Purged

by Peter Laws

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Matt quickly cranked the gears of his car. He had to floor the pedal just to keep up with the police car he was following, weaving fast through the country roads. They hadn’t put the siren on, but he could just about see Sergeant Miller in the driver’s seat, head bobbing up and down like a crash test dummy on the bumps as PC Taylor held on in the passenger seat. They’d left the rest of the team behind, crawling through the dry leaves looking for clues. Who knows, maybe they’d find a big old footprint with the backwards imprint of Chris Kelly’s name on it.

  He pictured himself standing with Chris at the healing centre, asking him about Tabitha Clarke.

  I’ve heard of her … but I’ve never had the pleasure.

  What the hell did that mean? Was it a lie? An actual bona-fide untruth? And if Chris was lying (and this was the part that prickled the skin) what the hell had he done? That was about as far as Matt was permitting himself to think at this stage. Just questions. Miller’s reaction since, on the other hand, was far less subtle. He was monumentally pissed at a ‘full-on lie’. His tight-lipped shake of the head and clucks of the tongue (he did this at least three times before leaping into his police car) made that obvious.

  The two cars raced their way back up the hill, very fast and towards the church. And despite the unsettling throb in Matt’s stomach, there was an undeniable thrill to bombing through the roads of Hobbs Hill, screeching tyres on the bends. His window was down, hair frantic and flapping. At one point he actually had to grip the roof and steer with one hand on a super tight bend. A rare thrill. He didn’t get to do this stuff at uni – another tick in the box of police involvement.

  When they reached the church car park they found that it was still full, rammed in fact. And they came to a gravel-crunching stop outside the main entrance. When they stepped out of the cars all three of them could hear the sound of cheering. The roar filled the air around them, but it wasn’t coming from inside the church and they couldn’t see its source.

  ‘It’s coming from down by the lake,’ Miller said and started to climb back into the car.

  ‘Then they must have started the baptisms already.’

  ‘Yep,’ Miller clunked the car door shut and spoke through the open window. ‘Come on, Professor. Bet you’ve never seen anything like this.’

  Miller spun some gravel as he headed off and Matt quickly followed to the top of the track. He jerked over the ridge like a rollercoaster tipping over the biggest dip. The bonnet plunged downwards and he saw the Healing Centre, the lake and Cooper’s Force in all its roaring glory at the bottom.

  A few hundred people were gathered on the natural slope of the hill, cheering, singing. The nutty acoustics from the rock-walled lake made it sound more like a gladiatorial arena than a church outing. All were turned towards the water where a long row of white figures stood in single file along the shoreline. It reminded him of an old Hammer movie. Robed devil worshippers, lining up for sacrifice.

  They reached the car park at the bottom and parked, blocking people in because it was so packed. They stepped out. Matt glanced at the entrance of the Healing Centre and at the glass in the door he’d smashed yesterday during his confused attempt at heroism. It was boarded up now.

  ‘Are you coming, or what?’ Miller said, then marched towards the edge of the crowd with Taylor behind him (who looked pale and slack-jawed at the thought of striding up to his own beloved pastor and calling him out for a sin). Some punters were starting to look over, wondering what on earth was going on.

  Matt caught up to hear Taylor in deep debate. ‘I take it you’re not just going to call Chris out, right in the middle of this? There might be an explanation … and it’s not like he’s going anywhere.’

  ‘Don’t panic. I’ll wait till he’s done.’

  Matt frowned, ‘Should we just talk to him right away? Find out what he—’

  ‘No. I want to give him some time to stew. I want him to see us here.’

  Matt noticed a tiny crucifix badge, glinting in the sun, on Taylor’s lapel. Was he wearing that before? Or had he just pinned it there, on the way over here?

  ‘Besides,’ Miller said. ‘I hardly want to make this lot unhappy with me, do I? Probably wake up with a dead chicken nailed to my door.’

  ‘That’s voodoo, Terry,’ Taylor said in disgust. ‘That is not Christianity.’

  ‘Bloody hell, it was a joke.’ He stomped deep into the crowd.

  There were hundreds out here. And the summer heat meant that most were wearing t-shirts or short-sleeved blouses. As the crowd grew more dense, Matt could feel his own arms smearing against hot bare skin as he squeezed his way through. The stink of perfume, fried onions and summer’s day body odour swept by him in nauseating waves, but that wasn’t what was making him feel so uncomfortable.

  No.

  What made him so uncomfortable were the narrowed eyes, the whisperings, which were not in his head but were real and external and happening right then. The collective crowd consciousness turned in his direction as he slid himself through their clammy bodies. Two policemen were nudging through the crowd, clearly on a mission and yet everyone was looking, kept looking, at him.

  Isn’t that the architect’s husband? Didn’t we pray for him this morning and then he ran off? Allergic to the truth, this one. Can’t you smell it on him? He isn’t here to worship, he’s here to destroy.

  They battled through the quicksand of the crowd and finally the three of them stumbled out from the front line, near the shore. A few volunteer stewards were there in dayglo vests keeping a busy eye on the people, making sure nobody got trampled to death since that would put a downer on the whole proceedings.

  A lovely, sudden breeze swam past Matt’s skin and he took a breath of the crisp air coming off the lake. His hair quivered a little as it passed through him.

  And there was Chris, hands clasped together. He was kneeling under a green and white gazebo, just next to where the band had set up on the grass. He stayed kneeling like that for another minute, a very public picture of holiness. Someone handed him a handheld radio mike and he sprang to his feet. He tapped the end of it before speaking.

  He didn’t say much. But it was enough to get the whole crowd cheering with delight. ‘How about we start … dunkin’ some disciples!’

  Like a talk show house band the musicians surged into life as Chris slipped off his shoes and walked towards the water. They were playing some sort of country hoedown version of ‘Abide With Me’ – insane but bizarrely catchy. Chris was wading into the lake, the water lapping at his shins, his knees, then his thighs. Then finally it reached his waist. The ever-present Billy waded out too, fat and bald and quickly becoming Igor to Chris’s Dr Frankenstein. By the time they both turned back round, the first candidate had already started to step into the water.

  It was a skinny lady in jeans and a long, white, flowing shirt. She was being helped along by a blonde woman from the congregation while people in the crowd cheered them all on.

  Finally the lady sloshed her way through, all the way to Chris and he tried to grab her hand. She planted her fingers on Chris’s chest and started to rub it. Quite sensually.

  ‘Eh up,’ Miller said, throwing Matt an uncomfortable glance.

  Then the lady ran her hand up Chris’s chest and tapped her fingertips across his face, feeling his forehead, the bridge of his nose, his lips and chin. Chris gently turned the blind woman to face the crowd.

  He moved her hands up to her chest then crossed them over as though he was preparing her for the grave. Little hands clasped together. Then he and Billy grabbed a forearm each. Their other hands were supporting her back.

  There were no microphones because of the water, so Matt couldn’t hear them as they spoke to her. But he could tell what was being said. Matt had used those words a fair few times himself, in his minister days. He tried not to whisper along with them.

  – Do you confess Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour?

&
nbsp; – I do.

  – Then I baptise you in the name of the Father …

  Boom …

  … down she went. The water quaked out beneath her as her volume displaced the lake. Instantly it flooded back over her hair, into her eyes, up her nostrils, through her open mouth, which she hadn’t managed to close in time.

  The crowd roared as they pulled her back to the surface, coughing.

  Chris’s mouth moved, making silent words.

  And of the Son …

  Down again …

  Under …

  Under …

  She crashed far beneath now, looking on the way down like a drowned corpse, soaked to the skin, then back up again, hair gooey and matted against her head. No longer a corpse, she was now a baby calf, freshly born and sticky with amniotic fluid.

  And then the third and final time.

  And of the Holy Spirit …

  Slam …

  Under.

  Deeper than ever. Almost as if she might smack her head on the sharp rocks at the bottom of the lake. There was an oddly stretched second when it wasn’t clear if Chris was even going to bring her back—

  —up again now, with a panting, undignified gasp as the bedraggled woman sprayed water, spit, snot and tears everywhere. And then, after she knew it was done, the blind woman crumbled against Chris. She shuddered with loud, orgasmic-sounding tears and sobs. Then Billy did something bizarre. He snapped his head back and howled like a wolf.

  And for a moment Matt could hear her.

  Not the blind woman. Not her.

  He could hear his own mother, weeping with joy from somewhere in the crowd, behind him, saying Hallelujah … isn’t Jesus great? Holding her towel out to Matt on the pebbly shore of Sizewell beach as he was baptised, fourteen years old, in the shadow of the nuclear power station.

  He blinked, and the millisecond his eyes were shut was enough time to see something else, flickering the neurons of his brain. His mother. Out there, on the lake. And she was weeping while a naked schizophrenic grabbed her wrists and slammed her into the water three times. Each time a thousand blades rose like Excalibur to meet her. And he sliced and sliced until his mother was no more than slivers of skin, floating on a lake made of blood.

  Then for a second, he looked at the hand, forcing his mother onto the blades. But it wasn’t Ian Pendle’s.

  It was his own.

  Matt’s eyelids flickered and he felt a dangerous urge inside him, the type he had when he was a kid in school exams, where he’d have a burning notion to stand up on the table and shout something loud and inappropriate in the quiet exam hall just to let out his tension.

  Now, by the lake, the real man inside him, the true honest man who he rarely let come to the surface in front of anyone but Wren, and sometimes not even to her, that man wanted to climb out of his skin and march over to the band, tear the microphone out of the smarmy bitch’s hand who was singing like a maniac and shout down into those speakers and across the field,

  Just you wait … just you wait till God turns off the happy taps and lets you drown under there … just you wait till he pushes you under and doesn’t let you come back up … and some schizo stabs your mum in the throat, or beats your wife till she can’t part her lips to say her own name. Hallelujah, praise the psychotic, useless Lord.

  A wave of dizziness hit him and he was shocked at the intensity of it. Somehow furious with Chris Kelly whose very presence seemed to pull Matt back into that first term Bible college world, a place where God was real and loving and had some sort of purpose for Matt’s life. The blissful, easy land where possessed black women didn’t writhe and call for him. Where his mum still walked her neighbour’s dog and still had a heartbeat.

  And lips. Don’t forget she had them once.

  A pre-fall world that told him life made sense.

  But from this side of the glass, in the company of all these believers, he knew how he felt. He was gutted. Gutted that it turned out that the old world of belief proved to be an utterly false one, made of paper and bread and cheap red wine without any alcohol in it.

  And most of all … he felt deceived. Yes! That was it. That was the exact word that now crackled in his head like it was written in the bulbs of the Blackpool illuminations, flashing on and off for eternity so he would never, ever forget it. He felt deceived by all of God’s finger-crossed promises of grace and mercy. Promises that wound up drowning in so much (so much) blood on his mother’s kitchen table.

  And all those tricked people in churches across the globe, stretching both forwards and backwards through time, deceived, by heroin that utterly screws you up.

  And whenever Matt felt deceit, anger was sure to follow.

  ‘Matt?’ Miller whispered. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Erm …’

  ‘Well?’

  He grabbed the first excuse he could think of. ‘I’m just wondering why nobody helped the blind lady pick a white bra.’

  Miller looked over as the blind woman was helped back to the shore. Her jet-black bra glared out vividly and clearly under the white of her shirt. ‘Wow,’ Miller said.

  Then Matt noticed something else. Chris wasn’t looking for the next baptism candidate any more. Instead, those sharp eyes of his were falling on Matt and the other two police officers standing beside him, who were as welcome here as undertakers at a baby’s first birthday party.

  There was no doubt about it. The wide, beaming grin on Chris’s face completely slipped away.

  ‘You see that?’ Miller said. ‘You see his face drop?’

  Chris held Matt’s gaze. What was that look in Chris’s eyes? Guilt? Disappointment? Fear? Pity?

  Ah, crap. Don’t let it be pity. I’m supposed to be pitying you, not the other way around.

  But before Matt could figure it out, the smile flashed back, almost as quickly as it went.

  Miller leant over, his lips close to Matt’s ear. ‘You can’t tell me that isn’t the face of a man who just pissed his pants. He’s worried that we’re here.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The row of baptismal candidates moved along a notch, hitching their white gowns as a nervous-looking elderly man walked slowly out into the lake. He dragged his cream chino’s through the water and shivered with the cold of it.

  Matt looked over his shoulder to see if Wren and the kids might be somewhere in sight but no matter how much he craned his neck, he couldn’t find them. All he saw was a couple of burger vans the church had hired. God, he was famished.

  The rest of the baptisms seemed to take forever to finish but as soon as they did the crowd began to dissipate, quicker than he expected. He watched them all gather up their things and head off. He could tell this was a church group because they all took their rubbish with them. The grass looked spotless once they’d moved off. And Matt watched the mass of them trekking up the dirt track back to their cars.

  They were laughing and smiling, arms round each other. They munched on the remnants of hot dogs and ice creams and looked … happy. Content with life. Even the ones in wheelchairs, or that blind lady with the black bra. They all seemed completely at ease with the world.

  Some of them would visit the doctor over the coming months and the doctor would say something like, ‘I’m sorry, but I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is you have twenty-four hours to live and the bad news is I was supposed to tell you that yesterday.’ And even so, they would still stumble out of that office shocked and devastated but not crushed.

  If he wasn’t such a stickler for old-fashioned concepts like ‘Is it true?’ he might even envy them. But their hope was based on a mirage, the shifting ghost of a folk tale.

  He turned back to Miller. ‘I think we should get on with this.’

  He nodded quickly and they walked towards the shore while Chris and howling Billy waded out of the water. Chris was rubbing his arms and the back of his head vigorously with a bright-yellow towel, like he was putting out a fire. He nodded towards them as
they approached. ‘I thought you came to Hobbs Hill to relax, Matt? Are you working here now? You one of those PI types?’

  Miller spoke much more gently than Matt had expected him to. ‘He’s helping us out with a few things, Padre.’

  ‘Terry, I keep telling you, you have to call me Chris.’

  Some of the band members were packing up their equipment. They coiled jack leads around their arms while trying not to look over at the drama. They were failing spectacularly.

  ‘Just a few quick words.’ Miller took Chris by the elbow and led him out of everyone’s earshot. Matt and Taylor went with them.

  ‘Why the long faces?’

  ‘We need your help with something,’ Miller said.

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘It’s about Tabitha Clarke.’

  ‘Ah, the missing lady?’ His tone swooped up at the end of the sentence. It sounded hopeful. ‘You’ve found her?’

  ‘Not yet, because between us …’ Miller leant in, ‘… there’s a possibility that she’s been murdered.’

  Chris blinked once. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I said there’s a chance she might have been murdered.’

  There was a pause, then a strange twitch of the mouth. Shock? A nervous tick? A millisecond smile? When Chris spoke next it was nothing more than a whisper. ‘Then may God rest her troubled soul.’

  ‘I said there’s a chance she’s been murdered. We don’t know for sure,’ Miller said.

  ‘Oh. I see.’

  ‘There’s something else,’ Matt added. Feeling incredibly awkward about this entire situation. ‘The police have found her phone.’

  The blood in Chris’s face seemed to drain away. Matt could tell both Miller and Taylor saw it too.

  ‘You okay, Padre?’ Miller said. ‘You look upset.’

  ‘Of course I’m upset. What a shock. To think this poor lady might have been killed … possibly.’ He asked no questions about the phone, Matt noticed.

  ‘Then you won’t mind coming with us? Just to help us with our enquiries.’