Reprobation

by Catherine Fearns

  ‘A coincidence, that double-headed axe. The body. The band. And there you were, in both places.’ He paused for effect.

  ‘Where were you on the night of the seventh of October?’

  It took Helen a few moments to realise the significance of the question.

  ‘I was at …. I was here. Where I always am. Here.’

  ‘You’re not always here though, are you?’

  ‘I was, that night. You can ask anyone… I mean this is absurd,’ She was panicking slightly and wasn’t sure why.

  ‘OK then, don’t worry we can check that. So why were you with a heavy metal band on the M6 last week?’

  ‘Oh yes, my goodness that must look so strange to you. I was looking on the internet the evening before – the day the body was found and you came to see me – and I just wished I could help more, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And I found this band with the same symbol as the body, and their lyrics from the same passage in the Bible as the… Oh, I don’t really know, I’ve been very stupid haven’t I?’ And then she was struck with a sudden horror and inexplicable sadness: ‘They didn’t do it, did they? The band?’

  ‘You’re not the detective here, Sister Hope. I’d appreciate it if you stuck to lecturing and… praying. We’re perfectly capable of doing Google searches ourselves. And lo and behold, when we do, what do we find? You.’

  ‘Well I didn’t think—’

  ‘This isn’t Miss Marple or, who is it, Father Brown. Next time you feel like playing detective… come to us. Can you do that?’ Quinn winced at Swift’s harshness.

  ‘And next time you fancy a night out, how about a nice girls’ dinner and a white wine spritzer at Pizza Express? Instead of satanic metal gigs.’

  Swift turned and left, Quinn offering a vaguely placating shrug to Helen as she followed him. Helen stood looking at the church door as it closed behind them, her heart racing from anxiety and, perhaps, a certain defiance.

  ‘Go on then. Say it. I was too much,’ Swift said to Quinn as they walked towards the car.

  ‘No, I wasn’t going to. She should have come to us with that axe picture, silly woman. Except that – you can’t deny she has been on the same lines as us, and she found the band connection before we did. That Kristensen guy was in the north-west at the time, he has a string of convictions – drugs, minor assault, even a church vandalism – and the symbol, the lyrics – it’s a coincidence don’t you think? And there are no coincidences?’

  ‘It is weird, I’ll grant you that. But it’s more likely that Shepherd is using him as a convenient smokescreen. Kristensen has a watertight alibi, for every minute of his life – the fella is never alone. None of us have ever heard of him, but apparently he’s some sort of god in the world of heavy metal. We could certainly do him for crimes against music though, and offences against personal grooming.’

  They got into the car. ‘You know,’ said Quinn, ‘I read about these Norwegian death metal bands who went around burning churches down. It was a big scandal all over Norway in the Nineties. These bands claimed to be genuine Satanists, you know, not like Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper, but proper devil-worshippers. There were a couple of murders as well. And OK, this band Total Depravity are too young to have been involved in those particular incidents, but they were obviously heavily influenced by it growing up.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Swift. ‘There are no coincidences. That singer is a scrawny little thing but he does have a team of huge blokes, I suppose they could all be in it together. It’s a bit much to murder someone as a publicity stunt though.’

  ‘Unless they are real Satanists.’

  ‘My God.’

  ‘You mean, my Satan.’

  They both laughed. Swift said, ‘This case is properly messing with me head. We’ll pay this Total Depravity a visit. Don’t make me listen to the music though.’

  He answered his mobile on speaker as they drove off.

  ‘Swift speaking.’

  ‘Boss. It’s Dave. The Super wants to speak to you in person – says can you go to Canning Place now.’

  ‘Shit. Yeah, on me way.’

  ***

  At Merseyside Police Headquarters on Canning Place, Swift took a deep breath and knocked on the Superintendent’s office door. He had only been in here a few weeks ago, formally receiving the promotion which he wasn’t sure he quite deserved. A ‘meteoric rise’, they had called it in the Liverpool Echo; local lad powers through the ranks and triumphs in the Vice Unit, secondment to the Met, before returning to join the Murder Squad as their youngest DI. But Swift felt he had just been supremely lucky, swept along like the sandsnakes on Crosby Beach.

  Superintendent Liz Canter sat behind her desk looking formidable and motioned him to sit. Liz Canter was the steely figurehead of Merseyside Police, and could hardly have been from anywhere other than the city of Liverpool. With chiselled cheekbones, skin leathery from decades of hard police work, tanning and smoking, blonde hair and dark eyebrows perfectly manicured, she wore her typically hard expression as a badge of office. She put her elbows on the desk and leaned forward, sighing.

  ‘Tell me I didn’t make a mistake with you, Darren. I heard from the forensic team at Kenilworth House – there were some raised eyebrows, I can tell you. What the bloody hell were you thinking, taking some nun to a crime scene?’

  ‘She was there as an expert witness…’ he ventured.

  ‘Expert my arse. She’s a potential suspect, and that was a fresh crime scene. It’s so against protocol it’s not even in the rule book!’

  ‘What about if we appointed her a Specialist Lay Adviser?’

  ‘Darren, come on. There are criminal profilers for that. Specialist Lay Advisers are doctors, social workers, engineers; they’re not nuns! The police don’t have spiritual advisers. You’re going to make us a laughing stock.’

  ‘So what – are you taking me off the case?’

  ‘No, not at the moment. It’s not completely unheard of to have murders around Crosby, there’s plenty of druglords in the vicinity, but this is high profile. Crucifixion on Crosby Beach? Fuck, it’s a field day for the press. To be honest, if I’d known this was going to be your first case I would have kept you back here for a bit longer. But the hassle of taking you off would be a pain in the arse, so this is your last chance.’

  Swift nodded, only half-relieved.

  ‘In any case, it wasn’t totally stupid, what you did – asking the nun’s advice. Definitely thinking outside the box, getting inside the mind of a killer, all those clichés. That’s the stuff that will make you a great detective one day. And I know you will be, that’s why I’ve always championed you, Darren. You’re intuitive, and you care. It’s just – you know, stick to the Crime Scene Protocols for now, yeah?’

  Telling off over, she softened. She was, after all, his unofficial mentor.

  ‘How’s it going then, being back in Crosby? Is it hard not being one of the lads anymore?’

  ‘It is weird, yeah. But it’s OK. They’re good lads. And girls. It’s dead stressful though isn’t it, leading a team? And with such high stakes. I don’t know… how to behave with them, how to be. I feel stupid. Just across the road from the station is the Kwik Save where I used to work on Saturdays when I was at school, and sometimes I wish I was still there, doing a nine to five.’

  ‘Imposter syndrome is normal, and it shows you care. Your detective personality will come, and in the meantime, people look up to you, Darren. Everyone is a smartarse in this city, and you hold something back. You’ve got a certain mystery about you, and that commands respect. The girls love you, the lads all want to be you, and you know this city. You live and breathe it, you know what makes people tick. I’m glad it didn’t work out in London. Because you belong here.’

  Canter smiled sympathetically and leaned back in her chair. Swift hated himself for opening up; he wished she would stop looking at him and felt absurdly close to tears.

  ‘Have you told them yet?’ she asked. ‘A
bout Matt?’

  ‘Not yet, no. It hasn’t come up to be honest with you.’

  ‘I think you underestimate them, you know, it won’t even be a thing. You’ve been burned several times, I know. You were unlucky in London. But this is Liverpool.’

  ‘I know yeah, it’s just, I’ve made it a thing. I’ll get meself sorted.’

  8.

  Helen was driving around the north of England again, and rather enjoying the liberation and mild rebellion of it. Whoever had designed the itinerary for this band’s tour had a somewhat flawed sense of geography, because it didn’t make any logistical sense. Dipping south to Birmingham, then back up to Newcastle, and now Leeds? She wondered if it was that enormously fat man who had been selling t-shirts and lurking on the bus. As she approached Newcastle she realised that she was quite looking forward to this concert. Despite the bizarre suitability of her cassock last time, she had decided to dress appropriately tonight, in the Total Depravity t-shirt and Mikko’s jeans, which she had hidden in her room at Argarmeols and then smuggled out with her. Mikko was so thin that the jeans were only slightly too big for her, and they still had that inexplicable chain hanging from them. She would also have a chance to return his leather jacket, which she imagined must be expensive. Yes, she was looking forward to this. She knew what to expect now, and somehow felt a part of the ritual of it all, with her suitable attire and her knowledge of the music. She smiled at how ridiculous she was, and had a strange certainty that God would be smiling at her too.

  This was a smaller venue than the last one, a side-street basement rock bar called ‘Judas’, and there was such a long queue that she worried she wouldn’t get in. But she finally passed through the door just in time for the beginning of Total Depravity’s performance. A sound system was playing ominous introductory noises, and there was the now-familiar sheeting wafting at the back of the stage depicting the double-headed axe.

  She beamed involuntarily when he came onstage, and even found herself clapping and cheering, although she was far from joining in with the rituals of the rest of the crowd, and refrained from raising her hands in that devil horns gesture – that would be a step too far. In that way the brain gradually accepts the unfamiliar, she began to process the sounds she was hearing in a different way, and it was becoming clearer. The resultant tones from the amplifiers were emitted in waves like church organ pipes. The doom-laded guitar chords were interspersed with passages of frantic chromaticism that had an almost carnivalesque absurdity to them, alternating soul-crushing melancholy with an almost joyful chaos. The cinematic key changes manipulated her emotions into exhilaration, and the Phrygian structure of the scales and chords evoked mysticism, medievalism, religion and fear, as he growled about the beauty of ephemerality, the horror of nihilism. It all looked remarkably difficult to play and she marvelled at the technical prowess of the musicians, their ensemble precision and their camaraderie. Singing about death, horror and Satan all looked rather fun.

  While she stood in silent contemplation, all around her people shook their heads rhythmically, ran in circles, climbed onto the stage and jumped off, making her wince. But the jumpers were caught by the crowd each time and were carried aloft back to their positions. She recognised the ritual of it now, every song ending with roars and cheers accompanied by those ‘horn’ hand signals as a sort of Amen.

  Tonight Mikko had elected not to wear a t-shirt, and his thin naked torso with its almost concave chest, his straggling hair and beard gave him the look of a demonic Jesus. This was enhanced by the red stage lights that lit up his eyes. His malevolent expression would occasionally break into a grin at his bandmates and he would launch into contorted dance moves. However tonight he didn’t seem as present as the last time, and Helen had the sense that he was somewhere else in his mind, and ‘dialling in’ his performance.

  The concert ended and the crowds began to disperse, but Helen did not see the fat man this time, and when she tried to go through the door at the side of the stage, a man wearing a security bib just folded his arms and shook his head. ‘I’m a friend of Mikko,’ she attempted weakly. ‘Aren’t you all,’ he said with contempt. She left the bar disappointed, but then she spotted the black bus parked on a side street at the back of the theatre. There didn’t seem to be anyone stopping her, so she walked towards it. And there was Mikko, exiting the theatre and hopping onto the steps of the bus. She waved and called out his name, too loudly, causing the stragglers outside the club to turn their heads. He was just about to go into the bus when he saw her.

  ‘Motherfuck.’ He was struggling with himself, turning and turning again several times and wringing his hands through his long hair, wanting to ignore her but unable to ignore her. In the end he decided to come down and approach her, and she was confused to see that he was furious.

  ‘What the fuck did you do? I had the police on me! You lied to me, you didn’t tell me about that body. You are bad news, dude. Motherfuck. What are you even doing back here?’

  Oh goodness, of course. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I wanted to, I wasn’t keeping it from you. There was just no time, your bus was leaving, and I wasn’t thinking straight… But now I really needed to tell you something else.’ She spoke very quickly. ‘The police, they took me to the apartment of the man who they think did this; and I saw what you saw.’ He was shaking his head and she felt she was still losing him. ‘He had drawings, many drawings, all of the same thing – the gate, the hooded figure, the double headed axe, the light and the dark. It was exactly as you described. He saw the same thing!’

  Mikko had stopped shaking his head, but he was looking some way behind hers, considering his demons.

  ‘They would have found you anyway,’ she continued. ‘I mean they did – the axe symbol on the body, that’s how they found you, just like I did. We are both connected to this, whether we like it or not.’ She sighed. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m sorry. I just wanted to tell you about the picture. Here, I can’t very well give you the jeans, but here’s the jacket.’ She began to take it off and make moves to leave, but he stopped her and put it back on her shoulders.

  ‘It’s freezing, what are you doing? Keep it on. Motherfuck. I was so freaked out by those police, it’s not good for my anxiety, dude. I couldn’t even understand what they were saying with that fucked up accent they had. And they were even questioning me about those Norwegian church burnings. That was back in the Nineties. Fuck.’

  ‘Well, that would be crazy, wouldn’t it,’ said Helen. ‘Because not only were you a child in the Nineties, but those Norwegian church arsonists were quite clearly black metal bands. And you, as everyone knows, play melodic death metal. The two are completely different musical subgenres.’

  Mikko smirked at that. Thank goodness, thought Helen.

  ‘You’re becoming a metalhead then are you, Sister Helen?’ He looked at her for a long time, then lit a cigarette, shivering in the cold. ‘OK. Fuck it. So what are you suggesting? That we try to find this guy, this murderer? You really think we can find him before the police?’

  ‘Well, I do have some ideas. Some leads we could follow. And even if we don’t, we might find some answers about your dream.’

  ‘OK fine, let’s fucking do it. Tomorrow we have a day off before we head to Scotland. Tell me where to go.’

  ***

  The next morning was impossibly bright and crisp, and a diminutive figure stood outside Manchester Deansgate train station in a cloud of cigarette smoke, rocking back and forth and hugging himself against the cold. He wore a long oversize grey coat with the lapels turned up, a trilby hat with the rim pulled down, and huge sunglasses which contrasted with his alabaster skin. Only a set of fangs could have made him look more vampirish. Helen pulled up in the Beetle, and he laughed at her comedic old-fashioned car, and she laughed at his wraith-like appearance. They drove off into the last of the morning rush hour traffic, and she felt that the awkwardness in the car was not wholly unpleasant. ‘Do you mind if I smo
ke?’ he asked. ‘No, I don’t,’ she said, and she realised that she didn’t. The nicotine incense was foreign to her and yet somehow nostalgic at the same time. They drove in silence for a while, then she ventured something that had struck her.

  ‘Your music, there’s something very classical about it isn’t there?’

  ‘I like my scales and arpeggios yeah. Old-school solos rule. I grew up idolising the great neo-classical guitarists – Van Halen, Malmsteen, Rhoads.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of any of those people. But it’s more than scales and arpeggios though isn’t it. Your songs are structured around the circle of fifths. They have a… yes, a sonata form. And you use a lot of Baroque techniques as well – that ostinato bass, it somehow invokes a Bach toccata. And there’s a folk element too. It’s incredibly technical isn’t it? Sorry, I’m talking too much aren’t I?’

  ‘Not at all. Talk away Sister Helen. Look they’re just guitar tricks, you know. Like quotations.’ He shrugged.

  ‘No, no, I don’t believe you, it’s more than that. You have an innate classical sensibility.’

  ‘OK, well thanks, dude. I guess.’

  She continued. ‘Did you study classical music?’

  ‘I did indeed. Thank you for noticing. Oslo Conservatoire. But I keep that on the down low to be honest with you.’

  ‘Conservatoire? Wow, that’s very impressive.’

  ‘Yeah, well I was not a good student at regular school – they said I had ADHD, hyperactivity, whatever. But it was actually that I have this photographic memory, I remember everything and so there’s just too much going on in my brain. Music was the only way to channel it. I don’t even need to try with music – I just see it’

  ‘That sounds like a form of synaesthesia.’

  ‘Whatever. And you’re obviously pretty fucking musical yourself then?’

  ‘I was. A long time ago. I took singing lessons when I was young. I was in a choir and so on. I loved singing actually.’