The Priest (30 page)

‘Did he drive off straight away? Do you remember what kind of vehicle it was?’

‘No, I don’t, really. Only that he offered. All I was thinking about was how much I was loving the evening air on my face
and on my legs… Oh, I must have been so drunk, and I didn’t even realise it. And in that silly outfit, too. I might as well
have gone begging to be attacked.’

She plunged her face into her hands and Mulcahy thought she might be crying. But when she drew them away and looked at him
again, there was no trace of tears, just embarrassment.

‘Maybe you could tell me what happened after that?’

Mulcahy knew it all already from reading her statement but he wanted to hear her tell it again. She’d walked on, she said,
past the big houses on Temple Road with their huge front gardens, without a care in the world, or so she thought. Then it
happened so suddenly: her attacker came from behind, clamped an arm around her neck and dragged her into one of the gardens
where it was pitch dark. It was her screams that had brought the householder out. In response to Mulcahy’s prompts, Mrs Coyle
confessed she couldn’t remember anything about the second man who came to her aid other than that she’d been told he was local,
and no, she wouldn’t have remembered the first one, Mr Quigley, either, except that she had called in on him a month or so
later to thank him for rescuing her. It had all been such a shock.

Mulcahy smiled sympathetically, interested to note that she clearly hadn’t been told that one of her rescuers was a taxi driver.
He had no intention of telling her now, either, he thought, wondering what were the chances it was the same one who’d offered
her the lift. In which case it would have been Rinn. Was it possible that he’d been following her?

Mulcahy decided to wrap up the interview. Mrs Coyle was seeing him to the door when he asked her if she was sure the attacker
hadn’t taken anything from her, or whether she’d noticed anything missing afterwards. She smiled and shook her head, but then
ran a hand across her chest in an unconscious grasping motion and seemed oddly preoccupied as she opened the door.

‘Why did you ask me that?’

‘What?’

‘About me missing something.’ There was a tremor in her voice and a look of real fear in her eyes. ‘You think it might have
been this fellow, The Priest, the one on the news, don’t you?’

Mulcahy was surprised but wary of acknowledging that it was the only reason he was looking at her case again. ‘It was one
of a number of possibilities.’

She nodded, then hacked a sharp cough into her hand.

‘Jesus Christ, he might have done
that
to me,’ she whispered. And suddenly her legs seemed to buckle but Mulcahy caught her before she went down. He helped her
back inside and sat her on a chair in the hall. She was shaking like a leaf.

‘He would have, wouldn’t he?’ she said, her face as white as a sheet beneath the sheen of make-up.

‘You had a lucky escape either way, Mrs Coyle, but these other attacks have only started recently and the likelihood has to
be that it wasn’t the same man.’

Anything to reassure her.

‘No,’ she insisted, ‘you don’t understand. It must have been him.’

He stepped back, there was such certainty in her voice. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘When I took the costumes back to the shop a couple of days later, they made an awful fuss because the crucifix from Daithi’s
vicar’s costume was missing. The
cross
. They wanted something outrageous like fifty euros for a replacement. I thought they’d lost it themselves as Daithi hadn’t
so much as tried his costume on. But then I remembered that we’d looked at them together and laughed about them the night
we got them home. And I knew I’d seen it – a big, cheap old brassy thing. So I paid up, thinking it would turn up somewhere
eventually. But it never did. Now I can’t help thinking maybe I wore it myself that night, as a bit of a joke, on impulse.
You know, to go with the tart’s outfit. And I forgot about it afterwards. From the shock, maybe? I never made the connection
before. I mean, I can’t be certain. It never even occurred to me until now.’

Back in his car, Mulcahy sat and waited for his heart to stop thumping and wondered what the hell he should do next.
He’d done his best to calm Caroline Coyle, then left her to her own thoughts. But what she’d said had unsettled him: it wasn’t
what he’d been expecting. And hadn’t it all come out just a little too easily? He decided he’d better put the brakes on and
think things through clearly. Even Mrs Coyle herself hadn’t been a hundred per cent sure about the cross. She admitted it
was the first time it had struck her. Stranger things had happened. People saw stuff on the television and read about it in
the papers and assumed the same had happened to them. It was something they had to deal with over and over again while handling
the tips lines at Harcourt Square. Nobody realised better than himself now how some people were capable of absorbing external
events and weaving them into their own personal narrative. But it was a shock to see it happen right in front of his eyes
– if that, indeed, was what had happened here. To his mind, it still merited further investigation. Careful, dispassionate
investigation. He’d have to get Brogan to set someone onto it as soon as he got back. But he also knew he’d have to be careful
how he put it to Brogan. She’d been acting twitchy around him ever since he’d done the Scully review for Healy and the last
thing she’d appreciate would be him bounding up to tell her he’d pulled another rabbit out of a hat.

Stepping back from it, he could see now that letting Sergeant Brennan’s witterings get so far into his head had been a mistake.
Even if Mrs Coyle had been solicited by a taxi driver that night, even if it had been this guy, Rinn, who was to say he’d
been the attacker as well? And as for The
Priest, the one thing they knew for sure about him was that his targets had all been teenage girls. And anyway, he used a
van, not a bloody taxi. His memory snagged on Grainne Mullins again. Hadn’t she said she’d only just been dropped off by a
taxi when she was attacked? But the taxi driver was gone by then. He’d dropped her off early so he could get petrol. Could
it have been a ruse? Had the driver maybe parked somewhere and come back for her? Christ, it was all coulds, mights and ifs. The
best thing he could do was lay it out for Brogan when he got back. That way he could stay on his side of the line and she could
follow it up if she wanted to. If it came to anything, she was welcome to the credit.

A
ny fears Siobhan might have had that a bigger story could come along and knock The Priest off the front pages never materialised.
She was busier than ever. Even her mortifying showdown with Vincent Bishop in Marco Pierre White’s had produced some upsides.
Prime among them, of course, being that Bishop had cooled off faster than a streaker in an ice storm. Crazed outbursts in
public places were never going to be okay in his book. He had made that quite clear, despite her garbled, on-the-spot apology
– in which she attributed her inappropriate eruption to crossed wires, stress, overwork and just about anything else she could
think of as she anxiously glugged most of the bottle of St Emilion Grand Cru he’d ordered to go with the medium-rare rib-eye
lying uneaten on his plate. She hadn’t heard from him since, which suited her just fine.

But there were other benefits, too. As expected, given the number of her fellow hacks who’d witnessed it, a few snibby comments
regarding her outburst appeared in the
Irish Independent
,
Mail
and
Sun
–
PRIEST-BREAKER UNLOADS ON
BISHOP
, that kind of thing. But as they had nothing to pin the incident on and as, like herself, Bishop had refused to comment to
enquiring hacks, the tongue-wagging died down as quickly as it had flared up. An appearance in the gossip columns, though,
was a first for her and could be regarded as yet another indication of her leap into the media stratosphere. It certainly
hadn’t dented Heffernan’s determination to get her that pay rise. Quite the opposite, if anything. Next morning he’d strolled
up to her desk, winked at her and said: ‘I see you’re working on keeping your profile up. Nice one.’

He’d even had a word with Griffin and instructed him to assign a couple of editorial assistants to help research her follow-ups. They
were just kids, and utterly clueless, but at least they were able to help with the donkey work – in particular on a piece
she’d pitched about the authorities’ shameful clear-up and conviction rates for domestic violence and sexual assaults generally.
There’d be plenty of room for headlines in that, she knew, but it wasn’t anything the other papers couldn’t cook up for themselves. What
she really needed was something new and exclusive on The Priest.

That was her biggest headache. What she hadn’t told Griffin or Heffernan was that her source in the Garda sex crimes unit
had gone to ground on her. Dried up. The spotlight was suddenly too bright to allow any leakage at all. And there was nothing
she could do about it. Normally she’d have had some hold over such an informant by now, if only
the mere fact that they had taken her money. But this one, having handed it to her on a plate, had vanished. He hadn’t even
come in to pick up the cash, yet. Damn it.

But she could hardly blame the guy for staying away. It seemed like the whole of the Garda Siochana had gone into paranoia
overdrive following publication of her Priest scoop. Even that creep Des Consodine was refusing to talk to her. And as for
Mike Mulcahy, he was blaming her just like all the rest of them. Why he had to take it personally, she had no idea. What had
she done that was so wrong? She’d been careful. She’d made absolutely sure his name hadn’t come into it. If he didn’t want
to believe that, so be it. But it still hurt. Especially as he’d dumped her by stupid text, as well. Didn’t even give her
a chance to explain. Maybe, if she kept her distance until the next big thing broke and things moved on, he’d get it into
perspective after a while.

The other fly in her ointment was that Roy Orbison hadn’t stopped phoning either. She’d had two more calls since. Both on
the machine when she got in after working late. The first, ironically, just hours after she’d wrongly upbraided Bishop – as
if she’d needed any further proof. She listened so hard to it, trying to get some clue as to who else could be behind it,
that it took her a minute or two to hear what the song itself was telling her, to realise that every verse ended with the
same line – the song title: ‘You Don’t Know Me’.

‘You could’ve told me that before now and saved me the trouble,’ she’d whispered grimly into the phone, before deleting it.
But something about that particular moment
chimed with her own dark sense of humour, and she’d laughed at it, too. And while the calls were still freaky, and no more
bearable for knowing now that it wasn’t Bishop making them, they also seemed a lot less serious after that. So much so, she
hardly even registered the next one: caught the first five seconds, pressed delete, then forgot about it straight away.

Maybe if she’d been less busy it would all have played on her mind much more. But now, as things were, she barely had time
to go to the loo. She looked around the
Herald
’s still busy newsroom, then checked her watch. She wanted to be sure she had time to pop to the Ladies’ before her live link-up
with Gerry Finucane’s
Crime Week
radio show on 2FM. She was reaching for her bag when the phone on her desk rang. Damn. They preferred to make the connection
over a landline. They’d probably keep her hanging on for ages now until they were ready. But she picked up anyway.

‘Siobhan Fallon?’ The voice was cultured, by Dublin standards – bound to be someone from media central in Montrose House.

‘Yeah, it’s me,’ she said. ‘But listen, love, do you think you could give me a couple of minutes and ring me back. I’m desperate
for—’

‘
Deus non irridetur
.’

Siobhan shook her head as if something in her ear had come loose. ‘Excuse me?’

‘
Deus non irridetur
,’ the voice intoned. ‘In the words of Saint Paul: “God will not be mocked.”’

Ah, for Christ’s sake, Siobhan thought. Not another one. Ever since she’d appeared on
Questions and Answers
the cranks and creeps had been coming out of the woodwork. The price, she was beginning to accept, of even her small modicum
of fame was being a loon magnet. And even though she’d asked the operators to stop putting anonymous calls through to her
extension, to let the newsdesk filter them, still some got through – this was the fourth or fifth nut job she’d had that day.
All of them men, naturally, all of them saying the dirty young trollops deserved everything they got from The Priest, or some
rancid rubbish to that effect.

‘Look, pal, whatever it is you’re after, I’m not interested.’

A low growling laugh came back down the line. ‘You should be interested. You make a living out of peddling filth, don’t you?’

‘Is that what you’re after, some filth?’

Again the horrible laugh, but this time the voice came back sharper.

‘I have no filth in my life except what you and your kind bring into it. I saw you on the television the other night, talking
all that filth about this so-called Priest. And there you were, parading yourself, with your low-cut top and your whore’s
lipstick, defiling the symbol of Christ’s sacrifice that you wear around your neck. Does it mean nothing to you?’

Siobhan self-consciously put a hand up to her neck, touched the little silver cross at its base, an automatic act of security,
though her mind was elsewhere, gathering rage.

‘I’ll tell you what means nothing to me, pal,’ she spat back
at him. ‘Bullshit artists like you ringing me up and mouthing off because you’re too pathetic to get your thrills any other
way.’

Normally that would have been enough. But not for this one.

‘You spout torrents of corruption, your every word drips with it. And you remain blind to the message. You have the gall to
condemn a righteous man.’