The Blood That Stains Your Hands (12 page)

Still standing inside the church gate, I take out my phone and dial home. My old home. The one I was kicked out of.

Peggy answers.

'Hey,' I say.

'Hello, Sergeant,' she says.

Immediately I feel some relief. She only ever calls me Sergeant when she's feeling reasonably benevolent towards me. I'd have got 'Thomas' or complete silence if I'd done anything recently to piss her off. As it is, I just haven't done anything at all recently.

'Everything all right?'

'Rebecca's pregnant and Andy's in prison for killing his maths teacher. But other than that, sure.'

Funny. And I wish she wouldn't make jokes about Rebecca being pregnant. Jokes like that have a way of biting you on the arse. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind if Andy murdered his maths teacher. Seriously, the guy's a dick.

'You OK?' I ask, ignoring the comedy shock tactics.

'Same old, same old. How about you?'

'Just been to church,' I say.

She laughs.

'No, really.'

'Is that the name of your new pub?'

Yeah, well, it's not like I don't deserve it.

'Andy in? I thought I might be able to drag him up the park to play football.'

'Seriously?'

I don't blame her for that tone either. When you're as rank awful a father as I've been, there's always a reason to question my actions. When was the last time Andy and I played football in the park? Two years? Three? Five? He's fourteen now, maybe the idea is a complete anathema to him. Perhaps the only chance of playing him at football is to get an Xbox and go on-line. Even then, I'd likely have to pretend to be someone else.

'I... I mean, I know he's probably too old for that kind of thing. It's just a nice afternoon, and I wondered... that's all. I'm just trying not to be an arsehole.'

My voice has flattened out as I speak. Just trying not to be an arsehole. There's a personal mission statement. I could have it stamped on my forehead, if not for the fact that there are plenty of times when I don't make that particular effort.

'No, I'm sure he'd love to,' she says, her voice softening. 'He might still have said no, of course, but then he's fourteen. He's out, though. Over at the new kid's, the one who just joined the school a fortnight ago.'

'Ah, OK.'

'Sorry. And Rebecca and I are just about to head to my mum's.'

And that'll be that. Maybe the next time I think of one my kids – in nine months or so – they might be available.

Another couple of minutes, then we hang up. Nothing promised, nothing else suggested. The merest civility is just about all we aspire to these days.

'Excuse me.'

I look round. And down. There's a kid standing next to me. A girl, twelve years old maybe, long hair, a dress and a cardigan. The sleeves of the cardigan are too short.

Where have I seen her before?

'Yes?'

'You should look at this.'

She holds out a small book. Thin. The title of it is written in small print on a plain, faded black cover. The Book of Daniel. I take the book from the kid, and immediately think of standing in the Old Kirk a few days ago, reading the large Bible. What had that been opened at? Not Daniel. Revelations.

I open the book, flick randomly through it in the way that you do. Not stopping to read anything. The type is small, and I guess you would call it a book, but there are only thirty pages. There are a few illustrations, of great beasts and apocalyptic visions.

'Why?' is the only word that comes into my head as I look up.

The kid is gone. Like, completely gone. I step through the gate and look along Church, up Oak Avenue, out onto Main Street. No sign of the kid, no sign of a car driving off.

I turn back and look round at the church and at the bright November afternoon. The small book weighs heavily in my hands.

––––––––

'A
kid?'

'Yes.'

'A mysterious kid, out of nowhere?'

'Yes.'

'Offering you the Book of Daniel?'

'Yes.'

'Jesus, Sergeant. Did he look anything like Damien?'

'It was a girl. Think I've seen her before, but... just not sure, you know, where. When. Or how, even.'

We're sitting in Taylor's office. Monday morning. We have coffee. From the coffee machine, not from one of the coffee giants in the vicinity. Although, presumably one of the coffee giants actually operates the coffee machine. It just doesn't have any branding on it.

If I was a coffeemeister I'd be able to tell whether this was Starbucks, Nero, Costa or Scotrail, but I'm just a guy. It's only recently that I've expanded my knowledge beyond telling the difference between an Americano and a mocha-frocha-vanilla cappuccino.

'Describe her.'

'It's... I remember standing next to her, and I remember the moment she gave me the book, I just don't entirely remember what she looked like.'

'So a strange, un-placeable girl gave you one of those Old Testament apocalyptic books. Well, that's.... ominous. Had you seen the kid during the service?'

'Don't think so. But... you know, it was pretty busy, man. The place was jumping. Not quite standing room only, but I sat at the back and there were only a few spare seats. Upstairs looked like it was heaving 'n' all.'

'Hmm,' he says. Takes a sip of latte. I mean, here we are, grown men. He's got his latte, and I've got my bog-standard milk, no sugar.

'St Mungo's was dead,' he says. 'And not because there was no one there. It wasn't empty, there were a couple of hundred folk, I suppose. Space for plenty more, but still enough to create some sort of atmosphere. And, of course, they'd lost two of them with Maureen and young Tommy. Particularly Tommy, it'd be the kind of thing that's really going to drag a place down. Yet, there was something more.'

'Like the life had been sucked out of it.'

He nods.

'And St Stephen's was the exact opposite. Like the life had been injected back into it. Like they're the vampire, sucking the life from the other three.'

'Maybe that's it,' he says. 'The forced union of the churches has really screwed up the three that had to go through with it. Even those who won the fight over the building, it still rankles with them. They're still having to share their home with the opposition, and they had to listen to the others when it came to choosing a minister. But St Stephen's... they escaped. They're free to do what they want.'

'Who knows how it'll work out in the long run,' I say, 'but for now they're having a party.'

'God, it's a right shitstorm in a biscuit factory, isn't it? Did you know about any of this stuff?'

'Nah,' I say. 'Like we said before, I'd heard they'd amalgamated, but didn't think anything about it. Thought it'd all be a very straightforward procedure. Turns out it was like trying to reform Yugoslavia.'

He smiles and nods.

'That, Sergeant, is a very good analogy.'

'Was Connor there?' I ask, quickly getting the subject off Yugoslavia, having been stupid enough to bring it up in the first place.

'Oh, yes. I'd given him the heads up that I'd be going, just so there was no Lee Van Cleef stare-down across the church, but we avoided each other all the same.'

'Post-match cup of tea?'

'Yes,' he said. 'But nothing like your high-end beverage operation. A few women with large pots of PG tips and Nescafe Gold Blend... D'you still get Nescafe Gold Blend?'

'Fucked if I know.'

'Me neither. Anyway, it was plastic coffee, a few bourbons and some custard crèmes.'

'We had muffins. Blueberry. Raspberry and white chocolate. Double chocolate chunks. Vanilla. I think it was vanilla.'

'Yeah, if we're still on this next week, we can swap.'

'Shit.'

'What?'

'Another week of church...'

He takes a drink, lays his cup down and looks outside at the grey mid-morning.

'If you'd rather be on your domestic abuse cases, petty drug crimes and failed car theft, I'm sure there will be plenty of them to keep you busy.'

Another week of these serious-looking dudes in suits and shoes, with all their pious shit, I think I might be just about ready to go back to the usual petty drug crimes, no matter how shitty all that stuff is.

The image of the girl in a dress and the short sleeves of her cardigan, the thin book in her hands, flashes across my mind. I eject the thought, lift my coffee.

*

O
ur lives are dictated by food and drink. Mostly drink. It's automatic. Want a coffee? Cup of tea? Would you like to go for a drink?

Here I am, having escaped a slow day at work to come and speak to Philo Stewart, the woman who runs the Bible group with her husband. One of those big old detached houses up the top end of Glenvale Road. Not too far from the Old Kirk in fact. I suppose church allegiances, like football team allegiances, will be dictated by much more than geography.

I'm standing at the bay window of the lounge. From here I can see the houses across the road, a little of the hills in the distance. They've probably got a better view over the town, and the sprawling south side of Glasgow, from their bedroom upstairs.

Bedroom. Hmm...

Stop being such a dick, Sergeant.

The door is pushed open behind me. Mrs Stewart enters the room clutching a small tray containing two mugs of tea, and what looks suspiciously like a plate of home-made flapjacks. About five each.

'That's a lot of flapjacks,' I say, as she places the tray on a small table.

She smiles as she takes a seat.

'Brain freeze,' she says. 'I put one each, and then I thought, well that looks a bit mean, so I put two each, and I thought, that might seem terribly proscriptive. So I panicked.'

She giggles.

I sit down opposite her. Have that familiar feeling – attraction, desire, an awareness of the inevitability of infatuation – accompanied by its negative pal, depression at the thought of here we go again. Someone else for me to lust after. Someone else to make an idiot of myself over. She's married, she's involved with a church which is, in some way at least, under our investigation. This has so many ways it can end badly, it could be a Middle Eastern democracy.

She's wearing a V-necked sweater, thin cotton, which rests lightly on her breasts, accentuating their shape. And jeans. She's wearing jeans.

'No children?' I say, a thought that I regret to admit came to me as I had been looking at her thighs, and as soon as it's out of my mouth, I could shoot myself in the face. Never, ever, ask a woman – especially one in her thirties – if she has children. Who knows what sadness lurks millimetres beneath the surface?

'Only been married a couple of years,' she says. 'Thought we'd enjoy the peace for a little while longer, then start trying in a year or two.'

See, right there, even though that was harmless enough, that's more information than I wanted to hear or that she wanted to tell me.

'Sorry,' I say, 'ridiculously rude of me to ask.'

'That's OK, but you're right. You got lucky this time, Sergeant, but in general it's the conversational equivalent of pulling the pin on a grenade.'

She smiles again as she leans forward and lifts one of the mugs, indicating for me to do the same. I hold her gaze, get swallowed up by it – and there it is, flashing through my brain, the image of her naked, sitting on top of me, me deep inside her – and it's gone, and I drop my gaze, lift the mug and a flapjack, then say, 'All right, tell me about old Mr Crackjaw, or his equivalent,' and bite into the biscuit. If you can call a flapjack a biscuit. I mean, it's not a cake.

Traybake?

She reaches forward and lifts a flapjack. The smile is still on her lips. I look at the V in her V-necked sweater, look at the first curve of her breast, look away as she straightens up, watch as she puts the flapjack to her lips and takes the tiniest bite.

'We're relatively new here. A couple of years. Arrived just as the whole thing had started off.'

'Where were you before?'

'Working for the Red Cross. I'd been in DRC, Afghanistan, Somalia, a little time in northern China. Heilongjiang province.'

'Shit.'

You don't get much of that kind of thing around here.

'DRC?' I ask.

'Congo,' she says.

'Of course.' Feel stupid. Provincial.

'Met Tony in Kabul. You know what these places are like. Everybody's having sex with everyone else.'

'Yeah. I was in Bosnia for a time, mid-90s.'

'Crap,' she says, 'no way. I've heard that was all kinds of a shitstorm. You'll have to tell me about it.'

I wouldn't like to see my face at the moment. I suspect a shadow is passing across it. A dark one at that, one that threatens to block out the light from the window.

'Some other time,' I manage.

'Of course,' she says quickly, and makes a small gesture with her eyes to apologise for intruding into whatever private grief was apparent from that there shadow. 'Anyway, over time we found that we generally were having sex with each other and no one else, and then I got posted to Syria, just as all that was kicking off. Went there for a few weeks, Tony got a job back here, asked me to come with him, and you know... I just thought, even then, you could see it. You could see that Syria was a country that was just going to get slowly fucked. Sorry. Shouldn't have said that.'

'That's OK.'

'So, I took him up on his offer. Tony. I mean, that sounds almost like it was a business deal. I didn't mean...' and she completes the sentence by waving a casual hand.

That's OK, I think. You don't have to explain. You're sitting with someone who you find far more attractive than your husband, and you're finding it a bit awkward. Could happen to anyone.

'And the church?'

'Tony joined. I came with him. I'd grown up with it, and it was one of the things that took me abroad in the first place. Seemed natural to join once we were here. And, as it turned out, all that time in Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan and the Congo had been good preparation.'

I laugh. Have been making my way through the flapjack as she talked, now down it with some tea. Make discreet dabs at the corner of my mouth in case there are any oats attached.