The Dead

41

I don’t know what I was expecting from the church of the Tyneside Bible Fellowship, but I wasn’t expecting this. The place was huge and looked more like a corporate headquarters than a church. I wondered how much the congregation had been fleeced to pay for it. I guessed they didn’t mind. After all, they’d been ‘saved’.

There was a sign on the lawn at the front of the church that proclaimed, ‘The Bible is inspired by God and is the final authority on all matters.’ Not much room for debate there then. I could never understand how quoting lines from a book, written by men, decades after the death of Jesus Christ, could prove anything to anyone about the existence of a god.

There was nobody in the church at this hour, so we ignored the big glass doors at the front and walked around the back. We found a door that was unlocked. Joe Kinane and I walked inside. We followed the corridor until we reached a small kitchen. There, sitting all alone at the table, drinking his tea, was the Reverend Michael Crowe. I recognised the man from his picture on the church’s website.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, clearly disconcerted by our presence. ‘What do you want?’

‘That’s not a very Christian welcome, Reverend Crowe. You know Joe Kinane from your old life,’ I reminded him, ‘it doesn’t matter who I am. Kinane works for me now. That’s all you need to know.’

The reverend looked nervous, but was he scared of Joe Kinane or of having his past life exposed to his congregation? Maybe it was both.

‘Is this what you really do now Crowe?’ asked Kinane.

‘Since I was saved, yes,’ he answered, with the glassy-eyed conviction of the brain-washed.

‘Saved?’ asked Kinane, ‘you’re fucking joking, aren’t you?’

‘I was saved and anointed by God to spread his word,’ Crowe told us firmly.

‘Anointed by God personally?’ asked Kinane. ‘Nice of him to take time out of his day, like that. He must be hellishly busy, poor bastard.’

Kinane went over to the kettle then. He picked it up and filled it from the tap in the kitchen sink. The sound of the water pouring into the kettle made Crowe turn his head and watch my enforcer. Kinane put it back on its stand and switched it on. Crowe continued to watch him as Kinane went to the oven and turned on all of the gas rings. There was a hiss and a click, click, click until each ring fired and flames shot up from them.

‘Good screw is it?’ I asked, ‘making a canny living are you, from your flock I mean? Or is that not what it’s called in your church?’

‘You can mock me all you wish,’ Crowe told me, ‘but the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand’ he said; ‘repent ye and believe the gospel; Mark, Chapter one, Verse fifteen.’

‘Shut the fuck up and listen or Kinane will break both of your arms. That’s David; Chapter one, Verse one.’

Kinane opened a drawer and selected some large kitchen knives. He checked that Crowe was looking at him as he placed the knives blade first into the flame of one of the gas rings, then he took a saucepan and filled it with water and put that on a ring too. Finally he took a frying pan and poured a load of oil in it until it made a deep pool and he placed this on one of the rings. I said nothing while he did this and Crowe watched him intently the whole time.‘This is quite a change of lifestyle, I must say,’ I said, ‘was it gradual or did it happen overnight? I mean one day you are killing people and the next saving them. That’s what it says on your website anyhow; the bit about saving them, I mean. You don’t mention the killing. Funny that.’

‘Salvation is a miracle, only through the goodness of God can we be led to repentance,’ he recited.

‘So you repent all of your sins do you?’

‘I have made my peace with God, yes.’

‘But you were never punished, were you? For those crimes you committed, for the men you killed. You just stopped, changed your life and got off scot-free. No prison term, no nothing in fact, just renounce evil one day and set yourself up preaching the word of the Lord to the gullible the next. Does it not feel strange telling fairy stories to nut jobs while fleecing them out of their money? I suppose it’s undemanding work.’

‘I feel sorry for you,’ he told me, ‘it’s obvious to me you are in great pain but it isn’t too late, it’s never too late to renounce evil and hear the word of Christ. He is your salvation, believe me.’

‘I am in great pain,’ I admitted, ‘I’ve got this terrible pain in the arse right now listening to you banging on about your imaginary friends Jesus and the Lord.’

‘There shall be false teachers among you, who shall bring in damnable heresies,’ he was quoting at me again.

I ignored this. ‘Kinane didn’t bring his tool box but he doesn’t need it here, not with boiling water, red hot knives and scalding oil. Kitchens are very dangerous places for men who don’t provide answers to my questions.’

‘What questions?’

‘How many men did you kill for Bobby Mahoney?’

‘I told you, I have made my peace with God.’

‘But not with me and I’m the one that’s in the room right now asking you. God can’t protect you from me, Crowe. If you really think he can, you’d better call on him now and ask him to smite me down, before I get Joe to put one of your hands in that pan of hot oil. Are you taking me seriously? I hope so. How many was it? Some say a dozen, there are others who claim it was more.’ He went silent on me then.

‘Perhaps when we are done here,’ I admitted, ‘we’ll just call the police and give them the information they need on all of those cold cases they’ve got on file from the seventies. They’ve got retired coppers working on them part-time and they love it because, no matter how old the case, they’ve always got a good chance of linking a suspect to a corpse due to the DNA. Must be your worst nightmare that Crowe? I mean, when you were killing folk nobody had heard of DNA. Bit sneaky of them to change the rules like that, eh? Not very sporting. I reckon we’ll start with the four people I know you killed for Bobby. I’ve been asking around you see. Should we tell them about James Connor? Or Martin Pearce?’ There was recognition in his eye at those names. ‘Maybe Patrick Donnelly will ring a bell with them or Susan Carter; poor lady was strangled in her bed one night because she knew the names of a gang who’d carried out a bunch of armed robberies and she was going to give up the lot of them. Bet the police kept her night clothes and bed sheets all these years.’

‘Bound to have,’ confirmed Kinane.

‘I killed six men for Bobby Mahoney and one woman,’ Crowe admitted suddenly, snapping out of his bible-speak. ‘I think about them every day and pray to God to earn his forgiveness.’

‘He might forgive you but Northumbria Constabulary most definitely will not,’ I reminded him.

‘What do you want from me?’

‘I want you to tell me about another man you killed, Alan Blake.’

‘What do you want to know?’ he asked, ‘and why do you want to know it?’

‘I want you to admit that you killed him. I know it already, but I want to hear it from you.’ I was bluffing the man. Armstrong sounded convincing but I didn’t know if he was right about Crowe’s role in my father’s disappearance. ‘Then I want to know why he was killed and where he is buried.’

‘Why?’

‘I have my reasons. They’re not your concern.’

‘And if I tell you, you’ll leave me to continue my work here?’ he asked me.

‘Yes,’ I said.

It took the Reverend Michael Crowe a long time to summon up the nerve to talk about it. He wasn’t the only one who was nervous. I had to hide the way I was feeling inside. I was so close to finally understanding what had happened to my father after all of those years of wondering. I had to resist the urge to shout at Crowe to come out with it.

Finally he said, ‘I was a different person then.’ He was explaining or rather justifying himself, ‘Godless, lost, in great pain. I drank and took drugs and I did terrible things for money. Bobby Mahoney ordered me to kill Alan Blake because Blake had stolen from him. The man I was then never thought to question that.’

‘Alan Blake stole the Stuart amp; Brown payroll and tried to keep it all for himself?’ I prompted.

‘Yes,’ Crowe seemed relieved I knew a little of it already.

‘How did he do that?’

‘Bobby’s lads were trying something new. Instead of them all disappearing with the money after a job and lying low, they reckoned it would look better if they handed it straight to someone else and were seen in public shortly after. There were two getaway cars that day; one for the men and one for the money. That way the lads could be seen sitting in a pub in the city-centre minutes after they’d pulled the job, which put the police on the wrong track.’

‘Not a bad idea, but why was Alan Blake trusted with the money?’

‘I doubt he was anybody’s first choice but someone will have vouched for him. Usually no one was foolish enough to steal from Bobby Mahoney.’

‘But he was, and he got away with it to begin with. Why did he come back?’

‘How do you mean?’ he answered.

I realised there was no point asking the Reverend why my father had blown his cover and returned to the north-east years after stealing from Bobby. Crowe might have been anointed by God, but he wasn’t a mind reader.

‘Where did you find him?’ I asked instead.

‘He was hiding out in a friend’s flat in Scotswood. The friend was away in Northern Ireland with the army. We were told where he was staying and I went down there.’

‘How did you kill him?’

‘With a knife.’

‘And what did you do with the body?’

‘Got it out of there and buried it where Bobby told me.’

‘Which was?’

‘On a building site. There was a trench already dug, part of the foundations of the new supermarket they were building. His body is under the car park.’

‘Thanks for the information.’ I told him, and he just couldn’t help himself. He had to ask me.

‘Why ask about Alan Blake now, after so many years? What was he to you?’

‘I’m David Blake,’ I told him, ‘Alan Blake was my father.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘Won’t help you,’ I said, ‘I told you that already.’