The Ballymara Road Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Priory. Harry felt an icy shiver run down his back as the lights in an upstairs window flicked on and then off again, as the night closed in.
    Downstairs, in the Priory basement kitchen, Annie O’Prey was almost on the edge of hysteria. Sister Evangelista was trying her best to calm her down.
    ‘Jaysus, it was there, so it was, on the kitchen table. I went upstairs for no longer than five minutes to light the fire in the study. I came back down and the chicken was gone. What am I to do if I have no food ready for the new father and his sister? What kind of welcome to the streets would that be, now?’
    Sister Evangelista was relieved that a new priest was arriving and that his spinster sister was accompanying him to act as his housekeeper. They had left Dublin that morning and were expecting to be welcomed with a quiet supper at the Priory, with a full meal at the convent with the sisters the following night.
    Sister Evangelista had been glued to the phone since Christmas Eve. As yet, she had told only the few nuns she could trust that the previous housekeeper, Daisy, had failed to meet her family at the port in Dublin. Daisy’s brother and his wife were convinced that Daisy had never boarded the boat at Liverpool. But Sister Evangelista knew better. Miss Devlin, a teacher at the school as well as a good friend to the convent and to Daisy, had put her on the boat herself. She had even asked two elderly ladies to look after her, until they berthed in Dublin, so they knew she had caught the ferry. Neither of them had a good Christmas, worrying about Daisy’s whereabouts.
    What was more, the bishop had been less than sympathetic. He had even shouted at Sister Evangelista down the phone and since then she had refused to talk to him again.
    ‘Take a hold of yourself, Sister, you are like a hysterical farm girl from the country,’ he had said. ‘Take charge of your senses and stop yerself from turning everything into a crisis, when none exists, will ye? I am fair exhausted with the carryings-on at St Mary’s. Father Anthony and his sister will arrive shortly, so just leave it all to him. And remember, ye tell him nothing of what ye found in the Priory, before Father James was murdered by whoever it was who savaged the poor man, do ye hear me?’
    She had heard him all right. Having discovered in the Priory, following his death, the father’s dirty secret and a heap of filthy photographs of young children, she wasn’t so sure she would describe him as a poor man any longer. She had also heard the bishop singing a different tune altogether regarding the arrival of Father Anthony, who had been sent directly to Liverpool from Rome via Dublin.
    The Pope was none too keen on his priests being murdered and their private parts dismembered. So the Vatican had taken Father James’s replacement out of the hands of the bishop, who had been incensed from the minute he was told the news.
    ‘Apparently, Father Anthony has been at the Vatican for a number of years and is very well known and trusted. Seems to me the Pope knows exactly what he’s doing and, regardless of what the bishop says, I am mightily grateful for the Vatican’s intervention,’ Sister Evangelista had told Miss Devlin, the teacher at the school.
    Sister Evangelista had been made very angry by the bishop’s tone. There had been two murders, not one: Father James and their neighbour, Molly Barrett, who had been found in her own outhouse with her head caved in. Sister Evangelista had had to beg the bishop to visit Liverpool and take some responsibility, but had been bitterly disappointed. He had been no help at all, leaving Sister Evangelista to deal with the police single-handed. It was not until she found the disgusting photographs in Father James’s desk that the bishop had bothered to visit the Priory. As she had confided to Miss Devlin, this was all very strange behaviour indeed.
    ‘Sure, he was never away from the Priory when the father was alive. Now