Death on the Eleventh Hole by J. M. Gregson Read Free Book Online Page B

think you’ll find Eileen downstairs. Have a talk with her and see what she feels about things.’
    The girl nodded, then retreated through the door without a word, keeping her front towards the priest like one retreating from a royal personage. She would have backed into Rushton if he had not stepped quickly aside. Once in the passageway, she turned without looking at the inspector and moved away in a rapid shuffle, with the heels of her slippers never leaving the ground.
    The priest was small and wiry. He wore baggy, stained trousers and was in shirt sleeves; a dog collar sat oddly above an old sleeveless pullover. He looked at the girl’s retreating back for a moment, then shook his shoulders and made a visible effort to change roles and speak to Rushton. ‘Jason Gillespie.’ He held out his hand. ‘Father Jason Gillespie, as you can see from the dog collar. I tried to do without it, when we started this place, but our guests like it. They like a clergyman to wear his badge, so that they know where they stand. It’s saved me from being thumped, more than once. Old habits die hard, even when life gets desperate.’
    Chris Rushton accepted the firm handshake, already after the briefest of views filled with admiration for a man doing good work he knew he could never have done. ‘You said you had something to tell me,’ he prompted awkwardly. ‘Something connected with the murder of Kate Wharton.’
    ‘That’s her name, is it? Poor girl.’ There was something more than conventional regret in the phrase.
    The priest was probably about forty, but he looked older because, despite a determinedly cheerful face and bearing, there was an infinite sadness for the fallibility of human nature in his wide brown eyes. He said, ‘I’ll need to tell you a little about the way we operate here, so bear with me. We aim to get our visitors off the streets and into eventual detoxification. We provide accommodation, a meal together at one o’clock each day, a day-centre for those who want to visit but not stay here. We tend to get people who haven’t any sense of belonging — most of them from adolescence onwards. We try to give them the family environment they don’t have, a feeling of trust and respect.’
    ‘Are most of your clients — sorry, visitors — young people?’
    ‘About half and half. We try to separate young people from older users. They are more reclaimable. But we measure success in a different way from the world at large. If someone this week has only taken cocaine three times instead of seven, that is an achievement we applaud. If someone accepts a detoxification programme and sticks to it, that is a triumph.’
    ‘So most of your visitors are drug addicts.’
    ‘Most, but not all. Some are young people who’ve spent virtually all their lives in the care of the social services, others are no longer in contact with their families. They tend already to be petty criminals. But some are just unable to cope with the deal life has given them. Annie, whom you saw leaving just now, nearly died from anorexia. Someone carried her here from a squat.’
    The priest’s enthusiasm rose as he spoke about the work of the centre, but Chris Rushton had a feeling of moving further and further out of his depth. He was full of admiration for people who did work like this, but he had joined the police force because he had a passion for order. All policemen had to play things by the book, and Chris found that an advantage, not a restriction. Lambert had spotted a strength in him when he put him in charge of the administration of serious crime cases: Rushton felt most at home filing information and cross-referencing on his computer.
    Now, looking at the work of St Anne’s House, he felt the panic all of us feel when we contemplate good work we could not possibly achieve ourselves. He took a deep breath and said, ‘And you feel that one of your visitors might have strangled Kate Wharton and dumped her body on the golf