The Silent Ones

by William Brodrick

  WILLIAM BRODRICK

  THE

  SILENT

  ONES

  THE FATHER ANSELM THRILLERS

  The ingenious, gripping series by

  Gold Dagger award-winner William Brodrick

  Monk-turned-lawyer-turned-novelist William Brodrick has proven with each new installment of his Father Anselm series that he’s the “writer of choice for those who prefer a cerebral challenge with a moral and social message” (Crime Review). In this newest addition, Brodrick tackles head-on the topical and sensitive social issue that’s become the modern scourge of the Church to create an intricate thriller that’s as devastating as it is impactful.

  In The Silent Ones, eleven-year-old Harry Brandwell’s family levels grave allegations against Father Edmund Littlemore, an American priest at the Larkwood Priory. Fleeing the charges and concealing his checkered past, Littlemore has gone into hiding, and the leaders of his religious order seem reluctant to help Father Anselm or the police find him.

  While Father Anselm traces Littlemore’s whereabouts, journalist Robert Saunders is likewise investigating the man. Separately, they find clues to his true identity and answers to why he has wandered so far, from Boston to Sierra Leone to the Larkwood Priory, under false names. Most disturbingly, Saunders uncovers a conspiracy that relies on the silence of survivors, the Silent Ones, meant to lead Harry Brandwell’s case to court—and to get Father Anselm to play into the hand of a group with dark secrets of their own. Contemporary, disturbing, and elegantly plotted, The Silent Ones is a compelling novel about the anatomy of silence, the courage of victims, and the redemptive power of public justice.

  Also by William Brodrick

  The Discourtesy of Death

  A Whispered Name

  The Day of the Lie

  Gardens of the Dead

  The Sixth Lamentation

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2018 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact sales@overlookny.com,

  or write us at the above address

  Copyright © William Brodrick 2015

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  EISBN: 978-1-4683-1684-1

  Contents

  Also by William Brodrick

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Part Two

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  Part Three

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  Part Four

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  Part Five

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  Part Six

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  In memory of Clare Hawks

  And for James, Basil and Phoebe

  Acknowledgements

  My gratitude goes to Ursula Mackenzie, Richard Beswick, Iain Hunt, Her Honour Judge Moreland (any errors of law or procedure remain mine), Françoise Koetschet, and Damien Charnock, with whom, many years ago, I first discussed the inner workings of this story.

  Secret guilt by silence is betrayed

  Dryden

  Part One

  ‘What’s the matter? Tell me what happened?’

  Ignoring his mother, Harry Brandwell jumped from the car and ran the short distance home. Kicking open the iron gate he shoved past Fraser and made for the front door. Once inside, he scrambled up the stairs. He didn’t have long. His stomach had turned. Bile was rising.

  ‘Harry?’ called his father, leaving the kitchen; then, in a lower tone to his wife: ‘What the hell is going on?’

  ‘I don’t know. He won’t say.’

  Harry made it to the bathroom just in time. When he’d finished heaving and spitting, he yelled over his shoulder, ‘Don’t come up. Leave me alone.’

  ‘But Harry—’ His mother was on the landing. ‘I said let me be, now go away.’

  After she’d backed off, Harry undressed, shaking off his clothes as if they were crawling with lice. He stepped into the shower and turned on the hot tap. Gradually the temperature increased. When he couldn’t stand the heat any more, he moved away and reached for a towel, dabbing his red skin as if he was bleeding from every pore. He was eerily calm. The flush of pain had cleansed his mind.

  ‘Harry?’ His mother was outside. She’d knocked gently. ‘Please talk to me.’

  He didn’t reply. He let the silence drive her away. Then he went to his room and lay down, listening to the soft scrape of the garden rake. Fraser was gathering up the fallen leaves.

  A month back Harry had refused to speak to Geraldine, the counsellor. So his mum had suggested he talk to Father Littlemore instead. He was new on the scene. An American. Came for Sunday lunch with presents. Flowers for his mother. Wine for his dad. Most recently – for Harry – a ship-in-a-bottle. But Harry hadn’t been fooled. Right from the start, when he first introduced himself as Father Eddie, Harry thought him a bit too nice, a bit too helpful. He tried too hard. Harry had seen these kinds of desperate measures before – at school when someone new turned up. He’d learned to read the signs. And the biggest of the lot was when Father Eddie changed the subject when asked where he’d been before moving to London. Harry had tried to tell his mother that there was something odd about the guy but she’d refused to listen.

  ‘And what about Gutsy Mitchell?’ she’d asked, a hand on each hip.

  It was a fair point. When Gutsy had arrived not wanting to talk about Dover, Harry had thought he must have something to hide, and he hadn’t. His parents had split up that’s all. And so thinking of Gutsy, he’d given Father Eddie a break. And anyway, he hadn’t liked Geraldine’s rules about open doors and not keeping secrets …

  ‘You can trust him,’ Harry’s mother had said, moving a few strands of black hair behind an ear. ‘You can tell him anything.’

  Father Eddie promised to teach him the chess moves that had never appeared in a book. Stuff the Russians would kill for. Tricks handed down by Bobby Fischer.

  ‘Who�
��s Bobby Fischer?’

  ‘You’ll have to come along to find out. You don’t have to speak. I’ll do all the talking.’

  Meetings had been arranged at Father Eddie’s place. They played chess. Harry found himself relaxing and then smiling but he just couldn’t open his mouth. And so Father Eddie played a clever trick. He told him a secret, the answer to where he’d been before coming to London: Freetown in Sierra Leone. He’d gone there to get away from his own problems, only it hadn’t worked. He’d had to come back. ‘We can’t escape who we are,’ he said. And he taught Harry a Krio phrase, ohlman de pan in yon wa-ala: ‘everyone has his own troubles’. In the end, Harry took the plunge and opened up.

  The gentle raking had come to an end. Which meant that Fraser would now be in the back garden with the tray of seedlings, waiting for Harry. They’d sown spring cabbages in little pots a month back and now it was time to plant them outside. It was their autumn project.

  Harry would have trusted Gutsy Mitchell with his life. Once you got to know him, Gutsy was Gutsy. Whereas Father Eddie had turned out to be two people. Once he got Harry telling him the stuff he wouldn’t tell Geraldine, once he got him at ease with assurances and promises – once he’d established a bond between them – he changed. With the recollection of their third and last encounter – the one that had made him retch and take a shower – the nausea returned to Harry’s stomach; he thought he might be sick again. Swinging his legs off his bed, he reached for the ship-in-a-bottle and gripped it by the neck. After opening the door he walked down the stairs, coming to a halt when he reached the door to the sitting room. His parents exchanged bewildered glances, their eyes finally coming to rest upon the object in Harry’s hand, raised high in the air. When his accusing stare had brought his mother to tears, Harry threw the bottle against the wall above her head. The gift from Father Eddie exploded, showering his parents with splinters of glass and balsa wood as they crouched, whimpering with fear. After a few moments of shared disbelief, Harry went outside … to carry on with the rest of the day, and tomorrow and the day after.

  ‘Are y’all right there, laddie?’ asked Fraser.

  The old man was on his knees making pockets in the soil with his gloved hands. His movements were slow and deliberate, his voice soft. Harry didn’t answer. He took the tray of seedlings off the garden table and laid it on the ground between them.

  ‘Canna give ye some advice, son?’

  Again, Harry said nothing. His eyes were on the dark earth. He was trembling with rage and self-disgust.

  ‘Sometimes things happen in life that we don’t like. D’ye follow me?’

  Harry nodded.

  ‘And we think we’ll never forget what’s happened. D’ye get my drift?’

  Harry nodded again.

  ‘Well, you can take it from me, son, that’s just not true. Not – true – at – all. And I should know.’

  Fraser had once been one of those hunched homeless figures who haunted the streets around the Embankment. He’d seen no point to living, but thanks to Uncle Justin and the Bowline Project he’d been given a second chance. The man who’d once eaten out of dustbins had become Harry’s friend and adviser. He’d let slip words that were wise and consoling.

  ‘I’m not sayin’ life’s a piece of shortbread, all right? I’m not sayin’ everything’s rosy in the garden. Because we all know that’s just nonsense. But what I can tell you is this’ – Fraser fixed Harry with an anguished stare, the look of a man who’d been there and bought the T-shirt – ‘no matter what’s happened, we get over it, in time. It’s hard to believe, I know, but it’s God’s honest truth. Everything’ll fade away, eventually. You’ve just got to wait, laddie. In the meantime, how about we enjoy oursels a wee bit? Help me plant these cabbages. Okay?’

  Harry nodded. ‘Good lad.’

  They set to work, filling up a patch of ground by the wall, Fraser remembering his mother’s boiled bacon stinking out the tenement, Harry listening from a distant place. The fact is – and Gutsy Mitchell agreed – there were certain experiences that were burned into your memory; they’d never disappear. Fraser knew that as well as anyone. He just daren’t say it to an eleven-year-old.

  1

  Anselm shuffled along the North Walk while his brothers continued west towards the refectory. Opening an arched door he slipped out of the cloister and presently came to the reception area where, a hand on each hip, his reproving gaze fell upon Larkwood’s Gatekeeper. The aged yet ageless Sylvester, lodged behind his desk, ignored the looming presence. Wide, sunken eyes glanced up from a book onto the bank of telephones and then returned with ostentatious concentration to the page under consideration.

  ‘You missed Vespers again,’ began Anselm.

  ‘No one bothered to warn me.’

  ‘There was a bell. It rang repeatedly. In fact there were two bells … a small one to tell you that a big bell was going to ring … and then, five minutes later, the big bell itself – the one you’d just been warned about. It rang and rang. You can hear it a mile away. And, from where you’re sitting, I’d say you’re about two hundred yards distant. Hard to miss.’

  The old man snorted. He didn’t quite run with time any more. Its movement was strangely parallel to whatever he might be doing. He’d always turned up flustered and late for every Office, but recently he’d begun to miss some of them completely; he frowned when reminded of things he’d known all his monastic life. The shift in behaviour had begun to worry Anselm. Larkwood’s Night Watchman was too important to fade away; too much loved to die. He had to live for ever.

  ‘It’s a disgrace,’ said Anselm. ‘This sort of thing would never have happened in the old days … when monks were monks. When we used our hands for speech. When the sound of a bell meant something.’

  In fact, unable to master monastic sign language, Sylvester had invented his own. The problem was that no one else had understood it, persuading a visiting philosopher from Harvard that Wittgenstein’s argument against a private language had been forcefully contradicted. The old man turned a page.

  ‘You’re mentioned in here,’ he said, archly.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Anselm smiled modestly. He’d been in the papers, but never in a book. Having quit the London Bar many years ago, he’d come to Larkwood Priory in Suffolk intent on the Silent Life. Made a beekeeper, he’d thought his days serving the interests of justice were well and truly over. But then, in one of those mysterious decisions reserved to monastic superiors, he’d been sent back to the world he’d left behind, instructed to help those forgotten by the law. A number of high-profile investigations had ensued, bringing with them – paradoxically – the recognition that had eluded him at the Bar.

  ‘Really? I’m mentioned by name?’

  ‘In the old days, we never repeated ourselves,’ snapped Sylvester. ‘Once said was enough. But, yes, he knows all about you and your kind and what happens when you come near a holy man.’

  Sylvester held up the cover so Anselm could read the title: Athanasius: The Life of Anthony.

  ‘I’m reading that bit about discerning good from evil. He’s on about demons in the desert but it works for people round here, too. When the good turn up, he says, joy and delight and stability enter the soul; whereas, when the bad come round the corner’ – Sylvester grabbed his gnarled walking stick, prodding Anselm’s midriff with each word – ‘there’s confusion and disorder, dejection, enmity towards ascetics, and fear of death. So there. That’s you nailed and sorted.’

  The old man grounded his stick and leaned back in his seat, examining Anselm with his watery blue eyes. He’d held every job in the monastery except that of Prior. As Cook he’d made more apple crumble than mashed turnips. As Cellarer his donations had outstripped Larkwood’s income. As Guestmaster, he’d thrown open the door to every shadow on the ground. He claimed never to have met an evil person in his life.

  ‘You’re not a bad lad,’ he said, reluctantly. ‘Come and ge
t me next time, will you? I’ve heard the bells so often, I’ve forgotten what they’re for. They’re just part of the air I breathe, do you know what I mean?’

  Anselm did. Sylvester had reached that hallowed state which is so easily overlooked, where an elder’s every action, even answering the telephone, becomes a profoundly recollected activity. His every gesture was steeped in significance. Although he didn’t recognise it, Larkwood’s Lantern Bearer was on the edge of this life; he pottered about blithely on the cusp, catching the light of the next, reflecting lost grace back into the corridors he’d almost left behind.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he groaned, struggling with bony hands out of his chair. It was time for supper, a communal gathering for which the old man was habitually and mysteriously early. ‘I could eat a horse. Oh yes … I forgot to say. There’s someone here to see you. Just turned up out of thin air.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I can’t remember. But he looked a bit shifty.’

  ‘Fair enough. Where is he now?’

  ‘I suggested he might go to Vespers.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And when was that?’

  ‘After the bell rang, you goose. When else do you think?’

  Anselm couldn’t find words for the occasion. He just watched the old man hobble off to the refectory, bemused and maddened by the trappings of holiness.

  2

  The man on the other side of the parlour table didn’t look shifty to Anselm in the least. His eyes simply flickered while he spoke, which Anselm took for intelligence, as if he had some difficulty processing his many thoughts and insights as they passed before his mind’s eye. Curiously, he didn’t introduce himself and he didn’t reciprocate after Anselm had taken the initiative – a quite useless step since this composed, purposeful visitor knew exactly who he was talking to.

  ‘There’s a great difference between who a man is and what he does,’ said the visitor. ‘A man can be constrained by his place in life … by his responsibilities to other people. He can find himself trapped by his public role. There are things he would like to do that he can’t do. I find myself in such a position and so I’ve come to you in a private capacity. Can I rely upon your discretion?’