Gillian Galbraith - Dying Of The Light

‘Have you not forgotten something, Father?’ the Inspector said.

The priest looked blank. ‘Thank you?’ he said quickly, feeling like a child again, desperate to avoid any more open expressions of disapproval.

‘Your tee-shirt, eh? We need ours back.’

The floor of the cell was slippery, still wet to the touch, from being swabbed with a vinegary mop following the departure of the last occupant half an hour earlier. A metal toilet protruded from the wall, unflushed and uncleaned.

Curled up in a ball on the cement bed-shelf, the priest shivered with cold despite the prison-issue blanket he had wrapped around his body. He should try to pray, he thought, beginning to recite an ‘Our Father’, but found, to his distress, that he had reached the end before realising it, the familiar words now as meaningless to him as a reading of the football results. If his favourite childhood prayer had lost its power, then he no longer had any means of approaching his Saviour.

And yet his need was as great as it had ever been, all his hopes gone after reading yesterday’s newspapers. If the ‘Leith Killer’ was still at large, as the headlines had proclaimed, then why had he not been released? Why was he still being treated as if he was the Leith Killer? But he knew the reason only too well. It was because they continued to believe that he was the girls’ murderer, although someone, in his absence, had stolen his mantle. And his knowledge of his own blamelessness would not deliver him from this ordeal. No. That would only happen if he provided them with proof of his innocence. Otherwise he would grow old and end his days inside. The lab results, however misguided they were, would be more than enough for most juries. Never mind his lies.

He covered his face with his hands, clenching and unclenching his jaw until his molars ached, in torment, reminding himself that he could not afford to tell the truth however tempted he was. Not if the cost of saving himself was the destruction of June’s marriage and the children’s happiness. And he had not even touched her since the birth of their child, content just to look at her, be near her, although no-one would believe that after the last time.

He had cherished that little flaw of hers, her vanity, finding it appealing, endearing, recognising that without it he would never have been allowed through the door. A priest! A man sworn to chastity but unable to resist her singular charms, his vows making him a catch.

And, he castigated himself, it was not as if he was even a good priest in other ways. ‘Know thyself’ the oracle demanded, and he had not flinched from the task. But how could he be a good priest when celibacy was demanded, and he could not keep to it however hard he tried? Oh, but when he had someone to touch, to love, it was so much easier to be kind to the rest of mankind, to understand them. Because he did not love his fellow man, he simply tried, often unsuccessfully, to live as if he did so. And even if no-one else could see the difference, he could and was constantly aware of it: that between the naturally good man and his pale imitator, the difference between gold and fool’s gold. But he had, ironically, come closest to being gold, the real thing, when sinning on a daily basis, seeing a woman and being loved by her. With her by his side he could have been a good priest.

He smiled ruefully at his own perverse, unorthodox analysis, pulling the blanket tighter, his hip now beginning to ache on the unyielding bed. In this world, he mused, some were born good, drawn instinctively to the right path, naturally kind in thought and deed, not prone to judgement and compassionate in their conclusions. And then there were the others. The vast majority, people like him, born without that grace but trying to live as if they had been blessed with it; performing generous acts, not artlessly, but as a result of a calculation to ascertain what the ‘right’ thing to do was. The end result, of course, was the same in terms of the act performed, but one sprang from the heart and the other from the head.

Well, he comforted himself, he had done his best. Apart from the women, anyway. But who, dying of thirst, could think of anything other than water? Whereas with that thirst sated, there was nothing that he could not have accomplished. And as a result of his weakness June had suffered once before, but it would not happen again, he would not be responsible for her unhappiness this time, never mind the children’s or that husband of hers. Their son would have a father, even if it was not him. The other women had emerged relatively unscathed from their contact with him and she would too.

Anyhow, it must be faced, his days of being a priest were over whatever happened to him now, because he was no longer fit to be a servant or a leader. Even if they would let him, and they would not. He had been too frail a barque for the journey he had set himself, holed from the start. But any other life was unthinkable; he did not know himself without his dog collar.

Jim Rose, the senior turnkey, blew out the candles on his birthday cake with a single breath. A polythene cup, lager spilling from it, was passed to him, and a deep chorus of ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ started up in the restroom, everyone joining in enthusiastically, fuelled by the many bevvies consumed earlier.

‘Any o’ yous fancy a piece of ma cake?’ Jim asked, stabbing the knife into the centre of the square, extracting it and then using it to point at each of the men around him.

‘Aye, I’ll take a wee slice.’ The voice came from an open doorway where a squat fellow leaned against one of the lintels, thick tyres of fat concertina-ed within his navy pullover, his trousers so tight they looked as if they might split if he flexed a knee.

‘Naw, Sean, no’ you. You’re oan a diet,’ Jim Rose said merrily, ‘an’ I promised Sheena I’d keep an eye oan you. What aboot anyone else though? It’s chocolate an’ -’ he took a large bite out of his own slice, ‘…absolutely lovely.’

Another man, clad in the regulation navy blue uniform, swaggered into the room and stood, beaming, with one of his hands behind his back in front of the observation screens. The monitors revealed two empty cells and one with a cleaner at work inside it, attempting to wipe graffiti off the ceiling with swipes from her mop, droplets of dirty water falling down onto her head.

‘Am I too late?’ the newcomer asked.

‘No, not at all, Norman,’ his host replied, picking up an empty mug and readying himself to pour the contents of a can into it.

‘Whoa, I’ll hae nane o’ that pish, Jim,’ Norman said, whipping his arm from behind his back to reveal a bottle of whisky in his hand. When the spirits were finished they returned to the Tennants until, after a further forty minutes, empty tins littered the floor, screwed up and contorted, and the crisp plates were bare. The birthday cake remained largely intact on its foil-covered base, a few half-eaten slices in the wastepaper basket and one deposited in a pot plant.

‘You checked the cells yet, Sean?’ Rose asked, sounding uninterested and looking at his colleague benignly.

‘No.’ A simple statement of fact.

‘How do you mean “No”?’

‘No, boss. I’ve no’ checked the cells.’

‘When did you last look in on the bugger then?’

‘Eh… forty, fifty minutes ago, mebbe.’

‘And he was fine?’

‘And he was fine.’