“Can I take your order, or would you like some more time?” The waitress had materialised beside him, electronic notepad poised. Corstorphine didn’t need to check whether his table companion was ready, she reeled off her starter and main with decisive efficiency – ordering another glass of wine at the same time. He felt distracted, some vague coalescing thought was clamouring to be heard but it had departed without leaving any memory of its passing. He ordered automatically, safe choices that wouldn’t be challenging either to cook or to eat, listening with half his attention as Jenny asked him if this was a regular haunt of his.
“No, I don’t come here that often. I quite like the food here, not too keen on that picture on a plate nonsense the trendier places dish up.”
“You’re lucky if they serve it on a dish! These days they want to serve it on slates, or wooden boards – anything impractical that your dinner can just slide off. Totally unhygienic!” She paused as the waitress returned with the drinks, waiting for Corstorphine to touch glasses.
“Here’s tae us!” He voiced the words, wondering if she too was running the rest of the reciprocal Scots toast in her mind – ‘wha’s like us? Gey few, and they’re a’ deid’. The thought suddenly occurred to him that she may be a widow, another soul cast adrift by the early death of a loved one. “Do you do this sort of thing often?” The words came quickly, covering his momentary embarrassment.
“Date strange men?” Her eyes remained amused, focussing on the wine glass which she revolved slowly in long fingers. “I could ask you the same question. Are you a serial dater, James?” She looked at him directly, her interest in his response apparent in her quizzical expression.
Corstorphine struggled to answer. “I’ve been on a few dates over the last year, none of them particularly successful.” He sipped his beer, wishing it had an alcoholic content, something to erase the words he’d just blurted out without thinking. What was he even doing here, fresh from a murder scene? He sensed his wife giving him an encouraging look, willing him to keep at it. “I’m sorry, I’m really not very good at this.”
She observed him keenly, making an analysis, much as any good nurse would every day on the ward. A doctor may have the clinical knowledge, but they don’t often combine this with empathy – seeing beyond the symptoms to treat the patient holistically as well as the illness. “How long have you been single?” Her amused expression now had an overlay of concern.
He saw the concern in her eyes, Corstorphine also read people for a living. Christ, this is going well – now she’s feeling sorry for me! “My wife died five years ago. Cancer. I’m only just getting back into the dating game.” He grimaced. “Think I’m out of practice.”
The starters arrived, punctuating Corstorphine’s statement with plate-sized full stops. They ate quietly, interspersing mouthfuls with satisfied comments as to the quality of the food.
“You just have to be you, James.” The advice came once the plates had been cleared away, filling the hiatus between courses. “My husband ran out on me, two years ago now. Had an affair with someone he met whilst out walking the dog.” She stared intently at the white linen tablecloth as if it held the answer to a question she’d asked many times before. She raised her head to lock eyes with him, no room for guile this close. “She was just a lassie in her early twenties, almost half his age.” She shook her head in denial. “Funny how you can’t see something that’s right under your nose. Do you get that in the police business? Clues so obvious that you wonder how on earth nobody could have spotted them at the outset?”
Corstorphine drank his beer, the cardboard taste that accompanied non-alcoholic beverages not so obvious after the first few sips. His palate must be getting used to it. “The benefits of hindsight. Aye, we get it all the time – especially from the press – or anyone who doesn’t have to join the dots as an investigation is underway. Sometimes it’s the smallest clue that brings it all together, or the modus operandi – habitual routines as easy to recognise as a fingerprint.”
The arrival of the main course interrupted his flow and they leant back in their seats as the waitress placed the plates on the table. Corstorphine exchanged a glance with her, seeking a sign that they shared some interest apart from the food. The unvoiced response was non-committal, leaving him to wonder if he was ever going to find a way through the unmapped middle-aged courtship ritual he kept attempting. It was all so easy when the whole world was younger and less encumbered with emotional and physical baggage. They met in groups, they drank, danced and partied in groups. Eventually they paired off, couple after couple as nature intended until only the oddballs, self-contained or unlucky, remained. He was beginning to feel like an oddball himself, a misplaced sock in the drawer of life. He felt his wife’s expression without the need to see it, lips pursed up to one side, head tilted inquisitively, requesting he just look at himself now. He took a knife to his steak, red meat exposed as the blade cut deep.
“What’s the story with the garrotted guy they brought in today?” She asked the question before he’d had a chance to eat the first mouthful and the meal in front of him morphed into an atrocity, juice running red under his blade. Corstorphine drew a breath, his appetite completely gone.
“Sorry, I’m not able to talk about work.” He stared blankly at his plate, willing the recent sight and smell of Oscar’s body to leave his vision.
“No, of course. Silly of me to ask – it’s just word gets around the hospital of anything like this. Left the ambulance crew a bit shaken, to be honest, and we talk these things over between ourselves.” She looked apologetic. “Helps to talk, makes it easier for us all to cope when something bad happens.”
“That’s alright. Sometimes the job throws up stuff that’s hard to deal with.” He cut the steak into a mouth-sized portion. “You just get used to it, I guess.” The steak tasted good as he dealt with the day’s trauma in his own way, consigning it to that part of his memory marked Private. With work marked off-limits, the rest of the conversation dealt with inconsequential topics as they discovered a shared interest in nature.
“Would you like to meet again?” She asked the question over coffee, once he’d relented and agreed to share the bill.
“That would be nice. Aye – I’d like that” Corstorphine felt the ground moving under his feet as if some giant continental plate had shifted. Every other blind date he’d been on had ended with the woman making hurried excuses, never to be seen again. They left the table, Corstorphine for once actually helping a woman on with her coat instead of proving an impediment to the process and exited into the night.
“Good! Good night then, James.” She leaned forward, head demurely turned to one side to present a cheek.
“Goodnight, Jenny.” He waited until she entered the waiting taxi before walking in a daze to his car. His wife sat next to him on the journey home, a quiet smile sitting on her invisible lips.
V
SUNDAY 09:15
The minister of St Cuthbert’s made his daily pilgrimage from the manse, shuffling along a well-trodden path through an overgrown graveyard to the church. Each step brought with it a sharp stab of pain in his lower back muscles and he silently invoked the Lord’s Prayer until he reached the medieval church porch. A pair of ornate Gothic doors opened easily against his touch and he tilted his head in obsequience towards the far altar before entering the cool, darkened interior. Half in hope he glanced around the church in search of any parishioners but was unsurprised to find he was alone. Fresh flowers adorned the window recesses, a mix of wildflowers and roses adding a splash of colour to an interior that had otherwise been drained of joy over the centuries.
His flock was diminishing year in, year out as the grim reaper took a steady toll of the aged. Any new young faces that made an inquisitive appearance over the year were soon put off by the unwelcoming stares of his congregants and instead often made their way to one of the evangelical churches that had s
prung up in the most ungodly of places. The local cinema hosted one of these gatherings of bright-eyed born-again Christians, playing guitars and singing along to the bouncing ball as the words scrolled on the silver screen in the upstairs studio. On the ground floor, without anyone finding this at all unusual, bingo devotees sat in equal glassy-eyed reverence as balls dropped out of a machine and the numbers were intoned with an intensity of meaning as powerful as the words spoken upstairs.
The minister knew all about evangelists. False prophets each and every one, most of them funded by shady American churches that monetarised Christ. Slick organisations taking a tithe direct from wage packets to fund private jets and lavish lifestyles. Why did the flocks not realise they were being fleeced? The similarities between sheep farming and religion were not lost on him; for God’s sake, it was even spelt out in the bible. He glanced at the figure of Christ on the cross, suspended for all eternity behind the altar and looking forlornly down on him. Was that an accusatory look? His eyes weren’t what they used to be.
Pulling an oversized key from his pockets with some difficulty, he inserted it into the lock of an ancient oak door securing the entry to the bell tower. A turn of the key released the door, and it swung open to reveal the small stone ringing chamber at the base of the bell tower. With the habit of years, his eyes travelled up beyond the thick red and blue banded Sally until the rope disappeared into a hole in the ceiling, some distance up the tower. Many years ago, when he had first taken the ministry, bellringing was the job of the church warden. He remembered walking to church with a straight back, acknowledging the smiles and greetings of his parishioners as they heeded the clarion call of the single bell. Now there was nobody left with the strength to pull the rope and soon the day would come when he too could no longer manage.
He locked the door back into place behind him to prevent it from swinging open, revealing the iron clasp set into stone that held the end of the rope. Ignoring the pain in his back, the rope was unwound and then wrapped into three large loops, turn after turn held in his hand to form an intimate bond between himself and the bell, high above. He had instructed generations of bell-ringers in how to hold the rope, how to allow sufficient slack for the recoil as the bell traversed its arc above their heads, how never to wrap the rope around their arms. He pulled on the rope, feeling the weight of the bell resisting his initial attempts to overcome inertia. The strength in his arms alone was insufficient these days to pull the bell up successfully. For the last decade he had needed to add his body’s own weight, letting himself fall almost to the ground to bring the bell round into position. The corollary of this, of course, was that he was then lifted up off his feet as the bell swung back, his arm attempting to pull the rest of his body heavenwards at each rotation. He imagined this must be what it would be like on the day of Rapture, when the godly are called to heaven. Bell ringing had become a transcendent event for him. Every Sunday his body fought against the increasingly reluctant rope, overcoming the adversity of gravity and friction before experiencing that brief dizzying moment when ascension appeared possible.
Gripping the rope hard, he threw himself towards the floor to force the heavy mechanism into motion. The rope lifted slightly, pulling him back to his feet and he threw himself down again, timing the force expertly to provide impetus at exactly the right moment. With increasing vigour he repeated his solitary exercise before the bell started to ring in earnest and his body felt that miraculous moment of weightlessness. The pain in his back receded as his spine was stretched, nerves free for the moment from the punishing effects of gravity on ruined cartilage. High up in the belfry, the force of his endeavours was transferred via a secondary mechanism, quite separate to the bell. A large circular bone cog connected to a reciprocating steel saw, a parasitic addition which had never been imagined by the original medieval craftsmen who had built this tower. The saw was cutting upwards through the oak beam that held the cast iron bell aloft. The minister was correct; over the last few months the bell had been increasingly resistant to his efforts. A younger bell ringer may have been less likely to blame the inadequacies of an aging body and had the bell tower mechanism investigated, but the minister put the increasing stiffness down to age and infirmity. Then, without warning, the oak gave way, parting along the line of the saw as the weight of the bell and vibration proved too much. Old mortar crumbled as the oak beam twisted in stone sockets, the stone giving way almost as easily as the mortar, and the bell began its fall from grace.
The minister felt something was awry as the vibration travelled down the rope, a sudden grip as the cord dug deeply into his flesh harder than a vengeful angel’s clasp – then nothing. He stood looking upwards in confusion, the rope starting to gather in coils at his feet as the tower groaned like a wounded giant. In the few seconds it took for the bell to shake free, the minister realised his peril. There was nowhere for him to go, save through the locked belfry tower door which resisted his panicked attempts to pull open. A discordant peel alerted him to his fate and his wide eyes stared heavenwards for the last time. The bell was in free fall, no longer held above the earth it accelerated downwards, smashing through the fragile ringing chamber roof in a cloud of plaster dust and reducing the minister to bone, blood and offal in one final act. The bell lodged against the bell tower door, dull metallic sounds still issued from its cracked surface as falling masonry hit the solid bronze before the church fell silent.
The small congregation had mostly taken their places in the pews. Faces turned to stone as the cacophony sounded, staring blankly at the white dust slowly filling the knave. Standing or sitting, frozen in shock, they remained mute until blood began trickling under the belfry door. The first scream cut the air like a knife, a release of tension that transferred to the other parishioners who reacted with a unity of purpose and vigour that would have put the young evangelists to shame. As one, they ran to push on the locked belfry door, but the oak remained irresolute, jammed solid against the weight of the bell and fallen masonry.
A sizeable crowd began to gather outside the church, neighbouring houses alerted by the discordant clarion death call as the heavy bronze bell rang a final descent. It was an irony that would not have been wasted on the minister, had he still lived, the last sounding of the bell bringing the largest congregation for many years.
Within minutes the fire brigade responded to the first garbled emergency call. The undulating siren was unnecessary on the quiet town roads but served to attract an even larger audience, as an otherwise uneventful Sunday turned into a free sideshow. Even as the firemen began applying the jacks and cutting tools to the ancient belfry door, the rumours of the minister’s violent end spread through the assembled crowd in hushed exclamations. People stood gawping at the stone tower, as if by observation alone they could make sense of the minister being struck down by his own bell. Some cast a worried look towards the sky, fearful that perhaps this was the first stage of a divine judgement that had found the minister lacking. Others enjoyed the spectacle, an unexpected circus in living high definition, literally on their doorsteps – the trick was to keep the enjoyment from showing on their faces. The young didn’t host such inner qualms and ran and jumped with the excitement of it all, oblivious to the opprobrium of their elders.
Two of the firemen were detailed to move the crowds back, their own worried glances towards the bell tower indicative of the danger the structure now presented. They were joined by the young constable, panting with exertion as he arrived on foot, arms spread wide as if herding sheep. The flock obediently moved, ripples growing wider as the danger the tower presented was made known.
In the distance another siren could be heard, the doppler shift lowering as it approached the church. An ambulance slid to a halt on the gravel, not expecting to be impeded by the growing crowds, and honked impatiently to be let through. The vehicle crept forwards towards the church doors with the crowd parting in a suitably biblical manner before it parked between the
gravestones. The crew exchanged brief words with the firemen and turned off the flashing lights. This was going to be the second body bag of the week.
PC Lamb stared at the crimson puddle already congealing under the bell tower door. Bloodied footprints led the way to the church porch doors, held wide open to allow access to the compressed air hoses powering the saws, cutting through the hinges and lock holding the door in place. It seemed like sacrilege to him, destroying the medieval door, and each attempt to force it open caused greater damage. A floodlight cast an unforgiving illumination on the scene, catching the crucifixion in stark outline where the figure of Christ appeared to be dancing in the firemen’s shadows, bringing back visions from his first MDMA-fuelled rave. A loud crack from splintering wood brought him back to the present as the recalcitrant door timbers parted and his stomach contents forced their way up his throat in response to the charnel house now revealed.
“Sarge?” He stood outside in the graveyard, after telling the firemen he was seeking a stronger radio signal, but glad to be out in the fresh air.
“Sierra four-five, this is Whisky tango. Did they no’ teach you radio technique at that police college, PC Lamb? Over!”
The sergeant’s lugubrious tone helped to calm his nerves. He took a couple of gulps of air, glad that he’d managed to keep his breakfast down. “Sorry, sarge. I’m at St Cuthbert’s. There’s been an accident. Over.”
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