A Turbulent Priest

by J M Gregson

  “Except of course that if you were innocent you shouldn’t have known what time the victim died,” said Peach calmly.

  “The news of Bickerstaffe’s murder had been made public by the time we spoke to you. The time had still not been revealed. Yet you admitted just now that you discussed your alibis for that time before we came to see you.”

  Keith Hanlon sat very still on the sofa, feeling the rigidity of his wife beside him, willing her not to speak, not even to look up into his face. Even a look could be fatal now, he felt. He tried hard to sound calm as he said, “You’ll have to do better than that, Inspector Peach. I told you, even the innocent can examine what they were doing at any particular time.”

  “And even the guilty can agree their stories, Mr Hanlon. Can make up a lie and then test each other to see that their stories tally, that they are giving each other an alibi for a particular time, a time they should not have known was important but somehow did. It always seemed that this wasn’t an individual crime, that whoever tightened that wire round Bickerstaffe’s neck had a partner who had helped him to set it up and provided him with an alibi for the time of the killing.”

  Pat looked up into her husband’s face sharply on the phrase about the wire round the victim’s neck, and Peach knew in that moment that she had never until then known the exact details of the garrotting of the man who had abused her son. Keith had protected her from that, just as now he tried to protect both of them by pressing his hand down warningly on top of hers.

  Keith was afraid of what she might say, but when she spoke at last it was an attempt to defend him. “We were here that night,” she said in a monotone. “Here at seven o’clock on that night. And I can prove it. It was our turn to shut up the church. The Sacred Heart. We still did it, you know, even after — after what Father did to Jamie. You can look at the roster for church security if you don’t—”

  “You were here on that night, Mrs Hanlon. But your husband wasn’t. Not at seven o’clock. Your husband’s name was on the roster, but it was you who shut the church. You took his place, because he wasn’t back home at that time.”

  She could have denied it. She could have given him lots of reasons for the change other than her husband’s absence. He would have known they were false, but he could not have disproved them. But she was a naturally truthful woman, with none of the resources of the habitual deceiver. She looked at Peach for a moment in horrified silence, then her resolve cracked. “That man deserved it!” she shouted. “He abused our boy! Our Jamie, who never hurt a fly!”

  Then, suddenly, her arms were round her husband and she was in tears. It was Keith Hanlon who had to conclude the bizarre ritual of confession. “Pat phoned him the night before and arranged that she would meet him in a ruined barn we knew, just outside Bolton-by-Bowland that Thursday evening. I waited in the barn until he came and then jumped him from behind. It was easy — he was only expecting Pat, you see. I hit him over the head with a cricket stump, before he even saw me. I didn’t give him the chance to speak. If he had spoken, had argued with me, had asked for mercy, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.”

  At this thought, Pat Hanlon was wracked by a renewed bout of sobbing; he pressed her head against his chest and stroked it gently, whispering wordless comfortings, as a mother might do to a child. Then he spoke again to the two faces opposite him. “He was unconscious, after I hit him. I tightened the wire around his neck before he could come round and look at me.”

  Lucy Blake said gently, “Why did it take you so long to get home after you’d killed him?”

  “I had to hide the body, didn’t I? That’s why we’d arranged he should meet me there. There was a wood behind the barn, with a deep ditch beside it. We’d picnicked there you see, when the children were younger, so we knew the spot well. I emptied the pockets. There was a letter there, threatening what would happen to him if he didn’t keep his mouth shut about some photographs. I’m afraid I burned it with the other things.” He was genuinely apologetic, as if he regretted this minor breach of the law more than the crime of murder.

  Lucy nodded, then asked quietly, “What did you do with the body?”

  “I put the body in the ditch, in the spot I’d selected before he came. It was a good five feet deep at that point, and overgrown — there was no water in it at that time. If it hadn’t been for that torrential downpour on the Bank Holiday Monday, it could have been undiscovered for years.”

  Act of God, they call that, thought Peach. He didn’t voice the thought to these devastatingly pious people. Instead, he radioed for assistance as Lucy Blake uttered the formal words of arrest over the couple, still clasped in each other’s arms but now both weeping. The uniformed men who arrived looked very young, even to Peach’s eyes. They took the unresisting couple out to the car. “No need for the cuffs,” said Peach quietly as they went.

  Pat Hanlon turned her face back to him at the door. “Father Bickerstaffe should never have done that, not to our boy. He didn’t deserve to live. And him a priest. Bringing disgrace to Holy Mother Church.” She sounded as if she still thought that might be a bigger sin than the assault itself.

  Lucy Blake stayed behind to break the news of what had happened to the children. She made a swift phone call to the children’s aunt, then set off to walk the half-mile to her house, rehearsing the wording of her dreadful news as she went.

  Peach went with the Hanlons to prepare the formal charges at the station. They seemed almost peaceful, quieter now with the relief of confession, that relief which their religion had afforded them all their lives. As if she divined Peach’s thoughts, Pat Hanlon turned to her husband in the back of the police vehicle and said, “We’ll be able to go to Confession now, and receive absolution from our sins, won’t we, Keith?”

  Her husband nodded, unable to speak, pressing his hand upon her arm to try to silence her. But she said contentedly to Peach in the front seat of the car, “They’ll allow us a visit from a priest in prison, won’t they?”

  If you enjoyed reading A Turbulent Priest, you might be interested in Stranglehold, also by J M Gregson.

  Extract from Stranglehold by J M Gregson

  Chapter 1

  The light shone into the man’s face, white and unrelenting. The room was hot and airless. On its stark and functional furniture, there was no room for dust to gather. But there was a faint odour of stale sweat within these bleak and narrow walls.

  It was almost two in the morning, but in the airless and windowless interview room it might have been any time.

  Only the fatigue of the three men who fought each other with words within this place gave any clue that this might be an hour when the remainder of the world was at rest.

  Lambert watched the cassette which turned almost silently beside him, recording each syllable of this so far pointless performance. He hoped the tension was building within the figure opposite him, but he suspected the man had been through these sessions too often to panic now. He resisted the feeling of hopelessness within himself; it troubled him more and more these days, whenever he approached the point of exhaustion.

  ‘You might as well admit it, Tommy. You were in Union Street at the time. You were seen. We can document it, if we have to. You – ’

  ‘I was at home.’ Tommy Clinton repeated the statement for the seventh time that night, as though he were making the response in some bizarre secular litany.

  ‘And who says so?’

  ‘I’ve told you. My mother. But she was asleep at the time you’re talking about. Like a decent old lady should be.’

  Lambert smiled sourly. An old lady, nodding a little with Parkinson’s disease, who had lied before for her son, who would bring herself to believe her own lies by the time they had prepared a case. Whom he could never put in court for cross-examination, in any case. They both knew the score.

  He drove himself on to what he knew he must do. He was helped by the irritation he felt that this man should best him. Tommy Clinton was a pathetic figure. His f
rayed shirt was grubby about the neck: it had been worn at least two days too long. His grey hair was greasy, untidy now from the four hours he had been at the station. His grey eyes were carefully blank; that came from his experience of petty crime, of hours of questioning like this.

  He was only here because of his grubby past, and that held no more than minor, even comic crimes, the kind even the police laughed at when he was gone. Tommy was no threat. But here he was, outsmarting the CID.

  ‘You’re a flasher, Tommy. Tried and convicted.’

  ‘I’ve given up all that, Mr Lambert. I’ve told you.’

  He had, several times. No doubt he would go on doing so. Unless they could frighten him.

  ‘Flashers go on to bigger things, sometimes. You know that, Tommy, and so do we.’ It wasn’t true, it was a rarity. But not unknown. And Tommy didn’t know the statistics: for the first time, he looked a little scared.

  ‘I haven’t done nothing. I told you.’ He kept his hands on the table between them, with the dirty fingernails turned towards the two men opposite him. But for the first time in twenty minutes, the hands became mobile. The fingers did not tremble, but they began to massage each other a little. All three men watched them in silence, like deaf men trying to interpret a new sign language.

  Lambert saw the first stirring of apprehension and went for it, like a fencer seeing an opening in his opponent’s defence. No, nothing so subtle, he thought wryly: like a boxer seeing the chance to put in a bludgeoning blow. Not a knockout, merely something that might weaken the adversary a little, score him an extra point with the non-existent judges.

  ‘This is big, you see, Tommy. Big and nasty. The girl was killed. And before she was killed, she was sexually assaulted. That’s what it will say in the papers. You and I know what that means. Clothes torn off; fist rammed in her mouth; face bashed until it bled; legs forced apart; tights – ’

  ‘It’s not my sort of crime, Mr Lambert.’ Clinton was desperate to stop the flow of detail, and Lambert scarcely less desperate to be interrupted. Both of them breathed hard as they stared at each other. ‘I’ve never been one for violence. I – I’ve had my little weaknesses with women, God knows, but I’ve never been charged with hitting them.’

  It was probably true, but Lambert was too weary to care. He smelt the fear on the man, and he went for it. ‘And when the man had finished with her, he killed her. Brutally, with his bare hands. Just to stop her talking. Or to give himself more pleasure. You tell us which, Tommy.’

  The police usually kept the facts from men like Clinton, hoping to make them uneasy by keeping them in ignorance of what the investigation was about, collecting bits of information which men like him often revealed when they jumped to false conclusions.

  This sudden revelation when he least expected it threw Clinton off balance. ‘You’re not setting me up for the Julie Salmon killing?’ His voice was almost a shout, bouncing off the walls at them, shocking in its alarm after his earlier calm. They smelt his stale breath, gusting at them now across the table as he struggled to control it.

  ‘You’re in the frame, Clinton. And you’re not helping yourself.’ Lambert sat back, recoiling a little from that awful stench, estimating the state of his man from a few inches further away. The little man knew the name of the victim; Lambert cudgelled his tired brain to decide whether there could be any significance in that. ‘We have a witness who saw you that night, not far from where the body was found. And at about the right time. There you are: I’ve levelled with you now. It’s about time you did the same with us.’

  The man was still frightened. The fingers twined and untwined rapidly, as if with a life of their own. Clinton watched them as though they were someone else’s, making no attempt to stop them moving. He was scared, but after the first shock, his fear took on the unthinking sullenness of a panic-ridden child. ‘I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t do any-thing like that. You can’t pin this on me.’

  His voice carried no conviction. In his world, the creed was that the pigs could pin most things on you if they had a mind to.

  Lambert, recognizing the doors being closed behind that blank, sullen face, eased his chair back a fraction. The man beside him knew the way he worked so well that no glance was needed between them to indicate what was required. Instead, there was the briefest of pauses. Then Bert Hook, who had not spoken for half an hour, took up the questioning, his voice unexpectedly restrained, even friendly, in that room which was designed to be unfriendly to men like Clinton.

  ‘You see, Tommy, we’d like to help you. To help you to help yourself.’ Hook felt unhurriedly through his pockets, watching the face opposite him, looking for the first hint of cooperation. The man had not asked for a lawyer, but that did not mean he felt he had nothing to fear. The petty fringe of the underworld in which men like Clinton lived did not deal with lawyers. Only, later on, with legal aid.

  Hook found the packet and shoved it on to his edge of the table. ‘Want a fag, Tommy?’

  Clinton’s hands moved a couple of inches towards the cigarettes, then drew back. ‘No. Keep your snout.’ His lips had betrayed him into the prison word before he could control them.

  But it was his hands which had given away his need for nicotine, as they had earlier given away his apprehension. Hook pushed the packet across the small square table between them, then struck a match as Clinton fumbled out a cigarette from it. The smoke smelt strong in the tiny, overheated room, the more so as both the policemen were reformed smokers themselves. Both of them found themselves with their eyes on the packet; Clinton’s had been only the second tube extracted from it. It was at the ends of days like this that they missed the relief of tobacco most.

  Hook forced himself to something near affability as he said, ‘Where were you, then, Tommy, on that night?’

  Clinton, grateful for the cigarette, looked up at the man opposite him, seeing the sweat under the arms of his white shirt and the tiredness on the sergeant’s face, feeling a bond between them from these signs of physical weakness as much as from the tobacco he had been given. But he looked down, resisting false friendship from men who must be his enemies by their calling. He shook his head stubbornly, then drew again upon the cigarette.

  ‘You see, Tommy, we know you were there. When you deny it, naturally we have to think bad things about you.’ Hook would not admit that their ‘witness’ was a prostitute who thought she had glimpsed him through the darkness: scarcely the most reliable of sightings. He saw Clinton’s little start of fear at his use of ‘bad things’, which the man obviously considered a euphemism.

  ‘My mum’ll tell you. I was at home.’

  ‘I don’t think we’ll even bother to ask her, Tommy. Old ladies like her should be left with clear consciences, I always feel.’

  Clinton said sullenly, trying to disguise his fear, ‘I was nowhere near that murder. I didn’t see anything. I can’t help you nail the man who did it.’

  It was the first perceptible switch of ground, and all of them were expert enough in these exchanges to detect it. Hook, playing this nervous fish which had taken his fly, did not hurry. ‘You see, Tommy, if we can just eliminate you as a suspect, we can concentrate on others. And because you were in the area that night, you will probably have seen some little thing which will be of interest to us, even though it doesn’t seem significant to you.’

  On the surface at least, Clinton was being treated almost as an equal; he liked the big words, the careful explanation. He was not used to being treated by many men with anything more than a routine contempt, and he did not find it easy to deal with this. He rose a little in his chair, as a cat rises a little under the knuckles which gently stroke its head. ‘If I was in that area, it was much earlier in the evening.’

  The brains of the men opposite him, trained over many years to dissect such vagaries, wondered automatically how much information the Press Officer had dispensed to the press about the time of the murder.

  ‘All right, Tommy. Let’s accept for the
moment that you were tucked up in bed at home like a good boy when poor Julie Salmon was killed. Where were you earlier that night?’

  Clinton looked hard at the hands which would not be stilled, as though watching carefully for their reaction to what he was going to say. ‘I was in the Grapes. Having a couple of drinks.’

  ‘And who was with you there, Tommy?’

  ‘I – I don’t remember. It’s a few days ago now and – ’

  ‘Pity, that, Tommy. Puts you right back in the frame, that does. Especially now you’ve told us you were in the area.’

  ‘Look, Sarge, the blokes I was with, they – ’

  ‘Rape and murder, Tommy. Crimes don’t come any bigger. Or any worse. Are you telling me your mates – ’

  ‘All right. All right!’ The hands which had been so mobile rose a little into the air, then fell back hopelessly on to the table and were still at last. ‘I’ll tell you all about what I did that night.’

  ‘And all the times, Tommy.’ They were the first words Lambert had spoken in over ten minutes. Clinton looked at him for a moment in shock; he had almost forgotten he was there.

  It was at that moment that there was a sharp rap at the door which surprised them all. Detective-Inspector Rushton’s face, reluctant but urgent, appeared as the door opened a few inches and said, ‘Sir, I’m sorry to interrupt, but something’s come in.’

  Lambert thrust down his irritation, choked back the expletive that had sprung to his weary lips. He rose without a word and followed the younger man from the room, shutting the door firmly behind him. Sergeant Hook said to the microphone, ‘Superintendent Lambert had to leave the room at this point. The interview was suspended,’ and pressed the stop button on the recorder.