The Priest

by Gerard O'Donovan

  Martinez fell silent as he let Mulcahy register, then absorb the impact of what he was saying.

  ‘It was you?’ Mulcahy could hardly believe it. ‘You organised to have the kid flown out?’

  ‘No, no,’ Martinez tutted sharply. ‘I did not know about this until Ibañez told me just now. This was most inelegant, but they must have had permission from your government, or they could not do it. No, the reason I’m calling is to tell you it was me who suggested that you be our liaison contact. When I heard Ibañez mention your name during the conference call yesterday, I was naturally very surprised. But, of course, I said there could be no better man to have on our side. I tried to phone you last night but you never answered, and I was diverted to some other thing and forgot. So, I apologise.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Jav,’ Mulcahy groaned. ‘I’ll probably be stuck on this for weeks now.’

  ‘Yes, but last time we spoke you said how bored you were.’

  ‘That was months ago.’

  ‘And things have improved so much for you since then?’

  By the time he hung up again, Mulcahy was feeling marginally more enthusiastic about his new assignment. They’d had a useful conversation about Salazar senior and the chance of a connection with him, although Martinez had been as sceptical as himself regarding that possibility. Mostly, Mulcahy was just pleased to have been able to get his own back on Martinez by forcing him to look into the possibility of a tie-in on his own turf.

  ‘You don’t ask much, huh?’ Martinez had complained. ‘Don Alfonso has every terrorist and lunatic in Spain, from ETA to those bastard Al-Qaeda bombers, hoping to take revenge on him.’

  ‘Precisely, Jav,’ Mulcahy said, driving the point home as forcefully as he could. ‘Come on, man, don’t tell me it didn’t cross anybody’s mind over there?’

  ‘Sure, it did. But then we think, how paranoid can we get? This is the man’s daughter, and nobody claims it has anything to do with him. We think even idiot terrorists and assassins are more, uh, media aware, these days.’

  Mulcahy wasn’t going to argue with that, but he left the ball in Martinez’s court all the same. Then he got stuck into his files again with renewed vigour. He wasn’t discovering much, so far, beyond his own disgust and bafflement at the number of sick perverts living in Dublin. In his five years in uniform in the late eighties, he’d only ever come across a dozen or so cases of domestic violence and a few flashers. Of course, a decade later, like everyone else, he’d been riveted by the ongoing scandal of Ireland’s paedophile priests. But his deeper reaction to that, back then, had been mostly a heartfelt satisfaction that the clergy’s centuries-old grip on the conscience of his countrymen had been shattered at last.

  What he was reading here, though, beggared belief – something that hadn’t sparked off any general outcry in the media. Hundreds of broken arms and ribs, shattered cheekbones, women and children hospitalised after being beaten by drunk or drugged-up husbands and fathers. Then there were the rapists and paedophiles of every hue – brickies, teachers, solicitors, IT specialists and bankers, as well as clergymen – and the cases he was reading were only the ones where actual bodily harm had been inflicted during the commission of the crimes. What he couldn’t get his head round was the fact that this couldn’t all have come from nowhere in a sudden rush. It wasn’t like the economic boom had sparked a parallel rise in deviancy. The horror was in thinking how much must have been hidden for so long.

  In the end, he had no choice but to set his revulsion aside and get on with the job. What was immediately evident was that violence on the scale inflicted by Jesica Salazar’s attacker was incredibly rare. As were the rates of stranger assault and rape generally. Irish men clearly preferred to vent their anger on wives and girlfriends, and usually in the privacy of their own homes. Starting with the cases that had actually made it into court, he worked his way steadily through the boxes, sheaf after sheaf of ruined lives, unearthing nothing that bore even scant resemblance or relevance to the attack on Jesica Salazar. Every time he came across a stranger-rape or violent sexual assault, he checked through the details for anything similar, then put it to one side to be reconsidered later.

  If the fully investigated cases didn’t look very hopeful, there was even less to glean from the huge raft of local reports and ‘unactionables’. Again most of these were domestics, often where charges had been laid in the heat of the moment – then hurriedly withdrawn. Here came not only the date-rape allegations that never went anywhere but also alleged assaults so serious that Mulcahy simply couldn’t believe they had not been considered worthy of thorough investigation. He’d worked his way through a third or so of the material by the time Brogan and Cassidy clattered back into the incident room, and he realised it was well after seven o’clock. Neither of them so much as glanced in his direction, instead stopping in front of the whiteboard to draw something on the map during a huddled conversation. He got up and went over to them.

  ‘Any progress?’

  ‘Yeah, a little,’ Brogan conceded, finally. ‘We’ve identified the scene, we think. Technical are going over it now. We’ll know more in the morning. But it looks like she may have been dragged into a van, and the assault occurred there. It would explain a lot.’

  ‘Makes sense,’ Cassidy agreed, gruffly. ‘A van scenario means he could’ve had his blowtorch or whatever all fired up and ready to go. We were looking at that as a possibility from the outset – or maybe you didn’t get here in time for that part of the discussion, sir.’

  Cassidy’s eyes darted towards Brogan.

  ‘No, Sergeant, I didn’t,’ Mulcahy replied, trying to keep the irritation from his voice.

  ‘Well, you’ll have a chance to get fully up to speed tomorrow at the nine a. m. briefing,’ Brogan interjected quickly. ‘I’m assuming you’ll join us for that, Mike. In the meantime, you might as well get off. Unless you’ve come up with anything yourself?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ he said. ‘Nothing obvious, anyway. Our man is beginning to look like a bit of a one-off judging by that lot. But you know that already.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t expecting you’d turn up anything exactly the same, or I’d have remembered it. But there’s a strong chance he’ll be in there somewhere.’

  ‘There were one or two that might merit another look, but I’d like to run them by you first.’

  ‘Why don’t you see me after the briefing in the morning,’ Brogan suggested. ‘I’ll have a quick look at whatever you’ve got then. In the meantime, Sergeant Cassidy and myself have a couple of other things to follow up tonight, before we finish. Okay?’

  ‘Fine,’ Mulcahy nodded. ‘See you in the morning, then.’

  The heavy diesel roar of a bus engine starting up outside the window, on Burgh Quay, drew Siobhan out of her reverie. She looked at the clock in the bottom corner of her monitor and realised another hour had passed without her adding significantly to the story up on her screen. It was a work-up of a short piece Griffin had passed her from the Associated Press wire, about a fat kid in Portland, Oregon, who’d held his entire high school to ransom with his father’s assault rifle after he heard that hotdogs were being taken off the lunch menu. A couple of phone calls to a nutritionist and a junior minister at the Department of Health, a few choice quotes, and she’d been able to work it up into a nice little piece about the obesity threat hanging over, not just America’s children, but Ireland’s, too. There was nothing like a bit of waffle to keep till Sunday.

  Twenty past eight: time to get going if she wasn’t to be late for Vincent Bishop. What little polishing, if any, the piece needed she could do in ten minutes, fresh, in the morning. Griffin had long since given up and headed off for a lonely night in, watching the rolling news channels on TV in his one-bedroom flat in Drumcondra. She closed the file and logged off, then stood up and wandered over to the window, stretching her stiff arms and back as she went.

  The daylight looked to be on the wane, but it was always hard to tell
through the smoked glass windows of the Herald building. She loved looking out at all the faces of the passengers on the top decks of the buses waiting at the terminus outside. Level with her on the first floor, and hardly more than twelve or fifteen feet away, they sat entirely unaware as she watched them through the one-way windows, trying to figure out from faces, hairstyles and clothes what sort of jobs they had, what sort of lives they lived, where they came from, where they might be going to. Once, late on a Friday night, she’d even seen a couple of kids shagging on the back seat of the Number 128. The rest of the deck was empty, the girl hanging off the seat-back, frantically trying to keep a lookout while the boy pumped away furiously, his jeans barely lowered off his arse-cheeks. They had no way of knowing that Siobhan’s shriek of surprise had brought the rest of the newsdesk running over for an eyeful, cheering like a bunch of overgrown kids when the boy at last shuddered and collapsed.

  Amused by the memory, she walked back to her desk. It was hard to beat the camaraderie of the newsroom sometimes. She was pulling her coat on and reaching to turn off her screen when the phone rang on Jim Clarkin’s desk behind her. She hesitated before picking it up. Clarkin, the paper’s raddled crime correspondent, rarely if ever made it into the office, preferring to trawl the bars near the Four Courts for his stories, or do the rounds of the circuit courts in his car. He always worked from his mobile. It was bound to be a wrong number. Still, you never knew.

  ‘Hello. Newsdesk.’

  To her surprise the caller did ask for Clarkin.

  ‘He’s not here. Is it anything I can help you with?’

  The caller, on a mobile, was barely audible through the static, but the gist of what he was saying was clear enough. He had information to sell.

  ‘Yeah, well, we’re always on the lookout for good stories. I suppose we could sort you out something, if it’s right for us. It’d have to stand up, though – we don’t hand out money for rubbish. Tell me more.’

  As she listened, leaning back against the desk, her face muscles soon slackened into boredom, until the caller revealed the pivotal detail of his story. A Spanish student had been attacked and raped out in the southside suburbs the night before. But it was the injuries he claimed had been inflicted that had Siobhan on her feet again in an instant, reaching for pen and notepad.

  ‘He did what? Ah, jayney, that’s revolting.’ Disgust tightened her face as she jotted down the details. ‘And is the girl alright?… Do you have a name?… Well, you must know… Spanish, and that’s all you have?… And, what hospital is she in?… Okay, what hospital was she in, then?…Yeah, good…What else can you give me?’

  But the caller was disappointingly short on further details and, when he began to repeat what he’d said before, she cut him short. ‘Okay, look, I suppose it’s worth twenty euro. Give me your name and I’ll leave the cash at reception for you.’

  She fished an envelope from a drawer and scribbled the caller’s name down on it.

  ‘No, don’t worry, it’ll be there – providing the story checks out. And thanks, yeah? Remember my name, Siobhan Fallon, if you ever have any more stuff like that, okay?’

  She hung up, grabbed her mobile from her bag and rang Bishop’s number. It went through to voicemail.

  ‘Hi, Vincent, something’s come up here, so I’m going to be a little late. Give me a call if you have to go.’

  Then she turned the mobile off, went back to her own desk and sat down again, eyes flicking from side to side, thinking hard. It was a good two minutes before she shook off her coat, pressed the space bar on her keypad, and watched the screen flicker into life again. Double-clicking with focused efficiency, she called up her contacts file and scrolled down through a maze of names, notes and numbers until she found what she was looking for. She tapped a number into her phone and waited.

  ‘Hiya, is that the Phoenix Park? Look, I know it’s late but is Des Consodine still there? Sergeant Consodine, I mean…’

  The evening was calm and clear, the delicate blue of a soft sky arching down to kiss the flat green sea, as he drove south along the Strand Road. For once, Mulcahy was glad of the sluggish traffic. He wearily took in the wide sweep of Dublin Bay, the tide a quarter of a mile out, the dun reaches of wet sand host now to dog-walkers, arm-in-arm lovers and the distant dots of line fishermen, eternal optimists that they were. Caught in the queuing traffic, looking out at the giant red and white smokestacks of the Pigeon House power station, the boyhood memories came flooding back. Of walking the beach, paddling in cold clear water, dodging the near-flat waves as they rippled in along the shore, his father’s trousers turned up to the knee, and the unshakeable certainty of a strong hand holding his, protecting him from whatever might come along. And afterwards, an ice cream from the kiosk in the Martello Tower, or maybe a trip out to Dun Laoghaire for a scoot around the bay in Seaspray.

  The traffic moved at last, and on a whim he turned the Saab into one of the narrow public car parks that dot the coast road at intervals. Dublin wasn’t such a bad place to be after all, he reflected, if only he could rid himself of this awful feeling of drifting without an anchor. He turned off the engine and gazed at the still, calm scene spread out before him. The low evening light seemed to hover above the surface of the water, pressing down on it, as if calming it still further. This tranquillity was totally at odds with the catalogue of assaults he’d been reading all day. But such moments of quiet beauty had always been a part of Dublin for him; the part he missed like crazy when he had moved to Madrid and was instantly overwhelmed by the clamour and rush of daily life over there. He had got used to that soon enough, too, of course, quickly becoming addicted to the exuberance of the Madrileños, their love of colour, noise and spectacle. Yet when he’d met Gracia and married her, it was the stillness in her that he’d fallen for. But it hadn’t been enough, not nearly enough, in the end.

  He raised his hands to his eyes and felt the weight of his mobile phone shift in his jacket pocket. He took it out and stared at it, scrolling back through the call log until he came to Siobhan Fallon’s number. Superficially, he couldn’t imagine anyone less like Gracia. Apart from her hair, of course. And the eyes. But Siobhan, too, seemed to have that vein of beauty running right down through her. Except in her case it wasn’t silent, or in any way interior. It was directed out towards the world. He pressed the call button but was put straight through to her voicemail.

  ‘Hi, Siobhan, it’s Mike Mulcahy. Just wanted to say I enjoyed last night, and was wondering if you’d fancy doing it again any time soon?’

  She got to the Pembroke half an hour late and, as suspected, found Vincent Bishop had already decamped from the bar into the restaurant and left a message for her to follow. He had a bottle of champagne on the go and he insisted she have a glass with him to toast her success on the Maloney story. Or ‘our’ success, as he insisted on calling it – a touch too loudly for Siobhan’s taste. But they soon moved on to other topics and it wasn’t until after they’d finished eating that Bishop brought the subject of Maloney up again.

  ‘I made a cracking deal as a result of that story,’ Bishop said, unbuttoning his jacket.

  ‘How do you mean?’ she said. A small warning bell jingled in her head but the food and wine had lulled her into relaxation.

  ‘Oh, you know, one of the sports promo companies Marty and Suzy Lenihan head up – I’d been looking at it for a while. I was able to scoop up a sizeable interest when the shares went through the floor first thing Monday morning – you know, after all the rumours that they’d be splitting up. It’s a solid little business, so the price’ll be back up in a week or two, once people realise it’d take a lot more than infidelity to tear those two apart.’

  ‘Look, Vincent, I really don’t want to hear about that.’

  ‘No, wait,’ he said, cutting in and putting his hand in his pocket. ‘I just wanted to say, thanks. I thought you might like this, as a mark of my appreciation.’

  He removed a tired-looking red velvet box fr
om his jacket pocket and handed it to her across the table.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, the full klaxon going off now, as she sat forward and stared at the box, the colour of dried blood against the pale flesh of his spindly fingers.

  ‘Have a look,’ he insisted. ‘Go on. It won’t bite.’

  Against almost every instinct, she took the box from him and opened it. Nestling inside was a hoop of dull yellow metal, barely a couple of inches in diameter but intricately wrought in tiny swirls, curls and sinuous protrusions, and studded with what looked like four greyish pearls. In form it reminded her of a Celtic Cross, but when she looked again she noticed a bent metal prong cutting across the back and realised it was some kind of Tara Brooch. Despite the signs of age, it was exquisite.

  She lifted her eyes from it and stared back across the table at Bishop, words for once evading her.

  ‘I know a Tara Brooch might seem a bit old-fashioned nowadays,’ he said half apologetically. ‘But this one’s special. Let me show you.’

  He took the box from her and removed the brooch, turning it over to reveal the flat, entirely undecorated, reverse side. Weirdly, the plainness of the metal here made it look even more precious.

  ‘There, see,’ he said, holding it up to the light. ‘It’s the mark of George Waterhouse, the Dublin jewellers who revived the Celtic style after the original eighth-century brooch was found in a stream in Meath in the 1840s. They made this piece for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. I got it at auction a couple of years ago. Most early ones were silver or pewter but this is a bit more refined, twenty-two carat gold with Irish river pearls.’

  ‘It’s… it’s gorgeous.’ She looked around the small dining room, thinking everyone in the place must be staring at them, but no one was.

  ‘So take it,’ he said, holding it out to her on the palm of his hand now. ‘It’d be lovely to see you wear it, but I’d keep it in the box if I were you. It’s a rare piece.’