The Discourtesy of Death (Father Anselm Novels) (29 page)

It was time to press
PLAY
. Time to hear the clang of a spoon on a pot or a pan.

Night was falling fast. Anselm drove slowly, his mind blank and heavy, like saturated blotting paper, incapable of holding another thought or idea. When the door had opened at Long Melford, he’d been trapped by a suspicion that he couldn’t reveal. Now he’d been empowered. In this most difficult of cases, he’d been given strength by a child.

‘Timothy,’ Anselm had said, a warm hand on each of the boy’s shoulders. ‘Leave this with me, do you understand?’

He’d nodded.

‘I’m familiar with this kind of thing.’ Anselm had smiled confidence. ‘I know what to do and what to say. I know when and I know how. There is a right time.’

A nod.

‘When Aunt Helen and Uncle Nigel get back, tell them I called, but I think it would be best if you kept our conversation between ourselves. Remember what I said about handling the truth? That sometimes it requires cooperation? Well, that is how I’m going to move forward. I’m going to speak to the ones who don’t like truth as much as you do.’

Anselm parked in a lay-by just outside Lavenham. Set back well off the road stood a medieval house, leaning dramatically to one side. Outside lighting revealed white window frames, grey timber supports and plaster washed a deep, salmon pink. The front door, a sequence of bolted planks, stood buckled within arched shoulders that held up a covered entrance. Anselm knocked hard, his heart beating violently. More so than in any case he’d ever handled at the Bar, when he’d
really
known what to do and say – along with the when and how.

‘Terribly sorry, but we’re Anglican,’ said Emma Goodwin, looking down as if to check whether Anselm was holding a collection plate. ‘Haven’t got a
penny
on me.’

‘I’m not here to talk about ways to God,’ said Anselm. ‘Oddly enough, that’s not my strong suit. Neither is the cost. I’m here to speak about your daughter.’

Emma Goodwin frowned, one hand rising to grasp the join on her white blouse.

‘I know who you are,’ she said, paling. ‘You’re that monk … the detective.’

‘I’m something else, actually. But may I come in? I think we need to talk.’

Emma Goodwin didn’t offer tea or cake. She brought Anselm into the kitchen, drawing back a chair at a long table, and then walked to the far end of the room. Spot lighting from between the beams lit the polished distance between them. She stood with her back to the sink, arms folded. You are guilty, thought Anselm, instantly. This is what the first-timers did when they’d been banged away on remand – the ones who fancied their chances in court. They rarely sat at the table in the prison visiting wing. They got up and walked as far away as possible, talking to their advocate from a safe distance, as if he might smell the lack of moral hygiene. A light directly over Emma Goodwin’s head cast a shadow beneath her brows, hiding her eyes, blacking out the sockets. Her mouth was slightly open. She looked terrified and terrifying. Anselm sat at the proffered chair. He didn’t speak immediately because he was waiting for Michael to arrive. When he didn’t come, Anselm said: ‘If at all possible, Mrs Goodwin, I’d like to talk to your husband as well.’

‘He’s not here.’

‘Will he be back?’

‘No.’ She’d snapped the word as if it were a lid on a box. She continued, as if to explain what she was hiding: ‘Not today, anyway. A few days off. A holiday.’

Anselm thought for a moment, calibrating his mind to the incongruity. A holiday? On the day Peter was released? When Timothy would need his family around him. When— ‘Why are you here?’ Emma Goodwin’s voice was abruptly shrill. She wanted him to go – just like the first-timers when told they didn’t have a cat’s chance in hell. ‘What do you want?’

Anselm knitted his fingers and leaned his arms on the table. In a friendly, don’t-worry voice, he said, ‘May I call you Emma?’

‘What on earth for?’

‘So we can talk about Jenny,’ replied Anselm. ‘It might be easier if we’re on first-name terms.’

Anselm stared compassionately at the figure by the sink. She was hunched, clutching her arms as if she were totally naked.

‘Mrs Goodwin,’ began Anselm, cautiously. ‘Is there anything you’d like to tell me?’

‘Absolutely not. Never. Ever. Are you finished now? I think it’s time you went.’

Anselm stood up and shuffled to the door, head down, like he did when he was brooding in the cloister. When he’d stepped outside, beneath the beamed portico, he turned around, driven by an impulse he could not contain: a certitude that now was the time to be mercilessly direct.

‘Mrs Goodwin,’ he said, talking to the cowering woman at the entrance to the kitchen. ‘I know how Jenny was killed.’

Anselm had skipped all the preliminary stages required before such a brutal declaration could be uttered. He’d made a number of assumptions about Mrs Goodwin’s character – that she was as intellectual as she was emotional; that she was skilled at ending conversations she didn’t want, using mock hysteria, if need be, to fend off the dull-witted; that she wasn’t scared of a crown court judge or reporters or a monk who’d appeared once in the
Sunday Times
. That she was an inconsolable mother. Anselm’s ruthless announcement brought them both back into the kitchen, Anselm to a chair, and Mrs Goodwin standing far off, arms folded by the sink.

‘You know?’ she asked, after fumbling for a cigarette.

‘I do.’

She struggled with a box of matches and lit up, swinging her head away as the fumes burned her eyes. After a pause, she breathed in deeply, and then appeared ready to faint, her mouth dropping open as the blue smoke burst out of her lungs.

‘I said I know, Mrs Goodwin,’ asserted Anselm, evenly. ‘I’m not guessing. I’m not adding up bits of evidence. I’m here to talk about the truth you’re hiding.’

Mrs Goodwin’s features began to work. Her nerves were out of control.

‘Your husband isn’t here,’ said Anselm, as if that might give her some reassurance. ‘You can speak freely. I’m not here to condemn you, or him. Or anyone else.’

Their eyes met along the length of the room. After holding Anselm’s mild stare for as long as she could, Mrs Goodwin looked askance, drawing smoke through the stub so fiercely that her cheeks became hollow. She glanced back, with a flash of confusion and defiance.

‘You can’t prove anything.’

‘I can. And I might. But I would prefer your cooperation.’ Suddenly, Anselm thought of the ill-timed holiday. He coughed lightly – a bad habit picked up in the Old Bailey when he’d sensed blood.

‘Where is your husband, Mrs Goodwin?’

‘None of your damned business.’

‘I would like to talk to him, too.’

‘He’s abroad.’

‘
Abroad?
’

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘Holland.’

‘Whereabouts?’

‘Harlingen.’

Anselm appraised the desperate, dejected woman. How was he going to help her? How to persuade her to stop this very serious fooling around?

‘Where is Timothy?’

‘You’ve no right to barge in here. You’re a trespasser. You’re a—’

‘Mrs Goodwin, I’m very much on your side. Where is Timothy?’

‘Upstairs.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Asleep.’

‘Would you wake him?’

‘No.’

‘Of course you won’t. Because he’s at Nigel and Helen’s.’

Mrs Goodwin dropped the cigarette on the floor as if she’d burned her fingers. A hand came to her mouth. Instinct controlled Anselm’s response. He sensed something more alarming than a hidden truth.

‘Now, let’s forget about Harlingen,’ he suggested, kindly, feeling his heart stab against his chest. ‘Where is your husband?’

Mrs Goodwin began to shake. She dropped her arms to her side, her whole body shivering as if she’d been pulled out of the freezer. She was gabbling quietly and shaking her head. Anselm rose slowly and approached her very gradually, one hand moving from chair to chair, coming closer as he spoke. A blue thread of smoke spiralled from the floor.

‘I know the burden you carry,’ he said, apologetically. ‘Put it down, now. It’s far too heavy. Let me help shift the weight.’

He’d reached the end of the table. Mrs Goodwin was mouthing sounds, her oval face drained of blood, her eye sockets hideously blue as if she’d been beaten.

‘Let me talk to your husband,’ he murmured, holding out his hand as if to show he meant no harm.

Mrs Goodwin replied so quietly that Anselm didn’t hear. He came a step closer, leaning his head to one side. He could smell her perfume and her stale, naked terror. His foot crushed the tiny smouldering stub.

‘Speak up,’ he whispered.

‘It’s too late.’

‘It’s never too late.’

‘He’s going to die.’

‘Who is?’

‘Peter.’

‘When?’

‘Now … tonight.’

Anselm raised a darkened eye.

‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s got a gun.’

‘Who has?’

‘I can’t contact him, he’s on the road…’

Mrs Goodwin didn’t finish her sentence. She was blinking erratically, her eyes glazed with complicity. Slowly, she reached for the packet of cigarettes. Unseeing, she placed the filter between her lips and felt for the box of matches. Anselm didn’t even hear the strike of phosphorus along the sandpaper. He was outside, running down the dark lane to the car parked in a lay-by.

Michael drove slowly along the shadowed lanes, the hedges black against the allure of darkness. The day was over. People were heading home. Heading back to their families. An unremarkable routine, played out everywhere, today and tomorrow, just like yesterday. Everyone did it. Except some. They never return. They disappear. Sometimes they vanish without trace. Others, they turn up in the back of beyond. Like Liam. They’d taken him to South Armagh where the IRA had a dedicated interrogation centre. A cow shed. They’d have stabbed him with a needle in Belfast and he’d have woken up in the middle of nowhere. A farm with prison cells. Quiet, rolling hills. Animals tearing at the bleak fields. They did that when the security people thought the tout had a lot of explaining to do. They wanted to take their time and get to the bottom of things. There’d been no point really. As Father Doyle had prophesied, Liam sang like a canary as soon as he’d smelled the cow dung and silage. The big lads hadn’t even had to string him up. They’d known from experience when a tout had told them everything. He’d still been a kid, caught with his trousers down.

Michael’s right hand felt for the machine. Bile rose like mercury in a thermometer. He pressed
PLAY
…

Michael had been back in Belfast a week when the phone rang to say there was a priest at the front gate. He’d got a message for Michael. After the operation in Donegal, Michael didn’t fly back to Edinburgh. Abandoning the palaver of shifting identities, he’d driven straight back to Belfast, torched the jalopy a mile from his barracks, and walked back to base with the Billingham bag slung over his shoulder. Looking pale and ill, he’d told his colonel that it served him right for trying to have a quiet drink in Scotland. Liam had not turned up for the meeting on Saturday as planned. And now, the following Wednesday, Father Doyle was at the gate.

Michael brought the priest to an interview room. It was bare save for a table and two chairs. The walls were green. The windows glazed and covered with heavy wire netting.

‘What did you do after I left you?’ commanded the priest, sitting down. He placed a tape recorder in the middle of the table. ‘What did you do about Ó Mórdha? I’ve heard nothing on the news.’

‘And you won’t.’

The haggard priest was large and imposing, a black brooding presence, with arms folded. He wasn’t like Nigel, cultivated, articulate and ready to spar with words. He was a bruiser who delivered bread for the journey.

‘What have you done?’

Michael resented the direct question. But there was something remorseless about those dark eyes. He seemed to be staring through a grille as if they were both in the dark.

‘Nothing.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

The priest’s hand strayed to the tape recorder.

‘You didn’t arrest him?’

Michael folded his arms, feeling cramped. It was as though the walls had moved in to squeeze his shoulders. The central light was glaring but Michael narrowed his eyes as if to penetrate the gloom.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

Michael wiped his mouth. His understanding of things was realigning. He’d thought the priest had expected an … executive action. The removal of Ó Mórdha. He’d thought Father Doyle had gone down Eugene’s road, for the sake of long-term peace, and brought a message to Michael. And Michael had taken the same route to Donegal, thinking this priest was just another pilgrim on the road, resigned to a difficult journey. But he wasn’t. Michael had misunderstood him; thought he’d seen into the priest’s tortured mind. But he hadn’t. Father Doyle’s thick finger had come to rest on
PLAY
.

‘Did you know that Liam was holding guns?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what did you do?’

Michael didn’t answer so the priest took it for another ‘Nothing’.

‘Well, they came back while you were on holiday.’

‘Who?’

‘The IRA. They came for their guns sooner than expected.’ The priest’s eyes were burning with a strange white heat. ‘One of them was missing. A Browning automatic. Fourteen rounds. And a silencer. Do you know where they are?’

Michael seemed to feel the heavy wire netting against his skin, pressing hard as the walls continued to advance inwards, bringing more darkness. The burly, ragged priest read the silence as a ‘No’.

‘Well, that’s fine, so,’ soothed Father Doyle. ‘Because, thankfully, Liam did. And he told ’em what they wanted to know.’

The unkempt priest, still in his hat, coat and scarf – all a shabby black, save for the snip of white plastic at the neck – leaned forward, pressing his finger heavily on the
PLAY
button.

‘Listen for yourself.’

The tape whirred for a few seconds. Someone walked away from the microphone. Seconds later there was a ‘ding’ … the strike of a spoon on the base of a pan … the signal for Liam to start talking; to repeat what he’d told them since he’d come to Armagh.