The Wolf at the Door. Jack Higgins

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      ‘Who?’ she said.

      ‘I’m sorry, and me thinking you were Mrs Caitlin Daly?’ She looked bewildered. ‘The mourning wreath on the door.’

      ‘Oh, I’m not Caitlin, and I saw her leave it earlier. Her mother was a wonderful friend to me. Died last year from lung cancer. Only seventy-five. She was still living with Caitlin at the presbytery by the church. But Caitlin isn’t married, never was. She’s been housekeeper to Father Murphy for years. Used to teach at the Catholic School. Now she just looks after the presbytery and Father Murphy and two curates.’ She was very fey now. ‘Oh dear, I’ve got it wrong again. He’s Monsignor Murphy now. A wonderful man.’

      Dillon gave her his best smile. ‘You’ve been very kind. God bless you.’

      They went back to the Cooper, and Billy said as he settled behind the wheel, ‘Dillon, you’d talk the Devil into showing you the way out of hell. The information you got out of that old duck beggars belief.’

      ‘A gift, Billy,’ Dillon told him modestly. ‘You’ve got to be Irish to understand.’

      ‘Get stuffed.’ Billy told him.

      ‘Sticks and stones,’ Dillon said. ‘But everything that befuddled old lady told me was useful information.’

      ‘I heard. Pool was wonderful, so was his mother, this Caitlin bird is beyond rubies, and as for the good Monsignor Murphy, from the sound of it, they got him from central casting.’ He turned left on Dillon’s instructions. ‘Mind you, he must be good to get that kind of rank in a local church where he’s their priest-in-charge.’

      ‘Turn right now,’ Dillon told him. ‘And what would you be knowing about it?’

      ‘I’ve never talked much about my childhood, Dillon. My old man was a very violent man, killed in gang warfare when I was three. My mum was Harry’s sister and she was an exceptional lady who died of breast cancer when I was nineteen. I really went off the rails after that.’

      ‘Which is understandable.’

      ‘It was Harry who pulled me around and you, you bastard, when you entered our lives. You introduced me to philosophy, remember, gave me a sense of myself.’

      ‘So where is this leading?’ Dillon asked.

      The Cooper turned another corner and pulled up outside their destination. The Church of the Holy Name, it said on the painted signboard beside the open gate, along with the times of confession and Mass. The church had a Victorian-Gothic look to it, which made sense because it was only in the Victorian era that Roman Catholics by law were allowed to build churches again. Dillon saw a tower, a porch, a vast wooden door bound in iron in a failed attempt to achieve a medieval look.

      They stayed in the car for a few moments. Billy said, ‘The thing is, my mother was a strict Roman Catholic. Not our Harry. He doesn’t believe in anything he can’t put his hand on, but she really put me on stage. When I was a kid, I was an acolyte. I tell you, Dillon, it meant everything to her when it was my turn to serve at Mass.’

      ‘I know,’ Dillon said. ‘Scarlet cassock, white cotta.’

      ‘Don’t tell me you did that?’

      ‘I’m afraid so, and Billy, I’ve really got news for you. I did it in this very church we’re about to enter. I was twelve when my father brought me from Northern Ireland to live with him in Kilburn. That means it was thirty-seven years ago when I first entered this church, and the priest in charge is the same man, James Murphy. As I recall, he was born in 1929, which would make him eighty.’

      ‘But why didn’t you mention that to Ferguson and the others? What’s going on? I knew something was, Dillon. Talk to me.’

      Dillon sat there for a moment longer, then took out his wallet and from one of the pockets produced a prayer card. It was old, creased, slightly curling at the golden edges. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death, we who are ourselves alone.

      ‘Jesus, Dillon.’ Billy took it from him. ‘Where the hell did this come from?’

      ‘It was Father James Murphy, as he was then, who first received the news of my father’s death in that firefight in Belfast, an incident that turned me into what I am, shaped my whole life. A casualty of war, he told me, gave me the card and begged me to pray.’ He smiled bleakly, took the card and replaced it in the wallet. ‘So, here we are. Let’s go in, shall we? I see from the board someone’s hearing confessions in there, although it may not be the great man himself.’

      He got out and Billy joined him, his face pale. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

      They entered and walked through the cemetery, which was also Victorian-Gothic and rather pleasant, marble effigies, winged angels, engraved headstones and cypress trees to one side. ‘I used to like this when I was a boy, liked it more than I liked it inside the church in a way. It’s what we all come to, when you think of it,’ Dillon said.

      ‘For Christ’s sake, cut it out,’ Billy said. ‘You’re beginning to worry me.’

      He turned the ring on the great door and Dillon followed him through. There was faint music playing, something subdued and soothing. The whole place was in a kind of half-darkness, but was unexpectedly warm, no doubt because of central heating. The usual church smell, so familiar from childhood, filled his nostrils. Dillon dipped his fingers in the bowl as he went past and crossed himself, and Billy, after hesitating, did the same.

      The sanctuary lamp glowed through the gloom and to the left there was a Mary Chapel, the Virgin and Child floating in a sea of candlelight. The place had obviously had money spent on it in the past. Victorian stained glass abounded, carvings that looked like medieval copies, and a Christ on the Cross which was extremely striking. The altar and choir stalls, too, were ornate and, it had to be admitted, beautifully carved.

      A woman was down there wearing a green overall, arranging flowers by the altar. A strong face with a good mouth, handsome in a Jane Austen kind of way, the hair fair and well-kept with no grey showing, although that was probably due more to the attentions of a good hairdresser than nature. She wore a white blouse and grey skirt under the overall, and half-heeled shoes. She held pruning scissors in one gloved hand, and she turned and glanced at them coolly for a moment, then returned to her flowers.

      Dillon moved towards the confessional boxes on the far side. There were three of them, but the light was on in only one. Two middle-aged women were waiting, and Billy, sitting two pews behind them beside Dillon, leaned forward to decipher the name card in the slot on the confessional box doors.

      ‘You’re all right, it says Monsignor James Murphy.’

      A man in a raincoat emerged from the box and walked away along the aisle, and one of the women went in. They sat there in silence and she was out in not much more than five minutes. She sat down and her friend went in. She was longer, more like fifteen minutes, then finally emerged, murmured to her friend, and they departed.

      ‘Here I go.’ Dillon whispered to Billy, got up, opened the door of the confessional box, entered and sat down.

      ‘Please bless me, Father,’ he said to the man on the other side of the grille, conscious of the strong, aquiline face in profile, the hair still long and silvery rather than grey.

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