The Priest (24 page)

‘And she couldn’t have crawled here from somewhere else, trying to get help?’

‘There’s nothing to indicate it.’ Keane shrugged. ‘I mean, this whole area’s been badly compromised, from our point of view.
First by the fella who spotted her – he was staggering
home from a party half scuttered, having a piss through the railings when he saw her. Then by the ambulance crew and the lads
from Fairview station. Because she was still alive, their priority was seeing to her medical needs rather than preserving
the scene. The one bit of luck we had was the weather, which was fairly clear. But even at that, things got pretty churned
up all round.’

‘So there’s no way of telling?’ Mulcahy said.

‘Ah, I wouldn’t say that now.’ Keane repositioned his glasses on his nose and grinned.

‘Well, are you going to tell me, or do I have to guess?’

The CSM’s tooth display grew wider. These techie guys were always such smart-arses. Spent their whole lives imagining themselves
wise-cracking on some TV show.

‘Well now, for instance, if you look closely at this excuse for a hedge over here?’ He pointed to the straggly, exhaust-choked
line of spiny hedging that grew against the railing. ‘There’s damage along the outside edge, our side that is, consistent
with the sort of crushing and tearing you get from something heavy and – from the surface area affected – roughly horizontal,
being tipped over it. We also got quite a few samples of skin that’d been scraped off by the spines.’

‘So she was, what, unconscious when she was pushed over?’

‘Or semi-conscious at best. It’s a reasonable deduction given the proximity of the hedge, and the fact that there’s no other
evidence of her moving around much before she was found.’

‘And you’ve got something else, right?’ Mulcahy said. ‘You mentioned something about him throwing “everything else” over after
her. What was that?’

‘What we’re assuming at this stage to be the girl’s clothes.’

‘He dumped them with her?’

‘Flung them after her, more like. With the result that all the stuff immediately around her got squashed into the ground by
the crew that took her away. But one or two items, like some more bits that got snagged on the hedge, might provide us with
something useful. Not that there’s many of them. A thin cotton skirt, cut. A strappy silk sort of top, torn. We got both shoes
for once – white stiletto heels, of course – and, even more surprising, we got the knickers. Not too ragged, so they may not
have been ripped off her, but they’re not in great nick, so we’ll have to take a closer look. There might be something latent
on them, you never know.’

‘Can I see them? Everything, I mean.’

‘Sure, it’s all bagged up, ready and waiting for a process request.’

Keane walked over to a Garda Technical Bureau van that still had its back doors open. He mumbled something to a technician
in the back, who handed out a sealed clear evidence bag containing a small bundle of clothing that couldn’t have weighed more
than six ounces.

‘See what I mean?’ Keane said. ‘She must’ve been flashing the flesh for a bit of action last night and got more than she bargained
for.’

‘They look like party clothes, or the sort of things she’d wear to a club. Do we have any idea where she was beforehand?’

Keane pushed his glasses up his snout again, and rolled his eyes a little. ‘You’re the detective. All we can do is tell you
where we found the stuff, what’s on it and what we might surmise from that – if anything. But not yet, obviously.’

‘Well, can you at least tell me what
these
might be?’

Keane bent to look at the bag. Mulcahy was crushing the plastic against the fabric inside, rubbing it gently between finger
and thumb to try and get a better look at something. He held it up for Keane’s perusal. Three thin red fibres, each a couple
of inches long at most, were snagged on the glittery material that gave the top its sparkly sheen.

‘Oh, yeah,’ Keane said. ‘I spotted some of those on the skirt earlier and took a couple off and bagged them up separately.
I can’t say for sure but they look man-made to me. Some kind of plastic, maybe? My guess would be it’s some type of netting,
like what they use for thick plastic sacks, you know, for coal, logs, hundredweights of onions, that kind of thing. So they’re
unlikely to have come from any kind of clothing, unless our man has very unusual taste in clothes.’

‘Something you might find in the back of a van, though?’

‘I guess so, but obviously, like I said, we’ll have to run tests before we can confirm it.’

‘Run them,’ Mulcahy said. ‘Top priority. I’ll get the authorisation sent through to you later.’

*

Although Brogan had asked him to get back to Harcourt Square as soon as he was finished, something in Mulcahy made him spin
the wheel and turn the Saab back towards Dorset Street and the Mater Hospital. His route took him up the Clonliffe Road and
past some of the citadels of Holy Catholic Ireland. On his left loomed the hulking concrete stands of Croke Park, high altar
of the Gaelic Athletic Association, where his father took him to worship regularly at both hurling and football matches. To
his right, almost facing it, was the great institutional edifice of Clonliffe College, once second only to Maynooth as a maker
of the nation’s priests, now all but defunct as a seminary such was the fall-off in vocations. Behind that lay the Gothic
sprawl of the Archbishop’s Palace, for decades the centre of clerical power and political sway in Ireland. More Victorian
sprawl awaited him at the Mater. Brogan, he learnt, had been and gone. He made his way through the labyrinthine corridors
and disinfectant fug to Intensive Care but wasn’t allowed any further than the door. Not that he would have wanted to go in,
anyway. One look beyond was enough, into the cubicle where the bruised and battered girl lay quiet and unmoving, breathing
through tubes and with seemingly every electronic gadget known to medical science attached to her. Enough to let him close
the circle and take into his heart what he’d known in his head and gut already; that the man who’d attacked this girl was
unquestionably the same evil bastard who’d beaten and tortured Jesica Salazar. The same guy who’d cut up Grainne Mullins,
too.

He left the Mater Hospital feeling sick, a hollow gnawing in his stomach that at first he didn’t recognise but, as he wound
his way south, began to realise was something he hadn’t felt in years. Anger. Real, burning anger. Righteous anger. What he
used to feel all the time when he was a fresh young cop with something to prove. Like when he first made detective and joined
the Drugs Squad and he knew he’d found his vocation. A bit like falling in love – the world became a different place. But
this feeling had eventually congealed into a cold, hard, angry focus day after day, year after year watching addicts wasting
away in misery, squalor and criminality. Dull-eyed kids prostituting themselves to death for a few quid for the next fix.
Girls barely old enough to conceive leaving their infant children wailing and starving while they went out shoplifting or
whoring for a score. And all the while the bastards who fed their habits lived high on the hog in gated mansions in Kinsealy
or on stud farms down in Kildare.

That was when the anger used to flow like lava through his veins. It gave him clarity and focus, drove him on, up through
the ranks from detective Garda to detective sergeant to detective inspector – all in the space of ten years. It was an emotional
state he’d have bet his life on never relinquishing. And yet here he was, back in Dublin, realising it had grown unfamiliar
to him – how he hadn’t really felt it since he’d gone to Madrid and become absorbed in statistics, policy, intelligence and
initiatives, and the prestige of working for Europol. What had happened? Had he got lazy?
Bored? Maybe he had just matured. But some tectonic shift had occurred in his way of seeing things and he hadn’t even noticed
it happening. Maybe that’s what he’d been missing over there. Not love or home or any of the soft, good things he’d assumed.
But something harder, darker and fiercer, the lack of which hadn’t even registered. But it was back now. And it felt good,
natural and necessary to have it there, burning in his blood, stoking up his heart.

Phone cradled between her chin and shoulder, Siobhan looked up from her notepad as Paddy Griffin arrived back in the newsroom.
She tried to catch his attention as he passed by on the far side of the room but, with just the one hand to wave with while
she continued writing notes with the other, she couldn’t attract his attention.

‘I see, uh-huh,’ she said, turning her attention back to the phone call again, flipping over a page of her notebook and scribbling.
‘And I can quote you on that, can I?’ She smiled as she got the response she wanted. ‘That’s terrific. You’ve been a great
help. That’s exactly what I needed.’

She put the phone down with a clatter and rushed over to Griffin, grabbed him by the arm and pulled him into Harry Heffernan’s
empty office.

‘You won’t believe this, Paddy.’

She shut the glass door behind her as Griffin parked his skinny behind on the edge of the desk, his arms folded, a man convinced
he’d seen it all and who would take a lot of convincing that there was anything new in the world. Still
his eyes glittered as he ran them over her, as always ready to indulge his star a little, not so much the professional that
he couldn’t enjoy a sly glance at her chest heaving in excitement.

‘So what’ve you got now, Scoop?’

‘This Spanish kid… the reason we can’t track her down?’

‘Go on.’

Siobhan’s eyebrows pitched her story as effectively as her words. ‘What that nurse told me about the girl being taken away
by a crowd in uniform turns out to be even righter than we thought. I’ve just spoken to someone at air-traffic control who
says they received statutory notice in the early hours of Monday morning that a Gulfstream jet would be inbound for Baldonnel
Aerodrome with an ETA of nine a.m. This guy’s a bit of a hothead about CIA renditions, so he decides to check it out and—’

‘Hang on, for Christ’s sake,’ Griffin interrupted impatiently. ‘What the hell’s the CIA got to do with anything?’

Siobhan shook a hand at him to hush him up. ‘Nothing. And if you’d be quiet a second, Paddy, you’d see that’s what I’m trying
to tell you.’

Like all news editors, he was incapable of waiting for a story to flow out, had to have it all in the first paragraph. She
stared at him until he put both hands up, then pretended to zip his mouth shut before indicating that the floor was hers.
She pushed her hair back and began again.

‘Look, I’ll make it easy for you. By law, the Air Corps has
to notify the Airport Authority of all military air traffic that crosses Irish commercial flight paths. So on Monday, this
guy at Aer Rianta spots that, among the usual stuff – fisheries protection flights, air-sea rescues and the rest – there’s
something out of the ordinary. It’s this Gulfstream flying into Baldonnel. Like I said, he’s a member of one of those internet
groups that monitor unusual flight patterns to track illegal CIA rendition flights. A concerned citizen, no less. With me so
far?’

Griffin nodded, maintaining his silence, but rolled his eyes in exasperation.

‘Okay, I’m getting to it. The flight is logged as coming in from an airbase in northern Spain, so he thinks something funny’s
going on. A good few rendition flights have gone through Spain, supposedly. And the CIA just love Gulfstreams. But when he
checks this one, it turns out it’s leased by the Spanish Air Force – so there’s no obvious CIA connection.’

‘And no story, either,’ Griffin snapped, his frustration getting the better of him.

‘No, not for him, maybe – but for us, yes. Because the guy keeps an eye out and the jet comes through bang on time, sits on
the ground for three hours and then takes off pronto, on exactly the same flight path back to Spain.’

‘So?’

‘So those three hours correspond exactly with the time it would have taken for a Spanish military unit to get from Baldonnel
airfield to St Vincent’s Hospital and pick up a
severely injured Spanish government minister’s daughter from under Nurse Sorenson’s nose at around ten o’clock on Monday morning.
Do you get it now?’

Griffin’s posture had stiffened, his back a fraction straighter, his eyes now much more alert.

‘You’re saying Mellado Salazar sent a military unit over here to get his daughter?’ Paddy Griffin grinned, teeth bared like
a wolf’s, his arms unfolded now, fingers clutching the edge of the desk. ‘Bloody hell!’

‘I can’t see how it’ll read any other way.’ Siobhan nodded excitedly.

‘Christ that’s a good one, alright. But what’s at the bottom of it? There’s got to be more.’

‘More? The Spanish interior minister’s daughter gets raped, and he sends the cavalry in to save his little girl, presumably
not trusting our boys to do the job. How much more do you want?’

‘Look, Siobhan, it’s good but I can feel it in my gut – there’s more to it.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Paddy!’ Siobhan looked at her watch, then for extra impact shoved her wrist in Griffin’s face pointing
at the time. ‘It’s twelve o’clock already and I’ve still got tons of stuff to follow up on the actual attack on the girl.
This bloody source of mine kept me waiting till late last night to unload all the really good stuff. I’m going to have enough
on my hands just writing that lot up and checking it, let alone go off and find something else.’

He waved away her objections. ‘No, shut up a minute and
listen to me. I’m not telling you to stop or to do anything other than what you’ve been doing all along. This is just an interesting
sidebar as it is, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t work it up into something better. Like, them coming over here could be
seen as a kind of trespassing on our sovereign soil, couldn’t it? I mean, they must’ve had permission from the Air Corps to
land. But what if it was all a bit sneaky and under the radar? A favour from one minister to his Spanish counterpart, maybe?
We could work up a hell of a big stink. “Spanish army – or even armada – invades Dublin”, something like that. What do you
think?’