The Priest
Page 39
Mulcahy silently cursed the lot of them. Few in the media had any real interest in the truth, as far as he could see, only in making their voices heard above the throng.
Of course, Mulcahy had his own ideas about Rinn. He tracked them through in his head as he lay awake in the night, unable to find comfort enough for sleep. But few of them led anywhere definite. All the psychiatrists in the world could say Rinn was a paranoid schizophrenic acting in the belief that he was getting instruction directly from St Paul. It would never make any difference to Mulcahy. Only one piece of evidence struck him as having anything like the ring of truth to it. Something that he hadn’t seen in any of the newspapers. It had been posted to him by an anonymous well-wisher in Kerry, a fellow cop, obviously, as it came wrapped in a Garda file folder – a photocopy of the 1974 accident report, dug out from the Killarney District archives, into the tragic car crash in which Sean Rinn’s parents had died, and he’d been so badly burned. The contents included typed-up notes from the attending officers, who’d been the first to arrive at the scene some ten to fifteen minutes after the collision. Rinn’s parents had been killed straight off, they recorded. Young Sean, just six years old, had been thrown by the impact out of the back seat into the front, where he’d lain in his mother’s lifeless lap as the car caught fire and everything in it burst into flame around him. Only the gallantry of one Garda John Reynolds, attending, had saved the lad’s life – risking his own by plunging into the fire, to pull the boy free despite the child’s reluctance to let go of his mother, to whom he was clinging for protection even at this grim pass. So fierce was the heat, added a footnote at the bottom of the page, that a small silver crucifix, which the boy had pulled from round his dead mother’s neck in the struggle to drag him free, had became fused to the palm of his tiny left hand and could only be removed days later by surgery, when the doctors at Killarney District Hospital deemed his condition stable enough to cope with an operation of that nature.
This was the kind of detail Mulcahy understood: something he could latch onto and let his imagination run with as far as it wanted to go. It was as much as he needed. What really mattered, in the end, was that Rinn had killed one young woman and ruined the lives of six others. And, of course, that he’d been caught. That’s what got Mulcahy through the bad dreams and the night sweats – knowing for certain, when he woke, that he’d stopped Rinn.
It was that, too, which made his current human resources status of ‘suspended pending disciplinary hearing’ bearable too. At least he’d get to argue his case in front of a panel, and not just Brendan Healy. Of course, the obvious fly in the ointment there was Cassidy. The sergeant had turned up in the hospital the day after, pleading with Mulcahy not to grass him up to Internal Affairs over the leaks. If pleading was the right word, that is, for the grudging, wheedling bullshit he’d offered by way of justification, about how he’d never taken the money from Siobhan and even some bollocks about Mulcahy’s father spiking his chances of promotion years back – for no good reason at all, he’d whined. But Mulcahy knew his father had always been a good judge of men; he’d probably sniffed the rottenness in Cassidy straight off.
Still, Mulcahy did feel he couldn’t just drop the sergeant in the shit now. After all, the man had saved his life. Yet neither was he sure he’d be happy to let it lie entirely. That was something he’d have to weigh up carefully. But not now. There’d be plenty of time for that later.
The one thing he couldn’t shake off was the memory of Siobhan Fallon hanging from the cross. She loomed there above him every night as he lay in bed, her naked body nailed to the rough planks, her blood showering down all round him, like an agonised spectre perpetually haunting his mind. Even going to see her in the hospital hadn’t managed to dispel the memory or even dim it slightly. It had only made it worse, if anything. There had been something so awkward, so unsettling, between them in that room. She’d seemed so hesitant, so reluctant to meet his eye or smile. It was like they’d never known each other before. And then, after just five minutes, some other guy had come in, an older, odd-looking fella – Vincent something or other, he’d said – with a huge bunch of flowers, and Mulcahy had made his excuses and left. Rinn, it seemed, had succeeded in killing something that night, after all.
Mulcahy felt a stab of pain in his shoulder as he shifted his position to look around the harbour and out at the calm waters of the wide bay beyond. There wasn’t much traffic going in and out just now and he longed to let a keen sea breeze wash across his face and body and cleanse him of this land and all the pain that inhabited it. Maybe Liam was right. Maybe he did need to loosen up a bit.
‘Do you think you could handle her if we stuck to the motor and took her out beyond the harbour wall a bit?’
‘Jaysus, he lives!’ Ford laughed. ‘Just tell me where to point the feckin’ thing, and let’s be on our way.’
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to my agent Broo Doherty for believing, to David Shelley, Daniel Mallory, Thalia Proctor and all at Little, Brown in London for their generosity, enthusiasm and support and also to Breda Purdue at Hachette Ireland.
Thanks also to my fellow writers at Criminal Classes: Kathryn Skoyles, Richard Holt, Elena Forbes, Keith Mullins, Cass Bonner and Nicola Williams, and our wise friends Margaret Kinsman and Chris Sykes; to Neil Midgley, Andrew Pettie and all the team at the Telegraph; to David Headley; to Lisanne Radice; to Dr Emma Norris; to the Bristol Writers Group; to Mark Bolton; to Noel Monaghan; to the staff at the Garda Press Office and all other members of the Garda Siochana who aided and abetted me in writing this book.
Finally, enormous gratitude to my mother, Jo; to Noelle, Carmel, Billy, Tony, Clare, Gill and Alison; and above all, to my beautiful wife, Angela, for her faith, hope and clarity.