When Anthony Rathe Investigates

Burial for the Dead-1

Burial for the Dead

“Why do you come here, Mr Rathe?” she asked. “What do you want to find?”

He gave no immediate reply. They were the same questions which he had asked himself, time and again, but he had never been able to provide a satisfactory answer so there was no reason why he should find it possible now. Instead, he kept his eyes on the grave in front of him, the gold lettering providing a sharp contrast to the black sheen of the stone. The name which lingered in the darkest corners of Rathe’s conscience stared back at him, the two dates with the cruelly brief time span between them shouting his guilt in his face. The woman edged closer to him, but Rathe did not turn to look at her even then. His attention was gripped only by the details on that black marker of death. But, after a few moments of no noise except the rising wind of the autumnal morning, Rathe dared at last to answer the questions.

“Forgiveness,” he said. “I want to find forgiveness.”

Kathy Marsden placed a hand on his arm. “You didn’t kill my son, Mr Rathe.”

“We both know that isn’t true.”

“He did it to himself,” she insisted. “Nobody else did anything.”

Rathe turned his face to hers and she stared into his dark, austere eyes. His expression was paralysed with a bitter sadness, the same expression she had seen each time she had found him standing in front of her son’s place of rest. He seemed about to speak, but initially no words came. She did not need him to speak; she knew well enough from their previous discussions what it was he would want to say.

“You don’t believe that,” he said at last. As she had expected.

“It’s not a question of belief. It’s the truth. You didn’t kill Kevin, no matter how much you convince yourself otherwise.”

“He was innocent.” Inside his pockets, Rathe’s fingers turned in on themselves, bunching into fists. “I can see that now. I just couldn’t see it then.”

“You didn’t convict him of any crime, Mr Rathe. The jury did that.”

“Based on what they heard in my arguments against him.”

Kathy Marsden did not argue the point. She saw no reason to dispute what he had said, not given that it was true. Instead, in a soft voice, she made a different point. “What happened at the trial, and afterwards, who said and did what… none of it means you have to come here every day. You should stay away.”

“I can’t. I don’t know what else to do to make amends for what happened to your son, Mrs Marsden.”

“Isn’t walking away from your life and career, this punishment of yourself, enough?”

“It doesn’t seem to be.”

She sighed heavily, a tired and frustrated expulsion of air. Rathe did not react to it. From somewhere behind them, the church clock struck the hour. Rathe wondered how long he had been standing at Kevin Marsden’s grave, living through the events of the recent past. No idea.

“You talk about finding forgiveness,” Kathy said. “Whose forgiveness do you want? Mine, or your own?”

Briefly, he smiled but it was not enough to erase the traces of melancholy from his face. “Perhaps both.”

She nodded, as though she had been expecting the answer. “You haven’t ever needed my forgiveness. But, if you feel you need it, you have it. You should move on from the past, Mr Rathe, and the first step to doing that is to forgive yourself.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think I can do that.”

Kathy Marsden leaned closer to him as the first spots of rain began to fall. “Then how will you ever find any peace, Mr Rathe… ?”

* * *

The vicar paused at the church door. The night sky was the deepest black, barely a star in sight, and the only light available to him was the meagre beam of the small torch which he held in his shaking hands. He could see that the door to the church was ajar, the wind gently whispering in the opening, as though willing the vicar to enter, enticing him into the darkness of the house of God. He muttered a brief prayer under his breath and, in a moment of indecisive anxiety, he looked back towards the sanctuary of the warm, cosy vicarage behind him.

He had been sitting in the living room, idly reading a Dickens novel, when he had become conscious of a strange light in the church. Not strange in the sense of it being alien, but rather that it was a light which should not have been lit at all. The Reverend Thomas Healey himself had locked and bolted the church earlier that evening and, as he was accustomed to do, he had ensured that all candles and electric lights had been extinguished and that the door to the church had been locked and bolted. Healey was not a man to be remiss about such things; if anything, he erred on the side of over-caution where the question of security was concerned. He had been surprised, not to say alarmed, therefore, to find that the stained glass artwork of the arched windows was now glowing with flickering candlelight. He had wrapped a scarf around his neck, grabbed his torch, and made his way rapidly along the small gravel path which connected the vicarage to the church itself.

Now, standing at the open door, he was unsure that his course of action was altogether wise. If someone had broken into the church, the intruder might still be inside. Whatever business he had there could not be legitimate, it seemed to Healey, since otherwise whoever it was would have waited for the morning and approached the elderly vicar personally. Healey could not dismiss his apprehension but, by the same token, he felt unable not to investigate this intrusion into the Church of St Augustine.

He pushed the heavy oak entrance as slowly as he dared, his breath held tight in his lungs, and he peered round the door, barely prepared for what he might find inside. The beam of the torch illuminated the concrete floor and the backs of the pews which were immediately in front of him. There was the smell of cold stone and the deathly silence of a building at rest. From behind him, the wind rushed through the widening gap of the entrance and the flames of the candles danced themselves into extinction. The sharp scent of smoke and wax drifted towards him and Healey creased his nose at the sensation. His only light now was the conical beam of the torch, lighting no more than two or three feet in front of him. His shoes clicked on the stones beneath his feet, the resulting echo seeming to fill the vastness of the old building, so deep was the silence into which he walked. The light from the torch moved across the pews and the walls and, once, Healey shone it behind him as if to dispel the irrational fear that somebody was following him. But there was nobody there. The old man was alone.

As he moved the light in front of him once more, however, he found that he had been wrong in his assumption. He was not alone in that church. There were two other men in there with him. At the sight of them, Healey caught his breath and he raised a hand to his mouth in shock. In front of him, there was a man lying face down on the altar steps, his arms outstretched towards the effigy of the tormented Christ which towered over the altar itself. The divine head hung on the battered breast, an expression of humble suffering etched onto the noble features, looking down at the horror which was sprawled out below those nailed, bloodied feet, as though recognising a sin which could never be absolved.

The dead man on the altar steps was dressed in an expensive suit, dark blue if that mattered to anybody, and his well-polished shoes exposed their soles to Healey. The vicar paid no attention to them. Instead, his eyes were fixed on the repulsive trauma which had been inflicted to the back of the man’s head. The deep crimson of his life had ebbed out onto the scarlet of the carpet which adorned the steps of the altar and, lying across his back, there was the instrument of death. One of the heavy, gilt candlesticks which normally stood on either side of the altar, the base of it stained with the same red smear of death. Its brother stood in its rightful place, innocent of any connection with the horror which had played out before it.

For a moment, Healey could see only blood. It seemed to him to be everywhere: seeping still out of the man’s head; staining the carpet of the altar; glistening on the golden base of the candelabra; pounding in his own ears as his heart raced in disgust at the scene which had played out before him. For a moment, he was incapable of registering anything other than the sight and smell of blood. But then, as if from some place far away, he heard the whimper of a voice. An adult voice, but oddly childish in its terrified pitch. Healey broke free from his blood-spattered spell and looked at the other man in the church. Not the horrible thing which had once been a man, but the undeniably human form which was standing over the corpse. He was staring at the vicar with the wild eyes of a madman, his face twisted in some emotion which might have been fear, panic, or guilt. Perhaps it was a mixture of them all. His hands were outstretched to Healey and at once the vicar was again conscious of the presence of blood. This time, it was smeared over those outstretched palms, as though begging the holy man to cleanse them. As the stranger took a step towards him, Healey made an instinctive move backwards. The man seemed bewildered by the vicar’s movement, frowning in confusion into the light of the torch’s beam. Then, as though his senses told him what was in the vicar’s mind, the man began to shake his head. A finger snaked out and pointed towards the body beside him.

“I didn’t do this,” he stammered. “I swear to God, I… ”

But Healey heard no more. He had no thought for anything other than his civil and moral duty and the need for a police presence in the house of the Lord.

How many hours passed between fleeing from the church and the arrival of the police was impossible for him to determine. But, now the churchyard was illuminated by the bright blue lights and the glare of the floodlights surrounding the entrance to the church, those same lights which he had seen before only in television dramas. The scientific officers in their protective suits wandered around the place like ghouls, adding more light to the area with their flashing cameras. The churchyard was alive with activity but it seemed to Healey that none of their movements were appropriate in what should have been the respectful silence of the cemetery. The whole thing sickened him, leaving a bitter taste of violence and death in the back of his throat.

Healey was grateful for the cup of tea which he had been given, but he barely tasted it as he drank. His mind was still seized by the scene which he had interrupted earlier that night. The night was everlasting and, similarly, Healey wondered whether his church would ever purify itself of the sin which had been inflicted on it. He had been given a blanket which now hung loosely over his shoulders, barely serving the purpose for which it was designed. Healey had a chill about his person which seemed to penetrate through his bones into his very essence. Was it ever possible to recover from the effects of violent death, he wondered, and no matter how deeply he sought within himself for an answer, Healey could not find one. He doubted God had an answer either; if He had, would He not have provided it by now? Heaven alone knew, in the space of time which had elapsed, Healey had asked often enough for God’s guidance. But the silence had continued. Healey drained the tea, as though in an effort to drown out the fear and the doubt which threatened to consume him.

The man sitting beside him looked as though he was ready to go home. His face was pale with exhaustion and his eyes were heavy with responsibility. His suit bore the shine of age and the tie which was hung around his neck was as limp and fatigued as the man himself seemed to be. His hair was grey, in need of a trim, and there was a day’s growth of patchy stubble about the chin. His slumped shoulders suggested the heavy burden of long hours and minimal sleep. Despite all that, his blue eyes were shrewd and alert, fixing themselves now on Healey with a determined glare.