She walked quickly back to the house, where Detective O’Donovan and three uniformed gardaí were waiting for her.
‘Well?’ asked Detective O’Donovan, with a sloping smile. ‘Did you get any good tips about how to grow bananas?’
‘You can laugh,’ Katie told him. ‘But if you want the truth about anything at all, always ask the simplest person you can find. They won’t have any agenda and they won’t try to embroider the facts to impress you and they’ll always remember things just the way they were.’
She paused, and then she said, decisively, ‘Benedict Tiernan, OP, was giving us a whole lot of BS, I’m sure of it. Our perpetrator came here in his van this morning and I’ll bet you money that he took Father ó Súllabháin away with him, and that for some reason Friar Tiernan gave him his full co-operation.’
Detective O’Donovan opened and closed his mouth, and then he said, ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’
‘Not at all.’
‘And what? You’re relying on what some mong of a gardener told you?’
‘I’m relying on my own instincts, if you must know.’
‘So what are we going to do? Arrest Friar Tiernan on suspicion of being an accessory to kidnap?’
‘We’re going to leave Friar Tiernan well alone for now. First of all, I want to find out who drives that van. Haven’t you heard from Jimmy yet? Surely he must have found Father Lowery by now.’
‘I’ve been calling his mobile, but he’s not answering. Neither is Father Lowery. I called St Michael’s church in Rathbarry and they’re not answering either.’
Katie checked her watch. ‘He should have reported back by now. Let’s give him another half-hour anyway.’ She looked back towards the retreat. ‘We’re being given the runaround here, Patrick, but I know who I need to talk to next.’
37
Gradually the window darkened, although the hydrangea kept on tapping against it, tappity-tap, tappity-tap, like a ghost who had long since given up hope of being let in, but who continued tapping all the same.
Is there anybody there? said the traveller, knocking at the moonlit door.
Gerry opened his eyes. He was suffering such pain that he found it hard to believe that he was still alive. Surely you could die from pain alone. Surely there was a way in which you could wish yourself dead. Dear God in heaven, please stop my heart. Please stop it now, so that I no longer have to go through this unbearable agony.
But of course God had turned His back on him, and no matter how desperately he pleaded, God would pretend that He hadn’t heard.
The room grew gloomier and gloomier, until it was almost completely dark. Gerry rose in and out of consciousness, like a swimmer dipping up and down in the ocean, except that he felt that the surface was on fire, as if it was spread with blazing oil, and whenever he reached it he was blinded and seared and deafened by his own screaming.
Without warning, the room filled up with dazzling white light. He tried to raise his head to see what was happening, but he didn’t have the strength, and the tendons in his neck were too tight. Please, Mary, Mother of God, let it be an angel, come to carry me away.
‘Help me,’ he said, inside his head; but not out loud.
It wasn’t an angel. It was the Grey Mullet Man, holding up a hurricane lamp. He was still wearing his mask and his pointed hat, but now he was covered in a long red apron that smelled strongly of rubber, and his forearms were bare, and covered in tattoos. He stood at Gerry’s bedside for a long time without saying anything, staring through his eyeholes at Gerry’s black and scarlet scalp and then turning to look at the shrivelled remains of his penis, like a burned-out indoor firework.
‘How was that for a penance?’ he said. ‘The burning bush, no less! Do you think that the good Lord has seen fit to forgive you yet?’
Gerry stared up at him, but it took all of his concentration to cope with his pain and he could hardly think, let alone decide if he had been redeemed.
The Grey Mullet Man held the hurricane lamp closer, so that Gerry could feel its heat against his cheek and hear its snake-like hissing. ‘I’ll tell you what I think. I think you’re nearly there, but not quite, like Christ on his way to Calvary, carrying His cross. You still have some way to go, and you don’t have Simon the Cyrenian to carry your cross the rest of the way for you, I’m afraid. Not that I believe that Christ dropped the cross at all. It doesn’t say anywhere in the New Testament that Christ dropped the cross. In fact, it doesn’t say anywhere that He even carried it a single inch. But let’s pretend that He did, like; and now you’re carrying your cross, just the same.’
‘John nineteen, verse seventeen,’ Gerry croaked at him.
‘Ah, there you are!’ said the Grey Mullet Man, in triumph. ‘I knew the priest in you would come out at last! No good denying it any longer, Father O’Gara! But you could still be wrong, you know, about Christ dropping the cross. It depends on your translation of the Greek word opisthen, for “after”. Did Simon carry the cross after Jesus had carried it, like after in time? Or did he carry it after him, meaning behind?’
The Grey Mullet Man waited, and then he said, ‘You don’t look like you fecking care, to tell you the God’s-honest truth, do you? So let’s be getting on with it, shall we? Let’s get on and bring your penance to its glorious conclusion. Lads, are you there?’
The man in the bishop’s mitre appeared; and, close behind him, the white expressionless face of the man in the pierrot mask was looking over his shoulder.
Oh, Jesus, thought Gerry. What are they going to do to me now? I’m already dying, so why don’t they just leave me alone? Shock or septicaemia or dehydration or hypothermia – one or all of them will get me in the end. I don’t need to go through any more torture. Please.
The Grey Mullet Man carefully set the hurricane lamp down on the plastic-topped kitchen chair.
‘By the way,’ he said, snapping his fingers, ‘I thought you’d be pleased to know that we have the last of you now. Father Heaney, Father Quinlan – yourself, of course – and now we have Father ó Súllabháin.’
‘He’s here?’ asked Gerry.
The Grey Mullet Man shook his head, his mask flapping from side to side. ‘Oh, no. It wouldn’t have been appropriate to bring him here. Not a fitting fate for him at all. To be honest with you, father, I didn’t want to go and bring him in just yet. We still haven’t finished with you, have we? And here we are, having to go out and catch ourselves another one. The last one, I’m happy to say.
‘The trouble is, the schickalony have been a little quicker off the mark than we thought they would. So we had to make sure that they didn’t mess things up for us.’
He took a craft knife out of his pocket and then leaned over to cut the black nylon straps that were holding Gerry’s wrists against the bedhead. Gerry felt an overwhelming urge to throttle him, but he couldn’t even feel his arms, let alone lift them up and seize the Grey Mullet Man by the throat.
The Grey Mullet Man dropped his craft knife back in his pocket and picked up a coil of shiny steel wire. ‘Recognize this? Fourteen-gauge piano wire. Thin enough to hurt, father, but not too thin to cut through your skin. Very popular with some of your lot for self-flagellation, and why not? You fecking deserve all the flagellation you can give yourselves, you perverts.’
The man in the pierrot mask came forward, took hold of Gerry’s left arm, and pulled him over until he was lying on his right side. He held him there, gripping his sleeve hard to prevent him from falling back. Behind him, the Grey Mullet Man unwound a long piece of piano wire and clipped it off with pliers. Then he pulled Gerry’s wrists together and bound them tight, around and around, until Gerry thought that he was going to cut his hands off altogether. Fortunately, he was so numb that he felt scarcely any more pain than he was feeling already. His hands felt ice-cold, and nothing else.
Once his wrists were wired together, the man in the pierrot mask let him drop back on to the bedsprings. They made a jouncing, squeaky sound, like t
hey would have done if a couple had been making love on them.
Now the man in the bishop’s mitre lifted Gerry’s legs as far apart as possible, and the Grey Mullet Man wired each of his ankles to the bed frame. His legs had been shapely and muscular when he played rugby, but now they were lean and white as chicken skin, and streaked with dark hair.
‘There now,’ said the Grey Mullet Man, tossing the coil of wire to one side. ‘All lashed tight and ready for the gelding. First, though, let’s hear you singing for mercy.’
He went back to the kitchen chair and picked up a jar of clear honey. He unscrewed the lid, dipped a tablespoon into it, and came up to Gerry and held it over his lips. Some of it dribbled on to his chin and ran stickily down the side of his neck.
‘Here you are, Father O’Gara. You know it’s good for the larynx. You’ll be singing sweeter than Pavarotti before you know it. Oh, I forgot. Pavarotti’s dead. Never mind, so will you be, soon enough.’
‘Mmmffff,’ said Gerry, and kept his lips tightly closed.
‘Come on, swallow it,’ insisted the Grey Mullet Man.
Gerry still kept his lips closed, so the Grey Mullet Man nodded to the man in the pierrot mask and he gripped Gerry’s nose between finger and thumb so that Gerry couldn’t breathe. When at last he opened his mouth, the Grey Mullet Man rammed the spoon into his mouth so hard that he broke one of his front teeth in half, and he swallowed the fragment of tooth along with the honey. He choked, coughed, gagged, and nearly vomited, but the Grey Mullet Man dug another spoonful of honey out of the jar and forced it between his lips.
‘Now then,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t so difficult, father, was it? So, let’s hear you sing for forgiveness. In your time, one-two-three, la-a-a-a-a!’
Gerry could do nothing but cough, and cough, and in the end he coughed so much that he let out a loud, cackling retch. The Grey Mullet Man said, ‘Jesus, I’ll be chugging myself in a moment if you go on like that. That’s not what I was looking for at all. I wanted sweet, holy music. I wanted a song of redemption, not the sound of someone talking to Hughie.’
He started to sing, in a high, eerie voice – the same voice that Gerry had heard singing ‘The Rose of Allendale’:
Hallelujah, God with us!
Hope restored and death undone!
Sinners saved and captives freed!
Beautiful redemption song!
Gerry retched again. There was nothing in his stomach but honey and saliva and phlegm, so he couldn’t vomit.
‘I give up,’ said the Grey Mullet Man. ‘I fecking give up. Let’s forget the sinners saved and the stone rolled back and get down to business.’
There was very little left of Gerry’s penis apart from a blackened rag that looked like a burned wash leather, surrounded by a cluster of fluid-filled blisters of differing sizes. His scrotum had been scorched red-raw, but the man in the pierrot mask was still able to grasp it in his left hand and squeeze it until Gerry’s testicles bulged. Gerry thought that he might have screamed again, but he wasn’t certain. Everything seemed like one continuous scream. Even the bright white light from the hurricane lamp seemed like a scream, rather than a light.
The man in the pierrot mask handed the steel-bladed castratori to the man in the bishop’s mitre. The man in the bishop’s mitre held them up in front of Gerry’s face, chopping them open and shut so that Gerry understood what was about to be done to him.
‘I know you, you gowls,’ he breathed. ‘I know all of your names.’
‘And what good do you think that will do you, Father O’Gara? What are you going to do, rat us out to the angels?’
Gerry stared at the ceiling. He felt the cold sharp blades of the castratori on either side of his scrotum. Then they slowly closed together, and he felt them cut through every nerve and every tubule and every inch of flesh. They made a surprisingly sharp crunch, too, which distressed him even more than the pain. It was the sound of his manhood being taken away from him, irrevocably.
The Grey Mullet Man collected his severed testicles in his open hand, before they could drop through the bedsprings. He held them up so that Gerry could see them, rolling them in a bloody mess between finger and thumb.
‘Do you think that this will help you to see God, father?’ he said, and even though Gerry couldn’t see his face behind his mask, he felt sure that he was leering.
He was still taunting Gerry when his mobile phone rang. He reached underneath his apron with his clean hand, took it out and flipped it open.
‘What’s the story?’ he asked. He clearly knew who the caller was.
He listened, and then he said, ‘Jesus. Feck. All right, then. Jesus. That’s going to put the cat among the fecking pigeons and no mistake.’
He closed the phone and pushed it back into his trouser pocket. Then he looked down at Gerry and said, ‘No more time to waste, father. Although you couldn’t be any kind of a father now, could you, state of you la.’
It seemed to Gerry as if the light from the hurricane lamp was dimming, even though it was hissing just as loudly as before. Sink, he thought. Let yourself sink under that sea, into that welcome darkness, into that numbing cold. Sink and never come back to the surface.
He didn’t feel the man in the bishop’s mitre lifting up his head, quite gently, so that the Grey Mullet Man could loop the piano wire around his neck.
38
Katie returned home to feed Barney and let him out into the back yard to do his business. She also wanted to phone the hospital to see if Siobhán was any better, and try to get in touch with John.
There was very little change in Siobhán’s condition. Not much better, not much worse, although the nurse told her that they were slightly concerned about her low blood pressure.
John wasn’t answering his phones, either his landline or his mobile, so she left him a message to call her and to tell her how much she loved him. She wouldn’t have time to see him this evening, what with the former Father O’Gara and now Father ó Súllabháin both missing, believed abducted.
She was opening up a packet of soda bread to make herself a ham sandwich when her phone rang.
‘Boss? It’s Patrick. I’ve just had a call from Inspector Pearse in Clon. He says that he’s fierce concerned about Jimmy O’Rourke.’
‘What? Why? The local guards aren’t even supposed to know that he’s down there.’
Detective O’Donovan told her about the overturned cattle truck on the Croppy Road, and how Sergeant O’Rourke had borrowed a squad car from the Clonakilty Garda.
‘They have his Toyota at the station but he hasn’t shown up to collect it and they don’t have the first idea where he is.’
‘All squad cars have trackers fitted, don’t they? Why can’t they find him?’
‘The tracker must have been disabled, like. That’s all they can think of.’
‘Did you tell them that he was on his way to Rathbarry, and who he was supposed to be seeing?’
‘I did not, no. I thought that I had better speak to you first.’
‘Oh, well, good man yourself, Patrick. But get back to this Inspector Pearse, would you, and explain what Jimmy was doing down there. You don’t have to tell him why exactly he wanted to interview Father Lowery, only that it was part of a major case that we’re looking into right now. And if they can locate Father Lowery, that would help, too. Can you call the diocese office for me and see if he’s turned up back in Cork?’
‘Right you are, boss. But there’s one more thing.’
‘Don’t tell me. Not more bad news.’
‘I’d say “unhelpful” rather than anything else. We paid a visit to St Joseph’s, to check on their records for the time when the choir was being formed, and there are none. In fact, they have no records at all between 1966 and 1997. The secretary said that when they were moved into temporary offices in 1998, during a renovation of the main building, they were all destroyed in a fire. That includes attendance records, examination results, copies of birth certificates, even
photographs. The whole lot.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘The secretary swore blind that it was true. We could get a warrant, I suppose, and search their archives, but I doubt if we’ll find anything.’
‘There must be some record somewhere. Try social welfare, or the HSE.’
‘I’m not about to give up yet, ma’am. You can count on it.’
‘Keep in touch with me, Patrick. This is getting critical. Our perpetrator has got hold of two victims now and there’s no way of telling how long he’s going to keep them alive.’
While Katie was eating her sandwich, she sat on one of the kitchen stools and opened up her laptop to look up the Cork Survivors’ Society. There were two numbers, one on Oliver Plunkett Street right in the centre of the city, and another in Glanmire, which was a collection of villages about four miles to the east of Cork, up the estuary of the River Glashaboy. It was the second number she wanted: it gave the name of the society’s director, Paul McKeown.
She swallowed a mouthful of sparkling mineral water to help her sandwich go down, and then she rang him. The phone rang and rang for a long time before anybody answered.
Then, a cautious man’s voice. ‘CSS. Who’s calling?’
‘Is that Paul McKeown?’
‘Who wants to know?’
‘Detective Superintendent Katie Maguire, from Anglesea Street Garda station. I’m investigating the murders of Father Heaney and Father Quinlan, and I was wondering if I could have a word with you.’
‘I see,’ said Paul McKeown. She could hear his steady breathing. ‘I don’t see how I can be of any help to you, superintendent.’
‘Well, I think you could be, more than you know. Can I call around and see you this evening? It shouldn’t take too long.’
‘Very well. My wife is out at her book club tonight, so that should be all right.’
Katie looked up at the kitchen clock. Nine minutes after seven. The day was disappearing fast and yet it was becoming more and more tangled by the minute. She felt as if she had plenty of answers but none of the right questions to make any sense of them.
Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) Page 26
