Broken Angels (Katie Maguire)

by Masterton, Graham

  ‘Not at the moment, Katie. We’re still feeding her through the drip, although we expect to take her off that in a day or two. And she can’t read yet, because her eyes can’t focus well enough. It’s grand that she can recognize yourself.’

  Katie stayed by Siobhán’s bedside until Detective O’Donovan arrived with two uniformed gardaí. Michael was still waiting obediently in the corridor, his head still bowed. Katie gave Detective O’Donovan the Tesco bag.

  ‘Take him in and have him make a full statement. I want him to explain the whole background in his own words – like his relationship with Siobhán and how they split up and how he married Nola but then started seeing Siobhán again. Also, get this hammer over to the technical unit pronto.’

  Then, ‘Michael?’ she said.

  Michael lifted his head. She had rarely seen anyone look so wounded. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Where is Nola working now? Is she still at Penney’s?’

  ‘No. Debenham’s, in the make-up department. Jesus, I wish I’d never seen that woman’s face.’

  Katie nodded to Detective O’Donovan. ‘Go and pick her up, too. Nola Lyons. Arrest her for attempted murder.’

  ‘Right you are, then.’

  Before she returned to headquarters, she visited the path lab. Father O’Gara’s body had arrived from Killeens and was lying on a stainless-steel autopsy table while Dr Collins was circling around it, ducking and weaving with her digital camera, taking photographs from every angle.

  Katie walked the length of the laboratory, between the sheeted figures that lay on both sides, deliberately keeping her eyes straight ahead of her and not glancing at any of them for signs of movement.

  Dr Collins stood up straight as she approached. ‘Ah, Katie. I’ve just finished taking my first round of pictures.’

  She stepped back and put down her camera. ‘Now, I think it’s time to cut the wires and find out exactly what this poor wretch has had done to him.’

  ‘God, he must have suffered some terrible pain,’ said Katie, shaking her head over Father O’Gara’s burned and battered body.

  ‘Being burned to death – that’s the most painful death of all,’ Dr Collins told her. ‘Not just anecdotally, but neurologically.’

  ‘Anecdotally? How can anybody tell you what it was like anecdotally?’

  Dr Collins went across to her instrument table and picked up a pair of sharp-nosed pliers. ‘It’s the fact that people rarely scream while they’re being immolated. You look at those newsreels of Buddhist monks burning themselves to death. The agony is too overwhelming to think about screaming.’

  She cut the wires that bound Father O’Gara’s wrists behind his back. She held up the wire and peered at it through her glasses. ‘I think your technician was right. This does look like piano wire.’

  Now she could manoeuvre Father O’Gara’s arms until they were parallel to his sides. His shoulders and elbows made a crunching sound as she did so, like a chicken’s joints. She rolled him on to his back, and then she cut the wire that kept his ankles tight together.

  At that moment, Katie’s mobile phone played. She checked the screen and saw that Inspector Fennessy was calling her.

  ‘Liam? What’s the form?’

  ‘We’ve had a sighting of the black van with the crozier on it, only about five minutes ago, out on the Carrigrohane Road, about a half-mile west of Ballincollig.’

  ‘Heading?’

  ‘West. We could set up a roadblock on the N22 at Clodagh, say. It didn’t appear to be travelling very fast.’

  ‘No – no roadblock. But try to pick it up and tail it. I want to know where they’re going, these Fidelios. I mean, they don’t seem to care that their van is so easy to pick out, do they? You’d have thought they would have had sense enough to drive around in a vehicle that was totally nondescript.’

  Dr Collins was having a difficult time cutting through the thick-gauge piano wire that fastened Father O’Gara’s knees together. It looked as if it had been wound around at least twenty times, and plaited together, too. She was twisting her pliers from side to side, and each strand gave way only reluctantly, with a flat ping-snap! sound.

  ‘Right you are, then, ma’am,’ said Inspector Fennessy. ‘We’ll put a tail on it but we’ll keep our distance.’

  But Katie suddenly thought: The Fidelios don’t seem to care that their van is so easy to pick out, do they? But why don’t they care? They’ve abducted and likely killed all four of the priests who castrated them, and abducted Monsignor Kelly, too; and they must realize that we’re out looking for them the length and breadth of County Cork.

  Then she thought, shite, and shouted out, ‘Stop it!’

  ‘What?’ asked Dr Collins, looking up from her autopsy table.

  ‘No, not you, doctor,’ Katie told her. ‘Liam – stop that van, and arrest whoever’s driving it.’

  ‘I thought you wanted us to follow it – find out where it’s going, like.’

  ‘It’s not going anywhere in particular. It’s a decoy, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A decoy. They made no attempt at all to hide that van, did they, when they dumped Father Heaney’s body in the Blackwater, and when they ran over Father O’Gara on Patrick Street, and when they collected Father ó Súllibháin from St Dominic’s Retreat Centre? For all we know, they made no more effort to hide it when they strung up Father Heaney, because it must have taken them long enough to do it, and it was only chance that nobody saw them – or remembers seeing them, anyway.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, superintendent. You might be giving them credit for being as clever as you are, whereas they could be as thick as shite, and just careless.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Liam. They have an agenda, these people. They feel they have to do everything to make their revenge complete, I’m sure of it. They may not mind being caught after that... but they don’t want to be caught just yet. Stop that van as soon as you can. I’ll bet you twenty euros there’s only one person in it, and that’s the fellow who’s driving it, and I’ll bet you he doesn’t know a castrati from a castanet.’

  ‘You’re the boss, boss.’

  She closed her phone and said to Dr Collins, ‘How’s it going?’

  Dr Collins had her teeth gritted and was using her pliers to flex the piano wires backwards and forwards until they snapped.

  ‘Nearly done it. Whoever tied him up like this was certainly making sure that he kept his legs together.’

  Katie’s mobile phone played again. This time it was John. He sounded tired and more than a little irritable.

  ‘Am I ever going to see you?’ he complained. ‘I’ll be probably be leaving the day after tomorrow. I know you’re catastrophically busy, sweetheart, but we really have to work something out.’

  ‘I’ll call you, darling,’ she promised him. ‘As soon as this crisis is over, I’ll call you and we’ll get together and I’ll make all of your wildest dreams come true. I mean it.’

  ‘I feel like I haven’t seen you forever.’

  ‘I know, because I feel just the same way.’

  She was talking to him and watching Dr Collins at the same time. Dr Collins snapped the last strands of piano wire that were keeping Father O’Gara’s knees fastened together. Then she took hold of each knee and started to force his thighs apart. She had to grit her teeth and use all of her strength to separate them because it was less than twenty-four hours since he had died and he was still in full rigor mortis.

  John said, ‘Any chance that we can we meet tonight? Just for a half-hour maybe?’

  ‘I don’t know, John. I’ll try, I really will. Let me give you a call later. By the way, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but it looks like we’ve caught the person who attacked Siobhán.’

  ‘Wow. Good work. Who was it? He wasn’t trying to kill you, was he?’

  ‘I did think to begin with that somebody might have been after me, but it wasn’t a he, it was a she. Michael’s wife, Nola. You kno
w which Michael – Siobhán’s ex-boyfriend. Well, not so ex, which is why Nola tried to kill her.’

  ‘Jesus. You Maguires lead such goddamn complicated lives. But do try to meet me later, won’t you? Just for a cup of coffee or something? I need to put my arms around you and smell your smell.’

  ‘I’ll do my best, my darling. I promise.’

  Dr Collins had managed to prise Father O’Gara’s knees apart by about twenty centimetres. She gripped them even harder, like somebody trying to lever open the doors of a lift, but when she parted them a little more Katie noticed that two single piano wires were still looped around his thighs, just above the knee. Dr Collins hadn’t bothered to cut them because they weren’t connected to each other and didn’t prevent her from opening up his legs. But now that his knees were gradually being forced wider and wider apart, Katie could see that each loop was connected to one of two taut wires that ran up the insides of his thighs and disappeared into the dark, boggy hole where his scrotum had been.

  She had seen wires like this before. Not rigged like this, of course, inside a castrated man’s body, but in a booby trap where two wires were attached to the doors of a van. When the doors were opened, the wires pulled two switches to complete an electrical circuit, and an explosive charge was set off.

  Katie didn’t say a word. A shouted warning could have startled Dr Collins into pulling Father O’Gara’s legs even wider apart. Instead, she walked quickly around the autopsy table, came right up behind Dr Collins and seized both of her wrists, then threw herself backwards with all of her body weight so that the two of them fell on to the floor, their legs in a tangle.

  ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ Dr Collins protested, in a voice that was almost a scream. But Katie caught hold of the sleeve of her lab coat and dragged her across the floor, panting with the effort of it, her boot heels kicking at the vinyl tiles to give herself purchase. When they were well clear of the autopsy table, she scrambled on to her feet, pulling Dr Collins up after her, and shouted, ‘Run! I think he has a bomb inside him!’

  The two of them pelted to the far end of the pathology lab and cannoned out of the double swing doors. Dr Collins stopped and looked back through one of the windows, but Katie snatched at her sleeve again and said, ‘Out! Come on! Right out of the building! As far away as we can!’

  ‘But, my God!’ said Dr Collins. ‘You’re not serious, are you? A bomb?’

  ‘Just keep going,’ Katie told her. They ran along the corridor that led to the hospital’s main reception area, their heels clattering, and as they did so, Katie lifted her mobile phone out of her pocket, ready to call for the army bomb disposal squad.

  They had only just reached the reception area, however, when they heard the deep, dull thump of a bomb going off, and felt the shock of it travelling through the floor, like an earth tremor. The double swing doors flew open for a moment, and a shower of fragments came clattering through – glass, metal, part of a chair back.

  The receptionist jumped up from her desk and said, ‘Holy Jesus – what was that?’

  ‘Call your security people,’ Katie told her. ‘Tell them this whole wing has to be evacuated, as quick as humanly possible. Then get out of here yourself.’

  Katie and Dr Collins stayed in the reception area while the receptionist called the hospital’s security team. Fire alarms began to ring all the way through the building, and Katie could hear shouting and footsteps running backwards and forwards. She called Anglesea Street and told them to contact the fire brigade and the bomb squad, and she also called Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll. For a change, he wasn’t still out at lunch.

  ‘They booby-trapped Father O’Gara’s body? I don’t fecking believe it! What did they do that for?’

  ‘The same reason they’re driving around in that van so openly. They’re trying to divert our attention away from what they’re really up to.’

  ‘You and your instincts, Katie. If you ask me they’re just a bunch of headers. Anyhow, you make sure that you stay well clear until the bomb squad get there.’

  ‘No more news about Jimmy O’Rourke, I suppose?’

  ‘Nothing. They’ll be bringing his body back later today.’

  ‘Okay. All right. I’ll wait to hear from you.’ Katie closed her mobile phone and then said to Dr Collins, ‘I’m going back to take a look at the body. Do you want to come with me? You don’t have to. It could be risky.’

  ‘No, I’ll come with you,’ said Dr Collins. ‘It’s highly unlikely that they would have planted two bombs in the same body, wouldn’t you say? That’s my experience, anyhow. And even if they had, both bombs would have exploded at the same time, wouldn’t they? One would have set off the other.’

  Katie grimaced, and said, ‘Okay, then. Let’s pray to God that you’re right.’

  They pushed open the double swing doors and cautiously re-entered the laboratory. The explosion had blown almost all of the sheeted bodies off their trolleys and on to the floor, so that they were lying on top of each other in a ghastly parody of a rugby scrum. The trolleys themselves had all been pushed into the opposite corner, although only three or four of them had been tipped over.

  The laboratory was still hazy with smoke, but there was no chemical smell, only the stench of scorched human flesh. Katie guessed that Father O’Gara’s body had been packed with some kind of plastic explosive such Semtex, or more likely C-4, which was highly malleable and had no odour at all.

  She walked across the debris-strewn floor, her boots crunching on broken glass. Father O’Gara had been so spectacularly blown up that at first she couldn’t work out what she was looking at. The middle part of his body had been blown wide open. His ribs were splayed apart, while one of his legs was standing in the washbasin on the opposite side of the laboratory. There was no sign of the other leg.

  Most extraordinary, though, were the translucent beige curtains that hung over the autopsy table where Father O’Gara’s remains were lying. They were all caught up in the fluorescent light fixtures in the ceiling, a vast and complicated spider’s web of human viscera. Katie could almost imagine a large beige spider running across the ceiling, making the long strings of connective tissue tremble as it hurried to make sure of her prey.

  The sun shone down through the clerestory windows and illuminated the membranes, so that Katie could see the blood vessels branching through them.

  Dr Collins reached out with her latex-gloved hand and gently tugged at them. Part of the curtains slithered down, but most of them were inextricably entangled in the lights.

  ‘Look at this,’ she said, making it all sway. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. Eight and a half metres of human intestines. One man’s entire insides.’

  Katie was too concerned with peering into the blackened barbecue pit that had once been Father O’Gara’s abdomen. She could see the remains of what looked like a metal switching device, and the two wires that had obviously been the trigger mechanism, all twisted and tarnished. She recognized this bomb-making technique, and it wouldn’t take her long to find out who had planted it. What she needed was a quiet chat with her old friend Eugene Ó Béara, who had never openly boasted of any relationship with the Provos because he didn’t have to. Everybody knew who Eugene Ó Béara’s closest friends were.

  She turned to Dr Collins, about to say something to her. Quite unexpectedly, Dr Collins had pulled off her latex gloves, taken off her glasses and cupped one hand over her mouth and her nose. Her eyes were brimming with tears. Katie went over to her and laid a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘It’s the shock,’ said Katie. ‘I have to tell you I’m feeling a little off balance myself. Come on – I think you and I need to get out of here.’

  44

  They waited outside the hospital until Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll arrived, closely followed by the army bomb squad and two crime scene technicians, as well as nine uniformed gardaí and most of the local media. The car park was crowded with khaki trucks and Land
Rovers and police vans and 4×4s.

  Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll went inside the pathology lab to see the destruction for himself, and then came out again, his cheeks wobbling in disbelief.

  ‘That would be have been a fecking massacre if they hadn’t all been dead already.’

  ‘I’ll go back to headquarters now and write up a report,’ Katie told him.

  ‘No, you won’t, girl. You’ll go home and get yourself some rest and something to eat and I don’t want to see you back until tomorrow morning. There’s nothing more you can do here, and Liam Fennessy’s taking care of things as far as the good Monsignor Kelly is concerned.’

  ‘I’ll be grand,’ Katie insisted.

  ‘No, you won’t. You’ve had a bad shock and you look as deathly as that lot inside of there. You’re taking on too much here. You’re worse than Boyle Roche’s bird, for God’s sake. You can’t be in three places at once.’

  ‘All right,’ Katie conceded. She turned to Dr Collins and said, ‘How about coming home with me? I’ll have to go out of the way to see my father, if you don’t mind that. I need to tell him the news about my sister. But I could do with the company, to tell you the truth.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dr Collins. ‘I’d like that. I’m getting a little stir crazy in that hotel room.’

  Katie thought that her father was looking even more frail than the last time she had seen him. He came to the door with a loose-woven grey shawl around his shoulders and the circles under his eyes looked inkier than ever.

  She told him that Siobhán was conscious, although she didn’t tell him that she wasn’t yet able to speak, and that there was no predicting if she would ever fully recover her mental faculties. She didn’t tell him about Nola either. There would be plenty of time for that when Nola had been charged and convicted.

  ‘Well – what a relief that Siobhán’s awake,’ said her father. ‘You hear of people staying in a coma for years, don’t you, and when they do wake up, all their friends have grown old and the world has changed beyond their recognition.’