Thicker Than Water

I tried to look surprised and disappointed as I ambled across the hallway towards her. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘Miss—’

‘Mrs.’

‘Mrs . . . ?’

‘Daniels.’ She looked back over her shoulder with a distracted air, then back at me. ‘I can’t really talk right now,’ she said, and then, as if the lapse of manners had to be balanced or atoned for in some way, she added ‘Jean. Jean Daniels.’

‘Of course. Mrs Daniels. Kenny said for me to call today.’ That sentence hung in the air for an over-long moment, while I assembled some other lies to go along with it. ‘For the books.’

The red haired woman frowned. ‘The books?’ she repeated.

I nodded gravely. ‘I’m collecting for the rummage sale,’ I said. ‘At Saint Gary-le-Pauvre. The priest’s a friend of mine, and I like to help out.’

‘Oh.’ The frown didn’t disappear, despite this morally unimpeachable cover story. If anything it deepened. ‘Well, I know Mister Seddon’s not in because my Thomas had to take his post from the postman this morning and we’ve knocked six or seven times to give it to him. You’ll have to come back another time.’

I didn’t take the hint: this was a recon mission, after all, and that included making contact with the local citizenry. ‘Kenny’s a fine man,’ I said, throwing out a random hook. ‘But we’ve not seen each other in a while. I hope he’s well. I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself. I’m Felix Castor.’

I held out my hand, but Jean Daniels didn’t seem keen to reciprocate.

‘So you’re from the church?’ she demanded again. Her tone was solemn and slow: the tone of someone working through a complex syllogism.

‘That’s right.’

‘And you said “the priest”, so - a Catholic church?’

‘Well . . .’ Too late to temporise. ‘Not un-Catholic,’ I admitted lamely. ‘Definitely on the Catholic side of the equation.’

‘But Mister Seddon is Protestant, isn’t he? Bitter orange, was the way he put it. I remember it particularly because it was one of the first things he ever said to me.’

Bitter orange. It was a resonant phrase for anyone born and bred in the briar patch of Liverpool 9. Mrs D was right, too: I remembered now that Kenny’s dad and all his uncles had been in the Lodge, marching in bright orange sashes and Moss Bros suits along County Road on the Glorious Twelfth.

Fortunately, Mrs Daniels seemed more apologetic than indignant to have caught me out in a flat lie. Or at any rate, she went on talking to cover the social embarrassment. ‘The very next day after he moved in, when I met him for the first time by the lift, Mister Seddon asked me what denomination we were. And when I said we weren’t anything very much he wasn’t happy at all. He said we must have been brought up something, in a Christian country. So I told him my parents were Catholic, my Tom’s were High Church Anglican, and he never had another word to say to us.’ She shook her head in solemn wonder. ‘It’s a shame the uses some people put the Lord to - making hate where there should be love, and turning a good message into a bad one.’"

"‘Well, Saint Gary’s is an ecumenical mission,’ I assured her, wishing I’d thought up a better cover story: she was sharper than she looked. ‘But it’s never been about the religion for me. I just like to do good for goodness’ sake.’

‘You’re not a priest?’

‘Not in the slightest. My brother’s a priest,’ I offered, as though that helped to establish my own credentials. ‘Like I said, I really just wanted to check in on Kenny and find out if things were going okay for him these days. We go back a long way. In case I didn’t mention it before, I’m Felix. Felix Castor.’ (I knew I was repeating myself but I reckoned it was time to be persistent.)

I stuck my hand out again. It would have been rude to ignore it twice, and Mrs Daniels seemed deathly afraid of giving offence. She put her own hand in mine, a little limply, and allowed it to be shaken.

Which meant that I finally got to read her. This kind of random trawling is an automatic thing with me: the same morbid sensitivity that lets me see ghosts even where others can’t sometimes allows me to pick up surface thoughts and emotions from people’s minds when I touch them. So I do it even in situations like this one where there probably isn’t much to be gained.

What I got from Mrs Daniels was powerful, narrowly specific, and no use to me at all. She had a shallow cut on her forearm and she couldn’t think how she’d done it. It was making her itch like mad but she didn’t want to scratch in front of a stranger. That was also why she hadn’t wanted to shake my hand, because she’d left the cut uncovered to make it scab faster and she was embarrassed to have it be seen.