Bad Catholics (7 page)

The sergeant didn't like the way things were going, the threat was a mistake. Not for the first time he wondered how Deal had got to be a Detective Inspector. He tried to move things forward.

‘When did you find out she had been stabbed?'

‘When I went out the second time, I could see blood just under the edge of her coat.'

‘Anything else?'

‘Her car keys were on the pavement.'

The inspector took over again. ‘Close by her?'

‘Yes.'

‘Anything else? A handbag?'

‘Not that I can remember.'

‘Your memory again.'

Jimmy went back to studying his thumbs. He gave the very strong impression that there was nothing more he had to say and now, please, he really did want to get on with the study of his thumbs.

Inspector Deal stood up.

‘We may want to speak to you again, Mr Costello. Please don't leave the area, and inform your local police station if you change your address. All right, Sergeant.'

The sergeant put away his notebook and pen and stood up. At the dining room door the inspector turned.

‘Let the nun know we've finished, for the time being.'

Jimmy nodded but didn't look at them. He was still busy with his thumbs. Philomena came in a few minutes later.

‘I heard the front door. Have they gone?'

‘They're gone.'

‘What did you think of them?'

‘They'll do whatever has to be done.'

‘What about the inspector? What did you think of him?'

‘Nothing in particular.'

‘I think he was not a nice man, Jimmy.'

‘So long as he does his job, does he have to be nice?'

‘I suppose not. Will they find out who did it, do you think? There's police in the alley looking round but there doesn't seem much to go on.'

‘They might get someone. Mrs Amhurst wasn't like our clients, she wasn't a nobody and her husband's very well-off, isn't he? He'll want a result, so they might get someone.'

‘But will they get the right one?'

‘It'll be close enough to suit most people.'

‘You sound a dreadful cynic.'

‘I just know how these things work. I'll go upstairs and lie down for a bit, Sister, if that's OK.'

‘Go on, then. Janine needs to keep busy, so she and I can use today to catch up on cleaning and the like. God knows there's plenty of it to catch up on. When will they let us re-open do you think?'

‘Couple of days maybe. When there's nothing more to be got from the scene of crime.'

Jimmy went up to his room and sat on his bed and thought about the inspector for a moment, then the sergeant. The sergeant hadn't told the inspector that he knew him. Now why was that, he wondered. He kicked off his shoes and lay on the bed. Did it matter one way or another, he asked himself, and fell asleep thinking about it.

Philomena sat alone in the dining room. There would be trouble, maybe a lot of trouble, she knew it for certain, but she couldn't tell how she knew. It was like the rains coming in the African bush, the signs were all there long before the clouds could be seen.

All you had to do was look for the signs.

Soroti Diocese, Northern Uganda, 1974

Soroti diocese was remote from Kampala, situated in the north-east of Uganda. But its remoteness had not saved it from the terror of President Idi Amin's regime. People in many parts of the diocese had suffered, but the small convent school of Our Lady of Pity, had so far been spared any violence. The school served a large and sparsely populated area and the hundred or so girls it educated were all boarders. There was a staff of four teaching Sisters, two Irish, one Belgian and one, the youngest, a Ugandan.

It was just after dawn. Sister Philomena, the headmistress, was already up and about, directing the few lay workers who cleaned and cooked, when the Land Rovers arrived. She went out to meet the visitors, whoever they might be, as soon as she heard engines. Visitors were rare and anyone who passed the school always stopped. Places to rest and refresh yourself were few and far between in this part of Uganda, so hospitality was a necessity rather than a courtesy. In the early morning light Sister Philomena watched the dust drift away as the two Land Rovers stopped on the dry dirt road in front of the school. Father Schenk, a Dutch Mill Hill missionary priest, got out. This visit meant trouble. To have reached the school so soon after dawn they must have set out in the dark, and to travel the roads across the bush at night, however slowly, was an act of pure madness. Whatever had made it necessary would be very bad news indeed.

‘Sister, we've come to take you and the other Sisters away. Just gather what you can get together in five minutes, then we must go. Tell your locals, if they're still with you, to get away into the bush, and spread the word.'

His Dutch-accented English was flat, without alarm or emotion. She realised that the occupants of the first Land Rover were the three Medical Missionary Sisters who represented the only medical presence for hundreds of square miles and if they were leaving, staying certainly meant dying. At the wheel of the second Land Rover was Brother Thad, an Australian.

‘Is Brother Thaddeus going?'

Father Schenk nodded.

‘We needed a driver-mechanic to be sure of making it all the way across the border, but he'll come back when we are safely in Sudan.'

Sister Philomena didn't really need to be told Brother Thad would come back once his job was done. He had long ago decided to die in what he now regarded as his home. Whether his death would come about by disease, accident, old age, or violence he left in God's hands. His job was to keep the vehicles running. He supervised the workshop-school that serviced and repaired all the vehicles for various missionary orders and trained local boys to be mechanics. He had been in Africa for twenty years, the last sixteen in Uganda.

‘What about my girls?'

The priest stood silent for a moment.

‘That's your decision, Sister. We can't take any of the girls. You will have to decide what to tell them. It would be better, I think, if they didn't stay here.'

‘Where can they go? We're not near anywhere. If they walk away from here they'll die in the bush.'

The other Sisters were now standing together by the door. Sister Philomena turned to them.

‘Collect only what you can carry in one hand and come out to the Land Rovers.'

‘And you, Sister, are you coming?' asked the priest.

She wanted with all her heart to go, but leaving the girls alone to face whatever was coming would haunt her for as long as she lived and destroy finally and forever the small idea of faith she fought daily to keep alive. To leave would be to kill even a pretence of belief. It would, in a sense, kill her as surely as a bullet in the head. Yet she feared death, the kind of death that might be coming, and she feared even more what might come before death. A good driver in the bush, she had sometimes gone out with the Medical Sisters. If she did the driving, more people could be seen. Twice in the past year they had come upon evidence of where the soldiers or police had been. The shock had lasted days. It was not just death or the dead. She had seen the dead and the dying before, but only from old age, disease or accident, not from butchery. She always blotted out these scenes, refused to remember.

But now a memory came, the crying baby sitting in the dust next to its gutted mother, who had no face. The other bodies, women, children, babies or the old, all in odd and awkward positions and all mutilated in some way or another. Only this one crying baby left unaccountably alive. She didn't remember much about leaving that place of horror. She vaguely remembered the Sisters helping one or two survivors who had crept out of the bush and she remembered being given the baby to carry. They had left the place as quickly as possible, because the scene was quite fresh and the perpetrators would still have been nearby.

The next time it was a family: mother, father, two young children and a baby. The heat, flies, and scavengers had had about two days to reduce the corpses to what they found by the roadside. The Sisters took the spades from the top of their Land Rover and buried what there was. She had been able to help bury the bodies and join in the prayers and drive on.

The Medical Sisters, who saw such things more often than she did, had told her that they were prepared to take calculated risks with their lives. They knew the army or police would come for them one day, but they would stay and work until that day came.

Now that day had come. Finally Sister Philomena spoke.

‘I'll stay, Father. I'll try and get as many girls away as I can. After that, we're in God's hands.'

The Irish and the Belgian Sisters came out of the school, walked past and got into the second Land Rover. The young Ugandan Sister came and stood beside her.

‘May I stay also?'

‘Would it do any good to talk to you about this?' the priest asked her in a resigned voice.

The young Sister shook her head and looked at the ground.

‘I'll pray for you,' he said and looked towards the school, ‘pray for you all.'

‘I hope you all reach somewhere safe,' Sister Philomena said. ‘Goodbye Thad,' she added fondly.

Neither smiled. It wasn't that sort of farewell.

The Land Rovers pulled away and were almost immediately lost to sight in their own dust. Silence returned. The heat of the day was beginning to make itself felt.

The two women turned and went back into the school.

Sister Philomena sorted out a group of about sixty who came from places which could be reached by three days' walking and split them into four groups, according to the direction of their villages. She allocated the most sensible girls to be in charge and added five of the very youngest from the distant villages to each group, bringing the total to eighty. She briefly instructed them in the rudiments of direction-finding, explained about resting and spacing food stops, and made very clear the importance of avoiding any vehicles which might carry police or soldiers. She equipped and provisioned them as best she could, prayed with them, and sent them on their way. She knew that groups of twenty were far too big, but by sending eighty girls away and keeping twenty at the school she had balanced the probabilities as best she could. Now all she could do was wait.

It was soldiers who came, not police. They arrived at dusk on the same day, about thirty of them in an open Land Rover and four lorries. Sister Philomena went out and stood in front of the school as soon as she heard them coming.

The soldiers jumped out of the lorries and stood silent, looking at her. She had come out alone, instructing the young Ugandan Sister to stay with the remaining girls in the dining hall. The soldiers were heavily armed. They were quiet but it was the quiet of interest and anticipation, not of discipline. An officer got out of the Land Rover, dusting his uniform as he walked towards her. He came to attention in front of her and, surprising her, gave a smart salute.

‘Good evening, Sister. I am Captain Nduma. We will be requisitioning equipment from the school and staying for the night. We will leave tomorrow. I trust we will have your full co-operation?'

He spoke very good English and gave her a beautiful smile. His combat uniform was clean and smart, his leather belt and holster highly polished. He was a big man in his early to mid-twenties. He gave no impression of malevolence, rather the reverse.

Against the odds, she began to hope.

‘You may take what you need. Will I get something in writing to show what you have taken?'

He laughed. He had an attractive laugh. ‘Of course, Sister. This is the army, not a group of bandits. Everything will be properly done. May we go to your office? My sergeant will take the men and look over the school and see what we require.'

She turned and walked towards the school. ‘Come with me, please.'

The captain motioned to a sergeant who in turn began to give orders to the men. Captain Nduma went with Sister Philomena to her office, where he took off his cap.

‘May I use your desk, Sister?'

This was not what she had expected. His correctness unnerved her.

‘Of course.'

Captain Nduma went to her chair, put his peaked cap on the desk, undid his belt, and put his holster next to his cap. Sister Philomena noticed that the holster flap was undone.

‘Will you have a chair, Sister?'

She brought a chair from a corner of the room and sat down, facing him.

‘Is your school well equipped?'

‘Yes, I think so, all things taken into account.'

Captain Nduma smiled again.

‘Everything is always taken into account. You understand, we will have to take many things. We have a wide area to cover and we must be as well equipped as possible to round up the insurgents.'

‘Insurgents? There are no insurgents here.'

‘Indeed, Sister? You sound very sure. Is that because you have specific information?'

She recognised at once her incaution.

‘No, I have no specific information, no information at all. I don't know anything about insurgents.'

‘So often, people tell me that they know nothing at all about insurgents, assuring me that there are none in their district. They fail to see the essential inconsistency of that position. That is because they are not educated people like you and I.' His smile disappeared and his voice changed. ‘If you know anything, Sister, it would be better to tell me now. If you do know anything, you will certainly tell me before I leave.'

‘Is that a threat, Captain?'

She was trying hard to get the headmistress into her tone.

Captain Nduma smiled again.

‘Very much so, Sister. Would you like me to give you some demonstration of just how much a threat it is?'

He pulled his automatic from its holster and laid it in front of him. The Sister and the headmistress both disappeared at once and Philomena, the frightened, powerless woman, was in their place.