Free Blood Men by Paul Cleave Page A

priest, Father Jacob. The church has one of those rare histories that few churches have, the history where nobody died in its construction. Love or hate religion, one thing is sure—it’s certainly leading the way in deaths. Religion takes more lives than cancer and coronaries and car crashes combined. A belt of trees form a barrier between the church and the closest of the graves; a couple of them have been cut down, fresh stumps surrounded by sawdust and bark jutting out of the ground, sun streaming between the gaps and hitting the stained-glass windows. A six-foot fence made up of iron bars with cobwebs and flaky paint stretches the distance between the cemetery and the road. Parked out front are a dozen media vans, nobody in them.
    Father Jacob has a deep voice that sounds somber, the acousticsof the church helping him convey the depths of his words—which to me all sound hollow. He stands up at a podium a few meters from my wife, looking more like a wizard than a priest, his white hair in need of a trim, an outfit one might wear to a fancy dress party. He tells us about God, and Heaven, and I’m not real sure where I stand on those concepts right now. My grandparents raised me to believe in God, but these were the same people who raised my dad, and look how he turned out. I want to believe in something; it would mean Jodie is somewhere better than this world—and she is certainly somewhere better than Christchurch. And I want to believe in something to make it easier on Sam. I’ve thought about it a lot over the last few days, and I think it comes down to this—I want to believe in God, but right now I’m too damn angry with Him to do so.
    It’s almost thirty-five degrees outside, but it’s cool in the church, and it’s obvious I’m not the only one who feels it. There is something bad inside this place, maybe the same bad thing that got the previous priest murdered, or perhaps it’s the ghost of that priest himself, still here, watching over us. I wonder if Father Jacob senses it, whether he wonders if he’ll be the next priest to come to a dark end.
    A lot of people show up—I never knew that I knew that many people. They show up from the firm I work at. There are plenty from Jodie’s firm too, and of course it’s not like we were social lepers, which means all our friends and family are here too. There are people I don’t recognize, others I haven’t seen in a long, long time. No one really knows what to say—except for John Morgan, who shakes my hand and reminds me, when I get the chance, to head in tomorrow and Wednesday to finish off the McClintoch file. I smile at him and think about putting him in a coffin of his own.
    I don’t have any family—my grandparents, who raised me and Belinda after Mum died, are both dead: a heart attack got my granddad; pneumonia and complications but mostly loneliness got my grandmother not long after. More than anybody, I wish Belinda was here. When we were young, before Dad got taken away, Belinda did her best to pretend I didn’t exist, and when she couldn’t pretendhard enough to make me disappear, she’d begrudgingly throw the occasional sentence my way. When we found out what Dad had done, she spoke to me more but her words were harsher. Then when we found Mum dead in the bathtub, she held my hand and stroked my hair while we waited for the police to arrive. She told me that day that she loved me, and that she would take care of me. Of course our grandparents ended up taking care of both of us, but it was a struggle for them. They were old and didn’t really have the means to support us that well, but they did what they could to keep us from being put into foster care. Belinda always saw me as her responsibility. She was four years older than me, a big sister and mum all wrapped into one person, but at night she was neither of those—at night she used to sneak out of home and work the streets for money, and she’d come back crying with her pockets