‘Whereas with my friend, Sister Rita, here, it's the celibacy she always had most trouble with.’
‘Really Sister Benedicta, I'm sure the inspector doesn't want to hear all this. You're making a fool of yourself.’
‘So be it,’ Sister Benedicta cheerfully replied from her ladder eerie. ‘It's understandable, I suppose, as she was married once, did she tell you? She only joined the order after she was widowed. She always likes to tease the sisters who retained their virginity that they don't know what they're missing. The implication being, that, for them, the giving up of what you've never known so can't miss, isn't much of a giving up at all.’
‘I suppose, in a way, she's got a point,’ Rafferty's smile attempted to ease Sister Rita's discomfiture at her fellow nun's disclosures.
‘Perhaps. Mother Catherine advises us that we must offer ourselves, our strengths and our weaknesses up to God, much as she confesses that she offers up her pride. Though I think she's too hard on herself.’ Her comment was an echo of Rafferty's own. ‘I don't think pride in one's achievements can be so wrong, do you, inspector? If God has enabled you to do things in this life, it always strikes me as churlish not to take pleasure in His gift.’
‘Talking of achievements.’ Rafferty, who had parked his behind on one of the boxes used for storing the fruit, stood up. ‘If you'll excuse me, Sisters, I still have a case to solve, so I'd better get on with it or it'll be failure I'll have to offer up to God and my superintendent.’ He smiled and added, ‘though sometimes, I'm not too sure if they're not one and the same.’
The results from both the national and international fingerprint checks on their victim had come back negative, as had the request put out to the nation's dentists.
Nathan McNally, Sister Cecile's ex-boyfriend, had still not been traced in spite of the artist's impression that her parents had contributed and which had been circulated to the media. Nor had he or any of his family contacted them; though whether this was because he was indeed the cadaver currently lying in the mortuary or because he and they had their own reasons for wanting to remain out of the police's radar, Rafferty couldn't guess.
With so little to help their investigation, Rafferty decided now was a good time to speak to the novice, Cecile, and find out if she was able to give them any idea about the possible whereabouts of McNally or his family. He would also like to learn more, from her own lips, about her own prior life. Because Llewellyn's further digging had revealed that the novice, although appearing ‘breathless with adoration’ in the expected mode, and hoping to be allowed to take her final vows within the next few years, hadn't always been breathless from the adoration of God.
Before finding her vocation – if vocation it was, as even her family doubted – and entering the convent, she had been a rather promiscuous young woman, with, in McNally, a violent and jealous boyfriend – the last in a long line of such boyfriends.
He couldn't help but wonder if Cecile's past life could be entirely unknown to the other residents of the convent or the diocesan hierarchy. Certainly Mother Catherine had let slip that she had been aware of something of the novice's troubled past. Indeed, she had struck Rafferty as acting more like a mother hen than a Mother Superior in her desire to protect Cecile. Was it merely because she did feel motherly to the young novice? Or was there some other reason?
Rafferty shrugged. Maybe he'd stand a better chance of getting answers from the more vulnerable younger woman than he had from the stronger older one? It was certainly worth a try. To this end, he went in search of Cecile.
He found her in the convent's chapel, on her knees on the hard, wooden floor, before the altar. A natural enough place to find a young girl who professed to have a vocation for the life of a contemplative.
But it wasn't the young novice's prayers that made him hesitate, it was the sound of her weeping. A weeping that seemed to be wrenched from her soul and that betokened great misery muffled only by the thick material of her veil.
She must have heard his quiet approach in spite of her tears, because she turned and stumbled to her feet. More like a guilty thing surprised than a woman who professed a desire for the religious life.
‘I'm sorry,’ Rafferty apologised. ‘I didn't mean to startle you.’
Slowly, after genuflecting to the altar, she approached him, wiping her wet face as she came towards him.
‘Tears? he questioned. ‘What's upset you, Sister?’
‘Nothing. Nothing. Really,’ she was quick to reassure. She gave him a watery smile that made her previous words even less convincing, before she said, ‘Well, not nothing, really, I suppose. Not to me. Only the usual. It's just that I spent another sleepless night questioning my vocation. I–I'm not sure I'll ever be ready to take my final vows.’
What had brought about this doubt? Rafferty wondered. The uncertainty of a pretty girl who was unsure that she really wanted to give up all the pleasure that her looks might provide for her in a more worldly life? Or was it an attack of conscience from a soul troubled by violent death?
‘Perhaps we could walk in the grounds and you can compose yourself,’ he quietly suggested, before he added, ‘There are a few questions I need to ask you.’
‘Questions?’ She shot an anxious glance at him from behind her veil. ‘About what, exactly?’
About the fact that we've got this dead body with marks of violence on him, whose identity is still unknown, he might have answered. But he didn't say this to her. He didn't say anything immediately.
Instead, he explained, as if she were an innocent child rather than a young woman mature enough to have considered making a life-long religious commitment: ‘As I'm sure you're aware, when there's a suspicious death we need to check out all the possibilities.’
She nodded, but said nothing.
‘And one of these possibilities, as we have learned, is that the dead man might be someone you know.’
She stared at him. ‘Some one I know? Who?’
‘Nathan McNally.’
‘Nathan?’ She tried to laugh off his suggestion, but her laugh sounded strained. Indeed, her breath was starting to become a little ragged. ‘But why would you think that? Nathan didn't even know where I'd gone. I certainly didn't tell him. Why should you think Nathan would turn up here? That he–’ she gulped – ‘might even be that dead man that Sister Rita stumbled over?’
‘No reason that would currently stand up in a court of law. No reason at all, beyond the fact that I understand he was unwilling to let you go, unwilling to let God have you. And now he seems to have gone missing. And because it seems he did some building work here towards the end of the summer–’
‘Building work? Nathan? Well, I never saw him.’
Cecile had been quick to deny that she had seen her ex-boyfriend working at the convent. But how likely was it that she wouldn't have seen him around the place?
‘You said he'd gone missing? What do you mean, exactly?’
‘He hasn't responded to our requests that he contact us. Neither has his family.’
‘That sounds like Nathan. He and his family always travelled a lot.’
‘Mm. Well, unless he's travelled to the ends of the Earth this time, he must surely have seen our requests that he contact us. They've been in all the national newspapers and on the TV and radio. Yet, as I said, we haven't heard a murmur from any of the family.’
‘Nathan was never much of a reader, inspector.’
Again, Rafferty couldn't help but notice her use of the past tense. ‘Travelled’ a lot. ‘Was never’ much of a…
She seemed aware of it, too, because, in her next sentence, she immediately corrected the tense. ‘He's not much of a one for the television, either. When I was with him, he always complained that there was nothing on but soaps and idiotic reality shows. Mostly, when he watched the box at all, he hired videos or DVDs.’
It was a convenient explanation. It might even be true.
Rafferty cleared his throat, fingered the epistle from h
is undemanding blackmailer that was back in its pocket home, and sighed. ‘What I wanted to ask you was if you have any idea where Nathan might have gone?’
Cecile shook her head and continued, as Rafferty noted, in her determined mention of Nathan in the present tense.
‘Nathan is a free spirit. That was what attracted me to him at first. Unfortunately, as I discovered, he isn't so keen on others also having a free spirit.’
‘Yet, from inquiries instigated during this investigation, I've learned that you made rather a habit of dating young men of, shall we say? repressive instincts when it came to their girlfriends.’
Cecile smiled. It was the first genuine smile he had seen since he had found her in tears in the chapel.
‘Let's just say that I have always been a slow learner, inspector. But I finally learned that I didn't want such men in my life any more. I grew up and stopped thinking that bad lads or men were attractive. I learned I didn't want a man at all.’ She frowned and bit her lip. 'At least, I thought I didn't. It's only since I've had the peace of the convent around me that I've begun to wonder if I wasn't doing what everyone outside always thinks nuns are doing – running away from life – rather than walking willingly to God.'
They strolled for another ten minutes, during which time Cecile confided that, apart from being aware that Nathan McNally was a loner, a drifter, who came from a travelling family, with no discernable past beyond the few pieces of, maybe, truthful information that he had told the young and naïve Chrissie before she had found herself as Cecile, and which had seemed to her in retrospect, to be more likely to be the comments of a fantasist, Nathan McNally was also a 'Nowhere Man', at least as far as the government was concerned.
Nathan McNally avoided government bureaucracy and earned his living by his wits. Unlike normal citizens, he had left no paper trail; or none that Rafferty, Llewellyn and the team had been able to find. Certainly the paper trail he had left in his younger years had come to an abrupt halt shortly after he had left school at sixteen. Mr Bell Senior had reluctantly confirmed when Rafferty had telephoned him that he had taken McNally on as a casual labourer and paid him cash in hand.
It explained why Mr Bell's insurers had declined to make good the builder's losses at McNally's hands. It also explained why Mr Bell had failed to report the thefts to the police. Presumably, he had been anxious to avoid answering awkward questions from Revenue and Customs. It was sentiment most of Rafferty's family shared.
McNally's known past was limited and brief, his present, indeterminable, and his future, if he was the corpse, non existent.
Cecile had confided to Rafferty during their ramble, that Nathan had seemed to feel that her love of God and her wish to dedicate her life to Him, was a rejection of him.
She had explained that she had told Nathan that it was nothing of the kind. It was more a case that, along with him, she would, by her prayers, show her love for all mankind. But, far from placating him, Rafferty read between the lines the words the young novice failed to confide: that rather than placating him, her claim to have an overpowering love of God, had made Nathan McNally more angry.
According to Cecile, her ex had been a man with a grudge against her sex. She had never met his mother, never heard him so much as mention her. If they had a permanent house, a home, which, in retrospect, seemed unlikely, she had never been invited to it.
Nathan McNally's reaction, when the young Chrissie had tentatively confided to him the growth of her vocation and her desire to become a nun, had been violent. His reaction had made her wonder if Nathan's family might have some religious connection which he had repudiated.
Cecile's suggestion had Rafferty wondering at the possibility that Nathan McNally might have been one of the by-blows Father Kelly's busy loins were suspected of fathering. It would certainly explain any religion aversion on McNally's part.
But, just then, the bell tolled, signalling it was time for Sext and Rafferty let Sister Cecile go. The young nun seemed eager to answer the summons to prayer. He found such eagerness strange in a young woman whose increasing doubt that she had a religious vocation at all had caused such anguished tears but a short time earlier.
He continued his stroll in the grounds after Cecile had gladly hurried off to attend Sext. He gazed across to the back of the convent's main structure, where Sisters Rita and Benedicta were washing their soiled hands under the outside tap, preparatory to answering the summons to prayer.
As he watched, the two muscular nuns completed their ablutions and strode athletically down the path leading to the rear entrance. And into his head, for the second time, popped a thought both monstrous and intriguing.
What if the sisters, the entire community, truly had been forced to collude in the death and cover-up of same of the novice's threatening ex-boyfriend as he had previously thought a possibility? A bunch of holy nuns involuntarily re-enacting Agatha Christie's famous novel of the Murder on the Orient Express, where all the train's passengers had come together to kill the victim?
Even Rafferty had to admit that he found such a possibility a bizarre one. But it would be less bizarre if Cecile's ex-boyfriend had come across her while he was at the convent doing building work. What if he had turned violent when Cecile continued to reject him in favour of God? It was possible, in an attempt to restrain him and help Cecile fight off his assault, that one or more of the nuns had been forced to hit him on the head rather too strongly. Certainly, looked at from that viewpoint, it wasn't a wholly unbelievable scenario.
For while the convent was a holy religious order, given over entirely to prayer and silent contemplation, it was an integral part of the Catholic Church. Whether accidental or deliberate, the man's death, his burial here, was a physical reminder of the less forgiving, far more violent aspects of the Church's historical outlook. That ‘Eye for an eye’ and ‘smoting’ stuff.
Violence had, for centuries, formed a large part of the Church's way of going about its business. Who wasn't to say the holy sisters of the Carmelite Monastery of the Immaculate Conception, its latest adherents, hadn't been willing to carry that behaviour over into the present, too? In order to protect a threatened member of the faith from an irreligious, heretical, violent and threatening outsider?
Such behaviour was far from unprecedented. Nor was it entirely unbelievable, given that, apart from Cecile herself and the postulant, Teresa Tattersall, the other nuns were all around sixty or more. They had been taught their faith in a more fire and brimstone age, an age when, much like his ma, preachers had spoken of Hellfire and Damnation.
Again like his mother, as young women, the sisters had not signed up to a milk and water faith, like the modern, liberal, ‘Anything goes', Church of England, with its ‘Happy-Clappy’ preachers, tambourines and guitars.
The religious teaching of their youth, even more so than the one Rafferty remembered with such vivid, unpleasant recall, would have been a harsh, demanding doctrine. One all about defending the Faith and being Soldiers of Christ. Presumably, also, one that defended its adherents from ungodly types like Nathan McNally.
But, of course, as Rafferty admitted: that was all supposition. And although he might suspect the convent's religious community of inadvertently killing the young novice's ex-boyfriend to protect her – he – they, had still been unable to positively ID the corpse. Even though the dead man's expensive watch had turned out to have an inscription, it was too simple a one to help them identify him.
And even though they had tracked the shop from where the watch had been purchased, it had turned into a dead end. The current owner had only held the lease for a year and had no paperwork going back as far as the year of the watch's manufacture. The previous long-term owner had died and his papers had long since been thrown away.
They were still awaiting a response from a member of the public with a claim that they recognised the dead man's costly timepiece. He had arranged for a second appeal on this in case a relevant member of the public had missed the request. B
ut while this appeal might yet come good, the days were passing.
Perhaps it was now time to admit defeat on the normal fingerprint and dental identification route and try something else? After all, time and the superintendent, was pressing.
Conscious that all their man hours had so far achieved little, that the country's dentists were still failing to come forward with a match for their cadaver, Rafferty was unwilling to delay any longer. He decided it was time to try another method to identify him.
Chapter Twelve
But, before Rafferty took himself off to organise this alternative means of identifying their cadaver, he spied Sister Rita returning from Sext. He thought it might repay him if he put some of his thoughts to the community's most earthy sister. Apart from any other things of interest he might learn from her, she had seen him in earnest conversation with Cecile so, if he had stumbled on the truth and that the murder of their man had been a joint effort by the sisters, he might be able to make her believe that Sister Cecile had inadvertently blurted something out.
He was hesitant to openly suggest that his current thinking was that this might have been a crime of passion or at least a crime provoked by passion spurned.
But, to his embarrassment, his lack of forthrightness seemed to encourage Sister Rita the Earth Mother nun, to think his questions were born of more prurient motives. Doubtless, this was encouraged by Sister Benedict's earlier disclosures, and that what he wanted was enlightening about nuns and sex in general, and that he had chosen her for his enlightenment.
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