The DCI David Fyfe Mysteries

by William Paul

  ‘Do you?’ said Fyfe, confused.

  ‘I keep it there as a reminder.’

  ‘A reminder of what?’ Fyfe asked.

  ‘That it should only be cast by those without sin.’ He put his hands inside the opposite sleeves of his habit and limped off silently. ‘I will get Father Quinn for you now.’

  21

  Father Donald Byrne was in an ugly mood when he barged straight into Lillian’s flat without knocking. She was stretched out on the sofa in T-shirt and jeans watching the afternoon soaps. She pretended not to notice that he had arrived but her curiosity got the better of her when he grabbed the half-bottle of whisky she was using to treat a mild toothache and started knocking it back.

  ‘Hard day at the office?’ she said sarcastically.

  ‘Shut up,’ he snapped.

  Lillian watched the television screen. He was a reflection on it, standing behind her. He was breathing heavily from the climb up the stairs and his dog collar was slightly askew like a hoop thrown over a target head at a fun-fair. He started to change into his track suit and jogging shoes. Lillian groaned inwardly, realising what that meant for her.

  ‘Where’s the pal you were bringing back to be my next-door neighbour?’ she asked.

  ‘He’ll be here,’ Byrne replied.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘That’s all right then. Should I warm his slippers?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  Lillian did as she was told. Byrne could be a violent bastard. He had hit her before. The small piece of scar tissue above her left eye was his handiwork. She could sense that he was close to striking out now as a nervous response to whatever had angered him. She did not want to provoke him so she kept quiet, concentrating on following the story of the soap. Byrne crouched down behind the sofa. Only his head was visible, hooded now, a skull-like wraith on the screen. She felt his hand begin to stroke her hair gently. It moved on to her shoulder and down her arm. With the palm of his hand he began to caress a breast through the material of her T-shirt, gaining urgency with each circular motion. Shit, she thought. No rest for the wicked.

  22

  So this was the wicked Father Quinn. An old man with a pot-belly, rounded shoulders, slightly protruding eyes, and a deeply lined face that looked as if it had just been pressed hard up against the mesh of a wire grille. There were tufts of grey-brown hair on his scalp and in his nostrils and ears. His nose was squashed to one side and huge ear lobes hung like pieces of fleshy jewellery, engorged with bright pink blood. The edge of his mouth was slightly turned down on the left, suggesting a mild stroke, and the tip of his tongue continually poked in and out of it. He was wearing a plain grey jogging suit. His footwear was of a much cheaper variety than the Reeboks on Brother Patrick who stood in the doorway for a moment as Quinn entered and then disappeared.

  Father Quinn walked across the creaking floorboards towards Fyfe, somehow managing to take a seat beside him at the table without once looking at him.

  ‘I am Detective Chief Inspector David Fyfe, Father.’

  Quinn sat with his arms folded, head to one side, staring out through the triptych of arched windows at the sea. The daylight was beginning to fail and the clean straight line of the horizon to fade. He made no attempt to introduce himself or say anything. Fyfe followed his gaze, trying to think of a good way of beginning the conversation. He had nothing prepared, no carefully thought out line of questioning. He was only there because the Chief Constable was a pal of the Archbishop. Did it really matter that Quinn had nicked the money? He wouldn’t do it again, wouldn’t get the chance. The Roman Catholic Church could afford it. A few thousand pounds out of a hole in its pocket wasn’t going to bankrupt the Vatican. Why not let the poor old bastard be tortured by his conscience for the rest of his miserable life? Wouldn’t a few hundred Hail Marys suffice? Was it really necessary to force an old man into a soul-destroying admission of iniquity?

  ‘Okay, I give in. I can’t take this silence any longer. I’ll admit to anything.’

  Fyfe was surprised by the outburst. He had been lulled into a near-hypnotic trance by watching the motion of the sea against the rocks outside. It hadn’t been an intentional tactic to break the ice but it seemed to have worked. He turned to Quinn, who was sitting with his hands on his knees and his belly sagging low between them. He might have been smiling but it was hard to tell because of the lop-sided nature of his face. Every breath was a laboured wheeze. He had a deep voice that whistled on sibilant letters and created a row of tiny bubbles on his bottom lip. There were no nails on three of the fingers of his right hand.

  ‘Did you steal the money?’ Fyfe asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘None at all?’

  ‘I wanted a set of strips for the Sunday league football team I ran. I couldn’t get official approval. They said it was too much of an extravagance. An extravagance, by God. For some of my boys it would have been the first new piece of clothing they had ever pulled over their head. Anyway, I decided to take an executive decision and allocated the money myself. Is that stealing?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘Then there were a mountain of other things that needed buying so I bought them, some of them. All of a sudden a few thousand pounds had vanished from the accounts.’

  ‘What did you buy?’

  ‘Stuff for the boys. We hired a bus and went on a tour to Spain. Didn’t cost them a penny and they loved it. I’m good with figures. I could have been an accountant. At the levels I stuck to, the Church never knew where the money went and the boys appreciated it greatly.’

  ‘You’re a real saint, Father.’

  Quinn bowed his head. He turned over his hands and stared into the palms as though he was holding something. ‘I realised I was getting in deep but I reckoned they wouldn’t do anything to me because of what I’d done with the money. It wasn’t as if I’d spent it on myself. But I couldn’t handle it after a while so I confessed.’

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘A priest. Who else?’

  ‘What priest?’

  ‘My parish assistant, Donald Byrne.’

  ‘Guilty conscience got the better of you, did it?’

  ‘Brother Patrick will have told you about the stone he keeps beside his bed?’ Fyfe nodded, thinking that he should take notes but not bothering. ‘Well, if I got my hands on it I’d crack Byrne’s skull wide open and scoop out his brains with a trowel.’

  Fyfe prevented himself breaking into a spontaneous grin. Quinn and him were soul mates. ‘You don’t get on with him, then?’

  Quinn lifted his head and shaped his lips into what was probably a sneer. ‘I would gladly kill him with my bare hands for what he has done to me,’ he said evenly.

  ‘Doing the Devil’s work, is he?’ Fyfe said, using the parting phrase of Mrs McMorrow, the loyal housekeeper.

  There was absolutely no reaction from Quinn. A pulse of blood on the side of his forehead made the wrinkled skin quiver. His tongue poked at the corner of his mouth. Otherwise there was no movement, no real expression. His ear lobes, if anything, went a deeper shade of pink but Fyfe decided that was just his own imagination working overtime. The same imagination that sensed the temperature in the room falling dramatically. Or maybe that was true because Quinn seemed to notice it as well and began rubbing his upper arms vigorously.

  ‘Do you know about Brother Patrick?’ Quinn said, leaning forward and speaking in a whisper. ‘Used to be a high-flying executive in a big company. Ten years ago he started drinking heavily, left his wife and family, used prostitutes, embezzled cash to maintain his lifestyle. Went to prison. Ended up a monk here in the back of beyond, running a funny farm for burned-out priests like me.’

  ‘Good for him.’

  ‘Do you know what you’ll be doing in ten years’ time, Chief Inspector? Do you know where you’ll be?’

  ‘I don’t know where I’m going to be tonight,’ Fyfe replied, deciding on the spur of the moment that he would go rou
nd and visit Sylvia. He sneaked a look at his watch to check the time.

  Quinn turned his head to look at the sea. He sighed deeply and his whole body shuddered. He began to run the tips of his fingers over his eyebrows. He spoke towards the window.

  ‘My confessor was of a like mind to me,’ he explained. ‘When I told him what I was doing and showed him how simple it was he had this sudden vision of building an orphanage in Eastern Europe, Rumania or Albania, somewhere like that. It came to him in a blinding flash, he claimed. God had given him, given us, this opportunity to do some real good. Not just to take a bunch of kids on holiday whose idea of deprivation is a second-hand bike instead of a new one. No, this was a chance to change lives for the better, to make a real impact, banish misery, bring joy.’

  ‘Like I said, Father. You’re a pair of real saints.’

  ‘Sounds daft, doesn’t it? But I believed in it at the time. I really did. I wanted to believe in it, needed to believe in it. So we went into partnership. We siphoned off more money than ever because we thought we could put it to better use than the Church.’

  ‘You and Father Byrne together?’

  ‘We bought shares,’ Quinn said, ignoring the question. ‘If capitalists can make themselves rich, why couldn’t we achieve the same result for the poor?’

  ‘Fancy chess sets too. And jewellery. How did they square with your principles?’

  Quinn shook his head. ‘That was Byrne. He moved into property speculation. It is easy enough. You just set up a trust, call it after Saint Thingummyjig, and nobody is any the wiser. There are literally thousands of genuine trusts doing all kind of good all over the place. Cuckoos in the nest are not instantly recognisable.’

  ‘It couldn’t last.’

  ‘It didn’t. The cuckoo grew too big. I could lose a few thousand pounds in the diocesan books, no problem, but a few hundred thousand pounds was a different story. It was only a matter of time before we were caught. I told him that but he wouldn’t stop. Didn’t seem to want to stop. He enjoyed it, the risk. He thrived on it. He was in charge by then. I was too far gone. I just signed whatever he put in front of me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The drink got to me. I could have as much as I liked, and I did. A bottle of whisky a night, more. Money no object, of course, and good malts too, none of the cheap stuff. I was in an alcoholic haze for six months at least.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell somebody else?’

  Quinn’s hands were on his knees once more, fingers kneading at the bones. His eyes were tightly closed as if he was in great pain. ‘Only a matter of time,’ he said, repeating it over and over. ‘Only a matter of time.’

  ‘Time’s up.’

  ‘It was when that bloke Barrie started calling in his debts that it all began to fall apart.’

  ‘Barrie?’

  ‘Yeah. Gus Barrie. You must know about him. He is a drug dealer, gun runner, dodgy businessman. You name it, he’s into it. He needed liquidity in a hurry for reasons I never understood.’

  Fyfe knew of Barrie, a big-time crook with a snow-white record. He had questioned him several times on different investigations. Once it had been at his offices and once at his home, a Roman-style villa in dubious taste behind high walls and electronic security gates. Each time it had been a dead end. Barrie was untouchable. He remembered the Windfall Construction notice on the scaffolding at the church. That was one of Barrie’s companies.

  Quinn opened his eyes. ‘Suddenly guys with tattoos and shaven heads were knocking on the door. We had to find money fast or we were dead. That was when the house of cards came tumbling down.’

  Another silence danced slowly around them, as complete as Brother Patrick’s Reebok-cushioned footsteps.

  ‘Three weeks ago they came to get me,’ Quinn said. ‘I was drunk, naturally, and made a fool of myself trying to put the blame on Byrne. He had got his retaliation in first by shopping me. I wouldn’t have believed me in the state I was in. He was able to play the injured innocent. They sent me here to dry out.’

  ‘That’s your story?’

  ‘It’s the truth as far as anything is the truth.’

  ‘Suppose I tell you your Archbishop doesn’t believe you. He thinks you’re just a bad example for poor innocent Father Byrne. You’re the criminal. Why do you want to drag others down with you?’

  ‘There is plenty of scope for thinking here,’ Quinn said. ‘High cliffs and few distractions.’

  ‘Is that all you do, think?’

  ‘Think and pray. Prayer makes the Christian’s armour bright and Satan trembles when he sees the weakest saint upon his knees.’

  ‘Very probably.’ Fyfe wondered if Satan might not be trembling with laughter but didn’t say it. ‘You still think of yourself as a Christian, then?’

  ‘Yes, despite everything. I have repented for my sins. I am on my knees. I pray for Father Byrne.’

  Fyfe had a hip-flask of whisky in the inside pocket of his jacket. He wondered fleetingly if he should offer Quinn a drink to see if he would take it. No. He rejected the idea and sneaked another surreptitious glance at his watch. Plenty of time yet.

  ‘Have you met Father Byrne?’ Quinn asked, changing his mood and his demeanour with a tilt of his head.

  ‘Briefly. He was too busy to talk. I’m seeing him tomorrow morning.’

  Quinn nodded and cupped his hands over his face. If he was to be believed, the old man’s story would not be good news for the Archbishop. If true, it meant two rotten priests instead of one. It meant complications and huge potential for embarrassing publicity. Wonderful stuff.

  ‘Tell me about Byrne,’ Fyfe said.

  ‘He is a renegade,’ Quinn said fiercely but dispassionately. ‘An apostate. A fornicator. A manipulator. A deceiver. A liar. An amoral criminal.’

  ‘Just a regular kind of guy really.’

  Quinn looked up from his hands. The profile position with the hands together in front of his face reminded Fyfe of a religious painting by some Old Master he must have seen before but couldn’t put a name to. Quinn’s forehead twitched erratically as though something was under the skin trying to fight its way out.

  ‘How does a guy like that get to be a priest?’

  ‘He wasn’t always like that. People change.’

  ‘Big change.’

  ‘You’re not a religious man at all, are you, Chief Inspector? You won’t understand that just as people like Brother Patrick can be born again, so people like Father Byrne can be sucked over to the other side.’

  ‘One sees the light while the other gets lost in the dark.’

  ‘You have it,’ Quinn said, covering his face once more. ‘As you have mentioned already, it is the Devil’s work.’

  ‘You mean he is possessed by an evil spirit?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking. But not one that jumps out at you with horns and a forked tail spitting green bile.’

  ‘Pity. We could have charged the little devil as well.’

  Quinn dropped his hands into his lap and his head sagged low. ‘I deserve your mockery, Chief Inspector. But Father Byrne deserves your professional attention as a policeman. He is plausible, persuasive and well regarded within the Church. He will continue to do untold damage until he is stopped. His one weakness is that he knows he will ultimately be stopped because his empire is built on sand.’

  ‘Only a matter of time, eh?’

  ‘Yes indeed.’

  The window rattled in a gust of wind, making them both look across. A black-headed seagull glided past on outstretched wings spiralling down towards the harbour. Its body was magnified and distorted momentarily as it passed behind a flaw in the glass. Darkness was spreading inwards from the horizon like a dust storm.

  Fyfe felt sorry for the old man seated at the table beside him. He was inclined to believe his story but worried that Quinn was too plausible and too persuasive for his own good. He admitted fiddling the books to begin with and then claimed Byrne had taken over. A classic case o
f shifting personal blame and copping out of responsibility. The reason why Fyfe sympathised with him was because of his instinctive prejudice against Father Byrne after their brief encounter. It would be interesting to see what the younger guy had to say for himself tomorrow.

  Fyfe stood up. ‘This is just a preliminary meeting. I will need a full statement, including details of all your business transactions and a log of where the money went.’

  ‘I’ll tell you all I know. But I don’t know what happened to most of the money. I was too drunk to realise what I was doing.’

  ‘I thought you said you were the financial brains.’

  ‘Byrne was a quick learner.’

  ‘I see.’ It was a reasonable scenario, Fyfe thought. So was protection of a fat bank account to provide for a comfortable, if conscience-stricken, old age. ‘I’ll come back next week and we’ll get it down on paper.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere. High cliffs and few distractions.’

  Quinn got to his feet, straightening slowly so that he seemed to be creaking like the floorboards supporting his weight. He shuffled away out of the room muttering to himself. Brother Patrick replaced him, arms still folded inside the sleeves of his habit, limping even more noticeably on the thick soles of his Reeboks.

  ‘Would you like something to eat before you leave, Chief Inspector?’

  ‘No, thank you. I have to get back. Urgent business.’

  ‘Of course. I hope you found Father Byrne co-operative. He seemed to be in a more positive mood today.’

  ‘He gets depressed, does he?’

  ‘We watch him closely.’

  ‘He told me something about you. Do you mind if I ask you if it is true or not?’

  ‘Ask away.’

  ‘He said you were a reformed alcoholic, a divorcee, a swindler, and a jailbird. Recognise yourself?’

  ‘Definitely, Chief Inspector,’ the monk replied with a placid smile. ‘In a former life, of course.’

  ‘That’s one up for Father Quinn’s veracity, then. Maybe the rest will check out as well. What do you think?’