Ruined Abbey , livre ebook

Ruined Abbey
A MYSTERY
ANNE EMERY



Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright


Chapter I
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong.
Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”
April 29, 1989
Father Brennan X. Burke was just about to vest for his early Saturday Mass at St. Kieran’s church in New York City when his telephone rang. By the time the call was over, Mass was all but forgotten, and Brennan was scrambling for the next flight out of the country.
“Brennan!”
“Molly, my darling! Conas atá tú? ”
“Níl mé go maith.” Not good.
“What is it?”
Brennan did not like the sound of his sister’s voice. As faint as it was coming down the line from London to New York, it was a guarded voice, and there was clearly something amiss.
He felt a pang of fear. Was she hurt? Ill? “Are you all right, Molly?”
The silence stretched across the transatlantic line.
Finally, she answered him. “I’m in the nick, Brennan. Holloway Prison in London.”
There was no point in asking whether he had heard her right and whether she was serious. He had and she was. Riotous images assailed his mind, but natural caution prevailed when he spoke again. “What can you tell me?”
“They picked me up for being a member of a proscribed organization — allegedly a member. I’m not going to say anything more about it on the phone.”
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Was she going to leave him with that? But she was right to keep silent; the Brits were probably listening in. Prison guards, the police, spies, who knew?
“I just wanted the family to know, Brennan, in case you don’t hear from me for a while. Mam’s birthday’s coming up, and if I don’t call …”
That was his sister all over, God be good to her. There she was in an English jail, facing who knew what fate, and she was worried about their mother missing a call on her birthday.
“I’m going over there.”
“To Mam and Da’s, you mean? This will blow the head off Da.”
“He’s not going to hear about it, at least for now. Going over to London is what I meant, Mol. I’ll be on the next flight out.”
“No, no, don’t do that.”
“I said I’m going, and I’m going. How long have you been in there?”
“Last night. Or this morning, I should say. Half-twelve, they came by my flat.”
The knock on the door at midnight, an event feared around the world.
“How long do you expect … well, they’re hardly going to tell you how long they plan to keep you in.”
“Normally, they could detain me for two days, but they told me they’re applying to keep me in for five more. Some special provision. So it …” Her voice wavered. “It could be a week.”
Brennan was terrified for her, but he knew he couldn’t show it, and he knew he couldn’t ask for details.
“Do you have a lawyer?”
“Yes, I called a solicitor this morning. Can’t say any more than that.”
“That’s right. Don’t. I’ll see you as soon as I can. The blessings of God on you, Molly.”
Brennan felt he was abandoning her by putting down the phone, but there was nothing he could do for her at a distance of thirty-five hundred miles. The sooner he got airborne, the better. It was seven in the morning New York time, twelve noon in London. He picked up the phone again and called his brother, a commercial airline pilot.
“Yo.”
“Terry.”
“Bren, I was going to call you. See if you wanted to head over to O’Malley’s this aft. Lift a few jars.”
“How fast can I get to London?”
“London? Are you serious?”
“Serious. Got a call from Molly. They’ve banged her up in jail on some kind of trumped-up charge.”
“I can’t be hearing this.”
“I just heard it myself.”
“Jaysus, don’t be telling the old man she’s in an English prison. All we need is him launching a missile across the Atlantic.”
“I won’t be telling him.”
“There’s obviously been a mistake. Molly would no more —”
“Presumably. Now, about a flight.”
“Leave it with me. Pack your things and wait to hear. And as soon as I can get over to Heathrow myself, I’ll join you. What kind of charges are you talking about? Is it what I think it is?”
“She’s accused of being a member of a banned organization. Terrorist organization.” Click.
†
Brennan arranged for one of the other priests to take over his parish duties for the next few days, and he packed a bag. Terry called with the time and flight number, and Brennan headed to the airport. His plane took off at ten that morning and touched down at Heathrow seven hours later, seven hours that seemed like seventy, so anxious was Brennan to get on the ground in England. With the time difference, that made it ten at night in London, and he still had an hour’s ride on the tube into the city. He knew there was no chance of seeing his sister in the lockup at that time of night, but he called from the arrivals lounge anyway. All he could do was leave a message. He would be at the prison gate first thing the next morning. He found a cheap hotel near King’s Cross station, but he may as well have sat up all night in the station as go to a hotel; he lay awake for hours, anxious and fearful about what was in store for his sister.
Then, in the morning, he may as well have been nowhere near the station because he was so impatient to see Molly he didn’t even bother with the London Underground; he hailed the first taxi he saw and told the driver to make haste to Holloway Prison in the borough of Islington. The driver, with the reserve for which the English are renowned, withheld comment on their destination but made friendly conversation all the way there. Brennan did his best to respond in kind, but his mind was elsewhere. His anxiety was compounded when the taxi dropped him off outside the complex of red-brick buildings where his sister was incarcerated.
Molly was older by just under two years; the resemblance between them was striking. They both had black hair going silver at the temples; they had the same aquiline nose; her eyes were a dark blue and his black. Right now, though, sitting across from him in the visiting area, she was pale and red-eyed with exhaustion.
“How are you holding up? You look as if you’ve spent two years looking into the abyss.”
“You know what they say, Brennan. When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you.”
“Yes.” He peered around him at the hard-looking inmates, their hard-looking visitors, and their equally hard-looking guardians, some of whom were men. “How am I going to get you out of here?”
“Your powers as a priest of the Roman Catholic Church are not recognized by the authorities in this place.”
“Or in this country, which is why I’m not here in my clerical suit and collar.”
“Yes, well … My solicitor is working on it, trying to get me released.”
“And?”
“She’ll be in later this morning. It’s so good to see you, Bren. You have no idea. The place is filthy. It has rats. I’ve heard the squeaks coming out of them, and I saw one scurrying across the floor. I’m afraid to close my eyes in case one of them … And some of the people in here have me terrorized; that includes the staff as well as the inmates. But now that you’re in England, I’ll feel a little …” She cleared her throat and made an attempt at a smile. She couldn’t carry it off.
He reached for her hand and was barked at by someone in authority. Male. “No contact, please, sir.” Please didn’t sound like please; sir didn’t sound like sir.
“Terry’s coming over too, as soon as he can arrange his days off.”
“Terry, God love him! I’d better be clear of this place before he turns up. He’ll eat the head off somebody in charge here, and next thing he knows, he’ll be under arrest himself. But I can’t wait to see him. What would I do without my little brothers?”
“I don’t know how much use we’ll be to you.”
“Just having you here is enough, darling.”
“Now what in the hell have they charged you with?”
“They say I assisted in the arrangement of a meeting to further the activities of a proscribed organization.”
“That organization being …” As if he didn’t know.
“The Irish Republican Army.”
Brennan looked over at the guard on duty; the man’s eyes were directly on him. Brennan was not about to ask his sister whether she had in fact been involved in such a meeting.
“If convicted,” she said, “I could be facing anything from a fine —”
“The family will come through with that.”
“— to ten years in prison.”
“Jesus the Christ and Son of God! That can’t happen!”
“It has happened, and could again.”
†
Consumed by what he had seen and heard, Brennan could barely concentrate enough to follow his sister’s directions for the tube to her place in Kilburn, in the northwest of London. But, after a couple of false starts, he found it. It was a terrace of houses with a narrow, paved laneway between it and a much larger, blander, and more modern block of flats. The first storey of Molly’s terrace was done in white stone, with the upper two storeys in red brick. Each house in the row had a demi-lune fanlight over the door. Her upstairs flat had three small bedrooms, a kitchen, and a sitting room painted a cheerful golden yellow with white trim. There was a dark wood dining table with four chairs at one end of the room; at the other end was a pull-out sofa. Pictures of maps and ancient buildings adorned the walls, and her books