Forgive Me Father. Paul Gitsham

or abusive, all is forgiven next time they turn up. It normally works; one of our regulars gets sent home about once a month. He always comes back the next day to apologise. Usually with a bunch of flowers he’s pinched from somebody’s front garden.’

      ‘But Lucas didn’t come back?’

      ‘No. To be honest, it wasn’t a big deal at first. He was apparently a bit noisy and kept on trying to start a sing-song, which was annoying everyone. Reverend Billy was upstairs and he came down to have a word and Lucas called him a … well, I’m not going to use that word. It all got a bit heated and in the end we threatened to call the police if he didn’t leave. He hasn’t been here since.’

      ‘I assume Reverend Billy is a priest?’

      ‘Baptist minister, actually. I’m told that’s a bit different.’

      ‘Would I be able to speak to him?’

      ‘I don’t see why not, I think he’s doing a literacy class.’ She glanced at the clock. ‘Wait here, he’ll probably be down in a few minutes.’

      * * *

      Reverend Billy was a short man in his fifties with a firm handshake and a ready smile. His sweater, a bright red and green affair, was almost literally eye-watering and clashed horribly with his purple shirt. He wore a white dog collar.

      ‘I lost a bet with a parishioner, and I have to wear this jumper for a whole week, unless I’m in church.’

      Ruskin liked him already.

      ‘It was a shame about Lucas. He was a troubled young man, but there was a lot of promise beneath all that anger.’

      ‘Do you know why he was so angry?’

      ‘Sadly, no. He didn’t speak to me very often. I got the feeling that this—’ he pointed to his collar ‘—made him uncomfortable.’

      ‘Do you get that a lot?’

      ‘Hardly ever to be honest. Most of our clients are happy to speak to me, particularly when I make it clear that I’ve no intention of talking about religion to them unless they want me to.’

      ‘So what happened the day that Lucas was kicked out?’

      Reverend Billy winced.

      ‘That’s not really what happened. Lucas had clearly been drinking before he turned up mid-afternoon. The weather was quite poor, so a few of our regulars were in here sheltering from the rain, watching the TV, reading the paper or using the computers. Lucas was very hyper and he put the radio on really loud and started dancing to it.

      ‘One of the lads asked him to turn it down as he was trying to watch the news. Lucas turned the volume up. The song was Band Aid’s “Do they know it’s Christmas?”, so he started singing along and then grabbed one of the women on the computers and tried to make her dance with him.

      ‘By the time I got downstairs, he was standing in the middle of the floor shouting that it was “’effing Christmas” and we should all be celebrating. Another ten seconds and I reckon he was going to get lamped by someone.’

      ‘So you asked him to leave?’

      ‘Not immediately, no. I tried to settle him down a bit, but he called me a C U Next Tuesday. You know, I hear a lot of bad language here – I’ve got a bit of a potty mouth myself at times – but nobody has ever called me that before. That’s when I asked him to leave. I told him he could come back the next day if he sobered up and behaved himself.’

      ‘How did he take that?’

      ‘He started shouting that “we’re all the same” and that we’d all “burn in hell”. I lied and told him I had called the police, and that was when he finally left, after kicking a couple of chairs over.’

      ‘Any idea what he meant by that?’

      ‘I’ve really no idea. I like to think it was the drink and the drugs talking, but you know what they say, “in vino veritas”, so who knows what he was going on about?’

      ‘Any idea where he went after that?’

      ‘No idea. If you do find him, detective, can you let him know that there are no hard feelings and that he’s welcome back here?’

      Ruskin assured the man that he would, before heading back to the car.

      Somebody had keyed a scratch along almost the full length of the left wing. He looked around at the empty street. The arcs of the CCTV cameras above the door didn’t cover the car. He sighed. Alex would not be happy.

       Chapter 18

      Warren had to wait until Bethany Rice’s father was free, before she was able to attend the station for an interview. A few weeks shy of her eighteenth birthday, Bethany Rice was a sixth-form student who worked at the abbey on weekends. Strictly speaking, she didn’t need an appropriate adult present, since she wasn’t under arrest and was seventeen, but Warren had learnt to choose his battles wisely, and he needed her cooperation.

      Apparently her father had been present when she was originally interviewed about Father Nolan’s death. He had reportedly been unhappy about her having her fingerprints taken for exclusionary purposes, and had insisted on going over her witness statement before she signed it, whilst helpfully explaining the rules regarding the retention of biological samples to the twenty-year veteran constable conducting the interview. The man had clearly been on Wikipedia before bringing his daughter in.

      ‘She’s doing really well, at school,’ her father had told Warren as they’d walked down to the interview suite, clearly flattered on his daughter’s behalf that she was being interviewed by a DCI. For his part, Warren was already wishing he’d passed her off to somebody else, but he had been free and wanted her interviewed sooner rather than later.

      By the time they reached the interview suite, Warren was already fully up-to-speed about the medical school interviews that Rice had recently been for, and the work experience at Addenbrooke’s hospital that she’d completed, even though her school hadn’t been as supportive as they could have been and they’d been forced to engage a tutor to help compensate for the poor teaching. Throughout this, Rice had said nothing, mostly looking at her shoes.

      Things did not improve when Warren started the interview. Mr Rice had clearly assumed that his daughter had been called in as a vital witness in the death of Father Nolan. It then transpired that Rice hadn’t told her father about the intruder in the abbey grounds.

      ‘If I’d had any idea that the site was so unsecure, I never would have let my daughter work there.’

      This last comment seemed to be aimed squarely at Warren, although quite what the man thought he could do about it was unclear. It also explained why Rice had chosen not to share the incident with her father.

      ‘I’d just finished my shift in the gift shop and I was walking back to the staff car park,’ said Rice, making eye contact for the first time.

      ‘We bought her a car after she passed her test first time,’ interjected Mr Rice. ‘Much safer than letting her catch that bus, especially when it’s dark.’

      ‘Carry on, Bethany,’ said Warren, pointedly ignoring the man’s interruption.

      ‘I saw somebody climbing over the wall along from the main entrance, in front of the graveyard. He sort of flopped over and hit the ground with a really loud thump, so I went over to see if he was OK.’

      Next to her, her father’s eyes bulged.

      ‘You went over?’

      ‘Yes, I thought he might have hurt himself.’ Her tone was defiant.

      ‘But he could have had a knife or anything,’ spluttered her father.

      ‘Well,