The Quick and the Dead (A Sister Agnes Mystery) Read online

  Agnes met his eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I would say that.’

  ‘So you don’t see the work of Satan in this?’ Ross’s clear stare gave nothing away.

  ‘Well,’ Agnes said, ‘it depends what you mean by Satan. If you mean the absence of God —’

  ‘I mean Satan. A presence, not an absence.’

  The room had grown suddenly cold.

  ‘So …’ Agnes said, and her voice seemed to echo in the silence, ‘you’re saying the Devil killed Becky?’

  ‘Someone acting on the Devil’s behalf, yes.’

  ‘Where does that leave God, then? Picking up the pieces after the Devil has asserted his power? Gathering up the corpse to Heaven, even though He was powerless to prevent the death in the first place? The God I believe in is greater than that. Don’t forget,’ Agnes went on, suddenly angry, ‘the Devil is a fallen angel. God created Satan too.’

  Ross leaned back in his chair and smiled. It was as if the room itself had been holding its breath, and now smiled with him. Agnes waited.

  Ross looked at her warmly. ‘You have faith, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s all there is.’

  ‘And are you brave enough — brave enough to admit that there is room for Satan within you?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I’m brave enough for that. Only, I won’t call it Satan. I refuse,’ Agnes said, ‘to pass the responsibility on to anyone else. What there is of Satan in me — it’s me. That’s all. Just me. And if I pray to God to deliver me from evil, I don’t mean that He should arm me in the holy battle with some external force.’

  ‘But if you say Satan is part of you —’

  ‘It’s a distraction to call it Satan. I’d rather take responsibility for what I am, including the potential to do harm.’

  ‘Then you make it acceptable.’

  ‘So you mean calling it the Devil —’

  ‘Calling it the Devil means that you can see it more clearly.’

  Agnes considered this. ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘And where does that leave Becky?’

  Ross surveyed everyone in the room before answering. ‘Becky died at the hand of Satan. God’s triumph is in taking her to Himself for eternity.’

  ‘And the murderer?’

  ‘What of the murderer?’

  ‘If he or she is all Satan, then there’s no room for forgiveness.’ Agnes was aware that Elizabeth was staring at her. She glanced across but immediately Elizabeth looked away, smoothing the creases of her skirt.

  ‘On the contrary,’ Ross was saying, ‘the murderer was possessed by Satan. If Christ can work within his heart, he, too, can be brought to the Truth.’

  ‘And do you think he will be?’

  ‘It’s not for me to say,’ Ross shrugged. ‘Becky ran from us, you see. She left the safety of our fold. Out there …’ He turned briefly to the window, to the sunlight falling on the neat front lawn. He shook his head at the perils of the world beyond.

  Roger Murphy stood up; Agnes was relieved to take her cue to go.

  ‘I’ve taken enough of your time,’ she said. The two boys got up from the floor. Steven went over to his mother, and Jerry stood crookedly, shaking one foot to get the circulation back. Ross led the way into the hall and opened the front door for Agnes.

  ‘I’ve enjoyed meeting you,’ he said, taking her hand.

  ‘It was kind of you to give up so much time,’ Agnes said. ‘And to put up with my Jesuitical rhetoric.’

  Ross smiled at her. ‘It makes a change, for me.’

  Agnes started down the steps. ‘Please try and get Shirley to see her daughter,’ she said.

  Ross nodded. ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  As Agnes went down the drive past the hydrangea bushes, she was aware of Ross Turner being ushered back inside by his flock, anxious to press another wave of refreshments upon him. She thought about Ross’s view of evil, as the black knight on the bloodstained battlefield where God and the Devil fought to the death for the human soul. She thought about what Julius would say when she told him; Julius, whose view of evil was that it was, on the whole, petty, everyday and utterly human. Good old Julius, she thought, walking to the station, feeling the presence of Ross Turner fading in the afternoon breeze.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘So was he gorgeous, then?’ Athena asked that evening, raising her voice above the restaurant noise. ‘I always imagine these preacher types to be really charismatic.’

  ‘Gorgeous? You’ve seen those ghastly American ones on the telly.’

  ‘Was he like that?’

  ‘Well, no, he wasn’t, but the point I’m making is —’

  ‘Shall we have the salmon?’ Athena perused the menu.

  ‘I rather fancy steak tonight.’

  ‘Actually so do I. I must be anaemic or something, I’m exhausted these days. So you mean, he was gorgeous.’

  ‘I suppose he was quite good-looking. Nice eyes. The thing is, though, he’s sincere. That’s what surprised me. He obviously really cares about his community, and he obviously really — believes. Properly, you know.’

  ‘He got to you, didn’t he?’

  ‘We had this discussion about evil.’

  ‘He won?’

  ‘It’s not about winning and losing. Only —’

  ‘Only, you didn’t win.’

  Agnes laughed. ‘It’s an uncomfortable feeling, Athena. For you the equivalent would be if you’d gone to all that trouble to catch Nic and he turned out to be married or gay or something.’

  ‘In my experience, neither are insurmountable, poppet,’ Athena replied, raising her glass. ‘To true love.’

  ‘That good, is it?’ Agnes said, raising hers.

  ‘Sweetie, it’s bloody fantastic.’

  Two hours later they walked back rather unsteadily towards Athena’s flat, arm in arm and giggling.

  ‘So you’re going to get married and live happily ever after, you and Nic?’ Agnes asked.

  ‘You watch me, sweetie. I’m going to walk up that aisle in a white dress with you as my bridesmaid.’

  ‘No, not bridesmaid,’ Agnes giggled as they came to a lurching halt outside Athena’s mansion block. ‘I’m going to be the one to give you away. “Who giveth this woman,” they’ll say, and I’ll say, “You can have her, mate.”’

  ‘I can just see it, can’t you?’

  ‘What, you getting married?’

  They stood together under the streetlamp. Athena was suddenly serious, shadowed in the yellow light as she looked at Agnes. She shook her head. ‘No. Not me getting married. Not really, poppet.’ She kissed Agnes on both cheeks and teetered up the steps, then turned and waved. ‘Super evening, darling, see you soon.’ She kissed her hand to Agnes, then leaned rather heavily against the door, which opened and closed again behind her.

  Agnes walked back to the main road, wondering whether to wait for a late bus or not. It was a warm night, and the street corners were dotted with idling loud young people.

  She set off towards the Embankment, finding herself heading east along the river towards home. At Westminster Bridge she paused by the stone wall and stared into the dark, silted waters. She thought about Ross Turner, his searching eyes, his belief in the empty, passive soul in which Good and Evil had to fight it out. She set off on her way, thinking about Col and his terror, and the Highwayman and Woodland Bill; and Sam, and Mike Reynolds; and the clicking on her telephone. And Becky, still lying in the morgue; still waiting for justice. She looked across the river, at the glittering decks of a restaurant boat. Was it all so fragile, she wondered, as Paz and Jenn claimed it was? Was justice something elusive, dependent on one’s status? Was Satan now lurking just out of reach, jeering at us all? She looked down into the depths of the river, at the swirling blackness flecked with yellow splashes of light. Her fingers recalled the warmth of Ross’s touch as he’d said goodbye. She envied him his certainty.

  *

  ‘You’ve never wanted certainties before,’ Madeleine said, after Mass the next da
y.

  ‘No. But wouldn’t it be nice, to think God is our Father. Really, really our father. And Jesus is the good guy, and Satan is the bad guy and it’s all clear-cut. As if standing up and saying, “Yes, I allow God into my heart,” does the trick. For ever. And if anything goes wrong after that it’s just the Devil and you just have to get rid of him and —’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘Nothing. What was I saying?’

  ‘You were saying you wanted to join the evangelical movement.’

  Agnes laughed. ‘No, not me. But Madeleine, it makes you wonder. Out there are great waves of faith passing us by, New Age stuff and anti-road protests and the evangelicals — how do we know we’re right?’

  ‘And all this because Sam wants to live with her father and there’s nothing you can do?’

  Agnes looked at Madeleine. ‘And Becky’s death, yes.’

  ‘Maybe there’s nothing mysterious about Becky’s death. Maybe it was a heavy making a mistake, or a madman or something.’

  ‘But her life —’

  ‘The preacher was OK and very sincere, you said. And a family so lost in grief you can’t tell what they’re like …’ Agnes was aware of an idea just outside her reach, something about Becky, and the Devil being the source of all evil …

  ‘Maybe you need to go to Yorkshire,’ Madeleine was saying. ‘Maybe you need quiet, to centre yourself.’

  Getting rid of the Devil, that was it. If you were as certain as Ross about who Satan was, and you thought you recognised Satan in someone, then killing that person might come to seem …

  ‘I mean, I know the kids at the hostel need you, but you still have to think about your own needs —’

  … Might come to seem perfectly justifiable.

  ‘You’re not listening, are you?’ Madeleine said, then laughed. ‘As if you’d ever change your mind.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Madeleine. I’m a bit distracted.’

  ‘If a purer spiritual path is really what you’re after, you could always join a nomadic order and travel from place to place with a begging bowl.’

  ‘Do you know, when all this is over, I might just do that.’

  On Sunday evening Agnes settled down at her desk with the notes she’d made from Sam’s file. She had the phone number of Linda, Sam’s birth mother, and all the details from Mike’s birth certificate. She wondered where to start. Sam’s Aunt Annie was probably the best bet. She checked the address. She was living in Harlow, married to a man called Brian Everett. Agnes got out the phone number, then wondered whether it wasn’t too late in the evening to disturb her. She got up to make some tea, and while she was waiting for the kettle to boil gazed absently out of the window. The chestnut tree outside swayed lethargically in the summer night. In the phone box outside a man was making a call. Almost immediately, Agnes’s phone rang. She picked up the receiver, and heard breathing. From where she stood she could see the phone box, and the man in it was holding the receiver, looking straight up at her. She remained there, frozen, staring down at him. Then he hung up, and Agnes heard her own line go dead. She stood there, holding the receiver, as she watched him leave the phone box and walk slowly away from her down the street, not looking back.

  When he was out of sight Agnes replaced her phone receiver. She stared at it for a while. Just a coincidence? How could it be? She shivered, went to her drinks cupboard and poured herself a large whisky. She sipped her whisky, standing by the window, looking out — in search of what, she wondered.

  It was too late to phone Annie now.

  Later that night, before she went to bed, she pulled her phone out from the wall socket.

  *

  Annie Everett, née Whittaker, had a rough, harassed voice. ‘That girl’s nothing but trouble. She was trouble to ’er mum, and that father of ’ers is going to find she’s nothing but trouble to him, neither.’

  ‘Mrs Everett, I promise that after this visit, no one else will bother you about Sam. She’s probably going to move in with her father now he’s reappeared.’

  ‘And there’s ’im thinking you can just come back into people’s lives when it suits you. They’re welcome to each other. Well, I can’t see you before four o’clock this afternoon, I’ll be back from school with the kids then, make it four thirty, you might get a cup of tea. You got the address?’

  ‘It’s very kind of you.’

  ‘She’s family, ain’t she.’

  Agnes put down the phone.

  It was not yet ten. She picked up her raincoat, looked outside at the glorious summer sky, and left her coat on the chair.

  Half an hour later she was at St Catherine’s House, scanning the shelves of the register of births, checking the dates against the notebook in her hand. She took down the book for June to September, 1979 and thumbed through it until she found the entry for Sam. Sam Whittaker, mother Linda Whittaker, place of birth Stepney, East London. There was no father listed. She made a note of the reference, then replaced the book. A thought struck her, and she pulled down the book for Mike’s birth date. There it was, Michael Hugh Reynolds, born London 1958. She scribbled down his parents’ names just in case, then went to order up the full birth certificate for Sam.

  When it came, she found, again, there was no father listed. The mother’s address was given as Flat 4, Kincaid Court, Atherton Estate, Stepney.

  She emerged into the midday heat. The ozone smog of the Aldwych traffic caught the back of her throat. Ravenous, she decided to grab a sandwich before driving to Harlow.

  Annie’s house was on a shabby estate near the ring road. Her front lawn was a neat, shaved square, edged with immaculate rose bushes. On each windowsill a box spilled forth colour, geraniums, verbena, pansies.

  Annie showed Agnes into her kitchen. She was a large woman, with pink, sun-scorched skin and a blonde perm. Her T-shirt said ‘Lanzarote’ in bright orange letters across the front. The television was on in the front room, and in the kitchen a toddler sat at the table, sucking the jam out of the middle of a biscuit.

  ‘’Scuse the mess,’ Annie said. ‘Kids everywhere. I’ve got four, though two’s not back yet, and I mind me friend’s two after school. Tea?’ She bustled to put on the kettle. ‘Nah, ’e’s not a bad ’un, Mike,’ she said, rinsing two mugs under the tap. ‘We go back years. Grew up together, Mike and his mate Bob, and my Brian too. I knew ’im way back as well.’

  ‘When Sam was born,’ Agnes said, sitting at the table, ‘Linda didn’t give her Mike’s name.’

  ‘Nah, I remember that. She wanted to, went down the Town ’All, ’opping mad she were, but they said unless he came too they couldn’t do it fer ’er, not with them not being married. And ’e was out on the sites, weren’t ’e, so she had to leave it at Whittaker. Then ’e pissed off so it was just as well.’

  ‘Why did he go?’

  Annie prodded at the tea bags in the mugs. She sighed. ‘It’s not fer me to say, really, but — Lin didn’t really ’ave the makings of a wife. I know it takes two, and maybe he could have done more, but she was — she just weren’t committed to ’im.’ Annie removed the sticky remains of biscuit from the toddler at the table, and stuck a bottle of juice into his mouth. ‘She took after our mum, I reckon. We ’ad so many uncles when we was kids, you could have had a bleedin’ football team. I was older than Lin, I kind of watched and waited, and when our Brian asked me to marry him, I thought, that’s it, I’m getting out, I’m not going to end up like her. But Lin, she was younger, she was there for longer, and it got worse, with the booze and everything. Biscuit?’ She took a Bourbon biscuit and turned it over in her fingers. ‘It’s what you make it, innit, life. Lin never quite got out. She could have got married, settled down, she ’ad loads of boyfriends …’

  ‘So when Mike says he’s the father,’ Agnes began, wondering how to put it.

  Annie’s eyes opened wide. ‘Oh, ’e’s the father all right. Ain’t no doubt about that. There weren’t one of them boys who’d have done that, fathered a kid and then deni
ed it, not in them days.’

  ‘Sam’s really keen to live with him.’

  ‘Good luck to them I say. I know I’m ’ard on her, we’ve had our ups and downs, and Linda’s had it hard too, I can't say she’s done right by the kid, and now that git of a boyfriend of ’ers is there all the time. Well, Sam’s a handful but she don’t deserve what he dishes out when all’s said and done.’

  ‘So you’d have no doubts about it?’ Agnes heard the front door open, and a tall, blonde girl sauntered into the kitchen.

  ‘Stacey, this is Agnes, we’re talking about Sam,’ Annie said. The girl made a face, opened the fridge, and took out a Diet Coke. ‘Doubts?’ Annie went on. ‘I tell yer, the only doubts I ’ave is thinking about him in his nice house, which I bet ’e’s got, having to cope with a bleedin’ sixteen-year-old.’ She laughed. ‘Does he know what teenagers is like?’ She jerked her head towards Stacey, who was leaning against the sink swigging from her can. ‘Eat you out of house and ’ome one day, then live on thin air and fags for a week. And the washing — they change all their clothes every two minutes … ’ She laughed again, as Stacey grinned, sat down at the table and took the toddler on to her knees. ‘He don’t know what’s coming to ’im, does he, eh, Stace?’

  Stacey pulled a face at the toddler, who chuckled, and then all three of them laughed together.

  Agnes drove back into London against the traffic and was home by seven. She put some pasta on to boil. The phone rang. She hesitated, then picked it up.

  ‘Agnes, hi, it’s Mike. Look, I wanted to thank you for everything.’

  ‘It’s a bit premature, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, I know nothing’s been signed, but we’re up and running, aren’t we?’

  ‘We are?’

  ‘Yeah, sure. Sam’s so happy now and she loves her new room — ’

  Agnes sat down. ‘Her new — new room …?’

  ‘I know, I know, I’m sorry, but neither of us could wait. I gave her my address, she hitched over with that boyfriend of hers, mind you he’s got to go, a wimp if you ask me … ’

  ‘When was this?’