Fallon stopped playing. “Have they gone?” he asked softly.
Anna da Costa stared blindly down at him, a kind of awe on her face, reached out to touch his cheek. “Who are you? she whispered. “What are you?”
“A hell of a question to ask any man,” he said and, turning back to the organ, he moved into the opening passage again.
The music could be heard in the sacristy, muted yet throbbing through the old walls with a strange power. Father da Costa sat on the edge of the table.
“Cigarette, sir?” Fitzgerald produced an old, silver case. Father da Costa took one and the light that followed.
Miller observed him closely. The massive shoulders, that weathered, used-up face, the tangled grey beard, and suddenly realised with something dose to annoyance that he actually liked the man. It was precisely for this reason that he decided to be as formal as possible.
“Well, Superintendent?” Father da Costa said.
“Have you changed your mind, sir, since we last spoke?”
“Not in the slightest.”
Miller fought hard to control his anger and Fitzgerald moved in smoothly. “Have you been coerced in any way since this morning, sir, or threatened?”
“Not at all, Inspector,” Father da Costa assured him with complete honesty.
“Does the name Meehan mean anything to you, sir?”
Father da Costa shook his head, frowning slightly, “No, I don’t think so. Should it?”
Miller nodded to Fitzgerald, who opened the briefcase he was carrying and produced a photo which he passed to the priest. “Jack Median,” he said. Dandy Jack to Ms friends. That one was taken in London on the steps of West End Central police station after he was released for lack of evidence in an East End shooting last year.”
Meehan, wearing his usual double-breasted overcoat, smiled out at the world hugely, waving his hat in his right hand, his left arm encircling the shoulders of a well-known model girl.
“The girl is strictly for publicity purposes,” Fitzgerald said. In sexual matters his tastes run elsewhere. What you read on the sheet pinned to the back is all we have on him officially.”
Father da Costa read it with interest. Jack Meehan was forty-eight and had joined the Royal Navy in “I945 at eighteen, serving on minesweepers until “I945 when he had been sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and discharged with ignominy for breaking a Petty Officer’s jaw in a brawl. In “I948 he had served six months on a minor smuggling charge and in “I954 a charge of conspiracy to rob the mails had been dropped for lack of evidence. Since then, he had been ques-tioned by the police on over forty occasions in connection with indictable offences.
“You don’t seem to be having much success,” Father da Costa said with a slight smile.
“There’s nothing funny about Jack Meehan,” Miller said. “In twenty-five years in the police force he’s the nastiest thing I’ve ever come across. Remember the Kray brothers and the Richardson torture gang? Meehan’s worse than the whole damn lot of them put together. He has an undertaking business here in the city, but behind that facade of respecta-bility he heads an organisation that controls drug-pushing, prostitution, gambling and protection in most of the big cities in the north of England.”
“And you can’t stop him? I find that surprising.”
“Rule by terror, Father. The Krays got away with it for years. Meehan makes them look like beginners. He’s had men shot on many occasions – usually the kind of shotgun blast in the legs that doesn’t kill, simply cripples. He likes them around as an advertisement.”
“You know this for a fact?”
“And couldn’t prove it. Just as I couldn’t prove he was behind the worst case of organised child prostitution we ever had or that he disciplined one man by crucifying him with six-inch nails and another by making him eat his own excreta.”
For the briefest of moments, Father da Costa found himself back in that camp in North Korea – the first one where the softening up was mainly physical – lying half-dead in the latrine while a Chinese boot ground his face into a pile of human ordure. The guard had tried to make him eat, too, and he had refused, mainly because he thought he was dying anyway.