Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) (38 page)

At five past three that afternoon, four squad cars sped into opposite ends of Marlborough Street in the centre of the city, a narrow, pedestrian-only street that runs between Patrick Street and Oliver Plunkett Street. No sirens, no flashing lights. Passers-by stood back against the walls and took shelter in the entrance to O’Donovan’s pub as five detectives and eleven uniformed gardaí scrambled out of their vehicles and shouldered their way into a narrow doorway next to Hotlox the hairdresser’s. No shouting, only the syncopated drumming of boots on the uncarpeted staircase.

It was gloomy inside the building, and smelled of damp and the dustbins that were crowded into the hallway. On the left side of the second-floor landing there was a small bar called Dorothy’s, whose only occupants were three elderly men sitting silently in front of their half-empty glasses of Murphy’s, and a woman with a shock of bright red hair whose head was resting on the table, fast asleep, her face as yellow as a painting by Toulouse-Lautrec.

On the opposite side of the landing was a brown-varnished door with a wooden painted sign beside it saying, ‘
Fidelio Sacred Choir. Please Ring and Enter
.’

Detective O’Donovan didn’t bother to ring. He rattled the door handle and it was locked, so he turned around and nodded to the beefy garda who was carrying the small, 10-kilo, red-painted battering ram they used for narrow doors and hallways.

It took three deafening blows before the locks broke and the frame splintered and the door shuddered open. The red-haired woman in Dorothy’s lifted her head from the table and screamed out, ‘What the feck? Can’t anybody get any feckin’ sleep around here?’

Detective O’Donovan went in first with his gun drawn, closely followed by Detective Horgan and then by Katie herself. The offices of the Fidelio Sacred Choir were dark and empty, and smelled empty, in the sour hopeless way that only a damp building can. There was a half-torn poster for Fidelio on the wall, with Denis Sweeney and the Phelan twins standing together in their black suits trying hard to look sacred. A green metal filing cabinet stood under the window with all of the drawers pulled open, and empty, and a sofa with a brown stretch-nylon cover was lying on its back with its legs in the air.

‘Damn it,’ said Katie, holstering her gun and prowling from one room to the other and back again. There was no evidence here at all. No harp wire, no piano wire, no nylon restraints, no clothing, no blood.

‘Go next door, would you, and ask them when was the last time that anybody was seen leaving this office,’ Katie told Detective Horgan. ‘Mind you, they all look too langers to know what day of the week it is, let alone who’s been coming and going.’

‘It doesn’t look to me like our Fidelio fellows have been here in quite a few days,’ remarked Detective O’Donovan. ‘I checked their website before we came out, though, and they’re still taking bookings.’

‘They might be taking bookings but that doesn’t mean they’re going to show up.’

‘So what do we do now?’ asked Detective O’Donovan.

Katie was just about to answer him when her mobile phone played ‘The Fields of Athenry’.

‘Superintendent Maguire? It’s Ciara Clare from the
Catholic Recorder
.’

‘I’m sorry, Ciara. I’m totally up to my eyes in it right now. Call me back later.’

‘But it’s the monsignor.’

‘What do you mean, “it’s the monsignor”?’

‘We were supposed to meet at lunchtime at Greene’s, but he never came. So I called his mobile but his mobile’s switched off, and so I called his secretary and his secretary said that he left his office this morning with a man she didn’t know and wouldn’t tell her when he’d be back.’

‘So he missed a lunch appointment. What are you so upset about?’

‘It’s these priests who keep turning up dead. He’s been really worried about it. He keeps asking me to see what I can do to keep it quiet, but it’s gone beyond that now. I can’t keep a story quiet that’s on RTÉ every night and Sky News and everything.’

Katie said, ‘What has he told you about these dead priests? Anything?’

‘He just says that they did something with the priests that they shouldn’t have done, and they stopped it, whatever it was, but it’s all come back to haunt him.’

‘Where are you now?’ Katie asked her.

‘I’m back at the office on Grand Parade.’

‘Well, meet me at Monsignor Kelly’s office as soon as you can. I might be twenty minutes or so by the time I’ve finished up here, but wait for me. Of course, if you hear from him before that, call me at once.’

‘I will of course. And – I’m sorry.’

‘Sorry for what?’

‘Sorry for everything, I suppose. Sorry for myself most of all. I didn’t understand at all what it was that I was getting myself into.’

Detective Horgan came back across the landing from Dorothy’s, flapping his hand in front of his face.

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, it was reekin’ in there, I’ll tell you.’

‘What’s the story?’ Katie asked him.

‘Those Fidelio fellows haven’t been there too often lately, and they know that in the bar there because they can hear them practising their singing sometimes, which the barman said was very uplifting. But they was there last night, about eleven, up and down the stairs every five minutes, up and down, up and down, and in a hurry by all appearances.’

‘Sounds like that’s when they cleared the place out,’ said Detective O’Donovan.

‘Maybe they have an idea that we’re close to them,’ Katie agreed. ‘Or... I don’t know. Maybe they have some other agenda. Now that they’ve abducted Father ó Súllibháin, that’s the last of their choirmasters, isn’t it? The last of the priests who mutilated them. God alone knows what they’re thinking of doing now.

‘Right,’ she said, ‘you and me, Patrick, we’re going to Redemption Road. Michael, do you want to finish up here? Talk to the barman in O’Donovan’s on the corner, and any regulars you can find in there. And the girls from the hairdresser’s. You never know. They might have seen something that can help us.’

By now, most of the gardaí who had backed up their raid were milling around in Marlborough Street, chatting to each other. Katie beckoned to one of them and said, ‘You, what’s your name?’

‘O’Dowd, ma’am.’

‘All right, O’Dowd, I want you and two more guards to follow us out to the diocese offices on Redemption Road, and anywhere else we go to after that. I think we might need some back-up.’

‘If you don’t mind me asking, ma’am, who exactly are we after nailing?’

‘If I knew, O’Dowd, I’d tell you, believe me.’

When they reached Redemption Road, Ciara Clare was already waiting for them outside. She was wearing a bright red dress of tight-fitting needlecord, with a matching bolero top, which she had obviously chosen to go to lunch at Greene’s with Monsignor Kelly. She looked deeply anxious, and her matching red lipstick was splodged.

As they climbed the steps of the offices, Katie looked up and saw that the sky, for four o’clock in the afternoon, was growing threateningly dark, and that the wind was blowing even more strongly – that fresh, chill wind that precedes a thunderstorm.

Katie spoke first to Monsignor Kelly’s secretary, the pointy-nosed nun with the diminutive mouth. She was just as distraught as Ciara, and kept twisting her sleeves as if she were trying to wring water out of them.

‘Here,’ she said, showing Katie the monsignor’s diary. She spoke in a hurried, panicky rush, as if she had memorized what she was going to say and was frightened of forgetting it. ‘He was supposed to be having lunch at 12.30 at Greene’s on McCurtain Street with Patrick Mulligan from the Church Overseas Missionary Fund. Then he was supposed to be back here at 3.45 for a discussion group with the bishop and lay volunteers about the changing of Mass times in rural areas to make up for the diminishing number of priests.’

‘But he didn’t arrive at Greene’s, did he?’ asked Katie.

The nun gave Ciara a sharp, resentful look and said, ‘No. Not according to Ms Clare.’

‘In fact, he left here in the company of a man you didn’t know?’

‘Yes, at about ten minutes to twelve.’

‘Can you describe this man?’

‘He was tall. Big. His hair was curly. He was wearing a black sweater and black trousers a bit too short for him so they were flappy round the ankles. He had a bit of a belly on him, to be truthful.’

‘He didn’t give you his name and Monsignor Kelly didn’t tell you his name either?’

The nun shook her head. ‘I had never seen him before but Monsignor Kelly must have known who he was because he came out of his office directly and went away with him.’

‘Was any word spoken between them?’

Again the nun shook her head. ‘I have had no word from him since and he has been uncontactable on his mobile. The meeting about masses in pastoral areas was postponed until tomorrow when, please God, the monsignor will have reappeared safe and well.’

She crossed herself, twice, and her mouth looked even more pinched than ever.

‘What about the fellow he was supposed to be meeting at Greene’s for lunch?’ asked Katie.

‘Patrick Mulligan? I don’t know about that.’ She paused, and then she said, ‘Ms Clare knows more about that than I do.’

‘Did Mr Mulligan not call you to ask why the monsignor hadn’t turned up?’

Again, the nun’s eyes darted toward Ciara. ‘No, he did not. I can only presume that he thought he might have made a mistake about the date.’

‘All right,’ said Katie. ‘Patrick – do you want to take a quick look at Monsignor Kelly’s desk, see if he’s left any notes?’

‘I can’t allow you to do that,’ the nun protested. ‘The monsignor’s desk... it’s private. It’s confidential. It’s
personal
.’

‘Don’t you worry.’ Detective O’Donovan grinned at her. ‘If I find any porn mags I won’t say a word.’

Katie took Ciara outside, and they sat in her car together. The sky was almost completely black now, with only a silvery streak of light over the hills to the north-east, where the sun must still be shining.

‘I think you’d better tell me what the situation is between you and Monsignor Kelly, don’t you?’ said Katie.

Ciara looked away, out of the passenger window. The trees along the driveway were thrashing so wildly they looked as if they were trying to uproot themselves.

‘I don’t know how it started, to be honest with you. I was sent to interview the monsignor about his favourite subject, which is involving lay people in church affairs. He was always quoting Jesus about that.
Go into my vineyard, too
.’

‘It sounds as if the monsignor went into
your
vineyard, too, Ciara, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

Ciara blushed and started to twist at the large silver cross studded with red glass rubies that rested in her cleavage.

‘It happened by accident, almost. We had to stay overnight at a church conference in Limerick and he came into my hotel room by mistake. Mixed up the numbers, that’s what he said. But then he said that the Lord must have mixed them up deliberately to bring us together. I was the Lord’s creation, he said, and I was so beautiful that the Lord must have intended him to celebrate my beauty.’

Katie nodded understandingly. At the same time, she thought:
What a line that was,
and from one of the vicars general, too. What’s worse, this poor cow actually believed him
.

‘That was the first time a man I really respected had told me that I was beautiful and I knew that he wasn’t lying to me because he was doing everything in his power to resist me. I could see for myself how much he was struggling.’

Of course he was struggling
, thought Katie.
You need to undo
thirty-three buttons to get out of a soutane
.

‘Tell me about these murdered priests,’ she said, as gently as she could. ‘You said that Monsignor Kelly was worried about them.’

‘I went to see him at his office one morning and he was very shocked and very pale. I mean, dead white, white as a sheet. I thought he was ill at first, but then he told me that somebody had phoned him – somebody he hadn’t heard from in a very long time – and that some awful trouble was brewing. I asked him what it was but he said he couldn’t tell me because I was too young and I wouldn’t understand.’

‘So he didn’t give you any idea what this “awful trouble” actually was?’

Ciara kept on twisting her cross round and round. Katie felt like slapping her hand and telling her to stop it, but she knew that it would only break Ciara’s confessional mood, and the last thing she wanted to do was antagonize her.

‘All he said was that
somebody
was blackmailing him into doing something that was impossible. He said that he had tried to make a deal with them, tried to meet them halfway. He even said that he had offered them money – lots of money – but they hadn’t shown any interest.’

‘That was the actual word he used – “impossible”? He didn’t say that he didn’t
want
to do it, or wasn’t
capable
of doing it for any particular reason? He said it was
impossible
?’

Ciara nodded. ‘He kept on saying, “It’s impossible. It can’t be done. It’s impossible,” as if I knew what he was talking about, but I didn’t know what he was talking about, and he wouldn’t explain what he meant.

‘There was something else he kept on saying, too. “I’m caught. I’m trapped. Whatever I do, it’s going to turn out badly.”‘

‘But you still had no idea of what he meant?’

‘No, although I was pretty sure it was something to do with these murdered priests. When Father Heaney was found dead, he called me and told me to go up to Ballyhooly and do everything I could to play the story down, like. He was raging when it was the top story on RTÉ, and then the
Independent
. But he kept on having these mood swings. Later on that same day he was much more positive, as if he had managed to sort something out. But when they found Father Quinlan hanging from that flagpole his mood went all black again, and ever since then it’s stayed black and it seems to be getting blacker.’