Redlaw - 01 (10 page)

He bustled away, gesticulating angrily at the forklift operator with one hand and yanking frantically at his moustache with the other.

Lucky, Hutchings
, thought Redlaw.
Saved by the spill
.

As he headed out to his car, Redlaw couldn’t help feeling that the BovPlas supervisor had been straight with him. Corporate stooge though he was, Hutchings had seemed justifiably indignant. His outrage over Redlaw’s line of questioning had been genuine. His counterarguments had been plausible.

Perhaps Redlaw was barking up the wrong tree.

On his way back into central London, he stopped off at St Erasmus’s in Ladbroke Grove. It wasn’t his usual place of worship, by any means. That honour went to the unimposing, modestly appointed Anglican church two streets away from his flat in Ealing, where he attended evensong most Sundays. St Erasmus’s was a much larger and more grandiose affair, complete with a neo-Gothic spire that towered above the Westway flyover and a belfry whose bells were so loud their peal easily held its own against the thunder of daytime traffic.

The parish priest, Father Graham Dixon, had done a stint as visiting pastor at SHADE HQ, ministering to the spiritual needs of officers alongside a Catholic bishop, a rabbi, an imam, a lama and representatives of other religions, including a Wiccan druidess and a Class XII Scientology auditor. In that time Father Dixon and Redlaw had developed a friendship which was pretty much confined to meetings for auricular confession, but was no less cordial for that.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” said Redlaw as he knelt at the communion rail, facing the sanctuary.

“No, you haven’t, John,” Father Dixon replied from the other side of the rail. “Don’t talk rot. If
you’ve
sinned, then it’s truly a sign of the End Times and I should be looking out the window for my first glimpse of the Four Horsemen. What’s troubling you? Care to share?”

For a time Redlaw said nothing, his gaze on the reredos behind the altar. It was a triptych, depicting Christ’s journey through suffering from Earth to Heaven, from Gethsemane via Calvary to the Ascension. Candlelight flickered on the carved, plainly coloured reliefs, lending them a strange liquid animation.

“Is it the job?” Father Dixon prompted. “What am I saying? Of course it’s the job. What else could it be? Captain John Redlaw has nothing else in his life.”

“And does Father Graham Dixon have anything else in his life beyond the Church?”

“
Touché
. Well, I have my allotment, actually. Those vegetables mean the world to me. But when you get down to it, yes, basically I’m a trad, boring-old-fart vicar who serves his congregation and visits the sick and elderly and tries to get by on an astonishingly meagre stipend. Nothing exciting about me. Not like the two-fisted, all-staking, all-dusting shady Redlaw. Surely he feels fulfilled in his work. Saving us from the Sunless scourge? Now that’s a glamorous existence. Men want to be him, women want to be with him...”

“Stop,” Redlaw said. “Please. Not in the mood.”

Father Dixon let the genial smile ease from his somewhat pudgy features. A frown appeared in its place. “That bad, eh? Come on, fill us in. Me and the Man Upstairs. We’re listening.”

“I know
you
are, Father. But...”

“Oh. Ah.” Father Dixon nodded. “I see. Is
He
? Is God paying attention?” He leaned forwards, dropping his voice but not the concern in his expression. “How long have you been feeling this way, John? Is it a recent thing or has it been brewing a while now?”

“How long since I last saw you?”

“I don’t know. Months.”

“Months, then. Maybe longer.”

“You seemed okay last time, as I recall. Bit dour, bit down in the mouth, but that’s default setting for you. You didn’t appear to be having any problems. No existential crises I was aware of. Routine confession followed by a chat and a cuppa in the vestry.”

“I just...”

“Go on. Honestly, He is here. Even if it doesn’t feel that way, He is.”

The church yawned around the two men, chilly and cavernous and full of whispering echoes.

“I’m not sure,” Redlaw began.

“About?”

“Anything, anymore. There was a time when I had no doubts. None. Everything was straightforward. Cut and dried. God wanted me to work for Him. That was the alpha and omega of my life. In my early twenties I seriously considered taking holy orders.”

“I know. You had a narrow escape there.”

“Became a copper instead. More practical. A better way of helping people. Tangible results.”

“Are you implying I’ve wasted my life?” said Father Dixon with a chuckle.

“No. I simply don’t have the knack for guiding others, the way you do. I lack empathy. I think with my head, sometimes with my hands, seldom with my heart. Served me well enough on the force. Model plod, I was, if not outstanding. A reasonable arrest record, a few solid prosecutions, no black marks, not one public complaint lodged against me. Then, after I’d been pounding the beat a few years, the Sunless began appearing. The population explosion in Eastern Europe. The diaspora. The mysterious deaths and then the first confirmed sightings. They came out of the murk of legend, into the light of reality. In no time, SHADE had been set up and I was one of the first to sign on the dotted line, one of the initial pioneers. I joined because I knew this was what I was meant to do. Sunless were self-evidently evil, unholy, an aberration, an abomination in the sight of God. People of faith were needed to combat them, people who also had some professional experience of the grimier side of life. I fit the bill perfectly.”

“No argument here.”

“The Lord had shaped me for this, I understood. He’d been nudging me in this direction all along. There wasn’t a moment of blinding-light epiphany, just the cool, calm realisation that my destiny had arrived. I was a machine. I worked tirelessly from dusk ’til dawn. We unearthed ’Less nests all over the city. We captured when we could, dusted when we couldn’t. I never hesitated, never questioned. I was righteous beyond righteousness.”

Father Dixon knew all of this already, but it didn’t even occur to him to interrupt and say so. Redlaw needed to vent. Let the man vent.

“I fought the good fight with all my might,” Redlaw said. “I worked with teams, or with partners, but I never gelled with anyone, and that never really mattered to me. I was happiest and best on my own. Then Sergeant Leary came along.”

“Róisín. Ah, yes. We all loved Róisín, John. She was—to use my choristers’ favourite adjective—awesome.”

“Love wasn’t it, Father. I don’t think I even know what love means.”

“Love is what God feels for you, John, constantly. When you’re least certain of it, that’s when it’s at its strongest.”

“Perhaps. What I had with Leary, it was pure compatibility. We knew what each other was thinking. Out in the field, we barely had to speak. We were the right hand and left hand of the same body. She had my back, I had hers. We could be up against hordes of ’Lesses, just the two of us, isolated, alone, in deadly danger, and I never for one second was worried because Leary was with me. Between us, together, I knew we’d be fine.”

“And then she died.”

“And then she died.”

“And you weren’t there.”

“I wasn’t there. Laid low with a case of shingles, of all things. Never had a night off sick before then. Leary was by herself, chasing up a lead—a sighting of a rogue ’Less up in Walthamstow. Turned out the intel was bad; and it wasn’t a single vampire but a whole nest of them, occupying the crypt of a deconsecrated church, of all places. She didn’t stand a prayer. Or at least, she would have stood a prayer if I’d been with her, or
someone
had been with her. But Leary was as headstrong in her way as I am. I was the only other shady, apart from Commodore Macarthur, she really respected. Certainly the only one she’d work with in the field. So she went it alone that night and the ’Lesses got the jump on her and...”

Redlaw’s throat felt tight. He had to force the words out.

“According to the scene-of-incident report, Leary used up two full clips of ammo on them, plus all her stakes. There must have been just too many, though. Dr Wing, in her autopsy, counted at least thirty separate bite marks on the body, from different sets of fangs. Child-sized fangs, what’s more. I reckon that’d be why Leary got caught out. They were child vampires. Compassion got the better of her. That was her one weakness: compassion.”

Father Dixon cocked his head. “Compassion is a weakness?”

“For a SHADE officer? Oh, yes. The younger vampires, the kids, you see, they really troubled Leary. She always hesitated over dusting them. She’d say they weren’t to blame for their condition. To which I’d say that most Sunless weren’t, and she shouldn’t let what they looked like when they were turned colour her judgement over what they had become since. It’s hard, though, I appreciate that. I’ve perhaps been known to think twice before dusting a kid. I’ve even...” He paused, then carried on. “These particular children, though, they showed her no mercy, once they’d overpowered her. They feasted fast and hard. There wasn’t a drop of blood left in her. Should be grateful for that, I suppose. At least she wasn’t turned and I didn’t have to hunt her down and dust her.”

“Would you have done that?”

“I’d have made it my mission. I wouldn’t have stopped, I wouldn’t have slept, until I’d put her out of her misery. As it was, I took it upon myself to carry out the beheading. Dr Wing kept the body on ice in the morgue for me until I was well enough to go in. Out of courtesy. Leary obviously wasn’t coming back, but a post mortem neutralisation had to happen anyway. Standard procedure. Macarthur said she wanted to do it, but I insisted. I couldn’t see why anyone else should have the right. I was Leary’s partner. We had a bit of a set-to over that, Macarthur and I, but I won in the end. The Commodore backed down, once she realised
I
wasn’t going to. I think I may even have threatened resignation if I didn’t get my way.”

“You still feel guilty over Leary’s death.” Father Dixon pitched the remark carefully as both statement and query. He already had a clear notion of the answer.

“Of course. If I’d been with her, it never would have happened.”

“It was bad timing, rotten luck, but you must see, John, that it had nothing to do with you. Regret’s a reasonable thing to feel, under the circumstances. But don’t mistake it for guilt. You were seriously ill. What, you should have risen from your sickbed and gone in to work that night? You could barely move.”

“But why was I ill?”

“Something to do with germs? I’m a vicar, not a doctor.”

“It’s almost as if... as if...”

“...God arranged the whole thing?”

Redlaw nodded numbly.

Father Dixon
pshaw
ed. “Don’t take this the wrong way, my friend, but I’ve never heard such complete and utter bobbins in all my life. God hit you with a rash and a fever, then had a bunch of vampires murder Róisín? Why? To prove what point? To make you miserable? To plunge you into despair?”

“He moves—you may have heard this, Father—in mysterious ways.”

“Too right, He does. But He’s not vindictive, He’s not a psycho, He’s not some divine Mafia don. The God I worship isn’t, at any rate.”

“He’s omnipotent. He could have prevented Leary’s death.”

“Maybe. But that obviously wasn’t in His plan.”

“But torturing me is?”

“Oh, John!” Father Dixon’s exasperated cry resounded to the rafters. “How egotistical are you? God’s got it in for you specially, that’s what you’re telling me? He’s decided John Redlaw needs taking down a peg or two? One of His staunchest admirers, His biggest fans, deserves a good smiting? It doesn’t make sense.”

“He did it to Job, didn’t he?”

“Yes, and He’s allowed any number of martyrs to be put to death, horribly, on His behalf. Not to mention you-know-who, His own son, what’s the guy’s name again? It’s on the tip of my tongue. Jesus... Jesus somebody. I’ll get it in a moment. That one who had the fun day being crucified. Him.” He jerked a thumb towards the reredos. “John, God isn’t trying to hurt you. Don’t be childish.”

“What is He trying to do, then? What does He want from me?”

“That’s for you to work out for yourself.”

“Come off it, that’s a total copout.”

Father Dixon could only shrug. “Way it works, I’m afraid. No easy answers. No multiple-choice tick-the-box. Just the long, arduous process of sifting through the contradictions and the inconsistencies and the sometimes outright absurdities to find some kind of truth. Takes most people a lifetime.”

“You’ve managed it, though,” said Redlaw.

“Oh, no. Don’t be under that illusion. I grapple with my faith on a daily basis. Sometimes I get so depressed about it all—the suffering in the world, the countless prayers that go unanswered, God’s apparent indifference to the human condition—that I feel like jacking it all in. I want to tear off the dog collar and go and live like a hermit in a croft in the Hebrides. But you know what keeps me going? What reminds me that there probably is a supreme deity and He’s watching out for us? You’ll like this.”

“I will?”

“Sunless.”