The Priest (33 page)

Mulcahy nodded, wondering what she was getting at. ‘You know him?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘but I’m sure I will by the end of the day.’ She smiled a little hesitantly before continuing. ‘The thing
is, Mike, I asked this morning, you not being part of my team and all, and Healy says you’re to hang back. That you’re not
being reassigned with the rest of us. I don’t know why that is. All I know is, he says he’ll be in meetings all morning for
the handover but he asked me to tell you to hang around – to “await further orders” is how he put it. Sorry.’

She said it like she was expecting Mulcahy to be devastated about this but his reaction to the news was precisely the opposite.
All he felt – in light of Murtagh and the upcoming Southern Region job – was relief. Jesus, if he’d been sent over to the
Murder Squad on some mass temporary transfer ticket, it could have taken him months to extricate himself.

‘That’s fine, Claire. I’m sure I’ll find something useful to do.’

‘Yeah?’ she said, looking at him like she couldn’t quite believe how well he was taking this.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’ll be fine.’

‘Well, I know we had our moments, Mike, but…’

If she was on the brink of saying something nice she was
saved by Cassidy’s intervention, a shout from across the room.

‘Boss?’

She looked over, then back at Mulcahy. He decided to put her out of her misery. ‘You go on, Claire. I’ll see you around.’

She was just turning away when it came to him. ‘Oh, one last thing. I don’t suppose you got a chance to look over that case
I was telling you about last night – Caroline Coyle?’

She blinked, seeming unsure of what he was talking about. Clearly the events of later that evening had wiped her memory of
it temporarily.

‘Oh, shit. No, Mike, I’m sorry. That sounded really promising but, you know, I’ve been up all night on this. It completely
slipped my mind. Could you put it in an email for me? I’ll get somebody on to it right away, okay?’

‘Sure,’ he said, watching her back as she walked away, spotting Andy Cassidy smirking triumphantly at him from the far side
of the room. The twat. He wasn’t going to be sorry to see the back of him. What to do about Sergeant Brennan, though, Mulcahy
was not so sure.

‘That’s it, Siobhan, you’re clear now,’ the disembodied voice of producer Seosamh Gaffney floated into her ears. At least
she could see and make eye-contact with the news presenters in the glassed-in studio in front of her small interview booth.
But Gaffney, who had brought her in and sat, with
widening eyes, discussing what she had for him while she was being miked up, was nowhere to be seen. He’d been off pressing
buttons in a control room nearby during the whole show. ‘And thanks a million, again. We haven’t had such an exciting story
break on air for ages.’

She took the cans off her head and gave her tingling ears a rub. She hated having to wear headphones, didn’t like the way
they made her voice echo back up her ear canal. But that was the way they did it on
Morning Ireland
and Gaffney had insisted. Especially as they wanted her free to come in on any discussion with the others they’d managed
to raise for interview over the phone. It had been a hell of a good session, with everyone in the small RTE news studio buzzing
in the knowledge that they had a solid-gold scoop on their hands, something no other broadcaster or news agency had even had
a sniff of before them. The two presenters, Lawlor and MacCoille, had been falling over themselves with the questions, eager
to get the most out of it knowing just how many people would be waking up startled in bed or letting their cornflakes go soggy
for fear of missing a detail with a mistimed crunch. This was, after all, the most listened-to radio show in the country. The
one that set the entire day’s news agenda. And on RTE that meant the entire day’s radio, because whatever went out on
Morning Ireland
got endlessly rolled over and recycled into every talk show that followed during the course of the day.

She had phoned Gaffney, an old pal from journalism school, as soon as she got back to her car in the Phoenix
Park. He’d all but gone down on his knees, begging her to come in, even offering to send a limo out there to fetch her into
the studio. But what was the point of that when she had her own car and, anyway, the drive in would give her a chance to get
her head together and her story straight? And time to phone Paddy Griffin and get the nod first, of course, laughing as he
howled invective down the line at the curse of being a Sunday news editor. Barely ninety minutes after being given the boot
by that bogtrotter sergeant, she was sipping coffee in the RTE studios in Donnybrook, yakking to Gaffney while some other
guy did sound checks on her mike. And, after an introduction in which she was described as ‘the
Sunday Herald
’s brilliant chief reporter Siobhan Fallon’, she began recounting in graphic detail everything she’d witnessed in the Furry
Glen earlier that morning. Of course she mentioned the
Herald
’s name as much as possible – she wasn’t going to risk upsetting Harry Heffernan until she had that pay rise carved in stone
– but she also made sure to take the lion’s share of the credit for herself. It wasn’t like she didn’t deserve it. She’d only
had to embroider the odd patch here and there. There was no shortage of colour to fill in the vague outlines of what she’d
seen: the spectral glare of the arc lights in the night, the ghostly toing and froing of the investigators in the hollow,
the sad spectacle of the stretchered body being borne away. But, most of all, it was the giant Papal Cross that she used to
illustrate her story. The image of it burned black against the rising sun. And it went down a storm.

So much so, that when they asked her to stay on to do the Pat Kenny show, later, the old stager led with the image of the
burning cross himself. And so it was for the rest of the morning, traipsing from studio to studio, from radio to TV and back
again, milking it for all it was worth, until she literally didn’t have the strength to say another word about it. That was
when she rang Gaffney and told him to send round that limo he’d promised her. She wanted to go home. Even as she was wafted
back to her flat in the soft, enfolding, new-leather comfort of a luxurious Mercedes, barely able to keep her eyes open, she
heard on the radio the story being taken up by others, rolling it on, building it ever bigger, that image of the Papal Cross
taking on a life of its own. She knew then that by end of day, even as she slept on in her own bed, it would have been adopted
by every hack and rent-a-comment on the airwaves as a kind of catch-all shorthand, a symbol of whatever malaise they might
suddenly decide had taken hold of Ireland.

And she knew, too, that however big a story it had been to begin with, the murder and that image of a burning cross would
make The Priest into the biggest source of outrage that Ireland had seen for a hell of a long time. There was nothing like
a society that thought it was over something for diving straight back in again at every opportunity and having another worry
at it. And Catholicism was still that something in Ireland, capable of tweaking every button, clanging every bell, pulling
every knob it ever had, with the added fury of those who now presumed themselves to be
above all that – but weren’t. As she finally succumbed to sleep in the back of the limo, she was sure she saw her name, Siobhan
Fallon, as if by angels held aloft, transported upwards seeking out its rightful place among the stars.

‘A
h, sure, when we bought this place, it was like our holiday house in the country. Now, with all the development there’s been,
it’s barely better than living in the suburbs.’

‘It looks a lot nicer than that to me,’ said Mulcahy.

Sergeant Pat Brennan, retired, hadn’t done half bad for himself, Mulcahy thought, as he stood outside the man’s home high
on the wooded slopes outside the village of Kilpedder, twenty miles or so south of Dublin. The house itself was nothing much
to look at, one of those ubiquitous white bungalows that scarred the lower faces of the Wicklow mountains like a pox. But
its location – at the end of a winding drive on what had to be at least three acres with fine views out over Bray Head, Greystones
and the sweeping bay beyond – was spectacular.

‘Got it for a good price, too, back in the early eighties. The owners were desperate to get away to England to look for work.
Heaven knows what it’s worth now,’ said Brennan with a tilt of his eyebrow.

Like hell, Mulcahy thought. The shrewd old goat probably knows its value down to the nearest tenner. Even with the collapse
of property prices, it had to be worth a couple of million easily. For a second Mulcahy was gripped by the thought that he
hadn’t heard a peep from his own estate agents since they said they’d lined up those viewings… how many days ago? He couldn’t
remember. Then the thought was gone as he followed the sergeant in through the front door.

Meeting Sergeant Brennan face to face had made Mulcahy revise the impression he’d got of him over the phone. For one thing,
there was a vivaciousness about him that just didn’t come across in his voice. In person, Brennan was fit, tanned, smart of
dress and straight of back. He still sported the No. 1 buzz cut he’d probably worn to maximise the grip on his Garda cap for
the best part of four decades on the force, and he looked at least ten years younger than the seventy-plus he had to be if
he’d held out to retire at sixty like he’d said. Nothing at all like the bitter old buffer Mulcahy had imagined. And he didn’t
seem to mind at all the interval that had passed since he’d spoken to Mulcahy. In fact, he seemed strangely chuffed, as if
the wait had somehow made the return even more important.

‘I knew you’d come back to me eventually. That’s why I wanted to speak to someone like yourself, who knows the value of good
intelligence. That young galoot I spoke to first had me written off the minute I opened my mouth. You have to go to the top
if you want anything done, nowadays.’

‘Yeah, well, a lot’s been happening over the last few days,’ Mulcahy replied. ‘Maybe you could tell me a little more about
this fella Rinn now? Didn’t you say he trained to be a priest?’

That, more than anything else, was what was nagging at Mulcahy. On the file, it had said Rinn was a taxi driver. How the hell
did that fit? But he couldn’t afford to tell Brennan about the file or anything else to do with Caroline Coyle. He didn’t
want to prejudice the man’s already coloured judgement any further.

‘Well, I was just about to get to that when you had to go. The grandparents packed him off to All Hallows, but he never made
it. I mean, he did a few years in the seminary there but he was never ordained into the priesthood.’

Okay, that cleared that up. Mulcahy looked around the kitchen, wondering where to go next. ‘You said he had a well-connected
grandfather, but where were his parents?’

Brennan drew in a big breath and let it out again slowly. ‘Well, that’s just it. It was a tragic case, really. The parents
died in a car crash, both of them, when the boy Sean was only six or seven. While they were on holiday down in Killarney. Terrible
thing. The boy was with them in the car and was severely injured himself when it caught fire. But he survived.’

‘And so the grandparents brought him up?’

‘That’s it. He was an only child like his father before him, so he went to them. And ordinarily, like, you’d have nothing
but sympathy. But, whether it was the accident did it, or it
was just in him all along, there was something twisted in that young man – twisted to the core.’

Mulcahy said nothing, unsure whether he wanted to encourage Brennan any further, thinking the young Rinn sounded an odd candidate
for the priesthood in that case. As if reading his mind, the old sergeant took up his theme again.

‘They must have thought he needed divine intervention, to hand him over to the priests so young. He was only fourteen or so.
But I sure as heck didn’t mind. Everything went quiet for three or four years and then he turned up in Rathgar again – in
civvies. I made some enquiries and the whisper came back that he’d been kicked out of All Hallows. Some awful scandal, they
said, but it’d all been hushed up by the priests and everyone else involved. Doubtless Mr Justice Rinn called in a few favours
to ensure the family name stayed unsullied. Anyway, I got a pal of mine over in Drumcondra to make some enquiries with contacts
he had in the college. What he heard – only rumours, mind – was that young Rinn had been involved in some incident at the
judge’s holiday place up in Gweedore over the summer, and that the priests had got wind of it and asked him to leave the seminary. That
was all he could find out. So I tried to make a few enquiries myself, but I didn’t have any contacts in those parts and, well,
I got nowhere with it. It was clear enough that
something
had happened up there, but for the life of me I couldn’t get anybody to open their gob. I tell you, though, I made sure I
kept a closer eye than ever on him after that.’

‘And?’

‘And nothing. A few months later he was packed off again, to teacher-training college, down in Maynooth this time, and I never
heard of him again. I’ve been living down here in Kilpedder since I retired in ninety-five – before he would have qualified.
But I presume he did, and went off to become a teacher. Some role model he would’ve been for children, don’t you think?’

‘Maybe. I don’t know,’ Mulcahy said. ‘But to be honest – and I hope you won’t mind me saying this, Sergeant – you never had
any evidence he did anything wrong at all, did you?’

‘Only the evidence of my own eyes. And, if you could’ve seen the state of some of the young women brought into my station,
you’d believe it too. In bits they were, and the coldness in his eyes when I questioned him. You’d think the same, too. The
little bastard, Lord bless my soul, never even denied it to my face. Just waited for his grandfather to come and get him,
while CID refused to lift a finger. I’m telling you, there were times I would’ve happily strung him up myself.’