I was getting too old to drink that much, I thought, looking at myself in the cruel side-light hitting the bathroom mirror in what passed for dawn. I remembered when pallor and dark eyes were just a Gothic touch. Today I looked washed up. I looked seedy. A black cassock and the harsh white slash of the dog-collar did me no favours either. I put some blusher on my cheeks but that only made the rest of me look greyer so I swiped a fistful of bog roll and scrubbed it off again.
I could tell from the commotion outside the bathroom door that my dad had arrived, revelling in his hangover as ever.
‘Mouth like a junkie’s carpet,’ he was saying, as I sidled into the kitchen. ‘Bacon roll, Finn?’ He had the frying pan out and buttered rolls lying open on plates.
‘Go on, then,’ I said. ‘What time did you pack it in? I never heard Paddy hitting the mattress.’ I had gone to bed as soon as we’d made our decision.
My dad nodded and groaned. ‘God knows. I was bladdered. We wrote everything down, though. Here was me ripping the piss out of your boy for taking notes, but he’s right. He’s not wrong.’
‘And?’ I said. I had half an ear cocked for what my mum was saying to Elayne in the living room, the timbre of her voice, the depth of the dips and the height of the peaks in her intonation. Her voice flattening out was an early sign of her beginning to sink again. But there was nothing of that about her this morning. She was clucking over it all like a flustered chicken. And Elayne, answering, warbled like a pigeon. They were both fine.
‘And,’ my dad said, ‘Paddy reckons that this Lovatt – his father! You can’t get your brainbox round it, can you? – played a canny hand. St Angela’s was as bent as a seven-bob bit but he never kept a penny of the takings. All handed over fair and square. So none of Paddy’s inheritance is tainted. It’s not the proceeds of crime. And it really is his inheritance too.’
‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘Is Paddy sure?’
‘Yep,’ said my dad. ‘It’s Paddy’s – inherited from Denise, his mother.’
‘What about Tuft?’ I said.
‘Nope,’ said my dad. ‘Lovatt never owned it – can’t benefit from a crime you committed – so he couldn’t leave it to his second wife, even if she did outlive him by a minute or two.’
‘So what was the point of the fake will?’ I asked. Then I answered myself: ‘So Paddy could get it without the story coming out.’
‘Bingo,’ said my dad. ‘Nice as ninepence.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Pretty neat.’
‘You don’t sound happy,’ my dad said. ‘I mean, I know it’s a lot to take – it’s like something off the telly – but if your life’s going to turn into a soap, better Dynasty than EastEnders, eh?’
I said nothing.
‘You can sell it all if it’s too tainted.’
‘The problem is, Dad, it’s tainted for me but not for Paddy. He’s okay. He didn’t even seem bothered about what Elayne was going through.’
My dad grunted, hunched over the frying pan, pushing the bacon around. ‘Aye,’ he said quietly, after a bit of thinking time, ‘you’ve got a point. I was as bad, off my head on that homebrew and thinking it was just a puzzle. Just a … Like a game. I never thought of Elayne.’
‘She’s your daughter’s mother-in-law,’ I said. ‘You can forgive yourself. But she’s his mum. And it’s not just that.’ I was whispering now, hoping, between the clucking and cooing in the living room and the hot fat spitting in the frying pan, Paddy wouldn’t hear me. ‘Why’s he not freaking out? Or why’s he not catatonic? Why’s he so on top of it all? Checking out his financial situation and feeling pleased about it? It’s not right, Dad.’
‘Trained mind?’ my dad said. ‘What’s that thing they say about surgeons?’
‘Compartmentalisation. But why’s he not worried about who moved the bodies? Someone moved them. Someone sent an email to buy a bit of time. That someone might even have killed both the Dudgeons. Paddy should be scared he’s next. Shouldn’t he? How can a job and a bit of money, even a few cottages … How can they even register?’
My dad turned to face me, and all the bravado of how much he loved a crippling hangover was gone now. He looked old and ill and more troubled than I had ever seen him.
‘We agreed to leave it,’ he said.
I nodded. We had. Every one of us. To save Elayne a bashing in the tabloids, to save Shannon more pain, to save Julie and Abby’s jobs, to make sure Mr Sloan had privacy while Social Services did what they had to do, we had agreed. I’d say I witnessed the will and we’d all take the true history of Sean and Simon to our graves.
‘You don’t suspect him, do you, Finn?’ my dad said. ‘Of moving the corpses?’
‘All I’m saying is we’re not at the bottom of this and Paddy doesn’t care.’
I saw a movement in the doorway and the skin on my neck shrank, pulling my shoulders up and freezing them. Turning, ready to face him if I had to, all my breath rushed out of me again in a gust of relief as I saw it was Shannon. And that very fact brought tears to my eyes. To be so relieved it was this woman I hardly knew, instead of the man I’d thought I knew better than I knew myself.
‘There she is!’ my dad said. ‘That’s a rare comfy sofa-bed you’ve got along the road. I slept like a slug. Zed beds we crashed on when we were young and daft and couldn’t afford a taxi? They’d cripple you. And a nice fierce shower too. I’m halfway to fixed. Couple of bacon butties…’
‘How did you sleep?’ I said. Shannon was so white she looked blue, but it might have been the cold light and her dark clothes, the fact that she had her black wig on again.
‘I dozed a bit towards morning,’ she said. ‘Dreamed of Sean, of course. But a different dream from usual. The start of the process, probably.’ She took a shuddering breath in and caught her lip. Then she sniffed deeply and shook her head. ‘I’m not going to cry today. Don’t know what I am going to do. But no crying.’
‘Come to church,’ I said. ‘I’m preaching a sermon. You can give me a star-rating after.’
‘I’m not really—’ Shannon began.
‘Have a bit of a sing-song,’ I said. ‘It’s like going to Mamma Mia. Or The Rocky Horror Picture Show.’
‘Maybe,’ Shannon said. ‘Is there any quiet time?’
‘That’s Quakers,’ I told her.
‘Because you’re right,’ Shannon said. ‘There’s a bit of this that’s still out of sight, isn’t there? There’s something missing. I can’t help thinking if I just sat and thought for long enough it would come into view. Like…’
‘A magic eye picture,’ I said. ‘Yeah, me too.’
‘That’s what yesterday was supposed to be,’ my dad said. ‘We maybe overdid the refreshments, mind you.’ He was lifting bacon rashers from the pan now and folding them onto the rolls. ‘Here you go, girls. Bacon butties coming your way, ladies,’ he called through to my mum and Elayne. ‘Paddy?’ he added, raising his eyebrows at me.
‘Migraine,’ I said. ‘Let him sleep on.’
I didn’t want him in the pew, watching me. I didn’t want him in the church. I didn’t trust that he had a right to be there, in God’s house, in good faith. You had to hand it to the Prods, I supposed. If you couldn’t play the old confession card, that was a hell of a good reason to keep your nose clean and make sure you never needed to.
The church was packed. Of course it was. There was a new deacon – a slip of a girl, at that – and there was a scandal the like of which Simmerton hadn’t seen for decades to be picked over. Tuft and Lovatt had disappeared. Out of the world or out of the country, either way it was another delicious chapter in the tragic lives of the Dudgeon family. It would keep the parish going through more than that morning’s service. The book clubs, darts nights, keep-fit classes and indoor-bowling fixtures would have perfect attendance for a while yet before everyone was done with the post-mortems.
Robert Waugh, as I’d suspected, was one of those ministers at his best on a Sunday morning, belting out benedictions and intimations, like a true vicar of the Old Testament God. I wondered if he had offered this sermon to me purely so I would make him look even better. He introduced me after the first hymn and prayer and I ascended the short flight of steps to the pulpit, tasting bitter adrenalin and feeling my hands prick with a sweat I couldn’t have said was hangover or nerves.
My mum and dad were smiling up at me. Paddy’s mum gave me a wary look then glanced away. Julie put her thumbs up and winked. I couldn’t see Abby. Maybe she wasn’t a churchgoer or maybe she’d faded into the background in her Sunday best, same as weekdays. I recognised one of the butcher brothers, a barista from the good coffee shop and the Webbs, of course, in the front row.
‘I’m going to read today,’ I began, ‘from one John, chapter one, verses five, six and seven. “Now this is the message that we have heard from Him and proclaim to you: God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all. If we say “we have fellowship with Him” while we continue to walk in darkness, we lie and do not act in truth. But if we walk in light as He is in the light, then we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of His Son Jesus cleanses us of all sin.”’
I’d been pleased with myself coming up with this passage to hang my debut sermon on, thinking the people of Simmerton would like nothing better than to focus on light and hope at the deepest days of their dark winter. But as I looked out across the pews, I saw a few disappointed faces, even a couple of raised eyebrows and twisted mouths, and I wondered if maybe every guest who hit this pulpit had the same brainwave and they were sick of it. Maybe it was rude for newcomers to mention it, like a great big birthmark on someone else’s baby.
I really wished I hadn’t started thinking of babies. I could see Shannon sitting there right at the back. But I’m not experienced enough to switch sermons on the run and I couldn’t drum up something to comfort her instead of this clueless riff on light and darkness, reminding her of her condition and her brother’s. The throw of the genetic dice that sealed his fate.
‘No need of UV rays…’ I was saying, ‘… warmth of the Simmerton welcome, bright smiles of my new neighbours…’ I thought of Mr Sloan. I saw the congregation shuffling its feet with a cacophony of gritty, scraping noises. Of course they all knew that two of our neighbours had died as soon as we arrived. If they’d known – or even dreamed – what else those neighbours had done, pretending a child was dead when it was living …
My brain ran up against this fact like a brick wall and stalled. My mouth kept talking. I had practised the sermon enough times for it to pour out of me. But all of my mind was elsewhere now. They had both conspired once before to pretend that a person was dead. They had pretended little Simon was dead. They went as far as to substitute another child’s body and bury it.
And what was happening this time? Paddy and I had seen two bodies and then they had disappeared. Someone had sent an email from a dead man’s phone. No one could work out who had moved the bodies or where they’d been put or who had sent the email or why.
But what, I was suddenly asking myself, what if the same thing had happened again? What if they weren’t dead? What if Tuft, lying there with blood glossy in her mouth and bright in her cuts … What if Lovatt, slumped over her with that knife sliced into his back and the bloom of that black butterfly … What if, once we had seen them, they got up and walked away? Flew to Brazil, safe from Shannon, safe from everyone. Scot free.
Maybe that was why the tableau had kept pulsing in my head, filling my dreams, pounding at me to pay attention. Some bit of my brain knew some bit of that picture was wrong.
I was still talking, about light and hope, about truth and clarity, and I was still thinking: we were always supposed to go back and see them. That wasn’t a slip. It was part of the plan. I wasn’t supposed to forget my bag. No one could have made me do that. It was the signed papers we were supposed to go back for, the papers Paddy thought he had, that Lovatt must have taken back from him. The bag was just an unexpected bonus.
But, then, why the hell did they send the email about going on holiday? That made no sense at all. Less than putting the bag out on the hallstand.
I drove my mind away from it all and back to the pulpit, back to the words I was speaking, back to the upturned faces of the Simmerton churchgoers. I was horrified to realise that they were speaking too. We were halfway through praying together in chorus, without a word of it – my direct address to God! – having glanced against any particle of my brain.
‘Forgive us our trespasses,’ I said, hoping they wouldn’t hear my voice change, ‘as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Amen.’
The congregation kept muttering and started shuffling again but I didn’t even register the dissonance until Robert Waugh, taking over again from behind the lectern, made some snippy little dig about the many paths to God.
I had said the Our Father of my childhood instead of the Lord’s Prayer as approved by my current bosses.
It was the least of my worries today.