Broken Angels (Katie Maguire)

by Masterton, Graham

  Liam Fennessy replaced his glasses and said, ‘There you have it. A third priest suspected of molestation, whether he actually did it or not. Let’s just hope for his sake that he hasn’t been taken by the same perpetrators as Father Heaney and Father Quinlan.’

  ‘You’ll find him, though, won’t you?’ asked Maureen O’Dwyer, twisting her wedding ring round and round. ‘You won’t let them hurt him? He’s such a good man.’

  Sergeant O’Rourke said, ‘We have gardaí out looking for him everywhere, Maureen, and we’ve sent a description of the van they took him in to every Garda station in Kerry and Limerick and Tipperary and Waterford. It’s quite distinctive, that van. Sooner or later somebody’s going to spot it. All you can do now is go home and pray. The good Lord will help you to get through this, I can promise you.’

  Katie called a young female garda to come into the interview room and help Mrs O’Dwyer out of the building. When Mrs O’Dwyer had gone, Katie turned around and said, ‘This backs up something I was saying to Dr Collins. It’s almost like this perpetrator wants to be caught. Not just yet, but eventually, when he’s finished punishing all of those priests that he believes deserve punishment. He could have used a different van but he wanted us to know that it was him. Or them, however many perpetrators there are.’

  ‘He could have just sent us a text,’ said Detective Horgan. ‘Hallo, this is the Serial Scrotum Snipper, at it again. And the code word is “Ouch”.’

  Katie gave him a sharp, tight-lipped look to show that she was distinctly unamused. But she recognized that he might be on to something. ‘I get the feeling that he could be using this particular van because it has some special significance... something that he couldn’t suggest to us if he were only sending us text messages. Like, this question mark painted on the back... what does that mean?’

  Liam Fennessy shrugged and pulled a face. ‘It could mean anything at all or nothing at all. It could simply mean, “Who the feck am I and why am I doing this?” Or it could mean, “I’m keeping you eejits guessing, aren’t I?”‘

  Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll looked at his watch. ‘Whatever it means, we’re going to have to take some serious steps forward with this investigation, and make them real quick. Katie – I’ve arranged a media conference for 14.30 and I need some ideas on what we’re going to say to them. We’ll have to be very diplomatic, like. There’s a lot of people out there who think that any priest who molested the children in his care actually deserves to be mangled and have his mebs cut off.’

  ‘Well, me included,’ said Detective Horgan. ‘In fact, I think they should do it publicly in Emmet Place and charge admission. And sell popcorn, too.’

  30

  Gerry awoke to excruciating pain and the ethereal sound of somebody singing. Of course he recognized the song. It was ‘The Rose of Allendale’, a wistful ballad about a traveller separated from the woman he loves. But the singing was extraordinary – high and resonant, as if it were being sung in an echo chamber, with grace notes that were held for what sounded like minutes on end.

  My life has been a wilderness

  Unblessed by fortune’s gale

  Had fate not linked my love to her

  The Rose of Allendale.

  He didn’t hear any more – couldn’t, because he was suddenly swamped with such black, intense pain that it blotted out everything – his hearing, his sight, even his ability to think. He was aware of nothing except the sensation that every bone in his body had been fractured or broken or crushed, and that all of his internal organs had been ripped away from their moorings – his liver, his spleen, his stomach and his kidneys – and that they were chafing and bumping against each other like dinghies in a stormy harbour, all tangled up in the fraying netting of his nerves.

  For over five minutes he was unable to cry out, unable to do anything but shudder and snort and gasp. Gradually, however, the pain ebbed away, even though every breath hurt so much that it ended with a little mewl.

  Whoever was singing, they had now reached the final chorus, and they drew out the very last note as if they couldn’t bear for the song to end. Then there was silence, except for a door slamming and the sound of a car engine starting up.

  ‘God, please, God, please save me,’ Gerry whispered. He opened his eyes and tried to focus on the room around him, although everything was blurry. He was lying on the bare diamond-shaped springs of a single bed that creaked and scrunged as he tried to turn himself over. The room around him looked like the bedroom of a derelict cottage. A single small window was hazy with dust and spiders’ webs, and outside he could see only the green leaves of an overgrown hydrangea, nodding repeatedly in the breeze.

  The walls were papered with pale green chrysanthemum patterns, but the damp had stained most of the opposite wall with dark brown blotches, and on every other wall the paper was bellying out or peeling off altogether. The floor was covered with cheap pale carpet, but it was so filthy and spotted with mould that it was impossible to tell what colour it had been when it was first laid.

  ‘Please, God,’ Gerry repeated, but he was so sure that God was ignoring him that he could almost picture His turned-away shoulder and the back of His flowing white hair. Gerry was convinced that God could hear him, but was refusing to answer. Instead, he appealed to Jesus.

  ‘O Lord Jesus Christ, most merciful, Lord of Earth, I ask that you receive this child into your arms, as Thou hast told us with infinite compassion.’

  He didn’t know if it was possible to administer the last rites to himself. After all, he was no longer a priest, but there was no other priest there. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine making the sign of the cross on his forehead with holy oil. ‘By this sign thou art anointed with the grace of the atonement of Jesus Christ and thou art absolved of all past error and freed to take your place in the world He has prepared for us.’

  As he mumbled out the last words of his absolution he became aware that somebody had very quietly eased themselves into the room and was standing very close beside him – leaning over him, in fact, listening to him.

  He opened his eyes and saw that it was the man in the pointed hat and the face mask, the same man who had spoken to him in the back of the van.

  ‘Please,’ Gerry begged him. ‘Would you get me to a hospital?’

  ‘Oh – you think that all of your heinous sins are forgiven and forgotten, do you, Father O’Gara? I’m deeply sorry about that, but they’re not at all – not by me and the lads, anyhow.’

  ‘Please call for an ambulance. I can’t bear this pain even a minute longer.’

  ‘No such luck,’ the man retorted. Gerry thought that his voice was oddly gruff, almost like a child pretending to be a grown-up. ‘We’ve brought you here for a reason, father. We’ve brought you here to show you that everything you do in life has a consequence, sooner or later, and that there’s no getting away with acts of evil.’

  ‘Who are you? Do I know you? What have I ever done to you?’

  ‘Oh, you know me right enough, just as well as I know you. But you don’t need to know my given name. I call myself the Grey Mullet Man these days, after those greedy fish in the River Lee that have such an insatiable appetite for raw sewage, because that’s what you are, you and your holy brothers. The raw sewage of life. The pieces of shit that passeth all understanding.’

  The man leaned even closer, so that Gerry could hear that he was whistling slightly through one nostril.

  ‘Do you know what my grandpa used to say to me about the grey mullet? The best way to cook them is to boil them in a pan with herbs and spices and an old running shoe. After half an hour, you empty the pan, throw away the mullet and eat the running shoe.’

  He stood up straight, and walked around to the other side of the bed, where there was a 1960s-style kitchen chair, with cream tubular legs and a pale blue vinyl seat. Gerry could see a two-litre Diet Coke bottle standing on the chair, although it was filled up with some clear liquid, not Coke. There were some other ob
jects, too, that he couldn’t make out clearly without turning his head, and his neck hurt too much for that.

  ‘Me, I’m exactly like the grey mullet because when I’ve finished feeding on all of that sewage I won’t be worth saving because I’ll be too fecking polluted, through and through. My very flesh will stink of you and your sins. But I was polluted a long, long time ago, wasn’t I, father? I was ruined body and soul before I had a chance to find out who I was or what it was I wanted out of life.

  ‘Maybe, just maybe, I would have chosen to be what you and your brothers wanted me to be. However, I fecking doubt it. In fact, I fecking know I wouldn’t. But you never gave me the choice, did you?’

  ‘God makes our choices, not us,’ Gerry whispered.

  ‘What? What did you say? You’re trying to blame God now, are you, Father O’Gara? That is very peculiar, if you don’t mind my saying so, because I don’t remember seeing Himself in the room when you were doing what you did to me, giving you the celestial thumbs up.’

  ‘I did nothing wrong,’ said Gerry. The pain was returning and his voice rustled like a ghost, or a sheet of paper tossed across the road by the wind. ‘I promise you, I meant only the best for you.’

  ‘No, you never did. You meant only the best for yourself and that fecking Bishop Kerrigan. You wanted glory, Father O’Gara, all of yez did. Glory glory fecking hallay-loo-yah!’

  ‘For the love of Christ, get me to a hospital,’ Gerry wept.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said the Grey Mullet Man. ‘This is where you confess to your sins and beg forgiveness from me, not from God.’

  ‘I’m not asking forgiveness from God,’ said Gerry. He paused for two painful breaths, and then he added, ‘God doesn’t listen to me anyway.’

  ‘Why am I not surprised?’ said the Grey Mullet Man. He took two black nylon cable handcuffs out of his pocket and came over to the side of the bed.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘we’re going to sit you up now.’

  ‘No!’ Gerry whined at him. ‘Please – no! I’m all smashed up inside. You’ll kill me.’

  ‘Well, father, that’s a risk we’ll just have to take, I’m afraid.’

  ‘No! Please, God, no!’

  But the Grey Mullet Man took hold of Gerry’s thick brown sweater by the shoulders and heaved him up into a sitting position. Gerry screamed, a long shrill scream of absolute agony. He could feel his bones crunching inside his body and his broken ribs digging into his lungs.

  ‘Come along, father,’ the Grey Mullet Man urged him. ‘This is nothing at all. You just wait till you see what I have in store for you next!’

  Gerry was in too much pain to scream again but as the Grey Mullet Man began to drag him up the bed, two or three inches at a time, each time he shifted him Gerry let out a thin, quavering howl.

  ‘Forgotten what a grand singer you are, father,’ said the Grey Mullet Man. He tugged and shuffled Gerry into a sitting position with his back to the bars of the bed’s iron headboard. Then he took hold of one hand at a time and fastened his wrists to the bars with the nylon cable handcuffs.

  By now, Gerry had passed out. His eyes were closed and his chin was resting on his chest, and there was a thin dribble of bloody saliva sliding from his lower lip. The Grey Mullet Man shook his shoulder and said, ‘Father O’Gara? Father O’Gara, can you hear me? Oh – Father O’Gaaaaara!’

  Gerry’s eyelids flickered but he didn’t respond. The Grey Mullet Man stood back and looked at him without trying to rouse him any further. Then he reached up and slowly drew off his pointed hat and the face mask that was attached to it. At the same time, the sun shone brightly through the hazy little window on the other side of the room and illuminated his face, almost as if it had been arranged as a stage direction.

  His hair was straw-coloured, curly and coarse. His face was rounded, and his cheeks were plump, with a faint red flush on them. His eyes were small, but intensely blue. He had a blob of a nose and pouting lips.

  Mrs Rooney, who had seen him dragging Father Heaney through the shallows of the Blackwater, had been right. He did look like a cherub. In fact, Father Machin had always compared him with the left-hand cherub in Rosso Fiorentino’s sixteenth-century painting of two cherubs reading a book at the feet of the Madonna.

  If he hadn’t been so tall and so heavily built, he could have looked sweet and harmless. But for a man of his height and bulk to have such a cherubic face was strangely threatening, especially since he was frowning at Gerry like a vexed two-year-old.

  He picked up the Diet Coke bottle from the kitchen chair and unscrewed the cap. He sniffed it, and puckered up his nose. He had always hated the smell of vinegar. It reminded him of the orphanage, and the pickled eggs that they used to serve at teatime, especially on St Paddy’s Day, when they dyed them green. He used to sit alone in the dining hall until it grew dark, refusing to eat his pickled egg, and forbidden to leave the table until he did.

  Sometimes he could persuade himself that his abiding hatred of the priesthood came from those pickled eggs, even more than what had happened to him later.

  It was over an hour before Gerry regained consciousness. By the time he did, the sun had been swallowed up by low grey cloud and the bedroom was so dark that he didn’t realize at first that the Grey Mullet Man was standing in the corner in his pointed hat and his mask, quite motionless, watching him.

  ‘Ah, you’re awake,’ said the Grey Mullet Man, in a curiously high-pitched voice, but then he cleared his throat and added, ‘You wouldn’t have wanted to miss what I’m going to be doing to you next. Well, fair play, perhaps you would, but I wouldn’t have wanted you to.’

  Gerry tried to moisten his lips, but his tongue was as dry as a slug on a garden path. ‘I don’t know why you don’t just strangle me, whoever you are, and have done with it.’

  The Grey Mullet Man stepped out of the corner and came up to the side of the bed. ‘Because justice has to be served, Father O’Gara. People so often misunderstand the Bible, don’t they, when it tells us eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. It simply means that the punishment should equal the crime. Not revenge for its own sake, but fairness. No more than what’s deserved – but on the other hand no less either, and that “no less” – that’s critical.’

  He paused for breath, because he had started to pant. ‘You put me through the fires of hell, father. You put me through the very flames of Hades. And that’s what I’m going to do to you.’

  ‘In that case, may God forgive you.’

  ‘Oh, He probably won’t. I don’t expect Him to. But to tell you the truth, father, I’m long past caring, because what you and your holy brothers did to me was far worse than anything that Our Lord could ever have done, or ever can.’

  He picked up the Diet Coke bottle and unscrewed the cap. He held it close to Gerry’s nose and said, ‘Smell that? Home-made napalm. Five indigestion tablets dissolved in ten teaspoons of vinegar and topped up with rubbing alcohol.’

  Gerry looked up at him with swollen eyes and a terrible feeling of dread.

  ‘You’re really going to do this, aren’t you?’ he said. His ribs and his pelvis were hurting so much that he tried to shift his position, but he could feel his fractured bones grate together and he had to stay absolutely still for a few seconds while his brain tried to cope with the pain. ‘There’s nothing at all I can say to change your mind?’

  Just then the bedroom door opened and two more men came in – one of them wearing a tall hat like a bishop’s mitre and the other wearing a chalk-white mask like a pierrot. They approached the other side of the bed and stood beside it with their arms folded. They smelled of cigarette smoke.

  ‘Sorry we took so long, like,’ said the man in the pierrot mask, in a muffled, cardboardy voice. ‘The traffic on the South Ring was shite.’

  ‘Just pleased to see that you didn’t start without us,’ added the man in the mitre.

  ‘Oh, there’s no way I would have done that, boy,’ the Grey Mullet Man assured h
im. ‘This is your day just as much as mine.’

  He tipped up the Diet Coke bottle and filled up the palm of his left hand with a large blob of glistening, pungent gel. This he slowly rubbed into Gerry’s scalp, like a hairdresser applying conditioner. Gerry snorted and tried to twist his head away, but again the tendons in his neck gave him a stab of pain, and the Grey Mullet Man was too strong for him.

  The gel smelled strongly of vinegar, and as the Grey Mullet Man massaged it into his scalp, it felt chilly, too.

  ‘I’m pleading with you,’ he whispered. ‘I’m pleading with you not to do this. Whatever you want me to say – whatever you want me to confess to – I will admit to it, I swear on the Holy Bible.’

  ‘How can you confess, father, when you’re so sure that you never did anything wrong?’

  ‘Because we did not believe – we never once thought – that what we were doing – was wrong. Not in any way at all. We devoutly believed – that we were giving you boys – the greatest gift that one man can possibly bestow – on another.’

  The pain of saying so much made Gerry’s eyes fill with tears, which poured down his cheeks until they were shining.

  ‘Would you look at him, for feck’s sake?’ said the man in the pierrot mask, shaking his head. ‘I never thought I’d ever get to see Father O’Gorilla cry like a fecking babby.’

  The Grey Mullet man took out a box of extra-long matches. He shook it in front of Gerry’s face and said, ‘You hear them matches chuckling, father? Ask not for whom them matches chuckle. They chuckle for thee.’

  Gerry stared at him with wet, reddened eyes. ‘No,’ he mouthed, soundlessly.

  The Grey Mullet Man took out a match and struck it. When it flared into life, he held it up for a moment. Gerry stared at it, and then closed his eyes, as if his closing his eyes could extinguish it.