The Priest (31 page)

His voice was becoming laboured now, his breathing heavier. She could imagine all too clearly what was going on at the other
end of the line.

‘Righteous, did you say? That’s a laugh. Do you think I don’t know what’s going on? Do you think I can’t hear you at it, you
sad fucker? Let me give you some advice – piss off and play with yourself on somebody else’s time. Or I’ll have this call
traced and it won’t be yourself you’ll be pleasuring but some seven-foot stinking crackhead in a prison cell in the arse end
of nowhere!’

She slammed the phone down. Behind her she felt the reassuring presence of Paddy Griffin drifting up, putting a hand on her
shoulder, his nose for trouble as unfailingly sharp as ever.

‘Are you alright, love? What was that all about?’

‘I’ll give you one guess.’ She looked up at him, a smile automatically snapping back on to her face. Never let anyone see
you’re fazed – his advice, she recalled.

‘A crank, eh?’ Griffin replied. ‘Well, sounds like you sent him away with a flea in his ear.’

‘It’s what he had in his hand that I was worried about.’ She balled her right hand into a fist and jerked it up and down obscenely.

‘Oh God,’ Griffin grimaced, his laugh diluted by nine parts sympathy. ‘That’s Holy Christian Ireland for you – full of tossers.’

‘Yeah,’ she said absently. Her mind was already turning back to the radio interview, wondering about the time again. She looked
at her watch and saw she still had a minute to spare. Only then did she notice that her hand was still trembling.

‘Paddy, love,’ she said, grabbing her bag. ‘Could you listen out for the phone for me. It’ll be RTE for that
Crime Week
thing, but I’m dying for a pee.’

The door to Brogan’s office was open, so Mulcahy just knocked and went in. She was staring intently at her computer screen
and when she looked up she gave him that tired, wary smile he’d been getting from her for the past few days whenever he turned
up to go through the best of the leads coming in over the phones.

‘Got something for me?’ she asked.

‘Yeah, maybe,’ he said. ‘How’s it going? Making any progress today?’

They still had a couple of hours before the main evening briefing and she could have asked him to wait till then, but instead
she smiled and invited him to sit down while she scrolled back through her email and called something up.
‘Looks like you were right about Scully, by the way,’ she said. ‘We got a call from police in the UK earlier today – Scully’s
cash card was flagged being used to withdraw £250 sterling cash at Harwich ferry terminal, in Essex, on the east coast. By
the time they realised what they were looking at, he was gone. I’m assuming across to the continent, but not under his own
name. At least, not according to the passenger manifests.’

‘There’s a service to the Hook of Holland from there, so Amsterdam would be my guess. It’s his kind of town. We can always
get the Dutch to check out the hotels there.’

‘Not much point,’ she replied. ‘Healy’s saying we should hand the lot over to the Drugs Squad now that it’s chiefly of interest
to them.’

In response to Mulcahy’s quizzical expression she pointed at another document she’d called up on screen. ‘We got back the
last of the forensics on the van today. Clean as a whistle. The hair’s definitely not Jesica’s – so that’s pretty much the
end of that. Because even though the blood spatter
was
blood spatter, it was matched to Scully’s father who finally relented and gave us a sample yesterday. Seems he must’ve cut
his hand on a bit of pipe.’

Mulcahy gave her a sympathetic smile but said nothing. He hadn’t really been expecting any other result.

‘And they drew a blank on those fibres, too,’ Brogan continued. ‘No sign of anything remotely like them in the van.’

‘Do they even know what they are yet?’

Brogan shook her head. ‘They say they’re not sure – i.e.
they haven’t got a clue. All Technical will say for definite is that the ones found on Jesica’s clothes are an
exact
match for the ones found on Catriona Plunkett’s top, too.’

‘That’s something, I suppose: find the fibres, find the man. How is she, by the way – Catriona? Any improvement?’

Brogan shook her head again. ‘Still under heavy sedation and they say they’re going to have to keep her that way for days.
At least until some of the burns begin to heal over and she can’t make herself worse just by moving. She’s in a terrible state,
poor kid.’ Brogan sighed heavily and nodded towards her screen. ‘I was just going over the CCTV of her outside the Kay Club
again.’

She clicked on the black subscreen on her monitor and Mulcahy saw a grainy image jerk into life, revealing a young woman in
teetering heels standing outside an open doorway. A length of thick rope hanging between two waist-height stainless-steel
poles indicated the area where club-goers queued for entry. She was looking away, her face turning first to peer up, then
down, the street, and she was alone except for a large shaven-headed man in black standing by the door behind her.

‘The bouncer?’ Mulcahy asked.

‘Yeah,’ Brogan nodded. ‘But look at this.’

They watched together in silence as the girl turned and engaged the doorman in what seemed to be a bit of friendly banter
and he responded, gesticulating with his hand. Brogan froze the image. ‘Okay, so according to the bouncer, here she’s asking
him why there aren’t any taxis waiting outside
like there usually are, and he’s telling her there won’t be any taxis because the local firms decided to boycott the pubs
and clubs in the Killester area.’

‘Boycott?’

Brogan nodded. ‘Apparently, two or three taxi drivers got robbed at knifepoint around Killester in the space of a week and
they were all up in arms about it. I checked it out and it’s true, although the boycott only lasted a couple of nights because
it hit the local drivers too hard in the pocket. But this particular Friday was the first night of it, and the one night the
ban held firm.’

‘So there were no taxis at all out in Killester that night?’

‘None of the local ones that do the clubs. To be honest, I’d kind of discounted that as a factor until now because Catriona
lived only a few hundred yards up the road. And look, here she turns and walks in the direction of home, as you’d expect.’

Sure enough, the CCTV caught Catriona turning and walking away, saying goodnight to the bouncer with a flirtatious twist of
her fingers. ‘God love her,’ Brogan said. ‘We thought that was the last we had of her on camera. But look at this. One of
Maura’s lads spotted something else this morning. It’s from a traffic camera a hundred yards further up the same road. It
only lasts a few seconds, which is how it was missed first time round. Just watch…’

She clicked on another subscreen and a rougher, greyer, wide-angled image emerged of a girl – the same girl, if you looked
hard enough – walking up the road towards the
camera, swinging her handbag by its long straps. There didn’t seem to be any traffic on the road. Then, just before she passed
the camera, she lifted her head, turned suddenly and raised her right arm. At which point she disappeared from the frame.

‘Show it to me again,’ Mulcahy said, intrigued.

Brogan played the footage once more, this time at half the previous pace. ‘Do you see what I’m talking about?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, still puzzling as she played it for him a third time, slower still.

‘So what do you reckon she’s doing?’ Brogan asked.

‘Well, if I didn’t know better, I’d say she was hailing a taxi. Either that or she recognised someone who happened to be driving
past.’

‘That’s what I figured, too,’ Brogan said.

‘My bet would be on the taxi,’ Mulcahy said. ‘Maybe someone who didn’t actually know that there was supposed to be a boycott
that night?’

‘How do you mean?’ she said, slightly spiky. ‘We
did
check it thoroughly. None of the ranks was operating that night.’

‘No, that’s just my point. It’s to do with something I unearthed today. Just a feeling for now, but if you have a few minutes…’

T
he call came in at around 2.15 a.m. Her mobile, trilling on the bedside table, cut through a waxy dream of something slipping
from her grasp.

‘Get yourself over to the Furry Glen asap,’ the voice instructed, ‘if you want to see something interesting.’

The voice was distorted, as it had been before, but instantly recognisable as that of her elusive source. A ten-second instruction
that penetrated her sleep like a knife slicing through flesh, before the click and vast nothingness of disconnection. Siobhan
was instantly awake, rummaging in the darkness for the jeans she’d peeled off only four hours before, razor-keen to know what
was going on, not content to wait until she got there to find out. Didn’t even stop for a coffee. She had a can of Red Bull
in the car if she needed a hit later. For now, the adrenalin pumping through her like a piston was more than enough.

She jumped in behind the wheel and roared up the ramp out of the garage, regardless of anyone sleeping in the flats overhead.
Her mind raced ahead all the way there, weighing
up the possibilities, the permutations. Why the Furry Glen? By day it was an overrated beauty spot in the Phoenix Park. By
night its quiet, bosky pathways made it a favourite hangout for gay men. Had The Priest switched sides? Had he maybe targeted
a guy this time?

She slowed the car as she reached the lights at the bottom of Grand Canal Street, then gunned the engine and sped through
on red across the bridge. The tip-off wouldn’t have come if they weren’t already thinking it had something to do with The Priest.
And if it was a crime scene she was going to, they had probably been there for a while already. Which meant there was a good
chance that whatever it was they were interested in would be there still, too. Not in a hospital. Was it a dead body? Was that
it?

She drove on through the still, quiet streets of the city, her progress marked by the split-second intervals between the sodium
orange streetlights, her foot easing off the accelerator only on the rare occasions she encountered another vehicle. Within
seconds of crossing the river and entering the Phoenix Park, she could see that something major was afoot. The mouth of Wellington
Road, which ran the couple of kilometres down and around the southern rim of the Park as far as the Furry Glen, was blocked
by a Garda car, its blue emergency lamps flashing in the night. She drove on up Chesterfield Avenue, the main route that splits
the Park in two, but found a similar blockade at the next turn-off, and then at the next again – patrol cars parked across
the side roads, denying access, every time with a uniformed
Garda leaning against the bonnet or sitting inside with the windows down. By then she knew there was no point trying to get
any further in the car, so she pulled over onto the grass verge, into the shadow of a copse, and killed the engine.

From there it was a twenty-minute hike, across flat grassy parkland and around dense patches of woodland, to reach the Glen.
How she made it she wasn’t quite sure, thanking Christ for the light of the full moon, and herself for having the good sense
to have slipped her trainers on and not the mules she’d been wearing earlier. On the downside, it did feel a bit mad to have
a handbag swinging from her arm. But by then it was too late to go back and she was already closing in on her target, guided
from some distance out by the unmistakeable flare of spotlights, a canopy of light domed in the night ahead of her. When at
last she reached the Upper Glen Road she spotted two more cop cars, but they were at least two hundred yards apart at either
end of the access roads leading down into the Glen itself. No one had thought to guard against anyone arriving from across
the park on foot.

She crossed unnoticed between them and slipped into the shadow of the trees beyond, making it all the way to the rim of a
wide and steeply sloping bowl in the ground that looked to be almost as deep as the thirty or forty feet it was across. Hiding
behind a rough-barked tree, leaning into its trunk for support, she took in the scene below, lit harshly by a battery of arc
lamps set up on the opposite edge of the hollow.
There were eight, maybe ten men down there, all dressed head-to-toe in ghostly white overalls, some standing, some taking
photographs, some on their knees, searching. A white forensics tent had been awkwardly erected over the centre of a thick
concrete pipe that spanned the base of the hollow. Siobhan’s heart skipped a beat at the thought of what might be beneath
it, and how she might manoeuvre herself into a position to get a look. It was probably the furious churning of her imagination
that closed off all her senses to the movement behind her. The looming form. The long arm reaching out to grab her.

They gave her pretty short shrift despite her well-practised protestations. The young cop who’d rumbled her was nice enough.
If anything he was more shocked to stumble upon her in the dark than she had been at getting caught. But the sergeant he marched
her down to meet was another matter altogether – all crew cut, red neck and stripes, the sort who liked to ask questions he
already knew the answers to.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing here?’ His Sligo accent was as thick as his neck. He was staring at her press card
and
Sunday Herald
ID like they were smears of something nasty on his hand.

‘I’m doing my job, Sergeant. To the best of my knowledge they haven’t passed any law against that, yet.’

It was while waiting for him to think up some devastating riposte that she spotted them: three figures – two men and a woman
– emerging from the gloom about fifty yards
in front of her, walking towards the hollow. One of them, in the same white overalls she’d seen the men down below wearing,
was talking and gesticulating at the others as if engaged in some elaborate explanation. The other two were in plain clothes,
detectives without a doubt. As they neared the edge of the hollow and peered over the rim, the light from below carved out
their facial features in sharp relief. Siobhan was sure she recognised one of them – but not sure enough.