“A brave man,” said one. “You know he tried to stop these bastards from digging the kid up at the cemetery?”
“So I understand.”
“Should be given some kind of medal, I reckon.”
The other drunk nodded sagely. “Or at least some kind of compensation for the injuries he suffered.”
“Injuries?”
“They beat him up.”
“Beat him within an inch of his life,” added the other.
“I hadn’t realised,” confessed Lafferty.
“Well, nobody gives a damn for the likes of us, Father. Begging your pardon, like.”
“God does,” replied Lafferty. “Never forget that.”
“Yes, Father,” replied the drunk, obviously unconvinced.
“You will tell John that I’d appreciate a word with him later if he should show up?”
“Of course, Father.”
Lafferty could make out six figures as he descended from the bridge to the towpath. As he got closer he saw that the nearest man was either asleep or unconscious on the fringe of the group. He lay sprawled over the path with his head at a slightly raised angle where it rested on what looked like a railway sleeper. An empty bottle was still clutched in his hand. Lafferty stepped over him gingerly. “Is he all right?” he asked the anonymous group in front of him.
“Who wants to know?” snarled a voice from the darkness.
“I’m Father Lafferty from St Xavier’s. I was down earlier looking for John McKirrop. Is he one of you?”
“McKirrop, McKirrop, always McKirrop,” replied the voice. “No he isn’t.”
“Then can you tell me where I can find him?” asked Lafferty.
“Mr McKirrop is out courting at the moment,” came the sneering voice.
“Courting?”
“He is out walking with his lady, Father, the beautiful Lady Bella and I do believe they’re without chaperone.”
The group broke into cackles of laughter.
“I really would like to speak to him if I possibly could,” said Lafferty.
“They went that-a-way,” snapped the voice. “About an hour ago.”
“Thank you, Mr?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said the voice.
“I think it does,” said Lafferty.
“Flynn,” replied the voice.
“God bless you, Mr Flynn.”
“I’d rather he came up with a jacket and a pair of shoes,” replied Flynn sourly. The others supported Flynn with their laughter.
“There was a sale at St Xavier’s last week end,” said Lafferty. “There were some things left over. Call round tomorrow afternoon to the church hall and we’ll see what we can do.”
The silence behind him awarded him some kind of moral victory as he set out in the direction indicated by Flynn.
The towpath darkened with each step Lafferty took away from the canal basin and he began to feel cold. The temperature was now close to freezing. What had Flynn meant by, ‘courting’? Surely McKirrop and the woman, whatever her name was, couldn’t be... or had the others back at the basin been making a fool of him? The collar round his neck sometimes had this effect. People confused celibacy with ignorance. Lafferty often regretted the downside of clerical garb. In many ways it seemed to act as a barrier between him and the people he sought to reach.
He recalled several instances in the past of priests removing their collars and going to live in deprived areas to find out what it felt like. In Lafferty’s opinion, this had been a pointless exercise. Sitting in a cold flat on a housing estate all day did not tell you anything about the reason for being there. It did not tell you what it felt like to be unemployed and with no prospect of a job for the next twenty years. You could not simulate that. It had to happen to you before you could possibly know what it felt like.
The canal water to his left picked up a thin white reflection and Lafferty looked up to see the moon slide out from behind a bank of steep cloud. He was grateful for any source of light; the path was now so dark. Something ahead scuttled across the path and rustled off into the undergrowth. Lafferty hoped that it wasn’t a rat; this was one of God’s creatures he had little time for. An owl called out from a distant thicket.
As he rounded the bend leading to the next bridge Lafferty thought that he saw the silhouette of two or three people above the parapet but couldn’t be sure, and besides, it didn’t matter, they seemed to be heading away from the canal not coming down to the towpath. Which was a relief — he did not welcome the prospect of joggers or worse still cyclists coming hurtling towards him on the narrow path. The fact that he was wearing clerical black would not have helped matters in the darkness.
As he neared the bridge, Lafferty suddenly stopped in his tracks. There was a single street lamp up on the road leading to the bridge. A little of its light spilled down on to the towpath, not much but, to eyes accustomed to the gloom, it was enough to see what was there. He could see two figures lying on the bank by the water’s edge. Could it be McKirrop and the woman?
“Are you all right?” he called out. And called again when the couple failed to respond. There was still no sound or movement. No cursing and scrambling around in the grass. Nothing.
“Hello there!” he tried once more.
Apart from the owl, which chose his moment well to emphasise the silence, there was no sound from the couple and they remained motionless.
Lafferty reminded himself that the two on the bank were alcoholics. They could simply be blind drunk. He walked over to them and knelt down to shake one of them by the shoulder.
McKirrop’s head flopped round to reveal a face lacerated on both cheeks and with a frightening wound on his forehead where he had obviously been hit by something heavy. There was a large depression in his skull and blood had congealed in a black mess within it. The glass around his feet suggested to Lafferty that the weapon had been a bottle.
“God Almighty,” whispered Lafferty. He turned his attention to the woman. She was lying in McKirrop’s shadow and he had to move McKirrop a little to get to her. It was only then that he realised that her head was not resting on the bank at all. It was hanging over the edge of the bank and was submerged in the water! Struggling to gain a foothold on the slippery grass, Lafferty managed first to pull the woman’s head up out of the water, and then pull her body up on to the bank. Her eyes were wide open but they did not see the moon that had just emerged from the clouds. One of her cheek bones had been smashed and the eye above it had been dislodged from its socket. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth.
Lafferty whispered a prayer under his breath but then recoiled as the woman’s body suddenly made a gurgling sound. Water and weed slurped out of her mouth as if she had vomited weakly. She was quite dead but some latent muscular spasm had been triggered. Some lost electrical brain impulse wandering around inside her body had conveyed its last message. As the body sank down into rest again Lafferty prayed over the woman and then turned back to McKirrop.
The word, ‘courting’ came into his head and it, in turn, led to the phrase, ‘lover’s tiff’. For some reason he could not put a rein on this surreal line of thought. A lover’s tiff. Good God Almighty, how inappropriate a phrase to describe the scene at his feet. But it was not inconceivable that the papers might choose to report it as such. What had led to it? What had they fought over? The bottle? The lady’s honour? There it was again, an intruding phrase from another world.
Lafferty said a prayer over McKirrop’s body but, as he opened his eyes, he saw McKirrop’s hand move. He watched the dead man’s fingers move like a white spider. A scar across the forefinger stood out in relief in the moonlight. Lafferty was mesmerised by the sight. He felt sure that this had to be another example of muscle spasm after death but the fingers didn’t stop. They went on searching, trying to make contact from the depths of some timeless abyss. Surely McKirrop could not have survived such a horrific head injury he had sustained? Lafferty knelt down on the grass and felt at McKirrop’s neck for a carotid pulse. There was none. And then there was something — very weak and very faint but it was there. It caressed the tip of his third finger like a fluttering butterfly. McKirrop was still alive!