Mulcahy heard a cough and looked up. The messenger was standing by the window, stubbing out the cigarette end on the metal sill outside.
‘They always say they’ll be ready for me,’ he moaned to the unlistening city outside. ‘But they never bleedin’ are.’
The house on Palmerston Park was about as grand a semidetached villa as it was possible to possess in Dublin. Late Victorian, solidly brick built, it rose through three floors of diminishingly elaborate casement windows, the uppermost arched attractively and poking out from a fine mansard roof. Like all the houses overlooking the quaint semicircular park opposite, it was set back from the road by a low granite wall topped by black spearhead iron railings. Only the choice of hedging behind them differed. For some it was laurel. For others privet. For this one, the choice had been an impenetrable, close-clipped Irish yew.
One hell of a place for a taxi driver to be living, Mulcahy thought, as he walked through the open gates, noting the satisfying crunch of gravel as he stepped onto the drive. But immediately he stopped in his tracks. A small arc of grass was all that remained of the front lawn. Most of the garden had been carved away to make more space for parking, although there was plenty of that already in front of the huge detached garage, converted from a coach house, over to the left hand side. What caused him to halt was a van – a filthy, but still discernibly white, Transit – that was parked in front of the garage. It was just the type described by the eyewitness in the Jesica Salazar case, and caught on the edge of a CCTV frame pulling in where Catriona Plunkett had been dumped in Fairview Park. Sure, there were thousands of similar ones in the city, and they still hadn’t even pinpointed the precise make or model they were after, but its presence on this driveway immediately put Mulcahy on the alert, the hackles on his neck tingling.
He mounted the double step to the stout, six-panel door and gave the large brass bellpush a shove. He was rewarded with an old-fashioned jangle from somewhere deep within the house – but nothing else. He waited a minute, then tried again. No response. He was thinking about the van again, wondering why nobody was answering the door when he thought he heard something, a clatter of tools, maybe, coming from round the back? Of course, it was a fine day – they might not have heard the bell if they were out in the garden. Mulcahy walked over to a narrow passage between the house and garage, where a wooden gate was open. He went through and at the far end came out into a magnificent garden, at least fifty metres in length, with mature beech and apple trees, a profusion of colourful flower beds, and a design sense straight out of a homes magazine. Only when he stepped on to the patio did Mulcahy spot a man on his knees, surrounded by planks, a pile of soil and other building materials, working on the far side of the garden. He was wearing camouflage-style combats and a thin, heavily soiled white T-shirt, and the muscles rippled on his arms and back as he worked.
‘Mr Rinn?’
The man straightened his back as suddenly as if he’d been lashed with a whip but otherwise stayed in the same position, his arm outstretched with a lump hammer in it, not even turning.
‘Mr Sean Rinn?’ Mulcahy tried again. The man slowly swivelled round now, his eyes shielded by the tatty peak of an army-style baseball cap.
‘Get out! Get out or I’ll have the Guards on you,’ he shouted suddenly, his face contorted in anger. Or was it fear? He stood up and began to advance, holding the hammer out threateningly, until Mulcahy put a hand up and pulled out his warrant card.
‘I am the Guards,’ Mulcahy said. ‘Now put that bloody hammer down and stop acting the goat. I need to talk to you.’
That seemed to do the job pretty quickly. The man dropped the hammer on the patio with a clatter and immediately started wringing his hands. Something here wasn’t right.
‘Are you Sean Rinn?’ Mulcahy asked, approaching him carefully.
The man shook his head, the peak of his baseball hat swishing the air in front of him.
‘No, sir, he’s out. I’m just doing some work for him, laying the path, like.’ His accent was flat and uneducated, with the pinched nasal quality of the Irish midlands. The way he spoke, Mulcahy figured he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the box. Probably been in trouble with the Gardai before, too, given the anxiety he was currently displaying.
‘Any idea when he’ll be back?’
‘Didn’t say, sir.’
Mulcahy took a look around. Everything seemed normal enough now. He’d just startled the guy. ‘Do you work here regularly?’
‘Once a week, sir, on the garden. I just gets on with what he tells me.’
Mulcahy nodded. ‘And that’s your van outside, not Mr Rinn’s?’
‘N-no, sir,’ the gardener stammered, anxiety seeming to get the better of him again. ‘It’s mine, sir.’
‘Right, then, I’d better let you get back to work,’ Mulcahy said, deciding there was nothing further to be gained from the conversation.
He scribbled a note on the back of a business card, asking Rinn to get in touch, and popped it through the letter box, then went and sat in his car. He shook his head. What in the name of God was a taxi driver doing living in a house like that? Not to mention employing a gardener? He looked at the case file lying on the passenger seat beside him. What to do? He was enjoying his time out of the office, away from the ceaseless ringing of the phones and his computer screen. But, as likely as not, old Sergeant Brennan was just a grumpy old fucker with a grudge, just as Rinn witnessing an assault was probably a complete coincidence.
Mulcahy looked at his watch. Plenty of time, and besides, he was out here now. He snatched up the file and opened it again, turning to the victim’s statement and scanning down through it. The woman stated clearly that none of her belongings had been taken. No missing cross and chain, nor any mention of one. He flipped back to her details: Caroline Coyle, 22 Cowper Road, Dublin 6. Only a minute up the road. DOB 17.6.78. That made her, what, thirty-one now – thirty at the time of the assault? She was way outside the victim profile; all the others were teenagers. Even Grainne Mullins was a teenager at the time of her attack. He thought of what his visit to Grainne had turned up and decided that wasn’t likely to be repeated here. The victim was clearly a respectable, articulate woman. The investigation had been thorough, as far as he could see. But they’d had nothing to go on. She was attacked. Her assailant got spooked and fled, leaving no trace of himself. It happens. A woman that age would probably be out at work at this hour of the day. But where was the harm in trying? He got his mobile from his pocket and tapped in the phone number listed in the file.
The first thing that struck Mulcahy about Caroline Coyle was how wealthy she looked. He’d half expected it, given the shimmering Jaguar coupé parked on the driveway of 22 Cowper Road, a classic Rathgar townhouse with a fan of white granite steps leading up to a double-pillared entrance. But when she opened the shiny red front door, Mulcahy was almost knocked over by the air of money and refinement that wafted out. And from her own carefully groomed person, as well.
She invited him to ‘come through’ and his eyes could hardly decide what to land on. Everything in sight was stunning, from the hand-woven carpet on the floor to the polished and gilded antiques that glittered from every nook. He thought he spotted a painting by Paul Henry in the hall, and he was sure the enormous oil painting above the fireplace in the sitting room she led him into was by William Orpen: a glorious scene of a young woman in a white dress reading in a sun-dappled green garden. He’d seen one similar on the Antiques Roadshow a month or so before, valued at some astronomical figure.
It was only when Mrs Coyle smoothed her dress beneath her hips and sat down on a sofa opposite him that he noticed how young she looked. On the phone she’d expressed surprise that he was following up, a year on, but he’d said it was routine. He’d more or less dismissed her as a possibility for The Priest’s sick attentions the instant she’d opened the door. Now, again, he wasn’t so sure. Beneath the poise, the make-up and the perfectly styled hair was a face that could prob
ably quite easily pass for an eighteen-year-old’s. When she told him she’d been on her way home early from a fancy dress party, his ears pricked up.
‘I’d gone as a tart,’ she said. ‘As in vicars and tarts. With Daithi, my husband, who was supposed to be the vicar.’
‘Vicars and tarts?’ Mulcahy asked, bemused.
‘An English thing we used to do when we were at Trinity together, and one of our pals decided to revive it. The boys dress up as priests, the girls as, well, slappers, I suppose. But Daithi got delayed in surgery – some emergency procedure he had to perform – and I was forced to go along to the party on my own and wait for him.’
She’d already told Mulcahy that her husband was a surgeon, which went some way to explaining their wealth, but he still couldn’t imagine how the man could have accumulated so much just by scalping patients.
‘Anyway, I’d been there a while when one of Daithi’s juniors phoned to say there’d been a complication and he wouldn’t be coming at all, and I couldn’t bear to stay on without him.’ She paused, biting her lower lip a touch shamefacedly. ‘I think I must have had a little too much champagne. In fact, I’m sure I did, because normally I’d have jumped straight into a taxi. Especially wearing that outfit – although I did have a coat on, too. But for some reason I caught the Luas. The tram was a novelty for me and I knew there’s a stop just down the road from here and I wanted to try it out and… what a stupid, stupid fool I was.’
Mulcahy was about to assure Mrs Coyle that people using public transport were as entitled to a safe journey home as anyone, but she rushed on, explaining how she’d felt ‘a little drowsy’ and missed her stop but woke in time to get off at the next one, and so began walking home.
‘By then I was glad of the chance to get some air. So much so, I even passed up the chance of a taxi home, can you believe it? God, how I beat myself up later for not taking it,’ she sighed.
‘A taxi?’ Mulcahy asked. ‘I didn’t see any mention of a taxi in your statement.’
‘Well, no, you wouldn’t have. Like I said, I didn’t take it. I told him I was enjoying the fresh air too much, and it was only a few hundred yards.’
‘What do you mean, you “told him”? Are you saying a taxi driver offered you a lift?’
It was a small point but one that, in the circumstances, rang alarm bells. It was illegal for taxi drivers to canvass fares and any driver caught doing so risked losing their licence.
‘Well, maybe it was a little unusual, now you mention it,’ she replied, and he saw a little flicker of alarm fire up in her eyes. ‘But his light was on when he pulled up and I didn’t think anything of it. I just said thanks but no thanks and walked on. You don’t think it was him, do you?’
‘I don’t know what to think,’ Mulcahy said quickly, wanting to get his next question in. ‘Did you happen to get a look at the driver?’
On her face, he could see the scared thoughts taking hold, tautening her pale, pampered skin, making her look still more like a child in grown-ups’ clothes.
‘Um, I… I don’t know. I mean, it was dark by then. I remember him pulling in beside me, and his window was down. But he was on the far side, in the driver’s seat. I don’t think I even looked in. Why would I? I just remember him calling me, offering me a lift, and I said, “No thank you, it’s much too nice an evening”, and…’
Her voice trailed away, her brow furrowed in concentration. Mulcahy could see that the assault had hit her deeper than she’d given away at first. But he had to take her through it again.
‘Did he drive off straight away? Do you remember what kind of vehicle it was?’
‘No, I don’t, really. Only that he offered. All I was thinking about was how much I was loving the evening air on my face and on my legs… Oh, I must have been so drunk, and I didn’t even realise it. And in that silly outfit, too. I might as well have gone begging to be attacked.’
She plunged her face into her hands and Mulcahy thought she might be crying. But when she drew them away and looked at him again, there was no trace of tears, just embarrassment.
‘Maybe you could tell me what happened after that?’
Mulcahy knew it all already from reading her statement but he wanted to hear her tell it again. She’d walked on, she said, past the big houses on Temple Road with their huge front gardens, without a care in the world, or so she thought. Then it happened so suddenly: her attacker came from behind, clamped an arm around her neck and dragged her into one of the gardens where it was pitch dark. It was her screams that had brought the householder out. In response to Mulcahy’s prompts, Mrs Coyle confessed she couldn’t remember anything about the second man who came to her aid other than that she’d been told he was local, and no, she wouldn’t have remembered the first one, Mr Quigley, either, except that she had called in on him a month or so later to thank him for rescuing her. It had all been such a shock.
Mulcahy smiled sympathetically, interested to note that she clearly hadn’t been told that one of her rescuers was a taxi driver. He had no intention of telling her now, either, he thought, wondering what were the chances it was the same one who’d offered her the lift. In which case it would have been Rinn. Was it possible that he’d been following her?
Mulcahy decided to wrap up the interview. Mrs Coyle was seeing him to the door when he asked her if she was sure the attacker hadn’t taken anything from her, or whether she’d noticed anything missing afterwards. She smiled and shook her head, but then ran a hand across her chest in an unconscious grasping motion and seemed oddly preoccupied as she opened the door.
‘Why did you ask me that?’
‘What?’
‘About me missing something.’ There was a tremor in her voice and a look of real fear in her eyes. ‘You think it might have been this fellow, The Priest, the one on the news, don’t you?’
Mulcahy was surprised but wary of acknowledging that it was the only reason he was looking at her case again. ‘It was one of a number of possibilities.’
She nodded, then hacked a sharp cough into her hand.
‘Jesus Christ, he might have done that to me,’ she whispered. And suddenly her legs seemed to buckle but Mulcahy caught her before she went down. He helped her back inside and sat her on a chair in the hall. She was shaking like a leaf.
‘He would have, wouldn’t he?’ she said, her face as white as a sheet beneath the sheen of make-up.
‘You had a lucky escape either way, Mrs Coyle, but these other attacks have only started recently and the likelihood has to be that it wasn’t the same man.’
Anything to reassure her.
‘No,’ she insisted, ‘you don’t understand. It must have been him.’
He stepped back, there was such certainty in her voice. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘When I took the costumes back to the shop a couple of days later, they made an awful fuss because the crucifix from Daithi’s vicar’s costume was missing. The cross. They wanted something outrageous like fifty euros for a replacement. I thought they’d lost it themselves as Daithi hadn’t so much as tried his costume on. But then I remembered that we’d looked at them together and laughed about them the night we got them home. And I knew I’d seen it – a big, cheap old brassy thing. So I paid up, thinking it would turn up somewhere eventually. But it never did. Now I can’t help thinking maybe I wore it myself that night, as a bit of a joke, on impulse. You know, to go with the tart’s outfit. And I forgot about it afterwards. From the shock, maybe? I never made the connection before. I mean, I can’t be certain. It never even occurred to me until now.’
Back in his car, Mulcahy sat and waited for his heart to stop thumping and wondered what the hell he should do next. He’d done his best to calm Caroline Coyle, then left her to her own thoughts. But what she’d said had unsettled him: it wasn’t what he’d been expecting. And hadn’t it all come out just a little too easily? He decided he’d better put the brakes on and think things through clearly. Even Mrs Coyle herself hadn’t b
een a hundred per cent sure about the cross. She admitted it was the first time it had struck her. Stranger things had happened. People saw stuff on the television and read about it in the papers and assumed the same had happened to them. It was something they had to deal with over and over again while handling the tips lines at Harcourt Square. Nobody realised better than himself now how some people were capable of absorbing external events and weaving them into their own personal narrative. But it was a shock to see it happen right in front of his eyes – if that, indeed, was what had happened here. To his mind, it still merited further investigation. Careful, dispassionate investigation. He’d have to get Brogan to set someone onto it as soon as he got back. But he also knew he’d have to be careful how he put it to Brogan. She’d been acting twitchy around him ever since he’d done the Scully review for Healy and the last thing she’d appreciate would be him bounding up to tell her he’d pulled another rabbit out of a hat.
Stepping back from it, he could see now that letting Sergeant Brennan’s witterings get so far into his head had been a mistake. Even if Mrs Coyle had been solicited by a taxi driver that night, even if it had been this guy, Rinn, who was to say he’d been the attacker as well? And as for The Priest, the one thing they knew for sure about him was that his targets had all been teenage girls. And anyway, he used a van, not a bloody taxi. His memory snagged on Grainne Mullins again. Hadn’t she said she’d only just been dropped off by a taxi when she was attacked? But the taxi driver was gone by then. He’d dropped her off early so he could get petrol. Could it have been a ruse? Had the driver maybe parked somewhere and come back for her? Christ, it was all coulds, mights and ifs. The best thing he could do was lay it out for Brogan when he got back. That way he could stay on his side of the line and she could follow it up if she wanted to. If it came to anything, she was welcome to the credit.
13
Any fears Siobhan might have had that a bigger story could come along and knock The Priest off the front pages never materialised. She was busier than ever. Even her mortifying showdown with Vincent Bishop in Marco Pierre White’s had produced some upsides. Prime among them, of course, being that Bishop had cooled off faster than a streaker in an ice storm. Crazed outbursts in public places were never going to be okay in his book. He had made that quite clear, despite her garbled, on-the-spot apology – in which she attributed her inappropriate eruption to crossed wires, stress, overwork and just about anything else she could think of as she anxiously glugged most of the bottle of St Emilion Grand Cru he’d ordered to go with the medium-rare rib-eye lying uneaten on his plate. She hadn’t heard from him since, which suited her just fine.
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