The Redeemed

CHAPTER 11




Jenny woke late, the alarm clock telling her it was nearly eight-thirty. Leaden, she hauled herself out of bed, vaguely recalling Steve leaving shortly after daybreak, kissing her cheek as she had drifted back into sleep. As the fog cleared she remembered they had been talking until nearly three, Steve trying to convince her that if anyone had a sinister connection with Katy's death it was almost certain to be her father. He had been impressive, piecing together the evidence like a criminal lawyer, almost persuading her that Brian was responsible for the year-long gap in her childhood memory. He wanted to hide something, Steve said, and he's terrified you into hiding it too.

'Like what?' she had asked.

Steve had answered with a look. He didn't have to spell it out.

She had always rejected the idea that her father had molested her. Her feelings towards him weren't hostile or ambiguous enough; and she could swear that nothing had happened during the years when they had lived alone together, her mother having fled with her Jaguar-driving lover. Yet if he had, the dark dreams that had haunted her for so many years would make perfect sense: the ominous crack opening in the corner of the bedroom in her family home, the unseen, malevolent presence that lurked in the darkness beyond. She almost wished it were true.

Steve had pressed her to make another appointment with Dr Allen. It was her moment finally to drag the memories from her subconscious while the door was still open, he had said. She had resisted, pretending to him that she couldn't face it while she was so busy at work, too afraid to admit the full extent of her terror. Not only was she frightened of falling into a place from which she would never escape, but she feared that the truth might reveal her as a monster from whom Steve would recoil.

She staggered to the window and drew back the curtains to reveal a perfect deep-blue sky. A pair of buzzards circled above the oak woods opposite; to the right of the cottage the patchwork of meadows and copses that sloped all the way down to the Wye was a vision of Eden. It's all there for you, Steve would have said, you just have to reach out and take it.

The phone disrupted her moment of tranquillity. She stumbled stiffly down the narrow stairs to answer it in the study.

'Oh, you're still there, Mrs Cooper,' Alison said with mock surprise. 'I only tried you at home to make sure. I thought you'd be over the bridge by now.'

'I've been catching up here where it's quiet,' Jenny said, in a voice still thick with sleep.

'If it's quiet you want, I should stay at home. Father Starr's on the warpath. He's insisting on speaking to you. I've got his number.'

'What about?'

'Do you think I didn't ask him?'





Jenny's call was answered by an elderly, austere-sounding priest. She could hear several male voices in the background and footsteps on wooden floors. Father Starr took a long time to come to the phone and spoke to her curtly. Could she please meet him at Clifton Cathedral, he asked.

'Can you tell me what this is about?'

'I'm afraid not.'

'I see. Don't you think some indication would be courteous?'

'Please grant me this one interview, Mrs Cooper. I would be most grateful.'





Each year, as summer reached its zenith, there were a handful of days during which the Wye valley radiated such transcendent beauty that it was impossible not to be inspired to a vision of a clear and uncomplicated future. Meandering through the graceful corridors of beeches that reached out and touched each other over the five miles of road between the villages of Tintern and St Arvans, Jenny felt her spirits lift. The sun spiking through the branches brought a simple, brilliant thought: she could rise above the tribulations of her past, and set her own parameters. It didn't need prayer or divine intervention; she could choose, right here and now, to take control.

She could begin with Starr. He was an obsessive who couldn't believe one of his converts capable of murder. He was manipulative, too, taunting her with mention of Alec McAvoy. It wasn't hard to understand his motive. And who but an egotist with fragile self-esteem could spend his life ministering to a captive audience of prisoners for whom the Church offered the only viable prospect of hope? A multitude of inadequacies could hide behind the priestly mask. She resolved to leave him in no doubt about what she thought - that he was wrong about Craven.

Father Starr was waiting impatiently on the steps of the brutally arresting modern cathedral. Built in the early 1970s largely of concrete, its three-pronged spire seemed to jab accusingly at the sky: a monument to the hubristic century that had created it, demanding rather than inspiring awe. Jacketless, a short-sleeved clerical shirt hugged his lean frame.

'Good morning, Mrs Cooper.' He didn't offer his hand. 'It's a little too hot to talk out here, don't you think?'

Without waiting for her answer, he turned and led the way through the cathedral's glass doors into an interior which, if it hadn't been for the abstract mosaics of stained glass, struck Jenny as having all the magic of an airport terminal. Vast concrete beams welded the building's precast sections together. The altar stood beneath a hexagonal concrete dome of which even Calvin might have approved.

'You don't appreciate the modernist architecture?' Starr said, reading her thoughts.

'No,' Jenny said, determined to follow through on her resolve.

'I try,' Starr said, with a suggestion of a smile. 'And invariably fail.'

He nodded to the altar, crossed himself, and directed her to the end of one of the many rows of chairs that substituted for pews.

'I think the architect's idea was to allow for purity of thought,' he said. 'In that, at least, I feel he succeeded.'

Jenny was about to ask him what was so urgent that couldn't wait, when she realized his small talk was veiling a silent prayer. His eyes were focused inwards, his folded hands perfectly still.

After a moment's meditation he said, 'I would usually be performing my duties at the prison on a weekday, but apparently I have been the cause of complaints. I have been asked to hand over my responsibilities to another priest.'

'Complaints from whom?'

'Two prisoners is all I have been told. Their identities have not been disclosed to me, of course. That would allow me to defend myself, which would never do.'

His sudden bitter tone surprised her. It was that of a man unused to rejection.

'Have you been told the substance of the complaints?'

'The governor informs me that I have exerted "indecent ideological pressure" on certain prisoners, thereby offending their freedom of conscience.'

'Have you?'

Starr shook his head. 'Never. I offer myself to prisoners to talk, that's all. To force myself on them would be anathema. My order's way is always to lead by example. If others see you have something they wish to possess, they will make the approach. In truth, Mrs Cooper, I am bewildered. Five years in La Modela, every day in the presence of evil, and not a single word of complaint.'

'You must have some clue what prompted this.'

'I have a suspicion, but I'm afraid you'll accuse me of being paranoid.' He turned to look at her, the first time she had seen genuine humility in him. 'Believe me, I'm not prone to conspiracy theories, but these complaints mean I can no longer contact Paul Craven. I fear for him. His behaviour has become erratic, his thoughts disjointed. I had become the one person whom he could trust.'

'You think the complaints against you were manufactured?'

'I hesitate to believe that—' He checked himself and gazed at the altar.

'But you do?' Jenny said. 'Who does this benefit? I thought priests were welcomed by prisons.'

'It may be a perfectly valid grievance,' Starr said, in an effort to convince himself, 'but I suppose there may be some who would like to see me discredited. A priest suspended from his post for browbeating doesn't make the most compelling witness at an inquest, for example.'

'I wouldn't pay it much attention,' Jenny said. 'Besides, any evidence you gave would hardly be critical.'

'But the allegations can be put, and repeated in the press. I will be called a zealot and my belief in Craven dismissed as delusional.'

Jenny thought of Ed Prince's parting words at the Mission Church the previous afternoon: his sly allusion to those Christians who didn't like the way his clients conducted themselves. She'd guessed he was referring to Starr, but in the turmoil of the evening she had left her thoughts half- formed. Was Prince implying that the priest had an agenda beyond exonerating Craven? She had come intending to tell Starr she couldn't help him, but he had headed her off and was dragging her into the mire.

Be direct, that was the only way. Hit him with the hard questions now and gauge his response. A would-be Jesuit couldn't deny the power of logic. If all he had to offer was blind faith in Craven with no facts to back it up, she could let him down with a clear conscience.

'Let me ask you something, Father,' Jenny said. 'What do you make of Eva Donaldson?'

'In what sense?'

'Her life story. Her conversion. What she represented in a spiritual sense.'

He gave her a sideways glance, reading her with eyes from which there was no hiding place. 'Are you asking me if I believe God was working through her?'

'If you like.'

'And whether I approve of her church?'

'You couldn't be much further apart,' Jenny said.

'Protestants forget we have "phenomena", too. But we subject them to scrutiny. The Catholic Church treats the experience of a solitary individual with caution. Doctrine, scripture and the accumulated wisdom of two thousand years must all play their part in discerning truth.'

'You're sceptical about her.'

'What would you expect?' He smiled. 'But just as for you there is only truth and untruth, for me there is only that which is from God, and that which is not. I am touched by Miss Donaldson's story, but I am also aware that human beings can generate a level of collective emotion that apes the action of the Holy Spirit. You can experience it in a football crowd - the collective surge of passion that physically lifts the exhausted player.'

'Football crowds don't reform young criminals or eradicate pornography.'

'I don't believe anyone has ever asked them to.'

'Have you been to the Mission Church? What they're achieving with children is very moving.'

'God isn't sentimental, Mrs Cooper: consider what happened to his son. We all enjoy interludes of happiness, but it's through our suffering that we progress.'

'All I have to offer is unrelenting pain and hardship — '

'I beg your pardon.'

'Captain Bligh. You must have seen The Bounty?'

'I don't believe I have.'

'It's the line he uses to entice loyal men to join him when the mutineers cast him adrift.'

'And does he prevail?'

'Yes. He survives and the mutineers become marooned in a paradise that turns into a hell.'

Starr nodded in amused approval. 'I must watch it. But I can assure you, no matter what you may have heard, I've no desire to persecute a crew of mutineers. My concern is purely for Paul Craven, and of course the truth.'

'What makes you so certain he's innocent? It must be something more than what he tells you.'

Starr said, 'You're impatient with me, Mrs Cooper.'

'Do you blame me?'

'What if I were to tell you that I had had a "word"?'

'God spoke to you?' Jenny said.

'If you wish.'

'And that's why I should put my neck on the line? The Ministry of Justice are already piling the pressure on me to steer clear.'

'You've rowed against the tide before. Alec McAvoy told me himself.'

'Can you please not mention him again?'

Father Starr persisted. 'I'm appealing to your conscience, Mrs Cooper. Something is not right.'

Jenny shot up from her chair and turned to face him. 'Do you know what I think? I think you're reading all sorts of things into this that don't exist. You're dramatizing, casting yourself in the middle of some imaginary struggle between good and evil, when the simple truth is Craven killed her.'

She started off across the stone floor, the click of her heels ricocheting like bullets off the cathedral's unadorned walls.

Starr jumped up and pursued her. 'Mrs Cooper—'

She kept on walking. 'I'm sorry, but I can't be used this way.'

He came alongside and reached into his shirt pocket. 'Please. I didn't know whether to show you this.' He brought out a folded piece of paper. 'I still don't.' There was anguish in his voice. 'Really, I've prayed, but I've no idea what's right.'

Jenny came to a reluctant halt. Avoiding her gaze, Starr handed her the single sheet.

'I've heard Eva Donaldson was friendly with a boy,' Starr said. He swallowed a guilty lump in his throat. 'His name's Frederick Reardon.'

'I've met him,' Jenny said. 'What of it?'

'He's got a violent past.'

She looked at the unfolded document. It was a standard printout from the Criminal Records Bureau. Two convictions were listed beneath Freddy Reardon's name. Both were on the same date a little over two years ago: possession of an offensive weapon and assault occasioning actual bodily harm.

'Where did you get this?' Jenny said.

'That I can't say,' Starr said.

'How did you know about Freddy?'

Starr shook his head. 'I didn't. This was given to me.'

'What's going on? Who's doing this?' Jenny demanded.

'I've told you all I can,' Starr said. 'Make of it what you will.'

With a look that told her his loyalties lay to a far higher authority than hers, he said a hurried goodbye and walked quickly away.





'He's playing games with you, Mrs Cooper,' was Alison's blunt assessment.

'Why would he?'

'He's a fanatic. Plausible, but the maddest people often are.'

'How would you get hold of a criminal record? It's not an employer's copy, it's come out of a Crown Prosecution Service file.'

'Maybe he's using a private investigator. A lot of my old colleagues from CID have gone that route. I dare say they could tickle up a few contacts in the CPS if they needed to.'

'He hasn't got the money, he's a penniless priest.'

'But think what he's got behind him.' Alison handed back the criminal record with a dismissive frown.

'I can't see why the Catholic Church would go out on a limb for a convicted murderer.'

'It's not about him, is it?' Alison said. 'Priests are like politicians, they tell you what you want to hear. With his own kind, I guarantee all the talk will be of false prophets and wolves in sheep's clothing. Every night when he flogs himself, your Father Starr will be praying for the Mission Church of God to be torn to the ground.'

Jenny said, 'Before I saw this, I'd made up my mind to certify cause of death and close the file.'

Alison gave her the sort of pitying look that could only come from an ex-detective who believed she had seen it all. 'Sometimes I think not even you know what drives you.'