I looked through the rest of the papers. I was surprised to find copies of the letters Father Daniel had told us about – sent to Anna’s apartment, the university and the Pristina police. I’d assumed he’d lied about them. However, there were no replies on file. Perhaps the letters had never actually been sent – of course, it was all just for show. Yet the tone of the notes he’d kept was solicitous. K still in shock, not eating much and keeping away from the other children.
There was nothing about Katarina running away. I looked through several files at random and found more of the same. In another drawer of the cabinet I found the document that would have been used to get Katarina across the border into Macedonia – and anywhere else they chose to take her. United Nations High Commission for Refugees, it said across the top. A passport photograph was stapled to the corner. The document stated that the subject had been received into the care of the UNHCR in Skopje on 29 January 1999 – ironically enough, that was the day I had left her at Syrna Street. Bryan Harley had signed in blue ink, and there was a countersignature and stamp from the Macedonian authorities recognising Katarina’s status as a refugee. You could see how anyone invited to inspect such a document would be impressed by its formality. The child’s papers were in order, sir, I had no reason to suspect. . .
The will to carry on looking through the files deserted me. In fact, the will to do anything at all deserted me. Search the rest of the desk, I ordered myself. Something was nagging me, something I’d missed or got wrong.
I found a ledger in which Father Daniel had set out what he’d spent in the running of the refuge. Amounts for food, electricity, stationery, toiletries – and every so often an entry that ran: Expenses fee ref. . . Then the name of one of the children and, in the numbers column, US$600 cash. Always the same amount. Father Daniel had paid an expenses fee to the woman who had brought Katarina to the refuge. Six hundred dollars was a lot of money for something that should have been an act of kindness.
My heart slumped. Take a stray child to the Catholic refuge near the Orthodox Church of the Holy Saviour and Saint Panteleimon and you can sell her for a tidy wad of US dollars, no questions asked. The Bura would have known that – it was almost certainly why they’d abducted Katarina in the first place. Suddenly I longed for Anna to be here with me, to hear her speak, to see how she would deal with this neatly filed paper trail that bore witness to so much suffering.
I hauled myself out of the chair and left, feeling as if to stay a second longer would be to risk inhaling a lungful of poison. To the front door and out under the open sky, breathing clean air. The crackle of rifle fire from the hills to the east reminded me where I was – a war zone. I thought I should go back to the files, take some evidence with me, but the idea of returning to that stifling little room filled me with revulsion. The church stood fifty yards away – I’d take refuge there while I decided what to do. I walked up to the arched oak doors between the squat towers and found them already open.
‘You’ll go to hell, you filthy man. Hell, you hear? You’re a murderer, the most mortal of all the sins.’
The words were violent, but the voice that delivered them was soft and mesmeric as the hiss of a snake.
‘A murderer, Daniel, who disembowelled his own father. And you accuse me of killing your poor ma? How dare you, when you know full well I was with you when she died.’
All I could see in the gloom of the church were rows of pews and an altar, above which hung a figure of Christ in priestly robes at the centre of a starburst of gilded plaster rays so chipped and dirty it looked as if, rather than radiating light, he was the target of a mortal attack.
‘You’ll learn obedience or you’ll die unshriven and the devil will teach it to you. He’ll spoon your soul out through your arse and have it for his dinner.’
The voice came from a wooden confessional box over to the left of the nave, by the sacristy door. I walked silently towards it.
‘There’ll be no rest for the boy who murdered his own father. What did the autopsy say? You sliced him open, then stabbed him five times. Stab, stab, stab. . .’ He repeated the word over and over in his wheedling voice, as if he were there at the scene, orchestrating the blows.
‘You know why I did it,’ whispered Father Daniel’s voice from the confessor’s side of the box. ‘To save Ma.’
‘I saw the state your mother was in when she brought you to me, it was a sight to wrench tears from an angel. It was a sight to make Satan snap his teeth. You say you were saving her, you stupid man, but all you did was condemn her—’
I came level with the curtain over the father confessor’s cubicle and tore it aside.
‘Get out.’
I aimed the Browning at his shadowed face, framed in its splendidly leonine mane of hair. Father Wulfstan Murray-Bligh, Rector General of the Order of St Hugh. He didn’t move. I should have killed him there and then, but I was too shocked to think straight and I hesitated. I forgot what a big man he was. He turned towards me and gave an affable smile, bracing his hands against the sides of the confessional box as if preparing to stand, then kicked out with vicious speed. I took the heel of his shoe on my knee, staggered back. He charged from the cubicle, head down, thick arms hugging my waist. I couldn’t stop him slamming the base of my spine into the carved oak panel at the end of a pew. If the bench hadn’t collapsed under our weight, he’d have broken me in half. The gun flew from my hand as I tried to break my fall.
I tried to roll him off as we came down, but he was brutishly strong, with the bulk of a tree trunk. I felt despair. Numbness in my hips, his torso crushing my ribcage, his red, snarling face rearing above me. I seized a hank of his white hair and pushed my arm straight, then went for his eyes with my free hand. My fingers searched for the sockets. He pulled his face sharply aside, and my hooked index finger found the pulp of his nostril. I tore it open, then hammered his temple with the side of my fist.
He bellowed in fury and gripped my throat with one huge hand, creasing my windpipe with his thumb. I started to choke. His hair slipped from my grasp and he got his other hand on my neck. He was panting, open mouth a cavern of wet, purple tissue, tongue thick as a cow’s, long yellow teeth. I got one forearm in under his throat and reached for the knife at my belt. Jammed fast by a piece of broken timber wedged against my hip. It was all wrong, all wrong. . . I’d let myself be drawn into a trial of strength with a man stronger than me. His big eyes were watching me, glittering with pleasure as my room to struggle free diminished, inch by inch. I pummelled at his temple but I might as well have been hitting him with a cotton bud. I tried to shout for Father Daniel to help me, but couldn’t even croak his name.
Then some piece of the wreckage of the pew gave way and we dropped a few inches, and in that moment I got my knee up into his groin and levered him up, just enough to give myself respite from his crushing weight. Not from the thumbs compressing my throat, but it gave me hope. . . And I remembered. He was a drinker. Sherry at lunch. A crate of bottles by his desk. Broken glass on the carpet. I felt around the barrel of his midriff until I found the upper right quadrant of his abdomen. I squeezed and probed with my fingers and felt him flinch. There. A big liver, bloated with toxins and fat.
I summoned all the strength I had left and swung my clenched knuckle into his side. Once, twice, three times. . . He gasped and tried to twist away. His thumbs drove deeper into the tissue of my throat. I hit him again and again and again, seeking out his weakness with the hard bones of my hand.
I was close to blacking out, but the gasps as my fist struck home told me he was in trouble, and I pounded his gut with ever more brutal calculation, adjusting the angle of my blows to land where they drew the deepest moans. In the end, he had to protect himself. His hands unwrapped from my throat. He groaned and rolled away.
I whooped air through my bruised windpipe, got to my knees, found my legs were working, stood. Wulfstan was down on one knee. I swung my boot into the exact same place where my fist had struck. He sc
reamed and twisted away. I kicked him again and he lowered himself onto his side, drew up his knees, one arm held stiffly over his liver. I kicked him three times more. Long, deliberate blows. He lay there, blood from his ripped nose plastered over his showy white hair. And I stood over him, wondering whether I had the strength or the will or the desire or even the need to finish him off.
‘Don’t.’
Father Daniel was sitting on the floor, leaning against the confessional. His face was blotched with patches of translucent white. The Browning was in his hand.
‘Better I do it,’ I whispered.
‘You must not sin.’
‘And you?’
‘Beyond salvation.’
He put down the Browning and crawled rapidly over to Wulfstan’s side. I collected the gun and watched. Father Daniel reached for Wulfstan’s shoulder. The prostrate man stretched up his arm to bat the hand aside, then suddenly froze. A heavy spasm passed through his massive frame. Cady took hold of the cuff of Wulfstan’s jacket and worked the sleeve off his arm. Wulfstan made a low crooning sound in his throat.
‘Let me be, Daniel. Hell. . . I warned you. Dear Daniel. . . I tried to save you. You and your poor ma. That’s all. To care for you. . .’
Father Daniel reached behind Wulfstan’s head and fumbled with the stud of his collar. Again, the big man tried to stop him, but every movement now made him shudder. Father Daniel got the stud undone. The dog collar was stitched at the front to a sleeveless tunic that covered Wulfstan’s chest. Father Daniel took two handfuls of the black cotton and ripped the tunic off. He threw the collar and tunic aside and looked up at me, his face full of horror.
‘There now, see what I’ve done. Defrocked him. To kill a priest, you see. . .’
He got to his feet and stumbled over to the place where he’d left the Browning.
‘Daniel, look at him,’ I said hoarsely. ‘He’s dying.’
Wulfstan’s face was the colour of cod belly, and he was shivering uncontrollably. You lose blood fast from a ruptured liver, and it won’t stop bleeding by itself.
‘Come with me,’ I said, and led Father Daniel from the church.
51
We walked down to the farmhouse, drawn there by some need that did not have to be named. We went slowly because my back was in spasm, and in silence because my throat was so swollen that it hurt to speak.
Instead, I thought about what had happened, and the first thing that came to me was that the handwriting I’d seen in Daniel Cady’s notebooks in the bedroom at the refuge was small, scratchy and uneven – nothing at all like the flamboyant script in the Book of Prayer Katarina had stolen.
‘I thought it was yours,’ I wheezed. ‘I almost killed you.’
He looked at me, puzzled.
‘The Book of Prayer.’
‘It was Wulfstan’s.’
The teller of bedtime stories, the giver of treats and punishments, the creator of that monstrous chimera called hell – not Daniel Cady but Wulfstan Murray-Bligh. And when I’d rung the refuge the day after rescuing Katarina. . . Perhaps it wasn’t Daniel I had spoken to, but Wulfstan. The moment this thought occurred to me, I knew it was true. He’d worked out who I was, questioned me to find out whether Katarina had taken his book, then directed me to Syrna Street – Daniel didn’t even know it existed. In fact, I now remembered, it was I who had told him the address.
‘Wulfstan was obsessed with his Book of Prayer,’ Father Daniel said. ‘I’d never seen him so angry as when he found it was missing. Usually, he is very controlled.’
We walked on down the track and the farmhouse came into view through a break in the trees. I swallowed and found that the constriction in my kinked windpipe had eased.
‘Is it true you killed your father?’
‘Ma wanted everyone to believe it was her,’ Father Daniel said quietly. ‘She had cause enough, God knows. My father had started taking me out to work on his boat, the Suffolk Rose—’
‘I read your poem – it was folded into Wulfstan’s book.’ I remembered the note at the end as well, written in what I now knew to be Wulfstan’s hand: Weakness. A terror that will not relax its grip. ‘Some of the lines have haunted me. No wonder you don’t like fish.’
He gave me a doleful look, and I saw that he wished I hadn’t found his poem.
‘Sorry.’
He inclined his head by way of acknowledgement and carried on.
‘Every time we came off the boat, my father would beat Ma with a knout because he said the house was dirty. He soaked the knout in seawater the night before, to make it heavier. The house was always clean, it could not have been cleaner. Now that I was one of his crew, he made me watch. He made me part of it, James. Ma looked at me with an awful sadness in her eyes. She thought I’d become like him. I couldn’t bear that. I couldn’t leave it so. After the third trip on the Rose, when we got back and he set about her, I took the knife from my pack and I gutted him, the way he’d taught me. It was just like Wulfstan said. But I had to do it or he’d have killed her.’
Daniel Cady stopped walking and looked down at his feet. His shoulders were shaking and I realised he was crying.
When he’d recovered a little, I asked: ‘How did Wulfstan find out?’
‘I confessed to him.’ Now, along with the grief, there was anger in Daniel’s voice. ‘I told him everything. When I was done, he said he had to pray for guidance and I was to wait for him. I sat in the confessional box for two hours. It was cold and I was hungry and frightened. I was fourteen and in the space of a week I’d killed my father and lost my mother, perhaps forever. Father Wulfstan was all I had. He came back and made me confess again, sparing no detail. I begged him to absolve me but he refused. He refused to forgive my sin in God’s name, as he had the authority to do. Then he told me that over a matter of such seriousness, it was his solemn duty to protect the Order, and so he had taped my confession.
‘He played it back to me again and again over the weeks and months and years that followed. He tortured me with it. He said I must atone for my sin by throwing myself on the mercy of God’s Church. The first step was to turn over all Dad’s money to the Order. My father was a rich man, you see?’
I nodded, remembering what I’d found out in Leicester Central Library: that John Cady, Daniel’s father, had inherited a fortune made in Lowestoft’s fisheries.
‘I had to buy my absolution, though to this day he’s never granted it to me. He called himself my mentor and talked in my ear about hell. He’s a great expert on hell, is Father Wulfstan.’
We arrived at the farmhouse. The kitchen had been hosed down and the loft-ladder lay broken on the floor. We found a pair of rickety wooden chairs and sat at the table like two old men. We should have gone up into the woods for safety, but I was too impatient to hear the rest of Father Daniel’s story.
‘What happened here that afternoon?’
‘What happened? It’s hard to describe, James. I think something evil took a mortal blow. It died slowly and lashed out with great violence as it went. Does that make sense?’
‘Yes, but I meant—’
‘You know who struck the mortal blow? Katarina. Yes, it was Katarina. Wulfstan was here when she was brought in. I’d just got back from a trip to Pristina. I welcomed her and took down her details. I tried to comfort the poor child and make her feel safe, then I took her to the kitchen to join the others. Wulfstan was there. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. He kept asking her questions, finding reasons to follow her about. She had such a simple grace about her – she didn’t know how to deal with this man.
‘I tried to keep her away from him. By then I half suspected he’d been abusing the children. He used to come to the refuge every few months and insist that Ma and I go off somewhere for a break. When I got back – well, the children wouldn’t speak about it, but they were scared and miserable. Then Wulfstan would leave and I’d tell myself it was nonsense: he wasn’t a child abuser. It was what I wanted to believe. But Wulfstan w
as so mesmerised by Katarina. It was horrible to see him pawing this modest girl with his greedy eyes. And she was so beautiful.’
‘Is so beautiful.’
I told him what had happened since I’d seen him last. I told him about the Vegas Lounge, how we’d pursued Haclan’s gang down to the bay near Thessaloniki and rescued Katarina and the other girls from the Santa Cristina. And I told him that Haclan was dead. He listened with head bowed.
When I’d finished, and I didn’t spin the story out, he said: ‘Katarina’s alive, they all are. Thank God.’ He looked straight at me for a moment. ‘I know nothing about you, James. Nothing at all. Will you tell me how you got caught up in this? I mean, you’re a soldier, I know. But if you can?’
‘I can. But finish your story first.’
‘Yes. . . Wulfstan, Wulfstan. . . He could have torn our lives apart, mine and my mother’s. He could have had me sent to prison for murder. He could have consigned me to hell – he’d always made me believe that, ever since he’d taken my confession. He and he alone could perform the absolution that would save me. He forbade me to go to another priest and I was too frightened to disobey. I was a prisoner in that place, and hardly noticed the years go by. I did everything he ordered, everything. But when I saw him staring at Katarina, I told myself I’d rather die unshriven than stand by while he preyed on her.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I called Ma and she came and helped me with supper. Wulfstan sat at the end of the table and said prayers. The children bowed their heads so low their hair hung in their plates. When they’d gone to bed, I told Wulfstan that next time he came I would stay at the refuge and show him how we looked after them. Our Saviour provides all the guidance I could possibly hope for, and more, in His wisdom, he replied. I will follow wheresoever He takes me. The words came out easily, but I saw in his eyes that he realised something had changed.
Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2) Page 34