Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) (24 page)

Detective Horgan was leaning against the far wall, one hand cupped against his face to mask the fact that he was picking his nose.

‘Ah, Katie,’ said Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll. ‘This is Mrs Maureen O’Dwyer. It was her husband, Gerry O’Dwye, who was knocked down on Patrick Street last night and apparently abducted by the fellows who knocked him down.’

Katie pulled out a chair and sat down opposite Mrs O’Dwyer. ‘We know it was him for sure?’ she asked.

Without turning around, Liam Fennessy said, ‘Two of the witnesses identified him, ma’am. He runs the Mighty Minstrel music store on Maylor Street.’

‘Yes, I know the Mighty Minstrel, of course. And I think I know
him
, by sight anyway. But why should anybody want to knock him down and then abduct him?’

Mrs O’Dwyer looked across at Katie with red-rimmed eyes. ‘We were married seven and a half years. He’s a good man, like, but he isn’t easy. He always says that his conscience is following around after him like a dog with the rabies, just waiting for the chance to jump on him and take a bite out of his neck.’

‘His conscience? Why, what has he done to feel guilty about?’

‘I’ve just been telling your man here. He wasn’t always Gerry O’Dwyer. Before that, and a few years before he met me, he was Father Gerry O’Gara.’

‘He used to be a priest?’

Mrs O’Dwyer nodded. ‘He was one of the priests they investigated at St Joseph’s Orphanage for messing with the children. They never proved anything against Gerry, and none of the children ever pointed the finger and said that he’d been molesting them. He swore blind to me that he never did anything of a sexual nature with those boys. But all the same he felt the shame of being accused of it terrible hard, so he said, and he gave up the priesthood and changed his name and tried to start a new life.’

Liam Fennessy replaced his glasses and said, ‘There you have it. A third priest suspected of molestation, whether he actually did it or not. Let’s just hope for his sake that he hasn’t been taken by the same perpetrators as Father Heaney and Father Quinlan.’

‘You’ll find him, though, won’t you?’ asked Maureen O’Dwyer, twisting her wedding ring round and round. ‘You won’t let them hurt him? He’s such a good man.’

Sergeant O’Rourke said, ‘We have gardaí out looking for him everywhere, Maureen, and we’ve sent a description of the van they took him in to every Garda station in Kerry and Limerick and Tipperary and Waterford. It’s quite distinctive, that van. Sooner or later somebody’s going to spot it. All you can do now is go home and pray. The good Lord will help you to get through this, I can promise you.’

Katie called a young female garda to come into the interview room and help Mrs O’Dwyer out of the building. When Mrs O’Dwyer had gone, Katie turned around and said, ‘This backs up something I was saying to Dr Collins. It’s almost like this perpetrator
wants
to be caught. Not just yet, but eventually, when he’s finished punishing all of those priests that he believes deserve punishment. He could have used a different van but he wanted us to know that it was him. Or
them
, however many perpetrators there are.’

‘He could have just sent us a text,’ said Detective Horgan. ‘Hallo, this is the Serial Scrotum Snipper, at it again. And the code word is “Ouch”.’

Katie gave him a sharp, tight-lipped look to show that she was distinctly unamused. But she recognized that he might be on to something. ‘I get the feeling that he could be using this particular van because it has some special significance... something that he couldn’t suggest to us if he were only sending us text messages. Like, this question mark painted on the back... what does that mean?’

Liam Fennessy shrugged and pulled a face. ‘It could mean anything at all or nothing at all. It could simply mean, “Who the feck am I and why am I doing this?” Or it could mean, “I’m keeping you eejits guessing, aren’t I?”‘

Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll looked at his watch. ‘Whatever it means, we’re going to have to take some serious steps forward with this investigation, and make them real quick. Katie – I’ve arranged a media conference for 14.30 and I need some ideas on what we’re going to say to them. We’ll have to be very diplomatic, like. There’s a lot of people out there who think that any priest who molested the children in his care actually
deserves
to be mangled and have his mebs cut off.’

‘Well, me included,’ said Detective Horgan. ‘In fact, I think they should do it publicly in Emmet Place and charge admission. And sell popcorn, too.’

Gerry awoke to excruciating pain and the ethereal sound of somebody singing. Of course he recognized the song. It was ‘The Rose of Allendale’, a wistful ballad about a traveller separated from the woman he loves. But the singing was extraordinary – high and resonant, as if it were being sung in an echo chamber, with grace notes that were held for what sounded like minutes on end.

My life has been a wilderness

Unblessed by fortune’s gale

Had fate not linked my love to her

The Rose of Allendale.

He didn’t hear any more –
couldn’t
, because he was suddenly swamped with such black, intense pain that it blotted out everything – his hearing, his sight, even his ability to think. He was aware of nothing except the sensation that every bone in his body had been fractured or broken or crushed, and that all of his internal organs had been ripped away from their moorings – his liver, his spleen, his stomach and his kidneys – and that they were chafing and bumping against each other like dinghies in a stormy harbour, all tangled up in the fraying netting of his nerves.

For over five minutes he was unable to cry out, unable to do anything but shudder and snort and gasp. Gradually, however, the pain ebbed away, even though every breath hurt so much that it ended with a little mewl.

Whoever was singing, they had now reached the final chorus, and they drew out the very last note as if they couldn’t bear for the song to end. Then there was silence, except for a door slamming and the sound of a car engine starting up.

‘
God, please, God, please save me
,’ Gerry whispered. He opened his eyes and tried to focus on the room around him, although everything was blurry. He was lying on the bare diamond-shaped springs of a single bed that creaked and scrunged as he tried to turn himself over. The room around him looked like the bedroom of a derelict cottage. A single small window was hazy with dust and spiders’ webs, and outside he could see only the green leaves of an overgrown hydrangea, nodding repeatedly in the breeze.

The walls were papered with pale green chrysanthemum patterns, but the damp had stained most of the opposite wall with dark brown blotches, and on every other wall the paper was bellying out or peeling off altogether. The floor was covered with cheap pale carpet, but it was so filthy and spotted with mould that it was impossible to tell what colour it had been when it was first laid.

‘Please, God,’ Gerry repeated, but he was so sure that God was ignoring him that he could almost picture His turned-away shoulder and the back of His flowing white hair. Gerry was convinced that God could hear him, but was refusing to answer. Instead, he appealed to Jesus.

‘O Lord Jesus Christ, most merciful, Lord of Earth, I ask that you receive this child into your arms, as Thou hast told us with infinite compassion.’

He didn’t know if it was possible to administer the last rites to himself. After all, he was no longer a priest, but there was no other priest there. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine making the sign of the cross on his forehead with holy oil. ‘By this sign thou art anointed with the grace of the atonement of Jesus Christ and thou art absolved of all past error and freed to take your place in the world He has prepared for us.’

As he mumbled out the last words of his absolution he became aware that somebody had very quietly eased themselves into the room and was standing very close beside him – leaning over him, in fact, listening to him.

He opened his eyes and saw that it was the man in the pointed hat and the face mask, the same man who had spoken to him in the back of the van.

‘Please,’ Gerry begged him. ‘Would you get me to a hospital?’

‘Oh – you think that all of your heinous sins are forgiven and forgotten, do you, Father O’Gara? I’m deeply sorry about that, but they’re not at all – not by me and the lads, anyhow.’

‘Please call for an ambulance. I can’t bear this pain even a minute longer.’

‘No such luck,’ the man retorted. Gerry thought that his voice was oddly gruff, almost like a child pretending to be a grown-up. ‘We’ve brought you here for a reason, father. We’ve brought you here to show you that everything you do in life has a consequence, sooner or later, and that there’s no getting away with acts of evil.’

‘Who are you? Do I
know
you? What have I ever done to you?’

‘Oh, you
know
me right enough, just as well as I know you. But you don’t need to know my given name. I call myself the Grey Mullet Man these days, after those greedy fish in the River Lee that have such an insatiable appetite for raw sewage, because that’s what you are, you and your holy brothers. The raw sewage of life. The pieces of shit that passeth all understanding.’

The man leaned even closer, so that Gerry could hear that he was whistling slightly through one nostril.

‘Do you know what my grandpa used to say to me about the grey mullet? The best way to cook them is to boil them in a pan with herbs and spices and an old running shoe. After half an hour, you empty the pan, throw away the mullet and eat the running shoe.’

He stood up straight, and walked around to the other side of the bed, where there was a 1960s-style kitchen chair, with cream tubular legs and a pale blue vinyl seat. Gerry could see a two-litre Diet Coke bottle standing on the chair, although it was filled up with some clear liquid, not Coke. There were some other objects, too, that he couldn’t make out clearly without turning his head, and his neck hurt too much for that.

‘Me, I’m exactly like the grey mullet because when I’ve finished feeding on all of that sewage I won’t be worth saving because I’ll be too fecking polluted, through and through. My very flesh will stink of you and your sins. But I was polluted a long, long time ago, wasn’t I, father? I was ruined body and soul before I had a chance to find out who I was or what it was I wanted out of life.

‘Maybe, just
maybe
, I would have chosen to be what you and your brothers wanted me to be. However, I fecking doubt it. In fact, I fecking know I wouldn’t. But you never gave me the choice, did you?’

‘God makes our choices, not us,’ Gerry whispered.

‘What? What did you say? You’re trying to blame
God
now, are you, Father O’Gara? That is very peculiar, if you don’t mind my saying so, because I don’t remember seeing Himself in the room when you were doing what you did to me, giving you the celestial thumbs up.’

‘I did nothing wrong,’ said Gerry. The pain was returning and his voice rustled like a ghost, or a sheet of paper tossed across the road by the wind. ‘I promise you, I meant only the best for you.’

‘No, you never did. You meant only the best for yourself and that fecking Bishop Kerrigan. You wanted glory, Father O’Gara, all of yez did. Glory glory fecking hallay-
loo
-yah!’

‘For the love of Christ, get me to a hospital,’ Gerry wept.

‘Oh, no,’ said the Grey Mullet Man. ‘This is where you confess to your sins and beg forgiveness from
me
, not from God.’

‘I’m not asking forgiveness from God,’ said Gerry. He paused for two painful breaths, and then he added, ‘God doesn’t listen to me anyway.’

‘Why am I not surprised?’ said the Grey Mullet Man. He took two black nylon cable handcuffs out of his pocket and came over to the side of the bed.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘we’re going to sit you up now.’

‘No!’ Gerry whined at him. ‘Please – no! I’m all smashed up inside. You’ll kill me.’

‘Well, father, that’s a risk we’ll just have to take, I’m afraid.’

‘No! Please, God, no!’

But the Grey Mullet Man took hold of Gerry’s thick brown sweater by the shoulders and heaved him up into a sitting position. Gerry screamed, a long shrill scream of absolute agony. He could feel his bones crunching inside his body and his broken ribs digging into his lungs.

‘Come along, father,’ the Grey Mullet Man urged him. ‘This is nothing at all. You just wait till you see what I have in store for you next!’

Gerry was in too much pain to scream again but as the Grey Mullet Man began to drag him up the bed, two or three inches at a time, each time he shifted him Gerry let out a thin, quavering howl.

‘Forgotten what a grand singer you are, father,’ said the Grey Mullet Man. He tugged and shuffled Gerry into a sitting position with his back to the bars of the bed’s iron headboard. Then he took hold of one hand at a time and fastened his wrists to the bars with the nylon cable handcuffs.

By now, Gerry had passed out. His eyes were closed and his chin was resting on his chest, and there was a thin dribble of bloody saliva sliding from his lower lip. The Grey Mullet Man shook his shoulder and said, ‘Father O’Gara? Father O’Gara, can you hear me? Oh – Father O’G
aaaaa
ra!’

Gerry’s eyelids flickered but he didn’t respond. The Grey Mullet Man stood back and looked at him without trying to rouse him any further. Then he reached up and slowly drew off his pointed hat and the face mask that was attached to it. At the same time, the sun shone brightly through the hazy little window on the other side of the room and illuminated his face, almost as if it had been arranged as a stage direction.

His hair was straw-coloured, curly and coarse. His face was rounded, and his cheeks were plump, with a faint red flush on them. His eyes were small, but intensely blue. He had a blob of a nose and pouting lips.

Mrs Rooney, who had seen him dragging Father Heaney through the shallows of the Blackwater, had been right. He did look like a cherub. In fact, Father Machin had always compared him with the left-hand cherub in Rosso Fiorentino’s sixteenth-century painting of two cherubs reading a book at the feet of the Madonna.