The moment he had heard these words uttered, Fr Luke was saddened. He felt deep down inside that his life had become routine, as exciting as a wet dishcloth cast disdainfully onto the tiles of a presbytery floor on some grey November morning. But knew in his heart and soul that putting in for a transfer now would be a simple waste of time. He could just imagine the Bishop’s face. ‘Would you go away out of that, Fr Luke!’ he heard him say, or ‘What in under God has got into you these days at all!’ pulling out the drawer of his big oaken desk to remove a bottle of C of the B (Cream of the Barley whiskey), and cheerfully exhorting him to ‘Have a wee dram there and put that old nonsense out of your head like a good man!’
Fr Luke sighed. He could understand the Bishop’s reaction – for that, he knew, and always had, was how everyone perceived him – a true pillar of the Church: solid; unbending before the fickle winds of change; a bollard hammered into the firmest of earth. As the minibus switched lanes, Fr Luke’s eyes brightened when he thought of Fr Pep breezily arriving at Barntrosna presbytery, clad from head to toe in his summer ‘duds’ of bright-coloured shirt (palm trees swaying against a background of purple, he recalled), sandals and loose cotton slacks. He might be old fashioned in his way, the minibus-ferried clergyman now amused himself by thinking, but he had been able to tell by the twinkle in the younger man’s eye that he was up to mischief. ‘Come on!’ Fr Pep had said. ‘Come on, Fr Lukey! I have a surprise for you!’
On foot of this reminiscence, before he knew it, Fr Luke found himself – transcendent power of the imagination! – sitting in the passenger seat of an open-topped Alfa Romeo sports car and not in a London-bound minibus at all, heading off down another motorway altogether (LA-bound, perhaps! Or San José even! ‘Do you by chance know the way?’ he laughed to himself as he thought of him calling to some passing Mexican or Puerto Rican driver!), lush gay strings sweeping out from the car radio as Fr Pep shouted over them: ‘What do you think of this little baby, Fr Lukey? Cool, eh?’ And, with his greying hair flying out behind him in the silky Californian breeze, the older clergyman being able to make one and only one reply: ‘You got it, Fr Pep!’
This was but the stuff of fantasy, however, for the Volkswagen minibus was no sports car, and their mission had little to do with the attainment of spurious American West Coast baubles such as choice acting parts but with the location of Noreen Tiernan, that and nothing else, apart from her subsequent safe passage home. Neither would there be time, as he now came to realize, and it had been foolish of him to consider otherwise, for meeting Aids victims, or lending an ear to the most unmentionable, possibly unpardonable sins the human mind could ever begin to conceive of, of prostitutes and every other manner of amoral deviant. It saddened Fr Luke. Of course it did. He would have gladly given generously of his time to ladies of the night and the problems of men with donkeys and gas masks. But that was the way it was and there was nothing could be done about it now. Perhaps, he sighed, there would one day come a time when he would be awakened by the sound of red-eyed, possibly deranged maniacs battering feverishly on the door of his presbytery, crying: ‘Father! Help me! God, please! Help me, Father! Help me! Help me! Help me!’ – but not on this trip.
*
Eustace De Vere-Bingham, his eyes glittering as he sat at the leopardskin-covered steering-wheel, had his dreams too. For the truth was that, many years before, he had been engaged to be married to a young girl who had later left him and who was indeed responsible for his eventual return to the family seat of De Vere-Bingham Hall in Barntrosna. And, side by side with that, there existed an even deeper truth – the fact that Eustace De Vere-Bingham had no interest whatsoever in butterflies, and had to be compelled by his brigadier father to direct his attention towards the field of lepidoptera – ‘I’ll see you do it! You’ll be proficient at something, you fool you!’ the words echoed. He winced at the reminiscence. For the plain truth was that it would not, in fact, have bothered him in the slightest if local youths had in the dead of night broken into his mansion and put every accursed one of the powder-winged nonentities to the torch. Eustace De Vere-Bingham held no brief for them (no more than he did for his own ‘family’, many years previously having publicly denounced his father – in fact, all of his forebears – as ‘idiots’ and ‘know-nothing Lilliputian would-be tyrants in tweeds’ whilst he set off to ‘discover the world’ and ‘live!’).
As in De Vere-Bingham Hall now, aged far beyond his years, he would pace the floor nightly in a smoking jacket with oriental patterns on it as he raked his fingers through his prematurely greying hair, pausing only to howl ‘Alicia!’ and stare wild-eyed through the French windows which opened to the south. (But which were rarely open now.)
‘Alicia!’ he would cry, punching with startling vigour the Restoration-style upholstery of the chaise longue, as he repaired once more to the ever-diminishing drinks cabinet. ‘Alicia Taylor de Montfort! God, how I loved you,’ he would choke before flicking the switch on his Bell and Howell projector and sobbing softly as the shuddering images of pink-hued girls obliterated the entire back wall with their volleyball-fisting shrieks of delight and cries of ‘Eek!’ Pursued by rambunctious playboys in the sad, narrative-less tales perennially set in a blank, timeless world of velour push-U-ups and cocktail jazz which seemed the faded aristocrat’s only source of pleasure now – including Sweat-O-Rama Treats and Wrassling She-Babes of the 60s.
Yes, but these were as nothing to the ultimate dream of Eustace De Vere-Bingham – to have his beloved Alicia returned to him. But not for the reasons that might at first be suspected, such as the loving and cherishing of her for the rest of their mortal days together. Which in a normal person might not be an unreasonable supposition. But which was totally and utterly redundant in the case of Eustace De Vere-Bingham. Because the truth was, however unpalatable, that, unbeknownst to anyone – his fondness for ‘loops’ and ‘nudie-grinding’ aside – Eustace De Vere-Bingham was, in fact, a deeply disturbed man. If such were not the case, why then did he, on those long nights when he paced the expensively upholstered floors of the family seat and assaulted inanimate objects – stuffed owls, ottomans, eighteenth-century commodes and the like – inexplicably cry: ‘You dare defy me! You dare defy Eustace De Vere-Bingham! Then there is only one thing for it, my dear Alicia! You must die! Do you hear me? Die, I said!’ A declaration invariably succeeded by swirling cries which wove their menacing way about the Gothic interior of the mansion like a night-crawling severed hand with fingers of ice. It was no accident that – incongruously, of course, in his Norfolk jacket – the customer most often seen paying visits to Nobby’s Videos to peruse such lurid-boxed titles as Don’t Go in the House, My Family – Monsters, Deranged and Stay Away From The Window! was none other than – Eustace De Vere-Bingham! Who, as perhaps only Nobby the proprietor knew, thought little of packing at least a dozen tapes into a fishing bag before his bubble-shaped conveyance tore off through the village in a cloud of sputtering, smoke and clanking exhaust pipes (one of his failings – despite his intelligence – was the fact that he lacked the patience essential for proper motor vehicle maintenance) before flinging himself with a menacing smirk onto the chaise longue and pressing the ‘play’ button, thenceforward to cynically graft the visage and other body parts of his former beloved onto the frames of the poor unfortunate females who seemed to have little respite from the misfortune visited upon them by the succession of slavering, dungaree-clad defectives and social misfits who derived particular pleasure from the application of crude workshop tools and other implements to assorted parts of the human anatomy.
It is not with any sense of pleasure that an author reports a grown man – in particular, one of such refinement! – kicking his legs gaily and cheering: ‘How do you like that, Alicia! Abandon me now, why don’t you, bitch! Ha ha ha! Chop her up! Choppity choppity! Oh boy! Oh yes! The former Mrs De Vere-Bingham! Not quite so forward now, one opines!’
Yes, dear readers – a Barntrosna secret, indeed, for thes
e were the true dreams of Eustace De Vere-Bingham; sick, macabre fantasies of blood-revenge, horror and murder of the most grisly kind beside which ‘nudie-cuties’ were as the most laughable and innocent of fairy tales! A mere red herring cunningly devised by him and willingly – slavishly – credited by the ingenuous, hopelessly good-natured locals.
‘No no! Please!’ came the helpless teenage cry once more as her bird-boned silhouette appeared upon a background of lurid flock wallpaper as cheap electronic music soared and the rotating bit of the drill moved ever closer.
‘Oh but yes!’ issued the cry from the lips of Eustace De Vere-Bingham as the deranged, acne-devastated youth (‘Alex’) leered and closed in remorselessly. ‘Oh but yes, you see!’
*
Of all the Barntrosna residents in the minibus that night, beyond question perhaps the most level-headed and realistic of all was Mrs Dolores Tiernan. And of course the reasons why this might be are obvious; after all, it was her daughter’s plight which had precipitated the mission of mercy in the first place. She could not afford to squander valuable time construing herself as some hotshot middle-aged detective from a small Irish village who was destined to astound the London Metropolitan Police with dry wit and pointlessly contrived idiosyncrasies. But there were occasional instances – and it would be dishonest to state otherwise – when the notion did not appear entirely unattractive and she would permit herself a wry, private smile. Seeing, perhaps, her small round form encased in a belted fawn mackintosh, a snub-nose revolver snug deep inside her pocket as she ‘laid it on the line’.
That was the only way to get results, she heard herself say. Hit ’em hard and hit ’em fast. That way they had respect for you. ‘Don’t you jerk with me!’ She sighed as the words came to her, her reverie evaporating now, for the idea of her cursing at anyone – never mind a policeman! – was just about the last thing you could ever imagine Dolores Tiernan doing. It wasn’t the kind of situation she found herself in.
But this wasn’t just any situation, and she knew it. Her daughter was missing and if extreme measures were called for, she would not be found wanting! ‘I want you to find my daughter and I want you to find her now! You got that?’ she would bark – and without a moment’s hesitation – if she felt it necessary. And they would have got it, all right, as she flung her cigar stump into the wastepaper basket and stormed out through the frosted glass door, disgusted.
*
But not half as disgusted as the policeman who had been guarding Stephanie was when he woke up with a mechanical digger churning up the inside of his skull and the cell door wide open. He stumbled blindly out the door of the station. Outside the red buses heaved and the black cabs throbbed in the slipstream. He sank his closed fist into his palm and cursed violently again. But it was to no avail, for of Stephanie Diggs and Noreen Tiernan there was no sign to be seen.
*
Unless you counted a sighting some nights later in the small hours of Saturday morning when a young man who had been out on the town celebrating his birthday looked up instinctively and through the fog that enveloped him (a consequence of eighteen bottles of Tuborg ale) experienced what can only be called the shock of his life – for there, leaning up against the damp brick of a seedy Soho sidestreet was a girl, her body completely, from head to foot, encased in black leather, smiling suggestively at him as a long cigarette dangled from her lips. ‘Got a light, darling?’ she enquired huskily. In his enthusiasm (he was already frantically searching his pockets) and disorientation, the unfortunate youth did not see the other figure emerge from the shadows; nor discern the starlike gleam of the open razor before it was coldly pressed to the flesh of his neck. ‘Give us your money! All of it!’ snapped Stephanie Diggs as she cast the remainder of her cigarette to the ground, whereupon it died with a hiss in a shining puddle. Noreen breathlessly fingered the notes stuffed into his wallet. ‘And if you ever breathe a word of this, we’ll come looking for you!’ she hissed, in an accent in every way almost identical to Stephanie’s.
‘Yes! Please – please don’t kill me!’ the pathetic youth now pleaded.
‘Next time that’s exactly what we’ll do!’ snapped Noreen as she pushed him forward gruffly. ‘Now get out of here if you know what’s good for you! Before we do something really naughty!’
‘Like cut your nibblies off!’ barked Stephanie after him, before hurling herself onto what can only be termed a roller coaster of heartlessly mocking laughter.
Which echoed shrilly through the night-time streets of the city of London as at last (their night’s work done) they made their way home to the East End apartment where they now lived on their ill-gotten gains and proceeds of their crimes. Nothing fazed them any longer – trepidations, such as they had been, now a thing of the past – as was plainly evident the moment they opened the door and entered the flat, Noreen shrieking with renewed vigour as she kicked off her stilettos and fell upon the bed (peach satin sheets!) crying: ‘Oh, Diggsy! Did you see his face! His poor little face!’ while Stephanie lit a cigarette and poured them both a drink, replying wickedly: ‘Sure did, chicken!’
There followed a period of relative silence as they turned over the events of the evening in their minds, sipping delightedly as further plans for the future unfolded – almost telepathically – in their minds.
About that night but one thing is certain: the girl lying on the bed with one leg folded and the white flesh of thigh gleaming with startling clarity above the top of her liquorice-black hose who had once been the most dutiful and responsible girl in all of Barntrosna village was no longer that girl. And, with each day that passed, behind the trowel-loads of eye shadow and knife-slashes of fire engine red lipstick, the memory of what had once been Noreen Tiernan, holy Barntrosna girl, student nurse, was fading fast and would soon clearly vanish from the face of the earth as surely as if it had never existed.
*
To say that the sister superior was taken aback when she looked up from her desk at which she was occupied filling in the timetable for the girls in the throat cancer ward would be an understatement, indeed as the smoggy, stuttering minibus trailed to a halt outside the hospital building what actually happened was that her spectacles fell off and she sat there for some moments with her pen poised upright at a ninety-degree angle as she did her level best to make sense of the drama which was now – somewhat haphazardly – unfolding on the forecourt directly outside the window. Eustace De Vere-Bingham, patting the lapels of his Norfolk jacket, was calmly surveying the immaculately landscaped terrain as if it belonged entirely to him.
Of the little gathering which was now assembled beneath the plaque which read ST BARTHOLOMEW’S GENERAL HOSPITAL, OPENED BY HM THE QUEEN, MARCH 13 1959, perhaps the least imposing was Pobs McCue and this was directly related to the unfathomable depth of shyness within him which had begun many years before in Barntrosna Primary School when his then teacher – Master Gunn – had dragged him out before the class and cuffed him gruffly on the back of the head, snarling pitilessly as his nine-year-old charges (forty of them) chuckled with a mixture of amusement and terror.
‘Well, good man McCue!’ he barked. ‘I suppose you’re going to make an ass of yourself again in the County Scholarship this year!’
Ever since that day, whenever he found himself confronted by figures of authority, Pobs would perceive himself to be as worthless and of as little import as some inconsequential piece of mud you would find in the middle of Barntrosna main street on the rainiest day of the season.
Thoughts which were now coursing through his head as he fiddled with his fingers and, through hooded, horsehair-rimmed eyes, looked up to see the hazy figure of the sister superior (Tank, of course!) now rising from her desk. Last to emerge from the minibus was Fr Luke, who, without warning, took it upon himself to begin something of a lengthy intellectual discourse with a bewildered Pobs as regards the cultural differences between Ireland and England and the procession of sub-textual disapprovals their little party might expect
in the course of forthcoming dialogues.
In all her long career the sister superior had never been confronted by such an eclectic grouping. She was quite at a loss for words. But when she heard them declare what the purpose of their visit actually was, she became utterly speechless. A glazy film appeared over her eyes and in a dry, hoarse voice, she addressed herself exclusively to Mrs Tiernan, whom she instinctively – and quite correctly, as it happened – assumed to be the spokesperson.
Fr Luke found himself saddened by the nurse’s lack of compassion. It was misunderstandings such as these that led to wars and hatred between peoples, he reflected. Eustace De Vere-Bingham, however, assumed no such attitude. He stiffened with outrage as the nurse suddenly – unforgivably – snapped at Mrs Tiernan: ‘Yes! She turned out to be quite a little madam, didn’t she – your little daughter! Coming here with the sweet Miss Colleen Irish act – butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth – and the next thing you know she’s involved not only in lesbian affairs but waylaying unsuspecting people right, left and centre! No, nursing wasn’t good enough for her! Or that half-man, half-woman trollop she took up with! Couldn’t be satisfied with an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, could she, no, it had to be mugging if you don’t mind, razor gangs, drugs and God knows what else!’