Read Death in Holy Orders for Free Online Page A

He struck out towards the groyne, which seemed with every second to be receding.
    He could see Sadie standing now on the edge, arms flailing, her hair streaming in the wind. She was shouting something but he could hear nothing but the drumming in his ears. He gathered his strength, waiting for the wave to advance, making progress, then desperately trying to hold on to it before the backward tug lost the few feet he had gained. He told himself not to panic, to husband strength, to try and catch each forward movement. And at last, foot by painful foot, he made it and, gasping, clutched the end of the groyne. It was minutes before he was able to move, but she reached down her hand and helped pull him up.
    They sat side by side on a ridge of pebbles and, without speaking, she took off her dress and began rubbing his back. When he was dry, still without speaking, she handed him his shirt. He remembered now that the sight of her body, of the small pointed breasts and the pink and tender nipples, had aroused not desire, but an emotion that he now recognized as a mixture of affection and pity.
    Then she said, “Do you want to go to the mere? I know a secret place.”
    The mere would still be there, a stretch of dark, still waterseparated from the lively sea by a bank of shingle, its oily surface hinting at unfathomable depths. Except in the worst storms, the stagnant mere and salt sea never met across that shifting barrier. At the edge of the tide the trunks of black fossilized trees stood like totem poles to some long-dead civilization. The mere was a famous haunt of sea birds, and there were wooden hides concealed among the trees and bushes, but only the most enthusiastic bird-watcher ever penetrated to this dark and sinister stretch of water.
    Sadie’s secret place had been the wooden hulk of a wrecked ship half embedded in the sand on the spit of land between the sea and the mere. There were still a few rotting steps down to the cabin, and there they had spent the rest of the afternoon and all the days that followed. The only light had come from slits in the planking, and they had laughed to see how their bodies were striped, tracing the moving lines with their fingers. He would read or write or sit back silently against the curved wall of the cabin while Sadie imposed on their small world her ordered if eccentric domesticity. The picnics provided by her grandmother were carefully laid out on flat stones, the food to be ceremoniously handed to him and eaten when she decreed. Jam jars filled with water from the mere held reeds and grasses and unidentified rubber-leaved plants from fissures in the cliff. Together they scoured the beach for stones with holes to add to the necklace that she had strung on cord along the cabin wall.
    For years after that summer the smell of tar, of warm rotting oak combined with the tang of the sea, had held for him an erotic charge. Where, he wondered, was Sadie now? Probably married with a brood of golden-haired children—if their fathers hadn’t been drowned, electrocuted or otherwise disposed of in Sadie’s preliminary process of selection. It was unlikely that any trace of the wreck would remain. After decades of pounding, the sea must now have claimed its prey. And long before the final plank was tossed into the advancing tide, the string of the necklace would have frayed and, at last, finally broken, letting slip those carefully gathered stones to fall in a heap on the sand of the cabin floor.

4
    I t was Thursday, 12 October, and Margaret Munroe was writing the final entry in the diary.
    Looking back over this diary since I began writing it, most of it seems so dull that I wonder why I persevere. The entries following Ronald Treeves’s death have been little more than descriptions of my daily routine interposed with descriptions of the weather. After the inquest and the Requiem Mass it sometimes seemed as if the tragedy had been formally tidied away and he had never been here. None of the