Murdering Ministers (15 page)

Tapster finished the song, took one more trip on and off the platform to place his guitar in its case, and settled back for the Communion service itself, which began with a long prayer conducted by Piltdown. Effie dared not close her eyes. She had placed herself directly underneath a glowing electric heater, and despite the cold weather outside, she was feeling snug and sleepy. Her drowsiness was intensified by the reverent hush that had fallen over the church. She slipped out of her wool coat and placed it beside her on the pew.

Piltdown ended his largely improvised prayer and segued neatly in the Lord's Prayer. The congregation murmured the well-known words with him. Effie joined in, mainly out of respect for their beliefs, but she found the prayer comforting and timely, following the nightmare visions of the previous evening.
Thy will be done. In earth as it is in heaven.
(Why “in” earth?)

After the amen, and another period of silence, Piltdown began to deliver some set lines over the bread—not a Communion wafer, she noticed, but a slice of a white loaf.

“On the night that he was betrayed,” the minister intoned, “our Lord took Bread, and when he had given thanks, he brake it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, ‘Take eat, this is my body which is given for you: this do ye in remembrance of me.'”

He tore the slice down the middle, and placed each half on a plate on either side of the table. He handed the plates to Sam Quarterboy on his left and to Dougie Dock on his right. The two deacons left the platform and began to make their way up each aisle, offering the plate to the communicants, like a flight attendant distributing boiled sweets.

The nearest communicant to Effie was a tall, old woman whose thick white hair was braided into a bun, sitting in the middle of the church. Dock would have to walk the last thirty feet of the aisle with the sole aim of offering bread to the detective. She tried to signal that she did not wish to participate, but as he neared, he recognized her and assumed this was some sort of greeting. He mouthed his trademark “Hell-oo” but then set his features rigidly, as if to teach her that a Communion service was not an occasion for social chat. Effie found herself mutely taking a piece of bread, like a small crouton.

When the servers had returned to their seats on the platform, Piltdown took one of the plates and passed along the row of deacons. Each took a piece of bread. Finally, he took one himself and turned to the congregation.

“Let us eat together, in remembrance of him.”

He placed the bread carefully in his mouth. The other communicants followed his lead, and the aweful silence of private prayer returned. Effie contemplated dropping her bread into her handbag, but had some odd notion that this might be a sacrilege beyond her comprehension. She reluctantly ate it, chewing it so long that she tasted sugar in her mouth.

Piltdown stood up and picked up a silver chalice.

“After the same manner also he took the cup,” he said, “when he had supped, saying, ‘This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me.'”

He put down the chalice and picked up one of the odd contraptions that resembled a cake stand, handing it cautiously to Patience Coppersmith. Then he passed the other to Nigel Tapster. Each deacon left the platform and followed the same path up the aisles as their colleagues who had distributed the bread.

Tapster served the cluster of teenagers first, with a brief smile. As he reached the old woman, she seemed to whisper something while taking a glass of Communion wine from the stand. Tapster raised his eyebrows and moved on.

It was Effie's first good view of the man she had come to interview, and he held her gaze as he approached, his intense, dark brown eyes scrutinizing her face. Certainly, despite the shabby ordinariness of his body and the clothes he wore, Tapster's eyes could command attention, could make you believe this man had secrets, maybe could offer impressionable children mad glimpses of different worlds.

Then Tapster's eyes narrowed and a small crease appeared beside his mouth, and Effie knew with disgust how he was appraising her. She looked away. Only when he reached the end of her aisle did he realize she was refusing the wine. He inclined his head and turned away.

A sudden chilly draft from the main entrance made her regret removing her coat. She gazed around the church, noticing the cracks and damp patches in the cream-colored plaster. You could almost make out faces in the patterns, just as the devout can sometimes spy the face of Jesus in an oil spill or a spaghetti advertisement. She knew it was only an accident of the mind, programmed from birth to turn two blobs of the right size and distance into a pair of eyes. An optical illusion for an overtired brain. Like the way she was imagining Tina's disembodied head, floating in the air at the back of the church.

Effie sat upright.

It
was
Tina.

She would know that face anywhere. And she wasn't floating. The girl had poked her head through a gap in the velvet curtains at the end of the other aisle and was watching the service intently. Why was she here? To see her mother or her father presumably. And finding her mother wasn't here, would she run away again?

Effie knew that if she could slip out through the curtains on her side, she could pass through the church's narthex and come up behind the child. As long as Tina didn't notice her. The girl seemed fascinated by the events on the platform—Effie risked a glance, Piltdown was serving wine to the deacons. She started to edge her way along the pew, sliding across the worn oak, keeping her eyes on Tina's profile. So far, the girl hadn't noticed the movement.

Effie reached the end of the pew. She had to rise to get over the pew's arm and into the aisle. She braced her feet and began to rise.

Tina turned and saw her. The head ducked away.

Effie flung her coat onto the floor and ran toward the gap in the curtains on her side of the church. There was a loud cry from the platform behind her, but she did not turn. Perhaps someone had been startled to see a communicant bolt for the exit? She shut it out of her mind, groping for the way through the velvet.

The narthex was dark and seemed empty. But could the girl be hiding among the winter coats hanging from pegs along one wall? Effie stopped and listened for the faint sounds of a thin body scurrying away, but there were more shouts coming from the church behind her—loud cries of children singing praises to God. She must have left the service at the very second it turned—rather unexpectedly—from veneration to celebration.

The narthex door was propped open! That's why she had felt the sudden draft. Effie bolted through the door, across the bare vestibule, and down the steps in front of the church.

There was no sign of the girl.

She ran straight across the car park, vaulted the low wall and stopped on the street, trying to assess all the escape routes. Nobody running in the road. Only houses and small commercial buildings across the street, nothing to offer cover in such a short space of time. Plenty of parked cars she could duck behind.

Effie looked behind her, swiftly weighing her options. Was the girl under a car in the church's car park? Had she ducked along that path beside the church, or scaled the fence and dropped into the manse's garden?

She paused again to listen. Still that noise of shouting, coming through the open door to the church, but no other telltale sound of escape. If the girl had fled the building, there was no way Effie could find her alone. Why hadn't she brought Tish with her? Damn. Damn damn bugger damn.

She strode back into the church, pausing in the vestibule. There were doors on either side of the space, presumably leading to broom cupboards or electricity meters, but both were clearly locked.

Could Tina still be in the narthex after all? Effie passed through the inner doors and closed them behind her. The shouting had turned to singing, although someone was still keeping up an odd, breathy grunt, out of time with the music. Like a dog or a pig in intense pain. Good God, Oliver hadn't warned her about this part of the service. It sounded even worse than Nigel Tapster's carol.

She parted the curtains and stared.

The older congregants were standing in their pews, rigid, almost as if they had no idea what to do at this point in the ritual. The deacons were also frozen on the platform, one or two of them whispering to each other. Tapster was gone. But the half-dozen young people had left their pews and were swarming in front of the platform, singing and chanting and performing an odd dance around something on the ground that Effie couldn't quite see. That's where the noise was coming from.

Nobody would notice her. She stood on a pew to get a better view of whatever was on the floor. A man's stomach rose into sight.

Effie began to sprint down the aisle. “Let me through!” she shouted. “Let me through, and stand back, everybody! Please!”

“Nigel is bringing us God's word,” protested a teenage girl. She was weeping, hysterical.

“He's not bringing you anything,” Effie said sharply. She pulled the children aside, trying to get to the convulsing figure on the floor. They were so far lost in rapture, what would it take to convince them there's a real problem here? “Can't you see?” she yelled. “He's dying!”

Her words made no impression on the children, who continued to sing tunelessly, but they seemed to bring the hesitating deacons to life. Piltdown raced down from the stage, followed by Dock, and tried to clear some space around the body. Effie could now see for certain that it was Tapster, lying breathless and delirious, the eyes that had checked her out five minutes earlier now rolling helplessly in their sockets.

“We need a doctor,” she shouted to Dock. “Is there a doctor or a nurse in the church?”

Dock shook his head. Effie looked around frantically and noticed that one sandy-haired teenager had stopped dancing and was watching Tapster, trembling with fear.

“Billy,” she said, gesturing toward the back of the church. “Go to the back pew and get my handbag. Now!”

The tremble turned into a sudden start, and Billy hurtled away.

Tapster was whimpering, clearly in intense pain, but unable to speak. Effie felt for his pulse, but it seemed that her touch increased his agony.

“We'd better all stand back,” she commanded as Billy returned with her bag. She opened it and grabbed her mobile phone. “Does anyone know if he's an epileptic?” she asked.

A hand closed suddenly on her wrist.

“He's not sick,” cried the girl who had spoken before, expressing a perfectly balanced mixture of pity and contempt for any mortal who did not possess the wisdom of her sixteen years on the planet. “God is speaking through him. I should know, I've been given the gift of prophecy! Hallelujah!” She let go of Effie and spread her arms wide, turning her head to the ceiling, but more of the teenagers had stopped dancing now and were hovering on the edge of the group, uncertain and frightened.

“Hallelujah!” the girl defiantly shouted again. Tapster squirmed, as if just the sound of the voice was giving him additional pain. “Oh, you just don't understand, you silly people! Come on, everybody, let's sing to the Lord.”

Patience Coppersmith strode into the group, pulled the girl aside roughly, and slapped her across the face. “For God's sake, Michaela, get out of the way,” she snapped.

Astonished, Michaela stayed where she was, a hand on her red cheek, until a tall youth gently drew her into a side pew. Meanwhile Effie called for immediate medical assistance, describing Tapster's symptoms. They reminded her of something she had read about once.

“Everybody stay very quiet,” she ordered, as softly as possible. “Noise seems to bother him. And don't touch him.”

But nobody seemed inclined to approach the man squirming on the ground. The teenagers withdrew fearfully to the pews they had been sitting in, except for Billy, who had moved to his mother's side. The other deacons who had left the platform stood helplessly. Most of the communicants had come forward from their pews, forming clusters of observers in each aisle.

“I think it's going to be all right,” Effie whispered to Dock, who was closest to her. “An ambulance is on its way.”

There was a sudden scream from Tapster, and his whole body quaked. The guttural noises that Effie had heard before began to come from his open mouth, and his fists clenched and moved toward his chest, almost as if he were trying impotently to beat his breast. His legs straightened, his whole body became rigid, and his back began to bow and rise. It was if an unseen hand had grasped his trouser belt and was lifting him slowly to heaven, until only the crown of his head and his heels were in contact with the floor.

Suddenly, Effie remembered exactly what the symptoms indicated. And she knew that if she was correct, Tapster was likely to die unless the ambulance was equipped with more than the basics, and there was nothing she could do about it.

“Dear sweet Jesus, his face!” cried Patience, and turned away. Billy hugged her. Effie knew what she had seen. As she telephoned for backup, she knelt in front of Tapster's turned-back head so that nobody could see the appalling, inhuman grin that was not the product of any joke but of facial muscles tearing at his lips and cheeks with superhuman strength. It would look even worse if they could see his face the right way up. The spasms had wrenched his eyelids open, too, and the staring pinpoints of his eyes met hers. There was no sexual interest this time. Only the inexpressible pain that scalded every fiber of his body. Aware that Tapster was fully awake, feeling every last ounce of the agony, Effie did not look away.

She saw life drain from his eyes.

The rasping breathing stopped. There was nothing but the silence of the church. The body did not relax, but slumped sideways, still contorted into a rigid crescent.

Effie escaped into professionalism. She tried to take a mental photograph of that moment. The frightened teenagers whimpering together. Billy and Patience Coppersmith holding each other. The other deacons looking down helplessly at the body, apart from Potiphar, who hadn't moved from his seat on the platform. Piltdown looking down from the pulpit. The other worshippers in an outer circle.