Last Rights

by James Green

  He put the phone away and went into the bar.

  ‘Another beer.’

  The girl behind the bar pulled another pint and put it on the bar in front of him. Jimmy paid.

  ‘How do I get a taxi?’

  The girl pulled a card out of a wad that sat in a glass by the till. It was a taxi firm’s card. Jimmy took it and his beer and went to a table, inside this time. He phoned for a taxi and told them the chaplaincy address, then put the card in his pocket and took a drink. He’d do the interviews for Gray, talk to whoever she wheeled in front of him. It was nothing more than going through the motions, a few interviews which wouldn’t get him anywhere, but it would make it look as if he was trying.

  While waiting for the taxi to turn up he went back to thinking about Brinkmeyer and started back on his list. The money thing was OK but did it mean you should give up on everything else. Sex? If it was just sex, even queer sex, McBride wouldn’t have been brought in. Unless the person Brinkmeyer was having it with was someone high enough up to do serious damage to the Church. Was that a possibility? No, that didn’t work. There’d already been too many of those sort of sex scandals for one more to matter. So not sex, not consensual sex at least. What else? These days did students blow their brains out because they were likely to fail their course? Maybe they did. These days kids at college were all nutters one way or another: ‘I’m going to fail my course, oh, God, I’d better end it all.’ Well, it would be easy enough to check if he was failing. But if that was all it was then why McBride’s interest?

  He looked out of the window again, but the heavier rain had made landfall and was throwing itself against the glass, making everything blurred. The big white ferry was gone. His mind went back to the money angle. How well did the guy live, how much did he spend? Following the money was never a bad idea. He smiled to himself, maybe these chaplaincy interviews might be of some use after all. If they knew Marvin they’d be able to fill in something of his life-style, habits and how he spent his time and money.

  A taxi pulled up and the horn blew. He took another big draught of his beer, left the bar and hurried through the rain into the taxi.

  ‘They told you where you’re going.’

  The driver nodded and pulled away. Jimmy sat back.

  The only thing he had to go on other than Brinkmeyer’s death was the stolen art, if there was any art stolen. McBride used him like a bloody sniffer dog, she gave him a smell of something and then watched him go. Still, why not? Follow the money and keep an eye out for the art and leave the sex to… Shit. He’d left the hotel’s umbrella in the bar. Never mind, he thought, pick it up next time I go for a pint. If it’s still there that is.

  Chapter Twelve

  St Nicodemus church, to which Sr Gray’s chaplaincy was attached, was in a part of the city where smart apartment blocks mixed with prestigious office blocks. At street level there were shops, bars and all the other places which serviced such a mix. The church itself was a modern affair, concrete and angular with coloured glass, and stood back from the road behind its own car-park which, although it was a weekday, was full. Jimmy guessed that parking in the neighbourhood was only had at a premium and the church rented out its space when it didn’t need it for Mass-goers on Sundays.

  The taxi pulled into the car park and drove to the church’s entrance. Jimmy paid it off and looked around. By the church doors was a small sign. On it he saw Chaplaincy Entrance and an arrow pointing to the right. That direction took him round to a building behind the church, a much older, brick-built affair. It had that grim, Victorian ecclesiastical look and Jimmy guessed that this had once been the church and that the modern affair was its replacement. He smiled to himself as he walked past the arched windows with their dark stained glass to the corner of the building, round which would be the main doors. I may be out of date and old-fashioned about these people, but at least I’m not on my own, he thought. They keep them round the back, out of sight, and let them use the leftovers.

  When he turned the corner the frontage changed dramatically. The dark wooden doors he had been expecting weren’t there. They had been replaced by a first-floor frontage that was all stainless steel and smoked glass. If you didn’t look up at the stone statue of some saint who gazed out into nowhere from his niche above the doorway you might have been standing at the entrance to a small but prosperous business, probably in the financial line. It was all very solid and secure but with the understated elegance that spoke of money.

  Jimmy pushed at the door gently. It eased silently open so he went in.

  Once inside he stopped. He had expected something shabby and makeshift, done on the cheap with hand-me-down furniture and fittings. A run-down church interior with cold tiled floor, peeling paint and the plaster near the floor blistering from the rising damp. God knows he’d seen enough such places in his time.

  What he got was a state-of-the-art conversion which would have graced anything the City of London might have done inside some venerable, old and cherished exterior. He was looking at a severe-chic café-bar area, with a mixture of easy chairs and settees beside wooden coffee tables and upright chairs at gleaming steel tables. There were small vases on all the tables, with little bunches of flowers in them. They looked real. The lighting owed nothing to the stained glass windows which had been retained, but cleverly reduced to the function of self-lit artworks and now had a beauty and appeal which they could never have hoped to achieve in their days of out-and-out holiness. Everything was bright, clean and comfortable; an upmarket bar, a place the right sort of people could come to and relax in. The sort of place that wouldn’t really welcome those from the margins of society - or the Jimmy Costellos of this world.

  A young man was sitting in one of the easy chairs reading a newspaper. On the coffee table was a beer bottle, a half-full glass and a plate of sandwiches. At an upright table a middle-aged man and a young woman were talking, both with dark suit jackets over the backs of their chairs. Two coffee mugs stood among the documents that spread across the table and by each chair was the inevitable black computer bag. A pair of business lunchers. At the far end of the room was the bar. At a table near the bar there was an elderly lady talking to the man behind the bar. The lady stopped talking as the man looked at him. Jimmy crossed the room to the bar. The man gave him a big smile. Jimmy didn’t return it. The man was about his own age, wore a white shirt, a dark bow tie, and was wiping a wine glass with a cloth. He looked like a normal barman. But that didn’t mean anything.

  ‘Mr Costello?’ Jimmy nodded cautiously. ‘Please go up. Sr Lucy is expecting you.’ He pointed with the wine glass to a staircase on one side of the room. ‘Her office is up those stairs. You can’t miss it.’

  Jimmy forced out a ‘thanks’ and went to the staircase. The elderly lady resumed her conversation with the barman. Nobody else took any notice of him. The staircase was satin stainless-steel again but with thick hardwood steps. As he began to climb the stairs the main door opened and three more people came in talking and laughing. Two men and a woman, all young, all wearing dark suits and looking like executives. Jimmy went on up the stairs.

  It wasn’t the hole-in-the-corner outfit he’d expected and if the downstairs was anything to go by, the Outreach Programme and chaplaincy were certainly funded well enough. Sr Philomena in her run-down dump in Paddington would have given her eye teeth to get a place like it.

  The corridor on the first floor had a thick, neutral carpet and the glass door said Office. Underneath it said Sister Gray, Administrator. Jimmy knocked and her voice answered.

  ‘Come in, Mr Costello.’ Sr Gray was sitting at her desk, a Scandinavian-style affair with an open laptop on it. ‘I presumed you would prefer to talk here rather than downstairs. We can get quite busy at lunch sometimes.’ She got up and went across to two easy chairs either side of a coffee table and sat down. Jimmy joined her. ‘Would you like a drink, tea, coffee?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Wine, beer? I can get Norman to
bring up anything you’d like.’

  ‘I’ve just had a beer in a bar. I’m fine.’

  ‘Very well. What can I tell you?’

  Jimmy felt unsettled by everything he’d seen. Suddenly he was the one who felt like an outsider, like he didn’t belong. And how could an Outreach centre like this get busy at lunchtimes? What was this district, the bloody queer quarter? Or did they travel? Then he saw that Sr Gray was looking at him, waiting. With an effort, a big effort, he pulled himself together and began.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘When did you first meet Marvin?’

  ‘About eighteen months ago. He came with another student.’

  ‘Were they,’ Jimmy searched for acceptable words, ‘in a relationship?’

  ‘No. Laura wasn’t his girlfriend, just a friend from the university. He was in a relationship though. That was why he came. He wanted to end it and his partner wanted it to go on. He came to ask advice.’

  ‘Why you? Isn’t there a university chaplaincy?’

  ‘Yes, and he used to go there, but he didn’t want to discuss it with any of the university chaplains.’

  ‘Why do you think that was?’

  ‘I got the very clear impression that his lover was a member of staff at the university. He never actually said it was, but that was my impression. If I was right then I can see how he wouldn’t want to discuss it with a university chaplain.’

  ‘So he got a friend to bring him here to get advice about breaking off an affair?’ She nodded. ‘And what advice did you give him?’

  ‘I wasn’t much help. In situations like that you never can be. One wants it to end, the other doesn’t. There’s no easy answer.’

  ‘Did he tell you why he wanted to end it? Was it something to do with becoming a Catholic, was that why he came to you? Had he decided he should sign up to the Church line, that being gay is wrong?’

  ‘That is not what you call the Church line. Being gay is not wrong. The Church simply says, as with straight people, that the use of sex in any relationship should…’

  ‘I know what the Church says and you can weasel round it all you like, you still get the same message, gay is wrong. Nobody bothers with the small print.’

  Sr Gray gave up trying to explain. He wouldn’t listen and he didn’t care. And he was right. What mattered to him, and to her, was not a discourse on Church teaching but finding the truth about Marvin’s death.

  ‘He was thinking about becoming a Catholic and had talked to the Catholic chaplain about it quite a lot. He had no problem with being gay and he thought gay people should express their love sexually. The reason he didn’t want to be in a relationship was because he felt his life was moving in a new direction. He thought he might have a vocation.’

  ‘The priesthood?’

  ‘It was only a possibility at that point but one to which he had given serious thought.’

  ‘So he was going to toe the Church line?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Costello, he was, but not the line you’re thinking of. He wanted to know if he was capable of living a celibate life, whether he was strong enough to live a life without active sexual expression. If he could he would go ahead and see if he had a vocation to the priesthood. If not he would drop the whole thing.’

  ‘About being a priest?’

  ‘About becoming a Catholic. It was a priest or nothing for him. He wouldn’t have become a Catholic knowing that he intended to continue to express any loving relationship he found himself in sexually. He felt that if he became a Catholic he would have to accept the Church’s teaching. If he wasn’t called to the celibate life then to live that teaching as a lay person would be a denial of who he was and who he wanted to be. He was a very honest young man and also a very well-adjusted one.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I told him to be as honest with his partner as he was being with himself. If the other person cared about him, loved him, he would accept what he wanted to do.’

  ‘And did it work? Did he end it?’

  ‘He ended it but it didn’t work as I had hoped. He didn’t tell me the details but it turned nasty. Scenes, threats, talk of self-harm. Frustrated lust can be an ugly thing.’

  ‘So, if he was going on with becoming a Catholic and this priest thing, as far as you know he had decided to give up sex?’

  ‘I assume so. That was what he told me he would do.’

  ‘Then what we have is one angry, male ex-lover who got ditched around eighteen months ago.’

  ‘You could put it that way.’

  ‘Then that’s the way we’ll put it. Were his studies going well?’

  ‘Oh yes, he was doing very well. He had been asked to consider staying on for a doctorate when he graduated. He was something of a star.’

  ‘Stars fall.’

  ‘Not this one, he was gifted and he loved his subject.’

  So much for the failing student idea.

  ‘What else can you tell me about him?’

  She thought for a second.

  ‘Not much. Since I’ve talked to you about him I’ve come to realise I didn’t know him very well at all. I don’t think I can actually tell you much more than I already have. When you come down to it, all I knew of him was that he seemed a happy, well-adjusted young man, a successful student and someone who had discovered the Catholic faith and thought he had a vocation to the priesthood.’

  ‘But you talked?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘When we talked, it was usually about the Church, about becoming a Catholic. It was like I told you, he was very happy with his life and looking forward to the future.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And art.’

  ‘Art?’

  ‘Art was the only other thing we talked about. He liked to talk about it, especially Renaissance paintings, that was something of a speciality of his. He loved Renaissance religious art. Actually it was the one thing which I found a bit trying. I like art well enough but there is a limit to how much I want to hear about it and Marvin went well past that limit on more than one occasion. The only person who seemed as fascinated by the subject as he was a man called Somerset, Thurlow Somerset. But he was an art dealer so I suppose…’

  ‘An art dealer?’

  ‘Yes, a very successful one. At least I think he must have been successful. He was quite rich, perhaps even very rich.’

  ‘How did he fit into things?’

  ‘Thurlow? He started coming about three years ago.’

  ‘Was he a regular at the chaplaincy, a friend of Marvin?’

  ‘No, he wasn’t a regular. He came to Vancouver twice a year for about two or three weeks and while he was here he came to the chaplaincy. I think he and Marvin just enjoyed talking about art. While he was here they saw quite a bit of each other but they never seemed to be friends, more two people who shared a passion.’

  ‘But no sex, you think?’

  Sr Gray almost sighed.

  ‘No, Mr Costello, with gay people, as with straight, it doesn’t always have to end up in bed. The passion they shared was for art, not sex, at least not with each other. Gays can have friends like other people, you know.’

  ‘You’re sure this Somerset was gay?’

  ‘I assume so.’

  ‘Could coming here have been a way to meet Marvin?’

  ‘Oh no, I don’t think so. No, I’m sure not. Mr Somerset came twice a year and had been here about three times before Marvin turned up.’

  ‘Why did this Somerset come to Vancouver?’

  ‘No idea. Business, I suppose.’

  ‘Where did he come from?’

  ‘New York. That was where he said his gallery was.’

  ‘And what did he talk about when he wasn’t talking art to Marvin?’

  ‘Religion, the Catholic Church. What it was all about. Obviously we talked about the Church’s teaching on sex and sexuality but he seemed interested in all aspects of the Church. He had an almost voracious
appetite for knowledge, nothing about the Church was too obscure or difficult or remote. He seemed to want to know everything.’

  ‘He wasn’t a Catholic?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was he thinking of becoming a Catholic?’

  ‘No, I never got the feeling that was what he was looking for.’

  ‘What do you mean, looking for?’

  ‘He seemed to be trying to find out something. It was as if he believed the Church was keeping some sort of secret, some knowledge which he wanted to share.’

  A slight eagerness crept into Jimmy’s question.

  ‘A secret? Something to do with a Catholic church here in Vancouver?’

  She gave a small laugh.

  ‘No, the Church in general. There was something about the faith of Catholics he wanted to discover. It was quite disconcerting. I told him what I could, answered his questions, and he’d think about it, think about it very carefully. The next time we spoke he either wanted to look at whatever it was more deeply or he had sort of swept it aside and started looking again. But I honestly have no idea what it was in the Catholic faith he was looking for. Marvin might have understood. Maybe it was something to do with art and I missed it.’

  ‘How come this Somerset bloke was allowed to come to a Catholic chaplaincy if he wasn’t a Catholic?’

  ‘You don’t have to be a Catholic or even a Christian. Some come with their partners because the partner is a Catholic, some come because they want to feel part of a worshipping community, not shut out from the world of people of faith. Some come because they want to be accepted for who they are but not join in the more aggressive or assertive ways of doing so.’

  ‘Sorry, can I have that in English?’

  ‘They didn’t want to use gay bars or clubs.’

  ‘I see. So this place was a sort of acceptable low-level version?’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’

  Jimmy didn’t understand but he pressed on.