The Priest (10 page)

‘Jav? How the hell are you? Christ, but I miss you guys.’

‘It’s not “us guys” any more,’ Martinez chuckled. ‘Did you not hear? Like you, like everyone, I was reassigned also.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Mulcahy said. ‘You live and breathe all that stuff.’

‘And you don’t?’

Mulcahy grunted acknowledgement of the undeniable truth of that statement.

‘Like I say,’ Martinez continued, ‘I was moved, promoted. Now I am in charge of – how do you say it – the Liaison and Protection
Division. You know, for VIPs, diplomats, politicians’ security and special needs?’

‘Jesus, I never had you down as a babysitter.’ But even as he said it Mulcahy realised Martinez, the most skilled net-worker
he’d ever met, would be brilliant in the role.

Martinez laughed out loud this time. ‘There is a little more to it than that, you know. I don’t sit much, because I am pulling
strings mostly, arranging favours. Like the one I, uh, arranged for Don Alfonso Mellado Salazar, yesterday.’

Martinez fell silent as he let Mulcahy register, then absorb the impact of what he was saying.

‘It was you?’ Mulcahy could hardly believe it. ‘You organised to have the kid flown out?’

‘No, no,’ Martinez tutted sharply. ‘I did not know about this until Ibañez told me just now. This was most inelegant, but they
must have had permission from your government, or they could not do it. No, the reason I’m calling is to tell you it was me
who suggested that you be our liaison contact. When I heard Ibañez mention your name during the conference call yesterday,
I was naturally very surprised. But, of course, I said there could be no better man to have on our side. I tried to phone
you last night but you never answered, and I was diverted to some other thing and forgot. So, I apologise.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Jav,’ Mulcahy groaned. ‘I’ll probably be stuck on this for weeks now.’

‘Yes, but last time we spoke you said how bored you were.’

‘That was months ago.’

‘And things have improved so much for you since then?’

By the time he hung up again, Mulcahy was feeling marginally more enthusiastic about his new assignment. They’d had a useful
conversation about Salazar senior and the chance of a connection with him, although Martinez had been as sceptical as himself
regarding that possibility. Mostly, Mulcahy was just pleased to have been able to get his own back on Martinez by forcing
him to look into the possibility of a tie-in on his own turf.

‘You don’t ask much, huh?’ Martinez had complained. ‘Don Alfonso has every terrorist and lunatic in Spain, from ETA to those
bastard Al-Qaeda bombers, hoping to take revenge on him.’

‘Precisely, Jav,’ Mulcahy said, driving the point home as forcefully as he could. ‘Come on, man, don’t tell me it didn’t cross
anybody’s mind over there?’

‘Sure, it did. But then we think, how paranoid can we get? This is the man’s daughter, and nobody claims it has anything to
do with him. We think even idiot terrorists and assassins are more, uh, media aware, these days.’

Mulcahy wasn’t going to argue with that, but he left the ball in Martinez’s court all the same. Then he got stuck into his
files again with renewed vigour. He wasn’t discovering much, so far, beyond his own disgust and bafflement at the number of
sick perverts living in Dublin. In his five years in uniform in the late eighties, he’d only ever come across a dozen or so
cases of domestic violence and a few flashers. Of course, a decade later, like everyone else, he’d been riveted by the ongoing
scandal of Ireland’s paedophile priests. But his deeper reaction to that, back then, had been mostly a heartfelt satisfaction
that the clergy’s centuries-old grip on the conscience of his countrymen had been shattered at last.

What he was reading here, though, beggared belief – something that hadn’t sparked off any general outcry in the media. Hundreds
of broken arms and ribs, shattered cheekbones, women and children hospitalised after being beaten
by drunk or drugged-up husbands and fathers. Then there were the rapists and paedophiles of every hue – brickies, teachers,
solicitors, IT specialists and bankers, as well as clergymen – and the cases he was reading were only the ones where actual
bodily harm had been inflicted during the commission of the crimes. What he couldn’t get his head round was the fact that
this couldn’t all have come from nowhere in a sudden rush. It wasn’t like the economic boom had sparked a parallel rise in
deviancy. The horror was in thinking how much must have been hidden for so long.

In the end, he had no choice but to set his revulsion aside and get on with the job. What was immediately evident was that
violence on the scale inflicted by Jesica Salazar’s attacker was incredibly rare. As were the rates of stranger assault and
rape generally. Irish men clearly preferred to vent their anger on wives and girlfriends, and usually in the privacy of their
own homes. Starting with the cases that had actually made it into court, he worked his way steadily through the boxes, sheaf
after sheaf of ruined lives, unearthing nothing that bore even scant resemblance or relevance to the attack on Jesica Salazar.
Every time he came across a stranger-rape or violent sexual assault, he checked through the details for anything similar,
then put it to one side to be reconsidered later.

If the fully investigated cases didn’t look very hopeful, there was even less to glean from the huge raft of local reports
and ‘unactionables’. Again most of these were
domestics, often where charges had been laid in the heat of the moment – then hurriedly withdrawn. Here came not only the
date-rape allegations that never went anywhere but also alleged assaults so serious that Mulcahy simply couldn’t believe they
had not been considered worthy of thorough investigation. He’d worked his way through a third or so of the material by the
time Brogan and Cassidy clattered back into the incident room, and he realised it was well after seven o’clock. Neither of
them so much as glanced in his direction, instead stopping in front of the whiteboard to draw something on the map during
a huddled conversation. He got up and went over to them.

‘Any progress?’

‘Yeah, a little,’ Brogan conceded, finally. ‘We’ve identified the scene, we think. Technical are going over it now. We’ll
know more in the morning. But it looks like she may have been dragged into a van, and the assault occurred there. It would
explain a lot.’

‘Makes sense,’ Cassidy agreed, gruffly. ‘A van scenario means he could’ve had his blowtorch or whatever all fired up and ready
to go. We were looking at that as a possibility from the outset – or maybe you didn’t get here in time for that part of the
discussion, sir.’

Cassidy’s eyes darted towards Brogan.

‘No, Sergeant, I didn’t,’ Mulcahy replied, trying to keep the irritation from his voice.

‘Well, you’ll have a chance to get fully up to speed tomorrow at the nine a. m. briefing,’ Brogan interjected quickly.
‘I’m assuming you’ll join us for that, Mike. In the meantime, you might as well get off. Unless you’ve come up with anything
yourself?’

‘No, not at all,’ he said. ‘Nothing obvious, anyway. Our man is beginning to look like a bit of a one-off judging by that
lot. But you know that already.’

‘Well, I wasn’t expecting you’d turn up anything exactly the same, or I’d have remembered it. But there’s a strong chance
he’ll be in there somewhere.’

‘There were one or two that might merit another look, but I’d like to run them by you first.’

‘Why don’t you see me after the briefing in the morning,’ Brogan suggested. ‘I’ll have a quick look at whatever you’ve got
then. In the meantime, Sergeant Cassidy and myself have a couple of other things to follow up tonight, before we finish. Okay?’

‘Fine,’ Mulcahy nodded. ‘See you in the morning, then.’

The heavy diesel roar of a bus engine starting up outside the window, on Burgh Quay, drew Siobhan out of her reverie. She
looked at the clock in the bottom corner of her monitor and realised another hour had passed without her adding significantly
to the story up on her screen. It was a work-up of a short piece Griffin had passed her from the Associated Press wire, about
a fat kid in Portland, Oregon, who’d held his entire high school to ransom with his father’s assault rifle after he heard
that hotdogs were being taken off the lunch menu. A couple of phone calls to a nutritionist
and a junior minister at the Department of Health, a few choice quotes, and she’d been able to work it up into a nice little
piece about the obesity threat hanging over, not just America’s children, but Ireland’s, too. There was nothing like a bit
of waffle to keep till Sunday.

Twenty past eight: time to get going if she wasn’t to be late for Vincent Bishop. What little polishing, if any, the piece
needed she could do in ten minutes, fresh, in the morning. Griffin had long since given up and headed off for a lonely night
in, watching the rolling news channels on TV in his one-bedroom flat in Drumcondra. She closed the file and logged off, then
stood up and wandered over to the window, stretching her stiff arms and back as she went.

The daylight looked to be on the wane, but it was always hard to tell through the smoked glass windows of the
Herald
building. She loved looking out at all the faces of the passengers on the top decks of the buses waiting at the terminus
outside. Level with her on the first floor, and hardly more than twelve or fifteen feet away, they sat entirely unaware as
she watched them through the one-way windows, trying to figure out from faces, hairstyles and clothes what sort of jobs they
had, what sort of lives they lived, where they came from, where they might be going to. Once, late on a Friday night, she’d
even seen a couple of kids shagging on the back seat of the Number 128. The rest of the deck was empty, the girl hanging off
the seat-back, frantically trying to keep a lookout while the boy pumped away furiously, his jeans barely lowered off his
arse-cheeks. They
had no way of knowing that Siobhan’s shriek of surprise had brought the rest of the newsdesk running over for an eyeful, cheering
like a bunch of overgrown kids when the boy at last shuddered and collapsed.

Amused by the memory, she walked back to her desk. It was hard to beat the camaraderie of the newsroom sometimes. She was
pulling her coat on and reaching to turn off her screen when the phone rang on Jim Clarkin’s desk behind her. She hesitated
before picking it up. Clarkin, the paper’s raddled crime correspondent, rarely if ever made it into the office, preferring
to trawl the bars near the Four Courts for his stories, or do the rounds of the circuit courts in his car. He always worked
from his mobile. It was bound to be a wrong number. Still, you never knew.

‘Hello. Newsdesk.’

To her surprise the caller did ask for Clarkin.

‘He’s not here. Is it anything I can help you with?’

The caller, on a mobile, was barely audible through the static, but the gist of what he was saying was clear enough. He had
information to sell.

‘Yeah, well, we’re always on the lookout for good stories. I suppose we could sort you out something, if it’s right for us.
It’d have to stand up, though – we don’t hand out money for rubbish. Tell me more.’

As she listened, leaning back against the desk, her face muscles soon slackened into boredom, until the caller revealed the
pivotal detail of his story. A Spanish student had been attacked and raped out in the southside suburbs the night
before. But it was the injuries he claimed had been inflicted that had Siobhan on her feet again in an instant, reaching for
pen and notepad.

‘He did what? Ah, jayney, that’s revolting.’ Disgust tightened her face as she jotted down the details. ‘And is the girl alright?…
Do you have a name?… Well, you must know… Spanish, and that’s all you have?… And, what hospital is she in?… Okay, what hospital
was
she in, then?…Yeah, good…What else can you give me?’

But the caller was disappointingly short on further details and, when he began to repeat what he’d said before, she cut him
short. ‘Okay, look, I suppose it’s worth twenty euro. Give me your name and I’ll leave the cash at reception for you.’

She fished an envelope from a drawer and scribbled the caller’s name down on it.

‘No, don’t worry, it’ll be there – providing the story checks out. And thanks, yeah? Remember my name, Siobhan Fallon, if
you ever have any more stuff like that, okay?’

She hung up, grabbed her mobile from her bag and rang Bishop’s number. It went through to voicemail.

‘Hi, Vincent, something’s come up here, so I’m going to be a little late. Give me a call if you have to go.’

Then she turned the mobile off, went back to her own desk and sat down again, eyes flicking from side to side, thinking hard.
It was a good two minutes before she shook off her coat, pressed the space bar on her keypad, and
watched the screen flicker into life again. Double-clicking with focused efficiency, she called up her contacts file and scrolled
down through a maze of names, notes and numbers until she found what she was looking for. She tapped a number into her phone
and waited.

‘Hiya, is that the Phoenix Park? Look, I know it’s late but is Des Consodine still there? Sergeant Consodine, I mean…’

The evening was calm and clear, the delicate blue of a soft sky arching down to kiss the flat green sea, as he drove south
along the Strand Road. For once, Mulcahy was glad of the sluggish traffic. He wearily took in the wide sweep of Dublin Bay,
the tide a quarter of a mile out, the dun reaches of wet sand host now to dog-walkers, arm-in-arm lovers and the distant dots
of line fishermen, eternal optimists that they were. Caught in the queuing traffic, looking out at the giant red and white
smokestacks of the Pigeon House power station, the boyhood memories came flooding back. Of walking the beach, paddling in
cold clear water, dodging the near-flat waves as they rippled in along the shore, his father’s trousers turned up to the knee,
and the unshakeable certainty of a strong hand holding his, protecting him from whatever might come along. And afterwards,
an ice cream from the kiosk in the Martello Tower, or maybe a trip out to Dun Laoghaire for a scoot around the bay in
Seaspray
.