Forgive Me Father

by Paul Gitsham

  ‘Look at this place. Five hundred years ago they were brushing abuse under the carpet, buying off people who made a complaint. What makes you think they are any different now?’ he turned back to Warren, who cringed as the man’s shoes came within millimetres of the edge of the parapet.

  ‘But back then, there was somebody who did his best to right those wrongs.’

  ‘Simon Scrope.’

  ‘Exactly. I went to Vernon Coombs’ talk last summer. Father Kendrick wanted to go, so I took him down. And that was when I saw what needed to be done. At the end of the talk, Vernon said that he had only scraped the surface. He hadn’t been expecting to find Simon Scrope’s confession, but when he did, he realised it was incomplete and he needed help to find the rest of the story from amongst the other monk’s diaries. I volunteered immediately.’

  Boyce fell silent. When he resumed talking, his voice was quiet, almost wistful, ‘Somewhere up on that hill out there, overlooking the abbey in which he was refused burial, are the remains of Matthias Scrope. He suffered in the same way that my own brother did and he had no one to believe him. But he did have someone to avenge him.’

  ‘But Wilfred Dodd was already dead.’

  ‘That didn’t matter.’ Boyce’s voice rose again. ‘It may have been too late for Keith and Lucas, but there were men in this house who committed acts against dozens of children. And there were also the men that helped them get away with it.’

  The wind whistled across the roof. Warren could think of nothing more to say. There were so many questions he wanted to ask, but he knew that Boyce was now figuratively, as well as literally, at the end of his tether. One wrong word, and the man would jump.

  ‘Tell me DCI Jones. Are you a Catholic?’

  ‘I’m not sure what that has to …’

  ‘Yes or no?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will you hear my confession?’

  ‘What? How? I’m not a priest.’

  It was clear that he wasn’t asking because Warren was a police officer.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I just need to tell someone my sins.’

  ‘But I can’t give absolution. I won’t give you absolution’

  Boyce laughed mirthlessly.

  ‘Oh, I’m well beyond absolution. I’m not going to ask for forgiveness for what I’ve done, because I don’t feel sorry for killing them.’ His voice cracked. ‘I just need someone to hear what else I did. What I’m really ashamed of.’

  He inched closer to the edge; the heels of his shoes now overhanging the drop.

  ‘Will you hear my sins, DCI Jones?’

  ‘Step back off the wall and we can talk about it.’

  ‘The time for talking is over. I just want you to listen.’

  Warren was at his wit’s end. The situation had spiralled out of all control.

  ‘OK, Gus, I’m listening,’

  ‘Bishop Fisher, Rodney Shaw, Deacon Baines; I’m as guilty as they are. I deserve the same punishment.’

  ‘Why? What did you do?’

  ‘It’s not what I did, it’s what I didn’t do.’

  ‘No Gus,’ shouted Warren. But it was too late.

  Boyce’s last words as he stepped into the void dripped with self-loathing.

  ‘Keith was my little brother, and I didn’t believe him.’

  Wednesday 25th March

  Chapter 91

  ‘Ah, Warren, take a seat and make yourself comfortable,’ Assistant Chief Constable Naseem gestured toward the comfortable-looking visitor’s chair. The sting of Warren’s grazes meant he’d rather stand, but his aching ankles wanted the weight taken off them. In the end he decided to follow instructions and he lowered himself down.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ asked Naseem.

  ‘Not too bad, sir. A few scrapes and strains, but I’ll be back to normal soon enough.’

  ‘Well, take all the time you need.’

  Naseem was at least the third senior officer to tell him that, but he still wasn’t sure if they were saying that because human resources’ guidelines suggested that they ought to, or because they truly meant it. He’d decided not to push his luck, and so after an appointment with Occupational Health, he’d self-certified and returned to desk duties.

  ‘How is Tony Sutton?’

  ‘He’s making progress, but it’s too early to tell.’

  Warren had made it to Accident and Emergency in record time after his rooftop confrontation with Boyce. He’d met Marie Sutton in the corridor.

  ‘They’re saying it’s a mini-stroke caused by an abnormal cardiac rhythm. He’s been complaining of palpitations for weeks. Apparently, Marie had been trying to get him to go to the doctor, but you know how stubborn he is. He just blamed it on too much coffee and stress … I should have said something …’

  ‘Don’t go there,’ warned Naseem. ‘He’s a grown man. Do they know if, you know …’

  ‘They’ve broken the clot up. He was speaking when they took him down for an MRI and he managed to squeeze my hand. They’ve pumped him full of drugs to thin his blood and they’re trying to get his heart back in a normal rhythm. But he’s out of danger, for now at least.’

  A wave of relief had washed over Warren, but the guilt still gnawed at him. He’d let another friend down.

  ‘Coffee?’ offered Naseem, ‘It’s not as good as John Grayson’s but it hits the spot.’

  Warren gratefully accepted. What Naseem’s choice of blend lacked in sophistication, his crockery more than made up for. Say what you like about Grayson’s snobbery towards the bean, ultimately he just wanted a mug full of caffeine, and unless he had visitors a rank or more above him, those mugs were large and usually had borderline inappropriate slogans on them. John Grayson was an easy person to buy for in the office secret Santa.

  Warren took a grateful sip before placing the cup back on its matching saucer, taking care not to chip the delicate bone china.

  He positioned himself a little more carefully, supressing a wince. The grazes along his lower back were healing nicely, although the same couldn’t be said for his suit, which had provided scant protection as he’d been dragged along the rooftop by Angus Boyce’s dead weight on the end of the rope. It was just as well he’d been wearing modest, dark-coloured underwear.

  The slam of his feet into the concrete parapet had left him hobbling, but at least his left shoulder – subject of much abuse over the past few years – had held up.

  ‘A lucky man, that Father Boyce,’ said Naseem.

  Warren nodded politely, although given what the man would have to live with for the rest of his life, perhaps he would have been better off dead. But that wasn’t his call to make, and his actions as he grabbed at the end of the rope around Boyce’s neck had been instinctive.

  He was never going to stop the man falling of course; Warren wasn’t nearly strong enough for that. But his desperate attempt had resulted in him being dragged along the rooftop, and that had saved Boyce. A successful hangman’s fracture relied on a sudden jerk. Warren had reduced the force imparted by the jerk so that the intended instantaneous death didn’t occur. Susan had tried to explain the physics to him – something about the rate of change of momentum being equal to the force in Newtons – but she’d been rambling, thinking more about the fifty-foot drop that Warren had almost been dragged over.

  Death by strangulation would have been Boyce’s eventual fate, but he had been cut down before that could happen. Warren wondered if, as he dangled there, the man’s thoughts had turned to Frank Madden; Boyce had slowly strangled the elderly priest over the course of almost an hour, as he elicited his supposed confession. Perhaps he’d ask him someday.

  ‘Obviously I’ve read the report, seen those horrible YouTube videos and heard the recording made on DC Ruskin’s mobile phone of your rooftop exchange – quick thinking by both of you by the way – but I wanted to hear what else he had to say for himself.’

  Naseem drained his cup and placed it carefully in front of him. It was an ope
n secret that ACC Naseem was already writing his memoirs: a frank account of the most interesting cases that he’d come across in his years in the police – to be published after retirement, obviously. Warren suspected that more than one of his own cases would feature in the book.

  He didn’t really mind. A former colleague of his was carving out a very enjoyable second career as an after-dinner speaker. He said it was a toss-up between the Women’s Institute and the Crime Writers’ Association as to which was the more bloodthirsty audience.

  ‘The bruising to his throat has subsided enough for him to talk now and he wants to make a full confession – to the police, this time, not a priest. He’s been assessed by the mental health team and he’s basically mad, but not mad enough to avoid trial.’

  ‘Well, that’s something, I suppose.’

  ‘He’s essentially confirmed everything that he told me on the rooftop, under caution this time, and he’s been largely open about everything else. He still feels no shame about killing Fathers Nolan and Madden and says that if he could go back in time, he would also kill Father Dodd for what he did to his brother. I think he’s on the fence about Father Daugherty. I’m not sure he really believes he was the victim of false allegations, although a psychiatrist I spoke to says that might be a protective response. It will have taken a lot of mental contortions for him to justify to himself what he did; admitting that he killed a man based on unfounded hearsay destroys that whole justification. Either way, he was prepared to kill everyone in that house; the soup in the tureen was full of half the chemicals in the garden shed. Mind you, it would have tasted so foul it’s questionable how many people would have taken more than a mouthful. If I had to guess, I’d say that we forced his hand. Rachel Pymm and her team have found some more suspicious deaths in the diaries, so I wonder if he might have been planning more murders, before killing Bishop Fisher as a final spectacular.’

  ‘So, what about Baines and Shaw? How were they involved?’

  Unbidden, images from the video found on Boyce’s phone sprang to mind. They say that carbon monoxide poisoning is a relatively painless way to die: the victim becomes drowsy, before passing out. However, the raw terror in both men’s faces, and their pleading voices as it became apparent what was going to happen to them, would haunt Warren for a long time. It was especially heart-breaking knowing that like Father Gerry Daugherty, neither man could fulfil Boyce’s demands for a full confession; they had nothing to confess to.

  ‘Bishop Fisher assures me that neither man was aware of the confessions that he had heard. Boyce simply refuses to believe him, even though his belief that Bishop Fisher is morally culpable because of his refusal to break the seal of the confessional directly contradicts his assertion that Fisher must have told Baines and Shaw about their sins.’

  ‘Did he always intend to frame them?’

  ‘This is where it gets a bit murky. I’m not sure if Boyce truly remembers what exactly happened and when. I think it’s fair to say that he felt casting suspicion on Shaw and then Baines was a perfectly legitimate way of causing confusion so that he could carry out the killings undisturbed. He hinted on the rooftop that he believed that Gabriel Baines had killed his wife all those years ago, to cover up his affair and inherit her wealth, although the original investigation was inconclusive. That probably added to the justification he felt in using him. But it’s still unclear how much of it was planned in advance and how much was a response to events as they unfolded. We know that some of the seeds of confusion were sown very early on. He borrowed Baines’ car to pick up the keys to the chapel, and we are now reasonably sure that we can trace the false rumours about an argument between Father Nolan and Rodney Shaw back to Boyce.

  ‘He was very friendly with the two men, which seemed natural. Almost everyone in that home, except for Baines and Shaw, was elderly and ill. It made sense that Boyce, who was only forty, would gravitate towards these two. The three of them would often go for a drink and Deacon Baines was something of an amateur chef, so they regularly went around his for a meal; Boyce would even stay over sometimes when he wasn’t doing the night shift looking after Fathers Kendrick and Ramsden. When the deaths started, the three of them became even closer.’

  ‘Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer,’ quoted Naseem.

  ‘From Boyce’s perspective, yes. Because of his relative youth and energy, Bishop Fisher came to rely on him more and more; he pretty much had the run of the place just like Shaw and Baines.’

  ‘Easy enough for him to skim off the money from the safe to frame Shaw then,’ said Naseem.

  ‘Yes, he just engaged Baines in conversation as he was placing the takings in the vestry safe one evening, and memorised the code. And he knew that Shaw kept his wax jacket and spare work boots hanging up in the greenhouse, so he could easily place Shaw forensically at the scene of Father Daugherty’s murder.’

  ‘And all the while he was listening to his friends’ woes and nodding sympathetically, I’ll bet,’ stated Naseem. ‘If nothing else, he was a cold bastard.’

  ‘I suppose he was, in a way.’ Warren paused. ‘And unfortunately, he made it too easy for us to suspect Shaw, and then Baines. I wish we’d connected the dots sooner, and then we could have saved them both.’

  Ever since Boyce had been revealed as the killer, Warren had been plagued by guilt. Had he and the team been blinded to other possible suspects by becoming obsessed with Shaw? Had they twisted the evidence to fit their preferred narrative, rather than changed their theory to fit the evidence? He had a lot of soul-searching to do.

  ‘Well, there are lessons to be learnt from every investigation. I’m sure that this one is no different.’ It was hardly a ringing endorsement, but then the man sitting opposite him was as much a politician as a police officer, Warren reminded himself.

  ‘What about Sister Clara?’ asked Naseem.

  ‘Wrong place, wrong time. They worked closely together caring for the priests and Boyce used her as a smoke screen. There’s no evidence that she was in anyway involved with helping him. She suffered a nasty concussion when he ambushed her in the kitchen; hopefully she’ll make a full recovery.’

  ‘What about Lucas Furber? Why did Boyce kill him?’ asked Naseem.

  ‘That’s where he clams up. Again, the psychiatrist reckons that acknowledging Furber’s death might be what undermines his whole mental justification. We don’t know if Furber was aware or involved in the planning of the killings, or if all he wanted was a confession, but it looks as though he had a significant change of heart around about Christmas. By then, I think Boyce had convinced himself that he was on a divine mission and that nothing could be allowed to derail it.’

  ‘And Boyce killed him by doctoring his drugs?’

  ‘We believe so. We’ve shown Boyce’s photograph to a few of Furber’s acquaintances, and they reckon that Boyce may well have been the priest that helped Lucas get clean from the heroin. Whether he did that because he wanted to help his brother’s old friend, or whether he just wanted a wingman who wasn’t an unpredictable junkie is unclear.

  ‘Boyce’s main duties in the house involved overseeing the care of Father Silas Kendrick and Father Lionel Ramsden. Father Ramsden has a morphine pump. An audit of the ampoules has found one missing. We haven’t worked out precisely where Boyce got the heroin from, but we have found traces of it along the window ledge, above the radiator in his room.

  ‘Exactly how he persuaded Furber to take the doctored heroin I don’t think we’ll ever know, but Lucas was in such a fragile state mentally that leaving a wrap of heroin and some needles next to him – especially when he was so drunk – was probably only going to have one outcome.’

  ‘Again, he was a cold bastard.’

  ‘I think so. He’s tried to justify everything as a result of him doing God’s work, ensuring that those who are guilty haven’t escaped justice on Earth. I suspect that even though he’s been judged fit to stand trial, his legal team will probably try an insanity
plea.’

  ‘Trying to recreate five hundred year old deaths to kill modern day abusers identified purely by allegations on the internet will probably go a long way to support that particular defence,’ Naseem mused. ‘Still, even if he is found not guilty by reason of insanity, he’ll be spending plenty of time locked away.’

  ‘Has there been any word about the wider impact of the case?’ asked Warren.

  ‘Everything uncovered in your investigations has been passed on to the relevant abuse enquiries. The press, of course, are free to say what they like about the deceased and we are hoping that the publicity surrounding the case might encourage some of their other victims to come forward and make statements.’

  ‘And what about the … legal … implications?’ asked Warren. He knew he was asking questions above his paygrade but he felt he deserved an answer.

  Naseem steepled his fingers. He chose his words carefully.

  ‘The Crown Prosecution Service believes that there is insufficient evidence that Bishop Fisher disregarded the allegations of child abuse for there to be any realistic prospect of a conviction, and that to pursue the matter any further would not be in the public interest.’

  Naseem looked over to the framed scripture discreetly hung on the wall to the left of his desk. Warren didn’t speak or read Arabic, but amongst the gold-lettered text he recognised the sweeping letters that spelt out Allah.

  ‘In the meantime, we will have to hope for justice from elsewhere.’

  Warren wasn’t surprised, but he was still disappointed. He’d done a lot of soul-searching over the past few days and he had eventually come to the same conclusions as Tony Sutton. That morally, the seal of the confessional should not be absolute in such cases. However, the reading that he’d done on the subject had soon shown that centuries of canon law disagreed with that assessment.

  Unfortunately, none of his research had eased his spiritual malaise. Until recently, Warren had taken his Catholicism for granted, yet he found himself sympathising with his friend, Sutton, who had sought a means to fulfil his spiritual needs outside of the church. He found himself asking why he still identified as a Catholic. Was it just a spiritual inertia? His family were Catholic, he’d been brought up as a Catholic, and he’d always regarded himself as a Catholic, even as he’d picked and chosen which parts of the creed he should follow. Yet could he remain part of an institution that structured itself in such a way that protecting itself from outside scrutiny lead to the hiding of such evil acts becoming more important than preventing them, or bringing the perpetrators to justice? What was more important? The doctrine of canon law, or the laws of human society, applicable to everyone, not just believers?