Bad Faith

by Gillian Philip

  I was so confused I just looked. About twenty feet below us the green tangle of twig and branch and overgrown grass gave way to brown devastation, the ground sodden and destroyed. There were great piles of broken branches and litter piled where the river had dumped them, and fringes of grubby white scum caught on the high water mark. Further down, the sullen river swirled around the base of trees, but it was almost back within its banks.

  ‘It’s gone...’ I swallowed. ‘S’gone down a lot.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ming, still staring down at it.

  ‘A lot,’ I said again, for something to say. I could feel the imprint of his body from my scalp to my toes, and my skin was tingling.

  ‘It wasn’t meant to do that,’ he said.

  ‘No. It was going to get worse before tonight. Always wrong, aren’t they?’ I was starting to feel better now that Ming was distracted, now that there was something to talk about. ‘Hey, what’s that?’

  He started, and tried to grab my hand back, but I was already edging down the slope. There was something big and white jammed behind a log. I didn’t like the slope, and I liked the river at the foot of it even less, but for some reason I felt high, as happy-go-lucky as some eight-year-old kid and just as curious. And immortal. And I wanted to prove I didn’t need my hand held, that shattered hip or no shattered hip, I wasn’t scared of steep muddy slopes like some fainting heroine in an Empire-line dress. And let’s face it, I was showing off.

  ‘Cassandra!’ shouted Ming. God, just like my mother. Cassandra!

  I turned back to take the mickey out of him, which was when the lance of pain shot up my right side. Must have been falling against the boulder that had done it, as if my hip had suddenly remembered it had been hurt, damn it. There was no arguing with that leg when it decided to go. I was furious with it even before my foot went from under me and I began to slide. Struggling to get my balance, I took a couple of hops, then two lopsided running steps, my right leg still refusing to take any weight. Careering on down the slope, I caught both feet on a jutting birch branch and went flying, right over the log and the white thing.

  It knocked the breath out of me, but that was just fright, because I’d mostly landed on something soft, my ankles hooked over the log, my shoulders and face in the scummy mud. I lay there feeling scared and not wanting to look at what I was lying on. I’d had a fleeting glimpse as I sailed over it and must have registered what it was, but just for the moment I wasn’t letting that visual image connect with my brain.

  What did I see? I don’t dream about it but I still see it sometimes in that funny shadowland between being awake and being asleep: that moment when your body jolts and you realise the slideshow in your head wasn’t real. That’s when I’ll see again what I saw then, and think that it’s lying beside me in the bed. A bloated thing in a cassock. A lolling head that isn’t quite the right shape. Curled puffy fingers that aren’t quite the right colour. And sticking out of the cassock, one foot, booted, on the end of a leg that isn’t at quite the right angle.

  Ming was crashing down the slope behind me. I could hear his panting breath as he skidded to a halt so that he didn’t end up in the same undignified position as me. Very clearly and quietly, I heard him blaspheme.

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  Clambering down around the log, he grabbed my arms to haul me to my feet. I had to clutch his shirt and then his shoulders to get myself upright and steady, but neither of us was worrying about Young Lust at that moment. Something lifted in my throat and I swallowed hard. With Ming gripping me tightly, we stood and stared.

  ‘Somebody bashed the Bishop,’ said Ming.

  Well, I guess he had his composure back. I snorted and giggled, because I couldn’t help it, and because I couldn’t think what else to do.

  What else was there to do, anyway? There was no question of trying to resuscitate the...Thing. It had a smell about it, and it wasn’t the Odour of Sanctity. It occurred to me that the smell had got onto me and I would never get it off, not as long as I lived. I started to shake, and Ming’s fingers tightened on my arms, but we still couldn’t look away.

  It wasn’t like the rabbit. Bishop Todd was not cute now, if he ever had been, and I’ll tell you, I wasn’t about to touch his eyeball. Near his head lay a rough stone about the size of a big man’s fist, and it was sticky with a dark congealed smear that was neither bright nor sparkling. Otherwise there didn’t seem to be much blood. Perhaps it had washed away in the water that swirled around his foot, making it move slightly as if he was lying there cooling his hot toes. A corner of mud-stained cassock drifted in the tiny sidelined current.

  Ming wasn’t making a wild guess about the cause of death. There was a great shattered hollow in the side of the head, but I must have been in denial.

  ‘He fell in the river,’ I said, and I was amazed how steady my voice was. ‘See, I was right. He fell in the river up at the forest park, and he washed downstream. Must’ve hit his head on the way. See?’

  ‘No,’ said Ming, crouching to prod the horrible wound with a twig. He wanted to be a doctor, did Ming. Fat chance, but I suppose he felt he should be able to do something like that. He recoiled as the twig went in too far, as if he was scared he’d hurt the broken head, but then he jabbed it gently again, as if he couldn’t help himself. His hands had just been touching me, I thought, and now they were touching the Bish – the Thing.

  ‘He’s maybe been eddying around here when the water was high,’ he said. ‘But he’s not been in the river. His cassock’s wet but he’s still wearing it.’

  ‘So?’ I don’t know why I felt so defensive. My thoughts hadn’t sorted themselves out yet.

  ‘It’d come off in the river. I read that once in a – ’

  ‘You read too much,’ I told him with a shudder. ‘I still think...’

  ‘Nah.’ He nodded at the lump of bloody stone. ‘That’s what hit him. That wouldn’t wash downstream with him, would it?’

  Well. All right.

  It wasn’t unusual that Bishop Todd – what was left of him – was wearing his cassock. It was an affectation of his. Famous for it, and he liked to be recognised, did Bishop Todd. Bet he was regretting it now, wherever he was. If somebody came after you with a big rock it wouldn’t be easy to run away in a cassock.

  The Bishop’s hands were pale and bloated, and his fingers reminded me of grubs you might turn up underneath a rock, a rock that hadn’t been moved for a long time. Those hands seemed to me the most horrific thing about him. They were worse than his face, worse even than his head. The protruding leg was pale too, whiter than white and blotched blue and grey, scattered with spiky hairs, puffy at the ankles around the tightly-laced walking boot. It was ugly but it wasn’t as horrible as his grub-hands.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Ming stood up and stared down thoughtfully at the Thing.

  I stared at him. ‘What do you mean, what are we going to do?’

  ‘I mean, I suppose we ought to call the police.’

  And that was the first time it occurred to me that we didn’t have to.

  • • •

  We stood in silence for a while. When I say silence, of course, I’m not counting the whooshing of wind high in the pines, and the rustle of beasts in the forest litter, and the subdued roar of the river, and the pounding of our own blood in our ears. I stared down at the broken grass and churned earth, trying not to look at the Bishop’s head, making myself focus on his feet instead, his feet in their tight-laced walking boots.

  And while we stood there, time at a complete halt around us, the switch happened. Ming turned into a bundle of shredded nerves: I could practically feel it happen to him. And I was suddenly in complete control of myself, calm and confident. Needs must.

  ‘Listen,’ said Ming abruptly. ‘When you report this can you leave me out of it?’

  ‘Why?’ The question was irrelevant, but I asked it to pass the time, while the wheels of my disordered mind turned and spun and clicked into place. What
was his problem? I knew for a fact that Ming had nothing to fear. For a fact. I, on the other hand...

  ‘Only, Cass, it’s not going to look good, me finding him... it...you know. With my parents and all?’ The words began to tumble out of him. ‘And getting suspended, and all the fights? And – and the land. Mum and Dad’s estate. You know?’

  ‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything.’ Completely, totally, unbelievably irrelevant. I wished he’d shut up for a minute so I could think what to do.

  ‘Cass.’ There was panic in his voice. He seized my arm. ‘Come over here, come away from...that.’

  He pulled me into the shade of a huge pine, though I kept looking back at the body. ‘Listen, Ma Baxter’s stepbrother’s second cousin? The one they gave our land to after the crofters failed?’

  ‘In inverted commas. Yeah.’ Shut up, Ming, shut up, I need to think...

  He crouched and tugged me down beside him, as if someone might see us. ‘It was only in his name, wasn’t it? It was a holding company. It was Bishop Todd got the land.’

  ‘Really?’ I blinked at him. That did shock me. ‘Really, Ming?’

  ‘Yeah, really. Don’t ask me how I know, it doesn’t matter. It’s just... it doesn’t look good. That’s all.’

  I could see his point. It’d be different if Ming’s parents had humbly accepted the change in their circumstances, which they might have done if their confiscated estate had stayed in the hands of the crofters, who I think they quite liked. But it turns out that militant atheists – which they were by then, if not before – weren’t good at keeping their mouths shut and their opinions to themselves. Ming’s parents were always in trouble, and quite often in the police cells for a night or two. My Mum and Dad, of course, couldn’t afford to have anything to with seditious political activists, but to give them their due, neither set of parents tried to come between me and Ming. I think they hoped the authorities wouldn’t bother with a friendship between kids. So I went on going over to stay at his poky new house in the bad part of town, squashed onto the floor in my sleeping bag in the sitting room. And Ming went on coming over to stay with us, where he got a whole spare room to himself, which I tried not to feel guilty about. Dad worried more about us now that we were getting older, because once we were of age it would be an Unauthorised Relationship with the potential for carnality (underage carnality was something the government didn’t even acknowledge, officially). But Dad never complained, and Mum only very occasionally said something level-headed and astringent about How These Things Looked.

  What it came down to was this: Ming being in the vicinity of a dead Bishop, and the one who stole his parents’ land, did not have the angelic sheen of innocence.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not going to look very good.’

  ‘And finding the body, Cass. That’s bad too. If you find the body you’re a prime suspect. It’s a well-known fact.’

  I bit my nails hard. ‘You so read too much.’

  ‘It’s not that I had anything to do with...I don’t want you to think...I mean, I wouldn’t...’

  ‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘Of course I don’t think that.’

  ‘Okay.’ He breathed a huge sigh. ‘So give me a head start, okay? Twenty minutes, say. Twenty minutes won’t make any difference. Then you can report it.’

  ‘We’re not reporting it.’

  Ming just stared at me. But I watched the brown gushing river and smiled.

  I said, ‘It’s really gone down a lot, hasn’t it?’

  • • •

  ‘You are not serious!’ Ming’s eyes were so wide the whites of them showed all around his irises.

  ‘I’m totally serious.’ I shrugged. ‘We have to hide it. That’s all.’

  ‘What d’you mean, hide it?’

  ‘Duh. We put it where nobody can find it.’ I sighed patiently. ‘You’re the expert. They can’t prove a murder if there isn’t a body. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Well, that’s not quite... actually it depends on...Cass, why are we even discussing this?’ I had never seen a face as white as Ming’s was, right then. ‘He’s been murdered! Why do we want them not to prove it?’

  Because the river was supposed to rise. Because it had gone down instead. Because there wasn’t enough force in the water now to wash the thing out to sea.

  Because the killer must have panicked, conscience-stricken. He must have run, run like the hounds of Hell were after him, when he should have waited to roll the Bishop into the crashing mountainous water. Because he must have hoped afterwards that the river had risen anyway. The way it was supposed to...

  If he’s in the river, there really is a God...

  But he wasn’t. And I wasn’t leaving him here, that was for sure, but nor could I shove him into the tamed river. Drifting, eddying, the furthest the Bishop would get was the low bridge under the bypass. I thought about him, stuck there in the brown water, that pale foot in the air like Excalibur, crowds gathering. It was not something I could contemplate.

  I said, ‘You’re not going to believe me. But help me anyway. Help me hide it.’

  ‘Cass, I can’t touch that thing.’ He was trembling.

  I frowned. ‘You just touched it. You just picked up that stick and...’

  ‘Yes,’ he snapped. ‘Okay. But I don’t want to touch it again. I don’t want to pick it up, I don’t want anything to do with it. I don’t want to take it anywhere.’

  ‘It’s not far.’

  ‘That’s not the point!’ He grabbed my hand. ‘Cass, what’s your problem? What makes you want to...’

  ‘See that?’ I said calmly.

  Bewildered, he looked at the ground where I was pointing. You could make out the print of a walking boot, at least half the sole and the whole of the heel, and between them, a very distinct design of an alligator. ‘Uh-huh,’ he said.

  ‘And see that?’ I pointed at the Bishop’s boot.

  He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. There wasn’t an alligator on it, that was all.

  ‘My Dad did this.’ I snatched my hand out of Ming’s and massaged it with my fingers, though he hadn’t hurt it. ‘Understand? Dad killed the Bishop.’

  • • •

  He didn’t say You’re mad or You’re crazy or Don’t talk such mince. He just shoved his hair out of his eyes with both hands, then clasped his hands behind his head.

  ‘Why do you think he’d do that, Cass?’

  Old Mister Analytical. Not Why would he do that? Just Why do you think he would?

  ‘I really haven’t got time for this.’ I was amazed at how cool and determined I felt. The fact was, I had no choice, and we’d better get it done quickly. Ming had to be on my side, he absolutely had to, just like he always had been. ‘Okay, here’s how it is. Dad hates Todd.’

  ‘So do a lot of people.’

  ‘No, Ming. You do. Most people think he’s great,’ I said bitterly. ‘Even if half the world hated him, it wasn’t them out here walking on Thursday when he went missing. It was my Dad. And he wanted Todd dead. I heard him say so.’

  ‘Lots of people have those Alligator boots,’ he said weakly.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘They don’t. They’re imported. You can hardly get them for love or money and Mum had to go on a six-month waiting list before Dad’s birthday.’

  He could see there was no point following that tack, so he fell silent. His eyes narrowed and it made me shiver, because I’d actually assumed Ming would howl with laughter and throw my arguments straight out of court. Instead he was taking me seriously, and that unnerved me.

  ‘What do you think his motive would be, Cass?’

  There it was again. Not Why would he have a motive? It was, What do you think his motive would be?

  ‘You’re not going to believe it,’ I said.

  ‘Try me.’ His eyes were very wary now.

  The words tumbled out of me in a rush. ‘Todd did something awful to Griffin. He abused him. Assaulted him. Oh God, I d
on’t know.’ I didn’t want to know, either. I never wanted to know.

  Ming’s jaw had gone all loose. So loose he couldn’t even speak.

  ‘Four years ago. I’ve worked it out, Ming!’

  He found his voice. ‘Cass. Oh, my God. Cassandra. What makes you think that?’

  What makes me think that!

  ‘Stop asking me those stupid questions!’ I yelled. ‘I heard them, okay? I heard Mum and Dad talking about it! I never knew because they never told me! They never told anyone! Todd threatened them, he threatened Dad with all sorts of things.’

  ‘Stop, stop. How do you imagine he would...’

  ‘Griff used to serve at the altar, remember? Todd was always coming to preach at our church. Dad was sick of him, he was always...’ My eyes widened as something horrible struck me. ‘Oh, Ming, maybe that’s why. Maybe it was so he could hang around Griff. And Griff worshipped Todd!’ I felt like crying but I was too angry. ‘It must have been just before he was elected Bishop. Dad couldn’t do a thing. His word and Griff’s against this powerful guy who was going to be Bishop and everybody knew it! A friend of Ma Baxter’s!’

  Ming was shaking his head, really slowly, his fingers still gripping the back of it. ‘Oh, my God,’ he kept saying, over and over again. Funny coming from him. ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘You believe me,’ I said. ‘You know it’s true.’ I was torn between triumph and sheer horror, because I was right. The look on Ming’s face told me so.

  ‘Cass,’ he said again, but no sound came out.

  I looked at him. Then I looked again. ‘You knew,’ I breathed.

  ‘No!’ His panic was back and that proved it.

  ‘You knew about this!’

  ‘Cassandra, please believe me. I didn’t. I did not know any such thing!’

  I wanted to believe him, I really did.

  ‘Cass,’ he pleaded. ‘Forget about this. What you’re thinking of doing, it’s crazy.’