Blood on the Bones

by Evans, Geraldine

  As if to show his lack of concern that his ignorance should be so apparent, he sat back and rubbed his hand over the grey stubble on his heavy jowls before he exclaimed, ‘Well, I'll be buggered. A body, you say?’ He sat even further back in the stout Windsor chair that was comfortably plumped with several fat cushions, and asked above the loud creaking protest of the chair as it accommodated the priest's adjusted bulk, ‘Who was buried in the grave? Do you know?’

  Rafferty shook his head. ‘Not yet. But to return to the sisters. I understand you've known most of them and ministered to all of them, bar the two young ones, for years. I'm ready to bet you must know more about them than anyone else alive, including their families.’

  ‘Is it gambling and breaking the secrets of the confessional, you'd be having me do, young Joseph Aloysius?’ Father Kelly folded his black-clad arms and scolded. ‘Shame on you for a well brought up Catholic boy. You must know I couldn't be doing either.’

  Rafferty pretended to go along with this urban myth. ‘No, Father. Of course not.’ The fibbing old fart. Pity the sod of Ould Ireland hadn't been so concerned with confessional ethics when I was in and out of his box, he thought. Because, in his youth, his ma had somehow got to hear all about the things he shouldn't have been doing; things she couldn't possibly have learned from any other source.

  Father Kelly was, unfortunately, a grass – one as green as Ould Ireland herself. The question was – would he be as enthusiastic a grass when it was nuns rather than unruly schoolboys he was ratting on? So far, the possibility didn't look promising.

  Rafferty tried another tack. ‘But surely you must also have learned things outside the confessional?’

  Father Kelly didn't answer him. Instead, he posed a question of his own.

  ‘It's not into suspecting the poor, holy sisters you're at now, is it? Shame on you, boy.’ He rummaged in his desk and found what Rafferty presumed must be the keys to the church and threw them at him. ‘You'd better away to the church and say ten Hail Marys as penance.’

  Rafferty caught the keys with a Flintoff flourish and tossed them on the nearest cluttered table. From the moment he had learned that Father Kelly was the priest who ministered to the sisters' spiritual welfare, he'd known he'd have trouble. How could he expect the priest to think of him as a respectable, responsible, adult detective inspector, when all the time he must have a picture in his mind of Rafferty the boy and youth who had been even more scruffy than his present day embodiment and whose Friday afternoon confessions took twice as long as anyone else's?

  Rafferty knew, unless the priest was to continue to run rings around him, that he needed to be firm. Sternly, he reminded him, ‘This is a murder investigation, Father and–’

  ‘Sure and you don't need to be telling me that. Won't the darling ladies be on their knees, morning, noon and night, praying for the poor man's immortal soul?’

  ‘It's not his immortal soul that concerns me, Father,’ Rafferty reminded him. ‘It's his mortal body and who ended its life. And given the enclosed nature of the sisters’ order, I have no choice but to ask questions of, and learn about, everyone who had access to the grounds, even the holy sisters themselves.’ Including you, you old reprobate, he thought, though he didn't push his luck by voicing the thought.

  The priest studied Rafferty from his whiskey-rheumed blue eyes, and asked, ‘So, what is it you're thinking I can tell you, anyway? Is it details of the nightly orgies you're after? Or the black masses when the devil and all his imps dance before the altar?’

  Rafferty counted to ten. Twice. Then he decided the best approach was to speak to Father Kelly in terms he was most familiar with: those of sin and retribution.

  ‘Are you going to answer my questions, Father? Or do you want me to charge you with obstruction? I will,’ Rafferty warned. ‘If I have to.’

  ‘There's no need to be issuing the threats to me, young Mr Detective Inspector. What would your mammy say if I told her?’

  Rafferty could guess. But this was a path he had no interest in exploring. And as he had had more than his fill of religion and its practitioners for one day, he decided it was time to get tough and make the priest understand that his threat wasn't an idle one. Quietly, he began to intone the words of the official caution. ‘Father Roberto Kelly–’ was as far as he got before the priest interrupted him.

  ‘Don't be starting on that nonsense with me,’ the priest scornfully reprimanded, with all the sermonising vigour that Rafferty recalled so well from his youth. ‘I'm not some gullible gawbeen of a country boy just off the ferry from Ireland. You don't scare me. I watch The Bill and all those American cop films, too, you know. I'm aware of the usual form in these matters.’

  Father Kelly's next words confirmed he was as conversant with the usual police arrest procedures as the most practised villain. He even had the usual vernacular off pat.

  ‘I also know that my brief would get me sprung before you could get me as far as the cells.’

  This interview was fast becoming as farcical as one of Brian Rix's West End shows, Rafferty acknowledged. But thankfully, before Father Kelly made him feel even more inadequate for the task of getting to the bottom of this inquiry than he already felt, the old priest confounded him once again by bursting into raucous laughter.

  ‘Sure and I had you going for a minute there, didn't I?’ he asked through his continuing loud guffaws. ‘Just having a bit of fun with you, young Rafferty.’ The priest's open mouth, from which the guffaws emerged unabated, displayed, behind the still fleshy lips of the born sensualist, an unedifying tombstone collection of decaying, nicotine stained teeth.

  ‘Just a bit of craic, boyo. Sermon writing can be nearly as dull as you always found sermon listening, you know. Especially when you've been doing it for as long as I have. And this Sunday's sermonising hasn't been going well. Not well at all. Call it a religious writer's block, if you like. Even the more serious minded and religiously resolute amongst the priesthood needs a bit of light relief from all the solemnity sometimes.’

  Rafferty wondered if Father Kelly included himself amongst this doughty, religiously resolute breed.

  ‘So, go on, go on,’ the priest now encouraged with a wave of his stubby hand. ‘What is it you're waiting for? Tell me, what is it you want to know.’

  Relieved that he wasn't, after all, to be forced to cart the old bugger off to the station, Rafferty said, ‘Basically, whatever you're able to tell me, Father. For instance, have there been any male visitors to the convent during the last few months who caused any kind of trouble? Anyone who had any sort of issues with one of the sisters?’

  ‘Issues, is it?’ The alcohol-induced thin veining on Father Kelly's nose and cheeks turned from red to regal purple as he tried to conceal the evening's second tendency to uncontrollable mirth beneath a pretended admiration. ‘And isn't it up to the minute you are with the words?’

  Rafferty knew he was being teased again. But this time he chose to grin and bear it. ‘Too much PC for the PCs, Father,’ Rafferty explained. ‘Politically correct cant catches up with the best of us in the end.’

  Father Kelly guffawed again at this. Suddenly the whole atmosphere eased. The priest even opened a drawer in his desk, fondled a bottle of Irish and poured two glasses kept so readily to hand that Rafferty guessed these sessions were a regular occurrence amongst the priest's habitual parishioner visitors. For while Father Kelly had signed up for the embrace of poverty, he wasn't keen on embracing too much of it. And he wasn't keen on it at all if it meant he was denied his favourite tipple.

  Rafferty found himself wondering whether his ma had ever sought recourse to the priest's advice and his whiskey. Between her errant, late husband and her six kids, she must often have had cause to seek such solace. Maybe, she'd even succumbed to Father Kelly's embrace, as countless other sympathy-seeking women were reputed to have done.

  But this was a thought beyond which even he wasn't prepared to venture and he quickly thrust it back from whence it ha
d come.

  The priest poured with a generous hand, not troubling to enquire whether Rafferty actually wanted a glass. A refusal of such alcoholic succour from a fellow with good, Irish blood in his veins was clearly beyond expectation or understanding.

  It being beyond Rafferty's understanding also, he never thought of offering anything but a grateful ‘Sláinte.’

  Father Kelly sat back and sipped his whiskey thoughtfully. ‘Troublesome visitors, you say?’

  Rafferty nodded. ‘Or anything else that struck you as out of the ordinary. Anything at all. Odd or not.’ He didn't add that he was clutching at straws. But this inquiry was already causing him sufficient qualms that he was happy to clutch at anything, even Father Kelly and his unreliable whiskey-sodden memory.

  The priest's stiff and plentiful yard brush-like eyebrows bristled and he looked at Rafferty with a narrowed gaze, as if suspecting he might be about to be accused of some sinful deviancy. Then his brow cleared, the realisation that he was without sin was writ large, as he announced firmly, 'It's not those with drink taken you're thinking of, clearly. The sisters wouldn't let any drink sodden man past the entrance gate.'

  Not unless he's called Father Kelly, anyway, was Rafferty's irreverent thought, before he added, ‘No, Father. I wasn't thinking of drunks.’

  The priest merely twinkled at him as if he'd taken to reading minds as well as sermons, and topped up both their glasses. ‘Now, I'm thinking, there was one young feller.’ He peered at Rafferty from under his mad messiah's eyebrows ‘You did say within the last few months?’

  Rafferty nodded.

  ‘The timescale would be about right, then, I'm thinking, though you could confirm it with the dear Mother. And though he didn't cause any trouble, he was pretty upset. Not surprising in the circumstances. I gathered he was enquiring about poor Sister Clare. According to Sister Rita this man claimed he was some sort of relative.’

  ‘Why ‘poor’ Sister Clare?’ And why had Mother Catherine failed to mention this visitor when he had questioned her? were Rafferty's thoughts.

  'Sure, and hasn't the dear woman been dead these thirty years? Died out in Africa. Ministering to the poor and the sick she was, when a murderous mob attacked the mission compound, killing Sister Clare and the other ministering angels. Sister Catherine, as the Mother Superior then was, was seriously injured. She was the only survivor and lucky to be so.'

  ‘That's where Mother Catherine got those terrible burns?’

  The priest nodded. 'Damaged her eyesight, too. That's why, even though, like the rest of us, she embraced poverty with her vows, she's provided with the funds to pay for those expensive tinted spectacles.

  ‘Anyway.’ Father Kelly tipped the last of his second Irish down his throat, poured a third and would have done the same to Rafferty's glass if he hadn't shook his head and moved the glass out of reach. ‘To get back to that young man I was telling you about. Mother Catherine was cloistered in her office with him for some time, breaking the news to him about Sister Clare's terrible death. That would be sometime towards the end of August, I'm thinking.’

  The priest frowned ferociously as he performed this prodigious feat of memory. 'As I said, Mother Catherine broke the news to him and the young man left, escorted out at the same time as me by Sister Rita. I hadn't seen him before that day and I haven't seen him since. Don't expect to. He had received the answer to his question and there was nothing else Mother Catherine could tell him. I imagine she would have much preferred not to have to speak about such a tragedy at all as it must have brought back some terrible memories for the dear lady.'

  Rafferty nodded. After hearing Father Kelly's story, he felt more forgiving that Mother Catherine had failed to mention her August visitor. Presumably, her amnesia was essential if she was to save herself from a too-frequent exploration of such memories

  ‘That's all I can think of in the odd or troublesome visitors line. But of course, I'm not there that much. And what I'm able to tell you doesn't amount to much, either, does it, young Rafferty?’

  Rafferty had to agree.

  The priest changed the subject then and began to interrogate him.

  ‘So, how's that young lady of yours doing since she lost her babby?’ he asked with every indication of concern. ‘I remember how set about was the poor little colleen when I saw her in hospital.’

  Rafferty wasn't fooled by Father Kelly's show of concern. As usual, the priest had an ulterior motive concealed beneath his black religious robes and Rafferty suspected he knew where this was heading. But he answered anyway. ‘She's fine, Father. Abra's fine now.’

  ‘That's grand. That's grand. Glad I am to hear it. Be even finer, would be my guess, if you made an honest woman of her.’

  But Rafferty, having obtained what he'd come for, not that that amounted to much, wasn't about to let the priest re-assert any kind of authoritarian Catholic hold over him now. So he simply thanked Father Kelly for the drink and the information, such as it was, bid him goodbye and made a rather swifter exit than he had entrance, chased by the question: ‘And when can I expect to see you at Mass?’

  ‘Sometime never,’ Rafferty muttered under his breath. ‘If I know what's good for me.’

  ‘I know it's still very early in the investigation,’ Llewellyn commented after Rafferty had returned to the station and recounted his conversation with Father Kelly, 'but, so far, we don't seem to have many promising leads.

  ‘Before you rushed off so precipitously, I was about to tell you that Dr Peterson was able to tell me nothing helpful, either,’ he revealed as Rafferty eased his tired body into his chair in his office. He hoped Llewellyn wasn't about to return to his earlier cross-questioning about his litter-bugging. But he was saved from this at least.

  ‘It's not as if it's likely that any of the nuns can have some dark secret, apart from one of the novices perhaps, as they would certainly have lived in the sinful world more recently than the rest.’

  Rafferty, thinking of his own recent encounter with a holy sinner, not to mention his blackmail letter which related to events months past, wasn't so convinced of these conclusions as Llewellyn seemed to be. ‘We don't know that this man's death came about because of any recent event,’ he pointed out. ‘Maybe something from a time in one of their lives prior to taking the veil came back to haunt one of the sisters.’

  ‘The timescale alone surely makes that unlikely?’ Llewellyn replied. ‘Apart from the novices, all the sisters have lived within an enclosed order for twenty years or more. Why would anyone seeking retribution for old secrets wait so long?’

  ‘Why indeed?" Rafferty asked, as he again thought of his own secret and the blackmailer who had himself been somewhat tardy in his approach. ‘But they do have occasional visitors. Mother Catherine herself told us that the sisters’ family and friends are allowed to make occasional visits, for instance. So anyone from one of the sisters’ past lives could have gained access and slipped one of them a note along the lines of: ‘Meet me in the shrubbery after Compline. Come alone.’ That kind of thing.’

  Llewellyn's inscrutable gaze gave little away, but Rafferty detected a hint of scepticism, a scepticism reduced only slightly when Rafferty reminded him what Father Kelly had told him. True it was, that although Mother Catherine had informed them there had been no such visitors to the convent during the relevant time, she had certainly suffered one memory lapse over the question.

  And although, unlike him, Llewellyn tended not to play favourites, the Welshman admitted his preferred suspects were the two men who had regular access to the convent: Father Kelly and Dr Peterson, particularly given the fact that the set of spare keys to the convent was missing.

  ‘It's just the logistical aspect of which I'm thinking,’ Llewellyn said. ‘Because whereas most of the nuns are given to abstinence, are on the slender side and have their days circumscribed by the demands of their Office, Dr Peterson is not only a big-built man, his time, although presumably as demanding as that of any busy GP, is
capable of some flexibility. Given his size, he would surely not have too much difficulty in carrying a corpse across the sisters’ extensive grounds.’

  He paused, then asked: ‘What about Father Kelly? Would he be capable of shouldering such a burden?’

  ‘Doubtful,’ Rafferty replied. 'Admittedly, Father Kelly is pretty hefty, too, but his is more of a whiskey-bloated stoutness. And he must be knocking on for seventy if he's a day. Not exactly designed for carrying heavy weights.' Not unless it was a parishioner's Christmas gift of a box of a dozen Jameson bottles. Rafferty suspected he'd manage that with no trouble at all.

  Of course, unlike Rafferty, the Methodist-raised Welshman had no lingering Catholic issues from his youth, which probably explained his more logical thinking. Llewellyn harboured no resentments about the stern, repressive nature of his upbringing, even though, from what Rafferty had learned of his sergeant's own youth, the Methodists weren't above a bit of repression themselves.

  Rafferty, struggling inwardly with his growing angst, was already finding the case a strain. How much more of a strain would it become, he wondered after he'd been encountering for several weeks on a daily basis, all the residual, ever-present Catholic issues of guilt, sin and denial that he had hoped were, if not long behind him, at least far from sight, sound and conscience?

  But the Catholic obsession with guilt and sin threw a long shadow. Rafferty suspected that, in time, he might even take to lighting candles in the hope that someone up there would help him bring this case to a swift conclusion. Because he was beginning to fear that Catholicism might yet manage to wrap its clinging, insidious tentacles around him for the second time in his life.

  Perhaps, subconsciously, he hoped that if he was able to prove that, like Father Kelly, one of the holy sisters wasn't so holy after all, it might strengthen his defences against such ensnaring tentacles. It wasn't beyond the bounds of credibility, because, like fornicating priests, nuns, too, were capable of breaking the tenets of their faith – as many unfortunate orphans and young unmarried mothers in their ‘care’ in the past, in Ireland and elsewhere, could vouch for.