“He can’t be — he was wearing normal clothes.”
“Shh!” She looks past him to the bedroom door, and he realises he had been shouting. They hold their breath, listening for their father. There’s no sound, and after a moment she whispers: “He might be on his holidays.”
“He was wearing a leather jacket, Cath.”
She looks into his face, absorbing the information, but her eyes stray again to the parcel, as if pulled by a magnet. “So, maybe it’s his brother, or a friend. It doesn’t matter Vinnie: that parcel is addressed to Father O’Brien. There’s no getting away from it — you robbed a priest.” She bites her lip. “And that’s a mortal sin.”
Cathy is in the Legion of Mary, and she’s been on two retreats with the sisters of Notre Dame. She always got an A in Religious Education — so if Cathy says it’s a mortal sin, he knows for sure that the Devil is already stoking the fires of hell, chucking on extra coals, ready to roast him.
“I’ll go to confession, I’ll do penance — I’ll do a novena,” he gabbles, trying to think of something that will appease. “I’ll do the Nine First Fridays—”
The shocked look on his sister’s face makes him stop. But the Nine First Fridays are the most powerful prayer he knows: a special devotion to the Sacred Heart, getting up at six o’clock on the first Friday each month for nine solid months to attend early mass and receive the Holy Eucharist — surely that will wipe his sin away?
“Vincent,” she says, gently, “There’s no penance for a mortal sin — and you can’t receive Holy Communion with a big black stain on your souclass="underline" it would be like inviting Jesus into your home with the devil sitting by the fire in your favourite armchair.”
When he was little, Vincent’s mum and dad both had to work, and Cathy would take care of him after school, in the holidays — even weekends, if Mum got the chance of overtime. Between the ages of five and eight, Cathy had been his minder, his teacher, his best mate, the maker-up of games and adventures. But he’d got bigger, and by his ninth birthday he wanted his independence. He became rebellious, and she was offended and hurt and that made her superior and sarcastic. Now, feeling the Devil squatting deep inside him, chiselling away at his soot-blackened soul, he feels small again, frightened and lost, and he wishes she would take charge.
“What’m I gonna do, Cath?”
She stares at the neat brown package as if it’s radioactive.
“Vinnie...” She frowns, distracted, like she’s doing a difficult sum in her head. “There’s only one way to get let off a mortal sin.” She turns her eyes on him, and they are so filled with fear that Vincent is seized by a terrible dread.
“What d’you mean, ‘it’s gone’?”
The man in the leather jacket is standing in a phone box, opposite the clock tower of the university’s Victoria Building. The quarter chimes have sounded and the clock’s gilt hands read six thirty-two; he should be in position by now. He closes his eyes. “Gone, vanished. Stolen.”
“You lost it.” His unit commander’s voice is hard, nasal, contemptuous.
“I thought it would be safe in the car.”
“Oh, well, that’s all right then — anyone can make a mistake.”
“It was well hidden.”
“Not that well, eh?”
The man fixes his gaze on the gleaming face of the clock, willing the hands to move, but the silence seems to last an eternity.
“When?”
“Sometime between six last night and five this morning.”
“Twelve hours you left it?”
“Wouldn’t it draw attention if I checked the damn thing every five minutes?”
“Watch your tone.”
The man grips the phone receiver hard. The sun has been up since four-thirty and the temperature in the glass box must be eighty degrees, but he daren’t ease the door open for air.
“Is it set to go?”
“It’s on a twenty-four-hour timer, like you said. It’ll trigger automatically at three, this afternoon.” He takes a breath to speak again, but the voice on the line interrupts:
“Shut up — I’m thinking.”
He waits in obedient silence.
“Whoever took it must’ve dumped it, otherwise you’d be locked up in a police cell by now.”
“That’s what I—”
“I’m speaking, here.”
He clamps his mouth shut so fast he bites his tongue.
“Even so, you’d better not go back to the hotel. Leave the car, catch a bus to Manchester. I’ll have someone pick you up.”
“I have a weapon. I could still complete my mission.”
“And how close d’you think you’d get?”
“I could mingle with the crowd. They won’t even see me.”
A snort of derision. “You’ve whiff of the zealot about you, lad. They’ll sniff you out in a heartbeat, so they will — be all over you like flies on shit.” The man listened to the metallic harshness of the voice, his eyes closed. “This’s what you get when you send a dalta to do a soldier’s job.”
That stings — he’s no raw recruit. “Haven’t I proved myself a dozen times?”
“Not this time, son — and this is the one that counts.”
“It’s a setback — I’ll make up for it.”
“You will. But not in Liverpool; not today.”
“Look, I checked it out — the approach roads are closed, but there’s a bridge—”
“What d’you think you’ll hit with a thirty-eight calibre service revolver from a bloody bridge?”
He wants to say he’s been practising — that he can hit a can from thirty yards, but that would sound childish — a tin can isn’t a moving target, and it takes more than a steady hand to look another human being in the face and fire a bullet into them. So he says nothing.
“No,” his superior says. “No. They’d catch you. And make no mistake — they would shoot you like a dog.”
“I don’t care.”
“Only fools want to be martyrs, son. And if you don’t care, I do. I care that we’ve spent money on equipment, and you let a scouse scallywag walk away with it. I care that security will be stepped up for every official visit after today — even if you walk away right now. Because there’s the small matter of a package that will turn up at three p.m.” He sighed angrily. “We’ll just have to pray to God the thieving bastard left it somewhere useful, like the city centre.”
He books his ticket for one o’clock and walks down to the docks to clear his head. They are still adding the finishing touches to the stands when he stops by the tunnel approach on his way back to the coach station. He joins a group of kids gawping through the wire mesh at the chippies hammering the final nails in the platform. He can see the plaque above the tunnel, draped in blue cloth. This is where the queen will make her speech. A team of men are sweeping the road leading to the tunnel entrance and a dozen more are raking smooth the bare soil of the verges.
Attendance is by invitation only, but a man dressed in overalls and looking like he has a job to do might pass unchallenged and find a good spot under the stands. Only what would be the point? Without the device, it would be hopeless: even if he did manage to remain undiscovered, he would have to abandon his hiding place, walk out in front of thousands of people, place himself close enough to aim his pistol and fire.
Police are already clustered in threes and fours along the newly metalled road; there will be sharpshooters along the route — and true enough, they would shoot him like a dog.
Father O’Brien hadn’t been anyone important. He didn’t have the ear of the bishop and he wasn’t destined for Rome; he hadn’t a scholarly brain nor a Jesuit’s mind to play the kind of politics it would take to elevate him above parish priest.