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inspector’s fury at the way the people’s voices had been ignored. It had been a powerful example of the effect that Danny Radford could have. The thought was also a reminder for Gaines of why they were there and the sergeant turned back into the room and surveyed the clergyman gloomily.
    He had encountered the vicar just the once, following an attempted burglary at the church when he had found him relentlessly optimistic and determined to forgive the perpetrators. Gaines did not like optimistic people, relentless or not, particularly when they appeared determined to forgive miscreants. Now, as he stood and watched the vicar dispassionately, the sergeant did not hold out much hope of an illuminating conversation.
    ‘How are you feeling, Reverend?’ said Radford to the vicar, whose right eye was swollen, his nose misshapen and who had a bandage round his forehead, ‘because you look like shit.’
    ‘I’ve been better,’ mumbled the clergyman, opening his good eye. ‘And thank you for your kind words, Inspector. You should have been a vicar with that bedside manner.’
    ‘They tell us that you’re a lucky man.’
    ‘Not sure it feels like that,’ murmured the vicar.
    ‘No, I’m sure it doesn’t.’ Radford picked up the chart hanging on the edge of the bed and read the top page. ‘Broken nose, internal bleeding and four cracked ribs. Apparently, one of your assailants ground his shoe so hard into your face that it was even possible to make out a partial footprint. Perhaps we should get forensics to take some prints. You up to being covered in plaster of Paris?’
    The vicar gave him a look.
    ‘Someone really has got it in for you, haven’t they?’ continued Radford, hanging the chart up again. ‘Care to tell us who that might be?’
    ‘There were two of them.’
    ‘I was rather hoping that you would be a touch more precise than that. A name perhaps?’
    The vicar hesitated then shook his head, wincing at the stabbing pain.
    ‘I have no idea who they were,’ he said.
    Alerted by the clergyman’s slight delay in replying, Gaines’ instincts kicked in and he walked over to look down at him with renewed interest.
    ‘You sure about that?’ asked the sergeant. ‘You really don’t know who did this?’
    ‘I have never seen them before in my life. Don’t look like that, Sergeant, you see a lot of people in my line of work. You can’t remember them all.’
    ‘I think I might remember the men who stoved my head in with baseball bats. Those things tend to stay with you, I find.’
    ‘Well I don’t remember.’
    ‘I always thought that His Nibs frowned on lying,’ said the sergeant. ‘Mind, I was brought up a Catholic, so what do I know? Maybe you Proddies are different. That’s what my old mam always used to say anyway. Not true Christians, that’s what she said.’
    The vicar did his best to shoot the sergeant a withering look but his injuries meant that he failed dismally and the pain shot across his skull again. Gaines gave a slight smile when he saw the vicar wince. Serves the cheerful bastard right, he thought.
    ‘I am not lying,’ said Rowland.
    ‘Come on,’ said the sergeant, ‘turning the other cheek is not doing any of us much good, is it? I say that you know exactly who they were.’
    ‘So do I,’ said Radford. ‘Let me run a little theory past you, shall I? Although I do have to say that, at first, the good sergeant here thought I had lost control of my senses. Given that robbery clearly was not the motive, we wonder if it was someone hacked off about your campaign to block the demolition. Someone within City Hall perhaps? Someone with a good reason to see your church demolished.’
    Rowland gave the slightest of shakes of the head, careful not to bring on more pain this time.
    ‘I can’t see that,’ he said.
    ‘I suspect you can’t see much at the moment,’ said Radford, looking at the clergyman’s swollen eye. ‘See, it strikes me that you’ve made plenty of enemies