TORN (12 page)

‘So what do you reckon?’ Kennedy asked. ‘Think it could be some satanic cult, or weird shit like that?’

Chris wondered the same thing. Was there some religious significance to this particular murder? Or was it another in a recent succession of murders bizarrely similar in their ghoulishness?

‘Too early to say anything at the moment,’ he replied noncommittally.

Soon, the GFU crew arrived, and the detectives headed out of the vestry and back into the main church.

By the altar, Kennedy paused for a moment, his head down.

Chris stopped beside him, curious.  ‘What’s up? Have you got some of kind of thing against churches?’ he asked, amused.  ‘Some deep fear of religious iconography, or something?’

Kennedy turned and gave him a scathing look. ‘Me?  Nah.’  He grimaced. ‘But it’s Sunday and from the looks of things, it’s going to be a long oul day.’ He headed back down the aisle, Chris at his heels.

‘Yes, it’s Sunday, but why should that matter? You and I both know this gig’s a million miles from nine to five.’

His partner sighed heavily. ‘It’s just Josie always does a lovely roast beef with Yorkshire puddings, the whole works,’ he added, his tone mounful. ‘And I bloody hate missing Josie’s Sunday roast.’

Reilly went inside the church and made her way down the aisle to the transept.

Next to the pulpit was a tightly twisted spiral staircase that would be completely unacceptable under modern building codes. It led up the tower.

She studied it for a few moments, trying to ascertain if it had been used recently.

Henrietta had advised that the tower was rarely used, so by rights there should be a thick coating of dust, which would easily show up any footprints. Then again Reilly imagined that the older woman would be the type to make a mission of keeping the interior of the lovely little church spick and span.

Unfortunately.

Unable to find any sign of recent use, she took the steps and slowly ascended to the level of the thin, ornate wrought-iron gate that accessed the room at the top of the tower.

Sliding the heavy deadbolt back out of the frame, she stepped inside the tiny room. Immediately, the first thing that struck her was the smell, a heavy alkaline scent that was almost like cat pee or … human, even?

She inhaled the air, letting the scent flow through her delicate nostrils, trying to catalogue it. Perfume she was good at; foul scents, not so good.

It was very heavy in ammonia, though, and did indeed smell like very strong urine. Actually … Reilly paused and inhaled again, realizing that the smell put her in the mind of skunk spray. Skunk? Were there skunk in Ireland?

Taking out an evidence bag, she tried to pinpoint the area it seemed strongest, but it was impossible to tell. In any case, she swabbed a small area from the wall and then the ground, bagged them, and in addition picked up a sample of grit from the same area on the floor.

The tower, with its two battered old wooden slat windows, was completely empty, save for some pigeon droppings. As birds didn’t urinate, Reilly already knew the foul smell definitely wasn’t coming from them.

Moving tighter into the wall, she began stepping in concentric circles inwards, her gaze scanning the ground area. Then, her keen eye noticed some tiny bluish dots that were slightly incongruous amongst the grit and the droppings.

She pulled out her tweezers and, bending low, carefully lifted one up for inspection. With some idea of what it was, she held it to her nose, sniffed, and removed all doubt.

Rubber.

Reilly’s mind raced, wondering if this was of any significance. Had the killer dropped it? Probably not. Whoever had hoisted that poor man up into the tree and slashed open his torso surely wouldn’t have then gone to the trouble of coming all the way up here to watch him die.

Or would he?

She craned her neck, looking upwards into the gloom, then made her way to the window. As she did, she let out a breath.

There, framed perfectly in the opening as if it were a painting, was the hawthorn tree, the misfortunate victim dramatically hanging front and center.

Leaving little doubt in Reilly’s mind that such positioning was completely intentional.

It took a while, but eventually the local police managed to arrange for a mobile elevating platform to be sent to the site from the nearest town.

The ME, having repositioned the man’s innards as best she could, wrapped the mutilated body in the tarpaulin and, with the platform operator’s assistance, accompanied it down to the ground, where she could examine it more closely.

Reilly took a lint roller from her bag and rolled the victim’s clothes and hands. Then she concentrated her efforts around the perimeter of the tree, walking in concentric circles around the base amongst the humongous roots poking through the soil. Granted the victim was not a heavy man, but even so, it would have been no easy task to hoist a body, dead or alive, up onto the branches of a tree.

Reilly was looking for imprints from a ladder, or anything that might have been used for such a job. While the ground itself was wet, the immediate area beneath the tree was largely dry, mostly because the canopy of branches was so thick and spanned so widely.

She was unable to spot anything that remotely resembled ladder markings, but something irregular in the grass approaching the tree caught her eye. At first it looked like a track of some kind, perhaps a path worn through by a dog, or some wild animal.  But no, there were actually two matching indentations, consistent in width, about as narrow as the wheels of a bicycle. Bicycle tracks?

Taking out her camera, she shot the tracks from various angles.  Then, finding little else of interest beneath the tree, she picked up her kitbag and headed towards the platform, ready to take a closer look amongst the branches.

Kennedy was watching her. ‘No way you’d get me up on that rickety contraption in the midst of all them poison thorns.’

‘You do know the tree’s not poisonous, right?’ Reilly replied.

‘Yeah, but I know evil when I see it.’ 

Looking back up at the tree, Reilly shivered slightly as she realized that perhaps he was right.

She was also somewhat dubious about the platform operator’s ability to bring her up into the branches intact, so thick was the enveloping canopy. She needn’t have worried, though, as he seemed to have taken great pains to position the apparatus in the precise location necessary to extend unobstructed to within a foot and a half of the crooked branch where the body had been hung. 

While Reilly waited, he fiddled with the lift’s control panel, which was mounted atop a sturdy steel box affixed to the rail enclosing the machine’s operating deck. Raising the panel's protective Plexiglas rain cover with one hand, he stuck the other in his pocket and retrieved the keys.

Reilly was impressed by how his fingers instinctively found the right one without his so much as glancing at the fob; her wide range of responsibilities at the GFU required her carrying multiple keys of all types, which, try as she might, she could never identify instantly. Inserting the key into the ignition slot, the operator gave it a quick clockwise turn, and the gas motor that powered the lift’s hydraulic articulation sputtered to life.

Then, opening a hatch on the front of the box below the control panel, he retrieved two bright red safety harnesses made of a heavy polyester webbing and secured to heavy lanyards by spliced loops ending in large carabiners.

‘You’d better put this on before you go near those branches,’ he said, handing her one of the harnesses and proceeding to illustrate how to put it on. ‘Safety first, that’s the company motto. It goes over your head and around the back, fastening in front, like this.’ Reilly copied his movements, securing her frame in the loose but reassuring embrace of the safety equipment. ‘OK, now pass the end of your lanyard back to me.’

Using the carabiners, he secured both their lanyards to the bottom rail of the safety railing. ‘Ready to go then?’

‘Yes, let’s do this.’

The guy kept up a steady stream of chatter as they ascended. ‘I suppose you’ve seen a lot of horrible things, doing what you do, but I thought I was pretty tough, and well, when I saw that poor divil, I was rightly shocked. I mean, I’ve seen dead bodies before, at funerals and that, but I didn’t realize that they could be so ... well, so sad, I suppose. The guy looks so sad that it made me feel sick.’

Reilly nodded, thinking that it was largely a good thing that most people never got to experience first-hand how horrible and ignoble death could be.

Using his palm, the operator depressed the large green button with an arrow pointing upwards, and the interlaced steel members accordioned up out of the mechanism’s base, shuddering under their combined weight. Doing Archimedes proud, they cleverly levered the earth away from them while providing a place to stand.

As the lift platform drew level with where the body had been positioned, the operator released the button, bringing them to a stop. Up close, the tree appeared many times more menacing, covered as it was in inch-long pin-sharp splinters.

Reilly duly handed the man the lengthy cord now securely fastened to her form, and, opening her forensic kitbag, set about her examination of the victim’s final resting place.

From below, she’d spotted some markings on one of the branches that looked out of place – it was as if part of the bark had been worn away. Now she realized that she was right.

She took out her camera and snapped a couple of shots of the marks close up, and from various angles. It looked like the killer had used an industrial hoist or pulley of some kind. He’d definitely used something to get the body up here, that was for sure, in order to bear not only the victim’s, but his own weight, once they were both amidst the branches.

If they could track down the type of hoist, and perhaps narrow it down to make and model, it might be helpful in finding out who had taken upon themselves to crucify the poor as-yet unnamed man, and leave him to the mercy of the elements and the scavengers.

Back on the ground, she quickly flicked through the digital shots of the body in the tree she’d taken from the tower.

Since her descent she’d been grappling with the thought that there was something familiar about this entire scenario, something oddly remniscent.

It was almost like a real-life version of a Renaissance painting, a medieval torture scene. Was that what was going on – a re-enactment of some kind?

Jack Gorman would go bananas if he could hear her thoughts. He was forever accusing her of making wild leaps, and forging connections where there appeared to be none. But it was how Reilly had always worked, and indeed, such odd disparate thoughts often helped her make her breakthroughs, so she couldn’t ignore them.

There was without doubt something familiar, something recognizable about the setup.

She looked again at the image of the victim in the tree. But what? And what kind of person could orchestrate something so grotesque, so evil?

A magpie sqwaked loudly in the distance and Reilly felt a fresh chill run up her spine.

Chapter 14

The following morning, Reilly, Chris and Kennedy assembled in the incident room at Harcourt Street Station, where they were scheduled to meet with Inspector O’Brien.

The disembowelled man in the tree had made front-page news, and the garda chief superintendent had ordered an immediate autopsy and more manpower for the investigation.

‘Last Rites – Police Baffled by Church Killing’ one of the more restrained headlines screamed, and outside the station Reilly had to battle through a media scrum demanding answers, their cameras and microphones recording everything.

As it was, the team were only beginning to try to put things together.

Through a dental match, Karen Thompson had by now identified that the dead man was 58-year-old Dr George Jennings, a well-respected Dublin GP who had been reported missing a week ago.

The ME had suggested that, based on the severe deterioration of his biological tissue due to prolonged weather exposure, he had most likely been up in the tree for most of that time,
More disconcertingly, she ascertained that when strung up there, Dr Jennings had been very much alive, and was vivisected as a feast for the scavenging birds.

Upon Reilly’s instructions, Julius was currently seeking out various makes and models of mechanical hoists, and their suppliers or hirers, trying to ascertain how easily the killer might have got hold of one. Such a task was always difficult, though. The killer may have been in possession of such an item for years, and a supplier search would likely be fruitless. But with someone as dogged as Julius on the case, you just never knew …

‘Three men dead, and all in the weirdest circumstances I’ve ever come across in my time!’ O’Brien thundered.

The team (as well as the media) had little choice but to contemplate that the recent murders, all so macabre in nature, should no longer be viewed in isolation. The elaborate manner of all three deaths was just too coincidental.