‘Have you called for the fire brigade?’
‘We did, yeah, but they’re all tied up with a big warehouse blaze out at Ringaskiddy, and they can’t send us their emergency tender with the Hiab for at least two hours. So we improvised, and O’Donovan’s arranged for the council to send us up a scissor-lift.’
‘Any idea who he is, this priest?’
‘Not so far. His face is mashed up something terrible.’
‘Okay,’ said Katie. ‘Give me fifteen minutes and I’ll be with you. Don’t touch anything, though. Nothing at all. I want to see him exactly as he is.’
‘Whatever you say, ma’am. I’ll see you in a tick.’
Katie climbed out of bed. She didn’t have time to take a shower, which she would have loved to have done, but she splashed her face in the bathroom basin and soaped between her legs. She smelled John, as she did so, and closed her eyes for a moment. But another priest had been mutilated and murdered, and there was work to be done, and so she towelled herself and hurriedly dressed. She chose her light grey polo-neck sweater and charcoal grey trouser suit. She wanted to feel businesslike.
Michael was sitting in the kitchen, wearing a bright blue sweater with a hole in the elbow, eating toast.
‘Look, Katie,’ he said, ‘I want to tell you that I’m sorry. Siobhán told me that you wouldn’t object at all.’
‘Forget it, Michael,’ Katie told him. ‘I have a murder to attend to, and somehow that makes a little adulterous hanky-panky seem extremely unimportant by comparison.’
Michael smiled at her and shook his head. ‘You’re a highly unusual woman, if you don’t mind my saying so.’
‘Oh, yes?’ said Katie, as she strapped on her wristwatch. ‘And you’re a very bold fellow indeed.’
‘I’m scared enough of my Nola, believe me. And your Siobhán’s a handful, all right. But you. I don’t know at all about you.’
Katie gave him a grin and patted him on the cheek. ‘In that case, Michael, it’s just as well that you and I aren’t having a fling, isn’t it?’
At the front door, she paused and called out, ‘Siobhán! You won’t forget to take Barney for his morning walk, will you?’
All she heard from Siobhán’s bedroom was a long-drawn-out groan, like a soul that wakes up to realize that it is in hell, after all.
21
By the time she arrived outside St Joseph’s, two squad cars were parked outside, as well as a bright yellow ambulance, and at least fifteen other assorted cars and vans and SUVs, including a green and white outside broadcast van from RTÉ, with a large white satellite dish on its roof.
As she climbed out of her car, she looked up at the flagstaff in the far corner of the car park. A heavy khaki groundsheet had been draped over the top of it, like a witch’s lair out of a frightening fairy story, high on top of a pole. Hanging below the hem of the groundsheet she could just make out one bruised and blood-encrusted hand.
A makeshift canvas screen had been erected around the orphanage, but the flagstaff was nearly thirty feet high and the screen did nothing to hide it from the crowds of onlookers.
Detective O’Donovan came up to Katie and jerked his head upwards. ‘Morning, boss. Looks like the exact same thing was done to him as Father Heaney. God alone knows how they got him up there. There must have been two of them at least, I’d say, even three.’
‘You’ve called the council for a lifting platform, haven’t you?’
‘I gave them another bell only a couple of minutes ago and told them to get their skates on. They said that it shouldn’t be more than a quarter of an hour, but they have to drive it all the way over from their depot on the South Side, and it isn’t exactly a Ferrari.’
Katie glanced across the road, where six or seven reporters were talking and smoking together behind the police barrier tape. She recognized Dan Keane from the Examiner, John McCarthy from the Southern Star, and Fionnuala Sweeney from RTÉ.
‘Where’s that girl from the Catholic Recorder? What was her name? Ciara something.’
‘Haven’t seen her. Maybe her editor decided that it was a waste of time, trying to play down a story like this.’
‘Wouldn’t surprise me at all,’ said Katie. ‘One castrated priest, you could put that down as a single act of revenge, couldn’t you? But two castrated priests – that’s beginning to look like a vendetta.’
They crossed the car park to the foot of the flagstaff. Katie had always thought that St Joseph’s had a grim look about it, and she could only imagine how the hearts of little orphans must have sunk when they first arrived there. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. It was a large flint-grey building with an octagonal frontage, standing on the corner of Mayfield Gardens and the Old Youghal Road. It had been built in the 1890s as an industrial school for ‘neglected, abandoned and orphaned children’. Although there was a life-size statue of St Joseph standing over the porch, with an oddly ingratiating smile on his face and his arms outspread in welcome, its miserly little leaded windows might have been deliberately designed to starve its inmates of sunlight, and its overhanging eaves always reminded Katie of Sister Coleen, one of the most vindictive nuns at her primary school, in her slate-grey wimple.
Sergeant O’Rourke had been talking to the janitor, but now he came across and joined them. He hadn’t shaved and underneath his lime-green tracksuit he was still wearing his orange-striped pyjama jacket.
‘Morning, Jimmy. State of you la! You look like a sackful of badgers.’
‘Sorry, ma’am, but I thought I should get here quick before some do-gooder tried to cut him down, like, and fecked up all the evidence in the process. I don’t even have my Y-fronts on. Now you’re here, I’ll dodge back home in a minute, if you don’t mind, and get dressed proper.’
‘Have a decent breakfast while you’re at it. I think we’re going to be here for most of the day.’
Sergeant O’Rourke shaded his eyes and squinted up at the single hand dangling below the groundsheet. ‘I climbed up the ladder myself and took a quick sconce at him, poor bastard. Somebody’s given him one devil of a reefing, I can tell you that for nothing at all. I don’t know hundred per cent for sure if he’s been castrated, but his habit’s soaked through with blood.’
‘We don’t have any idea who he is yet?’
Sergeant O’Rourke shook his head. ‘There’s been no clergy reported missing. Not so far, anyhow. We’re calling him Father X for now. But I’ll bet you money he’s a one-time kiddy-fiddler.’
‘Now then,’ Katie cautioned him. ‘Don’t go jumping to conclusions.’
‘How about going up there yourself and taking a lamp at him, ma’am?’ asked Detective O’Donovan. ‘I’ll hold the ladder for you, and I promise no shaking it – cross my heart and swear on the Bible.’
Katie looked up again. At the moment, Father X’s body was completely hidden in the dark shadows underneath the groundsheet, but Detective O’Donovan was right: before they lowered him down she needed to climb up and examine him closely in situ. First of all, they needed to work out how his murderer had hoisted him to the top of the flagstaff. It didn’t seem likely that one man could have done it single-handed – not unless he had used a block and tackle or some other ingenious way of lifting him up.
Not only that, it was important for her to see how his murderer had bound him. She had learned from experience that the way in which people tied knots was almost as idiosyncratic as the way they signed their names. She had also learned how much a victim’s injuries could tell her. Every bruise and burn and ligature mark and stab wound was like a brain scan of a murderer’s state of mind. Seething, or vengeful, or jealous, or just plain sadistic.
She hesitated, and then she said, ‘Okay, then, fetch the ladder. But I warn you, Patrick, I’m not happy with heights – and if I feel so much as a quiver, you’re back on crossing duty.’
While Detective O’Donovan and a podgy young garda went off to find the ladder, Sergeant O’Rourke sniffed and said, ‘Why do you t
hink they hung your man from the top of the flagpole like that? I mean, that’s a hell of a lot of trouble to go to, wouldn’t you say, just to make a point? Especially if nobody can understand what your point actually is.’
‘Maybe it’s a warning to other priests.’
‘It could be, like. Or maybe they’re trying to show the world that he was no better than vermin – the same way those farmers in Kerry shoot crows and hang them on their fences.’
Detective O’Donovan and the young garda came across the parking lot carrying a long aluminium ladder. With a sharp rattle, they lifted it up against the flagstaff and shook it vigorously to demonstrate to Katie that it was secure. Detective O’Donovan said, ‘I’ll go up first and pull that groundsheet off of him. Then he’s all yours.’
Katie waited while he clanked up to the top of the ladder, took hold of the groundsheet and dragged it sideways. It got caught on one of Father X’s heels, and he had to shake it two or three times as if he were making a bed. At last he managed to disentangle it, and drop it with an airy rumble to the ground.
When he came down, he said, ‘Take a look at his neck, ma’am. They’ve strangled him with some kind of cord. Not wire, like they did with Father Heaney.’
He took her elbow and helped her to mount the first step of the ladder. ‘Up you go, ma’am. But take it easy, okay? We don’t want to lose you, do we?’
‘Don’t worry,’ he told him, although she couldn’t help thinking: if you only knew.
She climbed up steadily until she reached the penultimate rung. She looked down and she could see everybody looking up at her – gardaí and technicians and reporters and the crowds of onlookers who had gathered behind the police cordon three streets away. She caught a flash of reflected sunlight, and saw that the cameraman from RTÉ News was focused on her, too. She suddenly felt as if she were very high up.
Sergeant O’Rourke was right – Father X looked exactly like one of those rotting crows that farmers tied to their fences. He was bedraggled, like a crow, and his black soutane had flapped open like a pair of broken wings.
His ankles had been fastened tightly to the top of the flagstaff with twenty or thirty turns of bright brass wire. His knees were wired together, and his wrists were wired behind his back. As Sergeant O’Rourke had told her, the end of each wire had been twisted into two tidy loops like a butterfly’s wings, in exactly the same way as with Father Heaney.
She climbed up to reach the very last rung, as high as she could, trying to peer down between Father X’s legs. His soutane had the traditional thirty-three buttons – each one representing a year that Christ had spent on earth. Enough buttons had been left unfastened to expose his badly bruised shins and knees, but his blood-smeared thighs were bound so closely together that she couldn’t see for sure if he had been castrated or not.
His soutane, however, had a glossy sheen to it that showed her that it was soaking wet. She reached across and squeezed the edge of it, and her latex glove was blotched with red.
‘Everything okay up there?’ called Detective O’Donovan.
Katie twisted around and said, ‘I’m grand, thanks!’ but as she did so she felt a sickening wave of vertigo and she had to grip the ladder tightly and close her eyes.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, please don’t let me fall off. It’s such a long way down to the ground.
She kept completely still, though, and after a moment she recovered her sense of balance. She opened her eyes and took a deep breath to steady herself. Right. Now let’s take a closer look at this fellow.
She leaned as far to the right as she dared. Father X’s nose had been broken in a zig-zag and his eyes were swelled up like two over-ripe damsons. His jaw was dislocated, too, leaving his mouth wide open in a silent shout.
From his thinning plume of white hair and the papery skin on the backs of his hands, Katie guessed that he was at least seventy, and probably quite a few years older.
She could see the cord around his neck that Detective O’Donovan had mentioned. It was very thin, so thin that it had cut deep into his flesh, and most of it was invisible. But there were two trailing ends, each at least seven or eight inches long, which his murderer must have gripped in order to strangle him. The cord was made of purple and blue threads, intertwined. It appeared to be decorative, but Katie couldn’t imagine what it could have been used to decorate.
‘Coming down!’ she called, and carefully descended the ladder, one rung at a time. When she reached the ground and looked back up at the top of the flagstaff, it didn’t seem to be very high up at all, but it had certainly felt like it when she was up there.
‘What do you think?’ asked Detective O’Donovan.
Katie shrugged. ‘I still can’t think how they hauled him up there, but I’d say that you’re probably right, and there were two or three of them. All the same, I’m pretty sure that at least one of them was the same perpetrator who killed Father Heaney. Those loops at the end of each wire – we never told the media about those, did we?’
‘So much for Monsignor Kelly and his suicidal odd-job man,’ said Sergeant O’Rourke, wiping his nose with a crumpled Kleenex and making no attempt to hide his satisfaction.
‘That’s right,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘Your suicidal odd-job man couldn’t have committed this murder because he’s dead.’
‘That’s if he genuinely did go ahead and top himself,’ said Sergeant O’Rourke. ‘He could easily have changed his mind. We don’t have any evidence, do we, except for that suicide note? We haven’t found his body yet.’
‘Well, no, that’s true. But we haven’t found him living and breathing either.’
‘Maybe he was so pleased with himself for killing Father Heaney that he decided to go for another priest – this unfortunate old whacker here, whoever he is. On the other hand, maybe he didn’t kill Father Heaney at all and he didn’t kill this fellow either, and the perpetrator was somebody else altogether, although Monsignor Kelly wants us to believe that it was him, for reasons known only to himself.’
Katie said, ‘Jesus! I thought I was confused before, but you’ve got my head spinning now. But – yes, I agree with you.’
‘You do? I’m not even sure that I agree with myself.’
‘No, Jimmy – neither I nor Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll were convinced that Brendan Doody killed Father Heaney, and I don’t think he killed Father X here either. Come on, Doody just doesn’t fit the profile. Whoever killed Father Heaney was carrying out a ritual revenge – very complex and very specific – the same as this killing here. He was sophisticated and he was cruel and he really took his time.
‘But Doody – you only had to look at Doody’s lifestyle to realize that he could never do anything like that. Whoever committed these murders doesn’t push sweetie wrappers down the back of their sofa cushions. Doody wasn’t exactly a retard, but from what Father Lenihan said, he was somewhat on the slow side. I don’t believe that he would have hurt anybody unless he was really goaded into losing his temper. He surely would never have gone to the trouble of trussing his victims up with wire and torturing them. In my opinion, he would have simply bashed their skulls in with a hammer, and probably regretted it the minute he did it.’
‘But why was the Right Reverend Kelly so keen for us to think that Doody was the killer?’ asked Detective O’Donovan.
‘That’s the million-euro question,’ said Katie. ‘And when I tell him there’s been a second murder, I’d very much like to hear what the good monsignor has to say for himself. Like you say, if Brendan Doody really has committed suicide, we can’t blame him for this killing, can we?’
She looked up at Father X’s body again, slowly rotating at the top of the flagstaff.
‘Don’t worry – I’ll be going across to the diocese later to talk to Monsignor Kelly about it. I think he knows a lot more about this than he’s been telling us.’
It took the scissor-lift nearly an hour to arrive, and by that time a blanket of cloud had slowly moved
across the sky and the sun had disappeared. Not only that, a fretful wind had risen, blowing dust and dead leaves across the car park. Katie was beginning to wish that she had brought her coat.
While they were waiting, she went across and spoke to the media. She told them only that the body was that of an elderly man, so far unidentified, dressed in a priest’s soutane. It was highly likely that he was a priest, but they couldn’t be one hundred per cent sure. His assailant had bound him hand and foot with wire, and beaten him severely, but it wasn’t yet possible to tell the full extent of his injuries.
‘Gelded, was he, the same as Father Heaney?’ asked Dan Keane, his pen poised over his notebook.
‘Like I said, Dan, we can’t tell that for certain. We have to get him down off that flagstaff first.’
‘But it wouldn’t surprise you if he was?’
‘Nothing surprises me, Dan. Not any more.’
As she was walking back across the road, a white flat-bed truck appeared, with a scissor-lift platform on the back, and turned into the car park. Two council workers in orange fluorescent jerkins jumped down from the cab, Fat and Fatter. They stared up at Father X suspended from the top of the flagpole and shook their heads in disbelief.
‘Holy shite, how did he get himself up there?’
‘We don’t have a clue,’ said Sergeant O’Rourke. ‘But what we’d like you to do is get him down.’
Long pause from Fatter. Then, ‘He’s dead, right?’
‘There’s no fooling you, boy.’
‘Yeah, but the thing is, we’re not allowed to touch him, not manually, with our hands, not if he’s dead. Health and safety, like. EU regulations.’
‘It’s all right. Our technicians will be handling the body. All you have to do is get them up there and bring them back down again.’
‘He’s not infectious, is he?’
‘I don’t think so. The last I heard, you can’t catch bruises or a broken nose.’
Fatter stared at him with piggy eyes. ‘Are you taking the piss, like?’
‘What do you think?’
Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) Page 12