The owners would be gone by now – into the city for business or shopping. They set the tone for local elections; they were the ones who needed to be impressed. Without their fickle patronage, the foundations of every public service buckled. Entitled, one-eyed, privileged and ignoring anything that disquieted them, they treated the police as bespoke security guards.
St Vincent’s Church was tucked into a corner at the end of the lane, hunched below a beautiful copper beech. In the day’s sunlight the beech presented filigreed shadows, flickering gently across the clapboard exterior. In summer, the congregation stood below its branches in welcome shade, sipping the lemonade sold to pay for the ever-atrophying roof. The roots slithered away below tufted grass to the small car park and burrowed under the church to prop it up.
She’d been brought here when she was eight years old: a port in a storm, a place of responsible adults. Somewhere that could wash the cut and ice the bruise; a location the cops knew; people who’d fuss and make tea for an hour, who’d bring biscuits and sweeties to her. They’d meant well, those Samaritans rescuing her from her own garden. But really: the idea that this place was any better than home. It was less visceral, but ultimately proved just as dangerous. The ripples still slid outwards, even now. Twenty-five years wasn’t enough to still the waters.
She stopped at the threshold. It was an achievement to be here at all – a marker of progress, but at the same time a necessary evil. For Dana, this was still something to be pushed through, to be accomplished and rewarded later. She could have met Timms elsewhere, but she knew she had to keep crossing this Rubicon every few weeks. If she didn’t, it would build even more in her mind and become another crippling obsession.
‘Bless me, Father, even though I haven’t sinned.’ Dana’s voice struck the stone floor, her steps echoing in the icy space. Churches made her shiver regardless of temperature, drove her backwards in her mind. She always felt she was scrabbling for grip, fighting to stay in the present despite a brutal dragging force. She looked up at Christ, bleeding and suffering.
‘Red! Wasn’t expecting you today. Of course. Well. Anyway. What have you to confess?’ Father Timms looked up from a stack of paperwork and pushed his spectacles up so he could focus. His voice shimmied off the stone walls and fluttered past her, out into the crisp air.
‘Uh, nothing. At least, I think I’ve been blameless.’ She dropped her bag by the door and stepped forward tentatively. ‘Does it count as a sin if you didn’t know it was a sin?’
‘“Sin” ’s an over-used, emotive word. Try “cock-up”, “screw-up”. Something like that.’
They grinned and hugged. Timms stepped back to look at her properly. It had been only days since they’d had coffee, but he sensed a change in her. It wasn’t only setting foot in here – though that was part of it. There was a gnawing uncertainty around her eyes and a bashful reluctance to meet his gaze. Notwithstanding the date, he thought he recognised Case Face; he’d seen it in her a number of times. She’d be sublimating everything to focus on a crime, but some things couldn’t be held down.
‘What was this sin that isn’t really a sin, then?’ He motioned to a nearby pew and they sat, legs facing front but bodies corkscrewed towards each other.
Dana coughed into her scarf, more to buy time than anything else. ‘Was hubris a sin?’
Father Timms waved a hand dismissively. ‘Ah, we had lots of odd ones back in the day. Coveting: coveting was big for a while. We’ve had to invent a few to keep up – taking selfies, that kind of thing.’ He nodded. ‘I think hubris was fashionable at some point, yeah.’ He paused, and his smile faded. ‘Not one I’d associate with you, Russo.’
‘Yes, well. Me neither. Although, if I was actually hubrissing, I’d be the last to know, wouldn’t I?’
‘That’s very true. If only the word existed, it would be true. Tell.’
Dana looked at the organ, which skulked by a velvet curtain in the corner. She could almost see her mother playing it stilclass="underline" the hunched back of a weaver, the dancing fingers, leaning her flimsy weight forward because her legs alone wouldn’t move the pedals. A spindly, gimlet-eyed spectre of a woman. Interminable hours after schooclass="underline" Dana scrawling in notebooks and reading novels while her mother worked herself into rapture. Then the scrubbing; the endless scrubbing.
That was after, of course.
And before, of course.
‘Well, all this feels… pre-emptive. I mean, I might be jumping the gun, but I need to get ahead of it now, before it causes real problems. I feel like I’ve taken on a task I don’t know how to complete. And there are very real implications if I don’t manage it.’
‘Imposter syndrome again? We’ve talked about that before. You have very keen self-preservation skills, Dana, but they come at the price of underestimating yourself. You know where all that comes from, don’t you?’
Yes, she knew. It was where everything came from: good or bad, useful or self-destructive. All from the same locus.
‘We have someone in custody for the Jensen Store homicide. You’ve heard about that?’ This place was not quite a confessional, but almost. She knew he would respect the sanctity of this discussion just as much: their friendship had reached that plane a while ago.
Father Timms nodded. Soon the local newspaper would clatter against his porch, sodden by morning dew at the first bounce. There would be lurid details and ill-informed speculation, but he already knew the bare bones. Carlton was still a small town with a hive mentality. ‘Yeah, I heard. Poor guy. So, you’ve got a suspect?’
‘Yes… technically speaking.’
‘But?’ he prompted.
Dana looked away, struggling to frame it right. Father Timms was smart – sometimes too quick for her own good – but her problem was mainly professional, not pastoral.
‘But… it doesn’t feel right. This, uh, suspect. He’s off-beam. Not in a mental-health way – at least, not that we can ascertain. But something…’ She paused. Saying it out loud made it seem even more nebulous. She couldn’t really explain what felt wrong. ‘There’s a big “something” I’m missing.’
In the mist beyond a car alarm sounded for two seconds then switched off. Father Timms flipped a hymn book over and over, like a card sharp idly toying with the pack. ‘You rely on your intuition, Dana. Why doubt it in this case?’
‘Not sure. Bill gave me a run at this guy and I think – no, I know – that I’m getting more from him than someone else would. But still I feel I’m falling short. We have twenty-four hours – crap, less than that now. But maybe four hours of actual talking to him. We might not get enough for a murder conviction without this guy opening up – confessing – and I’m the only person who’s getting anything from him; it’s all on me to break through and find the truth.’
‘Lot of pressure.’
‘Yes and no. There’s always pressure to close a case, especially one like this. But no, I wasn’t moaning about that bit.’ She scratched her nose. ‘I thought I could do it. I thought – since he seemed to trust me a little – I could get through his defences. Hence – the hubrissing thing.’
She faced the organ again, stuttered at the memory, and recovered. ‘Because I’m not sure I can. I feel like I can’t really get through to him. All I’m doing is getting little slivers off the corners, you know? Bill would say it’s early days, but it seems to me like a window that’s closing. This guy will lawyer up and clam up at some point, I’m sure of it. I need to be right in the guts of it by now, but I’m out in the margins. I’m going to run out of ideas and out of time.’
She squeezed the bridge of her nose and rubbed her eyes. ‘He keeps saying he doesn’t want a lawyer and we can maybe get extensions, but our luck can’t hold for ever. Sooner or later a judge is going to call “enough”, whether this guy agrees or not. Then we’ll be properly screwed. Father.’