Eye for an Eye
Authors: Graham Masterton
About the Katie Maguire Series
‘Sorry to disturb you, ma’am,’ said Sergeant O’Malley, knocking at Katie’s open office door. ‘There’s been a priest found dead in somebody’s back garden, up at White’s Cross.’
Katie looked up from the report she had been reading on drug-smuggling through Ringaskiddy, using disabled children as mules. She hadn’t slept well last night and she was suffering from a dull, persistent headache that even Nurofen hadn’t been able to cure.
‘A priest?’ she asked.
‘Retired priest anyway. I’ve reported it to Detective Inspector O’Rourke and he said to come up and tell you, too.’
‘What did he die of, this priest? Natural causes?’
‘Well, the rock that was used to bash his head in, that was natural.’
‘I see,’ said Katie, closing the folder in front of her. ‘What was he doing in somebody’s back garden?’
Sergeant O’Malley approached her desk and handed her an iPad. On the screen was a picture of a white-haired priest in a black cassock, lying on his side in a bed of flowering purple hydrangeas. His eyes were open and he looked as if he were staring at the camera with an expression of mild curiosity. However, the right side of his head had been deeply dented in, and his hair on that side was stuck together with congealed blood.
‘He had his wallet on him. His name’s Father Fiachra Caomhánach, from Watergrasshill, eighty-three years old. We contacted the diocese to get some background on him and we’re trying to trace any relatives now. But take a sconce at the next picture. There, see? Those were found lying in the bushes beside him.’
Katie slid to the next picture and saw a wooden crucifix with a silver figure of Christ nailed on to it, at least thirty centimetres in length, as well as a white glass bottle bearing an embossed medallion of a guardian angel.
Sergeant O’Malley said, ‘The diocesan secretary told us that Father Caomhánach retired in 2005. They said he was often in the news when he first took holy orders because the Caomhánach family used to be one of Cork’s worst crime gangs, back in the sixties, and his twin brother Deaglán spent years in prison. Not only that, Father Caomhánach was one of only four priests in the whole country who was trained by the Vatican to carry out exorcisms, and even though he was retired he was still qualified to do so, if he was called upon, like.’
‘And you think that was what he was doing when he was killed?’ asked Katie. ‘Performing an exorcism?’
‘He had all the gear with him, didn’t he? The cross, and the holy water. I’m assuming it’s holy water in that bottle, any road. He had a book, too. It’s all in Latin, but it has the word
Daemonum
in the title, so I reckon it was something to do with driving out demons.’
‘I don’t know. In this day and age? An exorcism?’
‘It’s possible, I’d say. I saw a programme about it on Channel Four the other evening. They said that there’s been a growing demand for them in Ireland recently – the exorcisms, like, you know.’
‘Well... Pope Benedict was a great believer in casting out evil spirits, wasn’t he?’ said Katie.
‘That’s right. And Pope Francis healed some poor fellow with the abdabs, or whatever it was that was wrong with him, right in front of a crowd of people in St Peter’s Square. That was supposed to have been an exorcism.’
‘Yes,’ said Katie. She sat thinking for a moment, and then she said, ‘Whose garden was he found in?’
‘Some auld wan. Hold on.’ Sergeant O’Malley took back his iPad and tapped on the keys. ‘Mrs Mary O’Donnell, seventy-seven years old, widowed. She lives alone in a bungalow on the R674, next to the Toolmate factory.’
‘Yes, I know where you are,’ said Katie. ‘And what did Mrs O’Donnell have to say for herself? Did she actually witness Father Caomhánach being killed? And who called us? Was it her?’
‘It was her all right, but all she told the operator was that somebody had suffered a bit of an accident in her garden, and when we arrived there she wouldn’t speak to us or tell us what had happened. She said she couldn’t because she was mortally afraid of the enemy, whoever “the enemy” is.’
‘“The enemy”?’ said Katie. ‘Well – it might not be relevant, but ‘the enemy’ is what Pope Benedict called the Devil,’ She stood up, and said, ‘Do the media know about this yet?’
‘Not yet. After I’d seen you I was going down to the press office to tell Mathew McElvey, but I’ll hold off on that if you want to tell him yourself.’
‘I imagine you’ve alerted Bill Phinner.’
‘Of course. He’s sending a technical team out there now, if they haven’t left already.’
‘Mother of God, I hate
any
case that involves the church,’ said Katie, irritably. ‘All you ever get is sealed lips and doors slammed in your face. They never lie to you, but they never tell you the whole truth, either. Then there’s their lawyers. Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll used to say that dealing with the diocesan legal advisers was worse than trying to untangle your Christmas tree lights.’
‘Tell me about it,’ said Sergeant O’Malley. ‘One of the first cases I ever worked on was that abuse case at Saint Vincent’s. I couldn’t get a straight word out of any of them, do you know what I mean? Like, “I don’t understand what you’re accusing me of, and even if I did, I didn’t do it, and even if I
did
do it, I don’t recall doing it, and if anybody else recalls me doing it, they’re grievously mistaken.”’
Katie went to the window and looked out. The clouds were low and grey and it was drizzling. ‘I’d best go up to White’s Cross myself. Are you going back there? I can see this taking some handling.’
*
Katie and Detective O’Donovan drove northwards from Cork City up to White’s Cross, following Sergeant O’Malley’s patrol car. As they did so, the sky grew even darker, and by the time they had parked outside Mary O’Donnell’s bungalow it was lashing with rain. Katie was wearing her long purple raincoat with a purple bucket rain hat to match. Detective O’Donovan’s grey quilted jacket made him look even bulkier than he actually was, and he had put on some weight lately. Too many Bigfoot sausages from the chipper on his way home from the station.
The bungalow was painted pale green, with damp patches on it, and it was set back from the main road behind a yew hedge that was badly in need of trimming. The asphalt driveway was already crowded with two Garda patrol cars, a van from the Technical Bureau, and three other unmarked cars. Sergeant O’Malley was waiting in the porch, and Katie and Detective O’Donovan followed him in through the open front door and into the narrow hallway.
Inside the gloomy little living room, Katie could see Mary O’Donnell sitting on a chintz sofa with a young female garda sitting beside her, talking to her. She was a tiny woman, with long greasy grey hair that was clipped back with a brown plastic click-clack. She had a beak of a nose and enormous glasses, and she was very round-shouldered. She was holding a cup of tea in both hands, with the spoon still in it, and it didn’t look as if she were actually drinking it but simply holding it to keep her wrinkled hands warm.
The young female garda looked up, but Katie pointed towards the back of the bungalow to indicate that she was going to take a look at the dead priest before she came and talked to Mary O’Donnell. An overfed ginger tom was lying by the fireplace, where a peat fire was smouldering, and he, too, looked up, as if he deeply resented all of this toing and froing in his domain, and the fact that he had no power to tell everybody to get out and leave him and his mistress alone.
Katie went through the kitchen and stepped out into the back garden, which was just as untidy and neglected as the front. The technical experts had already erected a blue vinyl tent over the flower bed where Father Fiachra was lying and the rain was rattling on it loudly. Eithne O’Neill and Tyrone Byrne were crouching next to the body, both wearing noisy white Tyvek suits. The chief technical officer, Bill Phinner, was standing beside them, looking as depressed as ever, as if he couldn’t understand what he was doing here, underneath this tent, on a wet Thursday afternoon, with a dead priest lying at his feet.
Eithne leaned forward to take close-up photographs of Father Fiachra’s smashed-in head, and as Katie and Detective O’Donovan crossed the lawn to join Bill in the tent her LED flashlight made the garden flicker like a film premiere.
Detective O’Donovan peered at Father Fiachra. His eyes were still open, although they were beginning to turn misty. He had bushy white eyebrows and a large nose with a cleft in the end, and deeply lined cheeks. His mouth was slightly open, revealing his mottled brown teeth.
‘Jesus. Somebody really smashed the shite out of him,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘Is that the rock he was clattered with?’
‘That’s the one,’ said Bill, nodding towards a jagged limestone block that was lying on the wet grass nearby. It was almost as big as Father Fiachra’s head, and although the technical experts had covered it over with a transparent evidence bag, which was speckled with raindrops, Katie could see the dark red bloodstains on one edge of it.
‘He was struck at least three times,’ Bill told her. ‘The first blow when he was standing up and the next two when he was lying face-down on the ground. I’d say his assailant was standing behind him and slightly to his right when he first hit him. The rock weighs approximately five kilos, which is twice the weight of your average house-brick, so it’s likely that the first blow would have been enough to crack his skull open and kill him.’
‘Maybe his assailant was just making sure he was dead,’ said Katie. ‘Or he could have been angry, or vengeful, or drunk, and that’s why he hit him more than he needed to. I say “he” because that’s one hell of a rocker for a woman to be lifting. What about the rocker itself? Do you think you’ll be able to get much off it?’
Bill shook his head. ‘Doubtful. It’s a fierce rough lump of limestone, so there’s not much hope of lifting fingerprints off it, and if his assailant was wearing gloves there won’t be any chance of DNA, either. All the same, if his gloves were wool, or cotton, we might find some trace of fabric on it. It’s always worth a try. You remember that fellow from Togher, the one who strangled his landlady? A single fleck of wool from his sock got caught on a splintery floorboard and that was enough to convict him. That was my finest hour when he was sent down.’
