benign?’
Delaunay smiled, looking at the floor. Then he looked at her. He raised an arm and tapped at the window with his knuckles. His fist was enormous. The impact thudded dully in the silence of his chamber. ‘The sea down on the shore outside our refuge here is sometimes benign. And sometimes it rages. Its power waxes and wanes. At the time I was aboard her, at least, the
‘I cannot believe you let them go.’
‘I knew about none of this until after their departure. I had not set eyes on Martin for a decade. Magnus called me out of the blue.’
Suzanne smiled. ‘Come, Monsignor. Does anybody ever really do anything entirely out of the blue?’
‘Now is not the time for theological debate,’ Delaunay said. ‘We are not here to discuss predestination. I have broken a vow in order to tell you what I have.’
‘Because I called you. Out of the blue.’
‘I was concerned for them on their departure. My concern for them has only increased since learning what I have since then. I would have called you, Suzanne. I was resolved to. I would have called you, had you not called me first.’
And this, she believed.
She did the calculation in her mind. They would be three, perhaps four hundred miles beyond the West Coast of Ireland. And they would be heading directly west, if they were on their charted course. And Delaunay had told her nothing that would make Magnus Stannard turn back. Quite the opposite, since McIntyre had established that Spalding’s desecrated relic was not aboard the
She rose to go.
‘I don’t think it wise for you to leave here tonight.’
‘You have facilities for female guests?’
‘We have facilities for any guest of our choosing.’
Suzanne looked at her watch. It was just after seven in the evening. Outside, the rain fell unrelentingly from a sky sullen with cloud. She had booked a room at an inn just outside the village of Holburn. It was a drive of around eight miles. It had looked very cosy in the pictures on the website. She had travelled most of the day to get here and was tired. She wanted an early night and an early start.
‘Why don’t you think it wise for me to leave?’
‘An intuition,’ Delaunay said. ‘It might be more circumspect to wait until morning. You will be comfortable here.’
‘I’ll take my chances,’ she said.
‘As you please.’ He got her coat from the stand and helped her into it. Then he guided her out the way she had come. They were both silent on the walk back through the dim, stone-flagged corridors and staircases of the seminary. But, to Suzanne’s mind at least, the silence was a comfortable one. Everything necessary had been said between them. She found herself liking Monsignor Delaunay despite the disturbing implications of the things he had told her. He had broken a vow in order to impart the information. He had chosen to sin out of friendship and loyalty and the instinct to protect. She suspected that he loved Martin. She thought that if it were not for his vocation, he would have made a very different kind of father than the one Magnus Stannard was. His strength, his might, was the key to him. He was mighty, so he could express his tenderness without fear of being considered weak. As a priest, of course, he should not have cared about whether or not his character impressed people. But she suspected that he did. He was possessed of enormous strength. His great weakness was his vanity.
She ran from the shelter of the seminary doorway, using her coat above her head as a hood. The rain sang a shrill note through the cinders under her feet in the car park. It felt more like October than June on the cliff top, in the exposure to the sea. She shivered, unlocking the car door, reminded of the capricious nature of the sea by its fury now, boiling on the rocks beneath her. And she wondered, as she kept on wondering, how Martin and his father were doing aboard the boat. She did not think the
Despite knowing what she did about the Waltrow brothers’ mystery and the death of Gubby Tench, Suzanne did not think that it could. But there was danger. She’d felt it in the barn in France. She had been warned about it by her ghost. With her car door unlocked, staring at tussocks of grass on the cliff edge at the brink of the void, she realised where her logic led. The baleful influence of Harry Spalding persisted because the stolen relic remained an object of desecration.
It made her wonder if Spalding had ever really died.
It was 7.20 p.m. when she turned the key in the ignition. That was still early in England on a June evening. But the weather on the Northumberland coast was so bleak and gloomy that she felt obliged out of caution to switch on her lights. She drove carefully, but saw no oncoming traffic on the road that led to the village and to her hot date with a lamb casserole and a decent glass of Cabernet Sauvignon. At some point, as it travelled inland, the road became tree-lined. A gust of wind soughed through branches and leaves and dumped rain from trees on the windscreen. Reflexively, Suzanne switched on the wipers. And switched on the radio.
The volume was so great that Paddy McAloon’s croon was a bellowing roar as ‘When Love Breaks Down’ burst out of the speakers. She leant forward against the restraint of her seatbelt to switch it off and the windscreen imploded in stinging fragments of shatterproof glass as the car halted and the roof bulged inward. Suzanne looked up at the thick shape of the fallen trunk in the thin steel above her. She heard the rasping strain of metal and knew she would be crushed and die here.
She snapped the seatbelt off and slithered down to the footwell to try to hide and make herself small and safe as the interior of the car continued to diminish under the weight of the tree trunk crushing it. Suddenly she heard the rent of metal on the passenger side. She glanced over and saw two huge hands pulling at the jammed door through foliage over the lower edge of the window. Blood spilled blackly down the door interior from the palms as glass still embedded in the sill bit into them. The thick fingers whitened with strain and the door was torn from its hinges and lock as Delaunay’s head intruded, wide-eyed. He reached for her and she was jerked like a strung puppet out of the car as it folded in on itself like something deflating under the burden of the fallen tree.
Delaunay half dragged and half carried Suzanne through the pelting rain back along the road. He lifted her into the passenger seat of his Land Rover as she tried to regain her breath and composure. He unscrewed the lid from a spirits flask and offered it to her. She was alert enough to notice that he held the flask by the tips of his fingers so the blood from his palms would not smear it. She took the flask and drank. It was whisky and its warmth and strength were very welcome.
‘You followed me.’
‘A precaution.’ His eyes were looking down the road, where the cabin of her hire car was now flat to its axle with the weight of the fallen tree. One of the rear tyres had punctured. Oil or petrol was leaking out of the vehicle in a rainbow stain on the road. The colours were subdued in the absence of real summer light.
‘You tried to warn me.’
‘An intuition.’
‘I think that Harry Spalding never died.’
Delaunay stopped. After offering her the drink, he had torn a cloth fetched from the back of the Land Rover into strips and was bandaging his hands with them. He leaned forward, plucked the flask from her grip and took a couple of hefty swallows before giving it back. He was wearing a cagoule over his soutane. The hood was down. His hair was plastered to his dripping head. When he had thrust that head through the branches and leaves of the fallen tree at the car window, he had reminded her of one of those pagan pub signs depicting the Green Man. She had thought he was a demon, not a priest.
‘I owe you my life.’
She was saying everything, she knew. And she knew it was the shock making her do so. Delaunay merely nodded and blinked. He got behind the wheel of the Land Rover and turned it, spraying through the surface water on the road, back towards the seminary.
Because she was trying to avoid the implications of what had just occurred, Suzanne spent the short journey
