Ken McClure: Past Lives

What Macandrew hadn’t reckoned on, was the sound of keys and money spilling out from Stroud’s pockets. The noise of coins hitting the marble floor and rolling seemed to go on for ever as Macandrew appealed to the heavens for more thunder to cover the noise. It was not to be. He watched in horror as the last coin pirouetted to an agonisingly slow halt.

When he looked up, he saw Ignatius standing at the chapel gates with Parvelli’s gun in his hand. A bullet whined off the floor in front of him and marble chips flew up in his face just before he dived back into shadow. As if to mock him, a clap of thunder now filled the cathedral, prompting him to curse fate out loud.

He knew that he didn’t have a hope of making it across the floor to the exit and that there was a limited number of hiding places on this side of the building. He decided on the desperate gamble of not moving away at all from the area of the Chapel of the Cross. His impromptu plan was to get back up on the scaffolding and lie perfectly still until Ignatius concluded that he must have escaped after all. It was a long shot but he was facing a man with a gun. Anything he did now was going to be a long shot.

Above the sound of the rain, he heard a groan come from the direction of his previous hiding place and knew that Stroud was coming round. He should have hit him harder but hadn’t wanted to risk killing him. Now — and too late — he was having second thoughts about that.

‘Pull yourself together, man!’ he heard Ignatius say. ‘It was Macandrew who hit you! He has the sword! He mustn’t get away!’

While Ignatius was occupied with Stroud, Macandrew saw his chance to crawl across the floor in front of the Chapel of the Cross and pull himself back up on to the scaffolding. There was no tarpaulin screen now to give him shadow but the lights Ignatius and the others had been using had been extinguished so candles were now the only source of lighting apart from occasional flashes of lightning. Still keeping hold of the sword, he reached the uppermost level and stretched out along the planks, preparing for a long wait. When he thought about it, he cursed himself for not leaving the sword behind. It was this that Ignatius was after and he wasn’t going to go anywhere without it.

As he lay, listening to the torrential rain on the cathedral roof, he wondered about Simone and whether or not he was going to survive to help her. He was picturing her lying unconscious in the stone bath beside the nun when a nightmare was born. He suddenly realised that it wasn’t a bath at all that the two women were lying in; it was a water cistern! That was why there were no steps down into it and why there was a chute in the wall! These “baths” were for collecting rainwater! Simone and the nun were going to drown if the storm continued!

Macandrew’s pulse was racing but he held his breath as he heard Ignatius’s voice again. ‘He’s still here I tell you!’

‘Come on,’ said Stroud’s groggy sounding voice. ‘We’ve looked everywhere.’

‘He’s here, I tell you. We’re just not thinking.’

Macandrew’s heart was thumping in his chest. He felt sure that Ignatius must hear it if he came any closer. He couldn’t risk turning his head to look but he was sure that he was nearby, maybe even directly below.

The scaffolding moved a little as a hand was slapped against an upright. ‘We haven’t checked up there ,’ said Ignatius. His voice sounded confident and Macandrew feared that the game was up. He was hopelessly trapped. The only direction he could now move in was further into the Chapel of the Cross and that led to a dead end. He wished he hadn’t thought of that expression.

He felt the scaffolding move again as if someone had started to climb up it. Then he heard something clunk against one of the bars below. When he thought that one of them must just be about to clear the top section, he made a lunge towards the end of the structure in order to hit whoever appeared first. There was no one there.

Macandrew saw that he had been duped. They had only been pretending to climb up. In reality, Stroud and Ignatius had been shaking the structure and hitting the bars in order to make him break cover. Now both were looking directly up at him and Ignatius was pointing the gun at his chest.

Ignatius’s features relaxed into a condescending little smile and Macandrew threw himself flat as he saw him purse his lips as a precursor to pulling the trigger. The bullet hit a pillar behind his head and stone chips fell like hail below. Macandrew scrambled sideways along the gantry but he was just moving further into a cul de sac . He was now as far away from the gun as he was going to get but that was only into the far corner of the chapel. He was only delaying the inevitable. He was trapped in a corner, twenty feet above the altar with nowhere to go.

Stroud and Ignatius moved in for the kill. They pushed open the gates of the chapel in unison and walked side by side towards the altar, keeping their eyes on him all the way.

Thoughts of Simone and her plight compelled Macandrew to make one last gesture of defiance. It wasn’t something he could explain afterwards but, as the two men came to a halt, he stood up straight and swung the sword round his head like an avenging angel. He brought the blade scything round into the steel cable that supported the giant crucifix above the altar and cut clean through it.

The heavy cross, already leaning at an angle out from the wall pitched forward and came down on to the two men below who could only watch in horror as it fell directly on top of them.

From where Macandrew stood up on the scaffolding, it looked as if the figure of Christ had struck them down with his outstretched arms; one man lay crushed under each horizontal element, eyes wide open in death. Macandrew surveyed the scene, in utter disbelief. He was not going to die after all... but Simone was if he didn’t get a move on!

He lowered himself to the floor and scrambled over to the bodies to begin a desperate search for the padlock key. Outside the rain seemed heavier than ever.

He found the key in Stroud’s inside jacket pocket — practically the last one he looked in — but thunder drowned out his expletive-filled diatribe about what fate had against him. He stumbled out into the storm, getting soaked to the skin before he’d managed to cross the square. A mixture of anguish and adrenalin drove him all the way back to the convent through streets that were more like rivers, thunder threatening his ear drums and raindrops peppering his face like steel rivets. There were moments when he wasn’t sure if he was really awake or in the throes of some awful nightmare but he was still carrying the sword and it felt real enough.

The side door to the convent was unlocked — just as he had left it. He half ran, half stumbled down the steps and along the corridor to the room with the trap door, flinging himself to the floor and yelling Simone’s name into the dark opening. There was no reply. All he could hear was the deafening sound of rushing water.

He grabbed at the candle he’d used earlier, cursing as the first match he scrabbled from the box refused to light, and then broke through his own clumsiness. He had a second failure when water dripped from his hair on to the candle flame but a third attempt saw him climbing down the wooden ladder, candle in hand.

Down here, the sound of water running into the cisterns was so loud it pained his ears. He held the candle out over the cistern and saw in one heart-stopping moment that two bodies were floating in the water. The nun was face-up, although water was lapping over her face but it was the back of Simone’s head that he could see. With a cry of anguish, he jumped down into the water and tried to turn her over but it was difficult because of the chain securing her to the wall.