‘And what does Horgan here say straight-faced? “I never knew that harps had handles.” I swear to God.’
Without looking around, Detective Horgan opened his notebook and said, ‘Only one harpist in the past six months was after buying any seventh-octave phosphor-bronze wire. Mary ó Nualláin, twenty-two years old. She regularly plays the harp during Sunday lunchtimes at the Ambassador Hotel. I very much doubt that when sweet Mary ó Nualláin bought her seventh-octave phosphor-bronze wire she was after killing dirty old priests with it.’
‘All right,’ said Katie. ‘But I want you both back on the case tomorrow.’
Detective Horgan flipped his notebook. ‘Bright and early, ma’am, don’t fret about it. Tomorrow we’re calling on the Cork Youth Orchestra and the Cork Pops Orchestra, and every freelance musician who ever plucked a clàrsach. We’ll catch the plucker, believe me.’
‘Michael,’ said Katie, sharply.
‘Yes, ma’am?’
‘Stop trying to be funny, Michael, because you’re not. Just find me the psychopath who killed these two priests, and as soon as you like.’
Before she left the office, Katie tried calling Siobhán to see if she had made anything for supper, but Siobhán must have gone out because she didn’t reply. Katie wasn’t too keen on Siobhán’s cooking anyhow, especially that chilli con carne she insisted on making almost every week, which was always runny like cheap dog food and always nose-streamingly hot.
She was too tired to think of cooking anything herself, so she drove into the centre of Cobh on her way home and stopped at Mimmo’s in Casement Square for takeaway cod and chips. While she was sitting under the bright fluorescent lights in the corner of the chip shop, waiting for her order, her mobile phone warbled and it was John.
‘How’s my sexy superintendent? Not that I’ll be able to call you that for very much longer. Superintendent, I mean,’ he corrected himself hastily, ‘not sexy.’
‘I’m grand, John, but a little knackered, to tell you the truth. It’s been a very long day.’
‘Am I going to see you tonight? Where are you?’
‘I’m sitting in the chipper, waiting for my supper.’
‘You have to be kidding me! I could have taken you out. Or maybe cooked you something. You’ve never tasted my fluffy three-cheese omelettes, have you? Mmmf! They’re to die for.’
‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I really need an early night.’
‘Okay, but I definitely want to see you tomorrow. Have you told your boss yet?’
‘Have I told him what?’
‘That you’re resigning, of course. That you’re coming to the States to be my bride.’
‘Is that a formal proposal of marriage?’
‘I don’t know. Is it? Yes, I guess it must be.’
‘I’m sitting in a chipper, waiting for a takeaway, and you’re proposing marriage to me over my mobile phone? How romantic can you get?’
‘I’ll get down on one knee. Listen, this creaking noise is the sound of me getting down on one knee. Is that romantic enough?’
‘I haven’t told him yet, no. I’ve been far too busy today. You must have seen it on the news. Another priest was found murdered, up in Mayfield.’ She lowered her voice because there was a knock-kneed young boy sitting close to her, and he was obviously trying to overhear what she was saying. ‘Castrated, too, just like the one who was found in Ballyhooly.’
‘I saw that on the news, yes. Couldn’t miss it, in fact. But you’re quitting, right? I didn’t think that you would be handling the case yourself.’
‘It’s my case, John. Of course I’m handling it. I may be quitting but I can’t just walk out with half of my investigations unfinished. And I have to give notice.’
John was silent for a few seconds, but then he said, ‘You haven’t changed your mind?’
The young Italian behind the counter lifted up a plastic bag and called out, ‘Small cod, small chips, mushy peas!’
Katie waved at him and called, ‘Small cod, that’s mine!’ To John she said, ‘Listen, sweetheart – my order’s ready. I’ll call you as soon as I get home.’
‘I just want to be sure that you haven’t changed your mind.’
‘Give me some peace, will you? I’ll call you. I’ll be home in ten minutes.’
When she turned into her driveway she was surprised to see that the bungalow was in complete darkness. There was a light in the porch, which was supposed to switch on automatically, but even that wasn’t working. As she climbed out of her car she saw that the living-room curtains were still open, and that none of the table lamps were lit, although two of them were on timers, set for eight o’clock. Even the television screen was glossy black.
That Siobhán, she thought. Sometimes I could kick her out and throw her clothes after her, she’s always so selfish and so inconsiderate. But then she thought: I’ll be gone soon, myself, and that’ll put an end to that problem.
She stepped into the porch, and as she did so, small pieces of white glass crunched under her shoes. She looked upwards. In all the time she had lived here, she had only had to replace the photosensitive bulb twice, and on one of those occasions Paul had been drunk and angry about something stupid and whacked it with a hurley stick. She could see that it had been shattered again, instead of burning out. Maybe Paul’s ghost had come around to see how she was, and when he found that she wasn’t in, he had smashed the bulb to tell how annoyed he was – and to make sure that she knew who had called on her.
She unlocked the front door and called out, ‘Barney? Where are you, boy?’ She hoped that Siobhán had taken him out for his walk before she went out clubbing, or wherever she had gone. The last thing she felt like doing right now was mopping the kitchen floor.
‘Barney? Are you there, boy? Barney!’
Barney always barked when she came home and jumped up against the kitchen door, but tonight there was silence.
‘Barney?’ she said. She switched on the pink-shaded lamp on the hall table. If Barney had been waiting for her behind the kitchen door, she would have seen him through the hammered glass, but inside the kitchen there was only darkness.
She opened the kitchen door and switched on the overhead light. No Barney. But there was a chopping board on the counter, with sliced-up carrots on it, and there were two saucepans on top of the hob, one filled with peeled potatoes in cold water and the other with purple flowering broccoli. Siobhán may have gone out, but she had gone out when she had only just started to cook them some supper.
Katie went to the back door and tried the handle, but it was locked and bolted from the inside, so Siobhán couldn’t have taken Barney out into the small back yard for a pee behind the geranium pots, while she herself smoked a cigarette. That was her usual definition of ‘walkies’.
Maybe she had taken Barney out for a serious walk, after all. But lighting-up time had been over an hour ago now, and Katie couldn’t see her leaving the house in darkness, without even closing the curtains. And where the hell had she taken him? All the way down to the harbour? If she had done that, Katie would almost certainly have passed them on her way back from the fish and chip shop.
She approached the living-room door, which was wide open. The only light came from a single street lamp outside, and the shadows of tree branches crawled backwards and forwards across the carpet like the long skeletal fingers of blind men, endlessly groping for their lost eyes. Rolled under the couch, boy, never find them there.
Katie felt a sudden intuitive tingle, all down the nape of her neck and across her shoulders, and before she switched on the living-room light she eased her nickel-plated revolver out of its holster, cocked back the hammer, and held it up high. Something was very badly wrong here, in this bungalow, and it wasn’t only the broken light in the porch, or the darkness, or the fact that there was no sign of Siobhán or Barney.
Something smelled wrong, too. It was a strong, musky perfume, Estée Lauder or something similar – the kind that Paul’s shirts
used to reek of, after he had spent the night with some local brasser (swearing blind, of course, that he had stayed over in Limerick for a business meeting).
Keeping her revolver raised, she reached over with her left hand and switched on the overhead chandeliers. The first thing she noticed was that the large mock-Regency armchair in which Paul used to sit was lying on its side, and that one of the occasional tables had tipped over. The china shepherdess that had been standing on it had fallen against the skirting board and her head had broken off, although she was still smiling inanely.
Katie took two cautious steps forward, and it was then that she saw a plump bare foot, protruding from behind the couch. She recognized the sparkly purple nail polish at once.
She circled around the couch, her eyes darting from side to side, in case an intruder was concealed behind the curtains or hiding behind the door, or in case somebody had been hiding in the bathroom or one of the bedrooms and came rushing in from the hallway to attack her. Never assume a perpetrator has left the crime scene.
‘Siobhán,’ she said. Then, ‘Siobhán!’
Siobhán was lying face down on the carpet behind the couch, dressed in her green boat-neck sweater and her tight black skirt. The hair on the crown of her head was thick with glistening blood and there were spots and squiggles of blood up the wallpaper.
Katie knelt down beside her, laying her revolver on the carpet close by so that she could reach it quickly if she needed to. Siobhán’s eyes were closed, but when Katie leaned forward she could hear that she was still breathing. Katie turned her over on to her back, and felt for the carotid pulse in her neck. It was slow, just under forty, and thready.
‘Siobhán, darling,’ she said, gently shaking her shoulder. ‘Siobhán, can you hear me?’
Siobhán continued to breathe slowly and thickly. She muttered, as if she were having a disturbing dream, but she didn’t open her eyes.
Katie scooped up her revolver and went across to the telephone. She dialled 112, identified herself and called for an ambulance. ‘And will you tell them to hurry, please. My sister has severe head injuries and she’s unconscious. I’m worried that she could have a cerebral haematoma.’
‘It won’t be long, ma’am, I can promise you that. No more than five minutes, tops. I’ve diverted an RRV on its way back from Glanmire.’
Next she called Sergeant O’Rourke. She caught him as he was starting his supper.
‘Jimmy?’
‘Good timing, ma’am. There’s an onion dumpling halfway from my plate to my mouth, and if you’d called me five seconds later you wouldn’t have been able to understand a word I was saying.’
‘I’m truly sorry, Jimmy, but something terrible’s happened and I need you to drop everything and do some organizing for me. Can you contact the technical squad urgently and call in four uniforms at least.’
‘Not another fiddling priest, for Christ’s sake.’
‘No. It’s my sister. There’s been an intruder here, at my house, and she’s been beaten on the head, by the looks of it. She’s concussed, and there’s a whole lot of blood.’
‘Get away out of that,’ said Sergeant O’Rourke, in horror. ‘Your sister Siobhán?’
Katie puckered her mouth tight and her eyes filled up with tears. She took a deep breath and then she managed to say, ‘Some of the furniture was knocked over, but it doesn’t look as if she put up a fight. Barney’s missing, too. I haven’t had a chance to take a proper look yet, but as quick as you like, Jimmy. I’ll be waiting here for you.’
‘Your own sister, in your own house. Jesus.’
‘Please, Jimmy. Just hurry.’
‘You can count on me, ma’am.’
Katie hung up the phone. She went over and knelt back down next to Siobhán. Think of it. There I was, my darling sister, calling you every name under the sun, and all ready to kick you out, and all the time you were lying here, beaten and bloody. Sometimes God can give you what you want, but sometimes He can show you how much you didn’t really want it, after all.
Siobhán was still breathing steadily, although her pulse rate was fluttering. Katie laid a hand on her forehead and her skin felt sweaty and chilled. She was going into shock and she urgently needed warming up.
Katie went through to the bedroom, kicking open the door and switching on the lights, and quickly checking behind the door and underneath the bed. She threw open the louvred doors of her fitted wardrobes, but there was nobody hiding there. Nobody hiding in the alcove behind the curtains either.
Katie checked Siobhán’s bedroom, too, and the bathroom. Whoever had broken into the bungalow and attacked Siobhán was gone, and probably long gone, too.
She lifted a thick plaid blanket out of the bottom of Siobhán’s wardrobe and carried it back into the living room. She covered her sister with it, right up to her neck.
‘There, sweetheart, that should warm you up,’ she said.
But Siobhán only murmured, ‘Mmmfffff,’ in response.
While she waited for the rapid response vehicle to arrive, Katie gave the living room a quick once-over, searching for any evidence that might tell her who had attacked Siobhán, and why. Apart from the tipped-over armchair and the decapitated shepherdess, there were no other obvious signs of damage. From the injuries on the back of Siobhán’s head and the way that Katie had found her lying face down, it looked as if she had been struck from behind by surprise, and the blood spatters on the wallpaper appeared to back this up. They rose up the wall in a near-vertical line, and they were entirely consistent with a repeated series of blows, like a handyman knocking in a nail, or a priest shaking an aspergillum, a holy-water sprinkler.
The living-room door was still wide open, but Katie had no latex gloves with her so she didn’t touch the Regency-style handle. Instead, she reached up and pushed the door shut with the heel of her hand. She just wanted to make sure that nothing had been dropped behind it.
And there – as the door swung back – was the message. It had been scrawled on the wallpaper in letters over six inches high, in dark green felt-tip marker.
GOD SAYS KEEP AWAY!
25
It was beginning to grow light outside when the surgeon came into the relatives’ room. Katie stood up and said, ‘How is she?’
The surgeon was Indian, with a hooked nose and protuberant eyes. If he hadn’t been wearing pale green scrubs, Katie could easily have mistaken him for the owner of the Bombay Palace restaurant in Cook Street. He laid his hand on top of hers and said, ‘Your sister is out of immediate danger, detective superintendent. She will survive.’
‘Thank God,’ said Katie. ‘When can I see her?’
‘You can see her as soon as she has been taken back to ITU and we have made her comfortable. But before you do, I must advise you that she has suffered some very serious injuries. As you know, she was struck on the back of the head with some kind of blunt instrument. Three times, with considerable force. I would say that it was probably a hammer, because it has left a circular impression.’
‘How bad is it?’
The surgeon shrugged. ‘All three blows gave her depressed fractures of the cranium, with intracranial bleeding and brain contusions. We have stemmed the bleeding and relieved the pressure, but it is too early at this stage to say if she has suffered any permanent impairment to her mental faculties. We will have to wait until she regains consciousness before we can make any kind of meaningful assessment.’
‘Thank you, Doctor...’
‘Hahq is my name, detective superintendent. Not doctor but mister.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Please, no problem. You need to give all of your attention now to your sister. I hope that she makes a speedy and full recovery.’
The surgeon left the relatives’ room, and as he did so John appeared with two plastic cups of coffee and two packets of ginger biscuits. He was wearing a battered brown leather jacket and jeans and he was unshaven. He had arrived at the hospital only thirty-five minutes af
ter Siobhán had been admitted, and he had stayed there with Katie all night. They had tried to sleep, but Katie had been too fretful to close her eyes.
‘Siobhán’s out of danger, apparently,’ Katie told him. ‘They’re taking her back to intensive care and then we can see her.’
‘That’s good news,’ said John. ‘Well – cautiously good news, anyhow.’
‘O God, I hope so. The trouble is, I’m beginning to wonder if she was attacked by somebody who mistook her for me.’
‘You’re serious?’
‘It makes much more sense, doesn’t it? Siobhán doesn’t have an enemy in the world. She gets on people’s nerves, I’ll give you that. She gets on my nerves when she behaves like a Stella. But I can’t see her upsetting anybody enough to hit her on the head with a hammer.’
John said, ‘I don’t think they were after either of you. It’s much more likely that it was a burglary gone wrong. Like I’ve been telling you all night, Siobhán probably came back and interrupted some scumbag ransacking your stuff. Or maybe she was home already and they broke in without realizing that there was anybody in.’
‘But, John, there was no sign of forced entry – only that broken light bulb in the porch. And think about it. If Siobhán had come home and found a burglar in the house, she would have challenged him, wouldn’t she?’
‘Well, either that, or tried to run away.’
‘But if she had tried to run away, she would have headed for the front door, wouldn’t she? And if she had challenged him, he would have started to hit her with his hammer when she was facing him, so she would have had defensive bruises on her hands and her arms.
‘No – it looks to me as if the perpetrator walked into the living room while Siobhán’s back was turned and hit her before she even knew that he was there. She didn’t struggle, she didn’t turn around. She never even saw who hit her.’
‘And that’s why you think he mistook her for you?’
‘Yes, I do. If her back was turned, he didn’t see her face any more than she saw his. Siobhán and I are both around the same height. We both have red hair, even if they are different shades. She wasn’t wearing those huge hoop earrings like she usually does. If the perpetrator was a hired hit man, he might never have seen me in person, and he could have been relying on somebody’s description.’
Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) Page 15