But there were other benefits, too. As expected, given the number of her fellow hacks who’d witnessed it, a few snibby comments regarding her outburst appeared in the Irish Independent, Mail and Sun – PRIEST-BREAKER UNLOADS ON BISHOP, that kind of thing. But as they had nothing to pin the incident on and as, like herself, Bishop had refused to comment to enquiring hacks, the tongue-wagging died down as quickly as it had flared up. An appearance in the gossip columns, though, was a first for her and could be regarded as yet another indication of her leap into the media stratosphere. It certainly hadn’t dented Heffernan’s determination to get her that pay rise. Quite the opposite, if anything. Next morning he’d strolled up to her desk, winked at her and said: ‘I see you’re working on keeping your profile up. Nice one.’
He’d even had a word with Griffin and instructed him to assign a couple of editorial assistants to help research her follow-ups. They were just kids, and utterly clueless, but at least they were able to help with the donkey work – in particular on a piece she’d pitched about the authorities’ shameful clear-up and conviction rates for domestic violence and sexual assaults generally. There’d be plenty of room for headlines in that, she knew, but it wasn’t anything the other papers couldn’t cook up for themselves. What she really needed was something new and exclusive on The Priest.
That was her biggest headache. What she hadn’t told Griffin or Heffernan was that her source in the Garda sex crimes unit had gone to ground on her. Dried up. The spotlight was suddenly too bright to allow any leakage at all. And there was nothing she could do about it. Normally she’d have had some hold over such an informant by now, if only the mere fact that they had taken her money. But this one, having handed it to her on a plate, had vanished. He hadn’t even come in to pick up the cash, yet. Damn it.
But she could hardly blame the guy for staying away. It seemed like the whole of the Garda Siochana had gone into paranoia overdrive following publication of her Priest scoop. Even that creep Des Consodine was refusing to talk to her. And as for Mike Mulcahy, he was blaming her just like all the rest of them. Why he had to take it personally, she had no idea. What had she done that was so wrong? She’d been careful. She’d made absolutely sure his name hadn’t come into it. If he didn’t want to believe that, so be it. But it still hurt. Especially as he’d dumped her by stupid text, as well. Didn’t even give her a chance to explain. Maybe, if she kept her distance until the next big thing broke and things moved on, he’d get it into perspective after a while.
The other fly in her ointment was that Roy Orbison hadn’t stopped phoning either. She’d had two more calls since. Both on the machine when she got in after working late. The first, ironically, just hours after she’d wrongly upbraided Bishop – as if she’d needed any further proof. She listened so hard to it, trying to get some clue as to who else could be behind it, that it took her a minute or two to hear what the song itself was telling her, to realise that every verse ended with the same line – the song title: ‘You Don’t Know Me’.
‘You could’ve told me that before now and saved me the trouble,’ she’d whispered grimly into the phone, before deleting it. But something about that particular moment chimed with her own dark sense of humour, and she’d laughed at it, too. And while the calls were still freaky, and no more bearable for knowing now that it wasn’t Bishop making them, they also seemed a lot less serious after that. So much so, she hardly even registered the next one: caught the first five seconds, pressed delete, then forgot about it straight away.
Maybe if she’d been less busy it would all have played on her mind much more. But now, as things were, she barely had time to go to the loo. She looked around the Herald’s still busy newsroom, then checked her watch. She wanted to be sure she had time to pop to the Ladies’ before her live link-up with Gerry Finucane’s Crime Week radio show on 2FM. She was reaching for her bag when the phone on her desk rang. Damn. They preferred to make the connection over a landline. They’d probably keep her hanging on for ages now until they were ready. But she picked up anyway.
‘Siobhan Fallon?’ The voice was cultured, by Dublin standards – bound to be someone from media central in Montrose House.
‘Yeah, it’s me,’ she said. ‘But listen, love, do you think you could give me a couple of minutes and ring me back. I’m desperate for—’
‘Deus non irridetur.’
Siobhan shook her head as if something in her ear had come loose. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Deus non irridetur,’ the voice intoned. ‘In the words of Saint Paul: “God will not be mocked.”’
Ah, for Christ’s sake, Siobhan thought. Not another one. Ever since she’d appeared on Questions and Answers the cranks and creeps had been coming out of the woodwork. The price, she was beginning to accept, of even her small modicum of fame was being a loon magnet. And even though she’d asked the operators to stop putting anonymous calls through to her extension, to let the newsdesk filter them, still some got through – this was the fourth or fifth nut job she’d had that day. All of them men, naturally, all of them saying the dirty young trollops deserved everything they got from The Priest, or some rancid rubbish to that effect.
‘Look, pal, whatever it is you’re after, I’m not interested.’
A low growling laugh came back down the line. ‘You should be interested. You make a living out of peddling filth, don’t you?’
‘Is that what you’re after, some filth?’
Again the horrible laugh, but this time the voice came back sharper.
‘I have no filth in my life except what you and your kind bring into it. I saw you on the television the other night, talking all that filth about this so-called Priest. And there you were, parading yourself, with your low-cut top and your whore’s lipstick, defiling the symbol of Christ’s sacrifice that you wear around your neck. Does it mean nothing to you?’
Siobhan self-consciously put a hand up to her neck, touched the little silver cross at its base, an automatic act of security, though her mind was elsewhere, gathering rage.
‘I’ll tell you what means nothing to me, pal,’ she spat back at him. ‘Bullshit artists like you ringing me up and mouthing off because you’re too pathetic to get your thrills any other way.’
Normally that would have been enough. But not for this one.
‘You spout torrents of corruption, your every word drips with it. And you remain blind to the message. You have the gall to condemn a righteous man.’
His voice was becoming laboured now, his breathing heavier. She could imagine all too clearly what was going on at the other end of the line.
‘Righteous, did you say? That’s a laugh. Do you think I don’t know what’s going on? Do you think I can’t hear you at it, you sad fucker? Let me give you some advice – piss off and play with yourself on somebody else’s time. Or I’ll have this call traced and it won’t be yourself you’ll be pleasuring but some seven-foot stinking crackhead in a prison cell in the arse end of nowhere!’
She slammed the phone down. Behind her she felt the reassuring presence of Paddy Griffin drifting up, putting a hand on her shoulder, his nose for trouble as unfailingly sharp as ever.
‘Are you alright, love? What was that all about?’
‘I’ll give you one guess.’ She looked up at him, a smile automatically snapping back on to her face. Never let anyone see you’re fazed – his advice, she recalled.
‘A crank, eh?’ Griffin replied. ‘Well, sounds like you sent him away with a flea in his ear.’
‘It’s what he had in his hand that I was worried about.’ She balled her right hand into a fist and jerked it up and down obscenely.
‘Oh God,’ Griffin grimaced, his laugh diluted by nine parts sympathy. ‘That’s Holy Christian Ireland for you – full of tossers.’
‘Yeah,’ she said absently. Her mind was already turning back to the radio interview, wondering about the time again. She looked at her watch and saw she still had a minute to spare. Only then did she notice that her
hand was still trembling.
‘Paddy, love,’ she said, grabbing her bag. ‘Could you listen out for the phone for me. It’ll be RTE for that Crime Week thing, but I’m dying for a pee.’
The door to Brogan’s office was open, so Mulcahy just knocked and went in. She was staring intently at her computer screen and when she looked up she gave him that tired, wary smile he’d been getting from her for the past few days whenever he turned up to go through the best of the leads coming in over the phones.
‘Got something for me?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, maybe,’ he said. ‘How’s it going? Making any progress today?’
They still had a couple of hours before the main evening briefing and she could have asked him to wait till then, but instead she smiled and invited him to sit down while she scrolled back through her email and called something up. ‘Looks like you were right about Scully, by the way,’ she said. ‘We got a call from police in the UK earlier today – Scully’s cash card was flagged being used to withdraw £250 sterling cash at Harwich ferry terminal, in Essex, on the east coast. By the time they realised what they were looking at, he was gone. I’m assuming across to the continent, but not under his own name. At least, not according to the passenger manifests.’
‘There’s a service to the Hook of Holland from there, so Amsterdam would be my guess. It’s his kind of town. We can always get the Dutch to check out the hotels there.’
‘Not much point,’ she replied. ‘Healy’s saying we should hand the lot over to the Drugs Squad now that it’s chiefly of interest to them.’
In response to Mulcahy’s quizzical expression she pointed at another document she’d called up on screen. ‘We got back the last of the forensics on the van today. Clean as a whistle. The hair’s definitely not Jesica’s – so that’s pretty much the end of that. Because even though the blood spatter was blood spatter, it was matched to Scully’s father who finally relented and gave us a sample yesterday. Seems he must’ve cut his hand on a bit of pipe.’
Mulcahy gave her a sympathetic smile but said nothing. He hadn’t really been expecting any other result.
‘And they drew a blank on those fibres, too,’ Brogan continued. ‘No sign of anything remotely like them in the van.’
‘Do they even know what they are yet?’
Brogan shook her head. ‘They say they’re not sure – i.e. they haven’t got a clue. All Technical will say for definite is that the ones found on Jesica’s clothes are an exact match for the ones found on Catriona Plunkett’s top, too.’
‘That’s something, I suppose: find the fibres, find the man. How is she, by the way – Catriona? Any improvement?’
Brogan shook her head again. ‘Still under heavy sedation and they say they’re going to have to keep her that way for days. At least until some of the burns begin to heal over and she can’t make herself worse just by moving. She’s in a terrible state, poor kid.’ Brogan sighed heavily and nodded towards her screen. ‘I was just going over the CCTV of her outside the Kay Club again.’
She clicked on the black subscreen on her monitor and Mulcahy saw a grainy image jerk into life, revealing a young woman in teetering heels standing outside an open doorway. A length of thick rope hanging between two waist-height stainless-steel poles indicated the area where club-goers queued for entry. She was looking away, her face turning first to peer up, then down, the street, and she was alone except for a large shaven-headed man in black standing by the door behind her.
‘The bouncer?’ Mulcahy asked.
‘Yeah,’ Brogan nodded. ‘But look at this.’
They watched together in silence as the girl turned and engaged the doorman in what seemed to be a bit of friendly banter and he responded, gesticulating with his hand. Brogan froze the image. ‘Okay, so according to the bouncer, here she’s asking him why there aren’t any taxis waiting outside like there usually are, and he’s telling her there won’t be any taxis because the local firms decided to boycott the pubs and clubs in the Killester area.’
‘Boycott?’
Brogan nodded. ‘Apparently, two or three taxi drivers got robbed at knifepoint around Killester in the space of a week and they were all up in arms about it. I checked it out and it’s true, although the boycott only lasted a couple of nights because it hit the local drivers too hard in the pocket. But this particular Friday was the first night of it, and the one night the ban held firm.’
‘So there were no taxis at all out in Killester that night?’
‘None of the local ones that do the clubs. To be honest, I’d kind of discounted that as a factor until now because Catriona lived only a few hundred yards up the road. And look, here she turns and walks in the direction of home, as you’d expect.’
Sure enough, the CCTV caught Catriona turning and walking away, saying goodnight to the bouncer with a flirtatious twist of her fingers. ‘God love her,’ Brogan said. ‘We thought that was the last we had of her on camera. But look at this. One of Maura’s lads spotted something else this morning. It’s from a traffic camera a hundred yards further up the same road. It only lasts a few seconds, which is how it was missed first time round. Just watch…’
She clicked on another subscreen and a rougher, greyer, wide-angled image emerged of a girl – the same girl, if you looked hard enough – walking up the road towards the camera, swinging her handbag by its long straps. There didn’t seem to be any traffic on the road. Then, just before she passed the camera, she lifted her head, turned suddenly and raised her right arm. At which point she disappeared from the frame.
‘Show it to me again,’ Mulcahy said, intrigued.
Brogan played the footage once more, this time at half the previous pace. ‘Do you see what I’m talking about?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, still puzzling as she played it for him a third time, slower still.
‘So what do you reckon she’s doing?’ Brogan asked.
‘Well, if I didn’t know better, I’d say she was hailing a taxi. Either that or she recognised someone who happened to be driving past.’
‘That’s what I figured, too,’ Brogan said.
‘My bet would be on the taxi,’ Mulcahy said. ‘Maybe someone who didn’t actually know that there was supposed to be a boycott that night?’
‘How do you mean?’ she said, slightly spiky. ‘We did check it thoroughly. None of the ranks was operating that night.’
‘No, that’s just my point. It’s to do with something I unearthed today. Just a feeling for now, but if you have a few minutes…’
14
The call came in at around 2.15 a.m. Her mobile, trilling on the bedside table, cut through a waxy dream of something slipping from her grasp.
‘Get yourself over to the Furry Glen asap,’ the voice instructed, ‘if you want to see something interesting.’
The voice was distorted, as it had been before, but instantly recognisable as that of her elusive source. A ten-second instruction that penetrated her sleep like a knife slicing through flesh, before the click and vast nothingness of disconnection. Siobhan was instantly awake, rummaging in the darkness for the jeans she’d peeled off only four hours before, razor-keen to know what was going on, not content to wait until she got there to find out. Didn’t even stop for a coffee. She had a can of Red Bull in the car if she needed a hit later. For now, the adrenalin pumping through her like a piston was more than enough.
She jumped in behind the wheel and roared up the ramp out of the garage, regardless of anyone sleeping in the flats overhead. Her mind raced ahead all the way there, weighing up the possibilities, the permutations. Why the Furry Glen? By day it was an overrated beauty spot in the Phoenix Park. By night its quiet, bosky pathways made it a favourite hangout for gay men. Had The Priest switched sides? Had he maybe targeted a guy this time?
She slowed the car as she reached the lights at the bottom of Grand Canal Street, then gunned the engine and sped through on red across the bridge. The tip-off wouldn’t have come if they weren’t already
thinking it had something to do with The Priest. And if it was a crime scene she was going to, they had probably been there for a while already. Which meant there was a good chance that whatever it was they were interested in would be there still, too. Not in a hospital. Was it a dead body? Was that it?
She drove on through the still, quiet streets of the city, her progress marked by the split-second intervals between the sodium orange streetlights, her foot easing off the accelerator only on the rare occasions she encountered another vehicle. Within seconds of crossing the river and entering the Phoenix Park, she could see that something major was afoot. The mouth of Wellington Road, which ran the couple of kilometres down and around the southern rim of the Park as far as the Furry Glen, was blocked by a Garda car, its blue emergency lamps flashing in the night. She drove on up Chesterfield Avenue, the main route that splits the Park in two, but found a similar blockade at the next turn-off, and then at the next again – patrol cars parked across the side roads, denying access, every time with a uniformed Garda leaning against the bonnet or sitting inside with the windows down. By then she knew there was no point trying to get any further in the car, so she pulled over onto the grass verge, into the shadow of a copse, and killed the engine.
From there it was a twenty-minute hike, across flat grassy parkland and around dense patches of woodland, to reach the Glen. How she made it she wasn’t quite sure, thanking Christ for the light of the full moon, and herself for having the good sense to have slipped her trainers on and not the mules she’d been wearing earlier. On the downside, it did feel a bit mad to have a handbag swinging from her arm. But by then it was too late to go back and she was already closing in on her target, guided from some distance out by the unmistakeable flare of spotlights, a canopy of light domed in the night ahead of her. When at last she reached the Upper Glen Road she spotted two more cop cars, but they were at least two hundred yards apart at either end of the access roads leading down into the Glen itself. No one had thought to guard against anyone arriving from across the park on foot.
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