by Stav Sherez
‘This is an established religious institution, not a cult,’ he said a little too sharply.
‘There’s a difference?’
He scratched his beard and listened to the whip-whap of the windscreen wipers as he considered this. ‘Yes, there is.’ Something had opened up between them in the unsaid words, a space neither realised had existed. ‘And I suppose you have something to back up your theory?’
‘Funnily enough,’ she replied, ‘I do.’
The diocese’s offices were located in a sprawling church deep in the heart of Pimlico. The car park was full, and priests and seminarians walked past them, hunched in conversation and thought, utterly oblivious to the two detectives as they made their way to the front door. Carrigan pressed the buzzer. The door opened revealing a young man dressed in brown monk’s robes and a thick mop of black hair that almost obscured his eyes.
‘Yes?’ His accent was so clipped and rarefied that it only took that one syllable to evoke an entire world of country houses, tweed jackets and private gentlemen’s clubs on Pall Mall.
Carrigan pulled out his warrant card. ‘We have an appointment with Bishop Price.’
The seminarian nodded once, then turned and headed back down the hallway. They followed him through a twisting panelled corridor studded with saints in agony and beatific virgins, photos of monks and priests and politicians lining the walls. They turned a corner and he pointed to a wooden bench beside a large arched door. ‘You can wait there.’
They sat on the bench, the wood cold and unyielding and only six inches deep so that they had to tense their feet against the floor to stay upright like dozing medieval priests perched on their carved misericords. Carrigan stared up at the coffered ceiling and tried to count the angels hiding in its folds.
‘Detective Inspector Carrigan? I believe we have an appointment.’
Carrigan hadn’t noticed the door next to him open and was startled, almost losing his balance on the narrow bench. ‘You’re not Bishop Price,’ he said, quickly gathering himself together as he looked up at the man standing beside him.
‘Quite right . . . which must make you the detective.’ The man offered his hand. ‘Roger Holden. I’m the diocese’s press secretary. I’d be happy to help you with any questions you may have.’
Carrigan stood up and shook his hand, flinching slightly at the unexpected pressure on his fingers and the way Holden looked directly into his eyes as he did this. The man was in his early forties, an expensive haircut framing a bland square face, teeth gleaming white behind fleshy gums. He wore a pink pinstripe shirt that looked as if it had been squeezed out of a tube of toothpaste and he smelled faintly of soap and mint.
‘Our appointment was supposed to be with the bishop.’
Holden smiled apologetically as they entered the office, the corners of his eyes crinkling. He wore a silver ring inset with a small ruby on his little finger and he kept worrying it with his other hand. ‘Unfortunately, the bishop is indisposed right now, but I’ll be happy to provide you with whatever information you may need.’
Holden took his seat behind a large, neatly ordered table, the papers and stationery all squared and aligned. Bookcases lined three of the walls, packed tight with leather-bound volumes, serious and grave in their uniformity. A row of metal filing cabinets stood to the left. A small oval oil painting on the far wall drew Carrigan’s eye. It depicted a group of three unnaturally elongated figures sitting around a campfire and peering fixedly into the flames. The scene was lit from the centre, shadows spreading like black fingers across the canvas, and there was something sinister about the way the shadows fell, as if independent of their origin. It made you want to get closer, to see what the figures were so entranced by. But of course you would never know, that was the point of the painting. Next to it sat framed certificates and more photos of people Carrigan didn’t recognise, handshakes and glossy smiles beaming from each one.
‘A drink?’ They both nodded and Holden cautiously poured some water from a silver jug, careful not to let a single drop land on the table. He took a small white handkerchief out of his pocket and used it to dry the lip of the jug before placing it back on the tray. ‘So, you’re in charge of investigating the fire?’
Carrigan nodded.
‘A terrible thing, terrible,’ Holden replied, folding the handkerchief neatly into four. ‘We’re still trying to come to terms with it. As you can imagine, Bishop Price is most upset.’ He looked up and placed the handkerchief back in his pocket. ‘Now, what can I help you with?’
‘We’d like the personnel files on the nuns so we can start identifying the bodies.’ Carrigan was surprised that Holden hadn’t asked him whether the fire had been deliberate or not – it was almost always the first thing anyone wanted to know in such cases.
‘Of course. That won’t be a problem,’ Holden replied, making a note on a peach-coloured piece of paper.
‘We were also hoping you could give us some information on the convent: what were the nuns like? What kind of activities were they involved in? . . . Anything we can gather may help us in determining why this thing happened.’
Holden smiled and said, ‘I think only God knows the answer to why.’
‘Well, since God’s not going to hand in his findings, we’ll see what we can do.’
Holden turned and stared at Geneva as if surprised to find her there. Carrigan had noticed how he’d studiously been avoiding her until now. Holden took a sip of water, his lips barely touching the glass.
‘You won’t have to look far, then. There are plenty of people who don’t like us. They’ve never liked us, not since the sixteenth century – but of course no one says so. They tolerate us because we keep quiet and because they need our dogma to justify themselves.’
‘What do you mean?’ Geneva asked.
‘Anglicans, the non-believers, the atheists and their ilk, they need us. They need our intransigence over contraception, abortion, euthanasia – they need it to highlight their own normality, how rational their belief system is compared to ours, how far they’ve progressed . . . but religion is not rational nor would we want it to be so. Mystery is the abiding nature of God. Ultimately, our roles are really not so different, Detective Sergeant Miller. We both have a set of rules we follow and we both try to stem the flow of evil in this world.’ He looked at her for affirmation then, finding none, continued. ‘What do you know about monastic orders?’
‘Only what I’ve seen in films,’ Geneva replied, and Carrigan felt a momentary snap of anger towards her but then noticed the look on Holden’s face and kept his mouth shut.
‘There are two main types of order: monastic and mendicant,’ Holden explained. ‘The former spend all their time cloistered and concentrate on prayer, while the latter have a greater emphasis on missionary work. The convent in Bayswater, the Sisters of Suffering, were part of a mendicant order; they were involved in good works and community outreach as well as their prayers and devotions and they subsisted on donations. You say you want to know about the nuns. Well, the convent actually has a very interesting history.’
Carrigan watched silently, letting Holden dictate the pace of the interview, allowing him to slip into comfortable routine and slick patter. He knew it was often when people were at their most relaxed that they gave themselves away.
‘The convent was founded by Constance Bellhew – I don’t suppose you’ve heard of her?’ Holden looked up, saw them shaking their heads and continued. ‘She was the 1910s equivalent of someone like Kate Moss, the girl everybody wanted to know. She presided over weekly salons, wrote several books of poetry, associated with Pound and Woolf, the whole Bloomsbury set. Then the war intervened and she gave it all up and volunteered as a nurse. She spent three hard years in the Dardanelles and at the Western Front and it was among the amputated limbs, shattered minds and unassailable volume of the dead that she found her place. A Catholic by birth, but never before by inclination, she began to read Teresa de Ávila and Julian of Norwich in
her tent during the eerie gunless nights, and when the war ended she joined an order of nuns and, a few years after that, took her vows.
‘But she soon sensed that there was something missing from her new life and she kept thinking back to how she’d felt in the trenches among the wounded and dying and realised that a life of contemplation and withdrawal was not for her. A couple of years later, in 1924, she formed the order of the Sisters of Suffering, in a disused building in a rundown part of town full of tenements and bedsits called Notting Hill. She believed that it wasn’t enough to pray to Jesus, one also had to live like Him – to spend your life alleviating the sufferings of the poor. In the years which followed, the Great Depression, the millions standing in bread lines, there was a lot of work to do, and Sister Constance found her calling. She reorganised the convent and set the rules by which they would function, including the rule of ten.’
‘The rule of ten?’ Carrigan interrupted.
‘She believed the number was the perfect balance; that too few nuns would be inefficient in their task and that too many would lead to a dilution of purpose and factional dissent.
‘Unfortunately, Sister Constance died during a Luftwaffe raid in the winter of 1943. The nuns had refused to leave the convent during the Blitz and spent their days ministering to the wounded and newly homeless. After the war, the convent flourished, renewed greatly by Sister Constance’s sacrifice, and was a tremendous boon to the community during the tense and racially divisive years that were to follow. More recently, the convent was headed by Mother Angelica. She’s been the abbess for the past twelve years. In her tenure, the convent greatly expanded its charity works and role in the community, from the battleground schools to the homeless shelters under the Westway. Their focus over the last five years has been predominantly in dealing with the scourge of drugs sweeping through our streets, setting up rehabilitation centres and workshops and organising the community. Indeed, over the past eight years the convent received several commendations from the Vatican for their outreach work.’
‘You know the history of all the orders in your parish in such detail?’
‘No, I prepared myself this morning when the bishop told me you were coming.’
‘So otherwise you had no particular dealings with this convent?’
‘No, Detective Inspector, I did not. What exactly are you implying?’
Carrigan shook his head, ‘Nothing, nothing. Don’t pay any attention to me, I was just thinking out loud.’ He flicked absently through the pages of his notebook. ‘Now, would there have been anyone else in the convent yesterday evening apart from the nuns?’
‘No, of course not,’ Holden replied.
‘You seem very sure of that.’
‘The nuns may have done a lot of outreach work but the convent was their personal space. And there certainly wouldn’t have been anyone there yesterday evening. It was the feast of St John of the Cross, an extremely solemn and private occasion for them.’
Carrigan nodded, thinking about the timing of this. ‘What about a cook or caretaker?’
He caught something in Holden’s expression before the man answered. ‘They cooked their own meals and made their own beds. That was part of Sister Constance’s rule, to ensure they never grew reliant on outside help.’
Carrigan leaned forward and placed his arms squarely on the table. ‘Tell me about the caretaker.’
Holden briefly looked away. ‘How . . . how did you? . . . Never mind.’ He twirled the ring on his finger. ‘It was against the rules but they did employ a part-time caretaker. There were some things that the nuns just couldn’t do by themselves – but it was more an act of charity, I believe. He was one of their strays, one of their countless lost sheep, a wiry little man by the name of Hubbard, Alan Hubbard.’ Holden shrugged. ‘They always had their little pet projects.’
‘Did Hubbard live on the premises?’ Carrigan asked, wondering what it was about the caretaker that made Holden so uneasy.
‘No, of course not. He came once or twice a week to fix things, that was all.’
‘Do you have an address for him?’
Holden shook his head. ‘As I mentioned before, this was not done with official sanction.’
‘And there was no chance that the nuns had invited him over for dinner? Maybe felt sorry for him, one of their lost sheep?’
Holden looked at Carrigan as if he’d just enquired whether the convent employed a stripper. ‘No, of course not. The feast of St John was a holy and onerous occasion. There certainly wouldn’t have been any guests. That’s ridiculous.’
‘Ridiculous,’ Carrigan repeated, writing the caretaker’s name down in his notebook and, next to it, the number ‘11’ and a question mark. The pathologist at the scene had, on cursory examination, determined that the bodies were probably all female, but Holden had described Hubbard as wiry and small – could the pathologist have been mistaken in his initial assumption? Carrigan gripped the pen a little tighter, feeling a flutter-surge of adrenalin at the thought that they’d either identified the eleventh victim or found a possible suspect.
‘I’m nearly finished,’ he continued. ‘Sorry to have taken up so much of your time. Just wanted to clear something up – your diocese has overall authority over the convent, is that correct?’
Holden smiled. ‘I wouldn’t call it authority, no.’
‘But your office was in charge?’ Carrigan persisted.
‘How much do you know about ecclesiastical governance?’
Carrigan was about to say not much at all when Geneva interrupted. ‘I know that the diocese is responsible for all religious orders within its boundaries and acts as a kind of governing body should conflicts arise.’
Holden studied Geneva carefully before he answered. ‘Yes, quite right,’ he said. ‘Though that does make us sound like some kind of local council. Convents differ from parish churches in that they’re far more autonomous, as you’d expect, so we don’t often have day-to-day dealings with them. Generally, we only deal with problems that arise, otherwise they pretty much run themselves.’
‘And . . . did problems arise?’ Geneva asked.
Holden met her gaze and said, ‘No, no problems at all.’
‘No problems at all? No threats or complaints? You’re sure about that?’
‘Of course I am. Everything concerning the bishop goes through me first.’
Geneva looked puzzled as she took out a thick green file from her bag. ‘Isn’t it true that there was a serious dispute between the convent and the diocese?’
Holden stared at the ring on his finger, his tongue flicking briefly across his lips. ‘I wouldn’t call it serious, no. Nothing more than a minor disagreement.’
‘Really?’ Geneva flicked through her papers, dropping several on the floor. As she got to her knees to pick them up, Carrigan could see Holden’s lips twitching with impatience. She finally sat back down and pulled out a single photocopied sheet from a three-month-old newspaper. ‘If it wasn’t serious then why would the bishop issue a writ of complaint to the order’s headquarters in Rome?’
Holden almost managed to hide his surprise, but not quite. He shook his head as if annoyed at having to explain something very simple to someone for the fourth time. ‘These are arcane matters of theology, Detective Sergeant Miller, I’m not sure you would appreciate the subtleties.’
‘You’re quite right,’ Geneva agreed. ‘I don’t really understand much of this, which is why I looked it up earlier and, according to the Catholic Encyclopaedia, such a writ of complaint is only issued in matters . . .’ She glanced down and paused as if reading the next sentence from her print-out but Carrigan could tell she knew it off by heart. ‘Matters of urgent or extreme deviation from the Creed.’
‘You seem very well informed.’
‘It’s my job,’ she replied, bristling against the smooth purr of his voice. ‘So, humour me a moment – if, for instance, the nuns believed in apocalyptic imminence, in the end of the world, then that woul
d be a reason for the bishop to issue such a writ?’ Geneva stopped, noting the crinkle in Holden’s brow, the way his eyes had narrowed slightly.
‘You believe the nuns killed themselves because they thought the end of the world was coming?’ Holden laughed. ‘Detective Sergeant, please, these nuns dedicated their lives to helping others. This wasn’t some misguided cult, this was a long established and rule-bound order.’ He rose from his chair and leaned across the table. ‘I advise you to tread carefully here. You can’t start bandying about the first thing that comes to mind, starting all sorts of rumours. This was a much loved and well-supported convent.’
‘Is that a warning?’ Carrigan asked, impressed by how Geneva had managed to rattle Holden.
‘Merely a statement of fact,’ Holden said.
Carrigan nodded blankly and wrote something down in his notebook. ‘Talking of facts, Mr Holden, would it surprise you to know that there was someone else in the convent yesterday evening? An eleventh victim? After all, according to your statement, that would be impossible.’
For the first time since they’d got there, Holden’s expression slipped, and Carrigan caught a flicker of panic and something else beneath the well-heeled charm.
‘Eleven bodies?’ Holden repeated to himself. ‘You must be mistaken. That . . . that simply can’t be.’
‘Merely a statement of fact,’ Carrigan replied.
8
The fire investigation officer was perched on the bumper of his truck, smoking a cigarette and reading a book. His helmet lay next to him and snow covered his blond curls and lined the curves of his droopy moustache.
Carrigan made his way through the slush, feeling his socks turning wet and cold, and introduced himself. The fire investigator nodded once and finished the sentence he was reading. He put down the book and Carrigan saw it depicted the blackened bodies of burn victims, displayed in glossy colour and intimate close-up, scrawled notes and bright yellow Post-Its covering the page.
