The Priest

by Gerard O'Donovan

  ‘Now, Inspector, this is Luisa,’ the woman said, leaving her standing while going to take a seat herself.

  ‘Uh, there’s no need to sit down, Mrs Mannion,’ Brogan said. ‘We’d like to talk to Luisa on her own, if you don’t mind.’

  She did mind, but once it was established that Luisa, being sixteen, didn’t need to be accompanied, Mrs Mannion didn’t have much room for argument. Not even when she suggested she should stay ‘in loco parentis, as it were’.

  Brogan thanked her, reminding her how she’d already told them Luisa’s English was better than average, then got up and closed the door behind her as the woman left the room. Brogan smiled at Luisa and touched her arm reassuringly, directing her to sit down on the sofa, beside her.

  ‘Don’t worry, Luisa, you’re not in any trouble.’

  Luisa smiled weakly, but wasn’t convinced.

  ‘You’re a friend of Jesica Salazar, is that right?’ Brogan asked.

  ‘Sí… I mean, yes,’ she stumbled.

  ‘Well, I don’t want to worry you, but Jesica’s had an accident and is in hospital.’

  Brogan gave the girl a moment to translate this to herself. A second later, shock and understanding hit home simultaneously, and some of the natural gloss of her complexion faded.

  ‘What happen to her?’

  ‘You don’t need to worry about that for the moment,’ Cassidy butted in, a little harshly.

  The girl looked back to Brogan, anxiously.

  ‘But she is okay, no?’

  ‘Sure, Luisa, she’s okay for now,’ Brogan equivocated. ‘But we need to ask you some questions. Did you see her last night?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Brogan glanced at Cassidy, who was hunched forward, all the tiredness gone from his face now.

  ‘You were out with Jesica last night?’

  ‘Yes, we went to, uh, to dancing together, in a club, with some of the other students.’

  ‘Can you tell us where this club was?’

  ‘Por supuesto… by the crossing in Stillorgan. You know the club, the GaGa? It is not very nice, but is, uh, near to here, you understand?’

  ‘The place near the bowling alley?’ Cassidy inquired.

  ‘Yes, this one.’

  ‘And what time did you leave the club?’

  Again she looked up guiltily.

  ‘It was late. Mrs Mannion, she wasn’t very happy…’

  ‘Forget about Mrs Mannion, Luisa. We’re only interested in what happened to Jesica. Did she leave the club with you?’

  ‘No.’ The girl looked surprised they could even ask the question. ‘No, she go early with…’ And then the penny, the peseta, the Euro… or whatever it was, dropped, and her eyes opened and her face flushed, and all of a sudden she was frightened.

  ‘Jesica… she is okay, no?’

  ‘Like I said, she’s doing alright, Luisa,’ Brogan replied. ‘But we really need to know who she was with in the club and afterwards. Did she leave with somebody else? With a boy? Is that what you’re saying?’

  Again the girl looked unsure whether to answer or not. Brogan guessed Jesica must have breached some sacrosanct school rule by leaving the club with someone other than a fellow student.

  ‘Come on, Luisa. We won’t tell anybody. This is important. Did she leave with a boy?’

  ‘No, not a boy, exactly.’ She hesitated. ‘He was more old. Maybe twenty, twenty-two. They were together all of the night, you know. They dance, they, uh, kiss. She said he will take her home to her house. He looked nice…’ Again she frowned, fear fighting understanding. ‘Was he…?’

  Cassidy pulled the car keys from his pocket and popped the locks before they were halfway down the drive. There was something about the instantaneous clunk and flash of orange lights that he found satisfying. He eased himself in behind the steering wheel while Brogan dumped herself unceremoniously into the passenger seat. Their long day was taking its toll on both of them.

  ‘Right,’ Brogan said, ‘let’s call in at that club on the way back and see if we can get any CCTV. Leave it any longer, they might record over it. Then we’ll call it a day. You look done in.’

  Cassidy didn’t disagree. He wouldn’t have disagreed a couple of hours ago.

  ‘And when we get there,’ Brogan continued, ‘maybe you could give Maura and Donagh a quick call and tell them to get over to the language school first thing in the morning, to take statements from those other kids Luisa just gave us the names of. That should allow the two of them enough time to get back to the office for eleven, so phone the rest of the guys, too, and tell them I want everyone in for an initial briefing at eleven sharp.’

  Cassidy groaned inwardly. Done in or not, if he had to track down the entire team at this hour of the night, it’d probably be another couple of hours before his head could hit the pillow. But of course that wouldn’t occur to Brogan – no way. They were all the bloody same. And as for that wanker at the hospital, Mulcahy. He had to be called that, didn’t he? The name alone was enough to keep the anger fizzing in his veins. Who did he think he was, strutting around like he owned the place? Greasing up to that poncy little Spanish git, him with his fucking apologies. If he ever crossed his path again, he’d make him regret that, one way or another. Cassidy dug the phone from his pocket to start the call-round, when he was pipped by the chirrup of Brogan’s mobile. He waited as she answered, grimaced, and mouthed Healy’s name.

  ‘Sir?’

  Cassidy looked on, curiosity mounting, as Brogan’s frown deepened to the point where her eyebrows very nearly met.

  ‘But that’s hardly necessary, sir. I mean…’

  He could just about hear the whine of Healy’s voice emanating from Brogan’s phone, but not well enough to make out a single word.

  ‘Okay, sir, okay…Yes, first thing.’

  Brogan said goodbye, through gritted teeth, and hung up.

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ she shouted, thumping the dashboard with the flat of her hand. It was as emotional as Cassidy had ever seen her. ‘You won’t believe what Healy’s gone and bloody done.’

  Mulcahy slammed his foot on the brake just in time to save himself a respray job. He thought he’d got used to negotiating the ridiculously narrow gateway of his parents’ semi-detached house in Milltown during the past few months. But coming back in the dark, his edge blunted by drink, he’d swung the steering wheel too freely into it, and only just stopped short of side-swiping the gatepost. He threw the car into reverse, lined it up, then eased it forward onto the scarf-sized patch of concrete that passed for a drive. He hadn’t even had a driving licence last time he lived here.

  He sat in the car, damning himself for driving home over the limit. This wasn’t Spain, and the days when a flash of your warrant card would get you a nod and a wink and a wave on from the lads in Traffic were long gone. Careers had foundered on less, and his was in a parlous enough state as it was. But that was the bloody problem with everything, wasn’t it? It had been a bad night to go out: the interview with that poor Spanish girl still raw in his mind, his annoyance at missing an afternoon’s sailing still lingering. But the lure of Siobhan Fallon had been strong. He’d wanted to get something good from this day before it ended. And it seemed like he would, too, after they’d gone outside to have that smoke. From the second they got out there, before he’d even held out his lighter and watched her lips purse round her cigarette and draw in the smoke, they were chatting like old pals. About Mark and the party, who they’d known there, making the connections. Huddled there in the tiny porch of the Long Hall, standing in from the rain, he’d smiled to himself at what a pair they must look. Himself big-boned, crude-carved, towering over her. Siobhan short, shapely, head tilted back to look up at him, laughing. Even in heels, she barely made it to his shoulder.

  Back inside, they couldn’t steer away from the subject of work for long. It was too big a part of both their lives. Certainly there didn’t seem to be much going on in hers apart from work. No man t
hat he could tell, although he’d already adjusted his assumptions in that regard when she called him. Even then, they kept it to generalities. She told him about some of her big stories, how being chief reporter for the Herald was alright but no great shakes, how she was still set on bigger things. When she asked him again, he told her more of what his job in Madrid had been, how intelligence work differed from regular policing, the opportunities it offered. He even offered to help her out with some info on EU joint prevention if she did decide to do a story. But by then he was fairly sure that it was him she was interested in, and not just a story.

  A flurry of rain drumming on the car roof pulled Mulcahy out of his thoughts. Fat drops burst lazily across the windscreen, snaking away down the long black bonnet. Beyond, behind the garage doors, his dad’s Nissan Almera was parked. Untouched for almost a year, like the house and all its contents, it was his now. And, like everything else, he didn’t want it. He couldn’t bear even to sit behind the wheel and turn the engine over once in a while. It felt wrong. In the end, he’d gone out and bought a car of his own. It wasn’t much, a big bruiser of an old Saab. That was all he could afford with the drop in pay and him still forking out for the apartment in Madrid. But at least now, when he woke in the night, he could look out the window and see something that was his.

  He gathered his stuff from the passenger seat and hurried to the front door, the bag of takeaway food he’d picked up in Ranelagh interfering with his efforts to get the key in the lock. Probably look drunk to anybody watching, he thought, though he was far from it.

  ‘You liked it over in Madrid then?’ Siobhan had asked, leaning in towards him, all interest, the chandeliers above striking sparks off her eyes.

  ‘Absolutely loved it. Best place I’ve ever worked, by a mile. There’s such a buzz, such a strong sense of life out on the streets there, in the sun, in the heat. It was great, for the most part.’

  ‘So what made you decide to come home?’ She sat back a little. ‘It sure as hell wasn’t the weather.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t the weather,’ he confessed, trying to laugh his way through the sudden catch in his voice. ‘The powers-that-be decided to set up a new operation in Lisbon. MOAC – the Marine Operations Analysis Centre.’

  Siobhan nodded. ‘Yeah, I think I read something in the Irish Times about that. Some kind of global drugs-tracking centre, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s it, for monitoring seaborne trafficking across the Atlantic mostly, but also sharing intel with other countries, co-ordinating rapid interventions, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Sounds exciting.’

  ‘It was. Or at least it would have been,’ he said ruefully. ‘Anyway, to cut a long story short, that put the kibosh on the Madrid operation, everything went west to Lisbon – and my role went with it.’

  ‘So how come you didn’t go, too?’

  It was the second time in a day that somebody had asked him. God knows how many times he’d been asked it in the six months since his return. And the fact that Siobhan sounded like one of the few who were genuinely interested didn’t make him feel any more comfortable with it.

  ‘I could have gone, but I didn’t. Like I said, it’s a long story.’

  He glanced at his watch, anything rather than look her in the eye.

  ‘So go on, tell me. I’m not doing anything else tonight, if you’re not.’

  His head came up in time to catch the smile rippling across her mouth. Some day, he thought, he might wake up to those lips, those eyes, bathe in their light like the morning sun, and be warm and happy. But not tomorrow – not if it meant first having to wade through all the crap of the past six months, and the twelve that had gone before them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, finally. ‘It’s too complicated. There was a whole load of other stuff going on, as well. I’d prefer not to go into it right now.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ she said, though clearly surprised by his reticence. ‘It’d be awful if we suddenly got all serious at this hour of the night.’ She swirled the remains of her drink around in the glass and knocked it back in one, then nodded towards his empty. ‘It’s my twist. Same again?’

  But the spark was gone from the evening after that, and while they had another couple of drinks, chatting happily enough, they’d called it a night fairly early. He hoped he hadn’t killed it completely. As they were leaving the pub he said he’d like to meet up again, and she’d given him that smile and said she’d like that, on the tips of her toes as he bent to kiss her cheek. There was something between them alright. He’d just have to wait till next time to pursue it.

  Back in the now, the stale smell of his parents’ past enveloped him as he pushed the door shut behind him. The still sharp memory of undertakers bearing their remains out that door, within six months of each other, cut into him as it did every night on his return. He headed for the kitchen in the dark. No need to see the faded green wallpaper, the tired carpet, the half-moon telephone table and the coat-stand in the hallway. He already knew everything was covered in a thin patina of dust. The tiny red bulb in the answering machine blinked at him as he swept past, but he ignored it.

  Mulcahy flicked the light on in the kitchen, trying his best to keep the house’s deathly atmosphere from settling on him. The kitchen and the spare bedroom were all he ever used now, during the few hours he could bear to be there. Sometimes he turned on the television in the living room for the news, but never sat and watched it, preferring to listen instead from the kitchen. As for the spare bedroom, he had no choice. His own room, with its narrow single bed and wardrobe crammed with relics from his childhood, felt as small and constricted as a tomb now.

  He upended the carton of takeaway – a glutinous mass of noodles, water chestnuts and pallid chicken pieces – onto a plate and left it steaming weakly while he grabbed a bottle of Navarra from the counter top, uncorked it and filled a small, short-stemmed glass. One more drink wouldn’t make any difference. As he turned, he noticed an odd orange glow above the overgrown hedge at the bottom of the garden. It looked like the shimmer from a fire. Glass in hand, he climbed the stairs and went to the small back room upstairs. Out of the window he could see over the line of high hedges into the small public park beyond. No more than a couple of acres of grass and clumps of stunted shrubbery, but it had been half the world of his boyhood, a place where cowboys roamed and would-be soccer stars scored the best goals of their lives. Looking out across it now, he saw a small bonfire flare up as another log was thrown onto it, flames casting shadows across the faces of the half-dozen kids sitting around it, talking and laughing as they sheltered from the rain under a long sheet of plastic, a makeshift tent. He thought of his meal going cold in the kitchen but felt no impulse to go eat it. The scene outside held him spellbound, recalling how years ago he’d sat round fires there with his gang.

  It’s not healthy, he said to himself, not healthy living like this in a house that’s getting more like a mausoleum by the day.

  For a second, like the fire outside, all the faces of his regrets seemed to flare up in front of him, dancing fingers of flame: his parents, his friends and colleagues in Madrid, his ex-wife Gracia, even Brendan-bloody-Healy, his current boss. Then, just as quickly, they faded again and with that came something like peace. In the window now, he saw nothing but the dark and himself reflected in it, realising that for months he’d been doing little more than hiding out here in Dublin, licking his wounds, trying not to feel sorry for himself and failing. That had never been his way.

  He turned and looked around the spare room, as if seeing it for the first time: the knackered old mattress on the bed unused for years, the boxes of hoarded remnants, a limp flap of wallpaper peeling from the corner by the window. He swirled the wine around his glass, then knocked it back. This house meant nothing to him, really. Without his parents it was just empty rooms. With a grim smile, he remembered how he’d spent most of his teenage years dreaming of getting away from it. He’d only moved back in for convenience, for
familiarity, because for so long he’d called it home. Getting rid of it had been just one thing too many to deal with.

  Well, not any longer. Tomorrow he’d do what he’d been putting off for months: despite the free-falling property prices, despite all the memories wrapped up in it, he’d arrange to have the house put on the market. Then at least he might have some chance of moving on.

  4

  Mulcahy waited for the gleaming Luas tram to trundle past, then eased the Saab into the queue of traffic at the top of Abbey Street. It was a glorious morning. Clear blue skies erased all evidence of the previous evening’s rain, and his inward-looking mood had dissipated with it. The first thing he’d done after he got up was phone a couple of estate agents. They hadn’t been confident about his chances of a quick sale, but just making the call lifted some of the weight from his shoulders. Eventually he got to Smithfield and found a parking place in the lee of the high stone wall of the former Jameson distillery. Ahead of him, the sun bore down on what was left of the old market square. Ranks of uniform new-build office and apartment buildings lined the west side, sucking every scrap of age and tradition from their surroundings. Like so many other projects, they’d been a sponge for the flood of Celtic Tiger cash that had swept through Dublin over a decade before, when legions of the newly rich were desperate to stash their cash anywhere the taxman couldn’t get his hands on it. Building boomed: in place of crumbling warehouses and inner-city blight came regeneration, young professionals, sleek apartments, smart shops and cafés. Even the old cobbles, worn smooth and black by four centuries of hooves, carts and footfalls had been ripped out and trucked away, replaced by whorls of new, pale-grey granite sets.