‘Finlay.’ A beat. ‘Everyone calls him Tony.’
‘We’ll need to speak to your husband,’ says Kallas bluntly.
A deep breath from Gill Blair, and she dies a little more before our eyes.
25
Back at the ranch for the round table. The familiar faces in this investigation, everyone with their job to do, everyone compartmentalised into one stream or the other. Kallas and Harrison and Ablett and Ritter and Milburn and me, and I’ve been here before, so many times, and the crimes never seem to change, just the faces across the desk.
I can barely look at Kallas, I can still feel the touch of her fingers on the back of my hand. Soft and cool, something flowing through it, like some sort of weird Reiki shit. Yeah, I’m probably just imagining that.
Focus, you moron!
Connections between the two victims. The low-budget movie business. Golf. How their lives were impacted by the virus. Or, as it seems, how they impacted other people with the way they dealt with the virus. Could there have been a connection between the home at Garrion, and David Cowal’s wife? Could there be someone who was upset by the deaths at the home, who might also have been upset by Mrs Cowal’s death? And money, of course, there’s always money. And Lord’s lovers, with now at least one that he shared with Cowal. And don’t forget the church, because even though everyone’s saying Cowal wasn’t interested in it, someone thought to crucify him in one, and that’s coupled to Lord’s church association.
So many routes, so many ways to go, so many things to break down. The coronavirus thing seems compelling, but then so is the business link, and so is the shared lover thing. Suddenly we have a multitude of possibilities. Think of a reason why some bastard might murder some other bastard, and if it’s not already on the list, it’s on the periphery, waiting to be added.
Naturally, when it comes to divvying up the spoils, I get Jesus. It was inevitable, right?
There’s been a murder. What role did Jesus play?
Then it’s wrapped, and we’ve all been packed off, and I’m heading out the station, on my way to walk the hundred yards or so to the church to speak to our minister again. Out onto the upper balcony of the woebegone shopping precinct, on a bleak, miserable day in October, darkness descending like a plague of demons.
THE FRONT DOOR OF ST. Stephen’s is open, and I enter the small hall outside the nave. There’s a single light on in the hallway, and then I walk through to the nave, which is more or less in darkness.
Stop for a second as the door closes behind me, and then I stand at the top of the aisle, looking at the dark colours and shapes of the stained glass of the windows behind the altar, lit from behind by streetlights.
Silence.
I’d imagined the Rev Goodbody sitting in the same place as last time, second pew from the front, looking up at Jesus, searching for something. The pews are empty, there’s no sign of life, the place so quiet, so dead, it feels as though no one’s been in here for months. The kind of dark silence that takes you in its hand, and you feel it at first as almost a comfort, quiet, and full of ancient sadness; then slowly, so slowly that you barely notice at first, but slowly it starts to envelope you, the fingers of the hand close in around you, and soon enough it’s smothering you, crushing you, and you don’t know if you’re ever going to be able to escape. That kind of dark silence. And at the far end of the nave, there’s the cross, and there’s the stained glass Jesus up there behind it.
But I don’t feel any threat. This isn’t a dark nightmare, when suddenly there’ll be a jump scare, the phantom from the shadows, leaping out with his knife or his cudgel or his bared teeth or whatever it is the phantom would leap out with. Just me and the dark and the sadness and the decline of this church community, something that started a long time before Covid pitched up and decimated the demographic.
My phone pings, the sound muted in my pocket, seeming to come from light years away, a lifetime away, another world. Because this world here is not one of phones and instant communication, it’s a world of faith and hope, of fealty to the unseen and unknown.
Take out my phone, look at the small pocket of light in the dark.
In the vestry. Door on the right at the rear of the nave.
Phone back in my pocket, time to get on with it. Head, as ever, seems to be in a hundred different places all at once, though of course, all of those places are familiar. Alcohol and sadness, women and melancholy, the feeling of being sucked into the void.
On and on and on, get on with it, down the aisle, through the door, another short corridor, only two doors down here, one of them with a light coming from beneath it, and I knock, wait a moment, she calls out, her voice soft, and I, with the thought in my head to get this over with as quickly as possible, to get back to the office to eat dinner at my desk, with all these good intentions, walk in, and there’s the minister, Rev Goodbody, sitting at her desk, and I know I’m pretty much fucked.
I can try not to be, though, I really can.
‘Come in,’ she says. ‘Take a seat.’
She’s leaning forward, weight on her elbows. On the table beside her is a bottle of vodka, a litre, which she’s only just begun. She has a shot glass in front of her, drinking the vodka neat. No ice. Needs must, obviously. There’s another glass beside the bottle.
To the left of the bottle, pushed back towards the edge of the desk, is her dog collar. Her black top now just looks like a black blouse, top three buttons undone. She has the look of someone at the end of a shitty day at work.
Don’t think about it.
‘Sit down,’ she says, indicating the seat opposite, and as I do so, she pushes the empty shot glass towards me. ‘Fill your boots. You look as though you need it as much as I do.’
‘Tough day?’ I say.
I don’t touch the glass.
I’m desperate to touch the glass. In my head I’m reaching out, lifting the bottle, and filling the glass and tipping the shot back in one, feeling that wonderful, warm, sharp kick in the throat.
I swallow.
‘Tough day?’ I repeat, after she’s answered the first attempt with a hooded, hounded stare at the desk.
‘Sure,’ she says. ‘If you call two funerals tough.’ She looks at me now, eyebrows raised, as if seriously asking the question. ‘What d’you think? Burying two people, comforting two groups of bereaved relatives, does that sound tough? After the spring and summer we’ve had.’
I have no answer, not that she’s looking for one.
‘I thought there’d be an end. We all thought there’d be an end. But it’s been relentless since April. Death upon death. Five a week, six a week, seven, eight sometimes. Barely a day has gone by. They’re not putting them all down to Covid, so sure, that’s great. But people are still dying, and up it goes again. All that treatment that wasn’t given, all those souls that just gave up...’
‘I didn’t think you had that many church members.’
‘Most of them aren’t. Not that we haven’t been devastated, not that the heart hasn’t been ripped out of the congregation... God, we talked about that before, nothing else to say. But most of these... I’m the parish minister, and that means I’m on call for funeral duty for anyone in all Cambuslang who wants a minister for their father or their mother or their whoever. Did they go to church? Did they Hell. Did they support the church community in any way whatsoever? Of course not. Did they give... did they give the slightest shit about God during the entirety of their life? Lip service at Christmas, but otherwise, no, they did not. You’re not drinking,’ she tosses into the middle of the conversation, then she continues, ‘But refusal isn’t in the minister’s handbook. We don’t get to ask those questions, we don’t get to say, nah, my friend, your dad doesn’t deserve God’s blessing. That’s not who we are. We allow all-comers to throw themselves on the death pile of sinners, repentant in the face of everlasting damnation.’
A head shake, a lifting of the eyes, and then she says, ‘Jesus, you’d think they wer
e all Catholics,’ and she can’t stop herself laughing at her own joke, and I can’t really find it within me to fake laugh along with her.
‘You’re not drinking,’ she repeats, and then when she sees the look on my face, she shakes her head. ‘Sorry, none of my business. How can I help you? You find out some other interesting titbit about me and Harry you think I kept from you the other day? Wait, Harry didn’t have erotic pictures of me on his phone, or something, did he? That’d be embarrassing.’
‘Did he take erotic pictures?’ I ask, somehow investing that curiously fascinating question with no drama and no interest whatsoever.
‘Don’t think so, but he was hardly above being surreptitious. He could be a bit of a cunt when he chose.’
No one swears like a vicar.
God, I’m thirsty. I shouldn’t be thirsty, I’m not thirsty, but now my throat is dry and crying out for that vodka.
‘There was another body discovered this morning,’ I say, the words quick out of mouth, as I force the change in focus.
‘I heard,’ she says, her eyes dropping again. More tragedy. Perhaps she’s thinking that that’ll be another funeral she’ll be required to take.
‘Did you know David Cowal?’
Her head shakes, doesn’t look up.
‘Just another name. Seems like a small town sometimes, and then you hear name after name you never heard before, and you realise it’s not so small, you realise just how many people are outside your orbit.’
‘They found him in St Mark’s.’
Now she raises her head, the look that’s been on her face since I arrived, getting darker and darker.
‘I heard that. I wondered what the story was. Was he just in there shooting up or something?’
‘He’d been crucified.’
A beat. Another. Her lips are parted, genuine horror in her eyes.
‘Jesus,’ she says eventually, and then she lifts the shot glass, tosses the drink down her throat, and pours herself another, all in one continuous movement. Now she holds that small glass at the end of both sets of fingers, and stares into it.
‘Why would someone do that?’
I don’t answer, and then she looks up, and she starts nodding.
‘That’s why you’re here.’
She rubs her hands across her face, pressing her fingers against her eyes, finally opening them wide, shaking her head, going through a routine of straightening out her thoughts, putting herself back in the right head space. If there is such a thing as right head space for hearing about someone being crucified.
‘Was it a traditional crucifixion? I mean, nails in his hands and feet? The old cross they left in there was wooden, right? Was it even big enough?’
‘It’s not a large cross, you’re right, but he was a slight man. And no, he was tied to the cross, and then... then killed in a particular way.’
‘Definitely the same killer?’
As I start to nod, my eyes drifting with sad, crushing inevitability to the vodka bottle, she says, ‘We should hope so, after all. One psychopath would be bad enough.’
‘What makes you think the killer’s a psychopath?’ I ask, and she gives me a look that implies the question might be loaded in some way, before tossing it disinterestedly aside, and drinking half the next shot glass.
I take a picture of Cowal from my pocket and pass it across the desk.
‘I saw the picture online earlier,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know him.’
‘He never came to the church?’
‘No. You know, in the old days, a minister might have struggled to answer that question, but not now. Now the incomers and the newbies, the fresh meat, stand out like beacons of the Lord.’
Fresh meat. God, this woman’s terrific. Wonderful edge to her, she uses words like cudgels, and talks like she doesn’t give a fuck.
‘How well d’you know the congregations of the other churches in town?’
‘Don’t his family know if he went to church?’
‘He has two adult daughters. They say he didn’t. From them, there’s nothing to suggest he might have had the slightest interest or connection to the church. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe his killer just thought it would be a cool place to kill someone. There’s something... that setting... an old abandoned church, the body on the cross, pool of blood on the floor, sun shining through a lone stained glass window, it feels incredibly cinematic. I know the stained glass would’ve been placed where it was in order that the sun caught the cross with the colours of the window, but it looks as though the death scene was staged.’
‘So your killer knew about the church.’
‘Must have done. It’s been closed for several years?’
‘Long time. Way before I arrived here. But I know they looked after it. God knows what they thought was going to happen. That people would return to the fold, congregations would grow, and they would have to reopen? Folly.’
She finishes the glass, pours herself another. She looks at the other glass, I can see her thinking about it, battling the demon that wants to give the alcoholic a drink, just as I’m battling the demon that wants to take it.
‘How well d’you know the other congregations in town?’ I ask again.
She puffs out her cheeks, leans back in her chair, fingers never leaving the glass.
‘Hardly. You’d have to speak to them. And you know the other Church of Scotland buildings in town closed a few years ago, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Just not enough people anymore. Anyway, they say that was a shitshow.’
‘It was.’
‘Ah, a veteran. Nice. You worked with DCI Taylor on the murders that happened around the church mergers?’
‘Yes. You know him?’
‘Heard about him, heard the story.’
‘Yeah, they... yeah, they fucked him, same as they fuck everyone.’ I pause, I stare at the table. ‘I speak to him every now and again. I guess, like all things, that too will pass. We’ll just be people who used to work together, people who used to know each other.’
She looks at me curiously, and then settles back. A sigh, then her lips are pressed together, she makes herself comfortable, and then the noise of the movement goes, and she’s stopped talking, and I’ve stopped talking, and now we’re just two people sitting together in a small office at the back of a church. On the wall are aerial photographs of the other closed down churches in town, and a couple of the minister’s certificates, and there’s a print of what looks to the untrained eye like a Brueghel of some sort, and there’s complete and all-consuming silence, like the silence is a thing, like if we sat here long enough, allowing our ears to become accustomed to it, we could hear each other’s hearts beating, we could hear the blood in our veins and the white blood cells in the lymphatic system.
I close my eyes. In silence, faced with my own destruction. I could glug straight from that bottle of vodka. I can taste the alcohol, and it’s right there, there for the taking, and I absolutely fucking hate myself.
‘Have you thought of anything else you could tell me about Mr Lord?’ I ask, opening my eyes, forcing words out of my mouth, to ask a question like I’m supposed to be doing, because it’s my job, goddammit, clinging to the idea that I can get through this without fucking up, without drinking and missing work tomorrow, or turning up reeking of stale booze, hoping the chief will send me home with a bitter little blue pill to pop with a glass of liver salts.
And it’s not just the alcohol that thrills you and tempts you, is it, you abject piece of shit?
‘I said it all,’ she says, then she casts a sober hand across the desk. ‘Harry Lord took me with far greater alacrity across here than you’re doing.’ A beat, the acid mutual stare of revulsion. ‘Perhaps you’ve just got more taste.’
There we go.
Fuck!
I have to get out of here. Hurriedly push the chair back, head shaking, almost drunkenly stumbling at the very idea of there being alcohol in the room, and I don’t even loo
k at her as I go, and I’m out the door, more or less bouncing off walls, and I already know I’m not going back to the station, and the evening stretches before me, and I’m thinking, vodka, vodka, vodka, and maybe I can be calculating about it, buy it now on the way home, drink it now, what’s the time, not yet seven, stop yourself getting the big one, the litre, or the two litre, get the half litre, that’ll do, get home, there’s ice in the freezer, vodka on the rocks, don’t need a mixer, drink, drink, hate yourself, maybe, fuck whatever, maybe watch porn, maybe fantasise about the sex you just ran away from, maybe about the chief, maybe about Kallas, except I know I won’t be able to think about her, because when I do, I’ll see how disappointed in me she is, and I’ll hate myself even more for doing that, as though it’s about her and not just about me, but it’s not going to stop me, and I don’t give a fuck that I haven’t had a drink in six days, I’m not counting, I’m not ticking off boxes and making marks on the wall, it’s a meaningless number, because I’m getting in the car, and I’m stopping at Oddbins on the way back to the house, and my next three hours stare gloriously and wonderfully and peacefully back at me.
26
‘Sergeant?’
I stop. Don’t immediately turn. I’d been fumbling with the keys in the dark, not that it’s so dark beneath the streetlights, that’s not why I’m fumbling. And I could’ve been surprised or jumped out of my skin at the voice, I could have whirled round, but I didn’t because I knew it was coming. I knew I was being followed. I may be a fucked-up mess, but the police gut is still there. And I saw her without seeing her when I entered the off licence, and she was still there when I came out three minutes later, and I didn’t look at her, and I didn’t care, but there was a small voice at the back of my head that I chose to ignore, but it means that when she speaks to me suddenly in the night, I’m not surprised, and there’s no jump and there’s no fright.
There isn’t a voice I want to hear now. No one. Not Harrison, not the chief, certainly not Kallas. None of them would be welcome. But this one, even more than the minister, is the worst possible. And she’s come to my house, and so I cannot leave. It will take me to stand here and tell her not to come in. It will take me to have morals and common sense and strength and an ability to say no.
In My Time Of Dying: DS Hutton Book 5 Page 13