Delaney straightened out the corner of the page he had folded, picked up a petrol receipt from the bedside cabinet and slid it between the pages, making a great display of closing the book gently.
‘Is that better?’ he asked.
‘Much better. You treat your own trashy paperbacks how you like, but my books command respect.’
‘You saying I dissed the Mosse?’
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying.’ Kate had a pair of black-rimmed reading glasses perched on the end of her nose, and she peered reprovingly over the top of them at Delaney.
‘You look just like the librarian at my old school, you know.’
‘Charming.’
‘It’s a compliment. All the boys fancied her.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, yeah. Miss Williams. Very sexy. Very strict.’
‘I’ll give you strict if you don’t watch out.’
Delaney snaked a hand towards her chest. ‘Is that a promise?’
Kate slapped his hand away. ‘Jack, behave yourself!’
Jack grinned and put his hand under the covers. He looked at the clock. It was nearly midnight. ‘I need my goodnight kiss.’
Kate sat up a little straighter as Jack’s exploring hand found its target. She smiled and folded the corner of a page of the paperback she was reading and put it down on the matching bedside cabinet.
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
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 aisle that led to a simple altar, raised on a painted concrete base with a brass rail at the front where the communicants would kneel to receive the wafer.
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
