Eye for an Eye (3 page)

‘All right,’ said Katie. ‘I’m going back up to White’s Cross myself a little later to have a word with the fellow who runs the Toolmate factory. He won’t be back from Dublin until five, but I want him to get his whole workforce together so that we can question them
en masse
, like, and see if any of them saw anything suspicious. I’ve met him before, at a charity do. Redmond Keane, his name is. Very charming man indeed, so I’m sure he’ll help us, if he can.’

Inspector O’Rourke said, ‘It’s the motive that has me puggalized, If that was the real Satan, all right, I can see that he would have wanted to kill a priest who was trying to exorcize him – although the real Satan would probably would have struck him with a bolt of lightning or pronged him with his fork, like, wouldn’t he, rather than bash him on the head with a rock? But if it was a fellow dressed up, why would he want to kill him? He’s not going to be afraid of a bit of chanting and a splash of the holy water, is he? Not unless he’s a total header.’

‘Maybe he recognized Father Fiachra as a priest who’d once abused him,’ said Katie. ‘That’s always a possibility.’

‘Well, yes, I suppose so,’ said Detective Inspector O’Rourke. ‘To be fair, though, the priests who taught
me
at school were all great, and right comedians one or two of them, but not one of them touched me, ever. I think the ones who are guilty of kiddy-fiddling deserve everything they get, but it’s a fierce pity that the good ones never seem to get any credit.’

Katie smiled. ‘I have to go to a social services meeting tomorrow. I’ll tell the bishop you said so. He’ll be happy out, I can tell you.’

*

Redmond Keane stood up from behind his desk as Katie and Detective O’Donovan were shown in by his plump young secretary.

‘Katie!’ he smiled, holding out his hand. ‘Very good to see you again. Well – not under these circumstances, I suppose. But you’re looking just as radiant as the last time I saw you. Do you know what I said to my cousin after that night? I’ve met a merrow with legs! Red hair, wonderful figure, and the sweetest of smiles!’

Redmond was tall and good-looking, with dark brown hair brushed up in a fashionable quiff. He was wearing a tailored black three-piece suit and a dazzling white shirt, although he didn’t have a tie and his collar was open. His eyes were bright blue, but they had a slight cast, which Katie found disconcerting, because she was never quite sure if he was looking at her directly or not.

His office was stark and bare, with a white desk and a plum-coloured carpet and white Venetian blinds, through which Katie could see factory entrance and the car park and the concrete workshops outside. The only decoration was an array on the wall behind him of spades and shovels and adjustable wrenches, and several other tools that his factory manufactured.

‘Please, sit down,’ he said. ‘I was still on the train when you sent me your text, and then Clodagh filled me in with all the rest of the details as soon as I got back. I was very sorry to hear about that priest. And to think he was murdered right next door – that’s desperate!’

‘That’s the reason I wanted to talk to your workforce,’ said Katie. ‘The forensic evidence indicates that the offender gained access to Mary O’Donnell’s garden through a gap in the fence that separates her property from yours.’

‘Now, stall there a minute,’ said Redmond. ‘You’re not suggesting surely that one of our workforce was responsible?’

‘I’m not suggesting anything at the moment. All I want to do is to ask your staff if any of them saw anything that might help us in our investigation. The individual we suspect of having killed Father Fiachra could have been dressed very distinctively, in black clothing with a black hood and what may have been a black mask covering his or her face, with shiny red eyes.’

Redmond raised his eyebrows. ‘Jesus, that sounds scary! Why would they have dressed up like that? It’s not Hallowe’en for a few months yet, is it?’

‘We believe that our suspect may have been trying to persuade Mary O’Donnell that he or she was Satan. Why, we have no idea, to be honest with you. But he’s been appearing repeatedly in her garden for the past several weeks and she was growing increasingly frightened of him. As you would expect her to be, a little old lady living on her own.’

Redmond said, ‘That’s totally understandable. I’ll call all the staff together into the canteen and you can put your questions to them. So long as they don’t feel that they’re being accused of anything, you know. I vet all my employees personally and I can vouch for every one of them.’

He called in his secretary and told her to put out an announcement that everybody in the Toolmate workforce was to gather as soon as possible in the staff canteen. Then he stood up and came over to Katie and said, ‘That was a grand evening, that autistic dogs do. Perhaps we should do it again sometime. Just you and me, you know.’

Detective O’Donovan looked up at him and cleared his throat sharply, as if he were warning him to keep his distance.

Katie said, ‘Too busy these days, I’m afraid, Redmond. If it’s not a charity evening it’s a public meeting and if it’s not a public meeting it’s a late-night sitting of the district court. I hardly even get the time to take my dog for a walk.’

‘There’s a pity,’ said Redmond. ‘If you do ever have a free evening, though, give me a call.’

‘Thank you, Redmond,’ said Katie. ‘I’m flattered, but it wouldn’t be appropriate, not at the moment, not right in the middle of this investigation.’

‘You’re not saying that
I’m
a suspect, are you?’ said Redmond, pressing one hand over his heart with mock sincerity.

‘Like I say, I’m not suggesting anything at the moment,’ Katie told him. ‘It’s just a matter of procedure.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Redmond. ‘That’s the first time a woman’s turned me down as a matter of procedure, I have to admit.’

It would help if I knew which way you were looking
, thought Katie.

*

Redmond ushered Katie and Detective O’Donovan into the staff canteen, where Toolmate’s workforce had assembled. As he did so, he laid his hand gently on Katie’s shoulder.

There were thirty-five workers altogether. All but four of them were men, wearing blue overalls with the Toolmate logo – a smiling cartoon workman carrying a shovel over his shoulder. They varied in age from boys who looked as if this was their first job after leaving school to hardened, middle-aged men with shaved heads and nicotine-stained fingers and tattoos.

‘Thanks for your time, all of you,’ said Redmond. ‘I know how busy you are keeping up with all our new orders.
Tsunami
isn’t the word for it! I don’t need to remind you that this has been Toolmate’s most successful year yet, and that we’re expanding exponentially.

‘However, we’re sparing a moment for the Garda this afternoon to show that we’re good citizens, and for Toolmate to play a responsible part in the local community. As you all know, a priest was found dead this morning in the garden of the house next door. Detective Superintendent Maguire here and Detective O’Donovan are investigating his death. They’d like to ask you a few questions to see if there’s any way you can be of assistance to them.’

There was shuffling and coughing and scraping of chairs, and from the hostile way some of the older men were looking at her, Katie thought that if any other woman were to ask them a question, they’d give her a good slap and tell her get on with cooking their dinner.

She waited until they were all settled and then she said, ‘Around nine-fifteen this morning, did any of you notice a person walking around the factory premises, somebody who wasn’t authorized to be here?’

There was a general shaking of heads and ‘No, didn’t see nobody.’

‘This person may well have been dressed completely in black, with a black hat or a hoodie,’ said Katie. ‘It’s also possible that they were wearing a black mask, too, although they could have been African.’

Again, there was head-shaking and a muttered chorus of ‘No, didn’t see nobody like that.’

‘What about sounds? Did any of you hear any unusual noises? Any shouting or screaming?’

‘Are you serious, girl?’ asked one of the older workers. ‘We have a forging press and a die-cutter and a broaching tool here, and they’re all banging out combination wrenches twenty-four hours of the day, not to mention about five hundred wrenches being dropped into a collection box whenever they’re ready. Even if we didn’t wear ear-protectors you could scream your head off like a banshee and none of us would hear you.’

‘All right, I understand, you couldn’t hear anything,’ said Katie. ‘But it seems like this person might have entered the next-door garden several times in the past few weeks, and they probably entered by way of the factory grounds. Are you all absolutely sure that none of you has ever caught a sight of them?’

There was more shaking of heads, and now the workforce was becoming restless.

Katie said, ‘That’s all, then. Thank you for your time. But if any one of you does happen to remember anything, you can always call the Garda Confidential number, or you can contact me personally at Anglesea Street. Nobody will ever know that you spoke to me, so there won’t be any comeback.’

Redmond asked, ‘Is that all, Katie? Okay, that’s it. You can all go back to work now, folks – and thank you.’

He walked Katie and Detective O’Donovan out to their car. ‘I’m sorry we couldn’t help you more,’ he told them. ‘All I can do is wish you good luck.’

He leaned on Katie’s open car door as she buckled up her seat belt. ‘And – Katie – when you’ve cracked this case, which I’m totally confident that you will – my offer still stands. Dinner at the Hayfield Manor. Champagne, music.’

‘Thank you for your help, Redmond,’ said Katie, and slammed the door hard, almost catching his fingers in it.

*

She had tidied her desk and was just about to switch off her desk lamp when Eithne appeared at her open office door.

‘Eithne? What’s the story? Have you finished up at White’s Cross now?’

‘We have, ma’am, pretty much. But I’m glad I caught you. We found this pressed down in the soil of the flower bed, like somebody had accidentally stepped on it.’

She came forward and held up a small evidence bag. Inside it was an oval piece of red translucent plastic. Katie took it and examined it closely.

‘Mary O’Donnell told me that Satan had shining red eyes. “Like two hot coals,” that’s how she described them. I wonder if this is one of them. Maybe it fell out of his mask when he was attacking Father Fiachra.’

‘That’s exactly what Bill Phinner thought,’ said Eithne.

‘All right,’ Katie told her. ‘If you can let me have some pictures of it by the morning, I’ll have them circulated round the fancy-dress hire shops and theatrical costumiers, and have them checked against online suppliers, too. Maybe somebody will recognize where it came from.’

*

Katie had just opened her front door when her iPhone played ‘The Last Rose of Summer’. Her Irish setter, Barney, was jostling around her and she had to push him into the living room with her knees as she answered the phone.

‘DS Maguire here. Who is it?’

It was a girl on the other end, and she sounded nervous. ‘It’s Clodagh. Mr Keane’s secretary, if you remember me.’

‘Oh, yes, Clodagh. I remember you, of course. What’s the story?’

‘I don’t know if I should be telling you this, because Mr Keane was very strict about us all keeping quiet about it. But I knew Father Fiachra when he was still at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Watergrasshill. He baptized me, and he often used to drop in to my mother’s for tea when I was little. He was a dear old man, he really was.’

‘Go on,’ said Katie, sitting down on the sofa and tugging off her shoes. She threw them across the room one after the other so that Barney would go and fetch them and stop snuffling around her for a few seconds.

‘Well, the thing of it is, I saw the fellow in black that you were asking about today. I reckon some of the others did, too, but Mr Keane said that we weren’t to breathe a word about it to the guards even if we had, because even if we had, we had not, do you know what I mean?’

‘Not entirely, I must say. Did he tell you
why
you shouldn’t mention it to us?’

‘He said it was something to do with health and safety. He said that if we told you, we might get shut down for breach of the regulations.’

‘A man walks around with a black hood and shining red eyes, making out that he’s Satan himself, and that’s in breach of health and safety?’

‘I don’t know. I’m just telling you what Mr Keane told us.’

‘But you say you saw him, this fellow in black?’ asked Katie.

‘I did, yes, about a week ago. I think it was a Monday. No, it must have been the Tuesday because that’s when they bring all the clean overalls round from the laundry. Anyway, I went outside to talk to the postman because he’d delivered two letters that weren’t meant for us, and as I went back I saw this fellow in the black hood. I couldn’t see if he had red eyes or not because he had his back turned to me, and he was quite a long way away down the end of the polishing shop. He was talking to Mr Keane. Then he went around the corner and disappeared.’

‘Did Mr Keane realize that you’d seen him?’

‘I’m not sure. I think he might have done because he kind of frowned in my direction, but the sun was in his eyes so maybe he didn’t. Anyway, I went directly back into the office and when he came back in himself he didn’t say anything.

Clodagh paused, and then she said, ‘You won’t tell him I rang you, will you? I’ll lose my job if he finds out. Maybe I shouldn’t have rung you at all.’

‘Don’t you worry, Clodagh,’ said Katie. ‘Nobody is ever going to know that you got in touch with me. This information that you’ve given me, though, it could prove very helpful. It could very well lead us to whoever it was that killed Father Fiachra.’

*

She called Detective O’Donovan and explained what Clodagh had told her.

‘Well, I have to say that doesn’t surprise me at all,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘I had a feeling about that scobe right from the start. I’m allergic to fellows like him.’