The Discourtesy of Death (Father Anselm Novels) (23 page)

Anselm reached down and picked up a fistful of stones. He walked to the edge of the sea and threw them one after the other at a chain of surf. In the distance, towards the mouth of the River Ore, he could see shingle banks breaking the surface of the water: a menace for boats rather than bathers.

There was – he thought, with a sigh – a second narrative. It was the simplest. The weight of evidence leaned heavily in its direction. And it was this: Jenny had, in fact, freely consented to her own death. Peter had helped her. Doctor Ingleby had smoothed over the legal wrinkle – judged a wrinkle by their shared convictions (Jenny’s included) set against the extremely distressing nature of Jenny’s medical condition. And if one item of evidence was needed to support this second narrative, surely it was Jenny’s last testament to Nigel: her seeming avowal that she’d lost hope in any late surprises.

These, then, were the two differing interpretations of Jenny’s death. And Anselm had little difficulty opting for the first. Because – more significant than any letter, be it to Larkwood’s Prior or Nigel Goodwin – Peter Henderson had thrown a brick at his own reflection.

The downside of manipulating someone – consciously or otherwise – is that once you’ve finally got what you want, you’re left feeling ill at ease. At least right-thinking people are. Because ultimately the manipulator would like the weaker party to
want
what they’d been forced to accept. To prefer the film on ITV as opposed to the documentary on BBC2. Nudge someone into taking their own life and you don’t feel uneasy, you feel awful. Take their life yourself, just in case they get cold feet, and, in time, you’ll feel not only awful but utterly devastated. And, in time – two years to be exact – Peter Henderson had broken down, crushed by a weight of his own making. Had Jenny chosen her death freely – the second narrative – Peter Henderson would have simply suffered from grief: deep grief. But not guilt. And it was guilt that had launched that brick.

And it was this guilt that gave Anselm his opportunity. Peter Henderson’s secret battle with his conscience was his one weakness. Deep down he wanted to make a confession.

Footsteps sounded on the beach. The shingle churned quietly with each slow tread. Anselm turned, reminding himself that Peter Henderson was a special and dangerous man.

‘Well, if it isn’t the Monk who Left it All for a Life of Crime,’ said the scholar, quoting the
Sunday Times
. ‘I always wanted to meet you.’

After another two-shot rehearsal, striking the cabbage each time, Michael left the Killing House and drove to the Queen’s Head in Bramfield (the village where the farmer talked to his fruit and veg). He’d been here twice before with Emma. The first time was eighteen months after Jenny’s accident. They’d ordered a rare breed of beef, roasted to perfection. Michael now tapped the menu in exactly the same place. In due course, the same meal appeared on the table. He began to eat, pondering over Emma’s anxiety as it roused his own.

‘Peter’s not looking after Timothy properly,’ she said, prodding the beef. ‘Never has done, and I don’t mean the laundry.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘There are no … no
guidelines
. No rules. Or not enough of them.’ She quaffed some wine, desperately. ‘Lets him do what he wants. Watches what he wants, reads what he wants. The boy’s not old enough to make his own mind up. The other day he was reading the
Kama Sutra
for God’s sake. There were
pictures
, darling. And it doesn’t end there. He’s got a copy of the Koran. And
Mein Kampf.
Of course, he hasn’t read the damn thing but he really shouldn’t be filling his head with that kind of Nazi nonsense. It’s the same with films. Peter
completely
ignores the wisdom of the censor. Eighteens all over the place and he’s only
eleven
. Has a DVD-thingy in his room. Found him watching some
American
film in the middle of the afternoon about a boxing chap who can’t understand the Trinity and a Catholic priest who uses the F-word all the time – second-generation Irish, I’d imagine – and this chap finally sneaks into a hospital and kills a brain-damaged woman. Almost a cabbage. Wires and tubes all over the place. Now, I ask you, is that really
appropriate
for Timothy?’

‘No.’

‘We have to do more, Michael. We have to make sure Timothy gets a decent chance in life. Take him out of the wrong books and films. Take him … sky-diving.’

‘I don’t know how.’

‘Rugby, then. Get him into a club. He needs something physical to get rid of all that energy. Have you noticed? He can’t keep still. Wiggles all the time. Jenny was
never
like that.’

‘No, she just changed her clothes every five minutes. It’s normal, darling. It’s his age. I used to roll all over the floor with Nigel. Tried to punch his lights out.’

The mention of his brother’s name stumped Michael. He stared at his plate, knife and fork suspended in time. Nigel was in Africa. But even if his brother had been eating beef at the adjacent table he couldn’t have been further away. Michael couldn’t face him any more, not after … Donegal. He couldn’t bear to see his eyes and feel that relentless energy. Couldn’t stand anywhere near him without recalling the homily he’d given to the medics at Sandhurst … that meditation on crisis, risk and decision; that meditation on the Still, Small Voice. When Michael had stumbled into his own crisis, he’d listened hard, almost on his knees, heart open, hands joined … around the pistol grip of a Browning automatic. He’d heard his name three times—

‘Any parental control?’ asked Emma, stabbing the beef. ‘No. None. Timothy goes wherever he likes on the internet. Clicks this, clicks that. Talks to people in China. Just like I’m doing now. Michael? Hello. Are you listening?’

‘Absolutely, darling.’

‘Something has to be done.’ Emma leaned back, exhausted, peering at Michael over the top of her wineglass. ‘We have to think of Timothy. Jenny can’t … she’s got enough on her plate.’

Michael paid the bill and stepped outside into the afternoon sunshine. Puffs of cloud seemed to be snagged in the nearby trees. A breeze tugged at the branches but the fluff wouldn’t let go. Tiny birds pecked at the floss and then exploded across the blue sky, scared by Michael’s approach. Following the memory of Emma’s voice, he walked to St Andrew’s, the local church with a thatched roof. She’d brought him here after they’d lunched a second time in Bramfield, this time on lamb. That had been a mere three months ago. Peter had just been sent to Hollesley Bay. Timothy was now fourteen.

‘I want to show you something,’ Emma had said.

Her tone had changed. Ever since Jenny’s death the flash had gone. There was no zip, no fast outrage or hasty opinions. No daft outbursts, like the sky-diving proposal. She was harrowed by the loss. Her confidence shaky. There was a bluntness where she’d once been soft. At times she was shrill.

‘Isn’t it moving?’ murmured Emma.

‘Completely.’

Michael’s voice had fragmented. They’d entered the cool nave and ambled to the chancel, watched, it seemed, by the grotesque carved headstops, sad and angry faces among the riot of vaulting. Emma was pointing at a memorial: a life-size woman lying on her bed, her infant daughter in her arms. Above the two reclining marble figures, as if on a shelf, his whole posture turned away, knelt a man, the husband and father, his hands joined in prayer.

‘Sir Arthur Coke can’t look upon what he’s lost,’ said Emma, touching the dead mother and child with a steady hand. ‘Childbirth took away their lives. He was the Lord Chief Justice of the realm. A very powerful man. There was nothing he could do. There’d been no crime.’

Emma moved away, her hand catching Michael’s sleeve.

‘Let me show you something else.’

She led him to a black ledger stone with ornate white lettering. She began to read the inscription, her voice echoing among the arches and scowling faces: ‘After the fatigues of a married life, borne by her with incredible patience…’ – Emma skipped the details that didn’t speak to her purpose – ‘… an apoplectick dart touch’t the most vital part of her brain; she must have fallen directly to the ground (as one thunder-strook) if she had not been catch’t and supported by her intended husband. Of which invisible bruise, after a struggle for above sixty hours, with that grand enemy to life (but the certain and merciful friend to helpless old age), with terrible convulsions, plaintive groans, or stupefying sleep, without recovery of her speech or senses, she dyed on ye 12th day of September in the year of our lord seventeen thirty-seven…’ Emma paused, allowing Michael’s attention to fall on the citation from the Book of Revelation. ‘Behold, I come as a thief.’

Michael felt the weight of Emma’s hand. She was still holding onto his sleeve. They didn’t speak. Each of them was thinking of Jenny and the dart to her nervous system, and Peter who’d not been there to catch her. They thought of Jenny’s groans over many years and the enemy of life who’d come too soon.

‘Peter is the thief,’ declared Emma.

Michael turned aside, like Sir Arthur on his shelf.

‘He stole her future,’ continued Emma, remorselessly. ‘She was only nineteen. She wanted to dance. She wanted to fly.’

It was true. So true. She’d longed to soar above ordinary life. One of the headstops caught Michael’s gaze. It looked like Peter. Deformed, of course, like one of those cartoons sketched at the beach, but it was him all right, in stone. The face looking down on him had the same high hairline, the same ears, the same dominating eyes.

‘Michael,’ said Emma – she, too, had found the scowling effigy at the base of the arch; she, too, was staring back, as if returning a challenge – ‘you’ve never told me what happened in Belfast and you don’t have to. I know what’s in the camera bag and I know what’s wrapped in the duster.’

Michael blinked suddenly as if grit had entered his eye.

‘Whatever happened,’ she said, her hand dropping off Michael’s sleeve and onto his cold skin, ‘I know you thought about it first, and very carefully. Whatever you might have done, I know you did it for the best. Because you are a good and honourable man. A man not frightened to make difficult decisions. A man not afraid to practise what his brother Nigel preaches.’

She was squeezing his fingers tightly, crushing them onto his wedding ring.

‘It’s a question of right and wrong now,’ she said, with whispering inevitability. ‘It’s a question of what ought to be done. We’re a messed-up family, Michael. I wish we weren’t but we are. I’d like things to have been different. But there’s a limit to what we can accept. And it is not right that a boy live under the same roof as the man who never loved his mother. It’s …
unnatural
. Something has to be done. You can’t look in the opposite direction for ever. You’ve got to get off your knees, come down off your pedestal and look at the future.’

Emma suddenly let the matter drop. Not even waiting for a reply, she stormed out of the church as if they’d had a blazing row, her hard shoes punching the stone flooring.

Michael found her at the cylindrical bell tower, an unusual construction in that it stood independent of the church itself. Ancient gravestones leaned right and left like a congregation of simple folk flummoxed by a difficult sermon. The dead had come out in droves to learn what the preacher was really getting at. Emma was chewing her bottom lip. Her face was stained with tears. She was shivering, though her hand had felt hot.

‘If you can do it for your country, you can do it for your grandson.’

That had been the end of the matter. Michael and Emma had planned Peter’s assassination in a church. It was as unreal as Father Doyle setting up Néall Ó Mórdha … only the Northern Ireland situation had turned out to be slightly different in the end. There’d been that last-minute hitch. Which was why, this time, Michael wanted to be absolutely sure of his ground: well rehearsed to handle the nerves; well prepared to handle any lingering doubts. He drove away from Bramfield along tight lanes, between amber trees and beneath a sky that had been written upon with lines of fading chalk. The world really was a paradise, if it wasn’t for the snags on the ground.

‘Behold, I come as a thief,’ he said. ‘The certain and merciful friend.’

Anselm was shocked. The unshaven man in the grey overcoat, collar turned up, appeared to have been ravaged by alcohol and years of sleeping outdoors in winter. It was the only comparison Anselm could make. He’d seen the ragged figures of shattered humanity limping around Waterloo and Blackfriars and Peter Henderson had found a place in their number. His brown eyes were deep and bleeding. The bags of dark blue skin beneath the lids seemed to have been stretched by the weight of sleepless nights. The black hair was all that remained of the well-known commentator and intellectual. It was still tangled and professorial, evidence of someone who always woke up thinking and dragged a hand over his head with intellectual dismay.

‘I read of you with interest, Father,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘The line that struck me most came towards the end. It was a summary of your work. Of what you do that makes you different: “…justice had been done in places beyond the reach of the law”. That is quite an achievement.’

Anselm took the firm grip with a cautious nod of acknowledgement. Peter Henderson didn’t appear to be joking. He was too broken for levity, even at his own expense. His voice was strangely dark, as if his larynx had been soaked in Carlsberg Special Brew. Not the sound Anselm had heard on the radio and television. The man had been radically changed.

‘The author says you’re more interested in mercy than justice,’ continued Peter Henderson, with a note of query. He’d started walking along the beach, drawing Anselm after him. Mitch kept a short distance behind as if he were a guard outside a mobile confessional. ‘When I put the paper down, I wondered if you’d ever considered that certain … intricate situations … require neither mercy nor justice. Just a blind eye. Not because it’s expedient. But because neither mercy nor justice can reach the true depths of what actually happened. When all we can do is turn away and look in the other direction.’