The Priest (48 page)

On the top floor, though, he found a small room, what looked to be a private chapel of sorts. On one side he could see a narrow
table serving as an altar, covered in embroidered linens, candles and what appeared to be a large gold tabernacle. On the
wall above it a thin finger of wavering red light illuminated a yellowing picture of the Sacred Heart. On another wall hung
a faded silk banner, its six-inch letters in an embroidered arc spelling out SODALITY OF THE MOST PRECIOUS BLOOD. Which creeped
Mulcahy out but meant nothing to him. If this was Rinn’s hideaway, his hidden place, then here, he knew, he might find what
he needed. Mulcahy approached the makeshift altar, its linen crisp, white and bare apart from the candle sconces and a small
plain wooden cross with a grey spelter figure of Christ attached to it with jagged-looking pins. The tabernacle, on the other
hand, was extraordinarily extravagant: large, at least eighteen inches square, and highly decorated in chased gold and silver.
The mere sight of it tempted Mulcahy to bless himself, summoning intense memories of his own brief period as an altar boy.
At the front, an ornate gold sunburst splashed across double doors, flanked on either side by ghostly silver saints, one holding
a book, the other wielding a sword. On a frieze above and all round the upper rim was a motto bearing the words
Sanctus, Sanctus
, etched repeatedly.

Mulcahy used his handkerchief to turn, cautiously, the
small key protruding from the lock at the centre of the sun, then levered each of the doors open with a pen. Inside, a silver
chalice, with a burnished gold interior, glinted out. What took his breath away, what made him lean further in and stare with
disbelief, was what was crowded in behind the chalice. Six wooden crosses, identical to the one outside on the altar, but
each of these had another crucifix hanging by a chain from the arms and draped across the figure of the Christ. One was as
tall as the wooden cross from which it hung, all flaking gold paint and blobs of coloured glass; he guessed immediately it
had to be Grainne Mullins’s ‘Versace’ cross. Another, not quite as big but brassy and plain, was probably the ‘vicar’s’ cross
Caroline Coyle had lost. Towards the front he saw a glittering chain holding a delicately wrought figure of Christ on a gold
cross tipped at each extremity with a large brilliant-cut diamond and knew it had to be Jesica Salazar’s. The others, he guessed,
would be Catriona Plunkett’s, Paula Halpin’s and, perhaps, Shauna Gleeson’s.

But none yet for the other crucifix standing bare outside on the altar linen. Waiting. He swallowed hard.

He looked around the room again. It was telling him everything he needed to know about Rinn except the one thing he wanted
more than anything: where the hell had he taken Siobhan? Outside he heard a faint wail of sirens, then a shout from below.
He ran out of the room and by the time he reached the bottom of the stairs, Cassidy was already standing by the open door,
a blaze of blue emergency lights
reflecting into the hall, directing one paramedic in green and yellow overalls into the back room, telling another to see
immediately to the man out in the garage.

‘How’s the girl?’ Mulcahy asked him.

‘Not good, poor kid,’ Cassidy said, looking a bit pale himself now. They both stepped back as another paramedic bustled past
them, a walkie-talkie squawking on her epaulette.

‘Did you find anything up there?’ Cassidy asked him.

Mulcahy nodded. ‘Like his own private monastery. All sorts of religious stuff. It was him, no question. All the girls’ crosses
are up there. Trophies. But I’m damned if I can find anything about where he might have taken Siobhan.’

‘Did you see this stuff in here?’ Cassidy opened the heavy panelled door into the dining room at the front of the house. Mulcahy
had stuck his head in earlier but, seeing no sign of his goal, he had moved quickly on. Cassidy pointed towards the long mahogany
dining table, which had a mass of papers spread out across its surface. One of the dining chairs was pushed away from the
table as if someone had stood up suddenly and left.

‘I thought maybe this was what he was doing when Fallon and her photographer pal turned up,’ Cassidy said. ‘He’d have seen
them coming in the gate, from here.’

Sure enough, most of the front garden, the gate and part of the garage were visible from that angle through the large bay
window. Cassidy’s mobile rang and he went straight back into the hall. The only words Mulcahy caught were, ‘Yeah, boss, that’s
right’ as he went out. He went over to the
table, tried to make out what it was Rinn had been doing there. Some sheets of paper were fanned out on the polished surface,
along with a large-format book and a fold-out map of the Phoenix Park. Mulcahy glanced over the map, saw nothing out of the
ordinary. Most of the paper sheets were photocopies. Turning a couple of them towards him, he saw that they were blow-ups of
lines from religious texts.
They that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its passions and lusts. (Gal 5:24)
and
Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature
…
the wrath of God is coming. (Col 3:5
–
6)
He turned them away, repelled, and drew the book towards him. It was a glossy picture book commemorating the Papal visit
to Ireland in 1979. On the cover was a picture familiar to Mulcahy, a head-and-shoulders shot of Pope John Paul II, resplendent
in vestments of green, white and gold, holding aloft his crozier. Mulcahy opened the book at a place bookmarked by an old
photo. The image on the large double-page spread inside was equally familiar to him: a high crane shot of the vast sea of
people surrounding the huge raised altar in the Phoenix Park, flags on tall standards fluttering in the breeze, everything
dwarfed by the massive cross behind.

Mulcahy glanced at the photograph that had been used as a bookmark, its poorly fixed Polaroid colours faded by the years.
It was of a group of boys and girls, all ten or eleven years old, all staring at the lens awkwardly. The kids looked like they
were on a day trip from a disaster zone. Some were in wheelchairs, others on crutches, their limbs
encased in plaster. At one end of the group, Mulcahy thought he recognised the face of a much younger Sean Rinn, a sad-looking
boy with buzz-cut hair and a forced smile splayed across his mouth. Beneath a gaping shirt and cardigan, the whole of his
torso, from his chin down to the waistband of his smartly pressed trousers, was swaddled in bandages. In the background was
the same vast crowd and altar he’d seen in the book. He flipped the photo over. Scrawled in ink on the back was a caption:
Sodality of the Most Precious Blood, Phoenix Park, Sept 29, 1979.

He heard footsteps behind him and turned.

‘Brogan’s on her way,’ Cassidy said. ‘Says some of the others will probably get here first. She has to come in from Tallaght.’

Mulcahy nodded. ‘Any idea what a sodality is?’

Cassidy squinted uncomprehendingly. Mulcahy held up the photo, pointed at Rinn, then showed him what was written on the back.
‘I saw it upstairs on some kind of a banner, too.’

‘It’s like a kind of association,’ Cassidy said, ‘set up for people to offer special devotions, prayers and masses on feast
days and special times of the year. That one would be to commemorate the “precious blood” Jesus spilled on the cross for the
salvation of mankind.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I was schooled by the Presentation Brothers. They made us learn all that stuff about feast days and sodalities by rote. Beat
the stuff into us. The Feast of the Most Precious Blood
is sort of movable, if I remember right. The first Sunday of July each year. Around now, in fact.’

Mulcahy didn’t need to check the date on his watch, but he did so automatically. ‘It’s tomorrow,’ he said, and somehow that
piece of information didn’t make him feel any easier.

Cassidy held his hands up, moving past him to the table.

‘What are you bothering with all that stuff for?’ he said, sharply. ‘This is what I thought you’d be interested in. I know
the boss will.’ He pushed away the book and sheets of paper, clearing space around the map of the Phoenix Park. It was an
old Ordnance Survey map, exquisitely etched and printed. Cassidy was stabbing his finger towards the left hand side, where
a circle had been drawn in pencil around the Y of the Furry Glen and the crowded contour lines marking out the hollow where
Paula Halpin’s body had been found.

‘Bang to fuckin’ rights,’ Cassidy was saying, but Mulcahy’s eye had snagged on another part of the map, an area of empty parkland
where there was no pencil circle, just a broad expanse of green with its name, the Fifteen Acres, printed across it. Beneath
the name, hardly distinguishable from the print above it, something had been added in a tiny script:
Deus non irridetur.
His heart stalled. It was the same message Siobhan had been sent: God will not be mocked.

Mulcahy’s mind was swirling now, arching up, reaching towards understanding but swamped by too much information to process
it quickly. Fractured images of Siobhan
on the television, of places and dates, of crowns of thorns, jagged pins and the blood of Christ. Too many possibilities, none
of them good.

‘He must’ve had a plan for Paula Halpin,’ Mulcahy said. ‘But it didn’t work out. You said she had heart trouble, didn’t you?
Maybe she had a coronary when he was assaulting her but he didn’t realise until it was too late. So he stashed the body near
to where he needed it to be, but it was discovered. Then he went out and got another girl, but at the last moment fate intervened
and got him someone even better, even more appropriate.’

‘What’re you on about?’ Cassidy said, looking up.

‘It must’ve seemed like a miracle to him: Siobhan Fallon just walking in his gate like that.’ Mulcahy paused, breathing hard,
making sure it pieced together right in his mind. ‘What do you make of that?’ he said, pointing to the Fifteen Acres on the
map.

‘There’s nothing there,’ Cassidy said, ‘just grass.’

‘But it’s an old map, isn’t it,’ Mulcahy said. ‘What’s there now? What’s been there since thirty years ago? Since 1979. What’s
there that ties in with all this other shite around here?’

Then it dawned on Cassidy too, and for a second all he did was yawp and utter a low, breathy, ‘Shit!’

But Mulcahy was already halfway out the door, in far too much of a panic to care if Cassidy was following him or not.

Mulcahy barely registered the great sweep of grand old Dublin he sped through as he negotiated the last clumps of
late traffic in Rathmines, jumped the bridge over the Grand Canal and onwards, past the arc-lit spires of St Patrick’s Cathedral,
tilting down beneath the gothic arches of Christchurch into Winetavern Street until, with a caterwauling of abused tyres,
he swung the car hard left onto the riverside at Merchant’s Quay. From there he put his foot to the floor and kept his hand
on the horn as they sped past bridge after bridge, leaving it to fate and sobriety to stop any other traffic straying into
his path. Cassidy, who’d only just made it into the passenger seat before Mulcahy gunned the Saab and roared away, spent most
of the journey in silence, one hand lodged like a shock absorber between the car ceiling and his head, cursing every time
a wheel slammed into a pothole, watching the road ahead with the fixed focus of a man who’s been in many a chase at speed
and never once enjoyed the experience. Mulcahy barely noticed him or, if he did, he didn’t care. His focus was on beating
the Irish land speed record. Up the quays he sped, from Merchant’s to Usher’s to Victoria until finally, at Heuston Station,
he ripped a few more millimetres off his tyres swinging north across the bridge to hare up Parkgate Street and in through
the monumental stone pillars guarding the entrance to the Phoenix Park.

‘Are you not even going to ask me why?’ Cassidy finally said, as they plunged headlong into the darkness of the Park itself.
Mulcahy switched on his main beams then glanced quickly over at him, as much time as he could spare before he had to twist
the car into and out of a roundabout.

‘No,’ he said coldly. ‘You shafted me. Why would a reason, good or bad, make any difference to me?’

‘Maybe now’s not the time,’ Cassidy said. And Mulcahy just grunted as he floored the accelerator again, blazing a full mile
up the rule-straight carriageway until, at the Phoenix Monument, he swung the wheel hard left and sped down into the still
deeper darkness of Acres Road. Without any warning, he killed the headlights, and his speed, and let the car coast on into
the black stillness. Mulcahy hushed Cassidy’s gasp with a peremptory ‘Shush!’ He strained forward, trying to make out the
way ahead, then steered the car onto a narrow slip road. He slowed to a snail’s pace. Around them a thinly wooded copse of
silver birch loomed like the endlessly mirrored bars of a cage, blocking their line of sight both ahead and to the right. To
their left, spread out beyond the broad grass plain stretching away to the south, the lights of the suburbs twinkled on the
skyline like a galaxy of earthbound stars. Mulcahy brought the car to a halt in front of a low red-and-white metal barrier
that blocked any further progress.

At just that moment, as if some higher power had decided to lend a hand, the thick cloud cover split apart and a huge moon
lit up the landscape all around them. Finding themselves staring ahead across a vast expanse of lonely car park, both men
seemed awestruck by what was revealed in the distance ahead: the steep grassy mound rising up from the flat land all around,
the high sweep of stone steps cut into its side, the vast metal cross rising fifty, maybe sixty metres
into the night sky, its twin arms spread in glory, its cold, hard steel blazing white in the moonlight. And below it, even
more exposed than they were, a lone white van was parked at the bottom of the steps – the only vehicle in sight.

‘It’s him.’ Mulcahy turned to Cassidy, the tension cracking his voice.

‘What the fuck is he up to?’ Cassidy whispered. But neither of their imaginations wanted to go there.