A Turbulent Priest (12 page)

Percy shook his head sadly. “No, sir, I’m sure you’re right. It’s just that I thought paedophiles weren’t good news, and paedophile rings should be tackled as soon as possible. I seem to remember a memo from you on those lines a few months ago. If there’s been a change of policy, I missed it.”

He had lost patience with the game now, and the two men stood eyeing each other for a moment in open hostility. Then Tucker said, “If he’s a paedophile, of course he must be pursued. I’m only saying that we must proceed with a little caution and—”

“Courcey’s a paedophile, sir. And a member of a ring exchanging child pornography. And involved in a murder case. I didn’t think it was a moment for too much caution.”

Tucker stared at his DI in horror. His own modest ambition to be Master of his Lodge seemed to him to be washed away on this flood of bad news. “Courcey is involved in the Bickerstaffe murder?”

“Involved, sir, certainly. Not necessarily guilty of pulling the cord round the poor bugger’s neck himself. Perhaps not involved at all in the murder: that remains to be seen. But he’s already tried to suppress evidence.”

Tucker sat down, suddenly and heavily, on the brass-studded leather armchair by the fireplace. “You’d better tell me all about it,” he said dully.

Peach did. When he had enlarged upon his views of the Courcey paedophilia ring, he also brought his chief up to date on the news from Downton Hall, and reported on the interviews with Kate Maxted and the Hanlons. He remained standing with feet astride on the sheepskin rug throughout. Then he took his leave of Tommy Bloody Tucker.

As the man led him covertly back across the hall, Percy called cheerfully towards the distant door to the kitchen, “Goodbye, Mrs Tucker. Sorry I didn’t have time to renew our acquaintance.”

Ten

There is a connection between intensity and psychological disturbance. There are too many exceptions for the association to be very useful, and psychiatrists find intensity far too wide and all-embracing a term for it to be valuable. Percy Peach affected a fine contempt for both psychologists and psychiatrists, but he had met a few very intense psychopaths in his time, one of whom had made a violent attempt to emasculate him with a meat hook.

He therefore noted with a wary interest that one of the men whose sons had been assaulted by the late Father John Bickerstaffe seemed very intense indeed. David Kennedy was older than any other of the parents involved in this affair. He was fifty-seven, a research chemist who worked in the laboratories of the electrical company which was a major employer in Brunton since the decline of the cotton industry.

Although he had agreed the time of this interview on the phone with Lucy Blake, he opened the door no more than three inches and peered at the police duo with dark suspicion. He inspected their warrants, gave no answering smile to DS Blake’s assurance that they had spoken on the phone earlier that morning, and treated them like a determined atheist beset by Jehovah’s Witnesses. He was a man with crinkly grey hair, a lined, worried face and years more appropriate to a grandparent than a parent. Eventually he said reluctantly, “I suppose you’d better come in.”

They went into a square room which was almost obsessively neat. No sign here of the toys they had noted in the Hanlons’ house; there was a modern desk under the window, a small cottage-style three piece suite, prints of what looked like Chester on the walls. A compact hi-fi tower stood in one corner of the room, but there was no television set. As if he registered their thoughts, Kennedy said, “The boys don’t come in here much. They prefer the back room with the television. I like to keep this place tidy.”

Lucy Blake said, “You have two sons, I believe.”

“Yes. Liam is sixteen now. It was Thomas, my younger son, who had the trouble at the youth club.” He spoke without hesitation or embarrassment. Obviously it was the euphemism he had decided upon and he would stick to that phrase.

“And you live here alone with your sons?”

“Yes. My wife and I were divorced six years ago. I was given custody of the children.” He had addressed all his remarks to her, as if he found it easier to talk to her than to Peach. Yet he had a monkish look; one might have anticipated that this ageing ascetic would have been soured towards all women by the failure of his marriage.

Because he seemed almost to expect it, Lucy said, “It’s unusual for a man to be given custody when a marriage breaks down, isn’t it?”

“She went off with someone much younger than me. She didn’t want the boys. They’d have got in the way of her new lifestyle.” He looked past her, not at her, while he spoke the bare phrases. He had a slight, mirthless smile and she wondered how much anguish his staccato delivery of the facts concealed. Yet it was he who had led her to those facts, he who had seemed to want the family background made clear.

In an attempt to bring his attention back to her, she said, “The authorities must have felt you would provide a good home for the lads, or they wouldn’t have left them with you.”

He smiled at her then, the first real warmth they had felt from him. “We get on well enough together, the three of us. We’re all odd in our own ways, but most of humanity is like that. The problems come when people don’t recognise it.”

This sounded dangerously like philosophy to Percy Peach. Philosophy wasn’t as bad as sociology or psychology, but it was suspect, and he took it as a cue to intervene.

“Difficult for the boys, though, not having a mother.”

“Not as difficult for them as having a bad mother. An increasing number of children have to manage without one parent or another, these days, Inspector. Or has that escaped your notice?”

Sarcasm was a brave weapon to employ against Peach. He looked at Kennedy with his head on one side for a moment, his face expressionless save for a widening of the dark eyes beneath his bald dome. With his black moustache, he looked for all the world like a miniature Oliver Hardy, about to hit poor Stan Laurel over the head for his latest
faux
pas
. Then he said, “It hasn’t escaped my notice, no. Many of those children end up in the hands of the police, you see. Their lawyers usually offer a bad home environment as mitigating circumstances when their offences come to court. But I’m glad to hear you’re coping manfully. Came to grief up at the youth club though, didn’t he, your Thomas?”

For a moment, Lucy thought Kennedy was going to spring at Peach. Then he controlled himself, forced himself to fold his arms as he sat in his armchair opposite his tormentor. The effort it cost him was evident in the unevenness of his breathing as he said, “That would have happened if Thomas had had both parents and his grandparents around. That man — that so-called priest — deceived other people as well as us.”

He was unable to bring himself to name Bickerstaffe, just as he had been unable to bring himself to name his wife, thought Peach. Ascetic men were often unable to name the thing they found most loathsome, just as frigid women could not name the organs of sex. He said, “That seems to be true enough. You had no suspicions about what was going on up there?”

“No. The parents are often the last to know in these cases, it seems. Liam had attended the youth club for a year or so, with no trouble. When Thomas seemed to be enjoying himself up there, I thought it a good thing for him to be mixing like that.”

He was defending himself now, a thing he had never expected or intended to do, thought Lucy. Percy’s penchant for getting under people’s skins usually made them reveal more about themselves than a more polite approach. Peach said, “Probably it was a good thing for young Thomas, until this happened. Brought him into contact with the opposite sex, for one thing. Excellent thing that, when he was living in an all-male household.”

“He’s barely fourteen. And there are girls enough in his class at school.”

“Not the same, though, is it? Bit of social mixing, outside school hours, not under the eagle eye of teachers or parents, good thing, I should think. Not that I’ve any kids myself. Must be difficult, handling adolescents on your own.”

Kennedy looked at him, calmer now, but not troubling to conceal his dislike. “We get by. We have our ups and downs, but we get by. Is this leading anywhere?”

“Not sure, really. It’s giving us a picture, I suppose. Roman Catholic yourself, are you, Mr Kennedy?”

“No. I don’t have much time for any established religion. My wife was a Catholic, and I allowed the boys to be christened in that church, on condition they were allowed to make their own minds up about religion as they got older. I may say they have now rejected it.” He could not restrain a look of satisfaction.

Peach himself had been brought up in an atmosphere of stifling, unquestioning piety, of priests in elaborate robes and thuribles swinging with incense. In due course, when he was about nineteen, he had rejected it all. Somehow he felt the boys in this house, wrestling with the problems of belief when they were no more than children, under pressure from a father longing to hear them declare their agnosticism, had had things much worse than he had. He said, “But you didn’t object to the lads attending a Catholic youth club.”

Kennedy spread out his hands without moving his arms: it was a curiously cramped gesture with which to indicate his liberality. “I am a broad-minded man, Inspector Peach,” he said, apparently unaware that his appearance and bearing had indicated exactly the opposite to them. “If they enjoy themselves in an environment where the religious overtones can only be minimal, I have no objection. And one of today’s religious buzz-words is ‘ecumenical’, so the club officially welcomes all faiths. I don’t think there are many kids there without Roman Catholic connections, mind you.”

“There won’t be now, at any rate,” said Peach robustly. “Not when the news of Father Shirtlifter gets round the town. And it will, you know, however much they try to hush it up. The victim’s background is bound to come out during the murder trial, for one thing.”

“You think his death is connected with his offences?”

“Oh, I’d expect so, wouldn’t you? There are plenty of people still around who think hanging’s the appropriate penalty for child abuse. It was probably one of them. Bickerstaffe was garrotted with a piece of thin rope or wire. About as near as you could get to hanging.” Percy, that bitter opponent of psychology, beamed happily at this awful amateur sally into its realms.

There was a sound of movement behind the door at the rear of the room. David Kennedy called, “Thomas? Come in here, will you?”

A thin boy, who looked less than his fourteen years, came reluctantly through the doorway, blushing furiously behind his horn-rimmed spectacles. Peach wondered if he had been listening behind the door, and the boy’s first words confirmed his suspicions. “I just came in from the back,” he said. “My bike’s got a puncture and I’m trying to repair it.”

“This is Detective Sergeant Blake and this is Detective Inspector Peach,” said his father, and the boy shook hands solemnly with each of them in turn. “They’re just here to ask a few questions. I knew they were coming.”

The boy nodded abstractedly, as if he did not need such reassurance. “Are you here to find out who killed Father Bickerstaffe?” he said.

Lucy smiled at him, but received no answering grin. He stood there a little owlishly, head on one side, full of a gauche intelligence. She hoped there was no bullying at his school, for he looked a classic victim for the unthinking cruelties of teenage boys. “We don’t expect to find that out by speaking to your father, Thomas. But we are trying to find out facts about Father Bickerstaffe, yes. And eventually, when we assemble enough facts, we shall know who killed him.”

“I hope you find who did it. He wasn’t a bad man, you know. He just liked — well, touching people. He went a bit too far, that’s all. But he stopped, when he knew you really wanted him to. It was partly my own fault, you see. I should have stopped him earlier than I did.”

David Kennedy, who had watched him indulgently until now, said with sudden harshness, “There is no blame attached to you, Thomas. None at all. We’ve had all this out before. I think you’d better get back to your bike now, leave us to sort this out; I don’t suppose we’ll be long.”

They looked more like grandfather and grandson than father and son, and the boy ignored him, did not even look at him. He repeated, his old-young face taut with the thought, “I hope you find who killed him. He was a good man, really. He didn’t deserve to be killed like that.”

They divined in that moment that he thought his father might have done this, that this puny figure was wracked at nights by the thought that the only adult who was close to him might have done this awful, unthinkable thing. He needed to talk, perhaps for hours, to someone who would listen with more understanding and sympathy than this anchorite of a father. Peach smiled at him, said with more kindness than Lucy had seen in him before, “You’re right, Thomas. We’re trying to build up a picture of Father Bickerstaffe — that’s the way we work, you see, when someone’s been killed like this. And it’s good to hear from you that you thought he had these good qualities. We’ll find out who killed him in due course, don’t you worry about that.”

The boy looked with them at his father to see his reaction. David Kennedy managed a strained smile. He said, “Your generosity does you credit, Tom. I don’t think you can help us here, though.” It was the first time he had used the diminutive of the boy’s name, and it emerged as an appeal. His son looked at him for a moment, nodded abruptly, and turned to leave the room. But the politeness which had been bred into him was too strong for him to leave like that: at the door he remembered his manners, turned and said, “I’ll say goodbye, then.”

“Goodbye, Thomas,” said the detectives in unison and the boy, reduced again to the embarrassed young teenager who had come so diffidently into the room, slipped out of it again. He had lost his self-consciousness only in the moments when he had spoken of the dead man and the search for his killer.

It was the first time they had seen any of the children who had been abused by Bickerstaffe. Both of them had been called upon to investigate much greater abuses of children than those perpetrated by that sad and lonely figure John Bickerstaffe. But the sight of that slight, bespectacled boy, still not quite certain of how seriously he had been affected by what had happened, reminded them vividly of the traumas of abuse, of the passions which must have been aroused in the very different homes affected by the dead priest’s activities.

Peach did not moderate the aggression of his approach to Kennedy with that thought. “Difficult for you, when you found out what had been going on up at that youth club. Being a single-parent family, I mean. And an all-male one, at that. And you so much older than most fathers, with such an age gap to breach to get close to your children.”

Kennedy seemed about to flare up at that. Then he said through clenched teeth, “We coped. We’ve coped with worse than that, in our time.”

“Really? Tell me how you coped, Mr Kennedy. When did you hear?”

“About the middle of August. A man called Farrell came round and asked to speak to me. He said he had the authority of the diocese. He was employed to counsel people, when things like this happened, he said. It became obvious as we talked that he was a kind of trouble-shooter for situations like this. It shows how many of them they have.” The last phrase came out with triumphant satisfaction, as if even amidst this personal tragedy he could not resist noting this corruption in a religion he despised.