Eye for an Eye Read Online Free Page B

at White’s Cross now?’
    ‘We have, ma’am, pretty much. But I’m glad I caught you. We found this pressed down in the soil of the flower bed, like somebody had accidentally stepped on it.’
    She came forward and held up a small evidence bag. Inside it was an oval piece of red translucent plastic. Katie took it and examined it closely.
    ‘Mary O’Donnell told me that Satan had shining red eyes. “Like two hot coals,” that’s how she described them. I wonder if this is one of them. Maybe it fell out of his mask when he was attacking Father Fiachra.’
    ‘That’s exactly what Bill Phinner thought,’ said Eithne.
    ‘All right,’ Katie told her. ‘If you can let me have some pictures of it by the morning, I’ll have them circulated round the fancy-dress hire shops and theatrical costumiers, and have them checked against online suppliers, too. Maybe somebody will recognize where it came from.’
    *
    Katie had just opened her front door when her iPhone played ‘The Last Rose of Summer’. Her Irish setter, Barney, was jostling around her and she had to push him into the living room with her knees as she answered the phone.
    ‘DS Maguire here. Who is it?’
    It was a girl on the other end, and she sounded nervous. ‘It’s Clodagh. Mr Keane’s secretary, if you remember me.’
    ‘Oh, yes, Clodagh. I remember you, of course. What’s the story?’
    ‘I don’t know if I should be telling you this, because Mr Keane was very strict about us all keeping quiet about it. But I knew Father Fiachra when he was still at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Watergrasshill. He baptized me, and he often used to drop in to my mother’s for tea when I was little. He was a dear old man, he really was.’
    ‘Go on,’ said Katie, sitting down on the sofa and tugging off her shoes. She threw them across the room one after the other so that Barney would go and fetch them and stop snuffling around her for a few seconds.
    ‘Well, the thing of it is, I saw the fellow in black that you were asking about today. I reckon some of the others did, too, but Mr Keane said that we weren’t to breathe a word about it to the guards even if we had, because even if we had, we had not, do you know what I mean?’
    ‘Not entirely, I must say. Did he tell you why you shouldn’t mention it to us?’
    ‘He said it was something to do with health and safety. He said that if we told you, we might get shut down for breach of the regulations.’
    ‘A man walks around with a black hood and shining red eyes, making out that he’s Satan himself, and that’s in breach of health and safety?’
    ‘I don’t know. I’m just telling you what Mr Keane told us.’
    ‘But you say you saw him, this fellow in black?’ asked Katie.
    ‘I did, yes, about a week ago. I think it was a Monday. No, it must have been the Tuesday because that’s when they bring all the clean overalls round from the laundry. Anyway, I went outside to talk to the postman because he’d delivered two letters that weren’t meant for us, and as I went back I saw this fellow in the black hood. I couldn’t see if he had red eyes or not because he had his back turned to me, and he was quite a long way away down the end of the polishing shop. He was talking to Mr Keane. Then he went around the corner and disappeared.’
    ‘Did Mr Keane realize that you’d seen him?’
    ‘I’m not sure. I think he might have done because he kind of frowned in my direction, but the sun was in his eyes so maybe he didn’t. Anyway, I went directly back into the office and when he came back in himself he didn’t say anything.
    Clodagh paused, and then she said, ‘You won’t tell him I rang you, will you? I’ll lose my job if he finds out. Maybe I shouldn’t have rung you at all.’
    ‘Don’t you worry, Clodagh,’ said Katie. ‘Nobody is ever going to know that you got in touch with me. This information that you’ve given me, though, it could prove very helpful. It could very well