Broken Angels (Katie Maguire)

by Masterton, Graham

  For five long seconds, Father Quinlan and the girl remained frozen in a tableau. The wind blew Father Quinlan’s soutane, so that it flapped and snapped, and it blew the girl’s hair in long art-nouveau skeins. The ocean gnashed at the rocks below them, and the gulls circled around them, screaming, but for all of that time, neither of them moved.

  Father Quinlan suddenly jerked up his right hand, as if to give the girl a blessing, or an apology, or to wave goodbye. Then he turned and stumbled down the side of the outcrop, half jumping and half falling, until he reached the pathway that would take him back to the road.

  He felt hot, as he walked, but not from embarrassment. He felt as if he had inadvertently opened up a furnace door and been scorched by the red-hot fires of temptation. For the first time in his life, he had seen with absolute clarity what kind of man he was, and what it was that he really lusted after, but had never allowed himself to admit to it. He had seen his own sin as vividly as if it had been depicted in a painting by Brueghel, with beetle-headed demons trying to drag him down to hell, and trumpeting angels trying to give him the strength and the courage to resist them.

  It was not the red-headed girl who had aroused him. He had seen her as a siren, yes – a seductress, like Eve, or Lamia, the beautiful child-eating granddaughter of Poseidon. But what had aroused him was the anonymous young man who had been lying on his back while the girl stroked his penis. So thin, so narrow-hipped, so boy-like. Father Quinlan had pictured himself kneeling in the girl’s place, ready to take him into his mouth.

  The Grey Mullet Man waggled the rope violently from side to side. ‘Don’t tell me you’re actually sleeping?’ he demanded.

  ‘Ahhhh! Please!’ gasped Father Quinlan. ‘Please – please don’t, that hurts so much.’

  ‘You’re ready to confess, then?’

  Father Quinlan tried to raise his head. The Grey Mullet Man was still wearing the cloth over his face, and his red rubber apron.

  ‘Yes,’ Father Quinlan whispered. ‘If that’s what you want.’

  The Grey Mullet Man untied the knots that fastened the rope to the taps, and lowered Father Quinlan to the floor. Father Quinlan’s knees buckled, so that he slowly collapsed on to his right side. As his dislocated shoulder touched the lino, he screamed so loudly that the Grey Mullet Man said, ‘Name of Jesus, hush, will you! You sound like a fecking chicken.’

  ‘O Holy Mary, Mother of God, O Holy Mary, Mother of God.’

  The Grey Mullet Man freed Father Quinlan’s wrists and one after the other levered his arms down by his sides. Father Quinlan bit his tongue to stop himself from screaming again, and a runnel of blood slid out of the side of his mouth.

  ‘Now then,’ said the Grey Mullet Man. He forced his hands under Father Quinlan’s armpits, and pulled him into a sitting position. Then he dragged him across the bathroom floor and propped him up against the wall, next to the bathtub.

  ‘Right now, father, let’s hear your confession. Loud and clear, please.’

  Father Quinlan closed his eyes. He was suffering such pain that he had almost forgotten how to speak. The Grey Mullet Man waited for nearly half a minute, but when Father Quinlan still hadn’t confessed, he said, ‘How about a little lubrication for the voice box? I was going to give you some later, in any case.’

  He went over to a small pine cupboard that stood in the corner and took out a large glass jar. He came back and held it up in front of Father Quinlan’s face and said, ‘Open your eyes, father. See this? John Martin’s best honey, from Dunmanway. You always swore by it, didn’t you? It’s the bee’s knees, that’s what you used to say.’

  The sun shone through the honey jar so brightly that it looked like an orange lamp. The Grey Mullet Man unscrewed the lid, and then produced a large stainless-steel dessert spoon out of his apron pocket. He poured honey on to the spoon until it was dripping in long strings to the floor, and then he held the spoon close to Father Quinlan’s lips.

  ‘Here you are, father. Golden honey to give you a golden voice.’

  Father Quinlan kept his mouth tightly shut and tried to turn his head away.

  ‘Come on, father, you know it’s good for you.’

  The Grey Mullet Man pressed the spoon hard against Father Quinlan’s lips. The strong, sweet smell of it made Father Quinlan retch.

  ‘Don’t you think that honey makes me sick, even now?’ said the Grey Mullet Man. ‘I can’t even see a jar of honey sitting on the shelf in my local shop and I feel like bringing up my breakfast. But if this is what it takes to make you confess, then so be it, father. You’ll just have to mortify the palate.’

  Still Father Quinlan kept his lips closed. It was his final act of defiance. You may force me to confess, whoever you are, but in my own eyes I committed no sin, and neither did my brothers. Everything we did was to please and glorify God, and to bring the brilliance of heaven to the diocese.

  Without hesitation, however, the Grey Mullet Man plunged his left hand between Father Quinlan’s thighs and grabbed hold of his testicles through his thin woollen underpants.

  ‘Ah, no, please,’ said Father Quinlan.

  ‘So you can speak, then? Alleluia! Let’s get this honey down you, shall we, and then we’ll see just how sweet you can talk to me.’

  Father Quinlan closed his lips again, but the Grey Mullet Man gave him a quick, sharp squeeze between his legs, and immediately he opened up wide. The Grey Mullet Man jammed the spoon into his mouth so hard that it rattled against his dentures, and then said, ‘Suck! Go on, suck! I want a clean spoon, father.’

  Father Quinlan sucked all the honey off the spoon and swallowed it. Although it was ferociously sweet, it had a bitter aftertaste – but that may have been blood from his bitten tongue.

  ‘Oh, you’re a good, obedient fellow when you want to be, aren’t you, father?’ said the Grey Mullet Man, standing up and screwing the lid back on to the honey jar. ‘Now, let’s hear you sing to me.’

  Father Quinlan was desperate to wipe the sticky honey from his lips, but both of his arms lay by his sides, dislocated and useless. ‘In the name of the Father...’ he began.

  ‘Go on,’ the Grey Mullet Man chivvied him, in his sandpapery voice. ‘And of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, amen.’

  Father Quinlan said, as loud as he could manage, ‘I confess.’

  ‘Good. You confess. You confess to what, exactly?’

  ‘I confess that in the summer of 1983 – I used my influence as their spiritual shepherd – to persuade several young boys who were entrusted to my care...’

  ‘Go on! You may have escaped penance for nearly thirty years, father, but now it’s time to beg for forgiveness.’

  ‘To convince several young boys who were entrusted to my care...’

  ‘Spit it out, father.’

  Father Quinlan looked up at him and shouted, ‘I promised them that they would see God!’

  14

  Katie drove Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll back to Anglesea Street. As they climbed out of the car, she looked up and saw a dirty white shirt blowing in the wind above the rooftops, its arms waving at her. It soared and circled high above her, and then abruptly lurched out of sight, like a drunk man being pulled into a pub.

  Detective O’Donovan was sitting at his desk, waiting for her.

  ‘Sandwich?’ he asked her, lifting up a lopsided doorstep of soda bread, filled with bright orange cheese.

  ‘No, thanks, Patrick. Let’s just get going, shall we?’

  Detective O’Donovan nodded towards the transparent plastic evidence bag lying on his desk, next to his unwrapped sandwiches. ‘Father Heaney’s diaries, or whatever they are. I thought you’d like to take a look at them before I sent them across for fingerprinting.’

  Katie picked them up. There were three books altogether, bound in mottled brown leather, about the size of pocket Bibles. She pulled a rolled-up pair of latex gloves out of her jacket pocket and snapped them on. Then she opened the evidence bag, took out one of the books, and turn
ed it this way and that, and sniffed at it, too.

  ‘Smells like churches,’ she said.

  ‘The whole of Father Heaney’s diggings smelled like churches. I’d say he was smoking incense instead of ciggies.’

  Katie opened the book’s cover. On the flyleaf – in tiny, crabbed writing – it had been inscribed with the words ‘Quam Condeco Deus’, and underneath the name ‘St Joseph’s Orphanage, Cork, 1983.’

  ‘“Quam condeco Deus”?’ asked Katie. ‘Something to do with God?’

  ‘It’s the same in all three books, ma’am. I looked it up on the internet. As far as I can tell it means How to meet God.’

  Katie flicked through the book from beginning to end. Jesus – it would take even the best translators weeks to decipher all of this diminutive handwriting. Each page was filled with numbered paragraphs, and even though she couldn’t understand very many words, she got the general impression that it was a compendium of ways in which a true believer could feel closer to God. ‘Statua angelus usequaque commodo Deus’ – God is pleased by statues of angels, whatever ‘usequaque’ meant.

  ‘Okay, Patrick,’ she said, returning the book to its evidence bag and handing it back. ‘But tell the lab to photocopy them all before they do their forensics. I want it translated as soon as you like. We need to know how Father Heaney thought he was going to be meeting his maker, whether he planned it or not.’

  They drove over the grey reflective river to the Lower Glanmire Road and parked outside the lofty pillared portico of St Patrick’s. Father Lenihan was standing outside, talking to two of his parishioners, and the wind was waving his white comb-over like a handkerchief.

  As Katie and Detective O’Donovan climbed the steps he swivelled around to greet them, clasping his hands together and tilting his head to one side as if he were being deliberately unctuous. He was a very thin man, with long arms and long legs, like the long-legged scissor-man in Struwwelpeter. His eyes were blue and his face was very pallid, but his cheeks were two scarlet spots, as if he had been drinking, or making himself up to appear as a pantomime dame.

  ‘You must excuse me, ladies,’ he said to his parishioners, two rotund women in hats like cowpats and cardigans of different shades of brown. ‘I have to have a word with these good people here. Guardians of the law. They’ve come about poor Brendan.’

  The two women shuffled reluctantly away, trying their best to remain within earshot. But Katie said, ‘Let’s go inside, shall we, father? I’d like to see Brendan’s living quarters.’

  ‘Well, of course. There’s been no news of him yet, I imagine? It was a hideous business all around, you know, such a shock, but on reflection it didn’t entirely surprise me. I always had the feeling that Brendan was simmering away inside of himself with some kind of pent-up anger against the world, although I had no idea that it was all directed against Father Heaney.’

  Father Lenihan led them through the church, and one after the other they all genuflected in front of the altar. Then he took them out of the back door and into the flagstoned yard, to the single-storey stone outbuilding in which Brendan Doody had nested – more like a giant hamster, thought Katie, than a human. The main room had a high ceiling, with rafters that trailed long dusty spiders’ webs, and it was filled from one side to the other with unbelievable clutter. Underneath the window, there was a broken-down sofa covered with a multicoloured hand-crocheted blanket, which Brendan Doody had obviously used as his bed. Next to the sofa there was a dilapidated basketwork armchair, but the rest of the room was jam-packed with tables and workbenches, all of which were covered with wrenches and hammers and paintbrushes and tins of screws and squeezed-out tubes of glue. The air was pungent with the smell of varnish and white spirit.

  At the far end of the outbuilding, a makeshift partition had been nailed together out of chipboard, with a crude doorway cut into it, and behind this partition was Brendan Doody’s kitchen and his washbasin. On the windowsill stood two half-empty bottles of medicated shampoo, for dandruff. The kitchen was equipped with no more than a two-ring electric hotplate, a brown plastic kettle and a row of cheap cooking spoons and spatulas. Katie opened one of the cupboards and apart from a box of tea bags and a packet of chocolate biscuits it was stacked with nothing but cans of tuna, probably thirty or more.

  The only personal touch that she could see was a curled-up photograph on the fridge of a grey-haired woman in a turquoise cardigan, who Katie guessed was Brendan Doody’s mother.

  They went back into the main room. Father Lenihan laid his hand on the back of the sofa and said, ‘I’d find him lying here sometimes, young Brendan. Not asleep, but staring up at the ceiling and whispering to himself.’

  ‘Did you ever hear what he was saying?’ Katie asked him.

  ‘I caught a word or two, but I don’t really care to repeat it. He was a poor unfortunate soul with a tortured spirit and I don’t think it’s for any of us to judge him.’

  ‘All the same, if you heard anything at all that might explain what he did...’

  Father Lenihan shrugged. ‘I suppose you can’t say ill of the dead. He used to whisper, “You demon, Skelly, you’ll be sorry one day.”‘

  ‘Skelly?’

  ‘I didn’t know it until yesterday, when Father Tiernan from St Joseph’s called me. “Skelly” is what the boys used to call Father Heaney, on account of him being so bony, I suppose.’

  ‘So on several occasions you actually heard Brendan Doody whispering what sounded like threats against Father Heaney?’

  Father Lenihan looked uncomfortable. ‘In a manner of speaking, yes. I mean, that’s always supposing that I heard him right.’

  ‘You’ve just told me that you clearly heard him say, “You demon, Skelly, you’ll be sorry one day.”‘

  ‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’

  ‘Come on, father, did he or didn’t he?’

  Katie looked acutely at Father Lenihan and the way that Father Lenihan’s blue eyes kept darting towards the broken-down sofa as if he were trying his hardest to imagine something that might not have actually happened.

  Father Lenihan twisted his hands together and said, ‘Yes, that’s it. That’s what he said right enough.’

  ‘Very good, then. When did you last see him?’

  ‘I, ah – I think it was about five to six, just before Mass. He said he was on his way to meet some friends.’

  ‘Did he seem upset, or different in any way?’

  Father Lenihan shook his head. ‘He might have been, but it was always very difficult to tell with Brendan. Sometimes he shouted as if he was very angry, but it was only his idea of a joke. People like Brendan... they don’t always have the same sense of humour as the rest of the world. He used to think that people in wheelchairs were funny. He used to point at them in the street and laugh his head off. It was only because people in Cork got to know him that he got away with it without somebody beating the dust off him.’

  Katie circled around the outbuilding, picking up screwdrivers and pliers and odd lengths of wire. One pair of pliers and a coil of brass wire she gave to Detective O’Donovan to drop into his evidence bag.

  Father Lenihan said, ‘I suppose with all this recent publicity about abuse, it was only a matter of time before it occurred to Brendan that he was entitled to take his revenge, too.’

  ‘Do you think that Father Heaney deserved what was done to him?’ asked Katie.

  ‘Of course not! Thou shalt not kill, under any provocation whatsoever. Besides, I know for a fact that whatever Father Heaney did, he was truly repentant.’

  ‘But you believe that Brendan had a very strong motive to punish him?’

  ‘That depends on how forgiving you are, superintendent.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Katie. She ran her fingertip along a small tenon saw, but its blade was rusty rather than bloody, and she put it down again. ‘Did Brendan own a van?’

  ‘No, not himself. He used to borrow one from the nursery up at Ballyvolane whenever he needed a van for an
y of his odd jobs.’

  ‘What did it look like, this van?’

  Father Lenihan pulled a face. ‘It wasn’t always the same van. I saw a blue one once, and a black one, but I’m not really the man to ask about vans.’

  ‘The black one – did you notice anything unusual about it? Any markings?’

  ‘Only a name that somebody had painted over, but you couldn’t read what it was.’

  Detective O’Donovan held up a spiral-bound notebook, and a green ballpoint pen. ‘I found these on the table here, ma’am. This must be the pad he used to write his suicide note in.’

  Katie took the notebook and leafed over a few pages. They were all blank, but when she angled it against the light she could still make out the indentation of somebody’s handwriting. She passed it back to Detective O’Donovan and said, ‘Yes, let’s bag this, too – and the pen, please.’

  She took a last look around, lifting up the cushion on the basketwork chair, and then the crocheted blanket on the sofa. The leatherette fabric was worn through, so that the springs were showing, and Brendan Doody had pushed dozens of crumpled-up sweet wrappers down the back of it, mostly Snickers and Aero bars.

  ‘Well, he never let himself go hungry,’ she remarked. She let the blanket drop back and then she said, ‘Did Monsignor Kelly tell you that we’d be needing a picture of him?’

  Father Lenihan led them back into the church and through to his dark panelled presbytery office. On the wall above his desk hung a very miserable-looking Madonna, as if she were mourning what the world had become, in spite of having sacrificed her only son. In fact, Katie thought she was the most dejected Madonna she had ever seen.