Turbulent Priests (Dan Starkey 3) (29 page)

I lay for ten minutes, curled, trying to hear above the wind and the rain and my laboured breath. It was the doctor who gathered himself first, calling out, ‘Duncan? Are you there?’ in a shaky voice. ‘Dan, are you there? Willie, are you okay? Can any of youse hear me?’ And Duncan emerged from the grass not fifteen yards from me and I rose too and we worked our way silently back through the hedge to Finlay, leaning ashen-faced on the bonnet of the Land-Rover.

‘Jesus,’ was all we managed between us for a while, then we sought the poor comfort of the interior of the car. Daylight would provide answers to questions we scarcely dared think about. It wasn’t much more than an hour to wait, but it stretched interminably; time had slowed . . . slowed . . . slowed until with the greying light we creakily climbed from the vehicle and stretched, an unpleasant stretch that emphasised our dampness.

‘Bloody hell,’ Dr Finlay said, his first words in some time. He looked older already, haggard, haunted.

‘Bloody Mother Reilly,’ I said.

‘Aye,’ said Finlay.

‘That’s what I like to see in an older woman,’ I said, ‘her sense of humour still intact. I’m glad her neck isn’t.’

Finlay turned as Duncan joined us. ‘You all right, son?’ he asked.

Duncan nodded morosely and looked at his watch. ‘I’ll have to go soon,’ he said. ‘What’re we going to do?’

‘Take a look,’ said Finlay, nodding across at the trench.

‘Naturally,’ I added.

‘Must we?’ said Duncan. ‘We must,’ said Finlay grimly, and stepped forward.

‘Can’t we just leave them?’ Duncan said.

Finlay ignored him. ‘It’s too late for that, mate,’ I said, and moved after the doctor. Reluctantly, Duncan followed.

The doctor stood at the edge of the trench, looking down, shaking his head. We joined him on either side, and were soon shaking our heads too. It was a mess. Human spaghetti, a mixture of the caved-in long-dead and the rotting newly dead, oozing together in the autumnal mud. Six bodies. Twelve feet, at any rate. Two of them, the bodies, not the feet, it was immediately apparent, were those of Mickey Murtagh and Mary Reilly.

Finlay stepped down into the trench. ‘I’ll need some help,’ he said, looking back up.

I nodded and stepped down. Duncan stayed where he was. ‘What’re you doing?’ he said, averting his eyes from the corpses.

‘We’re going to have to lift them out,’ said the doctor, rolling up his sleeves, ‘get them separated as best we can.’

‘But why . . . shouldn’t we leave them be . . . I mean . . . for forensics or whoever deals with . . .?’

Finlay’s head whipped round. ‘Will you snap out of it, man!’ he roared. ‘No one is coming to sort this out! We need to know who these people are, and how they got here. We need to know the truth.’ He shook his head, tutted, turned back to the corpses. ‘For God’s sake, Starkey, tell him, tell him to get back to the real world.’

The surreal world, actually, but he had a point. Duncan wanted to practise what I had preached, but not practised, which was hiding in bed until everything went away. ‘He’s right, Duncan,’ I said, ‘we have to find out for ourselves what happened. Nobody else is going to do it for us. Come on down and give us a hand – I mean, they’re only dead bodies. They can’t do you any harm.’

‘Aye, you didn’t feel that way last night.’

‘It scared the shit out of all of us, Duncan, but it’s different now. Come on down. Eh?’

‘I don’t like this at all,’ Duncan said, but he carefully dropped down into the trench, steadying himself for a moment against me while his feet found their proper level in the mud. His nose curled up in disgust. ‘They stink.’

And they did. They were gag-makingly rotten. Willie Nutt’s aroma would have served them as an underarm deodorant, had their underarms not largely oozed away.

Murtagh and Mary were no trouble. We lay them in the grass. Each time, I grabbed a leg. A cold, hard leg, slimy with mud. Murtagh was heavy with death. Mary was just heavy.

The others, beneath, were not as fresh. Duncan was sick three times. Me twice. The doctor not at all, though he choked up a couple of times. It took us half an hour to carry, coax, cajole and yes, well, pour, the remaining bodies above ground. When finally they all lay side by side, Dr Finlay set about examining them properly. Duncan and I sat back against the car and tried to make small talk. It was very small. Every once in a while our eyes drifted back to the doctor, poking into ribs, carefully pulling apart rotting clothes, nodding, tutting, spitting behind him.

Duncan looked at his watch again. ‘I’ll have to go soon,’ he said. ‘I’ve school to teach. If the kids arrive and I’m not there they’ll be suspicious. No, not suspicious, concerned. They’ll tell their parents.
They’ll
be suspicious.’

‘Let them be, we’ve a mass murder here.’

‘We don’t know it’s murder, Dan.’

I laughed. ‘What the hell do you think it is? You think that every once in a while someone walks through this field and falls into a hole and is never heard of again?’

‘It’s not impossible.’

‘You know it is.’

‘You’re jumping to conclusions. It could be old Mulrooney getting protective about people going on his property.’

‘Like trespassers will be executed.’

‘I’m not saying it is, I’m saying it could be.’

I shook my head. Dr Finlay spat behind him again. Duncan looked at his watch again.

‘It’s gone eight,’ he said.

Dr Finlay trudged slowly back to us. Ignored us, in fact, for a few moments while he leant heavily on the bonnet of the Land-Rover. There were tears in his eyes. He had come looking for fine Irish whiskey and ended up to his elbows in decaying people. He had a right to cry.

I put a hand on his left shoulder. ‘You okay?’

He nodded wearily. His hair was plastered to his scalp; his jaw, thickly stubbled, hung down, heavy; his lips were dry and cracked.

‘So what did you find?’ Duncan asked bluntly.

Finlay pushed himself off the car. He held his hands up, level with his chest, looked about him, confused for a moment. Looking for somewhere to wash them. Then he shook his head.
Silly
, he mouthed. He rubbed them down his trousers. ‘Well,’ he said. And stopped. And looked back at death row. He gave a slight shake of his head. ‘I don’t ever want to have to do that again.’

‘Who would?’ said Duncan.

‘What about Murtagh and Mary?’ I asked. ‘I take it death wasn’t by drowning.’

‘No. Of course not. They were both shot. In the chest. Looks like a shotgun did it. They’re practically hollow.’

‘Oh God,’ said Duncan, turning away. He took a deep breath of the sea wind. ‘Oh God,’ he said again.

‘And the others?’ I asked.

‘I’d say much the same. Difficult to tell. They’re pretty far gone.’

‘Have you any idea at all who they were?’

‘Yes and no. Two of them I can make a stab at. One’s a priest of some description; at any rate, he’s wearing a dog collar, although I’m not aware that we’ve gone short of priests in the recent past.’

‘How long do you reckon he’s been dead?’

‘I couldn’t say, not accurately. It’s not really my field. Six months, maybe. The other one, he’s been under a good deal longer, but at least we can put a name to him. Mark Blundell. From Belfast.’

‘You recognise him?’

‘If I knew someone looked like that, I’d be worried.’

‘So how . . .?’

‘Detective work. And this.’ He reached into the side pocket of his jacket and produced a damp-looking leather wallet. ‘Inside his coat.’ He handed it to me and I flipped it open. The contents were remarkably well preserved, considering where they’d been; there were a few damp spots on the three twenty-pound notes I withdrew and the half-dozen fast cash receipts were badly faded. The Visa card looked as good as new. A plastic-coated Department of the Environment identity card. A driving licence. A curling photo of a woman with two toddlers.

Duncan took the driving licence from me. He examined the photo. Shook his head. ‘He’s changed,’ he said.

I took it back. ‘Thank you, Sherlock,’ I said.

Duncan turned away again. ‘I hate this. All of it.’

‘What do they tell you, Starkey?’ the doctor asked. I could tell he already knew.

I quickly re-examined the evidence. ‘That he’s been underground about six years. That’s how long the autobank receipts date back. That he was based at the Department of the Environment in Belfast. That he was married with a couple of kids.’

‘Anything else?’

‘That he was probably here on a work-related matter. The receipts are dated for early February. You don’t get tourists that time of the year, do you?’

Finlay shook his head. ‘Rarely. Bird watchers, mostly. Some government people during the winter, but they’re always Department of Agriculture, checking we’re not exceeding our fishing quotas or trying to sell us on the benefits of myxomatosis. I can’t think why someone from Environment would bother with us – and get shot for his trouble, if that’s not going a bit far.’

Duncan nodded across at the line of corpses. ‘The other two – one of them couldn’t be his wife, could it? Maybe they’re all bird watchers . . . an accident . . .’ He trailed off. ‘We sometimes get bird watchers during the winter, maybe the two of them . . .?’

Finlay shook his head. ‘They’re both male. Young adults. Eighteen. Seventeen. God love them.’

‘His wife’s probably still sitting at home waiting for him then,’ said Duncan.

‘Four people don’t just disappear without anyone noticing,’ I pointed out.

‘Not here anyway. I’d know about it. For sure.’

‘So apart from Mary and Murtagh then, we can surmise that the four others are all from the mainland.’

‘Aye. I suppose.’

‘And we can also surmise that Father White and his fellow travellers, having made such a public show of the search for Mary and Murtagh and finding the boat and his gun and his warrant card, are not only involved in their murder, but in the murder of four others as well.’

‘Aye, it would be looking that way.’

‘But what would be the bloody point?’ shouted Duncan, throwing his hands up angrily. ‘It’s all meant to be about love and salvation. Not this.’

‘Well, that’s the million-dollar question, Duncan,’ I said. Finlay shook his head ruefully. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’ He slapped his hand down on the bonnet, then bunched it up into a fist and ground it into the palm of his other hand. ‘That trial, that bloody trial, was all about protecting Christine. But it wasn’t about
this
. . .’

‘What about the priest?’ Duncan asked.

I had a pretty good idea. The Primate had been wrong. I had been right. Murdered, not converted. I said, ‘If he’s only been dead six months, then the chances are he was visiting and found out too much . . .’

Finlay nodded. ‘That’s possible. But this chap from the Environment. My God, Starkey, if he’s been down there for
six years – that pre-dates any thought of Christine by two years. What’s the bloody point in that?’

I shrugged. There didn’t have to be a point, or if there was, it was a point of no return, a point we had just passed.

The whole notion of Christine as the daughter of God had been both disturbing and mildly comical. The flight of Mary and Murtagh had elevated it to the darkly bizarre. Their presumed drowning had transformed it into tragedy. Now, with the rotting corpses, it had metamorphosed yet again: now it was a horror story, and one that clearly had not yet reached its conclusion.

A slight drop in the wind made us turn suddenly back up the field at the sound of an engine. Another Land-Rover was just turning towards us through the gate.

‘Oh Jesus Christ,’ wailed Duncan, ‘they’re going to kill us too!’

His huge frame swivelled deftly, his eyes darted about, panicked. Then he dashed the few yards from the doctor’s car to the hedge. He threw himself into it, head first, then thrashed about for a few moments before finally disappearing.

Dr Finlay turned to me. He nodded down at the line of corpses. ‘So what’s our story?’

‘I’m working on it,’ I said.

36

Duncan was too far gone for us to shout after him not to worry, his big loping strides taking him over the hill and far away when all he had to face was my wife, Little Stevie, Father Flynn, Moira McCooey and the manifestation of God Almighty on earth, or indeed Christine, trundling along the track we’d made the previous night.

I recognised the dent in the side of the car first, then as it drew closer Patricia stuck her head out of the passenger window and shouted something, but it was carried away on the wind. As the priest stopped the vehicle Dr Finlay strode forward with his hands raised.

‘I’d stay where you are for the moment!’ he bellowed.

Flynn, his door already open, hesitated. Patricia climbed out. Christine ducked out behind her. Moira held Little Stevie in the back seat.

Finlay tried to block her path as my wife ran towards me, but she dodged him easily. I was ready for the hug. A warm embrace. I’d missed her, albeit subconsciously.

But she was coming at me too fast, was too close by the time I recognised the venom in her eyes and the black pouches beneath them. I opened my mouth. She raised her palms and gave me a huge shove. I toppled back into the sodden ground. Christine let out a
Yippee
and ran behind, laughing.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ Patricia yelled.

‘Trish, for God’s . . .’

‘I’ve been up all fucking night, worried to death!’

Dr Finlay put a placatory hand on her shoulder. ‘Mrs Starkey . . .’

‘Fuck off!’ she spat, slapping it away. She kicked out at me. I scrambled away. ‘You’ve no consideration for anyone, have you? Not for me! Not for the baby! Anything could have . . .’

Christine screamed. Shrill. A scream of innocence tarnished. We all turned. She stood by the line of corpses, her blond hair running away behind her in the wind, her tiny face blanched.

Moira struggled out of the car and hurried across, thrusting Little Stevie into Patricia’s arms as she passed. Then came Father Flynn. I jumped to my feet and with a shrug for Patricia moved down to where Dr Finlay had already lifted Christine into his arms.