Sins of the Fathers (6 page)

‘Aye, it is,' Woodend said. ‘Is there any indication that he might have been inclined the other way?'

‘There's no record of him ever having been arrested for loitering outside public lavatories, if that's what you mean,' Paniatowski said.

‘Not that that rules out the possibility of his bein' homosexual,' Woodend said. ‘Still, there's no point in just sittin' here an' speculatin', is there? It's time we got diggin'.'

‘Into his past or his present?' Paniatowski asked.

Woodend grinned. ‘He doesn't have a “present”,' he said. ‘He's bloody-well dead.'

‘Into his recent past, or into his more distant past?' Monika Paniatowski amended.

‘Into both.'

‘In spite of what Mr Marlowe said to you?'

‘Aye, we can't let a dickhead like him get in the way of us doin' our job properly, now can we? So how shall we divide it up?' Woodend thought for a moment. ‘Beresford, you can go up to the mattress factory an' see what you can find out about Pine's rise to fame an' fortune.'

‘You want me to go on my own, sir?' the constable asked, sounding somewhat alarmed.

‘Why not on your own? Do you want me there beside you, holdin' your hand?'

‘No, but—'

‘It's about time you learned that there's a lot more to bein' a detective than just wearin' your best suit to work. Don't worry, lad, you can do it. I've got confidence in you.'

Beresford either blushed with embarrassment or glowed with pleasure – and very possibly both.

‘Thank you, sir,' he said.

Woodend turned to Paniatowski. ‘You're still a Catholic, aren't you, Monika?'

‘Not exactly,' the sergeant said, with some show of reluctance.

‘But you do know more about the mysteries of the faith than either me or Beresford?'

‘I suppose so.'

‘Then you get to go to St Mary's, which is where, accordin' to our beloved chief constable, Pine was headin' when he left the village hall meetin'. See if he arrived at the church as he expected to, an' if he
did
arrive, how long he stayed an' who he talked to.'

‘And what will you be doing, sir?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Me? I shall be descendin' into the Heart of Darkness.'

‘I'm sorry, sir?' Beresford said.

‘He'll be going where no man with honest working class credentials would ever normally dream of showing his face,' supplied Paniatowski, who was well tuned in to Woodend's mind.

‘I still don't get it,' Beresford admitted.

‘First, I shall be poppin' into the morgue – which
isn't
the Heart of Darkness – to have a quick word with Dr Shastri,' Woodend explained. ‘Then I'll take myself over to the Whitebridge Golf an' Country Club – which is.'

‘Where they'll kill the fatted calf, and welcome you with open arms, like a long-lost brother,' Paniatowski said.

‘I somehow doubt that,' Woodend replied. ‘But since I
am
a police officer engaged in a murder inquiry, they won't be able to actually bar the door to me, either – however much they'd like to.'

S
t Mary's Roman Catholic Church had stood at the crest of Woodstock Hill for over five hundred years.

In its early days, when Whitebridge was no more than a small village in which a collection of downtrodden peasants scratched out a meagre existence, the gothic spire and sturdy square tower must have been a truly formidable sight. Even in the modern Whitebridge – a city that had recently begun to experiment with high-rise buildings – it was still the most impressive structure around, eclipsing the Anglican cathedral which the Protestant ecclesiastical planners had foolishly decided to construct on the flat ground in the town centre.

The edifice's history was chequered, as most history is. Though it was originally built as a Catholic church, there had been a period – a little over three centuries, in fact – when it had fallen into the hands of King Henry VIII's breakaway movement, the adherents of which had smashed the statues and stripped away all other signs of Papistry. But the world turns – as it inevitably will – and in the mid-nineteenth century, Catholic cotton money had been used to purchase the church and re-consecrate it into the old faith.

Monika Paniatowski could have left her bright red MGA right in front of the church – there were parking restrictions in force there, but what did that matter when you were the law? – yet instead she chose to park at the bottom of the hill, even though that meant subjecting herself to a long, steep climb.

The reasoning behind her decision was simple. Her sporty car was one of the most distinctive vehicles in Whitebridge, so people seeing it parked outside the church might be forgiven for assuming she had gone inside to pray.

And that was an assumption she really did not want
anyone
to make.

Ever!

That was an assumption it was worth climbing the highest and most gruelling
mountain
to avoid.

As she toiled up the steep gradient, Monika found herself thinking about her past in general, and her mother in particular – and with these thoughts came an involuntary physical reaction which made her feel as though her bowels were slowly turning to water.

Her mother had been a devout Roman Catholic. It had been Agnieszka Paniatowski's faith that had sustained her during those long, terrible, years while she and her daughter had criss-crossed war-torn Europe as refugees on the run. Never once – despite all the hardship they had endured, despite all the horrors they had seen – had that faith of Agnieszka's wavered.

And neither had her little daughter's. Even as a small child, Monika had understood that she was both a Pole and Roman Catholic – and that the two things were so intertwined that she could no more separate the one from other than she could separate her mind from her body, or her heart from her soul.

It was only later, in the supposed safety of this English mill town where they had come to live, that she had finally lost her faith – and even then she had not so much
lost
it as had it
torn from her
by what was said from the other side of the confessional grill.

Monika is thirteen years old. Her body is beginning to fill out, and the boys at school have started to notice her.

And not just the boys.

Not just at school.

She is sitting in the confessional of St Mary's Church.
Her
church. On the other side of the grille sits
her
priest.

‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,' she says. ‘It has been a week since my last confession.'

For a moment, she can say no more, but when she
does
speak again, the words spill out of her and feel like they will never stop. She tells how her stepfather came to her room, late at night and smelling of drink, and put his hand on her shoulder. She describes how that hand – that big, beefy, demanding, hand – burrowed its way under the blankets and found its way to her young breasts. With tears streaming down her face, she recounts what happened next – how he climbed into her bed, how he forced her legs apart, how he … how he …

‘Do you think perhaps you led him on, my child?' the priest, Father O'Brien, asks.

She is not even sure she knows what that means.

‘Led him on?' she repeats.

‘Man is but an imperfect being, prone to temptation,' the priest intones. ‘Did you tempt him, Monika? Did you cause him to think that his attentions would be welcomed?'

‘No. I didn't. I swear I didn't.'

‘But did you, deep within yourself,
want
him to do it to you, my child?' the priest persists.

She feels like yelling at the top of her voice that of course she didn't want him to do all those terrible things to her.

She wants to scream out that the priest must be a bloody fool for even thinking to ask that.

But she is in a confessional, talking to a holy man who represents Mother Church, and all she says is, ‘No, Father, I didn't want him to do it.'

There is a long silence from the other side of the grill, then the priest says, ‘But did you
enjoy
it, my child?'

Enjoy it! Did she enjoy it? Can't he even begin to imagine how soiled she felt when it was all over?

‘No, Father,' she says, almost in a whisper. ‘I didn't enjoy it all.'

‘Then you have done nothing wrong, my child, and there will be no penance to pay. You may continue with your confession.'

‘Is that it?' she asks herself. ‘I've done nothing wrong? And that's the end of the matter?'

She leaves the confessional with her faith sorely tested – but still intact. And then, a week later, as she is walking past the Catholic Club, she looks through the window and sees Father O'Brien and her stepfather drinking pints of Guinness together.

And, fool that she is, she takes comfort from that!

She actually believes that the priest is telling her stepfather that he must stop molesting her.

But later that night she wakes up to find the familiar hands making their familiar demands of her body, and knows that nothing has changed – that, despite the priest talking to her stepfather, no change has even been suggested.

She has been to her last confession. She has lost her belief in the priesthood, and with it, her belief in God.

Monika had reached the level of the church. She was finding it hard to breathe, though it was her memories, rather than the steep climb, which were the source of her difficulties.

She studied the main doorway, with its vaulted Gothic arch and its stone statue of the Madonna and Child.

She did not want to walk through the heavy oak door – did not want to hear it slam closed behind her, like a baited trap.

This is stupid!
she told herself angrily.

She wasn't a frightened little girl any more. She was a police officer.
Other
people were frightened of
her
. And since she had a job to do, she'd better start bloody-well doing it.

Her breathing was more regular now. She took a resolute step forward, turned the handle, and pushed the door open. Then, after only the slightest of hesitations, she stepped through the gap and allowed the church to swallow her up.

Woodend hated the morgue. Not because it was full of dead people – that was, after all, why it was there – but because of the chemicals.

For days after he had made a visit to it, he was convinced that he stank of formaldehyde. It wasn't a rational conviction – he accepted that, just as he accepted the fact that when he met Dr Shastri outside her grisly kingdom, he could detect no odour of death clinging to her. Yet still he would scrub and scrub at his flesh, and still the all-pervading smell would not go away.

He could almost taste the chemicals that morning – swooping down on him through the air like kamikaze swallows, mingling with the acrid smoke from his Capstan Full Strength and being drawn into his lungs – but, as usual, the delightful Dr Shastri seemed blissfully unaware of them.

‘I have cut up our little friend in accordance with your wishes, Oh Master,' the doctor said, bowing like the pantomime genie in
Aladdin
. ‘Even so, I am afraid that I'm unable to tell you much more than I told you last night. The blow to his head was inflicted with considerable force, as is fairly obvious from the extent of the injuries sustained. Death would have been almost instantaneous.'

‘Do you think that a woman could have delivered the blow?' Woodend asked.

‘A strong woman, most certainly,' Dr Shastri replied. ‘A very angry woman, quite possibly. What would have caused a woman more problems would have been moving the body. Dead weight, for that is what he had become: our little friend would have been quite heavy.'

‘An' you're certain he
was
moved?'

‘Oh, yes. Wherever it was that he was killed, it was certainly not in the lay-by.'

‘Any idea what weapon was used?' Woodend asked.

‘The proverbial blunt instrument,' Dr Shastri told him.

‘No more than that?'

‘I found tiny slivers of metal in the wound, but certainly no single piece large enough for me to be able to tell you with any confidence that they came from a set of eighteenth century candlesticks which can be found only in Doomlock Manor, the home of the mad and dangerous Lord Homicide.'

Woodend grinned. ‘What can you tell me about the post-mortem injuries?' he asked.

‘Again, not much more than you have seen for yourself. His mouth was smashed in, his stomach was slashed open.'

‘But was the mutilation to the stomach done with any kind of medical precision?'

‘Now why would you ask that?' Dr Shastri wondered. ‘Could it be that you have already decided, Chief Inspector, to “fit up” one of my esteemed colleagues for the murder?'

‘As a matter of fact, I was thinkin' of pinnin' the whole business on you,' Woodend said.

‘A good choice,' Dr Shastri told him. ‘I would certainly be a more colourful and interesting defendant than most of the drab, sad men you usually bring to trial. But in answer to your question, I would have to reply that this particular murderer was not in any way precise. I would almost say that our little friend was butchered, but that would be being unfair to butchers, many of whom know more about anatomy than half the surgeons currently operating in our great hospitals.'

‘Now that
is
a cheerful thought,' Woodend said. ‘Why did he make such a bloody mess of the mutilation? Was it simply because he had no idea what he was doing?'

‘Perhaps,' Doctor Shastri said cautiously. ‘But it is equally possible that the killer
wanted
to make a bloody mess.'