In less than two seconds, Glen was standing with his back to the doors and nobody behind him. He was still facing three of them, but he had a length of pipe in his hand and it wasn’t plastic.
He was the one cutting off their exit.
Christ, he thought, was this all they could muster? Or had his reputation so diminished through his prolonged absence that they thought this shower, plus the element of surprise, would be enough to take him down? It wouldn’t have been enough twenty years ago, and that was before he had been taught to fight by military professionals.
It certainly hadn’t helped them that there was no element of surprise.
Glen had long ago learned how to truly listen to his instincts. He understood how fear, the insistent sense that something was wrong, emanated from parts of the brain that predated language or even cognitive thought, and thus operated a million times faster. He had needed no such primal instincts today, though: the awareness that he was about to be attacked didn’t precipitate in the fraction of a second before the first blow was attempted. It came when the screw came over and told him to get a fresh bin for the offcuts.
It was all over the guard’s face: a draining anxiety about what he knew was about to go down. More than that, he was thinking beyond it too. This guy was already worried about the inquiry later, unsure whether his arse was covered, concerned for his job. Glen could tell this wasn’t a backhander to look the other way. There was pressure from somewhere else.
How far did it go, he wondered. Were the cops in on this too?
He’d soon find out.
He rendered two of them unconscious as swiftly and cleanly as he could. He didn’t want the aftermath getting complicated. The third one he left wide awake. Glen needed him to talk.
Glen had known this was coming, not merely since he’d noticed the state of that guard. He’d known it was coming since the moment he entered the prison.
Glen hadn’t spoken a word to the cops, but that didn’t matter. It was the golden rule of assassination: kill the assassin before he can tell anybody his version of events.
Sooner or later, he knew, they would make their move, and that was when he might finally catch a glimpse of who they were.
‘Who arranged this?’ Glen asked.
The guy answered pretty fast. He had expected this to be an easy gig, but now he wouldn’t be getting whatever he was promised, and clearly there were no contingencies. Whoever put him up to this hadn’t warned him what he was really getting into, so he wasn’t feeling particularly loyal. Especially when Glen asked him if he had ever been curious about what his own spleen looked like.
‘Doke,’ he replied pleadingly. ‘Doke Donnelly.’
‘Shite,’ Glen spat.
‘It’s the truth,’ the guy said, panicking. ‘It was Doke. He said to tell you it was payback for Stevie. And for Jazz.’
The guy had misunderstood why he swore. It wasn’t because Glen didn’t believe him: he did. He swore because this was the worst possible answer. Doke was loyal enough and stupid enough to have ordered this attack, but these were also two solid reasons why he couldn’t possibly be behind the other thing.
Confession
‘Knew I shouldn’t have worn these,’ Laura mourned, glancing down as her otherwise comfortable and work-practical suede shoes sank into the sodden turf, their soft tops spattered further with every step she took.
‘And I bet you said no when the nice woman in the shop offered you the can of that spray-protector too.’
A fairly scunnered look told Catherine she had just added a layer of regret to Laura’s discomfort.
They were making their way across the Shawburn municipal playing fields towards one of several pitches where football matches were in progress, the failing light indicating that none of them could have very long left to play.
Their route along a cinder path had brought them up behind one goalmouth of what had been indicated as pitch seven. It was here that Catherine ruined Laura’s mood – and quite possibly her shoes – by proceeding around the touchline towards two groups of men gathered near the halfway mark. All but two were dressed in tracksuit tops, shorts below, indicating that they were substitutes. The exceptions she took to be the respective coaches or managers, though there was no discernible age gap between them and many of the participants.
When she’d been told where she might find Father McGhee, Catherine had assumed the priest must be in charge of the team, but she quickly realised that he could be anybody here. It was far from a youth game, and the fitness levels clearly weren’t exacting either. She reckoned Laura would be able to comfortably outrun all of them, even in her suede pumps, while trying to keep pace with Zoe Vernon would have had them chucking up their guts.
Laura and Zoe would need their speed, though, were they ever imprudent enough to get involved in a game like this. In the time it took to walk halfway around the pitch, Catherine had seen two tackles that merited the production of her warrant card, never mind one from the referee; followed by an elbow-strike to the face like something out of the WWE. This last left its victim flat out in the penalty box while his team-mates raged at the ref, who had apparently missed it.
‘We’re looking for Francis McGhee,’ Catherine said by way of announcing herself to the nearer of the groups on the touchline.
The one guy not wearing a tracksuit and shorts turned to address her.
‘Do you see that guy with the number eight jersey? The one who just clothes-lined that boy a second ago?’
‘That was Father McGhee?’ Laura asked, appalled.
‘Naw. But keep watching him, because your man’s gaunny put him up in the air in aboot thirty seconds.’
Sure enough, as soon as the offending midfielder next got possession he was blindsided by a sliding lunge that could only have been described as ‘late’ by anyone naïve enough to believe that the ball played any part in the perpetrator’s calculations. The tackle was, to Catherine’s eyes, bang on time.
The referee hurried across to the aftermath, thrusting a red card at the silver-haired assassin, who responded with a resigned but disgusted wave of his hand.
‘Aye, well seeing the blind cunt spotted that,’ complained one of the subs.
‘To be fair, he could hardly fuckin’ miss it,’ said the coach. ‘Only bastart who never saw it coming was the buckled walloper in the number eight jersey.’
Catherine watched the offender leave the field. After a red card, the verb of choice for describing the dismissed player’s gait was normally ‘trudged’, but this guy sauntered, head high, like he was out for a walk and the game just happened to be going on behind him.
He was in his fifties, she reckoned. He had a full head of hair, swept back in a severe-looking quiff. His face was weathered, lines accentuating every angle, like he had walked out of a Howson painting. He reminded Catherine of Samuel Beckett, except she had never seen Samuel Beckett scissor-kick somebody from a horizontal position, following through with the trailing leg.
‘Is that him suspended next week?’ somebody asked.
‘Aye, but he was going his holidays or away with the school or something anyway.’
As he neared the touchline, silver hair gave a cursory shrug of explanation or apology to his coach, like he knew neither was truly necessary.
‘Franny,’ the coach said, jerking his head towards Catherine and Laura. ‘Polis here tae see ye.’
They hadn’t identified themselves as such, but with certain types you didn’t have to, and they liked to let you know it too.
‘I’m Detective Superintendent Catherine McLeod, and this is Detective Inspector Laura Geddes,’ she said, producing her card.
‘Was the tackle that bad?’ he asked, with a fly smile towards the boss.
‘I was always given the impression that Jesus said turn the other cheek,’ Catherine suggested.
‘Jesus never had to play holding midfielder in the Shawburn and Gallowhaugh District League,’ he replied.
�
�We need to talk to you about one of your parishioners.’
‘Sure. It’s a long way back to the pavilion: walk up with me. Gary, you got the key to the dressing room?’
The coach reached into his jacket and tossed McGhee a key with its end wrapped in red electrical tape.
‘I’m only giving you this because these ladies will make sure you’re not in there dipping pockets.’
‘Aye, very good. I’ll catch you after full time. You think we can close this one out with ten?’
‘Gaunny have to, aren’t we. But six-nothin’ up, aye: I think we can cling on.’
They walked with him back along the edge of the pitch and on to the cinder path.
‘Not exactly the beautiful game,’ Catherine observed.
‘Naw,’ he replied with an arch grin. ‘It’s an ex-offenders team. Keeps folk occupied, which is important when you’re unemployed. Gives them something to belong to, team-mates who’ll look out for each other on and off the park. That’s why I had to clean that boy out. It was so Eddie, the bloke that got elbowed, knows I’ve got his back.’
‘Looking out for mind, body and soul.’
‘The Lord’s work is never done, and sometimes it requires a two-footed mucking out. But you’re not here to talk about fitba, so what can I do for you?’
‘It’s about Brenda Sheehan,’ Catherine said.
McGhee nodded solemnly, maybe even relieved that it was about who he had expected and not some new difficulty.
‘How long did you know her?’
‘More than twenty years. Since I came to the parish. She was AA, as you may know. One of the twelve steps is putting your trust in a higher power.’
‘So you’d have seen her recently. How did she seem?’
‘Grand. She was a troubled soul, and she seemed that wee bit more, I don’t know, happy in her own skin, or in her own head maybe.’
‘So it would surprise you to learn that she was found surrounded by empties, apparently having aspirated her own vomit?’
McGhee literally stopped in his tracks. He seemed to calculate something, then resumed walking.
‘I’m guessing you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t think it would surprise me.’
‘We’re treating the death as suspicious, yes. What do you know about her brother, Teddy?’
‘I conducted his funeral. That was how I got to know Brenda back in the days when she worshipped the great god Smirnoff and seldom saw the inside of the chapel. I hadn’t been at the parish long, so I only got the history second hand. It was a truly miserable affair. I mean, I’ve seen some horrendous funerals, heart-breaking circumstances, but in its own way that was the saddest, because she was so alone. There was hardly anybody in the church; even some of the regulars who turn up to mass every day gave that one a bodyswerve because of what he’d done. Fuckin’ holy wullies, bane of my existence.’
Catherine had to remind herself that she was talking to a priest. It wasn’t just that he was dressed in muddy football kit, but his language and even his metre jarred with all her previous experience. The others she had met tended to slip into this auto-piety register that seemed an attempt to imbue their mundane and frequently asinine contributions with some deeper meaning and authority.
‘How did he die?’
‘He went off a roof at Bailliehall prison.’
McGhee arched his brow. Clearly there were layers to this.
‘Officially, it was an accident. Death by misadventure, failures of supervision, blah blah blah.’
‘But unofficially, you think something else?’
‘I don’t think: I know. It was a suicide. The prison authorities didn’t want it official, though, as that would have triggered all sorts, and they could argue there was no definitive way of knowing. Either way, it happened because he was somewhere he shouldn’t have been, and that was the part they wanted to address: their own procedures, not what was going on in the guy’s head. Heads rolled, arses were kicked, new procedures instigated.’
‘But if there was no definitive way of knowing . . .’ Catherine prompted.
‘There’s enough of a difference between definitive and reasonable doubt to give autocrats all the wiggle room they need. But I got the inside story, including details that weren’t supposed to leave Bailliehall.’
‘Who from?’
‘The prison’s Catholic chaplain. He made a point of letting me know.’
‘Why would he do that, when it was supposed to be confidential?’
‘Because he was a cunt.’
He slowed his stride, looking her in the eye so that she and Laura both understood this wasn’t coarse flippancy, common disrespect or McGhee trying to come across as a bit of a character. This was something that ran deep.
‘His name was Cawley, Father Pearce Cawley. He was a dinosaur, which I imagine you’ll appreciate is really saying something when we’re talking about Our Thing here. One of those bastards who got a dodgy Bible: all the pages about redemption and forgiveness were missing, you know?’
‘Don’t they end up cardinals rather than chaplains?’
‘I’m saying nothing. But what you need to know about the Catholic Church: it’s changed noo, but back then, if you committed suicide, you couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground, and there could be no mass said for you. That miserable auld fucker knew Teddy Sheehan had jumped, and he wanted me to know too, because I was planting him.’
‘Did he have it in for Teddy? Did he have a specific interest in the case, or a falling out?’
‘No. He was bloodless: somebody with no imagination, no empathy, no compassion. He knew what the rules were but it would never have occurred to him to look beyond them, you know?’ ‘You’re asking a polis that?’
‘Naw. Just checking you were the type who understood that this was a bad thing.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I went with the official version. Boy deserved a proper burial. Brenda deserved it.’
‘So, hang on,’ Catherine said, winding back. ‘You couldn’t be buried on consecrated ground if you committed suicide, but you were good to go if you murdered somebody?’
‘Aye. If you had sought absolution.’
‘And had Teddy?’
‘I took it as read. He’d confessed to the crime. He didn’t need to confess to me.’
‘What is confession, exactly?’ Catherine asked. She knew fine, having asked Laura for her lapsed-Catholic take on it, but she wanted to nudge McGhee on to the subject.
‘It’s a waste of fuckin’ time, mostly,’ he replied, which differed quite markedly from Laura’s answer. ‘Seriously, ninety-nine point nine per cent of it is actually absurd: wee folk like Brenda who have next to nothing in this world, who have hurt nobody, but they still need to sit there and tell me all the ways they think they’ve been bad.’
‘So why do you do it? Is it because you signed up, it’s part of the job and now it’s your shift?’
‘I do it, like many other apparently daft things in this game, for the exceptions rather than the rules. For the zero point one per cent that really need it.’
‘But what is it they need? What can you give them?’
‘I cannae say for sure that I’ve ever given them anything. I can only say what they need: forgiveness. They ask it from God because they can’t get it from the person whose forgiveness they need most.’
‘Themselves,’ Catherine said.
He looked at her for a moment, long enough for her to worry about what he saw.
‘I’ve been there myself,’ he said softly, the studs of his boots crunching as they crossed on to concrete. ‘I think most of us have, at some point. You ask for absolution from something higher because you hope that will give you permission to forgive yourself. Are you a believer, officer?’ he asked.
Catherine shook her head. Saying no seemed wrong somehow, diminishing, and she resented the way it was phrased, not specifying what she may or may not be a believer in.
‘Didnae think so,
’ he replied with a wry smile, almost conspiratorial. It was as though he didn’t bloody believe it either. ‘When somebody like me talks about a higher power, I know that turns some folk off. But I’m closer to your position than you’d imagine. I think we all have a need to believe in something greater than ourselves, and to make our lives a contribution to that. Some might call it God. You might call it the greater good.
‘But what I take from it, what I know, is that the greater good needs you to cut your guilt loose so you can get on with making a contribution. It needs you to forgive yourself.’
They were nearing the pavilion: a grand, Victorian-sounding word for a dull, seventies-built grey concrete box. It was time for the money shot.
‘Brenda Sheehan’s AA sponsor told us that the last time she saw her, she seemed happier, less burdened. She said she had made her confession. Father McGhee, I realise that it’s supposed to be confidential, but I need to know what she told you.’
She braced herself for the self-righteous bit about violating the sanctity of the confessional. Instead he fixed her with a curious look, scrutinising and almost relieved.
‘I can’t do that,’ he replied, politely apologetic.
‘But she’s dead, Father,’ Catherine argued. ‘And if anything she told you might be in any way related to what brought that about—’
‘You don’t need to sell me justice, officer,’ he interrupted, that strange look still glinting in his eyes. ‘I’m as pragmatic as they come. But you weren’t hearing me earlier. I already told you: Brenda Sheehan was not one of the zero point one per cent, remember? I can’t tell you what she confessed because there’s nothing to tell. If Brenda made the kind of confession that liberates a soul, then she didn’t make it to me.’
With that, he walked off towards the changing rooms, leaving Catherine in no doubt that he was telling the truth. It was that look of something close to relief: when she told him they were here about what Brenda might have confessed, he understood that he wasn’t going to be compromised or conflicted, because he knew he couldn’t help them.
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