Page 26 of The Altar Girls

‘Priests don’t lie.’

‘Pull the other one, Boyd.’

‘Okay, agreed. They’re only human.’

Once inside the large atrium, Lottie blew on her hands to get the blood circulating. Her fingers were corpse white, her toes numb inside her boots and thick socks. She struggled to push the door into the main hall.

A flurry of volunteers were busy lining up food supplies on long tables. It was easy to spot Father Richard Pearse, as he was the only male among them.

He noticed them straight away and rounded the end table to greet them.

‘You must be the detectives. Awful business. Fierce tragic. Just… awful.’

He was the polar opposite of Father Maguire and seemed to be closer to sixty. Where Maguire’s face was all sharp lines, Pearse’s was flabby, with laughter lines ingrained around his mouth. Brown-framed spectacles with thick lenses cut into his hairless head above his ears. The sleeves of his black shirt were rolled up to display freckled arms, and the strings of an apron strained around his rotund waist.

‘Is there somewhere private we can talk?’ Lottie asked.

‘Sure. Sure. Follow me. This way.’ He led them out of the hall to a small reception room by the main door. ‘In here. Take a seat. Anything I can do to help. Anything at all. Ask away. Ask away.’

Lottie thought it would be pure torture to have Garda Lei and this priest in the same room. Both talked non-stop.

‘I believe you said eight a.m. Mass yesterday morning, Father. Is that correct?’

‘It is, it is.’

‘And Naomi Kiernan was the altar server.’

‘Correct.’ His face was now more flushed than a moment ago.

‘Was she the only server there?’

‘Yes. There’s normally a minimum of two, but with the bad weather, you know, the other one didn’t turn up. Hardly anyone at Mass either.’

‘I’ll need to see the servers’ rota.’

‘That’s no problem at all.’

She asked the priest to detail his whereabouts yesterday and got much the same answer as Maguire had given.

‘Did you have lunch together?’

‘We did.’

‘Any other priests there?’

‘No. It’s just the two of us holding the fort this week. The other three are on a retreat in Westport. Lucky devils. Oh, that sounds bad. Didn’t mean—’

‘You and Father Maguire had evening dinner together also?’ Lottie was growing tired of him.

‘Mm… no. I was doing visits at Brookhead nursing home and had a bite to eat there. Their scrambled eggs are to die for.’ His face flushed further. ‘Now that sounds insensitive.’

‘What time did you return home?’

‘Must have been seven-ish.’

‘And did you see Father Maguire then?’

‘Can’t say that I did. I had some paperwork to do for the bishop, so I finished that and dropped it off at his house. We got chatting up there and I arrived back… well, it was about eight thirty or thereabouts and all hell had been unleashed.’