Broken Angels (Katie Maguire)

by Masterton, Graham

  The fire officer said, ‘I’d say so myself,’ as if he were loath to admit that she was right.

  ‘So it probably wasn’t done with the intention of burning the cottage right down,’ she continued. ‘If they’d wanted to do that, they would have started the fire inside rather than outside. It isn’t easy to set fire to a damp exterior wall.’

  ‘You’ll be wanting to see the body, then?’ asked the fire officer, sounding a little testy.

  ‘That’s what I’ve come for,’ said Katie, and followed him into the cottage.

  The kitchen ceiling had come down, and so the floor was covered in blackened plaster mush and broken slates. Water was dripping down everywhere, and the walls were all streaked with grey. The blue flashing lights of the fire engines parked outside gave the interior of the cottage a jerky appearance, as if they were walking through a 1920s movie.

  The fire officer high-stepped over a diagonal beam that had fallen across the hallway, and then turned around to offer Katie his hand, to help her over. Katie didn’t know if she ought to feel pleased or patronized, but she accepted his assistance anyhow. He then piloted her towards the bedroom by placing his hand in the small of her back, and she realized that he had been acting offhand because he fancied her.

  The bedroom had suffered very little damage, although like everywhere else in the cottage the window had been broken by the heat and its walls had been darkened by smoke. In the centre of the room stood a metal-framed single bedstead, with no mattress, and lying on it was a dead man, with his wrists fastened behind his back and his knees and his ankles bound together so tightly that his flesh bulged.

  ‘Like some illumination on the subject?’ the fire officer asked her, holding up a black rubber-covered flashlight. Katie took it and switched it on, directing it first of all at the dead man’s face.

  The whites of his eyes were speckled with tiny red petechial haemorrhages and he was staring sightlessly upwards. Although his face was swollen from asphyxiation and his mouth was dragged downwards in a grotesque parody of absolute agony, Katie recognized him at once from the photographs that Maureen O’Dwyer had lent them, especially his broken nose.

  She shone the flashlight on to his scalp, with its crispy curls of black and scarlet skin, and then she turned it towards his genitals. Not only had his penis been burned to shreds, but it appeared from the dried runnels of blood across his right thigh that he had been castrated as well, although his legs had been so tightly bound together that it was impossible to be sure.

  ‘Gave me a fierce funny feeling in the goolies when I first caught sight of that, like,’ said the fire officer.

  ‘I’ll bet,’ said Katie, without looking up at him. She went around to the other side of the bed and examined Gerry’s body more closely. He was tattooed all over with scores of bruises. Some of them were dark crimson, indicating deep soft-tissue damage. Others were little more than finger marks where he had been pulled or pushed or dragged across the bed.

  She pulled a pair of latex gloves out of her pocket and snapped them on, tugging at each finger in turn. Very cautiously, she laid the flat of her right hand on Gerry’s stomach, just above the raw, blistered weals where his pubic hair had been. She thought that his abdomen felt a little lumpy, but he had been beaten up so badly that a little lumpiness was hardly surprising. At least, she couldn’t feel anything moving, or squirming, or desperately trying to gnaw its way out of him.

  The technicians arrived, climbing noisily over the debris in their Tyvek suits.

  ‘Well, well, another one,’ said the older technician. He set his case down on the floor, and peered at Gerry’s mutilated body with the slightly detached frown of a Pizza Hut customer making a selection from the salad bar. The younger technician stayed well back. ‘Fecksake,’ he said, under his breath. ‘Look at the fecking state of that.’

  ‘I want this one handed over to Dr Collins just like he is now, please,’ said Katie. ‘You can photograph him all right, but please don’t cut any of the wire, and don’t take any skin or hair samples. I think we’ll get a more complete story if we examine him intact at the lab. Anyway, you’ll have the bed and the whole of the rest of the cottage to process. That should give you more than enough to be getting on with.’

  ‘Body bag then, Eamonn,’ said the older technician. The younger technician stepped back out of the room with obvious relief, while the older one went back to his close-squinting inspection of Gerry’s head and neck.

  ‘This wire they’ve used to garrotte him, it’s not the same type of wire as they used on the other two victims,’ he remarked, after a while. ‘It looks more like steel to me than bronze. Given the musical subtext of the other two killings, I’d hazard a guess that it’s piano wire. And look at the soup spoon they’ve tightened it with, that’s different too, different shape.’

  He cocked his head on one side so that he could see it better without touching it. ‘There... I’m right. It comes from Jury’s. The other two came from the Hayfield Manor.’

  Katie said, ‘That doesn’t tell us much, does it, except that that our perpetrator steals cutlery from more than one hotel?’

  But then she thought: Who would find it easiest to steal cutlery from a hotel? Somebody who worked there, especially somebody who worked in the kitchen or waited on table. It wasn’t important that the spoons came from different hotels. Hotels routinely employed casual staff – waiters and cleaners and dishwashers.

  She made a mental note to ask Detective Horgan to check up on all of the local employment agencies. It was a very long shot, of course, but several times in the past she had got results from even more remote possibilities than this.

  ‘There’s something else interesting here,’ said the older technician. ‘It looks likely that the burns on his scalp and his genitalia were caused by some type of inflammable substance. I’ve seen a couple of victims who were tortured with a blowtorch or had petrol poured over them, but these burns are not at all similar. See how they’re confined to only one area, with clearly defined limits. If they were caused by a blowtorch they’d be spotty and irregular, and if they were caused by a liquid, like petrol or white spirit or lighter fluid, the blazing liquid would have run down over his face and his ears and his shoulders, and all over his thighs and stomach. You can see how the blood has run across his thigh where we’re presuming that he’s been castrated. Burning petrol would have done the same.’

  ‘So what did burn him, do you think?’

  The technician looked at Gerry for a very long time before he answered. Katie had to acknowledge that he was right, though. Gerry’s scalp might have been burned almost down to the bone, but his face hadn’t even been scorched. There was a straight burn line across his forehead as if he were wearing a red and black beret.

  ‘Hmm,’ said the technician. ‘I’d hazard a guess at some kind of inflammable jelly. Something moderately sticky.’

  ‘Something like napalm?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Napalm-B is what you get these days, which is a mixture of polystyrene and benzene, and once it sticks to your skin there’s no way of getting it off you and it will burn right down to your bones. I’m not sure what caused burns like this. Some home-made mixture probably, but you should be able to analyse it when you get him back to the morgue.’

  ‘Okay, thanks,’ said Katie. ‘Let me see the photographs as soon as you can, and any forensics you come across.’

  ‘Of course. I think we need to catch this perpetrator somewhat smartish, don’t you? Whatever your man did, he didn’t deserve to die like this. He must have gone through sheer bloody hell.’

  Katie stayed at the burned-out cottage until the body was taken away. The sky was beginning to grow lighter, and there was an early morning shower of rain, which rustled through the hedgerows and damped down the last smouldering rafters.

  Detective O’Donovan sat beside her in the passenger seat of her car, and tried again and again to contact Sergeant O’Rourke. Still no response; and no s
ensible answers from Clonakilty Garda station either.

  ‘Fecking culchies,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t make it up. Their only dog handler is off sick with the runs. The dog’s all right, but it won’t let anybody else go near it. They’re waiting on another canine unit from Ballinspittle.’

  After that he checked his text messages. He read them slowly, moving his lips as he did so, and then he slid his phone shut, shaking his head.

  ‘Everything okay?’ Katie asked him.

  ‘It’s nothing. A slight difference of opinion with the beloved missus, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh. Not serious, I hope.’

  ‘She wants us to move to Tipperary, to be near her sister. Her sister has the MS but four kids under seven to take care of. I feel sorry for her sister but quite honestly I can’t abide the woman. Her husband was away for slates about six months ago and I can’t say I blame him.’

  Katie laid a hand on his shoulder. She didn’t know what to say to him, but he had made her understand that she wasn’t the only person in the world who had to make a decision to stay or go.

  40

  She drove back to Anglesea Street and went to the ladies’ locker room and took a short, lukewarm shower. The hairdryer was broken so she simply brushed her damp hair straight back. She changed her clothes – clean white underwear and a soft grey dogstooth blouse, with a knee-length black skirt and black tights.

  She applied some fresh make-up in the steamed-up mirror and then she felt almost human again, in spite of being so bone-weary.

  Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll was waiting for her in her office. He had brought her a cappuccino and a bacon and egg sandwich. He was eating a sandwich himself, which he repeatedly opened up and frowned into, as if he couldn’t decide what the filling was.

  ‘Oh, thanks, chief,’ said Katie, sitting down at her desk. An untidy heap of memos and messages was waiting for her, as well as all the files on the Codreanu case that she had asked for, the Romanian girl-smuggling ring that she had broken up.

  ‘Still no news of Jimmy,’ said Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll. ‘Two witnesses saw him arrive at St Michael’s at about four o’clock, just as Father Lowery was leaving in a taxi. Apparently Father Lowery was supposed to be going to St James’s church at Ardfield, and Jimmy went after him. But that was the last that anybody’s seen of either of them. Father Lowery never arrived in Ardfield, and he hasn’t returned to his house in Douglas and neither has he shown up at his office on Redemption Road.’

  He opened up his sandwich again and peered into it suspiciously.

  ‘I’ve sent a dozen of the lads down to Clon to join in the search. There’s over a hundred out now, from all over. Kinsale, Skibbereen, Rosscarbery, even a busload down from Limerick. We may be calling in one of the helicopters, too, if we don’t find Jimmy soon.’

  An Garda Síochána had two helicopters, known as the Air Support Unit, based at Casement airfield in Dublin. Not that any gardaí were allowed to fly them.

  ‘There’s still no trace of Father ó Súllabháin either,’ said Katie.

  ‘What about Father O’Gara, or Gerry Dwyer, or whatever his name is?’

  ‘They’re taking his body directly to the path lab. I’ve called Dr Collins and she’ll be starting her autopsy first thing this afternoon.’

  ‘Shite,’ said Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll, to nobody in particular. ‘This whole thing gets more fecking complimacated by the minute.’ Then, ‘How did you get on with that survivor society fellow? McKeown, is it?’

  ‘That’s right, Paul McKeown. We got on well, I think. He gave me a couple of possible leads to follow up.’ She gave him a brief résumé of what Paul McKeown had told her about St Joseph’s Orphanage Choir, and the special treatment that some of the choirboys had received from Fathers Heaney, Quinlan, O’Gara and ó Súllabháin.

  ‘We’ll be holding another media conference later today, won’t we?’ she said. ‘I think it might be worth us asking the public if any of them was a member of the choir when it was first formed, or if anybody can remember the names of any of the boys who sang in it.

  ‘I’m really keen to trace this Denis Sweeney and the Phelan twins. Somebody must remember them.’

  ‘Don’t bet on it,’ said Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll. ‘When it comes to the misdemeanours of the clergy, everybody seems to suffer from a dose of the collective amnesias.’

  They were still discussing what to say to the media when Inspector Fennessy appeared in the doorway. From the stricken expression on his face Katie could tell at once that he had bad news.

  ‘Andy Pearse has just called me from Clon.’

  ‘What’s happened? Have they found Jimmy yet?’

  ‘Both of them – Jimmy and Father Lowery, too. They were deep in some woods off the R598, near Castlefreke Warren.’

  ‘Name of Jesus,’ said Katie. ‘Dead?’

  ‘Both of them. Somebody blew their heads off with a shotgun.’

  Katie crossed herself, and couldn’t stop herself from shivering, as if the ghost of a goose had walked over her grave. From time to time, every garda faced a terrifying, life-threatening situation. Last month, when they had raided the Romanian brothel on Prince’s Street, one of the pimps had screamed at her and pointed a gun point-blank at her forehead, although it had later turned out not to be loaded; and she had lost count of the number of times that criminals had brandished knives at her, or baseball bats, or tyre levers, or even (once) an electric hedge-trimmer. But when one of their number was injured or killed it was just as painful and unexpected as a shot or a stab.

  Jimmy O’Rourke had been experienced, and wise, and funny, and older-brotherly towards her. Not only that, he had been one of the few detectives at Anglesea Street who hadn’t resented her promotion – or if he had, he had kept it to himself.

  ‘What in the name of God would anybody have wanted to kill Jimmy for?’ asked Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll, wobbling his jowls in disbelief. ‘I mean, he was only making a routine enquiry, wasn’t he? It’s not like he was trying to pull anybody in, was it?’

  Katie said, soberly, ‘I don’t think we should be asking ourselves why anybody would have wanted to kill Jimmy.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I think the real question is, why would have anybody have wanted to kill Father Lowery?’

  ‘God knows. It seems to be open season on priests at the moment.’

  ‘No – not just any priests. When the diocese disposed of the van with the croziers painted on the back of it, Father Lowery was the only person at Redemption Road who knew what happened to it, because he was in charge of transport. According to Monsignor Kelly, anyway. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Monsignor Kelly also has a good idea of what happened to it, although he swore that he didn’t.

  ‘Nobody else but Monsignor Kelly knew that we were interested in talking to Father Lowery, and why.’

  Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll flapped his hand dismissively. ‘Come on, Katie. You don’t seriously think that Monsignor Kelly had anything to do with this? He’s one of the vicars general. If he did – Christ almighty – he was being reckless beyond belief.’

  ‘I don’t know. He could be panicking. When this castration thing comes out, the sky is going to fall in for the diocese of Cork and Ross, believe me. The child abuse scandal is going to seem like nothing at all by comparison.’

  ‘You’ll have to be very, very careful with this, Katie. The last thing we want to be doing is getting on the wrong side of Bishop Mahoney.’

  ‘Who cares about Bishop Mahoney?’ Katie retorted. ‘The last thing we want to be doing is letting somebody get away with killing one of our own, even if they do wear their collar back to front.’

  ‘I still want you to handle this with two pairs of kid gloves on. If we start suggesting that a senior cleric took out a hit on a priest and a Garda detective – well, you can imagine yourself what kind of an unholy furore that would stir up. It’s bringing me out in a
cold sweat just thinking about it.’

  ‘But Monsignor Kelly is the only person I know of who had any kind of a motive,’ Katie insisted. ‘And if it was him who had Jimmy and Father Lowery murdered, that establishes something else, too. Monsignor Kelly knows that the van is still being driven by the same man that Father Lowery gave it or sold it to. In other words, Monsignor Kelly has known all along who the priest murderer is. He had Father Lowery shot so that he couldn’t tell us, but maybe Father Lowery had already told Jimmy who it was, and so he had Jimmy shot, too.’

  ‘Katie – you’re talking far too fanciful,’ said Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll. ‘If Monsignor Kelly has known all along who the priest murderer is, why would he keep it to himself? He’s a man of God, when all’s said and done. After Father Heaney, he wouldn’t have allowed the murderer to go on to kill Father Quinlan and Father O’Gara – or even if he couldn’t stop him, he would have told us who he was, surely?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Katie replied. ‘Not if he was trying to cover up something else. Something much more devastating than four abusive priests cutting the balls off sixteen young orphan boys.’

  ‘I can’t think of anything much more devastating than that, I’ll tell you.’

  ‘It has to be a cover-up,’ said Katie. ‘I can smell it.’

  ‘And what actually does a cover-up smell like?’

  Katie looked at him hard. ‘It smells like incense, that’s what it smells like. Because what about this Brendan Doody character? First of all, Monsignor Kelly tried to pin the blame for Father Heaney’s murder on him and make us believe that he had then committed suicide. But after that, Father Quinlan was murdered, and now Father O’Gara. Who killed them? Maybe Brendan Doody didn’t commit suicide at all, and it was him. Or was it somebody else altogether – in which case, what happened to Brendan Doody?’

  ‘We’re still officially looking for him,’ Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll reminded her.

  ‘He’s probably deep in a bog in County Mayo by now. Either that or he’s walking around Cork in some kind of disguise and laughing his head off at us.’