The Good Priest (7 page)

But it had not sounded like that. Usually, those types restricted themselves to sexual sins, the more deviant and flamboyant the better, hoping to shock him, or titillate themselves and him too, for all he knew. Alcohol made them bold. And it had not been absent this time either; you could have set light to the fumes from the man's mouth. In Salmond's fiefdom, money was not the root of all evil, that title went to drink. He should know.

But what had that other distinctive smell been, mingling with that of the whisky? Nothing he had ever come across before and, God willing, would ever encounter again; the perfume of a murderer.

‘I've killed somebody,' the man had said, and then he had laughed out loud! It had been less like a confession, more of a boast. No doubt he knew what he was doing,
knew he would be quite safe, with excommunication awaiting any confessor who betrayed a penitent. He had, at least, supplied his victim's name. Jim Mann. And it was a common enough surname in Kinross-shire – why, his own bishop shared it. James Reginald Mann … Jimmy Mann.

At that thought, Vincent sat bolt upright in his tangled bedsheets. Suppose it was his bishop? Suppose he was the actual victim? But, even if he was, there was nothing to be done about it. He could not raise the dead.

At that moment another thought struck him, making his mind race. What if the man had not killed his victim, as he had crowed, but only injured him, leaving him for dead? While he had been agonising over the crime, over what to do, the victim's life blood might have been draining away, might
be
draining away. By his inaction he might be letting it happen.

It was a split-second decision. He threw his bedclothes onto the carpet and stamped across the floor to the chair where his clothes were. Grabbing his jacket off the back of it, he felt for the familiar bulge in the pocket made by his mobile phone. Locating it, he dialled 999. The second he heard the operator's voice he blurted out: ‘Bishop James Mann may have been murdered. Try his house at 54 Oster Street, Dundee.'

Without waiting for a reply, he ended the call.

The next day's edition of the
Courier
, which he raced through from front to back, concerned itself with its usual diet of pensioners' flooded bedrooms, missing organists,
unexplained seabird deaths and the like. No mention was made of any reported assaults on humans, far less murders. Even the diocesan grapevine, usually speedy, sometimes accurate, proved unfruitful, and he did not have the nerve to call the Bishop himself, although as each minute passed the urge to do so intensified. Every time the phone rang, he answered it breathlessly, expecting news of his superior from the mouth of some excited gossip or other. Each time he was disappointed, quickly becoming uncharacteristically terse, desperate to get the caller off the line.

By 8 am the following morning he was back in the supermarket, intent on checking the latest issue of the paper. Despite the early hour, the place was crowded, buzzing with women, wire-baskets thrown over an arm, some jostling to get at the milk or peering inside the freezer cabinets. Others stood gossiping, nodding at him as he passed them by, holding their trolleys tight as if they might try to escape. An apologetic-looking man tapped him on the shoulder, offering a cube of cheese on a cocktail stick, determined to tempt someone with his plateful of samples. It was quicker to take one.

Easing his way through the melee, returning smiles but unable to reply to the cacophony of cheery greetings with his mouth full, Father Vincent reached the news-stand. A single copy of the
Courier
was left. Desperate to get it, he snatched the paper up and began to examine the front page. The main headline was ‘Fife Man Charged with Horror Blaze', but, immediately below it, he found what
he was looking for. Pushing his glasses up until they rested on his unruly, sandy hair, he glanced at an old photograph of the Bishop in his mitre and then, holding the paper out at arm's length, he read the accompanying report.

Closing his eyes, the priest let out a long sigh. Thank goodness, Jimmy Mann had survived. He had done the right thing and betrayed nobody. The spirit of canon law remained intact, surely, if not the letter? And it had all been true; the confession had not been the fantasy of a lunatic. Putting his spectacles back on his nose, he rolled up the paper and, picking up a bag of fresh rolls, went to the till to pay for his purchases. Twice, as he stood, lost in thought, the assistant had to ask him for the money.

Trudging along the pitted pavement, rolls and paper under his arm, he kept his gaze down. He knew where he was going, could trust his feet to take him to Swansacre while his mind attended to other matters. What would happen now? In all likelihood, the police would come
after him. Calls from mobiles were traceable, and emergency calls recorded. But whatever happened, surely, he had nothing to worry about? Thanks to his tip-off the Bishop had ended up in hospital hours earlier than he otherwise might have done. Those hours could have made a difference, saved his life, even. And no one need ever know how he had come by the information, so he had not betrayed that drunken brute in the confessional. But the feeling that he had become involved, enmeshed, tainted by the crime, did not diminish and the unpleasant fluttering sensation in the pit of his stomach remained.

The sick woman's daughter, Helen Compton, led him through a bright corridor into her mother's room. It was at the back of the spacious flat they shared. The walls were thick, the only window deeply recessed and covered by a pair of net curtains. The little daylight that found its way through the netting was too weak to illuminate the room and the elegant stainless-steel standard lamp did not make up the shortfall. Even with it on, the room was full of dark shadows. But it was as warm as an oven.

‘Thanks for coming, Father,' Helen murmured. ‘She'll be pleased to see you, I know.'

As he approached the high brass bed, Father Vincent breathed in and found his nostrils filled with the aroma of death. He had come across it many times before, in bungalows, cottages, terraced houses, hospitals, hospices and elsewhere, and he knew it well. If asked to describe it he would have found it difficult to do so, eventually settling on an amalgam of known smells. It was part the musty,
foetid smell of the long-term invalid, part wood-smoke and part cold boiled egg. Once he had asked a colleague, a young curate, if he had ever noticed it, but the man had looked at him uncomprehendingly. Hugh, for his part, had flatly denied its existence, suggesting it was a product of his own malfunctioning sense of smell. ‘Look to your own drink-damaged schnozzle,' he had laughed.

As he sat down on the woman's old-fashioned green silk eiderdown, he slipped his fingers inside his pocket, checking that he had brought with him the phial of oil in case she wanted to be anointed once more. Sensing a presence in the room, the old lady opened her dull eyes and looked with alarm at him, not recognising him with the light behind him.

‘Who's that?'

‘It's just me, Jean, Father Vincent. Helen thought you might like some company.'

‘Father, good of you to drop by again,' she said, her voice faint, her words tailing off with her failing breath.

‘I was passing,' he replied, ‘and I wondered if you'd like a bit more of the holy oil. It might give you a bit of a lift? Like the last time?'

‘I don't want it now. I'm not in need any more, thank you.'

‘Of course, that's fine with me.'

The old woman nodded, she could talk no longer. She held out a cold hand for him to hold. The other remained on the eiderdown, the skeletal fingers splayed out, her wedding ring standing proud from the knuckle. The skin of her hands was dry as paper, heavily mottled, with rivers
of indigo snaking their way through the islets of brown liver spots. The last time he had seen her, a month earlier, she had still been plump, heavy jowls concealing the two muscles that now stood out like strings from her scrawny neck. Beneath her nightie, her cleavage, once something she had been proud to display, had disappeared, leaving behind it only the bony sternum below.

‘Did you hear about the Kinross Ladies' victory in the league?' he asked, continuing to speak without waiting for her to answer, sure in the knowledge that she would be interested in his tale. In her glory days, she had been the manageress of the rink at the Green Hotel. By way of answer, she squeezed his fingers.

‘Joyce was cock-a-hoop. She was the skip for the match and it paid off. She's got a good brain – like a snooker player's. It was neck and neck right up to the very end. Three each, right by the button, and it's always a grudge match against Dunfermline. Well, Isla delivered her stone and whacked the lot of them out the way. Ginny fell over – she'd been sweeping that much, her legs had gone, but they won, against all the odds. They did it!'

‘Aha. I heard that,' she whispered, smiling, her eyelids remaining closed.

‘Of course you will have. Isla won't have been able to resist boasting about it to you, I bet.'

‘Aha, Pam as well. She says, maybe, we'll get a bonspiel on the loch yet.'

‘Did Isla tell you the other news?'

On the pillow, the invalid rolled her head slightly from side to side, letting him know that she had not heard it.

‘That young woman in the hospice shop, the one you liked so much, Jill. She's had her baby. Guess its weight? That sounds a bit like a competition, eh? Guess the weight of the baby and win …' he hesitated, trying to think of an appropriate prize, ‘the
baby
! Or maybe not. Anyway, it was thirteen pounds. Imagine that! Luckily, they're both fine.'

‘My Helen was just a wee thing,' the old lady said, licking her cracked blue lips.

Her eyes remained shut, whether with weariness or sleep he could not tell, and so, expecting it to be the latter, he whispered her name several times to see if she would respond. Hearing nothing, he slipped his hand from hers, edged off the bed and knelt beside it, his head bowed, almost level with hers. But the second he murmured the words ‘Hail Mary full of grace,' her eyes blinked open and she sat up, glaring at him indignantly.

‘I'm not that far gone! So you can get right up off your knees. You're vultures, the lot of you. Helen's every bit as bad.'

‘Doves, maybe, Jean, but not vultures.'

‘Well, you wait and see. I'll be leaping out this bed yet, like a phoenix, and surprise the lot of you!'

Content that the danger was now over, she lay back, closed her dark eyelids and let out a long, rasping sigh. For another ten minutes he sat on her eiderdown, holding her hand and trying to think of things to say, passing on snippets of local news but getting no response to his efforts. As he was trying to extract his hand from hers once more, without waking her, she said, ‘You know something, Father …'

‘What?'

‘You've a lovely soothing voice. It's as good as a lullaby … reminds me of my dad's.'

Sleep, when it overcame her, was accompanied by an oddly powerful snore. The second it started up, her daughter put her head around the door and signalled for him to leave.

‘Thirteen pounds, eh? What a whopper,' she said as they walked towards the front door.

‘How did you know?' He had thought he was passing on a scoop.

‘Oh, I heard it all on the baby monitor. I always listen in. Calling you a vulture indeed! She may be dying, but there's no excuse for that!'

That evening he sat down at his desk, determined to apply himself to the mound of untouched mail and impose some sort of order on it. With luck a fair bit would be circulars, free papers or other junk that he could safely ignore. Priority must be given to the red electricity bill, before all the lights in the parish house and the church were extinguished.

Taking a last draw on his cigarette, he opened his cheque book, biro at the ready, to find that it contained nothing but stubs. In one of the drawers there would be a new one, but in which one? Pulling out the first on the left-hand side of the desk he rummaged about in it and found, to his delight, his long-lost copy of Beasley's
Wines of the Côtes du Rhône
. Why had he put it in there, he wondered?

Browsing through it, his attention caught by a column describing the involvement of seven successive Popes in
the commune of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the purpose of his search was quickly forgotten. Avignon, that would be a fine place to go on pilgrimage, to sample the wines of Bedarrides, Courthezon, Orange and Sorgues too. His euros from the last trip to France must be somewhere about in the house, or had he remembered to change them? The sound of the doorbell made him look up from his book and, unworried, but curious who it might be at this hour, he went to answer it.

The young man who he found facing him did not return his smile. A stubble of reddish bristles covered his broad skull, and his unblinking eyes were fringed with white lashes, giving him a pig-like appearance. His bomber jacket was unzipped to display a too-tight T-shirt and his jeans appeared to have been sprayed onto his fleshy thighs. Fixing his eyes on the priest, he looked boldly at him, letting him know that he was no humble parishioner seeking assistance.

At the stranger's first words ‘Detective Sergeant Spearman', the priest nodded. It was no surprise. He knew a policeman the instant he saw one. But always before, in his previous life, the ‘polis' had been interested in his client, not in him.

In his sitting room, he showed the man to his favourite armchair and sat, very upright, opposite his guest on the hard wooden desk chair.