Lafferty scrambled up the steep muddy path to the bridge on all fours. The very urgency of his movements seemed to act against him and he kept losing his footing and slipping back. With a last frantic effort, he pulled himself up on to the bridge path where he started to run towards the nearest houses, a small group of bungalows some two hundred metres away. He was breathing heavily and his trousers were covered in mud when he reached the nearest house and flung open the garden gate to charge up the path. He banged on the door with both fists until he saw the hall light come on and heard someone behind the door.
“Who is it?” asked a timid woman’s voice.
“I have to call for an ambulance!” replied Lafferty. “It’s very urgent. Please open the door.”
“Go away!” said the voice behind the door. “Go away or I’ll call the police.”
“Look, I’m Father Lafferty from St Xavier’s. There’s a man badly injured down on the canal bank. He needs urgent hospital treatment.”
“I’ve told you once. Go away! Don’t tell me any more lies! I’ll call the police. I mean it!”
“Sweet Jesus!” exclaimed Lafferty. He dropped his hands to his sides in exasperation and moved his mouth soundlessly before giving up on the woman and crashing his way through the adjoining hedge to the house next door. Again he banged on the door. There was no reply and the house remained in darkness.
He had more luck at the third bungalow. The door was opened before Lafferty had even reached it by a man with a can of beer in his hand.
“What the hell’s going on?” asked the man.
Lafferty told him.
After the ambulance and police had been called, the man asked Lafferty, “Is there anything I can do?”
“Maybe some blankets and a torch?” suggested Lafferty.
“Of course.”
The man’s wife was quick to come up with a pair of blankets from the airing cupboard in the hall, while he himself fetched a torch from the garage.
“Take this one; it’s got a powerful beam,” he said. “Want me to come with you?”
“No,” said Lafferty. “You stay here and tell the ambulance people where to come. I’ll be down on the path on the east side of the bridge.”
“Will do,” said the man.
Five
The police were first to arrive on the scene, two officers from a Panda car that happened to be in the vicinity when the call went out. Lafferty felt relieved that his uneasy wait was coming to an end. For the past few minutes the only thing that moved had been the tiny pulse in McKirrop’s neck that he kept searching for. He was still subconsciously unwilling to believe that anyone with such a horrific head injury could be alive.
“We’ll take over now, Father,” said the elder of the two constables when they arrived on the bank; the other one looked like a boy. Lafferty straightened up and felt the stiffness in his back from having been in the one position for so long. The policeman knelt down to examine the bodies with his torch and Lafferty heard him whisper, “Sweet Jesus Christ.” He turned and said, “Take a look at this, Brian.” His colleague joined him in a squatting position and groaned before turning his head to the side to avoid looking any more.
“I thought you said one of them was still alive, Father?” said the first policeman as the wail of an ambulance announced its imminent arrival.
“The man is,” replied Lafferty. “He doesn’t look it but he is. I found a pulse in his neck.”
Lafferty watched as the policeman took off his glove and put his hand to McKirrop’s neck. “There’s nothing there now,” he said. Lafferty’s motionless face reflected the moonlit ripples from the canal as he looked down at the scene, his eyes a mixture of sadness and bemusement. The policeman looked away again but remained on his knees, his fingers resting lightly on McKirrop’s neck as if in deference to Lafferty’s assertion that the man was still alive.
“God! I felt something,” he exclaimed. “You were right. It’s very weak but it’s there all right.”
Voices and the sound of running feet came from the bridge. The new arrivals were a paramedic team and more policemen from a second car. The two paramedics, dressed in green overalls and carrying cases packed with emergency equipment, arrived on the bank and got to work on McKirrop, while Lafferty was invited by the newly arrived police inspector to tell him what he had discovered.
“Did you move the bodies at all, Father?”
“I had to move the man’s body to reach the woman,” Lafferty confessed.
The policeman shrugged and said, “Well, I don’t suppose it’s going to matter much anyway. Looks like a straightforward case of a couple of winos knocking hell out each other. But we’ll go through the motions. Where the hell are forensic?”
Lafferty felt himself drift into the background as yet more policemen arrived, this time from a white Bedford van. They wore overalls and Wellington boots. More light was cast on the scene as a lighting generator arrived and was coaxed into life; it provided almost as much noise as it did light. The relevant area was marked out with plastic tape bearing the legend, ‘POLICE’, and canvas screens were erected around the area where the bodies lay.
When he got the chance, Lafferty asked the inspector, “I don’t quite see who hit who, if you understand my meaning?”
“What do you mean, Father?” asked the policeman although he seemed preoccupied with other thoughts.
“If you are working on the supposition that McKirrop drowned Bella...”
“You know these people, Father?” interrupted the policeman, hearing Lafferty use the names. He turned round to look at him directly for the first time.
“In a way,” replied Lafferty. “I’d been looking for McKirrop to ask him a few things about Simon Main, the boy whose body was stolen from the cemetery. McKirrop was the man who was living rough in the cemetery at the time of the child’s disinterment.”
“Was he now?” said the policeman thoughtfully.
Lafferty pursued his original question. “Say that McKirrop drowned Bella, he could hardly have done it after sustaining the head injury he’s got and if he did it before, how did he get the head injury?”
The inspector, looking down at the scene as the paramedics continued their work, replied, “It looks to me as if the pair of them had some kind of argument; McKirrop hit the woman — that’s what smashed her cheek in. In turn, she hit him with the bottle — probably a reflex action — before she herself passed out and fell with her head in the water.”
“I see,” said Lafferty in a voice that was filled with doubt. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“We’ll need a statement from you, Father.”
“Of course.”
After giving details to the police Lafferty waited until the paramedics had lifted McKirrop up on to a stretcher and were preparing to climb up on to the bridge.
“I’d like to travel with him if that’s all right? He may die before you get there.”
“Very well, Father,” said the leading paramedic.
As they started up the steep path to the bridge, Lafferty looked back to tell the inspector that he was going, but the man was engaged in instructing a photographer and members of the forensic team who were still busy by the canal. He looked back again from the bridge parapet at the illuminated scene below. There was a gap in the canvas screen. Bella was staring up at the heavens, oblivious to all that was going on around her. He thought of Hieronymus Bosch