As he came in through the front door of the presbytery, he saw Mrs. Flannery seated on the edge of the chair which stood beneath a print of Our Lady of Perpetual Succor. She looked like a woman in a doctor's waiting room, and stood upright as Frank appeared. She had an officious and chastising whisper, and that was what emerged from her lips now. “The monsignor's been waiting for you. He's in his office with that policeman.”
Which policeman? Surely the Lidcombe affair was not a matter for the civil police.
“Go in, Father,” said Mrs. Flannery, gesturing with one hand. “Go in!”
Darragh did so. Monsignor Carolan and Detective Inspector Kearney were drinking whisky together, seated either side of the monsignor's desk.
“The man of the hour,” said Inspector Kearney, putting down his glass. His double-breasted coat was unbuttoned and the monsignor was in his customary autumn cardigan. They had an air of being at easy understanding with each other and with the whisky they shared. But the monsignor seemed embarrassed as he stood up.
“Well,” he said, and shook his head. “Frank . . .”
The detective rose too, and began to button his suit coat. He said, “We presume you don't know, Father Frank. Mrs. Catherine Heggarty is dead.”
Darragh became instantly giddy and was jolted sideways a step. The world had become too fast in its malice. He leaned against the wall and was gratified in some minor key of his senses to assure himself that it, at least, was still solid. Somehow the detective inspector produced a third glass from the table and sloshed some whisky and soda into it. Looking keenly at Darragh, he said, “You should have this, son.”
Rather than believe what had been said, he was willing to accept the monsignor and inspector had devised this chastising lie to save him from folly. But Monsignor Carolan still seemed more tremulous than Darragh might ever have imagined him to be. He said, “Because you had your Monday off, I had to give the poor thing her last rites. Rigor hadn't set in. I hope her soul was still there. Because the circumstances . . . they weren't promising.”
It was good priestly practice to absolve bodies not utterly claimed by death's iciness, in the hope that a repentant soul lingered, awaiting the blessed word.
Breath returned to Darragh. “She can't be . . . she was at Mrs. Flood's burial. Just ten days or so ago.”
“Ten days is a long time, Father Frank.”
“Tell me,” said Darragh. “Was she in an accident?”
His soul at a distance from the room, he observed Inspector Kearney inform the Monday tennis-playing dolt who had wandered into the monsignor's study. “Misadventure,” said Kearney. She had been found strangled early that morning. Did they, Darragh and the monsignor, really know what strangulation was? asked Kearney. It was harder than in the films to strangle any healthy soul; it took either great strength or great accidental bad luck on the part of the victim, and sometimes of the killer. This hadn't been bad luck. This had been strength. And it had not been done by someone who had forced his way in. There were no signs of that. Quite the contrary, Kearney asserted.
Darragh, in misery, returned to his body and heard the inspector's words as a distinct series of bricks, or stones, laid in place. “It takes strength,” Kearney explained in a lowered voice, “to close off the esophagus of someone healthy, to crush the larynx. Then at the same time, this strangler of Mrs. Heggarty's constricted the arteries carrying blood to the brain. That takes double strength. Neighbors haven't told the son yet, he's been staying with them overnight. They got him ready for school and he's over with the nuns now.”
“I must see to him,” said Darragh.
The monsignor shook his head. “There'll be time, and there'll be others to do it too. Stand still, for God's sake, Frank.”
“His father was taken prisoner,” explained Darragh, to justify going over there, extracting Anthony . . . and then what?
“It's probably a case for the sisters at Killcare,” the monsignor said. The Order of St. Joseph ran an orphanage at Killcare, between surf and bush, north of Sydney.
Darragh still thought he could sidestep the evil rumor of strangulation, a phenomenon unknown among women in Homebush and Strathfield, suburbs which, whatever their ordinary and even occasionally perverse sins, protected their citizens with the dome of their own blessed banality. It was a concept, too, which could not be fitted to what he knew of Mrs. Heggarty. So for a time he concentrated his uncertain but awful grief on that orphanage some hours distant. Killcare, he knew by instinct, would be overcrowded because of war, and because of the Depression, which only war had put pause to. It was not a homely institution. Anthony Heggarty, Darragh was sure, would prove an unsuitable orphan. He would prove short of the stoicism his situation asked of him.
“I can't accept what you're telling me. She was far too strong to be strangled.” The word itself invited incredulity.
“You'd better accept it,” said the monsignor, his face reddening. “Do you think we'd say a thing like that just for the joy of uttering it?” The monsignor had a sourness in his mouth he would gladly have spat out, but could not do it here, in his orderly study.
“You knew her, didn't you?” asked Inspector Kearney. “In your role as spiritual adviser.”
The mad idea came to Darragh that if Kearney had possessed the nobility to go off beer for Lent, Kate Heggarty would be alive. But she was not dead, he knew. It was still a tableau they'd devised to punish him for Lidcombe. And for having invited her into the presbytery. “See, we warned you about women. . . .” But the monsignor had talked about last rites and rigor mortis. He wouldn't do that. He wouldn't be such a ghoul.
“I'm her spiritual adviser,” said Darragh. “As far as I know. I haven't made a lot of progress.”
The monsignor assured him, “I checked with the diocesan canon lawyer, Dr. Field. He advised me that in these circumstances you are able to tell the inspector anything likely to help, unless of course it's under the seal of the confessional. The poor thing will have few secrets anyhow, not now. Everything will become public property.”
“Did she ask you about anything you can tell me?” asked Kearney. He was not as on edge as the monsignor. His work had inured him. “You see,” he said, “I'm asking you the same question as I asked you about that young runaway brother.”
Darragh could not frame words. He did not want to have her decisions, her rebellion and apostasy even, interpreted away in the stock terms of monsignors and policemen. “Well, I don't know . . .”
“But she came to the presbytery,” stated the monsignor, flushed and insistent. “She had a conference with you as her spiritual director, didn't she? It's not as if Mr. Kearney's asking you to spill the beans from the heart of the confessional.”
“Yes, but I don't know that she sought advice on anything that would lead to this terrible . . . this terrible result. She is strangled?”
“Yes,” said the inspector.
The monsignor, more frankly annoyed than Darragh had ever seen him, began to do the inspector's task. “Men are stranglers, Frank. You've never read in any newspaper of a strangling woman. And men worry soldiers' wives. I'd say that she talked to you about men. Did she?”
Frank felt that if he said as much they would nod like elders and write her off as a loose woman, a whore, asking for it. He believed more strongly in her honesty than he did in her murder, and felt a duty to protect it.
“Please, Frank,” said the inspector.
“She told me that she had problems of faith. Her husband had been taken prisoner and it made her doubt the Church's goodwill.”
“We didn't take her husband prisoner,” the monsignor complained.
“I'd like to see her body before I tell her confidences.”
“What's wrong with you?” asked the monsignor. “She's lost her right to confidences, poor thing.”
Inspector Kearney had lowered his eyes. “It's not possible, Father Frank. The body's been moved to the morgue. Awaiting the coroner's inquest.”
&nb
sp; He had half hoped that if she had been laid out in her house in the Crescent, he might be permitted to visit her. Darragh began to weep for her now. She was far gone into the hands of strangers.
To preserve her some small dignity, he said, “She told me nothing which explains this!” The this he had not quite yet managed to believe in.
“But you must want her killer found, Father?” Kearney suggested.
Of course Darragh did, though he could barely believe in the man's existence.
“She said she could not remain a practicing Catholic. I was very distressed to hear it. She told me that she felt very bitterly the injustice that her husband was a prisoner. His soldier's pay was not enough for her and her son to live on in dignity, she said. I told her I'd contact St. Vincent de Paul to see if they could help her, but she said she was too proud for that. She quoted ‘Rerum Novarum.' ”
“The social justice encyclical,” the monsignor informed the inspector. “I've heard a lot of troublemakers quote that one in my day.”
The monsignor had anointed her extremities and her fine mute eyes, yet she had affronted him by being found so unfortunately treated.
“Did she mention a man?” asked the inspector. “Her neighbors mentioned a man.”
Darragh was awed by the potency of that question. “Was she interfered with?” he asked without hesitation.
“Not directly,” said the inspector, getting this matter out of the way. “There was some stuff deposited on her, probably afterwards . . . a lot of stranglers are like that. They're better with the dead than the living.”
Darragh was chastened by the image of this frightful kindly man. His awful masturbation made all the schoolboys in the confessional seem like cherubim.
“She mentioned a kindly man,” said Darragh. He was willing to help even an imperfect agent like Kearney. “She knew it was a risk having him come to the house, but she said he wasn't demanding, and he helped her maintain her dignity.”
“How did he do that?”
Darragh knew how his answer would be interpreted. But there was no way of not saying it.
“He brought her things which she felt contributed to her dignity.”
“What sort of things?”
“Extra food . . .”
“Dignity,” said the monsignor with a feverish air of knowingness to Inspector Kearney. “A woman making up her mind to adultery in return for a pair of stockings.”
Darragh thought he might punch him, which was a cause of automatic excommunication under canon law.
“That's an unfair view, Monsignor,” he said. He could feel his own face blazing to match the monsignor's. He and the monsignor were like two hot poles, with the cunning, cool terrain of the inspector connecting them. “She had a genuine desire that she and her son wouldn't be degraded by want.”
“Such a sentiment,” said the monsignor, “doesn't alter my first impression. Frank, if you don't see as much, then you need to take a few more courses in moral theology.”
Darragh said, “Monsignor, please stop pretending I'm stupid.”
“And you, Frankie, you stop pretending we're stupid. The inspector and I have in our different ways been round the block a few times. It isn't bush week, you know, not with us. You'll be treated as you treat us.”
Frank found it hard to put in words, but it seemed to him that the monsignor was taking unnecessary and disloyal pains to do the policeman's work, while Inspector Kearney sat by with a priestly serenity on his broad and normally combative face.
“She told me she wasn't going to be one of those hypocritical Catholics,” said Darragh, “who risked sin and then crept back to the confessional. She said she wanted to be honest about it. She said her generous friend had not asked for anything, but she knew that he might, and told me that it was a moral risk she was willing to bear.”
“And she told you nothing about who this fellow was?” Kearney asked calmly.
“No.”
“An American soldier?”
“I don't know. She didn't make a point of that. She seemed to want God and me to be under no illusions.”
“A contract between unequal parties,” said angry Monsignor Carolan.
“I think you should have another drink, Vince,” the inspector told him. “There are some things I haven't managed to tell you or ask Frank yet.”
The monsignor sat down, panting. Darragh sensed the shock his parish priest had suffered, and felt a fraternal sympathy for him.
“Did you ever visit her home?” asked Kearney.
“Yes,” said Frank. His memory of going there recurred to him as an indefinably sweet instant, a daydream exalted and enhanced by duty.
“Oh dear God,” said the monsignor.
“I hadn't told the monsignor,” said Kearney, “but we found a letter of yours in her little lounge room.”
“I thought she was too fine a spirit to write off,” Darragh explained. “I offered further spiritual counsel . . .”
The monsignor said, “‘Spiritual counsel,' ” as if he disbelieved both words.
“There was no stamp on the envelope,” the inspector observed. “And no postmark.”
“I sent it home with her son.”
The monsignor's eyes were again engorged in a way that Darragh found himself tempted to detest. They were underlined by patches of furious red high on the cheeks. “Infatuation's little messenger, eh, Frank?” he asked.
“No,” said Darragh. “No.” He would become angry with the monsignor, but later. Yet Darragh believed the fellow should know, if he was so damn experienced, that the worst thing one priest could do to another was to raise accusations of physical attraction in front of a layman.
The monsignor compounded the wrong by murmuring, “Dean O'Haran again!”
Frank understood the historic reference, knew that the policeman would too, and was grateful for the fury that rose in him. “Monsignor, you have nothing to worry about on that score.”
“You've put yourself in it, Frank,” said the monsignor. “How will it seem if the Sunday Truth or the Telegraph informs the world that a priest was corresponding with a murdered woman?”
“There is no reason for the Truth or anyone else to say so.”
“Well,” said Kearney mildly, “there are Freemasons in the police force who would love to give a journalist such a set of details, Frank.”
“And the morning after it appears,” the monsignor continued, “every Catholic in Australia gets mocked with it as he comes into work! Speak frankly to Mr. Kearney here. He can help us prevent scandal.”
And that was why Kearney had conducted this interview in the monsignor's presence, so that he could have a barking dog to keep Darragh off-balance. But then, if he used tricks like that to find . . . to find what? The ideas of a victim and a culprit were still equally beyond Darragh's normally pliant powers of belief.
“Tell me all about your last visit to see her,” Kearney suggested.
Darragh did that. He had Mrs. Heggarty's letter, yes. He'd get it in a moment.
“Did you see any sign of her visitor?”
“Well, there was a visitor.”
“Who was it?”
He felt a strange brotherly guilt at mentioning Ross Trumble. “A neighbor, Ross Trumble, called in.”
“Ah, we know Rossy,” the inspector asserted. “What did he do there?”
Darragh found himself unwilling to say Trumble was drunk. “He dropped in some meat from the abattoirs.”
“A gift?”
“I suppose so. He said it was part of the quota of a friend of his.”
“So Trumble might be her fellow, eh?”
“I don't think so.” He was affronted by the idea that a bundle of abattoir lamb chops could be the trigger for all Kate Heggarty's turmoil of soul. So he told how she'd tossed Ross Trumble out of the kitchen for repeating things he'd already said to Darragh. What things? asked Kearney. The normal Red things, Darragh told him.
“He was harmless,” said Darr
agh. “I think.” Darragh told Kearney about Mrs. Heggarty's humane remark, that Trumble was about to lose both a mother and a girlfriend, and his orphan soul wanted to find other kitchens where he was welcome.
Kearney sent him to his room to get the letter from Mrs. Heggarty. On this errand, Darragh paused at his desk and touched his breviary. He opened it and found an ordination card of a classmate sitting there, Paul O'Brien. “Oremus pro invicem, Frank,” O'Brien had written. Let us pray for each other. And underneath was printed, “Our Lady of Perpetual Succor, pray for me.” Indeed. And for Kate Heggarty's repute, blighted in death, even though the men downstairs cast her as victim while at the same time consigning her to hell's pit.
He got the plain letter, and took it downstairs. As he reentered the study, the monsignor, beyond himself now and, Darragh noticed, possessing the emotional unreliability of someone who has gone over his normal quota of drink, said, “Ha! The billet-doux arrives.” It was easy to forgive him, since he looked, for the first time in Darragh's experience, sozzled.
Kearney read the brief letter Mrs. Heggarty had written. Then he said, “Do you mind if I show this to the monsignor?”
This put Darragh in an impossible situation—the monsignor was ready to take denial as an insult, but also to read too much into Mrs. Heggarty's words. In the end, he nodded his consent, and the monsignor turned his enraged eyes to it, and his “My good heavens!” and his “Mother of God!” sounded like distant artillery. The monsignor looked up, almost pleading. “Tell me what this means, Frank. ‘Except that I do not want to argue the matter with you again. I feel we argued the matter enough last time.' ”
“She didn't want me pointing out the danger she was in.”
“My God in heaven! Then why visit her?”
Darragh did not reply, and Kearney said, including both of them in the decision, “I don't think there's anything here for my colleagues. I'll have to keep it though, Frank, in case. But you went, like the shepherd in search of the lost sheep, in good faith, even though she told you not to talk about the matter. But then, she would, wouldn't she?”