Death Row - Mark Pearson [56]
Delaney threw her his own look of disbelief. ‘Oi!’
Kate flapped a dismissive hand. ‘That’s a trashy crime novel. It doesn’t count.’
She snuggled up to him, pulling a mock-stern expression. ‘Now then, young man, you were late bringing back that copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. What are we going to do about that?’
Jack moved his hand again and Kate smiled, breathing huskily in his ear.
‘Now that … is a good start.’
*
Black clouds hung low over the Thames, completely blanketing the moon and turning the water below into dark, impenetrable ink.
The minute hand clicked and shuddered twelve on the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster, and the sound of its historical bell, Big Ben, sounded. As it did so white flashes of light speared through the clouds, thunder cracked and low rumblings spread out like ripples of sound. But miraculously there was no rain.
*
Some twelve miles or so west of Westminster, in Harrow on the Hill, most people were in their beds and already sleeping. In the town centre a few pubs were still open and the youth of the area were singing, dancing, falling in love or settling disagreements with fists or broken bottles. But in one residential side street, a scant mile or so away from the hustle and bustle, away from the street lamps, the lights were all off, save for one solitary building where the multicoloured lights shone forth like a Christmas card.
Maureen Gallagher closed the large oak door behind her and walked into the church, her soft shoes making a gentle whispering, shuffling sound as she paused and knelt painfully, wincing a little as she felt the tendons in her joints crackle. She made a quick sign of the cross and rose again slowly, her knees creaking audibly this time, and Maureen winced again with the pain of it. Feeling much older than her forty-seven years she put a hand on the back pew of the church to steady herself. She straightened the scarf that completely covered her head and looked up at the altar and then around at the large stained-glass windows that marched along both flanks of the building. Ten of them in total. The night sky was coal black outside, but the lights she had put on filled the church with cold if brilliant illumination and picked out the blues and the reds in the windows so that they did indeed seem to shine bright with God’s glory. Maureen looked at them for a moment or two and then lowered her eyes, squeezing them shut as though in pain, her breathing ragged.
It was a small church built sometime in the mid-1950s. Utilitarianism winning out over ornamentation. The stained-glass windows with their overtly Catholic themes were the only stylistic nod to denomination. The small local Catholic community that it had been built to service was a far cry from the days when Saint Mary’s, the large church that sat on the crest of the nearby hill like a fortress, had been built. Commissioned by Archbishop Lanfranc and consecrated by Saint Anselm in 1094. Its towering wooden steeple was covered in twelve tonnes of lead and was visible for miles around. William the Conqueror built cathedrals and churches and monasteries as hymns to God in stone and mortar and toil. Henry the Eighth destroyed them and his daughter and descendants set about destroying the Roman Catholic Church in England itself, so that long, long before 1956 Roman Catholics had become only a small minority in the country. That had changed in recent years, of course, with the influx of eastern European immigrants, so that there were probably more actively practising Roman Catholics in England now than there were Protestants. But Saint Mary’s on the hill was now Church of England, and Saint Botolph’s below it in the residential sprawl surrounding the town had been built as a thoroughly modest affair. They were as different, one from the other, as a palace is from a garden shed. It had a plain rectangular shape, and a row of ten pews flanked either side of the central