Listening to Father Joe slowly climb the staircase, Lottie thought his footsteps sounded heavy with the weight of the sins of his church.
She felt physically ill studying the script, couldn’t read any more, so she quickly photographed the pages with her phone camera. She tried to record as much of the large book as she could. Calculating a grid in her head, she photographed in chronological order; she would piece them together on her own computer. This will not remain hidden, she vowed silently. The names inked on the pages seemed so impersonal, devoid of humanity; she wanted to read each one in her own time. They referenced a life story, a heartbeat and a heartbreak. And she was confident they related to the current murders in Ragmullin. James Brown and Susan Sullivan had spent time together in St Angela’s. And she was sure the connection to their murders was buried somewhere in this dungeon of ledgers.
When she’d finished photographing, she turned her attention to the shelves and scanned the dates inscribed on the dusty spines. Early 1900s up to the 1980s. She doubled back and plucked out a thin, 1970s ledger with references A100 to AA500. She located what she thought to be the relevant pages, hurriedly photographed without reading and returned it to the shelf. She searched for the boys’ ledgers. She discovered them on a bottom shelf, found 1975, photographed each page and returned the ledger to its dusty resting place. She did the same for the first half of 1976. She couldn’t bring herself to read it all now. And she wondered why Father Joe hadn’t just photographed the pages and emailed them to her?
The door opened. Father Joe stood with his hands thrust deep in his pockets.
‘You inferred last night,’ Lottie said, ‘that all this had something to do with Bishop Connor, but I don’t see any evidence here.’
‘Look at the signature at the end of each row of the priest’s movements,’ he instructed.
She did. A spindly scrawl, but there was no doubt whose name it was. Terence Connor.
‘I need to ring Boyd,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘I want him to talk to this Father Cornelius Mohan. He served in Ragmullin parish and was assigned to St Angela’s for three years.’ She looked at her phone. No signal.
‘Let’s get some air,’ she said.
Nausea threatened to overcome her, after what she’d just read. Brushing past Father Joe, taking two steps at a time, she hurried as if the dead had risen from the dusty pages and were following in her footsteps.
Outside, she walked in small circles under a streetlight. The tall buildings, leaning inwards, appeared to be grasping the shadows and throwing them around her like gravel in a sandpit.
‘Will you continue to search the other ledgers for me?’ she asked. ‘See what you can find? I’m sure everything connects to St Angela’s.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Father Joe said. ‘But how can you be sure?’
‘It has to be a cover-up and the mistake Father Angelotti made must have something to do with the reference numbers.’ Lottie tapped her phone. ‘Things are beginning to make some sense.’
She checked the signal and called Boyd.
Seventy-Three
It was closing time at the gym. The thump-thump music was consigned to the depths of nowhere and someone was flicking the lights on and off. Boyd completed his warm-down, switched off the treadmill and hurried to the locker room.
Mike O’Brien was buttoning his shirt at the neck, twisting in his cufflinks, his face red, bulging from exertion. He had turned his back and was pulling on his jacket when Boyd’s phone rang.
Boyd checked the caller ID, swore and answered.
‘Boyd,’ he said and listened as Lottie spoke.
‘Father Cornelius Mohan,’ he repeated, searching his gym bag. ‘I can’t find a pen, hold on.’
O’Brien held out a ballpoint, extracted from his breast pocket. Boyd took it, nodding a thank you.
‘Go ahead. Yes, I have that. Ballinacloy. Very good. Yeah, straight away.’
He wanted to ask Lottie a whole lot more, but she had hung up on him.
‘And I love you too,’ he said sarcastically to the phone in his hand.
He handed the pen back to O’Brien, lifted his bag and left the gym without any small talk.
Ballinacloy, a village of almost two hundred souls or sinners – whichever way you wanted to look at it – was situated fifteen kilometres outside Ragmullin, on the old Athlone Road.
Out in the yard, Father Cornelius Mohan packed turf into a basket. A cigarette hung from his chapped lips. Proud of his agility at his age, he was frustrated with how the snow had debilitated him. He feared falling and fracturing a hip.
As he turned to go back inside, the light dimmed. Someone had walked in front of the door, blocking the glow of the bulb. The old priest raised his white head and looked directly into a set of dark eyes. He felt pain grasp his heart and his breathing laboured. The turf basket crashed to the ground and the cigarette fell from his mouth on to the snow, sizzling for a moment before the red butt blackened and extinguished.
‘Remember me?’ The voice echoed, distorted by a gust of wind.
The old priest looked at the face, partially shielded by a black hood. Though the face was older, the eyes held the same coldness from long ago; an emotionless being he himself had helped nurture. And he knew a day like this would come.
Turning away, he kicked the basket and tried to run. His old legs refused to move quickly.
‘Go away,’ he shouted. ‘Leave me be.’
‘So you do remember me.’
A hand grabbed his shoulder. The priest shrugged it off and hobbled to the corner of the house before he stumbled on an iron grill over a drain. As he fell backwards his assailant jumped on top of him, pinning him to the ground.
‘What do you want from me?’ the old priest croaked.
‘You stole from me.’ The tone was menacing.
‘I never stole anything in my life.’
‘You stole my life.’
‘Your life was already nothing,’ he spat. ‘You should thank me for saving you from evil.’
‘You introduced me to evil, you mad old bastard. All my life I’ve waited for this moment and now at last I can send you on your way to the eternal fires.’
‘Go to hell.’
Father Cornelius was already struggling for air when the cord tightened around his throat. He thought he heard the ringing of bells, before his world went black.
Boyd kept his finger pressed on the doorbell. It was bright inside and he could see the backyard light was on.
No answer.
‘Come on,’ he told Lynch and walked around the side of the house.
The yard was lit by a solitary bulb, too low a wattage to cast light any distance. The moon, though low in the sky, cast the trees in a soft silhouette.
Lynch tiptoed behind him. He was glad he’d called her. He needed the company.
At the rear of the house, a figure lay motionless on the ground. Boyd struck out his arm, stopping Lynch in her tracks.
‘What?’ she asked, bumping into him.
Boyd looked back at her, put a finger to his lips and listened.