The Good Priest (13 page)

The dog, which had not been fed all day, meekly obeyed and began prowling round the kitchen table. Seeing a plateful of shredded pork close to its edge, she raised herself on her hindlegs and managed to gulp down the lot in a matter of seconds.

Still fuming about the inadequacies of the recipe, and now wondering what ‘soy sauce' might be in English, her master did not witness the theft. However, the smell of burning fat alerted him to a pan hissing and spitting on an electric ring. Grabbing its metal handle with bare hands, he screamed and dropped it onto the floor. Splashed by hot oil, the dog rushed with its tail between its legs towards the kitchen door. The old man, desperate to get to the cold tap and bathe his blistered hands, collided with the dog, falling over her and banging his head hard on the tiled floor.

After a couple of minutes he regained consciousness. Feeling cold and with aches in every part of his body, he dragged himself upstairs to bed. Once under the bedclothes he remembered that he had not undressed. Unwilling to get out of bed again, he wriggled out of his trousers and ejected them from under the sheets. As he was attempting
to undo a cuff button with his teeth, he heard knocking on his front door. Forgetting that he was half-naked, he lumbered out of bed and went to answer it.

Stuck on the front door lintel was another yellow Post-it note. On it was printed, in blue ink, the following instructions:

He had long ago given up reading these instructions. Unhooking the chain, he opened his front door wide.

The stranger before him, taking in his hunched posture, sunken cheeks and trouserless state, relaxed. You did not need a knife to kill a baby, and that was all this shrunken, wizened, toothless creature now was. Nothing but a husk. Everything would be his. Who was there to stop him?

‘Do I know you?' Dennis May enquired, peering up into the cold brown eyes of the stranger as if for guidance.

‘No, but I know all about you,' his visitor responded, slipping past him into the hallway. On his approach, Julia, her belly heavy with pork, gave a single token bark and then, after sniffing the intruder's outstretched hand, waddled off to her basket.

Everyone, including Dennis May himself, had expected him to die peacefully in his bed. After all, he was seventy-eight, tired and suffering from some kind of memory loss. But his end was like that of ‘a pig in an abattoir', as the ashen-faced trainee photographer described the scene to her boss over the phone. As she talked, she was meticulously circling the pool of blood on the kitchen floor, carefully avoiding any contact with the dark spatterings on the bland white door of the fridge. Looking up at the ceiling, she snapped a galaxy of dark specks placed there by a last exuberant spray of blood.

Theresa, the old man's niece, reluctant carer and sender of the birthday card, watched her every move from the next room. No one had noticed her sitting there when the door had swung open. In response to the condolences offered in the ensuing days, she repeated over and over again, ‘I told him … I told him.'

Two days later, a post mortem was carried out, but by then no one except Dr Allan was interested in the tell-tale tangles and plaques in the brain tissue of Alzheimer's disease. The severing of May's carotid artery by his murderer stole her thunder. She had diagnosed it instantly, she assured her sceptical colleagues, simply from May's failure to recognise her despite their meeting less than a month earlier about the itchy rash behind his knees. The cognitive tests merely confirmed her diagnosis.

‘I don't know. You'd forsaken your raven locks in the meantime – and undergone the
procedure
,' one of them replied, with a mischievous grin.

‘The procedure?'

‘The … uplift?'

‘Patient confidentiality, my arse!' she answered irritably, putting down her coffee cup and heading for the door.

CHAPTER NINE

Three days later, his mouth so dry that his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, Father Vincent contemplated the newspaper, trying to steel himself to open it. The newspaper itself seemed revolting; deadly as a snake, capable of inflicting harm on him, and his disgust with it was almost visceral. It would contain the reporter's distilled bile. Had he tongs to hand he would have been tempted to use them to pick it up, however preposterous he knew that would be. Since the journalist's ambush he had bought a copy every day and forced himself to read it. As a result he had now learned more about the misdeeds of celebrities than from all his previous newspaper reading, internet browsing and TV viewing put together.

A quick scan of the second and third pages revealed nothing of any interest to him but, turning to the fourth, his heart missed a beat. It was dominated by a single grainy colour photograph of a shambling vagrant, wild-eyed and scowling, his arm raised menacingly at the photographer. Instinctively and instantly, he recognised himself in the creature. The man he was staring at looked dirty, deranged and dangerous. He had been caught by the photographer standing on a lonely road, the wind and rain lashing him like a beast in the field. The impression created was of a damned soul raging against God and all of His works. But, he thought ruefully, it had all been as carefully staged by her as any shot taken by Diane Arbus
or Mario Testino. First she had driven by and drenched him with water from the puddle. Then, when he reacted just as she had hoped, she had turned and caught him in all his sodden fury on her mobile. She had cast herself as the matador and him as the tormented bull.

The report accompanying the image was lengthy and scandalous, and its author's enthusiasm for her task could be heard in each breathy sentence. Vincent was described as ‘small and scruffy, but not unattractive with piercing blue eyes and a mop of sandy-coloured hair'. The nuns, the writer observed, must enjoy having him ‘livening up their convent'. An unnamed female parishioner had, apparently, volunteered that he had ‘romped with countless of his female parishioners over the years,' adding that his career as ‘a Casanova in a cassock' had come to an end when he was ‘caught in the act in the sacristy by an enraged husband'. The reader was directed to further revelations on page seven. There below a photograph of ‘Bab's baps' were two further columns about him. In them another unnamed parishioner listed his ‘top ten trysting places', and his favourite chat-up line which, he learnt, was: ‘Anything you'd like to confess to me, babe?' A ‘broken-hearted' Laura Houston was then quoted as saying, ‘Vincent Ross is insatiable. He won't be stopped until he's finally thrown out of the church. He's preyed on countless vulnerable women over the years. I'm simply the last in a long line.' The final sentence of the piece read: ‘A spokesman for the Catholic Church said: “We have no comment to make.”'

As he tried to light his cigarette, his fingers trembled and made it difficult to keep the flame still. Once it was
lit, he took a deep draw and looked out of his window at the hills in the distance. The sun streamed through a break in the dark storm clouds, onto the highest summit, bathing it in a lemon-yellow light, creating deep shadows in the clefts of the cliffs and turning the old permanent pasture a startling lime-green colour. The sky had become a deep Prussian blue, darkening as if getting ready for nightfall. Gazing on the scene, he felt nothing, hardly took it in. Now it had happened; the waiting was over and the explosion had gone off. Smoke, dust and shrapnel dirtied the air, and body parts lay all around. She had pushed the detonator, but he had provided the dynamite.

Despite the wanton lies staring him in the face he found, to his surprise, that he was not angry. Anger had not, as he had expected and hoped, come to his aid, galvanising him into action, obliterating grief and shame. Instead, he felt numb, and as insubstantial as air, as if his entire innards had been pulverised by the blast. Overwhelmed suddenly by dizziness, he sat on the edge of his bed and took another deep draw on his cigarette. Everything, for the moment, seemed strangely remote and unimportant. After three days of anxiety, sweat running down his back as he scanned the newspaper daily, the story was now out. And it was a story: pure fiction. Reading it he had felt like a bystander, as if someone else was being pilloried, someone else was being vilified. But it was his name that was being invoked throughout. He had not ‘romped' with women in his own church. Had he ever ‘romped', he wondered? He glanced again at the open paper and saw once more the wild-eyed travesty of his
photograph, read again his own name, but felt nothing. None of it seemed to matter any more. Nothing mattered. Nothing hurt. He exhaled, and smoke issued like steam from his mouth.

An insistent and ear-splitting beeping assaulted his ears and he looked round, trying to locate its source. As he stood up, Sister Monica bumped through his closed door, saw him with cigarette in hand, and, now shaking her head in annoyance, prodded the smoke alarm on the ceiling with the end of her wooden broom handle. Seconds later, Sister Margaret hobbled in, panting heavily, and, incongruously, holding a pink face flannel in her hand. She too looked askance at the stunned priest.

‘Fuck!' he exclaimed, unaware until the word had left his mouth that he had said it out loud. Then, to the astonishment of the two nuns, he crushed his cigarette into his empty wine glass and marched straight out of the door. Sister Monica caught Sister Margaret's eye.

‘Was that Bertie's foul-mouthed cry I heard?' she asked, cocking her head to one side as if to catch anything else the parrot might say.

With every footstep he took, the anger inside him rose, consuming him, making him blind to his surroundings. It was as if the shrieking noise emitted by the alarm had released his fury too, broken his trance. And he was glad to be awake at last. Yes. He had done wrong. He knew that. Foolishly, he had allowed himself to become too close to a woman. But that was all, all he had done. He had not so much as laid a finger on her, tempted as he had been, far less slept with her. Since his ordination, all of sixteen years
ago, he had been celibate. As chaste as a statue and purer than holy water. And it had not been easy. He was not made of spirit alone, was no ascetic, did not share Ruskin's distaste for warm female flesh. Quite the reverse. He had longed to touch Laura, kiss every inch of her as she had offered herself to him. But he had not. Few, finding a bunch of ripe, black grapes hanging above their mouth would not taste it, caress the fruit with their tongue. But he had not. And here he was being trashed by the tabloids, sharing column inches with thrice-married love rats and disgraced porn stars. He had no home, no job, no income and, for all he could tell, no future. Something must be done, he said to himself, parroting unwittingly the war cry of Lady Lindsay. So saying, he turned on his heels and began the long walk back to the Red Retreat.

Catching himself at the mirror looking anew at his ‘piercing blue eyes', he laughed out loud. Had the reporter not noticed the crooked nose then? ‘Not unattractive', indeed! The impertinent bisom. Still, it was, he conceded, a more charitable verdict than the one he had reached on her.

Deciding to spend the evening with the nuns in their communal sitting-room, he finished his half bottle of Cabernet Franc in an attempt to make himself more convivial, less self-absorbed. Having flouted one of their few unspoken rules and sworn out loud in front of them he felt that an apology was overdue. How they would greet him, if they had read the paper, he did not know. The account in it bore little resemblance to what he had said to Sister Monica when he had first sought sanctuary in their home.

As he walked into the room, the entire community, all seven of them, were sitting in front of the TV, transfixed by Captain Mainwaring's antics in
Dads' Army
. Sister Susan, unaware of his arrival, was almost doubled up with hilarity, rocking back and forth in her chair. Choosing his moment, he tiptoed past the nuns and took the only vacant seat, an armchair opposite one of the picture windows. Every couple of minutes, a chorus of laughter would sweep the room, punctuated at intervals by solo chuckles and a descant of giggles. Looking at the TV he found himself unable even to smile at Croft and Perry's jokes, his fingers searching nervously in his pockets for his cigarettes as if they had a mind of their own. Staring at the backs of the women's heads, watching them as they exchanged glances at Pike's silliness or Private Godfrey's sweet smile, he felt, suddenly, lonelier than he had ever been in his own house. He wanted his life back. He wanted Satan back.

‘A cup of tea, Father?'

It was Sister Ellen, and without waiting for an answer, she gave him one, murmuring softly to herself, ‘Now, where's that sugar bowl got to?'

‘Red card! Red card! Get the bugger off the park!' the parrot squawked.

‘Shut it, bird – as that Mitchell man might say,' the old nun retorted, rattling a spoon along the bars of the cage and startling the bird into silence.

‘We cleaned him out today,' she said, looking back at the priest, ‘and put a copy of page four of the
Record
underneath his perch. That's where it belongs.'

‘And when that reporter phones,' Sister Margaret giggled, ‘we say, “What you wan'? Spare lib, Cantonese spare lib or prum sauce ‘n' spare lib?” That gets rid of her!'

While the sisters argued over what to watch next, Father Vincent, heartened by their kindness and their resilience, cast his eyes over the
Scotsman
. A small piece caught his attention. It concerned the murder of someone called Dennis May. Late in life the man had, apparently, opened the largest casino in Edinburgh.

The name seemed familiar and he repeated it in his head trying to figure out where he had come across it before. Dennis May. Of course – a Dennis May had taught him for a couple of weeks at the Scotch College in Rome. Satisfied that he had identified the man he re-read the report and was interested to see that he had been a big wheel in the gambling industry in Scotland. That seemed perfectly likely. At the College, his Dennis May had been an ardent card player, relieving many a seminarian of his book allowance. In fact, it was all coming back to him. Hadn't the man been thrown out for some such misdemeanour? Some gambling swindle or, on reflection, had it been an affair with a woman? Somehow, a sticky end for him seemed unsurprising.