Neither Simmons nor Pavlou was inclined to answer.
“Open it!” Oaten shouted.
Pavlou glanced at his colleague. “Well, guv, we got as far as the bishop who had responsibility for St Bartholomew’s. He told us about the monastery in Ireland. I called, but no one there knew anything about Father Prendegast.”
The chief inspector was shaking her head. “It didn’t occur to you to ask me if you could go over there and ask in person?”
Simmons’s eyes opened wide. “What, you would have signed off on that?”
“This is the Violent Crime Coordination Team, not some local nick. Of course I’d have signed off on it.” She looked at each of them. “Or at least, I’d have sent someone with more than half a dozen brain cells over there.” She picked up one of the tabloids that was lying on her desk. “Now I don’t have to. The press has done your job for you. ‘In an astonishing twist,’” she read, “‘we can reveal that murder victim Father Norman Prendegast was a pederast given a new identity by the Catholic Church. Blah blah real name Father Patrick O’Connell, blah blah St. Peter’s, Bonner Street, Bethnal Green, blah blah former choirboys Harry Winder and Andrew Lough, blah blah subjected to repulsive sexual practices.’” Oaten glared at Simmons and Pavlou. “And how do you think the papers got hold of this?”
“Oh, that’s obvious, guv,” Simmons said, a grin splitting his sallow face. “They chucked money at anyone they could find.”
“Wrong!” the chief inspector shouted, crumpling the newspaper up and throwing it accurately at his chest. “They did what you wankers are supposed to do. They asked questions, and when people stonewalled them, they kept on asking.”
“But they went to Ireland,” Pavlou said, pointing at a picture of the monastery where the dead man had been hidden away.
Oaten groaned. “We’ve already been over that, you pillock. This isn’t about who goes where, it’s about so-called detectives who don’t know their arse from their armpit.” She shot a glance at Turner. “Help us out here, Taff. What do we do next?”
“Um, interview Winder and Lough. Find out who else might have been abused by the victim. Talk to other people who attended St. Peter’s back in the late seventies and early eighties.”
The chief inspector was nodding. “Thank God someone around here knows his job.”
Pavlou stepped forward, his expression keen. “I’d be happy to go up to the northeast to interview Lough.”
“I bet you would,” Karen Oaten replied mordantly. “The question is, am I happy to risk another cock-up by letting you go?” She rubbed her forehead. “All right, contact the locals and get them to bring Lough in for questioning. At least that should keep the press off him till you get there.” She turned to Simmons. “You get down to Bethnal Green and talk to this Harry Winder. Remind him that, even if he’s sold his story to some rag, he has to come clean with us. Think you can manage that?”
The two sergeants nodded unhappily.
“Get going then!” She raised a hand at Turner. “Not you, Taff.” She waited till the door closed behind the others. “Morons. So, what are you working on?”
“Right now Chief Inspector Hardy’s got me-”
“Never mind Hardy, you’re reporting only to me from now on. There are too many people busy building their own little empires in this team.” She gave a hollow laugh. “If you can’t beat them…Okay, let’s have it.”
Turner nodded. “Right, guv. I was looking at the modus operandi.”
Oaten sat back in her chair. “And?”
“Well, it seems to me there’s some kind of message in it.” He flipped open his notebook. “Candlestick up him, sprawled over the altar, eyes removed, the quotation in the mouth…”
“Go on.”
“The wound to the backside suggests sexual abuse, doesn’t it?”
“Mmm.”
“And the naked body over the altar makes it pretty obvious that the killer doesn’t think much of the Catholic Church.”
“What about the eyes?”
“Well, could the priest have seen things that the killer is ashamed of or that he regards as his own?”
“Possibly linked to the abuse carried out on him by the dead man?”
Turner nodded. “It seems reasonable to assume that the killer knew Prendegast, or rather O’Connell. And, yeah, that he was abused by him.”
“So we need to start collecting alibis for the night of the murder from all the choirboys and such like that we find.” Oaten smiled at him. “Good, Taff. What about the quotation in his mouth, though? How did it go again? ‘What a-’”
“‘-mockery hath death made of thee.’ I was hoping you weren’t going to ask me about that.” Turner looked at his notes again. “Maybe the killer was just making a general point about how the priest has got his comeuppance.”
“Or maybe there’s more to it than that.”
Turner shrugged.
“All right, go on working on that, but I want you to keep an eye on Simmons and Pavlou, too. And, don’t worry, I’ll keep D.C.I. Hardy off your back.”
After he’d left, Karen Oaten pushed the newspapers from her desk and opened a file. In it were her own notes about the case. She was impressed that Taff Turner had gone the same direction as she had. But she, too, was uncertain about the quote from Webster’s The White Devil, so she’d arranged a meeting at the university later in the day with a specialist in Jacobean literature. All Oaten knew about John Webster came from the movie Shakespeare in Love-he was the teenage slimebag who had dropped a mouse down Gwyneth Paltrow’s dress, and squealed on her and the playwright. He was a nasty piece of work, but that wasn’t what was giving her butterflies in her stomach. She’d seen killings as elaborate as this before. In every case the murderer had gone on to strike again-and soon.
It was why she’d joined the Met. What she’d told John Turner wasn’t the whole story. She wished she could forget, but every time she started on a murder case, she thought of her childhood friend Christy Baker. They’d been inseparable from primary through to senior school in St. Albans, they’d shared everything and competed against each other at netball, hockey and athletics without ever falling out. Then, one December night when they were fifteen, Christy had disappeared on her way home from Karen’s. It was only a five-minute walk, but she hadn’t made it. Her naked and mutilated body was found ten miles away in a ditch. The killer, a deliveryman, was eventually caught, but not before he’d claimed seven more victims.
Karen Oaten didn’t think of herself as being in the job for revenge, but deep down she knew that she wanted to catch as many sick bastards as she could. She had no sympathy for them. She’d seen what Christy’s family had gone through; she’d been there herself. It was worse than anyone could imagine.
She twitched her head and came back to the present, wondering what scenes of horror lay in store for her team in the days and weeks ahead.
Evelyn Merton looked out of her kitchen window. The garden to the rear of the bungalow on the outskirts of Chelmsford was full of spring blooms. And so it should have been. She spent hours working in the flower beds and rock garden. Since her beloved brother, Gilbert, had died two years ago, she’d had to take on lawn duties, as well. At least they weren’t too strenuous at this time of year, and the mower with powered wheels that she’d bought was a great help. Evelyn smiled as she saw a robin engaged in noisy combat as he defended his territory from another of his kind. Nature was full of hostility as well as beauty. She’d known that throughout her life, especially after she’d started teaching primary children.
It was so long ago, but she could remember many of the children that had passed through her hands. Of course, when she’d left college in the late fifties, everything had been very different. Although she’d grown up in the comfortable suburb of Chigwell, she chose to work in the underprivileged East End. The children of the poor were dressed in faded, patched clothes that had been handed down from older siblings. They were skinny, their faces wan. The National Health Service was gradually making a difference, but she still saw children with their legs bent by rickets and their complexions ruined by smallpox. At least, back then, they had understood discipline. The last years of her service in Bethnal Green had been marred by persistent bad behavior, particularly among the boys. She had been forced to take stern measures, even though teachers were no longer permitted to employ corporal punishment.