A Prayer for the Dying. Jack Higgins

and the mother, already on the point of collapse, staggering along behind supported by her husband on one side and her brother on the other. They were poor people. They had no one. They turned inward in their grief.

      Mr O’Brien, the cemetery superintendent, was waiting at the graveside, an umbrella over his head against the rain. There was a gravedigger with him who pulled off the canvas cover as they arrived. Not that it had done any good for there was at least two feet of water in the bottom.

      O’Brien tried to hold the umbrella over the priest, but Father da Costa waved it away. Instead, he took off his coat and handed it to the superintendent and stood there in the rain at the graveside, the old red and gold cope making a brave show in the grey morning.

      O’Brien had to act as server and Father da Costa sprinkled the coffin with holy water and incense and as he prayed, he noticed that the father was glaring across at him wildly like some trapped animal behind bars, the fingers of his right hand clenching and unclenching convulsively. He was a big man – almost as big as da Costa. Foreman on a building site.

      Da Costa looked away hurriedly and prayed for the child, face upturned, rain beading his tangled grey beard.

       Into your hands, O Lord,

       We humbly commend our sister,

       Lead her for whom you have

       Shown so great a love,

      Into the joy of the heavenly paradise.

      Not for the first time, the banality of what he was saying struck him. How could he explain to any mother on this earth that God needed her eight-year-old daughter so badly that it had been necessary for her to choke to death in the stinking waters of an industrial canal to drift for ten days before being found.

      The coffin descended with a splash and the gravedigger quickly pulled the canvas sheet back in place. Father da Costa said a final prayer, then moved round to the woman who was now crying bitterly.

      He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Mrs Dalton – if there’s anything I can do.’

      The father struck his arm away wildly. ‘You leave her alone!’ he cried. ‘She’s suffered enough. You and your bloody prayers. What good’s that? I had to identify her, did you know that? A piece of rotting flesh that was my daughter after ten days in the canal. What kind of a God is it that could do that to a child?’

      O’Brien moved forward quickly, but Father da Costa put up an arm to hold him back. ‘Leave it,’ he said calmly.

      A strange, hunted look appeared on Dalton’s face as if he suddenly realised the enormity of his offence. He put an arm about his wife’s shoulders and he and her brother hurried her away. The two funeral men went after them.

      O’Brien helped da Costa on with his coat. ‘I’m sorry about that, Father. A bad business.’

      ‘He has a point, poor devil,’ da Costa said, ‘After all, what am I supposed to say to someone in his position?’

      The gravedigger looked shocked, but O’Brien simply nodded slowly. ‘It’s a funny old life sometimes.’ He opened his umbrella. ‘I’ll walk you back to the chapel, Father.’

      Da Costa shook his head. ‘I’ll take the long way round if you don’t mind. I could do with the exercise. I’ll borrow the umbrella if I may.’

      ‘Certainly, Father.’

      O’Brien gave it to him and da Costa walked away through the wilderness of marble monuments and tombstones.

      The gravedigger said, ‘That was a hell of an admission for a priest to make.’

      O’Brien lit a cigarette. ‘Ah, but then da Costa is no ordinary priest. Joe Devlin, the sacristan at St Anne’s, told me all about him. He was some sort of commando or other during the war. Fought with Tito and the Jugoslav partisans. Afterwards, he went to the English College in Rome. Had a brilliant career there – could have been anything. Instead, he decided to go into mission work after he was ordained.’

      ‘Where did they send him?’

      ‘Korea. The Chinese had him for nearly five years. Afterwards they gave him some administrative job in Rome to recuperate, but he didn’t like that. Got them to send him to Mozambique. I think it was his grandfather who was Portuguese. Anyway, he speaks the language.’

      ‘What happened there?’

      ‘Oh, he was deported. The Portuguese authorities accused him of having too much sympathy with rebels.’

      ‘So what’s he doing here?’

      ‘Parish priest at Holy Name.’

      ‘That pile of rubble?’ the gravedigger said incredulously. ‘Why, it’s only standing up because of the scaffolding. If he gets a dozen for Mass on a Sunday he’ll be lucky.’

      ‘Exactly,’ O’Brien said.

      ‘Oh, I get it.’ The gravedigger nodded sagely. ‘It’s their way of slapping his wrist.’

      ‘He’s a good man,’ O’Brien said. ‘Too good to be wasted.’

      He was suddenly tired of the conversation and, for some strange reason, unutterably depressed. ‘Better get that grave filled in.’

      ‘What, now, in this rain?’ The gravedigger looked at him bewildered. ‘It can wait till later, can’t it?’

      ‘No, it damn well can’t.’

      O’Brien turned on heel and walked away and the grave-digger, swearing softly, pulled back the canvas sheet and got to work.

      Father da Costa usually enjoyed a walk in the rain. It gave him a safe, enclosed feeling. Some psychological thing harking back to childhood, he supposed. But not now. Now, he felt restless and ill at case. Still disturbed by what had happened at the graveside.

      He paused to break a personal vow by lighting a cigarette, awkwardly because of the umbrella in his left hand. He had recently reduced his consumption to five a day, and those he smoked only during the evening, a pleasure to be savoured by anticipation, but under the circumstances …

      He moved on into the oldest part of the cemetery, a section he had discovered with delight only a month or two previously. Here amongst the pines and the cypresses were superb Victorian-Gothic tombs, winged angels in marble, bronzed effigies of Death. Something different on every hand and on each slab a pious, sentimental, implacable belief in the hereafter was recorded.

      He didn’t see a living soul until he went round a corner between rhododendron bushes and paused abruptly. The path divided some ten yards in front of him and at the intersection stood a rather interesting grave. A door between marble pillars, partially open. In front of it the bronze figure of a woman in the act of rising from a chair.

      A man in a dark overcoat, head bare, knelt before her on one knee. It was very quiet – only the rushing of the rain into wet earth and Father da Costa hesitated for a moment, unwilling to intrude on such a moment of personal grief.

      And then an extraordinary thing happened. A priest stepped in through the eternity door at the back of the grave. A youngish man who wore a dark clerical raincoat over his cassock and a black hat.

      What took place then was like something out of a nightmare, frozen in time, no reality to it at all. As the man in the dark overcoat glanced up, the priest produced an automatic with a long black silencer on the end. There was a dull thud as he fired. Fragments of bone and brain sprayed out from the rear of his victim’s skull as he was slammed back against the gravel.

      Father da Costa gave a hoarse cry, already seconds too late, ‘For God’s sake no!’

      The young priest, in the act of stepping towards his victim, looked up, aware of da Costa for the first time. The arm swung instantly as he took deliberate