The Gospel Of Judas (25 page)

‘Confided what?’

‘This wasn’t the first time that Maddy tried to take her own life. Didn’t you know about that? Didn’t you? Hadn’t she told her confessor?’ He laughed faintly. His expression was drawn in grey and white, a composition of disaster and despair, but his tone was of amiable patronage, a tone born of Winchester and Cambridge, of years of effortless superiority. ‘Maddy wasn’t the kind of person who needed the comforts of a priest. She was
ill
, Leo. What she needed was a doctor, a psychiatrist, but of course she wouldn’t have anything to do with them. So she found you instead. And she never told you.’

Leo tried to say something, but Jack trampled easily over his words. There was a relentless quality to his manner, as
though he was standing there in the alley and looking up the ochre side of the building and watching the woman balanced for a moment on the parapet way up there, five storeys up there, high up against the sky, just watching and waiting for her to make the small step into the void. ‘Maddy was the survivor of half a dozen previous suicide attempts, Leo. Mostly pills. Once she cut her wrists – wrist, singular, to be precise: she only managed one. And there was another incident that involved booze and one of my ties round her neck. You can make what you wish of that one. But mostly it was pills. She said to me, “You think I’m just messing around, don’t you? You think I’m just seeking attention. But one day I’ll do it properly.” That’s what she said. And now she has.’

There was a silence. Jack looked steadily at Leo and the smile had gone from his face, like snow from a bleak winter landscape. Was there accusation in that look? Did Jack Brewer hold Leo Newman, the innocent Leo Newman, the naïve Leo Newman, to
blame
?

‘She was ill, Leo. How stupid can you priests be? I’ve never really believed in priests as confessors, do you know that? It has always seemed to me like giving a child a hand grenade to play with. She was ill, a depressive or whatever you want to call it. She lived part of her life on the edge of despair and part of it in some idiotic state of excitement, like a five-year-old child at a party. Just like an overexcited child being sick at a party. Except she was an adult and so she didn’t throw up all over the carpet. She just fucked other men instead.’ He paused, as though for effect, as though to let his words strike home. ‘Didn’t she tell you that either? Didn’t she confess it in all its squalid detail? Perhaps she didn’t. Perhaps it had all gone beyond guilty secrets in the confessional. Perhaps she fucked her pet priest as well.’

Leo got to his feet. The ground seemed to shift a fraction. For a moment he had to concentrate on keeping his balance. ‘You’re distressed, Jack,’ he said. ‘You’re overwrought and you don’t know what you’re saying. Maddy and I were friends, you know that. Close friends.’ Why was it so easy to lie, not to lie directly, but to lie by implication? Why did the words come so easily to hand? He paused for a moment as though to let his assertion find its mark. And then he turned and made his way to the front door, leaving Jack alone in the sitting room. A face looked out of the kitchen to see what was going on, then darted back out of sight. He opened the door. Shame coursed through his body like a chill tide, guilt and shame in equal measure, the one seeping into the other, both denied the means of atonement, for atonement is at-one-ment and the one was gone, extinguished in a moment’s plunge.
She fucked other men
. He went out on to the landing and closed the door behind him. She padded across his mind, her buttocks moving clumsily as she walked. She turned towards him and her dark, untidy delta of hair pointed to things he could not comprehend. He even spoke her name as he walked down the stairs, as though she herself might answer him and explain. ‘Madeleine,’ he whispered. ‘Madeleine.’

That evening he went round to the narrow alley behind the
palazzo
to look again. The flowers were still there, ragged and bruised now, a sorry litter of yellow and red. He looked upwards, up the cliff of burnt ochre, up the receding lines of perspective towards the distant parapet. What happens on the way down, he wondered? Mere seconds. A decision taken and just as soon brought to its conclusion. Consummation of a kind. What happens during that momentary plunge? What do you think? Of
whom do you think? He saw the kick of her legs. Her skirt billowing. A sudden glimpse of white thigh. And then the blow. Something soft and heavy. Things breaking inside.

The magistrate examined Leo’s identity card, glanced at the photograph, considered his profession –
sacerdote
– thoughtfully. ‘
Prete
,’ she said. Her tone was carefully edged with contempt.

‘Priest,’ Leo agreed.

‘And your relationship with the Englishwoman?’

‘A friend.’

The office was high up in the ministry building with a view over plane trees and the dark flow of the river. The magistrate herself was brisk and smart, impatient to resolve one case and move on to the next. Manila folders were piled on her desk. In one corner of the room, hedged about with box files, a man sat behind some kind of word processor. There was the patter of a keyboard.

‘Where were you when she died?’

‘I was out of the country. In England.’

‘You can prove this?’

‘Prove it?’

‘Can you demonstrate when you left the country?’

And suddenly, quite suddenly – for only a moment before the idea had been beyond consideration – Leo understood that he was suspect. ‘Of course I can prove it.’

‘How?’

He cast around. How do you prove things? How do you know what happened, when? How do you know who the man Youdas was, and what kind of relationship he had with Yeshu? ‘Airline tickets. People, for God’s sake. The people I was with in London.’ He thought of the bishop and his heart sank. The keyboard tapped in the background, the hesitant touch of evidence. The magistrate looked down at the desk in front of her, examining a report or something. Her voice was neutral, informed with the indifferent tones of bureaucracy. ‘At what time of day did you leave Italy?’

‘In the morning. She drove me to the airport.’

A sudden upward glance. ‘The signora
drove
you?’

‘Gave me a lift. Drove me.’

‘So she was at your apartment in the morning when you were there?’

‘She came to my flat that morning. To drive me to the airport.’

‘So you were the last person to see her alive?’

‘Was I?’ Some kind of nightmare. Not a nightmare with Madeleine, not a nightmare with Judas. A nightmare of absence, the lack of someone, a void where once there had been a presence. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know when she died. I don’t know who saw her. How can I answer that kind of question?’

‘
Signora
Brewer’ – the woman struggled to pronounce the name; it came out with the vowels widened and emphasised:
Breu-where
– ‘died during the course of that morning.
She was not found until the afternoon, but she died during the morning.’

‘But when?’

She ignored his question. ‘Can you provide evidence that she took you to the airport at the time you say?’

‘Of course I can. The time of my check-in.’

‘Tell me. Tell me the time and the airline and the desk.’

He told her, and the keys pattered at his back, footsteps hurrying after his account of the morning, a morning that was merely two days ago but a whole world away, a whole aeon away, projected now into a new significance: the last moments of Madeleine on earth, her last moments anywhere perhaps. Madeleine letting herself into the flat with her light familiarity, her smile, her gentle hands touching his hands, his face. Madeleine begging him, that was what was so disturbing, Madeleine begging him for consolation, for consummation, for that fragile communion that they had shared, the communion that gave them an impoverished glimpse of the eternal. ‘She must have gone back to the flat,’ he said. ‘After she left me at the airport she must have gone back. Didn’t the porter see her come in?’

The magistrate was impassive. ‘We will need material evidence of all this. Airline tickets, receipts, that kind of thing. What was your relationship with this woman?’

‘I’ve already told you. We were friends.’

‘What kind of friends? Close friends? Were you her confessor?’

‘I had been, some time ago. When we first met. But no longer.’

‘How was she that morning? How did she seem?’

Leo shrugged. How did Madeleine seem? She was dead, for God’s sake. How did she seem? ‘Normal. She was a
woman of moods. She seemed happy, she seemed sad. Sometimes both at the same time.’

‘And that morning?’

He was silent. The magistrate looked at him, saw something there, picked up with her magisterial antennae some vibration. ‘Were you and
signora
Brewer lovers?’ she asked.

‘What an extraordinary question.’

She looked at him bleakly. ‘My job is extraordinary, Mr Newman. The death of a woman in this way is extraordinary. Falling from a roof is extraordinary, suicide is extraordinary, murder is extraordinary, therefore my questions are extraordinary. I repeat: were you and Mrs Brewer lovers?’

‘I am a priest,’ Leo said.

The magistrate made a small noise, a noise that was part laugh, part snort of contempt. Evidently she did not think much of priests. ‘I will have to ask you for a blood sample.’

‘A
blood
sample? Why in God’s name a blood sample?’

The keys pattered in the background. ‘Because Mrs Brewer had sexual intercourse shortly before she died. The pathologist found semen inside her body. We want to know whose it might be.’ Her words seemed to hang in the still air of the office like an exhalation from the tomb.
Inside her body
. And Leo saw Madeleine lying broken on a slab, an approximate collection of limbs and ribs, a bag of bruised and ruptured organs. And probing, latex fingers working their way inside the depths of her belly, intrusive impersonal fingers searching inside her. Desecration. He heard his own voice in the room, his voice being chased by the chatter of keys, by the scream of swifts outside the open window, by the awful hurrying footsteps of guilt. ‘What possible business can it be of
yours whether
signora
Brewer made love to someone before she died?’

‘Did she have sexual intercourse with you, Mr Newman?’

‘Her husband. Why not her husband?’

‘Mr Newman, will you please answer my question?’

‘Why is it your business?’

‘Because a woman is dead, Mr Newman. A woman is dead and it is my job to discover how and why she died.’

‘You think I might have killed her? This is ridiculous. You think I killed her?’

‘I don’t think anything yet. She was a woman with a family. Possibly she was a woman with a lover. She was a woman who might have been a danger to one of the people in her life. She was a woman who died. She may have fallen, she may have jumped, she may have been pushed. She may even have been killed by a blow to the head before being thrown from the roof. All these things are possible. Some of them are more probable than others; one of them happened. My job is to find out which one it was.’

Leo said, ‘She was a woman with a history of attempted suicide.’

The magistrate smiled, as though mere knowledge was an admission of guilt. ‘Did you
know
that, Mr Newman?’

‘I was told so by her husband. This morning.’

‘But you did not know about this before? Your close friend never told you that she had a history of … mental instability?’

‘Never.’

‘And you never suspected anything?’

‘She had moods. Nothing particular.’

The woman nodded. ‘And now will you answer my question? Did you have sexual intercourse with Mrs Brewer on the morning that she died?’

‘What about her husband?’ Leo repeated. He almost
shouted it. He raised his voice and the magistrate looked back at him and smiled a humourless smile because she was used to being shouted at by men and she had learned to use it to her own advantage.

‘Her husband denies having any sexual relationship with his wife for the last two months,’ she said.

Leo Newman was silent. The tapping of keys paused, waiting for his answer. Pointedly the magistrate looked down, consulted the pathologist’s report as though she might discover something new there, some small, organic detail that she had overlooked.

‘I did,’ he said quietly. ‘Yes.’

A quick glance up. ‘And did she consent to this?’

‘Do you mean, did I rape her and then throw her body off the roof and make my own way to the airport? Don’t be absurd.’

‘I mean just what I said. Did she consent to having sexual intercourse with you?’

Leo was silent. He closed his eyes. You might close your eyes in the confessional and no one would notice. Here the magistrate watched, and put her own interpretation on things. He closed his eyes and Madeleine touched his face with her fingers as though discovering him in the total darkness of the Church of San Crisogono. ‘Yes, she did. She wanted it.’

‘Meaning that you didn’t?’

‘Meaning nothing of the kind. We were in the middle of a love affair. It was difficult, not the kind of thing you can summarise easily in a couple of words.’

‘But you wanted the affair to end?’

‘Perhaps. I don’t know.’ He cast around for an answer, as though such things as answers and explanations were lying around somewhere in this cramped and shabby office. And
in a sense they were, bound up in dozens of manila folders: answers and half-answers and lies; the truth, the whole truth and nothing like the truth. What is truth, Pilate asked? The Greek word
aletheia
. ‘I don’t know,’ he repeated. ‘Then I thought, maybe yes, I wanted it ended. Now …’ His voice faltered. Something took over, some awful tide of emotion that for a moment he couldn’t control. He shook his head as though to rid himself of it. His eyes smarted and his heart pounded and sweat stood out on his forehead. He needed to swallow. There was something stuck in his throat that would not go down. Perhaps these organic manifestations were all symptoms of guilt. Perhaps they signified that he
had
killed her.