Stealing God

Book 0: The Road to Redemption

by James Green

Genres: Mystery; Hard-Boiled; Thrillers; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

Corrupt copper and bad Catholic Jimmy Costello is back, and he's studying to be a priest in Rome. But his old life refuses to stay buried... When a visiting archbishop dies in suspicious circumstances, the Kilburn hard man is asked to drop his religious studies and help local police investigate. Together with his partner Inspector Ricci, Jimmy follows a twisting trail of evidence from the streets of the Holy City to Glasgow and back, where they uncover a sinister plot more evil than they had ever imagined.

Release date: December 10, 2015

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 270

Sample

The Past is a foreign country: we did things differently there …

Life isn’t fair and it can be bloody unkind. If you want the breaks you have to make them for yourself. That was Jimmy Costello’s view in the old days and the breaks he made were usually an arm or a leg, other people’s of course. But things change. You do your best but then you find your best isn’t good enough. You make money, lots of money, but the girl you make it for goes and dies on you. What then? Well, if you’re London Irish from Kilburn you do one of two things: you humbly accept God’s will and carry on or you turn your back on God and take your future into your own hands, and if your family and friends don’t like it you tell them to go to hell. Unfortunately Jimmy wanted to do both and it nearly tore him apart. In the end, however, after a spell in the far west of Ireland and with the friendship of an old and wise priest, Jimmy found a way of dealing with who he’d been, who he was, and who he would become. He put himself back together and made a promise to the girl he’d worked so hard for. He’d put things right, he’d put himself right. Wherever she was he’d make her proud of him.

Jimmy applied to the Church to see if he was fitted for the Catholic priesthood. This initial enquiry got him a placement in a Paddington refuge to see if he was suitable material. But London wasn’t a safe place for Jimmy and his old ways came back to bite him and they nearly bit his head off. So, in 1995, Jimmy left London, once again in a hurry, just like he’d done when his wife Bernie had died of cancer and, for a time, the madness had taken over. This time, however, he didn’t hurt anyone – no one important, that is – so no one was looking for him. Jimmy put his money somewhere safe, where it would work for him, and set off for one last visit, to make peace with what was left of his family.

Jimmy and Bernie had two children, Eileen and Michael, and Jimmy had always thought of himself as a good husband and good father who protected his family and made sure they would never want for anything money could buy. But as soon as they were old enough they’d both left home and put as much ground as they could between themselves and their father. Eileen married and emigrated to Australia and Michael joined a Catholic religious order as a missionary priest. Too late, at Bernie’s hospital bedside, Jimmy realised what staying with him but losing her children must have meant to his wife.

Michael survived four years of vicious civil war in south Sudan before his order finally pulled him out and sent him to a supposedly safe place in Africa where he’d picked up something nasty which had killed him inside two months. But there was still their daughter, Eileen. She had two children and lived in Melbourne with her builder husband. Jimmy had never seen his grandchildren, and Bernie never would, so he decided to go and see his daughter and her family and make whatever sort of peace and amends he could. He took his time in travelling, not because he wanted to see new places and new faces but because he didn’t have high hopes and was in no hurry to have a door slammed in his face. There had always been a Christmas card with a short letter until Bernie died, then nothing. Jimmy felt it wouldn’t be a long visit.

Eileen wasn’t glad to see him, but he’d expected that. With the children, though, things were different. They weren’t carrying any baggage from the past; to them he was Gramps, not only an English rellie but an ex-detective sergeant, someone new and different, and, to Jimmy’s surprise and Eileen’s disapproval, they decided to love him. Eileen’s husband, Frank, was an Australian and they had met and married quickly while he in London as part of a European trip to see the world before he settled down. Eileen had told Frank nothing about her father but he could read his wife’s attitude just as well as Jimmy. One night he took Jimmy out to a bar and told him that what was between Jimmy and Eileen was their business, but didn’t want his children involved. If Jimmy could keep things civilised he was welcome to make as long a visit as he liked. That seemed eminently fair so Jimmy found somewhere to rent and began to get to know his grandchildren.

Eileen went along with her husband’s decision and for a while he was happy, he had discovered something utterly new to him: an uncomplicated life with nothing to haunt him and nothing to fight for or against. He had money so he began using it for his grandchildren and Frank and Eileen let him. The weeks he’d intended to stay soon turned into months and then into years while the children grew and flourished. But Jimmy knew it couldn’t last. He hadn’t changed, he was still looking after himself, making sure he got what he wanted, and using money he’d made by bending and breaking the law to be safe, idle, and happy in a faraway country wasn’t answering for the past. He’d promised Bernie he would become different, better, he had to go back and make that promise work. So, some years later than he had intended, Jimmy went back to Ireland to resurrect his application to Rome …

ONE

The narrow side street was domestic Rome, unattractive, functional, and none too clean, the small bar halfway down was a place where locals met for a drink, a smoke, and perhaps a game of cards or dominos. At one end the street opened out onto the busy Corso Vittorio Emanuele where the sidewalks were full of bright dresses, casual slacks, tailored shirts, and sunglasses. The traffic, as always, churned noisily and fitfully with the inevitable sounding of horns. But in the warm, spring sunshine no one wanted to think about the Eternal City’s eternal chaos, certainly not the three middle-aged men sitting in the bar. They looked at home, friends having a lunch-time drink in their local. One of them looked at his watch, a man with a lived-in face, short, grizzled hair, and a rumpled shirt, who looked as if he might have been born and raised in such a street. When he spoke, however, it was English and the accent pure north London.

‘I’ll have to go soon, the rector wants to see me.’

‘What’s up, Jimmy, smack on the wrist or a pat on the back?’

The question came from a small, balding man in a sweater. This time the accent was Australian. Jimmy smiled but didn’t respond so the third man, a big man, filled the silence.

‘You don’t expect him to tell you, do you? He never tells anyone anything if it’s about Jimmy. I’ve been served clams in chowder that I knew more about than I do about him.’ He turned to Jimmy as if inspecting him. ‘Eight months since we first met and I’ll tell you what we know about you. You’re a Duns College student, we know because we got told. You’re studying with us but you’re not one of us. You come from London, your accent tells us that. You must have plenty of money because Duns students have to be self-financing here and afterwards. That’s common knowledge.’ He nodded to the bottle and glass in front of Jimmy. ‘You like beer, not wine or spirits. And that’s it, that’s all of it.’

The Australian chipped in.

‘Except that you don’t talk about yourself.’

They were all smiling; it was banter between friends.

‘That’s right, Ron, he don’t talk about himself.’

Jimmy finished his drink.

‘What’s to talk about? Anyway, neither of you came to Rome to get my life story so what’s the difference?’

The big man laughed easily; you got the feeling he laughed a lot. He was wearing an overcoat and had a scarf hanging round his neck. The Jamaican accent explained why it wasn’t yet time for him to get into short sleeves.

‘Never mind why we came to Rome. We all know why we came to Rome, and you’re right, it wasn’t to talk about ourselves. But I tell you it isn’t natural for people working together not to know something about each other. A careful mouth is a good thing, a secretive one is something else altogether. Secrets have a way of popping out at you when they can do the most harm.’ Then he winked at the Australian before putting his elbow on the table and shielding his face with his hand. ‘Confess, my son, tell me all and receive my absolution before it is too late and the fires of Hell engulf your immortal soul,’ and he laughed a deep, West-Indian laugh. The Australian joined in.

‘Take him up on it, mate, he’ll go easy on you. He used to be a copper back in Jamaica so he’s seen it all. You can’t shock Danny.’

‘That’s right, you can’t shock me.’

‘Sorry lads, there’s nothing to shock you with. I might bore you to death though, if I ever got going.’

‘Don’t tell me a life lived in London hasn’t had its moments, mate. I can’t believe that.’

‘I don’t suppose London’s much different from Perth if all you do is live and work there and raise kids.’

Danny laughed loudly and slapped the table with his hands, hard enough for the barman to stop reading the paper and look up and the few others in the bar to glance across at them.

‘Information, Ron, information about Jimmy’s dark and secret past.’

Ron joined in grinning.

‘So, married with kids, who’d have thought you would let something like that slip …’

But the laughter died quickly and Ron and Danny looked at each other, then both looked down, away from Jimmy. It was Ron who finally looked up and spoke. There was no laughter at the table now.

‘Sorry, mate, I wasn’t thinking. No offence intended.’

Jimmy looked at his watch again.

‘None taken, lads, none taken, but the way I look at it, it’s best to let the past alone. Then maybe it will let you alone.’ He stood up. ‘See you.’

He left the table, put the bottle and glass on the bar, nodded to the barman, and walked out. The barman didn’t respond but gave Jimmy’s back a half-angry look as he left. Then he looked at the glass and bottle. Why did the Englishman do that? Collecting glasses, clearing tables, was his job. What was the reason? What was he trying to do, avoid giving a tip? But it couldn’t be that because he did leave tips. The suspicion natural to the Roman mind lasted as long as it took for Jimmy to leave the bar. Then the barman went back to his paper, pointedly leaving the bottle and glass where they were.

Ron looked sheepishly at Danny.

‘God almighty, that was a bloody gash thing to come out with.’ Danny nodded. If Jimmy had kids then he’d been married, and if he’d been married his wife was dead. Only a widower would have been accepted by Duns College to train for the Catholic priesthood. ‘We should have known. It was a bloody gash thing to come out with. I tell you, mate, I felt like the floor should just open up and swallow the pair of us. I’ll have to do better than that.’

‘We both will.’ There was silence for a moment. ‘I tell you what, Ron, I didn’t think it would be so hard.’

‘Hard?’

‘Not the study, the book stuff, I expected that, and it’s not the discipline. It’s what you have to become, the person you have to try and be, for others. I don’t know if I can do that.’

Ron’s natural cheerfulness reasserted itself.

‘Come on, sure you can, we all can. You’ve just got to give it time. The main thing is to learn, that’s why we’re here. You learn by listening, you learn by reading, and you learn by your mistakes. You get better and that’s the way you get where you’re going.’

‘Maybe so, but those mistakes hurt people, like we hurt Jimmy just now and sometimes the damage a mistake does is a lot worse and whoever gets hurt can’t just get up and walk away.’ The big man spoke as someone talking from painful, personal experience so the Australian stayed silent and let him talk. ‘There’s a price for everything, I found that out a long time ago, and I don’t want other people having to pay too high a price just so I can do my learning.’

Ron thought about it.

‘But it can’t be helped, can it? Other people always pay the price one way or another.’

‘I suppose so.’

Ron finished his beer.

‘Another coffee?’

Danny pushed his cup away.

‘God, no, I’m getting so I hate the filthy stuff. One is plenty.’

‘Why not have a beer then?’

Danny looked at him; somehow it had suddenly turned into that sort of day.

‘Because it wouldn’t be a beer and it wouldn’t stop at one and the price would be more than I would want anyone to pay.’

Ron had been an accountant in a firm of solicitors and was not in any sense worldly wise, but the big man’s words were not lost on him.

‘Bloody hell, it’s a day for finding out about people, I’ll say that. Jimmy’s lost a wife and you …’

But he let the rest of it hang in the air.

‘So I drink tea when I can get it and coffee when I can’t,’ the big smile came back, ‘and I’m still trying to learn from my mistakes.’

They got up. Ron put his hand in his pocket, pulled out some coins, and put the payment with a small tip on the table. The barman looked up from his newspaper and nodded to them as they went to the door. They had left everything on the table for him to clear away. They were OK, they were the regulars.

Outside the clear sky was no more than a ribbon of blue between rooftops. Down in the street, on the narrow pavement, there was a permanent semi-gloom. The two men stood for a moment. The afternoon was free of study or lectures, it was theirs with no calls on their time. By unspoken consent they turned away from the traffic and bustle of the Corso and went the other way, towards the spring sunshine and the trees at the bottom end of the street. They’d walk beside the Tiber where it would be warm, bright, and quiet and Rome would be looking its best.

‘I wonder what the rector wanted to see Jimmy about?’

‘Who knows?’

And they set off, not tourists, but certainly not Romans. An odd couple.

TWO

Jimmy had also walked towards the Tiber. His most direct route would have been the Corso Emanuele which led to the Vatican City but it was too busy for the walk to be pleasant so he made his way through shady, narrow, side streets until he came out at the Ponte Mazzini. He crossed the river which ran below him between high, stone walls and broad footpaths created in homage to the Seine in Paris. The road above the river was tree-lined, quiet, and almost free of traffic but not far away in front of him was the main road where the noise and bustle began again. He slowed his pace. What was it the rector wanted to see him about? It wasn’t time for the routine monthly meeting and he couldn’t think of anything that had happened which would require another appointment. He put the question out of his mind and busied himself with thoughts on a different matter, one with which he was familiar – pain.

It was hard to believe that some chance remark, like the one Ron had made in the bar, could suddenly rip open an emotional wound and make it feel as if all the hard work of healing had been wasted. The pain just flooded back. He dealt with it in the only way he could, the way the kind, old, Irish priest in Mayo had shown him. He accepted it. He knew he deserved it, so he didn’t try to fight it. A few short years ago this pain of loss and guilt could combine so that he came close to self-destruction, now a humble acceptance kept the worst of his demons at bay. His mind strayed to his theological studies; he let it, it helped.

All his life he’d heard the stories of how Jesus cured people possessed by evil spirits, first at school then on Sundays at Mass. As a child he’d enjoyed them, been impressed and a little frightened that evil spirits could get inside you somehow. As an adult he’d found such stories vaguely annoying when read out at church alongside the eternal truths enshrined in the Gospels. He sometimes wondered how the Church could mix the real Jesus and real miracles with such long-dead superstitious crap.

He no longer wondered.

Now he knew it wasn’t superstition and it wasn’t crap. The demons of self-destruction were very real. On arriving to study in Rome one of his first New Testament essays had been on the miracles of Jesus and he had drawn high praise for his understanding of the destructive power of inner demons. For a brief period he was regarded as a possible scholar, even asked out for a drink by a Rome-based English Dominican. But that drink and subsequent essays quickly put him back where he belonged, among the plodders.

His brain shifted again. Pain.

Why was the pain of Ron’s remark so much harder to bear, so much harder to deal with, than any physical pain? As a child he had learned that it was possible to control physical pain inflicted from the outside, to feel the fist or the boot, but go to a place deep inside yourself where you could hide, where physical feelings were somehow numbed or suspended. He had had to use the lesson many times himself and, as a policeman, made sure others couldn’t find such a place as he questioned them in a cell or influenced their thinking in some stinking back alley. Yes, many times, too many. But with this pain he could find no place to hide, nowhere was free of it, when it came it possessed him.

Pain.

You never got to the bottom of pain. However bad it was you knew it could get worse. Of one thing he was certain, this pain wasn’t something you could beat or hide from or overcome by your own efforts. The best that could be hoped for was to accept it, live with it, and ultimately find forgiveness. If forgiveness ever came.

Suddenly he realised he had stopped and was leaning on the low parapet, and gazing down into the brown water. It had rained heavily two days ago and the river was moving quickly, muddy and swirling. He stood up and looked towards the traffic on the next bridge. What the hell did it matter? He was who he was, what his past had made him. Now he had to make the best of it, what else was there? He smiled to himself. Nothing, there was nothing else. A pretty young woman was passing and smiled back at him, thinking his smile had been meant for her. She carried on and Jimmy watched her. Slim, in a light blue dress with long dark hair and high heels. Going to work or to meet a boyfriend. Someone with a life before them, things to do, people to meet, and places to go. Yet she had noticed him and smiled. That was nice, a fortuitous piece of uncomplicated human contact. He turned and set off; the young woman had lifted him.

The quiet road ended at a bridge carrying one of Rome’s main roads which, having crossed the Tiber, carried on for about a hundred metres then went into a big tunnel which swallowed its four lanes. Jimmy walked to the tunnel, once inside he lost all ability to think as his head filled with the traffic noise echoing and bouncing off the walls. After about four hundred metres he turned off the footpath and went down into a pedestrian underpass. It came out on the far side of the main road where a flight of steps took him up, back into the sunlight and out onto a wide piazza. Facing him at the end of the piazza were the massive walls and dome of St Peter’s Basilica with the columns of St Peter’s Square fanning out from it.

Jimmy began to walk across the piazza. On his right was an elegant hotel where people, mostly tourists, were sitting at tables, talking and drinking, soaking up the sunshine and the atmosphere. On the opposite side was a large, slab-like building which showed the world a blank, ochre wall topped by a shallow, red, pantiled roof. This was the Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio, the beginning of the Vatican and home to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. An innocent-sounding name until you were told it used to be called the Holy Office, and before that, the Inquisition. At the far end of the Palazzo the Renaissance ended abruptly and the stuccoed walls gave way to a high, steel security fence in the middle of which were two gates. Behind the fence to the side of the gates was an equally modern and ugly one-storey set of offices. These necessities of modern civilisation stood in the space between the Palazzo and St Peter’s Basilica and unashamedly jarred with everything around them as if to announce to the world, “don’t be fooled by all the history, pageant, and beauty that surrounds you; we are armed and dangerous”.

Jimmy arrived at the gateway where two Swiss Guards were on duty. Even after eight months in Rome he still thought they looked ridiculous in their striped red, blue, and yellow uniforms, dark floppy berets, and knee-length pantaloons. Although they looked more suited to a carnival he recognised at once the faces under the berets and the look their eyes had in them. These were soldiers, guards, and they took their job very seriously. He gave his name and the name of his rector. One of the guards went to the office inside the gate where his name was checked against a list and his face checked against a photo he had had to supply on arrival at the College. He was then waved through to the office where he was electronically swept, signed in, and given his pass. The guards’ uniforms might be quaint but the security certainly wasn’t.

He walked up the wide cobbled road between St. Peter’s and the Palazzo towards a complex of equally ancient buildings that stood behind the Basilica. This was the Vatican no tourists saw, where the work got done, where the lives and souls of over a billion Catholics world-wide were monitored, influenced, and guided.

Why did the rector want to see him? Not a slap on the wrist. He hadn’t put a foot wrong since he came to Rome, and he was sure the rector couldn’t have found out anything about London … at least he was almost sure. He was being careful, but these days he knew he made mistakes. He had made one back in the bar with Ron and Danny. He had told them something about himself and they had laughed and the pain had come again.

Pain.

It always came back to pain.

Jimmy stopped outside a small side entrance to one of the big old buildings. Here an office was made available to the Duns College rector when one of its students was in training. Jimmy paused. He wanted to clear his mind before any interview began.

I can’t put any of it right, I can’t bring any of them back, and I can’t change what I was or what I did. This is how it is now and this is what I’ve chosen. He looked at the ancient black door. Behind it, in an office on the top floor, the rector of the College waited. He looked at his watch. He was dead on time. Unbidden, a question forced itself into his. . .