The Discourtesy of Death (Father Anselm Novels) (21 page)

‘Yes, this will do,’ said Michael, sitting down.

‘Timothy, would you come here please?’

Michael sat in Peter’s chair to give himself the authority he didn’t possess in the Henderson household. He’d just brought Jenny back from Pin Mill on the day she’d asked him to untie her laces once and for all. En route, he’d paused to buy a hardback diary. It was in a paper bag on his knees.

‘You and I must help each other,’ he said.

‘How, Granddad?’

‘By being strong.’

Timothy sat on a stool by the fire. Like many ten-year-olds, he seemed so much younger. He certainly wasn’t ready to deal with his mother’s sudden incapacity. His father’s almost drunken disorientation.

‘We have to work together, you and I,’ said Michael. ‘We have to bring something good out of this.’

The boy didn’t look convinced. The boy appraised his grandfather with the disturbing percipience of the young who see life for what it is without yet being frightened. His hair was black and expensively dishevelled – a ‘look’ recommended by the stylist because it meant you didn’t have to comb your hair in the morning. He wore a red T-shirt. His eyes were dark and emotional like his mother’s; his expressions mentally calculating like his father.

‘Something good,’ repeated Michael.

‘Is that possible?’

For a brief moment, Michael remembered Jenny at Timothy’s age, lying in bed one night. She’d been frightened about something, and he’d said, ‘I’ll always look after you,’ and she’d replied, unblinking and with perfect composure, ‘No, you won’t.’ She’d grown to forget the exchange, but back then, on the cusp of growing up, she’d appreciated, as we all must, that we step into the world alone and will leave it in a like manner. That there are experiences in between that lie beyond the protection of those who love us, who would happily die to save our life. Timothy was appraising Michael now as Jenny had done then: with a kind of dark knowledge that the parent had forgotten or was hiding away.

‘Yes, it is possible,’ replied Michael, firmly.

There was much to say that he could not say, but that he believed, passionately: that Jenny’s accident was a shattering experience but that, in time, another kind of life could be built on the other side of disappointment, however crushing. That other people had been there and found peace. Making that point would have to wait, as much for Timothy as Jenny. For the moment Michael wanted to put in place some basic ground rules for the future that had opened out for them all.

He took the boy’s hands in his and said, ‘You must lead an absolutely normal life. Do the things you would have done if your mother hadn’t fallen off that stage.’

‘Wasn’t paralysed.’

‘Yes. Paralysed. She feels stranded, unable to move, a boat stuck in the harbour’ – Michael saw the phrase in Timothy’s mind: ‘Because she is’ – ‘and the last thing she wants is for you to feel tied to the house, tied to the room …
obliged
… obliged to be there, to be sad, to limit your own life. You set her free to cope as best she can if she sees that you are free. Climb trees. Phone your friends. Get annoyed because you have to go to bed. Ask to stay up late. She can be happy at least to see you happy. She can begin to find a new normality, if you are normal.’

Timothy nodded, but he didn’t speak. His expression said he didn’t climb trees. He had a PlayStation.

‘And you can help your father, too,’ urged Michael, feeling out of step and lagging behind. ‘Help him manage. Do some of the things he has to do before he gets round to them. Things he doesn’t want to do. Think one step ahead of him. He’ll see the clean dishes and be grateful.’

Timothy nodded again. He was in the scouts. He understood about a good deed a day.

‘And finally,’ said Michael, feeling strangely desperate, fearing he wasn’t reaching the boy, ‘I’ve got a present for you.’

Timothy frowned his curiosity. ‘What is it?’

Michael took the diary out of the paper bag and said, gently, ‘If ever you’re confused and unhappy, come talk to me, but if you can’t, put your feelings down on paper. Otherwise they’ll get blocked like leaves in the drain. No one will ever read what you write. It’ll help in the long run.’

Timothy took the book, unable to hide his disappointment. He’d expected something with a lot of RAM. And Michael knew at once that the boy wasn’t going to use it; that just as he was too young for the crisis, he was too young to be properly helped. He was going to have to live it out for now, and deal with the consequences later. Michael made one last-ditch attempt to help his grandson.

‘Don’t bottle up your anger.’

‘I’m not angry.’

‘Okay, fine … but if ever you find yourself boiling up, go break the garage window … the one that’s already cracked.’

Danny Carpenter had said just that:
Michael, thumping cushions is recommended, but frankly, I’m not convinced. Get a hammer and smash some glass. It’s a fantastic experience. Then come and tell me what you feel.
Michael hadn’t broken anything. He’d plumped up the cushions instead. Kept everything neat and tidy.

‘Granddad,’ began Timothy, ‘can I go now?’

‘Of course.’

I did the same thing, thought Michael with a stab of remembered distress. I asked could I go. Danny had watched him leave, powerless to reach inside another man. He never did learn about that trail in the Blue Stack Mountains and the blood spilled at the end of it.

Timothy was at the door, the diary under one arm. He turned round to look at his granddad and waved, his young face full of sudden emotion and warmth. He was a deep boy; a good boy; a boy whose feelings burst out like sunshine in winter. A boy of endless surprises. Michael waved back … they’d understood each other. When it came to making sense of boats sinking into sand, they were both secret travellers.

Michael breathed in the damp, tasting the spores of decay. His faith in a better life on the other side of disappointment had been dashed. Jenny had struggled. She’d done her best. She’d waited for the tide to come in … but cancer had come instead.
Cancer
. Hadn’t she suffered enough? Didn’t she deserve some kind of response for her faith? Some reply that surpassed her monumental fidelity? Not
cancer
. Not another desperate crisis. Not a
final
crisis without a solution. Jenny had simply closed her eyes and smiled … she’d said a kind of tide had come in after all, and the words had broken Michael’s heart. He couldn’t bear it. He couldn’t bear to see his broken girl accept more suffering.

But that was Jenny’s passage through life. Things could be different for Timothy.

Soon, he’d be installed permanently in Lavenham. He would be leading a normal life – as normal as possible in the circumstances. He would leave behind the time of grief and confusion. His mother’s struggle and death. His father’s window-breaking and neglect. The embarrassment at school. The pity in the street. Michael would then be able to take the youth gently in hand. Tenderly guide him towards the life he might have had, if only … if only so much had been otherwise, beginning on that fateful Friday evening when Peter Henderson had bought Jenny a glass of Entre-Deux-Mers in a Soho wine bar. But first there had to be violence. The necessary calculated brutality that only Néall Ó Mórdha could fully understand.

Michael went outside and opened the boot of his car. Taking a couple of toothpicks, he transpierced each sprout and fixed them like eyes to the round face of the cabbage. Then, carefully, he lowered the head into the plastic bag. Back inside the cottage, he used another toothpick to attach the handles of the bag to the top rear of the armchair, leaving the target lolling on the headrest. He then retrieved the Citroën instruction manual from the glove box – in lieu of the book that Emma had bought for Peter – and placed it on the armrest. The title, he was sure, would absolutely fascinate him. Standing at the door, Michael let a narrow shaft of Sunday light fall across the stinking room. Caught, like a night animal asleep, Peter lay in his comfy chair, his green, bulging eyes closed over by a plastic skin.

This was the Killing House. The SAS had something similar in Hereford. A purpose-built training centre where the shoot-to-kill boys could go through the motions of close-quarters battle training.

Anselm stopped in his tracks, frowned and retraced his steps. He’d just closed the outside door to the kitchens – taking a short cut to the river and his route to Mitch’s wherry – when he’d noticed a brother monk on his knees by Larkwood’s flagging Fiat. It was Brother Wilfred, the community’s retiring Guestmaster. Finding human contact a bit of a trial, the Prior had put him in charge of meeting people, organising their stay and generally extending the warm welcome of the Gilbertines. Wilf had become, to his astonishment, a screaming success. Anselm walked over to his side.

‘She won’t start?’ he asked, obviously.

‘I haven’t tried.’

Anselm persevered.

‘Wilf, the thing operates with a key. Stick it in the ignition and give it a turn.’

‘Not until I know it’s safe.’

Anselm sighed. This was one of those thorny subjects: the nature of intercessory prayer – asking for help in the light of what we had to do first. There was a minimum, surely? And even then, with all due respect to God’s knowledge of the internal combustion engine, wasn’t this a matter for the likes of Vincent Cooper?

‘Wilf, give me the key.’

The Guestmaster bowed low, peering under the passenger seat well. Coming to his feet, he looked around nervously.

‘Bede told me not to say anything,’ he murmured. ‘He says you’re raking over some old coals. That we all need to be careful. The whole community’s at risk. Because of you.’

‘What in God’s name are you talking about?’

‘Bede just taps his nose. Reckons the Prior might have picked the wrong man for the job.’ Wilf, always nervous and vaguely guilty, even when other people were at fault, writhed at breaking a confidence. ‘Reckons you’re a bit naive. Can’t see the dangers.’

‘What dangers?’

‘Bede just taps his nose. But he told me to check for a lunchbox under the car. He knows an
awful
lot of strange things, Anselm. I thought he was all gob and high blood pressure, but he knows how to make a bomb. He says you take a small tube and fill it with mercury … it’s called a tilt switch. Won’t tell me the rest, but he says when you drive on a gradient the liquid flows to the other end of the tube and completes an electric circuit which detonates a fuse and then … bang. You’re up there with Father Herbert who survived Passchendaele.’

Anselm snatched the keys, started the engine and drove the Fiat back and forth, pressing the accelerator and flinging the gears as if his foot were on Bede’s head and his hand tearing at one of his arms. The car thoroughly rocked, he left the door open and ushered Wilf towards the driver’s seat.

‘It’s not that kind of case, Wilf,’ he panted, aping patience. ‘No one’s at risk. The old coals are cinders in the grate. Bede’s still smarting from the fact he never rose higher than junior librarian and van driver for a rural outreach project that dished up books like meals-on-wheels to the housebound. It was a good, important job, but he wanted more. He’s forever searching out new levels of importance. Tell him from me that he better check under his bed. I learned a lot of bad stuff at the Bar. Things you can’t find out in books.’

‘Sorry, Anselm,’ mumbled Wilf, looking sheepish. ‘I suppose it’s me that’s naive.’

‘No, Wilf, you’re simply trusting. And you can trust me. No one is in any kind of danger.’

Mitch had toasted crumpets and lathered them with butter and honey – Larkwood honey, Anselm’s honey. They ate quietly for a while, Mitch waiting for a report on the meeting with Doctor Ingleby.

‘He’d agreed to meet me because he wanted to find out how much I knew,’ said Anselm, at last. ‘He gave me Peter’s side of the story without reservation, as if to counter whatever I might have heard from Nigel and Helen. He was, at times, strangely clinical, as if he were detached, when he plainly isn’t. He cares for Peter. At the mention of his name, these curtains in his eyes just closed. He’s hiding something, out of affection. He’s frightened. Such is my guess.’ Anselm reached for a crumpet wondering whether to be slightly offended that Mitch had said nothing about the honey, its exceptional texture and subtle flavour. He waited a moment, and then gave up: ‘He seemed to give me a warning, too. Hinted that I might be out of step with my time; told me that I should leave matters well alone; that people might get hurt.’

‘Sounds like a familiar message,’ said Mitch, archly. ‘And it suggests he
knew
about the pact and was
sure
that it had brought Jenny peace of mind. Which is why he’d been prepared to endorse it.’

Anselm agreed. ‘He came to Leiston very sure of himself. But that’s not how he went away.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The letter,’ replied Anselm, as if laying down an ace. ‘It really disturbed him. Because it points to murder rather than suicide. He hadn’t expected that and it left him a very worried man.’

Mitch threw his napkin on the table.

‘That damned letter,’ he exclaimed, as if a rash had come back. ‘Why is it so bloody important?’

‘Because the author speaks for Jenny,’ replied Anselm, simply. ‘And because they came to me rather than anyone else, expecting me to fight tooth and nail, in the face of the evidence. As you once did. Twice did.’

Mitch was stumped. Exasperated, he walked over to the noticeboard.

‘We’ve got to find them,’ he mumbled. ‘We’ve got to find out why they’ll write what they think but won’t speak out … it’s got to be one of this lot’ – he was examining the photographs. After a moment his finger tapped the face of Emma Goodwin – ‘What about Jenny’s mother?’

On first considering her features Anselm had seen more of a choreographer than a vet. An artist who carefully organised other people’s movements, not someone who castrated cats and put dogs to sleep. He’d then abandoned his own insight.

‘She’s supported him without fail,’ said Mitch. ‘She’s gone the extra mile … and in doing all that she was deceiving Peter. Telling him she and Michael were behind him all the way. What if she wants him accused … but not by her? Or Michael? What if she wants someone else to expose him, so that she can move in and pick up the pieces of Timothy’s life?’