Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) (11 page)

‘Are you sure?’

‘Never saw him before. Never.’

‘He’s not the man with the pointed hat you saw in the river?’

‘No. That fellow was much bigger.’

Katie passed her the second photograph. ‘How about him?’

Mrs Rooney looked at her impatiently. ‘
This
fellow is the same fellow as
this
fellow. But neither
this
fellow nor
this
fellow is the same fellow as the fellow I saw in the river.’

‘All right, then,’ said Katie. ‘I’ll send a sketch artist up to see you, and you can describe your cherub to her. Will you do that for me? I can’t tell you how important your evidence is, Margaret. You’re the only witness we have so far. You’re the only person who actually knows that the murderer looks like.’

‘But what about this fellow?’ asked Mrs Rooney, handing back the photographs of Brendan Doody. ‘What’s he got to do with it?’

‘Him?’ said Katie. ‘I wish to God I knew.’

Mrs Rooney picked up her dog and stood looking at Katie for a long time, as if she were going to come out and say something deeply profound. Eventually she reached out and touched Katie’s hair. ‘You’re too pretty to be chasing after murderers, girl. You should be chasing after a husband instead.’

For the first time in a very long time, Katie felt her cheeks blush hot.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I will so, when I get the time.’

The Grey Mullet Man bent down and picked up Father Quinlan, with his arms and his legs dangling like Christ being lifted down from the cross, and lowered him naked into the deep, empty bathtub.

Father Quinlan was aware of the chilly enamel walls all around him, but no matter how furiously he blinked his eyes he could see nothing but a milky-white fog, and his ears felt as if they had been packed with creaking wads of cotton wool.

He couldn’t think where he was, or what he was supposed to be doing here. He was juddering with cold, but when he tried to wrap his aching arms around himself to warm himself up, he could feel the chicken-like skin that hung around his stomach and he realized that he had no clothes on.

Was this real? Was he awake, or was he dreaming it all? He could hear a choir singing ‘
Credo in
unum Deum
’ from Mozart’s mass in C minor, so perhaps he had inadvertently fallen asleep in church. But he wouldn’t be naked in church, would he, not unless he was dreaming? Perhaps he was dead. That was it. Perhaps his body was lying in a chilly back room at Jerh O’Connor’s funeral directors, ready for embalming, and the singing was nothing more than mood music from the showroom, to console his grieving relatives.

Perhaps he was both – dead
and
dreaming. Did the dead dream? Was that possible?

But – ‘How are you feeling now, father?’ asked the Grey Mullet Man, in his softer, more conciliatory voice. ‘Still woozy, I hope, for your own sake.’

‘Where am I?’ he whispered. ‘Am I dead?’

‘Not dead yet, father, but you’ve arrived at end of the line. The place where all sinners eventually end up. You’ve admitted your wrongdoings, and here you are, all ready to pay the price for them.’

‘Price? What price?’

‘Come now, father, you always knew that you would have to
pay
for your sins, didn’t you? You didn’t think that all you had to do was confess to what you did, and say how heartily sorry you were, and forty-nine Hail Marys, and that would be the end of it, amen?’

Father Quinlan strained his eyes and through the fog he could dimly make out the shadows of the Grey Mullet Man, with his dark circular eyeholes and his pointed hat.

‘Who are you?’ he said. ‘Whatever you’re going to do to me, you could at least tell me your name.’

‘I told you my name, father. The Grey Mullet Man.’

‘That’s not what your parents christened you.’

‘No, but it tells you much more exactly who I am than the name that I was given – whoever gave it to me.’

‘I don’t follow you at all.’

‘Think about it, father. What does your grey mullet feed on?’

‘What? What are you talking about? Your grey mullet is a fish.’

‘Of course it’s a fish! And it feeds on
sewage
, father – that’s what your grey mullet feeds on!’

‘What?’

‘Have you never stood on Patrick’s Bridge and seen all of those dozens of grey mullet crowding around the outpipe? Raw sewage, they gobble it up. Not to mention food scraps and waste diesel oil and detergents and all of the other toxic sludge that we discreetly pour into our rivers and oceans in the hope that nobody will notice. Me – I’m just like your grey mullet, only human. I feed on all varieties of filth, all manner of detritus, except that I find
my
filth floating around churches and schools and seminaries – wherever sanctimonious abusers like you are contaminating the clear waters of childhood innocence.’

‘So what are you telling me? That you really can’t bring yourself to forgive me?’ Father Quinlan’s tone of resignation was so black and despairing that it sounded almost as if he were making a joke.

The Grey Mullet Man’s hat waggled as he shook his head. ‘No, father, to be honest with you, I cannot. Look – I’m in no position at all to say that
God
hasn’t forgiven you. Jesus may have forgiven you, too, for all I know, and Our Lady may have decided in Her heart that you are truly, truly sorry for what you did. But not me, not myself. Nor have any of the other boys you used for your own self-gratification and your own self-glorification – and which of those was the worse I couldn’t say, the gratification or the glorification.’

The Grey Mullet Man paused for breath. When he spoke again, he loomed so close that Father Quinlan felt his cloth mask flapping against his cheek.

‘Nobody has yet coined a word horrible enough to describe what you are, father, and even if they had, I very much doubt that anybody could ever bring themselves to speak it, for fear that their tongue would be blackened and blistered forever, and they would have to have it cut out.’

Father Quinlan was beginning to grasp that he must have been drugged, or anaesthetized. He was certain now that he wasn’t dreaming, and that he wasn’t dead. But he decided in a strange detached way that he was ready for death. It wasn’t so much the pain he was suffering – his dislocated shoulders and his cracked ribs and his broken toes. It wasn’t even the humiliation of lying naked in a bathtub while he was insulted and reviled and told that his sins were beyond forgiveness.

He was prepared for death because he was certain in his own mind that during his ministry he had tried his very best to delight the Lord his God, even if he had failed. He believed that God had understood what he had been trying to do, albeit vainly, and would take him into His arms when he died, the way a father holds a son who has done everything possible to please him, regardless of whether he has succeeded or not.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘In that case, you had better do your worst.’

The Grey Mullet Man needed no more prompting. Without hesitation he reached into the bathtub and manhandled Father Quinlan on to his stomach. Father Quinlan couldn’t stop himself from gasping out in pain. There was still a half-inch of rusty water in the bottom of the bath, and it splashed into his face, so that he could taste it. It tasted as bitter as blood.

The Grey Mullet Man pulled back each of Father Quinlan’s wrists, one after the other, like a garda making an arrest, and bound them together with wire, so tight that it almost cut off his circulation. He snipped the wire with a pair of pliers, and then rolled Father Quinlan on to his back once more. The pain from his shoulders was so overwhelming that all Father Quinlan could manage to say was ‘
daah
!’.

He lay there for a few seconds, shivering and gasping, but then he heard the sound of somebody else walking across the bathroom, and another voice. It was a reedier voice than that of the Grey Mullet Man, as if its owner were suffering from catarrh, or had just reached puberty. Father Quinlan strained his eyes through the fog and he could dimly make out another figure standing beside the bathtub, looking down at him. This figure appeared to be wearing a mask, too, and a tall pointed hat, but a hat that had two points instead of one – more like a bishop’s mitre than the
capirote
of the Grey Mullet Man.

‘Look at him now, the gowl,’ said this second voice. ‘You couldn’t have imagined it, could you? The way he used to strut up and down the corridors, like a bantam cock! Cluck, cluck, cluck! I never once dreamed that I’d see him like this.’

Father Quinlan felt sure that he knew who this was. There was something in his sing-song, clogged-up intonation that brought back the grainy image of a boy’s white face, in a gloomy changing room somewhere, a boy with short brown hair and wing-nut ears. The boy was crying. There were dirty tear stains down his cheeks, but Father Quinlan couldn’t remember what he was crying about.

Perhaps if he could remember what the boy’s name was, and what had upset him so much, he and the Grey Mullet Man might forgive him, and stop torturing him, and let him live.

Before he could think about it any further, however, he heard the door slam and more footsteps cross the bathroom floor, heavier this time. Yet another smudgy figure loomed over the bathtub and a third voice said, ‘
Well
,
now! Look who it feckin’ isn’t! Queer Balls Quinny!’

This figure spoke in a derisive, Hollyhill accent. All the same his voice was high and clear, and every ‘l’ from ‘well’ to ‘look’ to ‘balls’ was pronounced with liquid precision, as if he had taken elocution lessons.

Father Quinlan squinted up at him. He, too, was wearing a conical hat. He was wearing a mask too, but it looked more like a pierrot’s mask than a white cloth with holes in it. More theatrical than religious, but just as scary.

‘Hullo, Queer Balls, how’s it going, boy? Long time no see. Looking a little thin on top these days. How about a transplant? You could borrow some bazz from your bollocks.’

In response, Father Quinlan could only pant, his chest heaving laboriously up and down like a fox hunted to exhaustion. Apart from that, he couldn’t think of anything else to say, or anything else to ask. Whoever these men were, it was clear that they were determined to punish him for something terrible that he had done to them, and there seemed to be no point in trying to understand why they refused to forgive him for it.

‘Want to say a last prayer, father, before we get down to business?’ asked the Grey Mullet Man.

Father Quinlan shook his head. ‘I’ve already tried to make my peace with God, thank you.’

‘Fair play to you, then,’ said the Grey Mullet Man. Then, without any further hesitation, he reached down and grasped Father Quinlan’s left leg, dragging it upwards and hooking it over the left-hand rim of the bathtub, and pinning it there with all of his weight. The man wearing the white pierrot mask did the same with Father Quinlan’s right leg, so that the priest was lying on his back with his knees wide apart. In this position, his buttocks didn’t quite reach the bottom of the bath, so all of his weight was resting on his bruised and dislocated shoulders.

‘
God in heaven, what are you doing to me
?’ he screamed. ‘
Haven’t you punished me
enough? Please – why don’t you kill me here and now
!’

‘Soon enough, Quinny!’ retorted the man in the pierrot mask. ‘And you can count yourself as lucky, boy, believe me! Not like all of us poor bastards who have had to live with what
you
did to them for twenty years and more!’

The man in the bishop’s mitre came up close beside the Grey Mullet Man. Whatever Father Quinlan had been anaesthetized with, it was rapidly beginning to wear off, and he could see and hear much more distinctly, although his eyes were still unfocused, and the voices of his tormentors still sounded as if they were talking with their heads in metal buckets.

The man in the bishop’s mitre made a show of lifting up both of his hands, in the same way that a priest raises a chalice to be blessed at the altar, during communion. But when Father Quinlan realized what the man was actually holding up, his spine quivered convulsively with dread.
God in heaven, no. Merciful God in heaven, save me from this. Let my heart stop first, before they do this to me
.

‘I’ll bet you reck
this
well enough, don’t you, father?’ taunted the Grey Mullet Man. ‘Not too many of
these
in the world, are there? Very specialist piece of equipment, I’d say.’

‘Please,’ said Father Quinlan. ‘You will never get away with this. The guards will find you, sooner or later.’

‘They never found
you
, did they, boy?’ the man in the bishop’s mitre taunted him, and made six or seven slicing noises with the instrument he was holding up in his hands.

Father Quinlan recognized it, all right. It was made up of two half-moon blades, each about seven inches long, with wooden handles. The blades were joined at the top with a hinge, more like a pair of nutcrackers than a pair of shears. It was old, crudely cast out of blackened steel, although the edges of the blades had recently been whetted, and were shining, and very sharp.

O God in heaven, please, not this. When
we
used it, we used it for a reason. Not out of cruelty, not for revenge
.
When we used it, it was only for the greater glorification of God, and of the diocese.

Now the choir was singing ‘
Gloria in excelsis Deo
’. Outside the windows, a dark bank of clouds was rolling over the city, like a stallholder dragging a tarpaulin over his stall at the end of the day, and the interior of the bathroom was plunged into gloom.

‘
No
,’ said Father Quinlan.

But the Grey Mullet Man reached down and took hold of Father Quinlan’s shrivelled penis between finger and thumb, and stretched it upwards as far as he could. It looked like a mussel, dragged out of its shell.

‘
No
,’ said Father Quinlan, and then he started to gabble under his breath, as if he were trying to break the world prayer speed record. ‘
O Lord, Jesus Christ, Redeemer and Saviour, forgive my sins, just as You forgave Peter’s denial and those who crucified You
.’