‘Howya, grand morning,’ the boy said without looking up.
Mulcahy barely grunted, his breath catching in his lungs as his eye roamed the newspapers arrayed in front of him. Almost every front page carried the same story, but most looked hurriedly cobbled together in a late-edition rush compared to the massive headline splashed below the Sunday Herald logo. THE PRIEST! it screamed across the full width of the page, dwarfing the heading FRENZIED RELIGIOUS RAPIST ATTACKS TEENAGE GIRLS that ran underneath. To the right and lower down, a smaller headline SPANISH TROOPS IN DUBLIN topped a sidebar running down the outside edge, a border of words framing two grainy, blown-up photographs of Jesica and Alfonso Mellado Salazar.
Fucking hell.
Siobhan’s byline was all over the page, twinned with that of someone called Paddy Griffin, news editor. Hers alone headed up the ‘exclusive’ main story which focused heavily on the assault on Jesica Salazar but led, vividly, with the second attack, on Catriona Plunkett. As he pulled the paper open he saw there were five or six more pages of coverage inside, complete with pictures of Catriona Plunkett, her family, more of the Salazars and even maps and graphics illustrating the locations of the attacks. Where the hell had Siobhan got her information from? And so quickly? This wasn’t so much a leak as a cracked main.
As he read on, Mulcahy was astounded by what a credible blend of accurate reporting and wildfire conjecture Siobhan’s writing was – gruesome detail of the two attacks garnished with blood-curdling speculation about the terrors of having ‘a maniac in our midst’. It was exactly as Brogan had predicted. There were even quotes from some of the medics who’d treated the two girls. Worse, though, was the fury with which, on the inside pages, both the Garda Commissioner and the Minister for Justice came under fire for incompetence and procrastination. The poor sods in the Garda press office had been caught on the hop – the only statement reproduced being the first one Healy had left them with. There it was, word for word, pathetically inadequate. The criticism tilted into the red zone as the time lag between the two assaults was highlighted; a years-old file photo of Brendan Healy in uniform, looking grim, was captioned: ‘Could he have done more?’
As if that weren’t enough, the leader page launched yet another vicious attack on the Minister for Foreign Affairs for shaming the entire country by allowing military representatives of a foreign power, albeit a friendly one, to barge into an Irish hospital and remove a patient. Were our medical and justice systems held in such low esteem by other EU nations that we couldn’t be trusted with the care of their citizens? Surely the Minister should tender his resignation forthwith?
Mulcahy knew all the political stuff was piss and wind, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be hell to pay. He could picture all too well the repercussions: two ministers and a Garda Commissioner on the warpath, hundreds beneath them desperate to avoid the flak, frantic to find answers to the inevitable storm of questions that would be asked in the Dáil, and even more so to find scapegoats to throw to the slavering press.
And the woman whose bed he’d slept in on Wednesday was behind it all. How in the name of God had that happened?
He was still turning it over when he got into Harcourt Square at eleven. On the fourth floor, Brogan’s office door was shut but a light was visible through the opaque glass so he stuck his head round it. She was sitting at her desk looking frazzled. He’d never seen her so much as glance at a newspaper before, but there was a collapsed heap of them strewn across the floor beside a jumble of box files.
‘How goes it?’
‘I’m sitting in the middle of the biggest shitstorm I’ve ever been involved in, so how do you think it’s going?’ she said, looking up from the file she was studying. ‘Action this, review that, double check the bastarding other. By the way,’ she paused, indicating the box files. ‘I had to take those back from your office.’
He shrugged. ‘The fallout’s bad?’
‘Nuclear.’
‘Anything I can help with?’
‘No,’ she said, lowering her head again. Then, almost in passing: ‘Healy says he wants to see you, upstairs, soon as you get in.’
‘Upstairs?’ Healy rarely saw anyone in his office on the sixth floor, preferring to emerge occasionally to poke his nose into everyone else’s business instead. ‘Any idea why?’
Brogan shook her head. ‘I’ve got enough crap on my plate without worrying about yours.’
He headed back to the lift, pressed the button for the top floor. There the accommodation was more salubrious. Even the difference in carpet grade was immediately obvious. His shoes sank into thick Garda-blue tufts the second he stepped out. Here on the sixth there was no open-plan space, just corridors and discrete offices, some with small secretarial areas outside with desks and monitors. These were mostly empty now, it being a Sunday. Except for Healy’s, whose secretary was sitting there with her coiled hair and her two-piece suit, typing something on a screen.
‘Go straight in, Inspector,’ she said.
Apart from the standard-issue lamp on his desk, Healy’s office couldn’t have been less like Brogan’s. It was four times the size, with a big oak desk, executive chair and three monitors. There was also a two-seater sofa and armchairs over to one side, plus an assortment of filing cabinets and bookcases. But above anything else it was spotlessly tidy.
‘Come in, Mike, come in,’ Healy said, getting up. He was looking tired, Mulcahy thought, noticing the dark semicircles forming beneath his eyes. When he put a hand out it was not to shake but to point at the straight-backed chair in front of his desk. ‘Sit yourself down there. Can I ask Noreen to get you a coffee?’
Mulcahy refused the offer.
‘Right,’ Healy said, sitting into his chair again. ‘You’ve seen the press, I suppose. Christ, we took some pasting there. The bloody Minister and Commissioner have been taking turns hauling me over the coals since six this morning. I’m telling you, if I could’ve got my hands on that reporter, Fallon, I know what I’d be doing with the rest of my days. Serving them out in Mountjoy prison for bloody strangling her.’
Mulcahy smiled as politely as he could.
‘The thing is, Mike, we can’t afford to be having leaks like that. I said to Claire last night that, after this settles down, I should get you to have a look into it to see if we could root out the rotten apple. You impressed me a lot yesterday, I don’t mind telling you, so I was all the more surprised when Claire said she thought you knew Fallon. Then you seemed so offhand when I asked you about it, I thought, fair enough, we all know journos. And then, fuck me, what should drop into my inbox this morning but this. I’d like you to tell me what you make of it, Mike.’
Healy swivelled his computer screen round so that Mulcahy could see him double-clicking on his email queue, then on an attachment within the email he’d opened. He just had time to read the two-word message ‘hacked off’ before the media player launched a black subscreen which stalled a moment, then ran some good quality CCTV footage of two people, a man and a woman, approaching each other on the street, stopping to chat, then climbing into an open-top sports car.
Oh shit.
‘I recognised you straight away, Mike.’ There was a strain of incredulity in Healy’s voice now. ‘But, would you believe it, I had to ask a colleague who the woman was. She said she thought it might be Siobhan Fallon from the Sunday Herald. Tell me it isn’t true, Mike?’
Mulcahy swallowed, completely wrong-footed. The video clearly came from one of the gate cameras outside Harcourt Square, and the imprinted timecode identified it as being from the previous Wednesday. No getting away from that. But how the hell could anybody have got their hands on it? More to the point, who had sent it? He immediately thought of Healy’s exchange of glances with Brogan during the media meeting the night before.
He straightened up in his seat and looked Healy in the eye.
‘I told you last night that I knew her, Brendan. And I also told you I hadn’t given her any information about this
investigation.’
Healy snorted. ‘Sure, you said you knew her. But didn’t you think it worth mentioning, especially last night, that you’d been off for a jaunt in her car with her only three days earlier? I’d call that one hell of an omission, Mike. I mean, you must see how that looks?’
It was Mulcahy’s turn to become irritated.
‘Of course I see how it looks. It looks like someone’s trying to stitch me up.’
‘So, what’re you saying? You’re trying to tell me this meeting didn’t take place?’ By now Healy was jabbing his finger at the screen.
‘No, obviously it did. But what I’d like to know is who sent you this material. It’s clearly malicious. Haven’t you considered why someone would want you to see this?’
‘Sure I have. So I’ll tell you who sent it to me. “A friend” it says here. Untraceable, of course, but do you know what? Right now, I’m thinking, maybe they have been a friend to me. Or at least a hell of a better one than you’ve been.’
Mulcahy decided it was best to roll with that one. ‘Brendan, as I keep telling you, I was not the source of this leak.’
‘So you just happened to meet Fallon straight after you’d left a briefing regarding this very case, and at no stage did she bring up the subject of either Jesica Salazar or The Priest?’
‘No, not as such.’
It would have been easier to lie, but he couldn’t. That might only backfire worse in the long run if it ever emerged. And of course Healy pounced on it like a starving cat.
‘What the hell does that mean, “Not as such”?’
There was only one answer left to him. ‘It means she asked me if I knew about a Spanish girl who’d been attacked, and I refused to discuss the matter with her in any way, shape or form.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ Healy hissed at him. ‘She asked you this on Wednesday evening, and you didn’t think it was worth mentioning to either Claire or myself?’
‘No. How could I have known what Fallon was planning? Like you, yesterday, I just thought she was on a fishing expedition. I didn’t think it was relevant.’
Healy stood up. He was seething now, his voice shrill, barely able to control himself.
‘Relevant? I’ll tell you what’s bloody relevant. Someone’s been leaking like a drain to this bitch all week, as a result of which I’ve had my arse chewed off and my prospects blown to buggery for Christ knows how long. And you couldn’t even be bothered to give us a heads-up? I can’t believe it, Mike, that you, of all people, who I’ve been carrying for months, giving you an easy time, waiting to pop you back into your bloody beloved Drugs Squad, could come in here and see me drowning last night, and you couldn’t even be arsed to throw me a lifeline.’
That was it. He couldn’t just sit there and take that. ‘With respect, Brendan, that’s bullshit. I spent most of last night busting my balls to come up with an intelligent media response that would leave us looking as good as we could in the circumstances. And now I come in here and find you’re happier to believe some anonymous shit-stirrer—’
‘Bollocks,’ Healy cut in again, his finger jabbing the air. ‘This is about loyalty, trust and fair play. And I’ll tell you, this isn’t my idea of any of them. Nor is it a decent return on favours done. So I’m telling you now, Mike, you can go fuck yourself as far as I’m concerned. Don’t you come in here looking for favours from me in future, because I damn well won’t be doing you any.’
In the event, Healy didn’t have enough manpower to freeze Mulcahy out of the investigation completely. Later that day, he called to say he would be handing responsibility for liaising with the Spanish back to the Minister’s office but, beyond that – and a distinctly chillier note to their day-today encounters – there was little practical difference to Mulcahy’s role over the next few days as the investigation was ramped up beyond all previous measure. The long hours went by in a blur of frenetic activity, peppered by briefings, meetings and general slog. Healy might have considered himself to be leading the investigation but, as his chief representative on earth, Brogan was still in everyday charge. Much to everyone’s relief, rumours that she was to be replaced by a big-hitter came to nothing as Healy’s rearguard action, essentially a fight for self-preservation, was more effective than most would have anticipated.
So, for all that everyone felt the pressure increase a hundredfold, the most palpable effect was a welcome further injection of manpower and resources. For those on the ground the storm itself seemed to move off now, up to another level, the one above them where a war of words between press and politicians raged. Down below, a kind of bunker mentality set in, one where teeth were gritted, shoulders were squared and every member of the crew focused on one thing only – getting a result.
As for the world outside, it seemed to the Garda team as if madness had taken hold. Not just the city of Dublin but the whole of Ireland was in a full-blown panic over The Priest. From that Sunday lunchtime, the entire media apparatus had gone into absolute tunnel-vision hyperdrive. Every front page, every TV news bulletin led on the story. Every radio talk-show fell on the subject with pornographic glee, inviting every under-informed pundit, over-opinionated academic and the verbally diarrhoeic public at large to hash and rehash, corrupt and over-inflate the threat, oozing raw sentiment and fantasy, and above all whingeing about the incompetence of the Gardai, the government and anyone else they could think of blaming.
Mulcahy got through it all by adopting much the same attitude as everyone else. There was talk of an internal investigation to trace the source of the leak, but it was just talk. Mulcahy had his own suspicions – how could he not have? – but in the absence of any evidence, or the time to go find it, he was happy for things to stay as they were for now; not so bothered about clearing his own name as avoiding the risk of being stitched up by some ambitious Internal Affairs weasel keen for a quick and easy result. Tasked by Healy to review the case against Scully, he spent untold hours with his face glued to a computer screen reading and rereading all the initial interviews, poring over negative forensics reports, and going through the material on Scully’s seized PC with a detective Garda from the IT Dept. There was nothing of interest there, no buried files, no hidden sadoporn, no password-protected portals to websites advocating the torturing and mutilation of young Spanish or Irish women.
He even ploughed through Scully’s thesis work on the so-called Irish Inquisition, the title of which had understandably come close to giving Brogan a stroke. But it was nothing more than a dull historical account of the persecution of a young Irish noblewoman from Kilkenny who’d been tried for sorcery in the early fourteenth century. Scully had clearly been trying to work it up into a shocker but the material was doing its best to resist. Like everything else, it was a dead end that led Mulcahy back to the conclusion he’d reached earlier about Scully. He was an unsavoury character, there was no doubting that, and it was easy to see why Brogan had become convinced there was more to him than met the eye. Because indeed there was: he was a drug dealer worried he was being nobbled for something he hadn’t done. And so he ran. But for now, at least, Mulcahy could turn up nothing further to link Scully to the attack on Jesica Salazar.
Having delivered his conclusions to Healy, the superintendent handed Mulcahy another poisoned chalice straight away, putting him in charge of the tips and leads team. As Brogan had predicted, the result of the press and public hysteria about The Priest, in information-gathering terms at least, was pandemonium. So much so that a rota of six guards had been assigned to field and respond to the deluge of phone calls, letters and emails coming in from the general public.
They all had to be followed up, wherever feasible: every suspicious neighbour, every idiot with an axe to grind or just ringing in to share their fears, preoccupations and morbid fantasies. The prospect of further public humiliation as a result of missing a vital piece of information, especially one handed to them on a plate by a right-thinking citizen, simply didn’t bear thinking about. Mulcahy became the
filter. It was up to him to assess and prioritise, task initial responses, hand on to the appropriate quarter what wasn’t pertinent to the team’s own investigation, and pass up anything that was relevant, to Brogan, whose people would then do the onward enquiries. It was hard, intense work. It kept him busy, and so tired when he got home of an evening that he was unable to dwell on anything much else in his life. Not even Siobhan, the thought of whom still generated a maelstrom of contradictory feelings in him.
Coming out of Harry Heffernan’s office that Wednesday morning, Siobhan Fallon was beaming so bright even the word-blunted subs perked up and took a look at her. Everyone had been taking a lot more notice of her. These last few days she’d never been so busy, never been anywhere near so big. Doing radio shows over the phone, TV news interviews in front of the brass Sunday Herald sign by the main door downstairs. Once, even, up here in the newsroom, much to the annoyance of every begrudger in the place. All that tutting when the camera crew set up their lights. She couldn’t help wondering if it was because she was leaving the rest of them in the shade.
And now Heffernan had finally gone and bestowed on her the only acknowledgement of success that meant anything to him, or to any of the rest of them when it came down to it. He’d called her into his office and announced that he was going to talk to the chief exec about getting her that raise she wanted. Twenty per cent minimum, he’d said. It had better be. She’d already had a sniff that morning from Alan Hanley, the news editor over at the Irish Times. And a pal at the Sunday Tribune said her name had been mentioned as a possible poach over there, as well. If the ball kept rolling her way, she might be able to name her own price by the end of the week.
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