Trauma (29 page)

'Good old Ryan,' said Main. 'No bullshit. I think that's what I like best about you.'

Lafferty smiled too. He said, 'I've always thought of it as a curse. The truth can be such a hard taskmaster.'

'Well, I appreciate it,' said Main. 'Neither of us knows what to do.'

'I can't quite see why they're trying to warn you off with powerful signs of witchcraft,' said Lafferty. 'It doesn't seem to make sense.'

'Maybe they're trying to impress me,' said Main. 'They're demonstrating how powerful they are, earning my fear and respect? After all, my front door is undamaged but they walked in.'

'But why?' said Lafferty. 'The matter is really out of your hands. You've told the papers all you know and the police are handling the inquiry so why warn you off?'

Main thought for a moment then said, 'Maybe they see me as the prime mover, the instigator of the investigation, the one who won't let go.'

'Maybe, said Lafferty but he didn't sound convinced.

'I can't think of any other reason,' said Main.

'Me neither,' said Lafferty. 'Do you want to come back with me to St Xavier's?'

Main smiled and said, 'Sanctuary?'

'Something like that,' agreed Lafferty.

'No, but thanks all the same. I'm going to stay and take my chances and when you think about it, I don't have a lot left to lose, have I?'

Lafferty smiled wryly and said, 'I suppose from your point of view . . . you haven't.'

'What are we going to do about that thing?' asked Main, pointing to the hand. I don't see any point in calling in the police. Do you?'

'There's the question of whose hand it is,' said Lafferty.

'But the chances are from what you've said that it was taken from a corpse.'

'Almost certainly,' said Lafferty thoughtfully. 'Although they would have been hard pushed to come up with the hand of a convicted murderer. It was usual to cut the hands off a corpse while it was still hanging on the gibbet.'

'If we bring in the police and the papers get a hold of this they're going to have a field day,' said Main.

Lafferty nodded and said, 'I wonder if that's what they intended?'

‘
It doesn't go too well with trying to warn me off.’

'No,' Lafferty agreed. 'It doesn't. Have you got a plastic bag?'

'You're going to take it away?'

'I'll put it in the furnace at St Xavier's,' said Lafferty.

Main went to the kitchen and emptied a plastic Tesco bag which still had groceries in it. He gave the empty bag to Lafferty who picked up the hand gingerly and dropped it into the bag. It hit the bottom with a slap and Main screwed up his face.

'I know,' said Lafferty. 'You and me both.'

It was a little after one in the morning when Lafferty got back to St Xavier's. The house was cold - the heating had gone off at ten. He lit the gas fire in his room and paused in front of it for a few moments to warm his hands. He didn't look at the plastic bag sitting on the floor beside him but was terribly aware of its presence. He decided that the sooner he got it over with the better. He would take it outside to the old hut that stood between the church and the house which housed the central heating boiler although calling it that bestowed an air of modernity on it which was entirely unjustified. The heating system was ancient, so old in fact that no heating firm in the city would take up the challenge of servicing it. The same applied when the system broke down. When repairs became absolutely essential they were carried out by an old, ex-marine engineer in the congregation who did what he could.

Feeling as if the night were alive with hidden eyes watching him, Lafferty left the house. He opened the door and was assailed by he twin smells of oil and mustiness as he closed the door behind him and turned on the light - a bare, forty watt bulb that hung from an old flex draped over a roof support strut. He felt his pulse rate quicken as he looked down at the bag, wondering if some form of service might be in order. He hastily improvised a few words of prayer, asking that the owner of the hand be granted peace.

As he removed the hand from the bag, his reluctance to touch it made him fumble it and it fell to the floor. The candle wax covering split open and he saw there was a scar on the side of it. What was more, it was a scar he recognised! The last time he’d seen this hand its fingers had been clutching at the moon on the banks of the canal. It was John McKirrop's.

Lafferty fought his revulsion to consider the significance of his discovery and found some horrific logic in it. If McKirrop had survived his injuries, the odds were that he would have been charged with the murder of the woman, Bella. This object at his feet was as near to the hand of a murderer as the constructors of the hand of glory could get. Such dedication to detail frightened Lafferty. It also forged another link between this nightmare and HTU.

He steeled himself to pick up McKirrop's hand between his thumb and forefinger, opened the small iron door at the front of the furnace and threw it in before closing it quickly again and resting for a moment to recover his composure. God! he needed a drink. He closed up the hut and returned to the house where he poured himself a large brandy and took it into the bedroom; the gas fire had warmed it up a bit.

Lafferty sipped the brandy slowly while he thought over the events of the evening, one he feared that he would never forget. But why? was the question that now nagged at him. Why go to such lengths to advertise the involvement of witchcraft in the Simon Main affair? If the police could find out nothing about the practice of the black arts in the area and no one else could either it was obvious that these people had succeeded in conducting their affairs in complete secrecy yet here they were, doing something totally out of character. They must have realised that the newspapers would have a field day if Main had called the police instead of him . . . just as they had when McKirrop had given them his tale of ritual disinterment. Why would they want that?

The truth dawned on Lafferty with a suddenness that took his breath away. What had, only a moment before, been so complicated and puzzling was now quite simple and terrifyingly obvious. He rubbed his cheek nervously as he sought to come to terms with an entirely new hypothesis. Taking a sip at his brandy, he noticed that his hand had developed a slight tremor. He wanted to think everything through logically but his mind insisted on taking giant leaps. The new theory might be simple but, in its own way, it was also very frightening.

There was a notebook lying on the table beside the old hymn books. He had been using it earlier to make notes about what he should say at Mary O'Donnell's funeral in the morning. He brought it over to the fire and sat down with it on his knee to make notes. McKirrop had been in the cemetery that night and had seen all that had gone on. There was no doubt about that but both he and Sarah Lasseter had harboured doubts over McKirrop's version of what had happened.

Sarah believed that McKirrop had been murdered because of this. The four young men who died in the car fire had also been in the cemetery that night and they too knew the truth of what had gone on and insisted that Main had got it 'all wrong' when he had confronted them in the pub, giving rise to more doubt over what had really happened.

There was a strong possibility that these four had been murdered too to keep the truth quiet. So far so good, but while he and Main, not to mention the police and the newspapers, were meant to embark on a hunt for devil worshippers fuelled by the Hand of Glory incident there was a much simpler explanation. It said that Simon Main's body was missing from its grave because . . .
it had never been there in the first place!

This was the new theory that Lafferty embraced as he considered its implications for all of them. It meant that the powerful people behind this whole awful affair had probably nothing at all to do with devil worship or black magic. It had all been a red herring. But, as far as he was concerned, they had overdone it with the hand stunt. The real villains were the people who knew why Simon Main had never been buried in the cemetery at all.

He ran through everything again, making sure that it all fitted. The black mass story had most likely been an invention of John McKirrop. He had made the whole thing up to attract attention to himself or perhaps he’d even been paid to do it? Come to think of it, that might have been the reason he’d ended up in hospital for a second time. Maybe he’d got greedy and asked for more.

The four 'yobs' as they had been described by both McKirrop and Main had been just that. They had been drunken louts who had dug up a grave for kicks - something they hadn't really denied according to Main, but the coffin had been empty! That would be why they’d told Main he’d got it wrong. That was why they had referred to McKirrop as a liar in the pub.

The big question was what had really happened to Simon Main's body? Some kind of mortuary mix-up perhaps? It was not entirely unknown for such things to happen. In fact, it probably happened a great deal more often than anyone cared to admit. If couples could occasionally leave hospital with the wrong baby in the back of the car then surely which body went into which coffin was even more open to occasional error.

Lafferty dismissed the notion almost as quickly as it arose. If five people had been murdered, it was nothing to do with any kind of mix-up or mistake, however embarrassing it might have been. It was something much more serious and organised than that. He checked the time and saw that it was a quarter to two. He had a funeral to conduct in just over eight hours.

A slight lightening of the sky warned Lafferty that morning had come. He hadn't been to bed at all and felt relieved that daylight had returned - problems always seemed worse during the hours of darkness. He got up from the chair where he had spent the last few hours wondering what he should do about his new hypothesis and went over to the window to look at out at what was a cold grey world. His legs felt stiff and the stubble on his face rasped against his collar when he turned his head. It made him think about shaving and hot water but that only served to remind him of the furnace heating the water and what was fuelling it. It wasn't a bad dream; it had really happened. He shivered and rubbed his arms before shuffling through to the bathroom in his stocking feet - removing his shoes had been his sole concession to undressing.

Feeling better after a shave and a hot bath, he made himself toast and tea and sat down at the kitchen table while examining his notes for the O'Donnell funeral, not that they were copious. He had failed to come up with a magic formula for providing comfort in the circumstances. He had no idea why God had allowed such a thing to happen. It was going to have to be a variation on the theme of the ways of the Lord being strange. Have faith and trust in him; there are some things that we are not meant to understand just yet.

His mind started to wander again. He was still undecided about telling John Main about his new theory. The man was on an emotional knife edge; he would have to be awfully sure of his ground before saying anything. He did decide however, to contact Sarah Lasseter and tell her of his suspicions. If he was right about Simon Main never having been buried in the first place then the starting point for any investigation would be in HTU, where the boy had died. He suddenly realised that he had come up with a motive for the death of John McKirrop at the hands of one of the staff in HTU, something that he and Sarah had failed to do at in their last conversation. It made him more certain than ever that he was on the right track but time was getting on. He started to look out his vestments for the funeral.

The O'Donnells had decided that their daughter's body should be cremated but they had also expressed a wish that there should be a short service at St Xavier's before going down to the crematorium. Lafferty had readily agreed, hoping at the time that this was a sign that Jean's faith was winning through if she could demonstrate her affection for the church. His hopes had been dashed however, when Jean had explained that she hated the chapel down at the crematorium. 'It's a toilet,' she said when Lafferty had asked her why not.

It was a view he could sympathise with. The crematorium chapel did not have much going for it in the way of atmosphere. It was a bare, almost circular room with doors diametrically opposed to each other so that mourners entered by one door and left by another. This was so that the chain of the day was unbroken. As one funeral party left another arrived. As for decor, there was none. It was as impersonal as a hotel room. Not even the flowers were a constant. When each funeral was over the flowers left too.

It had already started to rain as Mary O'Donnell's coffin was brought into St Xavier's and laid down gently on its catafalque in front of Lafferty. He watched the mourners file in. Their dress ranged from charcoal grey suits to fluorescent yellow bomber jackets. Some of the relatives had obviously not seen each other for some time and gave exaggerated smiles of recognition as their eyes met before mouthing silent greetings. A number of women were sobbing and Lafferty could see that it was going to be a distressing service. Sobbing, like laughter, could be infectious.