The Reckoning

by Jane Casey

  ‘In a way. Maybe he didn’t like killing a priest. We could be looking for someone who is a Roman Catholic. Or was brought up as one.’

  ‘Could be.’

  I stepped around the bed, looking everywhere but at what remained of the head. One glance had been enough.

  ‘Presumably the body wasn’t like this when it was found.’

  ‘You presume correctly. But Hanshaw didn’t disturb the corpse too much. There’s rigor mortis in the hands – he didn’t bother to break it. Said he’d recover the rosary at the PM. The angle of the body is a bit off. He wasn’t as much on the bed as that. And Hanshaw did the undressing.’

  I looked up quickly. ‘Did he? So the shirt was buttoned up again after the branding?’

  Derwent nodded.

  ‘Left him his dignity,’ I said, almost to myself. ‘He – or they, it could have been more than one – must have decided the victim didn’t know anything useful. He let Kinsella dress himself again. The killer even let him pray, though making him use the same rosary that was used to torture him is a sadistic twist, isn’t it?

  ‘He was sitting on the bed,’ Derwent said. ‘When he was shot. Sitting on the edge. Praying.’

  ‘He knew he was going to die.’

  ‘It was quick. And he was old.’ Derwent moved, suddenly restless. ‘Finished?’

  I was. I went out of the room with a definite feeling of relief that I could leave the grim scene behind, but the details were still horribly vivid in my mind’s eye. I would never get used to looking at bodies, I thought dismally, which argued that a change of track might not be such a bad idea. I could leave the team – switch to financial investigation, maybe. There were very few bodies in fraud. That might kill two birds with one stone, because if Rob and I weren’t on the same team any more …

  I clamped down hard on that particular train of thought. I had been thinking about Rob in a completely unguarded way – a hopeful way. And what a waste of time that was. It was over, I acknowledged, walking blindly down the narrow hall towards the door. He had moved on already, and so should I. There was no point in thinking about him any more, and there was no point in considering leaving the team. Not when I still cared passionately about my job, and wanted to do well. My thoughts went to Godley and as we stepped into the open air I turned.

  ‘Has the boss been here? Is he coming down?’

  Derwent shook his head. ‘Too busy.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought he’d prioritise anything over a serial killer.’ Godley was as hands-on as his workload allowed and he had seemed so engaged with the case the previous night.

  ‘Keep your voice down.’ He took my arm and squeezed it, hard. ‘Do you want to give the game away?’

  I looked around. The only civilians were miles away. ‘Firstly, you’re paranoid. There’s no one near enough to hear. And secondly, do you seriously think you’re going to be able to keep this under wraps for much longer?’

  ‘Maybe not. But that doesn’t mean I want it to come from you. We’re going to need to manage the release of information carefully. The media aren’t going to be easy to handle; don’t make it any harder for us than it needs to be.’

  That was fair enough. And even if I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong, a tactical apology might go a long way. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll be careful. Look, I’ll go and talk to the neighbours. See if they heard anything.’

  ‘No need.’

  ‘You can’t have done it already.’ I hadn’t taken that long to get to the address.

  ‘Not me. Colin Vale. I asked the boss if we could have a bit of extra help and that’s who he sent.’

  Colin was a good detective, beyond painstaking. I nodded. ‘We could do with the support.’

  ‘I thought you’d be pissed off.’ It was not my imagination that Derwent looked disappointed. He looked past me and I turned to see the lanky DC folding himself in two to duck under the crime-scene tape. ‘Here he is now. How did you get on?’

  Lugubrious at the best of times, Colin was looking downright tragic now. ‘Not good at all.’ He pointed with his pen. ‘Next door to the left: out at work. They run the corner shop and leave the house at the crack of dawn, come back at God knows o’clock. I went along to the shop and checked with them anyway but they saw nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing. Next door to the right: the lady is deaf as a post and practically mute as well. From what I can gather, she didn’t notice anything. Upstairs is empty and has been for months. Top left is being renovated and the builders were using heavy equipment all morning from about seven o’clock. They didn’t notice anyone coming or going but again, not easy to get through to them because of the language barrier. They’re Ukrainian.’

  ‘Top right?’

  ‘Claire Halperin is her name. She’s a nurse – works shifts. She was doing nights this week, off at seven in the morning, usually back here by eight. She ended up getting home a bit late today because she went to the supermarket on the way. Got here shortly after Mrs Driscoll called 999 and saw the first responders but that was her first inkling that there was anything wrong. She hadn’t seen anyone hanging around over the past few days, definitely didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary yesterday or this morning, and I’d say out of the lot of them she’s the best possible witness. Young lady, but the sort who notices things.’

  ‘Did she know the victim?’

  ‘She did. She looked in on him now and then. Mrs Driscoll called her once when Mr Kinsella took a turn and Miss Halperin checked him out, stayed with him until the paramedics arrived, that sort of thing. He was all right, she said – they didn’t even keep him in overnight. But he was quite frail and she got into the habit of dropping in every couple of weeks for a chat. She liked him. Very shocked to hear he’s dead.’ Colin looked at me morosely. ‘I didn’t give her too much information about the circumstances.’

  ‘That’s probably for the best.’

  Derwent was looking annoyed. ‘He lived in a shoebox with twenty other people practically within arm’s reach; the walls are made of paper and nobody noticed a fucking thing. He was shot dead. No one saw anything suspicious. No one remembers anything useful like, say, a tall dark stranger covered in blood running down the street at nine in the morning or a car they didn’t recognise with the engine running. Any chance someone remembers overhearing an altercation? A cry for help? A fucking shotgun blast?’

  ‘Apparently not. But I haven’t done the premises across the road yet.’ Colin gave a deep sigh. ‘Not much chance, I’d have said. Not with the way the maisonettes are laid out. You’re basically hoping someone was in their kitchen looking out, or leaving the house, at the exact moment that your victim let their killer in. Because otherwise, you wouldn’t see anything. And there’s no sign of damage to the door or in the hall. It doesn’t look like it was a forced entry. You’re just hoping against hope that one of the neighbours was nosy enough to take notice when someone called to the door, basically, and I don’t like the odds. But I’ll ask them anyway.’

  ‘You might as well keep yourself busy that way as any other.’ Derwent paced back and forth. ‘Don’t let me keep you.’

  He seemed completely absorbed in his own thoughts. With anyone else, I would have gone off and found something useful to do. But with Derwent, I didn’t dare.

  ‘What’s the best thing for me to do?’ He looked at me blankly and I risked a suggestion. ‘You mentioned talking to Mrs Driscoll.’

  ‘Yeah. Sure. Why not. Go and talk to Mrs Driscoll. And then get back to the nick. I’ll go to the morgue. Make sure we didn’t miss anything on this one. It bothers me that there isn’t as much violence. It bothers me a lot.’

  ‘Not all killers escalate. They’re not machines.’

  He didn’t look at me. ‘Maybe the priest was better at talking to the killer. Maybe he convinced him to put him out of his misery. God knows, he was better off dead.’

  A fitting epitaph for a disgraced priest, but a cold one, I thought, as Derwent strode off t
o his car. I frowned a little. I was bothered too, but not about the violence. There were ready explanations for that; I had supplied a couple myself. What I couldn’t work out to my satisfaction was why the three victims had all died in such different ways. Barry Palmer’s skull was fractured, Ivan Tremlett’s throat was cut, and Fintan Kinsella’s head was blown off. I could understand using different means of torture, but I couldn’t imagine a killer who would be at ease with three such different methods of dispatch. Beating someone to death required brute force and a certain lack of finesse. A slit throat was the ultimate in neat efficiency. Shooting the priest was certainly violent, but it maintained a degree of distance between murderer and victim, and suggested a kind of fastidiousness that didn’t sit well with the other deaths. None of it made sense. It almost made me wonder if we weren’t looking for a single killer, but three, which was surely ridiculous. Still, it was worth suggesting.

  And I had not suggested it. The idea had occurred to me as soon as I saw Kinsella’s body, but I hadn’t even hinted at it. It was almost as if I was keeping it to myself, so I could discuss it with Godley at the earliest opportunity. But I would never do a thing like that. I had promised the inspector the previous evening. I’d said I wasn’t interested in playing games. I’d never have lied. Not to him.

  I watched Derwent drive away and I wasn’t aware of the slightest twinge from my conscience.

  Chapter Eight

  Somewhat against the run of play, things started to improve as the day progressed. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that DI Derwent was tied up all afternoon with the post-mortem. He would have been disappointed to realise that my interview with Mrs Driscoll was far from a chore. In spite of the circumstances I enjoyed every minute of it.

  Mrs Driscoll lived on the other side of the road, not quite opposite the crime scene, in a ground-floor maisonette that was the mirror image of the priest’s. She was small and wiry with dyed blue-black hair that looked as if it would be coarse to the touch. She was probably in her seventies but still spry, and her pale, watery eyes missed absolutely nothing. As promised, she was garrulous, but also entertainingly opinionated. Before I managed to ask her so much as a single question, I got to hear all about the ex-priest’s neighbours and the Loughlins, who owned the flat where he’d lived.

  Her living room was immaculately tidy, and I recognised the same take-no-prisoners attitude to dust that I’d noted in the victim’s flat – every surface was polished to a mirror-like shine. A vast squashy three-piece suite covered in vibrantly floral upholstery took up most of the space in the room, and the remainder was devoted to a huge flat-screen TV. The curtains were the same material as the sofa and chairs, but were tied back with elaborately beaded tassels. The carpet was maroon, as were the skirting boards and dado-rail, and the wallpaper was gold with a maroon swirling pattern. The effect was somewhat startling but the room was comfortable – or it would have been, had it not been stiflingly hot. On a day when the spring sunshine had the uniformed officers out in their shirtsleeves, it was heated with two radiators and an open fire. I sat as far away from the hearth as I could and sipped the glass of water she had provided, rationing it as sweat beaded on my upper lip and trickled down my back.

  Family photographs sat on every possible surface; I had had a good look at them while Mrs Driscoll was getting the water. In pride of place were four large, leather-framed graduation pictures, three boys and a girl awkward in mortarboards. They were all standing in stiff poses holding scrolls, and all with identical embarrassed smiles. The hair and clothes dated the pictures to the mid-nineties. The same faces smiled out of wedding pictures that were tucked away on a low bookshelf, arranged so the spouses were more or less obscured. Poor Abby had a similar lack of prominence in my parents’ front room. She would be relegated to a drawer by now, I guessed, reminded with a pang of my brother’s difficulties. From the legions of babies, toddlers and children who waved and squinted pinkly in their frames, I deduced that the Driscoll children had provided grandchildren in abundance. I didn’t dare ask about them, fearing that I’d never get Mrs Driscoll back on topic. Besides, she was not the sort of witness who required coaxing to be forthcoming. She was more than ready to talk, and was loud in her defence of the dead man’s reputation ‘Now that he’s not here to tell you himself and may perpetual light shine upon him may he rest in peace amen.’

  ‘Amen,’ I echoed. ‘So you were aware that he had been convicted of child abuse?’

  ‘Indeed I was. Not a word of it was true. That poor man, God bless him, he was the sort who’d break his heart for you. He wasn’t the man to argue. He went along with it sooner than say that the lads were lying. He used to tell me, “Mary, it was true as far as it went. I was there when they washed in the house, but I was making sure they minded themselves and the property. There was no malice in it.”’

  ‘But the events that were described did happen.’

  She waved a finger at me. ‘You have to realise, these were poor young fellows who had no access to hot water. No one else was looking after them. Filthy, they were, and full of nits and God knows what. Father Fintan washed their clothes and let them clean themselves to give them some self-respect. You couldn’t turn your back on them or they’d rob you blind in a second. So he made sure they weren’t left alone – for their own good. He was an innocent. He wouldn’t have seen that there was any harm in staying in the one room with them. And indeed there was not. Didn’t Christ himself wash the feet of his apostles?’

  ‘So they say.’ All of this was delivered at machine-gun pace and I was struggling to keep up. ‘Did he do anything similar when he worked here in this parish, do you know?’

  She drew herself up to her full height, which was roughly five foot nothing. ‘He did not. Nor did he need to. This area is respectable. This is not the sort of place where the children run wild. They may do that kind of thing up there in Liverpool, but not here. They wouldn’t dare behave that way. No child would ever go into that church needing to be washed, or they’d feel the back of their mammy’s hand.’ From the look on her face, I didn’t doubt it. ‘Father Fintan was a lovely man. A decent man, through and through. We were happy to welcome him back when he needed somewhere to go.’

  ‘Didn’t he want to return to Ireland?’

  ‘He had no family there any more. His sisters went to Canada, but they’re both dead now. His parents were long gone, as you’d expect. His brother was a priest on the missions somewhere – Africa, maybe. Or the Philippines. I wouldn’t know, frankly. They were scattered to the four winds, anyway, so he had no home to go back to. This was the closest thing he had to a home.’ The watery eyes blinked twice and moisture seeped into the vertical wrinkles that scored her cheeks. ‘Ah, sure we’d all like to go home, but you find out what that means when you start to think about it. It’s where they remember you, where you’re loved. That was here, as far as he was concerned. He’d been away too long from Ireland. He didn’t know it any more, and they didn’t know him. He was better off here.’

  Until someone brutally murdered him, I thought but didn’t say. As if she had heard me, she fixed me with a beady eye.

  ‘Robbery, was it? Were they looking for money?’

  ‘We’re not sure of the motive yet. We’re keeping an open mind.’

  ‘That’s what that other fellow said. That terrible eejit who came here earlier.’

  I beamed. ‘Inspector Derwent?’

  ‘Him. He’s an awful idiot, isn’t he? A know-all. They’re the sort who know the least.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve always found.’

  ‘He wasn’t interested in listening. Kept interrupting to ask his questions but he wasn’t even paying attention to the answers. He just kept saying, “Yep, yep, yep” when I was talking, trying to get me to hurry up. I know I can be a bit slow to get to the point, but I wanted to make sure he’d understand about Father Fintan. No one would have wanted to kill him. Not like that. God bless us and save us, when I saw what they�
��d done to him …’ She closed her eyes, suddenly looking frail, and I recalled what she’d found when she opened the bedroom door. At least I had had plenty of warning. I had been able to prepare myself. And I had still found it difficult to look at what remained of the old man.

  ‘It must have been a terrible shock.’

  ‘Ah, well it was, you see. But I was worried anyway because he wasn’t up. He was always out of bed when I got there. Usually he’d have been at Mass at seven. I didn’t see him there this morning but I didn’t think anything of it. I suppose I’d assumed that he wasn’t well, or he’d woken up late or something of that nature. When I opened the door and called out to him and there was no reply – well, I knew something was wrong, but there wasn’t any other sign that anything had happened. Except that his bedroom door was closed. When I saw that I thought he was dead, but I thought he’d have died in his sleep.’ She sounded completely matter-of-fact about it. ‘I was already praying for his soul when I opened the door and found him.’

  ‘That must have been very upsetting, Mrs Driscoll. So there was nothing out of place in the flat? Nothing that bothered you?’

  She shook her head, but there was a tiny hesitation before she did so.

  ‘In the kitchen …’I began.

  ‘Oh, you saw that, did you? The kettle.’ She nodded, her pale eyes shining. ‘Now, I wondered about that, because he would make himself a cup of tea when he got up, before Mass. That was all he’d have. No breakfast or anything. Not until after, and even then it would only be a bit of bread. But he’d have the tea before he went out, around half past six, and I’d wash up the mug for him with his other things when I came in during the morning.’

  ‘Do you always visit him at the same time?’

  ‘After Mass, but sometimes earlier, sometimes later. The odd time I’d be as late as half ten. I was nearly that late today, as it happened. Just by chance I had a phone call from an old friend and that held me up this morning. Of all the mornings to be late. Although if I’d walked in on whoever it was, I’d be lying there dead and you’d be looking at me, not talking to me.’