Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page A

least we have an idea now of when Father Heaney was dumped in the river. Let’s check all the CCTV cameras in a fifteen-mile radius... Cork City, Mallow, Limerick, Fermoy. We might be able to pick up this van on its way to Ballyhooly, find out where it came from.’
    ‘Right you are. I’ll get on to it.’
    Just then Chief Superintendent Dermot O’Driscoll knocked at her office door. ‘Katie – spare me a moment, would you?’
    ‘Of course.’ She always had time for Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll. He was a big man, with a red face the colour of corned beef and a wild wave of white hair. He was a man’s man, an enthusiastic follower of rugby and hurling, and a prodigious drinker on his days off, but he had supported Katie’s promotion from the very beginning and he continued to defend her whenever he thought she needed it. He had great respect for what he called her ‘detectivating talents’ and he believed that women have a much keener nose than men for liars and cheats and chancers. ‘Women can smell a load of cat’s malogian a mile off.’
    Sergeant O’Rourke and Detective O’Donovan left the office and Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll came in and hoisted his huge left buttock on to the edge of Katie’s desk. He was eating a pasty and every now and then he had to brush the crumbs from his belly.
    ‘How’s it going, then?’ he asked her, with his mouth full.
    ‘Too soon to say yet. I think the autopsy will tell us a lot more.’
    ‘Would you believe that I’ve just this minute had a phone call from the diocese offices on Redemption Road? The Right Reverend Monsignor Kevin Kelly, vicar general.’
    ‘Oh, yes? What did he want?’
    ‘He says that he might have solved our murder for us.’
    ‘Really? I know that some clergy are supposed to be able to work miracles, but how exactly has he managed to do that?’
    ‘He preferred not to tell me over the phone, but respectfully asked if we could pay him a visit at the diocese office.’
    ‘Oh, well, fair play to him. If he asked us respectfully . And if he really has solved it, that will save us quite a bit of trouble, won’t it?’
    Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll finished his pasty and smacked his hands together to get rid of the crumbs. ‘You never know, Katie. Stranger things have happened. About six or seven years ago I was totally stumped by a stabbing I was looking into, in Sunday’s Well. I had no witnesses, no weapon, and no forensics at all. But as soon as the victim’s name was printed in the paper, a priest rang me up and said that by chance he had got a crossed line when he was calling his mother, and he had overheard the dead fellow arguing with another fellow, and this other fellow had threatened to come around and stick a knife in him. The priest only caught the other fellow’s nickname, which was Tazzer, but since the dead fellow had only ever known one fellow whose nickname was Tazzer, I was able to collar him in about half an hour flat.’
    ‘And the priest was given a reward, I hope?’
    ‘No. The budget didn’t run to it. But he’ll get his reward in heaven, one day, you can be sure of that.’

10
    As he regained consciousness, Father Quinlan became aware that he could faintly hear singing – the high, sweet, penetrating voices of St Joseph’s Orphanage Choir, singing ‘ Ave Maria ’.
    He opened his eyes to see a triangle of sunshine on the ceiling. His vision was blurry and he felt as if he had been beaten all over. His nose was throbbing and blocked up with dried blood, his shoulders ached, and his ribs were so tender that he had to breathe in quick, shallow gasps. Both of his knees were painfully swollen, and even his toes felt smashed, as if somebody had repeatedly stamped on his feet.
    He grunted and tried to sit up but he had been lashed with nylon washing line to the single bed he was lying on, and he could manage only to lift his head two or three inches. Apart from that, his neck was so stiff that he could