Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) (18 page)

‘What did they use to castrate him?’ asked Katie. ‘Our technician thought that it was shears. You know, like they shear sheep with.’

‘The wonders of the internet,’ said Dr Collins. She picked up her Apple laptop from the table where all of her instruments were arrayed, opened it up, and passed it over so that Katie could see what was on the screen.

She saw a picture of a bespectacled grey-haired man who looked like a professor. He was wearing latex gloves and holding up a pair of crudely fashioned metal shears. Unlike sheep shears, however, these had half-moon-shaped blades and they were hinged at the top.

‘
Castratori
, these were called,’ Dr Collins told her. ‘They were specifically designed for the castration of young boys, so that their voices wouldn’t grow deeper when they reached puberty.’

‘You’re talking about
castrati
,’ said Katie.

‘That’s right. In the sixteenth century women weren’t allowed to sing in church, or on the stage, so they used boys instead.
Castrati
became fantastically popular and they were still in huge demand right up until the nineteen hundreds.’

‘But – Christ on a bicycle,’ put in Sergeant O’Rourke. ‘To cut a young lad’s mebs off, just so he could sing like a girl. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘It did if you were a dirt-poor family with half a dozen children and this was your only chance to make any real money. The very top
castrati
– the ones who became professional opera singers, or the ones who were chosen to sing in some of the great church choirs – they were like today’s rock stars. World-famous, and idolized, and very wealthy. You can forget about Bono. Farinelli, in the eighteenth century, was openly compared to God.’

‘How about that, then? I didn’t know God had a squeaky voice.’

‘
Castrati
’s voices weren’t at all squeaky,’ said Dr Collins. ‘They had extraordinary pitch, like a woman or a pre-pubertal boy, but much stronger and much more resonant. After they were castrated, their vocal cords grew only to the same length as a female high soprano, but their pharynx and oral cavity were fully developed, and they had the lung capacity of an adult male.

‘Farinelli’s voice spanned three octaves, and he could hold a note for whole minute without taking a breath.’

‘Sounds exactly like my Maeve,’ put in Sergeant O’Rourke.

Katie looked again at the bloody cavity where Father Heaney’s scrotum had been sliced off, with its flaccid lips. ‘The question I’m asking myself is, why?’

Dr Collins said, ‘
Why
is your area of expertise, detective superintendent, not mine. The only question I’m here to answer is
how
.’

‘But if you castrate a grown man it doesn’t affect his voice, does it, even if you allow him to live?’

‘No, of course not. When a boy reaches puberty, testosterone lengthens his vocal cords by more than sixty per cent, while a girl’s vocal cords lengthen by only half that, or even less. Testosterone also thickens up a boy’s vocal cords, which helps to give him a deeper voice, and that thickening is permanent.

‘In boys, the thyroid cartilage increases in length three times more than it does in girls, which gives men their Adam’s apple. You can’t reverse any of these physical changes by castration or hormone injections or any other means.’

Katie slowly shook her head. ‘So these two priests were castrated only to cause them suffering, or to humiliate them as men, or to make some point that we don’t yet know about? Or all three?’

‘I think it was revenge,’ said Sergeant O’Rourke. ‘That’s the most likely motive, the way I see it. This was done by somebody who was molested when he was younger. And of course, once he’d tortured them, and castrated them, he didn’t have much of a choice. He had to kill them.’

‘You’re probably right, Jimmy,’ Katie agreed. ‘But think about it: if the perpetrator was trying to punish these priests for molesting him, why didn’t he cut
everything
off?’

‘What?’

‘Why didn’t he cut their penises off, as well as their testicles?’

‘Now
that
is a very interesting question,’ said Dr Collins. ‘Especially if we’re talking about a victim who was forced to give oral sex, or who was sodomized. It’s the penetration that abuse victims find the most traumatic – the feeling that they’ve been physically violated. I’ve talked to dozens of rape victims, and they almost always have a vivid mental picture of their rapist’s penis – even when they can barely recall what his face looked like.’

‘
Don’t
,’ said Sergeant O’Rourke. ‘I can remember like it was yesterday Father O’Grady standing by the lockers and calling out, “Look at this, O’Rourke!” and there it was sticking out of his soutane like one of McWhinney’s Bigfoot sausages. I ran off so fast my rubber dollies never touched the floor.’

‘I hope you reported him,’ said Katie.

‘Get away with you, I was only seven and I was much too scared, and it would have only been my word against his, and in any case he’s long dead now and St Peter will have decided how to punish him. If there’s any justice in the world he’ll be grilling his sausage in hell.’

Dr Collins said, ‘I should finish examining Father Quinlan by midday tomorrow, detective superintendent, so that may tell us more. So far, however, I can formally tell you that the primary cause of Father
Heaney
’s death was strangulation.’

‘He didn’t bleed out?’

‘That wasn’t the primary cause, no. He probably would have died from loss of blood if he hadn’t been garrotted first. His inferior vesical artery was severed when he was castrated, and he also suffered a ruptured spleen, which caused more blood loss internally. He also had three broken ribs and massive internal bruising.’

She held up her latex-gloved hand and counted on her fingers. ‘But these are all the things we
don’t
have.
One
– we don’t have any fingerprints or distinctively shaped bruises or marks on his body that could help us to identify his assailant.
Two
– we don’t have any saliva or other bodily fluids either on his skin surface or in any of his body orifices that might yield incriminating DNA
. Three
– we don’t have any epithelial cells under his fingernails that might have resulted from scratching or fighting with his assailant.
Four
– we don’t have any human or animal hairs or any foreign fibres.’

‘So –
five
,’ said Sergeant O’Rourke, sticking up his thumb, ‘we seem to be well and truly clueless.’

‘I admit that it’s not going to be easy, especially if Father Quinlan’s body is the same.’

‘We have the harp wire,’ said Katie. ‘There can’t be too many places in Cork where you can find wire like that. A music shop, maybe. Or a college that teaches music. Or an orchestra.’

Sergeant O’Rourke took out his Blackberry and prodded at it, frowning. After a minute or two, he said, ‘There are six music shops in the city itself, like, and another five within a twenty-five mile radius – in Mallow and Bandon and Carrigaline.

He did some more prodding, and then he said, ‘We have at least five music schools in the area, including the Cork School of Music on Union Quay and Cork City Music College, but some of them teach only keyboards or guitar.’

‘Well, we’re going to need to do some legwork,’ said Katie. ‘Call O’Donovan and Horgan and have them start to go round the shops. Tell them they’re looking for – what was it? – seventh-octave harp wire, and the names of anybody who buys it from them.’

She turned back to Dr Collins and said, ‘I’ll come back tomorrow, when you’ve finished with Father Quinlan.’

As she did so, however, she was sure she saw movement under the green sheet that covered Father Quinlan’s body. Only a slight stirring at first, followed by a moment’s stillness, but then a quick, convulsive shake, as if Father Quinlan had woken up and was struggling to pull the sheet away.

‘
He’s still alive
!’ Katie whispered. She felt as if her scalp were shrinking.

‘What?’ said Dr Collins, staring at her.

Katie pointed toward the trolley. ‘Father Quinlan – he’s still alive! I just saw him move!’

Sergeant O’Rourke said, ‘There’s no way! Didn’t we see him dead as a doornail? The paramedics checked his pulse and his pupils and nobody gets any deader than he was.’

Even as he was speaking, however, the sheet suddenly humped up and shifted rhythmically from side to side. It looked as if Father Quinlan had heard them talking and was waving his left hand in an effort to attract their attention.

‘This is impossible,’ snapped Dr Collins, as if it was a personal affront that anyone should come back to life after she had conclusively decided that they were dead.

She crossed over to the trolley and wrenched off the sheet. Sergeant O’Rourke crossed himself and said, ‘Name of Jesus,’ under his breath.

Father Quinlan was still lying on his back with his eyes closed, as bruised and broken as Father Heaney – worse, if anything, because his shoulders had been dislocated and his arms were lying at his sides at such an awkward angle.

Out of a glistening hole in the left side of his stomach, just below his ribcage, a wet, dark, narrow-nosed creature was rearing up. It was writhing around and around, frantically trying to get itself free, and it was this convulsive writhing that they had mistaken for Father Quinlan attempting to tell them that he was still alive.

‘A
rat
,’ said Dr Collins, and her voice was soaked with genuine horror.

The rat continued to twist itself around, although for some reason it made no sound, no bruxing or chattering like a rat would normally do to show that it was stressed. Dr Collins reached across to the table where she kept all of her surgical equipment and found herself a thick pair of red industrial gloves. She pulled them on, and then she grasped the rat in both hands and started to tug it inch by inch out of Father Quinlan’s body.

‘Jesus,’ said Sergeant O’Rourke.

The rat emerged with a thick, glutinous sound that reminded Katie of rabbit guts dropping into the kitchen sink when her mother was preparing a rabbit stew, and it made her feel just as queasy.

Dr Collins stalked over to the opposite side of the laboratory, holding the waggling rat at arm’s length.

‘Sergeant O’Rourke!’ she cried out, ‘the locker, will you?’

Sergeant O’Rourke flung open one of the wire cages that were usually used as a temporary store for odd items of evidence, such as hats and shoes and purses. Dr Collins tossed the rat inside, where it landed with a heavy wet thump. She slammed the door and fastened it with wire.

‘Rats,’ she said. ‘Rats and maggots. Ugh! They disgust me. Sometimes I think I should have been a florist, or a confectioner.’

Katie looked down at the soft, boggy hole in Father Quinlan’s stomach. ‘Can you believe it? They must have sewed it up inside him. Holy Mary, Mother of God. You don’t think he was still alive when they did it, do you?’

Dr Collins took off her industrial gloves and snapped on a pair of latex gloves instead. She went back to Father Quinlan’s body, lifted his penis out of the way and opened up the wound where he had been castrated, parting the flesh with her fingertips as wide as she could.

‘There,’ she said. ‘See those stitches? You’re absolutely right. They pushed the rat inside him and then they sewed him up so that it couldn’t escape.’

Neither Katie nor Sergeant O’Rourke said anything, and Sergeant O’Rourke kept his hand pressed over his mouth, as if he were concentrating very hard on the evidence, or trying to prevent himself from retching.

Dr Collins went back and peered at the rat through the criss-cross wires of its makeshift cage. ‘I can’t say yet if Father Quinlan was still alive when they did it. But look – they tied the rat’s front and rear paws together with thread, so that it couldn’t burrow its way out of him, and they must have severed its vocal cords, so that it couldn’t make any sound. Maybe they thought that nobody would ever discover it was there, and he’d be buried with the rat still inside him.’

The rat hopped round and round, its back paws still fastened together. It was obviously in a panic, and it repeatedly hurled itself up against the sides of its cage.

Dr Collins said, ‘See? It managed to bite through the thread that was holding its front paws together, and then it used its claws and its teeth to tunnel through Father Quinlan’s intestines.’

Katie said, ‘I want photographs of this, please, doctor, lots and lots of photographs. And CT scans. And blood samples. Both human blood and rat blood.’

‘Oh, you’ll get all of those, I promise you,’ Dr Collins assured her. ‘And by the looks of things, I’ll be able to give you a lot more besides. Nobody can commit a homicide like this and leave no trace of themselves at all. It simply isn’t possible.’

Outside, it was bright but still blustery, and as they came out of the front door of the hospital they were caught up in a whirlwind that stung Katie’s eyes with grit.

‘What do you think, boss?’ asked Sergeant O’Rourke. ‘Are we dealing with a header, or are we dealing with a header?’

‘I think I need a drink,’ Katie told him. ‘We can stop at the Hayfield Manor on the way back, if you like.’

‘What, and ask them if they’ve counted their spoons lately?’

It was past seven by the time she arrived back at her desk at Anglesea Street. The last of the sun was shining through the window, and her pot plant cast a shadow on the wall that reminded her of a scowling witch.

On the roof of the multi-storey car park opposite, even more hooded crows had gathered, their feathers ruffled by the wind. Under her breath, Katie said, ‘
Shoo
,’ but of course they stayed where they were, a living reminder of the very close presence of death.

Detectives O’Donovan and Horgan came barging in through her office only five minutes later, both of them looking exhausted and smelling strongly of cigarette smoke. Detective O’Donovan slumped into the chair on the opposite side of her desk and dry-washed his face with his hands. Detective Horgan went over to the window and peered out of it as if he had seen something of riveting interest, like a girl undressing in a nearby apartment, or his long-dead grandmother walking along the street with her long-dead spaniel.