The Priest (40 page)

It would be a long time before she forgot that moment, how all of them in that room had let out a whoop of delight and punched
the air when Lonergan looked over into the mirror and winked at them through the glass. He’d nailed the big admission. Over
the next few days they could work on Byrne for the detail, but for now they had enough to charge him with, whenever they wanted
to.

Christ, but that man was an inspiration.

Brogan looked at her watch: ten-fifteen p.m. already. She felt in her pocket for her mobile. Even the thought of calling home
and listening to her husband, Aidan, griping about her long absence couldn’t bring her down. Aidan could go fuck himself,
she thought. How dare he say she didn’t spend enough time with the boy. Aidan was the one who’d said he was happy to stay
at home. Well, it was up to him, not her, to make that work. And as for the boy, she’d always found the time, and always would
find it, no matter how hard she worked.

She stepped away from the wall as the door beside her opened and two of the lads she’d shared the room with for the last couple
of hours – Lonergan’s lads – came out, laughing together, and bade her a friendly goodnight. She looked at their broad backs
as they walked down the corridor, the clatter of their footsteps echoing against the old tile walls, and she knew something
for certain. It’d been a long time since she’d found somewhere she wanted to be this much. Now she had, she was going to doing
everything in her power to keep things that way. Somehow, she was going to get herself transferred onto Lonergan’s team permanently.

He’d been at it for well over an hour, sitting at the
Herald
’s long newsdesk, a couple of fluorescent ceiling lights illuminating their small patch of floor space, everywhere else in
darkness or bathed in the orange glow drifting in through the windows from the streetlights outside. For a man who’d never
been inside a newspaper office before, Mulcahy found it all a bit of a let-down. Ranks of desks and computer screens sectioned
off into individual fiefdoms, like any office anywhere. The only difference he could see was that there were a hell of a lot
of TVs around, on shelves, on walls, on stands; you wouldn’t be able to hear yourself think if they were all on at the same
time. And Siobhan, of course, clacking away at her keyboard behind him.

All he’d asked her was if he could look up the
Herald
’s news archive sometime. And she’d been all over it right
away, saying, ‘Yeah, come on, come over and we’ll look it up now.’ He could see why she was good at her job – she wouldn’t
take no for an answer. She’d dragged him back to the
Herald
, sat him down and showed him how to look material up on the system. She had explained to him about the various online cuttings
services they used for other publications. And he had tried… but there was no magic bullet. The in-house archive had only been
computerised as far back as the mid-nineties. Even then, all he got was floods of random stuff that meant nothing to him.
He did his best to winkle out some information about Rinn, his grandfather or the big mystery in Gweedore. And once or twice
he thought he’d found something, but they were just wisps – hints that something bad had happened – that dissolved as soon
as he tried to pin them down.

In the end he was just plain knackered, his eyes watering more and more with every new search he called up. Until he suddenly
caught the flicker of a TV screen blooming into life beside him. He looked round. Siobhan was standing behind his chair, a
remote in her hand.

‘I just wanted to catch the late news,’ she said.

‘Sure.’ Mulcahy turned to watch as the headlines ran out and Siobhan raised the volume. No surprise, the lead item was the
Priest arrest, and he leaned forward as he saw Brogan onscreen, briefly, at the centre of a swirling crowd, with a tall guy
he recognised from the press conference, Lonergan presumably, leading this other guy out, with a coat over his head, through
the car park at Kilmainham
Garda Station. It was a real scrum, with cameras flashing and all the press monkeys pushing in and jostling to get near. Then
someone caught hold of the coat this guy had covering him and pulled it away, and the suspect’s face was exposed for a few
seconds and he looked absolutely shitscared
.
But it wasn’t the expression of fear that made Mulcahy sit up and gawp, but the face it was on. He was sure he’d seen the
man before, very recently, but it wouldn’t come.

Then Siobhan pushed the volume up another notch and he heard the newsreader saying: ‘The suspect who’s reported to run a gardening
business in Chapelizod was arrested just after noon today when Gardai from the Murder Squad raided his flat in St Imelda’s
Road…’ Mulcahy felt the breath go out of him from the shock. The gardener! He saw the face again now, but in his mind’s eye,
with a baseball cap on, anger in his eyes and a hammer in his hand. It was him, the fucking gardener from Rinn’s place, the
one who’d been working there that day he’d gone round. He’d seen him, met him, even been bloody threatened by him. And the
van, for Christ’s sake. The fucking van sitting there outside the house and he’d walked straight past it.

Mulcahy felt sick to his stomach, had to put a hand to his chest to stop himself being wiped out by the thought of it. He
desperately needed to think straight. That wasn’t while Paula Halpin was missing, was it? No, he reassured himself, he’d only
gone over to Palmerston Park after her
body had been found, and he felt a tiny trickle of relief at that. But then the anger came again. Any money, he’d bet any
bloody money that, if they checked the dates back, they’d find that Byrne was working at Rinn’s the day Caroline Coyle was
attacked, too. And, as for poor Paula Halpin, walking up from Dartry, it wasn’t Rinn’s clutches she’d fallen into, it was
his bloody gardener’s. Christ, how could he have come so close yet got it so totally, hopelessly wrong?

For a moment or two he felt totally emptied out by the thought, as good as paralysed from head to toe by the shock of it.
He glanced over at Siobhan but thankfully she didn’t seem to have noticed his reaction, absorbed as she was in the news report.
He sat back in the chair, thinking about Byrne, thinking about Rinn, feeling it all go round and round again. He rubbed his
forehead, his head began to pound again – and his lungs jumped on the bandwagon, screaming for a cigarette. He stood up slowly,
stretching his arms, pretending a calmness he was utterly devoid of, as Siobhan turned to him.

‘I’ve had enough of this for one night, Siobhan. I’m knackered and getting nowhere. Sorry to waste your time, but I’ve got
to get out of here now, before my head explodes.’

He’d been really very sweet down at the main door, insisting that she contact Brogan first thing about the package, fretting
over the fact that she was going back into the office
on her own. He’d even come over a little shy when she asked: ‘So are we friends again, now?’ But he hadn’t held back when
they kissed goodnight, with his big arms folding her into the hard warmth of his chest. It felt like he wanted her to stay
there for ever, and she’d be lying if she claimed she wasn’t tempted just to forget about it all and hop into the taxi beside
him, there and then. But maybe he would have drawn the line at that. Something was all too obviously still eating away at
him. And it was probably better to take things slowly this time, anyway. There was no way he didn’t want to get involved with
her, she could sense that. They’d just have to be careful, in future, and avoid the work thing altogether.

In future, maybe, but not just yet. Back upstairs she went straight to the terminal he’d been working on, which she’d pretended
to turn off when he left, but had actually only put to sleep, making sure the hard drive stayed up and running. She touched
the space bar and the screen flickered back into life. A few keystrokes later and she was able to call up the log, and then
a list of the files he’d gone through in the archive. It didn’t take long to find the one she wanted. He’d stared at it for
a good five minutes, not realising that from where she was sitting she’d been able to read the catchlines on just about everything
he had looked at.

She called up the story. It must have been one of the earliest on the database, from 1995, and it looked like something from
a gossipy political diary. The sort of thing they published back in the day when the
Herald
took itself
more seriously, and fancied itself a player in the power market rather than primarily a purveyor of scandal. It was a brief,
snibby insert written under the name Oisin MacCumhaill, which she vaguely recalled was the pen-name of a once-renowned political
columnist from years back. By the look of it, he’d been an insider writing for other insiders, trading in the sort of weaselly
winks, nudges and innuendo that were incomprehensible to anyone who wasn’t already in on the joke, or who wasn’t in the know.

GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN?

We’re all saddened, I’m sure, to note the departure, from the ranks of the exalted, of the last of the Great Ones. But, while
it might seem churlish to mention it now, there are those who will not mourn his passing. A heroic role in the formation of
our great nation is all well and good. As is a lifetime devoted to the cause of justice, equality and fair hearing. But, occasionally,
even heroes get it terribly, terribly wrong. So much so that great deeds in the past and even a lifetime’s devotion to Church
and State cannot redress the balance. Most good folk who were in Gweedore in the August of 1988 will remember it as a place
and a time of sunshine, beauty and joy. For a few, though, it will always remain a time of darkness, a high-water mark of
hypocrisy, of the blackest of stains on a character regarded by many as the next best thing to sanctified. He, of all men,
should have known that covering up evil for the sake of vanity, or family, in order to excise it from the public record,
was nothing but a perversion of the justice he affected to hold so high.

Siobhan stared at it, bemused. She read it and reread it, and tried to get her head round it. What the hell could Mulcahy
have seen here that was so important? It yielded nothing at face value. Clearly it was written as a kind of riddle, to begin
with – something the writer could only half say and hint at, for fear of being sued, presumably, or of some greater retribution.
Damn Mulcahy, anyway: he was on to something, she could feel it so strongly. Still, if
he
could be, so could she.

She scrolled back up to the top of the story. She knew for sure this was the one he’d stared at like he’d witnessed a revelation. The
one he’d sneaked back to when she’d gone out to the loo, and been so absorbed in, he didn’t hear her coming back at first,
then closed it hurriedly when he finally heard her behind him, making out it was nothing. ‘I was just trying to see if I could
get to grips with some of those cuttings services you mentioned,’ he’d claimed.

Yeah, right.

So what was it? From the log, she could tell that for Mulcahy the keyword had to be Gweedore. That’s what he’d put in most
of the searches. That and maybe a dozen other criteria: most frequently the word
justice
and the surname
Rinn
. All that had yielded him was a pile of references to some old judge who’d died years back, which he’d seemed vaguely interested
in at first, but then he’d whipped though
the files with barely enough time to read them. Towards the end, it looked like all he’d been doing was putting random-looking
searches about crucifixes and torture and sexual assault into the mix – and getting nowhere with them, by the look of it.

She scrolled back to the original story. The headline:
GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
. It was obviously some sort of riddle, but a riddle meant for who? The writer had a grievance against somebody, but why and
about what? And what was this ‘evil’ he was talking about?

Keywords.

She grabbed a pen and started writing down the words that seemed to stand out.
Great Ones
: a quick Google search led her precisely nowhere, the term being so vague it brought up references to everything from spiritualist
nutcases to Brazilian footballers. She tried again with
Gweedore
and
1988
but, again, came back with nothing other than a pile of tourism junk and meaningless timelines. She was on the point of giving
up when it occurred to her that, actually, it hadn’t been her who’d opened the web browser on Mulcahy’s terminal. She’d only
booted up the Archive-search system on the monitor for him. She’d just assumed he would know how to launch the browser himself.
And obviously he had, but when? That time she was out in the loo?

She moved the mouse again and clicked on the History button in the tool bar. Thank God she hadn’t closed the terminal down.
There it was, just before her own more recent
searches. A list of hits each titled
Donegal Courier
…
archive
. The sneaky bugger. Mulcahy had been checking out the local press in Donegal behind her back. How the hell had she not noticed
him doing that? She clicked on a link at random which took her to the
Donegal Courier
search page. And there they were: the keywords
Gweedore
and
assault
, the date,
1988
. She could see straight away that the
Courier
’s archive, too, only went back to the mid-nineties, so she clicked out and scrolled straight to the last page Mulcahy had
browsed. What she saw there made her sit up straight and lean in towards the screen. It was a story from the
Courier
’s news pages from 1997. And, like the story from the
Herald
archive, it referred back, in part, to a mysterious, and apparently shameful, incident that happened in Gweedore in 1988.

Bingo.

She read through the story again, this time for the detail. It was a fairly typical court report about the successful prosecution
for assault of a visitor to Bunbeg, a Dublin businessman called Anthony Michael Blaney, who’d rented a house outside the town
for his family for the summer of 1997. Blaney had assaulted a local youth, Aidan Lowry, who’d apparently dared to lean against
Blaney’s brand new BMW outside McClusky’s bar one evening, and the Dubliner had compounded the offence by trying to bribe
the Garda who was called to the scene. But as far as Siobhan was concerned, and Mulcahy too, she assumed, the real significance
only came in the final paragraph. It was a throwaway remark to all intents and purposes, but a bitter one.