Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) (43 page)

‘Still no movement,’ said one of them. ‘The curtains in the lounge are wide open but if there’s anybody in there they must be lying on the floor.’

‘Let’s just get inside,’ said Katie. She and Inspector Fennessy hurried up the steps to the front door, closely followed by the uniformed sergeant and three gardaí, one of them carrying a battering ram. The rest of the gardaí split up and disappeared around the sides of the house to cover any other exits.

The front door was solid oak, weathered to a pale grey colour. The cast-iron knocker had the face of a leprechaun, with a disconcertingly mischievous smile, as if he knew exactly what Katie’s business was here, even before she had knocked.

Katie took hold of it and banged it three times, as hard as she could.

‘
Armed gardaí
!’ she shouted. ‘
Open the door
!’

They waited for a few seconds, but there was no response, so she banged the knocker again.

Still no answer. Katie stepped away and pulled out her gun. ‘That’s it. Let’s have it open.’

The garda with the battering ram stepped forward without hesitation and slammed it into the door panels. This was a heavy duty Stinger, weighing thirty-five pounds, and the door burst open immediately. Katie ducked into the hall, followed closely by Inspector Fennessy and the rest of the gardaí.

‘
Armed gardaí
!’ she repeated. ‘
Come on out and show yourselves
!’

She crossed the hall to the living-room door, which was half ajar. Inspector Fennessy joined her and gave the door a kick to open it wider. Katie nodded at him and he quickly glanced inside.

‘Anybody there?’ she asked him.

‘Doesn’t look like it.’

Both of them pushed their way into the living room with their guns held up stiffly in front of them, but there was nobody here, not even lying on the floor.

‘Search the rest of the house, quick!’ Katie ordered. Three gardaí clambered upstairs, while two more went through to the kitchen and the dining room and the downstairs cloakroom. For a few minutes, the house echoed to the sound of slamming doors and hurrying boots.

Eventually the sergeant came back into the living room and held up both hands. ‘Nobody home,’ he announced.

‘Then where in the name of Jesus have they got to?’ said Katie. ‘Their van and their cars are all here. Don’t tell me they’re
walking
. Where would they walk to?’

They went back outside. The rain was growing more persistent and Katie could hear thunder.
Just the weather for a disastrous night like this
.

She walked around the right-hand side of the house, where there was a wet stone patio with a rose pergola, although the roses were badly neglected and most of them were shrivelled. Inspector Fennessy came up to her and said, ‘What now?’

‘I don’t honestly know, Liam. We search the house to see if they left any indication of where they were going, and how. Maybe they have accomplices who came to pick them up and take them away before we even got here. In which case, they could be absolutely anywhere at all. They could be halfway to Mayo by now.’

She walked through the pergola to the back of the house. Apart from a light in one of the kitchen windows, the gardens were shrouded in darkness. She stood quite still and listened to the rain falling through the trees, and the occasional rumbling of thunder.

‘Right,’ she said, after a while, more to herself than anybody else. ‘I think I’m going to call it a night. Let’s put a guard on the house for now, and we can come back in the morning and make a really thorough search.’

She turned around, but as she did so she heard a high piercing wail, almost unearthly. It faded away almost immediately and then there was nothing but the sound of the rain, and the gardaí talking to each other, and squad car doors slamming.

‘Did you hear that?’ she asked Liam.

‘Did I hear what?’

‘That sound. I don’t know. It was like somebody crying.’

Inspector Fennessy listened for a few seconds. ‘No,’ he said, impatiently. ‘I can’t hear a sausage. And I’m beginning to get very wet here, ma’am.’

More thunder, but then Katie heard that same falsetto wail. ‘
There
!’ she said, triumphantly. ‘You must have heard it that time!’

‘It’s a vixen, most likely,’ Inspector Fennessy told her. ‘They make all kinds of weird noises, vixens, especially when they fornicate. Like Montenotte girls.’

He started to walk back through the rose pergola, but as he did so the high-pitched sound started yet again, and this time it didn’t fade away. It grew louder, and sweeter, and more harmonious.

Katie and Inspector Fennessy stood staring at each other.

‘I never heard a vixen singing “
Gloria
” before,’ said Katie.

‘Me neither, I’m afraid to admit. It’s
them
, isn’t it? It’s those fecking Fidelios. They’re only out here
singing
, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Ssh,’ said Katie, raising one hand to her ear. ‘Can you work out where it’s coming from?’

They both stayed silent for almost half a minute. The ‘
Gloria
’ continued, although it swelled and diminished in the wind, and now and then it was blotted out by thunder. Eventually, Inspector Fennessy pointed into the darkness and said, ‘Just about there, I’d say. From behind those trees.’

‘I think you’re right. Call Sergeant O’Brien back, would you? Let’s get down there and take a look.’

While Inspector Fennessy went to tell the Garda sergeant what they could hear, Katie made her way down a flight of stone steps that led from the patio to the lawns. The lawns sloped at quite a steep diagonal to the south-west, and they were bordered by a copse of tall, mature oaks. As she made her way down the slope, Katie could hear the singing more and more clearly. There was no doubt that it was coming from somewhere beyond the trees.
A cappella
, unaccompanied, in the style of the chapel, but sweeter than any singing that she could imagine. Somehow the rustling of the rain and the distant rumbling of thunder made it all the more enchanting.

Inside the copse, it was very dark at first, and she had to tread very carefully to avoid making too much noise. As she went further, however, she saw a single bright light shining between the trees, and it became easier to see where she was going. She looked back. The criss-cross beams of at least fifteen flashlights were coming down the slope behind her.

The singing continued, heartbreakingly beautiful. Katie made her way to the very edge of the copse. She kept herself close to an oak that was thickly covered in ivy, by way of camouflage, and peered between the leaves.

Beyond the copse there was a grassy field, in which a pressure lantern had been hung on a tent pole. Around the lantern stood three figures dressed in extraordinary costumes. All of them were robed in white, but one of them was wearing a tall pointed
capirote
, while another one had a hat like a bishop’s mitre, and the face of the third figure was covered by a white, expressionless mask, like a clown. In the strongly contrasting light and shadows they looked like characters out of some religious nightmare.

It was these three who were singing, their hands pressed together as if in prayer. Katie recognized the chorus from her
Elements
CD, but if these were the same boys who had sung on that record, their voices had filled out and matured and developed an otherworldly dimension that made Katie feel that she was standing in a cathedral, rather than a rainy field in west Cork in the middle of the night.

But it wasn’t only the ethereal singing that made Katie feel as if she had entered another reality. Close behind the Fidelios, three tall scaffolding poles had been erected, each of them at least four metres high, and each with a shorter length of scaffolding clamped across the top to form a T shape. They were arranged in the same way that the crosses on Calvary had been arranged, when Christ was crucified.

On each scaffold a naked man had been bound with his arms spread wide. Each man was bruised and scratched and streaked in blood, and each man was wearing a crown of razor wire. Their heads were slumped down on their chests so that Katie found it hard to recognize them at first, but when the man on the left-hand scaffold lifted up his face to the sky and soundlessly opened his mouth, she realized with a shock that it was Monsignor Kelly. He appeared to look in her direction, but she very much doubted that he could see her, concealed amongst the ivy, especially since he had so much blood in his eyes.

The man hanging in the middle was emaciated and white-haired, with yellowish skin and a ribcage like the back of a kitchen chair, and Katie could only guess that this was Bishop Conor Kerrigan. On the right, a sallow man with a round head and a pot belly hung motionless. His left cheek was swollen with one huge inky-coloured bruise. This must be Father ó Súllibháin, whom Tómas the gardener had described as ‘Father Football’.

Inspector Fennessy caught up with her, and the rest of the gardaí now came crashing through the copse.

‘I don’t believe what I’m seeing here,’ said Inspector Fennessy. ‘This is like the Stations of the Cross gone mad.’

‘Come on,’ said Katie. She had never felt so determined in all of her career, although her voice was shaking. ‘Let’s put an end to all of this. Can somebody call for the paramedics and the fire brigade? Like
now
, please.’

She took out her revolver and stepped out from behind the tree, followed by Inspector Fennessy. The three Fidelios immediately stopped singing, and stepped back towards the scaffolds.

‘Stay where you are!’ Katie called out.

The three Fidelios backed away even further, until they were standing right next to the scaffolding poles, one by each of them. They moved almost as if they had been directed by a choreographer.

‘I said stay where you are! If you move one inch more, I’ll shoot you!’

The three Fidelios stayed where they were, but slowly raised their hands. Katie stalked up to them, keeping them covered, and said, ‘Let’s have those masks off, shall we?’

The man with the pointed
capirote
lifted it off and tossed it sideways on to the ground. He was a bulky man, round-shouldered, but he looked just like the cherub that Mrs Rooney had described, up in Ballyhooly. His hair was curly and his cheeks were round and ruddy and, most unnervingly, he was smiling at her, as if he had done something especially sweet to please her.

‘Denis Sweeney, is it?’ Katie demanded.

The man shrugged. When he spoke, his voice was a throaty treble, like a young boy’s, or a woman’s. ‘I have all kinds of names for myself.’

‘Such as?’

‘The Grey Mullet Man, I call myself sometimes, or, when I’m feeling bombastic, the Exactor of Divine Recompense. But Denis Sweeney will do.’

Inspector Fennessy said to the other two Fidelios, ‘You two – get those masks off before I fecking blow them off.’

They did what they were told, and dropped their masks on to the grass. They looked exactly like their pictures on the Fidelio website, with bulging brown eyes like hamsters and receding chins.

‘The Phelan twins, I presume?’ said Katie.

‘That’s them,’ said Denis Sweeney. ‘They sing like angels but they don’t converse much, except with each other.’

‘All right,’ Katie told him. ‘I want all three of you to lie flat on your faces on the grass and put your hands behind your backs.’

‘No,’ said Denis Sweeney. In the distance, there was another deep mumble of thunder.

‘
No
?’ said Katie.

‘That’s right, no. I refuse.’

‘Well, all I can tell you, Denis, is that if you don’t do it willingly these officers will be forced to make you do it
un
willingly. With batons, if necessary.’

Denis Sweeney looked up Bishop Kerrigan and smiled. ‘It was all his fault, you know. A man of God shouldn’t make promises and then go back on them.’

‘Denis, this is your last chance. Lie flat on your face on the grass and put your hands behind your back.’

‘There’s a problem there,’ said Denis Sweeney. ‘The problem is that I’m holding in my right hand here a wire, and this wire is connected to the double coupler at the top of this scaffolding tube. Do you know very much about scaffolding, do you?’

‘What are you trying to tell me?’

‘I’m trying to explain to you that if I drop flat on my face on to the grass, I will inevitably pull on this wire and the crosspiece will topple off and Bishop Kerrigan will topple to the ground along with it. Now a fall like that would be life-threatening enough for a man of his age but there’s another problem, which you may not yet have noticed.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about the second wire, which is fastened around his testicles and which will castrate him when he falls.’

He nodded towards Monsignor Kelly, hanging from his scaffold, and then to Father ó Súllibháin. ‘The same for these two. If the Phelan twins pull on their wires, that’ll be two more instant castrations.’

Katie stepped up close to him, still pointing her gun at his chest. He had tiny clear beads of perspiration on his upper lip. She looked up quickly at Bishop Kerrigan and saw that he wasn’t lying. A thin wire, like the wire they used to cut cheese in supermarkets, was wound tightly around his scrotum. It made his tiny penis stick up like the penis of a newborn baby boy, or a cherub in a Renaissance painting.

Denis Sweeney said, ‘I was going to do castrate them all anyway, if nothing happened.’

‘What do you mean, “if nothing happened”?’

‘What do you think we’re doing here tonight? They made a promise to us, did they not – this bishop, and this gligeen of a reverend, and those four priests, but then they never kept it. We gave up our manhood for what they promised us. It was the only thing in the whole world that a boy would give up his manhood for.’

Katie stared at him. ‘You
believed
them?’

‘Of course we believed them. They told us that Bishop Kerrigan himself was going to make us the most astounding choir that the world had ever known. With our singing, Bishop Kerrigan was going to bring the glory to the diocese of Cork and Ross, and when I say the glory I mean The Glory with a capital T and a capital G. He was going to do what Pope Sixtus V had never been able to do.