The Good Priest

by Gillian Galbraith

  Opening the double doors of the cupboard in the sacristy, he moved the Tupperware box containing the unconsecrated hosts to one side and reached for the bottles of communion wine. Holding them up to the light, he saw that one was full and the other half-full. More would have to be ordered from Hayes and Finch, and soon, or else the faithful would have to imbibe one of his bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon again. Surely someone would notice the difference, and comment on it? Hayes’ stuff was sweet as fermented Irn-Bru.

  He must, must, must attend to his desk, otherwise chaos would prevail. Red bills were already flying through the letterbox. There were no Mass cards left and he was behind with the registers too. If only administration was not so dull.

  An old picture of Pope Benedict XVI, his dark eyes glittering in their deep sockets, caught his eye and he looked away. Ratzinger seemed so unsympathetic, resembling Fester from the Addams Family, and too far removed from his image of the Good Shepherd for his taste. John XXIII was The Man. Or maybe Francis; they had chosen a good one this time.

  Hearing the sound of footsteps on the floor of the church he removed the Wild Myrtles CD from its sleeve, wiped it on his cassock and put it into the player. A few of their tracks were religious and the rest were in Finnish, so no one would be any the wiser. And they had lovely voices, those women, particularly the contraltos.

  Trade in the confessional was slow. With luck, the allotted time might be up, and if so he could finish for the night. He looked at his wrist, and was dismayed to see that he had left his watch by the sink in the kitchen. Surely it must be eight o’clock by now, he thought. If, as he suspected, it was after eight, on any other night he would, by now, be sitting down to eat supper in his kitchen. But that evening, to be on the safe side, he decided to stay another few minutes in case anyone else showed up. Latecomers were not unknown.

  As he waited, he amused himself by planning his own funeral. One thing was certain; he would not be taken out in his box to that frightful dirge ‘Be Still My Soul’. No wonder the mourners today, despite their sly drams, had shuffled out, sniffing and red-eyed to a man, after that so-called ‘Service of Celebration’. He would have something rousing, something reviving, like ‘Shine, Jesus, Shine’ or ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain’. Either would add a spring to people’s step, and there were enough of those sorts of joyous hymns even if a few of them were infantile. The coffin would be willow-woven, perhaps, or cheap oak? Whatever he chose, there would be no brass fittings for some poor furnace-man to have to fish out from the ash, wondering whether he had got a charred humerus or a coffin-handle instead.

  Who could be trusted to do the eulogy, to strike the right note? If Hugh did not go first then he would be the obvious choice. But would Hugh choose him? What the hell, there could be no reciprocation in these matters anyway. Hugh had a feel for these things, was able to extol the deceased’s virtues while touching as lightly as a butterfly on their vices, and thus making them recognisable. He would even raise a quiet laugh. Would Hugh advert to his fondness for drink, he wondered. But it was not a vice, not a failing, simply a fondness. A fondness for golf or making things out of matchsticks would not be described as a vice. Wine writers like Hugh Johnson, Jancis Robinson and Robert Parker were held in high esteem, and they had sunk gallons of the stuff in the name of research. Tonight he would try out the Chilean Merlot with its lovely smooth tannins; it should go well with the lamb.

  All thoughts of his evening meal fled when a bolt of pain shot through the heel of his left foot. Cramp! Drawing in his breath, he bent down and stroked it, and finding no relief, decided to remove his shoe. As he stretched out his toes, he decided to liberate his other foot from its slightly tight brogue as well.

  With his right shoe still in his hand, a strange, unfamiliar smell suddenly reached the priest’s nostrils. It was not the scent of his freshly laundered socks but an unusual odour, one more like raspberries, with a touch of Dettol and paraffin running through it. Unconsciously, he breathed in more of the aroma, trying to analyse it into its constituent parts, when a loud baritone voice startled him, booming out from the other side of the confessional box: ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’

  Between lengthy pauses, the man began to list his misdemeanours, giving an incoherent description of each one. As he spoke, the scent of raw whisky began to drift through the mix and, smiling to himself, the priest inhaled the heady fumes, trying to guess the brand. Bruichladdich or another of the Islay malts, at a guess.

  Every so often, as if he had lost his place, the man would return to an earlier trivial sin, repeating himself before alighting on a new, equally slight one. It was as if he had something momentous to confess, something huge, crushingly heavy, but lacked the courage to put it into words and, instead, was skirting round it. Twice, he banged on the wooden partition with the heel of his hand, looking for a speedier reaction, and then he shouted, ‘Wakey, wakey, over there!’

  Though he’d given the man some leeway in recognition of his drunken state, Father Vincent finally told him to keep his voice down, warning him that the CD had come to an end and others might be listening in.

  ‘Listening to me?’

  ‘Yes, to you. Who else?’

  ‘You not want to hear my confession or something?’ the man bawled, sounding outraged at the idea.

  ‘No, and there’s no danger of that. I’m simply concerned about privacy. Your privacy,’ Vincent explained, trying not to lose patience. ‘Others may hear what you are saying to me. If you shout …’

  ‘The earwigging bastards! Right!’ the man said, slurring his words even more and sounding angrier. ‘I’ll give them something to make it worth their while, eh?’

  ‘No, don’t!’

  ‘Here’s the one you’ve all been waiting for …’

  His words were followed by a theatrical drumroll, made by the man’s knuckles rapping on the partition of the confessional and his feet drumming on the wooden floor.

  ‘For Heaven’s sake, be quiet!’ the priest ordered, infuriated by the man’s lack of respect for him, for the church and the sacrament. For everything that mattered. Was he insane? He sounded deranged, as if it was more than just the drink talking or, more accurately, shouting.

  ‘Listen up, people! Listen up, the lot of you!’ the man bellowed. ‘Tonight – tonight I killed Jim Mann. Did you all get that? Tonight I killed somebody. But it’s all right – I got it, all right. I got it, and that’s what really counts!’

  Laughing, the drunkard stumbled out of the confessional, smashing the small wooden door back on its hinges in his haste to leave. On the other side of the grille, the astonished priest bent down, groping amongst the lumber on the floor for one of his missing shoes.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In the pitch-black of his bedroom, Father Vincent screwed up his eyes and turned onto his side once more, rolling his duvet with him as he did so to make a snug cocoon. A few seconds later, he turned over again to lie on his back. After hours of tossing and turning, his bedding was in total disarray; one pillow had gravitated towards his feet, the other had fallen to the floor and the bottom sheet had worked itself loose from the mattress. Sleep would not come to him, had eluded him since he had been woken by the National Anthem blasting from the radio by his bed. At two o’clock he had made himself a cup of cocoa and, holding his nose, forced himself to drink it. Two hours later he had searched in his medicine cabinet for a particular cough mixture, remembering, from a previous cold, the warning on the label. It had advised against driving and the use of machinery after taking it, due to its drowsiness-inducing qualities. But four swigs of the mixture, a double dose, had failed to knock him out, despite the two glasses of Norton Privada Malbec which had preceded it down his throat.

  The man had confessed to murder! In his fifteen-plus years as a priest Vincent had heard it all; every one of the seven deadly sins, from youthful, rosebud lips, moustachioed mouths and toothless, puckered maws. An alphabet of sins, venial and mortal, and the Ms had gone fr
om masturbation to moodiness, but never as far as that one. Never murder, bloody murder. If only, he thought, I could turn the clock back! I would listen in contentment to an unending stream of dull, drab and petty sins and never utter a word of complaint. Welcome the very sound of them, be happily pecked to death by ducks, offer up thanks for it.

  Someone had been killed and canon law decreed he could not tell a soul about it. The killer’s gory handprints might be all over the confessional box, their fingerprints, too, and minuscule traces of their DNA. Tomorrow, Mrs Thorburn or Mrs McMullen or, God help us all, Mamie, would flick their feather-dusters over those very surfaces and, if they did the job properly, would remove all traces of the killer’s presence. Unless, of course, it had all been made up, the bizarre fantasy of some inadequate attention-seeker?

  But it had not sounded like that. Usually, those types restricted themselves to sexual sins, the more deviant and flamboyant the better, hoping to shock him, or titillate themselves and him too, for all he knew. Alcohol made them bold. And it had not been absent this time either; you could have set light to the fumes from the man’s mouth. In Salmond’s fiefdom, money was not the root of all evil, that title went to drink. He should know.

  But what had that other distinctive smell been, mingling with that of the whisky? Nothing he had ever come across before and, God willing, would ever encounter again; the perfume of a murderer.

  ‘I’ve killed somebody,’ the man had said, and then he had laughed out loud! It had been less like a confession, more of a boast. No doubt he knew what he was doing, knew he would be quite safe, with excommunication awaiting any confessor who betrayed a penitent. He had, at least, supplied his victim’s name. Jim Mann. And it was a common enough surname in Kinross-shire – why, his own bishop shared it. James Reginald Mann … Jimmy Mann.

  At that thought, Vincent sat bolt upright in his tangled bedsheets. Suppose it was his bishop? Suppose he was the actual victim? But, even if he was, there was nothing to be done about it. He could not raise the dead.

  At that moment another thought struck him, making his mind race. What if the man had not killed his victim, as he had crowed, but only injured him, leaving him for dead? While he had been agonising over the crime, over what to do, the victim’s life blood might have been draining away, might be draining away. By his inaction he might be letting it happen.

  It was a split-second decision. He threw his bedclothes onto the carpet and stamped across the floor to the chair where his clothes were. Grabbing his jacket off the back of it, he felt for the familiar bulge in the pocket made by his mobile phone. Locating it, he dialled 999. The second he heard the operator’s voice he blurted out: ‘Bishop James Mann may have been murdered. Try his house at 54 Oster Street, Dundee.’

  Without waiting for a reply, he ended the call.

  The next day’s edition of the Courier, which he raced through from front to back, concerned itself with its usual diet of pensioners’ flooded bedrooms, missing organists, unexplained seabird deaths and the like. No mention was made of any reported assaults on humans, far less murders. Even the diocesan grapevine, usually speedy, sometimes accurate, proved unfruitful, and he did not have the nerve to call the Bishop himself, although as each minute passed the urge to do so intensified. Every time the phone rang, he answered it breathlessly, expecting news of his superior from the mouth of some excited gossip or other. Each time he was disappointed, quickly becoming uncharacteristically terse, desperate to get the caller off the line.

  By 8 am the following morning he was back in the supermarket, intent on checking the latest issue of the paper. Despite the early hour, the place was crowded, buzzing with women, wire-baskets thrown over an arm, some jostling to get at the milk or peering inside the freezer cabinets. Others stood gossiping, nodding at him as he passed them by, holding their trolleys tight as if they might try to escape. An apologetic-looking man tapped him on the shoulder, offering a cube of cheese on a cocktail stick, determined to tempt someone with his plateful of samples. It was quicker to take one.

  Easing his way through the melee, returning smiles but unable to reply to the cacophony of cheery greetings with his mouth full, Father Vincent reached the news-stand. A single copy of the Courier was left. Desperate to get it, he snatched the paper up and began to examine the front page. The main headline was ‘Fife Man Charged with Horror Blaze’, but, immediately below it, he found what he was looking for. Pushing his glasses up until they rested on his unruly, sandy hair, he glanced at an old photograph of the Bishop in his mitre and then, holding the paper out at arm’s length, he read the accompanying report.

  Early yesterday morning Police were called to the house in Dundee’s Oster Street of James Mann, Bishop of Inchkeld, following an anonymous tip-off from a member of the public. On arrival, the Bishop, 59, was discovered lying unconscious on the floor of his office with bruising to his face and head. Following treatment by paramedics at the scene, he was taken by ambulance to Ninewells Hospital. A spokesman for the hospital confirmed that the Bishop was expected to make a full recovery from his injuries.

  Closing his eyes, the priest let out a long sigh. Thank goodness, Jimmy Mann had survived. He had done the right thing and betrayed nobody. The spirit of canon law remained intact, surely, if not the letter? And it had all been true; the confession had not been the fantasy of a lunatic. Putting his spectacles back on his nose, he rolled up the paper and, picking up a bag of fresh rolls, went to the till to pay for his purchases. Twice, as he stood, lost in thought, the assistant had to ask him for the money.

  Trudging along the pitted pavement, rolls and paper under his arm, he kept his gaze down. He knew where he was going, could trust his feet to take him to Swansacre while his mind attended to other matters. What would happen now? In all likelihood, the police would come after him. Calls from mobiles were traceable, and emergency calls recorded. But whatever happened, surely, he had nothing to worry about? Thanks to his tip-off the Bishop had ended up in hospital hours earlier than he otherwise might have done. Those hours could have made a difference, saved his life, even. And no one need ever know how he had come by the information, so he had not betrayed that drunken brute in the confessional. But the feeling that he had become involved, enmeshed, tainted by the crime, did not diminish and the unpleasant fluttering sensation in the pit of his stomach remained.

  The sick woman’s daughter, Helen Compton, led him through a bright corridor into her mother’s room. It was at the back of the spacious flat they shared. The walls were thick, the only window deeply recessed and covered by a pair of net curtains. The little daylight that found its way through the netting was too weak to illuminate the room and the elegant stainless-steel standard lamp did not make up the shortfall. Even with it on, the room was full of dark shadows. But it was as warm as an oven.

  ‘Thanks for coming, Father,’ Helen murmured. ‘She’ll be pleased to see you, I know.’

  As he approached the high brass bed, Father Vincent breathed in and found his nostrils filled with the aroma of death. He had come across it many times before, in bungalows, cottages, terraced houses, hospitals, hospices and elsewhere, and he knew it well. If asked to describe it he would have found it difficult to do so, eventually settling on an amalgam of known smells. It was part the musty, foetid smell of the long-term invalid, part wood-smoke and part cold boiled egg. Once he had asked a colleague, a young curate, if he had ever noticed it, but the man had looked at him uncomprehendingly. Hugh, for his part, had flatly denied its existence, suggesting it was a product of his own malfunctioning sense of smell. ‘Look to your own drink-damaged schnozzle,’ he had laughed.

  As he sat down on the woman’s old-fashioned green silk eiderdown, he slipped his fingers inside his pocket, checking that he had brought with him the phial of oil in case she wanted to be anointed once more. Sensing a presence in the room, the old lady opened her dull eyes and looked with alarm at him, not recognising him with the light behind him.

  ‘Who’s that
?’

  ‘It’s just me, Jean, Father Vincent. Helen thought you might like some company.’

  ‘Father, good of you to drop by again,’ she said, her voice faint, her words tailing off with her failing breath.

  ‘I was passing,’ he replied, ‘and I wondered if you’d like a bit more of the holy oil. It might give you a bit of a lift? Like the last time?’

  ‘I don’t want it now. I’m not in need any more, thank you.’

  ‘Of course, that’s fine with me.’

  The old woman nodded, she could talk no longer. She held out a cold hand for him to hold. The other remained on the eiderdown, the skeletal fingers splayed out, her wedding ring standing proud from the knuckle. The skin of her hands was dry as paper, heavily mottled, with rivers of indigo snaking their way through the islets of brown liver spots. The last time he had seen her, a month earlier, she had still been plump, heavy jowls concealing the two muscles that now stood out like strings from her scrawny neck. Beneath her nightie, her cleavage, once something she had been proud to display, had disappeared, leaving behind it only the bony sternum below.

  ‘Did you hear about the Kinross Ladies’ victory in the league?’ he asked, continuing to speak without waiting for her to answer, sure in the knowledge that she would be interested in his tale. In her glory days, she had been the manageress of the rink at the Green Hotel. By way of answer, she squeezed his fingers.

  ‘Joyce was cock-a-hoop. She was the skip for the match and it paid off. She’s got a good brain – like a snooker player’s. It was neck and neck right up to the very end. Three each, right by the button, and it’s always a grudge match against Dunfermline. Well, Isla delivered her stone and whacked the lot of them out the way. Ginny fell over – she’d been sweeping that much, her legs had gone, but they won, against all the odds. They did it!’

  ‘Aha. I heard that,’ she whispered, smiling, her eyelids remaining closed.