Read The Discourtesy of Death (Father Anselm Novels) Online
Authors: William Brodrick
The Discourtesy of Death (Father Anselm Novels)
The Sixth Lamentation
The Gardens of the Dead
A Whispered Name
The Day of the Lie
COPYRIGHT
Published by Little, Brown ISBN: 9780748133857
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © William Brodrick 2013
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Little, Brown
Little, Brown Book Group
London, EC4Y 0DY
Table of Contents
For my father, who met disability and terminal illness without complaint.
My warm appreciation goes to Ursula Mackenzie for companionship while handling the rapids of difficult moral questions and guidance in shaping the subsequent novel; to Richard Beswick, Iain Hunt and Philip Parr for help in preparing the text for publication; to James Hawks who, turning to W. B. Yeats, found the title; and to Françoise Koetschet, Christine de Crouy Chanel and Sabine Guyard, old friends of Anselm, for their unwavering support.
Her heart sat silent through the noise
And concourse of the street;
There was no hurry in her hands,
No hurry in her feet.
Christina Rossetti
The man in the tweed jacket knelt down and pulled back one corner of the bedroom rug, a large, expensive thing, handmade in the uplands of Kashmir and sold by a connoisseur of elegant home furnishings from a tiny shop in a back street of Cambridge. The pile was bright red, with an involved gold and blue design, its twists and turns suggesting an obscure meaning known only to Gurus not quite of this world. There were countless animals beneath arching branches. It was called ‘The Tree of Life’.
The man’s scrubbed fingernails settled into a groove of planking. He pulled, gently, and the floorboard lifted like a lid onto a box of old tools. His hand entered the dark space, feeling for the Billingham camera bag that hid a small seventies tape recorder and the Browning Hi-Power 9mm automatic pistol with silencer. The magazine capacity was fourteen rounds. Four had been fired in quick succession thirty years earlier: BAM-BAM, BAM-BAM. Ten remained: one up the spout with nine ready to go. The safety catch was on. The silencer was detached, wrapped in a yellow cotton duster.
‘You can’t hesitate,’ came the low West Belfast voice down the years, dark like the damp sitting room in Ballymurphy where Army handler and informer had met for the last time. ‘You move quickly. He has to go down. You do the job.’
The man in the tweed jacket stared at the complicated pattern in the carpet. He’d once been a captain in the British Army, dressed in jeans and a bomber jacket. He’d shaved infrequently and he’d worn his hair long.
‘There’s no other way,’ said the informer, holding out the gun. Liam knew what he was talking about. ‘All the thinking’s been done, hasn’t it? If you want peace, you’ll have to pull the trigger.’
The man blinked and swallowed. Liam’s voice faded and with it the dim light of that tenement house in Northern Ireland. The Troubles were over. Birdsong came from the trees in the quiet Suffolk garden. Autumn sunshine lit the panes of polished mullioned glass. Shadows drifted across the neat lawn towards the trimmed garden hedge. Beyond, a red tractor rumbled along a quiet lane.
Resolved, Michael Goodwin (clean-shaven now, with short, neatly parted hair) replaced the plank and smoothed the rug home with his foot. Opening a drawer on a dressing table, he took out his two passports, one British the other Canadian, and slipped them into the opposing inside pockets of his jacket. Sliding the drawer shut, he picked up the three framed photographs of Jenny and laid them in the small suitcase packed that morning by his wife. She was downstairs, waiting; edgy, like the informer in Ballymurphy; sure and convinced, like the man he once was, the man who could pull a trigger when it was necessary.
‘I’m ready,’ said Michael entering the kitchen.
Emma turned around. Her right hand moved a stray hair above one eyebrow. Smoke from a cigarette lodged between two long fingers made her wince as if she couldn’t see properly. She stubbed it out, breaking the unburned length.
‘Don’t know why I bother,’ she said, languidly. ‘I thought these things were meant to calm the nerves’ – she nodded towards the open pack by the
Sunday Times
on the table – ‘all I feel is seasick. Waste of time and money. Should’ve had a stiff drink but I thought it’s far too early for a slug of gin. Didn’t want the headache. Damn thing always comes when I booze before lunchtime.’
She paused to watch him shrug on his Crombie overcoat. His movements were slow and deliberate; irrevocable. One after the other he pushed the buttons through the eyes.
‘Actually, there’s no gin left,’ she said. ‘Finished the bottle last night.’
Her matey fretting was just a performance – they both knew it. She wasn’t worried about the job, not as such. Her only concern was that her husband’s nerve might fail. That he might hesitate. The banter was just a kind of loving shove towards the door, urging him to get the necessary over and done with. For everyone’s sake.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, pocketing his trembling hands. ‘I’m ready.’
Their eyes met across the long breakfast table. Emma’s outline was dark against the windows above the sink, but Michael knew well the shades of feeling in that fine-boned face, the deep hollows that held her tortured gaze, the wide half-open mouth. He’d watched the changes for thirty-five years. She’d been happy, once; like him.
‘Just think of Jenny,’ she blurted out.
‘I will.’
‘Keep her face in mind.’
Michael nodded.
‘She deserved a better life.’
Emma reached for the cigarettes, stamped on the pedal bin and dropped the packet in the hole as the lid opened. They were silent. Husband with his hands in his pockets, wife with her back to him, her shoulders juddering, her breathing like a kind of suppressed insane laughter. She snatched some kitchen towel to wipe her face. When she’d mopped up the spilled emotion, her voice was quiet and assured.
‘People bring dogs to the surgery. They’ve bitten someone … I mean the dog, not the owner … and I put it down, quickly and painlessly. I have to. Because it might bite again. You can’t talk to a cross-breed. You can’t bring a pit bull round with a warning. There’s something wrong with their minds. The thing has to go down. And, you know, when it’s lying there on the table, no longer dangerous, it looks peaceful; simply asleep. Grateful that it’s all over. No more chains around the neck. No more bloody postmen to ruin its life.’
Emma turned from the window and walked the length of the beamed room to Michael. They faced each other, staring hard. Their hands locked.
‘Peter is not a good man, Michael.’
‘I know.’
‘Before they locked him up he was mouthing off on the radio about morality.’
‘Darling, I remember.’
‘He went to prison for the wrong reason.’
‘Yes, darling.’
Michael seemed to stumble out of the kitchen into a memory. He saw Jenny after the accident, lying on her back in the orchestra pit. He saw again the splayed feet of his fallen angel, the failed ballerina.
Don’t move her. Just wait for the ambulance.
Bright stage lights flashed off the brass instruments as the players in rumpled black grouped to stare at the crippled swan.
‘He never cared for her.’ Emma was angling her head, coming closer to Michael, drawing him back to the matter in hand. ‘And yet he got all the sympathy and praise.’
‘Emma, darling, I don’t need reminding.’
‘You do, over and again.’ She kissed him violently, as if she might suck the pain once and for all out of his life. ‘You do, because you’re a good man who’d never harm a fly.’ She reached for the table and picked up a book off the breakfast table. ‘Here’s Peter’s present. It’ll keep him in his chair for hours.’
Michael read the title to himself, feeling Emma’s angry satisfaction.
‘Well chosen,’ he said, without smiling. ‘He won’t be able to put it down.’
They walked arm in arm outside into the warm sunshine, Emma shouldering the camera bag, Michael carrying the suitcase and the book. It was like their wedding day, only there was no guard of honour from the regiment, no cheery guests; they were starting this particular adventure on their own. On reaching the blue Volvo hatchback Michael said, ‘I’ll call tonight.’
‘Okay.’
‘After that, it’s lights out. No contact. I need to be completely alone.’
‘I understand, Michael. I’m ready, too.’
‘You only ring to confirm he’s out of prison and back home.’
‘I remember.’
‘Use a coin box. Become someone else to make the call and then leave that someone else behind, in the phone box. Go home as if you’d done nothing.’
‘I will.’
Michael put the bags in the boot and then examined his hands. The tremors and shakes had gone for the moment.
‘They’re good, clean hands, Michael,’ said Emma. Like the informer, she had the impatient energy of the person who had to stay behind and wait; the fussy authority of the accomplice who’d planned but wouldn’t act. ‘I know I’m angry … that I’ll always be angry, but this is not about vengeance, Michael. Our feelings about Peter are irrelevant. We’re doing this for Timothy, Jenny’s boy … our grandson. To give him a better future. We can’t leave him with Peter, not after what he’s done.’
Michael drew her close and pressed his lips against her forehead. He left them there and closed his eyes.
‘Everything’s going to be just fine,’ he said, quietly. ‘Just go back to work and heal some cats and dogs.’
He opened the car door, seated himself and wound down the window. Emma was holding out some letters. She’d been clutching them in her free hand during their slow walk from the kitchen to the driveway.
‘You forgot these,’ she said, affectionate and scolding. ‘There are some of mine, too. Remember to pop them in the post, will you? They’re urgent. Should have done it myself when I bought those awful cigarettes, but I had other things on my mind.’
It was a desperate gesture to be normal. Doing what ordinary people do when their other half heads off to work. Michael glanced at her in the rear-view mirror as he turned into the empty lane. She was standing tall and remote, just like on the day Jenny was lowered into the ground. One hand was covering her mouth.
Michael drove to the post office, bought some tulips from a florist and then made for ‘Morning Light’, a thatched cottage in Polstead. Jenny had found it shortly after she’d moved in with Peter. She’d been captivated by the lemon colour-wash. She’d said, ‘Dad, I want to live and die here.’ It stood empty now, waiting for the surviving owner to finish his custodial sentence. Michael went through the usual motions: he opened some windows; he raked up the leaves; he shut the windows again. For the umpteenth time he counted the number of steps from the fuse box by the back door to the sitting room, halting two yards before Peter’s chair by the fire. Twelve quick, silent paces. These tasks done, he then departed from the established routine. First, he placed the captivating book on the armrest; second, he put the wheelbarrow by the back door. After one last look at the chair by the fire, imprinting the image in his mind, he locked up.