The Coldest Blood

7

Out on the peat the soil was silent, the usual trickling of water petrified by the permafrost. Dryden’s battered brown leather shoes were still dry when they got to the ruins, a lonely landmark it took them ten minutes to reach. A single snow flurry came and went, leaving the peat peppered with unmelted flakes of ice.

The orphanage had stood on a low island of clay in the Black Fen reached by a one-track drove which ran beside a deep drain. The building itself had been surrounded by a wall topped by iron spikes, now punctuated by falls of rubble. The entrance gates had long gone but over them a wrought-iron frieze held the name still.

The Catholic Orphanage of St Vincent de Barfleur.

Dryden nodded, unnerved by Father Martin’s brief excursion into Catholic history, and wondered out loud why it had been closed down.

‘Orphanages were out of fashion, and the Church’s reputation was hardly pristine. Numbers fell, too far in the end. The diocese tried to sell the building, it’s still trying to sell the building, but it’s been closed for a decade, more.’

Dryden looked at the priest’s profile, the jutting Gaelic brow in contrast to the weak nose. He’d guessed he was close to retirement age – perhaps sixty or more. The black cassock beneath the heavy overcoat made him look more substantial than he was.

They skirted an outer fence of wooden stakes and barbed wire which had been thrown up to provide some security. One of the fenceposts had taken root, a tree now the height of two men.

‘Good God,’ said Dryden, stopping and running a finger along the sapling’s bark, regardless of the blasphemy.

‘Yes,’ said Martin, the face brightening for the first time, the birthmark less visible now the priest’s skin had reddened with the cold. ‘A poplar. The posts must have been very green; it’s taken root. A little miracle…’

Dryden returned the gaze and the smile vanished.

They were in the shadow of the building now and, out of the blinding low-slung rays of the sun, Dryden could see it clearly for the first time. The floorplan was a letter H, and only the forward two wings were, in fact, in ruin. The rest of the house had been secured with corrugated iron over the downstairs windows and doors. It looked like a workhouse: functional architecture with the single flourish of the grand doorway over which stood a marble canopy on two pillars, one of which was bending outwards alarmingly. Ivy, now white with ice, had colonized the façade.

‘I didn’t realize it was so big,’ said Dryden. ‘How many boys?’

Martin crunched out a cigarette on the flagstoned courtyard. ‘Twisted words, Mr Dryden – our lawyers were quite specific. I should say nothing.’

Dryden held up his hands. ‘No notebook. I’m just trying to understand.’

Martin nodded. ‘I’ve read your stories, Mr Dryden. I detect a marked sympathy with the alleged victims.’

‘A Catholic education, I’m afraid. It leaves scars,’ said Dryden, struggling to keep the conversation uncharged.

The priest nodded, classing himself effortlessly as a victim too. He retrieved another cigarette and Dryden recalled the priests of his childhood and the acrid stench of nicotine; the jaundiced fingers.

‘Just over two hundred in 1970,’ said Martin. ‘That was the centenary. It had been there, or thereabouts, for years. There was a great need, you see – especially amongst the urban poor. Our boys came from many places, sent by their churches.’

‘And the priests?’

‘Numbers? It varied. When I was principal we never managed more than a dozen. Class sizes were on the large side – but then the education was on the poor side.’

They laughed, and the space echoed like an empty room.

‘I will deny this conversation, Mr Dryden – if anything ever appears.’

Dryden nodded. ‘It won’t.’

Martin stiffened, a palm at the base of his spine. ‘There was never any sexual abuse – you do know that? The allegations all refer to what – these days – can only be described as inappropriate attempts at imposing discipline.’

‘That’s a plus point, is it? A badge of honour? It’s certainly a novel brand image. St Vincent’s – we beat them but we never fuck them.’

Dryden was pleased he’d said it. Martin coloured, the birthmark almost disappearing, the hand holding the cigarette vibrating slightly. Dryden felt he’d reclaimed a little bit of his own childhood, if nobody else’s.

The priest produced a set of keys and wrestled briefly with a large padlock on the corrugated-iron sheet covering the front door. He swung it back, almost violently, as if airing the place, and then unlocked the door behind, which was studded with nails in mock medieval grandeur. Then he was gone, swallowed by the shadows, without looking back.

By the time Dryden had edged over the threshold the priest had thrown open a shutter, the light revealing in the gloom of the entrance hall an ugly ironwork candelabra suffocated in cobwebs.

‘I was thirty-one when I arrived here as principal in 1970,’ said Martin, shivering despite himself. ‘I think the diocese knew something was wrong and I was supposed to put things straight. The outsider. And that’s how they treated me.’

Dryden climbed halfway up the stairs to look back down on the priest, noticing the neat natural tonsure of scalp surrounded by the short, oiled hair. The floor was cold stone in a chessboard black and white design. Despite the dereliction two smells still tussled for supremacy, both remembered from Dryden’s childhood: beeswax polish and rotting carpet. The walls too were horribly reminiscent: split by a dado rail between purple below and lemon yellow above.

‘The winter of 1970,’ said Martin, lost now in his own memories.

Dryden nodded, climbing further despite the creaking wood. A bird fluttered somewhere in a loft and some leaves around an open fireplace blew themselves into a tiny whirlwind. On the landing a threadbare carpet ran off into the darkness in both directions: ahead a large stained-glass window looked out into the rear courtyard. Martin overtook him, turned left, and opened a door into one of the rear wings. It was a dormitory, and here the windows were without curtains or blinds and largely intact, bathing the long gallery in a flat, institutional light. Bedsteads had stood here in two lines against both walls, the linoleum still bearing faded stripes where the sunlight had fallen between them.

Martin stood, his large frame twisted slightly. ‘I didn’t know,’ he bowed his head. ‘Not for many years. The teachers had mostly been here for a lifetime – the youngest for twenty years. Several had been boys here. It had been a brutal place, and I often think the only real mark of their guilt was that they felt they had to hide it from me.’

‘You don’t mind if I find that hard to believe,’ said Dryden, walking the length of the empty room to a shoulder-height wooden partition. Beyond was another bare room, the floor tiled this time, and the walls showing the scars of a row of urinals. ‘It’s medieval,’ he said to no one.

‘Yes,’ said Martin. ‘Yes, it was. There were four dormitories – each a separate school house. Leo, Pius, John, and Paul. A priest ruled each – tiny kingdoms, really. The tradition, I was informed, was that the principal was expected to enter only at the invitation of the priest in charge. I never challenged it. I was expected to live apart, to preserve the authority of the office.’

‘Where?’ said Dryden, running a hand along the ice-cold tiles.

‘In one of the forward wings. There’s a flat. The rest of the staff lived in the other – except those with house responsibilities who lived here.’ He nodded to a single door in the far wall. Dryden tried the handle but it was locked; he rattled it, listening to the echo.

They retraced their steps to the hallway outside, down the half-lit stairs to the tiled lobby and into what had been an office to the side of the main doors.

‘My kingdom,’ said Martin, switching on another bare lightbulb. There was a desk in the middle, grotesquely decorated and on a grand scale, while above it a great picture had hung, its shadow still visible on the scarlet and gold wallpaper.

‘They can’t get the desk out. It was probably made in this very room.’

‘When did you know?’ asked Dryden, tired with the contemplation of furnishings.

Martin shrugged, turning out the light. In the sudden shadow he paused and Dryden could see his eyes, and the water that suddenly filled them. ‘It doesn’t happen like that. We aren’t innocent and then suddenly guilty, not when it really matters. We’re corrupted, by degree. It’s how evil works, Mr Dryden, through a series of tiny victories over good. I was institutionalized, and the institution allowed those things to happen, and then suddenly it was too late. I do remember when it was too late.’

‘What happened?’ said Dryden.

‘The school was empty, I can’t recall why. Perhaps a service at the church, or sports day – yes, sports perhaps. I knew I was alone. I was working in my office when I heard this persistent noise. It is very distinctive, the crying of the defeated. I won’t pretend it was the first time I had heard such things. I went upstairs and broke the rule.’

‘What did you find?’ asked Dryden. They were by the main door again, in front of a large hall mirror built into the wall in which the silver had begun to blacken in ugly blotches.

‘Beyond the wash basins were toilet cubicles. In Pius. The boy was in one. He said he’d been there for several days. He’d been given a Bible, I remember, and a cup to drink the water from the cistern. He was naked, crushed in many ways. I tried to get him to leave but he reiterated the punishments which awaited him if he dared. It was hard to believe, but there was no doubting his sincerity.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing. It was too late. I knew it had been happening, I had been protected from the knowledge by the rules. I said something ineffectual, to salve my conscience, and we carried on.’

He looked at Martin in the mirror, the face more sinister now that left and right had been transposed.

Outside, the sky was cloudless, the visibility icicle-sharp. They walked back towards the church along the old track which had been the drive, Dryden annoyed that the priest had succeeded in saying so much without making anything clearer.

They stopped at a low stone wall which edged a small graveyard.

‘As I said, two more victims have been identified,’ said Dryden, trying to inveigle the priest into specifics, into confronting the reality of the police investigation.

The priest opened the graveyard gate. ‘Yes. They are contacting others, I believe – Hugh Appleyard is a good man. Many more will come forward, I’m sure. Some will embellish the truth, some will invent it – but there is enough shame in a hundredth of what they say to damn the guilty.’

Again, effortlessly, he had distanced himself from the children who were in his care.

‘The priests in charge. What of their stories?’ said Dryden, encouraging him to implicate others.

Martin laughed then, and Dryden sensed the corrosive cynicism which had been his punishment for those decades of responsibility.

‘Ask them,’ he said, spreading his arms wide. ‘They’re all here. Remember, I was thirty-one when I arrived. The youngest priest was twenty years older. The last died two years ago.’

Dryden rubbed the lichen from the nearest grave and saw that each stone bore a simple cross and the diocesan crest.

Father Martin looked at the sky. ‘That is my sentence, Mr Dryden. To be left alone amongst the accused.’

Or your salvation, thought Dryden, filling his lungs with the frosted air.