little sprucing up. And then I remembered what Malins and Corbishley thought of me, and spruced down again.
It turned out that the senior officer responding to Ian’s summons was a woman, Detective Inspector Claire Lawton. She was stern faced, in her later thirties, and could probably transform her face into something like beauty if she smiled. I’d have loved a girlie day out with her, making sure she bought a more flattering cut and colour next time she bought a business suit. And suggesting a good hairstylist.
There were days I really wished I’d had a daughter. Or a son, for that matter. And it wasn’t just for the Mother’s Day cards.
But I should be concentrating on the matter in hand. ‘So you see, Ms Lawton, the complexity of the situation,’ I summed up.
‘I do. But unless we get him out of the church and into custody – even protective custody – I can’t seethat we can do very much. If he won’t come out voluntarily, and Father Martin doesn’t want us to go in and snatch him, what can we do? Especially as far as I can see there’s no evidence to link him with any reported crime. Not even an overdue parking ticket.’
‘A suspected immigration violation?’
‘
Suspected!
That wouldn’t be enough to generate the bad publicity we’d get if we went mob-handed into a church.’
‘Especially with all the TV cameras outside.’
‘It’s as bad as that, is it? I’d better go and have a look.’
‘Why don’t I come along too? See if Tang will talk to you? He might find you less threatening than a man, especially as you’re in plain clothes.’
‘Still one problem though, Mrs Welford,’ she grimaced. Those poor frown lines! ‘I don’t speak a word of Chinese.’
Getting back into the church wasn’t as easy as getting out had been. But it wasn’t the gauntlet of media people we had to run that was the problem. It was smaller, more vocal and distinctly hostile. A pair of geese.
‘What the hell do we do?’ I demanded, locking my car, never having come across anything like them back in Birmingham, on a roasting dish apart, that is.
‘Charge them,’ Nick said. He’d come along, he said, on the off chance. He didn’t say of what. Buthe hadn’t reported any useful news from his mates. ‘And flap your arms and hiss back!’
‘Will that work?’
‘Can you think of anything else?’
So, no doubt to the delight of the media mob, the three of us hurtled up the path, pretending to be bigger, better birds.
At least it broke the ice with those inside the church. Especially when I turned back and pointed to the journalists and hissed to the geese, ‘Kill!’
‘Samson and Delilah,’ Andy Braithwaite said, though it couldn’t be classed as a formal introduction.
Once again it was Nick who took the initiative, trying to explain to Tang that Lawton was a good kind lady and a good kind cop. While he talked and drew, I strolled the few yards down into the sanctuary itself, to be joined almost immediately by Andy.
‘Until Tang threw himself at this, I’d never realised that altars were made of stone,’ I said, as the silence started to weigh.
‘Not all by any means. Indeed, they’re quite a rarity. According to the guidebook,’ he said, withdrawing a folded leaflet from his inner pocket, ‘there’s a cross incised on it somewhere. I’ve explored every other corner,’ he said, apologetically. ‘Plenty of time on my hands.’
With what I hoped looked like reverence, I bent to lift the skirt of the altar cloth someone hadironed into box folds. More used to being on his knees than I, Andy crawled from one side to the other, peering as I hitched up fabric for him.
‘Eureka!’ he said, progressing from his knees to his haunches. ‘Look.’
If I got down beside him, it wasn’t impossible that I should need a crane to get me upright. Still, if God wanted me down there, He’d no doubt provide me with the steam power to get up again.
I traced an incised cross with my
Robert Silverberg, Damien Broderick
Blake Crouch, J.A. Konrath