The Priest (29 page)

‘If that’s what you’ve been told,’ Mulcahy said. ‘But hang on just a sec, I need to grab something from one of them.’

The messenger tutted loudly and screwed up his face. By now Mulcahy had a third of the files out of the main box, strewn across
the floor. ‘Look it, are they ready to go or not?’

‘I’ll only be a minute,’ Mulcahy insisted. ‘I’ll know what I want when I see it. Why don’t you have a smoke or something while
you’re waiting?’

‘Ah now, I don’t know about that.’

Mulcahy put his hand in his pocket and quickly dug out his pack and lighter.

‘Here, go on over to the window. No one will ever know.’

The man nodded, looked around to be on the safe side, then took the cigarette and strolled over to the open window. Mulcahy
heaved out the last armful of files and, bingo, there it was in his hand. He knew it straight off: a buff folder with a scrawl
of previous recipients on the front, and
a few loose-leaf typed reports inside. Case No 6B420703SSA: Coyle/Temple Road, D6, 03/08/09. In the status box the handwritten
word ‘Active’ had been obliterated by a red stamp – NFA.

He quickly opened the covers and recalled the details as soon as he started reading. He scanned the first page quickly. Mrs
C. Coyle, walking home from the Luas stop in Milltown… attacked… dragged into a garden… screams alerted the householder and
a passer-by… assailant ran off… victim suffered bruising… clothing ripped. He shuffled through the paperwork to the back,
saw what he wanted. Two sheets of paper with
Witness Statement
printed across the top.

The first statement was from the householder, Quigley, who’d scared off the attacker. Nothing out of place there. But the
second, that was it. A taxi driver who said he’d heard screams as he was passing, and had gone to help, whereupon he’d found
the householder tending to the victim. No sign of the assailant. Mulcahy flipped over the page to the end of the document
and there it was, the driver’s name, typed and signed at the bottom, alongside the home address he gave. He knew he’d seen
it before. The name the sergeant had given him, Sean Rinn. And still living in Palmerston Park, just around the corner from
where the woman was attacked.

Mulcahy heard a cough and looked up. The messenger was standing by the window, stubbing out the cigarette end on the metal
sill outside.

‘They always say they’ll be ready for me,’ he moaned to the unlistening city outside. ‘But they never bleedin’ are.’

The house on Palmerston Park was about as grand a semidetached villa as it was possible to possess in Dublin. Late Victorian,
solidly brick built, it rose through three floors of diminishingly elaborate casement windows, the uppermost arched attractively
and poking out from a fine mansard roof. Like all the houses overlooking the quaint semicircular park opposite, it was set
back from the road by a low granite wall topped by black spearhead iron railings. Only the choice of hedging behind them differed.
For some it was laurel. For others privet. For this one, the choice had been an impenetrable, close-clipped Irish yew.

One hell of a place for a taxi driver to be living, Mulcahy thought, as he walked through the open gates, noting the satisfying
crunch of gravel as he stepped onto the drive. But immediately he stopped in his tracks. A small arc of grass was all that
remained of the front lawn. Most of the garden had been carved away to make more space for parking, although there was plenty
of that already in front of the huge detached garage, converted from a coach house, over to the left hand side. What caused
him to halt was a van – a filthy, but still discernibly white, Transit – that was parked in front of the garage. It was just
the type described by the eyewitness in the Jesica Salazar case, and caught on the edge of a CCTV frame pulling in where Catriona
Plunkett had been dumped in Fairview Park. Sure, there were thousands
of similar ones in the city, and they still hadn’t even pinpointed the precise make or model they were after, but its presence
on this driveway immediately put Mulcahy on the alert, the hackles on his neck tingling.

He mounted the double step to the stout, six-panel door and gave the large brass bellpush a shove. He was rewarded with an
old-fashioned jangle from somewhere deep within the house – but nothing else. He waited a minute, then tried again. No response.
He was thinking about the van again, wondering why nobody was answering the door when he thought he heard something, a clatter
of tools, maybe, coming from round the back? Of course, it was a fine day – they might not have heard the bell if they were
out in the garden. Mulcahy walked over to a narrow passage between the house and garage, where a wooden gate was open. He
went through and at the far end came out into a magnificent garden, at least fifty metres in length, with mature beech and
apple trees, a profusion of colourful flower beds, and a design sense straight out of a homes magazine. Only when he stepped
on to the patio did Mulcahy spot a man on his knees, surrounded by planks, a pile of soil and other building materials, working
on the far side of the garden. He was wearing camouflage-style combats and a thin, heavily soiled white T-shirt, and the muscles
rippled on his arms and back as he worked.

‘Mr Rinn?’

The man straightened his back as suddenly as if he’d been lashed with a whip but otherwise stayed in the same
position, his arm outstretched with a lump hammer in it, not even turning.

‘Mr Sean Rinn?’ Mulcahy tried again. The man slowly swivelled round now, his eyes shielded by the tatty peak of an army-style
baseball cap.

‘Get out! Get out or I’ll have the Guards on you,’ he shouted suddenly, his face contorted in anger. Or was it fear? He stood
up and began to advance, holding the hammer out threateningly, until Mulcahy put a hand up and pulled out his warrant card.

‘I
am
the Guards,’ Mulcahy said. ‘Now put that bloody hammer down and stop acting the goat. I need to talk to you.’

That seemed to do the job pretty quickly. The man dropped the hammer on the patio with a clatter and immediately started wringing
his hands. Something here wasn’t right.

‘Are you Sean Rinn?’ Mulcahy asked, approaching him carefully.

The man shook his head, the peak of his baseball hat swishing the air in front of him.

‘No, sir, he’s out. I’m just doing some work for him, laying the path, like.’ His accent was flat and uneducated, with the
pinched nasal quality of the Irish midlands. The way he spoke, Mulcahy figured he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the box. Probably
been in trouble with the Gardai before, too, given the anxiety he was currently displaying.

‘Any idea when he’ll be back?’

‘Didn’t say, sir.’

Mulcahy took a look around. Everything seemed normal enough now. He’d just startled the guy. ‘Do you work here regularly?’

‘Once a week, sir, on the garden. I just gets on with what he tells me.’

Mulcahy nodded. ‘And that’s your van outside, not Mr Rinn’s?’

‘N-no, sir,’ the gardener stammered, anxiety seeming to get the better of him again. ‘It’s mine, sir.’

‘Right, then, I’d better let you get back to work,’ Mulcahy said, deciding there was nothing further to be gained from the
conversation.

He scribbled a note on the back of a business card, asking Rinn to get in touch, and popped it through the letter box, then
went and sat in his car. He shook his head. What in the name of God was a taxi driver doing living in a house like that? Not
to mention employing a gardener? He looked at the case file lying on the passenger seat beside him. What to do? He was enjoying
his time out of the office, away from the ceaseless ringing of the phones and his computer screen. But, as likely as not,
old Sergeant Brennan was just a grumpy old fucker with a grudge, just as Rinn witnessing an assault was probably a complete
coincidence.

Mulcahy looked at his watch. Plenty of time, and besides, he was out here now. He snatched up the file and opened it again,
turning to the victim’s statement and scanning down through it. The woman stated clearly that none of her
belongings had been taken. No missing cross and chain, nor any mention of one. He flipped back to her details: Caroline Coyle,
22 Cowper Road, Dublin 6. Only a minute up the road. DOB 17.6.78. That made her, what, thirty-one now – thirty at the time
of the assault? She was way outside the victim profile; all the others were teenagers. Even Grainne Mullins was a teenager
at the time of her attack. He thought of what his visit to Grainne had turned up and decided that wasn’t likely to be repeated
here. The victim was clearly a respectable, articulate woman. The investigation had been thorough, as far as he could see.
But they’d had nothing to go on. She was attacked. Her assailant got spooked and fled, leaving no trace of himself. It happens.
A woman that age would probably be out at work at this hour of the day. But where was the harm in trying? He got his mobile
from his pocket and tapped in the phone number listed in the file.

The first thing that struck Mulcahy about Caroline Coyle was how wealthy she looked. He’d half expected it, given the shimmering
Jaguar coupé parked on the driveway of 22 Cowper Road, a classic Rathgar townhouse with a fan of white granite steps leading
up to a double-pillared entrance. But when she opened the shiny red front door, Mulcahy was almost knocked over by the air
of money and refinement that wafted out. And from her own carefully groomed person, as well.

She invited him to ‘come through’ and his eyes could
hardly decide what to land on. Everything in sight was stunning, from the hand-woven carpet on the floor to the polished and
gilded antiques that glittered from every nook. He thought he spotted a painting by Paul Henry in the hall, and he was sure
the enormous oil painting above the fireplace in the sitting room she led him into was by William Orpen: a glorious scene
of a young woman in a white dress reading in a sun-dappled green garden. He’d seen one similar on the
Antiques Roadshow
a month or so before, valued at some astronomical figure.

It was only when Mrs Coyle smoothed her dress beneath her hips and sat down on a sofa opposite him that he noticed how young
she looked. On the phone she’d expressed surprise that he was following up, a year on, but he’d said it was routine. He’d
more or less dismissed her as a possibility for The Priest’s sick attentions the instant she’d opened the door. Now, again,
he wasn’t so sure. Beneath the poise, the make-up and the perfectly styled hair was a face that could probably quite easily
pass for an eighteen-year-old’s. When she told him she’d been on her way home early from a fancy dress party, his ears pricked
up.

‘I’d gone as a tart,’ she said. ‘As in vicars and tarts. With Daithi, my husband, who was supposed to be the vicar.’

‘Vicars and tarts?’ Mulcahy asked, bemused.

‘An English thing we used to do when we were at Trinity together, and one of our pals decided to revive it. The boys dress
up as priests, the girls as, well, slappers, I suppose. But Daithi got delayed in surgery – some emergency procedure
he had to perform – and I was forced to go along to the party on my own and wait for him.’

She’d already told Mulcahy that her husband was a surgeon, which went some way to explaining their wealth, but he still couldn’t
imagine how the man could have accumulated so much just by scalping patients.

‘Anyway, I’d been there a while when one of Daithi’s juniors phoned to say there’d been a complication and he wouldn’t be
coming at all, and I couldn’t bear to stay on without him.’ She paused, biting her lower lip a touch shamefacedly. ‘I think
I must have had a little too much champagne. In fact, I’m sure I did, because normally I’d have jumped straight into a taxi.
Especially wearing that outfit – although I did have a coat on, too. But for some reason I caught the Luas. The tram was a
novelty for me and I knew there’s a stop just down the road from here and I wanted to try it out and… what a stupid, stupid
fool I was.’

Mulcahy was about to assure Mrs Coyle that people using public transport were as entitled to a safe journey home as anyone,
but she rushed on, explaining how she’d felt ‘a little drowsy’ and missed her stop but woke in time to get off at the next
one, and so began walking home.

‘By then I was glad of the chance to get some air. So much so, I even passed up the chance of a taxi home, can you believe
it? God, how I beat myself up later for not taking it,’ she sighed.

‘A taxi?’ Mulcahy asked. ‘I didn’t see any mention of a taxi in your statement.’

‘Well, no, you wouldn’t have. Like I said, I didn’t take it. I told him I was enjoying the fresh air too much, and it was
only a few hundred yards.’

‘What do you mean, you “told him”? Are you saying a taxi driver offered you a lift?’

It was a small point but one that, in the circumstances, rang alarm bells. It was illegal for taxi drivers to canvass fares
and any driver caught doing so risked losing their licence.

‘Well, maybe it was a little unusual, now you mention it,’ she replied, and he saw a little flicker of alarm fire up in her
eyes. ‘But his light was on when he pulled up and I didn’t think anything of it. I just said thanks but no thanks and walked
on. You don’t think it was him, do you?’

‘I don’t know what to think,’ Mulcahy said quickly, wanting to get his next question in. ‘Did you happen to get a look at
the driver?’

On her face, he could see the scared thoughts taking hold, tautening her pale, pampered skin, making her look still more like
a child in grown-ups’ clothes.

‘Um, I… I don’t know. I mean, it was dark by then. I remember him pulling in beside me, and his window was down. But he was
on the far side, in the driver’s seat. I don’t think I even looked in. Why would I? I just remember him calling me, offering
me a lift, and I said, “No thank you, it’s much too nice an evening”, and…’

Her voice trailed away, her brow furrowed in concentration. Mulcahy could see that the assault had hit her deeper
than she’d given away at first. But he had to take her through it again.