“When did it happen? Where did it happen?” Dymphna asked.
“I really must go. I'll answer all your questions later. Remember, though, Dymphna, your mother must never hear of this. Don't worry, I obviously won't demand your father support the child. It will be a modern arrangement. I just want him to know. I must tell him.”
“But—”
“Why—”
“Children! Children! I'm turning my phone off now. And after that, I have that ill-advised PTSD counseling at that church. St. Fintan's, I believe. I'm dreading it, and it's mostly to do with the fact that your mother will be there.”
“D-doesn't that be you, but, Mammy?” Rory asked, a tinge of confusion in his voice. “Aren't ye talking about yerself?”
“Again, I'm talking to your wife. Dymphna, before I ring off, promise me. Promise me!”
“I-I promise.”
The line went dead, except between Rory and Dymphna.
“Rory! Can ye believe it? I don't know what's worse...me daddy being the father of yer new brother or sister or...or...that Keanu doesn't be yers! I kyanny understand...understand...” Dymphna shrieked as she felt a hand on her shoulder. She whipped around and saw it was Rory. She had forgotten they were in the same room together. She turned off her phone.
“Dymphna! Does O'Toole really be Keanu's daddy?” Rory was angry.
“I'm telling ye, I hadn't a clue!” Dymphna insisted. “More to the point, but...ye know what? I'm gonny keep yer mammy's promise. I'll not tell her. As...as...I've something to reveal to ye, Rory. Something I've never told anyone. Except Bridie.”
Rory continued to heave angry breaths at her.
“Did ye see the Virgin Mary and all? Or have ye got seven other wanes I've not even set eyes on?”
“Naw, nothing like that. It's this other. About yer mammy and me daddy. It doesn't be as horrid as it seems as...as...well, I have a feeling me daddy's not me daddy. I found some things out a few years ago that got me to thinking me daddy was really the coal man.”
Rory's anger seeped into shock.
“What?”
Dymphna nodded. She bowed her head, embarrassed.
“Is that why...why...yer mammy's so...so...”
“Why she kyanny stand the sight of me. I guess she don't like coal much.”
And now Rory took his wife slowly, gently in his arms. “Why didn't ye tell me before? Ye poor, poor girl! First them thugs tries to attack ye last night, then ye find out Keanu doesn't be mines. Now ye reveal this.”
Dymphna cried on his shoulder for a few moments. Yes, it had been a harrowing day. She had gotten away the night before by delving into her handbag and brandishing the sharpened screwdriver the woman always carried. The three thugs had fled down the bridge. But it had shaken Dymphna. Woken her up. Made her realize just how precious her life with her three children and her husband was. And why she had been having the heart-to-heart with Rory when his mother called.
She had promised him to never, ever go out drinking on her own again. She wanted to be a true mother to her children, and a loving wife to her hard-working husband. They would still leave the children in the creche, but she would pick them up every day after her job. Because she was going to get one.
Keanu aside for the moment, Dymphna and Rory's marriage was getting stronger and stronger.
After they had sex on the sofa, Dymphna popped up breathless and, slipping back into her bra, she reached for her phone.
“Who are ye calling?” Rory asked. He hauled on his underwear and wiped some juices from his fingers onto a cushion.
“Don't worry. Not me mammy. Sure, I'd be a daft eejit to do that! Yer mammy had nothing to worry about on that account. I must tell our Padraig, och, he won't care. Naw, I must tell our Siofra. She's got to know. She can keep a secret. So there's nothing to worry about.”
Rory eyed Dymphna with suspicion.
“As God's me witness!” Dymphna said. “I just told ye me mammy kyanny stick the sight of me. Sure, she's been kicked outta the family anyroad. Nobody wants to spend the time of day with her. Why would we tell her something that would have her raging five times as much as she normally does? Ye think I've a death wish?”
Rory agreed. “Alright then. I'm away off for a shower.” He gave a sigh. “At least two of them wanes be's mines. And that's be's better than none.”
She smiled at his arse as he walked across the living room and went up the stairs. Then she dialed the family house phone. But when Maureen answered, Dymphna couldn't help but blurt out the sordid secret. Somehow, Dymphna had forgotten that Maureen was Fionnuala's mother. The Floods had been living without Fionnuala for so long, Dymphna had gotten it into her mind that Maureen was Paddy's mother.
“Granny! Granny! Ye're never gonny believe what I've just heard...!”
“Are youse ready, wanes?” Maureen called up the stairs.
Padraig and Seamus bounded down them. Nobody knew where Siofra was. Padraig's eyes were wild with excitement.
“It's gonny be fecking magic!” he said, rubbing his dirt-encrusted hands together. “A right aul catfight, a kick off in the middle of St. Fintan's between me mammy and that Orange Proddy bitch!”
“Granny,” Seamus whimpered. “What are we—”
“What will the neighbors say?” Maureen roared. “I'm not having no snotty mutton-dressed-as-lamb Proddy tart tarnish the good Heggarty name! What the flimmin feck was yer daddy thinking? I'm gonny beat seven shades of shite outta him when he finally shows his traitorous body back at home here. In the meantime, yer mammy needs to know she's being shown up! I'm mortified for her, so I'm are! I know she's meant to be dead to us, but I think she's just risen again. Like Easter. Now's the time for the family to gather round her and support her in her time of need. The poor wee critter!”
“But, granny—”
“Get offa me cane, wee boy!” Maureen warned Seamus, who was tugging on it. “Or I'll clatter ye round the head with it so's ye end up at the A and E in Altnagelvin Hospital! Ye'll be sharing a bed right next to yer daddy, so ye will!”
“I kyanny wait!” Padraig giggled with sardonic glee.
Seamus wobbled between their knees, looking up at them with round and scared eyes.
“C'mere, ye useless article!” Maureen growled down at him. She grabbed him by the hand. She dragged him through the front door. He burst into tears as his little shoes scraped along the sidewalk. Padraig ran backwards in front of the two, roaring with slightly unhinged laughter. But there wasn't far to go.
As a woman who had form, Maureen rapped at the neighbors' door, tugged it open herself, barked “Look after this wane, would ye?” into the empty front hall, and shoved the sobbing Seamus inside. Her usual MO. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Dymphna hung up her phone, then ran upstairs. Rory was pulling a Protestant football team jersey over his head.
“Rory!”
He jerked in shock.
“What is it, Dymphna?”
“I...I don't know how it happened. But I've just heard from our Padraig. Shocked he called me, like. Must want me to be there to witness the carnage. Somehow me granny found out about...about yer mammy and me daddy.”
“Christ almighty! The speed gossip travels at in this town!”
“Me granny's on her way now to St. Fintan's! She's gonny tell me mammy! We've to get down there before hell breaks loose!”
“What'll we do with the wanes?”
They were having their nap.
“D-don't worry,” Dymphna said, unable to look him in the eye. For all her talk about being the born-again helicopter mother, she had slipped a bit of Bailey's into their milk. Just to give her and Rory time to have their talk and afternoon sex. “They'll be out for the count.”
They ran down the stairs and out the door without even grabbing their jackets.
CHAPTER 27
Perhaps the parishioners of St. Fintan's should have realized they had a spy in their midst. New priest Father Ste
ele had arrived to great excitement and much fanfare six months earlier. Not only was he young, handsome, charismatic and fit, he also dished out less penance at confession, delivered sermons that had the congregation rolling in the aisles instead of nodding off in the pews, and seemed to have gotten the communion wafers from a different, more discerning supplier, as they tasted delicious.
Father Steele seemed too good to be true, and that's because he was. The morality and ethics of the pact he had signed gave him many sleepless nights, and more tortured hours on his knees than Jesus at Gethsemane, but he had gambling debts to pay, and loan sharks on his back, and compromising himself at his new post seemed to be the only way to dig himself out of the financial black hole which held him captive.
The devil was the PSNI. The contract Father Steele had signed was with the Chief Commissioner. The PSNI had long understood the reluctance of the Moorside masses, guilty, innocent, victim, perpetrator or witness, to answer questions directed at them over the table of the interview rooms at the station. Father Steele was now a quasi-official informer to the police of any illegal goings-on he happened to overhear in his role as shepherd of the flock. His second payroll demanded he relay back to the PSNI any juicy tidbits that were let slip around the holy water fonts or, indeed, anywhere Father Steele happened to be. And he happened to be almost everywhere. That he was often seen drinking down at the Craiglooner pub was considered by most to be him being ‘one of them.’ It was something more insidious.
Of course, Father Steele wasn't totally bent. He would never report anything that was revealed in the sanctity of the confessional; that was still sacrosanct. Rome would have been able to defrock him, strip him of his collar, if he had grassed on any of the sinners who revealed their crimes there. To circumvent this, and to add to the rumors he heard nightly at the Craiglooner, Father Steele held weekly 'therapy' and 'counseling' sessions about a variety of topics. Those who joined and pulled up a chair into the circle of the parish center thought they were protected by the same vow of silence of the confessional, or maybe even that of a psychologist, but the parish center wasn't a confessional, and Father Steele wasn't a licensed therapist. For every crime revealed, for every criminal who was convicted due to his intelligence, the PSNI paid him an additional £500 bonus. He had already earned £2500 in bonuses. He now owed the mob 'only' £63,425.
McLaughlin and D'Arcy had briefed the priest. They suspected one of the people arriving (with the exception of the elderly Keeva and the youngest Ming girl, but not the second youngest, the Flood girl, they had stressed) of having something to do with the hold up at Final Spinz. It was Father Steele's mission, and he chose to accept it eagerly, to find out who that might be.
The police hadn't had enough time to outfit the rectory with surveillance equipment, and they didn't trust Father Steele's memory, nor did the man have any training in interpreting statements of crimes, so at ten to seven, Yootha, the parish secretary, guided McLaughlin and D'Arcy to a corner of the parish hall, where she showed them a door and told them they could listen from the other side. She opened the door with a mouth that twitched with some emotion. When McLaughlin and D'Arcy peered inside, it was obvious that emotion was mirth, and that Yootha thought less-than-highly of their nefarious and slightly scandalous activities in the house of the Lord. McLaughlin prepared himself to suck in as much of his stomach as he could.
“It'll be a tight fit,” he said. “But we'll manage, sure. Eh, D'Arcy?”
D'Arcy looked like she had just scribbled off the last number of a losing £50 scratch card, a feeling Father Steele had apparently felt many times and which had led to the two detectives being shoehorned in that storage closet of church paraphernalia that looked like it had been begging for a thorough purge since the Troubles.
“I'm afraid the light bulb's blown out.” Yootha smiled as she said it.
The detectives crammed into the darkness.
The shelves were straining under the weight of dog-eared missals and dust-encrusted hymnals in Latin, and flung throughout the room with not much care were old chalices, chipped decanters, teetering piles of once-golden plates for the communion wafers, and battered, tarnished incense boats.
McLaughlin looked around in alarm for somewhere to place his large form. He was preparing to sit himself on what he thought was a mere wooden box.
“Not,” Yootha gasped in horror, a hand to her mouth, “on the tabernacle!” McLaughlin sprung up with an apology. A lectern toppled over, and a flock of filthy chalice veils fluttered to the floor. “That's from Father Breeny's time here,” Yootha explained with a sniff.
McLaughlin wondered if that time were the Middle Ages. D'Arcy, from the look on her face, wondered what a tabernacle was, besides a choir.
The detectives pressed against each other, he wedged next to a box from which sprouted what he guessed were old holy water sprinklers, she jammed alongside God alone only knew what (or maybe Yootha knew as well). McLaughlin's mustache was flattened against the back of D'Arcy's bob. As the door was gleefully shut on them, and the alarming sound of the key being turned in the lock greeted their ears, McLaughlin felt his nose twitch and his eyes begin to water. It must have been all the dust. There was plenty of it.
“Well. This is cozy.” D'Arcy did not sound amused.
“We'll just have to make the best of it. They should all be along soon.”
“Is that your hand, sir?”
“Sorry. I thought that was the, er, something else in here.”
The chairs had already been arranged into a circle in the room outside the closet. Before they had been locked in, McLaughlin had caught sight of Father Steele approaching from a distance, straining under the weight of a box that held the equipment for activities he wanted the 'survivors' of the tragedy at the dry cleaners to play.
“I hope we're not investing in this Father Steele powers beyond his facility,” D'Arcy said stiffly in the darkness.
“Where do ye come up with them?” McLaughlin said, a touch of wonder in his voice. “I think yer man's gonny be grand.”
“Let's hope. If we can't move this investigation a bit more quickly, I'm afraid the commissioner's going to close the case. We'd never find those responsible.”
“Have faith, D'Arcy.”
“We're in the right place, I suppose.”
“I think I hear some footsteps now. It sounds like those clogs the Flood woman wears.”
“I agree, sir.”
“And those shuffling, slovenly steps the McFee girl takes.”
“Let's get our notebooks ready.”
Just as McLaughlin was wondering how he was meant to see to write notes in his notebook, D'Arcy snapped on her phone and went to her notebook app. Suddenly feeling older than he had a moment before, McLaughlin was nevertheless content. There was enough light shining from her phone to light up the little pages of his made-of-paper notebook as well. He clicked his pen.
Moments earlier, Fionnuala had just rounded the corner and clip-clopped into the city center. She was passing the homeless shelter when she spied Bridie puffing on a fag. The girl was leaning against the wall, one foot up, like a lady of the evening. Fionnuala's ponytails spun as she looked around for coppers. She had had a close call in Final Spinz the night before and realized now, regardless of the station opening hours, Derry's men and women in florescent green were on duty all hours of the day and night.
The Lord had been smiling down kindly on her once again. The PCs who happened to see the light shimmering beyond the bubbles of the dry cleaner's windows were Briggs and Lynch. Both were one of the few Catholics on the force. And the godmother of Lynch's cousin Carmel's seventh daughter was none other than Fionnuala's mother. For the Flood family, Briggs and Lynch were a treasure trove of early warnings of impending arrests, and so forth. So, although the coppers had seemed somewhat startled at the banners and flags Fionnuala had displayed proudly to them, they understood why she had passed the police tape. She hadn't really broken and entered, had she? She ha
d keys to the place. And, as everyone in town knew Fionnuala had been banished to the caravan, Briggs and Lynch realized the woman's need to appropriate her work sewing machine.
Now Fionnuala sidled up to Bridie.
“Bridie, love?” she said, also lighting up a cigarette and puffing away in companionship. “Ye're a woman after me own heart. And, more than that, a woman what's been chosen. Just like I have.”
Bridie, surprised, looked her up and down. “Are ye telling me the Blessed Virgin paid ye a visit and all?” She shook her head. “It be's like post-modern art, Mrs. Flood. Ye can only be the first one to do something once.”
What this meant, Fionnuala hadn't a clue, but even as she recoiled in slight distaste at this unexpected intellectual twaddle, her eyes widened.
“Is that yer way of telling me it didn't happen?”
Bridie crossed her arms.
“Of course it did. But I just don't believe that thousands of years would go by, there'd be one visitation in Derry, then another right after. The Virgin Mary doesn't arrive like buses does.”
Fionnuala's brow wrinkled with incomprehension, then she barreled on regardless. Her eyes sparkled with excitement.
“Sunday I'm having a...well, a wee demonstration of sorts here in the city center. A call to arms. It would be grand and marvelous if ye was to join in. I need all the brothers and sisters in arms I can gather up. Those what can also feel the call of the Lord, urging them on like Christian soldiers, marching as to war.”
“What are ye on about?”
“The eighth crusade, Bridie!” Words spilled from Fionnuala's un-lipsticked mouth, about Satan sending the air of Hell onto Earth, about the disgrace of the state of the churches in the South, about the Holy Land being overrun by aliens, about the need to rouse believers into action, and about the perks and no interest payments crusaders were guaranteed. Let alone the eternal salvation.
The look Bridie was giving her annoyed Fionnuala, but she kept blathering on, until finally she came to the reason for accosting her. “Can ye not round up some of them aul mates of yers? Them fanatics what banded together to try to break up our Dymphna's wedding? Ye know I was applauding for youse all from the sidelines. A marriage made in sin, so it was. Shame it went through as it did. Ye know who I'm on about. Can ye ring up that Mrs. Mulholland and her cronies? They be's the force we need, you and me, to help us march triumphantly into Jerusalem and do the Lord's work of reclaiming His most holy city.”
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