Jack Higgins – A Prayer for the Dying

When he went into his study at the presbytery, Anna was sitting by the fire knitting. She turned her face towards him. “You’re late. I was worried.”

He was still extremely agitated and had to force himself to sound calm. Tm sorry. Something came up.”

She put down her knitting and stood up. “After you’d gone, when I went down to the church to get ready for choir practice, Fallon was playing the organ.”

He frowned. “Did he say anything? Did you speak with him?”

“He gave me a message for you,” she told him. “He said to tell you that it had all been his fault and he was sorry.”

“Was there anything else?”

“Yes, he said that there was no need to worry from now on. That he’d started it, so he’d finish it. And he told me we wouldn’t be seeing him again. What did he mean? Do you think he intends to give himself up?”

“God knows,” Father da Costa forced a smile and put a hand on her shoulder, a gesture of reassurance. “I’m just going down to the church. Something I have to do. I won’t be long.”

He left her there and hurried down through the cemetery, entering the church by way of the sacristy. He dropped on his knees at the altar rail, hands clenched together and looked up at Christ on the cross.

“Forgive me,” he pleaded. “Heavenly Father, forgive me.”

He bowed his head and wept, for in his heart, he knew there was not one single particle of regret for what he had done to Jack Meehan. Worse than that, much worse, was the still, small voice that kept telling him that by wiping Meehan off the face of the earth he would be doing mankind a favour.

Meehan came out of the bathroom at the penthouse wearing a silk kimono and holding an ice bag to his face. The doctor had been and gone, the bleeding had stopped, but his nose was an ugly, swollen, bruised hump of flesh that would never look the same again. Dormer, Bonati and Rupert waited dutifully by the door. Dormer’s mouth was badly bruised and his lower lip was twice its usual size.

Meehan tossed the ice bag across the room. “No bloody good at all, that thing. Somebody get me a drink.”

Rupert hurried to the drinks trolley and poured a large brandy. He carried it across to Meehan who was standing at the window, staring out in the square, frowning slightly.

He turned, suddenly and mysteriously his old self again.

He said to Dormer, “Frank, what was the name of that old kid who was so good with explosives?”

“Ellerman, Mr. Meehan, is he the one you’re thinking of?”

“That’s him. He isn’t inside, is he?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Good, then I want him here within the next hour. You go get him and you can tell him there’s a couple of centuries in it for him.”

He swallowed some mote of his brandy and turned to Rupert. “And you, sweetheart – I’ve got just the job for you. You can go and see Jenny for me. We’re going to need her, too, for what I have in mind.”

Rupert said, “Do you think she’ll play? She can be an awk-ward bitch, when she feels like it.”

“Not this time.” Median chuckled. Til give you a prop-osition to put to her that she can’t refuse.”

He laughed again as if it was a particularly good joke and Rupert glanced uncertainly at Donner. Dormer said carefully, “What’s it all about, Mr.. Meehan?”

I’ve had enough,” Meehan said. “That’s what it’s all about. The priest, Fallon, the whole bit. I’m going to clean the slate once and for all. Take them both out this very night and here’s how we’re going to do it.”

Harvey Ellerman was fifty years of age and looked ten years older, which came of having spent twenty-two years of his life behind bars if he added his various sentences together.

He was a small diffident individual who habitually wore a tweed cap and brown raincoat and seemed crushed by life, yet this small, anxious-looking man was reputed to know more about explosives than any man in the north of England. In the end, his own genius had proved his undoing, for such was the uniqueness of his approach to the task in hand that it was as if he had signed his own name each time he did a job, and for some years the police had arrested him with monotonous regularity the moment he put a foot wrong.

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