and Paul. A priest ruled each – tiny kingdoms, really. The tradition, I was informed, was that the principal was expected to enter only at the invitation of the priest in charge. I never challenged it. I was expected to live apart, to preserve the authority of the office.’
‘Where?’ said Dryden, running a hand along the ice-cold tiles.
‘In one of the forward wings. There’s a flat. The rest of the staff lived in the other – except those with house responsibilities who lived here.’ He nodded to a single door in the far wall. Dryden tried the handle but it was locked; he rattled it, listening to the echo.
They retraced their steps to the hallway outside, down the half-lit stairs to the tiled lobby and into what had been an office to the side of the main doors.
‘My kingdom,’ said Martin, switching on another bare lightbulb. There was a desk in the middle, grotesquely decorated and on a grand scale, while above it a great picture had hung, its shadow still visible on the scarlet and gold wallpaper.
‘They can’t get the desk out. It was probably made in this very room.’
‘When
Martin shrugged, turning out the light. In the sudden shadow he paused and Dryden could see his eyes, and the water that suddenly filled them. ‘It doesn’t happen like that. We aren’t innocent and then suddenly guilty, not when it really matters. We’re corrupted, by degree. It’s how evil works, Mr Dryden, through a series of tiny victories over good. I was institutionalized, and the institution allowed those things to happen, and then suddenly it was too late. I do remember when it was too late.’
‘What happened?’ said Dryden.
‘The school was empty, I can’t recall why. Perhaps a service at the church, or sports day – yes, sports perhaps. I knew I was alone. I was working in my office when I heard this persistent noise. It is very distinctive, the crying of the defeated. I won’t pretend it was the first time I had heard such things. I went upstairs and broke the rule.’
‘What did you find?’ asked Dryden. They were by the main door again, in front of a large hall mirror built into the wall in which the silver had begun to blacken in ugly blotches.
‘Beyond the wash basins were toilet cubicles. In Pius. The boy was in one. He said he’d been there for several days. He’d been given a Bible, I remember, and a cup to drink the water from the cistern. He was naked, crushed in many ways. I tried to get him to leave but he reiterated the punishments which awaited him if he dared. It was hard to believe, but there was no doubting his sincerity.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing. It was too late. I knew it had been happening, I had been protected from the knowledge by the rules. I said something ineffectual, to salve my conscience, and we carried on.’
He looked at Martin in the mirror, the face more sinister now that left and right had been transposed.
Outside, the sky was cloudless, the visibility icicle-sharp. They walked back towards the church along the old track which had been the drive, Dryden annoyed that the priest had succeeded in saying so much without making anything clearer.
They stopped at a low stone wall which edged a small graveyard.
‘As I said, two more victims have been identified,’ said Dryden, trying to inveigle the priest into specifics, into confronting the reality of the police investigation.
The priest opened the graveyard gate. ‘Yes. They are contacting others, I believe – Hugh Appleyard is a good man. Many more will come forward, I’m sure. Some will embellish the truth, some will invent it – but there is enough shame in a hundredth of what they say to damn the guilty.’
Again, effortlessly, he had distanced himself from the children who were in his care.
‘The priests in charge. What of their stories?’ said Dryden, encouraging him to implicate others.
Martin laughed then, and Dryden sensed the corrosive cynicism which had been his punishment for those decades of responsibility.
‘Ask them,’ he said, spreading his arms wide. ‘They’re all here. Remember, I was thirty-one when I arrived. The youngest priest was twenty years older. The last died two years ago.’
Dryden rubbed the lichen from the nearest grave and saw that each stone bore a simple cross and the diocesan crest.
Father Martin looked at the sky. ‘That is my sentence, Mr Dryden. To be left alone amongst the accused.’
Or your salvation, thought Dryden, filling his lungs with the frosted air.
8
Dryden slept happily in Humph’s Capri, his dreams refusing to take flight thanks to the ballast provided by six pints of Isle of Ely Ale and a four-star curry which had given him hiccoughs. The session in The Fenman bar had been particularly lively, culminating in Garry’s ill-fated attempt to dance a Highland reel in anticipation of New Year.
When Dryden finally awoke the moon was up and ice covered the Capri’s bonnet. He stretched, aware that a hangover hovered, and cleared a porthole in the condensation of the window. Outside, against the stars, the black outline of The Tower Hospital loomed like an exam.
Humph was listening to one of his Estonian language tapes, repeating with care a long list of pastry delicacies available only in Tallinn, while flicking through his bilingual dictionary, unnaturally excited by the section devoted to pies. Each year he applied himself to some obscure language, in the almost certain knowledge there was little danger he would ever need to speak it in Ely. Then each Christmas he would flee the unspeakable horrors of the festive season by flying out to some forsaken European capital for a few days to try out his new vocabulary. He had just returned from Zagreb, having spent the previous year mastering Serbo-Croat menus.
