The Quick and the Dead (A Sister Agnes Mystery)

by Alison Joseph

  THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

  Alison Joseph

  © Alison Joseph 1996

  Alison Joseph has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published 1996 by Headline Book Publishing.

  This edition published by Endeavour Press Ltd in 2015.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  For Tim, as ever, and in memory of my father, to whom I owe so much.

  I would like to thank Sarah Dobson IBVM and Ex-Detective Sergeant Bob Hinde, again. Also Detective Superintendent Ivan Dibley and Ian ‘Chas’ Charles. Thanks are also due to Tim, Becca and Phil at Road Alert, and everyone who was at the Fairmile camp on the A30 in June 1995. Thanks, too, to the people of Essex Record Office for allowing the fictional world to intrude on their normal life.

  Chapter One

  ‘What do you mean, she’s gone? Gone where?’

  The boy was perched on the kitchen unit, swinging his legs. ‘Dunno, miss. She just said she was goin’, din’t she.’

  ‘My name’s Agnes.’

  ‘Agniz then.’

  With each swing of his legs the heels of his scruffy trainers made a heavy rubber thump against the cupboard door.

  ‘You mean she went out for the evening?’

  He shrugged, sniffed, thumped his heels again. Agnes noticed the marks his shoes were leaving on the white melamine. She grabbed him by the shoulders. ‘Do you mean she’s walked out of here? For good?’

  ‘P’raps. She din’t say. She ’ad a bag, though.’

  ‘For God’s sake, tell me. What were her last words?’

  He screwed up his nose, sniffed again. ‘She said she’d be safer out of ’ere. Somethin’ like that. Can I go now?’

  The boy slithered off the work surface and out of the door. Agnes heard shouting in the corridor as he joined the other hostel kids, the noise of the television being turned up in the beige and battered room they called the lounge. Safer out of here. Agnes took a cloth and started dabbing at the marks left by his shoes. We’ve let her down, she thought. I knew this would happen.

  ‘I told you, Julius, I said she’d go. She didn’t trust us anymore. All this bloody prevaricating, those half-wit social workers —’

  ‘All we know is that Sam has absconded. She may come back.’ Julius sat in his favourite chair in the little office attached to the church of St Simeon’s where he was priest. It was a humid July evening, and the leaded windows behind him were dull with the last of the daylight.

  ‘She won’t, Julius, I know she won’t. Would you stay here if you were her? She’s found by the police, soliciting in the West End. She’s brought to the hostel, and we tell her it’s a safe house, where we can work with her to sort out what she’s run away from, so that she doesn’t have to go back there. So she calms down a bit, begins to trust us, finally discloses all that stuff about her god-awful family — and then, what do we do? We get pea-brained bloody social workers involved so that they can send her straight back there —’

  ‘That’s not true, Agnes. No one was going to send her back. The Social Services team —’

  ‘What about that case meeting yesterday? She told me afterwards that she’d asked everyone, am I going back? And no one in that meeting could promise that she wouldn’t.’

  ‘That’s not true, Agnes — if you’d been there you’d have realised —’

  ‘If I’d been there I’d have given her my word there and then, that no one was going to send her back to that mother and that stepfather. No one. How could you schedule that meeting without me?’

  ‘I didn’t know you were going to be summoned by your superiors all of a sudden.’

  Agnes got up and began to pace the tiny office. Julius watched her, his eyes a piercing blue behind his half-lenses. Nearly twenty years, he thought, since those early days in France, when he was a curate and she was a young married woman locked into a life of terror and despair with her husband, Hugo Bourdillon. Julius shuddered as he remembered the night when Hugo’s violence had almost cost Agnes her life. Nearly twenty years, he thought, watching her restless pacing, since he’d rescued her, since he’d arranged for her to come to London and join her first community. And in a way she’d hardly changed. No longer that cowed young woman, no longer shadowed by fear, of course; but he saw now the same passion, the same intensity, the same strength and faith, that he’d recognised in her then.

  ‘I’m so angry, Julius.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Just because I had to see my Provincial that day —’

  Julius sensed something in her tone. He wondered what had happened at the meeting. ‘I’m sorry,’ he began.

  Agnes shook her head. ‘It’s not your fault. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine.’

  Still the same compulsion to blame herself, thought Julius, whether justified or not. ‘It’s not your fault either,’ he said, quietly.

  ‘Oh God. She’s only just sixteen.’ Agnes sat down at the desk and leaned her head on her hands. Outside it began to rain, a warm drizzle, softly rattling the window panes. Julius touched her hand gently with his own. After a moment Agnes lifted her head, smiled briefly at him, ruffled his soft white hair and stood up.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Out.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To look for her, of course.’

  ‘In this?’

  Agnes picked up her coat.

  ‘But where do you think —’ Julius began.

  ‘The obvious places. The West End. King’s Cross — she had friends down there.’

  ‘She’d have more sense —’

  ‘Look, Julius. Compared to her stepfather, King’s Cross is a lovely warm comfy place. And safer than here.’

  She’s glad it’s raining, thought Julius, as the door closed behind her. The colder and wetter the night, the better she’ll feel. Mortification of the flesh, he thought, taking off his little glasses and polishing them absently. Still the same old Agnes.

  At three in the morning, Agnes was perched on a bar stool in a tiny cappuccino bar behind Leicester Square, warming her hands round a large cup of coffee. The rain had eased off, and there was a fragile stillness outside, fragmented from time to time by shouting revellers, passing taxis and the occasional police car siren. Two young women teetered past the glass door with wide, mascaraed eyes. Agnes made as if to follow them to ask, yet again, Sam? Samantha? Sam Whittaker? She sighed and sipped her coffee. Needles in bloody haystacks, she thought. She could see in the mirror two hollow-eyed young men glancing nervously at the door, saw them stiffen as someone came through the door and approached their table. ‘You seen ’im? Eh? You seen ’im?’

  The two boys shook their heads, panic in their eyes.

  ‘You diss me, someone roun’ ’ere goin’ ter get wasted, you hear me?’

  The young men talked in low, pleading voices. Agnes felt suddenly wear
y. Behind her, the spiky nervous conversation; in her mind, still, the endless stream of faces as she’d searched for Sam. Bleached hair, black-circled eyes, dilated pupils, nervous, twitching mouths chewing chipped nails down to the quick.

  ‘Nah, no one called Sam ’ere. Nah.’

  And then the men, some scuttling for the shadows, the others pushy. ‘You ’eard the gel. No one called Sam. Now fuck off.’

  The conversation behind her had eased, and the man got up to leave. ‘Respec’, my man, respec’.’

  The two young men were left sitting over their cans of Coke. Agnes passed a couple of coins to the jumpy Italian-looking man behind the bar and left, in time to see a sleek BMW with darkened windows drive off into the night. She headed down to Trafalgar Square in search of a cab. The pavements glistened; a dirty breeze twitched the litter into sodden heaps. At Charing Cross the cab-driver sighed heavily when given her address in Southwark.

  Agnes let herself into her flat and switched on all the lights.

  She poured herself a whisky and sat on her bed. This was the tiny home, no more than a couple of rooms, that Julius had found for her two years ago. Dear Julius, she thought, rescuing her from Hugo all those years ago, rescuing her again when, in spiritual crisis, she found herself no longer able to fit in with the quiet discipline of her enclosed order. And now she was part of an open order, whose London base was a house in Hackney, but whose sisters lived and worked wherever the order thought fit.

  She sipped her whisky and looked at the clean white walls, the antique French high-backed chair, the little wooden icon of St Francis, the rich embroidered bedspread. She breathed in the peace and harmony after the ragged chaos of the London night. She wondered whether Sam had survived so far — and for how long she’d continue to survive, living on her wits, out on the streets.

  *

  ‘OK, you lot, now listen.’

  ‘But Agnes, I’ve ate me toast —’

  ‘Sit down.’

  The defiant young redhead, surprised at Agnes’s forceful tone, sat down heavily and exchanged sulky glances with the spiky blonde girl sitting next to her.

  ‘Sam’s gone, and I — we — need to know where.’

  ‘Gone? Where?’ said one of the boys.

  ‘She seems to have run away.’

  ‘Din’t wanna go back to her mam,’ said the redhead.

  Agnes sighed. ‘No, she didn’t.’

  ‘She’ll be back up West again, then, won’t she,’ said the boy.

  ‘You don’t know where, do you?’ asked Agnes.

  The boy shook his head and spooned cornflakes into his mouth. Milk dribbled down his chin.

  ‘I spent half the night looking for her,’ Agnes said.

  ‘Nah, she’d’ve seen yer comin’,’ said the spiky girl.

  The boy took another spoonful of cornflakes. ‘There’s them other lot, in’t there,’ he said with his mouth full. ‘She might’ve gone there.’

  ‘Which other lot?’

  ‘He means King’s Cross, don’t yer, Mick?’

  ‘Nah, not there. Them road ones.’

  ‘What road ones?’

  ‘Yer mean like what Becks done?’

  Mick nodded through another mouthful of cornflakes.

  The blonde girl elaborated. ‘Becky, right, after she left ’ere, she went out east somewhere, some forest. Where they’re buildin’ a road. She went to, you know, like, stop them.’

  ‘Rainbow doobries,’ Mick said, his mouth still full.

  ‘Fuckin’ stupid,’ the red-haired girl said. ‘Livin’ up a weedin’ tree.’

  ‘Nah, it ain’t stupid. Pollution, all that, savin’ the planet. It’s OK.’

  ‘Shelle, it’s stupid. Get knocked off yer perch wiv weedin’ chainsaws and banged up and they still build the weedin’ road in the end, don’t they. Can I go now?’ The red-haired girl sauntered out of the kitchen.

  ‘Yes, you can,’ said Agnes, as all the others scraped back their chairs, cleared their plates noisily and left the room. The spiky blonde girl began to run water into the sink.

  ‘Is it your turn on the chores rota, Michelle?’ Agnes asked her.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ she said.

  ‘This road place — do you know where it is?’

  ‘Becks said it was out near Epping, I think. Somethin’ ter do wiv the M25.’

  Plates dripping with foam appeared on the draining board and Agnes took a cloth and began to wipe them.

  ‘She’ll be OK,’ Michelle said. ‘S’better than goin’ ’ome, anyway.’

  *

  ‘You look exhausted,’ Julius said later that morning, when Agnes went over to the office. He put a cup of coffee down in front of her. ‘And I suppose you didn’t find her.’

  Agnes shook her head.

  Julius paused, his hand on her shoulder. ‘There’s not a lot we can do.’

  ‘We owe it to her —’

  ‘It’s not prison, the hostel. The kids are free to go.’

  ‘What sort of freedom’s that? Of course I’m going to look for her.’

  Julius sat down at his desk. ‘Fine. It’s only that we’re short-staffed at the moment, as you know.’

  ‘Just a day or two to find her.’

  ‘I know all about your Just-A-Day-Or-Two. It had better not be like last time, that’s all,’ Julius smiled, then stopped as he saw Agnes’s face.

  ‘That was different,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. I know. Sorry.’

  ‘And it’s over.’

  ‘Yes. Agnes?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve said this before, but don’t be too hard on yourself about — about all that.’ He watched her carefully. ‘What is it, Agnes? Something’s worrying you. That meeting?’ Agnes sighed. ‘The meeting was just Sister Christiane and her team being overly concerned about me.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘They suggested that I might be getting too involved with the hostel kids, at the expense of my religious life. How can you be too involved? There’s no such thing.’

  ‘If you were a secular person, then you’d be free to choose your involvement. But in this case, surely they have a point? I mean, look at last night, for example, walking the streets in search of Sam —’

  ‘And isn’t that the work of the Lord?’

  Julius looked at her. ‘That is not for me to judge.’

  ‘They’ve even suggested I consider taking a year away from London. I told them there was no need.’

  ‘Agnes — what did they say?’

  ‘Oh, something about needing me to teach French at the order’s school in Yorkshire. Someone’s left or something. Of course, it’s out of the question, as I told them.’ She took a gulp of coffee. ‘It’s nothing to worry about, they’ll have forgotten about it soon.’ She drew a piece of paper towards her and began to write on it. ‘I just need to know I’ve done what I can for her,’ she said. ‘Sam, I mean. There,’ Agnes went on, handing him the paper. ‘The rest of the week’s rota. Without me. See, it works, and I’ll start again next week.’ Julius took it and nodded. ‘By the way, Sister Madeleine’s popping in for a sandwich, she’s back at the hostel for a while. Do you want to join us?’

  ‘I’d love to, but I’m seeing Athena for lunch.’

  ‘Right. So I’ll expect you to roll in at about half past three clutching shopping bags and reeking of Chablis.’

  ‘I’m so glad you understand, Julius, dear,’ said Agnes from the doorway. ‘So many men wouldn’t,’ she laughed, closing the door behind her.

  *

  ‘I’ve already ordered the Chablis,’ Athena announced. ‘What’s so funny?’

  They were sitting in an Italian brasserie just off Fulham Broadway. Athena was wearing her lilac linen suit, and her thick black hair was pinned into an untidy bun, from which long tresses escaped. She wore red lipstick and from her ears hung huge twists of silver.

  ‘Oh, just something Julius said,’ Agnes replied, hanging her raincoat on the back o
f her chair.

  ‘He’s never approved of me,’ Athena said. ‘From the very beginning —’

  ‘You’re quite wrong there,’ Agnes replied. ‘Julius is very fond of you.’

  ‘But when we first met —’

  ‘When we first met it was over Hugo. Julius hates Hugo, that’s all.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Athena tasted the wine, paused for a carefully poised moment and then nodded graciously at the waitress.

  ‘So, how are you?’ Agnes smiled.

  ‘Oh, OK.’

  ‘As in, not OK.’

  ‘Well …’ Athena took a sip of wine. ‘Bored, really, that’s all.’

  ‘How’s the gallery?’

  ‘Fine. Selling more and more. We’ve got some lovely watercolours in at the moment, sort of Oriental things, and then in the main room we’ve got this huge installation, it looks like a pile of broken old radios, those big chunky ones from the fifties, and they’re draped in pink quilted dressing-gowns, and there’s Henry Mancini music coming out of it. Anyway, everyone comes in to see the installation and goes out with a watercolour. Great, eh? That’s art for you.’

  ‘But it’s not enough?’

  Athena put down her glass. ‘I think it’s my age. Even me, decadent old hedonist that I am, even I’m starting to think, what’s it all for? What does it all mean? And don’t look at me with that gleam in your eye, I’m not about to convert.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it, Athena. It’s a broad church, I know, but there are limits.’

  ‘Of course, the sad fact is,’ Athena went on, ‘that all this cosmic doubt would probably disappear if a gorgeous hunky geezer appeared on the horizon.’

  Agnes sighed. ‘So much for the yearnings of the soul,’ she said, as their pasta arrived. ‘So easily displaced by altogether different yearnings.’

  ‘And talking of yearnings, that Jonathan wrote to me.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes,’ Athena went on, taking a forkful of tagliatelle. ‘He wants to put up my rent. Bloody cheek.’

  ‘How much was he charging?’

  ‘Well, nothing at all — but it’s the principle, isn’t it?’