“Who’s going to go for the stuff?” asked Bella.
“How about you Flynn?” asked McKirrop before anyone else had a chance to say anything.
“Suits me,” said Flynn sourly.
McKirrop handed over two twenty pound notes and Flynn snatched them from his grasp trying to avoid his eye. McKirrop just smiled as he watched Flynn slope off. He knew he was back with the group. Bella came over to join him on the wall as he knew she would. She also took his arm and slid her hand into his pocket as he knew she would — ostensibly to massage his thigh but he knew what she would be looking for. That was why he had made sure to put three twenty pound notes in that pocket — the change he should have left from one hundred pounds. The rest of the money was stuffed down the back of his underpants.
“What’s this?” exclaimed Bella, using her girlish voice as she brought out the notes, feigning surprise.
McKirrop took them from her lightly. “My hard earned cash,” he said.
Bella smiled and McKirrop grinned. He handed one of the notes to Bella and said, “Why don’t you look after this one. After all, we’re all part of the same family down here aren’t we?”
Bella took the note and slipped it teasingly down the front of her blouse. “Well,” she said. “If you want it back, you know where to look.”
McKirrop grinned and got to his feet. “I’m going to take a leak,” he announced and started to walk along the towpath. He had covered about fifty metres before he veered off into the shrubbery to his right. He cursed as he almost lost his footing in the drop and grabbed hold of some branches until he reached the bottom of the ditch. He had chosen this particular spot because there was some light here from a security lamp in the factory yard on the other side of the wall beyond the shrubbery. He wanted to see what he had managed to extract from Rothwell’s pocket while he had been pretending to help him to his feet after tripping him.
It had been his intention to go for Rothwell’s wallet — he had reckoned there was still a hundred or so left in it after he had paid out the three hundred — but that had proved too difficult. He had had to make do with whatever had been in Rothwell’s right hand overcoat pocket. It had felt like a card at the time and he had high hopes that it might be a Visa or Access card. As he examined it in the bushes he was disappointed. It was neither of these, nor was it a gold Amex card.
The little blue and white card was a University of Edinburgh library borrower’s card and the only thing interesting about it, thought McKirrop, was that it had not been issued to a man named Rothwell. This was a staff card and it entitled one, Doctor Ivan K. Sotillo to use the university’s medical school library. McKirrop considered for a moment then slipped the card back into his pocket. This needed some thought.
Father Ryan Lafferty noticed the man sitting in a pew near the back of the church. He had avoided his eye when he had purposely looked in his direction so he had decided to leave it at that for the moment. He knelt and crossed himself as he broke the plain of the altar and then continued his journey through the narrow twisting corridor, smelling of dust and incense, to the adjoining church hall to see what the state of affairs was with regard to the jumble collection for Saturday’s sale. Two ladies, one elderly the other middle aged were engaged in sorting material into piles. The middle-aged lady who was working on the clothes pile held up a moth-eaten jacket with frayed cuffs and said, “Some people, Father! They must think we’re a rubbish tip down here at St Xavier’s. She tossed the offending article to one side.”
“Maybe a bit thoughtless, Mrs Tanner,” said Lafferty. “But I’m sure they meant well.”
Lafferty’s charitable view about the coat was not typical. It had been forced on him in part by the guilt he was feeling at suspecting the motives of the man in the church. His first thought on seeing him had been that he might be after the contents of the offertory box or even the altar silver. For that reason he had been pleased to see that the stranger had been seated at the back, well away from the valuables. This unkind thought was now weighing heavily on his mind.
Lafferty was prone to self criticism, and he was going through a particularly virulent spell at the moment. Recently, his time for reflection — usually around ten in the evening when he would sit alone with a glass of whisky by the fire — had been filled with fears that his church no longer represented the community at all. It was more like a club and what was worse, a private club where the members were predominantly old and female. His discomfort at this thought was not so much due to the fact that it might be true but, rather, that he actually liked it this way. When he was searingly honest with himself, and he was in these late night sessions, he had no desire to change things, no wish to go out into the community: he felt no need to evangelise. He felt no need because he suspected that there was no point. The people in his parish didn’t give a shit about Jesus Christ or his teachings and nothing he could say or do was going to change that. To imagine differently required a strong belief in the basic goodness of ordinary people. And that was where he was terribly afraid he was lacking. He was thirty-eight years old, a Roman Catholic priest and he was a cynic. He didn’t want to be but he was. The word made him afraid when he thought about it. Cynicism was like a cancer eating away at his faith. If only he could believe that it was a cancer — an illness — and not, as he feared most, a vision of reality.
“So what would you like done with it, Father?” asked the woman who had picked the jacket up from the floor and was treating it with exaggerated respect after Lafferty’s rebuke.
“Throw it in the bucket, Mrs Tanner, I wouldn’t wash my car with it,” murmured Lafferty absently. He was thinking about the man next door.
“Very good, Father,” said the woman with a shrug. So what was all that nonsense about ‘meaning well’, she wondered? She made a face at her elderly colleague.
“Will you ladies be all right on your own for a little while?” asked Lafferty. “I have something to do in the church.”
“Of course, Father,” replied the older woman.
The man was still there. Lafferty stood in the shadows behind the altar for a few moments, partly obscured by a pillar, just watching. The man wasn’t praying and he wasn’t reading but there was something about the way he moved in his seat from time to time that gave Lafferty the impression that he was trying to run away from something while sitting still.
Lafferty coughed to warn the man of his presence and came out from behind the pillar. He pretended to do something at the corner of the transept before walking up the side aisle to approach the stranger. “I’m Father Lafferty,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve met before?”
The stranger smiled a little distantly and said, “No, we haven’t, Father.”
Lafferty was looking at a man in his early thirties, well dressed although in casual fashion and with an educated tone of voice. He seemed deeply troubled. The lines round his eyes said that he hadn’t slept for some time and his fingers were constantly in motion, engaged in a nervous wrestling match.
“Something’s troubling you. Can I help?” asked Lafferty. This was a simple enough question but, for Lafferty in his crisis of confidence, it had a much greater significance. In truth, he wasn’t at all sure that he could really help anyone at all any more, or if he ever had for that matter. He married couples whom he would never see again, buried the dead who had been born Catholic and provided ‘club leadership’ in the automatic group activities of praying and singing hymns. All of these things, he reflected, could be done by a robot wearing the required vestments. He as a person didn’t matter at all.
The man shook his head almost apologetically. “I’m honestly not sure,” he said.