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one. Then he closed his eyes. The seconds tick-tocked quietly by. Fayhee seemed to be waiting for divine inspiration, and three minutes passed before he spoke again. And when he did, it was with a voice so quiet and gentle, Kelly and me both had to lean toward him to hear it. He said there was a job that needed doing and that Kelly and me were just the men for it. And I’d be a dirty, filthy liar if I said the story he then told didn’t sadden the table. For when the Father had finished, Kelly and me just sat there, not knowing what to do, or say. We didn’t want to break the silence although broken it had to be. So I said nothing could be done because the Father didn’t have the money to pay for what he needed doing. He hammered the table with a clenched fist and smashed the brandy glass. Blood began to run down his hand. It dripped off his fingers onto the carpet. He dug around in his pockets for a handkerchief, and finding one, slowly wrapped it around the cut.
    “I’m sorry,” the Father said. “I didn’t mean to do that. It’s just, what this monster did—”
    Father Fayhee stopped talking, and then, the very next moment, he started crying. His shoulders rose and fell with every sob he took, and Kelly and me, who had sat there watching him, had to turn away because, well, it was a little embarrassing. But after another minute or so, the Father stopped. He blew his nose, and, suddenly brightening, said it had been a long time since Madden and me had stood beside him in St Aloysius: me carrying the cross; Madden holding the missal. He went on to say that in all the years that had passed since then, it had been his great misfortune to lay alongside many a wet fish on the streets of London. He fell silent again. The seconds ticked by. He looked at his bloodied hand.
    “Their foul, putrid flesh offends my nostrils,” he grumbled, his smile slowly turning into a frown. “But that stench is as nothing compared to the bloody rankness enveloping me now.”
    He asked me if I thought Jesus had wallowed in the mire a lone man. He wondered if it were my belief that Jesus had suffered in vain.
    “Because you are attempting to send me, an instrument of that same Holy Father, out into the night with a flea in my ear.”
    I told him I was doing nothing of the sort. It was a business matter and nothing more. But the Father wasn’t listening. He said I had to be bold. Told me to I had to search deep within myself to find that heart of oak, for it was whispered I walked in the footsteps of Hector, whatever that meant.
    “Young children!” he cried, and begged us to help, saying it was somehow our responsibility; that it was up to us; that we had to confine the horror of this monster’s wicked work by casting the malevolent bastard into the dark and murky depths of some lonely canal. And then he left.
    Kelly and me sat in silence for a good long while after the Father went. But I could still feel his hand on my shoulder; could still smell the brandy on his breath, and hear the words he’d whispered reverberate inside my head.
    “Do it for your soul, my son. Do it… for your soul.”
    Kelly eventually asked what the Father had meant when he’d said God would throw open my door to the wolf and make shipwreck my vital spark. I told him it was nothing, just church pews squeaking. Then Kelly said something that surprised me. He wondered if what the Father had said was right: that perhaps some sort of exception should be made, due to the fact that what this bloke had been up to was bang out of order.
    “It chokes you up just thinking about it,” Kelly said.
    And that got me thinking. I wondered if it would be wrong to kill a bloke for honourable reasons. Wondered if it would be out of order to do a bloke in for reasons of morality. That was something altogether different. To actually kill someone was easy. It was just the bit that came afterwards that could be difficult.

    It was still snowing when Kelly and me left his