Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) (34 page)

‘And what good do you think that will do you, Father O’Gara? What are you going to do, rat us out to the angels?’

Gerry stared at the ceiling. He felt the cold sharp blades of the
castratori
on either side of his scrotum. Then they slowly closed together, and he felt them cut through every nerve and every tubule and every inch of flesh. They made a surprisingly sharp
crunch
, too, which distressed him even more than the pain. It was the sound of his manhood being taken away from him, irrevocably.

The Grey Mullet Man collected his severed testicles in his open hand, before they could drop through the bedsprings. He held them up so that Gerry could see them, rolling them in a bloody mess between finger and thumb.

‘Do you think that this will help you to see God, father?’ he said, and even though Gerry couldn’t see his face behind his mask, he felt sure that he was leering.

He was still taunting Gerry when his mobile phone rang. He reached underneath his apron with his clean hand, took it out and flipped it open.

‘What’s the story?’ he asked. He clearly knew who the caller was.

He listened, and then he said, ‘Jesus. Feck. All right, then. Jesus. That’s going to put the cat among the fecking pigeons and no mistake.’

He closed the phone and pushed it back into his trouser pocket. Then he looked down at Gerry and said, ‘No more time to waste, father. Although you couldn’t be any kind of a father now, could you, state of you la.’

It seemed to Gerry as if the light from the hurricane lamp was dimming, even though it was hissing just as loudly as before.
Sink
, he thought.
Let yourself sink under that sea, into that welcome darkness, into that numbing cold. Sink and never come back to the surface
.

He didn’t feel the man in the bishop’s mitre lifting up his head, quite gently, so that the Grey Mullet Man could loop the piano wire around his neck.

Katie returned home to feed Barney and let him out into the back yard to do his business. She also wanted to phone the hospital to see if Siobhán was any better, and try to get in touch with John.

There was very little change in Siobhán’s condition. Not much better, not much worse, although the nurse told her that they were slightly concerned about her low blood pressure.

John wasn’t answering his phones, either his landline or his mobile, so she left him a message to call her and to tell her how much she loved him. She wouldn’t have time to see him this evening, what with the former Father O’Gara and now Father ó Súllabháin both missing, believed abducted.

She was opening up a packet of soda bread to make herself a ham sandwich when her phone rang.

‘Boss? It’s Patrick. I’ve just had a call from Inspector Pearse in Clon. He says that he’s fierce concerned about Jimmy O’Rourke.’

‘What? Why? The local guards aren’t even supposed to know that he’s down there.’

Detective O’Donovan told her about the overturned cattle truck on the Croppy Road, and how Sergeant O’Rourke had borrowed a squad car from the Clonakilty Garda.

‘They have his Toyota at the station but he hasn’t shown up to collect it and they don’t have the first idea where he is.’

‘All squad cars have trackers fitted, don’t they? Why can’t they find him?’

‘The tracker must have been disabled, like. That’s all they can think of.’

‘Did you tell them that he was on his way to Rathbarry, and who he was supposed to be seeing?’

‘I did not, no. I thought that I had better speak to you first.’

‘Oh, well, good man yourself, Patrick. But get back to this Inspector Pearse, would you, and explain what Jimmy was doing down there. You don’t have to tell him
why
exactly he wanted to interview Father Lowery, only that it was part of a major case that we’re looking into right now. And if they can locate Father Lowery, that would help, too. Can you call the diocese office for me and see if he’s turned up back in Cork?’

‘Right you are, boss. But there’s one more thing.’

‘Don’t tell me. Not more bad news.’

‘I’d say “unhelpful” rather than anything else. We paid a visit to St Joseph’s, to check on their records for the time when the choir was being formed, and there are none. In fact, they have no records at all between 1966 and 1997. The secretary said that when they were moved into temporary offices in 1998, during a renovation of the main building, they were all destroyed in a fire. That includes attendance records, examination results, copies of birth certificates, even photographs. The whole lot.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘The secretary swore blind that it was true. We could get a warrant, I suppose, and search their archives, but I doubt if we’ll find anything.’

‘There must be some record somewhere. Try social welfare, or the HSE.’

‘I’m not about to give up yet, ma’am. You can count on it.’

‘Keep in touch with me, Patrick. This is getting critical. Our perpetrator has got hold of two victims now and there’s no way of telling how long he’s going to keep them alive.’

While Katie was eating her sandwich, she sat on one of the kitchen stools and opened up her laptop to look up the Cork Survivors’ Society. There were two numbers, one on Oliver Plunkett Street right in the centre of the city, and another in Glanmire, which was a collection of villages about four miles to the east of Cork, up the estuary of the River Glashaboy. It was the second number she wanted: it gave the name of the society’s director, Paul McKeown.

She swallowed a mouthful of sparkling mineral water to help her sandwich go down, and then she rang him. The phone rang and rang for a long time before anybody answered.

Then, a cautious man’s voice. ‘CSS. Who’s calling?’

‘Is that Paul McKeown?’

‘Who wants to know?’

‘Detective Superintendent Katie Maguire, from Anglesea Street Garda station. I’m investigating the murders of Father Heaney and Father Quinlan, and I was wondering if I could have a word with you.’

‘I see,’ said Paul McKeown. She could hear his steady breathing. ‘I don’t see how I can be of any help to you, superintendent.’

‘Well, I think you could be, more than you know. Can I call around and see you this evening? It shouldn’t take too long.’

‘Very well. My wife is out at her book club tonight, so that should be all right.’

Katie looked up at the kitchen clock. Nine minutes after seven. The day was disappearing fast and yet it was becoming more and more tangled by the minute. She felt as if she had plenty of answers but none of the right questions to make any sense of them.

She felt, too, that she was still relying almost entirely on guesswork to take this investigation forward. It seemed probable that Fathers Heaney, Quinlan, O’Gara and ó Súllabháin had deliberately castrated young orphan boys in order to make their choir the finest in Ireland. Their spiritual motive appeared to have been to please God so much that He would deign to make Himself visible in some way, although how this could happen was not clear. Maybe they had expected it to happen for real, so that everybody would witness His appearance, and see heaven. On the other hand, maybe they thought that it would happen only inside their own minds, a private revelation for them alone.

What she couldn’t work out, though, was Monsignor Kelly’s involvement. She strongly suspected that he knew what had happened to the van with the crozier on the back, and she even suspected that he had a strong idea who had murdered Father Heaney and Father Quinlan. Yet she couldn’t understand why he had been so eager to blame Brendan Doody. And where
was
Brendan Doody – alive or dead?

Not only that, where in the name of Jesus was Jimmy O’Rourke? She was beginning to grow seriously worried about him.

She closed her laptop, finished her sandwich and went into the hall to take down her raincoat. Barney came bustling after her, his tail whacking from side to side.

‘Sorry, boy. No walkies just yet. I’ll try to take you out when I get home.’

Barney made that keening noise in the back of his throat. She loved him dearly, but she was beginning to think that it was very unfair of her to keep a dog as boisterous and needy as an Irish setter when she couldn’t take him for regular exercise or give him the attention he deserved. What was more, John had given him to her, and supposing she decided to let John go off to America and not go with him? Barney would be a constant reminder of the chance that she had given up, and the love that she had sacrificed.

She hunkered down and stroked him and tugged at his ears, which made him snuffle and stick out his tongue and dance excitedly on the carpet.

‘What would you do, Barney? Stay or go? Go or stay?’

Barney cocked his head to one side, and gave her a sympathetic
wuff
.

It was already growing dark as she drove up towards Sallybrook. On her left, the huge oak trees were as black as blotches of Indian ink. On her right, she could see the wide curve of the River Glashaboy, reflecting the sky. She had always thought that there was something very secretive about rivers at night. No wonder so many people committed suicide in Cork by throwing themselves in the river. They knew that it would carry away all of their despair, and tell no one.

Paul McKeown lived in a large house halfway up a winding hill called Glen Richmond. It was a newish house, very neat, with a steep asphalt drive and a recently planted rockery and a double garage with white-painted doors. Katie climbed out of her car, walked up to the front door and pushed the bell, which rang with a full Westminster chime. A light went on behind the stained-glass window over the porch, and she could see a figure coming down the stairs, changing colour as it did so, from red to green to yellow.

He opened the door and said, ‘Superintendent Maguire?’

‘Mr McKeown. Sorry I had to call on you so late.’

She recognized him from the newspaper photograph of the rally outside the diocesan offices on Redemption Road. Tall – very tall – at least six feet three – with dark brown hair that was wavy rather than curly as it appeared in the photograph, but then it had been raining that day. He must have been about forty-two years old, and his hair was a little too long for his age, but it immediately told Katie a lot about his personality: non-conformist; quite artistic; somewhat vain.

He was extremely handsome, in a dark, slightly satanic way. He had a long face with a straight nose and sharply chiselled cheeks, and a strong, angular chin. His eyes were greyish-blue, the colour of a cloudy afternoon sky. He was wearing a very white shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up and a pair of indigo jeans with a plaited brown leather belt.

‘Come on in,’ he told her. She stepped inside and he took her through to a large living room with a polished oak floor and burgundy leather sofas. The decor was very minimalist. Above the fireplace hung a 42-inch plasma television, but there were no pictures or photographs anywhere. In the far corner stood a green bronze statuette of an angel at prayer, her wings spread wide, but apart from half a dozen white roses in a clear glass vase in the middle of the coffee table, that was the only decoration.

‘Sit down, please,’ he told her. ‘Like I said on the phone, I don’t know what I can do to help you.’

Katie sat on one of the leather sofas. ‘You could help me by telling me the truth,’ she said, giving him one of her really disarming smiles, her eyes all twinkly.

‘The truth?’ said Paul McKeown. ‘I haven’t said anything to you yet, so could I be lying to you?’

‘You told me on the phone that your wife had gone to her book club.’

‘I did, yes. What of it? She goes every Thursday.’

‘You’re not married, Mr McKeown. I looked you up in our records before I came up here. You’re on Wikipedia, too. You used to be married to Caoimhe ó Faoláin, the poet, the one who wrote
The Flowers of Cashel Beg
, but you were divorced three years ago.’

Paul McKeown didn’t seem to be at all abashed that Katie had caught him out. He gave her a nonchalant shrug and said, ‘Okay. I always tell people that I’m still married, especially women. I suppose you could say that it’s a defence mechanism. The trouble with being Paul McKeown is that women either have a prurient interest in what was done to me, or they think they can help me to forget it – often both.’

‘All right, I’ll forgive you this one time,’ Katie told him, not very seriously. But then she said, ‘I told you why I wanted to talk to you. We urgently need some help to identify who might have murdered Father Heaney and Father Quinlan. So far as we know, they’re currently holding another priest who came under suspicion for molestation, Father Gerry O’Gara, and they may have abducted a fourth, Father Michael ó Súllabháin.

‘I have to caution you that all of this is absolutely confidential at this stage of our inquiry, but we have notebooks kept by Father Heaney that describe how these four priests were brought in to form a choir at St Joseph’s Orphanage.’

‘Go on,’ said Paul McKeown. From the tone of his voice, she had the feeling that he knew, or at least suspected, what she was going to say next.

‘I’ll be blunt about it. At some stage, it appears that these four decided that the choir could only reach the height of musical perfection if some or all of the boys in it were castrated, like the choirboys in the Vatican in the sixteenth century. So that’s what they did. They castrated them. That’s according to Father Heaney’s notebooks, anyhow, so we have to be a little wary about the veracity of it. There’s a lot of cat’s malogian in those notebooks, too – about seeing God face to face, and heaven being a real place. So what he wrote about could have been nothing more than the sadomasochistic fantasies of a very frustrated priest. But on balance we don’t think so.’

Paul McKeown thought about this for a very long time before he said anything, his hands steepled in front of his face so that Katie couldn’t clearly see his expression. Then he suddenly stood up and said, ‘Let me get you a drink, superintendent. You look like a vodka lady to me.’

‘I’d love one, to tell you the truth, but I’m working, and I expect to be working for the rest of the night, and through tomorrow morning, too.’