a Prayer for the Dying (1974)[1]

by Jack Higgins

  'And who else? You can forget the change.'

  The old man grabbed his hand and counted out his change laboriously. 'You had visitors at number thirteen about twenty minutes ago.'

  'The law?' Fallon asked softly.

  'Nothing in uniform. They went in and didn't come out again. Two cars waiting at the other end of the street - another across the road.'

  He counted a final penny into Fallon's hand. Fallon turned and crossed to the telephone-box on the other corner. He dialled the number of the lodging-house and was answered instantly by the old woman who ran the place. He pushed in the coin and spoke.

  'Mrs Keegan? It's Daly here. I wonder if you'd mind doing me a favour?'

  He knew at once by the second's hesitation, by the strain in her voice, that old Michael's supposition had been correct.

  'Oh, yes, Mr Daly.'

  'The thing is, I'm expecting a phone call at nine o'clock. Take the number and tell them I'll ring back when I get in. I haven't a hope in hell of getting there now. I ran into a couple of old friends and we're having a few drinks. You know how it is?'

  There was another slight pause before she said as if in response to some invisible prompt, 'Sounds nice. Where are you?'

  'A pub called The Grenadier Guard in Kensington High Street. I'll have to go now. See you later.'

  He replaced the receiver, left the phone-box and moved into a doorway from which he had a good view of No. 13 halfway down the short street.

  A moment later, the front door was flung open. There were eight of them. Special Branch from the look of it. The first one on to the pavement waved frantically and two cars moved out of the shadows at the end of the street. The whole crew climbed inside, the cars moved away at speed. A car which was parked at the kerb on the other side of the main road went after them.

  Fallon crossed to the corner and paused beside the old newspaper seller. He took out his wallet, extracting the four remaining pound notes and pressed them into his hand.

  'God bless you, Mr Fallon,' Michael said, but Fallon was already on the other side of the road, walking rapidly back towards the river.

  This time Kristou didn't hear a thing although he had been waiting for something like an hour, nerves taut. He sat there at the table, ledger open, the pen gripped tightly in his mittened hand. There was the softest of footfalls, wind over grass only, then the harsh, deliberate click as the hammer of the Browning was cocked.

  Kristou breathed deeply to steady himself. 'What's the point, Martin?' he said. 'What would it get you?'

  Fallon moved round to the other side of the table, the Browning in his hand. Kristou stood up, leaning on the table to stop from shaking.

  'I'm the only friend you've got left now, Martin.'

  'You bastard,' Fallon said. 'You sicked the Special Branch on to me.'

  'I had to,' Kriston said frantically. 'It was the only way I could get you back here. It was for your own good, Martin. You've been like a dead man walking. I can bring you back to life again. Action and passion, that's what you want. That's what you need.'

  Fallon's eyes were like black holes in the white face. He raised the Browning at arm's length, touching the muzzle between Kristou's eyes.

  The old man closed them. 'All right, if you want to, go ahead. Get it over with. This is a life, the life I lead? Only remember one thing. Kill me, you kill yourself because there is no one else. Not one single person in this world that would do anything other than turn you in or put a bullet in your head.'

  There was a long pause. He opened his eyes to see Fallon gently lowering the hammer of the Browning. He stood there holding it against his right thigh, staring into space.

  Kristou said carefully, 'After all, what is he to you, this Krasko? A gangster, a murderer. The kind who lives off young girls.' He spat. 'A pig.'

  Fallon said. 'Don't try to dress it up. What's the next move?'

  'One phone call is all it takes. A car will be here in half an hour. You'll be taken to a farm near Doncaster. An out-of-the-way place. You'll be safe there. You make the hit on Thursday morning at the cemetery like I showed you in the photo. Krasko always leaves his goons at the gate. He doesn't like having them around when he's feeling sentimental.'

  'All right,' Fallon said. 'But I do my own organising. That's understood.'

  'Of course. Anything you want.' Kristou opened the drawer, took out an envelope and shoved it across. 'There's five hundred quid there in fives, to be going on with.'

  Fallon weighed the envelope in his hand carefully for a moment, then slipped it into a pocket. 'When do I get the rest?' he said. 'And the passport?'

  'Mr Meehan takes care of that end on satisfactory completion.'

  Fallon nodded slowly. 'All right, make your phone call.'

  Kristou smiled, a mixture of triumph and relief. 'You're doing the wise thing, Martin. Believe me you are.' He hesitated. 'There's just one thing if you don't mind me saying so?'

  'And what would that be?'

  'The Browning - no good to you for a job like this. You need something nice and quiet.'

  Fallon looked down at the Browning, a slight frown on his face. 'Maybe you have a point. What have you got to offer?'

  'What would you like?'

  Fallon shook his head. 'I've never had a preference for any particular make of handgun. That way you end up with a trademark. Something they can fasten on to and that's bad.'

  Kristou unlocked a small safe in the corner, opened it and took out a cloth bundle which he unwrapped on the table. It contained a rather ugly-looking automatic, perhaps six inches long, a curious-looking barrel protruding a farther two inches. The bundle also contained a three-inch silencer and two fifty-round cartons of ammunition.

  'And what in the hell is this?' Fallon said, picking it up.

  'A Czech Ceska,' Kristou told him. 'Seven point five millimetres. Model twenty-seven. The Germans took over the factory during the war. This is one of theirs. You can tell by the special barrel modification. Made that way to take a silencer.'

  'Is it any good?'

  'SS Intelligence used them, but judge for yourself.'

  He moved into the darkness. A few moments later, a light was turned on at the far end of the building and Fallon saw that there was a target down there of a type much used by the army. A lifesize replica of a charging soldier.

  As he screwed the silencer on to the end of the barrel, Kristou rejoined him. 'Any time you're ready.'

  Fallon took careful aim with both hands, there was a dull thud that outside would not have been audible above three yards. He had fired at the heart and chipped the right arm.

  He adjusted the sight and tried again. He was still a couple of inches out. He made a further adjustment. This time he was dead on target.

  Kristou said, 'Didn't I tell you?'

  Fallon nodded. 'Ugly, but deadly, Kristou, just like you and me. Did I ever tell you that I once saw a sign on a wall in Derry that said: Is there a life before death? Isn't that the funniest thing you ever heard?'

  Kristou stared at him, aghast, and Fallon turned, his arm swung up, he fired twice without apparently taking aim and shot out the target's eyes.

  2

  Father da Costa

  ... the Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. Father Michael da Costa spoke out bravely as he led the way up through the cemetery, his words almost drowned in the rush of heavy rain.

  Inside, he was sick at heart. It had rained heavily all night, was raining even harder now. The procession from chapel to graveside was a wretched affair at the best of times, but this occasion was particularly distressing.

  For one thing, there were so few of them. The two men from the funeral directors carrying the pitifully small coffin between them and the mother, already on the point of collapse, staggering along behind supported by her husband on one side and her brother on the other. They were poor people. They had no one. They turned inward in their grief.

  Mr O'Brien, the cemetery superintendent, was waiting at t
he graveside, an umbrella over his head against the rain. There was a gravedigger with him who pulled off the canvas cover as they arrived. Not that it had done any good for there was at least two feet of water in the bottom.

  O'Brien tried to hold the umbrella over the priest, but Father da Costa waved it away. Instead, he took off his coat and handed it to the superintendent and stood there in the rain at the graveside, the old red and gold cope making a brave show in the grey morning.

  O'Brien had to act as server and Father da Costa sprinkled the coffin with holy water and incense and as he prayed, he noticed that the father was glaring across at him wildly like some trapped animal behind bars, the fingers of his right hand clenching and unclenching convulsively. He was a big man - almost as big as da Costa. Foreman on a building site.

  Da Costa looked away hurriedly and prayed for the child, face upturned, rain beading his tangled grey beard.

  Into your hands, O Lord,

  We humbly commend our sister,

  Lead her for whom you have

  Shown so great a love,

  Into the joy of the heavenly

  paradise.

  Not for the first time, the banality of what he was saying struck him. How could he explain to any mother on this earth that God needed her eight-year-old daughter so badly that it had been necessary for her to choke to death in the stinking waters of an industrial canal to drift for ten days before being found.

  The coffin descended with a splash and the gravedigger quickly pulled the canvas sheet back in place. Father da Costa said a final prayer, then moved round to the woman who was now crying bitterly.

  He put a hand on her shoulder. 'Mrs Dalton - if there's anything I can do.'

  The father struck his arm away wildly. 'You leave her alone!' he cried. 'She's suffered enough. You and your bloody prayers. What good's that? I had to identify her, did you know that? A piece of rotting flesh that was my daughter after ten days in the canal. What kind of a God is it that could do that to a child?'

  O'Brien moved forward quickly, but Father da Costa put up an arm to hold him back. 'Leave it,' he said calmly.

  A strange, hunted look appeared on Dalton's face as if he suddenly realised the enormity of his offence. He put an arm about his wife's shoulders and he and her brother hurried her away. The two funeral men went after them.

  O'Brien helped da Costa on with his coat. 'I'm sorry about that, Father. A bad business.'

  'He has a point, poor devil,' da Costa said, 'After all, what am I supposed to say to someone in his position?'

  The gravedigger looked shocked, but O'Brien simply nodded slowly. 'It's a funny old life sometimes.' He opened his umbrella. 'I'll walk you back to the chapel, Father.'

  Da Costa shook his head. 'I'll take the long way round if you don't mind. I could do with the exercise. I'll borrow the umbrella if I may.'

  'Certainly, Father.'

  O'Brien gave it to him and da Costa walked away through the wilderness of marble monuments and tombstones.

  The gravedigger said, 'That was a hell of an admission for a priest to make.'

  O'Brien lit a cigarette. 'Ah, but then da Costa is no ordinary priest. Joe Devlin, the sacristan at St Anne's, told me all about him. He was some sort of commando or other during the war. Fought with Tito and the Jugoslav partisans. Afterwards, he went to the English College in Rome. Had a brilliant career there - could have been anything. Instead, he decided to go into mission work after he was ordained.'

  'Where did they send him?'

  'Korea. The Chinese had him for nearly five years. Afterwards they gave him some administrative job in Rome to recuperate, but he didn't like that. Got them to send him to Mozambique. I think it was his grandfather who was Portuguese. Anyway, he speaks the language.'

  'What happened there?'

  'Oh, he was deported. The Portuguese authorities accused him of having too much sympathy with rebels.'

  'So what's he doing here?'

  'Parish priest at Holy Name.'

  'That pile of rubble?' the gravedigger said incredulously. 'Why, it's only standing up because of the scaffolding. If he gets a dozen for Mass on a Sunday he'll be lucky.'

  'Exactly,' O'Brien said.

  'Oh, I get it.' The gravedigger nodded sagely. 'It's their way of slapping his wrist.'

  'He's a good man,' O'Brien said. 'Too good to be wasted.'

  He was suddenly tired of the conversation and, for some strange reason, unutterably depressed. 'Better get that grave filled in.'

  'What, now, in this rain?' The gravedigger looked at him bewildered. 'It can wait till later, can't it?'

  'No, it damn well can't.'

  O'Brien turned on heel and walked away and the grave-digger, swearing softly, pulled back the canvas sheet and got to work.

  Father da Costa usually enjoyed a walk in the rain. It gave him a safe, enclosed feeling. Some psychological thing harking back to childhood, he supposed. But not now. Now, he felt restless and ill at case. Still disturbed by what had happened at the graveside.

  He paused to break a personal vow by lighting a cigarette, awkwardly because of the umbrella in his left hand. He had recently reduced his consumption to five a day, and those he smoked only during the evening, a pleasure to be savoured by anticipation, but under the circumstances ...

  He moved on into the oldest part of the cemetery, a section he had discovered with delight only a month or two previously. Here amongst the pines and the cypresses were superb Victorian-Gothic tombs, winged angels in marble, bronzed effigies of Death. Something different on every hand and on each slab a pious, sentimental, implacable belief in the hereafter was recorded.

  He didn't see a living soul until he went round a corner between rhododendron bushes and paused abruptly. The path divided some ten yards in front of him and at the intersection stood a rather interesting grave. A door between marble pillars, partially open. In front of it the bronze figure of a woman in the act of rising from a chair.

  A man in a dark overcoat, head bare, knelt before her on one knee. It was very quiet - only the rushing of the rain into wet earth and Father da Costa hesitated for a moment, unwilling to intrude on such a moment of personal grief.

  And then an extraordinary thing happened. A priest stepped in through the eternity door at the back of the grave. A youngish man who wore a dark clerical raincoat over his cassock and a black hat.

  What took place then was like something out of a nightmare, frozen in time, no reality to it at all. As the man in the dark overcoat glanced up, the priest produced an automatic with a long black silencer on the end. There was a dull thud as he fired. Fragments of bone and brain sprayed out from the rear of his victim's skull as he was slammed back against the gravel.

  Father da Costa gave a hoarse cry, already seconds too late, 'For God's sake no!'

  The young priest, in the act of stepping towards his victim, looked up, aware of da Costa for the first time. The arm swung instantly as he took deliberate aim and da Costa looked at Death, at the white devil's face on him, the dark, dark eyes.

  And then, unaccountably, as his lips moved in prayer, the gun was lowered. The priest bent down to pick something up. The dark eyes stared into his for a second longer and then he slipped back through the door and was gone.

  Father da Costa threw the umbrella to one side and dropped to his knees beside the man who had been shot. Blood trickled from the nostrils, the eyes were half-closed and yet, incredibly, there was still the sound of laboured breathing.

  He began to recite in a firm voice, the prayers for the dying. Go, Christian Soul, from this world, in the Name of God the Father Almighty who created thee and then, with a hoarse rattle, the breathing stopped abruptly.

  Fallon followed the path at the north end of the cemetery, walking fast, but not too fast. Not that it mattered. He was well screened by rhododendron bushes and it was unlikely that there would be anyone about in such weather.

  The priest had been unfortunate. One of those time and chance
things. It occurred to him, with something like amusement and not for the first time in his life, that no matter how well you planned, something unexpected always seemed to turn up.

  He moved into a small wood and found the van parked in the track out of sight as he had left it. There was no one in the driver's seat and he frowned.

  'Varley, where are you?' he called softly.

  A small man in a raincoat and cloth cap came blundering through the trees, mouth gaping, clutching a pair of binoculars in one hand. He learned against the side of the van, fighting for breath.

  Fallon shook him roughly by the shoulder. 'Where in the hell have you been?'

  'I was watching,' Varley gasped. He raised the binoculars. 'Mr Meehan's orders. That priest. He saw you. Why didn't you give it to him?'

  Fallon opened the van door and shoved him in behind the wheel. 'Shut up and get driving!'

  He went round to the rear, opened the doors, got in and closed them again as the engine roared into life and they lurched away along the rough track.

  He opened the small window at the rear of the driver's compartment. 'Steady,' he said. 'Easy does it. The slower the better. A friend of mine once robbed a bank and made his escape in an ice-cream van that couldn't do more than twenty miles an hour. They expect you to move like hell after a killing so do the other thing.'

  He started to divest himself of the raincoat and cassock. Underneath he wore a dark sweater and grey slacks. His navy blue trench-coat was ready on the seat and he pulled it on. Then he took off the rubber galoshes he was wearing.

  Varley was sweating as they turned into the dual carriageway. 'Oh, God,' he moaned. 'Mr Meehan will have our balls for this.'

  'Let me worry about Meehan.' Fallon bundled the priest's clothing into a canvas holdall and zipped it shut.

  'You don't know him, Mr Fallon,' Varley said. 'He's the devil himself when he's mad. There was a fella called Gregson a month or two back. Professional gambler. Bent as a corkscrew. He took one of Mr Meehan's clubs for five grand. When the boys brought him in, Mr Meehan nailed his hands to a table top. Did it himself, too. Six-inch nails and a five-pound hammer. Left him like that for five hours. To consider the error of his ways, that's what he said.'