Even by her usual standards, Sister Cassie realised that she’d walked some significant distances today, but thankfully she’d been able to acquire her medicine and take it just before sunset, adequately rejuvenating herself for the nightly round.
After that, she could sleep. Though she still had that policewoman to speak to.
She abruptly checked herself as she bypassed the row of taxis on Bakerfield Lane.
She ought not to think of Lucy Clayburn as ‘that policewoman’. She was a hard-working young woman, who maybe was a little intense, but was also personable and pleasant, and much less officious than the norm, and seemed to be completely at home in a job which, in Cassie’s youth, had been exclusively occupied by rough, gruff men.
Of course, that didn’t make it any the less inconvenient that Lucy wanted to speak to her; it would mean that she’d be disturbed late on, probably woken up from that deep, dreamless slumber her medicine eventually dropped her into.
Some thirty yards on, she halted beside a figure huddled under newspapers in a shop doorway. She crouched and began conversing with him, digging into her satchel to bring out her tatty, dog-eared prayerbook. His name was Albert, and he was a rail-thin young Irishman. The first time she’d encountered him, it had been later than this and quieter, and he’d jerked upward in fright, only smiling through his sores and his fuzz of beard when she’d come right up alongside him. He’d told her that she’d made an ‘eerie spectacle for an unprepared fellow’, her cloaked, cowled form ‘gliding like a spirit’. She’d assured him she was no such thing as she’d squatted down and tried to make him comfortable, and he’d believed her, asking only that she pray with him. She’d been happy to oblige then, and every night since. She did so now, saying with him first the Hail Mary, which both of them knew by heart, and then leaning close with prayerbook open, so they could read together and aloud that part of the Liber Hymnorum known as St Patrick’s Breastplate.
Content that both of them were now protected against the wickedness of others, she perambulated on, eighty yards or so, before stopping at another recess, where two more shapes sat under blankets amid a detritus of beercans and other trash. They were grizzled, brutish-looking older men, neither of whom she knew, though she had met them several times before. Despite this, they were glad to see her, going through their usual routine of asking for whisky and cigarettes, but gratefully accepting her gifts of biscuits and bottles of clean water, and allowing her to tuck them in.
‘Stupid fucking bitch!’ a shrill voice called from a passing vehicle. ‘Givin’ ’em all a crafty wank? Making life easier for parasites!’
She ignored the abuse, as she always did, refastening her satchel as she cut across the road and took a side-passage. This brought her through to Hildegard Way, normally a quieter thoroughfare, though on this occasion she was almost run down by a green transit van, which came screeching around the corner as though in a frantic chase and had to swerve to avoid her. It pulled up some twenty yards further along, as if the driver was about to leap out and berate her. Sister Cassie girded herself for yet more nastiness. But that didn’t happen. The van simply pulled away again, now much more slowly.
She crossed to the other side of the road and headed down a side-street.
This was Laidlaw Green, a much narrower avenue running behind the backs of shops. Yet more dark, huddled shapes, blurred under rags and filthy, improvised sheets, were dotted along it. One by one, the ex-nun interacted with them all, sometimes crouching and doling out from her satchel, sometimes kneeling as though to pray or at least offer what gentle words she could.
It was late, and, feeling the first hints of drowsiness from her medicine, she knew that the need for rest and sleep would soon become overpowering. So she pressed on down the length of the Green, the farthest end of which was dominated by the derelict outlines of the mills and warehouses of St Clement’s.
She crossed Adolphus Road, diverting left onto an avenue lined with boarded-up terraced houses, and at the end entering a mini-labyrinth of streets which no longer led anywhere, their properties long demolished, leaving a mosaic of interconnected, weed-covered lots. One of these long-forgotten byways was Canning Crescent, which was still cobbled, as if it hadn’t been used since the days of clog irons and cartwheels.
Directly ahead now stood the colossal double blot on the skyline that was the twin outlines of Griggs Warehouse and Penrose Mill. The closer Sister Cassie drew, the more immense the aged structures seemed, and the more broken and desolate the occasional smaller buildings on either side of her. The only light now came from the upright patterns of windows denoting distant tower blocks.
Any normal person might be frightened in this district, especially at night, but the ex-nun was a familiar fixture here. The denizens of this wretched place didn’t just know her personally, they knew that she carried nothing of value.
And of course, even if that wasn’t the case, she’d said her protection prayer.
Just ahead, the road curved past a section of warehouse wall whose upper portion, having burned and collapsed, had created a slope of thorn-covered rubble. A footpath had been beaten through this, allowing access to the skeletally moonlit interior, and to Old Fred’s crib.
For all that she was confident in her safety, thoughts about Fred stirred a momentary unease in Sister Cassie. This was the place where he’d been abducted.
Forty yards on, just before Canning Crescent curved, there were two other thoroughfares. The one on the right was no more than a ginnel, a footway veering off between gutted outbuildings. That was the route she had taken the night he’d been attacked. On the left, some fifty yards from the sloped footpath to the warehouse’s interior, was the concrete ramp leading down into the subterranean section of the building, from which the dark-blue van must have emerged. That said, there was nothing down there now. Nothing she could see, except shadow.
At which moment a cat-like whimpering caught her attention.
Sister Cassie halted, surprised, but knowing instinctively that it wasn’t a cat.
She pivoted around, scanning the moonlit ruins. And immediately spotted the source of the sound.
A figure sat against the wall midway between the underground entrance and the sloping path up to Fred’s crib. It was huddled underneath a carpet, which had been folded into a cone, so that it covered everything except the face.
The ex-nun was thirty or so yards away but could already make out that it was a young girl, perhaps no more than a teenager. Her blonde head lolled as if she was half-insensible, but she was crying loudly. Sister Cassie started hurriedly towards her, already unfastening her satchel. She thought she had a few bits of plasters in there, and maybe even a squeeze of antiseptic ointment left in that old tube she’d found. And she’d need them, because even from two dozen yards off, the youngster’s features were visibly puffy and blotched.
She’d been badly beaten.
‘My dear child,’ the ex-nun said, shrugging her satchel from her shoulder and hunkering down.
When she tore the old carpet away, it was stiff with dirt and age, and hordes of woodlice cascaded off it. Used as she was to these woebegone backstreets, Sister Cassie shuddered with revulsion at that and threw it away gingerly, making as little contact with it as she could. As she did, she failed to notice the look of pain and misery on the battered face beneath split into a grin that was more like a feral scowl.