The Eye of God

By Keith Jacobsen

Former Catholic priest Michael Jones and the irreverent Father O'Malley return in this sequel to Out of the Depths (New Generation Publishing 2012) to tackle another baffling clerical mystery set in Liverpool. Battling loneliness and alcohol addiction, Michael meets Martha, a refugee from the Troubles in Northern Ireland. She tells Michael of the unexplained disappearance of her son, a former altar boy at his church, fourteen years ago. Suspecting the involvement of a visiting priest who has also vanished without trace, Michael and Father O'Malley decide to investigate. The trail leads them to a deserted village, a deconsecrated church and a walled-in estate haunted by the ghosts of a terrible past. Searching for the place where the Eye of God is blind, they soon find themselves in mortal danger.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781785077982

Book preview

2015

ONE

‘My name is Michael Jones. I used to be a priest.’

There were ten of us, seated on small, hard chairs grouped in a semicircle in the hall attached to the Methodist chapel. The floor, walls, ceiling, windows were all bare. A single bar electric fire stood in one corner, yards away from us, its feeble heat penetrating no further than a few inches. We sat in gathering gloom, the light from one unshaded bulb high above us barely adequate to throw a shadow. Most of us still had our coats and scarves on.

The others shuffled uncomfortably. All except the woman, who in five previous meetings had yet to say a word and was now looking to make it a silent six. She remained motionless, her eyes fixed on a brown stain on the floor in front of her. Week after week the stain had continued to fascinate her. Our coordinator, George, young, idealistic, bearded, with shaggy brown pullover, brown corduroy jeans, scuffed trainers, one yellow and one red sock and earnest manner, shook his head, smiling patiently as if dealing with a slow-witted but willing child.

‘No, Michael. Not what you used to be. That comes later. What you are now.’

I coughed, feeling my cheeks burn as the pairs of eyes focussed on me, willing me on, silently urging me to succeed.

‘Sorry, George. I’ll get the hang of it. My name is Michael Jones. I am an alcoholic.’

TWO

The words stumbled at the back of my throat. I thought I was going to be sick, but somehow I forced them out. They clapped, all except the woman. That was all I said that first time. It was enough for now, George reassured me. It was only a first step but it was always the biggest, that initial admission in front of the others. After that it would all be much easier.

He was right. The following week I told them everything, as they smiled sympathetically at me. All of them except the woman. I told them everything, that is, that I intended to tell.

‘My name is Michael Jones and I am an alcoholic. I am forty-five years old. I live alone. I have never been married. Until four years ago I was a Catholic priest, at St Jerome’s Church, just up the road from here. I was there for fifteen years. I gave up the priesthood because I realised I no longer had a vocation. Correction. I realised I had never had a vocation. It had all been a mistake. It was my mother who had the vocation on my behalf.’

They laughed at that, a little nervously, as if the subject matter might be rather too sensitive for laughter. All of them laughed, except the woman.

‘I sought refuge in drink because of everything I had lost.’

‘You mean your faith,’ suggested a bald man in his fifties in the same crumpled suit and skewed tie he wore each time. He had not worked for a year but had never told his wife and still left the house the same time each morning.

‘No. I still believe in God. I have to believe in Him, the things I say to Him every day.’

More laughter, except from the woman. Twice now I had got a laugh and she had not even looked up.

‘So what had you lost?’ asked the bald man.

‘My family, for a start. They’re all dead now. Then my job. I was sacked from the library where I worked for turning up late and drunk two days in succession. What else? My purpose in life, or rather the purpose I should have had, whatever that was.’

And so much more. Far more than I would ever be able to tell anyone.

‘My problem started slowly,’ I continued. ‘I was barely aware of what was happening. Just a couple of glasses of whisky in the evening, to take the edge off the silence and the solitude. Then I found I needed a glass in the morning before I could face the world. Soon it was a bottle each evening and two glasses each morning. Plus a visit to the pub each lunch time.’

No, I had never planned it. Who does? It had just crept up on me, as I had heard them all say. It took the place of thinking and planning. What sort of thinking and planning does a man do who finds himself in his mid-forties with no qualifications other than a fading knowledge of Church Latin and basic theology, and no experience other than years of putting on fancy dress to turn bread and water into the body and blood of a man who died nearly two thousand years ago, and going into the confessional to hear sins of barely imaginable triviality?

‘What about friends?’ someone asked, noticing I had stopped and afraid I would be unable to continue.

‘Yes, I have friends. They are my only blessing. And present company of course.’ More laughter, except from the woman. ‘Well, just one friend, actually,’ I continued. ‘Father O’Malley. Maybe some of you know him, he is still a parish priest at St Jerome’s.’ Yes, there was always Eamonn and he would always be there for me. Dear, loyal, irreverent Eamonn. ‘We were together for fifteen years. My former partner in crime, or rather in the priesthood. Much the same thing, really.’

Yet another laugh, again ignored by the woman.

‘We see each other at least once a week for mutual consolation. It used to be Irish whiskey for him and Scotch for me. Now he knows I am on the wagon so it is a much more sober affair.’

It was the one certainty in my life. I knew I would one day stop going to meetings of the group. But nobody and nothing would ever stop Eamonn and myself from meeting. Even the Day of Judgement would have to wait if by some mishap God scheduled it to coincide with one of our sessions.

Yes, it all went much better than I had dared to hope. I fluffed my lines but I got through without breaking down. I even made them laugh, not just once but four times, apart from that wretched woman.

What was it about her? The whole idea was that we all stuck our necks out, played the game, faced the music, put ourselves on the spot, listened and nodded encouragingly when others spoke and expected the same consideration when our turn came. She paid no attention and said nothing. Was she there under false pretences? Was she a journalist or an undercover policewoman? Surely George would be able to spot an interloper like that.

She was in her mid-forties, I guessed, small, crouching in her chair as if to make herself even smaller. She always wore the same clothes, a shapeless cardigan and ankle-length skirt under a buttonless coat, all a uniform dark green. I could not tell the colour or style of her hair, as she always had it covered with a brown scarf, which she kept pulled down over her chin and the lower part of her right cheek. She frowned constantly, as if trying desperately to remember something.

After I had finished, George told us that Martha was now ready. For a moment I wondered who Martha was. Then I realised he was looking in the direction of the woman. She did not look back. She continued to sit motionless, her eyes cast down. She and George must have spoken earlier, before the rest of us arrived. She was grateful for our patience and understanding, he told us. Martha would talk to us the following week. We all clapped. She had still not said a word and still we clapped, probably with relief at the discovery that she was one of us after all.

She was as good as her word, or rather George’s word. The following week she spoke. I had got through my first session somehow and felt pleased with myself. I had done as well as most of them, better than some. But she was different. Now we knew why she had waited for so long. She had had to prepare herself.

We drew our chairs closer to hear her. As she spoke, as if from a far greater distance than that which actually separated her from us, a harsh rasp at the back of her throat coarsened the natural lilt of her speech, like an ancient melody blown through a cracked reed. Some of us had spoken with a brash air of confidence, to hide fear. Others, like me, had stuttered and groped their way towards a space somewhere between honesty and deception, between comfort and danger. Her eyes still looked down and the lower part of her face was still covered by the scarf. But the fractured instrument of her voice never faltered. Alone among us she laid herself bare. And for half an hour we listened in a spell of silence and stillness that only the ritual motto of her final words would break.

THREE

‘My name is Martha McNulty. I am an alcoholic.

‘I was born in West Belfast forty-six years ago, to Catholic parents from County Clare in the Irish Free State. The Irish Free State. That’s what we call it. The republicans I mean, the nationalists in the North. It became the Irish Free State on Partition. When the island of Ireland is united, then we will call it the Republic of Ireland, not before.

‘That’s my husband, Ciaran, talking, not me. I was never into all that stuff. My parents were never into that stuff, either. They came from the South to escape poverty and the backbreaking labour of working thin, ungrateful soil which had never been theirs. Their parents and grandparents tilled it for powerful British landlords and then for powerful Irish landlords and their only reward was disease, hunger and early death. Life was better for my parents in Belfast. There was work. Only of the labouring and the casual and the seasonal sort it was true, but it was work. There was a small terrace house, two-up, two-down with an outside toilet, but it was home. There was the school and the church, and the neighbours whose doors were always open. It was a life. A good enough life, some would say.

‘I got married when I was twenty. Quite late for those days in those parts. They were already saying I was on the shelf. I was too choosy, too stuck-up, not so pretty that I could afford to be either. But nobody caught my fancy. Then one day someone did, coming up behind me to hold an umbrella over my head as I was walking home in the rain with two dripping bags of shopping. A young man with a twinkle in his eye and a smile to melt your heart and a tongue that could charm the hind legs off a donkey.

‘Ciaran. He had work. Of the labouring and the casual and the seasonal sort, it was true, but it was work. There were new industries coming to the city, factories heaving with grime and dust and hot metal and the stench of chemicals to catch in your throat and pierce your lungs, with chimneys filling the air with ash and black smoke, lighting the sky at night with flames that never went out, factories filling the workers’ hearts with pride and their pockets with cash. But they were over in the East, by the Lough, and it was the Protestants who went there to build the cars and the ships and feel the pride and spend the money.

‘My parents died soon after the wedding, of diseases nobody should have died of by then except that they did not dare to go to the hospitals because we were told they were not for the likes of us. I was pregnant right away. Twins, a boy and a girl, the boy the spitting image of his father. We were poor but we got by and were happy enough. Until the Troubles.

‘Ciaran joined the People’s Democracy, part of the civil rights movement. I had no interest in politics. He was angry with me for that. He told me we had to fight for our rights because nobody was going to give them to us. He went on marches. They were meant to be peaceful, but I knew they always hoped there would be violence so the world would see how we were treated. They were set on at Burntollet Bridge, near Derry. The attackers were off-duty B Specials and Unionists of various hues and colours. They used anything that came to hand, bottles, pieces of wood studded with metal, crow bars. Those were the days before the armalites and the bombs. Days of innocence and roses by comparison with what followed. When he got home at last he was covered with dried blood and bruises and he could barely walk. I told him to keep away from trouble in future. A dead hero was no use to me or the children. He promised, swearing on the Bible.

‘But he had already secretly joined the Irish Republican Army, as I later learned. One night, when Protestant rioters attacked our street and set fire to the houses, he was involved in a gun battle with the police a few miles away. It was a night never to be forgotten, though I’ve prayed every day since to be allowed to forget. It was as if the world were consumed in fire and noise brought up from Hell by legions of devils. Flames from petrol bombs and burning houses, sounds of gunfire and sirens from all directions. As our house burned I sat outside with the children, our pathetic little heap of possessions on the pavement beside us.

‘The next day a neighbour with a lorry drove us and a few other families to the border. He was the one who had told me Ciaran was now in the IRA. He said Ciaran had been last seen near the Divis Tower. There was no sign of him when we left.

‘We found our way to a camp near the border. They gave us food and shelter and money to get us to Dublin and a ferry passage here to Liverpool. Ciaran’s older brother, Liam, was here already. He took us in.

‘For weeks, months afterwards, I was shaking and could barely talk. The children were only five but they were stronger than I was. They seemed to accept what was happening. Only they kept asking when their father was going to join us. I told them he would follow as soon as he could. I rang friends and neighbours who were still in the area but they had no news of him.

‘Liam had work. Steady, respectable work. He had come over here when he was only seventeen, a grown man already, full of himself and bent on making his mark on the world. He worked days down the docks and went to night school to study to be a teacher. He was sure Ciaran was dead. Served him right, he would say, the crazy bugger, getting himself involved in all that stuff when he had a wife and kids to be responsible for.

‘Liam loved the kids, loved to spend time with them. Sean and Kate. Those were their names. Sean was the quiet one. Kate was more of a tomboy. Always out playing, falling over, grazing her knees and elbows. Liam played football with her. She was better at it than he was. He had no time for me. I was the woman about the house, that was all, useful for the cleaning and the shopping.

‘I was still in shock, still had nightmares in which we were trapped in a burning house and Ciaran was lying outside, soldiers and police taking turns to fire bullets into his head. It went on for months. That was when I turned to the reason we’re all here. In secret, of course. I hid the bottles in my room. Liam was teetotal. He wouldn’t allow a drop in the house.

‘I had had some training as a hairdresser back in Belfast. When we were with Liam I did cheap haircuts at home. I was too nervous to go out. I couldn’t have coped with going to a salon every day, with all the staff and the customers and the chat and no chance for a secret drink. But at home, once I knew Liam was out, I could calm my nerves with a sherry before my first customer arrived. Then have another one to pass the time before the next one.

‘One day, I left the kids alone to do some shopping. They were nine by then. I had sharp scissors in the house. I needed them for my work. I had forgotten to lock the scissors away. Kate was out and I thought Sean was up in his room. When I got back I saw right away he had cut himself, around his forehead and temple. I suppose he was trying to give himself a haircut, as he had seen Mummy do. Liam