The Priest (35 page)

‘Thank you, Mr Rinn. Nobody passed you as you ran up after parking?’

‘Not that I was aware of. Perhaps he went in the opposite direction—’

‘That’d be the direction you were coming from in your car. You didn’t see anything then, either?’

‘No,’ Rinn said flatly.

‘Very public spirited of you to stop.’

‘Well, like I said, the young lady sounded like she was in trouble.’

‘And nothing else has occurred to you about the incident since you made your statement? Sometimes things come back, small
things that—’

‘Recollections in tranquillity?’ Rinn interrupted, and moved away from the mantelpiece to look out over the garden through
the open doors.

‘If you like.’

‘No. I did think long and hard about it at the time. I was quite disturbed by the incident, in fact. As you can imagine, things
like that don’t happen very often around here.’

Mulcahy stared at him, wondering just how deeply Rinn might have thought about it afterwards, and how often.

‘I was hoping you might tell me in more detail how you came upon the incident, Mr Rinn. I wasn’t very clear on that from your
statement.’

Rinn turned to him quickly, surprise on his face. ‘No? I thought I’d made it quite explicit.’

Mulcahy said nothing.

‘Well, as I said, I was just driving up the road.’

‘Going to? Coming from?’ Mulcahy prompted.

‘I’m afraid I don’t remember, Inspector. I must have been coming home from somewhere, I suppose.’

‘You weren’t working then?’

‘Working?’ Rinn sounded genuinely surprised. ‘All this occurred at ten o’clock at night.’

‘Nine forty-five,’ Mulcahy supplied, helpfully.

‘Whatever,’ Rinn said, slightly tetchy now. ‘The thing is, Inspector, the time is irrelevant because I wouldn’t have been
working anyway. What I mean is, I don’t work. As I said, I’m very lucky. My grandparents left me well provided for. I don’t
need to work, so I don’t.’

Now it was Mulcahy’s turn to be gobsmacked. ‘But in your statement it says that you’re a taxi driver by profession.’

He’d rarely seen a jaw drop quite as precipitately as Rinn’s did, followed by a great boom of laughter. ‘A taxi driver? Me?
You must be confusing me with someone else, Inspector. Or maybe a colleague has been pulling your leg? Where does it say that?
Show me.’

Mulcahy flicked the file open and checked the statement. Sure enough, in the box marked occupation, the words ‘taxi driver’
were typed. He showed it to Rinn, and pointed to his signature at the bottom of the page.

‘I’m sorry, Inspector, but whoever typed this statement made a mistake. Obviously, I wouldn’t have signed it if I’d noticed
that at the time. But I’m sure you’ll see there’s no such reference in my statement. There couldn’t be. I’m sure I checked
it thoroughly at the time.’

Mulcahy scanned through the body of the statement and, as Rinn said, there was nothing about him driving a taxi, only a car.
How the hell could he have missed that?
Somehow the Garda who’d taken the statement must have inserted the wrong details. And now Mulcahy had gone down completely
the wrong track after him. Not only that, he was being made to feel a complete prat in front of Rinn, just to cap it all.

Mulcahy stood up, apologised to Rinn for disturbing him, and was heading for the door when his eye was caught by a small,
bright painting on the wall: a lush coastal landscape, with a sailboat cleaving through blue-green water in the foreground.
It reminded him so powerfully of sailing with his dad on childhood summer holidays in Cork, he just had to stop and look.
Somehow, the artist had captured all the pleasure of sailing in a single scene.

‘What a beautiful painting.’ Mulcahy leaned in closer to examine the small brass lozenge embedded in the frame.
Gweedore Summer by Padraig Rinn
, it read.

‘Yes, my grandfather was a gifted amateur artist,’ Rinn said.

‘Looks like it.’ Mulcahy’s eyes were still entranced by the swirl of blue and green on the canvas, but not so much that the
rest of him couldn’t sense a crackle of anxiety coming from Rinn beside him. The man’s mood seemed to have turned in an instant.

‘It’s so summery,’ Mulcahy said. ‘You can practically feel the light bouncing off the water.’

‘Indeed.’ Rinn seemed unbearably uncomfortable now, fiddling with the neck of his sweater as if feeling the heat of the day
for the first time. For just a second, Mulcahy caught
a glimpse of what appeared to be a spectacular scar of purple puckered skin wrapped around his throat, and he thought of what
Brennan had said about Rinn being badly injured in the crash that killed his parents. That explained the polo-neck sweater,
at least. Then it hit him – Brennan had mentioned something about Gweedore. Some incident or another.

‘Gweedore?’ Mulcahy said, looking Rinn full in the eyes. ‘That’s up in Donegal, right?’

‘That’s right,’ Rinn replied, a slightly strained tone in his voice now.

‘You have family connections up that way?’

‘My grandfather was raised there. He dragged us up there for a month every summer when the courts were not in session. Beaches,
safe swimming, rowing boats to take us out fishing. And, of course, the sailing, which he was passionate about.’

‘It shows,’ Mulcahy said, thinking Rinn’s tone didn’t exactly exude enthusiasm. ‘You don’t get back there very often yourself,
I take it?’

‘No,’ Rinn replied. ‘I haven’t been in years. Why do you ask?’

Again Mulcahy could feel the tension radiating from Rinn.

‘No reason,’ Mulcahy said. What a weird reaction. What the hell was he being so defensive about? The grandfather, maybe?

‘Is this the man himself?’ Mulcahy pointed at a faded old photograph in a glass frame on the mantelpiece. It was a
head-and-shoulders portrait of a glum-looking man with slicked-back hair, a large fleshy nose and thick tortoiseshell glasses,
his expression as stiff and unyielding as the starched shirt collar that dug into his neck. Beside it was another photo, retouched
by hand in muted colours, of a group of young men standing formally to attention, all wearing some kind of green uniform.
Mulcahy recognised the man at the centre as the one in the portrait, younger but with the same heavy glasses and what looked
like a gold chain of office around his neck. In the background, a long white banner read:
International Eucharistic Congress, 1932
.

Rinn hadn’t replied to his question, so Mulcahy turned and asked again. ‘Is this your grandfather, sir?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake…’ Rinn spluttered, his agitation getting the better of him. ‘Yes, it is. Now please, Inspector, if you
have nothing else pertinent to your enquiries, I really must get on.’

Mulcahy stared Rinn down for a couple of seconds, then took one last look at the painting of the boat on the water and made
his way out through the gloomy hallway to the front door.

‘Okay, Mr Rinn. If you do think of anything, you have my details.’

He was sitting in the Saab outside, still trying to get his head round how he’d tell Brogan that his great tip-off about a
taxi driver had turned out to be nothing but some fucker in uniform’s typing error, when his phone went off. Another voice
he didn’t recognise, a woman’s this time.

‘Noreen from Superintendent Healy’s office here, Inspector. He wants to see you.’

Mulcahy looked at his watch. Two thirty-five. God alone only knew what the traffic would be like.

‘I’m just on my way back in, Noreen, I’ll probably be half an hour.’

‘Shall we say three, then?’

‘Yeah, fine.’

The line went dead. He started the car and pulled out. This was one meeting he really didn’t want to be late for.

His mobile rang again just as he was about to get into the lift in Harcourt Square. It was Brogan, finally getting back to
him. He let the lift go and walked over to a quiet corner, congratulating her on the arrest and begging her for details. From
the rush in her voice, he could tell she was still high on it.

‘To be honest,’ she said, ‘it was more to do with Lonergan than us. That guy has some luck: I couldn’t believe how fast it
happened. Apparently, when the Techs were preparing the girl’s body for the post-mortem exam, one of them noticed a piece
of paper stuck to a corner of the plastic wrapping. It was all torn but there was some half-legible typing on it and also
some kind of a code. I’m telling you, Mike, these guys can work like lightning when they want to. In under an hour they matched
it to a gardening wholesaler – Hartigans, in Chapelizod. You know how close that is to the Phoenix Park. So we all go screeching
round to the place and this
weedy little guy in Hartigans says, “Oh yeah, that’s the back end of one of our delivery numbers”, like it’s no big deal.’

He heard her break off on the other end of the line and say something muffled to someone else. Then she was back. ‘Are you
still there?’

‘Yeah, go on.’

‘Okay, look, I have to go in a minute, so I can’t go into details, but here it is in a nutshell. The guy in Hartigans looks
up their records and says, yeah, here it is: a delivery of half a ton of coconut-husk chips to a gardener called Emmet Byrne.
And one of the local guys, who knows him, says Byrne’s got form for indecent assault. So we all go tearing over to his place
and, when we get there, first thing we see is a white Transit van, the side door open and what’s all over the floor of the
van except a load of sacks from this coconut stuff. And what are the sacks made of? Exactly those same red plastic fibres
we got on the other victims. I mean, they’re so distinctive, they literally couldn’t be anything else. So we had him, bang
to fucking rights. It was amazing.’

Mulcahy laughed as she broke off again, her excitement infectious even down the phone line. Then she had to go. ‘Lonergan’s
calling me. We’re going in to do the press conference now. I’ve got to go.’

‘Yeah, good luck with—’

But she was gone before he could finish the sentence.

Healy kept him waiting for a few minutes before Noreen’s phone buzzed and he was ushered in. This time the office
was in semi-darkness; only the glare from a huge flat-screen TV on the wall supplemented the meagre light penetrating the
curtains drawn shut across the huge window. Healy was standing by his desk, remote control in his hand, raising the volume
on what revealed itself to be a press conference. The cameras showed a long table on a dais, where four people – one in heavily
braided uniform, three in suits – were seated in front of microphones, answering questions. One of them, he saw, was Brogan.

‘Brendan, I just heard—’

Healy put a finger to his lips and swept a hand towards the chair in front of his desk. ‘Sit down there for a minute, Mike,
this is just coming to the end. RTE’s putting this news conference out live.’

In close-up appeared the man they all worked for. The heavy-set, furrow-browed Garda Commissioner Thurloch Garvey, his smoke-grey
uniform trimmed with enough gold to underpin a third-world economy, was looking eager to wind up the session, as he asked
for any other questions. The camera switched back to the room and a flurry of raised arms, picking out one in particular from
the pack of jostling reporters. Mulcahy instantly recognised Siobhan Fallon’s mop of curly black hair and curvy frame. Just
what he bloody needed with Healy hovering beside him.

‘Don’t you think it’s all a little bit convenient, Commissioner Garvey?’ Siobhan inquired, flashing her familiar smile. ‘I
mean, a murder last night and you pick up a suspect by lunchtime. This despite the fact that another
team of detectives has been looking for The Priest for weeks already?’

Garvey bridled. ‘That’s a ridiculous assertion. Of course it’s not a question of convenience. Next question, please.’

The camera panned back to the throng of reporters, from which came an indignant shout. Siobhan was trying to ask a follow-up
but Commissioner Garvey flatly ignored her. ‘Okay,’ he said into the microphone. ‘If there’s nothing more, we’ll wrap this
up now. Any further enquiries will be dealt with by Superintendent Lonergan via the Garda Press Office. Thank you.’

As they gathered their papers and left the room the camera cut back to the RTE news presenter and Healy pointed the remote
at the TV and lowered the volume.

‘She has a way of getting up people’s noses, that girl,’ he said as he walked back around the desk and settled into his swivel
chair.

Mulcahy thought it best not to respond to that.

‘Anyway, it’s a great result for us all,’ Healy went on.

‘Sounds like it – and solid too.’

‘You spoke to Claire?’

Mulcahy nodded.

‘As soon as those forensics come through,’ Healy said, ‘it’ll be in the bag. Lonergan told me so personally.’

‘It’s just a shame his crew has to get all the credit.’

There was a creak of leather from the chair as Healy leaned forward and put his elbows on the desk, pressing his fingers to
his nose, staring at Mulcahy.

‘You know, if I’m honest, I’m not so sorry about that. It’ll still be a long road preparing the case for the DPP, and this
whole thing has been a bad lot from the start. It’s never good when politicians get too closely involved.’ As he said it,
Healy made a cleansing motion with his hands, as if throwing something imaginary into his waste bin. Mulcahy wondered whether
Healy really thought a girl’s life was a price worth paying to pass the buck to Lonergan and the Murder Squad.

‘Anyway, things have moved on now,’ Healy continued. ‘All the investigations are being linked and dealt with under the one
umbrella by Lonergan and his team. But there’s still a loose end, and it’s one the Minister wants tied up quickly. That’s
the Spanish involvement – which, as you know, is still causing the government a bit of stick. Thanks chiefly to your friend
Fallon and her colleagues.’

Something must have cracked in the poker face Mulcahy thought he’d adopted because Healy smiled and sat back in his seat.

‘Don’t worry, Mike. All we want you to do is go to Madrid and take a statement from young Jesica Salazar. I got a call through
this morning saying that she’s well enough now to be formally interviewed.’