The Priest (37 page)

‘You didn’t know about that?’ Fr Touhy asked her, a little coyly she thought.

‘No, the guards didn’t release that information. It does kind of change the picture, though, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes and no,’ the priest said, rubbing his clean-shaven cheeks in frustration, and looking a lot less innocent now. ‘I’m telling
you this not only because it’s bound to come out anyway but because it needs to be known that he didn’t do it. It was a horrible,
vindictive accusation by a young girl who wanted to make trouble for Emmet and knew exactly how to go about it. Luckily, her
mother learned the truth before it went too far. Emmet was never charged with any offence.’

‘You know what they’ll say, Father,’ Siobhan said, composing the piece in her head even as she spoke. ‘No smoke without fire.’

‘That’s why I need your help,’ he said, ‘because it’ll be all too easy for them to make out he confessed again.’ He broke
off, rubbing his chin with a pale hand, his small eyes assessing her.

‘Confessed again?’ By now Siobhan wasn’t entirely certain who was using who here, but she wasn’t sure she cared, either. This
story got better by the second.

‘Yes,’ Fr Touhy said. ‘They didn’t want to drop it last time, even after the accusation was withdrawn, because the Garda who
arrested him said that Emmet had confessed. In the end they couldn’t do anything about it, apparently because he’d made this
supposed confession before he was cautioned. It was a close thing, but they had to let him go.’

‘And you think that’s why…?’ Siobhan trailed off, wanting him to say it for the tape.

‘Yes,’ Fr Touhy obliged, ‘I’m convinced that’s the only reason they came knocking again this time – because they hoped they’d
get a quick confession. Emmet has a thing – Lord help me, I should know – about confessing to things he didn’t do, thinking
that it’ll make him sound more important. Some of the stuff he comes out with can sound a bit off if you don’t know him. But
he doesn’t mean any harm. If you met him, you’d know he was incapable of doing such things.’

Siobhan wasn’t so sure about the sound of that, at all. ‘I
hate to break it to you, Father,’ she said as gently as she could. ‘But from the whispers I’ve been hearing, Emmet is in a
lot more trouble than that. To be honest, I haven’t heard anything about him confessing. Only that the Guards are claiming
they’ve got forensic evidence that’s as solid as you can get in a case like this. I think maybe you should prepare yourself
for that.’

She did a quick calculation in her head. It was Friday afternoon, so she only had another thirty-six hours to get through.
If she could keep the information about Emmet’s previous arrest exclusive for her own front page, it would be a spectacular
coup. And she couldn’t help feeling a little bit sorry for the old priest, anyway.

‘Look, Father, if you want my advice, I wouldn’t mention this to anyone else. As you say, it’ll probably all come out, anyway.
But there’s no point handing people another stick to beat Emmet with, either. You must know how bad this information could
look for him if it got into the wrong hands.’

What he said next took her by surprise.

‘And your hands are the right ones, Siobhan, are they?’

If she hadn’t taken so much care over her make-up earlier, he’d have seen her blushing to her roots.

‘I’d have thought you’d be forgetting about Rinn now that you’ve arrested this other fella,’ Brennan said when he picked up
the phone.

‘Yeah, well,’ Mulcahy replied, not wanting to say too
much on that score. ‘You know how it is. That’s the major focus of the investigation now. But not the only one.’

Brennan didn’t sound entirely convinced but his deep-rooted wish for someone, anyone, to put the screws on Rinn must have
overcome the ex-sergeant’s fixation on procedural correctness.

‘Right, well, I rang my old pal like you asked me to,’ Brennan said at last, exhaling heavily like a man deciding that, sometimes,
you just had to bend the rules to get results. ‘I thought maybe the fact that he’s retired for years now might loosen his
tongue a bit, but I reckon it’s his brain that’s got something loose in it. He could barely remember who I was, let alone
Sean Rinn.’

Mulcahy waited for the rest, praying this wasn’t going to be a waste of time. But Brennan sounded upbeat. Maybe he was just
teasing – enjoying being back on the job, if only by default.

‘But his wife gave me the number of another fella he was working with at that time, by the name of Tommy Casey,’ the sergeant
chuckled. ‘I gave him a call, and it turned out we knew each other from way back, and he was a bit more helpful after that.
He remembered Rinn alright, and all that fuss up in Drumcondra. Seems it was worse than I thought. According to Tommy, Rinn
was kicked out of All Hallows after an incident with one of the staff there.’

‘An incident? An assault, you mean?’

‘Yes, but not sexual. It was a fight – with a fella, we think. Tommy couldn’t give me exact details but as far as he knew
a complaint was made at Drumcondra Garda Station then quickly withdrawn, and there were rumours that a pile of money had changed
hands, and the whole thing got swept under the carpet.’

‘Sounds much the same as what you said before,’ Mulcahy said.

‘No,’ Brennan said. ‘I always thought he was thrown out of the seminary because of something that happened up in Donegal.
But this “incident” actually happened in Dublin, at All Hallows college itself. What Tommy said was that this other fella,
the one Rinn had the fight with, was from that part of the world himself, from Gweedore, in fact. Which is where Rinn’s grandfather,
the High Court judge came from. Do you get me?’

‘So?’ Mulcahy said, his brain pinging back to the oil painting he’d seen on the wall in Rinn’s house.

‘Tommy said the rumour at the time was that a huge amount of cash changed hands. I mean, for a fist fight? Unlikely, huh?
And Rinn getting thrown out? An overreaction, wouldn’t you say, when most of them seminarians were a bit mad, anyway? I mean,
all that celibacy, they had nothing else to vent their unholy hormonal urges on, so those boys were always taking lumps out
of each other with hurleys and the like, out on the playing fields.’

‘Okay,’ Mulcahy said. Maybe it
was
a bit strange now he thought of it, although he still wasn’t sure where the sergeant was going with this.

‘Well, that’s just it,’ Brennan said. ‘Don’t you see?
Whatever it was caused the clerical bigwigs in All Hallows to kick Chief Justice Rinn’s grandson out of their sacred ranks
must’ve been pretty damn serious. The old man was a big noise in the Knights, for heaven’s sake.’

Mulcahy’s mind spun back to the photo he’d seen on Rinn’s mantelpiece of his grandfather in all his regalia. So the old judge
had been a leading light in the Knights of St Columbanus, the principal powerbrokers in Irish society for decades after the
republic won independence. But so what? It would be more of a surprise if a poor boy from Donegal had grown up to be a High
Court judge
without
being heavily involved with the Knights. As with the Masons in other countries, the Gardai and the judiciary, in particular,
were riddled with the Knights back in the old days. All the same, Brennan did have a point. It was weird that someone with
such strong connections to them would be kicked out of a seminary, of all places, especially back at a time when the Knights
still had considerable power and influence. Bizarre, Mulcahy would have said.

‘So what I’m thinking,’ Brennan continued, ‘is that whatever it was happened in Donegal a couple of years earlier, must’ve
been at the root of it all. And it must’ve been pretty big. Maybe this guy from Gweedore knew all about it, and threatened
to blow the whistle, or blew it, until he was nobbled by Rinn senior and the priests. Maybe by then there was no going back
for Rinn as regards All Hallows. Whatever it was he did, it was too much for the clergy to look the other way.’

‘And as we now know, there wasn’t much they wouldn’t cover up for one of their own,’ Mulcahy agreed.

‘Right,’ said Brennan. ‘They wanted him out of there for some very good reason – and straight away.’

‘So whatever happened in Gweedore holds the key to Rinn.’

‘That’s exactly it,’ Brennan said, triumphantly.

Mulcahy sat back. It made a kind of sense. And that it probably had no relevance whatsoever to The Priest was almost beside
the point now. If Rinn really did have some secret to hide, it might be something that would justify reopening the case on
Caroline Coyle. With Rinn as prime suspect. That way, Brennan might get his closure, too.

‘Jesus, Sergeant,’ Mulcahy laughed. ‘You were a loss to CID and no mistake.’

Siobhan spent a couple more hours out in Chapelizod, pounding the pavements, calling into local shops and businesses, reporter’s
pad in hand, asking if they knew Emmet Byrne. In the process, she began to get two very different impressions of the man.
On the one hand there were those who saw him as a local character, a few cent short of the full euro but likeable enough all
the same, and fairly harmless with it, by all accounts. ‘Ah, sure, poor Emmet, there’s no bad in him at all,’ said the woman
who ran the newsagents. So, too, with the barber down the road and the women in the greasy spoon on the corner, where Emmet
often had breakfast or lunch. It was a different matter,
though, whenever she spoke to anyone from the Garda side of the fence, or anyone who was sharing information they’d got from
them. Rumours were flying about what a search of Byrne’s flat had thrown up. A reporter pal from the
Irish Independent
had phoned to say that all sorts of weird shit had been found in Byrne’s room: crosses, candles, chains, and a big pile of
porn. She said she’d got it gospel from one of the Guards who’d been in on the search, and that the place was full of newspaper
cuttings about The Priest. ‘Like a bloody shrine,’ she’d said.

So Siobhan phoned Fr Touhy and asked him if he knew anything about that.

‘Take it from me, I’ve been to his place many a time, and there was nothing like that,’ the old priest insisted. ‘I mean,
certainly, he has crosses and candles and a little shrine, but it’s a shrine to the Blessed Virgin. He’s a man of faith. Why
wouldn’t he have such things?’

‘And what about these cuttings about The Priest they say he kept?’

‘Ah no,’ the old man demurred, ‘I never saw anything like that. But I know he had a couple of pictures of the Pope and Padre
Pio on the walls.’

Siobhan’s source on the investigation team had stayed completely dry until about four p.m. when he called to say the dead
girl’s parents had been informed and to give her their address in Dartry. She was a little taken aback by that, but hightailed
it over there anyway. Sometimes the first one in was the only one in with things like that. The
parents would only make the mistake of opening the door once – to a reporter, that is.

But there was already a press mob outside the house when she arrived. So she decided to make her way back in to the office.
By then she’d had enough, and knew – not having heard about it from anyone else – that Fr Touhy must have kept quiet about
Byrne’s previous arrest as she’d advised him to do. There was always the risk, of course, that it would leak from somewhere
else, namely the investigation team. But given that it wasn’t already out there, she was thinking maybe the cops had decided
to play the long game with that piece of info. They’d wait a few days to see what might come out of the woodwork on Byrne before
they started on the dirty tricks proper. In which case, her front page still had a good chance of holding firm. If it did,
it would blow every other paper, every other reporter, out of the water. Come Sunday, hers was the story everyone would want
to read.

It was late by the time Mulcahy got back to Harcourt Square but he was in the grip of an obsession now and he knew he wouldn’t
relax until he’d checked out a few more details about Rinn. At the back of his mind he suspected this, in reality, was only
a substitute for going upstairs and beating the living Jesus out of Brendan Healy. But as that was never going to be an option,
he worked with what he had: Rinn. The first thing he did was try and call the uniform who’d taken the statement the night
Caroline Coyle
had been attacked. But he was told by the desk sergeant at Rathmines that the Garda in question had finished his rotation
earlier in the week and was off for a few days. ‘Give us your number and I’ll have him call you when he gets back,’ was the
best the sergeant could suggest. For the next two hours, Mulcahy sat at the computer terminal in Brogan’s office and searched
through the Sex Offenders’ Register, PULSE, the Drugs archive and every other arrest and intelligence database available on
the Garda Siochana Network. He drew a complete blank from all of them, apart from one minor traffic offence: an on-the-spot
fine for a blown headlamp on Sean Rinn’s car eighteen months previously.

Mulcahy knew his search hadn’t been all-inclusive. It couldn’t be. Whatever the system’s accuracy in regard to Dublin and
the other major centres, few of the more outlying rural Garda stations would have computerised their records dating back more
than five or six years. Up in Donegal, he doubted they had the manpower or motivation for that kind of work. In some cases
they probably didn’t even have the hardware for it. Gweedore was a case in point. A quick call to the local Garda station
in Bunbeg revealed, by recorded message, that it was only manned three hours a day, in the mornings, and not at all at weekends.
If he was going to find out anything from them, he’d have to wait till Monday. And yet a creeping sense that he couldn’t afford
to wait till then was getting the better of him. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t shake off that waking dream of Paula
Halpin strolling innocently up the
hill in Dartry to her death. It was as if some supernatural creature had opened up his head, climbed in and taken up residence,
not calling or taunting him but just sitting there, claws embedded in his brain, eyes blazing like a demon.