by Peter Laws
The smile he gave was utterly devoid of humour. ‘Isn’t that what you say just before you arrest someone?’
‘It means what it means,’ Miller said. ‘We need you to clarify a few things for us. Are you dry yet?’
‘I suppose I am.’ He folded the towel neatly (and slowly), then set it on the grass. ‘I’ll need a few minutes. My car’s up top in the church car park so you’ll have to wait till I get it.’
Miller shook his head. ‘You’ll come in my car.’
‘Seriously, my car’s just up there.’
Most of the crowd had gone but there was still a bunch of people heading up the dirt track. Clearly, Chris didn’t want the crowds to see their minister riding past them in the back of a police car. What sort of gossip might that cause?
And to be fair to Chris he was hardly under arrest, so there wasn’t any need to risk the guy’s reputation.
‘How about you come up in my car,’ Matt suggested. ‘Would that work better?’
‘Yes,’ Chris breathed deeply. ‘That’d be much better.’
Miller shrugged. ‘Fine. Then let’s go.’
As they walked, Matt hung back a bit and grabbed his phone to call Wren.
She answered after one ring. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m down at the baptism.’
‘We didn’t see you.’
‘I was down the front. Listen, I’m sorry for being a pain but can you get Seth to give you a lift back to the cottage? Is that possible?’
Silence.
‘Wren, are you there? Is it possible you can get Seth—’
‘It’s already happening. Seth saw us mooching around like little lost sheep and offered us a lift home. I’m sitting in his passenger seat right now.’
‘Hiya, Matt,’ Seth’s voice crackled in the background. ‘It’s all under control, so you take your time. Lovely to see you in church today.’
‘Wren, I’m sorry. I said I’d be back in time.’
‘And you weren’t.’
‘Hi, Daddy,’ Amelia suddenly called out from the back seat. ‘Lucy’s having pizza. She’s gonna be a fatty!’
‘Amelia. Shush …’ Wren said, then spoke back into the phone. ‘The older kids at the youth group. They’re having pizza at the church. Lucy’s joining them.’
‘Right.’
‘But we’ve got to go,’ Wren said. Then in a hissing little whisper she added, ‘Hey, here’s an idea. Maybe you could write a book about police stations instead.’
‘Wren, be reason—’
Click.
Gone.
He slipped the phone back in his pocket and jogged after the others who were hovering at the cars. Matt held up his hand to a waiting family he’d blocked in, ‘Sorry, guys.’
The dad gripped a picnic basket to his chest, frowning at what was happening.
‘Just doing my bit for law and order,’ Chris said.
When he and Chris finally sank into the car seats and closed the doors, Chris turned to him. ‘I’m not a murderer. Obviously you know that.’
‘They’re not saying you are.’
‘Then why’s Miller looking at me like I’m Lucifer?’
‘Maybe you shouldn’t talk until the station, okay?’ Matt turned the key in the ignition. ‘But listen, Chris, don’t get all panicky. I know this is weird for you but you’re not under arrest, do you understand? Don’t let Miller freak you out. Just tell the truth and it’ll be fine.’
Chris went to say something but then closed his mouth. He looked out of the window at the field and dips in the dirt road as they rose up it. At the tips of swaying grass running up the ridge, his eyes like a sad old Labrador who’d memorised the route to the vets and dreaded it.
As they drove up the track and approached the dregs of the crowd trudging up the hill, Chris suddenly smiled and buzzed his window down. He leant his head out. ‘See you next Sunday, everybody,’ he grinned with a full blast of the how you doin’ sparkle he’d shown on the church stage today.
They all looked back, genuinely delighted to see him. A few of them even high-fived him through the car window as they slowly headed up the track. Matt had to concentrate like hell not to knock any of the congregation over.
I’ve maimed foxes with this thing, you know!
When they reached the top of the hill, Chris finally shut his window and sank back into his seat, looking exhausted. The sad dog look returned and despite Matt telling him not to speak, he said, ‘I was angry yesterday at the Healing Centre, I said some harsh things to you. I’m sorry.’
‘That’s okay.’ Then he couldn’t resist it. ‘I forgive you.’
Chris smiled gently. ‘I’m glad of that. We ought not keep a record of wrongs, should we?’
That rather depends on how wrong those wrongs are, Matt thought, but he didn’t say it.
‘You shouldn’t hold what I was doing with Isabel against me.’
‘Chris, let’s just wait till—’
‘No!’ he slapped his hand hard on the dashboard. ‘Just give me a second. What we do up here is some specialist therapy. I am helping people.’
‘I know that, you told me.’
‘And yes it’s a little unorthodox. But all that stuff with Izzy hardly means I had something to do with Tabitha Clarke’s disappearance. Or Nicola Knox.’
‘I know.’
‘Or any others.’
Matt’s ears pricked up. ‘Others?’
‘I’m just pre-empting your questions, aren’t I?’
Matt could feel his foot easing off the accelerator. Wren always said he did that when he was distracted by something on the radio or when a sweet sports car whizzed by. To be honest, sometimes it was just a funny-looking cow in a field.
Chris had his focus now.
‘So who else has disappeared?’ Matt asked.
‘Don’t tell me you’re not wondering where Isabel Dawson is? Why she wasn’t at the baptism today?’
‘Well I noticed she didn’t get dunked, if that’s what you mean. But I’m not surprised she wasn’t there. She didn’t sound that keen, if you ask—’
‘Obviously you upset her with your heroics. Because she drove off yesterday after … the incident. And nobody’s heard from her since. So I suppose I’ll be guilty of that too. You probably think I bashed her little brains in with my bat.’
Matt shifted in his seat. ‘Did you phone her?’
‘Billy did. Last night and early this morning. We were going to let her come and finish off the therapy so she’d be ready for the baptism. Or at least watch it.’
‘And?’
‘Her phone said it wasn’t in service.’
‘Let’s just wait till we get to the station, alright?’
Chris clasped his hands together like he was praying and locked his knuckles against his chin, staring into the footwell as if God himself might suddenly pop his head up like a mechanic on a trolley, rolling under the car and listening in. ‘Our crime,’ he suddenly said into his hands, ‘is that we want people to meet Jesus and avoid a hideous, eternal death in hell. Is that really so bad? It’s what we all want up here. That’s just what this church does. Good work. Specialist work. God’s kingdom come on earth.’
Matt shifted gears. Stayed silent.
‘We’re a good church. And we do what needs to be done.’ Chris turned those old dog eyes back out of the window and watched the trees whizz by. A minute passed and he spoke again, voice quiet. ‘We’re still old friends, aren’t we, Matt?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that still counts for something?’
‘Of course.’ He meant it.
‘Because you always were so charitable to me. You saw me different to the rest of them. Didn’t you?’
‘Yeah, I guess I did.’
‘Then you’ll tell Miller … that I mean well. Won’t you? That my intentions … they’ve always been good.’
‘Just leave it until the station, okay?’
Chris nodded. A tiny, t
imid gesture.
‘Unless,’ Matt said, unsure of the wisdom in asking this when there was nobody else around to hear it, ‘is there something you want to tell me before we get there?’ He waited. ‘Is there anything you want to get off your chest?’
Chris pressed his lips hard together, then shook his head, locking his fingers in place and folding up his hands. It seemed like the only way he could stop them from trembling. And for the first time ever in the history of the cosmos, Chris Kelly sat in a car with another human being and for the entire journey didn’t say a word.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Matt and Miller closed the door and it clicked shut, leaving Chris Kelly inside the ‘holding room’, though up until today it had mainly been used as a storeroom for two old printers and a pile of old sandbags in case the lake, and the river that fed it, ever spewed forth. Evidently, there wasn’t a lot of holding required in Hobbs Hill.
Matt glanced back through the little square window. Now that the questioning was over Chris was sitting on a plastic chair, elbows wedged on the wooden table, head in his hands, praying.
Police Constable Taylor stood outside the room, shifting his weight from one foot to the next. Miller caught a glimpse of his constant tense two-step. ‘Matt, give me a second with Taylor. I’ll meet you in my office.’
Matt nodded and headed off, but he lingered a little when he turned the corridor, just so he could listen.
Miller whispered, ‘If you need a piss, then go and have a piss. I’ll watch the door till you get back.’
‘I don’t need the toilet,’ he whispered back. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Yeah, well you don’t look fine.’
‘Well it’s not very nice, is it? Dragging your own vicar in.’
‘He’s just a man, so don’t stress about it. And don’t you let this guy just walk out of here, just because he’s your guru.’
Taylor’s voice snapped louder. ‘I wouldn’t do that.’
Matt heard Miller’s footsteps clicking on the stone floor so he hurried along the corridor to the office. Miller seemed none the wiser when he caught up and just pushed the office door open. They went inside.
‘So what do you think?’ Miller creaked into his high-backed seat. ‘You reckon Chris had something to do with Tabitha’s disappearance? Maybe Nicola?’
‘The evidence. It’s …’ Matt sat in the chair opposite, ‘flimsy.’
‘What about the voicemail? You asked a man of the cloth straight out if he’d seen her, and he told you no.’
‘Because he hadn’t actually seen her.’
‘Oh, you’re playing semantics now. Just like he was.’
‘No. Think about what he said. Tabitha calls the healing centre out of the blue. Leaves an answering machine message for him. Says the pain of the cancer is making her desperate.’
‘That I can believe.’
‘So Chris calls her mobile back and leaves the message that we heard today. Says he’ll visit her, nothing more.’
‘Yeah, and he blatantly told you he’d never met her.’
‘Because he hadn’t met her. Hadn’t even spoken to her on the phone. Just returned her message with another message. He says he turned up at her house and she’d already gone. He didn’t mention Tabitha’s phone message to me because she’d sworn him to secrecy. Pastor confidentiality.’
‘And you believe him?’
‘I believe that she’d want to keep something like that quiet, yes. A known atheist asking for help from the church? It’s embarrassing for her. Makes her look … weak.’
Miller grabbed a paper clip from the desk and started to pull it apart. He moulded it into something approaching a straight line. ‘So you think he’s legit?’
‘Look, all I’m saying is that his story’s plausible and that you have no evidence to say otherwise.’
‘And the wedding woman? That stuff with the smashing plates.’
‘Specialist therapy. Radical counselling. On the whole I’d say Isabel seemed complicit.’
‘Yeah. But where the hell is she now?’
Matt waited. ‘I don’t know.’
Miller flicked the mutilated paper clip into the bin in the corner. He missed. Matt noticed fifty others lying there on the carpet.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ Miller said suddenly. ‘What if it’s something else, that therapy thing?’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. Some sort of sex game.’
‘What?’
‘A sex game. You know. You get those in London, don’t you?’
‘Legend has it. Yes.’
‘Well, you saw that blind woman today, feeling him up. You know how weird some people get. And think about it. Chris is single, isn’t he? A widower? Bound to be frustrated in the trouser department. Maybe that’s how some of those church folk get their rocks off. Dress up in wedding dresses, smash things up. Did you notice if his flies were down when you walked in on them?’
‘Well it’s usually the first thing I look for but sorry, I missed that this time.’
‘Maybe you should have. And I’ll tell you for why … because you can get some premium-grade perverts in churches.’ Miller put his elbows on the desk. ‘You know there were some child porn issues up at the church a few years back.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, there were pictures printed from the internet. Found them stuffed in a drain outside the church. I saw them and let me tell you that it was off the scale of normal sexual behaviour. Made me sick to my stomach. Couldn’t sleep for a month during that. Even put me off shagging my wife.’
The projector in Matt’s mind suddenly rattled into life, and images he’d tried to forget began to flash past him. Most of them were from some research he did for an academic paper he gave one Christmas at the university on the cheery, festive subject of ritualistic sex abuse. A long sigh rolled up through his throat but never seemed to leave his mouth.
Yeah thanks, Miller. Thanks for pulling those out of the files, just when I’d managed to bury them.
‘What I’m saying, Matt, is that Christians can be some of the sickest buggers out there. And I grew up in Catholic Ireland in a church school for boys. So I’m an authority on this stuff.’ The sudden slip at the edge of Miller’s mouth made Matt pause before speaking. Miller just sat there, staring at him, chewing at the inside of his mouth.
The silence was growing too intense. ‘But you said the church abuse cases happened before Chris came here.’
He nodded. ‘About a year before.’
‘And the people responsible were arrested?’
‘Well it could have been anybody.’
‘Was Billy here, when all that happened?’
Miller’s eyebrows went up. ‘Yeah, why do you ask?’
‘I was just curious how he handled it. Must have been pretty intense having that happen under his nose, being the youth worker.’
‘He handled it pretty well. The guy’s alright, actually.’
‘Right.’
Miller sighed deeply, then swung round in his chair for one entire revolution. ‘So what we’re saying is we don’t have anything on Chris Kelly.’
‘Nothing substantial.’
Miller seemed to gaze into the air, hoping for ideas to suddenly drop from the ceiling. ‘You told me he got jumpy when he talked about Hemel Hempstead.’
‘It’s where his wife died. Makes sense that it’s not his favourite place.’
‘How did she die?’
‘He didn’t say,’ Matt stared at his fingers for a moment. Then he put a palm on the desk. ‘Anyway, the bottom line is we’ve got a couple of emails sent to me, and some text messages and the paintings. But we don’t have any bodies.’
‘Not yet.’
Matt stood up. ‘I’ve been thinking about those text messages.’ He walked over to the noticeboard. A yellow Post-it note was stuck amongst the photographs of Tabitha and Nicola. He peeled it off and read it aloud, giving a voice to their sad, lonely-looking fac
es. ‘I’ve repented and I’m with God now. Maybe one day you could come too. Kiss kiss. Tabitha Tansy Clarke. Verecundus.’
Then he grabbed the green Post-it note alongside it and did the same, ‘Mum. I just wanted to let you know that I love you all, but I’m going to be with God now. One day, I hope you might believe and come too. Verecundus. Kiss kiss. Nicola.’
‘You remembered what that Latin bit means yet?’ Miller said.
‘I looked it up on my phone.’
‘You have a Latin dictionary on your phone?’
‘I have Google on my phone.’
Miller looked suddenly sheepish. ‘So enlighten me.’
‘Verecundus. It’s a Latin adjective. It means to feel shame. To be shy or modest. And it also means something that’s worthy of reverence.’
‘Well.’ Miller clapped his hands together. ‘That just about cracks this case wide open, doesn’t it?’
‘Okay, it’s pretty obscure. Interesting, though. So either Tabitha and Nicola are saying they’re with God, and they feel shame, which might explain the burnt paintings. Or they feel reverence. Not sure why they’d choose Latin, though. That’s bugging me.’
‘Taylor still thinks it’s a suicide pact. That they were lovers. I supposed I’m with God now sounds as suicide-y as it gets.’
‘Maybe the first bit sounds … suicide-y. I agree. But it’s the second part I don’t get. I’ve gone home to be with God now, maybe one day you might believe and come too.’
Miller shrugged.
‘It sounds like she’s talking about heaven, and that’s what’s doing my head in. Here we have a known atheist and a young girl who apparently never went to church. They’re talking in Latin, with confidence that they’re with God. And they’re encouraging others to go there too. Sounds almost … evangelical, wouldn’t you say?’
Miller nodded slowly.
‘So what I want to know is if she really did write this, then what happened to make an atheist suddenly believe so strongly in God? Because statistically speaking people converting to religion on their own is extremely uncommon. Almost everyone does it through a contact at a church or a place of worship.’
‘So who was their contact?’
‘Exactly. That’s the question. Who made them trust in God? Who made Tabitha so turned on to faith that she burns her own paintings? Assuming she wrote that message herself, of course.’ He put the notes back on the wall, pressing the glued strip so it stuck. ‘You met Tabitha before, right?’