Eye for an Eye by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page A

nine-thirty in the evening and Dermot was still denying that he had struck Father Fiachra with the rock.
    Katie and Detective O’Donovan had been interviewing him now for almost five hours, but all he would say was, ‘I was wearing the hood, I admit it. I was there in the auld wan’s garden, I admit it.’
    ‘There’s no way at all that you can deny it, Dermot,’ said Katie. ‘Your hair and your spit were found inside the hood and your footprint and one of the eyes from your hood was found in Mary O’Donnell’s flower bed.’
    ‘I never saw no priest, though. I swear on the Bible. I never saw no priest and I never hit him with no rocker.’
    ‘If you didn’t see him it would have been hard for you to hit him, I’ll grant you that,’ Katie told him. ‘But the fact is, Dermot, there was nobody else in that garden that morning except for you and him, so who else could have attacked him?’
    ‘I never saw no priest, I swear on the Holy Bible. I never saw no priest and I never hit him with no rocker.’
    Dermot’s solicitor Bryan Doody gave a long, exaggerated sigh. He was a short, portly man with a snub nose and a comb-over, and a navy pinstriped suit that was two sizes too tight for him, and he smelled strongly of stale cigars. All the same, he was a partner in one of the most expensive firms of lawyers on South Mall and Katie knew from experience that he wasn’t to be underestimated.
    ‘I don’t see the need for you to keep repeating the same question over and over again, Detective Superintendent,’ he told her. ‘My client has admitted that he was attempting to alarm Mrs O’Donnell, but only as joke. A bad joke, I’ll grant you, but Mrs O’Donnell’s refusal to sell her property to the Toolmate company had caused a great deal of ill feeling, since the future of so many local jobs depended on it. It wasn’t as if Toolmate weren’t offering her a price that was far above the market valuation.’
    He dragged out a handkerchief and loudly blew his nose. Then he said, ‘You have circumstantial evidence that shows that my client was at some time in Mrs O’Donnell’s garden, I’m prepared to grant you that. But your evidence in no way establishes that he was there at the same time as Father Fiachra, and it certainly doesn’t prove that he attacked him.
    ‘Quite apart from that, my client is an extremely God-fearing man and it would be totally against his faith to inflict harm of any kind on a member of the clergy.’
    ‘Very well,’ said Katie, checking her watch. ‘Let’s call an end to this interview for now. But I have to advise you that I’ll be asking your client further questions tomorrow morning.’
    Bryan Doody stood up and tucked his notes into his briefcase. ‘You can question him as much as you like, Detective Superintendent, but you’ll only get the same answer. He played a prank on Mrs O’Donnell, but as far as I know there has never been a law in Ireland against playing pranks. If there were, every member of the Dáil would have been locked up years ago.’
    He smiled and held out his hand, but Katie didn’t take it.
    ‘I’m in court tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘If you need to contact me, here’s my card. As I say, you can question my client until you’re black in the face, for all the good it will do you. He can’t admit to something that he didn’t do, and in any event you’ll have to release him by lunchtime, unless your chief superintendent makes an application to the district court to hold him for longer.’
    *
    That night, before she went to bed, Katie stood for a long time in front of the full-length mirror in her wardrobe. It had been two weeks since she had been to the hairdresser and her dark red hair looked as if she had been standing in a hurricane, but she had dropped a dress size since Easter and even though she was pale she thought she looked much better than she felt.
    It was the endless legal wrangling that made her feel so tired. Bryan Doody