The Priest

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The Priest Page 18

by Gerard O'Donovan


  Absorbed as she was, the rap on her door startled her. What in the name of Christ could it be now?

  ‘Come on in,’ she shouted, a bit sharply.

  ‘Boss?’ A cautious head peered around the door. ‘Am I interrupting?’

  ‘Maura, what is it? You weren’t at the briefing, were you? I thought you were long gone. You must be exhausted.’

  McHugh shook her head and waddled up to the desk, standing side on to it rather than facing forward. The curve of her belly was getting more prominent by the day.

  ‘You know you told me to get on to UCD and find out what they think of Scully down there?’ she asked.

  Brogan listened as Maura related how she’d got nowhere on the phones so she’d driven over to the university herself and been lucky enough to catch the History Department’s administrative secretary just as she was leaving and, even better, hit it off with her straight away.

  ‘She’d just found out she’s expecting and she took one look at me and, well, you know yourself how it is,’ she continued. ‘Anyway, turns out she doesn’t like our boy Scully much. Thinks he’s way too far up his own arse. My guess is they must’ve had a run-in over something some time. But y’know, it meant she was only too happy to lay the goss out for me.’

  ‘Good girl,’ Brogan smiled. Maura could winkle the grit from an oyster, she was so chatty.

  ‘Well, he’s definitely doing the PhD, anyway – although this girl did say he’s takin’ a bit longer at it than most. Getting on for three years, or something. So I asked her what sort of stuff Scully is studying and she says, far as she knows, his specialist area is medieval Christianity.’

  ‘Religion?’ Brogan said, her mind jumping immediately to what Mulcahy had been banging on about earlier. When, in interview, she’d asked Scully what he was studying he hadn’t been evasive, only said it was medieval history and implied that it was way too complicated to go into. He hadn’t mentioned anything about religion. Christ, why hadn’t she thought to follow up on that?

  ‘He doesn’t look the type, does he?’ she said, almost to herself.

  Maura wasn’t so sure. ‘I wouldn’t know. I always thought students were supposed to be poor. One or two of the ones walking in and out of the department today looked like they’d come straight off a catwalk.’

  Brogan said nothing, still cursing herself for not following up that line of questioning. Scully was such a cool little shit, how had he got that under her radar?

  ‘Anyway,’ Maura continued, ‘so I push a bit further and she eventually looks up his file and gives me the title of his doctoral thesis. Get a load of this, it’s called “Ireland’s Inquisition: Echoes of Bernardo Gui in the Annales Hiberniae”.’

  She’d tripped over the Latin a bit but Brogan got the picture. ‘The Inquisition?’

  ‘I know, that’s what I thought, too,’ Maura said, her face lighting up like a beacon. ‘That was all about burning people at the stake, wasn’t it? I couldn’t help thinking of young Jesica.’

  ‘Well, sort of,’ Brogan said, trying not to let her own somersaulting thoughts get the better of her, fighting against them, trying to think it through. The Inquisition was definitely all about religion, she knew from the little she could remember learning about it in school. But it was in Spain, wasn’t it, not Ireland? Jesus, Spain? Surely there couldn’t be a connection?

  ‘Did she say anything else about it?’

  ‘Nah, she didn’t know any more, but the thing is, she gave me a phone number for Scully’s thesis supervisor or whatever they call her.’ Maura consulted her notes again. ‘Dr Aoife McAuliffe, a lecturer in medieval studies. So I give her a call. In her fifties, I’d say, from the voice, and a right snooty attitude on her. This one was a lot meaner with the info. I got the impression that herself and Scully were dead tight, that she saw him as her star pupil or whatever.’

  ‘She had nothing bad to say?’

  ‘Not a word,’ Maura said. ‘She was more concerned about getting the whys and wherefores of him being questioned, and whether Scully’s human rights were being breached, than giving anything away to me.’

  ‘So did you get anything at all from her?’ Brogan just wanted Maura to get to the point. Her breath was getting shorter now, as her chest tightened with anxiety.

  ‘Well, that’s just it. Obviously, I didn’t tell her what we had him in for. And that’s just as well, cos otherwise I think she’d never have said what she did say.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Only that all his work involved looking at the persecution of heretics and witches here in Ireland during medieval times, and its connection to the, eh, wider Inquisition on the continent. Honestly, boss, I didn’t understand half of what she was saying. Most of it was about some Dame Alice Kettle or Kittler or something who was burned alive at the stake, or should’ve been… I don’t know. The thing is, at one point I stopped her and asked her who this Bernardo whatsit fella in the title of the thesis is.’

  ‘Gui,’ Brogan said, wondering why she remembered the name so well. Had she heard it somewhere before? ‘Bernardo Gui.’

  ‘Yeah, him,’ said Maura. ‘Well, you won’t believe this. According to McAuliffe, during the Inquisition in Spain, he was the fella who wrote the rulebook on how to torture people into making confessions.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ Brogan jumped up and grabbed her jacket from the back of the chair.

  ‘What is it, boss?’

  ‘We’ve just told them downstairs to let Scully go.’

  *

  As soon as Siobhan opened the door, she heard it. The low beep of the machine. Responding to its summons unthinkingly, she pulled her key from the lock and went straight to the living room and pressed the play button without even turning the lights on. Instantly, she recoiled when the rich thrum of a guitar blossomed from the answerphone speaker and the high male voice took flight: Roy Orbison again, and creepier than ever.

  Recovering herself, she jabbed at the machine to turn it off but in her haste succeeded only in knocking it to the ground. As she knelt down, fumbling between the waste bin and the table, the song continued to poison the darkness around her.

  Its tempo was a bit more jaunty by now and a string section had joined the guitar but it still closed in on her, so much she could hardly breathe. She recognised it now: ‘My Prayer’, more familiar from another version by The Platters that her parents used to play at home all the time. So long ago. So long it felt like a ghost stalking her through the darkness, Orbison’s strangled tones turning its message of imagined love into cold psychotic threat.

  At last she got hold of the answerphone and found the button. As she felt it click beneath her fingers all the pressure in her head seemed to wash away and the silence that fell around her became still more audible than the song had been. She heard her own breath rasping in and out of her lungs, her trousers brushing against the carpet as she pulled her legs out straight and sat back on the carpet, a feeling of exhaustion swamping her.

  ‘Fuck him,’ she said to herself in the enfolding gloom, the lights of the city outside refracting through the window like knives of orange flame. ‘Fuck him, if he thinks he can play me like some shitty old record.’

  11

  It was shaping up to be another spectacular summer’s day, that rare pairing of clear-blue heaven and bright biting sunlight guaranteed to make any self-respecting Dubliner add a ‘Glorious, isn’t it!’ to their morning salutations. Already, at only eight-fifteen, the heat had built up enough to feel almost oppressive by the city’s meagre standards, and Mulcahy was in the Saab, his elbow out the open window, heading into work, thinking hard about what else he might do today to push things a bit further forward.

  The Cork job was still very much on his mind again. He’d had a call from Liam Ford the night before to say that Dowling had been approached but was playing for time and more money. Fair enough, that was only to be expected. The man would be a fool to take the first offer he was made, especially for an
injury that was cutting short a distinguished career. But it still meant the deal would probably be done within weeks rather than months.

  It was beginning to feel like he was running out of time. Things would have to move soon, or he wouldn’t be free to go for the job. He’d spent the rest of the evening checking over and signing off on details and photos left for him by the estate agents. And first thing this morning he’d had a call from one of them to say they had two viewings lined up, with the possibility of one or two drop-ins, too, this being Saturday. The prospect of being unencumbered by either the house or his current job filled him with what felt like a force field of energy. Or maybe that was just Siobhan. He’d spent no small while thinking about her, too. Even the thought of moving to Cork hadn’t taken the shine off that. It was only three hours away by train.

  His mobile went off.

  ‘Mulcahy?’ It was Brogan.

  ‘Yeah. How’s it going?’

  ‘Not good.’

  Christ, she sounded low.

  ‘Did Kennedy rustle up a get-out-of-jail-free card for Scully?’ He wasn’t being entirely serious, so her response in the affirmative came as a surprise.

  ‘He did.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ Mulcahy cursed. ‘I thought we had him covered. How’d he manage that?’

  ‘Look, Mike, I don’t really have time to go into it now, but it’s actually a good bit worse than us just letting him go.’

  ‘That sounds ominous.’

  ‘It is. There’s been another one,’ she said, almost as if she herself could hardly believe what she was saying. ‘Another assault, I mean. Overnight, out in Marino. I don’t have a time yet, as it’s only just come in to us from District.’

  ‘Bloody hell, how bad?’

  ‘Even worse than Jesica, by the sound of it. Bad as it gets without the victim being dead.’

  His mind swam with the awful possibilities.

  ‘And Scully? He was out?’

  ‘We had no choice. His brief, Kennedy, was on the warpath. The warrant had too many holes. Lucky for me, it was Healy signed off on the release.’

  Not so lucky for the poor kid who was attacked, Mulcahy thought, but he kept that to himself.

  ‘And you’re sure it’s the same attacker?’

  ‘No question. Has to be. Same victim type, seventeen years or thereabouts, found semi-naked and unconscious in Fairview Park. Similar injuries, but even more disgusting, burns not just on the genitals this time but all over her body. I asked if they were shaped anything like crosses. Apparently there are so many it’s hard to tell for sure, but they said that’s one way of looking at it.’

  ‘Jesus, that’s awful. He’s getting worse.’

  ‘Looks like it,’ she said.

  ‘Was the victim a student?’

  ‘Hard to say, but they don’t think so. Not a foreign one at least. But same age, same dress style – her clothes were dumped nearby – all that. No ID yet.’

  ‘A working girl?’

  ‘Not that we know of.’

  ‘Is she still under? I mean, can she talk?’

  ‘She’s barely alive, as I understand it. She’s in Intensive Care in the Mater Hospital, under heavy sedation. It’s not looking good. The medics don’t give her more than a one-in-two chance.’

  God, but that was bad. He wondered briefly if Jesica might be well enough yet to be re-interviewed, then cast the thought from his mind. She’d be so well wrapped up back in Spain now, it could be weeks before anyone would be allowed near her again.

  Brogan went on, ‘Can you do something for me?’

  ‘Sure, name it.’

  ‘I’ve got to go brief Healy on this, and then head in to the Mater to look in on the girl and see if I can get anything from the guys who treated her. The local lads already called in Technical to do the CSI stuff out in Fairview, and apparently they’re still out there. What I really need is for someone with a bit of sense to get over there right now to do some nosing around. I’d send Cassidy but he’s on his way over to Scully’s, to bring him in early and check his whereabouts last night. He undertook to remain in the family home.’

  ‘Did we have anybody out there keeping an eye?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Doesn’t look like Scully kept his promise, does it?’

  ‘Don’t, Mike, I can’t bear to think… Christ, this is turning into a total fuck-up.’

  He heard her sigh deeply into the phone, and felt for her. This really wasn’t looking good. In fact, the worst possibilities hardly bore thinking about. She’d have to pull herself together or it would drag her under.

  ‘Don’t let it get to you, Claire. None of this was your doing. Look, I was on my way in anyway, so I’ll just head over to Fairview now, okay?’

  ‘Yeah, good,’ she said. ‘You know, let them get on with it but bring back a few initial ideas for us to run with, and make sure they don’t overlook anything that only we might see the significance of. See you back at Harcourt Square once you’re done.’

  She gave him the location details and, as soon as the cars ahead of him moved, he swung the car round in a tight tyre-squealing U-turn, heading down Haddington Road towards the East Link Bridge. The streets were fairly free now he was no longer heading into the centre so he put his foot to the floor and, as he did, the blood began to accelerate around his system too. Out of frustration that another young kid had been so abominably assaulted, and that somehow the team’s failure to find an answer in time could have contributed to it. Suddenly all his earlier doubts about Scully’s guilt were thrown into relief, like so many minor misgivings.

  As he sped on towards the river, Mulcahy passed the entrance to the estate where he’d interviewed Grainne Mullins the day before. Whatever she might think, it was clear to him that she’d had a lucky escape. He tried to picture Scully coming down to Irishtown from Blackrock, and taking out his anger on a working girl. Had it been an experiment? A trial? There seemed such a gulf in the levels of violence. He hardly noticed himself paying the bridge toll, such was the rush of thoughts crowding his brain. He made a mental note to double-check that someone else on the team had sounded out the Vice lads down in Store Street regarding other assaults on prostitutes. Despite Grainne Mullins’s experience, it was hard to believe anything similar could have occurred to another working girl and gone unreported. They might moan about the way the Gardai treated them, but they were usually quick enough to kick up if they felt any real threat out on the streets.

  His mind raced as he weaved through the heavier traffic on the East Wall Road, getting a broadside of angry horns as he ran a red light turning on to the North Strand. A couple of minutes later he spotted the team from Technical on the far side of the inbound carriageway, opposite the row of shops on Marino Parade. Their cars and vans were jumbled on the pavement, with still more of them inside the grounds of Fairview Park. He looked for somewhere to turn.

  They were packing up already. Mulcahy enquired after the crime scene manager and was directed towards a skinny, hawk-faced man called Eddie Keane. He was dressed in the standard white coveralls staring intently at the screen of a small digital camcorder he was holding at arm’s length, videoing a series of small red flags set on thin metal rods inside a patch of ground cordoned off by blue-and-white scene tape. The area was about five metres square and lay immediately behind the park railings which, together with a line of thin hedging, partially screened the spot from the sight of any traffic surging past on the Fairview Road.

  A bizarre spot to dump a victim, Mulcahy thought, as he headed towards Keane. Sure, it would have been much quieter in the early hours of the morning, but even so, this was a major thoroughfare, with cars and people passing day and night. He looked behind him, past the traffic, at the parade of shops across the wide road. A chemist’s, a mini-market, an estate agent and a café were topped by what looked like a floor of residential accommodation, all with net-curtained windows overlooking the park. A couple of security cameras, too, bolted h
igh on the brick frontage, though probably not at an angle to take in this patch of ground across the road. Even so, the chances of being spotted by someone were pretty high.

  ‘Either he needed to get rid of her in a massive hurry or he didn’t give a shit who saw him,’ Mulcahy said after introducing himself.

  ‘Or maybe both,’ Keane replied, pushing back a strand of floppy black hair off his forehead.

  Mulcahy guessed he was in his early thirties, wiry with an intelligent demeanour that was probably attributable to the thin rimless glasses perched halfway up his hooked nose.

  ‘He didn’t take much time over it, anyway. As far as I can tell, he must’ve pulled up, jumped out, hoiked the girl over the railings – followed by everything else – and then skedaddled. Didn’t leave much trace of himself behind, anyway.’

  Mulcahy took another look around. Fairview Park was a broad expanse of grass, pathways and small clumps of weatherbeaten hawthorn and poplar. The land, reclaimed from the sea and the muddy estuary of the Tolka river, was bisected by a curving embankment across which now clattered a lime-green Dart train heading towards the city centre. Beyond, a grey-blue expanse of sun-brushed seawater lit up the horizon, and to his right, far in the distance, he could just make out the twin humps that marked the southern exit of the Dublin Port Tunnel. Why dump a body here, Mulcahy wondered. Why had he chosen this busy spot? Could he really have been so desperate to get rid of her? Or was he trying to make some point? Did he want her found quickly? So she wouldn’t die?

  ‘Can we be absolutely certain he didn’t attack her here?’ he asked.

  Keane frowned and pushed his glasses a little further up the ridge of his nose.

  ‘No way did anything happen here in the open. Nothing corresponding to the injuries she received has been found on the ground. It would’ve been impossible to inflict that much, and especially that type of, physical damage without leaving some traces behind.’

 

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