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‘Yes, it was a man called Peter Webster. A really interesting person. Very interested in spirituality.’
‘Really?’ Nelson’s detective senses are immediately on alert.
Cathbad laughs, looking more like himself. ‘That’s not necessarily a sign that he was a madman, Nelson.’
‘Was?’
‘He died about ten years ago. Cancer. I went to the funeral. A humanist service and a green burial.’
‘What does that mean?’ says Nelson. He thinks he’s had enough of green things for the day.
‘The body is returned to the earth. A wicker coffin. A woodland site. No headstone. Wood is life, stone is death. It’s what I want for myself. Remember that.’
‘Why should I remember it?’ says Nelson. ‘You’ll outlive me. Now, what can you tell me about Emily? You must have known her quite well.’
‘Poor Emily,’ says Cathbad. ‘She really was a lovely girl.’
He’s about to say more when the door opens and dog and children burst into the room. Judy brings up the rear.
‘We had a race home,’ she says. ‘I came last. Hallo, Nelson. What are you doing here?’
But Nelson is looking at his best detective with new eyes. Flushed from exercise and with her hair loose, she looks years younger.
She looks like Emily Pickering.
Chapter 7
Sunday 13 June
Sundays are different, thinks Cathbad. Back home in Ireland it was a day dominated by the Church: the bells ringing, women still wearing mantillas, all the shops shut. Cathbad’s mother, Bridget, went to mass every Sunday even though she was considered by most people– including herself– to be a witch. Bridget Malone was also a single mother, something that was still considered shocking in a small Irish town in the 1960s. But Bridget had glided through it, supported by her mother, Fionnuala, who hadn’t turned a hair when she learnt that her daughter was pregnant and refusing to say who the father was. The two women brought Cathbad up between them although, of course, he was Michael Malone in those days. Bridget continued to go to mass and to take communion. The priest, Father Seamus, hadn’t turned many of his remaining hairs either, had continued to treat the unconventional family with respect. When Bridget died of breast cancer at the age of thirty-six, when Cathbad was sixteen, she had been given a full requiem mass complete with weeping nuns and the choir singing ‘Panis Angelicus’.
‘Let’s go to church,’ says Cathbad over scrambled eggs. The hens are almost laying too much these days. Both children have demanded cereal instead.
‘Church?’ says Judy. ‘Why?’
‘It’s Sunday. It’s what people do.’
‘We don’t.’ Judy, like Cathbad, was brought up as a Catholic. Her father, Pat, a bookie, is also of Irish heritage. Cathbad gets on well with his quasi father-in-law although he suspects that Judy’s mother, Christine, preferred her first husband, Darren. Well, only husband, if you’re being pedantic about it.
It seems that Darren is on Judy’s mind too.
‘I’m beyond the pale as far as the Catholic Church goes,’ she says. ‘Being divorced and everything. Where does that phrase come from? Is it to do with Ireland?’
If Judy wants to talk etymology, so be it.
‘I think it literally means “outside the fence”,’ says Cathbad. ‘A pale can mean a stake. As in Dracula and impaling. But you’re thinking of the Pale of Dublin, a part of Ireland that was under English control in the Middle Ages. Anything outside that was considered wild and lawless. Beyond the pale.’
‘And your wild and lawless idea today is to go to church?’
Cathbad grins. ‘Why not? I really should give thanks for my recovery last year.’
‘I thought you lit a candle in the Slipper Chapel at Walsingham.’
‘One candle is never enough.’
‘That sounds like aTwo Ronniesjoke. I don’t even know where the nearest church is.’
‘Our Lady Star of the Sea. It’s a short walk away.’
