‘As good a place to start as any.’ Rutherford sounded unimpressed. He squared his shoulders and fastened the middle button of his suit jacket. ‘Let’s get on with it. I want answers and I want them to start arriving soon.’
10
Some people kill because they want to do things with a body that they can’t do with a living person. Some kill because they take pleasure in the process of stripping someone else’s life away. And some kill because they believe it’s the only solution to the position they find themselves in. They’re the ones who take the most elaborate route to hiding the body because they don’t want it hanging around reminding them of who they really are.
From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL
The woman still formally known as Sister Mary Patrick sat with her face pointing towards the window. She might as well have been blind for all she registered beyond the glass. Her fingers moved below the desktop, slipping from one amber bead to the next as she methodically told the rosary. It was a habit so ingrained it had become unconscious, just the thing she did with her hands when they weren’t otherwise occupied. Atonement was a long road, one she’d barely started down. Or so she was told with monotonous regularity. Easy for them to say.
She managed to listen to the BBC radio news every morning, despite not living in the UK any longer. To her amazement, there was Wi-Fi in the house where she’d been put. When she’d walked into the town and bought herself a smartphone, she hadn’t been struck down by a thunderbolt, nor had anyone seemed to take any interest in her acquisition. And so she could listen covertly to the radio on her earphones in the privacy of her cell. Well, it was a room, really, but the monastic habit of thought had stayed with her and she thought of it as a cell. Particularly since she was enduring a sort of imprisonment.
She’d always known that one day she’d hear a headline that brought the past right into the present. Other people seemed to have been convinced that their history was dead and buried along with the bodies in the linen winding sheets, but she’d known the truth. She’d read her Faulkner. ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ She carried that past with her everywhere she went, every night when she laid her head down on the hard pillow, every morning when she opened her eyes after an apparently blameless sleep. The past didn’t keep her awake; instead it haunted her consciousness like a stalker.
She’d learned to live with the easy rush to judgement of others, the ones whose world hadn’t collided with the kind of girls the sisters had had to deal with. It wasn’t the nice girls who ended up at St Margaret Clitherow. Not the well-brought-up lasses who never answered back and stuck in at school. No, what she was landed with were the ones nobody else wanted. The ones who ran wild, the ones who made a vulgar jibe out of the home’s very name, the ones with the eating disorders, the ones who were already in love with drink and drugs before they even made it into their teens. The self-righteous who were so ready to condemn her wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in the convent of the Order of the Blessed Pearl.
She’d always known there would be consequences. And she’d rather they came in this world. Better that than prejudicing her chances in the next one. All the same, if she could keep things neatly boxed off in the confessional and the manageable penance of Hail Marys and decades of the rosary, so much the better.
That morning, in the measured tones of the news reader, laden with middle-class sang froid, she’d felt the weight of her personal impending disaster come hurtling towards her. It had taken its time to build up momentum, but now it was barrelling down the road in a straight line. The Church had done all it could to keep its dirty linen walled up in a dark hiding place.
But now the stone had been rolled away by the unlikely angel of the BBC.
11
The pressure to find someone to blame when investigators are faced with the darkest of crimes is almost overwhelming. Senior officers, the media, the family and friends of the victim – they all demand answers. As if answers were as easy to come by as the common cold.
From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL
Her encounter with Vanessa had left Carol agitated and angry. She reached for her usual calming solution – boots, outdoor jacket, hat, Buff and gloves – and strode up the rough slope behind the barn, Flash running elaborate figures of eight around her. There was a chill wind sweeping down from the moor top, bringing tears to her eyes. She told herself it was just the wind, but when she turned into the lee of the ridge, the tears took a little longer to dry than her excuse could justify.
Bloody Vanessa. The woman didn’t care how low she sank to find the leverage she needed to have her way. Whatever gun she’d held to Tony’s head, it had worked. It didn’t matter that Tony had said he wasn’t asking Carol to do what Vanessa asked; they both knew she wouldn’t refuse. She was past caring about herself or the tatters of her reputation. But Tony was a different matter.
She’d once reached a point where she’d thought she could walk away from her feelings towards him. Leave behind all the complicated emotional baggage and rebuild her life without him at the heart of it. That hadn’t lasted beyond the first threat to his future.
