The Priest

by Gerard O'Donovan

‘Who the hell else would it be, ya gobshite?’ Cassidy muttered, but Brogan was already talking over him.

  ‘Yes, what is it? Quickly.’

  ‘Urgent message for you, outside.’

  Cassidy suspended the interview and sat glowering at Scully like a guard dog sizing up an intruder. Outside, the young cop handed Brogan a handset. Who the hell could this be?

  ‘Boss, it’s Donagh. Sorry to interrupt, but I thought you’d want to know this.’

  ‘Go on, then. What’ve you got?’

  ‘You won’t believe it, boss. We’ve got the fucker. There’s a small white Transit van in Scully’s garage with welding equipment in the back. I did a quick check and, sure enough, it’s registered in his name.’

  ‘You beauty.’ In her mind, Brogan punched the air. ‘What’s it look like inside? Anything I can hit him with?’

  ‘Well, it looks clean enough. No blood or anything but then, as soon as I spotted the welding gear, I got the hell out. Thought I’d better leave the rest to Technical, y’know, if it’s a crime scene an’ all.’

  ‘Good lad,’ Brogan said, and told him to tell Technical to impound the vehicle and get it straight over to the lab on a flatbed. ‘Top priority, no excuses. Was there anything else?’

  ‘Actually, yes there was, boss. Maura bagged a stack of porno in his bedroom, and a fair old stash of cannabis and what looks like ecstasy tablets. About twenty or thirty of them.’

  Brogan felt her chest contracting, feeling certain that she’d got her man. With this lot, the rest should be just a formality. ‘Jesus, Donagh, you guys have outdone yourselves. Pints all round on me later, yeah? For now, though, I’m going back in to nail this bastard.’

  She hung up and handed the phone back to the uniform who was beaming at her for some reason. She ignored him, grabbed the door handle and took a deep breath, half expecting Cassidy to have wound Scully up into a bate in her absence. But in the interview room everything was exactly as it had been: Cassidy glowering, Scully making a poor job of looking unconcerned. Soon wipe the smirk off that face, she thought as she sat down again, tipping Cassidy the wink as she told him to start up the recorder again.

  Siobhan knew better than to trawl the wards. It wasn’t her style, and she’d only draw attention to herself. It didn’t do to get a reputation for that kind of thing. Of course, there was no point approaching the doctors or the admin staff directly. She’d get nothing from them, not at this stage. Their jobs were far too cushy and well paid to risk losing for the sake of a journalist’s curiosity. The nurses, on the other hand, were always a good bet: overworked, underappreciated and, crucially, underpaid. Best of all, though, were the cleaners, porters and ancillary staff, those poor eejits who did the worst jobs for the lowest wages, and were usually guaranteed to lay their hands on any information you wanted, for a small fee.

  She reckoned it must have been one of them who phoned her with the story in the first place, recalling the broad Dublin accent cutting through the phone crackle. It might even be easy to track him down, as he’d be one of very few nowadays who was actually Irish. Most of them were Bosnian, Afghan, Vietnamese – asylum seekers and illegal immigrants being the only ones desperate enough to scrape shit, blood and vomit off floors in an economy that, until recently, had enjoyed full employment. Even most of the good citizens now standing in dole queues for the first time in ten years would consider themselves above that sort of thing.

  She was standing near the hospital shop, considering the feasibility of tracking her informant down and surprising him, when luck presented her with an easier option. A bell clanged and a pair of wide steel doors opened in the bank of lifts opposite. Out shambled the tall, gaunt figure of Ivo Piric – a man who’d been very useful to her in the past. He was probably no more than forty but, with his deep-set eyes, hollowed-out cheeks and skeletal frame, Piric looked to be in greater need of medical attention than the oldster he was pushing ahead of him in a wheelchair. He’d always looked like that, ever since he turned up in Dublin in the late 1990s as a Bosnian refugee from the war in the Balkans. A man so haunted by the past it was etched on his face, having survived a massacre by hiding under the dead bodies of fellow villagers.

  When she originally sold his story to the Irish Independent she’d had doubts about a lot of what he claimed. Although there was no doubting he’d witnessed a massacre, something about him made her wonder which side of the atrocity he had actually been on. Even if she had been taken in by him, though, the work Piric was stuck doing here had to be some kind of punishment. As he went past with the wheelchair, he recognised her and smiled. She remembered how unsettling she’d always found that: like an animal baring its teeth, devoid of warmth.

  ‘Hi there, Ivo.’

  He put a hand up and parked his charge in the entrance to a television room, where patients and visitors were being deafened by some awful daytime magazine show. Piric loped over, his gaze already fixed on the small brown leather purse Siobhan was pulling from her bag.

  ‘I need some information,’ she whispered, putting a hand on his forearm and drawing him towards the far wall. ‘And you’re the very man to get it for me.’

  It took Mulcahy a lot longer to work out how to copy in all the stations in the Dublin Metropolitan Region than it did to write the email itself. He pressed send and his request for information on violent sexual assaults with any religious overtones spun away into the electronic ether, accompanied by a low whoosh from the speakers. He was thinking about trying Brogan again, when the phone rang. It was her.

  ‘Thought you’d want to let your embassy pal know we’ve got this lad in custody,’ she said, her voice humming with excitement.

  ‘Great,’ he said. ‘Give me some details and I’ll start packing my bags.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t do that just yet. We haven’t charged him.’

  ‘But he’s the one, right?’

  ‘He hasn’t put his hand up for it. But he’s admitted leaving the club with Jesica and we found a van in his garage with a load of welding equipment in the back. Technical Bureau are swarming all over it now – should have something for us by morning.’

  ‘I take it he’s not a welder, then?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Brogan laughed grimly. ‘He says he’s a postgraduate research student at UCD. Doing medieval history or something like that.’

  ‘That’s interesting.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘No, I meant the academic-welder thing. It’s not the most likely hobby for a historian.’

  ‘Absolutely, yeah,’ she said, her mind moving on elsewhere. ‘Anyway, for the moment I’m holding him on a possession rap. We found a stash of hash and ecstasy in his bedroom.’

  ‘That’s useful. Much?’

  ‘Not so much hash, but there must have been twenty or thirty Es.’

  Mulcahy knew what that meant. ‘That’s a lot for a cash-strapped student. You reckon that’s what he was doing up at the club – dealing?’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking. He’s not so cash-strapped, either. His clothes are all designer labels, handmade shoes, that kind of stuff. So not cheap student chic. I thought maybe you could check him out with your contacts in Drugs, whether they have any form or intelligence on him.’

  ‘Yeah, of course,’ he said, pleased to be able to do something useful at last.

  ‘Quickly, like. It would be good to have it to take into the next interview.’

  ‘No problem. Give me the name and details, I’ll make a call and get straight back to you.’

  She gave him everything she had on Scully and said she’d be waiting to hear from him.

  ‘Did you get my message about Geraghty?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘How come he went through to you?’

  He was glad she couldn’t see his eyes rolling heavenwards; he’d almost forgotten her paranoid streak.

  ‘I had a few thoughts about his findings myself,’ he said, ignoring her question. ‘I’m not certain we’ve—’r />
  ‘Look, I’m sure they’re very interesting and all,’ Brogan cut in, ‘but do you think you could keep them for this evening’s briefing? You can share them with everyone then. I really need this drugs gen on Scully. Could you just do that, like right now?’

  Stuff it, he thought. His own news could wait. ‘Okay, no problem, but before you go, have you said anything to Healy about this guy yet?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘I’m just wondering how much to say to the Spanish.’

  ‘It was Healy told me to call you,’ she said, her voice prickly. ‘I briefed him a few minutes ago. He said to let you – or them rather – know we’ve got a suspect in custody. They don’t need to know any more than that for now.’

  Things at the hospital had progressed even more swiftly than Siobhan had hoped. True to form, Ivo Piric was already aware of some fuss having occurred, but he wasn’t very strong on facts, rambling on about men in uniform taking a patient away. Intriguing, sure, but it sounded like something he’d dreamed up. For twenty euro, though, he was happy to find her someone who knew exactly what had happened. Siobhan settled into the empty canteen with a plate of sad grey fish and limp yellow chips, expecting a long wait. But barely four chips in, Piric was back. Which was how she’d ended up spending the past ten minutes crammed into a glorified linen cupboard with Nurse Edith Sorenson, flanked by shelf upon shelf of starched white sheets and pillow cases, her shorthand struggling to keep pace with the torrent of indignation spilling from Nurse Sorenson’s lips. So far the nurse had confirmed, as obliquely as she could, everything Siobhan’s informant had told her about this Spanish girl’s appalling injuries. But the stuff she was going on about now – of Gardai interrogating the poor creature though she wasn’t fit for it, then a fist-fight breaking out with some official, right at the girl’s bedside, and to top it all, what sounded like an invasion party from the Spanish embassy stalking the corridors of St Vincent’s Hospital – it was pure dynamite.

  ‘And you’re sure this was the same fella who came to get her yesterday, with the troops, as you call them. The original one from the Spanish embassy?’

  ‘I’m absolutely certain. He was only a scrap of a fella but very full of himself, I can tell you. Strutting around like a little Franco, he was.’

  Siobhan tutted sympathetically, noting the reference and deciding it put Nurse Sorenson in her mid-forties or so. ‘But you didn’t get his name?’

  ‘He didn’t offer it – on either occasion. I might as well have not been there as far as he was concerned. He was a very rude man.’

  ‘And there wouldn’t be any record of his name, in paperwork or anything, up at the nurse’s station? It would be a big help, you know, so we could give him his comeuppance in the paper.’

  Nurse Sorenson looked tempted by the suggestion but, as she’d already refused to let her have an unofficial peep at the Spanish girl’s records, Siobhan wasn’t holding out much hope. Sure enough, the nurse shook her head ruefully.

  ‘No. In any case, it was Sister Philomena who dealt with all the paperwork.’

  ‘And you don’t think Sister Philomena…’ Siobhan said, writing the name down to her informant’s evident horror, ‘you don’t think she’d be willing to cooperate?’

  ‘God no, she’d have my guts for garters if she knew I was talking to you. That’d be the end of me. I’m only telling you this because—’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Siobhan said, trying to calm her down. ‘You’ll have her in here yourself if you don’t pipe down. Look, you needn’t worry. I won’t let on to anyone about our little chat if you don’t want me to. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you telling me all this. It’s important that these people shouldn’t be allowed to think they can walk all over us, you know.’

  Nurse Sorenson relaxed a little, evidently relieved that she’d chosen so trustworthy a member of the fourth estate to share her story with.

  ‘Speaking of which, could you maybe remember the names of the Gardai who came in the day before? The ones who got involved in the fight with this fella. They sound just as bad.’

  ‘They were,’ Nurse Sorenson agreed. ‘Especially the young woman who was in charge. Nicely dressed she was, but she had a mouth on her. You’d think she could walk on water.’

  ‘And her name was?’

  ‘I don’t remember, I’m sorry. I’m sure it began with a B – Brady or Brosnon or something, but I know that’s not quite right.’

  ‘Any of the others?’ Siobhan looked up hopefully from her notepad. ‘The one involved in the fight, maybe?’

  ‘Ah, now, yes, I think she called him Andy. Yes, I’m pretty sure of it. She was calling him that while she was trying to drag him off the other…’

  ‘And you’re sure it was the Garda who struck first?’

  ‘Oh, yes, certainly. And without any warning, either. Just launched himself at the fella as soon as he came through the door.’

  Siobhan was so caught up in getting it all down, she nearly missed the next revelation.

  ‘Inspector Mulcahy was the only one of them who behaved with any sort of decency or respect for poor Jesica.’

  Siobhan gawped at her, not quite sure she could believe what she’d just heard. ‘Inspector Mulcahy, did you say?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure that’s what he said his name was.’ Nurse Sorenson was smiling a little coyly now. ‘He was my idea of a proper Garda.’

  ‘As in Mike Mulcahy, from the Drugs Squad?’ Surely that couldn’t be right? There had to be lots of Mulcahys in the guards. But at inspector grade?

  ‘I’m sure I couldn’t say.’ Nurse Sorenson paused, pursing her lips in concentration. ‘I can’t see why anyone from the Drugs Squad would have been here. I didn’t hear any talk of drugs. But now you mention it, he didn’t seem to be with the other two, if you know what I mean. To be honest, it was like he was only there because he could speak Spanish, and they were desperate to talk to young Jesica.’

  ‘He spoke Spanish?’ Siobhan didn’t even wait for a reply: she was already off and racing down the corridors of her mind, opening doors, closing others, putting it all together. If it really was Mulcahy on the scene, maybe there was some major international drugs connection as well? This was turning into one little beauty of a story.

  Now all she had to do was get to the bottom of it.

  When he phoned Liam Ford, he only had to wait a minute for the search to go through and to hear the ping of a positive hit echoing down the phone line to him. The last time Mulcahy had worked out of the cramped GNDU offices over in Dublin Castle, an outside request to run a check on a suspect would have taken a couple of hours, minimum. Now it was instant.

  ‘Yup, we’ve got a couple of Patrick Scullys here,’ Ford said. ‘One from Ballyheige, Kerry, so I’m guessing it’s not him. This other fella has an address in Blackrock alright. DOB 25.03.86, so that makes him what, twenty-three? Last-known has him a postgraduate student at UCD. That sound about right?’

  ‘That’s him alright. What’s he down for?’

  ‘Nothing much. Arrested for minor-possession cannabis – two point two grams – back in May ’07 at a university gig. Got off with a first-strike slap on the wrist that time, and nothing do-able since, except he keeps getting mentioned as a small-time dealer of Es. Nothing heavier, as far as we know. That’s all we’ve got.’

  ‘Typical student dealer, then, making some dosh on the side.’

  ‘Sounds like it, the little shit – making a blip on the radar every now and again.’

  ‘Fine, it’ll give us a bit more leverage on him, anyway. With that one on the sheet already, it’s enough for us to keep him in custody, for now.’

  ‘String the shitehawk up,’ Ford growled. ‘Whatever he’s supposed to have done.’

  ‘Glad to hear you haven’t grown a sensitive side over the years,’ Mulcahy laughed.

  ‘Yeah, right. Unlike you. What was all that about, at lunchtime? You ran out of the place like a scald
ed cat.’

  ‘Nothing you’d be interested in.’

  ‘I suppose you never called Murtagh either.’

  ‘Not yet, but I will.’

  ‘Speaking of calls, some little hottie was looking for you here earlier.’

  ‘For me?’ Mulcahy’s brow furrowed. ‘Over there?’

  ‘On the phone. Feckin’ bizarre, man, especially after I’d only just seen you and all. When I told her you hadn’t worked here for years, she was a bit surprised, then she said something about Madrid and having your mobile number, so I didn’t go on about it.’

  ‘She didn’t leave a name then?’

  ‘No, didn’t want to talk to me at all after that. And believe me, I tried.’

  Mulcahy racked his brains to think of anyone who’d known him when he was at the Castle and in Madrid and would fit Ford’s description. He couldn’t.

  ‘Oh well, if she’s got my number she can get in touch.’

  ‘You’d better hope so. I’ve never seen you looking more like you could do with having a good time. And she sounded like just the girl to give it to you.’

  8

  ‘Okay, okay, calm down, you lot.’

  Although there were only eight people present, the incident room was buoyed up by enough excitement for twice that many. The babble of voices faded away again as Brogan prepared to wind up the evening briefing. Sitting on a desk behind the semicircle of animated cops, Mulcahy felt more than ever the outsider. Having slogged their arses off all day out on the streets, the team was floating on a cloud of satisfaction that, at close of play, their good work was about to yield a result. It was the best feeling any decent cop could experience and one that he hoped and prayed they were bloody right about. Because, before the briefing began, he’d made that call to Murtagh about the Southern Region job. He’d cut to the chase, making no assumptions about Dowling’s departure but letting his own interest be known. And, hallelujah, Murtagh had responded enthusiastically in kind, saying in effect that he really hoped Mulcahy would apply the minute the job became available, because it needed to be filled quickly. The implication being: he was in, but only if he was free to move. That thought had been playing on Mulcahy’s mind throughout the briefing. That and getting the estate agents to crack on. It would all be so much easier with the house off his hands.