Broken Angels (Katie Maguire)

by Masterton, Graham

  John sat down. Katie sat down next to him and he took hold of her hands. ‘So, go on. Who do you think could have ordered a hit on you?’ he asked her.

  ‘Mother of God, John – it could have been any number of people. There’s this Lithuanian lowlife, Evaldas Rauba. He’s threatened me two or three times. I put his brother behind bars last year for smuggling in air pistols that had been converted to shoot nine-millimetre rounds – complete with silencers. Rauna stopped me in the street and said he was going to cut off my head and piss down my neck.’

  John grimaced. ‘You know some real charmers, don’t you?’

  Katie said, ‘The only thing that doesn’t really fit is why Rauba should send anybody to kill me with a hammer. Those Lithuanians have more guns than we do.’

  ‘And why would a hit man take the time to write on your wall? “GOD SAYS KEEP AWAY!” I mean, what’s all that about? God says keep away from what? God says keep away from the Lithuanians? And where does God come into it, anyhow?’

  Katie suddenly had a mental picture of Monsignor Kelly, and the hard-eyed way in which he had stared at her before he returned to the football match at Sunday’s Well.

  No, she thought. He’s an arrogant, sanctimonious, devious little bastard, but I can’t believe that he would actually pay somebody to kill me. Not one of the vicars general.

  Even so, Monsignor Kelly had given her the strong impression that he had a secret that he was desperate to hide. Was it so devastating that it was worth him breaking the First Commandment to protect it? It was unthinkable, but all the same she had to think it.

  A plump, freckly nurse came bustling into the visitors’ room and said, ‘Katie? Katie Maguire? You can come and see your sister now.’

  They followed her along the corridor and into the lift.

  ‘She’s not awake yet?’ asked Katie, as they rose up to the fourth floor.

  ‘Not yet, no. But her vital signs are good. Pulse, respiration, blood pressure. She’ll be going for another CT scan this afternoon.’

  She led them into Siobhán’s room, which had a view towards the airport and the countryside beyond. Thick clouds were resting on the hilltops as if a dirty grey quilt had been laid on top of them, and it was just beginning to rain. The only sounds in the room were the hissing of Siobhán’s oxygen and the meep-meep-meep of her heart monitor, and the pattering of rain against the window.

  Siobhán’s head was bandaged. Both of her eyes were swollen and crimson, as if she had been punched in the face. Katie pulled up a chair and sat down next to her, taking hold of her hand.

  ‘Oh, Siobhán, you poor baby. Who could have done this to you?’

  John cleared his throat and said, ‘With any luck she might be able to tell us herself, when she wakes up.’

  ‘When she wakes up. But who knows when that’s going to be? I want to find the gowl right now.’

  John was silent for a moment, but then he said, ‘Maybe this isn’t the right moment to bring this up, darling, but I do have to make some travel plans, and I have to make them real soon.’

  Katie wasn’t really listening and she didn’t answer. John waited, and then he added, ‘I also have to give the letting agency a definite decision on the apartment we’ll be renting. Later today, if possible. It’s directly opposite Russian Hill Park, but I’ve beaten them down to a very reasonable price, only two thousand three hundred a month.’

  He paused again, but when Katie still didn’t answer him he said, ‘I guess you could always join me later, if you still have unfinished business here in Cork.’

  Katie turned around. Unshaven, with his hair all messed up, he looked even more macho and attractive than ever, as if he had been in a fight, and conclusively won.

  ‘When were you thinking of actually going?’ she asked him.

  ‘End of next month. Even that’s pushing it. My friends want me to start working for them a.s.a.p. I was hoping you might be able to persuade An Garda Síochána to waive your period of notice.’

  ‘The end of next month? But that’s only, what, six weeks away! I can’t leave Siobhán until she’s better, can I? And I’m certainly not going until I catch whoever it was who hurt her.’

  ‘Of course. I understand.’

  Katie stood up and put her arms around his waist. ‘John... I love you. I want to be with you more than anything else in the world. You know that.’

  He nodded and kissed her on the forehead, but there was something distracted in the way he did it, as if he was already beginning to accept that they could never be together.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘why don’t I take you to Jury’s and buy you a decent breakfast?’

  ‘I couldn’t eat it, John. I’m sorry. I’ll stay here with Siobhán for now and maybe we can meet up for lunch.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, and kissed her again, on the lips this time, but it was more like a goodbye kiss.

  She was still sitting beside Siobhán’s bed when her mobile phone rang. It was Detective O’Donovan, calling from Anglesea Street.

  ‘Sorry to hear about your sister, ma’am. How is she?’

  ‘Serious but stable, thanks, Patrick. She still hasn’t regained consciousness, so it’s early days yet.’

  ‘Well, we’ll be saying a prayer for her so. You think they were after attacking you, rather than her?’

  ‘I think they could well have been, yes. There must be at least a dozen villains who would pay good money to see me laid out.’

  Detective O’Donovan said, ‘The reason I’m calling is I got back the first of Father Heaney’s notebooks, translated. I should have the other two by the middle of next week.’

  ‘That was quick. Who did it?’

  ‘Stephen Keenan, he’s one of the Latin teachers from the Presentation Brothers College. He owed me a favour, like, so he said that he’d do it for free.’

  ‘A Latin teacher owed you a favour?’

  ‘It’s a long story, but it involved one of his sons and a small quantity of illegal vegetation. I said I’d turn a blind eye.’

  ‘All right. So tell me about this notebook.’

  ‘I haven’t read it all, like. But you’d think that Father Heaney was on the illegal vegetation, too. He keeps on about talking to angels, and sending messages to heaven, and how to communicate with God.’

  ‘But that’s what priests do all the time, isn’t it? They communicate with God by praying.’

  ‘Well, that’s right, but when you pray it’s only hit or miss if you get an answer back, isn’t it? You can pray and pray until you’re black in the face, but you never know if God’s listening to you or not, do you? I mean, He may be listening to you, but when He hears what it is you’re asking Him for, He could be saying, “Fat chance of that, boy.”‘

  Katie was beginning to get a headache, and she rubbed her forehead with her fingertips. ‘I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying, Patrick. What’s so different about the way that Father Heaney communicated with God?’

  ‘Like I said, I haven’t read all of it yet, and there’s still two more books to come. But he keeps on talking about meeting God in person. Actually seeing Him, face to face. He says that there’s a link between earth and heaven, a physical link, and there’s a way to open it up. “We can hear His voice with our own ears, and touch His hand with ours. The truth is that God is real.”‘

  Katie said, ‘I think you’re right, Patrick – he must have been smoking something. I mean, why should a priest need physical evidence that God is real? I thought priests had faith. Otherwise they couldn’t be priests, could they?’

  ‘Makes you wonder, though, doesn’t it, like? What if God is real, like really real, and not just imaginary real?’

  ‘Don’t start getting all metaphysical on me, Patrick. I haven’t slept all night. If you can make me another copy of that translation, I’ll come into the office later today and pick it up.’

  ‘Right you are, ma’am. But I’ll tell you something else that Father Heaney says. He says, “To ca
ll on God, we have to use the language that they speak in heaven, and call on him with the voices of angels.”‘

  ‘And that means what, exactly?’

  ‘Feck knows, to tell you the truth.’

  26

  John called just after eleven. He sounded as if he was walking along a busy street. He told her that he would have to cancel lunch because he had to show a prospective buyer around the farm, but he could meet her early in the evening.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’m not hungry anyway.’

  ‘How’s Siobhán?’ he asked her.

  ‘No better, but no worse. I haven’t upset you, have I?’

  ‘No, honey, of course not. But we do need to talk.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. They both knew what they had to discuss.

  She sat beside Siobhán until the hospital porters came to take her away for another CT scan. By the time she left the hospital it had stopped raining, but the sky was still grey and oppressive and she felt like a character in some depressing black and white art movie. She drove back to the office, feeling exhausted and jittery from too much coffee.

  She took off her raincoat and sat down to check her emails. She had only just switched on her computer when Detective O’Donovan knocked at her office door, holding up a copy of Father Heaney’s translated journal.

  ‘Here’s the book, ma’am,’ he said. ‘And we’ve made some progress with the van, too, the one that Mrs Rooney saw by Grindell’s farm.’

  ‘Have we found it?’

  ‘No, not yet, but...’ he took a memory stick out of his breast pocket and held it up ‘...it was caught on CCTV at six twenty-seven that morning driving northwards out of the city centre, up Summerhill. That’s less than an hour before Mrs Rooney saw the fellow in the dunce’s cap dumping Father Heaney’s body in the river.

  ‘After that, it was seen at eight forty-seven going around the Magic Roundabout and then heading away up towards the airport.’

  ‘Is that the last time it was sighted?’ Katie asked him. ‘It could be anywhere at all by now.’

  ‘It depends on the route it took,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘It could have been driven on back roads all the way to Galway and not passed another camera all the way. But if it belonged to the same perpetrator who killed Father Quinlan, I doubt he took it very far. He might have abandoned it, of course, but if he did we’ll most likely find it sooner rather than later.’

  Katie said, ‘Ask the airport police to check their car parks, just in case he left it there. What about the number plate, or anything else that might help us to identify it? Father Lenihan mentioned that Brendan Doody’s van had lettering on the side, painted over.’

  Detective O’Donovan pushed the memory stick into Katie’s computer, and a CCTV picture appeared on her screen. A grimy black Renault van, with a white question mark stuck or painted on to its offside rear window.

  ‘For sure, that must be the same van that nearly ran the postie off the road up at Ballyhooly. I checked the number plate, but it belonged to a ninety-three Ford Fiesta that was scrapped two years ago. I don’t know if the question mark means anything. Maybe it means nothing at all, but I’m checking any trademarks that might have a question mark at the end of them.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Katie. ‘Any luck with the harp wire yet?’

  ‘Not so far, ma’am. We’ve checked every music shop in the city, and talked to the leaders of both orchestras, but not a sausage. Detective Horgan’s gone off this afternoon to call on every harpist that he’s been able to find, professional or semi-professional, about five of them, and a couple of amateurs, too. To be frank with you, though, I’m not too optimistic that we’re going to find out where it came from.’

  At that moment, Katie’s phone rang. She picked it up and a voice said, ‘Is that Detective Superintendent Maguire I’m speaking to?’

  ‘It is, yes.’

  ‘This is Garda Ronan Kerr from Cobh Garda station. You called us earlier this morning, yes, about an Irish setter called Barney? Well, he’s just this minute turned up. A member of the public found him wandering around by the Heritage Centre and has brought him in to us.’

  ‘Thank God. He’s not hurt at all?’

  ‘Not at all. He’s soaking wet, like, and he’s muddy, and he’s starving hungry, but apart from that he’s one hundred per cent.’

  ‘Bless you,’ said Katie, and put down the receiver. Detective O’Donovan said, ‘Everything all right, ma’am?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘everything’s grand.’ She was glad in a way that he was there, and that she had to keep her composure, because otherwise she would have burst into tears. It’s only tiredness, she told herself, but she knew in her heart that it was much more than that.

  She was gathering up her keys and her mobile phone, ready to go home, when there was another knock at her office door. To her surprise it was Dr Collins, with her hair pinned up unusually tidily, and wearing a double-breasted suit of green herringbone tweed.

  ‘Detective superintendent, I’m so glad I caught you! I wanted to show you this in person.’

  ‘Have you finished your post mortem on Father Quinlan?’

  ‘Ugh, yes. Father Quinlan and his rat. It was a common brown rat, Rattus norvegicus, about a year old, and it was carrying both Weil’s disease and salmonella. I would guess that it was caught in a sewage outlet, or possibly a cemetery. Not many people appreciate how many rats there are in cemeteries.’

  ‘What was Father Quinlan’s cause of death?’

  ‘Oh, strangulation, no question, the same as Father Heaney.’ She opened her briefcase and took out a clear plastic envelope marked EVIDENCE. Coiled inside the envelope was the thin, silky cord that had been tied so tightly around Father Quinlan’s neck, purple and blue braided together.

  ‘Before he was strangled, however, he was tortured in a similar way to the heretics who were tortured by the Spanish Inquisition. Strappado, they called it. His hands were tied behind his back and then he was lifted up clear of the ground. By all accounts strappado is by far the most painful form of torture there is. The Nazis used it in their concentration camps and the North Vietnamese used it, too, in the Hanoi Hilton.

  ‘Father Quinlan was also given a merciless beating. Merciless. Five of his ribs were broken, as well as his collarbone and almost all of the bones in his fingers and his toes. I don’t know what he did to deserve such punishment, but somebody really wanted him to go through hell.

  ‘Next, of course, he was castrated with the castratori. Finally, the rat was forced into his body cavity, and sewn up so that it couldn’t escape except by gnawing its way out through his intestines. I still can’t be sure if he was garrotted before or after this was done. I hope for his sake that it was before. I would have had to see the crime scene, and how much blood he lost.’

  Katie held up the clear plastic envelope with the cord in it. ‘Have you found out what this is?’

  ‘Yes, I have, which is why I wanted you to see it for yourself. Again, it was my musical lab assistant who identified it for me. It came from a bassoon, apparently.’

  ‘A bassoon?’

  ‘That’s right. He said that when they make the reeds for a bassoon, they often tie a knot around them, for decoration. It’s called a Turk’s head knot, because it looks like a turban, and this is the string they use – nylon string coated in beeswax.’

  ‘So Father Heaney and Father Quinlan were strangled with two types of string from two types of musical instrument?’

  ‘That’s correct. Almost identical MO, but distinctly different garrottes.’

  Katie sat down. ‘Jesus. What’s he going to use next time? Catgut, from a violin?’

  ‘Let’s pray that there won’t be a next time.’

  ‘Don’t be sure about that,’ said Katie. ‘I have a very bad feeling that this fellow is only just getting started.’

  Dr Collins said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you very much when it comes to tracking him down. The bassoon cord is distinctive,
yes. So is the harp wire. But there was nothing else on Father Quinlan’s body to identify his assailant – or assailants plural, since you say that there was probably more than one of them. No saliva, no blood, no hairs, no epithelials. No idiosyncratic bruises, such as might have been caused by a ring or a bracelet or a wristwatch. Nothing.’

  ‘This is what convinces me that he’s going to kill another priest,’ Katie told her. ‘He’s on a crusade, yes, but his crusade isn’t completed, and that’s why he’s being so careful not to leave any trace of himself. He might not care if we catch him eventually. He might even want to be captured, in the end. Most crusading killers have a need to tell the world why they did it. But he doesn’t want us to stop him yet.’

  ‘I’ll be re-examining both bodies tomorrow,’ said Dr Collins. ‘I’ve called Dr Reidy and told him that I won’t be returning to Dublin for a day or two at least.’

  ‘Well, if you can come up with any physical evidence at all.’

  Katie picked up her keys again. Dr Collins hesitated for a moment, biting her lip, and then she said, ‘You’re finished for the day, then?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know whether you heard but my sister was attacked and they’ve got her in intensive care. I was up all night and I really could do with some sleep.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. What happened?’

  Briefly, Katie told her how Siobhán had been assaulted. Dr Collins shook her head and said, ‘Terrible, that’s terrible. That’s a terrible thing to happen. Terrible.’

  ‘I’ll see you again tomorrow, then?’ said Katie.

  ‘Look, well, under the circumstances – what with your sister and all – this is probably inappropriate,’ said Dr Collins. ‘But I’m all on my own here in Cork, and you have nobody to go home to, and I was wondering if I could buy you dinner this evening.’

  Katie didn’t know what to say. She could sense at once that this wasn’t a casual invitation. This wasn’t going to be two law-enforcement professionals sitting down over bacon and cabbage and a glass of wine to discuss the technical ins and outs of a complicated case. This was supposed to open the door to something much more intimate. Dr Collins’s cheeks were flushed, and she was biting her lip again, and she was staring unblinkingly at Katie as if she was willing her to say yes, but sure that she was going to say no.