‘Dad! I didn’t hear you come in.’
‘Bridget, what a surprise!’ he said as he gave her a big hug. ‘I take it that coffee’s nearly ready then?’
It was. After she’d helped him put the shopping away they both sat down in the living room. Mac couldn’t get the smile off his face.
‘It’s so good to see you,’ he said.
She leant over and gave his hand a squeeze.
‘And you. I just wish I could get over more often.’
‘So what brings you here today? I mean I know you want to see me but…oh well you know what I mean.’
‘Yes living and working in London does make things a bit difficult sometimes. I just wish I could visit more often. To be honest I wasn’t planning on coming today, I actually managed to get Easter off and I was going to spend a couple of days with Tommy.’
‘I take it that a case came up?’ Mac asked.
He couldn’t help smiling though. Tommy’s loss was certainly his gain.
‘Unfortunately yes but I was coming to see you tomorrow anyway, we both were. Come and have a look.’
She took him to the fridge and showed him a truly massive leg of lamb.
‘We were going to do that for you and Tim tomorrow, at least that was the plan,’ she said with a sigh.
Mac could see that his daughter wasn’t happy about something. He thought he knew what.
‘Finding the going with Tommy a bit tough? It’s hard being with a policeman, you can try and plan ahead but you never know what’s going to come up at the last minute. You know I often wonder if your mother ever regretted marrying me…’
Bridget cut him short.
‘No dad, no she didn’t,’ she said with absolute certainty.
‘How can you be so sure of that?’
‘She told me a couple of weeks before she died. She said that she’d loved her life and the only thing she regretted was not having a little longer to spend with you and me.’
Mac’s eyes brimmed with tears.
‘That sounds like your mother alright but what about you? It must have been hard having me as a father, all those school plays I missed.’
‘If I’m honest it was hard at times. I remember we did a musical once when I was at primary school. We’d rehearsed for weeks and I so wanted you to see me in my costume, I was a star if I remember right. I had my own song and everything. Of course you couldn’t make it and I got a bit upset as all the other fathers were there. Later that night Mom let me stay up late, I remember we drank hot chocolate and cuddled up together on the sofa. We saw you on the news giving a press conference about some murderer you’d caught. You know what Mom said to me?’
Mac shook his head.
‘She told me that your job was to go out into the world and catch all the bad men that were out there so that everyone else could sleep safe in their beds at night. It was our job, mine and hers, to help you to do that. I felt like a very important nine year old after she said that. She let me stay up until you came in so I could tell you how proud I was of you and tell you what a success I’d been in the musical too of course.’
The tears started streaming down Mac’s face.
‘I remember,’ he said.
She hugged him and said, ‘I’m sorry Dad, have I made you sad?’
‘No, no you haven’t,’ he said as he wiped the tears away. ‘It used to be that any thought of your mother would do that but now when I remember her I just thank God she was in my life.’
‘Me too.’
Mac got a tissue, blew his nose and pulled himself together.
‘You have got something on your mind though haven’t you?’ he asked.
She grimaced.
‘Yes, I’ve got a decision to make, possibly two.’
‘Want to talk about it?’
‘If you don’t mind. I’ve been offered a job at the Lister Hospital in Stevenage. It’s only about the same money but it’s a sort of promotion I suppose, more responsibility and the chance to try out some new ideas.’
‘So?’
‘I must admit that I don’t enjoy living in London that much but I do like working at the Royal Free, it‘s exciting and makes me feel like I’m at the centre of things.’
Mac’s heart leapt at the possibility of his daughter living so close to home but he tried to keep a straight face. He didn’t want to influence her decision.
‘Well only you can make that call. You said that you had two decisions to make?’
Bridget pulled another face.
‘I’m not quite so certain about this but Tommy’s been looking for a flat in Letchworth and I’ve been helping him.’
Tommy Nugent was a Detective Constable working out of Luton police station. He’d worked with Mac on his first case and Mac liked him a lot. He was quite glad when he heard that he and his daughter had started going out together.
Mac was puzzled at Tommy wanting to move to Letchworth though.
‘Why? It’s a bit far to go to work in Luton every day. Why would he be looking here?’
‘Because he’s going to be working out of Letchworth police station in a month or so. After that case you worked on in Luton his boss, Dan Carter, has been promoted. He’s a Detective Superintendent now and they’ve put him in charge of a new major crime unit covering the three counties. There’ll be policemen in the unit from Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire as well as Hertfordshire so he asked Tommy if he’d be interested.’
‘I’ll bet Tommy nearly bit his hand off, didn’t he?’
‘Something like that. Anyway while we were looking at this particular flat, a bit large for a single man I thought, I just let the thought slip out that I might, sort of, see myself living there.’
She gave her father a shame faced look.
‘What did he say?’
‘Nothing but he did give me this very meaningful look.’
‘Is it getting that serious?’ he asked. ‘You’ve only known each other for three months or so.’
‘How long was it before you and Mom knew?’
‘I asked her to marry me four weeks to the day after we first met.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Nothing at first. A week later she asked me who I thought we should invite on my side and that was that. We were married four months later, the longest four months of my life I may add. I think it’s so much better these days, you know moving in together and seeing how it goes first.’
His daughter looked very thoughtful.
‘Are you worried about how you’d feel if Tommy does ask you to move in with him?’ he asked.
‘God no, I’m just worried he might not ask that’s all. Of course it’s all tied up with the job, if he asks me then it would be good to be working local and not going in and out of London every day but…oh I just don’t know!’ she said, looking a bit exasperated.
‘Let it rest over Easter and talk it over with Tommy when you see him. The answer will come to you.’
‘Thanks Dad,’ she said as she gave him a hug. ‘It’s so nice to be home again.’
Chapter Fifteen
Easter Sunday
Mac and Bridget were up early that Sunday. They’d arranged to meet Tim for breakfast in the Magnets and after that they were all going back to Mac’s for the day.
Bridget did most of the cooking while Mac acted as sous-chef and Tim threw in suggestions from the side lines. By four o’clock the leg of lamb was served up and even Mac had to admit that it knocked all the foot-long hotdogs in the Magnets into a big cocked hat.
After dinner they sat on the sofa and watched a children’s animated film on the TV. It was surprisingly funny.
Mac turned to comment on one scene and saw Bridget’s sad little face. She had tears in her eyes. He leant over and held her hand.
‘Missing Mom?’
She nodded.
‘And my Easter egg. Why do people think you grow out of them?’ she said grumpily.
Without another word Mac got up and went into
the kitchen. He returned with the Easter egg he’d bought in the supermarket. He’d put it away on top of one of the kitchen cupboards and almost forgotten about it.
‘Now that’s what I call an egg!’ Tim said admiringly.
‘God, it’s massive. How did you know?’ Bridget asked with a huge smile on her face
‘I didn’t, I just bought it and I’m so glad I did.’
A few minutes afterwards Mac took a sip of wine and looked around the room. His good friend Tim, who had been a rock for him to cling to when times were bad, was laughing out loud. He had a good laugh.
His beautiful daughter Bridget sat curled up with the remains of the smashed Easter egg on her lap. She was smiling and she had chocolate smeared along her top lip. She looked nine years old again.
Mac felt strange, very strange. An unexpected feeling rose up in him, one he thought he’d never feel again.
He was happy.
Chapter Sixteen
Easter Monday
BBC TV News
‘…well you might well have been wondering why we’ve been rushing through the news this Easter Monday evening and I can tell you that it’s because we’re now going to bring you a very special report from Greece, one I think you’ll really like. This report was filmed earlier by our correspondent Ben Cottinger in the town of Agiou Athiris in Central Greece.
‘I’m standing here outside what might seem a more or less normal family home in a fairly ordinary Greek town some two hundred kilometres north of Athens. However what happened here last Saturday evening can be truly considered as extraordinary and its ripples seem to have affected just about everyone in this troubled country.
This is the house of Nikos Nicolaou. He’s a retired history professor and, from all reports, not normally given to flights of fancy. However last Friday, after returning home from holiday, a dream woke him in the night. It was a dream so powerful that he couldn't forget it. The next morning he told his grandson, also called Nikos, all about it.
What he saw in this dream was a soldier carrying something from a burning building and then his father pointing to the wall of an attic room in the house. The first part of the dream he said was actually a memory of a real event, one which he thought he’d all but forgotten. In 1947, in retaliation for a jail break that freed six Partisans, one of them being Mr. Nicolaou’s father, the local security forces burnt down the church that stood in the main square of the town.
In the church there hung an icon that they called ‘Our Lady of Agiou Athiris’. It had been the focal point of the town’s religious devotions for many centuries. Every Easter the icon would be garlanded with flowers and there would be a procession through all the parishes in the town. Of course everyone assumed that the icon had been burnt along with everything else in the church. One resident who witnessed the events said that the loss of the icon had broken the town’s heart and that the town had never really recovered from its loss.
However Mr. Nicolaou, only nine years old at the time, had been hiding in an alleyway and saw a soldier run through the flames and out of a door at the rear of the burning church. He was holding the icon. It had not been consigned to the flames after all. He told his mother about it but she ordered him to forget what he’d just seen and apparently that’s just what he did.
As I said Mr. Nicolaou, being not all that religious, might be the last man who you might think would act on such a dream but he and his grandson did just that. They tore away part of the brick wall in the attic and, to both their surprise, they found something.
Around six o’clock that evening he called together every member of his extended family for a meeting at his house. About seventy or eighty people crammed themselves inside. There Mr. Nicolaou recounted the story of his dream and then showed them what they had found behind the attic wall. It was Our Lady of Agiou Athiris, the icon that everyone thought had been destroyed seventy years before.
The very oldest members of the family fell on their knees first as they knew the icon for what it was. The younger members had never seen the real icon just an old black and white photograph that had stood in its place in the rebuilt church. All that they had left of the icon or so they’d thought.
The whole family, one by one, said a little prayer and then kissed the corner of the frame which has been the tradition in this town for centuries. Mr. Nicolaou also showed them something else that they found with the icon, a photograph of the soldier who had saved it. His father must have placed it in with the icon when he concealed it in the wall. He told his family that it was now their duty to return the icon to its proper place and asked if they would all help him to do it.
So the whole Nicolaou family assembled right here on the street outside his house and then started walking that way towards the town centre. At the front of the procession the young Nikos Nicolaou held the icon aloft and old Nikos the photograph of the soldier.
Here’s what one of the neighbours, Maria Angeletou said –
‘I was sitting outside talking to my good friend Sofia when I saw them all walking down the road towards us. I said, ‘Look at those crazy Nicolaous. What are they up to now?’ As they got closer I saw what young Nikos was holding, I saw her. I knew it was her the moment I saw it. After all these years she had come back to us. I fell to my knees while they passed by and crossed myself, then Sofia and me joined them.’
And it was not just Sofia and Maria that joined the Nicolaou family. As they walked down this hill people sitting outside these bars and restaurants also joined in. The word spread by mobile phone and by the time they reached the main road here they were around three to four hundred strong. Now, as you can see, this is a fairly busy road, with two lanes of traffic each way, but last Saturday the traffic stopped. No-one seemed to mind though, in fact it seems that many of the drivers parked up their cars and joined in the march as well.
By the time they reached the main square here they were well over five hundred strong and at least as many again were waiting for them to arrive. Some of the younger and stronger members of the family had to force their way through the crowds so they could make it to the church. Once there they were met outside the church by the priest, Father Karas, who accepted the icon from Mr. Nicolaou. It’s said that neither men spoke a word as the icon was handed over. They explained afterwards that this was because they just couldn’t find any words that could fully express their feelings.
The priest, with some help, climbed onto this wall and then held the icon above his head so that the ever growing crowd could see it. He recited the ‘Hail Mary’ and then kissed the corner of the frame. This is what it is reported that the priest said next–
‘She has come back to us. Our Lady has come back to us in this time of austerity. It is a sign.’
There was a murmuring in the crowd until in almost one voice they started shouting in unison over and over again ‘Our Lady of Austerity’, a name she’s been known by here ever since. That night the priest insisted that the icon rested in the quiet of the church but there would be little rest in the town. There was a procession to arrange for the next day, the first for seven decades. Even those who had no part to play in the planning of the Easter festivities didn’t go to sleep. They were just happy to sit and talk over the wondrous events all through the night.
Before they put the icon to rest however a local news team got the story on film and on Easter Sunday, along with their breakfasts, most of the country watched the story of the miraculous return of ‘Our Lady of Austerity’. It hit home with a lot of Greeks, so much so that the procession, which used to take two hours at most, took over six as it attracted people from all over Greece, people like twenty nine year old Ekaterina who said this –
‘We live about eighty kilometres away from Agiou Athiris but when we heard about the icon on the news my husband and I got in our car and drove straight here. We’re not so religious but times have been very hard for us and I suppose we just needed some hope. We found it here, in her sad face and in the smiles
all around us. I can’t remember the last time I felt this happy. We have hope again.’
So another story about austerity from Greece I suppose but one that is thankfully a bit different. As one man told me after seeing the icon for himself ‘When I saw the light reflecting from the painting I thought that this indeed is the light at the end of the tunnel being switched on again for all Greece.’
(Newsreader) ‘Well that was filmed some hours ago but we can now go to Ben who’s still in the main square in Agiou Athiris. Ben what’s been happening?’
‘Well it’s not far off midnight here but as you can see the square is still packed with people. First though I’d like to show you a little clip, a clip that’s gone viral all over the world via the internet. Here you can see a man examining the icon. He’s one of the world’s leading experts on icons from this period and he was sent by the government to check that it was genuine. He examined the icon for about half an hour. The video then shows him packing his tools away in a bag. Everyone knew the icon was genuine when he knelt down in front of the icon and kissed the corner of the frame. He then stood up and, with a huge grin on his face, he said, ‘She is so beautiful.’ There’s no need to guess what all the headlines are going to be tomorrow. Anyway once he’d said that a cheer went from the church to the crowd outside and the whole town erupted. The Prime Minister visited an hour later and he called it ‘a sure sign that as a nation we can beat austerity.’
People are still flooding into the town from all over the country. I spoke to the man who owns the hotel over there in the corner of the square and he said that normally they would be lucky to be a quarter full. A couple of hours ago he said that the earliest you could get a room would be near Christmas and it’s probably next year by now. He said that he’s already had to take on four times as many staff as normal to cope with the influx of visitors. The ‘Miracle of Agiou Athiris’ as they’re calling it has really hit a nerve in the Greek public’s imagination and, here at least, austerity had ended as this town has been turned into something of a national shrine.
The Weeping Women (The Mac Maguire detective mysteries Book 3) Page 14
