Angel: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 4)

by LJ Ross

  They stepped into the torrent and found their clothes plastered to their skin within seconds. The wind sang around their ears and Ryan had to shout to be heard.

  “Get a medic out here!”

  It was not so much that he minded seeing the man hurt or bleeding, certainly not after the hurt he had inflicted upon so many others. But Ryan would not take the chance that he might, at some later stage in his prosecution, accuse the police of failing to provide him with his basic right to medical attention.

  They made their way through the driving rain and up the short incline to the foot of the Angel with two firearms officers in tow. Powerful uplighters shone a beam of white light on the monument and the rain glistened like falling stars against it. It was not beautiful so much as masterful, reflecting the industrial heritage of the landscape around it and despite its colossal size, Ryan thought it suited the area perfectly.

  O’Byrne knelt in the mud at its feet, shivering in the wind and rain and clutching a rosary between his trembling fingers. Ryan held out a hand to signal that the others should keep back as he approached the man with slow, careful steps.

  “Conor?”

  He didn’t look up from his prayer.

  Ryan took another step closer, until he was within touching distance of O’Byrne’s crouched figure.

  “Time’s up,” Ryan shouted through the wind. “Conor O’Byrne, I am arresting you on suspicion of murder. You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”

  The man looked up and, just for an instant, he thought he saw two angels, and both of them were made of iron.

  “God will protect me!” he shouted back. “I am his servant!”

  “You don’t really believe that,” Ryan reached down and hauled the man to his feet. He was tired of looking down and what he had to say needed to be said eye-to-eye. “You killed those women because you liked it. You killed the others because you were angry at their decision not to bury Grace on consecrated ground. Why pretend otherwise?”

  O’Byrne wrenched his arm free of Ryan’s grip.

  “You know nothing, absolutely nothing about Grace. You have no conception of what she meant to me; what we meant to each other. You’re not fit to utter her name.”

  Ryan swiped a hand over his wet face.

  “I’ve heard it all before, Conor, countless times. You were the loner. That loser kid who nobody wanted to play with, abandoned by your parents and left to grow up in an orphanage. So far, you have my sympathies.” He stepped forward again, into O’Byrne’s personal space. “Then, a new girl came to the orphanage and she took pity on you—”

  “No!” O’Byrne spat. “We loved each other!”

  Ryan didn’t pause for breath.

  “I’ve read the nun’s report, Conor. It said you were obsessive and a cause for concern. Did you know that? Or did you think you’d managed to destroy all the records in the fire?”

  O’Byrne’s eyes shifted away, which gave Ryan all the answer he needed.

  “Grace jumped from the roof of the orphanage because she couldn’t stand to be around you—”

  “That’s a lie!”

  “Is it? Tell me why she was so special, Conor. Tell me why you killed all those women in her memory. Tell me!”

  O’Byrne’s face crumpled and, just for a moment, Ryan thought he had gone too far. But then the face morphed again, into something hard and unrecognisable. As the rain fell around them, he laid himself bare.

  “Grace was everything to me. Everything. You can’t understand what it was like in those places—how could you?” He cast derisive, hateful eyes over Ryan’s face. “You won the lottery of life. You wouldn’t know what it feels like to be utterly and completely alone in the world.”

  “You were adopted.”

  “The Church is the only mother and father that I recognise.”

  Ryan said nothing, while the cold seeped through his jacket and into his bones.

  “All these years, I believed that Grace took her own life. I believed that she wanted to be rid of me and that she couldn’t go on. I thought that she had abandoned me.”

  Now the tears started to fall, mingling with the rain which ran down his cheeks and dripped from his chin.

  “They told me it was suicide and that was a grave sin. Father Healy would not allow her a proper burial; he said that the taking of one’s own life was to falsely assert dominion over God’s property, something that he could not sanction or forgive. So they cremated her. They turned Grace’s body into ash, as if she had never existed at all.”

  Behind him, Ryan sensed that his team were growing impatient but he held out his hand again to signal them back while he allowed O’Byrne to continue. He needed to understand what had led the man to kill so many people.

  If he could ever bring himself to understand.

  “Grace never left me. Do you understand?” The priest searched Ryan’s face with wild eyes, then shook his head as if to answer his own question. “You couldn’t understand because you don’t have the gift. But God invested me with His spirit and made me his messenger. He let me see her, too. After…after the first time I saved a soul, I started to see Grace again. She stayed with me, everywhere I went. Some days, she would disappear and on others I only saw her for a fleeting moment. But for every soul I saved, God rewarded me with her presence in my life.”

  Ryan no longer felt the rain, or the cold. He was completely absorbed in his study of the man in front of him, watching for the tiny behavioural signs that would reveal O’Byrne to be a fraud. But the more he watched and listened, the more he realised that he had been wrong about the man. He might not have killed in a frenzy, he might have been fully aware of his actions, but he was no longer sure that the man understood that those actions were wrong. He was not what ordinary people would have called ‘sane’.

  Whether the law agreed with Ryan’s assessment remained to be seen.

  “You’re saying that the women you killed were a kind of sacrifice, for which God rewarded you?”

  O’Byrne closed his eyes, screwing them up tightly.

  “They were Grace. When I took them, I thought they were Grace. I wanted them to be—I wanted them to be her—”

  He started to sob, deep and gut-wrenchingly loud.

  “But they weren’t her. I know they weren’t her. I saved them, though,” he opened his eyes again. “I gave them peace and a proper burial.”

  “How kind of you,” Ryan said. “I’m sure their families will be delighted to hear it.”

  O’Byrne switched again from sadness to anger, in the blink of an eye.

  “The others deserved no proper burial. I gave them no absolution, no rites. I hope they burn in the fires of Hell for all eternity.”

  Well, Ryan thought. He couldn’t be clearer than that.

  “Why? You said that the Church is mother and father to you. As a priest, you understand Catholic theology on the subject of suicide; you told me so yourself, in your office at St Mary’s. Therefore you above all people should understand Father Healy’s decision not to bury Grace.”

  O’Byrne began to laugh, long and loud.

  “So I did,” he agreed. “But Grace didn’t commit suicide, as I’d been led to believe.”

  Ryan frowned and realised that he was missing a piece of the puzzle.

  “On Friday 18th, just over a week ago, Barbara Hewitt came into St Andrew’s to give confession. It was fate that led her to me, or God’s divine hand,” O’Byrne’s voice was so quiet, Ryan strained to hear as he blinked the rainwater from his eyes. “God sent her to me, so that her lies might be revealed after all these years.”

  He shook himself and smiled bleakly.

  “She didn’t recognise me at all,” he recalled. “She burst into the church demanding that somebody hear her confession and, I admit, I was curious to hear it. Barbara had been the nurse at the orphanage but she
was also a midwife. I suppose I forgot about that, because it never occurred to me—”

  O’Byrne broke off and looked down at his shaking hands, remembering how good they had felt wrapped around the old woman’s throat.

  “You see, she confessed that she had told a lie, back in 1990, when she worked at an orphanage in Rothbury. The lie, she said, concerned a girl who had fallen from the orphanage roof as she had tried to run away. The girl had been beautiful, Barbara told me, with long red hair and blue eyes.” His voice quivered, but he carried on. “When the girl died, the committee in charge of the orphanage wanted to hush it up altogether but, when they couldn’t, they said it was suicide to avoid having to admit something much worse.

  “Grace was pregnant, you see,” O’Byrne delivered the bombshell in a queer, flat voice. “She went to Barbara to ask for help and Barbara—the fucking hypocrite—tried to pressure her into having an abortion, to commit a mortal sin, just to preserve the reputation of the orphanage and its staff. So, to protect the baby, Grace decided to run away.”

  In the short silence, Ryan asked the burning question.

  “Who was the baby’s father?”

  “The baby was mine,” O’Byrne snarled. “What we had was pure, it was special. There was nobody else.”

  “Why didn’t Grace tell you?”

  O’Byrne shook his head.

  “She was fourteen, chief inspector, and I was only two years older. Perhaps she thought that I would panic and try to pressure her into having an abortion as well. She must have been so desperate at the thought of our baby being taken away from her—all she could do was run.”

  Ryan’s jaw clenched. O’Byrne was guilty of statutory rape, to add to his other crimes.

  “Barbara told you that the Church wanted the pregnancy covered up?”

  “They painted it as suicide and denied her any proper burial rites. And Barbara had known. She was the one responsible for killing Grace and our baby.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I listened to her whining confession, begging for God’s forgiveness. She asked me how she could atone for it and I told her that it would take some time and that she needed to dedicate herself to rejoining the faith. I said that I would be happy to pay her a house call, to discuss things in confidence. She seemed so pathetically grateful,” he laughed unkindly. “I took the car and drove up there, the same night. She was surprised but happy to see me.”

  “And Healy?”

  “To save his own reputation, he let Grace’s soul be damned. He deserved to die.”

  Ryan remembered the sight of Father Simon Healy’s head hanging limply from the rest of his body.

  “The nun—Sister Mary-Frances?”

  O’Byrne nodded, tired now that he had purged himself.

  “She was the last one. I only wish that I had known about her deception years ago.”

  The words were spoken with such malice that Ryan almost took a step away, but he held firm.

  “Tell me something, Conor. Now that you’ve killed all those people, do you feel better?”

  O’Byrne waged an internal war for long minutes but finally he shook his head.

  “Grace has gone now. I can’t see her anymore.”

  Ryan stepped forward again to grasp his arm. This time, O’Byrne allowed himself to be led back down the hill towards the army of police at the bottom.

  CHAPTER 26

  MacKenzie yawned widely and looked across the empty Incident Room to where Lowerson had fallen asleep at his desk. She smiled and walked across to place an affectionate hand on his mousy brown head.

  “Jack?”

  He mumbled something indecipherable and she shook him gently.

  “Mmm? What? I’m awake…I’m awake,” he repeated, yawning until his jaw clicked.

  “Time to go home,” she said. “Phillips just rang to tell me they have O’Byrne in custody. They’re bringing him in now.”

  “Do they need us?”

  MacKenzie shook her head.

  “There’ll be plenty of forms to fill out tomorrow, no doubt, but our work is done for today. “Besides,” she broke off to check the time, “it’s nearly midnight. It’s past your bedtime.”

  Lowerson scrubbed his hands over his face and had to admit his eyes were drooping. It had been a long weekend, in the worst possible sense.

  “Would you like me to take you home, Mac?”

  He was adorable, she thought. Even though he looked like he could quite happily fall asleep where he stood, Lowerson was still concerned for her safety.

  “No. I appreciate everything you’ve done over the past few days. I know I don’t say it often but it made all the difference to me, knowing that you were there.”

  Lowerson felt a blush creep up his neck.

  “Anyway, the threat to my personal safety has been neutralised. We know who’s been sending the notes and The Hacker is behind bars. Sticks and stones,” she shrugged. “While he’s writing his sad little notes in his cold cell, I’m going to go back home and have myself a nice long bubble bath.”

  “I’m going to have myself a nice long beer,” Lowerson thought aloud.

  They shut down Operation Angel for the night and locked the Incident Room door behind them before making their way down to the ground floor of CID Headquarters. They said ‘goodnight’ to the duty sergeant at the front desk and walked out into the rainy night.

  “ ‘Night Jack.”

  “See you tomorrow, Mac.”

  She held her blazer over her head and scampered through the rain towards her car.

  Lowerson opened his mouth to call her back and then shut it again, feeling foolish. Instead, he waved a hand as she manoeuvred her red Fiesta towards the main gates of the car park and told himself he was a superstitious idiot when she tooted the horn in a cheerful beepety-beep.

  A moment later, she had gone.

  * * *

  Ryan personally went through the procedure of booking Conor O’Byrne into his cell for the night. If experience had taught him anything, it was that big fish tended to be slippery and surprisingly capable of wriggling off their hooks, particularly with the help of a fancy lawyer.

  O’Byrne’s solicitor had been right there waiting for his client when they drove into the car park. Swift and personal service came at a cost, but it was one that the Church was willing to pay to ensure that any potential embarrassment was kept to a minimum.

  But now, O’Byrne was alone once again inside the uninspiring surroundings of a holding cell with only his memories of Grace Turner to accompany him.

  “I want a twenty-four hour watch,” Ryan instructed.

  A medic had pronounced the man physically fit and well enough for detention overnight but it wasn’t his skin and bones that Ryan worried about. It wasn’t uncommon for men like O’Byrne simply to end it all, suicide being preferable to spending the remainder of their lives in prison or in the maximum security ward of a hospital.

  Phillips made a rumbling sound in his chest and took one last look through the peep hole to where the priest sat on the edge of his iron bed, staring at an empty spot on the wall of his cell.

  “Aye, I wouldn’t put it past him,” he concurred. “What do you want to do about a psychiatrist?”

  Ryan blew out a breath. There were a couple of ‘go-to’ forensic psychiatrists and psychologists that CID used on a routine basis to assess whether their charges were capable of being detained but the bigger questions surrounding the man’s overall sanity or capacity to stand trial would be hotly contested by his legal counsel. The Criminal Prosecution Service had their own list of preferred experts they tended to instruct when putting together a case.

  “Everything has been done by the book so far. Let’s wait to hear from the CPS tomorrow morning and take it from there.”

  Phillips nodded and rubbed at his eyes, which were bloodshot.

  “That’s everything tied up here then—”

  Ryan’s phone drummed out its electronic rendition of th
e Indiana Jones theme tune and he slapped his hands against his pockets in an effort to remember where he had stashed it.

  He found it in the back pocket of his dark jeans.

  “Ryan.”

  Phillips watched the chief inspector’s eyes turn from a dull grey to a bright silver and his face drained of all colour. He thought the man might keel over and he reached out immediately to put a supportive hand on Ryan’s back while a funny jitter passed through his body, a premonition of bad things to come.

  “What’s the matter, lad?” he mouthed urgently, but Ryan was rapping out a series of sharp questions followed by a barked order to the mysterious caller.

  “I want a squad car over to her house, now. He should be considered armed and dangerous.” He reeled off the address of Anna’s cottage in Durham. “I’m on my way.”

  Ryan ended the call and then, for the first time in Phillips’ memory, fumbled in his haste to bring up Anna’s number, which he called next. He held the phone to his ear while he waited for her to pick up and began to run towards the exit.

  “Ryan!” Phillips trotted behind him. “Ryan, for God’s sake man, what’s happened?”

  Ryan didn’t pause but he turned bleak eyes towards his sergeant.

  “Edwards. Edwards is out.”

  Phillips stopped dead.

  “What? What do you mean he’s out?”

  “He’s out!” Ryan shouted, sprinting towards his car. “He’s broken out of prison!”

  Phillips stood in the rain while Ryan reversed out of the car park with precise, jerky movements and was gone a few seconds later with a squeal of tyres. Phillips sent up a prayer to anybody listening that he wasn’t killed on the roads because he had never seen Ryan like that before, so wild with worry that he was a danger to himself and possibly to others. It was after midnight and the roads were dark and wet.

  But Phillips knew he would have behaved in exactly the same way, were the tables reversed. Keir Edwards, otherwise known as The Hacker, was a dangerous psychopath with a preference for slim young brunettes and an all-consuming hatred of Ryan, the man who had lost his sister in exchange for bringing her killer to justice. He thought of Ryan’s fiancée Anna, who lived within a short drive of HM Prison Frankland and could hardly bring himself to imagine what would happen if Ryan was too late getting across to her.