Trauma (10 page)

'When thieves fall out, there's no telling what can happen,' said Sotillo to the two silent figures who were holding Bella and McKirrop. 'I think under the circumstances gentlemen, they should perhaps do each other some serious and lasting damage . . .'

* * * * *

Lafferty left the flats with a heavy heart. The O'Donnell girl had been upset but what she had said had hit home and he had had to work hard at remaining composed about it at the time. The Church did depend a great deal on women like Jean O'Donnell. Decent, hard-working, good natured, God fearing women who saw their faith as a cornerstone of their lives. The real question was, how much did the Church depend on them and did it amount to exploitation as Mary O'Donnell had maintained. It was something he would rather not think about on top of everything else but there would be no getting away from it, he feared. The best he could hope for was a respite while he set out to find the drunk who had witnessed the Main boy's exhumation.

The teenagers had stopped playing football outside the entrance to the flats and Lafferty was pleased. He’d had enough of the younger generation for one day. He thought the boys must have gone indoors to watch television perhaps but as he passed one of the concrete support pillars he heard voices and turned to see three cigarette ends glowing in the dark. They were sitting with their backs against the pillar and their knees up. 'Game over boys?' asked Lafferty.

'Piss off,' came the reply from the gloom. Sniggers accompanied it.

'Well, God bless you anyway,' said Lafferty continuing on his way and adding under his breath, 'You little shit.' Was there ever an age of innocence? And if there was, at what age did it stop? Six? Eight? Ten, twelve years? Looking back on the church Christmas party for the under fives he distinctly remembered seeing signs of greed, jealousy and even downright malevolence among the party-goers. It was quickly stamped on by attendant mothers and dismissed as them 'not being old enough to know better' but Lafferty wondered about that. Know better? Was that it? Or did they really mean know better how to hide it? Know better how to dress up greed and envy as something else. Perhaps they just hadn't learned the rudiments of hypocrisy. That would come later.

Lafferty had been down to the canal earlier to begin his search for the man he now knew to be John McKirrop. He hadn't remembered the name himself but one of the two down and outs he found by the canal had given him this information and told him that McKirrop would probably be down later. The two of them had seemed pleased to help and almost were in competition to tell him everything they knew about McKirrop

'A brave man,' said one. 'He tried to stop these bastards from digging the kid up at the cemetery you know?'

'So I understand.'

'Should be given some kind of medal I reckon.'

The other drunk nodded sagely. 'Or at least some kind of compensation for the injuries he suffered.'

'Injuries?'

'They beat him up.'

'Beat him within an inch of his life,' added the other.

'I hadn't realised,' confessed Lafferty.

'Well, nobody gives a damn for the likes of us Father, begging your pardon, like.'

'God does,' replied Lafferty. 'Never forget that.'

'Yes Father, ` replied the drunk as if he had become a speak-your-weight machine.

'You will tell John that I'd appreciate a word with him later if he should show up?'

'Of course Father.'

Lafferty could make out six figures as he descended from the bridge to the towpath. As he got closer he saw that the nearest man was either asleep or unconscious on the fringe of the group. He lay sprawled over the path with his head at a slightly raised angle where it rested on what looked like a railway sleeper. An empty bottle was still clutched in his hand. Lafferty stepped over him gingerly. 'Is he all right?' he asked the anonymous group in front of him.

'Who wants to know?' snarled a voice from the darkness.

'I'm Father Lafferty from St Xavier's. I was down earlier looking for John McKirrop. Is he one of you?'

'McKirrop, McKirrop. Always McKirrop,' replied the voice. 'No he isn't.'

'Then can you tell me where I can find him?' asked Lafferty. 'He's not in any trouble.'

'Mr McKirrop is out courting at the moment,' came the sneering voice.

'Courting?'

'He is out walking with his lady, Father, the beautiful Lady Bella and I do believe . . . they're without chaperone.'

The group broke into cackles of laughter.

'I really would like to speak to him if I possibly could,' said Lafferty.

'They went that-a-way,' snapped the voice. 'About an hour ago.'

'Thank you, Mr?’

'It doesn't matter,' said the voice.

'I think it does,' said Lafferty.

'Flynn,' replied the voice.

'God bless you Mr Flynn.'

'I'd rather he came up with a jacket and a pair of shoes,' replied Flynn sourly. The others supported Flynn with their laughter.

'There was a sale at St Xavier's last week end,' said Lafferty. 'There were some things left over. Call round tomorrow afternoon to the church hall and we'll see what we can do.'

The silence behind him awarded him some kind of moral victory as he set out in the direction indicated by Flynn.

As the towpath darkened with each step Lafferty took he began to feel uneasy about what he was doing. What had Flynn meant by, ‘courting’? Surely McKirrop and the woman, whatever her name was, couldn't be . . . they had surely not come along here to . . . Apart from anything else the temperature was close to freezing. Once again Lafferty had cause to curse what he saw as his lack of understanding of people. He felt such an outsider sometimes. He had no empathy with the common man, no feel for what was going on in his head.

Ever since he’d donned the collar people had treated him either with varying degrees of deference or with hostile contempt. No one ever spoke to him as an equal apart from fellow priests and they knew as little as he did about the society of the layman. They could observe from the outside but that did not help in understanding what went on in a man's head and that was what was really important.

In the past, he recalled several instances of priests removing their collars and going to live in deprived areas to find out what it felt like. In Lafferty's opinion this had been a pointless exercise. Sitting in a cold flat on a housing estate all day told you what it felt like to sit in a cold flat. It did not tell you what it felt like to be unemployed and with no prospect of a job for the next twenty years. You could not simulate that. It had to happen to you before you could possibly know what it felt like. It was something that happened inside your mind.

The canal water to his left picked up a thin white reflection and Lafferty looked up to see the moon slide out from behind a bank of steep cloud. He was grateful for any source of light; the path was now so dark. Something ahead scuttled across the path and rustled off into the undergrowth. Lafferty hoped that it wasn't a rat; this was one of God's creatures that he had little time for. An owl called out from a distant thicket.

As he rounded the bend leading to the next bridge Lafferty thought that he saw the silhouette of two or three people above the parapet but he couldn't be sure, besides it didn't matter, they seemed to be heading away from the canal not coming down to the towpath. This was a relief. He did not welcome the prospect of joggers or worse still cyclists coming hurtling towards him on the narrow path. The fact that he was wearing clerical black wouldn’t help.

As he neared the bridge Lafferty suddenly stopped in his tracks. There was a single street lamp up on the road leading to the bridge crossing the canal. A little of its light spilled down on to the towpath. Not much but to eyes accustomed to the gloom it was enough to see what was there. He could see two figures lying on the bank by the water's edge. Could this be McKirrop and the woman? And if it was, what were they doing?

Lafferty rubbed his forehead as the word 'courting' sprang back to mind. He coughed loudly, feeling embarrassed at the Britishness of such an act. He did it again when the couple failed to move. There was no reaction. No cursing and scrambling around in the grass. Nothing.

'Are you all right there?'

Apart from the owl which chose his moment well there was no sound from the couple on the bank and still they didn’t move.

Alcoholics! They were alcoholics! He’d been so fearful that they might be engaged in sexual intercourse that he had overlooked the possibility that they might just be blind drunk. He walked over to them and knelt down to shake one of them by the shoulder.

McKirrop's head flopped round to reveal a face lacerated on both cheeks and with a frightening wound on his forehead where he had obviously been hit by something heavy. There was a large depression in his skull and blood had congealed in a black mass in it. The glass all around his feet suggested the weapon had been a bottle.

'God Almighty,' whispered Lafferty. He turned his attention to the woman. She was lying in McKirrop's shadow and he had to move McKirrop a little to get to her. It was only then that he realised that her head was not resting on the bank at all. It was hanging over the edge of the bank and submerged in the water.

Struggling to gain a foothold on the slippery grass, Lafferty managed to first pull the woman's head up out of the water and then pull her body up on to the bank. Her eyes were wide open but they did not see the moon that had just emerged from the clouds. One of her cheek bones had been smashed in and the eye above it had been dislodged from its socket. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth.

Lafferty whispered a prayer but then recoiled as the woman's body made suddenly a gurgling sound. Water and weed slurped out of her mouth as if she had vomited weakly. She was quite dead but some latent muscular spasm had caused it to happen. Some lost electrical brain impulse wandering around inside her body had delivered its last message. As the body sank down into rest again Lafferty prayed over the woman and then turned back to McKirrop.

The word, 'courting' was still going round in his head and it in turn led to the phrase, 'lover's tiff'. For some reason he could not put a rein on this surreal line of thought. A lover's tiff. Good God Almighty, how inapt the phrase seemed when used to describe the mayhem at his feet. What had led to it? What had they fought over? The bottle? The lady's honour?

Lafferty said a prayer over McKirrop's body but, as he opened his eyes, he saw McKirrop's hand move. He saw the dead man's fingers move like a white spider. He watched them stretch out to feel the night air like an insect's antennae. A scar across the forefinger stood out in relief in the moonlight. Lafferty was mesmerised by the sight. He felt sure that this had to be another example of muscle spasm after death but the fingers wouldn't stop. They went on searching, trying to make contact from the depths of some abyss. Surely McKirrop could not have survived such a horrific head injury. He knelt down on the grass and felt his neck for a carotid pulse. There was none and then there was something. Very weak and very faint but it was there. It caressed the tip of his third finger like a butterfly’s wing. McKirrop was still alive!

Lafferty scrambled up the steep muddy path to the bridge on all fours. The very urgency of his movements seemed to act against him and he kept losing his footing and slipping back. A last effort and he pulled himself up on to the bridge path where he started to run towards the nearest houses, a small group of bungalows some two hundred metres away. He was breathing heavily and his trousers were covered in mud when he reached the nearest house and flung open the garden gate to charge up the path. He banged on the door with both fists until he saw the hall light come on and heard someone behind the door.

'Who is it?' asked a timid woman's voice.

'Please call for an ambulance!' replied Lafferty. 'It's very urgent. There’s a man gravely injured.’

'Go away!' said the voice behind the door. Go away or I'll call the police.'

'Look, I'm Father Lafferty from St Xavier's. There's a man badly injured down on the canal bank. He needs urgent hospital treatment.'

'I've told you once. Go away! Don't tell me any more lies! I'll call the police. I mean it!'

'Sweet Jesus!' exclaimed Lafferty. He dropped his hands to his sides in exasperation and moved his mouth soundlessly before giving up on the woman and crashing his way through the adjoining hedge to the house next door. Again he banged on the door. There was no reply and the house remained in darkness.

He had more luck at the third bungalow. The door was opened by a man with a can of beer in his hand before Lafferty had even reached it.

'What the hell’s going on?' asked the man.

Lafferty told him.

After the ambulance and police had been called the man asked Lafferty, 'Is there anything I can do?'