Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) (22 page)

Apart from the traditional dunce’s cap, there was the
hennin
worn by French noblewomen in the fifteenth century – the archetypal pointed hats seen in fairy-tale illustrations of maidens imprisoned in castles. Then there was the
capuchon
worn during the Mardi Gras celebrations in Louisiana, the
Spitzhut
found in Bavaria, and the black sugarloaf hat favoured by witches. But it was the
capirote
that interested Katie the most. This was a cardboard cone worn by religious flagellants in Spain, often with a mask attached to cover the face. During the Spanish Inquisition, accused heretics would be forced to wear one during their public humiliation, their torture, and their eventual execution.

Katie thought:
What could have been more like the Spanish Inquisition than the way in which Father Heaney and Father Quinlan were murdered
?

It seemed almost certain that the murderer was taking revenge on molesting priests, but Katie couldn’t help feeling that there was very much more to it than that. She had never found it easy to persuade boys to admit that they had been sexually abused by a member of the clergy: many of them simply wanted to forget that it had ever happened. But nearly as often, some of them still regarded the priest who had abused them with respect and affection.

‘Suppose you’re an adolescent boy,’ the psychology lecturer at the police college at Templemore had once told them. ‘Suppose you’ve been deprived of love and affection for your entire life, beaten and abused and neglected by your drunken, ignorant parents. Then suppose that a smiling friendly priest feeds you Mars bars and shows you photographs of naked women, and lovingly masturbates you. Would that really be your idea of hell?’

Katie googled for news reports about protests against abusive priests and came up with hundreds of thousands of results, although most of the reports related to America, and the archdiocese of Philadelphia in particular. But when she checked a story from the
Cork Examiner
, dated 29 April 2003, she came across a story headlined BISHOP URGED TO NAME MOLESTING PRIESTS.

She remembered the protest, although it had been mostly peaceful and no arrests had been made. She had been plain Detective Garda Maguire at the time. About thirty victims of child molestation had paraded along Redemption Road, nearly all of them disguised to conceal their identities. They had demanded that Bishop Kerrigan should publicly release the names of eleven Cork priests who were suspected of having abused the children in their care, both boys and girls.

There was a photograph taken as the protestors gathered outside the diocese offices. On the front steps, accepting a petition from the leader of the protest, was Monsignor Kelly himself, with an oddly glazed look in his eyes. He was surrounded by five or six other clergy, all much bigger than him. They looked more like his bodyguard than his companions in the cloth. It was raining, and one of them was holding an enormous umbrella over his head.

The leader of the protest was Paul McKeown, director of the Cork Survivors’ Society, which had been established to give psychiatric counselling to young men and women who had been abused by priests when they were younger. Out of everybody on the march, he alone wore no mask. He was tall, with dark curly hair, but his face was turned away from the camera, so Katie couldn’t see clearly what he looked like.

Behind him, the rest of the protestors wore scarves or balaclavas or pale, expressionless masks. At the very back, however, Katie saw five protestors wearing pointed white hats, with white cloth flaps covering their faces. Any one of them could have matched the description that Mrs Rooney had given them.
Just like the dunce’s cap they used to make us wear in high babies, whenever we got our sums wrong
.

But now she noticed something much more in the photograph. Some way behind the protestors in the pointed hats, two vehicles were parked. One was an old maroon Honda Accord, and the other was a black van. On the rear doors of the van, two white question marks had been painted, one on each door.

The van was at least fifty feet away, and it was out of focus, so it was difficult for Katie to make out its number plate. It was also difficult to see whether the question marks really were question marks. Although they were clearer than the single question mark on the back of the van that had been picked up on CCTV, they appeared to have been smudged or decorated in some way.

She picked up the phone and called Detective O’Donovan. ‘Patrick? You’re not in bed yet?’

‘I’m watching the League of Ireland live. Galway United versus Sligo Rovers.’

‘Well, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but in just a minute I’m going to be emailing you a photograph. It’s a picture of a protest that was held in April 2003 by the victims of sex abuse by priests. Some of the protestors are wearing pointy hats like the man that Mrs Rooney saw in the Blackwater river. But there’s also a black van in the background and it looks very similar to the van we’ve been trying to locate. I want you to get on to the picture desk at the
Examiner
and see if they can’t dig up an original copy of that picture, so that you can send it to the photography unit at Phoenix Park and have them enhance it for us.’

‘I see,’ said Detective O’Donovan. He sounded deeply dispirited. ‘Okay, then.’

‘What’s the score?’ asked Katie. She could hear the roaring of the football crowd in the background.

‘Galway three, Sligo nil.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘So am I, ma’am. I support the Bit o’ Red.’

Gerry O’Dwyer set the alarm of his music shop, stepped out of the front door and locked it. Maylor Street was almost deserted except for a group of young people on the corner, shuffling and shouting and smoking cigarettes. Gerry checked his watch as he walked toward Patrick Street. It was 11.07 p.m. He hadn’t meant to stay so late, but his accountant was expecting his annual returns first thing tomorrow morning. She was off on holiday to Lanzarote next week and if she didn’t complete his tax return by Monday then she wouldn’t be able to complete it for two weeks, and he would have to pay a penalty.

Gerry thought how ironic it was that he had to hurry to hand her his accounts when he couldn’t afford even a weekend’s bed and breakfast break in Kerry for himself and Maureen. But with the Irish economy the way it was now, people were buying food and paying off their credit-card bills rather than spending their money on musical instruments. Almost every day one of his customers came into the Mighty Minstrel trying to sell him back one of the guitars or fiddles that they had bought from him when times had been prosperous. There was a saying in the Irish music trade that when you’re buying it, it’s a fiddle, but when you’re selling it, it’s a violin.

Gerry was a big man. At the Presentation Brothers College he had been a star rugby player, and after he had taken holy orders he had coached the rugby team at St Joseph’s. These days, however, he felt and looked worn down, both by time and circumstance. His thick curly hair was grey now, and his broken nose made him look more like a down-and-out boxer than a powerful second-row forward. His shoulders were rounded inside his shabby green tweed coat, and he shambled rather than strode.

He would never have admitted it, even to Maureen, but he felt that God had turned His back on him, even after he had given God everything, and more.

As he reached the corner of Patrick Street, a man came out of the doorway of Brown Thomas, the department store, and walked towards him at a sharp diagonal.

‘Got a light there?’ the man asked him, holding up a cigarette. He was thin, with a large narrow nose. He wore a black leather jacket, and he had silvery, slicked-back hair that gleamed in the street lights.

‘Sure.’ Gerry stopped, and reached into his pocket for his lighter. He didn’t smoke himself, but there were plenty of times when he needed a naked flame for melting sealing wax and glue and burning through catgut. He flicked it alight and the man leaned forward with his cigarette between his lips, cupping his hands around Gerry’s in a way that Gerry found almost too intimate.

The man blew smoke out of the corner of his mouth and said, ‘Thanks.’ Then he cocked his head to one side like an inquisitive spaniel and said, ‘I reck you, don’t I?’

‘You might well do,’ Gerry told him. ‘Were you ever at Pres?’

‘Pres? Me? Too slow for a school like that, boy. I used to think the Straits of Gibraltar was called the Straits of Gibraltar because they wasn’t gay.’

‘Maybe you’ve seen me in my shop. The Mighty Minstrel.’

‘That’s the musical instrument shop? No, I was never in there – not musical, me – so it wouldn’t have been in there that I saw you.’

‘In that case, I really don’t know. Now, you’ll forgive me, I have to be getting along. I’m late enough as it is.’

‘Hold on,’ the man told him, lifting his cigarette hand. ‘I can see you wearing a dog collar. That’s it! I can clearly remember you dressed up like a priest. Now, would that be right, like? Was you ever a Father Whatever-your-name-is?’

‘A priest? No. Never.’

The man shook his head. He had a sly grin on his face that Gerry didn’t like at all, and he was still breathing smoke out of his nostrils from the last drag that he had taken of his cigarette. He could have easily passed as a demon.

‘That is very peculiar,’ he said. ‘I could have sworn blind that you was once a priest that I used to know. He looked the spit of you, so he did, only twenty years younger. Same wonky snoz. Same sideways look in his eye, like he was hiding something inside of him he didn’t want you to catch sight of, know what I mean?’

‘No, I don’t. And I really have to go.’

‘Come on, I got it right here on the tip of my licker. Father O’Grady, was it? No, not Father O’Grady. Father O’Gallagher, that sounds more like it. Father O’Gallagher!’ The man paused, frowning, and took another drag on his cigarette. ‘No – wait, that wasn’t it either. It was – hold on – it was Father O’Gara! That’s it, Father O’Gara! That’s who you’re the spit of! Father O’Gara, from St Joseph’s!’

Gerry said nothing, but stepped to one side and started to walk away.

‘Father O’Gara!’ the man whooped after him, and his voice echoed around the near-deserted shopping street. ‘That’s who you are! I dare you to deny it! In front of God, I dare you to deny it!’

Gerry had crossed the pedestrianized side of the street but now he stopped at the kerb and turned around. ‘You listen to me, my friend! I don’t know what you think you’re playing at, but my name is O’Dwyer and I was never a priest. Now do us both a favour and hop off, would you?’

Unabashed, the man came stalking after him, stiff-legged, still grinning. ‘And what will you do if I don’t, Father O’Gara? Call for the schickalony? They could check your fingerprints, couldn’t they, and prove who you are?’

Gerry said, ‘Get the hell away from me, before I do something to you that I’d regret.’

But the man came even nearer, and leaned forward, and stared up at him with triumphantly widened eyes. ‘You mean like all of them other things that you regret, Father O’Gara? Like all them poor sobbing boys at St Joseph’s? Oh, the tears that stained those pillows, father, not to mention everything else they got stained with.’

‘I never did that!’ Gerry barked at him. ‘I never once did that!’

‘So you admit who you are!’ the man retorted. ‘You admit that you’re Father O’Gara!’

Gerry pushed him square in the chest with both hands, and although he no longer possessed the strength of a rugby forward, the man toppled backwards on to the pavement, his legs flying up in the air. His cigarette rolled into the gutter in a shower of sparks.

‘Right!’ the man spat. He rolled over on to his side and climbed back on to his feet, panting with anger and effort. ‘Right! That is fecking it! I’m telling you, that is fecking
it
! I claim ya!’

He came towards Gerry with both fists raised in a puny imitation of an old-style bare-knuckle pugilist. Gerry said, ‘Don’t even think about it. I could eat you for breakfast. Now will you hop off like I told you to?’

But the man kept edging closer and closer, jabbing at the air and snorting and saying, ‘Come on, boy, come on!’ Gerry lifted his hands and backed away from him. ‘I’m not going to fight you, you gowl. Go home and sober yourself up.’

‘What are you frightened of, father? Frightened that somebody knows who you really are? O’Dwyer, my skinny arse. You’re Father O’Gara from St Joseph’s and you have hell to pay.’

Gerry kept on backing slowly away, both hands defensively lifted. He was so preoccupied with this prancing, jabbing idiot that he didn’t hear the van that started up its engine and pulled away from the kerb less than two hundred feet off to his right. It accelerated towards him without any headlights, and he became aware of it only at the moment when he stepped backwards into the road.

He tried to leap back on to the pavement, but the man in the black leather jacket took two brisk steps towards him and pushed him in the chest, in the same way that Gerry had pushed him. The man didn’t have much weight behind him, but he caught Gerry off balance.

Gerry stumbled and swayed, both arms whirling, trying to stop himself from falling over. He was too late: the van hit him with a deafening bang. It was going no faster than twenty miles an hour, but that was enough to send him tumbling across the street, over and over and over, until he hit a litter bin and came to a stop, his face bloody, his arms and legs awkwardly bent in a swastika pattern.

He lay with his cheek against the concrete, staring at the leg of the litter bin. He was still conscious, but the world was dark around the edges, and growing darker. He wasn’t at all sure what had happened to him. His body felt as it had once felt when a rugby scrum had collapsed on top of him and he had been trampled by the boots of half a dozen of his fellow players as they tried to disentangle themselves.

He could see his left hand lying on the pavement and he tried to move it, but it didn’t seem to be connected to his brain. He wasn’t at all sure that his legs were still attached to his body. He wondered if he would ever be able to walk again.