‘I thought you were handling all that yourself now, sir?’
Healy shifted in his seat a little uncomfortably. ‘Yes, well, according to this fella Martinez who called us, it seems Señor
Salazar is insisting that the interview should be conducted by someone the girl is familiar with, namely you. There’s also
a
continuity-of-evidence benefit, and the Minister is particularly concerned that there shouldn’t be any holes in the judicial
process due to Miss Salazar’s, eh, unorthodox removal from our jurisdiction. Especially with the possibility of a public enquiry
looming. So, given that you’ve interviewed her before and know the sensitivities of everyone involved, we thought you’d be
the right man for the job.’
Mulcahy had to stop himself from smiling. He knew damn well that this could only be Javier Martinez’s doing. How many strings
must he have pulled to get that one to fly?
‘Well? Don’t you have anything to say?’
‘Yes. I mean, no, sir,’ Mulcahy stumbled. ‘Will anyone else be going?’
‘No, you’re only going over to take a statement from her. Someone there can witness it. I’ll ask Lonergan if he wants you
to take some mugs of this fella they’ve arrested and try for a positive ID. But that may not be necessary at this stage. Word
is the girl still doesn’t recollect much of the incident at all. So it’s mostly a formality, but we have to be seen to respond
quickly to their offer. Lonergan can always send one of his own team further down the line if she comes up with anything else
subsequently. I just want it wrapped up at our end for now, okay?’
‘Of course.’
‘Good. See Noreen outside about your travel arrangements. You’ll be going tomorrow. Short notice, I know, but we want to get
this done as soon as possible.’
‘Not a problem.’ Mulcahy glanced over at Healy, who was now apparently preoccupied by the muted television screen on the wall
again. ‘Will that be all, Brendan?’
‘No, Mike, there was one more thing.’ Healy sat forward in his chair. ‘I had a call from Chief Superintendent Murtagh from
Southern this morning. He said a job had come up in Cork that you were interested in applying for.’
Mulcahy’s spirits lifted. At last, Dowling must have agreed to take the compensation package – and his timing couldn’t have
been better. ‘Yes, head of the Southern Region drugs task force. He thinks I’d be good for it.’
‘I’ve no doubt you would, Mike,’ Healy smiled at him. ‘I’ve no doubt of that at all. But as I told Chief Superintendent Murtagh,
I’m afraid you won’t be available to take up his offer.’
Mulcahy’s innards instantly felt hollowed out, his head as if it’d been pumped full of air.
‘Excuse me?’
‘I said I told Murtagh you wouldn’t be free to take it up.’
‘Why the hell not?’
‘Well, I should’ve thought it would be obvious. With Brogan out of commission for the foreseeable future over on Lonergan’s
murder team, we’re an inspector down here, so obviously I can’t afford to lose you as well. Especially not in the current
climate. You’re going have to stay on in Sex Crimes until we get Brogan back.’
It hit home like a punch in the gut, a real sucker punch, and now Mulcahy felt the breath go out of his body from it.
‘But for God’s sake, Brendan, that could take ages. What about the job? I’ve been waiting months for an opening like this to
come up.’
‘I know, it’s a tough break, Mike, but I really can’t afford to let you go just now. Even if I’d wanted to do you the favour’
– he paused, filling the momentary silence with a vengeful little smile – ‘I wouldn’t be in a position to. Not unless I wanted
to make a rod for my own back. And anyway, Murtagh was very understanding about it – as I’m sure he’ll tell you himself. So,
when you get back from Madrid, you can take Brogan’s office and I’ll be in touch regarding her caseload. We’ll have to sort
you out with some staff as well, of course, seeing as she’s taken all hers with her.’
Mulcahy didn’t even hear the rest of it. A horrible pounding in his head was blocking everything out.
He needed somewhere to go, somewhere to sit and calm down and stop the damn torment that seemed to have taken up residence
in his skull. Jesus, what an idiot he’d been. How could he not have seen this one coming? He should have phoned Murtagh himself
as soon as he heard Brogan was being transferred and asked when he might be needed. At least that way he could have gone in
to see Healy prepared, had ready some kind of fait accompli. But now? Now, he was just plain buggered. He looked at the itinerary
sheet in his hands. Noreen had pounced as soon as he came out the door. ‘It’s the nine-fifteen Aer Lingus flight to
Madrid, check in eight-fifteen, arrive…’ Again he hardly took in a word of it. Without even thinking about it he made his way
back down to the fourth floor. He saw the door to the incident room was open and knew it was one place guaranteed to be empty
now. But he was wrong again. So bloody wrong.
‘How’ya, Inspector.’
Christ almighty, what the hell was Cassidy doing back here?
‘Sergeant? I thought we’d seen the last of you.’
‘No such luck,’ Cassidy grunted, unpinning an A3 blowup of Catriona Plunkett from the board and rolling it up.
For a second the awful thought flashed through Mulcahy’s mind that Cassidy, too, might be being held back from the Murder
Squad, that he would be expected to work with the man for the foreseeable future… but it seemed he was to be spared that indignity
at least.
‘I was just on my way back from the post-mortem on the girl,’ Cassidy said. ‘I thought I’d stop off to pick up these bits
and pieces. She was only fourteen, you know.’
There was real anger in Cassidy’s voice, a sense that he, too, had been seeking the sanctuary of an empty incident room to
find some calm. Mulcahy thought of the dead girl himself and felt the weight of a tragedy considerably greater than his own
career problems settle on him.
‘Christ, that’s young,’ he said. ‘The ID came in fairly quickly, then?’
Cassidy nodded, pulling some photocopied forensics
sheets from the wall and adding them to the pile in front of him. ‘Paula Halpin, from Dartry. Missing persons had her, reported
gone by her parents Tuesday night. Went out to the shop to get fags for her mother, didn’t come back.’
‘God, how would you live with that?’ Mulcahy said, thinking how guilty the mother must be feeling. ‘From Dartry, did you say?’
Somehow it struck an odd note. Then again, there was no particular geographical cluster relating to The Priest’s victims. Cassidy
looked at him as if to say:
what of it?
Mulcahy let it go. ‘So, how did the PM go? Do we have a cause of death?’
Cassidy continued staring at him, as if considering whether or not to share. In the end, he turned away again and nodded.
‘The preliminary results indicate that she died of a major myocardial infarction.’
‘A heart attack?’
‘Yeah, brought on by shock from the severity of her injuries, the doc said. Seems she’d suffered from a heart murmur since
birth. Did for her, apparently – but they’re still looking into that.’
‘The poor kid.’ Mulcahy shook his head.
‘You can say that again,’ Cassidy said, as he loped off.
The Long Hall was deserted, the lunchtime rush long over and still too early yet for the after-work crowd. Mulcahy, grateful
for a sense of isolation at last, mounted a stool at the long mahogany bar and ordered a pint, thinking of the
last time he’d been in here, with Siobhan Fallon, and of that other night – the night they’d spent together before the whole
thing blew up about The Priest. Christ, what an unmitigated cock-up the last few weeks had been.
The barman gave him a peculiar look as he set the pint down and Mulcahy realised he’d been leaning into the counter, rubbing
his temples, staring like a madman into the huge Victorian mirror behind the bar. He sat up, straightened himself out, breathed
deeply in, then out again. He reached for the pint and took a long gulp. Immediately, the wash of cold stout through his system
exerted a kind of calm. Then the thought of losing the Southern Region job sent his stomach into spasm again. He took another
pull on the pint, trying to think his situation through rationally. It could take months for Brogan and the others to prepare
the case for the DPP, assuming they had the right man. And, now they had this Byrne guy in custody, you could be sure they’d
take their time getting it right. Meanwhile, because of Healy’s intransigence, every opportunity that came up in Drugs would
be closed to him. In other words, he was totally fucked – stuck spending all his time chasing wife beaters, rapists and child
abusers.
Mulcahy started flicking through his mental address book of acquaintance and influence. Who could he phone to give him a hand,
get him out of this fix? But he knew it was pointless. He’d called in his entire stock of favours when he’d first returned
from Madrid and all that had got him was a place in the NBCI, beholden to Brendan Healy.
He took another long gulp. The thought of his career going down the pan – with Healy gleefully pulling the chain – was almost
too much to bear. Maybe it was time to face the inevitable, he thought, swirling the remains of his pint in the glass. Maybe
it was time to throw in the towel.
He was about to order again when he caught another glimpse of himself in the mirror and something clicked in his head. What
was it that had bothered him when Cassidy spoke earlier about the murdered girl? Paula Halpin. From Dartry. That was it. Dartry
wasn’t that far from his parents’ house. More to the point, it was miles away from Chapelizod where Byrne lived and worked,
but only a couple of hundred metres down the road from Palmerston Park and Rinn’s house.
He tried to shake the thought away. It made no sense to focus on it. An arrest had already been made. And Rinn, apart from
acting a bit weird about his past, had seemed a perfectly, maybe even more than averagely, respectable guy. It wasn’t even
much of a coincidence. Still, the fact of it pulsed like a live electric cable in his head: Dartry. In his mind’s eye he saw
a young girl, fourteen years old, all milky-white skin and curly auburn hair, sauntering up the Dartry Road from Milltown
Bridge, past the old Laundry Mills and Trinity Hall. In her hand she held a little red plastic purse that seemed to beat and
throb, and around her neck hung a glittering cross. But instead of walking on up the hill towards light and life, she turned
to take a shortcut through—
‘Are you havin’ another one, boss?’
Startled, Mulcahy was wrenched from his thoughts by the barman, who was holding up an empty pint glass. He shook his head,
put his hand in his pocket, and pulled out his phone.
F
ather Touhy, the parish priest of St Imelda’s in Chapelizod, looked like he’d long been on the wrong side of seventy. A frail,
slightly hunched man, he had a pale, gentle face and, above his black clergyman’s suit, a shock of white hair like the head
on a pint of Guinness. He made only one enquiry – ‘Are you the young woman who asked that question on the television?’ – before
agreeing to speak to her when she answered in the affirmative. Siobhan had phoned his number on the off-chance. His church
was locked up and already swamped by reporters and camera crews, spilling off the pavement outside. A whole mob of them had
gone racing down there as soon as the Garda press officer, in response to a leading question, announced that yes, Emmet Byrne,
the suspect in the Priest case,
did
indeed have an association with the Catholic Church – he worked as a part-time gardener for the parish church of St Imelda’s,
Chapelizod.
Seeing them all there already, Siobhan told the taxi driver to keep going. Mainly because she spotted Anne-Marie
Cowen from RTE News doing a piece to camera outside and didn’t feel like talking to her. Just as well. A simple phone call
later, and the parish priest was letting her slip in the back door of the tiny semi-detached presbytery around the corner,
and sitting her down with a cup of tea. He was glad she’d called, he said, as he felt sure he’d need more direct intervention
than God’s to convince the Gardai that they were wrong about ‘poor Emmet’ – who was, Fr Touhy insisted, a man more sinned
against than sinning.
Siobhan looked at her watch, eager to get on with it, figuring she had half an hour, maximum, before the rest of the pack
realised where the presbytery was and started beating a path to its door. The poor old priest looked like he might be close
to tears from the stress of it all already. He even confessed, straight out, his fear that a Catholic clergyman might not
be considered the best defender that a man accused of a sex crime, let alone rape and murder, could have these days in Ireland.
So maybe he wasn’t so naive after all.
‘I’m sure people will respect the opinion of a parish priest of long standing, like yourself,’ Siobhan said. ‘They’ll want
to hear what you have to say about Byrne anyway. Whether they believe it or not is up to them, I suppose.’
He smiled at her, understanding what she was saying. ‘Do you think I’d have him working here if I wasn’t a hundred per cent
confident in him? He’s a good man, gentle. On the slow side, yes, if I’m honest. And that’s the problem – his friendliness
can sometimes be misinterpreted.’
‘Misinterpreted?’ Siobhan said, her antenna zinging. ‘How exactly do you mean, Father?’
‘Well, you know, like that last time he was arrested.’
She nearly gagged on her ginger nut, but just about managed to cover it up with a cough.
‘Sorry, I think a bit of biscuit went down the wrong way there, Father. You were saying, about the arrest?’
‘That’s right,’ Fr Touhy said. ‘For interfering with that child. A terrible thing, it was.’
‘A child.’ She put the cup and saucer on the table, trying not to let them rattle. Thanking every saint in heaven that she’d
remembered to switch on her voice recorder, she reached for her notepad anyway, just in case. For the second time that week
she wondered if she hadn’t been accidentally promoted into the ranks of the blessed. Could fate be any kinder to her?