by LJ Ross
MacKenzie shoved a hand on her hip but had to admit that was probably true.
“Come in, then.”
Her boot caught on the welcome mat outside her front door and she nearly tripped. Lowerson caught her elbow just in time but the action dislodged the mat so that the edge of a small cream note suddenly became visible.
Lowerson reached for it but MacKenzie stopped him and reached for a fresh pair of gloves from a pouch inside her enormous work bag. Only then did she peel open the envelope to look at the message on the card inside. It consisted of only three words:
SEE YOU SOON
MacKenzie felt her chest contract and she struggled to breathe. She bent over, drawing slow, deep breaths as she fought to quieten her instinctive fear. Lowerson threw protocol aside and drew her in for a quick hug.
“It’s alright,” he murmured. “You’re alright.”
The nausea receded and she began to shiver.
“I don’t know how long this has been here,” she managed. “It could have been left before the last one, which was posted through the letterbox. It could have been left yesterday afternoon, or last night, or this morning—”
She stopped herself and took a few more deep breaths.
“Let’s go inside,” he suggested, with a sharp-eyed look around the street.
* * *
Ryan and Phillips entered Interview Room C after a suitable ‘sweating’ period and stated the preliminaries for the official recording, noting the names of those present. O’Byrne offered them both a cordial smile, which Phillips returned and Ryan ignored.
The detectives took their seats opposite the Dean and his lawyer and Ryan looked straight into the other man’s eyes. O’Byrne stared boldly back and didn’t so much as flinch.
“Father O’Byrne, we’re grateful that you agreed to attend voluntarily for an interview and we acknowledge that you have exercised your right to have a solicitor present.”
“As I’ve told you before, chief inspector, I’m happy to assist wherever I can, within reason.”
He was a cool one, Ryan thought. He’d give him that.
“Chief inspector, my client would like to make it clear from the outset that he considers this interview to be an intrusion into his private life and a calculated move on the part of Northumbria CID to smear the Catholic church in this area.”
The solicitor’s nasal voice grated but Ryan supposed the self-important little man had to be seen to be earning his fee.
“Duly noted,” Ryan snapped. “Anything else?”
“On the summary sheet that was provided to us less than thirty minutes ago, it is clear that my client will have very little to say considering he has no knowledge of, nor involvement in, any of the crimes you are investigating.”
“Well, it’s a small world,” Phillips chipped in. “You never know.”
“It certainly is a small world,” Ryan agreed. “For instance, I understand from my colleagues DI MacKenzie and DC Lowerson that you held a discussion with them yesterday afternoon at St Andrew’s Church. Is that correct?”
The priest glanced at his solicitor.
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“During the course of that discussion, you recalled that a woman by the name of Barbara Hewitt had visited St Andrew’s Church to give confession on Friday 18th March. Is that correct?”
The solicitor leaned in to whisper something in the priest’s ear.
“I was shown an image of a woman I recognised and was later told that her name was Barbara Hewitt. I didn’t know that was her name before then.”
“I see. Would you mind recounting your experience with this woman, for our benefit?”
The solicitor leaned in again.
“I have no objection, although I have already cooperated fully with the other members of your division,” O’Byrne was careful to point out. “I recognised the woman I later learned was Barbara Hewitt because she entered St Andrew’s Church around lunchtime on Friday 18th March, when I was attending to certain church duties within the remit of the deanery. I am the Dean of the Central Newcastle district and from time to time I run several charitable services—”
“And I’m sure the people of Newcastle are grateful,” Ryan overrode him. “Let’s stay focused on Barbara Hewitt and what she had to say to you.”
Something flickered behind the Dean’s eyes. Ryan caught it and kept pushing.
“You told my colleagues that she came in to give confession?”
The solicitor leaned forward to murmur something else but the Dean’s eyes remained fixed on Ryan.
“Yes, she came to confess.”
“And can you tell us what was said during the course of that confession?”
Here, the Dean fell back on well-worn ground and relaxed into his usual spiel.
“As I made abundantly clear to your colleagues yesterday afternoon, I am bound by my faith. Were I to reveal the content of our discussion, I would likely be excommunicated and rightly so.”
“Then you may have an unfortunate choice to make between excommunication and prison,” Ryan ground out. “Barbara Hewitt gave confession and was killed later that very same day, yet you refuse to tell us what was said. Why?”
“It can be hard to explain to people outside the faith—”
“Fuck the faith!” Ryan slammed his hand on the table and watched the other man baulk at the deliberate blasphemy.
“Chief inspector, I’ll remind you to remain respectful of my client,” the solicitor began, self-righteously.
“And I’ll remind your client to respect the rights of an innocent woman who’s lying dead at the morgue,” Ryan snarled.
The Dean’s eyes flickered at the use of the word ‘innocent’, Ryan noted. He pressed harder, prodding at the wound.
“Barbara Hewitt was an old woman who hadn’t harmed a fly in her entire life. She deserves justice and her killer deserves to rot in a prison cell,” he continued.
The small, polite smile slipped from the Dean’s face.
“Only God can grant the final judgment.”
“If you believe that, Father, then you must agree that the taking of life is an abomination. It’s a sin and would put you in danger of losing your immortal soul.”
The Dean blinked and looked away as his solicitor inched forward.
“Are you accusing my client, chief inspector?”
Ryan smiled grimly.
“If he continues to stonewall, I’ll have no choice but to view your client’s actions as a deliberate obstruction of justice. I ask him once again: tell us the content of Barbara Hewitt’s confession.”
The Dean folded his hands.
“I am bound by my faith,” he parroted. “No comment.”
Ryan flipped open his file and a photograph fluttered onto the table between them, showing a lurid image of Karen Dobbs lying dead at Heaton Cemetery.
“Oops,” Ryan drawled.
Slowly, he turned the image around so that O’Byrne would be afforded a better view. “Her name was Karen Dobbs,” he said. “She had a little boy.”
O’Byrne peeled his eyes away from the photograph and found himself trapped by Ryan’s hard stare.
“I pray for her soul.”
Ryan drew out another photograph, this time of Krista Ogilvy-Matthews.
“This is Krista. She was a teacher.”
The Dean looked at the air above Ryan’s head and his mouth moved, as if he were about to say something.
“Pardon?” Ryan leaned forward and cupped a hand to his ear. “I didn’t quite catch that.”
The Dean clamped his lips shut.
“Chief inspector, these theatrical parlour games are both predictable and pitiful,” the solicitor whined.
“Maybe I’m just clumsy,” Ryan said, without moving his eyes from the priest’s face.
He drew out a different image this time, of Grace Turner. As he turned it over, he watched the Dean’s face closely.
His gaze remained fixed somewhere in the dis
tance.
“Look at her,” Ryan said softly. “Look at Grace.”
The use of her name had the Dean’s eyes whipping back round, unable to control his instinctive reaction. He sought her out and came to rest on her face, as it had been all those years ago. Ryan thought he saw a sheen of tears.
“Do you know this girl?”
The Dean swallowed and then shook his head, slowly back and forth.
“Chief inspector, there is no mention of a Grace Turner on the summary sheet. If you choose not to stick to the agreed lines of questioning then I shall be advising my client that he is not required to remain.”
“That’s your prerogative,” Ryan shrugged, then held up the picture of Grace. “This girl’s nobody, really.”
His casual statement drew a look of pure venom, just as Ryan had intended.
“Can you tell us your whereabouts between the hours of five p.m. on Friday 18th and five a.m. on Saturday 19th March?”
The solicitor tapped something on a piece of paper he held in his hand.
“As I have previously told you, I was at St Andrew’s Church until after nine p.m. attending to certain church duties, including the weekly Narcotics Anonymous group.”
Ryan smiled to himself.
“Didn’t happen to see Karen Dobbs, did you?”
O’Byrne’s index finger started to tap.
“I returned to my home on Clayton Street and spent a quiet evening reading.”
“Nothing like a good book,” Phillips put in. “What did you read?”
The Dean cast him a confused look.
“The-the Bible. I was preparing a reading for the next day.”
“How about Thursday 24th?” Ryan demanded.
The solicitor patted his client’s arm and drew himself up to his full measly height.
“My client is prepared to cooperate with your investigation because he feels that he has nothing to hide. He will read a statement regarding his activities over the course of the past few days, following which he expects to return to his good work.”
Ryan sat back in his chair and waited for it.
“On the evening of Thursday 24th March, I was engaged in an administrative meeting held at St Mary’s Cathedral until around six o’clock, following which I returned home for the evening and stayed there until eight o’clock the following morning of Friday 25th, whereupon I drove across to administer the services at St Andrew’s Church. I was engaged at St Andrew’s until after nine p.m., as I have been for the last two Fridays in a row while the parish priest is temporarily absent. Again, I returned home and spent a quiet evening there. On Saturday 26th, I rose at around seven o’clock and spent much of the day at St Mary’s Cathedral attending to my duties there until after eight o’clock when I returned to my home, less than a two minute walk away from the Cathedral. Finally, I spent Sunday 27th back at St Andrew’s Church to supervise the weekly soup kitchen and so forth.”
Ryan rubbed his palm over his jaw and cut to the heart of the matter.
“In other words, you have no alibi for the hours of darkness on any of those dates?”
“My client does not need an alibi, chief inspector—”
“Oh, I think I’ll be the judge of that,” Ryan replied.
“No, chief inspector,” the Dean surprised them by saying. “God alone will be the judge.”
“I’ll leave you to worry about that.”
“What do you drive?” Phillips asked, throwing a quick curve ball.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your car, I mean. What do you drive?”
O’Byrne clasped his hands to steady them.
“The church provides a Vauxhall Corsa for my use. I can provide you with the paperwork, if you need it.”
On safe ground, Ryan surmised.
“I understand that you act as the Bishop’s proxy, in his absence. Is that correct?”
“Yes, I have that great honour.”
“Where is the Bishop at the moment?”
“He is currently in Rome but is planning to return ahead of schedule, next week, given all the recent troubles.”
Ryan took a surreptitious glance at his watch and then looked over at Phillips.
“I guess that’s all,” he tried to sound disappointed.
“Yeah, thanks for coming in,” Phillips managed to convey the impression that they had been scraping the barrel. “We know how busy you must be.”
“No problem at all, sergeant. I understand that you have a job to do.”
“Aye, it’s been hard without any leads—”
Ryan gave him a mock-hard look and Phillips looked crestfallen.
“Anyway, thanks again for coming in.”
They all shook hands like gentlemen and they waved the Dean off. In silence, Ryan and Phillips moved across to one of the long windows overlooking the car park and watched him exit the main building with a regal air, pausing to thank the small group of pro-Catholic supporters who had materialised at some point during the last hour. They watched him say a few words to the news teams who clamoured for a soundbite before moving off.
Morrison hurried out of the viewing room to find them.
“You let him go? Why?”
“Oh, ye of little faith.” Ryan continued to watch the Dean until he and his solicitor had swept out of the car park with a screech of expensive tyres.
“He has no alibi, you heard it for yourself,” she said.
“Which is exactly what we expected,” Ryan reminded her. “I thought he would have been able to come up with something more original than ‘I was writing sermons all night’.”
Phillips chuckled.
“We need hard evidence, something irrefutable that we can use in court. By morning, we’ll have it.”
Morrison let the air hiss out of her chest in a whoosh.
“I hope you know what you’re doing. If this goes south—”
“It won’t.”
Ryan turned to Phillips.
“Get in touch with MacKenzie and Lowerson. Tell them break’s over.”
* * *
While Ryan and his team focused their efforts on catching a killer, Jimmy Moffa’s stooge exited the city in a nondescript blue van, freshly spray-painted with the logo of a fictional carpet cleaning company. Ludo hummed along to Elton John’s Greatest Hits and kept strictly to the speed limit. He had been given clear instructions not to draw any unwanted attention by speeding and he did not deviate. The success or failure of their current venture depended upon his following Jimmy’s instructions to the letter and Ludo did not question the sanity or sense of it all. He was loyal as a basset hound and had been trained well.
He knew the rewards and he had inflicted enough of the punishments personally to know that he wouldn’t ever want to be on the receiving end of Jimmy’s wrath.
He turned up the volume and kept the speedometer dead on sixty, all the way to Humberside.
CHAPTER 20
In the space of a few short days, the people of Newcastle upon Tyne had divided themselves into two camps. There were those who believed that The Graveyard Killer was a religious fanatic and those who believed that any killer lacked true faith, regardless of denomination. Once the line had been drawn, those on either side of it fought bitterly. Pickets sprang up outside St Mary’s Cathedral and beside Earl Grey’s monument; Union Jack and English flags began to appear in shop windows—though what they had to do with anything, Ryan couldn’t say—and the news was filled with it. The newscasters fairly brimmed with purpose, reading their copy to the masses in serious tones which served only to fuel the fire.
The sight of the Dean of Newcastle being taken in for questioning provided ample fodder for both sides. Conor O’Byrne was a photogenic man with an unblemished track record of public service but, as Ryan knew to his cost, killers didn’t need to be low-achieving, sexually-repressed prototypes of Norman Bates to take lives. They could be highly-functioning, intelligent people with a great capacity for control, and that made his job
all the harder.
But what was life without a challenge?
Ryan looked down at the sheaf of papers he held in his hands. On the top sheet was a complete list of the names of all the children registered at Our Lady of Charity Orphanage in Rothbury at the same time as Grace Turner. Running a fingertip down the list, he could see nobody by the name of ‘O’Byrne’.
But he could see a ‘Conor Jones’.
Ryan scanned the text relating to Conor Jones which PC Yates had retrieved from the orphanage records. Conor Jones would be the same age as Father Conor O’Byrne and he matched the physical description. But it was the note penned by one of the nuns that was most interesting:
Conor is a quiet boy who has difficulty socialising with the other children. However, when a new child joined us last month (GT), we noticed a sharp change in him. The two have become inseparable and the obsessive quality to his behaviour has given rise to concerns expressed by several members of staff—the matter is tabled for discussion at the next meeting chaired by Father Healy.
No other file notes had been recovered because the Church Records Office had suffered an arson attack in the late nineties, the perpetrator of which had never been identified.
Ryan looked up and into the face of the Dean of Central Newcastle, whose image played across the television in the Incident Room. He watched the man schmooze with the cameras, waxing lyrical about love and forgiveness as if he were a romantic hero rather than a cold-blooded killer.
“Enjoy your sense of freedom,” Ryan murmured. “It’ll be your last for a good long while.”
* * *
Father Conor O’Byrne didn’t know how much longer he could hold himself together. He could feel his hands shaking and held them tightly together so that it wouldn’t show. He felt faint with the sheer effort of remaining in control and sweat caked the skin on the back of his neck, blessedly hidden beneath the material of his shirt and collar.
Everywhere he turned, there were people. Reporters, activists, church staff and gossip-mongering volunteers who sought him out to appease their own curiosity.
A sea of faces awaited him inside St Mary’s Cathedral, at least three times the usual number. They watched him enter the church but didn’t move forward to greet him, choosing instead to remain in their huddles, whispering and worrying about the Dean of Central Newcastle.
