TORN (11 page)

Heading into the vestry, Father Byrne hung up his robes. A movement outside caught his eye, and he moved towards the tiny window that looked out over the church’s expansive rear grounds.

Magpies, circling the hawthorn tree.

The birds were always plentiful around here, and he’d spied many of them on his way in. Yet this morning they seemed oddly … agitated. And there were
so
many; considerably more than was typical.

For reasons he couldn’t quite fathom, Father Byrne felt compelled to investigate what was making the magpies so excitable. He had plenty of time; it was just before eight, and worshippers wouldn’t begin to arrive for another half-hour or so.  A walk through the grounds would be enjoyable, actually.

Using the vestry’s rear door, the priest went outside. He rubbed his hands together to try to ward off the biting chill, and took a deep lungful of the fresh morning air.

But, he realized, suddenly growing tense, there was something else present in the air that morning - a heavy odor that almost certainly wasn’t fresh.  He frowned and looked again towards the hawthorn tree.

Was that it, he mused. Had the magpies come across a dead animal – a badger or squirrel perhap
s
and were feasting on the remains?  In these parts, squirrels were almost as plentiful as magpies so that wasn’t unusual. Well, whatever had the birds’ attention, he noted, it was in the vicinity of the tree.

Shuddering, but this time not from the morning air, Father Byrne strode in the direction of the tree, all the while watching the magpies and their delighted swooping dance.

But when the object of the birds’ attention suddenly came into view, the priest immediately revised his earlier belief.  Reeling back in horror, he fell to his knees and invoked all the angels and saints in heaven to protect him.

Far from feeling close to God, right then Father Byrne was certain he had come face to face with Satan himself.

Reilly was taken aback by the size of the hulking stone church.

Located in a small town just outside Blessington, an area famous for its beautiful mountain lakes, the church had been shrouded in the cold gray of the early morning fog on Reilly’s arrival,.

Although the Wicklow countryside was only a short drive out of the city, Reilly was unfamiliar with the area and she had forgotten to bring the GFU van’s sat nav. After she’d taken a few wrong turns, Chris had sent a patrol car to meet her and guide her to the location of what he’d described on the phone as ‘yet another brain-fry murder’.

As the sun rose, the church appeared huge, but an almost menacing darkness still clung to it, as though the mist had not moved on, but rather simply condensed back down into the masonry.

As the clouds parted further, the church grounds sparkled with droplets of moisture, each diffracting so that everything seemed rainbow light, except the church, which brooded with a heavy gothic gravity of mass. It sat upon a raised mound, and a macabre cast-iron spiked fence encircled it protectively. 

Entering the sanctified space, Reilly noticed that the building felt cold and forbidding, far removed from the vibrant and resplendent churches she had come across elsewhere.

It was decorated in an austere manner that suggested respectful worship a great distance removed from an unsympathetic deity.

‘Who found the body?’ she asked Kennedy.

‘The priest, Father Byrne. Chris is interviewing him now.’

As Reilly followed Kennedy through the doorway, a woman popped up from the long wooden pew upon which she had been praying.

‘Hello,’ she bubbled. ‘You must be the crime scene people. Father Byrne asked me to assist you – he’s with that nice-looking detective at the moment.’ She turned and shook their hands with a perfunctory grace obviously acquired by glad-handing her way through many church socials. ‘My name is Henrietta. I’m the chairperson of the lay committee. I help Father Byrne with the admin, and also make sure that nobody walks off with the donation box. This is just terrible,’ she babbled. ‘I really can’t believe such a thing could happen, especially around here. It’s such a quiet little place; nobody bothers anyone else and you’d never think ...’

The woman’s words went right over Reilly’s head when she looked down the aisle towards the altar.

‘Wow,’ she gasped.

A larger-than-life-size Technicolor statue of Jesus suffering horribly on the cross towered above the altar, backed by large stained-glass illustrations of the stations of the Cross.

‘Erm, very nice,’ Kennedy said, obviously confused as to what the interior of the church had to do with anything, when the dead body had been found in the grounds.

‘Look up a little,’ Reilly told him.

Above the statue and the stations, dwarfing them both, was an immense carving depicting a huge gnarled hawthorn tree, its twisting limbs running around the corners, and back out of sight into the recess.

The screen that separated the nave from the chancel bore a hawthorn leaf motif, and was topped with a hawthorn branch curled into a shepherd's crook instead of a more traditional crucifix. Reilly had the botanical knowledge to pick up on how deeply the image of the hawthorn tree had permeated this place of worship.

Kennedy let out a long, low whistle. ‘Now I get you. That’s a big tree.’

‘Yes it is,’ Henrietta continued giddily. ‘Almost as big as the real one. Come on, I’ll take you to it.’ 

She started down the aisle, continuing a steady stream of chatter, Reilly and Kennedy in step behind her. ‘Marcus, our groundsman, is out there keeping an eye on the poor soul since Father Byrne found him this earlier morning.’

Reaching the transept, Henrietta turned right, and then left again, pulling back a gray curtain with ‘Private’ embroidered across it. She then led them through the vestry, which was spartan and smelled of bleach and disinfectant. Jeyes Fluid, to be precise, Reilly’s trusty nose informed her.

From there, Henrietta opened a side door and took them out into the church’s rear grounds. Reilly immediately spotted the tree the funny little woman had been referring to. 

The church property backed onto deep woodland, the plot long and deep, and cleared back to well over a hundred yards.

About two-thirds of the way down, the gentle rolling lawn was interrupted by a large, circular earthwork, in the centre of which grew a huge hawthorn tree. The gnarled and twisted branches of the tree seemed innumerable, and it wasn’t until she had appreciated the sheer majesty of it that Reilly could comprehend how a body could be hidden there in plain sight.

‘See him just there?’ said a man nearby, whom Reilly deduced was Marcus, pointing to an inconguous patch of bright orange nestled on the side of the tree facing them. It was a quarter of the way up, located in the twisted confines of the thorny labyrinth. ‘We managed to get a tarpaulin over him before the rain really set in,’ the groundsman continued, ‘but it’s pretty obvious he’s been up there for a while, so it’s definitely not the first shower he’s had to endure.’

‘Come on. Let’s get a better look,’ Kennedy said, and they tramped cautiously down through the grass towards the foot of the tree.

The detective reached up and pulled away the tarpaulin, and even Reilly felt her stomach turn over.

Thanks to the elements, the body – that of a ma
n
was in execrable condition. But the first thing she noticed was the teeth. They were clean and white, a pearly parade. The dentalwork stood out as the focal point because it glowed with a bright white light compared to the rest of the corpse, which was naked, gutted and somewhat weathered.

Reilly had seen enough corpses in her life no longer to be affected or nauseated by them, but what she was seeing now was definitely making her woozy.

The stomach, colon, intestines and other lower abdominal organs of the victim  appeared to have been torn out of his body, and suspended from the thorny branches that curled overhead. The trauma of this seemed directly reflected in the searing, suffering aspect of his face.

Even while Reilly gaped aghast at the horrific spectacle, a large crow dropped down from higher up in the canopy and, blithely ignoring the small group standing only a few feet away, began scavenging amongst the dangling innards.

Reaching into his pocket, the groundsman quickly withdrew a palmful of sand and aimed it up at the bird. 

‘No!’ Reilly cried out, aghast. ‘It’s a crime scene, you can’t—’ But it was too late; the damage was done, and there was sand scattered everywhere beneath the tree. Her stomach sank.

Aggravated, the bird leaped into flight and landed on a branch not far from where the group still stood, obviously intent on keeping them under its watchful and unblinking gaze.

The groundsman reddened, horrified. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think—’

‘Of course you didn’t,’ Reilly snapped irritably.

Another forensic nightmare. She’d need to take a sample of the sand he had left so as to dissociate it from any evidence they might now be lucky enough to find.

Soon afterwards, the ME arrived and began to make arrangements as to how best to extricate the body from its thorny throne. While she waited for the all clear to run the scene from Karen Thompson, Reilly surveyed the site from afar.

As she did, she was reminded of one of Daniel Forrest’s lectures at Quantico. Her former mentor was a stickler for analysis, and, adopting his attitude, Reilly couldn’t help but notice the almost theatrical way the victim had been displayed: suspended from a branch in a tre
e
but with his head facing towards the hulking form of the church.

She couldn’t be sure, but it was almost as if the killer had intended for the dying man’s tortured gaze to fall directly onto the imposing church tower.

Significant or just coincidence?

She looked at Kennedy. ‘Somebody show me how to get up into that tower.’

Chris followed the beam of light into the darkness. He could hear Kennedy’s breathing behind him. They stepped up and past the altar, heading for the door in the back corner of the church.

The door was dark, and the ancient wood creaked as Chris gently nudged it open. His torch intruded into the gloom beyond.

‘What is this place?’ Kennedy asked. ‘I came through here earlier with Reilly.’

‘The vestry.’ Chris followed the beam of light into the small room.

It had a dry, musty smell, the scent of old air, scurrying mice and thick layers of dust overlaid with disinfectant. The white painted walls were bare except for a heavy wooden crucifix on the far end. There was a small table in one corner with a sturdy wooden chair, and a recess half covered by a faded velvet curtain.

‘This is where the priest gets changed before the service,’ explained Chris, ‘like his little office at church.’  He looked sideways at Kennedy. ‘Clearly you were never an altar boy.’

Kennedy chuckled. ‘Do I look like the altar boy type to you?’

‘Well, I was.’ Chris gave a little grin to himself in the darkness, imagining his partner’s expression

He got the expected snort in reply. ‘Hard to imagine that. I’d assumed you were a right little terror when you were young.’

‘Oh, I was,’ admitted Chris. ‘That doesn’t stop you from being an altar boy, though –it’s a good grounding in divilment, actually,’ he added, thinking of all the hijinks he and his mates used to get up to, during and after Mass.

His torch highlighted the lock on the back door. ‘Here we go …’ 

It was not quite closed, and there were clear signs of damage around the lock. ‘That must be how he got in.’ He shone the torch on the floor. There were several sets of footprints in the thick dust.  Someone had gone back and forth recently.

‘So did the priest have anything useful to say for himself?’ Kennedy asked as they looked around the small area.

‘Not a lot, to be honest. He was pretty shaken up, obviously.’

Poor Father Byrne, Chris thought, what must it have been like for him, coming into the church by himself, calm, and at peace with the world, as he got ready for morning Mass, and finding that horror?  And what lasting effect would the intrusion of such profanity and evil in a place he would normally have regarded as safe have on him?

Would it shake his faith? Or would it strengthen it – reinforce his conviction that the devil was at large, and that he needed to tend his flock in order to help them stay vigilant and safe?

‘Apparently they just do daylight services here,’ he told Kennedy, ‘but the Mass calendar is posted on the boards both here and at the church in town.’

Kennedy cursed. ‘So anyone would be able to see the schedule, know when someone was here, or wasn’t?’

‘Exactly. Plenty of opportunities for someone to sneak a body on to the grounds unseen.’