply walk away and leave Seamus behind, could she? Even if he was dead, and lying in the Old Church Cemetery, he would be so lonely if his mother was living thousands of miles away, and how could she lay flowers on his grave?

Her phone started to ring. She opened her eyes and realized that she had been dreaming, and that she wasn’t standing out in the rain, after all. In fact, the sun was shining through her yellow floral curtains, and her bedroom was filled with golden light.

She sat up in bed and shook her head to wake herself up. Then she picked up the receiver and said, ‘Yes?’

‘It’s Jimmy, ma’am, Sergeant O’Rourke. Sorry if I woke you.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Ten past seven.’

‘Jesus, sorry. I must have forgotten to set my alarm. What’s the story?’

‘We’ve got ourselves another one, ma’am. Another priest, with his mebs cut off. Well, we’re not sure about the mebs yet, but from all the blood it looks like it.’

‘Oh my God. Where?’

‘A blind man couldn’t miss him, ma’am. He’s hanging by his heels from the flagpole outside of St Joseph’s, thirty feet up. He’s all bound up with wire, just like Father Heaney. Hands tied behind his back, knees and ankles tied together, and the same loops in the wire, just like Father Heaney. Somebody’s given him a terrible mangling, too, by the look of it.’

‘When was this?’

‘Only about an hour ago. First light. A young fellow was delivering papers and he looked up and there he was. Poor kid thought it was a vampire and practically shit his pants.’

‘You haven’t cut him down?’

‘I sent a young garda up on a ladder to cover him over with a groundsheet and we’ve set up a diversion around the Middle Glanmire Road. We don’t want the kids to see him hanging there, on their way to school.’

‘Have you called for the fire brigade?’

‘We did, yeah, but they’re all tied up with a big warehouse blaze out at Ringaskiddy, and they can’t send us their emergency tender with the Hiab for at least two hours. So we improvised, and O’Donovan’s arranged for the council to send us up a scissor-lift.’

‘Any idea who he is, this priest?’

‘Not so far. His face is mashed up something terrible.’

‘Okay,’ said Katie. ‘Give me fifteen minutes and I’ll be with you. Don’t touch anything, though. Nothing at all. I want to see him exactly as he is.’

‘Whatever you say, ma’am. I’ll see you in a tick.’

Katie climbed out of bed. She didn’t have time to take a shower, which she would have loved to have done, but she splashed her face in the bathroom basin and soaped between her legs. She smelled John, as she did so, and closed her eyes for a moment. But another priest had been mutilated and murdered, and there was work to be done, and so she towelled herself and hurriedly dressed. She chose her light grey polo-neck sweater and charcoal grey trouser suit. She wanted to feel businesslike.

Michael was sitting in the kitchen, wearing a bright blue sweater with a hole in the elbow, eating toast.

‘Look, Katie,’ he said, ‘I want to tell you that I’m sorry. Siobhán told me that you wouldn’t object at all.’

‘Forget it, Michael,’ Katie told him. ‘I have a murder to attend to, and somehow that makes a little adulterous hanky-panky seem extremely unimportant by comparison.’

Michael smiled at her and shook his head. ‘You’re a highly unusual woman, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

‘Oh, yes?’ said Katie, as she strapped on her wristwatch. ‘And you’re a very bold fellow indeed.’

‘I’m scared enough of my Nola, believe me. And your Siobhán’s a handful, all right. But you. I don’t know at all about you.’

Katie gave him a grin and patted him on the cheek. ‘In that case, Michael, it’s just as well that you and I aren’t having a fling, isn’t it?’

At the front door, she paused and called out, ‘Siobhán! You won’t forget to take Barney for his morning walk, will you?’

All she heard from Siobhán’s bedroom was a long-drawn-out groan, like a soul that wakes up to realize that it
is
in hell, after all.

By the time she arrived outside St Joseph’s, two squad cars were parked outside, as well as a bright yellow ambulance, and at least fifteen other assorted cars and vans and SUVs, including a green and white outside broadcast van from RTÉ, with a large white satellite dish on its roof.

As she climbed out of her car, she looked up at the flagstaff in the far corner of the car park. A heavy khaki groundsheet had been draped over the top of it, like a witch’s lair out of a frightening fairy story, high on top of a pole. Hanging below the hem of the groundsheet she could just make out one bruised and blood-encrusted hand.

A makeshift canvas screen had been erected around the orphanage, but the flagstaff was nearly thirty feet high and the screen did nothing to hide it from the crowds of onlookers.

Detective O’Donovan came up to Katie and jerked his head upwards. ‘Morning, boss. Looks like the exact same thing was done to him as Father Heaney. God alone knows how they got him up there. There must have been two of them at least, I’d say, even three.’

‘You’ve called the council for a lifting platform, haven’t you?’

‘I gave them another bell only a couple of minutes ago and told them to get their skates on. They said that it shouldn’t be more than a quarter of an hour, but they have to drive it all the way over from their depot on the South Side, and it isn’t exactly a Ferrari.’

Katie glanced across the road, where six or seven reporters were talking and smoking together behind the police barrier tape. She recognized Dan Keane from the
Examiner
, John McCarthy from the
Southern Star
, and Fionnuala Sweeney from RTÉ.

‘Where’s that girl from the
Catholic Recorder
? What was her name? Ciara something.’

‘Haven’t seen her. Maybe her editor decided that it was a waste of time, trying to play down a story like this.’

‘Wouldn’t surprise me at all,’ said Katie. ‘One castrated priest, you could put that down as a single act of revenge, couldn’t you? But
two
castrated priests – that’s beginning to look like a vendetta.’

They crossed the car park to the foot of the flagstaff. Katie had always thought that St Joseph’s had a grim look about it, and she could only imagine how the hearts of little orphans must have sunk when they first arrived there.
Abandon hope, all ye who enter here
. It was a large flint-grey building with an octagonal frontage, standing on the corner of Mayfield Gardens and the Old Youghal Road. It had been built in the 1890s as an industrial school for ‘neglected, abandoned and orphaned children’. Although there was a life-size statue of St Joseph standing over the porch, with an oddly ingratiating smile on his face and his arms outspread in welcome, its miserly little leaded windows might have been deliberately designed to starve its inmates of sunlight, and its overhanging eaves always reminded Katie of Sister Coleen, one of the most vindictive nuns at her primary school, in her slate-grey wimple.

Sergeant O’Rourke had been talking to the janitor, but now he came across and joined them. He hadn’t shaved and underneath his lime-green tracksuit he was still wearing his orange-striped pyjama jacket.

‘Morning, Jimmy. State of you la! You look like a sackful of badgers.’

‘Sorry, ma’am, but I thought I should get here quick before some do-gooder tried to cut him down, like, and fecked up all the evidence in the process. I don’t even have my Y-fronts on. Now you’re here, I’ll dodge back home in a minute, if you don’t mind, and get dressed proper.’

‘Have a decent breakfast while you’re at it. I think we’re going to be here for most of the day.’

Sergeant O’Rourke shaded his eyes and squinted up at the single hand dangling below the groundsheet. ‘I climbed up the ladder myself and took a quick sconce at him, poor bastard. Somebody’s given him one devil of a reefing, I can tell you that for nothing at all. I don’t know hundred per cent for sure if he’s been castrated, but his habit’s soaked through with blood.’

‘We don’t have any idea who he is yet?’

Sergeant O’Rourke shook his head. ‘There’s been no clergy reported missing. Not so far, anyhow. We’re calling him Father X for now. But I’ll bet you money he’s a one-time kiddy-fiddler.’

‘Now then,’ Katie cautioned him. ‘Don’t go jumping to conclusions.’

‘How about going up there yourself and taking a lamp at him, ma’am?’ asked Detective O’Donovan. ‘I’ll hold the ladder for you, and I promise no shaking it – cross my heart and swear on the Bible.’

Katie looked up again. At the moment, Father X’s body was completely hidden in the dark shadows underneath the groundsheet, but Detective O’Donovan was right: before they lowered him down she needed to climb up and examine him closely
in situ
. First of all, they needed to work out how his murderer had hoisted him to the top of the flagstaff. It didn’t seem likely that one man could have done it single-handed – not unless he had used a block and tackle or some other ingenious way of lifting him up.

Not only that, it was important for her to see how his murderer had bound him. She had learned from experience that the way in which people tied knots was almost as idiosyncratic as the way they signed their names. She had also learned how much a victim’s injuries could tell her. Every bruise and burn and ligature mark and stab wound was like a brain scan of a murderer’s state of mind. Seething, or vengeful, or jealous, or just plain sadistic.

She hesitated, and then she said, ‘Okay, then, fetch the ladder. But I warn you, Patrick, I’m not happy with heights – and if I feel so much as a quiver, you’re back on crossing duty.’

While Detective O’Donovan and a podgy young garda went off to find the ladder, Sergeant O’Rourke sniffed and said, ‘Why do you think they hung your man from the top of the flagpole like that? I mean, that’s a hell of a lot of trouble to go to, wouldn’t you say, just to make a point? Especially if nobody can understand what your point actually is.’

‘Maybe it’s a warning to other priests.’

‘It could be, like. Or maybe they’re trying to show the world that he was no better than vermin – the same way those farmers in Kerry shoot crows and hang them on their fences.’

Detective O’Donovan and the young garda came across the parking lot carrying a long aluminium ladder. With a sharp rattle, they lifted it up against the flagstaff and shook it vigorously to demonstrate to Katie that it was secure. Detective O’Donovan said, ‘I’ll go up first and pull that groundsheet off of him. Then he’s all yours.’

Katie waited while he clanked up to the top of the ladder, took hold of the groundsheet and dragged it sideways. It got caught on one of Father X’s heels, and he had to shake it two or three times as if he were making a bed. At last he managed to disentangle it, and drop it with an airy rumble to the ground.

When he came down, he said, ‘Take a look at his neck, ma’am. They’ve strangled him with some kind of cord. Not wire, like they did with Father Heaney.’

He took her elbow and helped her to mount the first step of the ladder. ‘Up you go, ma’am. But take it easy, okay? We don’t want to lose you, do we?’

‘Don’t worry,’ he told him, although she couldn’t help thinking:
if you only
knew
.

She climbed up steadily until she reached the penultimate rung. She looked down and she could see everybody looking up at her – gardaí and technicians and reporters and the crowds of onlookers who had gathered behind the police cordon three streets away. She caught a flash of reflected sunlight, and saw that the cameraman from RTÉ News was focused on her, too. She suddenly felt as if she were very high up.

Sergeant O’Rourke was right – Father X looked exactly like one of those rotting crows that farmers tied to their fences. He was bedraggled, like a crow, and his black soutane had flapped open like a pair of broken wings.

His ankles had been fastened tightly to the top of the flagstaff with twenty or thirty turns of bright brass wire. His knees were wired together, and his wrists were wired behind his back. As Sergeant O’Rourke had told her, the end of each wire had been twisted into two tidy loops like a butterfly’s wings, in exactly the same way as with Father Heaney.