Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) (21 page)

‘After that, it was seen at eight forty-seven going around the Magic Roundabout and then heading away up towards the airport.’

‘Is that the last time it was sighted?’ Katie asked him. ‘It could be anywhere at all by now.’

‘It depends on the route it took,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘It could have been driven on back roads all the way to Galway and not passed another camera all the way. But if it belonged to the same perpetrator who killed Father Quinlan, I doubt he took it very far. He might have abandoned it, of course, but if he did we’ll most likely find it sooner rather than later.’

Katie said, ‘Ask the airport police to check their car parks, just in case he left it there. What about the number plate, or anything else that might help us to identify it? Father Lenihan mentioned that Brendan Doody’s van had lettering on the side, painted over.’

Detective O’Donovan pushed the memory stick into Katie’s computer, and a CCTV picture appeared on her screen. A grimy black Renault van, with a white question mark stuck or painted on to its offside rear window.

‘For sure, that must be the same van that nearly ran the postie off the road up at Ballyhooly. I checked the number plate, but it belonged to a ninety-three Ford Fiesta that was scrapped two years ago. I don’t know if the question mark means anything. Maybe it means nothing at all, but I’m checking any trademarks that might have a question mark at the end of them.’

‘Okay,’ said Katie. ‘Any luck with the harp wire yet?’

‘Not so far, ma’am. We’ve checked every music shop in the city, and talked to the leaders of both orchestras, but not a sausage. Detective Horgan’s gone off this afternoon to call on every harpist that he’s been able to find, professional or semi-professional, about five of them, and a couple of amateurs, too. To be frank with you, though, I’m not too optimistic that we’re going to find out where it came from.’

At that moment, Katie’s phone rang. She picked it up and a voice said, ‘Is that Detective Superintendent Maguire I’m speaking to?’

‘It is, yes.’

‘This is Garda Ronan Kerr from Cobh Garda station. You called us earlier this morning, yes, about an Irish setter called Barney? Well, he’s just this minute turned up. A member of the public found him wandering around by the Heritage Centre and has brought him in to us.’

‘Thank God. He’s not hurt at all?’

‘Not at all. He’s soaking wet, like, and he’s muddy, and he’s starving hungry, but apart from that he’s one hundred per cent.’

‘Bless you,’ said Katie, and put down the receiver. Detective O’Donovan said, ‘Everything all right, ma’am?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘everything’s grand.’ She was glad in a way that he was there, and that she had to keep her composure, because otherwise she would have burst into tears.
It’s only tiredness
, she told herself, but she knew in her heart that it was much more than that.

She was gathering up her keys and her mobile phone, ready to go home, when there was another knock at her office door. To her surprise it was Dr Collins, with her hair pinned up unusually tidily, and wearing a double-breasted suit of green herringbone tweed.

‘Detective superintendent, I’m so glad I caught you! I wanted to show you this in person.’

‘Have you finished your post mortem on Father Quinlan?’

‘Ugh, yes. Father Quinlan
and
his rat. It was a common brown rat,
Rattus norvegicus
, about a year old, and it was carrying both Weil’s disease and salmonella. I would guess that it was caught in a sewage outlet, or possibly a cemetery. Not many people appreciate how many rats there are in cemeteries.’

‘What was Father Quinlan’s cause of death?’

‘Oh, strangulation, no question, the same as Father Heaney.’ She opened her briefcase and took out a clear plastic envelope marked EVIDENCE. Coiled inside the envelope was the thin, silky cord that had been tied so tightly around Father Quinlan’s neck, purple and blue braided together.

‘Before he was strangled, however, he was tortured in a similar way to the heretics who were tortured by the Spanish Inquisition.
Strappado
, they called it.
His hands were tied behind his back and then he was lifted up clear of the ground. By all accounts
strappado
is by far the most painful form of torture there is. The Nazis used it in their concentration camps and the North Vietnamese used it, too, in the Hanoi Hilton.

‘Father Quinlan was also given a merciless beating.
Merciless
. Five of his ribs were broken, as well as his collarbone and almost all of the bones in his fingers and his toes. I don’t know what he did to deserve such punishment, but somebody really wanted him to go through hell.

‘Next, of course, he was castrated with the
castratori
. Finally, the rat was forced into his body cavity, and sewn up so that it couldn’t escape except by gnawing its way out through his intestines. I still can’t be sure if he was garrotted before or after this was done. I hope for his sake that it was before. I would have had to see the crime scene, and how much blood he lost.’

Katie held up the clear plastic envelope with the cord in it. ‘Have you found out what this is?’

‘Yes, I have, which is why I wanted you to see it for yourself. Again, it was my musical lab assistant who identified it for me. It came from a bassoon, apparently.’

‘A
bassoon
?’

‘That’s right. He said that when they make the reeds for a bassoon, they often tie a knot around them, for decoration. It’s called a Turk’s head knot, because it looks like a turban, and this is the string they use – nylon string coated in beeswax.’

‘So Father Heaney and Father Quinlan were strangled with two types of string from two types of musical instrument?’

‘That’s correct. Almost identical MO, but distinctly different garrottes.’

Katie sat down. ‘Jesus. What’s he going to use next time? Catgut, from a violin?’

‘Let’s pray that there won’t
be
a next time.’

‘Don’t be sure about that,’ said Katie. ‘I have a very bad feeling that this fellow is only just getting started.’

Dr Collins said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you very much when it comes to tracking him down. The bassoon cord is distinctive, yes. So is the harp wire. But there was nothing else on Father Quinlan’s body to identify his assailant – or
assailants
plural, since you say that there was probably more than one of them. No saliva, no blood, no hairs, no epithelials. No idiosyncratic bruises, such as might have been caused by a ring or a bracelet or a wristwatch. Nothing.’

‘This is what convinces me that he’s going to kill another priest,’ Katie told her. ‘He’s on a crusade, yes, but his crusade isn’t completed, and that’s why he’s being so careful not to leave any trace of himself. He might not care if we catch him eventually. He might even
want
to be captured, in the end. Most crusading killers have a need to tell the world why they did it. But he doesn’t want us to stop him yet.’

‘I’ll be re-examining both bodies tomorrow,’ said Dr Collins. ‘I’ve called Dr Reidy and told him that I won’t be returning to Dublin for a day or two at least.’

‘Well, if you can come up with any physical evidence at all.’

Katie picked up her keys again. Dr Collins hesitated for a moment, biting her lip, and then she said, ‘You’re finished for the day, then?’

‘Yes. I don’t know whether you heard but my sister was attacked and they’ve got her in intensive care. I was up all night and I really could do with some sleep.’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry. What happened?’

Briefly, Katie told her how Siobhán had been assaulted. Dr Collins shook her head and said, ‘Terrible, that’s terrible. That’s a terrible thing to happen. Terrible.’

‘I’ll see you again tomorrow, then?’ said Katie.

‘Look, well, under the circumstances – what with your sister and all – this is probably inappropriate,’ said Dr Collins. ‘But I’m all on my own here in Cork, and you have nobody to go home to, and I was wondering if I could buy you dinner this evening.’

Katie didn’t know what to say. She could sense at once that this wasn’t a casual invitation. This wasn’t going to be two law-enforcement professionals sitting down over bacon and cabbage and a glass of wine to discuss the technical ins and outs of a complicated case. This was supposed to open the door to something much more intimate. Dr Collins’s cheeks were flushed, and she was biting her lip again, and she was staring unblinkingly at Katie as if she was willing her to say yes, but sure that she was going to say no.

Katie remembered being given a similar stare by Sister Bridget, at school, after Sister Bridget had asked her if she would like to have extra tuition in algebra, one to one, in the privacy of Sister Bridget’s room.

Katie dropped her keys and her mobile phone into her bag. ‘Thanks for the invitation, doctor, but I have to go all the way to Cobh Garda station to collect my dog, and then I have to go home and make sure that my house is locked up securely, and then, believe me, I’ll be fit for nothing but crawling into my pit and dropping off before I have time to say my prayers.’

For some reason, she didn’t mention that she would probably be meeting her lover, too. That would have sounded as if she were aware that Dr Collins was making a pass at her, and perhaps, after all, she was wrong, and she wasn’t. Perhaps she was simply lonely and wanted somebody to talk to, instead of eating her dinner on her own.

‘That’s all right,’ Dr Collins flustered. ‘Perhaps we can do it some other time. Tomorrow evening, or the evening after. I just wanted you to know that what you’ve achieved here – well, you’ve really impressed me. It shows that a woman
can
make it to the top, even in a man’s world like the guards. And a very attractive woman, too.’

Katie switched off her desk lamp, so that Dr Collins was standing in silhouette against the window. ‘Thank you, doctor. Goodnight.’

John called her shortly before 9 p.m.

‘I’m sorry, Katie. I’m tied up on the internet with Bob and Carl in San Francisco, and it looks like I’m not going to be finished till way after midnight. There’s so much we still have to do to get this business up and running.’

‘Okay. Don’t worry. I’m really tired anyway.’

‘I’ll see you tomorrow, though, for definite. Maybe for lunch, if you can spare the time. I love you.’

‘I love you, too,’ she told him. A framed photograph of him stood on the telephone table, and she reached out and touched his lips with her fingertips. He was smiling in this photograph, but she hadn’t noticed before now that he seemed to be looking over her shoulder, not directly at her, his attention caught by something far behind her.

She put down the phone and returned to the kitchen. She had been making herself a Gubbeen cheese sandwich with the intention of taking it to bed and watching television for an hour or two, but all of a sudden she wasn’t hungry any more and she didn’t feel so tired. Barney was asleep in his basket in the utility room, wuffling to himself. When she had brought him home she had given him a bath and fed him and made a fuss of him, but he had still followed her from room to room in case she was thinking of deserting him again.

She undressed and showered and put on her long white linen nightdress, the one that John said made her look like a ghost. ‘If you came into my bedroom in the middle of the night wearing that nightdress and going
Wooooooo
, I think I’d crap myself.’

To relax herself, she played the
Elements
CD from St Joseph’s Orphanage Choir, very softly. Those sweet, high voices reminded her that life wasn’t all torture and stranglings and hammer attacks. Not only that, she thought it was both apt and uplifting that this sacred music had been recorded by children from the same orphanage where Father Quinlan had been found hanging. It was almost as if they were trying to offer him comfort, to sing him on his way to heaven.

She opened her laptop and quickly read through the two post mortem reports that Dr Collins had sent her. Both of them were lengthy and highly technical, a list of almost every fracture and contusion in the medical lexicon. Some of the injuries she hadn’t been aware of until now. Before he was castrated, Father Heaney had apparently been sodomized with a tightly rolled-up newspaper – a fact that Dr Collins had been able to establish because the lining of his rectum had not only been torn but stained with soybean oil, which was used as a solvent for newspaper ink, as well as carbon black, cadmium yellow and other natural pigments that were used to print colour photographs.

Katie had intended to make herself a cup of tea, but instead she went over to her drinks table and poured herself a large vodka.
Mother of God
, she thought,
revenge is one
thing, but this is out and out sadism
. Each trauma that Dr Collins had listed was even more cruel than the one before, and she could only think that the perpetrator was either a psychopath or a demon. Demons, however, existed only in legends, and in the Bible.

She took a large swallow of vodka, and shuddered, the way that demons are supposed to shudder when they hear the name of God.

One thing of which she was increasingly sure, although she still had no evidence to back it up: Brendan Doody wasn’t the man they were looking for. For some reason, Monsignor Kelly had tried very hard to convince her that he was the murderer. But there had been nothing in Brendan Doody’s way of life that suggested a character so inventively cruel. He had painted fences for people, mowed their lawns and weeded their gardens; and there had been nothing in his shabby lodgings to suggest that there lived a man who was obsessed with inflicting agony on others.

It was 10.30 p.m. now, and she called the hospital to see if there was any news of Siobhán. ‘Still the same, I’m afraid,’ the nurse in the ITU unit told her. ‘Unconscious, but stable. Mr Hahq will be coming to see her again at nine tomorrow morning.’

She went back to her laptop. Now she searched the internet for all kinds of pointed hats, to see if they could give her any clue to the identity of the man who had dragged Father Heaney into the Blackwater River. Some of the earliest pointed hats had been found on mummies from the Iron Age, around 800 BC – ‘
Terrifically tall, conical hats, just like those we depict on witches riding broomsticks at Halloween or on medieval wizards intent on their magical spells
.’