Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) (25 page)

If he hadn’t been so tall and so heavily built, he could have looked sweet and harmless. But for a man of his height and bulk to have such a cherubic face was strangely threatening, especially since he was frowning at Gerry like a vexed two-year-old.

He picked up the Diet Coke bottle from the kitchen chair and unscrewed the cap. He sniffed it, and puckered up his nose. He had always hated the smell of vinegar. It reminded him of the orphanage, and the pickled eggs that they used to serve at teatime, especially on St Paddy’s Day, when they dyed them green. He used to sit alone in the dining hall until it grew dark, refusing to eat his pickled egg, and forbidden to leave the table until he did.

Sometimes he could persuade himself that his abiding hatred of the priesthood came from those pickled eggs, even more than what had happened to him later.

It was over an hour before Gerry regained consciousness. By the time he did, the sun had been swallowed up by low grey cloud and the bedroom was so dark that he didn’t realize at first that the Grey Mullet Man was standing in the corner in his pointed hat and his mask, quite motionless, watching him.

‘Ah, you’re awake,’ said the Grey Mullet Man, in a curiously high-pitched voice, but then he cleared his throat and added, ‘You wouldn’t have wanted to miss what I’m going to be doing to you next. Well, fair play, perhaps you would, but I wouldn’t have wanted you to.’

Gerry tried to moisten his lips, but his tongue was as dry as a slug on a garden path. ‘I don’t know why you don’t just strangle me, whoever you are, and have done with it.’

The Grey Mullet Man stepped out of the corner and came up to the side of the bed. ‘Because justice has to be served, Father O’Gara. People so often misunderstand the Bible, don’t they, when it tells us eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. It simply means that the punishment should equal the crime. Not revenge for its own sake, but fairness. No more than what’s deserved – but on the other hand no less either, and that “no less” – that’s critical.’

He paused for breath, because he had started to pant. ‘You put me through the fires of hell, father. You put me through the very flames of Hades. And that’s what I’m going to do to you.’

‘In that case, may God forgive you.’

‘Oh, He probably won’t. I don’t expect Him to. But to tell you the truth, father, I’m long past caring, because what you and your holy brothers did to me was far worse than anything that Our Lord could ever have done, or ever can.’

He picked up the Diet Coke bottle and unscrewed the cap. He held it close to Gerry’s nose and said, ‘Smell that? Home-made napalm. Five indigestion tablets dissolved in ten teaspoons of vinegar and topped up with rubbing alcohol.’

Gerry looked up at him with swollen eyes and a terrible feeling of dread.

‘You’re really going to do this, aren’t you?’ he said. His ribs and his pelvis were hurting so much that he tried to shift his position, but he could feel his fractured bones grate together and he had to stay absolutely still for a few seconds while his brain tried to cope with the pain. ‘There’s nothing at all I can say to change your mind?’

Just then the bedroom door opened and two more men came in – one of them wearing a tall hat like a bishop’s mitre and the other wearing a chalk-white mask like a pierrot. They approached the other side of the bed and stood beside it with their arms folded. They smelled of cigarette smoke.

‘Sorry we took so long, like,’ said the man in the pierrot mask, in a muffled, cardboardy voice. ‘The traffic on the South Ring was shite.’

‘Just pleased to see that you didn’t start without us,’ added the man in the mitre.

‘Oh, there’s no way I would have done that, boy,’ the Grey Mullet Man assured him. ‘This is your day just as much as mine.’

He tipped up the Diet Coke bottle and filled up the palm of his left hand with a large blob of glistening, pungent gel. This he slowly rubbed into Gerry’s scalp, like a hairdresser applying conditioner. Gerry snorted and tried to twist his head away, but again the tendons in his neck gave him a stab of pain, and the Grey Mullet Man was too strong for him.

The gel smelled strongly of vinegar, and as the Grey Mullet Man massaged it into his scalp, it felt chilly, too.

‘I’m pleading with you,’ he whispered. ‘I’m pleading with you not to do this. Whatever you want me to say – whatever you want me to confess to – I will admit to it, I swear on the Holy Bible.’

‘How can you confess, father, when you’re so sure that you never did anything wrong?’

‘Because we did
not
believe – we never
once
thought – that what we were doing – was wrong. Not in any way at all. We devoutly believed – that we were giving you boys – the greatest gift that one man can possibly bestow – on another.’

The pain of saying so much made Gerry’s eyes fill with tears, which poured down his cheeks until they were shining.

‘Would you look at him, for feck’s sake?’ said the man in the pierrot mask, shaking his head. ‘I never thought I’d ever get to see Father O’Gorilla cry like a fecking babby.’

The Grey Mullet man took out a box of extra-long matches. He shook it in front of Gerry’s face and said, ‘You hear them matches chuckling, father? Ask not for whom them matches chuckle. They chuckle for thee.’

Gerry stared at him with wet, reddened eyes. ‘
No
,’ he mouthed, soundlessly.

The Grey Mullet Man took out a match and struck it. When it flared into life, he held it up for a moment. Gerry stared at it, and then closed his eyes, as if his closing his eyes could extinguish it.

The Grey Mullet Man said, ‘I light this candle in memory of all the lost boys at St Joseph’s Orphanage – of all the happy futures that were never to be – of all the terrible pain and humiliation they suffered. Most of all, I light it in the sure and certain knowledge that what they went through will never happen to another boy, ever. Amen.’

‘Amen,’ echoed the man in the bishop’s mitre and the man in the white pierrot mask, and the Grey Mullet Man touched the burning match to the top of Gerry’s head.

Instantly, with a sharp crackling noise, Gerry’s hair burst into flame. For the first few seconds, he couldn’t feel anything at all, but the fire burned fast and fierce, with flames leaping up more than two feet above his head, and as soon as all his hair was shrivelled, and the blazing gel began to burn his bare scalp, he let out a screech that made the man in the pierrot mask clamp his hands to the sides of his head.

Wearing a crown of living flames, Gerry threw himself wildly from side to side, so that the bed frame screeched and groaned in protest and its feet danced a frantic rumba on the floor. But the thin black nylon straps that were holding Gerry up against the bedhead were unbreakable, and in the end there was nothing he could do but sit absolutely rigid, his teeth gritted, his face contorted with agony, his fists clenched, while the fire flared up higher and then eventually died down.

After three or four minutes, the last flames licked at his blackened, bloody scalp, and then slunk off into oblivion. Gerry’s head slumped forward. He was unconscious again from shock, and his whole body was quaking as if he were freezing cold. Acrid smoke rose lazily up towards the ceiling and then got caught in a draft and shuddered away.

The man in the bishop’s mitre crossed himself. ‘Well,’ he asked, ‘do you think he saw hell?’

‘Only a glimpse of it, I’d say,’ said the Grey Mullet Man. He screwed the top back on to the Diet Coke bottle and placed it back on the chair. ‘But don’t worry, he’ll soon find out what it’s really like, the same way that all of us did.’

Katie’s cappuccino had gone cold but she drank it anyway, tugging a tissue out of the box on her desk to wipe her mouth. She had just picked up her phone to call the hospital when John knocked at her office door. He was wearing his brown leather bomber jacket and a green and white check shirt and he had just had a haircut, so he looked five years younger.

‘
Katie
,’ he said, giving her that quick, cautious smile.

‘John! Hi, darling. You’ve caught me right in the middle, I’m afraid.’

‘No time for lunch, then?’

‘We have a media conference at 2.30 and I’m trying to make some progress in this priest-killing case, so that we have something newsworthy to tell them.’

John came into the room and stood beside her desk. ‘Hey – why sweat it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘All you have to do is tell the press that you’re investigating some extremely promising new leads, and that you’re only a few days away from making an arrest, and that you’ll get back to them as soon as you’ve had a late lunch at the Clarion with the man you love and maybe a half-hour’s hanky-panky in a room upstairs.’

Katie gave him a mock-exasperated look. ‘I can’t do that, because I
don’t
have any extremely promising new leads, and because I seriously
do
have to make some progress. Nobody’s supposed to know this yet, but another priest has gone missing – well,
ex-
priest – and we’re seriously concerned that the same thing is going to happen to him – that’s if it hasn’t happened already.’

‘You mean...?’ John lifted two fingers and snipped them in a scissors gesture.

Katie nodded. ‘And likely even worse, if what they did to Father Quinlan is anything to go by.’

‘Jesus.’

Katie stood up and came around her desk and put her arms around John’s waist. ‘Listen,’ she said, much more quietly, ‘you don’t know how sorry I am that all of this has blown up now.’

He kissed her – once, twice, three times. ‘Come on, sweetheart. You have your job to do, I know that. Most important, though, how’s your sister?’

‘Still the same, the last time I saw her. I was just about call and find out.’

He held her close. ‘I’m really sorry I was so pushy when I came to the hospital. I guess I’m afraid that I’m going to go out to San Francisco and that you’re never going to follow me. It’s like every day a new reason comes up why you won’t be able to.’

He hesitated, and then he said, ‘What I was going to tell you today was that I really have to go as soon as possible. I can’t even wait until the end of next month. The guys are screaming for me to get out there and organize all the online sales distribution.’

‘Then you should go.’

He looked down at her, looked intently into her eyes. ‘I don’t want to go unless I’m one hundred per cent sure that you’re going to be following me, once your sister recovers and once you’ve wrapped this case up. I don’t want to go out there and discover that I’m never going to see you again.’

Katie pressed her head close against his chest – so close that she could feel his heart beating through his soft cotton shirt. When she breathed in she could smell cinnamon and oak aftershave, and just
him
. She couldn’t find any truthful words to say to him, because she knew that, right at this moment, she couldn’t promise on the Holy Bible that she
would
follow him to San Francisco; but she also knew that he couldn’t possibly afford to stay here in Ireland.

‘You know the old saying,’ she told him. ‘The test of the heart is trouble.’

At that moment, Detective O’Donovan appeared in the open doorway. He cleared his throat to announce his arrival, and John and Katie separated.

He held up a USB stick. ‘Sorry to interrupt you, ma’am, but the photography boys in Phoenix Park just sent me this and I think you need to see it urgent-like.’

‘Of course,’ said Katie. She tilted her head up to give John a kiss. ‘I’ll talk to you later this evening, okay? Maybe we can manage to get together for a drink and something to eat.’

John said nothing, but gripped her hand tightly for a moment, and then left.

‘Sorry, ma’am,’ Detective O’Donovan repeated.

‘No, you’re all right. Let’s have a look at what you’ve got there.’

Detective O’Donovan went across to Katie’s computer with its wide-screen monitor and plugged in the memory stick. Instantly the black and white newspaper photograph of the Cork Survivors’ Society demonstration appeared on the screen. There was Monsignor Kelly standing on the steps of the diocese building under that monstrous black umbrella, surrounded by his heavyweight priests, and there was Paul McKeown from the CSS confronting him, and the motley crowd of masked and hooded protestors gathered behind him, like refugees from a travelling carnival.

‘This is a print taken from the original negative,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘The background’s out of focus, like, but they used that Kneson Imagener software and you won’t believe what they were able to bring up. Amazing.’

He clicked the mouse and the photograph jumped into sharp focus. He clicked the mouse a second time and the screen was filled with a close-up of the black van with the two question marks on the back doors. There was lettering on the van’s side panel, too, and Katie could read it quite clearly.

‘Get everybody in here,’ she said. ‘I want the whole team to see this. And Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll, too, if he’s back from lunch.’

Within five minutes, Inspector Fennessy and Sergeant O’Rourke and Detective Horgan and three other detective gardaí had crowded into Katie’s office.

‘This has to stay strictly under wraps until I say so,’ Katie cautioned them. ‘Before we tell anyone at all, I need to go and talk to Monsignor Kelly again.’

Sergeant O’Rourke went up close to the monitor and peered at it with a concentrated frown. After a while he turned around and said, ‘These question marks on the back doors of that van, they’re not question marks at all, are they? They’re like those shepherd’s crook things that bishops tote around with them.’

‘You’re right,’ said Inspector Fennessy. ‘Croziers, that’s what they are. Two bishop’s croziers.’

‘Exactly,’ said Katie. ‘And look what it says on the side of the van.
Diocese of
Cork and Ross. Redemption Road, Cork
. And the telephone number.’

Sergeant O’Rourke was slowly shaking his head from side to side. ‘So this fecking van that this priest killer’s been driving around in, and using for carting bodies around, it belongs to the church?’