Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) (40 page)

‘You’re the boss, boss.’

She closed her phone and said to Dr Collins, ‘How’s it going?’

Dr Collins had her teeth gritted and was using her pliers to flex the piano wires backwards and forwards until they snapped.

‘Nearly done it. Whoever tied him up like this was certainly making sure that he kept his legs together.’

Katie’s mobile phone played again. This time it was John. He sounded tired and more than a little irritable.

‘Am I
ever
going to see you?’ he complained. ‘I’ll be probably be leaving the day after tomorrow. I know you’re catastrophically busy, sweetheart, but we really have to work something out.’

‘I’ll call you, darling,’ she promised him. ‘As soon as this crisis is over, I’ll call you and we’ll get together and I’ll make all of your wildest dreams come true. I mean it.’

‘I feel like I haven’t seen you forever.’

‘I know, because I feel just the same way.’

She was talking to him and watching Dr Collins at the same time. Dr Collins snapped the last strands of piano wire that were keeping Father O’Gara’s knees fastened together. Then she took hold of each knee and started to force his thighs apart. She had to grit her teeth and use all of her strength to separate them because it was less than twenty-four hours since he had died and he was still in full rigor mortis.

John said, ‘Any chance that we can we meet tonight? Just for a half-hour maybe?’

‘I don’t know, John. I’ll try, I really will. Let me give you a call later. By the way, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but it looks like we’ve caught the person who attacked Siobhán.’

‘Wow. Good work. Who was it? He wasn’t trying to kill
you
, was he?’

‘I did think to begin with that somebody might have been after me, but it wasn’t a he, it was a she. Michael’s wife, Nola. You know which Michael – Siobhán’s ex-boyfriend. Well, not so ex, which is why Nola tried to kill her.’

‘Jesus. You Maguires lead such goddamn complicated lives. But do try to meet me later, won’t you? Just for a cup of coffee or something? I need to put my arms around you and smell your smell.’

‘I’ll do my best, my darling. I promise.’

Dr Collins had managed to prise Father O’Gara’s knees apart by about twenty centimetres. She gripped them even harder, like somebody trying to lever open the doors of a lift, but when she parted them a little more Katie noticed that two single piano wires were still looped around his thighs, just above the knee. Dr Collins hadn’t bothered to cut them because they weren’t connected to each other and didn’t prevent her from opening up his legs. But now that his knees were gradually being forced wider and wider apart, Katie could see that each loop was connected to one of two taut wires that ran up the insides of his thighs and disappeared into the dark, boggy hole where his scrotum had been.

She had seen wires like this before. Not rigged like this, of course, inside a castrated man’s body, but in a booby trap where two wires were attached to the doors of a van. When the doors were opened, the wires pulled two switches to complete an electrical circuit, and an explosive charge was set off.

Katie didn’t say a word. A shouted warning could have startled Dr Collins into pulling Father O’Gara’s legs even wider apart. Instead, she walked quickly around the autopsy table, came right up behind Dr Collins and seized both of her wrists, then threw herself backwards with all of her body weight so that the two of them fell on to the floor, their legs in a tangle.

‘What on
earth
do you think you’re doing?’ Dr Collins protested, in a voice that was almost a scream. But Katie caught hold of the sleeve of her lab coat and dragged her across the floor, panting with the effort of it, her boot heels kicking at the vinyl tiles to give herself purchase. When they were well clear of the autopsy table, she scrambled on to her feet, pulling Dr Collins up after her, and shouted, ‘
Run
!
I think he has a bomb inside him
!’

The two of them pelted to the far end of the pathology lab and cannoned out of the double swing doors. Dr Collins stopped and looked back through one of the windows, but Katie snatched at her sleeve again and said, ‘Out! Come on! Right out of the building! As far away as we can!’

‘But, my
God
!’ said Dr Collins. ‘You’re not serious, are you? A
bomb
?’

‘Just keep going,’ Katie told her. They ran along the corridor that led to the hospital’s main reception area, their heels clattering, and as they did so, Katie lifted her mobile phone out of her pocket, ready to call for the army bomb disposal squad.

They had only just reached the reception area, however, when they heard the deep, dull thump of a bomb going off, and felt the shock of it travelling through the floor, like an earth tremor. The double swing doors flew open for a moment, and a shower of fragments came clattering through – glass, metal, part of a chair back.

The receptionist jumped up from her desk and said, ‘Holy Jesus – what was that?’

‘Call your security people,’ Katie told her. ‘Tell them this whole wing has to be evacuated, as quick as humanly possible. Then get out of here yourself.’

Katie and Dr Collins stayed in the reception area while the receptionist called the hospital’s security team. Fire alarms began to ring all the way through the building, and Katie could hear shouting and footsteps running backwards and forwards. She called Anglesea Street and told them to contact the fire brigade and the bomb squad, and she also called Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll. For a change, he wasn’t still out at lunch.

‘They booby-trapped Father O’Gara’s body? I don’t fecking believe it! What did they do that for?’

‘The same reason they’re driving around in that van so openly. They’re trying to divert our attention away from what they’re really up to.’

‘You and your instincts, Katie. If you ask me they’re just a bunch of headers. Anyhow, you make sure that you stay well clear until the bomb squad get there.’

‘No more news about Jimmy O’Rourke, I suppose?’

‘Nothing. They’ll be bringing his body back later today.’

‘Okay. All right. I’ll wait to hear from you.’ Katie closed her mobile phone and then said to Dr Collins, ‘I’m going back to take a look at the body. Do you want to come with me? You don’t have to. It could be risky.’

‘No, I’ll come with you,’ said Dr Collins. ‘It’s highly unlikely that they would have planted
two
bombs in the same body, wouldn’t you say? That’s my experience, anyhow. And even if they had, both bombs would have exploded at the same time, wouldn’t they? One would have set off the other.’

Katie grimaced, and said, ‘Okay, then. Let’s pray to God that you’re right.’

They pushed open the double swing doors and cautiously re-entered the laboratory. The explosion had blown almost all of the sheeted bodies off their trolleys and on to the floor, so that they were lying on top of each other in a ghastly parody of a rugby scrum. The trolleys themselves had all been pushed into the opposite corner, although only three or four of them had been tipped over.

The laboratory was still hazy with smoke, but there was no chemical smell, only the stench of scorched human flesh. Katie guessed that Father O’Gara’s body had been packed with some kind of plastic explosive such Semtex, or more likely C-4, which was highly malleable and had no odour at all.

She walked across the debris-strewn floor, her boots crunching on broken glass. Father O’Gara had been so spectacularly blown up that at first she couldn’t work out what she was looking at. The middle part of his body had been blown wide open. His ribs were splayed apart, while one of his legs was standing in the washbasin on the opposite side of the laboratory. There was no sign of the other leg.

Most extraordinary, though, were the translucent beige curtains that hung over the autopsy table where Father O’Gara’s remains were lying. They were all caught up in the fluorescent light fixtures in the ceiling, a vast and complicated spider’s web of human viscera. Katie could almost imagine a large beige spider running across the ceiling, making the long strings of connective tissue tremble as it hurried to make sure of her prey.

The sun shone down through the clerestory windows and illuminated the membranes, so that Katie could see the blood vessels branching through them.

Dr Collins reached out with her latex-gloved hand and gently tugged at them. Part of the curtains slithered down, but most of them were inextricably entangled in the lights.

‘Look at this,’ she said, making it all sway. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. Eight and a half metres of human intestines. One man’s entire insides.’

Katie was too concerned with peering into the blackened barbecue pit that had once been Father O’Gara’s abdomen. She could see the remains of what looked like a metal switching device, and the two wires that had obviously been the trigger mechanism, all twisted and tarnished. She recognized this bomb-making technique, and it wouldn’t take her long to find out who had planted it. What she needed was a quiet chat with her old friend Eugene Ó Béara, who had never openly boasted of any relationship with the Provos because he didn’t have to. Everybody knew who Eugene Ó Béara’s closest friends were.

She turned to Dr Collins, about to say something to her. Quite unexpectedly, Dr Collins had pulled off her latex gloves, taken off her glasses and cupped one hand over her mouth and her nose. Her eyes were brimming with tears. Katie went over to her and laid a hand on her shoulder.

‘It’s the shock,’ said Katie. ‘I have to tell you I’m feeling a little off balance myself. Come on – I think you and I need to get out of here.’

They waited outside the hospital until Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll arrived, closely followed by the army bomb squad and two crime scene technicians, as well as nine uniformed gardaí and most of the local media. The car park was crowded with khaki trucks and Land Rovers and police vans and 4×4s.

Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll went inside the pathology lab to see the destruction for himself, and then came out again, his cheeks wobbling in disbelief.

‘That would be have been a fecking massacre if they hadn’t all been dead already.’

‘I’ll go back to headquarters now and write up a report,’ Katie told him.

‘No, you won’t, girl. You’ll go home and get yourself some rest and something to eat and I don’t want to see you back until tomorrow morning. There’s nothing more you can do here, and Liam Fennessy’s taking care of things as far as the good Monsignor Kelly is concerned.’

‘I’ll be grand,’ Katie insisted.

‘No, you won’t. You’ve had a bad shock and you look as deathly as that lot inside of there. You’re taking on too much here. You’re worse than Boyle Roche’s bird, for God’s sake. You can’t be in three places at once.’

‘All right,’ Katie conceded. She turned to Dr Collins and said, ‘How about coming home with me? I’ll have to go out of the way to see my father, if you don’t mind that. I need to tell him the news about my sister. But I could do with the company, to tell you the truth.’

‘Yes,’ said Dr Collins. ‘I’d like that. I’m getting a little stir crazy in that hotel room.’

Katie thought that her father was looking even more frail than the last time she had seen him. He came to the door with a loose-woven grey shawl around his shoulders and the circles under his eyes looked inkier than ever.

She told him that Siobhán was conscious, although she didn’t tell him that she wasn’t yet able to speak, and that there was no predicting if she would ever fully recover her mental faculties. She didn’t tell him about Nola either. There would be plenty of time for that when Nola had been charged and convicted.

‘Well – what a relief that Siobhán’s awake,’ said her father. ‘You hear of people staying in a coma for years, don’t you, and when they do wake up, all their friends have grown old and the world has changed beyond their recognition.’

‘Have you eaten?’ Katie asked him.

‘Ailish left me a potato pie. I’ll heat it up when I get hungry.’

‘Well, make sure you do.’

He stared at her for a long time, saying nothing, his eyes searching her face as if he were trying to see her mother in her.

‘You’re all right, though?’ she asked him.

He nodded. ‘I’m all right, my love. But you know what they say. The way to avoid the tragedies of the past is not to let them happen to begin with.’

He paused a little longer, and then he said, ‘So how’s your murder case coming along? I saw something about it on the TV news this morning. You’ve found another dead priest, then? Father O’Gara? I’m sure I knew him once, Father O’Gara.’

Dr Collins was sitting close to the fire but she still gave a shudder, as if she had felt a sudden draught. ‘Oh, God,’ she said, and that was all she had to say, because Katie knew exactly what she was seeing in her mind’s eye.

As concisely as she could, Katie brought her father up to date on her investigation. ‘We’re still looking for these characters, these Fidelios. There’s no way of telling for sure if they’ve got hold of Monsignor Kelly and Father ó Súllibháin, but we can’t think of anyone else who would have wanted to abduct them.’

Katie’s father said, ‘It’s the church behind this, you mark my words. The church will do anything to protect its own, in my experience. The church will even sacrifice the innocent, if needs be. I had to deal with the murders of two children in Blackpool once, two girls, nine and eleven, both strangled, and I’m convinced to this day that they were going to tell their parents what their priest had been doing to them, but they were silenced. You know,
silenced
.’

He pulled his shawl tighter around his shoulders. ‘My forensic evidence mysteriously went missing, and I couldn’t find a single credible witness. But I know who did it. He’s dead now, so there’s no point in pursuing it, but he should have been punished at the time.’

Katie said, ‘What I need to find out is the real identity of this Reverend Bis. If I can find
that
out, then hopefully I can find out who he was acting for when he approached those four priests to form the St Joseph’s Choir.’