Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) (27 page)

They reached headquarters and climbed out of Katie’s car. As they walked across the car park, Inspector Fennessy said, ‘How about giving details of the van’s appearance to the press? It must be kept
somewhere
overnight, and somebody must have seen it.’

‘Not yet,’ Katie told him. ‘Like I said before, I think the perpetrator has left that crozier where it is for a reason. I think he knows
we
know about it. But I don’t want him panicking and painting it out, or dumping the van altogether. He’s taunting us. But he still has unfinished business and he’s going to make sure that we don’t catch him until he’s done.’

‘So you’re sure that he’s going to kill more priests?’

‘I’m convinced of it now. I can just
feel
it. And, let’s face it, how many priests were investigated for child molestation in Cork alone? Eleven? Twelve? We could be talking about much more than serial killing here. We could be talking about a massacre.’

Gerry was woken by the same ethereal singing that he had heard before, ‘The Rose of Allendale’. This time it sounded even higher than it had before, almost falsetto.

Though flowers decked the mountainside

And fragrance filled the vale

By far the sweetest flower there

Was the Rose of Allendale.

He was still lying on the bare diamond-patterned springs of that iron-framed single bed, and his wrists were still secured by nylon straps to the bedhead, but three or four heavy woollen blankets had been dumped on top of him. They smelled musty and damp, but he was shivering with shock and he was glad of them.

His scalp felt as if it was still on fire, though he knew that the flames had long since burned themselves out. What he didn’t realize was that almost all of his hair had been frizzled off, except for a few scrubby clumps at the back, and that there were several patches on the left side of his head that had been seared right down to expose his skull. He had two small devil’s horns made out of curled-up blackened skin, and the rest of his head was scarlet and glistening with fluid.

He couldn’t believe that it was possible for a human being to suffer so much agony, let alone
him
. The pain went on, and on, and on, like some terrible relentless noise that keeps you awake for night after night, and he prayed for it to end as he had never prayed before. His lips moved, and he could hear his prayer in his head, but the only sound that actually came out of his mouth was a soft, monotonous growl.

‘
O holy Father, please turn Your head around for once and see my pain and take pity on me. I know that I have trans
gressed and let You down. Please end this torture, and take me into Your arms. Please God, let it all be over. Please. Even if there is nothing beyond death but eternal silence and eternal darkness, please take pity on me and let me die
.’

He was still praying when the Grey Mullet Man reappeared.
Oh Jesus
, he thought,
not more torture. Not more pain. Nothing could be worse than this
.
He had never felt so frightened in his life. Underneath the blankets, he wet himself, copiously, and his warm urine pattered on to the floor.

The Grey Mullet Man loomed over him for a while, sucking his cotton mask in and out as he breathed, so that – tantalizingly – Gerry could almost make out his features.

‘You were
praying
, father,’ he declared, at last. ‘You were only fecking praying, weren’t you?’

‘I’m in hell,’ Gerry whispered.

‘Come back to me?’ said the Grey Mullet Man, cupping one hand to his ear. ‘You’re, where are you?’

‘I’m – in –
hell
!’

‘You’re in hell, are you? Well, well. Hell. No better than you deserve, Father O’Gara. The hell that you put others through, that was a never-
ending
hell – whereas yours at least will come to a swift conclusion. Not as swift as you might have been praying for, but a little too swift for me and my friends.’

Gerry gave two or three agonized gasps, and then he said, ‘We genuinely believed... we truly and honestly believed... that we would see God.’

‘I’m sure you did,’ said the Grey Mullet Man, in a mock-pitying tone. ‘But don’t you get it? That’s what makes everything you did to us all the more contemptible. How does a man get to see God? How does
any
man get to see his maker? Through
redemption
, father, that’s how. Through selflessness, and through his own devotion. Not through the wilful sacrifice of others.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Gerry.

‘Oh! You’re
sorry
! I’m sure you are now, like. But whenever I saw you in that music shop of yours – and, believe me, I looked in to see you more times than you will ever know, you never looked sorry then, not once. Smiling and laughing you were, not sorry.’

‘What are you going to do to me now?’ Gerry asked him. His voice was little more than a high-pitched wheeze.

‘I tell you, boy, what we’re going to do to you now, you’re going to love it!’

‘
What
?’

‘Don’t be an eejit. I only said that mockeyah. You won’t enjoy it at all. But if you accept it as a justifiable penance, maybe that will help you to get through it.’

‘Please don’t hurt me any more.’

The Grey Mullet Man leaned even closer, and for one split second Gerry thought that he knew who he was. There was something very distinctive in the way he spoke, something in his accent and something in the way that he would mix Montenotte words like ‘contemptible’ and ‘redemption’ and ‘justifiable penance’ with Blackpool street slang like ‘gutty boy’ and ‘mockeyah’.

He sounded to Gerry like somebody who had first been brought up in the roughest and poorest of homes, but had later been adopted by a family who were much more cultured and prosperous.

He had a name on the very edge of his consciousness.
I know who this is
, he thought.
I’m sure I know who this is
. He was about to say the name out loud when the Grey Mullet Man gripped the edge of the blankets that had been heaped on top of him and heaved them all on to the floor. Gerry was jolted on to his side, right on to his smashed-up ribcage, and he felt as if he was being simultaneously stabbed by a dozen mad assailants with kitchen knives. He forgot everything then. The name. The day of the week. His own name, even. He almost forgot that he was human.

The Grey Mullet Man said, ‘What you took from us, father, was far worse than taking our lives. You took
us
– you took who we were. I used to look in the mirror every morning and see a face, and the face looked like me, but it wasn’t me. Not any more.’

Gerry was in too much pain to speak. He gritted his teeth and made a sound like ‘
gah-gah-gah-gah
’!

‘Right – let’s get on with it, shall we?’ said the Grey Mullet Man. He whistled sharply between his teeth, and the other two men reappeared, the one with the bishop’s mitre and the one with the pierrot mask.

‘He’s conscious at last,’ the Grey Mullet Man informed them. ‘Conscious enough, anyway. I wouldn’t want to go to all of this trouble for him not to feel a thing.’

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, he looks like five and a half pounds of raw liver.’

‘Don’t you start feeling sorry for him. Just remember what he did.’

‘I don’t feel sorry for the bastard at all, believe me. If I could find a way to keep him suffering like this for the next thirty years, then I would.’

‘Give us a hand here to take his trousers off. Jesus, look, he’s pissed himself.’

The Grey Mullet Man unbuckled Gerry’s brown leather belt and then pulled down the zip of his tan corduroy trousers, the crotch of which was dark and sodden with urine. The man in the pierrot mask tugged them down, over his thighs, over his knees, and wrestled them right off, over his feet. Meanwhile the man in the bishop’s mitre pulled his dark brown sweater right up to his chest. He must have pressed on Gerry’s broken ribs, because Gerry screamed out, ‘
Dear God almighty
!
Don’t
!’

With a grimace, the man in the bishop’s mitre took off Gerry’s pale blue boxer shorts, which were heavily stained with dark brown. He held them up and swung them from side to side and said, ‘Shit himself, too.’

‘Well, there’s revenge for you,’ said the man in the pierrot mask. He leaned over Gerry and said, right in his face, ‘You did the same to
me
once, didn’t you, you bastard, when I was in catechism, and only seven years old? I was dropping and you wouldn’t let me go to the jacks. I stunk so bad the whole class crowded over to the other side of the room and you had to send them out to the playground ten minutes early.’

‘
I know who you are
,’ Gerry croaked at him. ‘
I know who all of you are
.’

‘You think so, Father O’Gara? Pity you’ll never get the chance to tell anybody, isn’t it?’

‘I know who you are, but most of all the Lord God knows who you are, and you will join me in hell, believe me, all three of you.’

‘Sez you.’

The Grey Mullet Man came back up to the side of the bed and he was holding up that two-litre Diet Coke bottle of clear shining jelly. He shook it and said, ‘We gave your brain a bit of a frying the last time, didn’t we, just so you’d know what we thought of you? But now it’s time to get down to the real business. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, and manhood for manhood. Yes, Father O’Gara. You were a priest yourself. You know all about manhood, and what it means when you’re denied it, either by the will of God or the whim of a man.’

Gerry was beginning to fade out of consciousness again. The room appeared to grow darker and darker, and the Grey Mullet Man’s voice began to echo. He felt as if he were inside a theatre, with the Grey Mullet Man playing the stage magician, his two masked cronies acting as his assistants, and himself as the volunteer from the audience who was going to be made to disappear, or sawn in half – or something unimaginably worse.

The Grey Mullet Man unscrewed the cap of the Diet Coke bottle and again filled up the palm of his left hand with quivering transparent gel. Gerry could smell the vinegar.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not again. Please.’

The Grey Mullet Man stood beside Gerry for what seemed like forever, although in reality it was probably less than thirty seconds. Nobody spoke. All that Gerry could hear was the creaking of the bedsprings underneath him, and the tappity-tapping of the hydrangea against the window, and the dog-like panting of the Grey Mullet Man and his two companions behind their masks. He realized with dread why they were panting. They were excited.

‘
No
,’ said Gerry. But he was helpless, and when the Grey Mullet Man began to massage his flaccid penis with gel, he was incapable of anything but jerking his hips from side to side.

After the Grey Mullet Man had applied a thick, cold coating of gel on to Gerry’s penis and pubic hair, he screwed the cap back on the Diet Coke bottle and wiped his hands on one of the blankets.

‘There now,’ he said. ‘That is what I’d call a Roman candle. A
Holy
Roman candle.’

He took out his box of extra-long matches, opened it up, and struck one. It flared up, but it broke and dropped on to the carpet, and the Grey Mullet Man had to step on it to put it out, and take out another.

‘
No
,’ Gerry repeated, although he wasn’t sure if he had managed to say it out loud. He closed his eyes tight, so that he wouldn’t have to witness what was going to happen to him next. But he couldn’t block out the scratching sound of the second match, or the spitting sound that followed. There was a few seconds’ pause when he felt nothing at all, and he thought:
Thank God,
maybe this isn’t going to hurt at all
. But then a searing heat exploded between his legs, hotter than a roaring blowtorch. He opened his eyes and to his utter horror he saw his penis stiffen and rise up, even as it was lasciviously licked by flames, even as its skin was shrivelling and crinkling, as if he were being aroused by Satan himself.

When she returned to her desk, Katie saw that her phone was flashing. She picked it up and found that she had a phone message from Dr Collins.

‘Katie? That rat that was sewn up inside Father Quinlan’s abdomen – I’ve analysed its stomach contents. There was some raw chicken, half-digested, also cheese and crispbread. That strongly suggests that the rat was kept in captivity for several days before Father Quinlan was murdered, and fed by its captor. So I’d say that its sewing up into Father Quinlan’s body was almost certainly premeditated.

‘There’s something else that you should know about. Shortly before they were garrotted, both Father Heaney and Father Quinlan had ingested at least twenty-one grams of honey, which is about one tablespoonful. Neither of them had time to digest it properly, because it hadn’t passed through the stomach into the small intestine to be broken down by enzyme action into glucose.

‘I have more results for you, but these are definitely the most interesting. Perhaps we can meet later and discuss them over a drink.’

Katie leaned back in her chair, tapping her pen against her teeth. This was yet more proof that Father Heaney and Father Quinlan had been murdered by the same person or persons. But why on earth would they have been swallowing honey, just before they were killed? She doubted if they had been eating it voluntarily. So why would their murderer feed it to them?

Was it symbolic? If so, symbolic of what?

At that moment, Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll knocked at her open door and said, ‘The jackals are all here. Do you want to do the business?’

Katie flicked the live microphone in front of her – more to catch the attention of the media who had assembled in the conference room than to check that it was working.

‘Good afternoon and thank you for coming, all of you,’ she announced. She recognized most of the faces in front of her – Fionnuala Sweeney from RTÉ, Dan Keane from the
Examiner
, Mary Fitzpatrick from Cork 96FM radio news – even Ciara Clare, although she was now wearing her long purple cardigan, covering up the tight stripy top that she had been flaunting this morning.