‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’ll be fine.’
‘Well, I know we had our moments, Mike, but…’
If she was on the brink of saying something nice she was saved by Cassidy’s intervention, a shout from across the room.
‘Boss?’
She looked over, then back at Mulcahy. He decided to put her out of her misery. ‘You go on, Claire. I’ll see you around.’
She was just turning away when it came to him. ‘Oh, one last thing. I don’t suppose you got a chance to look over that case I was telling you about last night – Caroline Coyle?’
She blinked, seeming unsure of what he was talking about. Clearly the events of later that evening had wiped her memory of it temporarily.
‘Oh, shit. No, Mike, I’m sorry. That sounded really promising but, you know, I’ve been up all night on this. It completely slipped my mind. Could you put it in an email for me? I’ll get somebody on to it right away, okay?’
‘Sure,’ he said, watching her back as she walked away, spotting Andy Cassidy smirking triumphantly at him from the far side of the room. The twat. He wasn’t going to be sorry to see the back of him. What to do about Sergeant Brennan, though, Mulcahy was not so sure.
‘That’s it, Siobhan, you’re clear now,’ the disembodied voice of producer Seosamh Gaffney floated into her ears. At least she could see and make eye-contact with the news presenters in the glassed-in studio in front of her small interview booth. But Gaffney, who had brought her in and sat, with widening eyes, discussing what she had for him while she was being miked up, was nowhere to be seen. He’d been off pressing buttons in a control room nearby during the whole show. ‘And thanks a million, again. We haven’t had such an exciting story break on air for ages.’
She took the cans off her head and gave her tingling ears a rub. She hated having to wear headphones, didn’t like the way they made her voice echo back up her ear canal. But that was the way they did it on Morning Ireland and Gaffney had insisted. Especially as they wanted her free to come in on any discussion with the others they’d managed to raise for interview over the phone. It had been a hell of a good session, with everyone in the small RTE news studio buzzing in the knowledge that they had a solid-gold scoop on their hands, something no other broadcaster or news agency had even had a sniff of before them. The two presenters, Lawlor and MacCoille, had been falling over themselves with the questions, eager to get the most out of it knowing just how many people would be waking up startled in bed or letting their cornflakes go soggy for fear of missing a detail with a mistimed crunch. This was, after all, the most listened-to radio show in the country. The one that set the entire day’s news agenda. And on RTE that meant the entire day’s radio, because whatever went out on Morning Ireland got endlessly rolled over and recycled into every talk show that followed during the course of the day.
She had phoned Gaffney, an old pal from journalism school, as soon as she got back to her car in the Phoenix Park. He’d all but gone down on his knees, begging her to come in, even offering to send a limo out there to fetch her into the studio. But what was the point of that when she had her own car and, anyway, the drive in would give her a chance to get her head together and her story straight? And time to phone Paddy Griffin and get the nod first, of course, laughing as he howled invective down the line at the curse of being a Sunday news editor. Barely ninety minutes after being given the boot by that bogtrotter sergeant, she was sipping coffee in the RTE studios in Donnybrook, yakking to Gaffney while some other guy did sound checks on her mike. And, after an introduction in which she was described as ‘the Sunday Herald’s brilliant chief reporter Siobhan Fallon’, she began recounting in graphic detail everything she’d witnessed in the Furry Glen earlier that morning. Of course she mentioned the Herald’s name as much as possible – she wasn’t going to risk upsetting Harry Heffernan until she had that pay rise carved in stone – but she also made sure to take the lion’s share of the credit for herself. It wasn’t like she didn’t deserve it. She’d only had to embroider the odd patch here and there. There was no shortage of colour to fill in the vague outlines of what she’d seen: the spectral glare of the arc lights in the night, the ghostly toing and froing of the investigators in the hollow, the sad spectacle of the stretchered body being borne away. But, most of all, it was the giant Papal Cross that she used to illustrate her story. The image of it burned black against the rising sun. And it went down a storm.
So much so, that when they asked her to stay on to do the Pat Kenny show, later, the old stager led with the image of the burning cross himself. And so it was for the rest of the morning, traipsing from studio to studio, from radio to TV and back again, milking it for all it was worth, until she literally didn’t have the strength to say another word about it. That was when she rang Gaffney and told him to send round that limo he’d promised her. She wanted to go home. Even as she was wafted back to her flat in the soft, enfolding, new-leather comfort of a luxurious Mercedes, barely able to keep her eyes open, she heard on the radio the story being taken up by others, rolling it on, building it ever bigger, that image of the Papal Cross taking on a life of its own. She knew then that by end of day, even as she slept on in her own bed, it would have been adopted by every hack and rent-a-comment on the airwaves as a kind of catch-all shorthand, a symbol of whatever malaise they might suddenly decide had taken hold of Ireland.
And she knew, too, that however big a story it had been to begin with, the murder and that image of a burning cross would make The Priest into the biggest source of outrage that Ireland had seen for a hell of a long time. There was nothing like a society that thought it was over something for diving straight back in again at every opportunity and having another worry at it. And Catholicism was still that something in Ireland, capable of tweaking every button, clanging every bell, pulling every knob it ever had, with the added fury of those who now presumed themselves to be above all that – but weren’t. As she finally succumbed to sleep in the back of the limo, she was sure she saw her name, Siobhan Fallon, as if by angels held aloft, transported upwards seeking out its rightful place among the stars.
15
‘Ah, sure, when we bought this place, it was like our holiday house in the country. Now, with all the development there’s been, it’s barely better than living in the suburbs.’
‘It looks a lot nicer than that to me,’ said Mulcahy.
Sergeant Pat Brennan, retired, hadn’t done half bad for himself, Mulcahy thought, as he stood outside the man’s home high on the wooded slopes outside the village of Kilpedder, twenty miles or so south of Dublin. The house itself was nothing much to look at, one of those ubiquitous white bungalows that scarred the lower faces of the Wicklow mountains like a pox. But its location – at the end of a winding drive on what had to be at least three acres with fine views out over Bray Head, Greystones and the sweeping bay beyond – was spectacular.
‘Got it for a good price, too, back in the early eighties. The owners were desperate to get away to England to look for work. Heaven knows what it’s worth now,’ said Brennan with a tilt of his eyebrow.
Like hell, Mulcahy thought. The shrewd old goat probably knows its value down to the nearest tenner. Even with the collapse of property prices, it had to be worth a couple of million easily. For a second Mulcahy was gripped by the thought that he hadn’t heard a peep from his own estate agents since they said they’d lined up those viewings… how many days ago? He couldn’t remember. Then the thought was gone as he followed the sergeant in through the front door.
Meeting Sergeant Brennan face to face had made Mulcahy revise the impression he’d got of him over the phone. For one thing, there was a vivaciousness about him that just didn’t come across in his voice. In person, Brennan was fit, tanned, smart of dress and straight of back. He still sported the No. 1 buzz cut he’d probably worn to maximise the grip on his Garda cap for the best part of four decades on the force, and he looked at least ten years younger than the seventy-plus he had to be i
f he’d held out to retire at sixty like he’d said. Nothing at all like the bitter old buffer Mulcahy had imagined. And he didn’t seem to mind at all the interval that had passed since he’d spoken to Mulcahy. In fact, he seemed strangely chuffed, as if the wait had somehow made the return even more important.
‘I knew you’d come back to me eventually. That’s why I wanted to speak to someone like yourself, who knows the value of good intelligence. That young galoot I spoke to first had me written off the minute I opened my mouth. You have to go to the top if you want anything done, nowadays.’
‘Yeah, well, a lot’s been happening over the last few days,’ Mulcahy replied. ‘Maybe you could tell me a little more about this fella Rinn now? Didn’t you say he trained to be a priest?’
That, more than anything else, was what was nagging at Mulcahy. On the file, it had said Rinn was a taxi driver. How the hell did that fit? But he couldn’t afford to tell Brennan about the file or anything else to do with Caroline Coyle. He didn’t want to prejudice the man’s already coloured judgement any further.
‘Well, I was just about to get to that when you had to go. The grandparents packed him off to All Hallows, but he never made it. I mean, he did a few years in the seminary there but he was never ordained into the priesthood.’
Okay, that cleared that up. Mulcahy looked around the kitchen, wondering where to go next. ‘You said he had a well-connected grandfather, but where were his parents?’
Brennan drew in a big breath and let it out again slowly. ‘Well, that’s just it. It was a tragic case, really. The parents died in a car crash, both of them, when the boy Sean was only six or seven. While they were on holiday down in Killarney. Terrible thing. The boy was with them in the car and was severely injured himself when it caught fire. But he survived.’
‘And so the grandparents brought him up?’
‘That’s it. He was an only child like his father before him, so he went to them. And ordinarily, like, you’d have nothing but sympathy. But, whether it was the accident did it, or it was just in him all along, there was something twisted in that young man – twisted to the core.’
Mulcahy said nothing, unsure whether he wanted to encourage Brennan any further, thinking the young Rinn sounded an odd candidate for the priesthood in that case. As if reading his mind, the old sergeant took up his theme again.
‘They must have thought he needed divine intervention, to hand him over to the priests so young. He was only fourteen or so. But I sure as heck didn’t mind. Everything went quiet for three or four years and then he turned up in Rathgar again – in civvies. I made some enquiries and the whisper came back that he’d been kicked out of All Hallows. Some awful scandal, they said, but it’d all been hushed up by the priests and everyone else involved. Doubtless Mr Justice Rinn called in a few favours to ensure the family name stayed unsullied. Anyway, I got a pal of mine over in Drumcondra to make some enquiries with contacts he had in the college. What he heard – only rumours, mind – was that young Rinn had been involved in some incident at the judge’s holiday place up in Gweedore over the summer, and that the priests had got wind of it and asked him to leave the seminary. That was all he could find out. So I tried to make a few enquiries myself, but I didn’t have any contacts in those parts and, well, I got nowhere with it. It was clear enough that something had happened up there, but for the life of me I couldn’t get anybody to open their gob. I tell you, though, I made sure I kept a closer eye than ever on him after that.’
‘And?’
‘And nothing. A few months later he was packed off again, to teacher-training college, down in Maynooth this time, and I never heard of him again. I’ve been living down here in Kilpedder since I retired in ninety-five – before he would have qualified. But I presume he did, and went off to become a teacher. Some role model he would’ve been for children, don’t you think?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know,’ Mulcahy said. ‘But to be honest – and I hope you won’t mind me saying this, Sergeant – you never had any evidence he did anything wrong at all, did you?’
‘Only the evidence of my own eyes. And, if you could’ve seen the state of some of the young women brought into my station, you’d believe it too. In bits they were, and the coldness in his eyes when I questioned him. You’d think the same, too. The little bastard, Lord bless my soul, never even denied it to my face. Just waited for his grandfather to come and get him, while CID refused to lift a finger. I’m telling you, there were times I would’ve happily strung him up myself.’
Mulcahy flicked back through what the sergeant had told him on the phone: the scrapes he said he’d had with Rinn back in the late eighties. They hadn’t sounded too serious, mostly involving incidents in Palmerston Park, the secluded couple of acres of well-tended lawns and rose beds in front of Rinn’s grandfather’s house. Brennan now told him again how, during the few months Rinn had been home between colleges, a number of ‘courting couples’ had been attacked in the park after dark, as a result of which one young guy had been hospitalised after being beaten round the head with a brick.
‘This girl you said got a decent look at him,’ Mulcahy said. ‘How come she got so close?’
‘She was the one whose boyfriend was hurt. Susan Roche.’ All the anger was gone from Brennan’s voice now. ‘I remember her like it was yesterday. Crying over her young fella in the dark, while we waited for an ambulance. She was drenched in blood, got a thump herself but was lucky it was only a glancing blow. The boyfriend was on top when he was struck first and he’d managed to shield her from the worst of it. I went with her to the hospital and she told me, in the ambulance, how she’d seen their attacker’s face as he stood over them. From her description it was Rinn alright, I had no doubt. But the case got handed over to CID straight away, and those guys… oh, they interviewed him, but you could tell they’d been got at. Chief-bloody-Justice Padraig Rinn again. Never was justice so ill served by anyone in the judiciary.’
‘It can’t have been easy for you,’ Mulcahy sympathised, genuinely. He’d felt similar frustration himself on one or two occasions, when the system he was desperately trying to uphold seemed wilfully directed away from the side of good.
‘You’re right there,’ said Brennan. ‘I almost packed it in. Went through a bit of a rough patch, so I did. But I didn’t give up, in the end. Because the girl, young Susan, came back to me a couple of months later and thanked me for what I’d done. She said even though she felt let down by the investigation she knew I’d done my best. A lovely kind girl, she was, didn’t deserve that. She even said some day she’d find it in her heart to forgive him. “I might even get around to saying an Our Father for him, Sergeant” – that’s what she said. An Our Father. That really impressed me.’
‘Why so?’ Mulcahy said, wondering at the sudden emotion in the old man’s voice.
‘Because that’s what Rinn was bawling at her all the while he was beating her fella with the brick.’
Although she’d only had a couple of hours sleep back at her flat, Siobhan looked immaculate when, just after three o’clock, she emerged from the lift at the Sunday Herald in a scoop-necked Betty Jackson top, tailored black trousers and a pair of pointy black Christian Louboutins she’d blown the budget on a good few months back but which still looked as good as new. She strode across the open-plan floor of the newsroom, thanking heaven for the reviving miracles worked by make-up and curling tongs. Almost before she put her bag on her desk, Paddy Griffin was there beside her, dangling a long arm around her shoulder and giving her a squeeze.
‘Good work this morning, girl – especially all that malarkey about the Papal Cross. Nice touch. Shame we had to waste it all on RTE, though.’
Siobhan extricated herself as politely as she could and leaned across the desk to turn on her computer monitor. ‘It wasn’t a waste, as well you know. And anyway, there’s loads left in the tank for Sunday, don’t you worry.’
Griffin’s eyes lit up immediately. ‘What you got?’
&n
bsp; Siobhan looked at him and laughed. ‘You don’t want much, do you? Another scoop? No chance. I only meant I can work up what I’ve got into something special. “Eye-witness exclusive: fear and loathing in the Furry Glen”, etc,’ she laughed. ‘You know the kind of thing. All the gory details. They’ll be lapping it up come Sunday. Anything yourself?’
Griffin sighed and swatted at the air in front of him.
‘Not really. Foreign Affairs has been on the ropes in the Dáil over whether there should be an official enquiry into the “Spanish invasion” or not. Word is they might agree to one, if only to kill the media coverage by putting it all on a sub-judice footing for now. I’ve a couple of the lads looking into it. Actually, I was wondering if you’d be free to help them with it, later.’
‘Ah, come off it, Paddy, does it look like I’m not busy or something? Or is getting up at two o’clock in the morning not enough for you? I only brought you the biggest story of the week.’
‘So far,’ said Griffin glumly.
‘So far,’ Siobhan parroted, and leaned over to touch her desk for luck – though the closest thing to wood in it was the chipboard under the laminate. ‘And what’ll be my chance of improving on it, if I’m stuck weighing up the likelihood of a dull-as-ditch public enquiry?’
‘Okay, okay!’ Griffin held his arms up in surrender. ‘Christ, I forgot for a moment that you were a fucking celebrity now, and that you don’t have to play by the same rules as the rest of us mortals. Forget it.’
Siobhan’s triumphant smile was broken by the trill of her mobile. She put a hand up to block out Griffin’s whingeing.
‘Yeah, that’s me,’ she spoke into the phone, then her eyes widened. ‘Are you serious? When?…Yeah, of course… What time?… Great, yeah, thanks.’
Siobhan snapped her phone shut, looked at her watch, then turned to Griffin again. ‘Maybe we’re not going to need that public-enquiry piece after all.’ She grabbed her bag from the desk and shut down her monitor again. ‘You’re not going to believe this.’
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