The Quick and the Dead (A Sister Agnes Mystery)

by Alison Joseph

  ‘You know —’ Rona said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t think he wanted to die. I think he thought he was dying, but that doesn’t mean he wanted to.’

  ‘No.’

  They sipped their tea. ‘After Becky, and now Col,’ Rona said. ‘It’s all very weird.’

  Agnes nodded.

  ‘Or it might just be asthma,’ Rona said.

  Agnes took a large mouthful of hot tea. ‘I hope Sam’s OK,’ she said.

  *

  ‘Sam’s gone,’ Jeff said, when Rona and Agnes arrived back at the camp. Agnes paid the taxi-driver, marvelling at the warm morning sunlight so inappropriate to the events of the night.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Agnes asked, turning to Jeff as the cab bumped back down the track and Rona went over to the stream to wash.

  ‘Soon as Jenn told her what’d happened, she cleared out her bender, packed her bag and walked.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Mike’s. We tried to stop her, she was going to hitch, there and then. We asked her to wait for you, but she said she couldn’t hang about, not after Becky and now Col, she said she had to go. In the end Zak said he’d hitch with her, that’s where they’ve gone.’

  ‘To Mike’s?’

  Jeff nodded.

  ‘And where’s everyone else?’

  Jeff knelt and blew on the fire. ‘Who else? Two down, six and a dog to go — this is going to change the fucking face of protest, when word gets out.’

  ‘Wait a minute, Jeff, there’s no evidence to link Col with —’

  ‘If the pigs can tell me they’re doing all they can to find out what happened to Becks, if that hospital can tell me that Col died of asthma — then maybe, just maybe, I’ll listen. But otherwise — you tell me, Agnes — fucking spooks hanging around the bushes all night, crazy phone calls to the office, Becky’s corpse in a fucking fridge while the pigs do nothing — I’m angry, Agnes, I’m fucking angry …’ He rubbed ash from his eyes and got to his feet. ‘But they won’t stop us. They can pick us off one by fucking one, we’ll just rise up somewhere else …’ He turned and stomped off towards his tree.

  Agnes sat by the fire, blinking back tears from the smoke. After a while she got up and wandered into the woods, following the same path she’d followed with Dog the night before. As she approached the point where the paths diverged, she saw a figure standing on the lower path, about where they’d found Col. It took her a second to realise it was Bill. He turned and saw her, as she scrambled down to join him. He stared at the ground.

  ‘How was it?’ he said at last.

  ‘OK, I suppose,’ she replied at last. ‘Tough for Rona. We’re superfluous, now the next of kin are on their way. Not that he’s got anyone obvious.’

  ‘Did they talk about the inhaler?’

  ‘They said,’ Agnes began, ‘that if someone has a weak heart —’

  Bill thumped a tree-trunk with his fist. ‘Why did the kid have a bloody inhaler when it was quite clearly the wrong stuff for him?’

  ‘We weren’t to know.’

  ‘And after what he’d been through, anyone would have a weak heart, and I just go and fill him up with fucking poison — ’

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ Agnes said firmly.

  He looked at her. ‘It’s nice of you to say so,’ he said flatly. She returned his stare. ‘And what had he been through? You just said, “after what he’d been through —”’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ There was a distance in his eyes.

  ‘Oh come on, Bill —’

  He surveyed the surrounding trees.

  ‘Last night,’ she went on, ‘it seems to me that you were close enough behind me to help with Col — almost as soon as I found him, you were there.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So how come you appear not to have seen the person who was shadowing me?’

  Bill eyed Agnes for a moment. ‘I don’t get you.’

  ‘It’s quite simple, Bill. Someone was walking behind me, making sure that their footsteps were in time with mine, almost as soon as I left the camp. Now either it was you — in which case, why so furtive? Or, it was someone else, someone known to Dog, too — in which case, why didn't you see them?’

  Bill paused, then said, ‘I thought we might be getting on better than this by now.’

  ‘Or,’ Agnes went on, ‘you did see them, in which case the question is, why didn’t you say anything? Now I’m sure you have your own reasons for lurking in the forest, and I’m not actually interested in what they might be. But when it comes to someone’s life being in danger, a boy not yet out of his teens, and you lurk and lurk and know more than you bother to tell until it’s too bloody late —’

  Bill’s voice was quiet. ‘You’re angry with me?’

  ‘Of course I’m bloody angry with you. You and your silly hippy ego trip of Knowing the Ways of the Forest, when we all know that for every vole or fox you see, you see ten bloody detectives or bailiffs or security guards or whatever they are — it seems to me, you could have done more than you did.’ Bill was staring at the ground. His voice was quiet. ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’

  There was silence between them. Bill said, ‘You’re right to be angry. I’m angry too. And yeah, I should have been quicker. I knew he was in danger, and I was too late.’ Agnes looked at his profile as he stared out towards the edge of the wood. He blinked and turned to her. ‘And unlike you, I have no one to shout at.’

  Agnes swallowed. ‘Bill.’ He was looking at her. ‘Bill, I’m —’ She took a deep breath. ‘I didn’t mean to sound as if I was accusing you.’ He waited. ‘I’m upset, I suppose.’

  ‘We both are,’ he said. He sat on the ground, and she sat down next to him, pulling her raincoat around her.

  ‘OK,’ he said, after a while. ‘In answer to your questions. Firstly, yeah, sure, I see the odd geezer sizing the place up at odd hours of the night, usually at first light when all your crusties there are still asleep. But what’s the big deal? It’s Department of Transport land and they want it back. Secondly, there wasn’t anyone else following you last night. It was me.’

  ‘So why —?’

  ‘Why creep along? Because, Little Sister, I wanted to know where you were going. It’s simple. You interest me.’ Agnes fiddled with a loose button on her coat. ‘But — but you must have seen Col come into the woods earlier?’

  Bill shook his head. ‘He must have come from the village, across the fields. He wouldn’t have passed me.’

  ‘But you knew he was in danger. You just said —’

  ‘I know only what I told you,’ Bill said sharply. ‘I heard one conversation about their shared history, and that’s all. And I knew they were scared. And, yeah, sure, I should have known more, but like I say, I live here. I have my meat to hunt for. My purpose is not to look out for the safety of that lot, although I do what I can. In this case, it wasn’t enough.’ He pulled at some bits of moss on a tree-stump next to him. ‘Agnes?’ he said, and she turned to him. ‘Once you’ve decided that someone’s a prat, do you ever change your mind?’

  Agnes wound the loose thread around its button. ‘I’m sorry about that.’

  Bill stood up and stretched. ‘Shall we go back?’ Agnes got to her feet next to him, and he reached over and brushed a twig from her hair. ‘I’m only a prat sometimes,’ he said.

  Agnes turned towards the camp, smoothing her coat where she’d been sitting on it. ‘That makes two of us, then,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not sure women can be prats,’ he said, as they walked back to the camp. ‘Isn’t it just a masculine noun?’

  ‘Like priest, you mean?’

  Bill stopped and looked at her. ‘You’re angry about an awful lot, aren’t you, Little Sister?’

  *

  Agnes joined the M25 at the slip road and swerved fast into the middle lane, ignoring the flashing lights of the driver behind her. It had never occurred to her before to question the masculinity of the prie
sthood; let alone to be angry about it. In her calling she had met so many interesting, scholarly, maverick, intelligent women that it had never crossed her mind that being excluded from the priesthood was any kind of issue at all. She put her foot down and dodged into the fast lane to overtake a BMW, and wondered why she had let slip that remark to Bill. Why him, she asked herself, realising as his name crossed her mind that once again, he had eluded her; his slippery sympathy, his apparent concern being a screen behind which he could hide, opaque, invisible.

  She stopped for bread and cheese on the way home. There was a message on her machine from Madeleine giving Agnes her hostel rota days for the next week. She picked up the phone and dialled Mike’s number.

  ‘Hi,’ she heard Mike’s voice on a recorded message. ‘Mike and Sam aren’t able to come to the phone right now, but please leave us a message after the tone.’

  Agnes hung up. Mike and Sam. It was all too neat, too easy. This Us, this Father-and-Daughter Us after a mere few weeks of half-hearted administration on the part of overstretched Social Services departments. Agnes picked up her London street map and looked up the estate in Stepney where Linda and Annie had spent their uneasy, chaotic childhood. She put the map in her pocket and went out, back down the stairs to her car, and drove, seeing the dilapidated blocks of post-war housing grow more grey, more shabby, until she reached the Atherton Estate. She parked in the main road opposite the estate, next to a high fence. There was a smell of burning plastic. She walked past the first block, called ‘Aberdeen Court' and found herself in a courtyard surrounded on three sides by balconied, three-storey flats. Some were obviously still well-maintained, with window boxes of petunias and geraniums; others were derelict, their broken windows boarded up. The tarmac yard was covered in broken glass, crushed cans and graffiti. Amongst the scrawled, brightly coloured names someone had written ‘Death, First and Last’. Agnes wandered further in, under an archway, emerging into another, similar courtyard. She surveyed the neat, optimistic architecture, the new hope of slum clearance, now dying in the embers of the welfare state. Somewhere in here, she thought with sudden conviction, lies the key to Sam's past. She looked up, at the nailed-up doors, at the straggling washing, signs of the struggle to maintain some kind of life amongst the debris. Where to begin, she wondered, walking back to the street. When she reached her car she saw two young men, their feet huge in roller blades, one lounging against the driver’s door, the other sitting on the bonnet. She smiled at them and they stayed exactly where they were, eyeing her as she approached them. Then the boy on the bonnet suddenly smiled back, slid off the car and both glided away down the street.

  Agnes drove back to Southwark, wondering whether Julius was free to go out to eat that evening; thinking that she must phone Athena; wondering where to start to trace Sam’s early life. Back home she tried Mike’s number again and he answered.

  ‘Hi, Agnes, good of you to call. How’s things?’

  ‘I suppose you know about Sam’s friend Col having died?’ There was the briefest pause. ‘Yes. She told me he had asthma. I guess living rough doesn’t help all that. Hey, she’s here, do you want a word?’

  Sam came on the line. ‘I was going to ring you,’ she said quietly. ‘Running off and that, lunched it, you know.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Agnes said. ‘It must have been a bit much for you after Becky too.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So you haven’t told Mike the whole story?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He said Col’s death was asthma.’ Agnes waited. Eventually Sam said, ‘It was.’

  ‘And Becky?’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘And the past lives? And Emily Quislan?’

  Agnes heard Sam catch her breath, before she said, ‘Oh, you know, all that that —’

  ‘Sam, I need a straight answer.’

  ‘It weren’t really me, it were Becky and Col, and now they’re gone anyway, like she said — ’

  ‘Like who said?’

  ‘I never met her, Col told me about her, and when Becky died he got scared ’cos of what she’d said.’

  ‘Sam — who’ll be next?’

  ‘No one. That’s it now.’

  ‘Not you?’

  ‘She never knew about me. It was only what Col told me, that’s all I knew. He said it was secret. I gotta go now.’

  ‘Sam, you’ve got to tell me more. If Becky’s murderer is out there —’

  ‘Mike says it’s me tea. Bye.’

  ‘Sam —’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I think, Agnes. I think they made it up. I think they wanted to liven things up a bit. Anyway, it’s over now. Gotta go. Bye.’

  Agnes held the receiver in her hand, then slowly put it down. She remembered that Julius had said he was visiting friends that evening; anyway, she wasn’t hungry. She poured herself a glass of Côtes du Rhône and sat at her desk, thinking. Emily Quislan was a mid-Victorian lady who owned a nice little patch of land in Essex. Col was a young homeless boy who had died in hospital the night before from a weak heart and an asthmatic attack. Agnes put down her glass and began to doodle on a notepad. And, she thought, Col and Emily were linked because Emily Quislan once had the rights to a water source called Fyffes Well, which was on the land occupied by the Ark, and which was blocked up, only to be reopened 150 years later. And now someone was threatening to poison it. And Becky and Col were both found with rosemary.

  Agnes sipped her wine. And Bill knows more than he’s letting on, she thought, remembering the measured tread of cracking twigs behind her in the forest. And Sam is now rewriting her story so that all her terror has vanished, and it turns out that Becky and Col were just making things up.

  She drained her glass, stretched, got up and looked absently out of the window. It had begun to drizzle, although the night was still warm. She felt as if everyone was drifting away from her, Bill with his rhetorical tricks, Sam with her new-found loyalty to Mike; Becky and Col, now beyond her reach altogether. Someone went into the call-box, hesitated, then picked out a card and left hurriedly. Agnes stared down into the street, thinking it was time to do her evening worship and go to bed. She drew the curtains. The truth about someone, she thought, is separate from them. Emily Quislan, long since dead, still has a truth about her that I can uncover: maybe several, conflicting truths. And Sam, whatever she tries to tell me now, still has a history that is accessible to me. And Becky and Col — yes, even Becky and Col, Agnes thought, lighting a candle and preparing to pray — even they have left behind a truth that can be uncovered — not only can be, but must be. She stared into the candle flame as it threw juddering shadows onto the plain white wall.

  Chapter Twelve

  On Sunday afternoon, Agnes was startled by a ring at her doorbell. She had attended Julius’s Mass in the morning, and had had lunch at her community, and was now at home, not expecting visitors; so it was with some surprise that she opened the door to find Nic standing there. The rain of the night before had cleared, and he stood in the sunshine in denim jeans and a plain white T-shirt.

  ‘I’m — um — I hope I’m not disturbing you,’ he began.

  ‘No. Well, come in.’

  He looked uneasily around her bed-sitting-room, choosing eventually to sit on the chair by her desk.

  ‘Can I get you a drink or something?’ Agnes offered. Nic shook his head, so she sat opposite him on the bed. ‘Is it about Athena?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, and she realised then that the reason he looked so different was that he no longer had a ponytail but had had his hair cut short. ‘She’s told you, presumably,’ he went on.

  ‘About the — the baby, yes.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do.’ His hand went to the back of his neck where his hair used to be, then dropped to his lap again.

  ‘I couldn't think of anyone else I could talk to about it.’ Agnes waited, then said, ‘How is Athena?’

  ‘Not brilliant. You’ve seen her, I guess?
’

  ‘On Thursday. Not — um, not since then.’

  ‘She didn’t say what happened. Only that you both —’

  ‘She wouldn’t listen,’ Agnes said. ‘I didn’t want to judge her, really I didn’t.’

  ‘Anyway, she went to her house in Gloucestershire on Friday. You know it? It’s just a little terrace apparently.’

  ‘Yes,’ Agnes said, remembering the beginning of their friendship, the boozy evenings by Athena’s fireside, the lopsided Grecian rug hanging on the wall, the chrome dolphins in the bathroom. ‘Yes, I know that house. When’s she due back?’

  ‘This evening, supposedly. The thing is, Agnes, she’s made an appointment. For a termination.’

  ‘Oh. When?’

  ‘Tuesday.’

  ‘Right.’

  Nic looked at her. ‘I really want her to keep the baby.’

  ‘Look, are you sure you don’t want some tea or something?’

  ‘And,’ Nic went on, ‘I thought perhaps you’d feel the same.’

  ‘What I feel is hardly relevant.’

  ‘But, about life — I mean, surely you believe, with your faith, that abortion is wrong. And in my work I’ve come to believe the same. You see, there are times when I’m really aware of this kind of legacy, this sense of lives that haven’t formed, it’s kind of karma and I think, who are we to know what’s right? The problem with our society, now, is that we live in the short-term, with no regard for the consequences. It’s all Me Me Me and —’

  ‘And what do you think is right for Athena?’ she interrupted.

  Nic matched her direct gaze. ‘That’s what I’m trying to say,’ he said. ‘If she gets rid of that baby, no one knows what she’ll have done to herself.’

  ‘And if she doesn’t get rid of it?’

  ‘Then she’ll be a mother. And I’ll be …’

  ‘You’re already a father, aren’t you?’