Death Row - Mark Pearson [57]
Maureen Gallagher had been a volunteer at the church for five years but had never taken communion. She found the gazes of the saints and the cruciform Christ that hovered over the altar with arms outstretched almost intolerable. She had taken a pilgrimage to Walsingham once, five years ago, in a desperate effort to make amends. But the weight of the silence and the darkness and the sweet smoky smell of burning candles in the many, many medieval churches she visited had filled her soul with despair and crushed her spirit under the guilt she bore like the carapace of a beetle broken under a workman’s heel. Some sins couldn’t be forgiven, she knew that. But she came to Saint Botolph’s church every morning with her tray of cleaning materials and on her hands and knees scrubbed, polished and buffed the floors and the wooden pews, driving the candle smoke from her memory with the sweet smell of beeswax and the artificial aromas of spray polish. And if she could only bear a glance now and then at the watching figure on the wall, it was nothing like the leaden despair she had felt in the shrines of Walsingham.
Maureen came late each night, summer or winter, long after anyone else, priest or parishioner, had left. She liked the solitude and silence when she worked. She came to Mass alone and sat in the back pew, neither making eye contact with her fellow worshippers nor engaging in conversation after the service. She had barely spoken fifty words to the priest, Father Carson Brown, since she had first volunteered her services five years before. She was so used to being wrapped up in her own quiet world of silent prayer and penance that she didn’t really register the sound that night of the door opening behind her as she knelt rubbing an old yellow duster over the brass of the communicants’ rail. She didn’t hear the soft steps as the visitor approached behind. What brought the presence to her attention was the dark figure and pale face distorted and reflected in the mellow curve of the rail. She turned around and looked up. The lights overhead seemed brighter now, shining on the stained-glass windows and somehow putting a nimbus around the visitor’s face like a vision of a latter-day saint. Only the glow in the eyes that looked down on her, with no mercy or seeming humanity, didn’t seem to come from the church lights alone. Maureen Gallagher put up a hand to shield her eyes from their glare and brought the face into focus. It took a moment or two and then the breath leaked from her body as the realisation dawned on her. The weight she had been carrying for so very long seemed to rise from her for the briefest of moments.
‘It’s you,’ she said.
Then a thunderbolt hit her in the heart. And the weight was gone for ever.
SUNDAY
Not for the first time in his life Father Carson Brown was feeling guilty. It was a very Catholic emotion, surely enough, he realised, and he was a Catholic priest after all, but it wasn’t a strong enough emotion to stop him from returning to the scene of the crime. Or to the woman to be more precise.
Sarah Jane Keeley. She had dark honey-coloured hair that tumbled around white shoulders that were sprinkled with the lightest of freckles, and wide blue eyes that were regarding the priest with the sort of lustful playfulness that Rome would certainly never have approved of.
Father Brown tucked his shirt into his trousers and buttoned them up. ‘You are a bad woman, Sarah Jane,’ he said.
The woman in question was lying on the bed and smiling languidly up at him, a sheet held to her chest, the tip of her tongue licking the ruby moistness of her top lip in a slow, sensual curve.
‘Do you have to go?’ she asked, with a coy smile playing now on her perfectly formed cupid’s-bow lips.
‘I do,’ he replied. ‘And there’s no point pouting like Marilyn Monroe! There’s a Union of Catholic Mothers’ meeting this morning and I have to make sure everything is set