‘Have you eaten?’ Katie asked him.
‘Ailish left me a potato pie. I’ll heat it up when I get hungry.’
‘Well, make sure you do.’
He stared at her for a long time, saying nothing, his eyes searching her face as if he were trying to see her mother in her.
‘You’re all right, though?’ she asked him.
He nodded. ‘I’m all right, my love. But you know what they say. The way to avoid the tragedies of the past is not to let them happen to begin with.’
He paused a little longer, and then he said, ‘So how’s your murder case coming along? I saw something about it on the TV news this morning. You’ve found another dead priest, then? Father O’Gara? I’m sure I knew him once, Father O’Gara.’
Dr Collins was sitting close to the fire but she still gave a shudder, as if she had felt a sudden draught. ‘Oh, God,’ she said, and that was all she had to say, because Katie knew exactly what she was seeing in her mind’s eye.
As concisely as she could, Katie brought her father up to date on her investigation. ‘We’re still looking for these characters, these Fidelios. There’s no way of telling for sure if they’ve got hold of Monsignor Kelly and Father ó Súllibháin, but we can’t think of anyone else who would have wanted to abduct them.’
Katie’s father said, ‘It’s the church behind this, you mark my words. The church will do anything to protect its own, in my experience. The church will even sacrifice the innocent, if needs be. I had to deal with the murders of two children in Blackpool once, two girls, nine and eleven, both strangled, and I’m convinced to this day that they were going to tell their parents what their priest had been doing to them, but they were silenced. You know, silenced.’
He pulled his shawl tighter around his shoulders. ‘My forensic evidence mysteriously went missing, and I couldn’t find a single credible witness. But I know who did it. He’s dead now, so there’s no point in pursuing it, but he should have been punished at the time.’
Katie said, ‘What I need to find out is the real identity of this Reverend Bis. If I can find that out, then hopefully I can find out who he was acting for when he approached those four priests to form the St Joseph’s Choir.’
‘Go back to your evidence,’ said her father. ‘Haven’t I always told you that? The devil hides in the detail.’
‘I don’t really have much evidence, do I, except for Father Heaney’s notebooks, which could mostly be fantasy for all I know, and a whole collection of harp wire and piano wire and bassoon string. And a rat. And a detonator.’
‘Fair play, that’s all you have, like. But go over it again, and when you’ve done that, go over it again. And if you have any witnesses, nag them and nag them until they’re sick of the sight of you. These days, it’s all rush, rush, rush to get a case wrapped up, so that it looks good in the media and, most of all, it doesn’t put too much of a strain on the budget.’
Katie lifted both of her hands in surrender. ‘Whatever you say, detective sergeant. I have the translation of Father Heaney’s notebooks in my briefcase, and all of the notes that my team have been compiling on my laptop. When I’ve had a large drink and something to eat and a couple of hours’ sleep, I’ll take another look at them. And then I’ll take another look. Are you satisfied?’
Katie’s father gave her a faraway smile. She had a disconcerting premonition that he wasn’t going to live for very much longer. She looked across at Dr Collins and she thought that Dr Collins had sensed that feeling of mortality, too, as if Death had passed by the half-open living-room door, and glanced inside, and seen her father sitting by the fire. Don’t you worry about missing your wife, boy. You’ll be seeing her soon enough.
Before they left, Dr Collins excused herself and went to the lavatory. While she was away, Katie’s father inched himself forward in his armchair and took hold of Katie’s hands in his.
‘Now, tell me, have you made up your mind yet?’
‘About what? About John, you mean?’
‘He’s a good man, Katie, and I can tell how much he loves you. Let me tell you something, a love like that doesn’t come into your life very often, if at all, and you don’t want to let it slip through your fingers.’
Katie said nothing, but her father squeezed her hand even tighter, and said, ‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that you have Siobhán to take care of, and me, and the entire well-being of the city of Cork and everybody in it. But you have your own life, Katie. Michael will take care of Siobhán and Ailish will take care of me, and the city of Cork can take care of itself.’
‘You really think I ought to go?’
He gave her that faraway smile again. ‘It’s your decision, girl. But I’m just reminding you that you have only the one life. I will never be able to hold your mother in my arms again, and I weep for the loss of her every single day. It’s bad enough weeping for the loss of a love you once had. Don’t be after weeping for the loss of a love you never had at all.’
When they arrived at Katie’s house, Katie switched on the table lamps and drew the curtains and turned on the central heating. Barney was wildly pleased to see her, and kept jumping up and down and thumping his tail against the furniture. Katie let him out of the kitchen door into the back yard and then came back into the living room.
‘Drink?’
‘Oh, please. Brandy, if you have any.’
‘There – kick off your shoes and relax,’ Katie told her. She poured a brandy for Dr Collins and a vodka for herself and then they both sat back on the sofa side by side and let out simultaneous sighs of relief.
‘Slàinte,’ said Dr Collins, lifting her glass.
‘Fad saol agat,’ Katie replied. ‘Long life to you.’
‘What a hell of a day it’s been,’ said Dr Collins. ‘And, my God, it’s been so much worse for you, what with your sergeant being killed and these priest murders and everything.’
‘I’ve had better days, if that doesn’t sound too cynical.’
Dr Collins looked across at her. ‘Do you know something, you’re not like any female Garda officer I’ve ever dealt with before. Not a senior officer, anyway. All of the female Garda officers I’ve dealt with, in the upper ranks, it’s like they’re constantly trying to assert themselves because they’re women. They behave more like the men than the men do.
‘But you – I don’t know. Like I said before, you’re very strong, but you’re so much yourself. It’s your very femininity that makes you strong.’
Katie gave her a quick, noncommittal smile. ‘How about something to eat?’ she suggested. ‘Pizza, or I have some cold chicken, if you fancy that. I could throw a salad together.’
‘I hope you don’t think that I’m coming on to you,’ said Dr Collins.
‘As a matter of fact, I think you are, but I’m not upset about it. I’m flattered.’
Dr Collins blinked at her furiously. ‘Oh. Oh, I see. I’m sorry.’
‘Honestly, don’t worry about it. I’m flattered, that’s all. I have to admit that I thought you were a bit of a gorgon when I first picked you up at the airport, but I admire what you do and I’ve grown to like you as a person. So, when you pay me a compliment, I’m flattered.’
Dr Collins looked at her, biting at her lip, and there were so many stories in that look, so many disappointments.
‘All right,’ she said, at last. Then, ‘How about a chicken sandwich?’
Once she had eaten, Katie no longer felt so tired, so while Dr Collins went to have a shower, she took Stephen Keenan’s translation of Father Heaney’s notebooks out of her briefcase, sat on the sofa with a large vodka and started to read it page by page.
Barney lay uncomfortably close to her, his jaw resting on her foot, one eye open and one eye closed. He was always suspicious when there was a stranger in the house.
Katie’s father had made her feel careless, because the truth was that she hadn’t yet read any of these notebooks, not line by line. She had only listened to Ste
phen Keenan’s summary, and skimmed through a few pages to get the general tone of what Father Heaney had written. She knew that Patrick O’Donovan had read them more closely, but he might not have been looking at them with the same eye as hers.
According to the notes that Stephen Keenan had scribbled in the margin, Father Heaney had written ‘Vita Brevis’, ‘Life Is Short’, at the top of the very first page and underlined it ‘three times, heavily, as if he was really trying to emphasize it’.
Next, he had gone on to describe his career as a teacher at St Anthony’s, in Douglas, and how successful he had been as a choirmaster – especially on that glorious day in 1979 when his choir had sung for Pope John Paul II. It was not until page forty-three that he came to describe the secret meeting in the house in Montenotte when the Reverend Bis had asked him to put together a new boys’ choir for St Joseph’s Orphanage.
‘The Rev. Bis declared that without question this would be the sweetest children’s choir in all of church history; and so I asked him how he would be able to compare this choir with the choirs of the sixteenth century, the beauty of whose singing is (of course) known only by reputation.
‘The Rev. Bis assured me that there would be empirical proof of this choir’s supremacy. It would be a choir to delight the ears of God; and God would reciprocate by appearing before them in all His splendour, His robes shining like the sun.’
Katie skipped a few pages. Stephen Keenan had mentioned that Father Heaney had used obscure nicknames and puns and anagrams in order to conceal the identity of most of the people mentioned in his diary. Some of these names had taken him hours to decode, and many of them he hadn’t been able to decode at all. In the Latin version, Father O’Gara had been called Procul Rana, which could be roughly translated as ‘a far frog’. Stephen Keenan had eventually realized that this was an anagram of ‘Fr. O’Gara’.
When he had talked to Katie about his translation, he had repeatedly referred to ‘the Reverend Bis’. On the page, however, Katie saw that Father Heaney had always written it as ‘Rev. Bis’.
Maybe I’m fooling myself, thought Katie, but that looks to me like an anagram of brevis, meaning ‘short’. And Father Heaney had prefaced his notebooks with Vita Brevis, and underlined it.
Why hadn’t Stephen Keenan seen it? Maybe it had been far too obvious for a complicated analytical mind like his. But ‘short’ or ‘shortie’ could well have been Father Heaney’s nickname for the cursor – the go-between who came to recruit him to organize the choir – especially if that go-between had been a noticeably short man, high up in the diocesan hierarchy.
And who fitted that description more than the Right Reverend Monsignor Kevin Kelly, VG?
Katie opened her laptop and switched it on. It took her only a few minutes to locate the history of the diocese of Cork and Ross and the clergy who had worked for the bishop’s office and the diocesan secretary’s office over the past thirty years. One of the younger recruits to the bishop’s office in October 1980 had been the Reverend Kevin Kelly, who had distinguished himself in his ecclesiastical studies at St Patrick’s College, the national seminary for Ireland, in Maynooth. His exact position in the bishop’s office was unclear, but for a young priest he appeared to have been unusually close to the bishop himself, who at that time was Bishop Conor Kerrigan.
Katie found several newspaper photographs of Bishop Kerrigan at important diocesan functions and celebratory masses, and the young Reverend Kelly was almost always at his side. In some pictures their heads were close together and they were clearly sharing some confidence or other.
In his prime, Katie recalled that Bishop Kerrigan had been an uncompromising fundamentalist – anti-abortion, anti-birth control, anti-euthanasia, an unshakeable believer in transubstantiation and the reality of angels. His favourite saying was, ‘Remember – man is called by grace to a covenant with his creator.’
Towards the end of his life, however, he had rarely appeared in public and had given no interviews. The official explanation had been that he was suffering from pancreatic cancer.
Dr Collins came back into the room, wearing Katie’s white towelling bathrobe, her hair wound up in a turban. Barney immediately sniffed and lifted up his head and made a whuffing noise.
‘Enjoy your shower?’ Katie asked her.
‘Heaven,’ she said, wiping her steamed-up glasses. She looked at Katie short-sightedly, with an expression that seemed to suggest that it would have been even more heavenly if Katie had shared it with her.
‘Well, I’ll take one myself now,’ said Katie. ‘Come on, Barney, out in the yard for your evening business. How about another drink? Or something else to eat?’
Dr Collins shook her head. ‘I’m fine for now. How’s it going with the notebooks?’
‘I still have a lot to read. But I think we have a clear indication that all of those four priests were recruited by Monsignor Kelly, and that Monsignor Kelly was acting on behalf of Bishop Kerrigan.’
‘And what does that tell us?’
‘So far, not very much that we didn’t know already.’
Dr Collins sat down next to her, her bathrobe opening to reveal her pale bare thigh. Katie put down the notebooks and closed her laptop and stood up.
‘Anything you want, just help yourself,’ she said.
Dr Collins nodded, as if to say I wish.
45
Katie let Barney out of the kitchen door, and then she went through to her bedroom and undressed. Wrapped in a towel, she walked back along the hall to the bathroom.
She stood in the shower for over three minutes before she started to wash herself, her head tilted up, her eyes closed, letting the warm water gush over her. Her late husband, Paul, had installed the power unit for the shower himself, because he had always considered himself a bit of a handyman, but it had always vibrated loudly whenever the shower was turned on.
Because of that, she didn’t hear the front doorbell chiming, and she didn’t hear Dr Collins call out, ‘Somebody at the door, Katie! Do you want me to answer it?’ If she had heard her, she would have said absolutely not, especially since she wasn’t expecting any visitors.
She was thinking about the advice her father had given her about John. She knew that her father was right, and that real love is a precious rarity. At the same time, however, she had worked so hard to reach the rank of detective superintendent, and she was so dedicated to her job and her team of detectives, that she knew that she would feel genuinely bereaved if she walked out on them. It would hurt, and hurt badly, and it would hurt her team, too. And then there was Siobhán, of course, and her father himself.
She was soaping her shoulders when she heard a loud bang from the hallway – so loud that it made her jump. She recognized at once what it was, and she immediately turned off the shower.
She stood in the shower stall, not moving a muscle, listening hard, while the last of the water gurgled down the drain and the shower head dripped. She didn’t call out. Somebody had fired a shotgun in the hallway and it wouldn’t have been Dr Collins, which meant that there was an armed intruder in the house.
Very carefully, she slid open the shower door. She listened again. At first there was nothing, but then she heard a dry cough and the sound of somebody going into the living room. She was surprised that Barney hadn’t barked, but then he was probably too busy snuffling around the dead leaves at end of the yard, trying to pick up the scent of shrews.
She stepped out of the shower and reached for her towel, but as she did so it slipped off the towel rail and down behind the brown wicker laundry basket. She was about to reach over and pick it up when she heard another dry cough, and a knocking noise, like the barrel of a shotgun knocking against the side of the coffee table, or the arm of a chair.
She went to the bathroom door and eased down the handle. She opened it only an inch, but when she peered into the hallway she could Dr Collins’s right arm lying on the floor, and the white sleeve of her towelling bathrobe was spattered with blood.<
br />
Oh, Jesus, she thought. Oh, Holy Mary, Mother of God, she’s been shot, and she isn’t moving.
She opened the door wider so that she could see into the living room. Because of the acute angle between the two doors, she could see only one of the armchairs, a lamp, and part of the window, but a hunched-up shadow was moving across the curtains, as if somebody was swaying from side to side.
She eased herself out of the bathroom. The front door was still ajar and a strong breeze was blowing in from the street outside. She could see the street lights flickering behind the trees, and the glistening of the water in the harbour. Dr Collins was lying on her back, both arms raised, with a bloody hole in her chest the size of Barney’s red dog bowl. She was staring up at the ceiling and her mouth was wide open as if she were just about to shout something. Katie’s white towelling robe was bundled up around her waist.
Katie crept towards her bedroom, keeping her back to the wall. Her discarded clothes were still strewn across the bed, but it wasn’t her clothes she was after. It was the flat TJS hip holster that was lying on top of her chest of drawers on the left-hand side of the door, with her nickel-plated Smith & Wesson .38 revolver.
She picked up the holster and gently tugged the gun out of it. As she did so, there was another knocking sound from the living room, and yet another cough, and then a man in a dark green sweater and black jeans suddenly stepped out into the hallway, carrying a double-barrelled shotgun in his left hand and all of Father Heaney’s notebooks in his right.
Katie cocked her revolver and pointed it at him, holding it in both hands.
‘Drop it!’ she shouted at him, almost screaming.
The man flinched, jerking up his right elbow so that all of the notebooks fell on to the floor. He tried to swing the shotgun around, but very awkwardly, and the barrel caught on the radiator on the opposite wall. Katie shot him, twice, in the chest.
The man toppled backwards, dropping his shotgun. He tried to keep his balance, but he stumbled over Dr Collins’s body and fell heavily on to the floor, both legs swinging up into the air together, like a rocking horse. His left hand scrabbled for his shotgun but Katie bent down, picked it up, and tossed it back along the hall, out of his reach.
Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) Page 32