Free The Priest by Gerard O'Donovan Page A

the whole day off and, as usual, had a busy afternoon planned. First, lunch with TV presenter Ryan
     Tubridy, who’d finallysuccumbed to her request for an interview. Then an afternoon in the
Herald
office beckoned, setting up her diary for the week. She liked it there on Mondays, when usually just herself and Paddy Griffin
     were on the desk. It was the only time the place was ever quiet enough for her to hear herself think.
    And later, drinks in the Pembroke with Vincent Bishop. Again. He’d probably tell her when she got there that he’d booked a
     table for dinner as well. That he’d like her to join him. Like the last time. Once more Mulcahy’s face rose in her imagination,
     that smile twisting the corners of his mouth. When he’d asked her about whether her sources ever expected anything in return?
     Christ, he’d hit the nail on the head with that one.
    Siobhan had been introduced to Bishop a few months earlier by a friend at a Sport Ireland function, and already she’d come
     to regard him as a bottomless well of invaluable information. She’d heard of him previously, of course. One of Ireland’s new
     perma-rich, unblunted even by the recession. She knew how he’d sold his father’s dance-hall business in the seventies to found
     the Bishop insurance group – ‘Irish security for Irish people’ – and made millions, selling that in turn to found a slew of
     staggeringly successful internet and media-based concerns. In his spare time, wherever he found that, he was well known as
     one of the main drivers of the Irish art boom in the early 2000s – a dogged collector with a fierce reputation for always
     acquiring what he wanted, no matter what the price.
    In person he was polite but reserved. Guarded. A bit weird to look at. Tall, pale and bone thin, lank black hair – dyed probably
     – limp handshake, limp everything, probably. Widowed for years, he was a bit awkward, a bit clammy with her at first but seemed
     to take a shine all the same, and opened up to her when she started getting a bit gossipy. Maybe he sensed she had no interest
     in his money. His contacts, on the other hand… Christ, but they were phenomenal, and across the board in business, the arts,
     sport and politics. How he did it, she had no idea, but he seemed particularly well up on all the dirt. And he knew its value.
     So they had that much in common, and they’d met up fairly regularly since. Not on dates. As far as she’d been concerned, he
     just wanted someone to have an in-the-know yak with. But that was then.
    She turned off the hairdryer, threw it on the bed and walked through to the living room, straight to the small desk where
     her telephone was, leaned over and pressed the play button on the answerphone. From the cheap grey plastic speaker came a
     brief hiss and crackle, like the start of an old 45rpm record, then a single strum of a guitar, and an eerie disembodied voice
     started warbling.
    It was Roy Orbison, singing ‘In Dreams’, though she hadn’t really taken that in when she first played the message. It had
     seemed a lot funnier when she got home last night, a bit tipsy from the drinks with Mulcahy and a little deflated by the way
     things had gone with him. Or, more accurately, hadn’t. To walk in, press a button and hear thatwash of music fill the room. Just the song. Nothing else. No message. Christ, talk about from one extreme to the other. Hilarious.
     She’d just laughed it off and tottered away to bed – and she went out like a light.
    Now it was beginning to creep her out. First thing this morning, it crowded in on her waking thoughts, going round and round
     in her head – not in a good way. She’d never liked Orbison’s music. Her father used to have one of his LPs and as a little
     girl, something about the cover picture had freaked her out. She could see it now, that image of a puffy-faced old man in
     dark glasses and weird black hair, trying to look like someone half his age,