by AB Morgan
‘What poison did you use?’ I asked, desperate for an admission of guilt. ‘In the cake, what have you used to poison me?’
The silence was unbearable. Father Raymond and Pip stared at each other as if I had surprised them by my astute deduction.
‘Goodness me, relax. We haven’t poisoned you. Pip is not the guardian you are looking for, because I am,’ Father Raymond said, standing up and clearing away my spit-splattered plate. I was shaking so much that I spilt my tea when I tried to take a calming sip. Father Raymond took that away from me too.
‘Let’s start again, shall we?’ he said, sitting down next to me and taking my hand. ‘Monica, you’ve been incredibly persistent and determined, and I’m here to help you, not to poison you. I’ve worked with Jan Collins for more years than I care to remember. She was a remarkable individual and Pip here will follow in her footsteps and mine. I am a Jesuit but not one who follows the orders of an organisation, I follow the truth of God himself, which is why I can never take the fourth vow of the Jesuit brotherhood, which is to obey the orders of the Pope.
‘The church has veered dangerously away from God. No man should abuse children in His name, and no church should ever deny wrongdoing or the love of one man for another. God is love, Monica.’
I wasn’t feeling the love. Nausea yes, love no. Pip was wiping the tablecloth and laying my place again, with clean cutlery and crockery. ‘I don’t think I can manage any more cake,’ I confessed. ‘In fact I need a few minutes to get myself together.’ Pip gave me a hug as the tears of relief sprung from the corners of my eyes. ‘I’m so sorry, we thought you were working with Charlie Adams,’ I said to Father Raymond, ‘and that you had killed Father Joseph and Jan. I can’t believe we got it so wrong.’
‘I hope by “we” that you mean Aitken, Brown and Partners. Only you and Pip know who I am and I’d like to keep it that way.’ His face fell as he saw my reaction. ‘Who else is involved?’
I was about to answer him when the doorbell rang. ‘Probably Emma coming to collect me,’ I said, feeling ashamed, guilty and generally wretched. Pip went to answer the door.
It wasn’t Emma, but I heard a familiar voice echoing from the hallway. ‘Shit,’ I muttered, looking desperately at Father Raymond. ‘That’s Charlie Adams,’ I whispered with my eyes wide in abject fear. Run and hide. I slid underneath the refectory table as Pip was being directed by Charles Adams to lead him to the delicious afternoon tea he’d heard about from Karen and Vanessa at St David’s Church Hall.
‘They were so helpful. I needed to talk to Monica Morris and they said she would be here. Her car isn’t outside, oh, and I see she hasn’t arrived yet. Never mind, I’ll wait.’ Charles Adams pulled out a chair at the end of the table. The opposite end from where I was hiding.
I couldn’t see what was going on.
‘No, I think we might have been stood up,’ Father Raymond said. His confident lie was impressive.
My handbag remained next to the chair where I had been sitting and I reached out very cautiously to slide it beneath the table without being noticed. I was trembling through every limb in my body. Never mind flight or fight reactions, I was struggling not to lose control of my bowels. Crapometer readings were off the scale.
‘I’ve brought along my own contribution. As you can see I’ve gone to a lot of trouble and cut off the crusts. A little bird tells me that you are vegetarian, Father, so for you I have prepared a special salad sandwich. For Philip there is a selection.’ Charlie’s voice was mocking and distant.
‘While we wait for the charming nurse we shall play a game of sandwich roulette.
‘Ever heard of coniine, gentlemen?
‘No?
‘But you will have heard of hemlock.
‘Yes, I thought so.
‘Pip, you go first.’
34
Managing to slip my mobile phone out of my bag, I sent a shaky text.
‘I’m OK I’m under the table. WAIT.’
The rapid reply gave no encouragement.
‘Too quiet, can’t hear him.’
I couldn’t risk crawling under the table. If I was a slim, tiny, dainty thing it might have been a different matter, but a woman of my Amazonian proportions would have sent chairs crashing. Tablecloths would have moved, exposing me as I dragged them off the table in my clumsy efforts to be closer to the enemy. The only choice I had was to remove the earwig fob from the lanyard and skim it along the floor towards the far end of the table.
‘Tea?’ I heard Pip ask in a high-pitched nervous squeak.
‘Good idea, we’ll need tea to wash the sandwiches down. I’ll have cake,’ I heard Charlie say with a cutting edge to his tone of voice.
There was a rattling of cups being placed on the table at the far end, giving me the opportunity to slide the fob along the wooden floor towards Charlie Adams’s legs. My aim was wildly inaccurate and the fob hit the leg of a chair, ricocheting to the far right. It now lay outside the protective shelter of the table above it. I winced and held my breath, hoping that the noise had not been heard.
‘What sort of tea is this, it looks a bit stewed? A fresh pot please, Philip, then you must have a sandwich of your choice.’
‘Which ones should he look out for?’ asked Father Raymond.
I needed paper and a pen. Trying not to make a sound, I found, in my handbag, my personal diary in which I wrote in large letters, ‘any that smell like mouse’ and pushed the tiny diary between Father Raymond’s knees.
‘The ones with coniine in should be avoided, Father. I have manufactured a superbly intense alkaloid so we shan’t have to wait long to see the effects. It should make for a much more interesting game, don’t you think?
‘When they find you, it will look just as if you’ve poisoned your secret lover, and killed yourself in a bizarre suicide pact. Not a last supper, a last afternoon tea. How quaint.
‘Oh yes, I know about you two. Too obvious. Gay priests frolicking together by the railway tracks.’ A bitter snigger added to the insulting way in which Charlie Adams addressed Father Raymond each time he spoke to him.
A silent text came through to my personal mobile. ‘Loud and clear. Prepare to be evacuated. One confession needed.’
What did they mean, one confession needed? Pip was risking death in the next few minutes. ‘Is that the same sort of sandwich you gave to Ben Tierney?’ Father Raymond was playing for more time, but it was a beautiful choice of question, if only he knew it. A confession should be imminent, I thought.
‘No, that was my speciality for mental health patients, Datura Stramonium, a member of the deadly nightshade family, and it contains all sorts of lovely anticholinergic alkaloids. It always fools the ignorant. This one is different, remember, I said so. Eat up, Pip.’
‘It smells a bit funny,’ Pip said. From my position on all fours under the table, I saw Father Raymond stand suddenly. There was a scuffling of chairs and the whole table moved above me making a dreadful scraping noise on the floor.
‘No, Pip, don’t eat it! I’ll eat it,’ I heard Father Raymond say in despair. Then Pip shouted, ‘No, Ray, please don’t.’
Charlie Adams was applauding loudly. ‘Bravo, bravo. A bloody excellent game.’
I sent a text with tremulous fingers. ‘Get an ambulance and get here now’.
Father Raymond slumped back down onto his chair and my eyes were then level with his knees. So I reached out and touched him to let him know I was there.
‘Pip, you might as well have a sandwich now, because lover boy Ray has had a big bite of his. Finish up now, Ray, there’s a good man. I can’t leave until they’re all gone, or you are.’ Charlie let out a sigh as if he was being kept waiting for an appointment. Pip had moved to kneel next to Father Raymond. ‘Come on now, Philip, you might as well eat yours now; life‘s not going to be worth living without him. Think … you can be together forever.’
The doorbell rang.
‘Oh, how lovely, that will be Nurse Monica, better l
ate than ever. I’ll let her in, shall I?’
As Charlie got up from the table, I stuck my head out from under the overhanging tablecloth and mouthed for Pip to run. He didn’t move.
Instead, we listened, spellbound, to the commotion from the entrance hall.
Emma’s voice. ‘Sorry she can’t come, she sends her apologies.’ Then the most astounding, thunderous, crashing noise of body hitting floor I’d heard in all my years as a psychiatric nurse.
‘I don’t apologise, you bastard!’
Max.
There was more thudding and groaning before I could hear the voices of the IPCC’s officers arriving to take over from my husband. ‘Well done, sir, I think we’d better take it from here in case you overstep the mark.’
Charlie could be heard groaning, ‘What the fuck?’
As Emma raced into the kitchen, with Max not far behind her in his full biker gear, Father Raymond collapsed onto the floor with Pip holding him.
Father Raymond’s body was limp, but in his eyes the terror showed, as his breathing became fearfully shallow.
‘The ambulance won’t get here in time,’ Emma said, as she rushed over to us.
‘He’ll be okay if we breathe for him. Wipe his mouth,’ I barked as I grabbed my handbag from beneath the refectory table to find a small bottle of alcohol hand rub that I kept for no-soap situations. I passed it to Emma who used a tissue to wipe Father Raymond’s lips and chin.
Emma and I took it in turns to give mouth to mouth, as we had been trained to do, every year, on a dummy. The nursing instinct had taken over.
Pip was as calm as he could manage.
‘Keep talking to him. He can hear us, he’s not dead. We just have to keep breathing for him until the ambulance arrives, the poison wears off eventually,’ I said to Pip, trying to explain before taking my turn again. Emma was still in phone contact with the ambulance control centre. ‘Speak to Guy’s Poisons Unit. Tell them it’s coniine, like hemlock. Same thing, apparently. We’re doing mouth to mouth, please hurry.’
Emma and I sat in A&E for what seemed like an eternity of tension and uncertainty. Playing eye-spy and engaging in some less than complimentary people-watching, we made valiant efforts to distract ourselves. This failed to keep our attention for long, so Emma had then taken to wandering across the room to stare out of the window towards the psychiatric admissions wards in the block opposite. It did at least break up the strain of endless waiting.
Although it was getting dark outside, the car park was well lit.
‘Here come the police with another one of ours, by the look of things. Yep. That’s our friend Harvey and his wailing, German mother, causing havoc as usual. She’s being comforted by Toni who’s utterly drained, poor woman.’ Taking my cue from Emma’s running commentary, I made my way to her side. We watched together as a screeching Mrs Fields remonstrated with the police and tried to block the doorway to prevent her son from being admitted. ‘That’s not going to help,’ I confirmed. ‘Look, the police are having none of it.’
When the brief drama was over, we plodded slowly back to where we had set up camp in the waiting room on unyielding plastic seats. A&E was an uninspiring department, lit by unflattering fluorescent lights, some of which were flickering enough to set off epilepsy.
Seeing the police had set me thinking. ‘I hope they lock Charlie Adams up securely; I wouldn’t want him coming after me again. What with him and Frank Hughes both being on my ‘should be put down list’ and me on theirs, I’m going to be in a precarious position when they see freedom again. In fact, my life expectancy has shortened dramatically in the past few weeks.’
‘It’s been a bit of a weird one, hasn’t it?’ Emma commented, ever the mistress of understatement.
When we’d arrived at A&E, shortly after the ambulance, it was obvious that the staff were not hopeful that Father Raymond would make it through the next few hours. So we lied and told the staff that Pip was Father Raymond’s brother, enabling him to stay by his side. ‘Who cares,’ Emma had said, ‘It’s close enough to the truth, and sometimes a lie fits better anyway. God won’t mind.’
‘Yeah, well, God is love and all that bollocks. Want a cardboard coffee from the machine?’
‘No thanks. It’ll keep me awake tonight and I was rather hoping to be able to switch off my head. Ah … I spy with my little eye, something beginning with P.’ As she said this, Pip appeared and we both sat up from our slumped positions on the uncomfortable seats. His facial expression was difficult to read.
‘Well?’
‘He’s alive.’
‘Thank God for that,’ I sighed, slumping again with relief.
‘No. Thank you two for that. I don’t know what to say.’ Pip sat next to me and burst into tears, released from hours of nerves and facing the possibility that Father Raymond could have died. ‘Twice in a matter of days … we nearly got killed by a train, then we’re both nearly poisoned to death by a policeman. Our friend Jan is dead, Liam is dead, and Ben is dead, which will probably kill his parents. I don’t want to talk about Father Joseph, but he’s the reason behind all this death and devastation.’
‘Exactly how much do you know?’ Emma asked.
‘Not much. You’ll have to ask Ray when he recovers a bit more. He knew everything. But I do know that I can’t become a priest in the Catholic Church. Not now I know about the abuse and the denials, the subterfuge, the politicians, and the government figures. I can’t.’
‘Ben was right all along, how bloody sad,’ I said. ‘Everyone thought he was deluded. You know, I still feel guilty for thinking that Father Raymond had poisoned Father Joseph and killed Jan. We thought he was hiding something because of the rumours he spread about Liam Brookes.’
Pip managed a watered-down version of a smile. ‘I asked him about that myself. He did it to protect his oldest and dearest friend, Jan, from her own brother. Stepbrother, drug dealer, horrible piece of work, Frank Hughes. Ray and Jan decided between them that if Frank thought all her money had already been spent, then he would leave her alone, and that if they named Liam, the police would take his disappearance seriously enough to bother looking for him and uncover what happened to Nick Shafer, but they didn’t.
‘Ray changed the lock on the back door at her house, because Frank had broken in and stolen a load of cash while his sister was in hospital. What a despicable thing to do.’ Pip shook his head.
‘At least it explains who I saw at Jan’s house the day I found her. It was Frank, looking to sneak back in. No wonder he hated me so much, I turned up at Jan’s house twice when he was there, and at the Heights, at the funeral and the police station. He must have thought I was watching his every move.’
‘What about you and Father Raymond?’ Emma asked Pip, not one to shy away from an awkward question.
Pip did not side-step the answer. ‘We discussed this before you came for tea, Monica, and we had hoped to break the news to you today over a slice of sponge cake, but some nasty individual ruined our big moment. We guessed you knew about our relationship, from how you were at the hospital, when you came in to see me. You were so thoughtful and accepting.
‘The news is that Ray is leaving the priesthood for the same reasons that I can’t join it and because we can’t deny who we are. We’d like to work with the abuse survivors and try to see that justice is done, so we plan to get in touch with Tam Aitken.
‘Imagine how powerful the message will be to the churches and the politicians when they hear the story we have to tell.’
‘Danny Wakeman’s listeners are in for a treat when he gets hold of this little beauty,’ I said to Emma in a stage whisper, looking at Pip.
‘Bring it on,’ he said, grinning.
35
The Daily Albion:
Ex-Priest and his lover die in suicide pact:
Or is it something more sinister?
The small town of Lensham has been the subject of media attention for the past twelve months.
First ther
e was a series of unexplained deaths which all related to each other and to allegations of historical sexual abuse, a paedophile ring, and the Catholic Church.
A spokesperson from the offices of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster has emphatically denied any wrongdoing and insists “The Church takes seriously any such allegations and will take steps to commence an internal review of the evidence once this has been presented. However, at this time, no complaint has been received which relates in any way to abuses within the Catholic Church in Lensham”.
Janet Collins, aged 54, divorced, was the first of the suspicious deaths in Lensham. Suicide was considered to be the most likely cause because of her history of mental health difficulties. But suicide was never proven and her brother, well-known local businessman, Frank Hughes, 47yrs, divorced, was arrested on suspicion of her murder but released with no charge 48 hours later. He is currently serving a sentence for serious drug offences.
Detective Sergeant Charles Adams, aged 34yrs and originally from Nuneaton, is on trial suspected of killing Mrs Collins. Coroner Mr Howard Williams is awaiting completion of the court hearings in the trial of Detective Sergeant Adams before he is able to announce a verdict regarding her death.
Jan Collins’s journalist colleague, Nicholas Shafer, 47yrs old, was found dead in his flat in the South of France under suspicious circumstances, several weeks before the death of Jan Collins. He and Mrs Collins worked together to investigate and expose systemic abuse within the Catholic Church and their findings have formed evidence presented in the trial of Charles Adams, as have the statements from several adults who claim to have been abused as children in the 1980’s by the local priest.
Back in Lensham, shortly after the death of Jan Collins, Father Joseph Kavanagh of St Francis’ Catholic Church, 78yrs old, died of a heart attack brought on by food poisoning, we are told. His death is also being considered in the murder trial of Charles Adams, as is the death of Benito Tierney, 32yrs old. Ben Tierney was married with two children, and was a mental patient who spent years making allegations of abuse against Father Joseph Kavanagh.