by C K Williams
“Nothing could be more untrue,” he says quietly, evidently battling some complicated emotions that I cannot decipher.
“I am not so very glad to see you seem to make a habit of leaving this lying around.” I jerk my head at the rifle. “Any good shooting lately?”
Daniel’s brow furrows. “What, you mean that old thing?”
“Correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I can tell, that old thing happens to be a working firearm.”
“I will lock it up right away,” he says, and I follow him into the sacristy, where he locks the rifle into a cabinet. It is a small but light room, comfortably cluttered, a large desk at the centre and dark shelves with many books along the walls.
“Listen, word about Kate’s injury got out,” I say. “I didn’t tell anyone, and neither did Kate.”
“She’s already phoned me about this,” he replies, furrowing his brow as he puts the key to the cabinet into his pocket. His movements are erratic. “I told her I hadn’t said a word.”
He looks at me when I say no more. “You don’t believe me.”
There is something to his voice. A tremor. As if he was nervous.
“Why are you nervous?” I ask.
“I’m not nervous,” Father Daniel lies.
“Your hands are shaking,” I point out. “Are you lying to me?”
He keeps looking at me, that stormy expression back on his face even as he tries, desperately tries, to keep his voice even: “This may be hard for you to believe, but so are yours.”
I glance down.
He is right.
God-fucking-damnit!
“How do I know?” I ask. “How do I know that you are telling the truth? Who blabbed if it wasn’t you?”
He shakes his head. He is tall, our priest. “You will have to have faith.”
“Do you?”
“What?” He turns away, to his desk, shuffling with the many papers and Post-it notes on top of it.
“Do you still have faith? Considering you are no longer celibate.”
His fingers still on the desk. He closes his eyes. “She told you.”
“It was difficult to miss,” I say. “You’re not subtle, Father Daniel.”
He flinches. “I’m not?” he asks, trying to smile. Trying to make light of it.
“No,” I say, stepping a little closer. I can smell his eau de cologne and his sweat and something which could be incense.
“You’d perhaps be surprised, Jannis,” he says, turning back to me.
“Why?” I ask, because I have to know. I cannot just take this on faith. I need to know if he has a reason to want to hurt Kate. If he knew that she wasn’t in love with him. “Why are you risking your vocation, your career, your life, for someone who does not even love you back?”
He visibly staggers.
“You goddamn fucking arsehole,” he says, but he says it quietly. He closes his eyes. There is anger in his face and beneath it the barely contained sadness of someone who is about to break into tears.
I can feel myself deflate. The guilt hits me with the sudden strength of a bottle to the head, glass shattering against your skull, your body slowly sinking to the floor. I open my mouth. But I do not know what to say.
“Why are you still standing there?” Daniel asks, still speaking quietly. “Is there anything else you would like to add to my humiliation?”
There isn’t.
“We have to find out who blabbed,” I say.
He laughs, silently. “Get out.”
I do.
11:01
Kate’s car isn’t there.
I panic before I have even parked the rental. Jumping out, I run for the door. She left. She left on her own. She might be lying somewhere, head split open, bleeding out while I was arguing with Daniel.
Once inside the house, I call her name, giving in to the irrational hope that she will answer. Needless to say, there is no reply. I check all the rooms. It takes me two sweeps through the kitchen until I notice the bright yellow Post-it note on the counter.
You goddamn fucking arsehole
* * *
K
Daniel must have called while I was driving back. He must have confronted her.
Cursing in German, because it is so much more satisfying, I reach for my phone and dial her mobile. It rings. And rings. I pace. And pace. “Come on.” It rings. Keeps ringing. I keep pacing. Front of the kitchen. Back of the kitchen. “Come on!”
Click. Her voicemail.
I curse, louder this time, and try again. This time, it goes straight to voicemail. Staring at the note, I run my hand through my grey locks, my movements erratic, scratching across my beard, fuck, fuck. Where could she have gone?
Daniel. Maybe she went to the church, to talk things through with him.
I am ready to grasp at straws. Even though he is the last person that I want to face right then, I reach for my phone.
Do I even have his number?
No, I fucking don’t.
Back out. Back into the car. I need to find her.
Back to him.
11:23
“She isn’t here, Jannis.”
“Where could she have gone?” I ask, back in the sacristy.
“I don’t know. She didn’t say anything to me.”
I want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. Kate out there on her own with someone out to get her. “There was someone at the house last night,” I say, hands clenched to fists. “Someone came to her house with a rifle.”
Daniel goes pale. He glances at the cabinet that contains his rifle.
Then he takes out the key. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s go.”
“Where?” I ask, matching the brisk pace he sets.
“I don’t know. But we’re going to find her.”
11:41
We check the graveyard first, but there is nothing but glistening snow and tall headstones and the sound of the branches of the ancient yew tree, cracking under the white weight.
I look out over the white graveyard and the white mountains beyond, the church and the ancient stone walls no more than pale ghosts. The sky is as white as the snow and the clouds seem to be closing in on us, fog wafting up the hill, turning wood and stone and flesh into grey shadows. It draws out my fears, closing in on me like the fog and the clouds until I am blinded by it.
“Where could she be?” Daniel asks next to me. “She could have gone to her practice?”
“What for?”
“To get that scalpel on her desk to cut your throat?” he suggests.
It reveals a streak of dry humour I had not noticed in him before. “Very funny,” I say.
“Well, do you have a better idea?”
I look at the wooden cross at our feet with Alice Walsh’s name on it. Her memorial sits right under the yew tree, on top of the hill. There are so many fresh flowers and even more red graveyard candles. Everyone seems to have been allowed to bring something, everyone except Kate. There is even a wreath already, made of white lilies and tall gladioli.
Elizabeth
Tessa
Adams
William
Florence
O’Rawe
Girls and boys come out to play
With heartfelt condolences
“Florence O’Rawe,” I say, our breaths turning to white clouds in front of our mouths. “How did she know? How did she know about the injury?”
“I don’t know,” Daniel replies, fixing his gloves. At least he is wearing gloves, and a sensible coat. His thin face is turning raw in the cold. “I don’t know,” he repeats, and suddenly, he is taking off. “But we’re going to find out.”
12:11
We go to the practice first to check, but there seems to be nobody there. Then Daniel navigates me to the home of Florence and William O’Rawe. They live in a large house off the side road of a side road in the middle of a forest of tall, dark pine trees. Daniel rings the doorbell, but no one answers. They sky is an oppressive dark gr
ey, as if the sun had no intention of ever rising today.
“That’s a bit unusual that no one’s in,” Daniel says while I try to glance in through one of the front windows. They live in a very nice house, the two of them, three floors and a private driveway and more land at the back than any one person should reasonably have. “Not Florence, she should be at the library, but William…”
I think I may be looking into their sitting room. “Would it be normal for them to be flying the Irish flag in there?” I ask.
Daniel shrugs. “Will took Florence’s name at the wedding, and he hasn’t exactly been quiet about his loyalties. Pat’s his best friend, and he was involved with the IRA in the past. I think the only reason why they are not putting up a flagpole is to spare his mother’s feelings. Staunch unionist, Elizabeth is. It’s relatively quiet here, usually, especially in the winter, but you should see the Mountains come July. People paint the pavements in the colours of the Irish flag or the Union Jack for the Battle of the Boyne. It gets fairly intense for a while.”
“I know,” I say. “I remember when I came here for the first time, Kate picked me up from the airport, and we were stopped by the police because they wanted to make sure we weren’t smuggling weapons. Apparently, both unionists and republicans have come to Germany for weapons in the past.” I look around the quiet woods, the tall mountains, the many many sheep. “When you look around, you wouldn’t believe that people paint their pavements here, would you?”
“There are even two newspapers,” Daniel says as he presses the doorbell once more. “To each their own. At least they can both be sold side by side at the Coop.”
That is when something catches my eye. On the holly bush by the front door, to our left. It is a bit of fabric, I think, as I step closer, dread settling at the pit of my stomach. It looks suspiciously like a bit of fabric from Kate’s new coat.
“This is odd,” Daniel repeats, “maybe he’s out with Neighbourhood P—”
That is when we hear the shot.
“It came from the back of the house!” I shout, whirling around, and start running.
12:12
The garden is white and cold and the ground is slippery and I almost fall, twice, before I finally manage to circle the house.
William O’Rawe is standing in the centre of the clearing, holding the rifle propped up against his shoulder, taking aim.
Aiming at a tin can on a tree stump.
I come to a halt. Daniel follows me. William O’Rawe puts the rifle across his shoulder when he spots us. “Ah, it’s you. Come to help me with target practice?” He grins. He is in his late fifties, but still very attractive. And knows it, too?
“Is this yours?” I ask him sharply.
“My mother’s,” he explains. He is wearing a tartan scarf, Irish silk according to the label. “And what business is it of yours?”
“Had it last night already, did you?” I ask.
“No, it was at my mother’s,” he replies.
“Why are you shooting at tin cans, William?” Daniel asks.
“Well, we’d better be prepared, hadn’t we?” William straightens his shoulders. “We’re protecting this neighbourhood now. And we’re not going to let them put up another border, either.”
“Jesus, William,” Daniel admonishes, throwing up both hands.
“What?” he asks. “You’re just going to let them walk all over you?”
“On the side of the weak and the needy and those who protest in peace,” Daniel replies. “Right now, I am on Kate’s side. We are looking for her. What is that bit of fabric doing on your holly bush, William?”
William O’Rawe stares at Daniel. “Sean told me you picked her side at the graveyard. You know that the police have not made any more arrests, don’t you? You know that the only reason they let her go was because they didn’t have sufficient evidence to charge her. You have to admit, it could have been her. The police don’t think so, because she’s a woman. They always get away with everything, because it’s them who have all the power in the end, isn’t it? It’s them, they have the wee ones or they don’t, they say it’s their bodies as if we had no part in it at all, and Kate’s always been like that, she’s always been like that. When Florence went to see her about having children, Florence came back and said she didn’t want to have any anymore, and it was her right, and it was all that bitch telling her…”
“Was Kate here?” Daniel repeats. “That’s all I want to know.”
William shrugs. “Sure, she came by just now. Her coat caught on the bush. Can’t say I’m sorry. She wanted to know where the twins are living. You know, the twins, the cottage where they live is my mother’s—”
“Thank you,” Daniel says. He takes me by the wrist. “We’ll go then.”
William O’Rawe is still holding the rifle. “You do that,” he says. “And you tell her to watch her back. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to her now, would we?”
12:31
The air in the car is warm and dry. Daniel’s long fingers lie pale and firm on the steering wheel. “You see,” he says. “She’s fine.”
I nod. “It’s so like her. Going off on her own like that. Drives me mad.”
“Well, yes, she’ll do that to you.”
His phone is on shuffle. A song comes on. It is a number from a musical, an off-off-Broadway one, none of the big productions.
I glance down at the screen. “I saw that,” I say. “At the Fringe.”
“Secret thespian?” he asks.
“I go every year.”
“I lock up the church every August and spend the summer at the Fringe myself. Where do you stay, though? Hotels are insane in the summer.”
“I am loaded,” I say, dead serious.
He glances at me.
“Bed and breakfast thirty minutes from the Royal Mile,” I concede. “Why, where do you stay?”
“With my parents,” he says matter-of-factly.
“Explains the accent,” I comment.
“I have been told it makes me sound very sexy,” he says.
I say nothing.
He glances at me.
Then he looks back at the road.
13:14
The cottage sits by the ocean road. This is exactly where the Mourne Mountains look like the perfect mixture of Norwegian fjords and the coast of southern France. It is a truly beautiful stretch of coast, right by the Rostrevor Forest with its walks and climbs and trees. There is no snow on the ground here, not so close to the water. The sun sits bright and white behind the thick clouds that stretch out over the sea.
It is built of grey stone like most of the houses, and has those vertical white blinds I have never seen anywhere else but around the Mountains of Mourne, where they seem to be mandatory. It looks cosy enough from the outside.
The door is opened by the young man I saw crying in the church. It feels like such a long time ago. He was the one who said he was sorry, to his sister, just before they left the church.
He is not crying right now, but he looks like he might have done quite a bit of it over the past few days. He is wearing tight black trousers, leggings really, a black shirt and large red Angry Birds slippers. His eyes are wide and dark, like a doe’s, and his hair is standing up in all imaginable directions. He looks like the opposite of an angry bird.
“Hi, Enda,” Father Daniel says, smiling politely. “We were told Kate was with you?”
The young man nods mutely, then motions for us to come inside. The cottage looks as if it was outfitted by an elderly lady in the 1950s, and then no one made any changes to it ever again: floral beige wallpaper, beige carpets, antique closets, decorative porcelain plates on every available surface and rose patterns wherever you look.
Enda returns to the sitting room, where he kicks off his slippers before he sits down on a chintz sofa next to his sister. This must be Betha. The sofa barely registers his weight. There isn’t much to register. Betha is wearing black tights, skirt and a blouse, including a lot of n
eon-coloured bands holding her hair up in a bun. She is wearing rainbow and pro-choice badges. Her arms are crossed in front of her chest as she watches us come in. “We’re busy here.”
She tilts her head at the coffee table, which seems to be an old seafarer’s chest. And there sits Kate. On the chest in front of the twins. She turns around. Her eyes widen as she sees us. “You two mates all of a sudden?” she asks through clenched teeth.
“No,” Daniel and I answer almost simultaneously. The young man and woman, Enda and Betha, stare at us. The tension does not escape them. How could it? All three of us staring at each other, everyone evidently wanting to say or do something but none having the balls to go through with it.
Kate turns back to the teenagers on the couch, shifting uncomfortably, Betha with her back as ramrod straight as if she was in an interrogation room, and Enda with his legs tucked in under him. I believe that he does not realise that he is fiddling with a hole in his very colourful sock, making it larger by the moment. Maybe that is his nervous tic.
“Should they be listening to this?” Betha asks. Her voice is firm and dark. She seems suspicious of all three of us. Her most impressive scowl is reserved for Daniel, however.
Kate presses her lips into a thin line. Then she straightens: “They are all right. We just have things to talk about. Daniel, maybe we could go back to yours after this.”
The twins exchange glances. They look a right pair, the two of them, fresh-faced young people wearing rainbow flags and Remain and Border Poll buttons in this old cottage where every table is covered in doilies and every cushion is mustard yellow with a pattern of red roses, kept in suspiciously good shape.
Kate turns back to the twins. “As I was telling you, I have been receiving threatening messages. A few nights ago, there was a knock on the door, but when I opened it, no one was there. And last night, someone came to the house with a rifle.”
