by Mark Pearson
‘Anyway, enough about them. Let me get you a drink, young Constable Cartwright, and you can tell me all about yourself.’
Sally held up her glass. ‘I’ve had my quota. I’m driving, remember.’
Bennett flashed a grin. ‘Then you can have a fruit juice.’
Bennett turned round to the barmaid and held his empty glass aloft. ‘Any chance of some refreshment for an honest working man, darling?’
To Sally’s dismay the barmaid smiled back at him – she even detected a hint of a wink. Dear God, she thought to herself, just what we need, another bloody Jack Delaney.
*
Jack turned down the corner of a page of the book he was reading, Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth, and heard a sharp intake of breath. He turned his head to see Kate staring at him in disbelief from her side of the bed.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘Just marking the page.’
‘Well, don’t do it like that! Use a bookmark or a slip of paper.’
‘It’s only a paperback book, Kate. It’s not an illustrated gospel from Lindisfarne.’
‘It’s my book. So don’t do it again.’
Delaney straightened out the corner of the page he had folded, picked up a petrol receipt from the bedside cabinet and slid it between the pages, making a great display of closing the book gently.
‘Is that better?’ he asked.
‘Much better. You treat your own trashy paperbacks how you like, but my books command respect.’
‘You saying I dissed the Mosse?’
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying.’ Kate had a pair of black-rimmed reading glasses perched on the end of her nose, and she peered reprovingly over the top of them at Delaney.
‘You look just like the librarian at my old school, you know.’
‘Charming.’
‘It’s a compliment. All the boys fancied her.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, yeah. Miss Williams. Very sexy. Very strict.’
‘I’ll give you strict if you don’t watch out.’
Delaney snaked a hand towards her chest. ‘Is that a promise?’
Kate slapped his hand away. ‘Jack, behave yourself!’
Jack grinned and put his hand under the covers. He looked at the clock. It was nearly midnight. ‘I need my goodnight kiss.’
Kate sat up a little straighter as Jack’s exploring hand found its target. She smiled and folded the corner of a page of the paperback she was reading and put it down on the matching bedside cabinet.
Delaney threw her his own look of disbelief. ‘Oi!’
Kate flapped a dismissive hand. ‘That’s a trashy crime novel. It doesn’t count.’
She snuggled up to him, pulling a mock-stern expression. ‘Now then, young man, you were late bringing back that copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. What are we going to do about that?’
Jack moved his hand again and Kate smiled, breathing huskily in his ear.
‘Now that … is a good start.’
*
Black clouds hung low over the Thames, completely blanketing the moon and turning the water below into dark, impenetrable ink.
The minute hand clicked and shuddered twelve on the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster, and the sound of its historical bell, Big Ben, sounded. As it did so white flashes of light speared through the clouds, thunder cracked and low rumblings spread out like ripples of sound. But miraculously there was no rain.
*
Some twelve miles or so west of Westminster, in Harrow on the Hill, most people were in their beds and already sleeping. In the town centre a few pubs were still open and the youth of the area were singing, dancing, falling in love or settling disagreements with fists or broken bottles. But in one residential side street, a scant mile or so away from the hustle and bustle, away from the street lamps, the lights were all off, save for one solitary building where the multicoloured lights shone forth like a Christmas card.
Maureen Gallagher closed the large oak door behind her and walked into the church, her soft shoes making a gentle whispering, shuffling sound as she paused and knelt painfully, wincing a little as she felt the tendons in her joints crackle. She made a quick sign of the cross and rose again slowly, her knees creaking audibly this time, and Maureen winced again with the pain of it. Feeling much older than her forty-seven years she put a hand on the back pew of the church to steady herself. She straightened the scarf that completely covered her head and looked up at the altar and then around at the large stained-glass windows that marched along both flanks of the building. Ten of them in total. The night sky was coal black outside, but the lights she had put on filled the church with cold if brilliant illumination and picked out the blues and the reds in the windows so that they did indeed seem to shine bright with God’s glory. Maureen looked at them for a moment or two and then lowered her eyes, squeezing them shut as though in pain, her breathing ragged.
It was a small church built sometime in the mid-1950s. Utilitarianism winning out over ornamentation. The stained-glass windows with their overtly Catholic themes were the only stylistic nod to denomination. The small local Catholic community that it had been built to service was a far cry from the days when Saint Mary’s, the large church that sat on the crest of the nearby hill like a fortress, had been built. Commissioned by Archbishop Lanfranc and consecrated by Saint Anselm in 1094. Its towering wooden steeple was covered in twelve tonnes of lead and was visible for miles around. William the Conqueror built cathedrals and churches and monasteries as hymns to God in stone and mortar and toil. Henry the Eighth destroyed them and his daughter and descendants set about destroying the Roman Catholic Church in England itself, so that long, long before 1956 Roman Catholics had become only a small minority in the country. That had changed in recent years, of course, with the influx of eastern European immigrants, so that there were probably more actively practising Roman Catholics in England now than there were Protestants. But Saint Mary’s on the hill was now Church of England, and Saint Botolph’s below it in the residential sprawl surrounding the town had been built as a thoroughly modest affair. They were as different, one from the other, as a palace is from a garden shed. It had a plain rectangular shape, and a row of ten pews flanked either side of the central aisle that led to a simple altar, raised on a painted concrete base with a brass rail at the front where the communicants would kneel to receive the wafer.
Maureen Gallagher had been a volunteer at the church for five years but had never taken communion. She found the gazes of the saints and the cruciform Christ that hovered over the altar with arms outstretched almost intolerable. She had taken a pilgrimage to Walsingham once, five years ago, in a desperate effort to make amends. But the weight of the silence and the darkness and the sweet smoky smell of burning candles in the many, many medieval churches she visited had filled her soul with despair and crushed her spirit under the guilt she bore like the carapace of a beetle broken under a workman’s heel. Some sins couldn’t be forgiven, she knew that. But she came to Saint Botolph’s church every morning with her tray of cleaning materials and on her hands and knees scrubbed, polished and buffed the floors and the wooden pews, driving the candle smoke from her memory with the sweet smell of beeswax and the artificial aromas of spray polish. And if she could only bear a glance now and then at the watching figure on the wall, it was nothing like the leaden despair she had felt in the shrines of Walsingham.
Maureen came late each night, summer or winter, long after anyone else, priest or parishioner, had left. She liked the solitude and silence when she worked. She came to Mass alone and sat in the back pew, neither making eye contact with her fellow worshippers nor engaging in conversation after the service. She had barely spoken fifty words to the priest, Father Carson Brown, since she had first volunteered her services five years before. She was so used to being wrapped up in her own quiet world of silent prayer and penance that she didn’t really register the sound that night of the door opening behind her as she
knelt rubbing an old yellow duster over the brass of the communicants’ rail. She didn’t hear the soft steps as the visitor approached behind. What brought the presence to her attention was the dark figure and pale face distorted and reflected in the mellow curve of the rail. She turned around and looked up. The lights overhead seemed brighter now, shining on the stained-glass windows and somehow putting a nimbus around the visitor’s face like a vision of a latter-day saint. Only the glow in the eyes that looked down on her, with no mercy or seeming humanity, didn’t seem to come from the church lights alone. Maureen Gallagher put up a hand to shield her eyes from their glare and brought the face into focus. It took a moment or two and then the breath leaked from her body as the realisation dawned on her. The weight she had been carrying for so very long seemed to rise from her for the briefest of moments.
‘It’s you,’ she said.
Then a thunderbolt hit her in the heart. And the weight was gone for ever.
SUNDAY
Not for the first time in his life Father Carson Brown was feeling guilty. It was a very Catholic emotion, surely enough, he realised, and he was a Catholic priest after all, but it wasn’t a strong enough emotion to stop him from returning to the scene of the crime. Or to the woman to be more precise.
Sarah Jane Keeley. She had dark honey-coloured hair that tumbled around white shoulders that were sprinkled with the lightest of freckles, and wide blue eyes that were regarding the priest with the sort of lustful playfulness that Rome would certainly never have approved of.
Father Brown tucked his shirt into his trousers and buttoned them up. ‘You are a bad woman, Sarah Jane,’ he said.
The woman in question was lying on the bed and smiling languidly up at him, a sheet held to her chest, the tip of her tongue licking the ruby moistness of her top lip in a slow, sensual curve.
‘Do you have to go?’ she asked, with a coy smile playing now on her perfectly formed cupid’s-bow lips.
‘I do,’ he replied. ‘And there’s no point pouting like Marilyn Monroe! There’s a Union of Catholic Mothers’ meeting this morning and I have to make sure everything is set up for them.’
Sarah Jane grinned. ‘John won’t be back until tonight, you know?’
‘I know.’ Father Carson Brown smiled back at her. John Keeley was the reason he was feeling guilty. They had grown up together, best friends through primary school and then secondary school, the Salvatorian College Catholic school, not a hundred miles from the street in Harrow where John Keeley now lived and where he himself would visit whenever his old friend was away on business.
At eighteen John Keeley had gone to university to study law and Carson Brown had gone first to seminary college and then on to the priesthood. The truth of the matter was that the two boys had both been in love with Sarah Jane Keeley since they had met her in infant school. Not that they knew it at the time, of course. Sarah Jane had been a complete tomboy, but the three of them had been inseparable and as they grew into teenagers it was clear that the friendship between them had also grown into something else. But it was John that she clearly fancied, so Carson had kept his distance, never revealing his true feelings for her. In fact, he fell so hopelessly in love with her at age sixteen that he decided if he couldn’t have her then he wouldn’t have any other woman. He threw himself into his studies and volunteer work at his church, Our Lady and Saint Thomas of Canterbury, and delighted his surprised parents when he announced that he wished to train for the priesthood. It took him many years until he finally made his way back to a position in Harrow and six months after that before he made his way into a position with Sarah Jane. And it wasn’t the missionary one.
‘What are you smiling at?’ the object of his affectionate recollections asked.
‘Life,’ he said. ‘And all of its rich tapestry.’
‘Seems to me you look like the cat that got the cream.’
‘If I was a cat I would be purring.’
‘I certainly am. You sure you don’t want to come back to bed and stroke me again?’
The priest laughed. ‘Like I say, you’re a wicked, wicked woman, Sarah Jane.’
‘You’re quite right, and I should be spanked for it.’
He laughed again. ‘I’d give it a try but I imagine I’d end up with a couple of missing teeth.’
‘Yes. You probably would.’
Sarah Jane let the sheet drop, revealing her large breasts, the nipples clearly aroused and as pink as her lips against the creamy white magnificence of her skin. She put her hands behind her neck, arching her back slightly. ‘Are you really sure you wouldn’t like to linger?’ she asked again, breathlessly.
Carson swallowed and shook his head, a look of something like regret passing through his eyes. ‘I really can’t – sorry.’
Her smile faded. ‘You’ll have to go and tell a few Hail Marys, I suppose?’
The priest sighed. ‘Don’t, Sarah Jane.’
‘It’s not our fault I chose the wrong man.’
‘I know.’
‘It’s your precious God who made him gay. Made him that way but didn’t give him the balls to admit it until he had been married to me for fifteen years.’
‘Let’s not discuss this again.’
‘Seems to me your religion can be pretty flexible when it comes to your own moral code but not to others.’
‘It’s not my religion that dictates celibacy.’
Sarah Jane blinked. ‘Come again?’
Father Carson Brown sat beside her and took her hand. ‘It’s just Church law, not based on any scriptural doctrine.’
‘Really?’
The priest nodded his head sadly. ‘It was in 1139 when the Second Lateran Council forbade the marriage of priests and declared null and void those legitimate marriages that had taken place before.’
‘Nice of them.’
‘But it didn’t ban sex for them.’
Sarah Jane was sitting up now, the sheet wrapped demurely around her and her forehead creased with a frown. ‘What do you mean?’
‘The edict made the wives into concubines, is all.’
‘Why?’
‘So their progeny wouldn’t have the right to inherit property. Priests used to travel around before but now churches were being built by communities and parishes were created and the priest was staying.’
‘So?’
‘So it was all about money. The property was owned by the Catholic Church.’
‘So why haven’t they done anything about it nowadays, if it’s such an old and ridiculous law?’
‘They’ve tried. Ever since the 1960s there has been an enormous groundswell of opinion that the Church law should be changed. There’s an organisation called CORPUS that campaigns and represents tens of thousands of resigned priests throughout the world. Trust me, I don’t feel guilty about what we are doing because my heart and my soul are telling me it’s right.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. And that’s what constitutes faith. It’s what religion is all about.’
‘So why haven’t you told me this before?’
Father Carson took a deep breath. ‘Because I am thinking of resigning from the priesthood.’
Sarah Jane looked up at him, shocked and feeling not a little guilty. ‘Because of me?’
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head sadly again. ‘Because of me.’
*
The conversation with Sarah Jane Keeley was still running through Father Carson Brown’s mind that Sunday morning as he walked past the houses on Westbury Terrace and up to his church. Most of the curtains were closed but he still felt as if he could feel the eyes of his parishioners on him … judging him. He held his jacket closed with one hand, shivering against the cold as he opened the small gate to Saint Botolph’s. There was a low wall in front of the church that the gate was set in, and beyond that about twenty yards by six of yard. The gravel, still rimed with frost, crunched under his feet, as he closed the gate behind him, but he paid no attention to the s
ound or to his surroundings as he walked up to and into the small side porch that led into the church. He didn’t find it odd that the outer church door was open and he hardly registered the coldness of the holy water as he dipped the first two fingers of his right hand in it and made a sign of the cross on his forehead. The inner doors to the church were also open and the priest had his head bowed, deep in thought, as he entered, knelt and made another larger sign of the cross, touching his forehead, both shoulders and his chest. He rose slowly and walked towards the altar. It took a moment or two for him to notice that something was amiss.
On the altar, which should have been bare, was a white cloth draped over a large object. Puzzled, Carson Brown walked forward up onto the low dais and raised the cloth. He looked down uncomprehending for a heartbeat and then gagged and held his hand to his mouth. He turned away in horror, fell to his knees and threw up into Maureen Gallagher’s mopping-up bucket.
Outside on the church’s roof a crow took off into the air. Buffeted by the wind, he swirled and banked, his caw shrieking like a prophecy fulfilled.
*
The sound echoed in Delaney’s ear as he looked out of the window at the river below him. And time stilled. The water swirling violently now. The rush of it as loud as the wind in his ears. And the little stars of sunlight, which had danced on the water like mayflies, were now flakes of snow, little shards of ice that tinkled in the air like frozen whispers.
It seemed as though time had also frozen. Jack had entered a crossing place between the past and the future. A hiatus. A moment of change that was irreversible and inevitable. Then he blinked his eyes and turned back the way he had come, ran to the edge of the ruined first floor of the mill house, and lowered himself over the edge of the broken floor to dangle for a moment before letting go. Then it seemed like he was falling for ever, the scream ringing in his earls like a knife thrust in his heart, before the cold floor appeared to jump up at him, slamming his knees into his chest as he rolled onto his side, jarring his shoulder as he slammed down. He gasped with pain, rubbing his knee, and staggered to his feet. He could still hear Siobhan screaming in terror and ran across the mill-house floor to the door. His feet slid on the ice-covered concrete and he skidded into the door, clutching it to regain his balance before wrenching it open and charging outside. Siobhan’s screams were desperate now and Jack ran towards the river.