Broken Angels (Katie Maguire)

by Masterton, Graham

  ‘Where are you now?’ Katie asked her.

  ‘I’m back at the office on Grand Parade.’

  ‘Well, meet me at Monsignor Kelly’s office as soon as you can. I might be twenty minutes or so by the time I’ve finished up here, but wait for me. Of course, if you hear from him before that, call me at once.’

  ‘I will of course. And – I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry for what?’

  ‘Sorry for everything, I suppose. Sorry for myself most of all. I didn’t understand at all what it was that I was getting myself into.’

  Detective Horgan came back across the landing from Dorothy’s, flapping his hand in front of his face.

  ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, it was reekin’ in there, I’ll tell you.’

  ‘What’s the story?’ Katie asked him.

  ‘Those Fidelio fellows haven’t been there too often lately, and they know that in the bar there because they can hear them practising their singing sometimes, which the barman said was very uplifting. But they was there last night, about eleven, up and down the stairs every five minutes, up and down, up and down, and in a hurry by all appearances.’

  ‘Sounds like that’s when they cleared the place out,’ said Detective O’Donovan.

  ‘Maybe they have an idea that we’re close to them,’ Katie agreed. ‘Or... I don’t know. Maybe they have some other agenda. Now that they’ve abducted Father ó Súllibháin, that’s the last of their choirmasters, isn’t it? The last of the priests who mutilated them. God alone knows what they’re thinking of doing now.

  ‘Right,’ she said, ‘you and me, Patrick, we’re going to Redemption Road. Michael, do you want to finish up here? Talk to the barman in O’Donovan’s on the corner, and any regulars you can find in there. And the girls from the hairdresser’s. You never know. They might have seen something that can help us.’

  By now, most of the gardaí who had backed up their raid were milling around in Marlborough Street, chatting to each other. Katie beckoned to one of them and said, ‘You, what’s your name?’

  ‘O’Dowd, ma’am.’

  ‘All right, O’Dowd, I want you and two more guards to follow us out to the diocese offices on Redemption Road, and anywhere else we go to after that. I think we might need some back-up.’

  ‘If you don’t mind me asking, ma’am, who exactly are we after nailing?’

  ‘If I knew, O’Dowd, I’d tell you, believe me.’

  When they reached Redemption Road, Ciara Clare was already waiting for them outside. She was wearing a bright red dress of tight-fitting needlecord, with a matching bolero top, which she had obviously chosen to go to lunch at Greene’s with Monsignor Kelly. She looked deeply anxious, and her matching red lipstick was splodged.

  As they climbed the steps of the offices, Katie looked up and saw that the sky, for four o’clock in the afternoon, was growing threateningly dark, and that the wind was blowing even more strongly – that fresh, chill wind that precedes a thunderstorm.

  Katie spoke first to Monsignor Kelly’s secretary, the pointy-nosed nun with the diminutive mouth. She was just as distraught as Ciara, and kept twisting her sleeves as if she were trying to wring water out of them.

  ‘Here,’ she said, showing Katie the monsignor’s diary. She spoke in a hurried, panicky rush, as if she had memorized what she was going to say and was frightened of forgetting it. ‘He was supposed to be having lunch at 12.30 at Greene’s on McCurtain Street with Patrick Mulligan from the Church Overseas Missionary Fund. Then he was supposed to be back here at 3.45 for a discussion group with the bishop and lay volunteers about the changing of Mass times in rural areas to make up for the diminishing number of priests.’

  ‘But he didn’t arrive at Greene’s, did he?’ asked Katie.

  The nun gave Ciara a sharp, resentful look and said, ‘No. Not according to Ms Clare.’

  ‘In fact, he left here in the company of a man you didn’t know?’

  ‘Yes, at about ten minutes to twelve.’

  ‘Can you describe this man?’

  ‘He was tall. Big. His hair was curly. He was wearing a black sweater and black trousers a bit too short for him so they were flappy round the ankles. He had a bit of a belly on him, to be truthful.’

  ‘He didn’t give you his name and Monsignor Kelly didn’t tell you his name either?’

  The nun shook her head. ‘I had never seen him before but Monsignor Kelly must have known who he was because he came out of his office directly and went away with him.’

  ‘Was any word spoken between them?’

  Again the nun shook her head. ‘I have had no word from him since and he has been uncontactable on his mobile. The meeting about masses in pastoral areas was postponed until tomorrow when, please God, the monsignor will have reappeared safe and well.’

  She crossed herself, twice, and her mouth looked even more pinched than ever.

  ‘What about the fellow he was supposed to be meeting at Greene’s for lunch?’ asked Katie.

  ‘Patrick Mulligan? I don’t know about that.’ She paused, and then she said, ‘Ms Clare knows more about that than I do.’

  ‘Did Mr Mulligan not call you to ask why the monsignor hadn’t turned up?’

  Again, the nun’s eyes darted toward Ciara. ‘No, he did not. I can only presume that he thought he might have made a mistake about the date.’

  ‘All right,’ said Katie. ‘Patrick – do you want to take a quick look at Monsignor Kelly’s desk, see if he’s left any notes?’

  ‘I can’t allow you to do that,’ the nun protested. ‘The monsignor’s desk... it’s private. It’s confidential. It’s personal.’

  ‘Don’t you worry.’ Detective O’Donovan grinned at her. ‘If I find any porn mags I won’t say a word.’

  42

  Katie took Ciara outside, and they sat in her car together. The sky was almost completely black now, with only a silvery streak of light over the hills to the north-east, where the sun must still be shining.

  ‘I think you’d better tell me what the situation is between you and Monsignor Kelly, don’t you?’ said Katie.

  Ciara looked away, out of the passenger window. The trees along the driveway were thrashing so wildly they looked as if they were trying to uproot themselves.

  ‘I don’t know how it started, to be honest with you. I was sent to interview the monsignor about his favourite subject, which is involving lay people in church affairs. He was always quoting Jesus about that. Go into my vineyard, too.’

  ‘It sounds as if the monsignor went into your vineyard, too, Ciara, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

  Ciara blushed and started to twist at the large silver cross studded with red glass rubies that rested in her cleavage.

  ‘It happened by accident, almost. We had to stay overnight at a church conference in Limerick and he came into my hotel room by mistake. Mixed up the numbers, that’s what he said. But then he said that the Lord must have mixed them up deliberately to bring us together. I was the Lord’s creation, he said, and I was so beautiful that the Lord must have intended him to celebrate my beauty.’

  Katie nodded understandingly. At the same time, she thought: What a line that was, and from one of the vicars general, too. What’s worse, this poor cow actually believed him.

  ‘That was the first time a man I really respected had told me that I was beautiful and I knew that he wasn’t lying to me because he was doing everything in his power to resist me. I could see for myself how much he was struggling.’

  Of course he was struggling, thought Katie. You need to undo thirty-three buttons to get out of a soutane.

  ‘Tell me about these murdered priests,’ she said, as gently as she could. ‘You said that Monsignor Kelly was worried about them.’

  ‘I went to see him at his office one morning and he was very shocked and very pale. I mean, dead white, white as a sheet. I thought he was ill at first, but then he told me that somebody had phoned him – somebody he hadn’t heard from in a very long tim
e – and that some awful trouble was brewing. I asked him what it was but he said he couldn’t tell me because I was too young and I wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘So he didn’t give you any idea what this “awful trouble” actually was?’

  Ciara kept on twisting her cross round and round. Katie felt like slapping her hand and telling her to stop it, but she knew that it would only break Ciara’s confessional mood, and the last thing she wanted to do was antagonize her.

  ‘All he said was that somebody was blackmailing him into doing something that was impossible. He said that he had tried to make a deal with them, tried to meet them halfway. He even said that he had offered them money – lots of money – but they hadn’t shown any interest.’

  ‘That was the actual word he used – “impossible”? He didn’t say that he didn’t want to do it, or wasn’t capable of doing it for any particular reason? He said it was impossible?’

  Ciara nodded. ‘He kept on saying, “It’s impossible. It can’t be done. It’s impossible,” as if I knew what he was talking about, but I didn’t know what he was talking about, and he wouldn’t explain what he meant.

  ‘There was something else he kept on saying, too. “I’m caught. I’m trapped. Whatever I do, it’s going to turn out badly.”‘

  ‘But you still had no idea of what he meant?’

  ‘No, although I was pretty sure it was something to do with these murdered priests. When Father Heaney was found dead, he called me and told me to go up to Ballyhooly and do everything I could to play the story down, like. He was raging when it was the top story on RTÉ, and then the Independent. But he kept on having these mood swings. Later on that same day he was much more positive, as if he had managed to sort something out. But when they found Father Quinlan hanging from that flagpole his mood went all black again, and ever since then it’s stayed black and it seems to be getting blacker.’

  Katie waited for a long moment, and then she said, ‘Has Monsignor Kelly given you any idea at all who the killers might be? Do you think he knows who they are? Or at least has an inkling of who they are?’

  ‘No. But they’re boys who were sexually abused by priests when they were at school, aren’t they? Getting their revenge, like.’

  Katie neither confirmed nor denied it. She waited for another long moment, while the car trembled in the rising wind and the first few drops of rain fell on to the roof. In her rear-view mirror she could see lightning crossing the distant horizon like stilt-walkers. Don’t worry, the circus will be here before you know it. The clowns will be coming to get you.

  ‘Do you mind if I ask you one or two personal questions?’ she said. She was very aware of Ciara’s perfume. A strong, seductive scent, heavy on hyacinth and musk, just right for lunch with an alpha-plus male, especially an alpha-plus male in a thirty-three-button soutane. Chamade, something like that.

  ‘You want to ask me about me and Kevin?’

  ‘Yes. Do you usually go to bed together properly? You know, like lovers?’

  Very long pause, more cross-fiddling, then, ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Sometimes, but not as often as you’d like to?’

  ‘He’s very busy. And of course it’s difficult. You know – if we were to be seen together.’

  ‘So what is it mostly – oral sex in the office, like you did the other day?’

  Ciara blushed, but Katie had been interviewing women about their sexual adventures and misadventures for a very long time, ever since she was a young garda on the streets of Cork on a Saturday night, and she knew how desperately most of them wanted to talk about it, especially to another woman.

  ‘You wouldn’t ever expect him to give up the cloth and marry you, would you?’

  ‘Of course not. I couldn’t ask him to do that. Anyway, he’s a man of God. He’s completely devoted to his calling.’

  ‘Doesn’t that make you feel a little bit excluded? I mean, there you are, giving him your best attention, as it were, and he’s standing there thinking about the Virgin Mary.’

  ‘He says that when I’m kneeling in front of him it’s the same as kneeling in prayer because I’m worshipping his body, which was made by God, the same as mine was.’

  And what happens when you swallow? thought Katie, although she never would have said it out loud, and she felt blasphemous even thinking it. Transubstantiation?

  But her intimate questioning and her religious cynicism had served their purpose. She now had a confession from Ciara that Monsignor Kelly had outrageously abused his position as one of the vicars general in order to coax her into giving him sexual favours. It was a confession that Ciara might later try to deny, but not under oath, in a court of law.

  As they climbed out of the car they heard the first rumbling of thunder. Ciara turned to Katie, her hair whipped by the wind, and said, ‘You will find him, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course, we’ll find him all right.’

  ‘And what I told you – you know – about our relationship?’

  Oh, that’s what you call it, licking the mickey of some vertically challenged cleric, a relationship.

  ‘Of course,’ Katie told her, although she didn’t say precisely what ‘of course’ was supposed to imply.

  Ciara began to walk back across the car park towards her own car, a pale green Nissan Micra. As she did so, Katie’s mobile phone played ‘The Fields of Athenry’.

  ‘Katie? This is Nurse Monahan from the hospital. I’m happy to tell you that your sister has just regained consciousness.’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ said Katie. She pressed her hand over her mouth and burst into tears.

  ‘She’s well in herself, but —’ Nurse Monahan started to tell her, but then thunder crashed right over Katie’s head and drowned out everything else she had to say.

  43

  She pushed her way in through the hospital doors, lowered her umbrella and shook it hard. As she crossed the reception area, a voice called out, ‘Katie! Hold on a minute, would you?’

  It was Michael, wearing a saggy grey gaberdine raincoat with a tightly twisted belt, and carrying a plastic shopping bag from Tesco’s.

  ‘Michael! What’s the story? Have you been up to see her yet?’

  ‘Not yet. As a matter of fact, I was waiting for you.’

  ‘What were you waiting for me for? Listen, I have to go up and see her. You know that she’s recovered consciousness?’

  ‘They told me, yes. I’m ashamed to face her, if you must know.’

  Katie had reached the lifts now, and pushed the button for ITU. A small boy was standing close by, looking up at Katie and Michael and listening attentively to what they were saying, as if they were characters in a play.

  ‘Push on, kid,’ Michael told him, but he stayed where he was.

  The lift doors opened. Katie stepped inside and Michael followed her. He held up the Tesco bag. It was covered with raindrops and obviously contained something heavy.

  ‘I was under the sink this morning, looking for the tap to turn off the water because we had a leak in one of the radiators. That’s when I found this. It was behind all of the dishcloths and the Brillo pads and all of that. It’s me hammer.’

  ‘What was your hammer doing there, under the sink?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I asked myself. I took it out and had a good look at it and it’s got hair on it, I think, and what looks like blood.’

  He was about to reach into the bag to take the hammer out and show her, but she said, ‘No – leave it there. It’s been contaminated enough already.’

  Michael had tears in his eyes. ‘It was Nola. It must have been. Only Nola would be mad enough to attack Siobhán with a hammer, for God’s sake, and only Nola would be stupid enough to hide it under the sink without even taking the trouble to wash it. Jesus, I wish I’d never set eyes on the bitch.’

  When they reached the third floor, Katie took out her mobile phone and called headquarters. ‘Send O’Donovan round to CUH, would you? I’ll be here with my sister in intensive c
are.’

  She took the Tesco bag out of Michael’s hand and spoke to him gently. ‘I want you to wait right here in the corridor, Michael. I’ll call you in a minute and you can see Siobhán, too, if the nurses will allow it. Meanwhile, please stay here. What happened, it wasn’t your fault and you shouldn’t be after blaming yourself for it. You’ve done really well to bring me the hammer.’

  She could hear how calm her voice was, as if a ventriloquist were talking out of her mouth. Inside, though, her brain was kaleidoscopic with splinters of anger, not only at Nola for nearly killing her sister but at Michael for messing both women around, and at Siobhán, too, for having a relationship with a gowl like him.

  Michael sat down on the end of a row of plastic chairs, his head slumped. Katie stood beside him for a moment and then walked along the corridor to Siobhán’s room.

  She found Siobhán propped up with pillows, with her eyes open. Her head was still thickly bandaged and her vital signs were still being monitored, but when Katie came into the room she managed a weak, disorganized smile.

  One nurse was taking her blood pressure while another was writing up her notes. Katie put the Tesco bag down on the chair and walked around the bed to embrace her.

  ‘Oh, you don’t know how glad I am to see you with your eyes open! How are you feeling, darling?’

  Siobhán shook her head and made a barely audible bleating noise, like a lamb caught in barbed wire. The nurse who was taking her blood pressure said, ‘She can’t talk yet, I’m afraid.’

  ‘But she will be able to? In time?’

  ‘You’d have to talk to Mr Hahq about that. We’ve done two more scans and there’s some improvement, but it’s very early days yet.’

  Katie turned back to Siobhán, took hold of her hands and smiled. She looked like Siobhán, although her face was puffier than usual, but there was nothing in her expression that reminded Katie of her quick, mischievous self. She smiled back at Katie sweetly, but so tiredly that she could have been eighty years old.

  ‘Is there anything she needs? Anything I can get her?’ Katie asked.