Reprobation

by Catherine Fearns

  ‘Why did he cut open her abdomen? What else was in there?’

  ‘Oh my god.’

  ***

  There was a knock on the library door. Helen jumped in her chair and quickly closed down her web browser, even though the screen was facing away from the door. The Deaconess popped her head in.

  ‘Helen? Ah, there you are. There was a phone call for you, someone called Mikko Kristensen? He says he is on his way to see you, and he’ll be here soon. And he gave me the following message for you. She stepped into the library, and read from a post-it note: ‘Get yourself a… I’m afraid he said the f-word here… mobile phone.’ She sighed. ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Helen? Shall I meet him with you?’

  ‘No, no, it’s quite alright Margaret. He’s… a student of mine. He’s having a difficult time with the course and I’m giving him some spiritual help. You know, as we do here from time to time.’ She smiled, but Margaret did not smile back. She moved further into the room.

  ‘Be very careful, Helen. I believe this person has been sent here to tempt you. And this is a good thing, my dear. Remember Article 11: “But God, the Father of all comfort, does not let them be tempted beyond what they can bear, but with the temptation he also provides a way out – it’s Corinthians 10.13 of course – and by the Holy Spirit revives in them the assurance of their perseverance”.’ There it was again, that kindness tinged with threat. Helen was beginning to find it unbearable.

  ‘I’ll be careful, Margaret. I promise.’

  As soon as the Deaconess left, Helen rushed up to her room and waited at the window, a strange buzzing in her head, an increase of her heartbeat, an irritating sweating that she couldn’t stop. As soon as she heard the crunch of gravel and saw a taxi turn into the driveway, she grabbed her coat and ran down to the doorway to greet him outside. This was not a visitor that could be deemed in any way appropriate to come into the building, and as he emerged from the taxi, immediately lighting up a pre-rolled cigarette, she saw with dismay that although the ridiculous slogan t-shirt he was no doubt wearing was covered by a winter coat, he was also wearing a beanie hat embroidered with the word ‘SATAN’ in capital letters. The inverted cross tattoo on his neck was clearly visible. With unfortunate timing, Sister Mary pulled into the driveway just after his taxi, and emerged from the Beetle with two huge shopping bags filled with groceries. ‘What’s up, Sister?’ he nodded at her. ‘Can I help you with those?’

  He moved to take the bags from Sister Mary, but she snatched them away and looked at him with grim disapproval as she marched up the steps, glowering at Helen too as she puffed past her into the house.

  ‘Hey, Sister Helen.’ Mikko stood at the bottom of the steps, rocking on his heels with his hands in his pockets. He gestured behind Helen to where Sister Mary had gone inside. ‘What’s her problem?’

  ‘I imagine she objects to your hat.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Fuck.’

  ‘Come on. You wore that on purpose.’

  ‘I didn’t! OK, maybe subconsciously. So anyway, our friend Clancy left me a message. I thought maybe we could call him back together and get our results. Or whatever.’

  Helen wasn’t really sure how to behave. Should she thank him for coming all this way? People seemed to lightly make fun of each other, with a little bit of sarcasm, perhaps she would try that.

  ‘So you dressed for the occasion then? You know I can’t bring you in to the building looking like that. I’m pretty tolerant as Calvinists go, but the other Sisters? Not so much.’

  ‘OK, Sister Helen. Let’s go for a walk then, show me your hood. I want to check out this spooky-ass forest, it is awesome around here.’

  As they walked away, side by side, a face appeared in one of the upstairs windows of Argarmeols Hall. The Deaconess watched from a room that might have been hers, or might have been Helen’s. Then two more faces appeared, Sisters Frida and Mary in the kitchen window. And another, and another. A leader and eleven of her twelve apostles, watching over their own, the apostate being drawn into the wilderness. Helen did not dare look back but she could almost feel their gazes upon her. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

  They headed into the pine forest, walking mostly in silence. This was her territory, and she felt somehow proud to be showing it to him. She knew every twist and turn of the path, every undulation of the hills, every tree trunk. It had rained all that morning, and the pine trees hung heavy with damp and the heady scent of wet leaves, autumnal decay. At one point a red squirrel darted across their path and Mikko started in fright: ‘Fuck! What the fuck is that?’ which made her laugh and lightened the atmosphere. Their boots became stained with wet sand and clotted with leaves. Sometimes the path was clearly constructed with pine logs, wooden hand rails, and at other times they had to clamber, putting out their hands for balance on mossy rock outcrops, stepping over roots and branches, avoiding prickly gorse. Once in a while Mikko, with his nervous energy, would pick up a pine cone and throw it, skim it like a child, into the forest against a tree trunk. Eventually the foliage thinned and they could hear the sea, smell the sea, and they came out upon the sand dunes of Formby Point. The tide was out and waves crashed far away, perhaps half a mile out across the sands. It was always windy here and they both automatically stopped and took deep breaths into the wind.

  ‘This is actually pretty beautiful,’ he said. ‘It’s a lot like where I grew up, looking out over the North Sea. When I’m not touring, I honestly can’t imagine not living on the coast somewhere. And definitely in the North. I like living on the edge of something, you know, on a frontier. It makes you feel existential even at the best of times. You know Norway has over twenty-five thousand kilometres of coastline, stretching right up to the Arctic. And it is brutal as fuck up there.’ He was talking a lot, and Helen sensed he was nervous.

  ‘So we have all these legends about the sea,’ he continued. ‘I mean, not just the Vikings and shit. There are these monsters called draugs, which are supposed to be the spirits of sailors drowned at sea. So if you drown, and you don’t have a proper Christian burial, you can’t get into Heaven, and so you come back as one of these evil draugs, with no head, like, just seaweed instead of a head.’

  ‘A draug…’

  ‘Yeah. It means living dead person in Old Norse.’

  ‘I must look that up, thank you. Actually I don’t know much about Scandinavian mythology, and of course it would be so suitable for my course.’

  ‘I’ll come and give a guest lecture.’

  ‘Not unless you cut back on the swearing, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s just another version of a zombie. When I die,’ – he looked out towards the horizon, where an enormous empty oil tanker was slinking into Liverpool Bay – ‘I’m gonna have one of those Viking burials. Just launch me out to sea on a blazing longship, surrounded by my guitars, and let the wind carry my soul to Valhalla.’

  ‘Ah, so you believe in Valhalla then, the great hall of the gods?’

  ‘No, man. No more than I believe in your Heaven and Hell. They’re all just stories we needed to tell ourselves in the past, dude. Otherwise life was just too hard to explain. And now, now that we can explain everything, somehow we still need stories. Different stories. I don’t know.’

  He drew deeply on his cigarette and motioned vaguely with his hand to indicate a boat romantically floating out to sea. The river Alt drains into the Mersey at Formby Point, and on the beach it splits into hundreds of tiny channels that trickled towards the sea like dark blue blood vessels. Down there somewhere, in the intertidal lagoons, the Neolithic footprints of animals, birds and people have been preserved for seven thousand years. Baked by the sun and sealed into the muddy shoreline by repeated layers of sand and silt from the tide, coastal erosion was now revealing these ghosts from Liverpool’s ancient hunter-gatherer past.

  The vastness of the sandscape here was perhaps an illusion, since it wasn’t more than a few miles to Southport, but the hor
izontal nature of the view made it look as if it went on forever. It always compelled Helen to want to set out and just keep on walking. But eventually, she would always have to turn back. She was tied to this landscape now, this windblown land constantly in motion. Like Mikko, she was always drawn to the coast, and enjoyed living on the edge of something. The sense of scale was disorienting, and she thrived on the altered perspectives; she would watch huge container ships seemingly lumber into view, obscuring the landscape, and then suddenly disappear into port as if they had speeded up. She would watch them come and go, wondering what was in those containers and what it must be like to work on board those lonely giants. And she would watch the marsh birds prepare for their journey to warmer climates whilst the squirrels hoarded for winter.

  There were constant reminders of danger here, not least from the ominous and seemingly permanent firing of bullets at Altcar rifle range. There was a Victorian shipwreck three-quarters’ buried in the sand, now serving as a jagged fence; while the war rubble that formed the tidal barrier on Blitz Beach between Crosby and Hightown provided another reminder of old conflicts. The frontal dunes were constantly in peril from the elements, as violent storms coupled with high tides could see huge swathes of sand sheared off them, leaving vertiginous cliff faces scarred with marram roots.

  Everything that was new here became quickly stained with salt and sand; new brick-built housing estates in Formby village, new cars, new shoes, faces. Helen sometimes felt that her whole body and soul was preserved as if in salt. A living dead person. As if he had been reading her mind, Mikko said: ‘So this is like your purgatory, huh. Living here. Total Depravity has a song called ‘Purgatory’ on our second album. It kind of sucks to be honest with you.’

  ‘Well, the concept of purgatory is Catholic, not Protestant,’ she said. ‘But I suppose this is… yes, I do feel…’ She trailed off, because she had no answer to give. They sat on some dry-ish sand on the top of a dune, and looked out at the vastness below, faces braced against the wind, picking pieces of marram grass.

  ‘Why did you come all this way to tell me?’ she asked him. ‘You could have just telephoned…’

  ‘Erm, excuse me, you don’t have a phone remember.’

  ‘You know what I mean, you could have, you know, left a message…’

  ‘Er, hello, this is a message for Sister Helen, just to let her know that God says she is definitely going to Heaven, thanks, bye.’

  She gave him a withering look.

  ‘I don’t know, man,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to see the place. I like being close to someone who really believes in something. Spirituality doesn’t just appear, you know. It needs someone with a brain capable of imagining a world they can’t see. And that’s powerful to be around. Everyone needs to believe in something, right?’

  ‘Yes, I think that’s right. Well, I suppose you believe in music.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess. And I mean, I also came here because you’re pretty fucking hot for a nun. What can I tell you?’

  Helen stared at the ground.

  ‘Sorry’ he said. ‘Too much. The truth is… I sort of didn’t want to find out by myself. I don’t know why but I wanted to be with you. For spiritual guidance right? That must be it. So – you ready for this?’ He took out his phone.

  ***

  Swift and Quinn stood in the cold mortuary room at Aintree Pathology Department, shivering but not from the cold, relieved that this particularly horrible post-mortem was almost over. The girl’s body lay shrouded in front of them, with pathologist Dr. Colvin moving around her, completing the required tasks in his usual business-like manner. Perhaps his brusqueness was the only way to cope with such a job. This was by no means the first time Swift had been in a mortuary, but it was the first time as a Detective Inspector in charge of a case, and he hoped to God he would ask the right questions. Fortunately Dr. Colvin was an old hand and would most likely take him through everything. Colvin however didn’t seem his usual, jovial self; something was bothering him, and Swift expected it was simply the grisly severity of the crime.

  ‘So.’ Colvin read from his clipboard, adjusting his glasses with his other hand. ‘Let’s review. Twenty-something female, cause of death bleeding. Time of death estimated between midnight and six a.m. yesterday morning. Bled to death from two deep knife wounds to the abdomen. A very precise disembowelling in one single movement. A professional job, if you can call it that. With a very sharp instrument.’

  ‘One disembowelling movement. But you said there were two knife wounds,’ pressed Swift. Despite his subdued manner, Colvin was still playing his usual game, making this into a pathology lesson.

  ‘Yes. I did.’

  Colvin sighed, shook his head and placed his gloved hands on the surgical table, facing the officers across it. The sheet remained covering the body. ‘You don’t need to see underneath it again do you?’ Swift and Quinn both shook their heads; Quinn felt that the image of this girl’s body would be imprinted on her memory for a lifetime. Colvin continued:

  ‘The second wound was the disembowelling. The first wound was a rudimentary Caesarean. Well, I say rudimentary, but it was conducted by someone who knew their way around the body. I’d be very impressed if… sorry, impressed is the wrong word… surprised, if they didn’t have medical training.’

  ‘Caesarean? Do you mean she was pregnant? How pregnant?’

  ‘Judging from the large size of the uterus and placenta, certainly third trimester. Just… horrible.’ Swift and Quinn looked at each other and shuddered.

  ‘Is there any chance the baby could have survived?’ she asked.

  ‘Well. You do hear about these things of course. Usually on those American true crime TV programmes though. The umbilical cord appears to have been cut carefully, which implies the intention was indeed for the baby to survive.’

  ‘So the girl was alive when it happened…’

  ‘No illicit substances in the blood, and no blow to the head, so it appears that she may have been awake for the whole thing.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Now obviously we’re still waiting on results from fingernails, stomach contents, so hopefully forensics will have a lot more to work with soon.’

  ‘OK. OK. We’ll get back and see where we are with an ID. There doesn’t seem to be any match with Missing Persons,’ said Swift, nodding uncertainly. ‘But when I called Tomlinson back, they mentioned another inmate who had been close to Shepherd, name of Chelsea McAllister. We’re heading to her address next.’

  There didn’t seem to be any way to end this session with dignity for the victim. They stood in front of her body for a few moments, hands clasped in front of them funereally, then they began to step away with as much reverence as they could. But Colvin hadn’t finished.

  ‘There’s something else, detectives.’ Colvin didn’t look up from his clipboard now. ‘I’m still struggling to fathom it myself, but I’ve checked several times and I rarely make mistakes with these things.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘She… was a virgin.’

  He was still staring intently at his clipboard, and Swift and Quinn looked at each other in confusion.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Precisely that. Hymen intact. That foetus was not the product of sexual intercourse.’

  ‘Artificial insemination?’

  ‘Well, given that we are still, I estimate, several hundreds of years away from inventing parthenogenesis in humans, and I gather we’re not Herod’s men looking for the second coming here, then yes, artificial insemination would seem to be the only explanation. It is conceivable – pardon the pun – that an insemination needle could have been inserted vaginally without breaking the hymen, and since it was almost nine months ago it could have closed over. Insemination via a needle in the abdomen is also theoretically possible, although with the skin damage I haven’t been able to find any evidence yet.’

  ‘Why would someone artificially inseminate such a young girl? Unmarried, no
reason for infertility…’

  ‘I’m at a loss, detectives. I suppose that is for you to find out.’

  10.

  ‘OK let’s do this.’ Mikko called a number and then placed his phone balanced on his knee so it was between them.

  ‘Hello, Professor Matthew Clancy here?’

  ‘Hello, Professor, this is Mikko and Helen, we’ve got you on speaker, and we are on standby for our all-important results.’ Mikko smirked at Helen, but he couldn’t hide his underlying nervousness. They were both glad to be outside with the distractions of the wind and the scenery.

  ‘Ah yes. So, first things first.’ said Clancy, ‘Are you sure you want to know? Not that it means anything of course, but I don’t want to give you nightmares. It’s a bit like a Ouija board you know.’

  ‘Sure, we’re totally down for this. Hit us.’

  ‘OK. Well – scientific bit here – I sequenced the OS1 gene from both of your cheek swabs, and on Helen’s we see a guanine replaced with adenine at position 32, which has the effect of replacing a cysteine with a tyrosine in the amino acid sequence.’

  ‘So what does that mean then? I mean, who’s going where?’ Mikko was still smiling at Helen while he said it.

  ‘Well, if you were to believe Andrew Shepherd’s theory, it would mean that Helen has the soterion mutation, and therefore is one of the elect. She is going to Heaven. While you are… not.’

  ***

  It was late afternoon, and the sky was descending. The tide was coming in, and black clouds loomed low on the horizon over the sea.

  ‘Well, there we are. I guess I’m gonna be with my brother.’

  Mikko was trying to keep it light, but she knew that he was looking at her for reassurance.

  ‘I don’t believe it, you know,’ she offered.

  ‘Yes, you do, that’s the whole point of Calvinism!’

  ‘No I mean I don’t believe this genes thing. I don’t understand… I’m more confused than ever.’